Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ The more animals and plants I learned, the larger, more complex and yet more familiar the world around me became.

      It was a long time before I understood that even the simplest of field guides are far from transparent windows on to nature. You need to learn how to read them against the messiness of reality. Out in the field, birds and insects are so often seen briefly, at a distance, in low light or half-obscured by foliage; they do not resemble the tabular arrangements of paintings in guides, where similar species are brought together on a plain background on the same page, all facing one way and bathed in bright, shadowless light so they may be easily compared. To use field guides successfully, you must learn to ask the right questions of the living organism in front of you: assess its size and habitat, disassemble it into relevant details (tail length, leg length, particular patterns of wing cases or scales or plumage), check each against images of similar species, read the accompanying text, squint at tiny maps showing the animal’s usual geographical range, then look back to the image again, refining your identification until you have fixed it to your satisfaction.

      The process of identifying animals in this way has a fascinating history, for field guides have closely tracked changes in the ways we interact with nature. Until the early years of the twentieth century, bird guides, for example, mostly came in two kinds. Some were moralised, anthropomorphic life histories, like Florence Merriam’s 1889 Birds Through an Opera-Glass, which described the bluebird as having a ‘model temper’ while the catbird possessed a ‘lazy self-indulgence’. ‘If he were a man,’ she wrote of the latter, ‘you feel confident that he would sit in shirt sleeves at home and go on the street without a collar.’ The other kind of guide was the technical volume for ornithological collectors. In those days birds were often identified only after being shot, so such guides focused on fine details of plumage and soft parts. ‘Web between bases of inner and middle toes,’ runs the description of the semipalmated plover in Chapman’s 1912 edition of his Color Key to North American Birds. But with the rise of recreational birdwatching following the First World War, when the morality of killing birds was increasingly questioned and the advent of inexpensive binoculars brought birds into visual range, such details were of limited use. A new way to identify birds was needed.

      The first of the modern field guides was Roger Tory Peterson’s 1934 Field Guide to the Birds. It was inspired partly by a chapter in the popular 1903 children’s book Two Little Savages, written by Ernest Thompson Seton, first chief scout of the Boy Scouts of America. In it, a nature-minded boy despairs of learning the birds from books that require you to hold them dead in your hands. He decides instead to make ‘far-sketches’ of the ducks he sees in the distance and arrange them into a ‘duck chart’ that shows the characteristic ‘blots and streaks that are their labels . . . like the uniforms of soldiers’. Peterson’s paintings, like Seton’s charts, tabulated and simplified birds, and he went further, adding small black lines on the page that pointed to distinctive characteristics that were most easily visible: the black band on the end of a crested caracara’s tail, the ‘ink-dipped’ wings of the flying kittiwake.

      When he was a young man in the 1920s, Peterson was a member of the Bronx County Bird Club, a group of competitive, iconoclastic young naturalists. In the days before portable guides, field identification aids could take unusual forms: one club founder carried around an envelope containing coloured plates cut from a copy of E. H. Eaton’s lavish but unwieldy ornithological guide Birds of New York that he had found in a trash can. The group was mentored by Ludlow Griscom, a stern, exacting teacher who became renowned for inventing the technique of identifying a bird instantly in the field, even when flying. ‘All the thousands of fragments we know about birds – locality, season, habitat, voice, actions, field marks and likelihood of occurrence – flash across the mirrors of the mind and fall into place – and we have the name of the bird,’ Peterson later explained of Griscom’s method. This split-second, gestalt ability to recognise a species built from combining book knowledge with long field experience became the mark of ornithological expertise, and was at the heart of a growing culture of competitive bird-spotting that lives on today. For there’s an immense intellectual pleasure involved in making identifications, and each time you learn to recognise a new species of animal or plant, the natural world becomes a more complicated and remarkable place, pulling intricate variety out of a background blur of nameless grey and green.

      Today, electronic field guides are becoming increasingly popular, and photo-recognition apps like Leafsnap and Merlin Bird ID let you identify species without the skills required to use field guides. They can do what print guides cannot: play animal sounds and songs, for example. But they also make it harder to learn those things we unconsciously absorb from field guides: family resemblances among species, or their places in the taxonomic order. When I was growing up, the materiality of these guides, their weight and beauty, was part of their attraction. I spent hours staring at their coloured plates of butterflies and birds, distinguishing each from each and fixing the painted images in my mind. The first time I saw a silver-spotted skipper butterfly basking on bare chalk on high downland pasture, I instantly knew the name of this dusty-golden dart with pale, ragged patches on its wings. Field guides made possible the joy of encountering a thing I already knew but had never seen before.

      Back in my hotel room, I pull two Australian field guides from the bottom of my suitcase, eager to find out what it was that I had seen. Flicking through the first, I find a page of honeyeaters: nine birds arranged on a pale green background. That striking pattern of white and yellow and black is found in two species, but those round silver eyes are distinctive. I check against the distribution maps and the short description on the facing page. What I saw was a New Holland honeyeater. And turning to the plant guide, which describes only a few hundred of the thirty thousand different plant species found in Australia, I decide, tentatively, that the shrub it sat on was probably a waratah, and the banksias I saw by the path were hairpin banksias, with their ‘protruding, wiry, hooked styles’. These species are well known here, but for me they are small triumphs. Now I know three things. A few hours ago, I looked over a valley at sunset and knew nothing at all.

Tekels Park

      I shouldn’t do the thing I do, because motorway driving requires you to keep your eyes on the road. I shouldn’t do it also because pulling at your heart on purpose is a compulsion as particular and disconcerting as pressing on a healing bruise. But I do it anyway, and it’s safer to do it these days, because this stretch is being transformed into a smart motorway so the long slope of the M3 as it falls towards Camberley is packed with speed cameras and 50 mph signs, and when I’m driving there on my way somewhere else I can slide my car into the outside lane to bring me closer and slower to the section of fence I’m searching for, running west and high under skies white as old ice.

      Perhaps a hundred thousand vehicles pass this place each day. Back in the mid 1970s I could lie awake in the small hours and hear a single motorbike speeding west or east: a long, yawning burr that dopplered into memory and replayed itself in dreams. But like snow, traffic noise thickens with time. By the time I was ten I could stand by Europe’s second largest waterfall, listen to it roar, and think, simply, it sounds like the motorway when it’s raining.

      I shouldn’t look. I always look. My eyes catch on the place where the zoetrope flicker of pines behind the fence gives way to a patch of sky with the black peak of a redwood tree against it and the cradled mathematical branches of a monkey puzzle, and my head blooms with an apprehension of lost space, because I know exactly all the land around those trees, or at least what it was like thirty years ago. And then the place has passed, and I drive on, letting out the breath I’d been holding for the last thousand feet or so, as if by not breathing I could still everything – movement, time, all of the dust and feet that rise and fall in a life.

      Here’s an early memory. A ridiculous one, but true. I learned to speed-read by trying to decipher military warning signs that bordered the roadside on my way to primary school. keep out was simple, but danger – unexploded ordnance took СКАЧАТЬ