Best Quotes from Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald with Page Numbers

When I was small, I decided I wanted to be a naturalist.

Nests were all about eggs, and eggs were something I knew I shouldn’t ever collect.

For children, woods and fields and gardens are full of discrete, magical places: tunnels and dens and refuges in which you can hide and feel safe.

I didn’t know where birds fitted into all this. I didn’t know where I did.

Home is a place you carry within you, not simply a fixed location.

We make things according to plans, but all of us also have that sense of where things should go.

Do birds plan like us, or think like us, or really know how to make knots?

Egg collecting requires skill, bravery in the field, hard-won knowledge of the natural world.

Eggs and war; possession and hope and home.

I spoke through an egg and wept.

It was miraculous: a thing I’d seen representations of since I was a child had come alive.

For me, boars still exist inside those older stories, are still emblematic, still rich and passing strange.

Knowing that boars lived in the forest I walked through also charged the English countryside with a new and unusual possibility: danger.

But there is always, always a gap.

The world has lost half its wildlife in my own lifetime.

The single boar appearing from behind the trees felt like a token of hope.

It made me wonder if our damage to the natural world might not be irreversible.

So many things were affecting about this encounter: not just the calling-forth of an animal icon into flesh.

Being considered by a mind that is not human forces you to reconsider the limits of your own.

I have learned not to distrust intuitions like this.

I’ve a territorial, defensive soul.

There’s nothing like a visit from the landlord to put me on the back foot.

I’m spilling with contagious rage.

He is totally bored.

The bird loves the boy because he is entirely full of joyous, manifest amazement.

That’s because he is happy.

We glory in the importance of accurate classification.

There is, suddenly, one of the most beautiful moments of human–animal interaction I have ever seen.

Such hard words to hear, uttered with such certainty.

I am going to sleep in the room with the parrot, when we live here.

The more animals and plants I learned, the larger, more complex and yet more familiar the world around me became.

Even the simplest of field guides are far from transparent windows on to nature.

To use field guides successfully, you must learn to ask the right questions of the living organism in front of you.

Each time you learn to recognise a new species of animal or plant, the natural world becomes a more complicated and remarkable place.

There’s an immense intellectual pleasure involved in making identifications.

The materiality of these guides, their weight and beauty, was part of their attraction.

Field guides made possible the joy of encountering a thing I already knew but had never seen before.

I feel lost and very far from home.

But with the rise of recreational birdwatching... a new way to identify birds was needed.

What I saw was a New Holland honeyeater. And turning to the plant guide... I decided, tentatively, that the shrub it sat on was probably a waratah.

Perhaps a hundred thousand vehicles pass this place each day.

Their diverse lives expanded what I considered as home way beyond the walls of my house.

When you are small, the things you see around you promise you they’ll continue as they are forever.

How could I know that the mower’s job was to hold history in suspension, keeping the meadow exactly where it was against the encroachment of heather and birch and time?

Every year the meadow grew back and thrived and was as rich as ever.

Losing the meadow is not like losing the other things that have gone from my childhood.

When habitats are destroyed what is lost are exquisite ecological complexities and all the lives that make them what they are.

The world is full of people busily making things into how they think the world ought to be.

The pull on my heart is also the pain of knowing that this is possible, but that it is very unlikely.

I wonder how we might learn to align our aesthetic and moral landscapes to fit that intuition.

The sky may seem like an empty place, just as we once thought the deep ocean to be a lifeless void. But like the ocean, this is a vast habitat full of life.

The tallest buildings... project into airspace that birds have used for millennia.

The whole notion of the aerosphere and airspace as habitat is not something that has come into the collective psyche until recently.

We cherish our cities for their appearance at night, but it takes a terrible toll on migrating songbirds.

For a falcon, a skyscraper is simply a cliff: it brings the same prospects, the same high winds, the same opportunities to stash a takeout meal.

Watching their passage is almost too moving to bear.

