During The Long Spring journeys I encountered my favourite mammal in only three places:  a distant sandy-pink coloured dog fox of the race silacea at the SEO/BirdLife reserve near Belchite, Aragón (pictured);   a bright red vulpes fox near Falköping, Sweden, and, during my periodic returns home to Yorkshire, monochrome glimpses of our local crucigera animals captured in infra-red light by my camera traps. This year, with the book safely packed off to Bloomsbury, I have been able to devote more time to my local foxes. 

​For one so ubiquitous in folk stories, myths and reality, it is a difficult animal to know.   Ours is a rural population, nocturnal, rarely seen, unlike the urban foxes that now inhabit many towns and cities in the UK.  Sometimes, it seems they wield strange powers: in 2011 Czech scientists discovered that foxes are somehow able to ‘see’ the Earth’s magnetic field, and use it for range-finding before pouncing on their prey.   My understanding of my elusive neighbours is almost entirely gleaned from footage recorded while I sleep:  

My two favourite pieces of fox literature are based on direct knowledge and experience of the animal, but make no pretence of understanding.  Instead, mystery and miscomprehension are the starting point for inner reflection, for a teasing out of the authors’ own self-awareness.

Rudolf Těsnohlídek's The Adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears appeared as a serialised comic-strip in the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny – People’s News – in 1920, inspiring the seventy year-old Leoš Janáček to write one of the 20th century’s best-loved operas.  The Czech word Bystroušky, sharp-ears, has a double meaning, synonymous with cunning.  The Cunning Little Vixen, as the opera eventually became known in English, transformed the originally comedic cartoon into a philosophical reflection on the cycle of life and death, and desire for a return to simplicity.
​
Ted Hughes’s The thought-fox is a poem about writing a poem. In a room late at night the poet is sitting alone at his desk. Outside the night is dark and silent, but the poet senses a presence ‘entering the loneliness.’  The night is the darkness of the poet’s imagination out of which a vague idea emerges.  It has no clear outline; it is not seen but sensed; it is compared to a fox, delicately sensing its way through the undergrowth.  The fox emerges only slowly out of the formlessness of the night.  The fox is the poem, and the poem is the fox:  ‘the page is printed.’  

Today I walked through the meadows of RSPB’s Adwick Washland, in the company of poets Brian Lewis and Matthew Clegg.  It was the final event for 2017 of a Ted Hughes festival based in nearby Mexborough, where Hughes grew up after moving from Mytholmroyd at age seven.  It was also a celebration of wildlife-rich meadows, today being National Meadows Day.  Brian and Matthew led a small group through a landscape whose history is one of change, where coal mining, farming, and wildlife have dominated in turn.  Old and new landscapes is a recurring theme in Brian’s work, in both miniature – Haiku and Tanka – and more extended form.  As the sun climbed higher, the air was suffused with skylark song, lapwings’ skirls, and the occasional ‘long scream of needle’ – as Ted Hughes put it - from swifts.
​
Matthew’s exploring of landscape through words does not, as he explained, always involve making a literal connection.  One reading, at a stone-built viewpoint between two areas of marshland, was of his reworking of the rallying speech from Aristophanes’ The Birds, entitled Hoopoe’s Cuckoo-song.  Birds, real and literary, were always close at hand, from recently-fledged avocets – a local success story – to the ones featured in the final short poem of the day.  In this, Matthew described a flock of starlings landing on high tension electricity cable: ‘their song is a kind of current, and the current is a kind of song.’

Hormone-disrupting pollutants in the urban rivers of South Wales may seem like a strange inspiration for an artwork.  But a Pontypridd artist has chosen to interpret the story of the dipper, and research by one of the UK’s leading pollution scientists, in a new and very personal work. 

River Canary is Tara Okon’s response to the discovery that decades after we thought Wales’s rivers had been cleaned up industry’s legacy is having adverse effects on the health and development of wild birds.

Tara, whose ink drawings have a geometric complexity reminiscent of her artistic hero M.C. Escher, uses a similar tessellation style to tell contemporary stories.  “I read about the impact of pollution on the dipper in an article by Professor Steve Ormerod, and something clicked.” 

