A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiburg
Jonathan Meiburg has written an unusual book – part travelogue, part nature study, part literary exegesis, and all very intriguing.
The titular remarkable creature is the caracara. This bird is closely related to the falcon species, but differs from it in several ways. Caracaras spend a great deal more time on the ground than the average raptor, walking from place to place, being both idle and curious. They have a large repertoire of food preferences, i.e. they’ll eat almost anything. They interact with humans by grabbing anything they can whenever they can. It is monkey-like behavior. My favorite story- from among many with which Meiburg regales us – has to do with a tennis game in which caracaras would stroll onto the court to retrieve errant tennis balls.
I daydream about keeping a striated caracara in my apartment. It would be the world’s most exasperating roommate, but watching it build a nest of shredded T-shirts, LP jackets, and guitar strings in my bookshelf might be worth it. I can imagine it standing on my kitchen counter in the morning, tearing into a box of cereal with its beak or cracking an egg with a blow from its clenched foot, then stashing a piece of toast under my chair while I boil water for coffee. After breakfast, it might become absorbed in a dirty sock or a roll of paper towels while I try to figure out where it’s hidden my keys.
There are several subspecies of caracara. Here are two:
Crested Caracara
Striated Caracara, feeding on carrion, something they have no hesitation about doing
Jonathan Meiburg sought out this feathered creature in some fairly exotic locales. Caracaras are native to the Falkland Islands; in addition, they can be found in the South American country of Guyana, where Meiburg had some fascinating, not to say harrowing, adventures.
All the while his writing is penetrating and beautiful. Here he describes doing research on Steeple Jason, one of the islands in the Falkland complex:
It was typical field science grunt work—tough, dull, and faintly absurd—but it had its moments. Steeple Jason’s twin peaks give it the stark beauty its Homeric name suggests, and on clear days the cold air streaming in on the southwest wind was so pure that a veil seemed to lift from the world. Giant petrels wheeled above the island’s central ridge, and crowds of gentoo penguins emerged from the surf to bask in the sun at its slender neck. Most of the penguins milled and snoozed in a loose colony near their landing beach, but a few followed an obscure yearning and climbed the ridge to gaze at the sea from above.
As you can easily see, this author has an admirable empathy with the creatures of the air and sea. His passion for nature is inspiring. As often as he can, he brings in the life and works of W.H. Hudson, who grew up on the Pampas of Argentina and shared this same passion.
The trees above us trembled and groaned, and I remembered Hudson’s description of a private forest near London called Savernake, where he loved to sit among giant copper beeches and listen to the wind in their branches—an experience, he wrote, “worth going far to seek.” That is a mysterious voice which the forest has: it speaks to us, and somehow the life it expresses seems nearer, more intimate, than that of the sea. Doubtless because we are ourselves terrestrial and woodland in our origin; also because the sound is infinitely more varied as well as more human in character. There are sighings and moanings, and wails and shrieks, and wind-blown murmurings, like the distant confused talking of a vast multitude.
Hudson is obviously a writer worth getting to know. I remember when I was a girl my mother handing me his novel Green Mansions, telling me she thought I’d like it. I did – in fact, I loved it. But I’ve not read anything by him since, and I was unaware of the scope and beauty of his nonfiction writings. So this is a bonus gift from the author of A Most Remarkable Creature.
William Henry Hudson 1841-1922
It turns out that Jonathan Meiburg has a band called Shearwater. I certainly admire his versatility! On the band’s website you will find several sound files.
The caracara is indeed a most remarkable creature, and this is a most remarkable book. Highly recommended, especially if you care about the earth and its nonhuman inhabitants.
‘The old trees were the mothers of the forest.’ – Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard.
I picked up this book expecting a lyrical hymn to the beauties of nature. It was indeed just that in certain places, but in others…well, here’s a not completely atypical sentence:
Cedar can’t form mycorrhizal fungal partnerships with the birth and fir for the simple reason that it forms arbuscular mycorrhizes, not ectomycorrhizas like the other two.
Well…gosh… Certainly gave the spell checker a vigorous workout – not to mention my brain.
So, yes, there’s a great deal of hard science in this book. Simard does her best to explain it, but it still left my head spinning.
Mycorrhizae: the association between roots and fungi. (For more on this subject, see the entry on the Univeristy of Nevada Extension site. Here’s another site, Frontiers in Plant Science, that may prove useful.)
Suzanne Simard became interested in silviculture, aka forest ecology, because of her distress over the heedless clear cutting taking place in the forest of British Columbia, where she was born and grew up. Also, she’s a scientist by nature, and she developed a passionate need to understand what actually went on in forests – soil, shrubs, insects, birds, sunlight, rain, and above all, how all of this affected the trees, and by association, mushrooms. (Oh, and there was the time the family dog fell into the outhouse….But that’s another story!)
She got her PhD in forest ecology and has conducted countless studies in various areas of the forest, all the while braving unforgiving weather, merciless insects, wolves, and bears. She’s made precise measurements, returning again and again to see how her studies were progressing.
This video provides a good explanation of the some of the wonders she unearthed (literally);
Lest you think this volume is an impenetrable tome, I wish to assure you that some of Simard’s writing is quite accessible, even at times, poetic.
I loved the generous rhythm of the way the land and the forest and the river came together to refresh the winds at the close of each day. Helped settle us all down for the night. Air purified by the ancient forests hovered, and I let the downdraft cleanse me.
Contrasting with calm passage of prose is the sheer exhilaration Simard expresses as discovery follows discovery:
Pine got nitrogen from alder not through the soil at all but thanks to micorrhizal fungi!
At moments like this, her excitement communicates itself to the reader. I for one will never feel quite the same about micorrhizal fungi again!! (And no, I’d never heard of them before reading Finding the Mother Tree.) The discovery of the relationship between the various entities in the forest constitutes a revelation:
The cohesion of biodiversity in a forest, the musicians in an orchestra, the members of a family growing through conversation and feedback, through memories and learning from the past, even if chaotic and unpredictable, leveraging scarce resources to thrive. Through this cohesion, our systems develop into something whole and resilient. They are complex. Self-organizing. They have the hallmarks of intelligence.
And finally, there’s the conclusion Suzanne Simard reaches, hugely satisfying, borne out by her meticulous research:
I imagined the flow of energy from the Mother Trees as powerful as the ocean tide, as strong as the sun’s rays, as irrepressible as the wind in the mountains, as unstoppable as a mother protecting her child.
