The wild isles, p.43
The Wild Isles, page 43
Once I’ve located the corncrakes, through reports from the public and my night surveys, I visit the landowners. I feel nervous driving down unfamiliar tracks, knocking at farmhouse doors, dogs barking. Older Orcadians tend to refer to women, regardless of marital status, as ‘wives’ so, arriving at farms to speak to farmers about the endangered birds on their land, I am announced with ‘The corncrake wife is here.’ The RSPB offers the farmers money to delay cutting or grazing the grass, or to mow in a ‘corncrake-friendly’ pattern: from the inside of the fields outwards, giving the birds more of a chance to escape. Every farmer is willing to discuss the options with me. I find them knowledgeable about the wildlife on their land and most are able to change the mowing pattern, although delaying the crop until August is often, despite the payment, too drastic a change. No one flat-out refuses: that’s not really the Orcadian way. They just say they’ll think about it, then I never hear back.
I learn as much as I can about this one species. I read scientific papers and follow research on their migration routes. They’re all that people ask me about. I accidentally replace other words with ‘corncrake’ when I’m typing; I change my ringtone to a corncrake’s call; I set a Google alert for corncrake references in the world’s media. Somehow this bird has become my thing. I am hallucinating a Crex crex call in the background of music on the radio and at night I dream of corncrakes.
In June 2011, fifty adult male corncrakes were caught on the Hebridean island of Coll, lured into nets by a taped call of what they thought was a rival male. Geolocators, weighing less than a gram, were attached to their legs on plastic rings. The following summer, some of the birds were re-caught, and their tags revealed that they had travelled all the way to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa. This seems incredible: in Scotland, corncrakes are reluctant to fly at all, which is what makes them so vulnerable to farm machinery. There is even local folklore about them going ‘underground’ instead of migrating, turning into moorhens or perhaps riding on other birds’ backs. But fly they do, although just 30 per cent of adults survive the migration to return to Orkney the following year. Many are trapped in hunters’ nets in north Africa. Corncrakes need to rear a lot of chicks just to replenish the population, let alone increase it.
*
Since before I started the job, I’ve been reading Moby-Dick. I’ve been reading it for so long it feels like I’ve been on a three-year round-the-world whaling trip, carrying it back and forth every day, hefty in my shoulder bag, like a harpoon. I’m storm-crazed Captain Ahab, but instead of a whale I’m chasing an elusive bird. Although I’ve heard almost thirty males, I still haven’t seen one. The corncrake is always just beyond me.
On tough nights, I start to ask myself questions. Why save this bird, a bird seldom seen, a relic from the crofting times, a bird unable to adapt to modern land use? What difference does it make? And then I learn that, in 1977, corncrake remains were excavated from the Pictish and Viking Age site at Buckquoy, in Orkney’s West Mainland. It shocks me to discover that corncrakes had been here for thousands of years, yet in less than a century we have all but wiped them out. Their decline is undoubtedly down to human activity so it seems right that we should take responsibility to conserve the last few.
An isolated male, perhaps the only corncrake on his island, calls for three, four, five hours a night, for months. One was heard calling on Flotta all summer, and I am delighted to learn that chicks were seen at the end of the season – he found a mate, after all.
I reach a total of thirty-two calling male corncrakes heard in Orkney during the season, just one more than last year. Each male that calls from the same spot for more than a few days is assumed to be accompanied by a female. Although numbers still remain low, since the RSPB’s Corncrake Initiative has been running, there has been a slight upward trend in Orkney. Unlike the fabled drowning sailors, the corncrakes are struggling against death and somehow it is as if my fate becomes intertwined with that of the bird. I’m trying to cling to a normal life and stay sober. They are clinging to existence.