Something tugs at my heart. I’ll never see any of these birds again.

Part of what high-rise buildings are designed to do is change the way we see.

High-rise buildings, symbols of mastery over nature, can work as bridges towards a more complete understanding of the natural world.

Each time the lights went back on, a new sweep of birds was drawn in.

‘Here they come!’ someone whispers.

Standing close to vast masses of birds affects everyone differently: some people laugh, some cry, others shake their heads or utter profanities.

Language fails in the face of immense flocks of beating wings.

It is an astonishing illusion that makes me blink in surprise.

But the changing shape of starling flocks comes from each bird copying the motions of the six or seven others around it with extreme rapidity.

Sometimes they seem uncannily like an alien, groping entity, living sand or smoke moving through a suite of topological changes.

In the air, fear is the factor shaping the flocks, pressing and contorting them as they fly.

I feel uncomfortably disoriented. Big flocks of birds can do this.

I marvel at how confusion can be resolved by focusing on the things from which it is made.

In the face of fear, we are all starlings, a group, a flock, made of a million souls seeking safety.

You want me to ask questions, because you say it is easier to answer questions than tell your story.

Secrecy is paramount, but faith is also faith.

They see your belief as a contagious disease.

Your life is in danger, he said. Truth. So you fled. You left everything.

None of us wants to know how it feels to not eat or drink or sleep for five days and nights.

You say, It was the worst feeling. Then you say it again. The worst feeling.

Which makes everything that ever happens to us happen twice.

I am a refugee who sings in a talent competition in a detention centre.

What you want to talk about are the problems facing the people around you.

I want to be useful, you say. I don’t want to spend my time in the hostel, waiting.

We wait expectantly for our spring swallows and swifts, the first summer butterflies; we listen for the mating calls of autumn foxes and deer.

Above me is a towering column of flying ants.

But I know exactly where individual ants are, because every few seconds a gull twitches itself to one side, beats its wings once, twice, and snaps at the air.

What I’m witnessing is the nuptial flight of a species of ant called Lasius niger, the common black ant of our town streets and suburban gardens.

Though these queens may live another thirty years, they will never mate again.

This tower of birds is an attraction visible for miles, an ephemeral landmark above a roadside church in a small country town.

But it’s things I’ve learned from scientific books and papers that are making what I’m watching almost unbearably moving.

This vast stretch of sky, the gulls, the imperceptible ants, is a working revelation of the interrelation of different scales of existence.

It is that the motive power behind this grand spectacle is entirely invisible.

I can’t help but remind me that I’m little more than an ant in the wider workings of the world, no more or less important than any of the creatures here.

Migraines remind me we’re not built with the solidity so many of us blithely assume.

Perfection cannot be intrinsic to us, built as we are of chemicals and networks and causal molecular pathways and shifting storms of electricity; none of us are ever in perfect health.

No matter how old I am, I thought, sometimes I’ll encounter things that are new.

Sometimes it is not you. Sometimes the world is to blame.

Defiance and change in process are collective acts, not individual ones.

We are already inside the apocalypse, and forest fires and category five hurricanes are as much signs of it as the rising of the beast from the pit.

Apocalyptic thinking is a powerful antagonist to action.

Just as the structures of the migraine-stricken brain can be altered, so might the structures of a world locked into what feels like an inevitable reliance on fossil fuels and endless economic growth.

There are actions we can take that seem impossible and pointless and yet they are entirely, and precisely, and absolutely required.

Even if we don’t believe in miracles, they are there, and they are waiting for us to find them.

The unpredictable flowering of beautiful alien forms from rotting wood, dung or leaf litter in a forest moving towards winter is a strong and strange conjuration of life-in-death.

Mushrooms have a more direct relationship to mortality.

If you’re collecting fungi to eat, your expertise in identification is all that keeps you from death or serious illness.

Fungi force us to consider the limits of our understanding: not everything fits easily into our systems of classification.