Suzanne Simard in fact, as two daughters, so she knows whereof she speaks. She’s had an eventful life; a few of those events have been harrowing, but she’s come through heroically – at least, it seems so to me..
A simplified version of what’s in the book can be heard in Suzanne’s TED talk:
At the end of this eighteen minute talk, she received a standing ovation. I wanted to join in!
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Related to the above, there’s a wonderful documentary called Fantastic Fungi, available on Netflix and Amazon Prime. Here’s the trailer:
There’s also a lovely companion volume. 
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Suzanne Simard, where she longs to be
Recent Reading
The Cold Millions by Jess Walter.
So, after reading Ron Charles’s rave review of this title in the Washington Post, I felt I had to give it a try. (I get a kick out of Ron Charles; he becomes almost incoherent with enthusiasm sometimes, especially when he REALLY, REALLY [as my grandson would declare, for emphasis] likes a book.) So…
A jumble of riotous action set against the backdrop of labor unrest and free speech suppression, chiefly in Spokane, Washington, in the early years of the twentieth century.. Main characters are brothers Gig (Gregory) and Rye (Ryan) Dolan, struggling to survive amid the tramps and hobos out of work and out of luck in the Pacific Northwest.
I could believe in Rye and Gig, but my credulity was strained by the character of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a nineteen-year-old married and pregnant firebrand and uncompromising crusader for workers’ rights and freedom of speech. Yet in his acknowledgements, the author states that she’s drawn from real life.
And lo! Here she is, in full haranguing mode: 
Of course, truth can be stranger than fiction, but…well, read it and decide for yourself. In any event, the book is a wild ride, and great fun (if confusing at times).
Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald 
What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us. It never has done….
Centuries of habitat loss and slow attenuation of our lived, everyday knowledge of the natural world make it harder and harder to have faith that the way things are going can ever be reversed.
We so often think of the past as something like a nature reserve, a discrete, bounded place we can visit in our imaginations to make us feel better. I wonder how we could learn to recognize that the past is always working on us and through us, and that diversity in all its forms, human and natural, is strength. that messy stretches of species-rich vegetation with all their invertebrate life are better, just better, than the eerie, impoverished silence of modern planting schemes and fields. I wonder how we might learn to align our aesthetic and moral landscapes to fit that intuition.
One could become impatient with too many of these generalized exhortations, eloquently expressed though they may be. Fortunately, Macdonald does leaven them with specifics. Of course there is much delightful writing about birds, not surprising from this author, but here’s a less expected passage, from an chapter entitled “Nothing Like a Pig.” The set-up: her boyfriend has taken her to see an animal she had previously known only from stories and folk tales:
This creature was not what I expected, despite its slap of familiarity. It had the forward-menacing shoulders of a baboon, and the brute strength and black hide of a bear. But it was not really anything like a bear, and what surprised me most of all was that it was nothing like a pig. As the beast trotted up to us, a miracle of muscle and bristle and heft, I turned to the boy, and said, surprised, “It’s nothing like a pig!” With great satisfaction he grinned and said, “No. They’re really not.”
This essay collection has been much anticipated by readers of Macdonald’s award-winning work H Is for Hawk. A number of people have asked me if I’ve read that particular book. Truth to tell, I tried to, but I ran afoul of Macdonald’s description of the steps involved in taming the hawk. I felt an intense aversion to the whole process – it seemed to me a form of avian torture. So that it was it, for me. Vesper Flights is blessedly free of such content, and a very rewarding read.
The Revenge of Thomas Eakins, by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick 
What an interesting man: a deeply gifted painter and, except for a brief European sojourn in his youth, a life long resident of the City of Brotherly Love. Born in 1844, Thomas Eakins grew up saturated with the rich artistic culture that characterized Philadelphia in the late 1800s.
Painted in 1875, The Gross Clinic is probably Eakins’s most famous work:
Another work, one of my favorites, is Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871):
The artist’s wife, Susan Macdowell, 1884-89
Self-portrait, 1902
The Writing Master (Benjamin Eakins, the artist’s father), 1882
Portrait of Walt Whitman-1887. The poet and the painter were great friends.
(Eakins was a great portraitist; his skills were much sought after in this area.)
This is the house in which Eakins live: 
Designated as an historic landmark in 1965, it now houses an artists’ cooperative. In Eakins’s time, the place seemed to be bursting with life – relatives an friends would come frequently to visit an often to stay. There were numerous children (although Eakins and his wife not have any) and pets also -including, for a while, a monkey who caused untold mischief.
You could understand why, in the above portrait, Susan Macdowell looks rather long suffering. And there were other reasons, as well.
Thomas Eakins was not only a great painter, but an enthusiastic and committed teacher. He also became infatuated with photography. And that’s where the trouble began…
While some of the photographs are entirely decorous, others are…well, something else. A large selection of works by Eakins in both media can be accessed at WikiArt.
Why the title of this biography contains the word “revenge” I am not sure. Unless it refers to the frequently heard saying, “Living well is the best revenge.” Eakins’s life was turbulent, that is for sure, but most of the strife he encountered he brought on himself. He was stiff and unbending in his principles, even in situations where a little bending would have cost him little.
The subjects of a number of his nude studies, both painted and photographed, were often drawn from his young male students, many of whom seemed all too willing to doff their garments in order to please their esteemed instructor. The speculation prompted by this practice, can be easily imagined.
Whatever took place in his personal life, as a professional, he was exact and uncompromising. He was left us a legacy of realistic art for which we can only be grateful. As for this book, I found it utterly absorbing – a great about an artist and his times.
Introducing Ketupa Blakistoni!
The enigmatic fish owls, when they appear, are surprisingly un-owl-like, not gliding down from the trees so much as “dropping” like sacks. At a meter high,they are at once imposing and comical, a jumble of feathers with ragged, twitching ear tufts.
One can only be grateful that Jonathan Slaght and his Russian counterparts willingly expend so much time, energy, money on their quest, the nature of which is to survey the Blakiston fish owl population with a view to aiding the conservation of this endangered species. This research involves much slogging through ice cold conditions, both wet and dry, in Primorye, a maritime territory in Russia’s Far East. There’s also a great deal of waiting around. This requires much patience on the part of the researchers, and also, at times, on the reader’s part.The frost overnight had formed a crust on the deep snow, bearing the owl’s weight and yielding just enough to leave clear, crisp indentations on the sparkling surface. The owl had walked with a calm swagger, each toe pad clearly articulated and its two hind talons raking lines in the snow like a spur-heeled cowboy in the rodeo dust. The sun glistened brilliantly off the marks, scars on a field of diamonds. It was beautiful, and I felt almost like a voyeur: the owl had been here in darkness and secret, but the snow left evidence of its path for me to marvel at.
