NATURAL HISTORY: Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo By Michael McCarthyJohn Murray, 243pp, £16.99
‘FREE AS a bird” – we were reared on such sayings and they bore the weight of gospel truth. It took us some time to recognise how bound they were, our friends in the air, to the routes and routines of their migrations.
One of the revelations of Michael McCarthy's mesmerising book is how little we've known, until very recently, about the exact nature and extent of their journeys. While he concentrates on the 16 million birds that arrive every spring, under cover of darkness, in England, Scotland and Wales, after their odysseys from Africa, he reports how it wasn't until September 2007 that we had proof of an almost unimaginable flight: a wader, a bar-tailed godwit to be precise, weighing little more than a pound, set off from her breeding grounds in Western Alaska. Nine days later, nine days and nights on the wing, supported by tail winds and by the fat reserves that doubled her weight, she touched down in the temperate winter quarters of New Zealand. Seven and a quarter thousand milesof uninterrupted flight.
McCarthy, an award-winning journalist, suggests he’s no authority. He claims “mere competence” so he makes field trips with experts, and he infuses his meditations with the energy of urgent reporting. But the allure of this book is the sense of wonder with which almost every page is stamped.
His research ranges from the encyclopaedic Natural Historyof Pliny the Elder, who died near Pompeii in the fall out of the eruption of Vesuvius, through Shakespeare, to the pioneering studies of Gilbert White in 1797 and Eliot Howard who, a century later, confirmed the idea of birds' "territory" from the lessons of his friend Mark Cocker, to reports of scientific findings as up-to-date as last November. Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo is the best book about birds I've encountered since Cockers's Crow Country.
While his catalogue of statistics illustrates the decline in numbers of what we call “spring bringers”, those emblems of annual renewal, it’s the velocity of the decline that’s especially shocking. He calls one chapter simply “Vanishings” and attends in others to the cuckoo, the wood warbler, the turtle dove, and the swift. His description of the first time he held a nightingale, a bird that had assumed the aura of myth, trembles with infectious excitement.
He explores a pattern of behaviour that’s gone on since the last Ice Age, the twice-annual answer to a call by millions of creatures which, whether attuned to the earth’s curvature or its fields of gravity, or responsive to the stars and sun and moon – original masters of Sat Nav – voyage out of and back into Africa obeying the seasons’ commands. By straddling two continents they show us one world.
Now their paths can be followed and timed by ringing and reading, and by satellite tags. In earlier ages, observers believed their own eyes, even when they thought they couldn’t. Luck played its part. Before we knew the range of birds’ migrations, one Count Christian Ludwig von Bothmer noticed in 1822 a strange-looking stork on a roof near his castle on the Baltic Coast. And, naturally, keen to investigate and true to scientific procedures of the day, he shot the bird. It was then he discovered the cause of its odd appearance: there was embedded, the length of its neck and more, a three-foot arrow of sub-Saharan provenance.
The bird had been pierced some thousands of miles south of Mecklenburg but still honoured its impulse to propel itself north in the proper season, evidence for the first time that European migrants penetrated deepest Africa.
This is a book of fascinating explication – of how birds have evolved to divide the sky into strata to survive in its ecosystems, of how a sedge warbler can mimic 26 species, half of which remain in Africa but whose songs it carries to sing in England, and of how swifts circumnavigate storms by as much as 1,000 miles.
And then there’s the marvel of swifts, which, by pure instinct (though sometimes after much stalling), launch themselves from a height into air. That plunge is a parable of trust, and these relatives of the hummingbird spend the next three years on the wing until their first touchdown to nest and breed. They tread in the air.
I have yet to find a better report of the shenanigans and connivances of the cuckoo. How these brood parasites replicate the eggs of their host species, in turn imprinting their offspring so that they will lay in the nest of the same species, would put an advanced computer programme to shame.
McCarthy’s narrative of loss presages an end of birdsong, an eeriness invoked by the title of Rachel Carson’s watershed work Silent Spring (1962).
Oh I know, I know, it matters not one whit to most people if the yellow wagtail or spotted flycatcher suffer serious declines. It hardly matters at all even to those who can’t go for a walk in the parks or the woods without plugging their ears with their ipods. As much as the health of canaries employed in mines until 1987 were gauges of air quality, the birds embraced in this book are indicators of whether, to paraphrase Ted Hughes, the machine of the globe is still working.
This is not an ornithological study. It is a cultural one. We know a component of change is loss, but we have become too accustomed to accepting it in the natural world. We might take heart from McCarthy’s sense of wonder and our knowing that it’s shared – when those godwits complete their epic voyage to New Zealand the cathedral bells in Christchurch ring. This book could help ensure they continue to peal in celebration, announcing an arrival, and not strike the solemn knell that marks an irreversible going.
Peter Fallon’s most recent book of poems is The Company of Horses. He lives in Loughcrew in County Meath