The world might be, it turns out, too complicated for us to know.

We are visual creatures. To us, forests are places made of trees and leaves and soil.

Without fungi’s ceaseless cycling of water, nutrients and minerals, the forest wouldn’t work the way it does.

I’ve become more and more intrigued by the curious place they occupy in our imaginations.

Over the years I have not only learned to identify a few species... but I am better than I used to be.

But all around me now, invisible and ubiquitous, is a network of fungal life, millions of tiny threads growing and stretching among trees.

I try to walk in woods for a few hours before nightfall on every New Year’s Day.

There’s a quietness that fosters an acute sensitivity to small sounds that earlier in the year would be buried under a riot of birdsong.

These alarm calls remind me that we have consequential presence, that the animals we like to watch are creatures with their own needs, desires, emotions, lives.

A winter wood reveals the bones of the landscape it grows upon, the geographical contours of slopes, gullies and hollows.

Because life is less obvious in a winter wood, where it does subsist, it demands attention.

Most of the life here is too small for me to see or exists underground.

That woods are places of process and constant change was something that took a long time for me to understand.

Winter days are always moving fast towards darkness, and when the wind is bitter it’s not easy to walk without thinking of what it will be like to be back in the warmth of home.

So often we think of mindfulness, of existing purely in the present moment, as a spiritual goal.

They are wood and soil and rotting leaves, the crystal fur of hoarfrost and the melting of overnight snow, but they are also places of different interpolated timeframes.

Witnessing a total eclipse wreaks havoc on your sense of self, on rational individuality.

They provoke a flood of primal awe.

In confronting something like the absolute, all our differences are moot.

When you stand and watch the death of the sun and see it reborn there can be no them, only us.

I’d wanted a solitary revelation but had been given something else instead: an overwhelming sense of community.

Your intellect cannot grasp any of this.

Totality is so incomprehensible for your mental machinery that your physical response becomes hugely apparent.

Here I am, sitting on the beach in the underworld, with all of the standing dead.

Instinctively, I felt that something far greater was at play.

Joy, relief, gratitude; an avalanche of emotion.

‘This is why Mars is so special to us.’

‘Habitability is not something very obvious. It can be hidden.’

‘For a long time, I thought that I could do without interacting with others. I didn’t have many friends at all, and I didn’t look for them. I had enough.’

‘What people see in me is the successful woman, the leader, but all of this is built on sweat and work and temper, you know? It’s losses, tragedy, death and tears.’

‘I guess you cannot be strong if you never have been hurt and learn how to survive that.’

‘I am thinking to myself that if I go underwater, I cannot sink.’

‘It’s really a place where time and space get warped.’

‘We are trying to connect to our own origins.’

‘Our planet is actually changing in front of our eyes, at a speed that is extremely scary.’

‘The Earth itself is in no danger whatsoever. It will survive whatever we throw at it. What is in danger is the environment that made us possible.’

Hares are magical harbingers of spring.

Most of us think of hares as magical and mysterious because lore and legend tells us they are so.

They might not be able to change sex at will, but female hares can become pregnant again before they give birth to their young.

A form is the space a hare makes to see everything and be invisible.

Hares have an astonishing capacity to outrun, jump and dodge things that pursue them.

Spring has of late become thin to me.

It’s starting to mean supermarket daffodil bunches and Easter promotions, rather than its richly textured changes.

Those boxing hares were a glorious sight, but behind their sparring forms flickered a shadow of disquiet.

Climate change has made our seasons creep; now catkins appear in winter.

The meanings we have given things like hares and seasons persist so strongly once their models have gone.

Allergies never fail to make life new.

Indeed, the longer life goes on, the more I realise that most quadrupeds make me ill.

Sometimes the words wouldn’t come, and the loneliness stoppered me up.

So much pressure was building up inside me that day that by mid-afternoon I had to hide.

