The intricacies of snipe crypsis

Marshland is my favourite habitat. I am a marsh-dweller at heart, instinctively drawn to any sodden, wind-whipped, wind-flattened place of wild song. It’s the mystery of marshes that I love—the fact that even the smallest patch of boggy ground always feels wild, and that these places retain a thrilling sense of impenetrability and threat. It’s for those reasons too that I love the secretive snipe most of all marsh birds. The intricacies and varieties of snipe crypsis are a beautiful embodiment of its environment.

It is simultaneously easy and difficult to see a snipe up close, because they hide in plain sight. When you do see one, and see it well, you can appreciate just how brilliantly the bird’s plumage mimics fenny colour and substance. The full spectrum of bog browns is there in the stippled stub, sedgy striations and loamy sod of each feather, which in the aggregate gives the impression that the bird constructs a piece of marsh right there in front of you. Snipe are the very stuff of their habitat (or, which is the same thing, their habitat is the stuff of snipe), so the trick to finding one in the field is to carefully examine the wet edges of promising territory and hope that some tiny part of it materialises as snipe; or, conversely, start from the premise that everything you’re scrutinising is snipe until it gives itself up as mud and grass.

Spot the snipe! Scottish Wildlife Trust (https://scottishwildlifetrust.org.uk/2019/01/snipe-spotting/)

Even the noises snipe make seem determined to give away as little as possible. If you accidentally disturb snipe from the ground, they burst up at the last second from your feet, uttering a quiet ‘snick’ or ‘sneck’ which to me is somewhere between a kiss and the sharp tear of cloth, as though the bird has just ripped up from the grubby fabric of soil itself.

Snipe are camouflage masters, but, remarkably enough, they appear in several of our place-names. You’d think that their bog-drab understatement would rule them out of any criteria for useful place-marking. But there they are in places such as Snitterfield, Snydale, Snitemore and Snite. In the last of these it seems that literally just the Old English name for the bird was enough, the place itself invoked for early medieval folk by those mysterious marsh-keepers divining earth’s sub-secrets with their twitching bills like priests at solemn rituals.

The unquestionable defiance of a chiffchaff’s spring song

The True Sounds of Night, Part 2 will be here soon, but I wanted to take seasonal advantage of today’s post before the moment is lost.

I heard my first chiffchaff of the year today. Small as this occurrence might seem, small my nod of recognition, small as the bird is itself, it is a triumph of the still-early year. The chiffchaff is one of our very earliest spring arrivals, arriving from the Saharan south in mid-March when the land here is still winter-dim, so there is a glorious sense in which its bright notes carry a little of the warmth and light yet to come. Its plumage conveys something of this spring promise: a dusky, suffuse dun, but with the subtlest, emerging hint of mossy green—a small brightening.

The chiffchaff’s song is only two notes. Actually, it’s often three, sung like a small child determinedly chanting its first numbers, but it’s two that have been remembered in its mimetic name: chiff chaff, chiff chaff, chiff chaff … To be sure, it is monotonous. It has nothing of the blackcap’s variety and sweetness, nor the wood warbler’s silvery, tremulous splendour. But it is the most spring-like of all to me; unquestionably defiant, definite, delivered with such unfaltering and vital energy. The chiffchaff hammers those metallic notes on the anvil of its own syrinx. Translated into poetry, they are spondees, each one equally emphatic with no room for lesser syllables. CHIFF CHAFF CHIFF CHAFF CHIFF CHAFF …

The name feels old, but is recorded no earlier than Gilbert White’s famous references to the bird. Very early English people must surely have had a name for this spring chimer, but if they did it fell out of use, or lives on secretly in some county dialect word for this little leaf sprite (perhaps even chiffchaff itself, the local Hampshire name that White obviously inherited?)

Strangely, the bird doesn’t have the same popularised status as other, more celebrated summer migrants. It ought to, though, and ought to be better known—this bird that arrives well before most others, declaring its gladdening presence right across the land with such hopeful insistence and never letting up.

