Category Archives: Nature

A Book of Silence: Sara Maitland

11 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Nature, Non-Fiction

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“It is quite hard to remember which came first—the freedom of solitude or the energy of silence. … I became less driven, more reflective and great deal less frenetic. And into that space flowed silence: I would go out into the garden at night or in the early morning and just look and listen… . For the first time in my life I noticed the gradation of colours before sunrise—from indigo through apricot to a lapidary blueness.”

Our society seems to be getting noisier. Noise follows us everywhere—in the busyness of cities, the music in shops and 24-hour television. And even when there is no sound, there is noise of another kind—the distraction of social media and smartphones. It feels like people are afraid of being quiet. And paradoxically, quiet is also what many people yearn for: a slowing down, the time to stop and notice, and to reflect.

Sara Maitland grew up in a noisy household, where the children were encouraged to voice their opinions. She loved talking, so much so that she says her hobby was depnisophy (skill at dinner party talk). But after her divorce, when she starts to live alone, she finds what she really needs is silence and moves to an isolated house on the moor in Weardale, near the Penines.

Maitland is curious about silence: what it means, how it affects people differently and what drives those who go in search of it. She sets out to answer these questions both by going to remote places and by reading the accounts of others who have, voluntarily or involuntarily, spent long periods by themselves.

But how do you define silence? Is it just an absence of noise, of conversation, or a complete emptying of the mind? Does reading, or listening to classical music (without vocals) or loud bird calls count as being silent?

Before I read this, I hadn’t realized how many kinds of silence there were. There is the silence of hermits, and the one experienced by people alone on boats in the middle of the seas or hiking in the wilderness; the kind that focuses inward and the kind where the boundaries between the self and the universe fade. And there is the dark side, the path to madness.

People often fear the absence of sound, of communication. A retreat from the world and into utter silence is often seen as an indication of something not quite right, and a risk that isolation can lead to insanity. Rather than something that enriches, it is seen as an absence, a lack. Maitland disagrees. As a practising Christian and a writer, she values silence and the way it opens up a space within.

She writes about how the quality of silence changes with the landscape. The silence of the desert is very different from that of a forest. She goes to the Sinai desert and for the first time, hears “the sound of silence…the absence of anything to hear”. In a forest, there is always some sound—water, creatures or the wind through the trees. Also, in a desert or on a moor, everything is visible for miles. The forest, on the other hand, holds secrets, which is why fairy tales are so often set there. 

Silence can affect the mind, playing tricks on it. One winter when she was snowed in, she ventures out for a walk. About half a mile from her house, she hears a terrifying sound, like the wailing of the damned. She is convinced that it will drive her insane, but eventually realizes that it was the wind.

But on the whole, there is more to gain than lose from silence. Being alone with your thoughts makes you more reflective, more self-aware and more still within. As the quote at the beginning of this piece shows, you become more aware of nature, of tiny changes and their meanings. 

This is a rich book with interesting ideas, and a lot of research—it is full of quotes from other writers, which is sometimes interesting but at other times, a little too much. I learned a lot from this—and not just about silence.

The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar: Life with an Enchanting Tawny Owl—Martin Windrow

17 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Nature, Non-Fiction

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“Shaving is tricky with an owl on your right shoulder.”

Especially when the owl sees it as a game, pecking at the razor at the end of each stroke and trying to eat the shaving cream. Meet Mumble, the Tawny Owl with whom Martin Windrow shared 15 years of his life.

Introduced to birds of prey through his older brother Dick, Windrow decides to get one of his own. Enter Wellington, a Little Owl (a species, not a description). It is a disaster from the start. The appropriately named owl (with the Duke’s iron will) had not been hand-reared by a human, and all of Windrow’s attempts to win his trust are met with deep suspicion. Eventually, Wellington escapes.

The second time around is completely different. Windrow’s owl is one of a batch of eggs that are hatched under Dick’s care. When Dick’s son is given the privilege of naming the owl, he calls her Marmite Sandwich, after his favourite thing. Windrow finds Marmite Sandwich in the kitchen, a little ball of feathers with large, shiny eyes.