A giddy, wet, rainy echo of a cry.

He was running to be with the rest of the hounds, and the sound was drawing him along the rainy roads.

I was transfixed.

He was doing exactly what he needed to be doing.

He was tired but joyful.

Lost, but catching up.

‘We want our country back’, lay partly in its vagueness, which let it appeal to all manner of disaffected constituencies.

‘It would be a shame to lose our old customs,’ Rider said. ‘Especially what’s been happening this past year all over the world, where we all seem to be going to hell in a handbasket.

‘To be proud of being English, ten years ago, was to be thought of as being small-minded, racist... But I think now it’s different.

What’s the word? Sustains?

‘Hopefully it will inspire me to be somebody.’

I began to feel a luxuriant, drunken joy.

But they are beginning to realise that they should be celebrated.

You move through a landscape thick with narratives handed to you by others, and what you read from the banks as you pass is part of what you choose to believe about your nation and who you are.

You might see leisurely eighteenth-century landscapes in the loose herd of cattle standing in the river.

There are always counter-narratives, hidden voices, lost lives, other ways of being.

When they’re fitted under the eaves of my new house, I’m hoping those scoops will be the point of entry for pairs of house martins.

It brought home to me how fiercely in Britain we are ridding our human spaces of everything that isn’t us.

What of swifts? They need holes in eaves and under roof tiles to nest, and we’re increasingly blocking them up.

We still balk at extending our zone of control outside of our gardens to things so obviously not ours.

I remember the curious thrill of seeing a prospecting great tit drop into the darkness of the box hung on the side of my house.

It was a little flush of pride dangerously near possession.

We’d sit on the lawn hearing the begging calls of blue tit fledglings and think, They’re ours.

These days, nestboxes in gardens faintly remind me of the provision of workers’ cottages on landed estates.

The birds don’t care, of course. They really don’t.

I want their submarine chirrups to fall through the open windows while the late-spring evenings lengthen.

All of us know at heart that driving is always challenging fate.

Look at yourself, says the DVC, cutting through all that is quotidian, cutting it all away. Look at yourself. Here you really are.

Deer that die because they are creatures with their own lives, their own haunts and paths and thoughts and needs.

I’ve valued deer for their capacity to surprise and delight me, which is why I’ve resisted learning more about them. The more you know about something, the less it can surprise you.

Fate comes up out of nowhere in the headlights glowing like a goddamned unicorn.

Not knowing very much about deer has made my encounters with them less like encounters with real animals and more like tableaux of happenstance, symbolism and emotion.

It’s about animals more generally, and what it might mean to not want to know more about them: a much bigger why.

This is what deer are for me. They stand for the natural world’s capacity to surprise and derail my expectations.

The deepest ramifications of the DVC are tied intimately to their sense of who they are.

Deer occupy a unique place in my personal pantheon of animals.

What we are watching is a small, feathered rebuke to our commonplace notion that nature exists only in places other than our own.

The rusting chimneys and broken windows of the Poolbeg site have their own troubling beauty, that of things that have outlasted their use.

Falcons haunt landscapes that speak to us of mortality: mountains, by virtue of their eternity; industrial ruins, by virtue of their reminding us that this, too, in time will be gone.

Perhaps the peregrine is becoming the imagined essence of landscapes like these.

At times of difficulty, watching birds ushers you into a different world, where no words need be spoken.

These days, working in Dublin, Eamonn keeps one eye on the sky, scanning churches and city towers.

In an instant, his city is transformed. Buildings become cliffs, streets canyons.

A day can be cut in two by three seconds of a hunting peregrine and leave you stilled into silence.

I’d swear... that a hunting peregrine changes the quality of the atmosphere it flies through.

The act of watching a falcon chase its prey above the scarred and broken ground below feels like quiet resistance against despair.

The bird was suffused with a kind of seriousness very akin to holiness.

Swifts are magical in the manner of all things that exist just a little beyond understanding.

