fretmarks

Gossss

2009-11-06T12:53:00.000Z

An ex-cep-tional afternoon's haul...

2009-11-03T16:30:00.003Z

The following post

2009-11-03T16:19:00.002Z

Is that most irritating thing, an academic paper I never published because I couldn't for the life of me track down some of the missing references. It is hard going in places. I was still attempting to sound clever, rather than just say things clearly. Wrote it five or six years ago for a workshop on objectivity in the sciences at the LSE. It's been sitting on my hard drive (and circulating as photocopies) for so long I thought: I'll just publish it here. Peer-reviewed journals be damned. Please feel free to completely ignore it. It's just better out here than in there, yanow?

Covert Naturalists

2009-11-03T15:55:00.007Z

Covert (n).

c. by covert: under cover, covertly. in (into) covert: in concealment; in hiding, or disguise, secretly; rarely, in safety. in (the) covert of: in the shelter of; rarely, in shelter from…under covert: under cover, in shelter; in concealment, under a disguise.
3. A place which gives shelter to wild animals or game; esp. a thicket;
4. The technical term for a flock or ‘company’ of coots. Obs.
5. Ornith. in pl. Feathers that cover the bases of the larger feathers on some particular part of the body, e.g. tail-coverts, wing-coverts, esp. the latter.
6 trans. (legal) authority, jurisdiction. Obs.

1. Introduction

This paper investigates some aspects of objectivity in ethology. It does so by exploring aspects of the culture and field-practices of ethologists. I take as read Clifford Geertz’s statement that to understand a science one must examine neither its theories nor its findings, but ‘what its practitioners do’. And while fascinating problems relating to objectivity might be tackled by examining arguments over the selection of units of behaviour, or focusing on the quantitative analysis of ethological data, here I concentrate on those field-practices that are effaced from ethological papers, or, if present, are passed over as self-evident or as mere commonsense.

Importantly, I want to stress that I do not look here at the forms of “unobtrusive” manipulative experiment that ethologists carried out in the field. Ethologists were adamant that such experiments were only to be carried out after long and arduous ‘reconnaissance observation’ of the species in question: and it’s the ways in which objectivity was sought through the field practices of reconnaissance observation that are the subject of this paper.

Using various dictionary definitions of the word ‘covert’ to trace the different senses in which ethologists could be said to be ‘covert naturalists’ is a surprisingly rewarding way of grappling with aspects of objectivity in ethology. I want to concentrate on two aspects of the hunt for objectivity in particular. First, the various forms of objectivity promoted by the use of hides to observe animals. Secondly, taking as my cue Niko Tinbergen’s assurance that observation is itself a scientific procedure, I want to engage with the forms of objectivity promoted through ethologists’ strategies of observation and visual perception. And I end on a speculative note, discussing how ethologists could understand an imaginative empathy with animals to be a credible method of obtaining scientific data, rather than an anthropomorphic and subjective movement.

Anxieties of influence

Before launching into an examination of ethology’s field-practices, I want to set the scene. And to this end, an obsolete, legal sense of the term ‘covert’ meaning ‘under jurisdiction or authority’ is pertinent. For wider questions relating to forms of subjectivity and objectivity in ethology are clearly related to the history of the discipline. Attempting to assume jurisdiction over the field of animal behaviour, early ethologists such as Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz sought to assume the authority to define which questions should be asked of animals and how they should be asked. Ethology was presented as a necessary corrective to and a reaction against the manipulative experimental practices and laboratory-based methodologies of experimental psychology. Psychologists’ experimental testing of behavioural theories on animals, they argued, led to invalid conclusions, for animals could not exhibit true behaviours in such depauperate and artificial experimental conditions. They also challenged the expertise of experimental psychologists; individuals such as de Haan and Skinner were derided as failing to possess that knowledge of and ‘intimacy’ with animals that ethologists considered an epistemological and moral requisite for understanding animal behaviour. Lacking personal knowledge of the animal’s natural behavioural repertoire, the scientists' experimental results could not be adequately judged and were therefore invalid. Lorenz described experimental psychologists as ‘intelligent’ but ‘eyeless’.

Rejecting the generalisable, universal and ‘placeless’ guarantees of objectivity offered by laboratory science, ethologists embraced place to obtain valid data. This is the second meaning of covert I want to raise—that is, ‘covert’ meaning a place where wild animals live. Ethologists are truly covert naturalists: their methodological ideal to assure the accuracy of their observations on animal behaviour by investigating it in a milieu in which the animals behave ‘naturally’ Taking science into the field in this way inevitably generated anxieties over its jurisdiction over a territory whose boundaries cannot be effectively policed. Figure 1, of an ethological field of inquiry, contains cows, for example, and weekend campers, not ethologists, might be in those tents. Clearly, farmers, walkers, birdwatchers, botanists, egg-collectors all have access to this landscape; it’s not restricted to scientists alone.

Figure 1. Ethologists hiding in the field

The restriction of social access to laboratories is a powerful symbolic guarantee of credibility, and Rob Kohler, among others, has explored how the social diversity of the field deprives field scientists of this automatic credit. Ambiguous identity and anxieties about credibility literally come with the territory.

These problems were particularly problematic in the early years of the discipline. Establishing ethology’s scientific credentials through demarcating it from cognate field-activities such as birdwatching and casual nature appreciation was a particularly crucial task, for ethology arose from the social milieu, moral economies, and field practices of these activities. It was crucial for early ethologists to convince their audiences that ethology was a scientific discipline and that their observations were credibly objective.

Yet because both the spaces, the subjects, and the technologies of ethology—the use of hides, binoculars, and so on—were shared with the avowedly ‘non-scientific’ activities of photography, hunting and birdwatching, scientific credibility was necessarily assumed by displacing objectivity away from instrumentation, away from dedicated research subjects and laboratory spaces restricted to ‘science’ and onto the expertise and professional identity of the individual ethologist.

Lacking dedicated instruments, subjects and scenes of enquiry, ethologists assumed objectivity, crucially, through strategies of observational practice: forms of looking, forms of attention—as well as forms of intimate knowledge of animals and, ultimately, I will argue, ethologists fostered interpretive strategies founded on professional, legitimate forms of empathy.

These strategies operate in intriguing counterpoint to another strategy crucial to ethology—the effacement of the scientist—and I shall discuss this later in the paper. First of all, I want to look at the forms of objectivity sought through the use of hides—how scientists made themselves disappear.

Self-effacing scientists

1. Effacement through invisibility

The first form of disappearance I want to discuss is a literal one. Covert naturalists are hidden naturalists. Covert means dissimulation, disguise, secrecy, and being covered or concealed, and all these senses irresistibly refer to the ethologist’s use of hides (figure 2).

Figure 2. “Examples of observation hides” (from Pettingill, 1970, Ornithology in Laboratory and Field, reprinted in Lehner, p. 67)

These self-effacing technologies are designed to absent the scientist from the phenomenal world of the animals investigated. Hides create a disembodied observer with no consequential presence. They are an architectural attempt to guarantee the epistemological reliability and truth of behavioural data through an assurance that the scientist in no way affects the behaviour of the animals observed. In a related sense, the hide literalises and concretises that ascetic withdrawal from the immediacy of the observed phenomena which is at the heart of the positivist-pragmatic ethos—translating a methodological, cognitive freeing from subjective involvement to a literal freeing from involvement. What trust is in participant observation, invisibility is in ethological observation; both strategies aim to prevent subjects from hiding or distorting information—in ethnography because the subjects do not trust the researcher or the ultimate purposes of the research—and in the ethology because the animal’s ‘true’ behaviour will be distorted if the observer is present.