The true sounds of night

It’s been far too long since I posted. Nearly two years of juggling writing a book (which is still very much in the early stages!) and bringing up two young children has meant I’ve got very lazy about finding time to post blog entries as well. It is a resolution this year to try and get back to form. So, here’s my first effort of 2022.

At the beginning of this year my family and I moved house, after over a decade living in Cranbrook. Various circumstances forced the move and the speed with which it all happened, and my wife and I found (still find) ourselves caught between novel excitement for a new-build house in Headcorn (also Kent) and the wrench away from a sixteenth-century, old-beamed cottage in Cranbrook that we had come to love very much. We have both felt the detachment from all that history. We had never imagined ourselves living in a new-build, for the very reason that we both feel deeply attached to places that are steeped in the past.

There was, however, a moment of serendipity when we turned up to view the Headcorn house (and subsequently put down a reservation fee that very morning). The new estate was just off Ulcombe Road. Ulcombe is a village just north of Headcorn that I had come to know very well through many trips for the book I am currently writing. It means ‘the owl’s valley’. Moving from Cranbrook, ‘the cranes’ brook’, to another bird place, just when I’m writing a book about birds and place, was an omen I couldn’t ignore!

What follows is the first in a short sequence of posts on my explorations in and around the village of Ulcombe, searching for tawny owls and pondering the night. The sequence is adapted from an owl chapter in my book.

~

In November, when the trees were nearly bare, I drove in the pre-dawn hours through tree-tunnel lanes, seeking the sound of owls and owls’ true landscape. Darkness. At no particular point, I pulled up right in the road, turned the ignition off and got out. I leant on the bonnet while the car blinked and cooled to silence. In these narrow Kentish lanes with high banks and tree-roofs, far from big towns and hidden from scattered rural habitations, the dark feels absolute. Scudding cloud doubled the dark—no moonlight, no stars.

It’s a point easily overlooked, but our experiences of night are not the same as our ancestors’. The changes to our night sky, in fact, are so recent and rapid that it’s no exaggeration to say that up to the nineteenth century—the twentieth century even—it was a simple condition of people’s lives that night was dark; that it was distinctly divided from the day; that this cycle, by and large, determined rhythms; and that darkness could only be dissipated by the moon or the shadowy flicker of firelight. The differences with modern experiences are probably more apparent now in the twenty-first century (which has never known a time without intensive, global industrialisation) than has ever been the case in human history. In our own times, light pollution violates the solar pattern so aggressively that only the most rural or unpeopled parts of our country are spared the star-blinding sky glow. Urban lights right across the West can be seen from space (if you take a Google look at the planet it’s not so much night’s space-blackness you see across half the globe but the astonishing light show illuminating that blackness).

It’s a startling realisation. When we speak of ‘dark’ now, it is infected by these dazzling intrusions. The word itself, though, is rooted in a purer, different understanding that traces back through Middle English derk to Old English deorc and back further to a proto *derkaz past. Medieval folk, speaking pre-modern English, had various other words for ‘dark’ and ‘darkness’ too, such as þeostre (THAY-os-tre). As a term in our once richer nocturnal lexis, þeostre could not have encompassed the industrial twilight that now passes for night in our metropolises and conurbations.

Þeostreness–real dark–intensifies nocturnal sounds. Devoid of the distractions and diminishments of anthropogenic light noise, it sharpens sounds’ presence and clarity, and, too, our senses to hear, feel, them. That morning, hoping for an owl in dark about as dark as I could find in south-east England, I got to thinking about how that sort of darkness must have genuinely affected they way that people living in past ages heard and understood owls. Owls must have seemed, were, intensely, the ‘first true sound of night’, as J. A. Baker, author of The Peregrine, memorably puts it. For him, an owl’s ‘dark release of song’ made ‘dusk bristle[ ] … like the fur of a cat’. I love that. Conveyed through blurred senses in Baker’s description, an owl’s sound is an animate shaping force.

I drove on, deeper into the lanes and the owls’ realm. There was still time yet, still time for the last true sounds of night.