Peregrinations and ruminations, for sustenance in tough times
Two days ago, a walk around the neighborhood was most salutary. While I didn’t take these pictures, I did see these flowers!
Narcissi
Vinca
Crocuses
Daffodils
Forsythia
But then you go inside and the same grim news awaits you… Or, rather, more and different grim news. But no, mustn’t dwell on it. Instead, be grateful for what we still have to sustain us:
Great books, like this one: 
I just finished it, and I loved it. Patrice “Pixie” Paranteau is a character I will cherish going forward. It’s been a long time since I fell so completely in love with a character in a novel as I did this time.
I continue to enjoy the Darko Dawson series by Kwei Quartey. Dark is a many-sided, fully three dimensional creation. I cherish him also, as well as his world in Ghana.
Kwei Quartey and Louise Erdrich have both created worlds for me to lose myself in. Much needed at this time. I am deeply grateful to both these gifted authors.
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I am always finding new paintings that amaze me. I mean, look at this!
Scenes from the Passion of Christ by Hana Memling, ca1470
My post of March 12 featured this work by Annibale Carracci:
Boy Drinking – a show piece for Carracci’s technical expertise – resided at the Christ Church Picture Gallery at Oxford University until approximately 11 PM on Monday, March 16. That is the estimated time at which it was stolen, along with two other priceless paintings, one by Salvator Rosa and another by Van Dyck. Click here for more on this theft.
Let’s hope for a speedy recovery of these priceless works of art.
As if the world doesn’t have enough to worry about right now, I know…
Finally, there is always music, as with this gorgeous Stabat Mater by Domenico Scarlatti, whose sonatas I recall playing on the piano many years ago. (The visual, this achingly poignant Pieta, is by, once again, Annibale Carracci.)
Best of 2018, Three: Nonfiction, part one
One does not expect to encounter, in a book about birds, an anecdote concerning Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Nevertheless…
It seems that for the famous Cheek To Cheek dance sequence in Top Hat, Ginger Rogers wanted to wear a dress that was festooned with a multitude of feathers. Problem: As she and Fred Astaire whirled around the dance floor, the feathers flew off the dress in large numbers. According to Astaire, “‘It was like a chicken being attacked by a coyote.'” Ginger, however, was adamant – she wanted that dress.
Now I’ve watched this dance sequence many times and I always assumed those feathers were fake. No such thing!
Ostrich
Simon Barnes’s book has many delightful anecdotes like this. But even more, it has an abundance of facts about birds: their flight, sounds, migratory and mating habits, their significance in myth and legend, the art of falconry, the slaughter and the irony inherent in the hunting of birds, and their endangerment through loss of habitat. Barnes has a deep knowledge of the avian world. Yet when he writes about it, he has a light hand; his tone at times is almost whimsical. And yet he could not be more serious.
The book is filled with wonderful black and white images like the one above. These are drawn from a variety of sources.
Wandering Albatross
Kingfisher
And the cover art, as you can see above, is gorgeous. Be sure to click on it, in order to enlarge it as much as possible.
A swanfall is one of those routine miracles that the wild world throws at us, and it’s as wonderful a thing as I’ve ever seen. First the lake was open and pretty empty: within the hour you could see nothing but swans. It was like watching Bank Station in the City of London in the morning: a place that is at first sparsely populated turns into the busiest place in the world before your eyes: not gradually but all at once.
Apparently New Zealand was once a veritable paradise for birds:
If time travel were possible, I’d take my Tardis to New Zealand a few years before 1280. This is the ultimate destination in time and space for anyone with birding in the blood. New Zealand was the kingdom of the birds and it remained so until the arrival of humans in the thirteenth century.
A flightless parrot that is barely hanging on there is called the kakapo. Barnes mentions Douglas Adams’s search for this curious creature as described in his book Last Chance To See. I remember reading that book when it came out in 1990 and enjoying it immensely – at least, as much as Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!
Barnes has much of interest to say about eagles, but I really loved this story:
My dear Aunt Barbara used to tell a story about a vicar—I have long forgotten his name and parish—who took evensong after a protracted and agreeable lunch. With his belly full of claret and port and other vicarly delights, he approached the lectern but, alas, misjudged his descent from the steps of the altar. He made a dramatic lurch in the general direction of the congregation but saved himself by clasping the outspread wings of the lectern, for this traditional piece of ecclesiastical furniture was, of course, in the form of an eagle, its wings supporting the Book. He muttered, in tones audible to the front row, ‘If it hadn’t been for this bloody duck, I’d be on the floor.’
Eagle lectern at St Nicholas Church, Blakeney, Norfolk, England
One reason it’s taking me so long to get through this book is that I keep running to the computer to find videos on birds. In addition to the kakapo footage above, I particularly like the these two, on the barn owl and on falconry respectively:
One day a couple of weeks ago, while I was observing nature from my kitchen window, I saw a bird – I don’t know what kind – leave its perch on the bare branch of a tree and float gracefully down to the ground. At that moment, I thought, I could really get into birds. A dangerous notion, I know. Birders can be an obsessive lot.
Not long after that, I found The Meaning of Birds on the new nonfiction shelf at the library and was intrigued by its square shape and striking cover. I had never heard of it, despite the fact that I read loads of book reviews. It’s now bristling with post-it notes and has been renewed up to the limit. I finally gave in and downloaded it from Amazon.
The Meaning of Birds, it must be said, is primarily concerned with the nature of England. But Simon Barnes has traveled all over the world in search of bird knowledge. This book is a rare gift to nature lovers. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Charismatic cows, trees contracting like drinking straws, and other wonders
Many are the moments of beauty contained in this small gem of a book. The most central of these is the eponymous tree, a majestic red oak presiding serenely in Harvard Forest.
Author Lynda V. Mapes tells us that in the eighteenth century, surveyors would designate certain trees as boundary markers. They were the original witness trees. She decided that the term would serve admirably for the large red oak around which she would orient her year long study of the Harvard Forest and its numerous plant and animal denizens.
Mapes often waxes lyrical when describing her year long immersion in nature:
This was the splendid time of the spring ephemerals, the woodland wildflowers precisely timed. They had been coming on with the sun since the spring equinox, the display growing in color and diversity as the sun gained in its height and heat, day by day, capturing the brightest light the understory would receive all year, right between the melt of the snow and the leaf-out of the trees. Four-petaled bluets, their blooms the size of a pinkie nail, paved the crown of the wagon road in nodding blue and white flowers. Sun flecks found pools of deep purple: the broad-leaved wood violets, turning their white-whiskered faces to the sun. The elegant, single nodding bloom of sessile bellwort, with its graceful, winged leaves, stood in creamy-white perfection at the feet of the trees. Bees, wasps, flies, and beetles sought these early-spring nectar sources, returning the favor with pollination, in a meetup essential to each.
