On birthdays

Prologue:

The strangest places in nature exist in the tangled web between our ears. The forests trails, the mossy paths and neural tracks of the mind need to be explored; else we are left wondering what lies over the horizon. In the end these journeys filter, blur and finally focus our understanding of the world around us.  We see what we see because of where we have been. This is a story more of places than people, a story of the way landscapes can come to mean more than just hills and valleys.  So, how did I get to here?

I was born in a thick-walled, small-windowed terrace cottage in the spring that followed a long cold winter.  Snow ghosts had hidden in the hedge banks until March.  I would later learn that the populations of herons and wrens had been laid waste that winter, the birds freezing to death in a frozen countryside. As I grew up, they grew back; loud voiced, sharp beaked.  The Cottage had a strange, organic kind of architecture, with surprising steps, stairways behind doors and only two rooms on the same level.  It had the ability to be cool in summer and frosty cold in the winter.  I was born in the one room with any heating – which we called the breakfast room, but was a room of all trades, the busiest room in the house.  Seventeen years later I watched my mother die in the same room.  Utterly helpless again.  A start and a finish, only metres apart.  If there was a moment when my childhood ended, it was that Sunday, in that room, as her last breath caught and failed.   And in that moment the arc of a journey began that only ended when I was able to sit, still and aware, and listen to the breathing of my own kids, warm in bed, under a watertight roof, in a country far away from the small and folded landscapes of Somerset.

Our house contained an odd mix of books, furniture, prize possessions and spots of growing, rain triggered dampness.  I had more volumes of Ladybird Books of the British Countryside than I did pairs of socks.  My father was the only person I knew who had a 35mm SLR – an Exa IIB to be exact.   He shot Kodachrome 64, which arrived in bright yellow boxes; frequently in the summer, only occasionally in the winter.  When I was ten I worn “wear test” shoes to school – a human product tester, with no need to buy shoes – and was given a pair of binoculars for no other reason than it seemed like a good idea. We had a car that broke down more often than I care to recall, a set of encyclopaedias that lived in the Lounge and no running hot water.  We took two weeks of day trips during the summer holidays, packing a picnic and following directions, written in pencil on a page of scrap paper, pinned to the dash.  A37, B3139 and onward.  When we arrived at the bottom of the page we were sent off to explore and to come back at lunchtime.   Outside of these days I walked when I could and caught the bus when I could not, learned how to cook and tie knots in the Scouts and discovered the private solitude of fishing.  Given the choice I chose boots over shoes and plain colours over patterns.  I loved being outdoors, but rarely strayed too far from home.  I missed things that many other people saw, and saw things that others missed.  From inside the family, the outside world looked odd, but I wanted to see more of it.  I privately worried about what other people saw and thought of our family when they looked in.   I moved away at nineteen and started to stop calling the village and The Cottage home. But for all of that, it’s still the place I look back to, still the place I type in Google now and then. (“In search of absent school friends”?)

It’s clear to me now that so much of what I have done ever since I left has been in response to the strange contradictions of luxuries and missing basics I saw as child.  The good - watch, look, record, read, try.   The bad – push family away, read rather than do, speak your mind at all times.  The ugly - well, secrets are secrets.  A strange blend of nurture that pointed me in the way of nature. 

An old rail line ran through the village, and it became both a route and a purpose.  You could walk it to get somewhere, or walk it to pass time.  The grey rail ballast was slowly being buried by regrowth, and the trenches and pillboxes of a global conflict were slowly sinking back into the ground.  There were flowers in spring, butterflies in summer and grasshoppers that could be caught between cupped hands.  Turn left at the bridge and you could walk to the old station, with its platforms, broken building stumps and the smell of cut wood.  Turn right and you could walk towards the tunnels or go further to Norton.  This was my tiny world, my patch, the place where I learned the taste of grass, the call of common birds and strange metallic smell made when you tried to knap flint. 