2. Objectivity through interchangeability

The second form of disappearance promoted by hides is an effacement of individuality. Unlike participant observation, where trust is earned by individual fieldworkers through a dialogue with their subjects , the invisible hide-bound expert ethologist is in principle interchangeable; provided they possess sufficient expertise to judge, to paraphrase Niko Tinbergen, ‘when nature carries out experiments in front of one’, it does not matter which individual scientist sits behind the canvas blind. This form of ‘interchangeability’ clearly connotes an aperspectival objectivity. And indeed, a literal interchangeability is manifest in the way hides are used—before valid observations of animals can occur, they must be ‘tricked’ into thinking that there are no humans in the hide. G. K. Yeates explained that the typical ethologist’s strategy in works because, quote, ‘A bird’s ability to count is lamentable’. Thus, in a situation like that shown in figure 1, two or three people enter the hide at the same time, in full view of the animals—and then after a short period all but the actual observer leaves, assuring the animals the hide is empty. After all, it is the presence of the scientist’s body that would alarm the animal, and it is the scientist’s bodily presence which is effaced,

3. Heroic effacement of the body

A third form of effacement is more complex in nature. Ethological fieldwork begins with extended ‘reconnaissance observation’ the purpose of which is to familiarise the observer with the behaviour of the animal; this necessary groundwork results in an ‘ethogram’. This ‘set of comprehensive descriptions of the behavioural repertoire of the species’ (Brown, J. L. The evolution of behaviour, Norton, NY 1975) is considered both to be of scientific worth in itself, and as a crucial grounding for further research. Sustained reconnaissance observation is the method by which expertise is gained by the ethologist, and it is far from the casual strolls of amateur birdwatchers or nature enthusiasts. Ethologists sharply differentiated ‘watching’ animals from ‘observing’ them – the former the province of the amateur, the latter a professional activity and the mark of the ethologist’s eye. Observing was considered a rigorous, scientific activity. Marler describes it as ‘the most arduous and demanding aspect of behavioural study’. Lorenz, too, stressed how it makes ‘great demands upon the observational capacity of the investigator… the investigator must live with the animals, day after day’ . Lehner (1979) sees animal behaviour study as dependent on

‘weeks and months and years of careful stalking, hiding and painstaking observations…hours are spent in a hide under less than ideal conditions, with inclement weather making you physically uncomfortable and your view of the animals poor and the inactivity of the animals frustrating. Your binoculars get beaten about and rained and snowed upon, and the pages of your field notes become limp and stuck together.'

These extended observations are generally made from the isolation of a cramped, closed hide. Not only are valid observations guaranteed through the strategy of visually effacing the scientist’s body, but also by effacing the body physically, too—the weaknesses of the body must be transcended by the application of heroic self-discipline in the field.

In sum, hides supply the ethologist with other forms of effacement than mere invisibility. Field scientists have long incorporated the trope of the explorer-hero in their assurances of objectivity; a movement by which trust and credibility is attached to scientific witnesses by virtue of the courage, self-sacrifice or physical endurance they have undergone in the field. In sum, this heroically achieved moral authority is premised on a triumph over embodiment—a different form of effacement—ethologists transcend the limits of human endurance to obtain scientific truth, truth guaranteed by the suffering involved in obtaining it.

Figure 3: Niko Tinbergen building a hide for reconnaissance observation in the late 1920s

4. Photographic objectivity

All this self-effacement recalls Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s point in their paper ‘The Image of Objectivity’ that at the heart of mechanical objectivity lies non-intervention, rather than verisimilitude; they have discussed how the machine came to embody a morality of self-discipline and restraint, the producer of pure images, authentic images, images uncontaminated by interpretation.

I want to argue here that ethologists assumed forms of mechanical objectivity not solely through bodily effacement, but also through ‘borrowing’ mechanical authenticity from photographic discourse. Numerous ethological field methods, including the use of hides, were derived directly from early twentieth-century wildlife photography. Niko Tinbergen, was himself a keen photographer, like many early ethologists, and in the 1920s, he announced that wildlife photography was growing in scientific stature. No longer content with easily obtained images of birds on their nests, photographers were seeking new technical challenges; they were now attempting to capture representative animal behaviours on film. To do so, they had to sit for many hours in hides waiting for birds to show ‘interesting’ behaviours such as displays and other forms of interactions between individuals. Sustained observation and sustained critical attention had to be paid to the animals in order to obtain the ability to predict when such photogenic behaviours might occur. This is exactly the form of predictive capacity described as essential to the ethologist by Lehman in 1955, who explains that after considerable experience of watching animals, ‘the observer can get a feeling of what is going to happen next, which is compounded in different degrees of the intellectual experience of relationships that are involved on one hand, and, on the other, of building yourself into the situation’.

Now, photographic conventions clearly influenced the ways in which ethologists broke down sequences of behaviour into a series of gestural or postural units, but there is a much stronger point to be made here. Functional analogies between the eye of the ethologist and the camera lens are crucial, for they influenced the ways in which ethologists understood their own cognitive and experiential processes when they observed and interpreted animal behaviour. Put simply, the effacement of the ethologist in the hide, the strategies of non-intervention, the replacement of the camera lens with the eye—these all allowed ethologists to characterise themselves as functioning like scientific instruments, their ‘nervous machinery’, in principle free from the subjective temptations of aestheticising and theorizing, was able to supply as objective and accurate a portrayal of reality as of its functional cognate, the photograph.

Lorenz extolled the ability of the mechanical, unconscious processes of ethologist’s ‘nervous machinery’ to produce perceptions that were a valid source of knowledge. Blackboxing the unconscious processes by which these truths were obtained; he maintained that the ‘systematic intuition’ of the zoologist relies on a high degree of accuracy through processes which are unamenable to conscious examination, in which a large number of variables are unconsciously weighted and analysed’.

However, he agreed that this might ‘seem highly suspicious to some scientists’. And unsurprisingly he identified these scientists as ‘a school of orthodox American behaviourists who seriously attempt to exclude direct observation of animals from their methods. It is a worthwhile task to prove what we have seen’ he continued, ‘ in such a way that these and other ‘eyeless’ but intelligent people are bound to believe it’ Tinbergen wrote in a similar vein, stressing the normative aspects of using one’s nervous machinery as a means of credible witnessing. The ‘experienced observer’ of animal behaviour, he explained, can judge from the basis of ‘extensive previous observations’ when the ‘experiments’ nature is carrying out are valid ones, and that ‘in principle such a selective technique is no different from discarding a ‘jump’ of a barometer due to the slamming of a door’. He continues:

But we cannot be surprised if non-ethologists are not prepared to concede its validity […] though it may be regrettable that so many scientists are unduly impressed by the exactness of their mechanical measuring instruments, and insufficiently impressed of the potential performance of our own nervous ‘measuring equipment’, we must take account of this widespread attitude.

Lorenz, Tinbergen and others present manipulative experiments as the rhetorical underlining of truths that had already been obtained by the ‘nervous measuring equipment’ of the ‘expert’ or ‘clinical eye’. The capacity for accuracy of this ‘expert’ or ‘clinical eye’ was considered directly proportionate to the amount of time the ethologist had spent observing animals; in other words, the ethologist’s nervous machinery was calibrated through long exposure to the research subject. F. B. Kirkman’s description of his long-term study of black-headed gull colonies in the 1940s traces the ‘autobiography of the clinical eye’ succinctly. In the early days of his research Kirkman explained that he ‘filled about 60 pages of a notebook in four weeks’ while in later years he ‘covered the same number in two or three days’. Where once he had experienced ‘tedious intervals of many minutes…seeing nothing of interest and marvelling at the folly that had brought me there’, in later years ‘the problem was not to find something to pass the time but to find the time to note down all I wanted, for almost every bird had come to be significant. I saw, where formerly I looked; and the difference lay not in front of the eye, but behind’.

Using such nervous machinery necessitates a split in the cognitive duties of the ethologist. A recent ethological textbook reinforces this splitting of the ethologist into both a mechanical recording device and a self-conscious analyst of the data it offers. ‘Observers’ writes Lehner, ‘must be more than a visual recorder…one must be disciplined enough to know when to be a machine-like recorder of data and when to contemplate what is happening or has happened’. Ethologists metaphorise themselves as scientific instruments—transparent, reliable, calibrated through long exposure to the subject of investigation—but they also require themselves to be expert assessors of the data so provided through a process of critical self-analysis. Niko Tinbergen’s pioneering studies of behaviour in herring gull colonies contains clear descriptions of this process. If ‘nature carries out experiments in front of one’ he explains, the observer is required to ‘be alert, to appreciate the significance of what one has seen.’ Ethological understanding involves a gradual process of understanding the fine nuances of ‘a multitude of very slight movements’ which, to the novice observer, are noticed ‘unconsciously.’ The construction of the observer-proper, however, involves a ‘conscious analysis of his own perception’

Delight and love

Now, I’ve described how ethologists saw the accuracy of their ‘nervous machinery’ as guaranteed through those long hours of sustained and rigorous reconnaissance observation. The notion of the ethologist as a self-policing instrument calibrated by long exposure to animal behaviour seems to offer a view of the relationship between observer and observed as one of pure disinterest, freed from the taint of subjectivity. Ethologists, however, often stressed that no individual could possibly subject him or herself to the necessary rigours of observational practice without a strong emotional attachment with the animal observed. ‘I contend’ wrote Konrad Lorenz, that not even a person with the almost superhuman patience of a yogi could look at animals long enough to perceive the laws underlying their behaviour patterns’. ‘Only a person who looks with a gaze spellbound by…inexplicable pleasure’ can achieve such a feat, and thus generate valid knowledge. This gaze, writes Lorenz, is founded on ‘delight and love’ in the object.

