I used to think smell was my most evocative sense, but increasingly over the last two decades it’s been birdsong. The mewing of eagles takes me back to a year in Greece, the screams of swifts or swallows to many places, the song of blackbird and thrush to the garden where my children grew up, the cawing of rooks and pigeons whoing to my prep school. And always they feel positive, even when the times they bring back so vividly were often quite sad. I think our response to birdsong goes very deep, and of course all the way to our beginnings. And now I sit in a beautiful French farmyard, and all I can hear are a dozen different birdsongs, but somehow all in the same conversation
At our place it is Orioles. They nest in our giant tulip poplar the last 5 years and even neighbors comment on their return. It's amazing how much life can be returned to a small patch by our human cooperation. This was a very dead yard when we came, just mowed regularly and "cleaned up", with a few landscape plants and some mature trees. We have been building soil, mulching, adding hundreds of new species, and leaving duff on the ground -- and now host a paradise of bird and insect life here. I feel the same relief, "The world still works!" It didn't take very long or very much expertise, just allowing things to get going again. Where I live we have sandy soil and the topsoil and forests were lost 200 yrs ago. People apply this dyed dark brown mulch around enormous potted plant specimens that have been stuck in the sand. Then they put up bird feeders and hire companies to spray their yard for ticks and mosquitoes, and spray the weeds that sprout in their driveway. It's such a picture of superficial values... wanting that bird song but being afraid of life and impatient of life's authentic processes. My heart aches for how lost we are!
Ordinary sparrows chirping in the garden my grandfather made in the middle of Queens, NY after becoming a refugee and losing everything to war. His garden was an oasis of Life, full of currants and raspberries he would turn into very sweet wine. We loved it.
He was a man of deep and abiding faith in God. Pardon the long excerpt from scripture but I can't help thinking of it when I remember the sparrows and him and his garden.
Matthew 10: 26-31
“So do not be afraid of them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. 27 What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs. 28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. 29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.[b] 30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows."
Jun 9, 2022·edited Jun 9, 2022Liked by Paul Kingsnorth
I wanted to comment, and subscribed specifically just so I could do so! I'm sitting on my back deck facing the woods, barely coherent because of the birdsong cacophony! I just read your article aloud to my wife so she could appreciate your writing, too, Paul. We're surrounded by several feeding finches (house, purple and red), red-winged blackbirds who sing like referee's whistles, six cardinal pairs who chip-chip as they hang on the feeder, wrens who sing loudly & repeatedly before entering the birdhouse near the deck, doves who coo on the ground, and the woodpecker who hammers away at the metal water heater vent on the roof, trying to wow the ladies, which makes him sound to me like a Wehrmacht MG-42 machine gun nest in WW2.
Aren't we lucky! It still works! When I think about it I never deserved mine. That's a good story of yours about the creative mind. And birds. I went through a difficult spell with wrong-headed direction many years ago when actual birds intervened on successive occasions. They got my attention thank goodness, though one or two at some cost to themselves. I was somewhat chastened.
Funny, but I woke with an oddball dream this morning, as vivid as any actual sunny moment in June. I was at the top of a tall old-fashioned building looking through an open window to a lawn a good distance below where there was a scatter of people and some old-fashioned hens who were scratting around normally. Directly in front and close to me, was the top of a beautiful tall tree and a young white hen happily walking about on the branches. She decided to join the others below, skipped into the air and with her short wings cleared the top branches and glided down. It was fairly steep and the final landing was by arranging herself more like a parachute. The other hens took no notice, but the people on the lawn, and me looking down, spontaneously applauded in congratulation. A nice note to wake up to.
Recently I have started to see the birds all around us as angels.... with a nice flavour of peace and hope. Though the three young magpies that are squatting in the holy holly tree wake me early with their morning kerfuffal, and they are plotting murder and feasting as far as the pigeons nest is concerned. Thanks for being who you are Paul. Have great family holydays.
Earlier today I was admiring four old male ducks who were lingering in the sun. The bright color on their heads had dimmed with age, and one of them was limping. Their beaks were busy cleaning feathers. Then they rose, shook their feathers and settled down. I felt a wave of calm wash over me.
In 2019, something terrible happened at our house: the birds disappeared. There was a conspicuous absence of birdsong that began in late spring and lasted the rest of the year. The only ones that remained were the crows in autumn. We live across from an Audubon sanctuary, so it was even more strange. I asked everyone I knew what could be happening. Tried to find answers online, to no avail. That January, the “plague” came. Later, I finally found out that birds will disappear ahead of major catastrophes. They will also commit suicide by flying en masse into buildings. This is called “bird strike”. It was one of the worst phenomena I’ve experienced. It will definitely make its way into one of my books at some point.
