Vesper Flights By Helen Macdonald - Wunderkammer or The Numinous

 Wunderkammer

/ˈvʊndəˌkamə,German ˈvʊndɐˌkamɐ/

noun

a place where a collection of curiosities and rarities is exhibited.

After seeing the rainbow when I wrote "Hang on when the winds are blowing and look out with a slightly upward  face ; never known  what you will end up seeing..", never expected my weekend was going to be www - wondering with wunderkammer. 

28th of 2021, and 5th of February Vesper flights by Helen Macdonald is a Wunderkammer, and I keep loosing myself reading it, transposed into the past at times, wondering about the mysteries of nature and changing times. 

This is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world around us. Moving and frank, personal and political, this book has lot of nature.  The subject of the book is love, and most specifically love for the glittering world of non-human life around us. Finding ways to recognize and love differences. The attempt to see through eyes that are not our own. To understand that our way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things. Literature shows us that we are living in an exquisitely complex world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It do succeed in teaching us the qualitative texture of the world. We need to communicate the value of things, so that more of us might fight to save them. Cannot Thank you enough for your thoughts on this book Bindu Manoj. I am not even half way through. Normally it should have been completed by now. But so much to ponder in each of the 41 chapters that follow.

1) Nests: 

Home that your carry within you, not simply a fixed location. How nests and eggs are good things to think about when considering matters of individuality, and the concepts of same, and different and series. Meaning of nest is always woven from things that are partly bird and partly human, and as the cup or wall of a nest is raised, it raises, too, questions about our own lives. Do birds plan like us, or think like us? We are fascinated by the difference between skill and instinct, just as w police the difference between art and craft. We see our own notions of home and family in the creatures around us, we process and consider and judge, and prove the truth of our own assumptions back to us. Egg collection needs skill, bravery , knowledge of the natural world, as the collector grants themselves the permission to withhold new lives and new generations. Eggs and war; possession and hope and home, human hurt and harm. If you hold a falcon egg close to your mouth and make soft clucking noises, a chick that was ready to hatch will call back.  Eggs make the author upset, and she realized the reason, loneliness it was. And what a time to read this, when just one set of birds flew away from the nest out of the window, and another is being hatched at home:-)

2) Nothing Like Pig: 

There are animals that are mythological by virtue of being imaginary: basilisks, dragons, unicorns. There are animals that were once just as mythologically rich, but have had so  much exposure to us now that their earlier meanings have become swamped with the new ones: lions, tigers, cheetahs, leopards, bears. We have a long history of territorial anxiety over wild animals intruding on our spaces. When animal become so rare that their impact on humans is negligible, their ability to generate new meanings lessens,  and it is then that thy come to stand for another human notion: our moral failings in our relationship to the natural world. The world has lost half its wildlife in my own life-time. Climate change, habitat loss, pollution, pesticides and persecution have meant that vertebrate species are dying out over a hundred times as fast as they would in a world without humans. The calling forth of an animal icon into flesh, the realization that there is a particular form of intelligence in the world that is boar-intelligence, bar-sentience and being considered by a mind that is not human forces you to reconsider the limits of your own. 

3) Inspector Calls: 

New tenants come to look for a house, with eight year old autistic son Antek, whom the author takes to meet the parrot. They think the house is too small for them and their son, but the son with certainty say, I am going to sleep in the room with the parrot, when we live here. We glory in the importance of accurate classification. 

4) Field Guides: 

Help identify birds, but even the simplest is far from transparent windows on to nature. The more animals and plants you learn, the larger, more complex and yet more familiar the world around become. Today electronic field guides are becoming increasingly popular, and photo-recognition apps like Leafsnap and Merlin Bird ID let identify species without the skills required to us field guides. They can play animal sounds and songs. With them you learn new things.

5) Tekels Park: 

Almost by accident I'd been granted this childhood of freedom and privilege, partly through a quirk of location, partly through my parent's trust in the safety of this place, and I lived in the familiar setting of so many of my children's books. I didn't know how unusual my freedom was, but I know what it had given me. 

It's the same the whole world over

It's the poor what gets the blame

It's the rich what gets the pleasure

Ain't it all a bloomin' shame?