A simply prodigious amount of time, spent in presuppositionless observation, is necessary in order to collect and store the factual material which the great computing apparatus needs in order to be able to lift the gestalt from the background. Even a Tibetan priest schooled in the practice of patience would not be able to remain stationary in front of an aquarium or adjacent to a duck pond or even in a blind constructed for observations in the open as long as is necessary to accumulate the data base for the perceiving apparatus. Such sustained endeavours can be accomplished only by those men whose gaze, through a wholly irrational delight in the beauty of the object, stays riveted to it. (Lorenz, The foundations of ecology, p. 47)

This seems thoroughly at odds with the disinterestedness commonly considered the hallmark of objective scientific inquiry. Yet it is far from unusual; reading ethological literature one repeatedly encounters similar statements. Tinbergen described ‘intent observation’ as leading to an experience of ‘imagining that I could feel what a wild animal must feel’. What form of scientific objectivity allows this form of empathy?

Returning to the dictionary one makes the happy discovery that an earlier, quite etymologically unrelated meaning of the term ‘ethologist’ means a ‘mimic’: ethology is the practice of mimicry. And with this in mind, I was delighted to find, in a recent textbook on ethological method by Philip N. Lehner, a series of imaginative and visual exercises designed to teach students the correct strategies of visual perception in ethological observation. Lehner instructs the student of ethology to to watch an animal intently for minutes at a time before shutting their eyes and tracing the animal’s outline in their mind’s eye. Lehner says that the desired result is a feeling that the student has become the animal he or she is observing. ‘It helps if the animal is not overly active’ explains Lehner. ‘You might find it better to begin with a stuffed animal…then go through the entire procedure with a live animal’

For centuries, hunters have described their ability to achieve a close identification with the hunted animal as leading to the experience of them feeling they were the hunted animal. Tinbergen, at least, saw the experiences of hunting and ethological observation as closely allied. ‘Knowing from personal experience how it feels to have killed, cleanly and without cruelty, one of those extremely alert Arctic seals after a long stalk over the fjord ice’ he wrote, ‘I can testify that the experience of the genuine hunt…is indistinguishable from that of watching, unseen, from a well-built hide, the natural behaviour of, say, a family of shy hawks’. Yet ethologists needed to make their own animal knowledges more credible than such non-scientific understandings.

Lorenz also offers analogies between hunters and ethologists in his popular work, Man and Dog, although here they are far more implicit. Lorenz theorises that ‘stone-age hunters’ had the ability to establish social contact with dogs because these hunters had ‘a finer perception of animal expressive movements than a present-day town dweller’ . It is hard to not immediately identify these ‘stone-age hunters’ as Lorenz in disguise: he was, after all, famed for his own social contact with animals (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Lorenz, literally effacing his body, with two greylag goslings.

Is Lorenz suggesting that the ethologist’s facility for perceiving animal expression is an innate capacity of the human species, one that is atavistically present in modern day ethologists? The reading is tempting, particularly since Tinbergen repeatedly refered to his own ‘innate’ love of landscape and his ‘congenital’ love of natural beauty as spurring him to study animals in the field. Yet such a conclusion would deny that the forms of empathy used by ethologists were founded on credible premises. Lorenz carefully explains that this facility for perceiving animal expression was, for the stone-age hunters, ‘part of their professional training, for a stone-age hunter who could not distinguish a peaceful from an angry mood in a cave bear would indeed have been a bungler. This faculty in man was not instinct but a feat of learning’ . Lorenz is at pains to present the interpretive ability of the stone-age hunter as a mark of professional expertise. It is crucial for the project of ethology that its understanding of animals is a professional understanding, a legitimate empathy.

Negative Capability

In their paper The Image of Objectivity, Daston and Galison quote Ernest Renan (1890) on the scientific virtue of strong ascetic self-discipline. Holding out against the temptations of theorizing, aestheticising and pouring evidence into preconceived molds: one should, Renan maintains, ‘deny oneself’ the headlong haste of human inclination to reach after a definitive solution; heroic scientists should ‘forbid themselves all premature philosophical thought’ . I want to set Renan’s statement against another nineteenth-century call for the abstention of subjectivity—that of John Keats, which is of considerable and unexpected facility in trying to understand how ethologists could view empathy as an objective interpretive ability.

In a letter to his brothers of 1817 Keats described the mysterious faculty of ‘Negative Capability’, the mark of the poet and artist; a state in which a person is ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. Negative Capability is founded on a form of ‘chameleon capacity’ , the ability to ‘tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment'.

This quality of attention, this capacity to exercise strong self-discipline to suspend theorizing is precisely the form of observational technique valorised in ethology. As Lehner describes it, observation is ‘as much a state of mind or awareness as it is a technique’. I suggest that we should read the observational strategies of ethologists in terms of a professional negative capability. Early ethologists were particularly keen to dismiss anthropomorphism, the attribution of human mentalities or motives to animals, as subjective and dangerous. However, they commonly described empathetic forms of emotional projection as necessary epistemological strategies for comprehending the alterity of another organism’s life-world, or Umwelt. Can empathy be objective? Apparently so. For this strategy of imaginative projection is not perceived as a subjective collapsing of animal into human or human into animal; it is presented as a measured, interpretive act based on strategies of effacement and forms of rigorous, precise observation. Empathy for the ethologist is an actor-oriented interpretive act founded on professional expertise.

The ethologist seeks to understand, as the title of Tinbergen’s collection of essays, the animal and its world – the animal’s Umwelten. ‘The ethologist must’ wrote Dyer and Brockman, view the animal as the subject of its Umwelt, and … imagine what it would be like to be the one at the centre of that world’. They continue:

Progress in understanding [processes that influence animal behaviour] come from imagining what it might be like to be the animal, not only possessing its sensory apparatus but also being attuned, both in perception and in response, to the objects and relationships in the outside world that are most relevant to its survival…freed from the anthropomorphic assumption that animals perceive the world in much the same way as we do, early ethologists uncovered sometimes astounding capacities of animals to detect and respond to environmental features that we can detect only with specially designed instruments.

This redefines the nature of ‘the field’ for the covert ethologist. For if ‘covert’ means a place where wild animals live, it ultimately relates to the animal’s own Umwelt, a concept of profound importance in ethology, premised on the concept that animals inhabit unique, species-specific perceptual worlds. Thus the term ‘covert’ refers ultimately not simply to ‘the field’ as a scene of inquiry to be contrasted with the laboratory, but to the perceptual world of the animal and its salient environmental features.

Ethologists are truly covert naturalists for this is the world they seek to bring forth, to comprehend an animal’s world – from the point of view of the animal. Through undergoing a variety of methods of effacement and through a gathering of professional expertise, the ethologist is thus credibly freed from the temptations to anthropomorphise and may legitimately use empathy as an interpretive method. It is a professional empathy in principle unobtainable by those who have not undergone the rigorous effacements of subjectivity discussed above. In this final effacement of subjectivity, the ethologist seeks to assure us that objectivity is indeed letting nature speaking for itself—through the ethologist. In this case, to conclude, credibility is thus assumed in the form ‘Trust me, I am the animal’.

(For refs and bibliography ask me if you're in need. I have most of them here)

Apes and Peacocks

2009-10-30T15:22:00.004Z

The end of October is by far the best time to be in Cambridge. You get flat and delicate mists in the morning that burn away to a sky of candescent seawater over the spires by afternoon. And the streets are thick with yellow leaves and yelling cyclists.

Which makes me sad that I'm leaving it. Only for a few months, mind. I don't have enough money coming in to continue living here. Not right now. So back to my mum's in Hampshire for what is half a rest-cure (open wood fire, warmth, food, good company, walks) and half a work-fest (big desk, broadband, a working telephone). With a once-a-week jaunt back up here to teach and see my friends.

So I'm finally packing up the house and hmm. But I am sure my mother will be delighted by the cased pike, the red deer antlers, the sets of gos feathers, piles of paper, book boxes, bags of frozen venison and computer cables that'll accompany my passage.

Just desert

2009-10-29T10:10:00.010Z

So last Friday mum and I are doing the Lawrence of Arabia thing. Oh yes. We're curled up in sleeping bags under a thick desert sky. It's 2am and what wakes me is light. A lot of it. It's strobing off the cliffs opposite.

Ah. Some part of my mind can't help counting, then; one two three four five six and a deep surge of thunder rolls up the desert and over our sleeping bags.

Oh not again, I’m thinking.

I have this ability to conjure storms in deserts. It's happened twice before. And it's happening again.

Four hundred yards from camp, then, are two little horizontal figures in the sand, one asleep, on her side, and the other lying on her back watching the dark slowly swallow the constellations, left to right, and knowing that the rain would come. It always does.

So we dragged ourselves back to the camp, where the rest of our tourist brethren slept, and waited. And it is sufficient to record that the rest of the night involved being rained-upon inside goatskin tents, then poured upon, as Ibrahim and his workers dragged huge tarpaulins across the roof, wicking gallons of desert rainwater upon scores of horrified tourists. Hahaha. The ngiht ended in damp exhausted sleep, most of us in a pile in the middle of the tent, competing for scraps of dry floor, snoring and flapping like walruses.

