Dear Reader,
Do you have a spark bird? A bird that sparked a heightened awareness and appreciation of the feathered sort? I’ve just learned that term from a new essay by Emily Raboteau (discussed later in this issue), and I love it. I found my spark bird perhaps twenty-five years ago. In dense and shifting fog, I was rowing in a cove at Roque Island in Maine. As I approached the shore . . . a flash of bright yellow! A delicate brown and white bird with a long beak and very long skinny legs the color of pineapple was making its way along the water’s edge, advancing with absolute poise and concentration.
I had never seen such a bird: the lesser yellowlegs. He seemed like a visitor from some faraway place or ancient age. Then I remembered that I was the tourist, and that he was at home. This was before smartphones, so there was no photo to take. I simply quieted my oars and drifted near him for as long as I could. Just looking. I’m not a serious or knowledgable birder, but like many of you perhaps, I am looking more carefully and with more joy during the pandemic.
I want to thank you once again for all your kind words and support! This would be a good issue to share with your friends who love birds and birding. In the future I will definitely be discussing more books about avian life, so if you have a favorite book about birds, by all means drop me a line by email, Twitter DM, or carrier pigeon.
Review
Vesper Flights
Helen Macdonald
Grove Press, 2020
261 pages
$27.00
A couple of weeks ago, I went for a short hike on a cold but sunny day at Appleton Farms in Ipswich, Massachusetts. In March, the sun really starts to do something for a person. Even on a cold day it can make you feel warm. I just learned the word for this: apricity, the warmth of a winter sun. I parked in a small lot at the farm, and watched through my windshield in wonder as a flock of bluebirds zipped and zinged all around the little meadow right at the trailhead. They were apparently apricating as well.
As I hiked down to the farmhouse, I saw a hawk circling over a pasture in a wide, low swoop. Northern harrier? Male? As I crossed the wooden bridge over the railroad tracks, he flew past me and landed in a tree by the trail. He looked to be in fine fettle. I made a loop through woods and marsh. The trail was lined with nesting boxes. More bluebirds, scads of them. And then on my way back, my eye caught flashes of blue on the ground: a starburst pattern of tiny blue and gray and fluffy white feathers. They were starting to soak into the mud. I didn’t witness the hawk actually clamping its talons onto that little bluebird, but I felt as if I had been to the opera.
Would I have perceived the drama if I hadn’t read this week’s book? Perhaps, but I doubt it. And if so, not in the same way.
It was on these very trails last summer that I listened to the audio version of Vesper Flights, by Helen Macdonald. She is a British writer, well known for her memoir H is for Hawk. That book recounts the story of how Helen trained a goshawk while grieving the death of her father, and it became a surprise bestseller in both the U.K. and the U.S. H is for Hawk owes its success to the extraordinary physical and emotional precision of Macdonald’s writing. It is a book about loss, from which the author reaches out her gloved arm not only to Mabel the Goshawk, but also to the past: to the suffering kindred soul of writer T. H. White. And to the present: to readers struggling with their own losses on both the personal and planetary scales.
Vesper Flights is a book of forty-one essays derived from Macdonald’s continuing explorations of the natural world, and she asks us to see this collection as a Wunderkammer—a cabinet of wonders. “I like to think that my subject is love, and most specifically love for the glittering world of non-human life around us . . . To think what it might mean to love those things that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.” And that’s what grabs me. Macdonald is describing not just starlings and swans, but a different way of looking at the world—with clear eyes, an open heart, and absolute attention to the differences and connections between humans and our neighboring species. The issues of our time are all here in this book: nativism and the uses of the past, late capitalism and class, climate change and the sixth extinction. Yet they are treated not with polemic and prescription, but instead with delicacy and angularity. For this reason, I hope that in the future Macdonald might report on the roles that climate change, habitat destruction, and human food systems might have played in the emergence of COVID-19, as well as other zoonotic diseases that may become an increasing threat to human communities.
Macdonald grew up feeling different from other children. She was preoccupied with nature from an early age. She had a pair of binoculars, and the English countryside to roam and inhabit, especially a beloved eight-acre meadow. “I’d press my face in the grass to watch insects the size of the dot over an ‘i’ moving in the earthly tangle where the difference between stems and roots grew obscure. Or turn over and prospect for birds in the thick cumulus rubble of the sky.” Her powers of observation as a writer capture not only detail so minute you wonder if she looks through a jeweler’s loupe, but also the gradients of things, the shadings and quiet transformations from light to dark, from stem to root.
The book’s title essay, “Vesper Flights,” also meditates on transitions and orientations. She describes the extraordinary group ascents to high altitude— the vesper flights—of swifts at dusk and dawn. She details the attempts of humans to understand the birds’ communal efforts to test the airs, to forecast the weather, and to plan their migrations. There is scientific method here, and there is also mystery. Macdonald tells of a World War I pilot gliding in circles at night behind enemy lines, “a light wind against him, the full moon overhead . . . He had flown into a small party of swifts in deep sleep, miniature black stars illuminated by the reflected light of the moon. He managed to catch two.” Wow. How?
The “Great American” solar eclipse of 2017 is also the subject of an important essay in this book, in which she revisits a central theme of H is for Hawk: the relationship of the individual to her community. “Long ago, when I first decided I wanted to see a total solar eclipse, I planned to do so in romantic solitude . . . The presence of other people would detract from the meaningfulness of it all, I thought, convinced that the best way to experience the natural world was to seek private communion with it.” Yet in this important essay, Macdonald breaks down the myth of romantic solitude, and explicates its dangers: “. . . it is always a political act, bringing freedom from the pressures of other minds, other interpretations, other consciousnesses competing with your own.” Experiencing nature in crowds at industrial scale can also be problematic, for it can lead to ecological damage and, in the U.S., can reinforce tropes of American exceptionalism. But Macdonald points out that the eclipse-viewing crowd offers another model: “. . . confronting something like the absolute, all our differences are moot. When you stand and watch the death of the sun and see it reborn there can be no them, only us.”