Beyond the bounds of this village parish there were places we visited in all weathers. The Mendips were normal, other places a little less frequent. Priddy with it pools of tempting rudd but easier perch, Roman stones, hill top barrows and henge ditch circles.  Velvet Bottom (really!) with an under-road tunnel and fine-cropped grass.  Charter House with its pond where I never fished.  Ebbor Gorge, Cheddar, Chew, Blagdon.  Beyond the Mendips there were the Somerset Levels, the damp sibling of limestone hills.  We called them the Back Streets of Wells, and were often lost in the criss-cross network of roads.  Eventually we would find a road sign to Glastonbury, Wedmore or back toward Wells.

Sometimes we would point the car in the other direction, towards Wiltshire and a patch of woodland called Brokers Wood – or just Woodland Park.  In hindsight it may have been the first eco-tourism venture I saw, but at the time it was a place with well labelled woodland paths and a brown water, clay based lake full of roach and carp.  This was the best exploring place I knew as a kid.  The map was simple and the paths clear.  Path 1 was the longest; it cut straight through the woodland in a direct fashion, and it was the most popular and the least interesting.  Path 7 was short and its route seemed to flow with the contours of the ground; it may have been an old badger path co-opted to human use.  You normally saw squirrels there, occasional woodpeckers and small flocks of unidentified warblers.

My landscapes were old, tended and familiar, with few straight edges and many hidden corners.  It rained at the due times – and the one summer it did not, it made national news and we called it a drought.  Late spring smelt of wild garlic and sounded of bird song.  Winters were damp rather than cold, and snow was a school stopping, day off treat. Alongside my preference for boots, I gained a love of the small, the concealed and the local.  I would not have been able to tell you at the time, but I gained a love for places that I could call my own.  They were my places.  Places that the wider world ignored.  Places that would never really feature in stories or TV shows, but ones I could visit again and again and never get bored. I’d know them for 19 years when I left.

The train arrived in Sunderland in the late afternoon; I loaded my bags into a van and was driven to the campus.  Twenty minutes later I was in a small room about eight or nine floors up a building that looked like a sinking ship.  It was the longest single journey I had ever made.  Out through my window were things that I had only ever seen on TV.  Industry, or at least its battered remains, and small houses huddled next to each other in the chill light. Pubs carried brands I had never heard of.  People still built things with their hands or dug coal from the Earth. People joined unions and were hated for it by a government that seemed to govern for other people in other places. I was a fish out of water, so I sought the beach.  Although the winds of the North Sea were always sharp, the beach had a feel I recognised from elsewhere.  Nothing else seemed the same.  I stayed for three years and, as is the way with students, explored the warm landscape of the bars more than the region. 

If Sunderland was a post-industrial landscape, then County Cork was a pre-industrial one.  In a single day I moved from a landscape dominated by the hallmarks of industrial decay to one that had never undergone industrialisation in the first place.  To my eyes The Republic looked like a modern country with an older landscape – and maybe both of these assessments were wrong.   I lived on an island with flower rich fields and otters for neighbours.  Over one horizon was America – a place of huge magnetic attraction to Ireland – and over the other was the UK – which was not as well regarded by many.  I watched dolphins in the evenings and wondered why I never got any mail.   I watched the sea sparkle and the sky become alive with a scatterwork of stars.  The sound of the sea, and washing that never really dried, became a kind of background noise that was unspoken, and constant. When I returned to Somerset it was made clear to me that I had not returned home, so I washed my clothes and left, and headed north to Gateshead.  As factory chimneys fell, and people burnt their garden fences for warmth, I tried to bring greenery back to rail lines, spoil heaps and foundry ruins. If the truth were told, I felt like I was marking time; unsure of both where and what I should be. Chance took me back to the countryside.  Back to a place of archetypes and other people’s poems.  To a place of Lakes, damp oak woodlands and open hilltops. 