A roving winter flock: the smallness of winter being

The frost today was so full and white and stiff with sharp glistenings it was like snow had fallen. The cold mist, which hung with us all day, made the air so thickly and densely grey—every fine degree of grey—it was as though I might weigh it, turn it in the hand.

Hoar frost in the Wealden landscape south of Cranbrook, 10th January.

I took the lanes south of the town into the frozen woods and meadows, then into the gills, following one brook into the ancient shaws that have survived down the centuries in the High Weald. In spring this place bursts with oak-green light, shimmers with bluebells, luminous with wood anemones and heady wild garlic. All that colour and life was yet to come.

A gill valley south of Cranbrook under frosted winter mist.

The ‘gills’ define the Kentish Weald—a network of streams cutting through steep, wooded valleys. They made this landscape so difficult to farm thousands of years ago that many of the shaws, fortunately, have never been unwooded. Down in the gill the world is double enclosed beneath beneath hoary trees and beneath mist. I was glad to be alone in the old land and all that silent stillness.

Suddenly, above me, a winter tit flock—then all around, and that little spot was immediately alive with small-bird movement. A great tit oiled its rusty hinge. Blue tits snickered and tee-heed. Long-tailed tits were restless, feeding, feeding, branch to branch, tree to tree, attending to nothing but the roving imperative of simple survival.

Everything about these birds is smallness—the upside-down deftness; butterfly buoyancy; finicky feeding in slender tips of tree tops; song all peep and scold and titter; mouse-scurry of mouse-birds. The long-tailed tits are smallest; dainty, downy and whiskered. They seem light as one of their own tiny feathers, and their aerial song is so delicate it is as though the birds’ tiny frames are transfigured into their own tiny fairy notes. The Old English word for the family (from which we derive ‘titmouse’, though the two words are unrelated) is mase: ‘little or tiny thing’. ‘Tit’, incidentally, means the same thing, so titmice are ‘small-small things’.

Winter smallness defined that moment for me. Not just the birds, but the secrecy down there under winter-thin trees in the valley nook. My sense of place was the slow, clear run of a brook and little birds in search of little food for little whirring bodies.

Frost on hogweed.

The isolation of deserted villages and red kites

On a weekend in March before these lockdown days, I went walking high on the Sussex hills in search of loneliness. I would have no chance again for months.

The South Downs escarpment above Fulking running east to the Devil’s Dyke has the grandeur of mountains. The chalk buckles into steep glacial vales. When the wind blows (always it seems) it cuts cold and sharp straight over the north edge. There is no protection.

I’d come for solitude twice over. Right up here in the keening wind,  just a little south of the ridge, off the track and along a scattered line of gorse, there are remains of a deserted medieval hamlet. The folding land creates a shallow coombe but it’s hard to imagine why anyone might choose to make a living in such a location, so far above other settlements snug in the down’s foot-slopes. Perching (Perchinges in Domesday) was once a small but thriving community though, with a well and a mill, toughing it out in downland traditions.

Site and remains of Perching medieval village, looking north. (Image: Geograph, Simon Carey)

Perhaps this hardship finally made life up here impossible. Or perhaps, like many of England’s 3000 or so ‘lost’ villages, it was left suddenly to the wind when the Great Plague devastated the population in the fourteenth century. The pandemic of an age; a pancosmic pestilence from God for our great ills. For what might God scourge us now?

Perching in Domesday Book (1086). The spelling here implies Old English -ingas suffix, meaning ‘descendants or people of’ a particular person. (Image: Open Domesday.)

Back on the escarpment I turned at the right moment to see a lone red kite alongside me soar over the precipice. They are the most exhilarating creatures of freedom, managing economy with such supreme ease, forked tails figuring the air like compass points. I thought of how often and for how long we’ve envied birds this. In the indoor weeks to follow, I thought of kites, knowing intensely the ‘clay that clutches my each step to the ankle’ while the kite ‘Effortlessly at height hangs … steady as a hallucination in the streaming air’ (Ted Hughes, ‘The Hawk in the Rain’).

