Fledgling

The young birds in the garden are doing really well. Yesterday there were as many as six little Blue Tits on the feeders or at the bird bath at once. There’s just one Great Tit now, there are not so many sparrows, even the Jackdaws are fewer in number, as is to be expected at this time of year. The Great Spotted Woodpeckers are still coming and there’s at least one Greenfinch still which calls more or less non-stop, all day. I wondered if there was something wrong with him and thought that it must be exhausting, but that it seems is what they do. There’s also a juvenile Robin – they look like small Song or Mistle Thrushes to me at this stage. When I sit outside I am much closer to the feeders which means some of the birds stay away, but the Blue Tits are bold and don’t seem to worry and some of the others are beginning to follow suit.

The Robin

Blue Tit

The buddleia is now in full bloom and butterflies are feasting on it. Mostly Peacocks, but also Small Whites and a Comma.

A Brimstone after I first posted:

This, incidentally, has pretty much taken over a small container pond, but I don’t mind because it’s so attractive – Horsetail of some sort.

Hannah Bourne Taylor, Fledgling, Aurum, 2023 (the paperback edition).

I mentioned the author and her campaign for Swift bricks here:

Wildlife Miscellany: Octopuses, Elephants, Beagles, Swifts, a Badger and more – Animal Wild

“We can help by installing nest boxes and callers, and listening to Hannah Bourne-Taylor of the famous 2022 Feather Speech, asking simply for (cheap) swift bricks to be made compulsory in all new housing developments. She has been tireless in spite of every setback and disappointment. But even though the building trade is in favour, the mandatory element looks to be withdrawn: the Reform party is against it and Labour are scared that they will be labelled as “woke”. Depressing and pathetic.”

The Feather Speech was delivered at the end of an almost naked walk through London wearing little but impressive body paint in the form of a Swift.

Her efforts have been knocked back yet again. It’s clear the government doesn’t care about nature and wildlife, as many are saying, but I think it goes further and deeper than that. They seem actually to hate it, like the worst farmers. The parliamentary debate about driven grouse shooting was a sick joke. The shooting lobbyists simply lie. It is no coincidence that the majority of Hen Harrier persecutions happen near or on the barren wastelands of grouse moors. The RSPB confirms, although I wish they would stop using the word “gamebird”. The lobbyists deliberately conflate the number of Hen Harrier chicks being born with the overall population of breeding adults, but the numbers do not correlate. The average life expectancy of a young Hen Harrier in the UK is just 121 days. And the baseline is very, very low. Like the hunting lobby, they try to set the debate as one between rural and urban communities but they simply do not have the rural support they claim, especially in areas directly affected, whether by smoke from the moor burnings, the noise and upset of the shoots themselves, or hunt chaos and trespass.

Fledgling is a book I looked forward to returning to and William Boyd, no less, describes it on the front cover as entrancing and The Observer as poetic, but there were elements I found pretty irritating. Certainly her descriptions of Ghana are full of colour and life, but she wildly overuses similes in sentence after sentence and often veers towards the purple and overly florid.

Hannah Bourne-Taylor has followed her husband who has found work in Ghana and she finds herself lonely and depressed in Accra. Her writing about this is very introspective and I found rather self-indulgent. I do not wish to be unsympathetic but she might have thought of this in advance and found some self-reliance and something to do. She is ‘saved’ by rearing firstly a Swift and then a Bronze-Winged Mannikin Finch. She moves heaven and earth for them and develops intimate relationships, which is unusual with wild birds and frowned on at wildlife rescues (if animals become too used to humans, do not perceive them as a threat, their chances of survival will be slim). Her devotion though is admirable.

There are anomalies. She knows the rule about keeping physical contact to an absolute minimum and mentions breaking it on page 80, but by then she has already done so multiple times.

She is very good on bird’s nest soup – yet another example of the persecution of animals, especially in China, for supposed rejuvenation and sexual prowess in humans. But there is no nutritional value nor even much flavour in the product of this multi-million-dollar industry which has spawned huge concrete buildings purely to establish harvests.