In the end it can be as simple as this: they follow each other.

The best thing for being sad... is to learn something.

We all have to live our lives most of the time inside the protective structures that we have built.

Swifts aren’t always cresting the atmospheric boundary layer at dizzying heights; most of the time they are living below it in thick and complicated air.

To find out about the important things that will affect their lives, they must go higher to survey the wider scene.

Not all of us need to make that climb, just as many swifts eschew their vesper flights because they are occupied with eggs and young.

The things we need to set our courses towards or against.

Swifts are my fable of community, teaching us about how to make right decisions in the face of oncoming bad weather.

There’s a species of summer magic I chase every year.

Tonight I’m searching for it in a disused chalk quarry on the outskirts of my university town.

I feel small, insistent tugs as they get entangled in my hair.

The magic begins.

Tiny motes of cold fire mapping a sparse starfield over the ground.

They can’t eat, drink or fly, but spend their days burrowed deep in stems and under debris.

Once mated, the females extinguish their light and die.

This encounter in the summer night feels more like the workings of magic than chemistry.

It is hard to write about glow-worms without recourse to metaphors of stars and lamps.

These shining, tiny beacons retain an allure that draws people out in droves to stand and wonder.

I only saw them once. I didn’t know I’d never see them again.

They were legendary birds.

They sang... as if they were drifting in from an impossibly remote place.

That place, I realised, might be the past, the birds speaking of history.

These plantations were beloved of birders because they were the only place in the country you could see breeding golden orioles.

Even so, I knew I needed to come back and try again.

We never thought of these birds as immigrants; this was no Lost Colony.

They quietly thrived.

Though beautiful, reed beds are unsettling places.

It’s hard to comprehend that in all these views through my binoculars, he was never more than the size of a fingernail at arm’s length.

I never cared much for swans until the day a swan told me I was wrong.

Let no one ever speak of swans as being airy, insubstantial things.

Something shifted inside me and I began to weep with an emotion I recognised as gratitude.

These birds are entirely wild, yet here they are, tame as farmyard ducks, feeding on a wet stage lit up like a West End theatre.

It’s impossible to regard the natural world without seeing something of our own caught up in it.

A swan had come towards me and offered me strange companionship at a time when I thought loneliness was all I could feel.

What comforts me now, watching these arctic swans in our era of rising political nativism, is how clearly they are at home.

To turn them into families rather than flocks, trace their family trees and give them names.

When I was small, Bewick’s swans were strange and glamorous because they migrated here from the Soviet Union.

The experience is joyous, but messes with your everyday notions of what a wild animal is, what wildness is at all.

Nature reserves are places in which we can experience the past.

Walking in them is an act of virtual time travel.

The wildlife and vegetation around me here are not frozen remnants of another time but things with their own histories, moving and shifting ceaselessly in response to local conditions.

It is impossible to predict in detail how the course of this rewilding will run, but our separation from it is intrinsic to the plan.

When one boot sinks calf-deep in black mud, I’m forced to turn back.

I learned to stop needing to see.

I’ve learned how to identify birds in pieces, through scraps of colour and shape glimpsed through undergrowth.

Wicken does let me visit the past, but it’s not the past of a Saxon warlord, a Victorian naturalist or an imagined unsullied wilderness.

This way of watching wildlife is full of difficulty and mystery, and it makes the landscape seem intrinsic to what its creatures are.

It is an older way of observing animals, distinct from the way they are usually viewed today.

...the predictability of the life-cycle of a thunderstorm is strangely reassuring.

A thundercloud takes perhaps an hour or so to cycle through its life... then disappear.

The destructive power of storms forces you to recall the vulnerabilities of your human frame...

But storms are made of more than stuff. They’re also things of metaphors and memory.

Even now when I count those seconds, I feel a slow wonder that is as much connected to the passage of years...

Summer storms conjure distance and time but conjure, too, all the things that come towards us over which we have no control.