There was 11 miles of lake just outside my window, birds in the trees, deer through the kitchen window and sinuous, ropey eels in the boatsheds. There were squirrels in bushes; Red squirrels, real squirrels, Nutkin squirrels - not the grey ones of Path 7.  There were daffodils in spring, but, as far as I could tell, not a host. On my days off I could wander on the fell tops with the clouds, never lonely, but sometimes lost.  The beaten tracks lead you to places that people painted and hug on their walls; if you left the tracks you could find rare moments of solitude.  Those places were owned by the ravens and peregrines.  A deep throated cronk or a blue grey flash.  If you only climbed to the top of the hill you shared your coffee with other walkers and food-stealing sheep.  If you kept going over the hump or stopped just before, you could make conversation with yourself or the wind or the passing birds.  If you can fall in love with a place, then I did.  It may have been busy most of the time, with walkers and school kids (who we encouraged to come), but with care and a bit of thought you could avoid the crowds and find a place to hide.  More than anything it became a place where you could lose yourself without getting lost.  A place where you could explore more than just the things marked on the map.  It was a landscape in which I began to understand that you could move beyond the things that you have been taught were true, that you could move past the beginning and ending that occurred in one small room.  It’s strange what walking up a hill in the snow can do for you.

But for all I loved the place that great celestial spanner thrower had other ideas and put one clean into the middle of the works. We went for a walk to the top of a hill behind work, and a few days later I showed her a woodpecker nest.  Things became beautifully complex and simple all at the same time.  In the end decision day came and I had to choose between a place and a person – which is as much of a non-competition as I can imagine.  And to clear up any possible ambiguity here, the person won. So I packed my bags (and boxes), archived my memories, climbed Golden Slipper with Callum and headed to Australia.

And one of those things was a mistake.  I spent the first few years in Australia refusing to look into the archives, even when I wanted to and grew resentful and tired.  I felt guilty about wanting to look there, and that stopped me looking elsewhere as well.  The combination of chronic under-observation and the demands of a vampire employer created a darkness that filled the spaces between my ears.  It would seep out in bursts of anger that fed back into the gloom and grew; the negative effects of positive feedback.  The anvil on my chest crushed more than my heart.  It made the prospect of continuing more ghastly than the prospect of ending.  It was up hill all the way, up hill every day and there was never a hint that the view at the top would be worthwhile, or even different.  It was a frightening place to be.  And just about the last thing I held on to, was that you had to keep trying.  One last push to a summit that was out of reach. Failure was weakness.  Eventually, inevitably, on a Thursday evening, I broke.  And rather than a dam burst of anger, it flooded out as tears.  I needed help and (luckily) I found it.  The reason for my journey was still by my side, and so were my kids.  There were two sets of independent ears to listen.  And there was a keyboard wired to a grey box.  And with it I started to write.  And in the substance of those last three sentences I found that the paths out of the dark forests of the mind were still open; overgrown, and under-walked, but still open.  The compass needle steadied and the maps made sense, the hill became less steep and the promise of a view ahead looked real.  You may never reach the top, but it’s important to believe that you can.  Clouds are part of the landscape, but nobody can live forever in the heart of a storm.

Now it was OK to access the archives and look around – the words I received and the words I formed gave me a reason to think and to pay attention again.  When I held out my hand people took it and held it, and I remembered how good it felt. The new and the old blended in ways that I never expected and memories would rise unbidden as a connection I’d never noticed before snapped into place.  (“A typewriter cackles out a stream of memories”).  The darkness recedes.  The anvil departed.  There are still shadows, but I’ve found a way to see into them.   They no longer scare (or scar) me as much. 

This is today’s versions of how I came to be here.

Epilogue.

Stories are not fixed, until they are written down.  And stories that are fixed may, eventually, come to be untrue.  In the retelling of stories we find new things and different pathways.  We find people who should be there, but aren’t and places that we have forgotten that we should have not.  Stories grow in the telling if you find people to listen and ask questions.  All of the posts that have come before this contain part of this story. While people keep listening I intend to keep telling the story ……..

Intentionally West.