A mercurial flock of knot

It flashed across the marsh, once and momentary—a lighthouse beacon, the sudden flare of sunlight on angled glass, like accidental morse code. We waited in silence, sure we’d seen something, though doubtful enough to put it down to ghostly illusion. A trick of the light.

There! Again. A brilliant whiteness materialised instantly from itself. It swelled and diminished all at once, pulsed itself along the horizon, a good two miles from where we stood on the sea wall with the North Sea to our backs. This was no ghost, but miracle nonetheless: a mercurial flock of knot, one thousand strong, joined by dunlin and grey plover, spiralling, dilating, compressing, flexing, pouring down and through the estuary.

Knot massing on the shingle. Image: Tom Mason/Daily Mail.

Knots are not the only birds that fly in this mesmerising, synchronised fashion. Starlings are best known for this phenomenon known as a murmuration. That species can gather in millions, filling the sky with borealis transformations. But, for my money, knot are the most spectacular. You don’t get starling numbers, but they add to those virtuoso shifts in shape and size a constant change in colour. The flock appears suddenly, as though from an icy fracture in the winter sky, so intensely white it blazes even against bright, clear morning, but then all those bodies and wings turn as one and they are suddenly silver, then as suddenly again, black, and back through to white, until there is an exact angle when a precise shade in the wintry spectrum somehow dissolves the flock entirely, and you lose them.

Observing knot like this is an exercise in metaphor. Your mind races for comparison, a way to conceptualise what you see: smoke, blizzard, writhing eel, multiplying cells, double helix, bait ball—the centre generating outwards while consuming itself inwards with predator rapacity. To witness this spectacle of disintegrating wholeness is to perceive the world newly and to know it more marvellous.

The Essex marshes at dawn, two hours before the knot spectacle occurred.

Birds in English Place-Names

I’m currently writing a book on birds, nature and place in our medieval past. It’s a nature book as a much as a work about medieval literature and culture. The narrative takes me all over Britain, exploring how people understood and connected to the natural world in the Middle Ages. Currently, in my first chapter, I’m on home turf in Kent writing about birdy towns and villages (including my home town, Cranbrook). I hope to post something of what I’ve produced soon, but for now, here’s a blog post on the subject of birds in place names that I wrote at the end of last year for Boydell and Brewer: https://boydellandbrewer.com/blog/world-literature/spirits-of-place-birds-in-english-place-names/

Interview on my book

Bit of a cheat post this one, but Boydell and Brewer have recently published an interview they conducted with me on my book, Birds in Medieval English Poetry, so thought I’d share it. Click here, or simply read the text below.

Thank you for assisting our discussion of your book, Dr Warren. To begin, could you tell us a little about how you came to write this book, which is now the second in our new series Nature and Environment in the Middle Ages. What first drew you to the natural world in literature? 
When I decided to return to medieval studies after some years in teaching, it was an obvious choice for me to pursue a subject that combined a personal love of mine with literature. I knew that there was plenty to say about birds, in fact, because I’d written on this subject for my undergraduate dissertation a number of years before. Medieval literature is full of birds, and it seemed strange to me that no one had yet produced a full study examining how they are represented and what their significance is, or at least not one that seriously considered the presence and relevance of ornithological interests, rather than simply birds’ totemic aspects. Birds—as just one, conspicuous set of species in the natural world—were clearly of profound interest to medieval thinkers and writers, and I wanted to explore how and why. So that’s how it all began, but the project inevitably took on much bigger proportions for me as it progressed.

Do animals receive enough attention in medieval scholarship? 
I think it’s more a question of do they receive the right sort of attention. Animals haven’t been ignored in medieval scholarship, but there is a long tradition of thinking that medieval poets weren’t really interested in actual species themselves; it was what they meant that was important. Birds, specifically, have always received short shrift in ornithological histories, which tend to deal with Aristotle, and then skip to the 16th century. The medieval chapter in these histories is always by far and away the shortest—it’s a respectful nod to the more familiar textual references that exist, and which suggest that birds must have been observed on some level, but the popular attitude, at least, is that medieval people ‘knew little about birds, and cared even less’ (Stephen Moss, A Bird in a Bush: A Social History of Birdwatching).

