Ghosts of gone birds

I was fortunate while in London to catch the very end of the Ghosts of Gone Birds exhibition at Rochelle School, Shoreditch. The visual exhibition is the focal point of a programme of multimedia events which aims, in the words of the project's creator Ceri Levy, to 'raise a creative army for conservation.' Ghosts has attracted an impressive array of artists, famous and less so, and asked each of them to 'breathe life' into an extinct bird or birds of their choice. The results are exciting in their variety and ingenuity, testament to the limitless power of birds to fan our creative flames.

Time was when taking photographs in galleries and exhibitions was a capital offence. Not so these days and Ghosts positively encourages the publicity of amateur photographers uploading their own images to social networking sites. So I have no qualms about reproducing my photographs of prints by Ralph Steadman, one of the exhibition's most prolific contributors. Steadman's birds have all the caricaturist's hallmarks; scratchy lines and ink blots, grotesque humour and precarious vulnerability. Other than Leonard Baskin, I cannot think of an artist who captures the 'essence' of a bird more intuitively in his work. It is not surprising that both Steadman and Baskin collaborated with Ted Hughes, for whose 'red in tooth and claw' nature poems their art is the perfect complement.

Steadman draws birds that are both real and imagined. Alongside the egrets and grebes and parrots are made-up birds with wicked names like the Nasty Tern and the Needless Smut. There is perhaps a nod in the direction of medieval bestiaries here, those lavishly illustrated menageries of fantastical creatures compiled in the silence of monastery scriptoria; a touch too of Jorge Luis Borges' erudite but playful Book of Imaginary Beings. It may just be me, but I even sense hints of Dr Seuss, whose One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish was a staple reading aid of my childhood, populated with lovable and laughable pets with conveniently rhyming names.

Behind his sly humour Steadman has another purpose, however. For every extinct bird that history has recorded there are dozens of others that will have passed into oblivion without our knowledge, unnamed, undocumented and therefore unlamented. As another contributing artist, David Taborn, explains: 'I started to ponder over the 'unsung' birds whose state of extinction left no evidence, and for whom a memorial to the 'unknown bird' would be appropriate.'  Steadman has taken the unknown bird and given it form and name. Who's to say that his Gob Swallows and Once Bittern are any less plausible than the giant moas of New Zealand? Even Dr Seuss' creations are hardly more comical looking than the dodo.

Whatever his motives, Ralph Steadman has been truly kindled by the Ghosts project. Initially commissioned to contribute a single work, his prints keep coming and he has quipped that extinct birds 'have more character than today's politicians.'

The show at Rochelle School has finished now but Ghosts goes on building its creative army. You can buy prints and follow developments on the project's website www.ghostsofgonebirds.com

The end of a day

Across the dunes and salt margins of Aberlady Bay darkness advances swiftly. There are no roses or carnations in the sunset, only chrysanthemums, russet and old gold like the drapes of a stately bedroom. A constant wind has blown all day. It comes from the west but carries the crystalline bite of winter. It whips the expanse of grey grasses into waves that mimic the sea. The tide is on the full and the sea is foaming, booming. Gulls lift from the rocks and are hurled away instantly. 

Inland the dry wood of buckthorn bushes rattles and creaks. It looks dead but the stems are heavy with orange berries that glow unnaturally bright in the failing light. As I pass I send up flocks of feeding winter thrushes, clacking fieldfares that the wind quickly scatters. Higher still and there are geese; hundreds of birds in undisciplined squadrons that have risen as one from nearby fields. There are no syllables in human speech that accurately express their calling. Perhaps they sing of the Sagas of the far north.

The moon is barely two days old. It is the closing bracket of a parenthesis written in stars as yet unseen across the heavens. Occasionally the wind brings a shrill, panicky piping of oystercatchers and the liquid notes of a solitary curlew. Around here they are still called by their old name by some folk; whaups. It captures their plaintive fluting exactly. Our predecessors knew a thing or two about birds. Back at the car my face glows from the flaying wind and there is salt on my lips.

I offer these pictures with love to my dearest friend J. Yesterday her mother died after a long and, at times, bloody-minded battle with illness. J has flown over the sea to be with her. The end of a day is not the end of all days.

Let's hear it for the garden warbler

We should be honest, in the appearance stakes the garden warbler has an image problem, a reputation for being our dowdiest of birds. In a land where the non-enthusiast complains there are plenty of LBJs ('little brown jobs') for company, the garden warbler (he or she, for the sexes are alike) has made an art of plain dressing. He has no crest to strike a pose, no rufous breast to square up to a rival; he has no flashing wing bars or cocky eye stripe with which to woo a mate. His absence of distinguishing features, the RSPB notes with an exclamation mark, is itself a guide to identification. So who will speak up for the garden warbler? What can be said for this drab little bird?

