In our nature

Between reading Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights, I’m checking in on a peregrine falcon in central Melbourne. She’s in a box on a ledge, 33 floors above Collins Street, where the wind through buildings and the throbbing trams below sound subaquatic. Her backdrop is grey brick, matt-white bird shit, a crowded skyline. Beneath her are three mottled eggs. Watching her sit for hours on end, as I do the same at my Sydney desk, I recall the enforced tedium of early motherhood, its blend of patience and ambivalence, which has little to do with babies and everything to do with the conditions under which we’re required to raise them. But that’s my projection, since this falcon seems hyper-alert, eyeing the camera that livestreams her into the building’s foyer and online. Reading Macdonald, who can turn a falcon oracular, it’s tempting to guess what this bird might signify to a locked-down Melbourne. What can this “large, robust, world famous cosmopolitan” (Birds of Australia), whose habitat might once have been a gorge or a cliff, tell us about solitude, patience and confinement?

Live feeds such as “367 Collins St Falcons” turn our screens into modern wildlife hides, promising access to animal behaviour that wouldn’t occur in our presence. In “Hiding”, one of 41 essays in Vesper Flights, Macdonald describes the etiquette of using hides, and notes the “dubious satisfaction in the subterfuge of watching things that cannot see you”. Vesper Flights riffs on this beguiling notion: animals, studied closely enough, can reveal otherwise unknown aspects of ourselves. In a shrewd guide to nature writing recently published in Literary Hub, Macdonald noted that the form requires “a lot of information about yourself. Race, gender, class, and personal history will inform what you say, even if nature is supposed to be free of such concerns – in fact, particularly because it is supposed to be free of them.” But also: “Animals aren’t just repositories for human meanings, even if we unthinkingly use them to reflect our own selves and concerns. They are always more, always reminders that the world does not exist for us alone. They resist us.”

A British historian and poet, Macdonald became acclaimed for her nature writing after is for Hawk (2014) won several awards including

Johnson Prize for nonfiction. A memoir about her pet goshawk, Mabel, and a biography of T.H. White,

H is for Hawk fused natural history and literature.

Vesper Flights extends her special affinity for birds. Swifts, starlings, swans, falcons, cuckoos, storks, as well as their eggs and nests, appear throughout the collection. Among these essays (some new, several republished) are a one-page gag on Macdonald family members and goats, and a long, spellbinding account of travelling with the director of the Carl Sagan Center to high-altitude zones in Chile considered “terrestrial analogues” for Mars. There are few stylistic pyrotechnics here – most pieces are insightful, smoothly narrated blends of history, observation, reflection, insight and anecdote. Many include the self-accounting common to recent literary nonfiction, so we assemble a portrait of the solitary young naturalist, drawn to counting the layers of the Earth during childhood stress, avid reader of field guides, mapper of the singing positions of resident birds in her garden, and future falconer. Macdonald’s sobriety and occasional sentiment is leavened with salty, unexpected details, often voiced by others. “Undoubtedly people do eat swans,” says an ornithologist. “It was a collision with the divine,” a friend says of driving into a deer at night.

Much has been written about the ethical imperative to decentre the human in new writing about nature. But there’s no consensus on how to write this way. We know now that what human rights scholar and professor Danielle Celermajer calls the conceit of “human exceptionalism in splendid isolation” is unsustainable. In is for Hawk, when Macdonald put herself “in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her”, her own “humanity was burning away”. She continues to efface herself in Vesper Flights through keen observation, and to elevate animals by revealing the anthropomorphism in other accounts of their behaviour. In her essay “Field Guides”, about those “unquestioned authorities” of her childhood through which she learnt of the natural world, moral pronouncements and anthropomorphism coexist with scientific taxonomies. One guide claims a bluebird has a “model temper”, while the catbird has a “lazy self-indulgence”.

Vesper Flights favours the elevated, lyrical register of Macdonald’s British predecessors and poets. She prefers the decorative to the plain – “wonderment” is a favourite noun, adverbs are embraced, heightened states are optimal. This is nature writing as a source of secular wonders, even though her title references vespers, “evening devotional prayers, the last and most solemn of the day”. Swifts are “creatures of the upper air” and “akin to angels”; late spring air is “burnished”. Most pieces deliver at least one marvel – who knew that swifts never descend to the ground? Macdonald is unapologetically reverential but makes fun of her tendencies, recounting a youthful wish to watch her first solar eclipse in “romantic solitude”, a time when she “was inclined to think myself the centre of the universe”.

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