Spies in the sky: Helen Macdonald on how birds reflect our national anxieties
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Version 0 of 1. I lost my passport. Blind panic. I needed one, fast. So one morning I drove north up the A1 past the sex shops and service stations half-buried in fog and the convoys of container trucks. And at 9.15am, somewhere near the turn to Wisbech, a flock of plovers flew low in front of the windscreen and hung there before vanishing into nowhere. Seamless fog. No visible land or sky. And I thought of the air-age globes they sold in the 1930s that had no geography on them at all, that were perfectly white except for the printed names of airports, because we were all to look skyward back then – history had brought us wings and borders would fade into obsolescence. At the passport office, 30 tight-lipped people file singly through X-rays. We sit waiting to be processed, feet on grey carpet. Soft murmurs. Flatscreens. We watch BBC news in spooling text and clips, riots and far wars and seaside party conferences. Those conferences were in Brighton. I was there one winter. I stood on the pier at dusk and watched the starlings coming in to roost, blobs of running oil over the ocean rising in packs to settle in the ironwork under the planked wooden floor, and as they settled in the dark beneath the arcade lights they began to sing, and their songs mimicked the fairground music – the same notes in new avian order, tapes spliced and doubled and whistling, a thousand shortwave radios tuning between circus stations out east, across the Baltic from whence they came. And I stood there hearing mimicked human music under the floor, and, “Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak. Nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him. To keep his anger still in motion.” I look at the security guards at the passport office and they look at me, and I think of a British officer called Peter Conder who spent the second world war in prison camps in Germany. He survived by watching birds. Goldfinches. Wrynecks. Migrating crows. For hours and days and years on end. When he came home he didn’t talk. He stayed with his sister and stared out of the window at London starlings roosting in long lines on ledges of Portland stone. With war-worn eyes he perceived that they spaced themselves equally, just far enough apart to reach the next bird. So they could deliver a blow or a rebuke. Bunks and camps spooled out again in postwar ornithology. He christened it the principle of individual distance. And before that, when the first world war made caustic maps of Flanders fields and woods, built no-man’s land and fields of mines, of wire, of engraved trenches of men and water, of how when, after it was over, a man called Eliot Howard decided that birds held territories, too. He told us that they did not sing for love. Told us that males sang to other males, and there was warning in every note. Each curl of song was staking the birds’ small claim to a patch of English ground. And their bright colours weren’t to attract a mate. The plumages they wore were badges of threat: little warring uniforms. And I think of Julian Huxley on the wireless back in 1942, explaining that if you don’t know your birds, you can’t fully know your country. He said the yellowhammer’s song was the essence of hot country roads in July. The crooning of the turtle dove of English midsummer afternoons. Birds were “the heritage we are fighting for”. When war broke out and the navy sent Peter Scott to sea, he looked back from the deck of his destroyer and knew he was fighting to protect the mallards and teal that reared their ducklings in the reed beds of Slapton Ley. Somehow they were England. I clutch my numbered ticket and wait to be processed. I think of the new nature writing. Of Springwatch, Migrant Watch, leaflets through our doors. It has happened before, when things collapse, when ideas fail, when economies slide, when newsprint is crisp with fears of invasion and the loss of who we are. We mark ourselves on our maps to consider our territory. We police. Turn inward. Seek ourselves in the mirror of the countryside. See nature as refuge. As ours. As us. In the winter of 1934, Norfolk farmers learned the skylarks in their fields were migrants from the continent. They shot them for raiding their spring wheat. “No protection for the Skylark”, ran the headlines in the local press. “Skylarks that sing to Nazis will get no mercy here.” A woman in a blue coat is sitting three chairs away, her eyes closed, her knuckles white against the envelope of application forms. Is she asleep? Can you sleep and hold something so very tight? When I was a child, I had a book called Garden Bird Study, which told me to draw a map of the land around my house and mark upon it the singing positions of its birds. If you watched very carefully, you could work out where one territory ended and another began. I did what the book told me to do. I drew lines on my map. I marked nests. I kept lists of birds – resident, summering, wintering, overflying. Every smudge of pencil tied me closer to the birds and the garden. But it untied me, too. It unfolded layers of other eyes, other lives, other visions of what the world might be. When we left that house, years later, I mourned the memory of all my childhood rooms. But I mourned too the lines, the lists, the little crosses for the pigeon’s nest, the blackbird’s nest, the robin’s outside the door. They had become part of the nature of home. There was a man called Maxwell Knight. He was a spy. Birdwatcher is old intelligence slang for spy. Let us list the spies that have watched birds. Sidney Ripley. Sir John Philby. Martin Furnival Jones. Andrew Parker. Hundreds more. You have the same skills, the ability to identify, recognise, be unobtrusive, invisible, hide. You pay careful attention to your surroundings. You never feel part of the crowd. Maxwell Knight specialised in counter-subversion. He was the original M. He kept snakes in his pockets. Monkeys in his London flat. He kept animals and agents. Both had to be won over, made trustworthy. And he was most fascinated with cuckoos. They laid their eggs in other birds’ nests. They were sharp-eyed penetration agents who looked like hawks and lived their cover. Their spring arrivals were announced on the letters page of the Times. Both English and highly mysterious, they were the perfect bird for him. He raised a baby cuckoo called Goo. It was a small, perfect mirror of himself. He loved it. There was a man called David Lack. He worked during the war on the early-warning chain of coast-watching radar stations. When the wavelength shrank to 10cm, the operators started reporting echoes out at sea. They were not ships or aircraft. They were ghosts. They moved at 30 knots. Air-raid warnings resulted. Planes were scrambled. Nothing was ever there. Varley and Lack established that they were the radar reflections of seabirds. But there was more. When higher-power radar was invented, more ghosts appeared. Operators called them angels. They were commonest in spring and autumn. They didn’t drift with the wind. They were disturbing. In Marconi’s research laboratory, scientists wrote of lines of angels moving along the coast. Scintillating discrete angels broke away from the line, they said. And a well-marked stream of persistent angel echoes could be seen moving up the Thames estuary. The angels were birds. Starlings rising from their roosts in pulsing circles, lapwings moving north along weather-fronts, pushed by heavy snow. I leave the building with the promise of a passport, and so does the woman in the blue coat, and the elderly couple off to meet their grandson in Australia for the first time, and I’m walking to my car thinking of when a bird-ringer told me what happens when 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. • This is an edited extract from Helen Macdonald’s script for 10 X Murmuration, a film made with Sarah Wood. It is part of the exhibition A Murmuration, at the Brighton festival, until 24 May. Details: brightonfestival.org |