Conservancy Book Review 4
Vespers in Flight, by Helen MacDonald
Carey Benham, Trustee, Kiawah Conservancy
If you’re searching for a book to relish slowly and savor – like a piece of good chocolate – then read Vespers in Flight, by Helen MacDonald, a superb collection of forty-one essays which explore the author’s sense of awe, pathos, and wonder when encountering animals or exploring nature. MacDonald’s prose is poetry in itself, descriptive, flowing, simple but forceful, and sometimes heart-breaking. This is not a light-hearted book, but I found her writing very rich and her tone revelatory and meditative: each essay transports you to a realization or a discovery about yourself in relation to the natural world.
Taken together, the essays give you glimpses of MacDonald’s life as a science historian, an understanding of her erudite knowledge, and her multitude of experiences in the outdoors, particularly with birds. She is the author of a previous book, H is for Hawk, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction, which is about her experience training a goshawk, a very difficult and unsettling endeavor, but something she chose to do to while grieving the loss of her father.
The subjects of two essays, “High Rise,” and “Vesper Flights,” are redolent of one of our most precious wildlife species here on Kiawah: the beloved red knots who make their way to the shores of Kiawah each spring to rest and feed during their long 9,000 mile journey from South America to the Arctic. In “High Rise,” MacDonald, equipped with her binoculars, joins a Cornell researcher on the top of the Empire State Building to observe the seasonal night flights of migrating birds. In “Vesper Flights,” the essay title given to the book, she gives us a fascinating tutorial on the flight of swifts who ascend up to 8,000 feet in the evenings (Latin word for evening is “vesper”) and who stay in the air for months at a time without landing.
Besides her lifelong study and love of nature, there is another reason MacDonald composed these essays. She believes that literature owes the world a description of what is happening to the environment, up close and in real time, that we need literature to communicate all about the animals that are going extinct, and that we are indeed going through the sixth great extinction – and it is caused by us. She emphasizes, “We have lost half of the world’s wildlife in our lifetime.” She writes that “literature can teach us the qualitative texture of the world. And we need it to. We need to communicate the value of things so that more of us might fight to save them.”
This “qualitative texture” is what MacDonald offers so splendidly in her writing. In many instances in the book, a revelation occurs after the moment she encounters an animal, from close by or far away. She has the ability to create heart-breaking empathy for a swan that swims out of a park pond and curls up to sleep at her feet, for a falcon chick still in its egg ready to hatch, who chirps back at MacDonald through its shell, for a wild boar that she meets through a fence, for a hunting dog running past her, lost from its pack, and for a rescued baby bird, a swift, who having never flown yet in its brief life, is gently released to fly away into the evening sky.
I think all of MacDonald’s essays will appeal to readers, but one in particular resonates with me, perhaps because of memories of my childhood and the outdoors – or maybe because of the loss of habitats we have seen not only on this island but all over the world. In “Tekel Park,” she delivers a poignant description of a meadow and its environs, near her childhood home. The area was filled with a profusion of different insects, including common blue, small skipper, grizzled skipper, marbled white and small copper butterflies, grasshoppers, white moths, and ants. A diversity of flowers, wild herbs, wavy grasses, plants, shrubs and trees abounded. As a shy loner in childhood who reveled in the outdoors, she explored every inch of this habitat with her “Zeiss Jena 8×30 Jenoptem binoculars.”
She said that she knew the meadow intimately, lying in the grass, watching the insects the size of “a dot over an i” and looking up “to prospect for birds in the thick cumulus rubble of the sky.” She writes, “I was allowed to roam unchallenged because everyone here knew me – though they’d have quiet words with my parents after they’d yet again spotted me knee-deep in the middle of the pond looking for newts, or walking past the guesthouse with a big grass snake, two feet of supple khaki and gold twined about my arms….I didn’t know how unusual my freedom was but I knew what it had given me. It had turned me into a naturalist.”
She moved from this area in the 1990s and returned a decade later to find the meadow very similar to what it was, “impossible, miraculous, still crowded with life.” But then she returned again when she was in her 40s. To her profound dismay and disquiet, she found the meadow had been treated like a lawn, mowed repeatedly, until “the exuberant moving life I’d known and loved was gone.” She mournfully writes, “I cried when I saw it: a woman weeping not for her childhood, not really, but for everything that had been erased from this place.” From there she comes to the realization that the owner who had stripped the meadow of its diversity of life was probably a nice man and simply did not know what was there, and that the world is full of people like this, making the world into what they think it should be, “burning huge parts of it to the ground, utterly and accidentally destroying things in the process without even knowing they are doing so. And that any of us might be doing that without knowing it, any of us, all the time.”
This came home to me as a deep and perceptive illustration of human nature in relation to the environment today and why many on Kiawah support the efforts of the Kiawah Conservancy to protect the lands and wildlife species that define our community.
Thankfully, in this essay, and throughout the book, there is always a resounding note of hope. She concludes, “I think of the meadow. Those clouds of butterflies have met with local extinction, but held in that soil is a bank of seeds that will hang on….for a very long time,” inferring, of course, that seeds might be allowed to germinate there again, evolving into a habitat for the butterflies and all of the other plants and animals. Of the meadow, she says, it 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.”
Please read this book. Because of MacDonald’s magical prose, her ability to describe and elucidate the miraculous lives of plants and animals, this book awakened in me deep feelings of appreciation for our natural world around us, a sense of mourning for what we are losing, but also hope that we can still do something to save species in the midst of climate change.