To begin with, it is rather misleadingly named, unless you have the kind of garden that requires the services of a modern-day Capability Brown. Its taxonomic genus Sylvia gives a better clue to habitat. The garden warbler has a liking for woodland, especially for mature broad-leaved, deciduous trees from which it may venture into parks but never strays far. Sylvia borin is the specific name - not 'Sylvia boring' as I have heard before now.

Garden Warbler from Wiki Commons

What else? Like all our British warblers it diets mostly on insects, from which we can deduce several things. It is a summer visitor when food is plentiful, a long distance migrant. The garden warbler comes to us from central and southern Africa and its annual stay is a short one. Usually it has left again by early August. Catching enough insects to fatten up for the return flight is hard work, so warblers are active birds, rarely staying put for more than a few seconds. All in all its nondescript plumage and tendency to flit about in dense leaf cover makes the garden warbler a challenge to spot.

But if we can't see it we can always listen, and here is the reward for our effort. I suppose it ought to be a lesson to us that this plain little bird has one of the loveliest of songs. It comes in short bursts of a few seconds, like an out of practice soprano with plenty of power but short on breath. The notes are are all sweet without any of the scratches and whistles often associated with other warblers. But it is also elusive, never quite resolving into a 'tune', never quite repeating a refrain. Apparently the song contains much mimicry of other birds but it is delivered at a speed that makes this hard to discern. It would be revealing to hear a recording slowed down.

Many connoisseurs of birdsong have been lyrical in their praise of Sylvia borin. Sir Edward Grey, Liberal MP and British Foreign Secretary from 1905-1916, took much solace from birdsong in the dark days leading to the First World War. In his The Charm of Birds (1927) he places the garden warbler in the first order of songsters, running a close second to its stable mate, the blackcap. 'To my ear the opening notes of the blackcap's song and those of the garden-warbler are so alike that I hear them with a doubt of which bird I am listening to; but the garden-warbler goes on and on for a longer time and yet never seems to liberate its voice upon the air so completely as the blackcap does. In other words, a garden-warbler's song seems always on the point of an achievement to which only the blackcap attains.'

Another keen ornithologist, French serialist composer Olivier Messiaen was in awe of birdsong all his life. In the 1970s he published La fauvette des jardins, a thirty minute piece for solo piano, as his tribute to the supremacy of the garden warbler. The composition makes no attempt to imitate the song, but instead draws original inspiration from its tinkling beauty.

I have just spent a week camping in the quiet countryside of Teesdale, county Durham. The song of the garden warbler was part of my daily alarm call, some mornings rather earlier than I might have wished for! He (or she) had a favoured bush close by, a stopping off point on his territorial rounds, from which a few bursts of notes were rendered before moving on, ever restless, ever hungry. But even further afield his song was loud enough to lift above the general chorus. Like Sir Edward Grey, I was charmed. Like Olivier Messiaen, I was inspired. In a country of 'little brown jobs' there is nothing boring about Sylvia and we do well not to judge a bird by its cover.

Hawks among the headstones

Quite a crowd had gathered by the time I arrived and at first it was difficult to see the attraction. But as the bodies parted, I saw him, just a few feet away on the other side of the railings in the grounds of Edinburgh's Cathedral of St Mary. 'Oh!' I exclaimed. 'A sparrowhawk, how exciting!' And there he was, a male bird with striking grey and pink barred plumage, glaring defiantly back at us. Beneath his talons, stunned but still living, was a stricken feral pigeon. In a characteristic pose he made a canopy with his wings, concealing his prize. The more squeamish members of the crowd made shooing noises. One woman pleaded 'can't you make it stop?' Another asked 'why doesn't it fly away?' Male sparrowhawks are not large birds, sometimes only half the weight of their mate. The pigeon was simply too heavy to lift, too tasty to leave. It was a showdown.

This dramatic photograph is not mine. It was taken by Jane Barton of the Hampshire Ornithological Society. I hope she will not object to me reproducing it here as it captures closely the scene I witnessed.

In the general gloom of declining bird populations the urban sparrowhawk has been something of a success story. The Edinburgh Hawkwatch project, which monitors local sightings of the birds, estimates that 30 or more pairs may breed within the confines of the city, a remarkable recovery from the former indiscriminate persecution suffered by all our birds of prey. Sparrowhawks nest high in trees and Edinburgh is well endowed with inner city woodland. Prime sites are some of the older, less manicured cemeteries. Other bird species do well too in the dense cover of the graveyards and that's good news for sparrowhawks which diet almost exclusively on small birds.

My favourite corners of Edinburgh's cemeteries will remain my secret and they give the appearance of being largely forgotten. They are certainly not the parts frequented by tourists in search of famous graves. In fact I doubt they receive many visitors at all. I encounter occasional dog walkers but that's about it. I find this rather surprising given the general appeal of all things gothic. Headstones bearing all manner of symbols and memento mori emerge like crooked peg teeth from a sea of undergrowth and the crumbling, ivied mausoleums are picturesque in the true aesthetic meaning of the word. They are best in dappled sunlight or when a breeze shakes big drops of rain from the broad-leaved canopy after a downpour.