A day after unpacking I repack. Less pairs of shorts, no sandals and four shirts as dress as my wardrobe allows.  It’s work rather than a holiday.  But I still shoehorn my camera gear into the same bag as last week, hoping that a luggage fascist is not on duty at the airport.  Normally the elephantine size of other people’s hand baggage gives me a degree of moral leverage if objections are raised.  Boarding a plane with telescope or a long lens draws suspicious glances and muffled accusations of espionage, but a double stack package of Crispy Kreme donuts, with special requests for sensitive handling and a personal overhead locker does not raise an eyebrow.  I have to laugh, as I am no more likely to be a spy than the donuts are to be real food.  Of all the things I have seen brought on to a planes, the donuts seem to be the most wilfully strange.  Maybe their owners have just watched Alive, and have brought stores for a few months of hardship. I pass the time on the plane with a film in which two Australians and Elizabeth Bennet seem to be hunting Osama Bin Laden.  Although I admit I could be wrong.

Our host greets us at the door.  She shows us to our rooms and pales slightly at the time at which we need breakfast.  Down by the sea the upper sky turns dark blue while the horizon is lit by the afterglow of sunset.  A horizon bright with the light of a sunken Sun grows dark with height, until it sinks to the full black of a spangled night sky.  Surfers slide on the last of the evening’s waves, dull patches in the pale glow.  People run.  People walk.  Bare torsos and expansive tattoos compete for attention with slowly driven cars.  A couple from Lancashire drink dark thermos tea and mention that never in the 40 years since they arrived have they left Western Australia.  Welcome to Perth.  Welcome to a different Australia.

Even by Australian standards Perth is a long way from anywhere except Fremantle.  Sitting out on its own, away from the populous east coast, away from the seat of Federal Government, it would have taken very few changes of history for it to have become the capital of its own country.  As it is, there is an uneasy truce between the west and the rest.  Both benefit from the presence of the other, although neither seems brave enough admit to this.  But the difference I’m interested in does not lie in the roots of history or in the per capita contribution to the economy - it lies in the biology.  If you look at an Australian bird book you will soon notice a cluster of birds that only occur in the south west of Western Australia.  Little patches of colour on an otherwise empty map.  It’s these birds I hope to see.

(The truth of the matter is that the major reason I’m in Perth is not for birds, but for work.  Four days in an office, dotting Is and crossing Ts.  But the fifth day and the weekend are mine.  Anything I find on the workdays will be an accident, but on my days it will be deliberate.)

Just over the road and through a screen of trees, a lake has tempted me all week.  In the early morning drive into work I could see pelicans and other smaller, more mysterious birds, floating on the water.  But the morning commute waits for no man, birder or not, so I never got more than a few tantalising glimpses.  It was clear that there were plenty of birds there, but an eye’s corner view is never enough.  So, on the last day, in the dead time between the end of work and the time to go to the airport, I impose on my workmates to try a spot of birding.  They were tolerant, if not necessarily enthusiastic, as we pulled up next to Herdsman Lake.  Even in the car park (an undervalued habitat in my opinion) there were birds.  A Purple Swamp Hen dashed about on the grass, looking for the remains of a school group’s lunch.  Far too large and brightly coloured to be inconspicuous it was none the less being ignored by the kids, captured, as they were, in their game of Duck, Duck, Goose.  The sight of me with lens and monopod is too much for the Swamp Hen.  It charges towards the sanctuary of the water with an exaggerated stride and an exasperated look. 

A reed bed just over the water rattles to the sound of the eponymous warbler, coots chase and fight over birdy slights.  In the spindly trees, a pair of Nankeen Night Herons – buff red brown, with a black cap and tassel - squabble over who will sit on the highest point.  This is an exercise in futility as the uppermost limbs bend and collapse under even their modest weight.  Hardhead and Musk duck dive in the shallow water, always coming up where my lens is not pointing.  All of these birds were in clear sight – or coming in loud and clear through clear air – so identification was not hard.

In the midst of the ducks another bird floated with its head tucked round over its back, under its wing.  It looks little more than a fluffy lump, but I think I know what it is.  Something angular about the shape, and the indistinct, vague way the rear end of the bird forms, shouted out “grebe”.  The combination of long, curved neck and the two-tone colour all point in the same direction.  When the bird lifts its head to reveal two long ear crests and an equally long beak, the deal is done – it’s a great crested grebe.  Strangely, its lobed feet stick out from behind its body.  Small field marks meld together to conjure a sighting from uncertainty.  The bird tucks its head and returns to its sleeping position. 