Ormerod’s 35-year study of dippers showed that decades after the worst industrial and mining effluents had been cleaned from rivers like Tara’s local Taff, there is a lingering legacy.  The addition of newer chemicals creates a cocktail with surprising results.  Tara has noticed there are now more dippers on the Taff compared with years ago.  But Steve and his team at Cardiff University have found that urban dippers hatch fewer female chicks than those nesting in rural rivers nearby, while urban chicks are underweight compared with their rural counterparts.

My writing room looks out on a garden, and then across fields, to a rising Yorkshire hillside streaked with the remnants of a snowscape that has all but vanished overnight.  I am vaguely getting my eye in for the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch tomorrow, which has just been plugged by Radio 3.  At least 600,000 families are expected to join in, if recent years are anything to go by.

This annual celebration of the commonplace is one time when we reconnect with wildlife en masse. It is a positive that we can take out of the background trend of declining contact with nature; a note of hope that marks the end of a fortnight in which many of us have been reflecting on that sad and dangerous trend.

Positive News, the world’s first positive newspaper, can be relied upon to find inspiration in the loss of nature words from children’s vocabularies. Lucy Purdy, a London-based freelance journalist specialising in environmental and ethical issues, writes that “despite this, a new breed of writers and publications are using language, and new perspectives, to reinvigorate our relationship with the natural world.”

Lucy has written twice this week in response to our #naturewords campaign.  In New Internationalist Magazine, she surveys the current crop of nature-word champions like Dominick Tyler and Robert Macfarlane.  She concludes “At a time when systems and values crumble before us, using language to help craft a new story could be crucial. Words which stimulate and enrich. Our humiliated, hopeful humanness laid bare to the page.”

Dominick Tyler has himself been blogging about the Oxford Junior Dictionary.  Tyler’s  Landreader Project has been collecting words for landscape features, like jackstraw, zawn, clitter and logan, swash, cowbelly, hum and corrie, spinney, karst and tor.  Lucy Purdy describes it as a stirring synthesis of people and place. Already, more than 2,000 terms and words have been gathered, and in March Tyler will publish a book based on the project, titled Uncommon Ground.

In his latest blog, Tyler reflects on the list of words omitted from the OJD, which he considers as “a kind of prose-poetry supplement to be administered like a multivitamin as a defense against lexical malnutrition. Perhaps we can intone it to our children and, even better, seek out each of those things it names and show them.” 

Melissa Harrison writing in today’s Times explains why she put her name to a letter signed by 28 leading authors and thinkers: “to delist these words is to make the very things they represent begin to disappear because the process of putting words to things is how we begin a relationship with them.”

In Italy, English teacher and mother of twin girls Nadia Stevenson read about #naturewords with alarm, and wrote to author Rob Macfarlane, one of the twenty-eight who wrote to the Oxford University Press last week.  “I've been pondering all day as to what can be done. Although I'm just one small voice in the huge scheme of things, I have an immense love and esteem for the natural world of which we are part, as well as great hope for my daughters' futures.”

So two days ago Nadia set up a Facebook page Save Nature Words from Extinction.  On the page she writes:  “While we may choose to what extent technology is or isn't part of our lives, we cannot escape the fact that we ARE part of the natural world, it isn't an optional extra.” 

"Drumming" is the peculiar sound that snipe make when they display in diving flights across their marshland territories.  Hearing my first drumming snipe, when I was about thirteen, is one of the clearest of the many abiding memories of my early days as a birdwatcher.  So much so, that when I was asked to speak at Earth Music, a series of concerts broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 in 2011, I chose to read from a collection of essays, one of which featured this formative experience.  Below is an extract, but first, hear for yourself what this drumming sounds like.