It was very funny. It also pissed a lot of people off.
.
Which pissed me off.

Anyway, birds of course. So. Wadi Rum is familiar to anyone who’s watched Lawrence of Arabia. It looks like this:

i.e. vast seas of trout-pink and scorched orange sand, from which rise massifs that resemble in places aerated milk chocolate and in other places lungs of cold tar. And the sand is full and readable. Nocturnal lizards' dinted footfalls to their holes. Jerboa pads. The sinuous little canyons of snake trails. Desert lark feet thickly stitched over the sand. I'm horribly ignorant about mammals: these prints could be foxes. Or cats. Or caracals.

The noise of this desert is disconcerting. It’s either silence so deep the blood thumps in your ears, or, suddenly, it's full of noise. A noise like someone tuning a short-wave radio at top volume. Or making drunken wolf-whistles that echo exuberance between cliffs. And then the flock of birds shouting and whistling wheels round the corner and lights on a crag. Tristram’s grackles. Slim black starlings with a purple sheen, a fluting flight and deep orange primary patch that matches the evening cliff-face so precisely in colour that for a space of a few minutes near sunset it’s as if they fly with a hole cut out of their wings.

And there are rosefinches, too. Scores of them. Some feed on seeds on the lee side of the cliff. Others hop about eating the dry scraps of flatbread the Bedouin guides scattered on the roof of the kitchen tent. They’re blank little birds, constantly calling. Cream-paper coloured females, and males carmine-red with silver crowns. They are beautiful and unaccountably boring.

Oh, and there was a sooty falcon, too, the next morning, cleaving its way through a milky sky on its way somewhere fast. And brown-necked ravens. And hooded wheatears and and and.

But the best desert bird of the trip wasn’t big and glamorous at all. It was down among the white rock rubbish deep in the trails around Petra. I'd gone down there at dawn with my mum to miss the crowds. She'd wandered up to the far end of the site. I was dawdling. I looked up, looked down: and there was a bird on the rocks. It was whiskery and grey. At first I thought it was a female wheatear of some species or other. It had that stance. And as I got closer I noticed first that it wasn't. And second, its demeanor. It was hunting.

Some passerines hunt so purposively you almost have to hold your breath watching them. This was one of them. It was hunting ants. It had a bold black eye, a sharp insectivore's beak, and the rest of it mouse-grey except for an astonishing, rather long thrush-like tail of shiny, obsidian black. Every time it hurled itself down to snap up an ant, and bobbed back up to its hunting rock, it fanned and dipped the tail, a species-specific tic of surprising beauty.

Because I had never seen a bird as matte and soft which suddenly flashed a tail so glass-shiny that the bird hunting became rather like watching a ball of wool with a mirror somehow incorporated; every time the tail spread the sun caught it and flamed. Anyway, that was my first blackstart. And I left it snacking on ants. Nom.

One other notable bird was sufficient to pull my heart halfway out of my chest, though. And it wasn't a desert bird at all. We were on a coach somewhere on the long, dry, King’s Way between Amman and Karak. The land here was brown. For mileseverywhere you looked was nothing but brown. Thousands of acres of dry earth and broken rock. This went on, and on, and on. No trees, no plants, no fences. Not even a cloud to cast a shadow on the scene. Your eyes start to hurt in their search for novelty. And then, on a low slope just by the road, a small concrete house. In the garden, one palm tree, a scruffy oleander, and a chain-link fence. The eye fastens greedily on the two spots of green as the bus went past and away back into the brown desert. But not before seeing a bird: perched inside one of the links, his breast facing the bus, was a stunning cock redstart.

A few months ago this bird would have been nesting in wet woodlands in northern Europe. He was on his way to Africa to winter. And now, in October heat and in the middle of nothing, he had come down in the only patch of green for miles. And miles. And miles. The bus drove on. And all the long way to Karak and for several days afterwards, that redstart, with his bright forehead and his celluloid toes grasping plastic-coated wire in the middle of nowhere, burned in my mind, pushing away at me, as if I’d dropped something very precious from home behind, and was worried I might never again find it.

Flat Hawk Down

2009-07-02T11:35:00.002+01:00

Plans to moult Mabel out in an aviary fell through this year -- if anyone has a spare pen, pleeeease get in touch -- but so far, she seems to be quite happy to renew her feathers on her bow. It's been bitterly hot the last few days, so rather than put her on the lawn, she's been loafing inside, with a bath to keep her company. And every morning, as the sun hits the floor, she engages in a spot of luxuriant sunbathing. Bless.

Inspector Calls

2009-05-19T10:52:00.002+01:00

I’ve a territorial, defensive soul. There’s nothing like a visit from the landlord to put me on the back foot and then some. 8am came, finally, and I was spilling with contagious rage. I'd seriously considered burning the bastard house to the ground. It seemed a logical means of preventing any complaints about coffee rings on the Ercol table.

I put Mabel back in her transformed, super-clean room. She jumped onto her perch, and then looked and was like whaaat? Blue masking tape? Aaaaargh! and bated. Onto the lining paper, and her talons punched through the paper, and she stared down and was like whaaaaaaat? What is THIS? Where is my carpet? Bate bate bate bate. Meanwhile upstairs The Birdoole is making his special noise over and over again, half starling churr, half white noise, which is the most annoying noise he can make and well he knows it.

It is at this point I wish – and I swear, fretmarketeers, that I have never thought this before, which may seem strange, but there you are – in the midst of this crescendo of hawk bells and paper tearing and beating remiges and yelling parrot – I wish for a VERY LARGE DRINK. Gin-based. Or gin, solely.

By eleven, things are calmer. I’m upstairs marking essays at my desk, though fractiously. It’s soothing air; the window opens onto cool grey. A red Ford draws up. A man and woman get out.

The prospective tenants have a son, and he is autistic. I know this from my landlord. He must be, what, eight? No sign of him. But these are parents; they’re moving with the imperceptible restraint of manner that is born of care so he must be in the back of the car. Yes. And as he climbs out of the car, my heart folds and falls because he is wearing a stripy red and orange jumper and is grasping in each hand a model sea-lion.

Downstairs the grown-ups are talking, and the boy is bouncing about in the semi-darkness of the hall. He is totally bored. I look down at his hands. Each of the sea-lions has chips of missing paint about its nose where it has interacted with the other, or with something hard, and I ask him if he wants to see the parrot. His eyebrows rise and he waits. A brief, wordless ok from his parents, and we ascend the stairs. He counts each step out loud. And we stop in front of the cage. The bird and the boy stare at each other.

They love each other. The bird loves the boy because he is entirely full of joyous, manifest amazement at the bird. The boy just loves the bird because he is a bird. And the birdoole does that chops-fluffed-little-flirting twitch of the head, and the boy does it back. And soon the bird and the boy are both swaying sideways backwards and forwards dancing at each other, although the boy has to shift his grip on the plastic sea lions to cover both ears with his palms, because the bird is so delighted he’s screeching at the top of his lungs.

It is loud says the boy,
That’s because he's happy – he likes dancing with you I say.
And then, after a few moments, I tell him that I like his sea lions very much.

He frowns as if he’s assuming upon himself the responsibility of my being one of the elect, and says, ‘lots of people think they are…’ he pauses contemptuously ‘…seals’.

But of course they are sea lions! I say.
Yes, he says.
We glory in the importance of accurate classification.

**

His parents are here in the room. One look at my tiny lawn was enough; far too small for their son. So much for my week of cleaning purgatory.

His mother looks anxious. Come on Tomas! We are going now.

There is, suddenly, one of the most beautiful moments of human-animal interaction I have ever seen. Tomas nods his head gravely at the birdoole, and the birdoole does a deep, courteous bow in return.

A minute later I hear the front door open, and just before they cross the threshold, I can hear clicking that I suspect might be the collision of sea lion’s noses, and then Tomas makes an announcement. “I am going to sleep in the room with the parrot, when we live here’, he says. Such hard words to hear, uttered with such certainty, in the hall.

Hazel, Peacock, Little Shop

2009-05-16T09:39:00.007+01:00

Advertising Fail

2009-05-15T19:45:00.004+01:00

Whenever life gets you down, just turn to the internet. Today's offering is a British site offering free adverts for people who wish to buy and sell birds. And what a rich pageant of life is evidenced there.

Today's pick ranges from the astonishingly vague and succinct:

I want to buy a hawk, about half year age.

to the simply baffling:

I am looking for a pair of inprinted Very young Barn Owls in the wales area if possible

Why? Seriously. I'm tempted to ring the premium rate number to tell him that barn owls are less fun than anything else in the world. You know me, folks; I'm here to teach.