(As a kid and a teenager I used to watch this same bird on Leachmere Water – more prosaically know as Embrough Pond – while I fished.  Glancing from a red topped float to the bird and back again. Sometimes the float would be gone, but not that often.  One spring day the birds danced for a friend and me.  They chased, water walked side by side and passed waterweed from male to female, re-establishing a natural order that had almost been lost to the brims of decorated hats.  I never saw any chicks, but the adult birds were constant companions in the often fishless hours.)

Across the water, tucked under a broken tree are some small grey ducks.  When they shuffle into the water they float low, perhaps denser than most ducks, with zebra striped flanks and an oversized boxy bill.  I can’t really see them that well, but I know they are Pink Eared ducks, a delightful little bird I never tire of watching.  It’s only through a ‘scope or binoculars that you have any chance of seeing their pink ears.  I know the bird without seeing the thing that names it.  Later in the day, when I bring up my pictures of these birds on a computer, one of my non-birding companions comments that they look like they have “a pink highlighter pen mark on the side of their head”.  This is the kind of description that never makes it into field guides, but is none the less completely accurate.  Their remarkable square ended bill goes unremarked upon, their stripes go unnoticed, but the pink ear draws attention.  Deservedly so.  The features I used to name the bird were overlooked, but the invisible becomes clear to those who look for beauty rather than name.  As birders, do we lose sight of the beauty in the birds because we only look at the things that allow us to name that bird?  Do I remember the beauty that I find only when it is out of place or unexpected?  Whatever the reason for awareness being pricked, it happened that day, by that lake, in those few stolen minutes after lunch.  The dull chills of air-conditioned office discussions were swept away by this breath of fresh – if rather humid and warm – air.  I could have stayed for a very long time.  I think I managed 15 minutes or maybe it was 20.

Any breakfast that offers the possibility of chocolate milk and muffins is going to be a battle between opportunity and restraint.  The muffins I can do without, but a glass of temptation is a rare luxury.  “Miss Maud’s” sounds like it could be a brothel, but it’s not.  The place sparkles with Scandinavian themed cleanliness and purity.  It may well be pastiche, but it’s good pastiche.  I don’t have time for a long breakfast, so I build a bacon sandwich (joy of joys!) and leave. 

Half way through the sandwich a 4WD pulls up and my guide for the day steps out.  He’s a Stuart with a ‘u’ rather than an ‘ew’, a quietly spoken zoo keeper with an eye for birding detail and a wife who cooks a mean nut slice.  He has that most valuable of commodity, local knowledge.  The day begins with a semi-serious listing of birds we see from the car – magpie lark, silver gull, wattlebirds.  But soon we stop when it becomes clear that neither of us is driven by lists alone.  We pull up next to a small urban lake – it’s one of the few places in Perth that I’d recognise – and I say “I’ve been here before” – Stuart seems to think I’m identifying a problem, but I’m only stating the truth.  A splash in the water distracts us from this conversation.  An Australasian grebe and its chess board dappled chick swim close to the shore, acclimatised no doubt by passing cyclists, night time singers and visiting birders.  The lake is a rich green, its algal life set to overdrive by the nutrient swill of storm water.  Ducks feed in the sticky looking liquid and shake their heads in disapproval as they surface.

As we are driving through the morning streets a flock of large black cockatoos dribble in ones and twos from the tops of the street trees.  These are Carnaby’s Black Cockatoos, a species restricted to the south west of Western Australia.  They have white panels in their tails that flash as they fly.  We park illegally, but with clear moral authority, on the pavement and get out to watch.  The birds call with crackling voices and swoop low over rooftops and rush hour pedestrians.  Nobody seems to be looking upwards.  Maybe the birds are too familiar – although I doubt it.  Students in dark blazer jackets and pale shirts ignore the birds as well.  I wonder what is so absorbing as to make a metre wide bird, flying within an arm’s reach, invisible.  More people seem to be paying attention to our parking than the birds.  The birds leave and so do we.