My friend told me about when her mother died, leaving behind a husband and three young children. The family went on holiday in America, and my friend described her dad as ‘just driving’. You might feel that you can’t go on, yet you do, just driving to give yourself something to do while things settle, shift and gain form, until the way that life is going to be makes itself clear. I’m driving on, one-kilometre grid square by one-kilometre grid square. Imperceptibly, the churning in my chest is subsiding. Like when I cycled at night in London, I find relief by being in motion. One night, I realise I’m feeling easier and more normal, even lucky to live and work here in Orkney.
This is a different kind of nightlife. The life I had in the city – parties and clubs – is no longer there for me but these never-nights, marking off grid references and following maps in the mist, they are my own. I’ve found no corncrakes tonight but dawn is coming. I’ve got a flask of coffee and I can hear seals.
There are wonderful moments. I make eye contact with a short-eared owl, plentiful this year and known locally as ‘catty faces’. It’s on a fence post next to where I park, and we both turn our heads and see each other. I gasp, the owl flies. One still-pink dawn, just before midsummer, I stop at the Ring of Brodgar on the way home. There’s no one around, and I take all my clothes off and run around the Neolithic stone circle.
Then, just after three a.m., when I finish my survey one night towards the end of the seven weeks, I pull away slowly in the car and something unexpected happens: I see a corncrake. It’s just a moment but it’s in the road right in front of me, running into the grass verge. Its image – the pink beak and ginger wing – keeps darting through my mind: just a second that confirmed the existence I’d spent months searching for. My first and only corncrake. Usually dawn comes slowly but tonight I drive out of a cloud and suddenly it’s a new day.
from H IS FOR HAWK
Helen Macdonald
A polymath in the old nature writing tradition, Helen Macdonald (b. 1970) is an academic historian of science, an artist and illustrator, falconer, poet and writer. She grew up in Camberley, Surrey, and possessed a keen interest in local wildlife – and birds of prey in particular – as a child. Her memoir, H is for Hawk (2014), an international bestseller which won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize, Costa Book Award and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France, tells the story of her grief over her father’s death and recovery through training Mabel, a goshawk. It is also a biography of T. H. White. Macdonald is the author of Falcon (2006) and an essay collection, Vesper Flights (2020), and writes regularly for The New York Times. She has presented radio series and TV documentaries including a Natural World programme about training a new goshawk chick and an examination of the hidden nature of motorways.
EXTINCTION
Falconers have a word for hawks in the mood to slay: they call the bird in yarak. The books say it comes from the Persian yaraki, meaning power, strength and boldness. Much later I was amused to find that in Turkish it means an archaic weapon and is also slang for penis: never doubt that falconry is a boys’ game. I’m back in Cambridge now, and as I carry Mabel up the stony track to the hill each day I watch her come into yarak. It is disturbingly like watching her slow possession by a demon. Her crest feathers rise, she leans back, tummy feathers fluffed, shoulders dropped, toes very tight on the glove. Her demeanour switches from everything scares me to I see it all; I own all this and more.
In this state she’s a high-tension wire-strung hawk of murderous anticipation, wound so tight she bates at anything that moves – things she’s not a hope of catching: flocks of larks, distant racing pigeons, even a farmyard tomcat – and I hold her jesses tight and don’t let her go. But when a hen pheasant rockets up from my feet I do. She chases it fiercely but it has too much of a head start; after fifty yards she slows, turns in mid-air and comes back to me, planing over the top of a hedgerow ash to land gently upon my fist. On another day she bursts downhill in pursuit of a rabbit and is about to grab it when the rabbit stops dead in its tracks. She overshoots and crashes into the ground; the rabbit jinks, doubles back on itself and runs uphill to the safety of a hole. She leaps back into the air to resume her pursuit but the rabbit is gone. She alights, confused and crestfallen, on the grass.