I am with her on Audubon too. His monumental The Birds ofAmerica which now sells for huge sums was her favourite book as a child but is now forever tarnished by the knowledge that he had killed every bird he painted.

She releases the Swift having formed a close bond. It is almost immediately killed and eaten by a Marsh Harrier. Of course I understand her sadness, but as one friend said to me, “a bad day for the Swift, but a good day for the raptor”. After that she cannot bear to watch Swifts at all. Come on now. Thereafter raptors are described as sinister and “casually ready to kill”, but Swifts are killers and consumers of insects and presumably don’t feel too bad about it.

Sometimes there’s way too much detail. Collecting dead snakes she first puts them into plastic bags “that had once brought pâté and Cheddar from Sainsbury’s”. Stopping at a roadside garage with a pangolin who was on his way to being released, she describes the garage as “a dirty, noisy, concrete place that smelt of petrol” – well, they usually are and they usually do.

It concerns me, as someone who regularly feeds fledglings at a wildlife rescue, that she does not seem to know (if she does she really should mention it for the benefit of others) that finches are unusual amongst songbirds because they will continue to gape for food even when sated. Other birds will obviously lose interest, almost I have sometimes thought looking at you as though to say “Why are you still offering me food, you idiot?” That is why at HART Wildlife Rescue finches are staff only – the amounts they are fed have to be very precisely monitored. I only learnt this recently myself but then I am not the author of a book which could be read as a manual on how to raise fledglings. Feeding a group of young Starlings at HART a few weeks ago, far from forming a bond with them, I became convinced that one of them in particular absolutely wanted to kill me.

At a vet’s practice in Accra, someone asks her why she bothers at all with ‘her’ finch, such a common bird. This leaves her “contorted with despair.” It’s like her grief for the Swift. I have no problem with people grieving for animals just as they would for a human (I do this myself) but you do have to pull yourself together and move on if you are going to be of any use to other animals in need of help, no matter how hopeless things sometimes seem for wildlife.

I am not entirely comfortable with the rather scathing nature of this review but she just takes things too far, perhaps this is down to her avowed mental health issues. At grand receptions she attends with her husband, she dare not tell the truth about what she does (“nothing” at one point, she says) because it leads to “unbearable, awkward silences”. When she gets home, she dissolves into tears. There are worse problems.

There are a fair few typos too. “Base” when she means “bass” in a musical context at least once and arguably twice, for example, and “a way” instead of “away” which should have been an easy spot for a proofreader.

Some of the book is very moving. Especially the tales of the rescue dog Shoebill and her reunion with the finch long after he had been released and joined the flock. He showed “a flicker of recognition” and they chirped to each other. “For a moment, I was made of sunlight.” And there’s a lovely quote from Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798’: “Nature never did betray, The heart that loved her”.

Three references inspired me to do a little research.

There’s mention of the Harmattan. When I was in Ghana, which I adored (the country and the people), and did not want to leave, see Animal Wild, the owner of the hotel where we stayed in magical Busua had written a poem about it. It’s a dry trade wind occurring between November and March, carrying huge amounts of dust from the Sahara. It does a lot of damage and the haze can block the sun for days at a time.

I had forgotten about tardigrades, microscopic creatures which are resilient to great extremes of heat and cold, pressure, even radiation. Incredibly, they can survive in outer space as well as without nutrition or water. They suspend their metabolism, entering a state of “cryptobiosis” and they fascinate scientists.

Finally Maria Sibylla Merian, 1647-1717, “one of the first naturalists to observe insects directly”. I had not heard of her. She painted them too and was the first to recognise entire lifecycles. Some dismissed her observations as wild fantasies. In short, beginning with silkworms, she was the discoverer of metamorphosis (as opposed to spontaneous generation as was commonly thought at the time). The illustrations to her De europische Insecten are gorgeous.