No weather so perfectly conjures a sense of foreboding, of anticipation and waiting, as the eerie stillness...

As the weeks of this summer draw on, I can’t help but think that this is the weather we are all now made of.

All of us waiting. Waiting for news. Waiting for Brexit to hit us. Waiting for the next revelation...

Waiting for hope, stranded in that strange light that stills our hearts before the storm of history.

Hope was a thing with feathers.

And before that, after the First World War had made caustic maps of Flanders fields and woods, built no man’s land, built fields of mines and wire and engraved trenches of men and filthy water, a man called Henry Eliot Howard decided that birds held territories too.

If you don’t know your birds you can’t fully know your country.

They had become part of the nature of home.

What they were doing was war work.

Birds were ‘the heritage we are fighting for’.

When we left that house, years later, I mourned the memory of all my childhood rooms.

I think of the new nature writing.

But you are not entirely free because you have to do it again, and again, and again.

What science turned to romanticism teaches us is the beauty of unimagined hordes of lives that aren’t our own.

But most people have never seen a cuckoo, and it is getting harder for anyone to do so.

We are starting to understand.

In his books, Knight defined the term with care.

To trust an animal, he wrote, one must tame it oneself.

There’s a world of counter-subversion right there.

Knight championed the keeping of British wildlife.

Our understanding of animals is deeply influenced by the cultures in which we live.

We can – and do – use animals as our proxies.

The cuckoos trapped and tagged... are never solely data points on a map.

They tell us things about ourselves, about the way we see our world.

The movement of tagged creatures are no longer followed solely by the eyes of experts.

Following a tagged animal on a map is an addictive pursuit.

You do not know where it will travel next.

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.

The fantasy of a borderless world is quickly replaced by visions of heroic exploration.

You can marvel at the bar-tailed godwits that make a nine-day, eleven-thousand-kilometre nonstop flight from Alaska to New Zealand.

Our unconscious desire to see ourselves in the lives of animals is shared by the scientists engaged in these projects.

Increasingly, animals are seen not only as proxies for scientific researchers but also as scientific-research equipment.

Each animal being tracked across the map is symbolically extending the virtues of technological dominance and global surveillance.

The stork was innocent – an unwitting player in a geopolitical game of surveillance and intelligence.

‘Why are they burning them?’ I asked her. ‘It’s Dutch elm disease,’ she said, pulling at the knot of her headscarf.

But should they contract a mortal disease, trees cope better than we do.

We use trees to measure our own lives, to anchor our notions of time.

The spectral elms on the internet were images of a different kind of extinction from that of the passenger pigeon or dodo: the extinction of a landscape.

Like droughts, tree diseases bring economic loss and ecological impoverishment while at the same time stripping familiar meaning from the places we live in.

Dedicated scientists, volunteers and nursery workers have spent many decades trying to restore the American chestnut with the aim of recreating the landscapes we have lost.

Their position makes sense if you think our reasons for wanting to restore the trees are merely ecological. Of course, they are not.

Knowing your surroundings, recognising the species of animals and plants around you, means opening yourself to constant grief.

But perhaps when all the ash trees are gone and the landscape has become flatter and simpler and smaller, someone not yet born will tap on a screen, call up images and wonder at the lost glory of these exquisite, feathered trees.

I hope it is not so.

The space between us in the house and these wild creatures in the garden was filled with unalloyed magic.

The ‘simple, Franciscan act of giving to birds makes us feel good about life, and redeems us in some fundamental way.’

Even if its impact is not always positive for wildlife, it is for us.

When a wary squirrel or bird trusts you sufficiently to take food from your hand, it’s gratifying and special, a reaching across the border between us and them, wild and tame.

Feeding animals can be a deep solace to those who, for reasons of social or personal circumstance, find contact with others difficult or impossible.

They are my whole life, because all my relatives are gone.