No them. Only us. This book has made me realize that one of the most difficult aspects of lockdown is that I am only able to be with groups of people online. Outdoors, I am nearly always alone. What I yearn for most right now is to be in the fresh air with people. People with whom I can pore over maps, puzzle over mushroom identification, share snacks, and swat mosquitoes. People with “other interpretations, other consciousnesses.” People with whom I can join forces and march. I want to live an undivided life, in which my online activism gets real again in the real world. Thanks to vaccine scientists and so many others, that future is now in sight, and I hope to make the most of it.
The undivided life may also mean breaking down the false ways in which we make nature synonymous with rural landscapes. Macdonald spends time watching peregrines hunting from the chimneys of a power station, in an industrial district near Dublin. She has kind words for the kitschy suburban birdhouse. And she reminds us that the scraggly wilds at the edge of your local shopping mall can be very good places to look for birds.
There is so much more to wonder over in Vesper Flights, and language is deployed with consistent virtuosity. Macdonald takes us on a boat up the Thames with jolly English swan catchers, to the top of the Empire State Building at night to watch the fall bird migration, and to the crater lakes of the Altiplano in Bolivia, with a cosmic scientist diving for extreme life forms that might exist on other planets.
“There was one time in 2006, when she was suspended in the middle of the volcanic lake, caught midway between earth and sky, the water arctic blue and each ray of sunlight diffracting around her so that she felt surrounded by diamonds. ‘And on top of that,’ she says, ‘copepods, little zooplankton, tiny shrimps, and they are so red. It’s a symphony of color. I’m suspended like that, and time stands still. And for one fraction of a second, everything is perfect. I don’t need to have to explain anything. For that very moment, you understand everything. And there is nothing to understand.’”
Macdonald even takes us inside her own head, to explore the migraine headache and to consider just what books of theology might have to offer to the non-believer. “Trying to think and write after reading them feels a little as if I’m trying to learn glass-blowing on my own. Their concepts are hot, supple, incandescent, feel slightly dangerous . . . but even so I’m drawn to think about this stuff, to try to shape it, with all its burn and glow and texture.”
I feel a bit the same way after reading this book. Helen Macdonald is offering us a hard, dangerous, and exciting way to be in this world, a practice of sustained attention to the phenomenal and of openness to what lies beyond. In a recent talk, Macdonald invoked Robin Wall Kimmerer’s invitation to imagine how we would act if we understood that the world loved us back. No them. Only us.
Feast Your Eyes
As mentioned earlier, I really loved this essay “Spark Bird,” by Emily Raboteau. Her topic is a series of bird murals that were recently created in her New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights. Raboteau explores with much care the many and sometimes conflicting ways in which these artworks are being seen and understood during this difficult time. Hers is but one among a range of beautiful pieces in the current issue of the journal Orion.
Poem of the Week
In honor of Vesper Flights, please enjoy Swifts, by Anne Stevenson. Here is the first stanza.
Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains.
The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads.
But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child
You shout, 'The swifts are back!'
From the Library
I’ve lately been reorganizing my books, at the wholly enjoyable pace of a snail. And I have been coming across quite a few delights, many of them found by my husband Jay during the 70s and 80s at secondhand dealers like Johnson’s Bookstore in Springfield, Massachusetts, a famous haunt which sadly no longer exists. The other day I took a gem off the shelf: Useful Birds and Their Protection by Edward H. Forbush (1907). Forbush was the official ornithologist of the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture. This tome was commissioned and funded by an act of the state legislature. It’s filled with delightful illustrations, which often feature birds doing things that are helpful to farmers and foresters, like eating gypsy moth caterpillars.
The volume presents itself as a bird manual for farmers and foresters. Yet in truth, this book is a cri de coeur from Forbush for humans to stop killing birds to extinction. “The war of extermination waged on game birds is a blot on the history of American civilization.”
For Your Reading Radar
Many thanks to subscriber Hillary Rayport for telling me about Imbolo Mbue’s new novel, How Beautiful We Were. Mbue’s work portrays a complex, multi-generational struggle in an African village to fight back against the destructive actions of an American oil company. Omar El-Akkad’s review led the New York Times Book Review last Sunday. He wrote, “What carries Mbue’s decades-spanning fable of power and corruption is something much less clear-cut, and what starts as a David-and-Goliath story slowly transforms into a nuanced exploration of self-interest, of what it means to want in the age of capitalism and colonialism—these machines of malicious, insatiable wanting.” You can hear Mbue discuss her book on this podcast hosted by the New York Times. Mbue also has a story in the latest New Yorker with an exuberantly analytical title: “The Case For and Against Love Potions.”
For Your Calendar
Later this month, Harvard Bookstore will be hosting author Nathaniel Rich in conversation with nature writer and activist Terry Tempest Williams. The topic will be Rich’s new book, entitled Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade. The talk is scheduled for Wednesday, March 31st at 7 PM EST. According to the publisher (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), “In Second Nature, ordinary people make desperate efforts to preserve their humanity in a world that seems increasingly alien. Their stories—obsessive, intimate, and deeply reported—point the way to a new kind of environmental literature in which dramatic narrative helps us to understand our place in a reality that resembles nothing human beings have known.”
Have a great weekend. Let me know what you get up to outdoors. xo Nicie