“‘Kweep’, it said quietly. Enchanted, I leaned closer. It blinked its furry grey eyelids, then jumped very deliberately up on to my right shoulder. It felt like a big, warm dandelion head against my cheek, and it smelt like a milky new kitten. ‘Kweep’, it repeated, very softly.”

On the drive home, the owl escapes from her box and perches on his shoulder throughout the drive, taking a “delicate beak-grip” on his ear to steady herself. Windrow rechristens her Mumble for her way of holding a “quiet conversation with herself, me and the world at large”. And that is the start of a beautiful relationship.

Back in his apartment, Mumble settles into Wellington’s old cage, a large aviary on his balcony (which he has to keep secret from his landlord). Living with what is essentially a wild bird is fascinating, and Windrow is a keen observer. Mumble has a definite personality. She is eternally curious, loves drinking from a dripping tap, riding on the carriage of a typewriter as he types and exploring the back of shelves. Her curiosity can sometimes get her into trouble, like the time she leans over a little too far over the dishwashing water and falls in (and mutters irritably to herself as she slowly dries off). She also tries to feed Windrow bits of raw chicken, and when he avoids the morsels, she tries to stuff them into his ear instead.

As an owlet she is fine with visitors, but as an adult bird she is possessive and attacks anyone else who comes into the apartment. Windrow and Mumble eventually move to the country where she has a larger aviary outdoors.

Windrow’s observations of Mumble are interspersed with a lot of information about owls in general: the different species, how they are coping with the way humans are changing the landscape and their place in folklore. He is obviously passionate about owls and at the end of this book, I felt I had learned a lot about these wonderful birds.

Crow Country: A Meditation on Birds, Landscape and Nature—Mark Cocker

13 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by in Nature, Non-Fiction

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crow-countryThere is something primeval about crows and ravens, which is probably why they often get a bad rap in fiction. They are often portrayed as the harbingers of bad tidings and connected in some way to evil. And when we are not seeing them as some sort of malign influence, we ignore them—they are, after all, plentiful and not beautiful, unlike kingfishers or peacocks.

But there is a lot more to these birds, and using them as a projection of our fears does them a grave injustice. The corvid family—which includes crows, raven, rooks, magpies, jays and many others—are not only the most intelligent among birds but also among animals. They are self-aware, recognizing themselves in mirrors (which most animals can’t), and able to use tools. This intelligence is one of the reasons that I have been fascinated by them for a long time.

So it was only a matter of time before I picked up this book. Mark Cocker is a nature writer who has been following roosting rooks near his home in Yare Valley, Norfolk. His obsession with rooks started almost casually. Lying in bed, half-awake in the early morning, he had got used to listening to their cries as they flew over his house, “the notes clattering on to the road and the rooftops of the village like flakes of tin”. Then one afternoon, at dusk in November he caught sight of a long silent procession of rooks and jackdaws flying to a roost in the valley. He decided to go looking for the roost, and was enthralled.

The book starts with him watching for the evening roost. The rooks and jackdaws arrive in huge numbers—there are often 20,000 birds or more in a flock—and settle noisily on the fields in a “vast, undifferentiated mass”. As the sun goes down and the light disappears from the sky, a hush falls upon the flock. There is not a sound. No one has been able to figure out why this happens, but it happens every sundown. Then a group of rooks heads for the trees. This is the signal the others have been waiting for. The sky is suddenly filled with the rooks and their cries, moving like “a gyroscope of tightly packed fish”.

The mass of birds also touches deep within Cocker. The swirls of birds in the sky are “like inkblot tests drawing images out of my unconscious. … the flock blossoms into an immense night flower”, stirring “something edgy into my senses”.

With this beautifully written scene, Cocker lays out all the elements of the book: the naturalist’s perspective on the behaviour of the birds; the sheer beauty and wonder of the spectacle; and the way it takes him back into himself, into an almost meditative state.