Sky (extracts)

“The air was very pure and the sky was a faded blue with shining white clouds arranged like flights of angels. Towards evening, when the sun began to set the clear turquoise of the sky was beyond all imagined beauty.”  Diary of Dr. Katherine Heanley, Sept. 27th 1914, Manea

In my father’s land the only landmark is the sky.  If there were but one sign to pilot by, it would be a small shape, a ship-shaped silhouette, cut from an edge of sky where it meets the horizon.  This Ship of the Fens, or The Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Ely, has been the south pole of a hemisphere of cloud, water and soot-black soil these past fifty generations.

Here it is the sky that governs the mood of the ground beneath, and calibrates your sense of scale.  You might stand under a bright cumulus-laden sky, and it feels as though you are watching yourself from a great distance, standing at the horizon, The Ship of the Fens at your shoulder.  Under a slate sky, in a spotlight, ringed by the flat horizon, you are at the anonymous centre of all things.

Into this sky I watched a strange bird rise, only to plummet back into the field with a sound like a balsa-wood plane. 

Out of this sky, into this same field, a German plane fell one day.  It was May 1941.  My father heard about it as he was riding home from school, and by the time he’d pedalled to Welney anything removable had been taken by the local boys.  Almost thirty years later, all traces were long gone; but across a dull, smeared sky this strange balsa-bird arc’d over us both.  We had gone into the field to find lapwing nests; not, as my father would have done at my age, to harvest eggs, but just to look.

Neither my father nor I knew straight away what this bird was.  I had never seen such a disproportionate beak before, and the sound it made was the strangest I had encountered in all nature.  The Observer’s Book suggested woodcock, or maybe snipe, but S. Vere Benson’s descriptions of the calls seemed to rule them both out.  In the evening, in my room at The Crown at Outwell, I leafed diligently through the little book.  The various sandpipers and shanks didn’t look quite right, and no sound ascribed to them came close to that flat airborne bleat. I checked the snipe again, more thoroughly. This bleating, it turned out, was no cry from within, but a play of wind on tail-feather, a reed-instrument that rose from the reeds to deliver its vibrations across far meadows and wide open sky.


                                                           ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On a winter visit, the quiet would drop like a mallard as the sky itself fell drear, the better to reveal lonely lights in distant houses I barely noticed before.  Wigeon, siffling and back-biting only minutes earlier would repose themselves; flights of lapwing chose their spot and settled.  In the osiers below the bank blackbirds clucked and then didn’t.  For a while, a brief fermata, nothing stirred.  Then the nocturne, a delicate chorus of small sounds would start to sound from across vast acres.  First might be a gentle, nasal skirl from the midst of a small flock of lapwing.  From afar, a drake wigeon might siffle or his mate yap. A distant dog, or door-jamb, or other commonplace unnoticed in the light of day, would lend its voice and shorten the span of any silence.

In spring, walking back to Manea under a brighter darkness I would hear none of the wigeon of winter; the lapwings’ squealings would as often as not come from above, in a night-flight illuminated by faint pearl-shimmer on damp grass.  And higher still, and farther off, a dive-bombing snipe on a night raid would leave its tail-flaps open, and bleat like a child playing front-gunner, to land unseen while its feather-cry hangs in the clean air.  

The stunning For the Birds installation at the RSPB reserve at Ynys-hir has been taking shape over the last few days, as these photos show.  The 2km night-time walk among thirty wildlife-themed artworks opens today and runs until 5 October.  

For the Birds, a nighttime journey into a wild avian landscape.  New Site-specific works by sound and visual artists Jony Easterby, Mark Anderson, Kathy Hinde and Esther Tew at Ynys-hir RSPB reserve, Wales.

2-5 October, Ynys-Hir, nr Machynlleth, SY20 8TB

NATURAL LIGHT spoke to Kathy Hinde a few days before she set off to install For the BIrds - read the conversation in full here. 

It is night. The inside of an old upright piano hangs in a tree.  Film footage of birds is projected onto it and their wing beats generate a continually evolving musical score. Their movement is registered by a computer that responds by activating an array of tiny motors.  These tap the strings at the very spot where the birds’ shadows fall.  It is as if the birds themselves were creating the delicate music that emerges. 

