The Economist December 18th 2021 Holiday specials 55
From that point, as he writes in “The Nightingale”
(2020), he has come closer and closer to the birds. For
six weeks a year, in April and May when the nightin-
gale sings most ardently, Sam is “almost feral”. He is
nightingale-invisible in the woods, going barefoot and
wearing a woollen jacket that makes no sound in the
rain. No phone, no torch; he relies on instinct, and
finds his peripheral vision sharpened (as Baker did) to
a full circle of awareness, the view of the watching
bird. Every so often he falls into stillness, to take in the
feel of the woods. The best cover he has found, the
nightingale’s own choice, is a shell of thorns.
That song surprised him on first hearing. The
nightingale is traditionally the harbinger of summer,
longing and love. But what Sam heard was “mercurial,
spacious, gymnastic, brazen, exuberant...flamboyant,
histrionic and wounded”, all from a creature that sang,
like him, unaccompanied and alone. Nightingales
helped him with his improvisation. They also helped
him understand himself, because—like all great per-
formers—they seemed to expose and amplify what-
ever mood he had brought with him into the woods.
Gradually, instead of singing his human songs to
them, he began to lure them with sounds they would
understand. He approaches them now with harmonic
whistles in the same pitch as the birds’ song, and they
respond to him as to one of them. The tonality still
strikes him as acerbic and strange, but each time it be-
comes beauty, and then he wants nothing else.
With the nightingales, singing or listening, he feels
he is “spinning myself farther back into the web of na-
ture”. Thoughts are washed away and the bird “rinses
right through you”; there is a sense of dissolving, even
flying. Like d’Arrigo, like Baker, he loses for a time the
heaviness of human existence. Unlike them,he has
also discovered that men (and women) maycomeclos-
est to birds when they are simply whistling.nGreat raptors fascinate humans not only for the
way they fly but the way they see. Hawks spy from a
great height, hover, then “stoop”: plummeting on the
slightest sign of life. All the stranger, then, that the
man who most closely became a hawk in recent dec-
ades was a mild, pullover-wearing, short-sighted chap
who lived most of his life in Chelmsford, in Essex. As
he pursued the peregrine, which came to obsess him,
J.A. Baker had only foot and bicycle for transport. Yet in
winter, when peregrines came to Essex, he was out in
all weathers, bumping frantically along the lanes, run-
ning across fields, crawling through cover, to enter the
hawk’s world. As he wrote in “The Peregrine” (1967),
“The eye becomes insatiable for hawks.”
Soon, indeed, his way of looking and the hawk’s be-
came the same. He could view the land as if from a
height, flowing out “in deltas of piercing colour”. Step-
ping out each morning, always in the same clothes (for
so was the hawk), he would know “the way of the wind
and the weight of the air”. He shared the fear and exal-
tation of the bird, and its boredom as it waited for prey
to stir. In snow, he shared its solitariness.
His view of himself, too, was now the peregrine’s: a
hostile human shape, stumbling, unpredictable, with
trembling white hands. And his idea of time was the
hawk’s, “a clock of blood, and as you hunt...it contracts
inward, like a tightening spring”.
The hawk came to know him. But it would not share
its skill. This he had to sense vicariously, rejoicing in
its clever feints before its prey and its conjuring of ris-
ing flocks of panicking birds; picking out the laggards,
as the hawk did; marvelling at how it could flick a
fieldfare from its perch, “as lightly as the wind seizing
a leaf”, or strike a death blow so quickly that he missed
it, diving “as if hurled from the sky”.
Hawklike, he also sought out the kills. He admired
the beautiful butchery and noted, from the warmth
and wetness of the blood, how fresh the prey was. A
kill of a black-headed gull seemed so fresh and sweet
to him, “like a mash of raw beef and pineapple”, that he
could have eaten it himself. As he crouched over the
bodies he became a mantling hawk, watching for men.
He was no longer, at such times, a man himself.
Finding a hawk’s knobbly claw-prints in the snow, he
rested his own hand in them, a fellow being and com-
panion. Their bond was indefinable and impalpable,
but it was there: “the strange bondage of the eyes”. He
would shut his own and sink “into the skin and blood
and bones of the hawk”. After seeing the world through
those great brown targeting eyes, he dreaded being
“inglorious again”. But all too soon it was back to 20
Finchley Avenue, his wife Doreen, and tea.
The aerial masters screech, bicker and cry; the most
celebrated bird-musician, however, sings out of deep
cover, a small dull lark obscured by night. That secrecy
adds to the age-old preciousness of its song. Sam Lee, a
London-born folk-singer and conservationist, knows
where they are because for several years he has entered
their world and sung with them.
The bond was instant. When he first heard one
sing, it was “an otherworldly baptism”; in 2014 he be-
came a collaborator. He sang then for a radio broadcast
from the garden of Beatrice Harrison, a cellist who, 90
years before, had famously played as a nightingale
sang. Sam’s instrument was his voice, so he sang “The
Tan Yard Side”. As a nightingale joined him, he felt they
were in a wild and ancient conversation.
The
nightingale
is the
harbinger
of summer,
longing
and love→Angelo d’Arrigo