With the spike in 21st century ecological sensibilities, though, there has been a revolution right across disciplines. Ecocriticism and animal studies have achieved considerable popularity and influence in medieval scholarship over the last decade, striving to emphasise the reality of nonhuman creatures in life and text, and demonstrate that how medieval people thought about the natural world and their relationship to it was much more complex and diverse than we have previously thought. So yes, I do think animals are receiving the right sort of attention in medieval scholarship now, but there’s still some way to go (if you look at how many panels there on nonhuman topics at the big medieval congresses each year in Kalamazoo and Leeds compared to other more traditional topics, there is a very striking disparity).

Your book discusses a rich span of poetry, from Anglo Saxon texts through to Chaucer and Gower. Do you have a favourite? 
I do have a particular fondness for The Seafarer. There’s something about the early Christian asceticism and the tempestuous seascape in which this plays out that really appeals to me; I suppose it chimes with my love of bleak, people-less spaces, like marshes. There is something so affecting and powerful about the intimate linking of the exile and the wild nonhuman, and the fact that birds are a conspicuous part of the environment and the Seafarer’s experience is fascinating to me. Seabirds are especially compelling to us humans I think, being that that they are perfectly at home in a location so alien and hostile to us—their mysterious experience is what, paradoxically, makes them such rich metaphors. I’m sure this must have genuinely been the case for those monastics seeking solitude and hardship on remote Atlantic islands like Skellig. If you’ve ever visited locations like this you’ll know you just can’t avoid the raucous presence of seabirds!

How did you come to settle on this particular selection? Did you have many to choose from? 
There are so many texts to choose from, especially if you move outside European traditions and consider, e.g., Arabic or Persian texts as well. I chose only English texts because I was interested in representations of native British wild birds, and because I purposefully wanted to bring new perspectives to much-studied poems by revealing and exploring their intricate and knowledgeable depictions of birds. These birds have received attention before now, but I wanted to take this further—to look at how the ornithological elements might be part of the wider thematic interests of the texts. There is also a subsidiary thread to the book which seeks to fill in some of those gaps about medieval ornithological knowledge, for which it was useful to survey the whole span of the Middle Ages.

What place, if any, did birds hold in the everyday lives of people in the Middle Ages? 
As for the everyday lives of most people, it’s very hard to know. The surviving texts of the medieval age, of course, were not written by or for, and can’t be said to represent the ‘everyday lives’ of, most people. But the written evidence does imply that for intellectual or elite milieux, at least, birds had a diverse and important status in all sorts of ways ranging from the practical to the philosophical: food, quills, hunters (and quarry) in falconry, caged songbirds, intriguing comparative subjects in theories about voice and music, allegories in bestiaries, subjects of ‘special mention’ in encyclopaedias (Bartholomew the Englishmen). In poetry, of course, birds became elevated metaphors for a whole variety of subjects, but what I aim to do in the book is show how knowledge of real birds and species (the ‘everyday’ if you like) still important in informing how these metaphors work.

Beyond this, though, it is possible to get a feel for how birds must have played a part in vernacular lore and discourses. Old English names for birds, for instance, suggest remarkable degrees of observation and listening, and their presence in Anglo-Saxon place names or charter boundaries conveys how they were acknowledged as important elements of environment (‘take the path left past the pond where the coal tit lives’, sort of thing), and there is no reason to believe that much of this didn’t descend from or wasn’t shared by your ordinary man and woman living and working in the natural world where birds are. There is no doubt that wild birds generally were much more plentiful in the Middle Ages; our modern ‘baseline’ perception is heavily distorted because we live in a world where pretty much all species, but particularly groups like farmland birds, have dramatically declined due to modern industrial practices.