One of the first things I noticed and appreciated about the old farm I moved to in 2010 was the barn swallows. Swooping in and out every evening in a graceful dance - it's impossible not to grin and watch them in amazement. It's ok that they poop all over our tractors, crates and other equipment. They got here first, and I hope they stay forever!
When the Machine and Progress get what they want, the birds disappear. I’m in Texas, USA, and the housing industry here works like this: a company buys a tract of pasture/forest land, knocks down all the trees, bulldozes everything, then puts in streets and builds houses in a barren wasteland. Right before selling the houses, they might put a little sapling (looks like a dead stick) in some of the front yards... if you’re lucky. The result: no birds, no insects, no wildlife at all. Just a dead silence. (Is it the same everywhere, or not?)
This is why, when we were house hunting years ago, we didn’t even consider any neighborhood or development less than 30 years old. We have tall pine trees and mature oaks and elms, and there are birds and insects and squirrels galore. Woodpeckers, cardinals, bluejays, mockingbirds, falcons/raptors I can’t identify cuz they’re too fast, vultures/buzzards which perform valuable cleaning services but which I still view with antagonism since they threaten to carry off our ducks if our geese look away for a moment, and many small species birds I’m not clever enough to know the names of. I love it here in our wonky old house in the populated forest. There’s always some tweeting going on (the real kind) or whistling, chirping, screeching, honking, and quacking. It’s comforting and right.
As the years pass, I’m getting angrier about the way “progress” destroys life. With each new neighborhood I see going up, I feel sadder for people who don’t experience birdsong every day, for kids who grow up listening to doors slamming and people shouting and engines running but not birds singing. What kind of a childhood is that? What does it do to their psyches, to their souls? Damn the Machine, please, God.
My wife and I have the inverse experience to returning birds — we're enjoying our first spring full of birds at the back porch, thanks to our first feeders there. So far, we count wrens, tit-mice, robins, cardinals, wrens, cat-birds, chickadees, finches, and one gigantic blue jay. It's a pleasure to spot them throughout the day and the evening, but this thread also has me looking forward to their (first return) next spring.
We have an illustrated book of 250 different North American birds, accompanied with a slim speaker and simple dial that will play a recorded call or song for each bird. My sons will sit for long periods with this book and have memorized some of the calls. A favorite is one of the owls: “Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all!” is the translation(?) for us earth-bound humans. So Teddy, the five year-old walks around the yard calling this out, hoping owls will come home to roost. We’ve had other children visiting in our home lately, and they’ve all sat with the book, methodically listening to each song and replaying favorites–the Common Loon and a Puffin are popular with boys, I’ve noticed. All that to say–something that still “works” in my little world is that children can still be fascinated by fairly simple and natural things, given the chance. It delights me to see them delighted in the bird calls and paying attention to the birds in our yard, trying to decipher who’s who out there in the trees. Happy spring/summer to everyone!
This made me think of the following lines from Lawrence's Women in Love: “Do you think that creation depends on man! — It merely doesn’t. There are the trees and the grass and birds. I much prefer to think of the lark rising up in the morning upon a humanless world. — Man is a mistake, he must go.— There is the grass, and hares and adders, and the unseen hosts, actual angels that go about freely when a dirty humanity doesn’t interrupt them—and good pure-tissued demons: very nice[…] If only man was swept off the face of the earth, creation would go on so marvellously, with a new start, non-human. Man is one of the mistakes of creation—like the ichthyosauri. — If only he were gone again, think what lovely things would come out of the liberated days;—things straight out of the fire[…] believe in the proud angels and the demons that are our fore-runners. They will destroy us, because we are not proud enough. The ichthyosauri were not proud: they crawled and floundered as we do. — And besides, look at elder-flowers and bluebells—they are a sign that pure creation takes place—even the butterfly. But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage—it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings. It is anti-creation[.]”
Very much in line with what Pentti Linkola was stating for decades. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Linkola was an ornithologist. He loved all of Creation except for humans and feral cats, the two great enemies of birds.
It is remarkable that governments across the world are pushing for population expansion!!! They claim that without population growth, the generations of today will suffer, but the reality is that if there is not a rapid decline in population, everything that lives on this planet, and even the planet itself is in peril.
Back to Lawrence:
“There are too many people on earth
insipid, unsalted, rabbity, endlessly hopping.
They nibble the face of the earth to a desert.”
Bad times are a comin, bad times are a comin. The best we can do is to gather together into monastic communities where we can commune with what is left of nature, and pray to the Divine in all of Its manifestations.
