"Vesper Flight"

[fiefoe]

Like Helen Macdonald said in the preface, this collection is like a cabinet of wonders and aims to show the sheer vastness of possibilities of living creatures on this earth. The piece that left the deepest impression is about swifts.

• It was science that taught me how the flights of tens of millions of migrating birds across Europe and Africa, lines on the map drawn in lines of feather and starlight and bone, are stranger and more astonishing than I could ever have imagined, for these creatures navigate by visualising the Earth’s magnetic field through detecting quantum entanglement taking place in the receptor cells of their eyes.
• They possess different wordless intuitions from me, ones relating to how one holds the landscape between head and eye and heart and hand. In my own history of the countryside, nests weren’t things that were made to be found. They were carefully maintained blind spots, redacted lines in familiar texts.
• Nests were like bruises: things I couldn’t help but touch, even though I didn’t want them to be there. They challenged everything that birds meant for me. I loved them most because they seemed free. Sensing danger, sensing a trap, sensing any kind of imposition, they could fly away. Watching birds, I felt I shared in their freedom. But nests and eggs tied birds down. They made them vulnerable
• I spoke through the shell to something that had not yet known light or air, but would soon take in the revealed coil and furl of a west-coast breeze and cloud of a hillside in one easy glide at sixty miles an hour, and spire up on sharp wings to soar high enough to see the distant, glittering Atlantic. I spoke through an egg and wept.
• It was a long time before I understood that even the simplest of field guides are far from transparent windows on to nature. You need to learn how to read them against the messiness of reality.
• as if by not breathing I could still everything – movement, time, all of the dust and feet that rise and fall in a life.
  似乎不呼吸就能让一切静止——动作，时间，一生中起起落落的所有尘土和脚步。
• beyond the fence, is a place that draws me because it exists neither wholly in the past, nor in the present, but is caught in a space in between, and that space is a place which gestures towards the future and whose little hurts are hope.
  有一个地方牵动我心，因为它既不完全存在于过去，也不是现在，而是夹在二者之间的时空，那时空指向未来，它牵动的微小痛楚就是希望。
• The more I stare at the city across miles of dusty, uplit air, the more I begin to think of these super-tall buildings as machines that work like deep-sea submersibles, transporting us to inaccessible realms we cannot otherwise explore.
• On days with north-west winds in late summer and early fall, birds, bats and migrant dragonflies all feed on rich concentrations of insects caused by powerful downdraughts and eddies around the city’s high-rise buildings, just as fish swarm to feed where currents congregate plankton in the ocean.
• thirty or more songbirds pass over. They are very small. Watching their passage is almost too moving to bear. They resemble stars, embers, slow tracer fire.
• ‘They wanted to filter all that stuff out. Now the biologists want to do the reverse.’ Farnsworth is one pioneer of a new multidisciplinary science, fit for an era in which weather radar has become so sensitive it can detect a single bumblebee over thirty miles away.
• a black-throated blue warbler so neat and spry he looks like a folded pocket handkerchief.
  一只黑喉蓝林莺如此整洁灵秀，好像一块精细折叠的西装口袋巾。
• European starlings that assemble in the sky before they roost. We call them murmurations, but the Danish term, sort sol, is better: black sun. It captures their almost celestial strangeness.
• Watching the flock has brought home to me how easy it is to react to the idea of masses of refugees with the same visceral apprehension with which we greet a cloud of moving starlings or tumbling geese, to view it as a singular entity, strange and uncontrollable and chaotic.
• But now they’ve discovered that the brain always records two tracks at once. That it is always taping two stories in parallel. Short-term memories, long-term memories, two tracks of running recollection, memory doubled. Always doubled.
  Which makes everything that ever happens to us happen twice.
  Which makes us always beings split in two.
  You are an epidemiologist. You are a refugee.
• So it is a mark of your kindly reticence that all you can say about it is, 足见你的善良隐忍。
• Migraineurs like me are experts in denial. We know how it feels, that fingertip pressure behind the eyes and heart, knowing it’s there and at the same time believing it does not exist. Which is why I keep thinking of migraines whenever I hear the news, although we have a much clearer understanding of the science of climate change than we do the science of migraines.