It's so painful to see the meadows lost, the trees cut. Something I had myself written on seeing the trees cut from time to time.  Centuries of habitat loss and the 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. How better was the past. What is being looked for is neither the past, nor the present, but it gestures towards the future whose little hurts are hope. 

6) High-Rise: Change the way we see. Bring us different view of the world, of prospect and power - making the invisible visible. (Wasn't there a post by me on this almost 10 years before); We can see so may birds migrating, from street level, the blank sky above seems a very different place, deep and coursing with life. Living in a high-rise building bars you from certain ways of interacting with the natural world. You can't put out feeders to watch robins and chickadees in your garden. But you are set in another part of their habitual world. High-rise buildings, symbols of mastery over nature, cna work as bridges towards a more complete understanding of the natural world - stitching the sky to the ground, nature to the city. Birds find homes here, like in cliffs. (Do we not have pigeons all around here. )

7) The Human Flock: 

Flock exist because of fear. The magic of flocs is the switch between geometry and family. How easy it is to react to the idea of masses of refugees with the same visceral apprehension with which we greet a cloud of moving starlings or tumbling geese, to view it as a singular entity, strange and uncontrollable and chaotic. But the crowds coming over the border are people just like us. Flock help pick similarity out of strangeness, wanting freedom from fear, food, a place to safely sleep. 

8) The Students Tale: 

A fellow student, embracing Christianity, was about to be imprisoned, so he flees from home, how he flees and gets into a detention camp was all very bad. English not being the first language, but most common words used were Apostate, Bigoted, Depraved. Hide. Inspite of it all, wants to help people. Back to school all click pic, waiting while the world is rebuilt. 

9) Ants: 

Their contemplation on scale and purpose cant help but remind that we are not even a little more than ants in the wider working of the world. 

10) Symptomatic: 

Migraine though painful, helped realize we're not built with the solidity so many of us blithely assume. WHO's 1948 definition of Health - ' a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity' - refers to precisely no one, is a sweetly turned phrase more ableist than utopian. That perfection cannot be intrinsic to us, built as we are of chemicals and networks and causal molecular pathways and shifting storms of electricity; none of us are ever in perfect health. Pain wipes you free of knowledge, makes understanding utterly redundant. Some get migraine around the time of their periods, and therefore it is said that menstruation is migraine's closest cousin. Apocalyptic thinking is a powerful antagonist to action. It makes us give up agency, feel that all we can do is suffer and wait for the end. No. It is not always a cataclysmic ending and not always a disaster. In its earliest sense the word meant a revelation, a vision, an insight, an unveiling of things previously unknown and it bring the knowledge, that we have the power to intervene. Just as the migraine stricken brain can be altered, so also the structure of the world, locked into what feels like an inevitable reliance on fossil fuels and endless economic growth. There are actions we can take and is required. We can exert pressure, we can speak up, we can march and cry and mourn and sing and hope and fight for the world, standing with others, even if we don't believe it.  Miracles are waiting for us to find them. 

11) Sex, Death, Mushrooms

We hardly know the existence of fungal life until we see the fruiting bodies it throws up when conditions are right. Mushrooms are a visible manifestations of an essential yet ungraded world. With mushrooms, there’s a kind of connoisseurship attached to this transgressive relish. A destroying angel looks just like a mushroom to most people, but to a mycologist it’s a compelling reminder of mortality, and at the same time is testament to one’s personal expertise, the ability to notice and make fine distinctions between one organism and another. We’re definitely fascinated by creatures that can hurt us, like crocodilians, sharks, and big cats, and evolutionary psychologists often suggest that our fascination with lethal creatures has clear evolutionary roots—we are hardwired to notice them before less threatening creatures.  It’s thrilling to be close to the lethal side of nature in same way that standing on a cliff top can provoke a thrill: it raises notions of agency, existence, mortality and one’s own identity all at once in a way that makes those things safe to imaginatively explore.

12) Winter woods

So often we think of mindfulness, of existing purely in the present moment, as a spiritual goal. But winter wood teach something else, the importance of thinking about history. They are able to show you the various pasts all at once. In them potentiality crackles in the winter air. 

"And while my feet are treading on last year’s leaves, those of next spring are already furled in buds on the tips of twigs around and above me.” The line puts the reader in the woods. That's the beauty of writing, very poetic, given she was first a naturalist, then a poet and only after that a writer. 