God bless you and your's, Paul
I used to think smell was my most evocative sense, but increasingly over the last two decades it’s been birdsong. The mewing of eagles takes me back to a year in Greece, the screams of swifts or swallows to many places, the song of blackbird and thrush to the garden where my children grew up, the cawing of rooks and pigeons whoing to my prep school. And always they feel positive, even when the times they bring back so vividly were often quite sad. I think our response to birdsong goes very deep, and of course all the way to our beginnings. And now I sit in a beautiful French farmyard, and all I can hear are a dozen different birdsongs, but somehow all in the same conversation
At our place it is Orioles. They nest in our giant tulip poplar the last 5 years and even neighbors comment on their return. It's amazing how much life can be returned to a small patch by our human cooperation. This was a very dead yard when we came, just mowed regularly and "cleaned up", with a few landscape plants and some mature trees. We have been building soil, mulching, adding hundreds of new species, and leaving duff on the ground -- and now host a paradise of bird and insect life here. I feel the same relief, "The world still works!" It didn't take very long or very much expertise, just allowing things to get going again. Where I live we have sandy soil and the topsoil and forests were lost 200 yrs ago. People apply this dyed dark brown mulch around enormous potted plant specimens that have been stuck in the sand. Then they put up bird feeders and hire companies to spray their yard for ticks and mosquitoes, and spray the weeds that sprout in their driveway. It's such a picture of superficial values... wanting that bird song but being afraid of life and impatient of life's authentic processes. My heart aches for how lost we are!
Ordinary sparrows chirping in the garden my grandfather made in the middle of Queens, NY after becoming a refugee and losing everything to war. His garden was an oasis of Life, full of currants and raspberries he would turn into very sweet wine. We loved it.
He was a man of deep and abiding faith in God. Pardon the long excerpt from scripture but I can't help thinking of it when I remember the sparrows and him and his garden.
Matthew 10: 26-31
“So do not be afraid of them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. 27 What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs. 28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. 29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.[b] 30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows."
May the sparrows and his memory be eternal ☦️
I wanted to comment, and subscribed specifically just so I could do so! I'm sitting on my back deck facing the woods, barely coherent because of the birdsong cacophony! I just read your article aloud to my wife so she could appreciate your writing, too, Paul. We're surrounded by several feeding finches (house, purple and red), red-winged blackbirds who sing like referee's whistles, six cardinal pairs who chip-chip as they hang on the feeder, wrens who sing loudly & repeatedly before entering the birdhouse near the deck, doves who coo on the ground, and the woodpecker who hammers away at the metal water heater vent on the roof, trying to wow the ladies, which makes him sound to me like a Wehrmacht MG-42 machine gun nest in WW2.
Aren't we lucky! It still works! When I think about it I never deserved mine. That's a good story of yours about the creative mind. And birds. I went through a difficult spell with wrong-headed direction many years ago when actual birds intervened on successive occasions. They got my attention thank goodness, though one or two at some cost to themselves. I was somewhat chastened.
Funny, but I woke with an oddball dream this morning, as vivid as any actual sunny moment in June. I was at the top of a tall old-fashioned building looking through an open window to a lawn a good distance below where there was a scatter of people and some old-fashioned hens who were scratting around normally. Directly in front and close to me, was the top of a beautiful tall tree and a young white hen happily walking about on the branches. She decided to join the others below, skipped into the air and with her short wings cleared the top branches and glided down. It was fairly steep and the final landing was by arranging herself more like a parachute. The other hens took no notice, but the people on the lawn, and me looking down, spontaneously applauded in congratulation. A nice note to wake up to.
v. best for the holiday
Recently I have started to see the birds all around us as angels.... with a nice flavour of peace and hope. Though the three young magpies that are squatting in the holy holly tree wake me early with their morning kerfuffal, and they are plotting murder and feasting as far as the pigeons nest is concerned. Thanks for being who you are Paul. Have great family holydays.
I like songbirds. They're quite tasty.
The bigger birds that attack cats, not so much. I don't think they quite understand the natural order of things.
Earlier today I was admiring four old male ducks who were lingering in the sun. The bright color on their heads had dimmed with age, and one of them was limping. Their beaks were busy cleaning feathers. Then they rose, shook their feathers and settled down. I felt a wave of calm wash over me.
In 2019, something terrible happened at our house: the birds disappeared. There was a conspicuous absence of birdsong that began in late spring and lasted the rest of the year. The only ones that remained were the crows in autumn. We live across from an Audubon sanctuary, so it was even more strange. I asked everyone I knew what could be happening. Tried to find answers online, to no avail. That January, the “plague” came. Later, I finally found out that birds will disappear ahead of major catastrophes. They will also commit suicide by flying en masse into buildings. This is called “bird strike”. It was one of the worst phenomena I’ve experienced. It will definitely make its way into one of my books at some point.