Growing up with bird tables outside my window taught me a lot about animal behaviour.

Animals are not human, but they are enough like us to grant us a strange and strong sense of kinship.

The birds that choose to come to my garden make my house a less lonely place.

This morning, as I filled the feeders in my garden, a flock of small passerines hopped about in the hedges... and I found myself yawning, too, in a moment of contagious fellowship.

The whole thing took less than five minutes, which left me feeling obscurely cheated by the ease of my seasonal effort.

Berries grow to be eaten, not used for interior decoration.

Most, packed with fats and carbohydrates around the seeds at their hearts, have evolved as vegetable offerings to birds.

In the presence of such bounty they’ll tolerate, if not entirely welcome, each other’s presence.

Some berries are more palatable than others.

the traditional yearly trim of hedgerows in autumn will deprive a whole community of valuable winter foodstuffs.

But increasingly, as hedgerows become valued for wildlife rather than simply as stock barriers, they are cut on two- or three-year rotation.

Their magic isn’t simply in the surprise of their comings and goings – some years they appear, often they don’t.

They’re both highly classy and fantastically trashy to look at; no Christmas decoration could ever approach their absurd, animate beauty.

My mother and I stood entranced.

The immigrants are hawfinches, starling-sized finches on steroids dressed in tones of salmon pink, black, white, russet and grey.

Birds know no political borders.

Our small population of resident hawfinches lives mostly in ancient woodlands or as small colonies in the forests and parklands of stately homes.

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.

It’s a truism that birds know no political borders.

Perhaps the immigrant finches will stay and raise young here.

What is most joyous to me about this once-in-a-lifetime influx is that birds renowned for their attachments to ancient woods and country estates are turning up in unexpectedly everyday places.

They’re clambering about yew branches in local churchyards and foraging in the leaf litter of suburban parks.

These spectacular refugees have eschewed the venerable treetops of stately homes to spend their time instead with sparrows.

‘I can’t look at birds in them without my heart aching fit to burst, even if those birds look otherwise healthy and happy and well-adjusted.’

‘We limit the lives of captive animals in myriad ways, and don’t always judge their impacts according to the needs of the creatures involved.’

‘There’s a tender domesticity attendant to birdkeeping that cuts through familiar stories about working-class masculinity.’

‘To me, redpolls have always been delicate and distant entities, small dots flitting around the tops of alder trees.’

‘Keepers of small birds love them not only as individuals but as possibilities and potentialities; over the years they design complex strategies of pairing and selecting to breed birds of particular shapes and patterns and colours and songs.’

‘Birdkeeping gestures towards the future as much as it does to those moments in the present when a goldfinch mule raises its head, puffs out its throat and pours forth song.’

‘It’s the term artificer that sings, here, and of a matter that is at the heart of the class system: taste.’

‘They don’t like us keeping British at all.’

‘Outside the bird show, I hear a goldfinch singing from the top of a sapling behind me. It sings of seeds and thistledown, of mates and flights and the fragility of eggs in a moss-and-cobweb nest.’

‘Where was the harm in that?’

A wildlife hide: a building whose purpose is to make one disappear.

Hiding is a habit that is hard to break.

Sometimes the window in front of me resembles nothing so much as a television screen.

You don’t need to be invisible to see wild animals behaving entirely naturally.

There’s a dubious satisfaction in the subterfuge of watching things that cannot see you.

It’s thrilling. We followed the otters downstream.

They were part of her local community.

Your job in a hide is to pretend you are not there.

Sitting in the dark for an hour or two and looking at the world through a hole in a wall requires a meditative patience.

The sudden appearance of a deer at the lake’s shore... becomes treasure.

By nine the sun has set behind the King’s Forest.

As night falls, our senses stretch to meet it.

He was a strong man, a strong-willed man, who carved his own, inimitable path through life.

He was so ready to see magic in the world.

The thought is a hard one.

They were so small. So new.