13) Eclipse

Sun and Moon. Darkness and Light. Sea and Land, Breath and no Breath, Life and Death. A total eclipse makes history laughable, makes you feel both precious and disposable, makes the inclination of the world incomprehensible, like someone trying to engage a stone in discussions about the price of a celebrity magazine. Watching the sun climb out is even more affecting. From a point of brilliance, it leaps and burns. It's unthinkably fierce, unbearably bright, something  like a word. And thus begin the world again. 

Remembering the Mahabharata story. 

14) In Her Orbit

Dr. Nathalie Cabrol.  Born in France on August 30, 1963. 

Her hero is her husband Edmond Grin is 101 years old now. Cabrol calls him Merlin after the magician. She was 23 and he was 66 when they first met. She was doing her Ph.D in astrophysics. At that time in her brain that was like: "I know this man. I know this person. From where do I know him?" He sat near her in the class, they looked at each other and "That was it - it took us, you know?" "I cannot explain, but I was waiting for him to show up". "When he has nothing to do, he plays with Einstein's equations:

For more than a decade, Dr. Nathalie Cabrol has been going to Mars every morning as she pursued her dreams of exploring Gusev Crater. She’s a planetary geologist with the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center. In a unique scientific partnership with her husband, Dr. Edmond Grin, Cabrol studied and successfully proposed, and promoted Gusev Crater as a landing site for the martian rovers. Gusev may hold an ancient lakebed; Spirit is seeking evidence of water on Mars. Her fascination includes microbes, mountaineering, deserts.  Volcanos, lakes; fire, water. They are Completely opposite but if they work together they create steam, which is a source of energy. You can produce power and create things with that.  If water goes on fire there is destruction. She is trying to find balance between creation and destruction. There is a pattern in her life, she say;  where the highest of highs are swiftly followed by the lowest of lows. 

"What people see in me is the successful woman, the leader, but all of this is built on sweat and work and temper, you know? It's losses, tragedy, death and tears. I guess you cannot be strong if you never have been hurt and learn how to survive that."  

"There was this sense of being responsible for myself, of being in chare and seeing beautiful things, and exploration and discovery."

Her interests include studying climate change. she says:

"Earth itself is in no danger whatsoever. It will survive whatever we throw at it. What is in danger is the environment that made us possible. We are pretty much cutting the branch we are sitting on. So either we understand that very quickly or life will go on - but a different one. It's going to be sudden and frightening". She  thinks it will not be a slow disappearance. 

As a child she had a sense of connecting, that were not so obvious to others. She believes that this is still one of her greatest strengths. 

Antofagasta is a port city in northern Chile, about 1,100 kilometres (700 mi) north of Santiago. Aguas Calientes Volcano or Cerro Aguas Calientes, also called Simba, is a cone-shaped stratovolcano located 5 kilometres east of the Lascar volcano and 10 kilometres north of Laguna Lejía, Chile. this is where Helen Macdonald had been with Nathalie Cabrol. Cabrol has deep respect for the cultural histories of the landscapes she works in. About this place she say Inca's would come to ask questions of God and so are they. Same questions "Who we are, where we are coming from, what's out there? We are trying to connect to our own origins. So we are doing this scientifically, they were doing it in a more intuitive way."

Are we alone?  Is her quest. 

and her advise to all is, " We create our own barriers and limitations. Keep dreaming as dreams do not have such barriers and never take no for an answer."

15) Hares

Indicated spring once upon a time, but is becoming rare. They are the fastest land animal. Feed mainly at dawn and dusk, they eat their own droppings. They are things of eyes and speed and fear; they have an astonishing capacity to outrun, jump and dodge things that pursue them - foxes, dogs, eagles. 

16) Lost, But Catching Up

Allergies never fail to make new life. Writer is allergic to horses, dogs, foxes and reindeers.A week after her fathers death, as she was smoking in her porch, she saw succession of mud died, battered 4X4s  passed her way, giddy, wet, rainy echo of hounds, and soon after there was one pale, alone hound being a hound, trying to follow and catch up with the others, tired but joyful.  