This is Piano Migrations, an installation by Kathy Hinde, one of four artists creating For the Birds a spectacular night-time trail of light, sound and sculpture at the RSPB’s Ynys-hir reserve from 2-5 October.

Using LED and small speaker technology the artists are pioneering a high impact low energy spectacle. A thousand lights will wind their way through the landscape, leading into a unique spectacle of reflections and artistic interpretations on the life of birds. 

I managed to catch Kathy during a brief stop-over at her Bristol studio, fresh from the 90dB Festival in Rome and soon to head off to Wales with a version of Piano Migrations and assorted other bird-related artworks.  “I’m surrounded by weird machines” was her slightly breathless greeting to my phone call.

I wanted to hear more about For the Birds.  “It was Jony Easterby’s idea. He lives near Machynlleth and knows the reserve really well.”

Easterby brought a number of regular collaborators together – Esther Tew, Mark Anderson and Kathy, to co-create a celebration of birds.  “We are all artists who work a lot outdoors, in the midst of nature” explains Kathy.  “We are installing about 26 artworks along a two-kilometre walk.  We’ve worked together for a few years and know instinctively how our works will complement each other.  We’ll be putting the trail together over about ten days and our walk-throughs will enable us all to refine each other’s contribution.”

As for Kathy, her input revolves around the recurring themes of her work: the mapping of migratory routes, the relationship between man and technology and the effects of environmental change on nature.   Piano Migrations is a characteristic fusion of natural processes, low-tech and high tech.  “It changes all the time.  Wherever I take it I ask them to find me a ‘new’ broken piano so the sounds are always different.  And I love it when, as recently in Bavaria, they re-use the piano frame in an entirely different artwork afterwards.”

Using software developed by her partner Matthew Olden, Kathy experiments with different films of bird flight to create new versions.  “The first version used film I shot of house martins on telegraph wires.  It looked like music on a stave and that’s how the idea came to me.  I like to create systems that have their own behaviour – I compose by setting up the system but the actual music comes from the behaviours I can’t control.  The original house martin version of Piano Migrations is completely different to using film of cranes, which produce a much more graceful rhythmic pattern.”

I’ve noticed that cranes seem to feature a lot in her work, and I ask which came first, an interest in birds, or did that emerge through her art?

“I always spent a lot of time outdoors as a child, always in the woods.  But really my interest in birds has grown around my artistic practice.” 

And what is it with cranes?  “We made origami cranes at school and I loved it, I’ve been doing it ever since, making them flap their wings and everything.  Then in 2010 I spent sixteen hours in a hide in Hornborga, Sweden, with real cranes all around doing their dancing displays a few feet away from me.  One of my installations at Ynys-hir will be stainless steel ‘origami’ cranes with motors to make them move and lit up with special lighting.”

 “I love the whole idea of migration, and there being no borders.  There are lots of lovely metaphors.” Kathy then reveals that her great-grandmother was a migrant - arriving in Britain from Lithuania in 1901. “And my grandmother sold pianos in Wigan, so these connections mean a lot to me.”

So what other weird machines will she be taking to Wales? “I’m working on a bird imitating machine using Swanee whistles whose tails are controlled by computer.  I’m composing a piece for this machine but the prototype still needs improvement.”

It is only late in the conversation that I realise the Ynys-hir installation is for visiting after dark. “Ynys-hir has these amazing vistas over the estuary but we want to bring it to life at night, and create a different feel.

“I want people thinking about the sights and sounds of nature in different ways...”

“You seem to want to magnify everyday experiences of nature” I suggest. 

“Exactly, that’s a good way of putting it.  My motivation is to imbue a desire to care for the environment, but it’s implicit in the work that I make, it’s not something that I preach.  People have to get there themselves.”

For the Birds, a nighttime journey into a wild avian landscape.  New Site-specific works by sound and visual artists Jony Easterby, Mark Anderson, Kathy Hinde and Esther Tew at Ynys-hir RSPB reserve, Wales 

2-5 October, Ynys-Hir, nr Machynlleth, SY20 8TB