On this exceptionally, unseasonably warm day in October (it’s 22 degrees Celsius), I saw two swallows flicking and swooping out to sea. It’s not unusual to see swallows at this end of October, even into November, but it feels more and more like a farewell as autumn wears on. There are other signs of its progress towards winter: gathering, clattering woodpigeons in stubble fields; seeping redwings overhead at night; brent geese gargling in estuarine creeks. There is a handover of birds going on, a seasonal changing of the guard. The seasons, their passing and weathers, never feel certain or predictable anymore though, and I can’t help feeling on days like today that much of what once passed for seasonal certainty (in an echo of the uneasy sentinel relief in the opening scene to Hamlet) now betokens some strange eruption. Something rotten in the state of the world.
The disruptions and anxieties of climate change notwithstanding, the coming and goings of migratory birds through the seasons have always been, and still are, important to our connections and responses to our immediate environments, determining and shaping not just our sense of the seasons, but our sense of the places in which we experience these seasons. A friend and colleague, Nick Acheson, has written of the ‘gap’ that is left, physically and emotionally, when hirundines leave his home turf at summer’s end. Likewise, Charles Foster, an avowed swift aficionado, has written of the funk he suffers when his favourite bird leaves for Africa in August. He makes every attempt to ‘avoid that sudden sickening emptiness’, to reduce the ‘desolation and despair’ (The Screaming Sky, 2021). Without swifts, Foster’s street in Oxford is devoid in some sense, and the ‘sky has no form, no structure. Its beams have been removed’. The fabric of place, of the very air we breathe, is rent in pieces, disintegrates into nothing.
No wonder then that people might once have dreamed about preserving that essence of summer place, or may have been so stubbornly attached to die-hard myths about some species sleeping out winter at the bottom of ponds: a small wick sputtering through the dark cold months, a flame aglow in the benthic gloom. That’s a myth to believe in, to keep alight.
Surely, this is the idea inspiring the Wise Men of Gotham‘s foolish and unsuccessful efforts to ‘pen’ a cuckoo in a shrub for perpetuity (it’s a popular ritual—there are ancient cuckoo pens all over the country). At the root of that legend is the powerful conviction that a cuckoo’s voice, suddenly sounding to our great anticipation one April day from the back-end of winter, and just as suddenly ceasing in mid-summer, is somehow spring itself. It is the genesis of the season, and the breath of its invocation calls forth warm and generous life. To prevent cuckoos, swifts or swallows leaving in mid-summer would be to somehow capture and distil aestival substance, to be shelved alongside jars and flagons of summer’s golden yield, as though the matter of the birds themselves–fission of light, energy, song–is that of the long-day moment of our year. The very idea pinpoints the most life-affirming, life-full moment of a place, calls it out, and then keeps it tight, clutched in a fist close to the praying heart. That prayer becomes more precious and more fraught every year.
The Compleat Birder 