17) Swan Upping

Swan Upping is the annual practice of catching the swans on the River Thames and marking them to indicate ownership by the Crown or a corporation.The name of the ceremony is thought to originate from the call, "All Up" - a signal for the boats to circle a brood. Private owners of swans developed a complex system of markings, etched into the swans' beaks to identify them as private, and not Crown, property. Historically, this legislation was created because swans were eaten as a prized food at banquets and feasts. Valuable rights of ownership were granted by the monarch to a select few. But today, swans are no longer eaten and are a protected species. Global by virtue of being local. Linked it to Brexit and the fears. 

18) Nestboxes

Nestbox, is a man-made enclosure provided for animals to nest in. The modern nest box was invented by the British conservationist Charles Waterton in the early 19th century to encourage more birdlife and wildfowl on the nature reserve he set up on his estate at Walton Hall. 

19) Deer in the Headlights

In America on record 200 people die every year hitting dear, and unrecorded would be still more. It's called Deer vehicle collison (DVC).  Deer surprise and delight people. But they die because they hav no conception of the nature of roads. They are creatures with their own lives, their own haunts and paths and thoughts and needs. 

20) The Falcon and the Tower

For the longest time we thought of peregrine falcons as rare, shy creatures found only in the wildest, most forbidding places, like mountains, remote gorges, sea cliffs and crags, where they came to seem an intrinsic part and animate expression of uncorrupted wilderness. But these days you’re more likely to see a peregrine (a kind of falcon, but the world literally mean, one from abroad) sitting on a factory roof or chasing pigeons between office buildings downtown. We assumed these birds needed wilderness. We assumed they were made of it. It turns out they don’t, and they aren’t. Watching a peregrine hunting over an industrial landscape is a reminder that animals can always resist the meanings we give them, and they can always surprise us. It’s a good thing to remember. Falcon's haunt landscapes that speak to us of mortality: mountains, by virtue of their eternity,; industrial ruins, by virtue of their reminding us that this, too, in time will be gone, and that we should protect what is here and now. Set at an abandoned power station, the essay ends with a note saying the “act of watching a falcon chase its prey above the scarred and broken ground below feels like quiet resistance against despair. Matters of lif and death and a sense of our place in the world tied fast together in a shiver of wings across a scrap of winter sky.”

21) Vesper Flights

Vesper is a Latin word meaning evening. Vespers are evening devotional prayers, the last and most solemn of the day, and 'Vesper flights' is the most beautiful phrase, an ever-falling blue. 

There are different layers between us and the centre of the Earth: crust, upper mantle, lower mantle, outer core, inner core. Upwards in expanding rings of thinning air it is troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, exosphere. Few miles beneath is molten rock, a few miles above limitless dust and vacancy, and we are in the troposphere. There is so much up above, and so much below, so many places and states that are implacable, unreachable, entirely uninterested in human affair. 

Listening them One by one built imaginative sanctuary between walls of unknowing knowns.

"I’m starting to think of swifts differently now, not as angels or aliens, but as perfectly instructive creatures." After leaving their nests, young swifts apparently fly continually for two or three years, never landing at all. They inhabit the air as herring inhabit the ocean. Their vesper flights, the precipitous ascents these birds make every dawn and dusk. Twice daily they fly thousands of feet above their usual airspace in order to orient themselves using the patterns of stars and polarized light, wind direction and distance vision, and it seems likely they do this in order to predict oncoming weather and work out what they should do next. Their Vesper Flights take them to the top of what is called the convective boundary layer. Humid, hazy part of the atmosphere where the ground's heating by the sun produces rising and falling convective currents, blossoming thermals of hot air; it's the zone of fair-weather cumulus clouds and very day life for swifts. What they are doing here is:

• Forecasting the weather
• Planning the next trip
• Orienting themselves
• Decision Making by using the 'many wrongs principle', i.e. averaging all the individual assessment in order to reach the best navigational decision. 

These flights are instructive. They speak  of how we, as societies and individuals, need to take time to work out exactly where we are, and what is on all our horizons, so that we might know the best courses to take in the face of what is coming towards us. 

T.H. White's Merlin said: "The best thing for being sad, is to learn something". The realm of our own life is the quotidian. As we live inside the protective structures that we have built; none of us can bear too much reality. So we have hobbies. We're held together by our lives, our interests, and all our chosen comforts. But we can't have only those things, because then we can't work out where we should be headed. 