This is particularly when she’s talking about trees:
Trees are interstitial beings, connecting the atmospheric and terrestrial realms. They are rooted in the ground, but made from thin air, conjuring the sky, the atmosphere, and the sun to earthly form. For this alchemy they embody wonder; they are a transubstantiation that has amazed people for centuries. For really, who would think something so solid and long-standing as a tree could be made from the limpid, quicksilver ingredients of sun, water, and air?
The ‘charismatic cows’ were brought into the forest to help in maintaining an area of pasture land. Their presence is something of a holdover from the days of the Sanderson Farm, “one of the core properties from which the Harvard Forest was created.”
The cows, I noticed, had charisma. They were the first thing tour groups typically wanted to stop and look at when they came to visit the Forest, and they always drew smiles. People brought their kids by on weekends just to pet the cows through the fence. The pasture is small enough that it could just as easily have been mowed twice a year, but the cows were themselves historical reenactors, co-opted into our living exhibit of a New England pastoral landscape. Using animals to defend the open meadow from the encroachment of the Forest was the whole historical point.
From Lynda Mapes I’ve learned many fascinating facts about trees. The ‘drinking straw’ phenomenon alluded to in the title of this post is part of a lengthier explanation of how trees handle water:
The tree does all that pumping against the countervailing forces of gravity and friction, without making a sound or using a calorie of energy. The number of interconnected water transport conduits— xylem cells— can exceed hundreds of millions in the trunk of a large tree such as the big oak, and their total length can be greater than 200 kilometers, or some 124 miles. The speed of water flow up a ring-porous tree such as the oak is also impressive, on the order of twenty meters or sixty-six feet per hour. The forces involved are enormous; a tree will actually slim ever so slightly in shape on a hot, dry day, as the suction of evapotranspiration pulls in the sides of the tree like a drinking straw. The tree replumps at night, as it refills with water.
Don’t know about you, but I found this simply amazing!
I was especially pleased that Mapes found several occasions in which to reference two of my historical heroes of the conservation cause: Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold.
Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862
Aldo Leopold 1887-1948
Here’s Leopold in his paper “Phenological Record for Sauk and Dane Counties, Wisconsin, 1935– 1945”:
“Each year, after the midwinter blizzards, there comes a thawy night when the tinkle of dripping water is heard in the land. It brings strange stirrings, not only to creatures abed for the night, but to some who have been asleep for the winter. The hibernating skunk, curled up in his deep den, uncurls himself and ventures forth to prowl the wet world for breakfast, dragging his belly in the melting snow. His track marks one of the earliest dateable events in that cycle of beginnings and ceasings which we call a year. From the beginnings of history, people have searched for order and meaning in these events, but only a few have discovered that keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search, and also the chance of finding order and meaning. These few are called phenologists.”
How beautiful this passage is, both for its appreciation of the skunk’s awakening slink after its long sleep, and the connection Leopold draws for us to the pleasure of noticing the world around us and seeking to understand the land’s inner workings. He kept track of the first crowing of the pheasant, the first arrival of the marsh hawk, the emergence of the woodchuck from hibernation, and arrival of the bluebird. When the gray chipmunk first popped out of its burrow in spring, and eastern meadowlarks arrived, Leopold made a note. He tracked the first time the prairie mole made its active run up and around in broad day, the breakup of the ice on the Wisconsin River, and the arrival of the killdeer. He logged with precision the first calls of the Canada goose, woodcock, and leopard frog. He noticed when the first adult moths of the spring cankerworm flew in the trees, and the first song of the cardinal, brilliant red in the still-bare trees. He marked well the first bloom of the pasqueflower, the wood sorrel, and the toadflax, the bird-foot violet, penstemon, and coneflower.
Mapes adds at the end of this passage: “What a wonderful way to live.”
Indeed.
In aid of ongoing research, Webcams have been placed strategically throughout Harvard Forest. And here is a video about the Witness Tree Project:
As I was reading, one of my favorite speeches in Shakespeare kept coming back to me. It’s from As You Like It. The speaker is Orlando. He’s commenting on the unexpected pleasures of his exile to the Forest of Arden:
And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stone and good in everything.
I would not change it.
I should add here that the Harvard Forest is not “exempt from public haunt.” Visitors – both human and animal – are cordially welcome.
You’ll note that this post is largely comprised of direct quotes. I felt it was useless, if not impossible, for me to attempt to paraphrase the text. Instead, if you care at all about trees, nature in general, climate change in particular, and a host of other related subjects, I urge you to read this book. It confers blessings one minute, promotes anxiety the next, but never relinquishes a sense of wonder. All this, in slightly over two hundred pages!
Lynda v Mapes
Book list for a friend, Part Two: Nonfiction
Sometimes you read a book that redirects your mind. An interest that hovered at the periphery is suddenly at dead center. A previously unknown artist captivates. People and places take up residence in your head, demanding attention which you grant willingly, happily.
All this and more came to me courtesy of Paul Theroux’s deeply felt, wonderfully realized travelogue.
The subtitle”Four Seasons on the Back Roads” is meaningful. Theroux had no interest in visiting places like Charleston and Savannah; rather, he wanted to see what life is like for people in the small towns that dot the landscape of Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
This happened in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, at the beginning of the author’s southern travels:
He was sitting in his car trying to determine the location of the Cornerstone Full Gospel Baptist Church. A woman in the car beside him asked if he was lost. He explained that he was a stranger, to which she replied “Ain’t no strangers here, baby.” Introducing herself as Lucille, she offered to lead him to the church. When she had done so, he thanked her. She responded with two words: “Be blessed.”
That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome. I had found it often in my traveling life in the wider world, but I found so much more of it here that I kept going, because the good will was like an embrace. Yes, there is a haunted substratum of darkness in Southern life, and though it pulses through many interactions, it takes a long while to perceive it, and even longer to understand.
I sometimes had long days, but encounters like the one with Lucille always lifted my spirits and sent me deeper into the South, to out-of-the-way churches like the Cornerstone Full Gospel, and to places so obscure, such flyspecks on the map, they were described in the rural way as “you gotta be going there to get there.”