I’m not going to go into all the things I learned from this book but I will share one. The difference between rooks and crows: rooks are sociable creatures, moving in vast numbers and sharing everything, including sources of food. Crows are solitary and fiercely territorial creatures. So when you see a solitary crow, it’s a crow; more than two means they’re rooks.

This book is a journey that Cocker takes you on. He approaches the birds both as a naturalist and the effect they have on him. I was expecting something more straightforward, but thoroughly enjoyed this—the writing was beautiful (I have been reading his columns in the Guardian Weekly, so I was expecting that) and the indirect way he approached his subject, oddly enough, made it more interesting. All in all, a pleasure to read. I’ll end with a quote from Mark Cocker that sums it up:

“This book is all about that moment, about the ritual and the elements of the natural world—the light, the environment, the birds, myself—which create it.”

H is for Hawk: Helen McDonald

28 Monday Dec 2015

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Nature, Non-Fiction

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H is for HawkA hawk stares out from the cover of this book: it is hard to turn away from the fierce intensity of its gaze. And intense, too, is how I would describe this book, which is about grief, trauma and the relationship between humans and goshawks.

When Helen McDonald’s father dies, she is devastated. She tries to persuade herself that she is fine, that she is dealing with her grief. But she isn’t, she is drifting into a kind of madness, a profound displacement. “Time didn’t run forwards any more. It was a solid thing you could press against…that flowed both ways and sent ripples of recollection forwards and new events backwards so the new things I encountered, then, seemed souvenirs from the distant past.”

To try and deal with grief, she decides to buy and train a goshawk. Goshawks are “bulkier, bloodier, scarier” than other hawks. They are creatures of deep woodlands and hard to see: “a sense of something moving just beyond vision”. McDonald is a falconer and has been obsessed by falconry and hawks since she was a little girl, learning the terminology (which she uses in the book) and reading anything she can find on the subject.

McDonald calls her goshawk Mabel (the ferocity of hawks is supposed to be in inverse proportion to their names: call a hawk Spitfire and it will probably refuse to fly). She brings Mabel home, turns her phone off and devotes herself to the bird.

The relationship between McDonald and Mabel starts with the slow, patient work to try and convince Mabel that she can trust a human. Mabel stays indoors until McDonald feels she is ready to go out. The first time in the park is traumatic for both of them, especially for McDonald, not only because she has been keeping away from people, but also because she is beginning to see the world through the eyes of the hawk. And this is how she deals with grief—by losing herself in another creature so completely that, for a while, she almost becomes it. The hawk is vital to her emotional healing.

The spirits of two men also haunt this memoir: one is McDonald’s father, a photographer who had understood her obsession with birds, and to whom she was very close. But the story of the other man, T.H. White, who also trained a goshawk and wrote about it, forms a large part of this book. White, in attempting to train his hawk, Gos, had done everything a falconer should not do. He saw falconry as a “metaphysical battle, like Moby Dick” rather than as a slow process of building trust. He had had a traumatic childhood with a violent alcoholic for a father and a mother who was emotionally cold and distant. The only way White could get by was to “mirror what was going on around him”. This meant a life of perpetual disguise: he was a homosexual when it was illegal so he flirted with women, and he was afraid of everything so he did everything he was afraid of. The only time he could really be himself was in his cottage in the woods with his goshawk, who—for him—represented freedom. But by training the hawk, he was also unconsciously trying to work through his childhood traumas, something he realized only towards the end of his relationship with Gos.

McDonald’s writing is a pleasure to read, not just for its language but for her unflinching description of deep grief and the way she weaves together the different threads running through the book. But the memoir is dominated by the bird—Mabel—that stares out from the cover. McDonald’s description of her first encounter with Mabel is lyrical: “The man pulls an enormous, enormous hawk out of the box and in a strange coincidence of world and deed a great flood of sunlight drenches us and everything is brilliance and fury. … She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water.”

When McDonald manages to come to terms with her grief, it is Mabel who helps get her there, and who takes her on a journey through her pain until she can reconnect with herself and the world. And this is not in any anthromorphic sense, but by the simple fact of being a hawk. I know that I will carry the image of this fierce, indomitable bird with me for a long time.