Expanding on the last question, why would the presence of birds in poetry have appealed to a medieval poet or audience? 
Beyond what I’ve suggested above, I think the overall thing for me is that birds are such consummate and enigmatic transformers. They complicate, escape and thwart human attempts to categorise—something I pick up on with particular reference to the Exeter Book Riddles in the book. Birds, in life and in poetry, always seems to be in some sort of ‘trans’ status and I think this has a lot to do with why they were (and are) so compelling. David Wallace has eloquently said in his recent book on Chaucer that medieval conceptions of the human condition engaged the ‘perilous art’ of aligning ‘bawdy bodies and stargazing intelligences’. From this perspective, it’s not hard to see why birds were illuminating parallels—they are animals below human status in one sense, and yet occupy the ethereal heights above humans as well; they are both mundane and numinous at once.

A captivating aspect of your volume is the depiction of everyday birds and how their reality is used and transformed into metaphor. What’s your favourite example? 
Again, I’m drawn to the alien, pelagic qualities of the seabirds in The Seafarer which the poet aligns with the solitary speaker, but perhaps one of the most interesting examples is the owl in The Owl and the Nightingale. Part of the poem’s sophisticated comedy, for me, is that the ‘realities’ of the eponymous birds are consistently (and knowingly, on the part of the author) confused, which causes problems when these particular qualities are transposed into metaphorical use in texts like the popular bestiaries. So, when the nightingale attacks the owl’s day-blindness (which becomes a well-known metaphor for the sinner who cannot or refuses to see the light of Christ), we are aware that profound moral ‘truths’ are being drawn up on false premises: the owl states herself in the poem that this particular ‘truth’ about owls is just plain wrong.

This book clearly demonstrates a real love for birds. Are you an avid birder yourself? 
I certainly am. I birdwatch a lot in Kent where I live, particularly on the marshes up in the north of the county. It was my uncle who got me into birding when I was very young, and it’s his photos, in fact, that illustrate the book, including the striking image of flying godwits on the front cover.

Of course, you don’t need to be a birdwatcher to write about birds in medieval poetry, but I do think it has helped attune me to various nuances, such as the importance of sound or accurate observation in Old English bird names, or the ornithological aspects of certain species that clash with allegorical treatments.

What are you working on now, or will you be working on next? 
Still birds! I was approached by a publisher some years back whilst writing my PhD about the possibility of producing a trade version of my thesis. So, now the monograph is finished up, I’m turning my attention to this new project. It will take some of the informative, ornithological elements of the monograph and weave these into a nature/travel-writing narrative. The first chapter is set on the Essex Marshes, particularly concerning a place called Foulness Island, to explore Old English place names, and how birds, but also the natural world more generally, are intimately observed and become a part of human conceptions of place.

 

The miraculous mimicry of a jay

Two days ago I was very excited to receive advance copies of my brand new book.

It’s been way too long since I last posted, so I think the advent of my book’s publication is an appropriate excuse to offer something now as a preview into one of the chapters. Here, then, is a little something based on chapter two, which is all about transforming trickster birds in an astounding collection of Old English riddles that only survives–and might have only ever existed–in one manuscript from the 10th century, known as the Exeter Book because it’s been at the cathedral in that city for probably all its lifetime. One of these riddle birds is a jay. A talking jay.

In recent years there’s been a lot of focus on birds’ remarkable vocal abilities. This year, as it happens, is the ‘Year of the Bird‘ for the National Geographic. Their range of articles has sought to celebrate the colourful diversity of bird life, and one focuses specifically on birds’ cognitive abilities, exploring how ingenious and imaginative some species can be.

Not surprisingly, corvids feature pretty heavily. It’s well-known that corvids top the smart bird charts because of their comparatively large forebrains with densely packed neurons. In the article, an eight-year-old girl named Gabi has befriended American crows visiting her garden who habitually bring her gifts. Corvid species, more than any other genus of bird, have demonstrated all sorts of remarkable functions (see here, here and here–for a bit of fun!) that parallel the ‘unique’ capabilities that supposedly set us humans above other creatures.

Jackdaw. Source: pxhere.