On the subject of traveling in America, Theroux quotes this comment by Henry James: “One’s supreme relation…was one’s relation to one’s country.” Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? And did he actually do much traveling in his native land?
At any rate, Theroux continues:
With this in mind, after having seen the rest of the world, I had planned to take one long trip through the South in the autumn, before the presidential election of 2012, and write about it. But when that trip was over I wanted to go back, and I did so, leisurely in the winter, renewing acquaintances. That was not enough. I returned in the spring, and again in the summer, and by then I knew that the South had me, sometimes in a comforting embrace, occasionally in its frenzied and unrelenting grip.
I received two gifts from Deep South for which I’m especially grateful. One is an introduction to the writer Mary Ward Brown. Like me, Theroux had never heard of this author before being introduced to her by an enthusiast. After reading her short stories and her memoir, this was his assessment:
Her writing was direct, unaffected, unsentimental, and powerful for its simplicity and for its revealing the inner life of rural Alabama, the day-to-day, the provincial manners and pretensions, the conflicts racial and economic. No gothic, no dwarfs, no twelve-year-old wives, no idiots, no picturesque monstrosities, nothing that could be described as phantasmagoric.
One of the story collections, Tongues of Flame, is available as a Kindle download. I’ve now read most of the stories contained therein, and I can but agree wholeheartedly with Paul Theroux.
The story “New Dresses” takes place some years ago and is told from the point of view of Lisa, a Midwesterner. She has married into the Worthy family, a clan with deep roots in the South, and she’s having trouble adjusting. In this scene, Lisa has conveyed her extremely frail but insistent mother-in-law to a department store in town, where everyone seems to know and revere her:
Mrs. Worthy had to be supported to the elevator, where the black woman averted her eyes and worked the controls in silence. Mrs. Worthy leaned on Miss Carrie, who kept one arm around her waist. Lisa stared blindly at advertisements taped to the wall, wondering what vanity or pride could prompt anyone so sick to subject herself, subject them all, to such an ordeal.
From the story “The Barbecue:”
Jeff was named for the southern hero Jefferson Davis. The first time someone told Tom his weekend neighbor was a collateral descendant of the president of the Confederacy, of the same blood and could trace it, Tom had laughed. “You mean they got the papers on him, like a bull?” Laura said there was an original portrait of President Davis’s mother in one of the Arrington parlors. They prized it above everything else in the house, she said.
The J in Tom’s name stood for Jefferson too. He was named for a hero even greater, the architect of American democracy, but he was no kin whatsoever. It was just a name his father had picked out, hoping it would help him amount to something, his mother said. His father had been a two-mule farmer in the poorest county of the state.
This is the kind of fiction writing I have come to cherish: straightforward, unadorned, not striving for effect.
While visiting the home of Mary Ward Brown, a painting by Crawford Gillis was pointed out to Theroux. He had never heard of this artist. Neither had I. While searching for his work online, I came across the site of the Johnson Collection in Spartanburg, South Carolina. What a gem of an art museum!
Two paintings by Crawford Gillis:
Kazoo Players
Man Plowing
Have a look at the site; the place is a veritable treasure trove. I just want to include one other work here. It’s an untitled painting by Carl Christian Brenner. It is so evocative, I get lost in it. (To get the full effect, click to enlarge):
I have many marked pages in my e-book version of Deep South, and the book deserves a great deal more attention that I have time to give it at present. Let me just say that I loved it. Despite the desperate straits of some of the small towns he visited, Paul Theroux made me want to go to the Deep South- to see what he saw and to meet and talk to the people he met.
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If you’ve spent any time at this site in the past year, you’ll know that Stranger Than Fiction, the course in the literature of true crime that I had the privilege of teaching last year, pretty much hijacked my nonfiction reading for a while. If you read in the subgenre of historical true crime, the experience is slightly less scary. So here are some recommendations, made on that basis.
Let me get Murder by Candlelight out of the way first. This survey of crime in early nineteenth century England can admittedly be rather unsettling. But Michael Knox Beran’s is such a bracing and refreshing intellect, I can’t help but sing the praises of this book (though approach with caution, please!)
And here are some others: The Destiny of the Republic, in which Candice Millard returns James A. Garfield to his rightful place in the pantheon of great Americans;
Blood Royal by Eric Jager, in which medieval France comes vividly, if frighteningly, to life (The Last Duel by this author is also very enjoyable);
The Mad Sculptor by Harold Schechter. Schechter is also the editor of True Crime: An American Anthology. This is the book I used as my text for the true crime course.
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Some of the most marvelous nonfiction I’ve come across recently is in the form of exhibition catalogs. I saw “Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World” just before it closed at the National Gallery in Washington DC: 
Alexander on Horseback
Dancing Faun
Runner
I saw Gauguin to Picasso: Masterworks from Switzerland at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC several months ago. 
The Road Menders, Vincent Van Gogh
Red Roof by the River, by Paul Gauguin
Church of St. Severin, Paris, by Maurice Utrillo
(I stood in front of this painting for quite some time, along with a young couple. Finally I said, “Why is this painting so wonderful?” The woman murmured that she did not know, and then they both turned to me with radiant smiles.)
Jew praying, by Marc Chagall
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“Class Distinctions: Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer” never came any closer than Boston, and while I love the Boston area, I wasn’t able to make to to the Museum of Fine Arts to see the exhibits. However, the paintings are so fabulous that I purchased the catalog anyway.
Cover image: Street Musicians at the Doorway of a House, by Jacob Ochtervelt
The Astronomer, by Johannes Vermeer
Interior with Women Beside Linen Chest, by Pieter de Hooch
Fantasy Interior with Jan Steen and the Family of Gerrit Schouten, by Jan Steen
Catharina Hooft and her nurse, by Frans Hals
Shipbuilder and his wife, by Rembrandt
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A quick reminder concerning Josh Ruxin’s inspiring chronicle of the work that he, his wife, and many others have been doing in Rwanda before I go on to more current items.
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I am now reading two nonfiction titles: The Romanovs by Simon Sebag Montefiore and The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf. I’ve written recently about The Romanovs, and I hereby reiterate my intention to read the entire book. Eventually.
The Invention of Nature is a biography of Alexander Von Humboldt. I’m about half way through it, and it’s wonderful. Here was a man gifted with a profound intellect and a restless curiosity about the world around him. The story of his explorations of South America, begun in 1799 and lasting for five years, is alone worth the price of admission. He cheerfully endured almost inconceivable hardships in his quest for ever deeper knowledge and understanding of the natural world.