I’m crestfallen too. It’s not that I’m baying for blood. But I don’t want Mabel to get discouraged. In the wild, young goshawks will sit for hours hidden in trees waiting for an easy opportunity to present itself: a fledgling crow, a baby rabbit. But it is September now: nature’s easy pickings are grown. And while most goshawkers have a dog to help them find game, or a ferret to bolt rabbits for their hawk to chase, I do not. All I can do is walk with the hawk and hope we find something to catch. But I am a liability; her senses are far better than mine. We walk past a gully under a hedge where there are rabbits and rats and God knows what, all covered with brambles and briars and robins’ pincushions set on briar stems like exotic fruit, their vegetable hairs brushed green and rose and carmine. She dives from my fist towards the undergrowth. I don’t know she’s seen something – so I don’t let her go. Then I curse my pathetic human senses. Something was there. A mouse? A pheasant? A rabbit? With a stick I poke about in the gully but nothing comes out. It is too late; whatever it was has gone. We walk on. Mabel stops looking murderous and assumes an expression of severe truculence. How the hell, I imagine her thinking, am I supposed to catch things with this idiot in tow?
*
I return exhausted from our latest attempt: a hellish, traumatic afternoon, fractious, gusty and sour. I’d met Stuart and Mandy out on the hill. ‘I’ll run the dogs for you,’ he said. ‘See if we can get a point for her.’ But Mabel wasn’t having any of it. She bated and twittered and glared. She hated the dogs, she hated it all. I hated it too. I fed her up and drove us home. Then I started pulling clothes from a wardrobe, attempting to transform myself into a cheerful, civilised person who does things like go to art galleries. I brush the burrs from my hair, wash my face, shrug on a skirt, push the sleeves of a cashmere jumper back to my elbows, paint a black line over each eyelid. Foundation. Mascara. A smear of lipsalve to seal my wind-dried mouth, a pair of shiny boots with heels that make me worry that I can’t run in them – for running seems essential these days – and I check the result in a mirror. It is a good disguise. I’m pleased with how convincing it seems. But it’s getting late, and I’m running against the clock. I have twenty minutes to get to a gallery for the opening of an art exhibition. I’m supposed to give a talk about it in a few weeks’ time and I have to see the bloody thing first. I battle with sleep as I drive, and by the time I reach the gallery doors my knees are ready to give way.
I expect a room of paintings and sculpture. But when I open the doors there’s something so unexpected inside my brain turns cartwheels. It is a full-sized bird hide built of rough-hewn pine, and it is – I read the sign – an exact copy of a real structure in California. Seeing it in the gallery is as disconcerting as opening a fridge door and finding a house within. The hide is dark inside and packed with people peering through a window in one wall. I look out of it too. Oh! I see the trick. It is a neat one. The artist has filmed the view from the real hide, and is projecting it onto a screen beyond the window. It shows a soaring California condor, a huge, dusty-black carrion-eating vulture rendered nearly extinct by persecution, habitat destruction and poisoning from lead-contaminated carcasses. By the late 1980s only twenty-seven birds remained, and in a last-ditch effort to save the species they were trapped and taken into captivity so that their domestic-bred young could be used to repopulate the wild. Some people tried to stop this happening. They believed honestly and sincerely that once all the birds were captive, condors would cease to exist. These birds are made of wildness, they argued. A captive condor is a condor no more.
I watch the condor for a while. It makes me impatient. My head is packed with real skies and real hawks. I’m remembering live condors I’d met at a captive-breeding centre years before: vast, loose-feathered, turkey-necked birds with purpose and curiosity; avian hogs in black feather-boas. Precious, yes, but complicated, real, idiosyncratic, astonishing. The condor on the gallery screen was nothing like them. Helen, you are an idiot, I think. That is the whole point of this exhibition. The whole point of it, right there in front of you.
I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing – not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There’s little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss? There is a vast difference between my visceral, bloody life with Mabel and the reserved, distanced view of modern nature-appreciation. I know that some of my friends see my keeping a hawk as morally suspect, but I couldn’t love or understand hawks as much as I do if I’d only ever seen them on screens. I’ve made a hawk part of a human life, and a human life part of a hawk’s, and it has made the hawk a million times more complicated and full of wonder to me. I think of my chastened surprise when Mabel played with a paper telescope. She is real. She can resist the meanings humans give her. But the condor? The condor has no resistance to us at all. I stare at the attenuated, drifting image on the gallery screen. It is a shadow, a figure of loss and hope; it is hardly a bird at all.