There are adverts from the hopeful:

hi there my name is kevin i rescue peregrins & harris hawks off people that buy them and dont realize the dedication involved in keeping them if this is you and you find yourself unable to care for your raptor then get in touch with me and i will pick the bird up from you we do not buy birds all birds must be free to us where a good home is waiting for them over 20 years experience with raptors

To the increasingly desperate:

right I'll be honest - I'm going 2 prison on 25th so everything needs 2 go. 2 male finish gossis 08 bird 650 1999 bird 500 bonded pair harris 500 male gyr pere and block and hoodtelemetry marshall trx 2 transmitters 600. if someone takes the lot 2000 they have the aviaries free charge.

Anyway – moving on – I dreadfully misinterpreted an advert, just now. This one:

I have an Alutek aviary for sale. It measures 6ft long, 6 ft high and 3ft wide with a door to the front. The mesh is 14 guage, 1 mesh. It is entirely made from aluminium. It has been disassembled for ease of transportation and consists of 7 panels.
The aviary is only six months old and housed two POWs for a couple of months.
£100 ovno

POWs?

I stopped reading like I'd hit a brick wall with my face.
Read it again, Helen.

TWO of them?

It's very Guantanamo. Is this some guy's private prison for ... but no, what? what the....backgarden prisoner of war camp? what? wtf?

But it was fine. All was fine. I had forgotten that acronyms may mean more than one thing.

I also have a male Princess of Wales cock bird in lovely condition and ready to breed. £35 ono

Relieved.

Wynges, fete, and tethe

2009-05-15T10:41:00.002+01:00

I expect there’s no-one out there any more, but hello anyway. I’ve been in a state of clear and present danger of late – my landlord is bringing some prospective tenants to look at my house tomorrow. I can’t afford to keep this house on, and am looking for somewhere smaller, and possible more remote. In the sense of being outside town. Anyway, thus: the last week has been purgatory. Clean, sweep, wipe, clean. Goshawk mutes off carpet (how?) (repaint walls) (where on earth did this come from, what is it, and where should I put it?) shit, look at the stains on this curtain. What on earth even are they? Etc.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do I. and it’s not been making my teaching particularly inspired. Retaining the house-cleaning mindset in a practical criticism supervision is alarming. That’s what the faces of my students appeared to suggest.

So I’ve papered the floor of Mabel’s room with extravagant swags of lining paper and I’ve masking-taped them to the skirting boards. I’m going to stuff her with food, and hood her, and wait for the inevitable bate as the tenants are shown ‘her’ room, and that mix of worry, bewilderment, and rising anger in the landlord and his mother that having her in the house will surely provoke.

Enough of my polished panic. I wanted to tell you this: found a book the other day on EEBO (Early English books online, that is) which is already embroidered on my heart. It’s a book called:

The noble lyfe and natures of man of bestes serpentys fowles and fishes that be moste knoweu.

The writer is Laurence Andrew, who sounds very like a languid painter and ne’er do well in a village murder mystery, but no. this Laurence Andrew published hisbook in 1527, and it is glorious.

It does, as they say, what it says on the tin. The title is accurate; after every species, Andrew gives the ‘operacion’, or uses of the beste or serpent or fowle or fish in question; medical, epicural, spiritual.

So as I go off to hide the last few goshawk mute stains under judiciously-placed rugs, here are a few selections. I’ve done the most minor of tinkerings to them; expanding the contractions in the original and leaving out the operacions. I am preaching to the converted I expect but if one comes up against a particularly baffling spelling, try reading the offending word/s out loud. ‘Moche’ for much, or ‘fete and tethe’ as feet and teeth.

Reading too many books like this palys merry hell with your normal spellinges, btw.

Wild dog
CHama is lyke a wolfe / But it is full of whyte spottes ouer all his body / & it is in Ethyope / he is vnderstanded moche lyke a dogge / & lyke a dogge may be lerned to all maner of games.

Hedgehog
CIrogrillus & erinatius is all one & it is a lytelle beste lyke a pigge & his skynne is rownde aboute full of sharpe pinnes saue only onder his bely that no man may come nygh hym & it is moche lyke an vrchen / but whan it is layde in luke warme water than it is so glad that it stretcheth hym selfe a brode

Ant
ANtees or pismers be very lytell wormes and they be very wyse / they make their holes in the grounde ande bere the erth out / and they make a narowe entre into their hole & make grete prouision to leue vpon all ye yere after / the ante deuideth euery corne or or grayn that he geteth in thre partis that he caryeth into his hole / because it sholde nat shote and waxe grene in his hole or demesne / these antes cary eche other out of their holes whan they be dede / and bury them.

Hare
THe hare is a beste that is swift in ronnynge & alwaye full of feare & drede & exchewinge / it hathe longe eares / & his hinder legges be longer than his fore legges / & it hath bothe membres for as now it is the male and as than it is the female / & alwayes the lippes be waggynge vp and downe.

Mouse
A Lytelle beste is the Mows and eteth gladly bred or othere thynges made of corne or such as man eteth and it is veri diligent to gete his levinge wherfore it biteth many an harde thing asonder to passe through to gete his mete / and it is veri moyste of nature / therfore yf it drinke moche it dyeth therof. In Orient be myse as great as foxes / and they be of that nature that they will kyll a man In Arabia be great myse also / & theyr fore fete be as brode as the palme of a mannes hande and theyr hinder fete be as smale as a finger ende·

Goshawk and sparrowhawk
ANcipiter is a goshawke / and he is of foure maners. The first is this / great of body and wyll be sone tamed / and hathe a lusty countenauce wt great fete and longe talentis / and it fereth nat to set agaynst no byrde. The seconde is smaller & hathe great iyen & shorte talentis / & is nat lightely tamed / the fyrst & seconde yere he is but lytell worth / but the thirde yere he is gode & dothe very well and is named Alietum. or in Englysshe a Tassell goshawke. The third is named nisus or a sparow hawke & is yet smaller / it is swift and sone tamed & made to the game. The fourth is the smalest of them & is named a musket / and they be all lyke. The goshawke is of that property yt yf he take a birde ouer night whan he brauncheth himselfe to rest / that kepeth he in his talentis all the night / & on the morning he letteth it fle agayn / and though he met wt the same birde agayn himselfe hauinge gret hunger yet of all yt daye he wyl nat touche him / & of all ye birdes that he taketh he covyteth the harte.

Goose
THe Goose is a birde as great as an egle & the wilde gese flee lyke as the cranes dothe all in ordre / and like as the wynde bloweth so they flee eastwaerde. and they rest very selden excepte it be whan they do eat / & they reioyce so sore in their fleynge yt they slepe but seldem. And contrary that nature be the tame gese for thei be heuy in fleinge gredi at their mete & diligent to theyr rest / & they crye the houres of yt night & therwith they fere ye thieues In the hillis of alpis be gese as great nere hande as an ostriche they be so heuy of body that they can nat flee & some take them with theyr hande

Bee
THe Bee is a lytell byrde yt hathe bothe wynges fete and tethe / bothe and they be gladly in swete ayres. and they be very diligent in theyr operacions. and amonge them all they chose a kinge / but nat to be subiect to him / but they dare nat flee tyll yt theyr kyng flee before theim as a leder or a gouernour And the bees haue eche a different operacion / and theyr operacion hathe no certentye / some souke the flores / some gader the dewe / of this they make hony and waxe wherewith is serued both god & man / & they be euer redy to worke in season of the yere whan it is fayre weder

Raven
THe Rauen is a cryenge byrde yt maketh moche noyse but he can crye no thynge but crascras. The female bredeth out the egges alone and he fetchet her mete & the yonges be vij. dayes olde or they ete and vpon the seuenth day begine they to be black The [...] in the [...] partyes yt feghteth against the asses & whan they put out the iyen of ye bestes to thentente that the people sholde fleye them for the skynne / & that they sholde haue the carkas and flesshe / and often tymes so geteth he his mete / and he bildeth moche about toures and steples. and he warneth of […] comyng weder bothe fayre and fowle & eche in a different maner wt his crye and he lerneth very gladly for to stele.