Over thousands of years crops, grains, vegetables and fruits had followed the footpaths of humankind. As humans crossed continents and oceans, they had brought plants with them and thereby had changed the face of the earth. Agriculture linked plants to politics and economy. Wars had been fought over plants, and empires were shaped by tea, sugar and tobacco. Some plants told him as much about humankind as about nature itself, while other plants gave Humboldt an insight into geology as they revealed how continents had shifted. The similarities of their coastal plants, Humboldt wrote, showed an ‘ancient’ connection between Africa and South America as well as illustrating how islands that were previously linked were now separated – an incredible conclusion more than a century before scientists had even begun to discuss continental movements and the theory of shifting tectonic plates. Humboldt ‘read’ plants as others did books – and to him they revealed a global force behind nature, the movements of civilizations as well as of landmass. No one had ever approached botany in this way.
As you can see, Andrea Wulf’s writing is clear and lucid. Von Humboldt freely mixed his scientific observations with an esthetic response; hence, his writing is often lyrical:
At the foot of the high granite spine that, in the early days of our planet, defied the incursion of the waters during the formation of the Antillean Gulf, there begins a broad, immeasurable plain. Upon leaving behind the valleys of Caracas and the island-rich Lake Tacarigua, 1 which reflects in its surface the trunks of the pisang trees, leaving behind fields resplendent with the delicate light green of Tahitian sugarcane or the solemn shade of cacao plants, one’s gaze toward the South comes to rest upon steppes that, seeming to climb, dwindle into the distant horizon.
From “Concerning the Steppes and Deserts,” in Views of Nature 
Admittedly it was a mistake to tackle both of these books at the same time. But I confess I’m in a fever over the cornucopia of new offerings in nonfiction – I have trouble restraining myself!
Here are two more that I’m going to tackle next:
Best reading in 2015: Nonfiction
My reading in nonfiction this year was heavily influenced – indeed, largely determined, at least initially – by the course in the literature of true crime which I taught back in February and March. This proved to be an exhilarating experience on all levels: the interaction with genuine, enthusiastic, and unapologetic intellectuals, the chance to master new classroom technology with the indispensable help of my (ever-patient) husband Ron, and above all, the research, which took me into new and previously unknown (to me) areas of American history that proved utterly fascinating.
I chose for the course’s primary text Harold Schechter’s impressive anthology. I figured if it was good enough to receive the imprimatur of the Library of America, then it would serve the course well. I took the historical/chronological approach to the material, as Schechter does.
Thanks are due once again to my friend Pauline for making this happen (and giving me plenty of help along the way).
In a post I wrote in August entitled “Six nonfiction titles I’ve read and esteemed so far this year,” four were true crime:
The Stranger Beside Me (1980) and Blood and Money (1976) are classics of the genre. I had long wanted to read the Ann Rule title and was glad to finally do so. Her story of the terrifying rampage of serial killer Ted Bundy, a man she actually knew, retains its power to shock and bewilder. For me, these effects were even more immediate in Tommy Thompson’s strange and gripping tale of Texas high rollers and their fateful (and fatal) entanglement.. Blood and Money is one of the greatest exemplars of true crime reportage. I read it when it first came out, and I wondered if it would pack the same punch on rereading. It did – and then some.
This House of Grief by Australian writer Helen Garner is the story of an appalling family tragedy and the accusations that eventually followed, culminating in a trial that was completely riveting. I couldn’t put this book down. In the Wall Street Journal’s Books of the Year feature (Review section, Saturday/Sunday December 12-13, 2015), Kate Atkinson describes This House of Grief as “both scrupulously objective and profoundly personal.” She cites it as one of the best books read by her this year (as does Gillian Anderson, in the same article).
As for Ghettoside, I lack sufficient superlatives in my vocabulary with which to praise journalist Jill Leovy’s achievement in this book. Crime and punishment as played out in South Los Angeles are vividly and disturbingly rendered. What really makes Ghettoside work is the intense focus on individuals caught up in the maelstrom. I was glad to see that this title made onto several lists of best nonfiction of 2015.
The two other titles in the “Six nonfiction” post linked to above are biographies:
Re the Strauss title: I really enjoyed getting the back story to the Shakespeare play, one of my long time favorites. And as for Joan of Arc, what can one say? As a girl, I was fascinated by her story. These days, I find it even more compelling. And Harrison relates the particulars with clarity and grace.
I very much enjoyed David Gessner’s dual biography of Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner, two towering greats of twentieth century environmentalism. I hope that description doesn’t make them sound stodgy. They were anything but – especially the cheerfully irreverent Abbey, who lived more or less wild and free, marrying multiple times and hurling rhetorical thunderbolts whenever the mood moved him. He’s best remembered for Desert Solitaire (1968), a memoir of his stint as a park ranger in Arches National Monument, now Arches National Park. In addition, he coined the expression “monkey wrench gang” in his 1975 novel of the same name.
All the Wild That Remains also functions as a travelogue, as Gessner retraces the steps of his subjects and when possible, talks to folks who knew them.
David Gessner
Writing about this book is serving to remind me how much I enjoyed it. I might read it again. I was also delighted to be able to give it as a gift to my dear friend Bonnie, who now resides in nature-friendly Oregon. Bonnie’s the librarian who first introduced me to the literary stars of the environmental movement. Together we presented a program on this subject at the library.
Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey [click to enlarge]
This is a delightful romp through the world of used and antique books, with a past master of the art. Michael Dirda is a passionate, compulsive collector and an amazingly knowledgeable person. The only problem with Browsings is that you learn of numerous titles that you’d like to read. And so that list – that fateful (I almost write “fatal”) list – grows by leaps and bounds, while you, poor you, are stuck with your one pair of eyes (which you desperately hope will hold out a bit longer) and one brain (same hope, even more fervent). You can’t read any faster! And nor, really, do you wish to.
Here’s just a small sampling of the titles Dirda mentions in Browsings:
Classics, crime fiction, science fiction, fantasy, memoir, swashbuckling adventure – he’s open to all of them. Dirda possesses the most receptive and exuberant mind I’ve ever encountered.
Speaking of recommendations, I’ve gotten plenty of them from Martin Edwards’s delightful history of the Detection Club, which I’ve been absorbing in measured and delicious dollops. Among its other virtues, The Golden Age of Murder is an excellent companion volume to the classic reissues now coming in gratifying numbers from the British Library.
I recently found Witches: Salem, 1692 to be a sobering reminder of where institutionalized rigidity and narrow mindedness can lead. Read it and weep – but also be fascinated by this recounting of one of the darkest chapters in our history.