The other exhibit is perfectly simple. It is a bird lying on its back in a glass box in an empty room. Seeing it makes all my soapbox musings fade and fall away. It’s a parrot, a Spix’s macaw. There are none left in the wild now and the last captive birds are the focus of desperate attempts to keep the species alive. This one is long dead. Stuffed with cotton wool, a small paper label tied to one of its clenched dry feet, its feathers are the deep blue of an evening sea. It might be the loneliest thing I have ever seen. But leaning over this spotlit skin in a glass coffin, I don’t think of animal extinction at all. I think of Snow White. I think of Lenin in his ill-lit mausoleum. And I think of the day after my father died, when I was shown into a hospital room where he lay.
But this isn’t him, I thought, wildly, after the woman closed the door. He isn’t here. Someone had dressed a waxwork of my father in hospital pyjamas and a patterned duvet. Why would they do that? It made no sense. It was nonsense. I took a step back. Then I saw on his arm the cut that would not heal and stopped. I knew I had to speak. For ages I could not. Physically could not. Something the size of a fist was in my throat and it was catching the words and not letting them out. I started to panic. Why couldn’t I speak? I have to speak to him. Then the tears came. They were not like normal tears. Water coursed in sheets down my cheeks and dripped to the hospital floor. And with the water came words. So I leaned over the bed and spoke to my father who was not there. I addressed him seriously and carefully. I told him that I loved him and missed him and would miss him always. And I talked on, explaining things to him, things I cannot now remember but which at the time were of clear and burning importance. Then there was silence. And I waited. I did not know why. Until I realised it was in hope that an answer might come. And then I knew it was over. I took my father’s hand in my own for the last time, squeezed it in a brief goodbye and quietly left the room.
*
The next day out on the hill Mabel learns, I suppose, what she is for. She chases a pheasant. It crashes into the brambles beneath a tall hedge. She lands on top of the hedge, peering down, her plumage bright against the dark earth of the further slope. I start running. I think I remember where the pheasant has gone. I convince myself it was never there at all. I know it is there. Clay sticks to my heels and slows me down. I’m in a world of slowly freezing mud, and even the air seems to be getting harder to run through. Mabel is waiting for me to flush the pheasant, if only I knew where it was. Now I am at the hedge, trying to find it, constructing what will happen next scenarios in my head, and at this point they’re narrowing fast, towards point zero, when the pheasant will fly. I cannot see Stuart and Mandy any more, though I know they must be there. I’m crashing through brambles and sticks, dimly aware of the catch and rip of thorns in my flesh. Now I cannot see the hawk because I am searching for the pheasant, so I have to work out what she is doing by putting myself in her mind – and so I become both the hawk in the branches above and the human below. The strangeness of this splitting makes me feel I am walking under myself, and sometimes away from myself. Then for a moment everything becomes dotted lines, and the hawk, the pheasant and I merely elements in a trigonometry exercise, each of us labelled with soft italic letters. And now I am so invested in the hawk and the pheasant’s relative positions that my consciousness cuts loose entirely, splits into one or the other, first the hawk looking down, second the pheasant in the brambles looking up, and I move over the ground as if I couldn’t possibly affect anything in the world. There is no way I can flush this pheasant. I’m not here. Time stretches and slows. There’s a sense of panic at this point, a little buffet of fear that’s about annihilation and my place in the world. But then the pheasant is flushed, a pale and burring chunk of muscle and feathers, and the hawk crashes from the hedge towards it. And all the lines that connect heart and head and future possibilities, those lines that also connect me with the hawk and the pheasant and with life and death, suddenly become safe, become tied together in a small muddle of feathers and gripping talons that stand in mud in the middle of a small field in the middle of a small county in a small country on the edge of winter.