Pheasant
FAscian{us} is a wyld cocke or a fesant cocke that byde in the forestes & it is a fayre byrde with goodly feders. but he hath no combe as other cockes haue / and they be alway alone except whane they wylle be by the henne. and they that will take this bird / and in many places the byrders doth thus they paynte the figure of this fayre byrde in a cloth & holdeth it before hym / & whan this birde seeth so fayr a figure of hym selfe / he goeth nother forward nor bacwarde / but he standeth still staringe vpon his figure / & sodenly commeth another and casteth a nette ouer his hede and taketh hym Thys byrde morneth sore in fowle weder & hideth hym from the rayne vnder ye busshes Towarde ye morninge and towardes night than co~meth he out of the busshe and is oftentimes so taken / & he putteth his hede in the ground & he weneth that all his bddy is hyden / and his flessh is very light and good to disiest

Gyrfalcon
THe birde Gyrfalco commeth ouer the see in company of many wilde geese. and at the nyght he taketh one in his talantys to thentent yt she shold kepe hym warm / & in ye mornyng he letteth her flee agayn wtoute any harme & in the daye he taketh one fore his repast

Bat
VEspertilio / a backe is a birde wt foure fete / and hathe a mouth & tethe lyke a mowse and no tayle / and it hath no feders / but it hath .ij. winges on the which be no feders / but thin skinnes facioned lyke a dragons winge / & therwt they flee / and it geteth his mete by night like the owle. and it bringeth forth her yonges lyke a beste with iiij. fete and it layth none egges· The blode of it is good to be enoyted vpon maydens brestes for than they shall nat waxe very grete. The braynes tempered wt hony helpeth the iyen of the water yt descendeth into them Ther be in Ynde some as moche as doues and they flye by euyn tide. they haue tethe like a man. and these be so bolde whan thei fle that they festen in the face of a man and byte the nose or eres of and shend a mannes visage.

Wasp
AWaspe seketh her mete of stikin gecarion / they haue stinges like the scorpion withinforth / and the fetche theyr mete also frome the floures and frutes of the trees / they take flies and byte of their hedes and than carie them to their holes in therthe / but the moste parte of them leue by caryon flesshe.

Hoopoe
VPapa is a birde that cryeth hop hop. & it hath a crowne of feders on his hede / but he is very onclenly. he is moche be the ordure or fylth of man and he eteth stinkinge erth. he that is enoynted with his blode and than gothe to slepe he shal thinke that the deuyll woryeth him. Phisiologus sayth that whan the hoppes be foolde yt they can fle nomore / than the yonge ones be so kynde to theyr dames that they let them laye in their neste for than their sight fayleth them also / and they plucke of their syres & dammes feders & they ouerstryke their iyen wt an herbe that they fynde be nature wherwith they se agayn / & than they sit ouer them & kepe them warme & fede them tyll yt they be fully flgged & can flye at their wyll.

Dolphin
DElphin{us} is a monster of the see & it hath no voyce but it singheth lyke a man / and towarde a tempest it playeth vpon the water Some say whan they be taken that they wepe The delphin hath none eares for to here / nor no nose for to smelle / yet it smelleth very well & sharpe. and it slepeth vpon the water very hartely that thei be hard ronke a farre of / and thei leue C.xl. yere. & they here gladly playnge on instrumentes as lutes / harpes / ta / bours / and pypes They loue their yonges very well and they fede them longe with the mylke of their pappes / & they haue many yonges & amonge them all be .ij. olde ones that yf it fortuned one of ye yonges to dye than these olde ones wyll burye them depe in the gorwnd of the see / because othere fisshes sholde nat ete thys dede delphyn so well they loue theyr yonges. There was ones a kinge yt had taken a delphin / whyche he caused to be bounde wt chaynes fast at a hauen where as the shippes come in at / & there was alway the pyteoust wepynge / and lamentynge that the kynge coude nat for pyte / but let hym go agayne

Sea lion
LEo marin{us} / the see lyon is lyke the lyon of the londe / but the lyon on the londe is full of pryde / & the lyon of the see is very meke / & ellis they be lyke of all condicyons and strengthe / wherfore I wryte nomore of him.

Startling

2009-03-23T09:41:00.002Z

Artist: Marcus Coates

Peregrine (1999)

Watercolour on Starling

Beach Trapping, LIFE style

2009-03-15T19:34:00.006Z

Way back when, on Assateague....boy, I am so delighted to see these again. They are photos of the early days of tundrius peregrine trapping on barrier beach flats, and show a world disappeared. I love them.

I wrote a paper on beach-trapping years ago, a history of science paper. Never published it: that winning combination (for winning, read losing) of insecurity and laziness conspired. Also, it's dry as hell, except the fantastic quotes from folks like Al Nye. I'm excerpting a passage below, though, if you're interested in why grown men buried themselves in sand with a box on their head, holding live pigeons...

***

In the late 1930s Assateague ran horizontally along the coast of Maryland and Virginia for approximately 37 miles. Attempts to colonise the island had been foiled by hurricanes; it was littered with the detritus of civilization; abandoned beach houses and wrecked hotels. Only three miles wide at its widest point, its broad expanses of open beach led back to rolling dunes with vast wash flats of sand on their lee sides, the largest of which, Fox Hill Levels, was astonishingly featureless; at least a mile wide and six or seven miles long, on a bright sunny day you could stand at one end and hardly see the other.

In late September 1938 falconers Al Nye and Bill Turner were treated to an extraordinary discovery account. Turner’s father and his friend Roddy Gascoyne had returned from a poor day’s surf-fishing on Fox Hill Levels and to relieve their boredom they had cruised up and down the flats with a .22 Hornet shooting the ‘great number of duck hawks’ that were sitting around on pieces of driftwood and on the sand itself. Nye was incredulous:

We, naturally, didn’t believe them at first and thought that they must be confusing these hawks with some other kind. Who had ever heard of seeing 40-50 Duck Hawks on the sand on an island! But they persisted in claiming that they were actually Duck Hawks, in light of the fact that they had seen several tame falcons of Bills, and had actually killed several on the island. So Bill and I finally made up our minds to visit the island to see just what was there.

They did, and were astonished. These birds utterly failed to meet previous conceptions of the species; these peregrines were far from the solitary inhabitants of sites of natural sublimity that Nye’s diary entry describes:

The habits of the Duck hawk on Assateague are amazing! Duck hawks in my mind have always been associated with high cliffs, either in mountainous areas or on high, rocky promontories overlooking river valleys. Then, too, I have seen them sailing majestically over Hawk Mountain, and also at Cape May. […] But at Assateague, they forsake all elevated perches, and really prefer to sit on bits of driftwood right on the sand. They actually look like terns or gulls in this respect. As a result, it is quite a shock to see the lordly Peregrine of inland lofty cliffs sitting like a gull on the sand next to the ocean .

They were shockingly anomalous. Almost every attribution previously accorded the peregrine was reversed. While the ‘rock’ peregrines were large and dark, these ‘beach’ or ‘blond’ birds, as they were quickly termed, were small and usually pale. While rock birds were found inland, and were largely sedentary, solitary and very territorial, fiercely defending the cliff sites that were their home, these blond birds were coastal, found in groups of up to 80 birds and transitory, appearing in unpredictable numbers sitting on the beaches and wash flats for a couple of weeks each fall. Whereas ‘rock’ birds were shy and unapproachable, blond birds were sometimes so tame that they allowed falconers to walk up and touch them. They looked like, and flew like, peregrines. But they were behaving in utterly alien ways, resisting previous readings and significations.

Nye and his friends immediately set about trying to trap these birds. They were initially unsuccessful, for their first attempts used technologies designed to secure sedentary birds in predictable spaces. Sitting in a blind watching a pigeon-baited net was frustrating because the peregrines on Assateague were unpredictably distributed across a vast area of relatively homogenous space. Instead, falconers actively searched for falcons along nearly 40 miles of beach from vehicles transported over by barge, their tyres let down for driving on sand. A trapping method was required that took cognizance of the free-floating relationship between falcons and place on Assateague. The trapper had to be as mobile as the falcon—traversing space, locating targets and then setting about securing them. Nye hit upon the ‘dig-in’ or ‘headset’ method on his second visit. On sighting a falcon, he buried himself in a shallow trench in the sand with only his head exposed, his half-buried hands holding a live pigeon as bait. A headset of loosely woven grass, or an up-ended crate, completed the disguise.

The results were immediate and astonishingly rewarding to the trapper. Nye’s account of the first peregrine he trapped using this method demonstrates both the emotional charge of the event and makes plain that the competitiveness of east-coast falconry culture was as highly-charged on Assateague as on the river cliffs of the Susquehanna. With one flutter of the pigeon, Nye wrote:

that peregrine took off and headed right straight in like a homesick angel and (snap) just like that. Came right straight to the pigeon. No dilly-dallying, no stooping, right straight to the pigeon. Here I was with very close to a heart-attack, looking through this grass. We had a peregrine, a wild peregrine sitting on my fist two feet away. And I want you to know in all sincerity my heart was pumping like I have never had it pumped before. […] I slipped my hand under until I felt the leg of the hawk. Boy, at that point, it’s a wonder I didn’t squeeze it in half. I held on so tight. But I grabbed that leg and then I reached with my fingers over and I got the other leg. Then I took the headset up and came up out of the sand. And…there I was with an immature falcon caught in less than ten minutes after I left Turner and his bow net down the beach. My god. Here I was with this beautiful thing, you know […] Then I made my first big mistake. What’s that? I turned around and went back down the beach and told Turner and his buddies about it. Oh Lord.