This book was a revelation! Here is history with a truly local perspective – we’re talking about landmarks a mere ten minutes from my front door. Ron and I went scouting locations in Howard County alone and had excellent luck. Then I found another landmark that’s been relocated to the Baltimore Museum of Art. (Alas, still no access to Doughreagan Manor, not even to gaze upon from a distance.)
Wake also describes in scintillating detail life among Britain’s aristocrats and their newly arrived American counterparts in the early eighteen hundreds. (This was well before the invasion of the so-called “dollar princesses.” later in the same century.)
This is not a book for reading straight through, but one to contemplate with delight. I am in awe of the inventiveness of children’s book illustrators. They are among our greatest artists, and 100 Great Children’s Picture Books is full to bursting with their wondrous works.
I’ve written several posts on this book; or rather, I’ve quoted large chunks from it. Sir John Lister-Kaye’s beautiful descriptions speak for themselves; I could not hope to emulate his eloquence. Here he describes a phenomenon that is nothing short of astonishing:
Sitting at my desk one morning I looked up to see a thin veil of smoke passing the window. Puzzled, I rose and walked across the room to the bay window that looks out over the river fields. Normally I can see right across the glacial valley to the forested hills on the other side, the river glinting in between. That morning I could barely see the far side at all. It couldn’t be smoke, I reasoned, there was too much of it. It must be drifts of low cloud. Then it cleared and handed back the view.
I returned to my desk. A few moments later I noticed it again; another pale shroud passing on a gentle south-westerly breeze, funnelling along the valley. But something wasn’t right. Late summer mists don’t do that, they hang, and anyway, the cloud base was high. Perhaps it was smoke, after all. I got up again and stood in the window just as another cloud closed off my view. I always keep my precious Swarovski binoculars on my windowsill so I took a closer look.
What I saw was a breath-taking spectacle of such overwhelming natural abundance that I was lost for words. I picked up the phone to Ian Sargent, our field officer, who was off duty with his girlfriend Morag Smart, who ran our schools programmes. ‘Come quickly. You must see this.’ As always, when I stumble across some extraordinary natural phenomenon, my first instinct is to share it. But I also wanted witnesses. The world is full of cynics. I knew people wouldn’t believe me if I kept it to myself.
It was neither mist nor smoke. It was silk. Spiders’ web silk. The massed gossamer threads of millions of tiny spiders dispersing by a process known as ‘ballooning’. Every long grass stem, every dried dock head, every tall thistle, every fence post held, at its apex, a tiny spiderling – what we commonly know as a money spider – poised, bottom upturned to the wind in what has been described as the ‘tiptoe position’ and from which single or multiple threads of silk were being spun. Other spiders were queuing beneath, awaiting their turn. As each slowly lengthening thread caught the wind we could watch the spider hanging on, tightening its grip on the stem or the seed head, while the gently rugging threads extended ever longer into the breeze.
For the tiniest spiders lift-off happened when the threads were ten or fifteen feet long, but slightly larger spiders spun for much more – perhaps twice that length. Then they let go. The spiders were airborne, sailing gently up, up and away across the fields, gaining height all the time, quite literally ballooning down the valley with the wind.
Many are the books about nature and natural phenomena that I’ve started with the best of intentions only to leave unfinished. Not only did I finish Gods of the Morning, but I was genuinely sorry to see it end.
Sir John Lister-Kaye with his daughter Hermione
And so I come to Murder by Candlelight. Subtitled The Gruesome Slayings Behind Our Romance with the Macabre, this would at first glance seem to be a catalog of the grotesque, best read in broad daylight if at all. It is true that author Michael Knox Beran recounts some terrible crimes; they date from the early nineteenth century and took place in Britain. But this book is about so much more.
Let me quote myself, from an earlier post:
Murder by Candlelight is not only a true crime narrative – or rather, a narrative of multiple true crimes – it is a work of philosophy, psychology, and history. True, some of it is hard to read – repugnant, even gruesome – but other parts are rich with a profound insight into the human condition. The erudition displayed by Michael Knox Beran is nothing short of amazing. For instance, it is not every day that a book sends me scurrying to the works of Arthur Schopenhauer:
Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860
Yes, I know, he doesn’t look as though he’d be very scintillating at a dinner party, but he’s actually a deeply fascinating thinker. I have in mind specifically a work entitled The World as Will and Representation. Sound dry as dust? Not the portions quoted in Murder by Candlelight – they’re anything but.
I had not previously heard of Michael Knox Beran, but he will most definitely be getting a fan letter from Yours Truly.
Forthwith, an excerpt:
The killings described in this book took place in the high noon of Romanticism, when the most vital spirits were in revolt against the eighteenth-century lucidity of their fathers and grandfathers, those powdered, periwigged gentlemen who had been bred up in the sunshine of the Enlightenment, and who were as loath to descend to the Gothic crypt as they were to contemplate the Gothic skull beneath the skin. The Romantic Age, by contrast, was more than a little in love with blood and deviltry. It was an age that delighted in the clotted gore of the seventeenth-century dramatists, the bloody poetry of Webster and Tourneur and Middleton. “To move a horror skillfully,” Charles Lamb wrote in his 1808 book Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare, “to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit: this only a Webster can do.” Inferior geniuses, Lamb said, may “terrify babes with painted devils,” but they “know not how a soul is to be moved.”
And one more:
The keenest spirits of this epoch in murder history— Sir Walter Scott, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Carlyle among them— knew a good deal about the horror that moves the soul. In their contemplations of the most notorious murders of their time, they saw “strange images of death” and discovered dreadfulnesses in the act of homicide that we, in an age in which murder has been antiseptically reduced to a problem of social science on the one hand and skillful detective work on the other, are only too likely to have overlooked.
For the student of history, the murders of a vanished time have this other value. An eminent historian has said that were he limited, in the study of a particular historical period, to one sort of document only, he would choose the records of its murder trials as being the most comprehensively illuminating. A history of the murders of an age will in its own way reveal as much of human nature, caught in the Minotaur-maze of evil circumstance, as your French Revolutions, Vienna Congresses, and German Unifications. What a vision of the past rises up before us in these dark scenes, illumined by wax-lights and tallow-dips: and what an uncanny light do they throw upon our own no less mysterious, no less sinful present.
In the course of my reading of Murder By Candlelight, it began to exercise a greater and greater hold on my imagination. I, who have lately been reading multiple books simultaneously (as well as magazines and newspapers), could only read this one book. And yet I slowed down purposely as the end neared, not wanting to finish. I finally did so in October. I am now rereading it, to try and better understand and recapture the effect it had on me the first time. I’m about one third of the way in, and yes, it’s happening again.