Watching the slow diminishment of sense and detail around me.

It’s OK. It’s OK.

It’s not hard.

But the song continues, and the air around us is full of invisible wings.

‘Of course it didn’t, it survived. But it was a steep learning curve.’

‘It can be very tiring,’ she says. ‘The early mornings! But when you let one go, it’s just sheer magic.’

Tending injured and orphaned creatures until they are fit to be returned to the wild can feel like an act of resistance, redress, even redemption.

But my simple sense of the justice of saving them was magnified by coming to see things about them I’d never otherwise have known.

‘There’s something inside humans when they’re faced with a helpless creature. We have an imperative. A duty.’

‘I believe most people, especially children, simply cannot see an animal suffer.’

Once people have seen a swift in the hand, they’re in awe of them.

It stares into the wind for a while, then starts shivering. Anticipation.

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.

‘Up! Up! Up!’ calls Judith.

You lay your hand flat on a billy goat’s forehead and push, just a little.

It’s a little like arm-wrestling, but much more fun.

The goat always wins.

He must have filed this information away.

He puts his hand against the goat’s forehead, with everyone watching.

He pushes really hard.

There’s a long silence broken only by the sound of photographers and journalists.

The goat gets up, stares at him and runs away.

The press pack never let him forget the time he pushed a goat over.

And it was all my fault.

You do such things when there’s no other thing that can be done.

There comes a point where you can’t even think about alternatives.

We have corralled the meanings of animals so tightly these days, have shuttled them into separate epistemologies that are not supposed to touch.

The nature of those truths were particular. They weren’t hard-won through therapeutic dialogue.

Every time I stopped moving the world dipped and swung and held itself in suspension around me.

With ravens or owls or hawks or bears; herons or cats, foxes, even butterflies.

They were encounters with animals that resolved themselves into personal truths.

The ostrich and the cattle were living animals with their own life-worlds and deserving of their own stories.

I had crawled through God knows how many cowpats en route – and I was close enough to see flies and eyelashes.

But there is always more.

The natural world is not, to me, a fabric of stuff that gleams with revelation of a singular creator god.

Those moments in nature that provoke in me a sense of the divine are those in which my attention has unaccountably snagged on something small and transitory.

What I feel is certainly the mysterious terror and awe of... the sense of something wholly other that renders me breathless and shaking.

There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find This Moment & it multiply, & when it once is found, It Renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed.

Part of the numinousness in these experiences of nature is how unpredictable they are.

In my experience if you go out hoping for revelation you will merely get rained upon.

I’ve found it easier... to encounter numinousness in a different way – in those moments where mystery arises from the meeting of human art and unpredictable natural phenomena.

The gift of the Radio Mayak interval melody was in how that melody reached me.

That recording stood even then for all the ways that age and distance corrode.

Listening to it felt like heresy.

"I thought animals were just like me."

"Rescuing animals made me feel good about myself; surrounded by them I felt less alone."

"The deepest lesson animals have taught me is how easily and unconsciously we see other lives as mirrors of our own."

"Animals don’t exist in order to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves."

"The more time spent researching, watching and interacting with animals, the more the stories they’re made of change, turning into richer stories with the power to alter not only what you think of the animal, but who you are."

"It’s not that creatures work as models for human lives – no one I know thinks that humans should spawn like wave-borne fish or subsist entirely on flies – but the more I’ve learned about animals the more I’ve come to think there might not be only one right way to express care, to feel allegiance, a love for place."

"The effort generates questions that are really about how different the world might be for a bat, not just how being a bat is different."

"Perhaps this is why I am impatient with the argument that we should value natural places for their therapeutic benefits. It’s true that time walking in a forest can be beneficial to our mental health. But valuing a forest for that purpose traduces what forests are: they are not there for us alone."

"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."

"When I looked at the rook and the rook looked at me, I became a feature of its world as much as it became a feature of mine."