I am glad for you to go on holiday. Your voice is vital and needs to be taken care of!
One of the first things I noticed and appreciated about the old farm I moved to in 2010 was the barn swallows. Swooping in and out every evening in a graceful dance - it's impossible not to grin and watch them in amazement. It's ok that they poop all over our tractors, crates and other equipment. They got here first, and I hope they stay forever!
When the Machine and Progress get what they want, the birds disappear. I’m in Texas, USA, and the housing industry here works like this: a company buys a tract of pasture/forest land, knocks down all the trees, bulldozes everything, then puts in streets and builds houses in a barren wasteland. Right before selling the houses, they might put a little sapling (looks like a dead stick) in some of the front yards... if you’re lucky. The result: no birds, no insects, no wildlife at all. Just a dead silence. (Is it the same everywhere, or not?)
This is why, when we were house hunting years ago, we didn’t even consider any neighborhood or development less than 30 years old. We have tall pine trees and mature oaks and elms, and there are birds and insects and squirrels galore. Woodpeckers, cardinals, bluejays, mockingbirds, falcons/raptors I can’t identify cuz they’re too fast, vultures/buzzards which perform valuable cleaning services but which I still view with antagonism since they threaten to carry off our ducks if our geese look away for a moment, and many small species birds I’m not clever enough to know the names of. I love it here in our wonky old house in the populated forest. There’s always some tweeting going on (the real kind) or whistling, chirping, screeching, honking, and quacking. It’s comforting and right.
As the years pass, I’m getting angrier about the way “progress” destroys life. With each new neighborhood I see going up, I feel sadder for people who don’t experience birdsong every day, for kids who grow up listening to doors slamming and people shouting and engines running but not birds singing. What kind of a childhood is that? What does it do to their psyches, to their souls? Damn the Machine, please, God.
My wife and I have the inverse experience to returning birds — we're enjoying our first spring full of birds at the back porch, thanks to our first feeders there. So far, we count wrens, tit-mice, robins, cardinals, wrens, cat-birds, chickadees, finches, and one gigantic blue jay. It's a pleasure to spot them throughout the day and the evening, but this thread also has me looking forward to their (first return) next spring.
We have an illustrated book of 250 different North American birds, accompanied with a slim speaker and simple dial that will play a recorded call or song for each bird. My sons will sit for long periods with this book and have memorized some of the calls. A favorite is one of the owls: “Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all!” is the translation(?) for us earth-bound humans. So Teddy, the five year-old walks around the yard calling this out, hoping owls will come home to roost. We’ve had other children visiting in our home lately, and they’ve all sat with the book, methodically listening to each song and replaying favorites–the Common Loon and a Puffin are popular with boys, I’ve noticed. All that to say–something that still “works” in my little world is that children can still be fascinated by fairly simple and natural things, given the chance. It delights me to see them delighted in the bird calls and paying attention to the birds in our yard, trying to decipher who’s who out there in the trees. Happy spring/summer to everyone!
This made me think of the following lines from Lawrence's Women in Love: “Do you think that creation depends on man! — It merely doesn’t. There are the trees and the grass and birds. I much prefer to think of the lark rising up in the morning upon a humanless world. — Man is a mistake, he must go.— There is the grass, and hares and adders, and the unseen hosts, actual angels that go about freely when a dirty humanity doesn’t interrupt them—and good pure-tissued demons: very nice[…] If only man was swept off the face of the earth, creation would go on so marvellously, with a new start, non-human. Man is one of the mistakes of creation—like the ichthyosauri. — If only he were gone again, think what lovely things would come out of the liberated days;—things straight out of the fire[…] believe in the proud angels and the demons that are our fore-runners. They will destroy us, because we are not proud enough. The ichthyosauri were not proud: they crawled and floundered as we do. — And besides, look at elder-flowers and bluebells—they are a sign that pure creation takes place—even the butterfly. But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage—it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings. It is anti-creation[.]”
Very much in line with what Pentti Linkola was stating for decades. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Linkola was an ornithologist. He loved all of Creation except for humans and feral cats, the two great enemies of birds.
It is remarkable that governments across the world are pushing for population expansion!!! They claim that without population growth, the generations of today will suffer, but the reality is that if there is not a rapid decline in population, everything that lives on this planet, and even the planet itself is in peril.
Back to Lawrence:
“There are too many people on earth
insipid, unsalted, rabbity, endlessly hopping.
They nibble the face of the earth to a desert.”
Bad times are a comin, bad times are a comin. The best we can do is to gather together into monastic communities where we can commune with what is left of nature, and pray to the Divine in all of Its manifestations.