Sir John Lister-Kaye on tawny owls and willow warblers
Throughout my reading of Gods of the Morning, I’ve been astonished over and over again by Lister-Kaye’s gorgeous descriptions:
Like molten gold from a crucible, the first touch of sun spilled in from the east, from the glistening horizon of the Moray Firth, so bright that I couldn’t look at it, flooding its winter fire up the river, right past me and on up the valley. The river trailed below me, like a silk pashmina thrown down by an untidy teenager. Strands of mist over the water were fired with yellow flame, as though part of some mysterious ritual immolation. The new-born light raked the steep glen sides, floodlighting every rocky prominence and daubing deep craters of black shadow so that the familiar shape of the land vanished before my eyes. I was in a wonderland, strange to me and a little unnerving. The dogs sat uncharacteristically silent at my feet, noses lifting to test the air, but stilled as though they, too, could sense the moment.
And yet, even in the midst of all this beauty, there appear certain disturbing vignettes. One concerns an almost sacrilegious act committed by Lister-Kaye when he was eleven years old.
Tawny owl
His grandfather had shown him the customary roosting place of a tawny owl in a yew tree on the family property. Earlier that year, young John had been gifted with an air rifle:
It was the most exciting birthday gift I had ever received. In the short space of a birthday afternoon I became Davy Crockett, Kit Carson and the Lone Ranger all rolled into one ill-disciplined puberulous youth bursting to tangle with danger and adventure.
You can probably guess what happened next:
The head-hanging truth that still torments my soul is that when no one was looking I crept out and shot that owl. For a moment it seemed not to move; then it tipped forward and fell like a rag at my feet. I picked it up, hot and floppy in my hands. Its cinnamon and cream mottled plumage was as soft and silky as Angora fleece. One owl, one boy, one gun. Two burst hearts, one with lead, the other with guilt. I had never held a tawny owl before and its lifeless beauty hit me in a withering avalanche of instantaneous remorse and shame. I have never forgotten it and never forgiven myself. To this day I ask myself why I did it.
The very definition of remorse.
Several works came to mind when I read this passage. Foremost among them, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
‘God save thee, ancient Mariner!From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—Why look’st thou so?’—With my cross-bowI shot the ALBATROSS.……………………………………And I had done a hellish thing,And it would work ’em woe:For all averred, I had killed the birdThat made the breeze to blow.Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay,That made the breeze to blow!
Illustrations for “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Gustave Dore
Surely there is no more dramatic and meaningful moment in life than when you realize that an action you’ve taken – whatever the reason – is profoundly, morally wrong. Almost always that action is an irreparable transgression, against God, nature, or one’s fellow human beings. Sometimes that action involves the taking of a life. In a chapter in A Sand County Almanac entitled “Thinking Like a Mountain,” the great conservationist Aldo Leopold recounts such a moment in his own life:
We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.
In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
John Lister-Kaye’s sense of wonder at the nesting and migratory habits of birds – indeed, at their very existence – shines throughout in Gods of the Morning.
A willow warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus – the cascading leaf-watcher) is an unexceptional little bird, often our first summer migrant, an arrival announced by the male birds rendering a rippling, descending peal of pure notes tinged with mild complaint, but as pretty as a summer waterfall. It’s a refrain that rings through the spring woods, repeating over and over again, lifting to a brief, pleading crescendo, then slowing as it falls and, diminuendo, fades away at the end. It seems to be calling out, ‘Now that I’ve arrived, what am I going to do?’
…………………………………………..
Like the blackcap, it resides in that large family of typical warblers that come and go every summer without any fuss, unnoticed except by ornithologs like me and a few thousand binocular-toting others to whom these tiny creatures assume an importance far greater than their size. If they’ve heard of a willow warbler at all, the vast generality of people don’t know that it has just completed a global marathon, back from wintering in southern Africa, a migration of three thousand miles of skimming arid plains, dodging desert sandstorms and leap-frogging seas and mountains, and they probably wouldn’t care much either. ‘All little brown birds are the same to me,’ I’m told, over and over again. But not to me: for me they all carry meaning and I thirst to know more. Sylviidae, the family.
I’m here to tell you, it takes a rapturous devotion like Lister-Kaye’s to keep all this warbler lore straight! But if anyone can do it, he can.
Willow warbler
Reading this skilled and eloquent observer’s descriptions of his almost mystical encounters with avian species put me in mind of a piece I read some years ago: Loren Eiseley‘s “The Judgment of Birds.” There’s a bit in this essay about a close encounter with a crow that has remained vivid in my imagination:
This crow lives near my house, and though I have never injured him, he takes good care to stay up in the very highest trees and, in general, to avoid humanity.
His world begins at about the limit of my eyesight.
On the particular morning when this episode occurred, the whole countryside was buried in one of the thickest fogs in years. The ceiling was absolutely zero. All planes were grounded, and even a pedestrian could hardly see his outstretched hand before him.
I was groping across a field in the general direction of the railroad station, following a dimly outlined path. Suddenly out of the fog, at about the level of my eyes, and so closely that I flinched, there flashed a pair of immense black wings and a huge beak. The whole bird rushed over my head with a frantic cawing outcry of such hideous terror as I have never heard in a crow’s voice before and never expect to hear again.
He was lost and startled, I thought, as I recovered my poise. He ought not to have flown out in this fog. He’d knock his silly brains out.
All afternoon that great awkward cry rang in my head. Merely being lost in a fog seemed scarcely to account for it—especially in a tough, intelligent old bandit such as I knew that particular crow to be. I even looked once in the mirror to see what it might be about me that had so revolted him that he had cried out in protest to the very stones.
Finally, as I worked my way homeward along the path, the solution came to me.
It should have been clear before. The borders of our worlds had shifted. It was the fog that had done it. That crow, and I knew him well, never under normal circumstances flew low near men. He had been lost all right, but it was more than that.
He had thought he was high up, and when he encountered me looming gigantically through the fog, he had perceived a ghastly and, to the crow mind, unnatural sight.
He had seen a man walking on air, desecrating the very heart of the crow kingdom, a harbinger of the most profound evil a crow mind could conceive of—air- walking men. The encounter, he must have thought, had taken place a hundred feet over the roofs.
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At the conclusion of Coleridge’s poem, the mariner offers this moral:
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.He prayeth best, who loveth bestAll things both great and small;For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
Sir John Lister-Kaye
Books to the Ceiling 