The ‘dig-in’ method was later mostly replaced by the ‘noose pigeon’, a pigeon wearing a leather ‘jacket’ covered with nooses attached to a long string that was tossed out toward falcons. The suspense, excitement and strategic planning of falcon trapping was addictive: ‘Trapping in itself became a very important and intricate part of my falconry activities’ recalls Brian McDonald, who trapped for a week every year on Assateague between 1945 and 1969. ‘I enjoyed the going to the beach and the trapping almost as much as I did having the birds and flying them at that particular time’ A code of tacit trapping ethics developed throughout the 1940s and 1950s concerned directly with the ownership of birds. S. Kent Carnie recalls:

if you’re driving along, and here’s a guy up in front of you, and he’s got a peregrine down on a pigeon, and he’s working it, the deal was that he would turn on the four-way flashers on the car, so that the lights were flashing, and the unspoken rule was you did not go anywhere near it. That was sacrosanct. That was his bird. You didn’t try and get that bird off of him; uh, I do know of […] some guy was down there who was not at all accepted by the group. And the guy had barged in and tried to trap somebody else’s bird and they, they simply roared in, bumped it off the pigeon and ran him off the beach, whatever […] So, there was, as I say, there was an ethical standard there; you didn’t mess with another guy’s bird…the birds were in the boathouse at the old coastguard’s station, or in the old hotel before it burned down, and they were commonly kept in sort of a big, common mews, and that was the guy’s bird and the bird was in there, that was his, and you know…mostly you didn’t mess with it.

Nye and three or four other falconers began trapping in earnest in 1939, when 22 falcons were secured . Despite the predictable secrecy surrounding the discovery of a source of falcons, the word spread among east coast falconers. Heinz Meng recalls how George Goodwin, falconer and curator of mammology at the New York Museum of Natural History kept ‘the island’ secret from him. In 1942-3, Steve Gatti and Brian McDonald, unofficial falconry apprentices of Nye, heard of ‘an island’ where falcons could be caught and asked Nye about it. He refused to discuss it. McDonald recalls ‘he even made phone calls to all the then DC falconry group telling them to avoid Steve and I because we were trying to find out about the island and he did not want us to go there and trap’. Nye’s anxieties were prescient: Assateague rapidly became the source of most peregrines flown in the eastern US.

From the 1940s onwards, Assateague became a yearly pilgrimage for six to eight groups of falconers, mostly from the Philadelphia area, some from the Washington DC area. They met on Assateague, driving cars or ex-military jeeps over the beaches and wash flats, some staying for a day or two or over a weekend, others, such as Jim Rice, Halter Cunningham and Brian McDonald, staying for a week or more. Throughout these years, numbers of beach birds showed no obvious decline, although numbers fluctuated greatly in relation to weather conditions during their migration. The sedentary rock birds, however, whose local prey-base was heavily contaminated by pesticides, began dying off in the 1940s—just as falconers turned their attention almost entirely to beach birds. Early trappers required no licenses, as peregrines were unprotected in Maryland and Virginia; later, falconry legislation allowed the taking of birds by registered falconry permit. Increasing property development on Assateague led to decreases in the areas on which falconers could trap, and in the late 1960s licenses to trap for falconry were revoked as a result of territorial conflicts with the National Park Service warden and the Chincoteague Wildlife Refuge manager over perceived over-trapping of an threatened species on what had become a National Seashore. By 1969, when the DDT-induced extinction of the inland race of the peregrine placed both beach (tundrius) and rock (anatum) subspecies on the Endangered Species List, trapping of peregrines for any reason other than scientific investigation was forbidden.

(With great thanks to Kent Carnie for his help and hospitality during my stint researching at the Archives of Falconry in Boise)

Writing, chernobyl-style

2009-03-01T19:58:00.004Z

What's four months in the world of blogging, eh? Well, I'm not entirely back. I'm finishing off a load of radio talks for recording at the BBC in Bristol this Tuesday. That's "finishing off" in a rather broad sense, yanow.

I can't believe it's come to this. I've had over a year to write them. Maybe I just enjoy the fear. Others get it from base jumping. I get it from staring down deadlines.

Ah well, they'll come good. Right now I'm wired on coffee, chocolate and cigarettes and my fingers ache from typing. In the meantime, here's who I've been sharing my bedroom with for a while. Matilda the merlin. She's destined for an aviary that's not quite finished, so I'm looking after her on behalf of my boy. She's a feisty little sod. Living with an imprint parrot and a mellow goshawk makes you forget some rather important things about merlins. Like, they bite. Try cleaning this one's beak after she's eaten and you remember it. Noli me tangere, dude!

Here she is having a good old preen and oil. She prefers the bow, before you ask. And before you even think of asking, those bags are full of old clothes destined for a charity shop. I don't keep the rubbish in my room.

The Birdoole

2008-10-23T01:32:00.005+01:00

Yes, it's time to redress the Mabelcentric blog!

The Birdoole is a parrot. That’s what I tell people, though in fact he’s a cinnamon green-cheeked conure, a colour variant of a spry little South American species the colour of a child’s paintbox. Bright green, with blue wings and a blood-red tail, and just the right size to enjoy lying upside down in my palm to have his tummy tickled, little nubby tongue waggling and eyes blinking in pleasure.

It took me a long while to realise that parrots like to cuddle, to be groomed. Little, clambering avian monkeys. We have a routine. In the morning he’ll whistle and puff softly, and I’ll get out of bed and let him out. He stretches his wings, flies down onto my bed and then sidles up, crabwise, with his little pinkish feet, to nestle right under my chin. He’ll murmur away in parrot Esperanto; exactly the same chunter of half-formed syllables and tones of a year-old child, then purr softly, preening my chin and neck with very soft nibbles that still make me grit my teeth; he can’t help it. Birds have feathers, humans have skin. Skin has more nerve-endings. Ow, yes, birdoole, I say. I love you too.

The birdoole was an impulse buy: I’m embarrassed to admit it, but he’s come to stand for the kind of unexpected event that seems small at the time but becomes lifechanging in retrospect I wa sitting down in the bowels of Starbucks six years ago with Xtin, who then shared my house, and considering. “You know, I think I’m going to get a bird” I said. “I really need a bird around the house. A couple of canaries, or something. Want to come and buy one?” Half an hour later, I’ve checked the yellow pages and Xtin and I are driving out into the lawless fenland countryside. We find the sign; it’s a numberplate-style affair, half-buried in nettles by the side of an endless, thin road that sinks and rises across dark arable fields. We turn down it, and pass burned out cars and anonymous farms. There is no-one. The road narrows, and turns, and we find ourself driving deep through a tunnel of six-foot high nettles, over a humpback-bridge so tiny and steep I’m worried the car will be grounded, and finally turn into a paddock full of portakabins, aviaries, and livestock. A couple of Dobermans; a sheep. A goat. Ducks. Wire on the windows of the cabins, and cabins full of birds. Big poffy canaries that look like they’re made of yellow foam and polystyrene. Tiny zebra finches, bouncing from perch to perch like hyperactive insects. Others. Bengalese finches, java sparrows. Christina considers them. “Can you … connect with these things? I mean, have a relationship with them?” I’m not sure what she means. They’re birds.

We wander about a bit more, and fate is set when we walk into the hand-reared parrot room. It’s got an airlock door, and faded posters of parrots on the walls, and there are a couple already in there, trying to interact with a beautiful sun conure who is not too friendly. And there’s a glorious green ecletctus parrot, and we stroll about. Right at the back of the room is a twilweld mesh door, and hanging onto it is a tiny, scruffy, bird. Both his feet grip the mesh and his tail is spread against it for balance. He is the smallest and ugliest parrot imaginable. And we walk in, and he flies to us immediately. He sits on my hand and nibbles and bites my fingers; not from ire, but because he’s bored, and he’s a baby, and I can see his little bright green cycling shorts and the irrepressible confidence of the thing. Christina has never held a bird, so we get the bird onto her hand, and it nibbles her too. Ow, she says, but her face is bright with amazement. I have a bird on my hand, she says.

And about twenty minutes later, we’re driving back to Cambridge with a cage and a bird in it. He's hanging onto the wire, bug-eyed and amazed by it all. "Widget!" he says. "Widget! Widget!" and makes little prrrrp! noises at things of interest: clouds, houses, other cars. And that's how the Birdoole arrived.