Knowledge of this ingenuity is by no means new, of course. It’s just that scientific studies now are proving the hunches or proverbial lore that has surrounded these species for millennia. Above all, it’s corvine mimcry that most captivates us, not only as a source of marvel, but because it raises questions about our own linguistic abilities. The Greeks and Romans certainly came across talking corvids. I particularly like an anecdote from Plutarch about a barber’s pet jay renowned for its vocal skills (which I came across in Jeremy Mynott’s new book), which one day, upon hearing a trumpet fanfare, falls silent for a period of time. The town’s people cannot fathom what has happened, until it reveals that it was only ‘withholding its mimetic skill while it adjusted and refashioned its voice like a musical instrument. For suddenly its voice returned … and there rang out the music of the trumpets, reproducing all its sequences and every variation in melody and rhythm’.^[1]

These abilities are certainly no exaggeration. Jays have a repertoire that can encompass a wide range of other bird species, ‘and a motorbike horn, human voice, whistled songs, barking dog, and (probably) lawnmower’.^[2] (See here for a jay mimicking a buzzard.)

When it comes to medieval knowledge of corvid mimicry, there are no shortage of examples again. One piece of classical writing on magpies, by the Roman poet Martial, was certainly known to medieval writers. He has the bird itself tell us that ‘if you did not see me, you would deny that I am a bird’ (Epigram 76). The point here, of course, is that the bird is such a good mimic that one needs to actually have the bird in sight to confirm that it is indeed a bird. It’s this aspect of avian brilliance that I love about Exeter Book Riddle 24 (see here for the Riddle in the original manuscript), which I write about in chapter two of my book.

Ic eom wunderlicu wiht,     wræsne mine stefne,
hwilum beorce swa hund,     hwilum blæte swa gat,
hwilum græde swa gos,     hwilum gielle swa hafoc,
hwilum ic onhyrge      þone haswan earn,
guðfugles hleoþor,      hwilum glidan reorde
muþe gemæne,      hwilum mæwes song,
þær ic glado sitte.     . ᚷ. mec nemnað,
swylce . ᚫ. ond . ᚱ.      . ᚩ. fullesteð,
. ᚻ. ond . ᛁ .     Nu ic haten eom
swa þa siex stafas      sweotule becnaþ.
(Riddle 24)

[I am a wondrous creature. I vary my voice: sometimes bark like a dog, sometimes bleat like a goat, sometimes honk like a goose, sometimes yell like a hawk, sometimes I mimic the ashy eagle—cry of the warbird—sometimes the kite’s voice I speak with my mouth, sometimes the gull’s song, where I sit gladly. G they name me, also Æ and R. O helps, H and I. Now I am called as these six letters clearly indicate.]

The solution to Riddle 24 is definitely a corvid species, because the speaker tells us so: those funny letters which look like something out of Lord of the Rings are Germanic runes–the Anglo-Saxon alphabet from before the days of the Roman alphabet–and when re-arranged correctly they spell out higoræ (Old English for jay, though sometimes translated as magpie). This jay gives a virtuosic performance that suggests to us how tricky, even inadvisable, it can be to categorise and label species with particular characteristics that neatly separate them from all other creatures. As the jay shows us, comically, you can get yourself tied in knots doing this! A mimicking bird is the perfect subject to get across this idea because it can convincingly incorporate the ‘unique’ voices of other creatures into its vocal range in a way that makes things we thought were defining and distinguishable the very opposite–indistinguishable! A jay’s voice is a jay’s voice, but also a goat’s, and a hawks, and a dog’s, and a goose’s, and … . I imagine how this Riddle would change over time as jays in different centuries respond to different stimuli around them. (I think here of the well-known Attenborough clip of the lyrebird mimicking modern man-made sounds).

A medieval jay (gai). Source: Sherborne Missal (British Library, Add MS 74236).