• And then the revelation came. It wasn’t what I’d expected. It wasn’t focused up there in the sky, but down here with us all, as the crowds that lined the Atlantic shore raised cameras to commemorate totality, and as they flashed, a wave of particulate light crashed along the dark beach and flooded across to the other side of the bay, making the whole coast a glittering field of stars. Each fugitive point of light was a different person. I laughed out loud. I’d wanted a solitary revelation but had been given something else instead: an overwhelming sense of community, and of what it is made – a host of individual lights shining briefly against oncoming darkness.
• Your intellect cannot grasp any of this. Not the dark, nor the sunset clouds on every horizon, nor the stars, just that extraordinary wrongness, up there, that pulls the eyes towards it. The exhilaration is barely contained terror.
• For it turns out there’s something even more affecting than watching the sun disappear into a hole. Watching the sun climb out of it. Here I am, sitting on the beach in the underworld, with all of the standing dead. It is cold, and a loose wind blows through the darkness. But then, from the lower edge of the blank, black disc of the dead sun, bursts a perfect point of brilliance. It leaps and burns. It’s unthinkably fierce, unbearably bright, something (I blush to say it, but here it comes) like a word. And thus begins the world again. Instantly.
• Above me, the Southern Hemisphere stars are all dust and terror and distance and slow fire in the night, and I stare up, frozen, and frozen in wonderment.
• I realised two things: first, that Spencer’s painting had unwittingly recorded a schism in national history, and second, that it was haunting me because I felt I no longer recognised my country, that everything around me had become ominous – muddy and dark.
• A common tern clipped overhead, translucent supple wing beats over a river crowded with traffic, and something about its flight made me think that it was flying under clouds, but there were no clouds, there were no clouds anywhere and had not been all day, and the sky was the stretched, varnished perfection of linseed-thinned oils.
• These days, nestboxes in gardens faintly remind me of the provision of workers’ cottages on landed estates.
• My pet parrot understands what I’m feeling faster than I do; he jumps from his perch on the back of a chair, runs along the tabletop and snuggles against my forearm, extending his soft feathery neck to nibble gently at the back of my hand.
• We have all been reminded that a day can be cut in two by three seconds of a hunting peregrine and leave you stilled into silence and the memory of each curve of its flight.
• The Poolbeg site is about as far as you can get from a thriving natural ecosystem, but the act of watching a falcon chase its prey above the scarred and broken ground below feels like quiet resistance against despair. Matters of life and death and a sense of our place in the world tied fast together in a shiver of wings across a scrap of winter sky.
• under a bridge over the River Thames, where sunlight from the water cast bright scribbles on the arches above.
• They were only ever flickering silhouettes at twenty, thirty, forty miles an hour, a shoal of birds, a pouring sheaf of identical black grains against bright clouds.
  它们分明只是以20、30或40英里的时速闪动的剪影，密集如鱼的群鸟，明亮的云朵下倾泻的一捧毫无二致的黑色谷粒。
• Their nests are made of things snatched from the air: strands of dried grass pulled aloft by thermals; moulted pigeon-breast feathers; flower petals, leaves, scraps of paper, even butterflies. During the war, swifts in Denmark and Italy grabbed chaff, reflective scraps of tinfoil dropped from aircraft to confuse enemy radar,
• As soon as they tip themselves free of the nest hole, they start flying, and they will not stop flying for two or three years, bathing in rain, feeding on airborne insects
  To avoid heavy rain, which makes it impossible for them to feed, swifts with nests in English roofs will fly clockwise around low-pressure systems, travelling across Europe and back again.
• The remote air, the coldness, the stillness, and the high birds over white cloud suspended in sleep. It’s an image that drifts in and out of my dreams.
• swifts weren’t just making vesper flights in the evenings. They made them again just before dawn. Twice a day, when light levels exactly mirror each other, swifts rise and reach the apex of their flights at nautical twilight.