Not all of us need to make that climb, just as many swifts eschew their vesper flights because they are occupied with eggs and young - but as a community, surely some of us are required, by dint of flourishing life and the well- being of us all, to look clearly at the things that are so easily obscured by the every-day. 

Swifts, are fables of community, teaching us about how to make right decisions in the face of oncoming bad weather, in the face of clouds that sit like dark rubble on our own horizon. 

22) In Spight of Prisons

Lampyris noctiluca, things both sublime and ridiculous: half intimations of remote stellar distance and half waggling bettle bums. Glowworm's adult lives are short and made of light—but in their two years as larvae they are creatures of macabre darkness, using their proboscises to inject snails with paralyzing, dissolving neurotoxins before sucking them up like soup. This reads like a horror movie. Female glow-worms can't at, drink or fly, but spend their days burrowed deep in stems and under debris, emerging after twilight to clamber up plant stems and glow to attract the smaller, winged males. Once mated, the female extinguish their light, lay fifty to a hundred and fifty small spherical, faintly luminous eggs and die. It seems more like magic than chemistry. Light is the result of a reaction when the enzyme luciferase acts upon a compound called luciferin in the presence of oxygen, ATP and magnesium. Glow extinguishes if kept in a vacuum. They cannot be meaningfully captured on film. They are part of our hidden countryside; guiding distracted wanderers. 

23) Sun Birds and Cashmere Spheres

Oriole and the nest. Being a rare bird in England, though very common in America, this covers the authors attempts and struggles to see the bird, which was like a fingernail at arm's length.  (Another post on birds and nests at home)

24) The Observatory

It's impossible to regard the natural world without seeing something of our own caught up in it. When lonely, Swan gave Helen company, and she finds comfort watching the artistic swans in our era of rising political nativism.

25) Wicken

Wicken Fen is a tiny fragment of the lost marshland ecosystem that once covered around two and a half thousand square miles of eastern England. When she took her niece there, niece asked her when they made this place, where did they bring the animals from? She wanted to know if the animals were brought from the zoo. The countryside she saw was always a green desert. Charles Darwin had collected rare beetles from wicken-cut reeds sent to Cambridge in boats to light university fire. It is pleasurable to imagine that you can commune with the past in a place like this. There is more to listen . This way of watching wildlife is full of difficulty and mystery, it makes the landscape seem intrinsic to what its creatures are: things in the present moment - bewitching, complicated and always new. 

26) Storm

Storms are things of metaphors and memory, they distress some, while it is a glowing moment for others. Writer recalls, her father explaining, how storms are born from sunlight and hot earth, moving air and water, and how you can count the seconds it takes between lightning and thunder - one Mississippi, two Mississippi - to work out how far away the storm is. Five second is a mile. Summer storm conjure distance and time but conjure, too, all the things that come towards us over which we have no control. No weather so perfectly conjures a sense of foreboding, of anticipation and waiting, as the eerie stillness that often occurs before the first fat drops of rain, when storm light makes luminous all roofs and fields and strands black silhouettes of trees on the horizon. This is the storm as expectation. As solution about to be offered. Or all hell about to break lose. This is the weather we are all now made of. All of us waiting. Waiting for news, waiting for hope, stranded in that strange light that stills our hearts before the storm of history. 

27) Murmurations

Murmuration refers to the phenomenon that results when hundreds, sometimes thousands, of starlings fly in swooping, intricately coordinated patterns through the sky. Starlings is a gregarious Old World songbird with a straight bill, typically with dark lustrous or iridescent plumage but sometimes brightly coloured. Science turned to romanticism. The particulate beauty of unimagined hordes of lives that aren't our own, tracked minute by minute across the sky and rising out of mystery. This is music made comprehensible by war, but the songs the birds sing are hymns of slowly moving light. Out to renew the passport, when it was informed that it would be given, the writer was thinking of the bird-bander told me what happens if you mist-net long-tailed tits. Because they forage in family flocks, these mouse-sized birds get trapped in mist-nets all at once. Freed one by one from the mesh they're hung in individual bags from hooks in the ringing shed, ready to be weighed and measured and ringed. And in that awful solitude they call to one another, ceaselessly, urgently, reassuring each other that they are still together, all one thing. And once the rings are closed about their legs, they're released, all together, to resume their lives, carrying their tiny numbers with them as they fly. 

