杏吧原创

MY NAME comes from the Saxon and means 鈥渙f the bird鈥�; some primitive ancestor was presumably mustered under such an emblem. I should like to think it was that of a raven, long my secret favourite among species, but that is purely wishful. I remember years ago seeing ravens over Los Alamos in New Mexico; they seemed, and sounded, familiar things in that otherwise very strange and inhuman landscape, and transported me in a second back to my native Devon. No landscape that has birds, especially widespread ones like the raven, can be totally foreign.

I have always felt psychologically, poetically and mystically 鈥渙f the bird鈥�, yet I am not what most people would think of as a birdwatcher and I am a very long way from being anything as professional as an ornithologist. I once took part in a self-styled ornithological expedition, vaguely under the aegis of Peter Scott, in Arctic Norway. Our alleged purpose was to observe Steller鈥檚 eider (of which we caught not a single glimpse) and to capture lesser white-fronted geese.

I remember waking on the tundra very early one nightless morning and hearing the dibbling sound of Anser erythropus feeding very close indeed 鈥� the geese were not more than 10 feet away, in between the two tents we were sleeping in. We were camping in one of the rare meadows on the Vaas peninsula. I very cautiously widened a chink in a flap. The dear birds were grazing around our guy ropes; and making a total mockery of all our catapult nets and other catching apparatus. We did finally bring a pair of bean geese to Slimbridge, pinched out of the nest by a Pasvik river farmer and bought for money. It was a wonderful bird experience in every other way, and unlike some more serious members of our party I realised that lesser white-fronted geese, like ravens, have a distinct sense of humour.

One of the ugliest experiences known to man (or to this man) is being caught in the realms of some birding enthusiast, ready at the faintest encouragement to tear the helpless victim to shreds with his rarities, his experiences, his lists, his superb binoculars, his even more superb camera 鈥� his need, normally childish in its eager transparency, so flagrantly to cap, to humiliate, to better us. It betrays neither love of birds nor love of humans, but an overwhelming passion for one鈥檚 own expertise. I remember years ago meeting someone in the film world whose chief title to fame was the number of women he had slept with, or, as I came to suspect, claimed to have slept with. The temptation to lie, such reported experiences being so rarely checkable, is much the same in both spheres; and not only to lie just to cheaply impress, but even in the end firmly to believe your own lies.

A bird-lover in London

In most ways, then, though I could not live without birds, and never more so than after a stroke, I cannot call myself a birdwatcher or ornithologist. I do not even feel I have properly earned the title of bird-lover. I do feed birds in our garden here in Dorset, which I run very modestly as a wild garden, that is, as much for its wildlife as for myself. Even in London, going to the lake in Regent鈥檚 Park is as much a pleasure for me as going to the theatre or the cinema. The heronry, the great crested grebes, the early congregations of shovellers with their weird ritual procession-meetings, which always remind me bizarrely of those held by that lapsed religious group the Shakers, the white-fronts, the eiders, the pintails, the wigeon. Parts of London seem very hostile to me nowadays, foreign. But in that familiar walk around the lake, I know myself near home.

I first came to birds as a boy by an odd path: hunting them. I am ashamed to say that, among other birds, I have shot a raven and a buzzard. Nature has punished me for the former, since I now see the raven so rarely here in Dorset that it hardly seems to exist 鈥� it is almost, as with so many creatures, not a living animal but a fossil. This spring, very high above Seaton in Devon near here, I heard a high sound, and stayed rooted to the ground, head craned upwards, as I stared at two black specks hurtling, eternal messengers from other worlds, on their way to some destination further north. I used to hear ravens several times each year in west Dorset, but these were the first in the past five. But when I began with nature, all lay in learning how to kill it.

Any true modern ecologist will find this execrable. But I am old enough now to understand that hunting things, though it may start with lusting to kill, can end with a paradoxical deep love; with, as in my own case, comprehensively rejecting shotgun and rod, and finally the camera. I also hunted wild orchids for years, and for a time tried to photograph them, but then gave even that up. Why? This brings me to a greater matter, which must shock many.

In my own firm opinion, nature and the countless ways we have discovered to reproduce it, visually, aurally and verbally, are antipathetic; above all I believe it is so verbally. Words cannot reproduce nature; they exist in totally different worlds. Even this article defeats its own end. I might try to convey some of the bird experiences from my 70 years or more of life; but I shall fail, just as I believe countless writers, from the greatest and most eminent, from Henry David Thoreau and Richard Jefferies, to the miserably hack and journalistic (no names!), have failed 鈥� and certainly as my own profession, that of fiction, has failed. The errors of novelists abound.

This is for me one of the great claims of birds: that however familiar and common they are, they cannot really be described. We cannot write of them in our own terms, and certainly not in theirs. I was sitting on a Devon cliff only this last spring, watching a trickle of first swallows coming in across the sea from France. What did they feel? What did the cock blackbird I stood over the other day, oblivious of me, seemingly drugged by the sun, its beak gaping; what the blackcap, that breeds as always in the bamboo thicket at the bottom of my garden, singing now among the new-leaved sycamore? What our dustmen and scavengers (Larus argentatus or herring gull), eternally ready to pounce down on any food we leave out?

Let me put it in one 鈥渓aw鈥�. Nature cannot be experienced other than as it is, and then only by one person; this is simply a reflection of the great defect of modern society 鈥� that few can live in any real contact with nature.