• ‘The best thing for being sad,’ said T. H. White’s Merlin, ‘is to learn something.’ All of us have to live our lives most of the time inside the protective structures that we have built; none of us can bear too much reality. We need our books, our craft projects, our dogs and knitting, our movies, gardens and gigs. It’s who we are. We’re held together by our lives, our interests, and all our chosen comforts.
• I’m convinced it’s the latter, for the word is such a beautiful phonetic approximation of an oriole’s song: Wo-de-wal-e, wo-de-wal-e, a phrase like the curl of the cut ends of a gilded banner furling over the page of an illuminated manuscript.
• As water droplets are pulled up into the cloud they freeze, eventually growing too heavy to ascend further, and so they fall, bumping into smaller fragments on their way up. Each collision transfers electrons, so that the lower parts of the cloud collect a negative charge while the upper parts collect a positive charge. Eventually lightning leaps across these differentials between the cloud’s top, its base and the ground, casting out shockwaves of superheated air that make the sound of thunder.
• ‘Birdwatcher’ is old British intelligence slang for a spy, and if you read Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys, you’ll see how long natural-history fieldcraft has been seen as a preparation game for war.
• watch how great white sharks tagged in Californian coastal waters migrate over a thousand miles to spend their winters in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean now known as the White Shark Café, read of how Amur falcons might survive on their journey over the ocean between India and Africa by following swarms of dragonflies making the same trip and feasting on them in flight.
• you veer from a sense of power at your ability to surveil at a distance to the knowledge that you are powerless to influence what happens next.
  你这一刻还在感慨自己的强大，能从远方监控它们，下一刻就觉得无力，因为无法改变随后发生的事情。
• Increasingly, knowing your surroundings, recognising the species of animals and plants around you, means opening yourself to constant grief.
• Children who are growing up watching glaciers retreat and sea ice vanishing, villages sinking, tundra wildfires raging and once-common trees disappearing – will they learn to regard constant disappearance as the ordinary way of the world?
• There are acceptable animals and unacceptable animals, as there have been deserving and undeserving poor, and the lines of respectability are drawn in familiar ways, through appealing to fears and threats of invasion, foreignness, violence and disease.
• The history of hawfinches in Britain reminds us how seamlessly we confuse natural and national history, how readily we assume nativity in things that are familiar to us, and how lamentably easy it is to forget how we are all from somewhere else.
• The longer you sit there, the more you become abstracted from this place, and yet fixed to it. The sudden appearance of a deer at the lake’s shore, or a flight of ducks tipping and whiffling down to splash on sunlit water, becomes treasure, through the simple fact of the passing of time.
• One has reached across to gently preen the mantle feathers of a nest-mate. Watching them I realise I’ve never seen baby birds so desperate to snuggle. It’s as if they’ve been magnetised to press themselves against each other, wing upon wing.
• Nothing has visibly changed, but something is happening, like an aircraft avionics system coming online as it powers up. Blinking lights, engine check. Check. That doesn’t work, though, not quite, as an analogy, because what I am watching is a new thing making itself out of something else. There is no doubt in my mind that this is as much a transformation as a dragonfly larva crawling from water and tearing itself out into a thing with wings. On my open palm a creature whose home has been paper towels and plastic boxes is turning into a different creature whose home is thousands of miles of air.
• These are texts you’re probably handed on your first day of studying theology, but all of them are new to me. Trying to think and write after reading them feels a little as if I’m trying to learn glass-blowing on my own. Their concepts are hot, supple, incandescent, feel slightly dangerous, and I’ve not been taught anything about their tolerances, or what to do with them, and the things I will make of them will surely provoke pity and amusement from experts in this field.
• One of them was a tall man who possessed a kind of brooding softness, like a voice pitched sotto that makes you lean in and find yourself unexpectedly close.
• Straight away I use the trick I learned as a child, and all my difficult emotions lessen as I imagine how the press of cooling air might feel against its wings. But my deepest relief doesn’t come from imagining I can feel what the rook feels, know what the rook knows – instead, it’s slow delight in knowing I cannot. These days I take emotional solace from knowing that animals are not like me, that their lives are not about us at all.