So this Anglo-Saxon jay mimics other nonhuman voices. Interestingly, the human voice is not included in its repertoire. But I like to think this bird has another trick under its wing. You see, it’s very easy to assume that animals and objects being represented in the Exeter Book Riddles are personified: they usually speak in the first person voice as if they actually have a human voice. Once we remember, though, that we are dealing with no ordinary creature in this particular Riddle, but one that is renowned for mimicking even the human voice, the boundaries change again. The human speaker reciting the poem (and let’s remember that medieval poems were often read out loud) actually becomes one of the many voices adopted by the jay, thus craftily integrating the human voice that at first sight seems to be absent from its list. The jay is not personified, but is actually speaking the poem! This jay with its astonishing vocal abilities, like the magpie in Martial’s epigram, plays a game of hide-and-seek with us. If we did not see it, we would not believe it was a bird.

^[1] For a selection of other classical sources dealing with mimicking birds, see Jeremy Mynott, Birds in the Ancient World: Winged Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 143-9.

^[2] Stanley Cramp, gen. ed., Birds of the Western Palearctic, 9 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977-94), vol. 8, pp. 19-20.

A bittern booming in the mire

It’s easy to imagine why some birds appeal so well to our myth-conjuring habits. I think particularly of those species that make a skill of obscurity. Crepuscular birds excel in shadow—the nightjar or woodcock are no more than ghostly silhouettes in dusk-dark. By day you’ve not a chance—their plumage is the very stuff of earth, intricate and cryptic patterns of leaf-litter, mulch, soil.

The bird that most comes to mind for these evasive sleights, though, is the bittern. It does not need darkness; this bird has perfected invisibility in specialist reed bed living. The woodcock’s argillaceous plumage is matched in the bittern by habitat imitation so effective it is remarkable no origin myths have passed down to tell of how the bird sheared from reed in metamorphosis, ripped up from the very same material in which it skulks. It’s colour and striations mimic the close, vertical world of marsh and fen exactly, especially so when the bird lifts its beak right up, narrows itself to reed-thinness and sways gently with the wind-rustling stems.

A well-camouflaged bittern. Image: Wikipedia Commons.

This morning I’ve been waiting since dawn at Ham Wall RSPB reserve for the briefest of glimpses. It’s April and I can hear one male booming—a sonorous, eerie bass note that carries over a mile. It’s this aspect of the bird, in fact, that humans have responded to for millennia. The many dialect terms for the bittern show alliterative playfulness with the bird’s reverberations: butter bump, bog bumper, bog blutter. These marvellous names go way back. In the Anglo-Saxon age, when King Alfred was hiding out here on the swampy Levels, the bird was a raredumle, probably meaning  something like ‘reed-boomer’. By the late Middle Ages, the vernacular term was miredromble, but the English language also adopted French bitour, which became ‘bittern’. The strange booming spurred inventive explanations about how ‘a bitore bombleth in the myre’ by lowering its head ‘unto the water doun’ (Chaucer), or blowing through a reed. Inevitably, the supernatural aspect of the disembodied noise associated it with omen and disaster.

Image: RSPB

The old names alert us to the priority given to bird sound in the past, and even now the bittern is certainly a bird more encountered by its unique call than sight. Its presence in the once extensive marshes of Britain bred inventive myths down the centuries. Here on the Levels, bitterns stalked the prehistoric swamps alongside pelicans, cranes and white-tailed eagles. Neolithic tracks across the marsh still exist, preserved in peat beneath the watery landscapes recreated in recent years. What did our prehistoric ancestors make of the bittern’s booming call? What was their word for the bird? We’ll never know, but surely they were equally struck by its eldritch presence. Perhaps those medieval myths and names reach back this far.

Like many of Britain’s fen and marshland birds, the bittern became extinct. It recolonised in the early twentieth century after an absence of 50 years, but numbers remained low and as recently as 1997 there were only 11 booming males. Thanks to hard conservation work, 46 males have been estimated calling on the Avalon Marshes this spring in Somerset alone, the densest population anywhere in the country. Our names and myths recall how elemental bitterns are to this habitat, as much as reed and peat and water. It is joyously encouraging that a bird so intimately rooted in these special places is not lost.

RSPB Ham Wall reserve, April 2018