We drive down to the river, where an osprey nest sits on a dead tree and cyclists ride by without noticing.  On the river there are swans, appropriate given its name, which look at me we one cautious eye. Parrots feed on the grass edges of the paths. 

A string of wetlands wind their way through Perth, the surface expression of an underground river.  When the rains are heavy, the wetlands grow, only to shrink back again when the rains fail.  Today they are wet and birds gather in large numbers.   Cormorants sit in the waterside tree.  A few Black Winged Stilts probe, fine beaked, at the soft mud.  Rainbow Lorikeets, a bird introduced from the east, fly overhead calling loudly, pushing native birds from tree holes and nest sites.  At one site, huge flocks of cormorants nervously fly run backwards and forwards over the water, their feet pounding the water, their wings grabbing at the air.  It sounds like the faint applause of a bored concert crowd, clapping because it’s the right thing to do under the circumstances.

We travel south (I think), hoping to outrun the light but persistent rain that was now falling.  South (possibly) towards a set of new lakes formed in the damaged lands of industry.  Nature is being given a helping hand here to mend the wounds of surgical extraction.  Water, that great cure all, pools and stands and around it new trees grow.  The ground underfoot is sticky with a black mud which gums to the soles of my shoes and ends up coating the carpet of the 4WD.  A huge two-tone bird appears, fleetingly, over the low trees and my mind leaps to “Sea Eagle” – but I am totally, embarrassingly, wrong.  Had I not see the bird again I would have sworn it was a bird of prey.  It was a pelican, a bird that is almost impossible to misidentify.  But I managed.  I think back to how and why we name things, and how, when you look for rarity you often, mistakenly, find it.  I jumped from one impression – a large two-tone bird – to a name in a heartbeat, and I got it wrong.  There should be more to paying attention that a side-ways glimpse and a jumped to conclusion. 

The mud continues to stick to my feet, and I feel the need to scrape my shoes as I enter a small hide, the window ledges of which are placed at the ideal heights for hobbits or pro basketball players.  A strange repetitive splash and whistle comes from a small bay off to our right.  A male Musk Duck is displaying in a way that removes any doubt about his identity.  This already characteristic duck is trying to lure females to it in a way not really seen by any other duck.  Already a bird that sits low in the water, it sinks even further and slaps the water behind it by flicking its legs backwards.  On close observation this move seems to violate the constraints of avian anatomy.  It looks like a move doomed to dislocate the legs of our love struck male.  At more or less the same time as the feet slap the water, the bird gives off a high pitched squeaky whistle.  Quite why this display attracts females eludes me, and on this day the female of the species was also overlooking its attractiveness.  As we leave the hide the male is still splashing and whistling.  Maybe he is just practicing.

Eventually we point the car back towards the city, but a pair of lakes called The Spectacles pulls us off the freeway.  Rather less than surprisingly these lakes are round and joined by a thin ribbon of wet vegetation.  A network of gravel pathways leads away from the car park.  The rain has settled the dust, and the path-side vegetation drips short showers of second hand rain.  The lakes themselves are dry – and from the viewpoints you can only see where the water is meant to be, rather than water itself.  It looks as if this last chance venue has little to offer, and we walk away.  A bird perches on the very top of a tree – it’s not the right shape for a lorikeet, and it’s too fine for a rosella – I think of the pelican/eagle and take my time – just as I start to say “I think I’ve……..” it flies off with a dipping bobbing flight.  It’s a Red-capped Parrot.  A life bird.  A few minutes later I get better views of one in the trees by the edge of the path.  This time a good view and a short pause lets me make the correct call - and Stuart’s conformation helps as well!  I think it’s a good way to end the day – a reminder that the challenges of naming birds can be overcome.

And then the day’s end becomes even better.  A small flock of birds land in the tree in front of me.  They are fine, slight, birds, with a small head and long tail.  “Elegant Parrot” says Stuart.  I get one short, but clear look and the birds move off.  The light from the cloud thick sky is failing.  But the birds are clear enough for this one last naming.  

Slow down, take a breath, think.  That’s what you need to do. As I pack up my camera and bins I wonder what the next day will bring.