28) A Cuckoo in the House

Title name is based on an animal book from 1950 and the writer is the real-life spy Maxwell Knight, the inspiration for “M” in the James Bond series, was also a BBC radio naturalist and a Cuckoo called Goo. There are skills that spies and naturalists share . So many famous spies have been naturalists and bird-watchers. There are definite correspondences in techniques and psychologies: stalking unwitting creatures unseen, making close observations, reading body language, having the capacity to wait for one’s target in patient silence and obscurity, all are things so obviously shared between these worlds that in the 1950s the term “bird-watcher” was British intelligence slang for spy. What’s more, being an amateur natural historian is a classic cover story for agents in the field, for it allows one to possess binoculars and spotting scopes, notebooks, technologies like parabolic reflectors, even radio-tracking devices, and a fairly decent excuse to be in places far from the usual tourist tracks . Cuckoo's life beautifully mirrored the concern's of Knight's own. The words Knight used to describe Goo's behavior were highly charged: Friends, Newcomers, Handlers. Cuckoos are competent and ruthless, who lay eggs in others nests. 

To trust an animal, he wrote in Taming and Handling Animals, one must tame it oneself, make it 'gentle and tractable'. The accent is on the word 'make' because to tame a wild creature means that we have to gain its confidence, remove its natural fears, and in many cases even inspire affection, so that the animal concerned will feed readily and regularly will look well; will refrain from biting and other forms of attack and will accept us as well disposed towards it.. or possibly as one of its own kind. A fool of a person will never own an intelligent pet; a nervous person will never succeed in winning the confidence of any wild creature. 

Our understanding of the animals is deeply influenced by the culture in which we live. No matter how they are tracked on their long migrations, they still are birds of mystery, things much greater than small bundles of bones and muscle and grey feather. They tell us things about ourselves, about the way we see our world and they carry their strange human histories with them on their way. 

29) The Arrow- Stork

It encourages me to see the world as an animal does: a place without politics or borders, without humans at all, merely a series of habitats marching climatically from cool northern mountains to the thick rainforests of Angola and Congo.  

You watch young cuckoos find their way to Africa with no parental help, see loggerhead turtles swim seven and a half thousand miles from feeding grounds off Mexico to the beaches of Japan; discover bar-headed geese migrating over the Himalayas, in doing so enduring extreme and sudden changes in elevation that would disable or kill a human. You can marvel at the bar-tailed godwits flight from Alaska to New Zealand across the Pacific Ocean. To us these appears remarkable feats of physical endurance. We cannot help measuring the capacities of animals against our own. 

Our unconscious desire to see ourselves in the lives of animals is shared by the scientists engaged in various projects, making birds partners in their research. They are used for geopolitical games of surveillance and intelligence, weather forecasting and climatic research. A Stork named Menes carrying a 'suspicious electronic device, was suspected of being a spy. Security experts cleared the stork of  espionage and he was released, only to be later found dead on an island near Aswan, a draggled corpse of a stork that had become a poignant avatar for human fears and conflicts. A story of almost comical paranoia. 

30) Ashes

Solastalgia is a term coined by the Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht to refer to people's emotional distress when their home landscapes become unrecognizable through environmental change. He was speaking of drought and strip mining. It can arise by melting tundra and wildfire as well. Tree diseases bring economic loss and ecological impoverishment while at the same time striping familiar meaning from the place we live in. Globalisation with it's accelerating scale and speed of international trade has brought numerous pathogens and pests to species with no natural resistance to them. If you are a tree, death comes hidden in wood veneer, in packing material, in shipping containers, nursery plants, cut flowers, the roots of imported saplings. Will the new generation Children learn to regard constant disappearance as the ordinary way of the world? Hope not. 