Birdoole has a very small English vocabulary. He can say "hewo" and "whatchadoing?" and "Birdle!" but his overall vocabulary is as rich as a sixteenth-century playwright. There're noises that mean everything from 'hello!' (a double whistle) to 'black-headed gull!' (admiring purr) to 'sparrowhawk' (eeeeeeep!). There are bath noises and happy eating noises. There are I'm sleepy noises, and noises that mean: I'm enjoying this piece of crumpled paper. Apple noises. Raisin noises. A double-kritch noise that means "running water!". The static burr hzzzzz! that means 'bugger off!' And of course, the high-pitched trill that means 'good night'.

Xtin and I joke (but only just, because it's true) that we've learned far more parrot from The Birdoole than he's learned English. There's a moral to that somewhere. Possibly.

Falconry

2008-10-22T21:41:00.001+01:00

I'll have the Birdoole catching pheasants in no time....

Birthday Bunny

2008-10-17T12:28:00.003+01:00

Best birthday card ever. Ever.

2008-10-16T12:55:00.004+01:00

Click for big. Aimee's drawing looks more like Mabel than Mabel does. Thank you Aimee!

Water monster

2008-10-13T14:52:00.002+01:00

I've told you all about collecting the goshawk last year. The endless, endless drive. The terrifying hotel. The appalling fried breakfast. The peat-coloured bathwater. The long wait on the quayside, fending off teenage heroin addicts and watching gulls pick bits of marine matter from the water. I forgot to tell you about the strange occurrence on our way back.

Nothing had changed in the car. Yes, I was poorer to the tune of several hundred pounds than the day before. The car had hundreds more miles on the clock. The weather was slightly different. It was morning. And in a box on the back seat was a goshawk.

There is a scene in that great Russian schlock-fantasy novel Nightwatch in which a group of otherworldly policemen, bored in a car, start changing the weather conditions. So rather than freezing on a winter night drive, they can conjure the experience of a night in more southerly climes, smell the breeze and the soft warmth of a different night, a different place.

Something like that happened in the car. Something thin and initially hardly there at all leaked from the box, from the goshawk. It was an intangible disposition of the air. It was the feeling of water. Water and some of those aromatic terpenes that you smell when you crush pine needles. A deep, watery sense. It wasn’t a smell. No: the car smelt of upholstery and hawk mutes and a whiff of red bull from the can on the floor. It was a feeling, not a smell. Aquaria and woodland ponds and liminology. Dripping conifers and stones and crushed wet woods.

I was driving south along the A1 on a hot August day, and my mind was full of water. I remember thinking, for no good reason, of Chinese zodiacal animals. Water pig. Metal dog. Fire horse. Elemental natural history.

Then I realised why. The atmosphere in the car had gone to water. And it was most definitely coming from the soft-plumaged, wobbly goshawk in the box on the back seat. Which (in one of those leaps of intuition found in dreams, made me remember how sparhawks and goshawks were described as being moist, of having moist humours, in sixteenth and seventeenth century falconry books. How you should avoid overdrying foods; how you should order their diet to suit their moist nature).

And then I thought, decidedly, yes. Goshawks are water. Falcons are air and hot stone. Goshawks are water and wood.

The feeling got more and more pervasive. Finally, intrigued, I swallowed the worry that I was going mad, and turned to Xtin, loafing in the passenger seat.

“Hmm" I said. "You know, this goshawk is making the car atmosphere strange”

“Oh yes” she said. “I know”.

“It’s like water and…”

“Pine needles and water” she said. With a voice that was as sure of the fact as if she'd pointed out a passing car.

We sat for a while, staring fixedly at the road.

“Strange, isn’t it?”

“Uh huh”

Dinos!

2008-10-12T15:56:00.006+01:00

Jake and Dinos Chapman? I love them so much. And now I love them even more. Driving down towards the Jesus College carpark with Xtin the other day, under the crisping horse chestnuts, I came across...

I laughed out loud. With real, real, deep delight.

They are here, on loan, for six months. And the installation is called:

The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth (But Not The Mineral Rights)

Raaaah!

Frankly, they are the best reason for anyone to visit Cambridge.

Back I Am

2008-10-06T19:42:00.008+01:00

Mabel's downstairs, in the dark. Her tail bell rings every time she rouses, and the sound comes sweetly up the stairs.

She's hungry. I can feel the hunger in her bones. I can feel it also in mine. Hungry and bored and frustrated, she bounced off my upper arm yesterday leaving two puncture-marks and a half-bracelet of bruise that aches and aches. It's the weather. It's been ghastly. Rain and wind, and she's been ready to fly free for a week. I've been keeping her weight screwed down, and every fibre of my being wants to feed her a huge, bloody crop of quail or pigeon. And also is praying that tomorrow the weather will clear, and we can go kill something.

The forecast is, of course, for showers or possibly heavy rain. A friend has told me I should be jumping her up to the fist over and over again to condition her and keep her from being bored, and I know he is right, but ... maybe it won't rain tomorrow...

She looks wonderful, of course. She's all grown up. And as calm and lovely as ever. This is her the evening she came out of a moulting pen. She'd not seen a soul for six months. Can you tell?

And here she is, special guest appearance at my niece's fifth birthday party, three days later...

Aimee loves birds. She loves, particularly, my parrot, The Birdoole. And she was keen to see Mabel. But faced with Mabel, all milk-glass chest and sinew, and burning eye and wicked claws, she cows at the last minute and hides behind her aunt. I don't blame her. Mabel's much....scarier this year. She's more solid somehow. Self-possessed. No shit. No messing about. Steadier in the face of the world.

Me too, methinks?

Oh, also: this was fun:

Ah, the best way to get around the hunting with dogs ban. "But officer....it's a CAT".

Sorry I've been away so long. No particular reason. Back I am.

Svalbard!

2008-08-08T20:18:00.007+01:00

As yet they're all pretty much untitled, but they're up anyway. Here.

More later, but for now, let it just be said that WALRUSES ARE NOW MY FAVOURITE MAMMAL!

Hello old friends

2008-07-18T18:51:00.007+01:00

Am still alive, and all is well. I've been giggling at Steve's post on Querencia, here.

Here's my response: an image from a greetings card. I love it to bits.

And...I have new additions to the menagerie. Can you tell from my slightly worried smile that I'm rather lost for words to find myself suddenly in possession of a pair of jill ferrets?

They'll be highly useful for bolting rabbits for Mabel and I think they're really ridiculously cute. Despite their being ... a bit bitey at the moment.

And courtesy of my brother, a picture of Aimee in her new school hat, which makes her look almost indistinguishable from Jay (from Jay and Silent Bob). Ha!

Guess who's going to Svalbard in a week? Oh yes. Arctic here I come....

Apologies

2008-06-04T23:46:00.002+01:00

For being such a poor blogger. I'm apologising right now.

I'm writing this goshawk book, and it's taking up all the parts of my brain that do words.
I'll be back. Really.

So: when did bowperches get crap?

2008-06-03T18:47:00.011+01:00

I don't know. I really don't.

They used to be awesome. But something went wrong, and I'm not sure why.

Pluvialis' guide to what you need in a bowperch (apart from it 'not breaking' of course):

Smooth bow-shape allowing the ring to travel smoothly across to the other side should the hawk bate.
Padding that will neither hurt the hawk's feet, nor impede the passage of the ring.
In indoor bows, a ring that falls to floor level when the hawk bates. Tail feathers always get broken by a leash that travels at an angle up through the train to an attachment point higher than floor level.

That is all.
It's only three things.
Why can no-one get it right?
Seriously, pretty much everything out there fails to fulfil at least one of these.

Broken tail feathers!

Ring won't travel freely when the bird bates: too high an arc

I just have no idea what this is.

It's as if as soon as falconers start designing hardware, they've forgotten about the bird. None of them seem to have watched a hawk on a bow for very long:

Is it that we're all flying Harris' hawks these days? Oh no, it can't be. Or is it? Is it? Is it that Harris's never bate, so no-one worries about these things?

No, it can't be. Can't be. For starters, American perches seem to be better. Mike's falconry supplies do a nice one:

See? Harris' hawk!
Northwoods' one is a good shape, though it's let down massively by the wrapping. Now, where did that talon go? Also, has anyone any experience of this kind of strange double bow? It might work. It might not, but it might. What happens when the bird jumps down on the wrong side of the bow? Do you have to make the leash extra-long to stop it getting brought up short?

No, the more I look at this the more I'm just confused.

The best bowperches I've come across in the UK are Martin Jones' ones. They are bloody expensive, but worth saving up for. Which is what I'm doing, right now.

The coolest goshawk perch I've ever seen involved the bird being able to fly down the length of a steel cable between perches about twenty feet apart. One of the perches was under cover. That goshawk was muscly as a pitbull and in perfect feather. I wish my tiny town garden was big enough for a perch like that...

Rant over. Anyone any theories, though? Why and when did they get so crap?

Update: my god, I have never, ever sounded so self-satisfied and snotty as in this post, have I. Sheesh.