At each end of the day in particular the cemeteries are busy with birds. Blackbirds and dunnocks rummage in the leaf litter, song thrushes entertain from high perches and wrens trill or tick angrily from crevices in the masonry. In winter flocks of redwings comb the grass, seeming to move as one as they search for worms in the iron ground, and fieldfares strip the shrubs of berries. I have heard laughing woodpeckers and, on lucky days, the shrieking calls of sparrowhawks.

I know of at least one cemetery nest site near the centre of the city and it can be a noisy place in May and June. The nest itself is well hidden but the birds betray their presence with their calling. Roles at the nest are clearly defined and account for the pair's difference in size. Exclusively the female incubates and watches over the vulnerable newborn chicks while the male hunts. His returns to the nest are greeted by volleys of banshee catcalls that sound eerie among the surrounding gravestones. It may be just my imagination but other birds seem to grow quiet and watchful when the male is present, although I have never witnessed him hunting so close to the nest.

In common with all raptors, the predatory habits of the sparrowhawk and its effects are widely and sometimes wilfully misunderstood. There is aboslutely no evidence that the return of the birds to our urban spaces has contributed to declining songbird numbers. Mortality rates among small birds are very high anyway. The hawk, a highly territorial bird, is an integral part of the population equilibrium, and simply wouldn't stay to breed if there was not an adequate food supply. Nevertheless, sparrowhawk nest sites remain vulnerable to persecution, which is why I am not telling where mine is.

Moments of light and being

'When one says 'ten o'clock' or 'three o'clock', this is not the grey shrunken time of towns; it is the memory of a certain fulmination or declension of light that was unique to that time and that place on that day, a memory as vivid to the hunter as burning magnesium.'

J.A.Baker The Peregrine

The phrase 'moments of being' was, I believe, first coined by Virginia Woolf in an autobiographical essay A Sketch of the Past written in the 1930s but not discovered or published until long after her death. She describes brief states of heightened awareness of reality, of being alive, in contrast to the humdrum fug of unreality in which most of her life was played out. The stimulus for such a state could be trauma or surprise, something out of the ordinary that jolts us 'awake'.

Unreality is a common enough experience for many of us and dangerously so when a manifestation of depressive mental illness. In her almost unbearably personal poem Lady Lazarus (also published posthumously) Sylvia Plath wrote 'I do it so it feels real' to account for cyclical attempts at dying. Near-death experiences, it seems to me, were the stimulus for the moments of being that she craved but found so elusive.

I have been party to countless conversations during my life where someone has talked of a 'moment of being', likely often without knowledge of its derivation. Very frequently its use has been to describe something in the natural world; a thing of beauty or terror, a rare sighting, something that will dwell long in the memory. I have used it in this way myself, never truly sure whether it is quite what Virginia Woolf meant. But then why not? Encounters with nature beyond the ordinary are exciting. They make us feel alive, even if we aren't sure what we have seen. The unexpected flash of a kingfisher or splash of an otter, the explosion of a sparrowhawk into a peaceful garden, have the power to animate even the most nonchalant among us.

In response to my last post Greg shared a personal story of his own close encounter with a swift. It is a lovely miniature, with a happy outcome, and although no doubt a brief episode it has remained with him years later. Looking back, it is revealing to me how many of my own such moments involve birds.

Some are quite literally moments (an Orkney hen harrier lifting silently from the heather beneath my feet and ghosting away across the moor). They may last longer, long enough for me to be aware of the 'reality-shift' even as it is happening (dusk in a Polish forest after thundery rain, an hour spent listening to the fluty song of a pair of golden oriole). When time allows they may be further extended (a whole day perched on a Cornish cliff watching the comings and goings, the ritual greetings of a kittiwake colony).

For me, time does odd things during moments like these, slowing and spacing out. Visible for no more than a minute, there was time to count every ring in the hen harrier's tail feathers, to note the way her feet trailed as she flew and her lazy, soundless wingbeats . At the same time my mind speeds up, my senses sharpen and everything else becomes unimportant. There are passages in J.A.Baker's unnerving book The Peregrine where the sense of the author as a man blurs into the animus of the falcons he stalks. As the book progresses, Baker's employment of personal pronouns diminishes. The birds are everything.

I cannot put a precise date to any of these events, it is not important. They are all more than a decade ago but they, and many many similar occasions both before and since, are scorched into my memory without a single detail lost. They are testimony to the healing, restorative power of nature to remind us that we are real; moments of being, moments - to borrow J.A.Baker's striking imagery - of the fulmination and declension of light, when we are unquestionably alive.