31) A Handful of Corn

'Simple, Franciscan act of giving to birds makes us feel good about life, and redeems us in some fundamental way.' - Mark Cocker. Feeding animals can be a deep solace to those who for reasons of social or personal circumstance, find contact with others difficult or impossible. People who feed urban pigeons tend to be isolated and socially marginalized as such acts ephemerally dissolve people's solitude. People are even fined or jailed because thy refuse to stop feeding birds in their gardens. There are acceptable animals and unacceptable animals, as there have been deserving and undeserving poor. Appealing to fears and threats of invasion, foreignness, violence and disease, help to distinguish them. People feed animals and birds because it surrounds us with creatures that know us, are able to forge bonds with us, have come to regard us as part of their world. 

32) Berries

Berries grow to be eaten, not for interior decoration. Many have evolved as vegetable offerings to birds. During winter birds find difficult to find food and berries are some of the few things that they find to eat. But people use them to decorate Christmas trees. The gemlike cluster of berries make the house look spectacularly festive, but those are meant for birds and not for decoration. Flocks of waxwing, take away food even from your hand during this time. 

33) Cherry Stones

Hawfinches, starling-sized finches with enormous, cherry-stone-cracking beak resembles a pair of side-cutting steel pliers quite capable of severing a human finger. They have been immigrants. Spurred by failure of the hornbeam crops, warm air storms, loss of suitable habitat, nest predation by grey squirrels, are all various reasons. They move across Europe. These spectacular refugees have eschewed the venerable treetops of stately homes to spend their time with sparrows, feeding happily on sunflower hearts and peanuts scattered on garden bird tables. The unprecedent irruption of avian refugees speaks so obviously of current issues - political borders. The history of hawfinches in Britain reminds us how seamlessly we confuse natural and national history, how readily we assume nativity in things that are familiar to us, and how lamentably easy it is to forget how we are all from somewhere else. 

34) Birds, Tabled

Bird Fair and Bird show: Our attitudes towards nature are shaped by history and class and power. These two events mirror a longstanding division in the ways we relate to the natural world. One view is that nature is something pristine out there that should only be observed or recorded; the other sees it as something that can be brought into interior spaces and closely interacted with. 

35) Hiding

A wildlife hide: a building whose purpose is to make one disappear. What you see from hides is supposed to be true reality, that is wild animals behaving perfectly naturally because they do not know they are being observed. In so doing, you create a divide between you and the natural world, it's like watching a television screen.  

36) Eulogy

Nightjars are cryptic beasts for whom subtlety is safety; during daylight hours they rest and nest upon ground that so perfectly matches their feathers they are almost impossible to detect, even from a few feet away. 

37) Rescue

Tending injured and orphaned creatures until they are fit to be returned to the wild can feel like an act of resistance, redress, even redemption. It's little like the story of Noah rescuing the animals. There is something inside humans when they're faced with a helpless creature. Most people, mainly children, cannot see a child suffer. Rescuing animals draws out 'raw emotions that unleash our deepest insecurities about our humanity, mortality and place in the natural world. Rehabs are often criticized for being too sentimental, their work dismissed as acts of compassion for individual animals with little or no conservation benefits. Writers friend Judith has been rescuing swifts, and she feels that each bird she saved, may truly be precious to the species fortunes. Orphan swifts are brought to her from all over eastern England. While some don't make it, most are successfully retuned to the wild, triumphing over death. It's tiring to let them go, but once you let one go, it's sheer magic. Anticipation. Functional explanations: Bird is warming up its pectoral muscles ready for flight. Emotional explanations: anticipation, wonder, joy, terror. The sensitive filoplumes growing betwen the feathers of its wings and sleek sides ar being brushed by the breeze, feeing their element for the first time. With a little motivation, the swift starts to ascend, flickering up and up into a sky streaked with evening cirrus. It describes on carful circle above the head, then lifts even higher and fly. Hands that it's claws had gripped tight before letting go, is the last solid thing the bird would touch for years. 

38) Goats

You lay your hand on a billy goat's forehead and push, just a little. You push, and it pushes back, and you push harder, and it does too, and it's a little like arm-wrestling, but much more fun, and the goat always win. Once writer told her dad about her love for pushing dogs. A year later he came home crossly, as he tried doing it in a zoo, but the goat went back and both fell. A press photographer, having done this in front of his colleagues, the press pack never let him forget it.

