Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald
cutlass-curved, razor-sharp tusks. Its small legs and hindquarters that work to steer the huge muscular bulk of the front end. Its manifest, frightening power.
As he spoke, the boar pressed itself up against the fence and sniffed loudly through its wet nostrils. Rashly, I moved my hand towards it. It looked up, flat-faced, with red boar eyes considering, and sniffed again. I drew my hand away. Then, after a while, I lowered it again. The boar stood. It allowed me to push my fingers gently into its arched black back. It felt like a hairbrush with too many bristles and backed with thick muscle, not wood. There was wool underneath the hair. ‘He’ll be getting his winter coat soon,’ said the boy. ‘Six-inch guard hairs.’ I scratched the beast’s broad hump and felt, as the seconds passed, that some tiny skein of aggression in his heart was starting to thrum. I have learned not to distrust intuitions like this. Suddenly we both decided that this was enough, my heart skipping, he grunting and feinting.
Wandering off, he sank on to his knees, nose to the ground, then, with infinite luxury, sat and rolled on to his side. Ripples ran down his hide. I was entranced. For all my interest in this creature, the boar had become bored with me and simply walked away.
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. After most of the night cleaning the house I was spilling with contagious rage. I’d even considered burning the bastard building to the ground. It seemed a logical means of preventing any complaints about coffee rings on the Ercol dining table.
By eleven, things are calmer. I’m upstairs marking essays at my desk. The air is soothing, the window open upon cool grey. A red Ford draws up outside and a man and woman get out. The prospective tenants have an eight-year-old son, and he is autistic, my landlord told me. There’s no sign of him. But these are parents; they’re moving with the almost imperceptible restraint of manner born of care so he must be in the back of the car. Yes. And as he climbs out my heart folds and falls, not because he is wearing a stripy red and orange jumper but because he 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 my 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. The boy just loves the bird. And the bird 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 is happy,’ I say. ‘He likes dancing with you.’
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.
‘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 come into the room. They have decided the house is too small for them and their son. So much for my week of cleaning purgatory.
His mother looks anxious. ‘Come on, Antek! We are going now.’
There is, suddenly, one of the most beautiful moments of human–animal interaction I have ever seen. Antek nods his head gravely at the parrot, and the parrot makes 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 lions’ noses, and then Antek 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.
From a high lookout near a spectacular three-tiered waterfall in Australia’s Blue Mountains National Park, the peaks in the far distance reflect sunshine scattered through a haze of aromatic eucalyptus terpenes; the light has turned them a bleached and dusty blue. At my feet the land falls away into a virgin forest of graceful, pale-barked trees that stretches as far as the eye can see. Further up the slope are leggy shrubs with flowers resembling bright plastic hair curlers: banksias, I think. When a small bird appears in the foliage below I fix it in my binoculars. White, black and acid yellow with eyes like tiny silver coins, it’s wiping its down-curved beak on a branch of a shrub with strappy leaves. I don’t know what the shrub is, and I’m not sure what the bird is, either. I think it’s a honeyeater, but I don’t know what anything is, not precisely. Not here. The air smells faintly of old paper and something a little like jet fuel. I feel lost and very far from home.
I grew up in a house full of natural-history field guides, everything from Locket and Millidge’s 1951 two-volume guide to British spiders, with its hairy, many-eyed line drawings, to illustrated books on trees, fungi, orchids, fishes and snails. These books were the unquestioned authorities of my childhood. I marvelled at the names entomologists had given to moths – the figure of eighty, the dingy mocha, the dentated pug – and tried to match their descriptions to the drab living specimens I found on the walls of the porch on cool summer mornings. The process of working out what things were often felt like trying to solve a recalcitrant crossword puzzle, particularly when it involved learning technical terms like scopulae and thalli. 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