39) Dispatches from the Valleys

Out of college you want to live , have real job in real world, working with real and sensible people, so when Helen Macdonald was hired by a falcon conservation-breeding farm in rural wales, she was convinced she had found her perfect career. But two incidents made her want to escape, Ostrich trapped in a locked barn, who was bleeding the whole night with one leg injured, she hit the head of the bird, made it unconscious and killed and the encounter with the heard of bullock in the valley, on the lee side of a slope in the far distance. She went full-on Captain Willard from Apocalypse Now. It was an epic stalk. Cover, concealment, camouflage. No sudden movements, everything slowed into certainty. Crawling she reached there, and yelled. The heard scrambled to its feet, lowing in entirely understandable terror, and stampeded, she continued, until they were all gone. The ostrich and the cattle were living animals with their own life - worlds and deserving of their own stories. They were encounters with animals that resolved themselves into personal truths. And the nature of those truths were particular. They weren't hard-won through therapeutic dialogue, but like those offered by Tarot Cards. Many strangers have ben generous enough to share with her a meaningful encounter they have had with an animal. Encounters with creatures are real, built out of all the stories and associations we've learned about them throughout our lives. We must be readier to accept what animal's emblematic selves are trying to tell us. Cows, were a warning to make them run the hell out of there, because the valley we were all in was dark and deep and could have no good end. 

40) The Numinous Ordinary

There are times in which the world stutters, turns and fills with unexpected meaning. When rapturousness claims a moment and transfigures it. Love, beauty, mystery. Epiphanies, Occasions of grace. Secular lexicon at times don't give right words to describe certain experiences and failings. Books that investigate the nature of our intuitions of the sacred, written by people like William James and Rudolf Otto, does. Like 'the soul, held speechless, trembles inwardly to the furthest fiber of its being'. We encounter numinousness in various ways. It could be a story, a radio, a tape, though light, heavy, holding us in thrall, a scrap of the divine not good for the soul, a thing that stands between you and telling of secrets. You become obsessed with it, until you decide to be. 

41) What Animals Taught Me : Animals don't exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. The purpose of animals in medieval bestiaries, for example, was to give us lessons in how to live. I don't know anyone who now thinks of pelicans as models of Christian self-sacrifice, or the imagined couplings of vipers and lampreys an allegorical exhortation for wives to put up with unpleasant husbands. But our minds still work like bestiaries. We thrill at the notion we could be as wild as a hawk or weasel, possessing the inner ferocity to go after the things we want; we laugh at animal videos that make us yearn to experience life as joyfully as a bounding lamb. A photograph of the last passenger pigeon makes palpable the grief and fear of our own unimaginable extinction. We use animals as ideas to amplify and enlarge aspects of ourselves, turning them into simple, safe harbors for things we feel and often cannot express. None of us see the animals clearly. They're too full of the stories we've given them. Trying to imagine what life is like for an animal is doomed to failure. The attempt is good and important thing. It forces you to think about what you don't know about the creature: what it eats, where it lives, how it communicates with others is important.  We should value natural places for their therapeutic benefits. It's true that time walking in a forest can be beneficial to our mental health. But valuing a forest for that purpose traduces what forest are: they are not there for us alone. 

All of us have equal billing in this world. We are living in apocalyptic times. But in the oldest sense of the word, apocalypse doesn’t mean one final, dreadful ending, but a revelation of things that were always there but have only now been brought to sight and understanding. We have to grieve; we have to feel the unimaginable losses all around us. But I hope that experiencing that grief will help us come together, to march and sing and call forth change. “To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable”  line from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark

Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator and naturalist, and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of the bestselling H Is for Hawk, as well as a cultural history of falcons, titled Falcon, and three collections of poetry, including Shaler’s Fish. Macdonald was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, has worked as a professional falconer, and has assisted with the management of raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia. She now writes for the New York Times Magazine. She reminded me of Sharyn Coleman. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeM6E_IjYzY

The essays are connected, in the way the objects in an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities were, by accident and strangeness and wonder in the eye of the beholder. We have to mourn for what is disappearing, we need to feel to change ourselves, and believe it is ours. Love all that is not like us. 

Reading it was insightful yet stressful, thought-provoking about things written in there as well as those not in there, with a need to have a dictionary for there are lot of new words to learn from. A worthy investment!