As I noted back in the summer, this blog has strayed somewhat from its original purpose. Crow Country, however, is one of the books which I took from Edinburgh to
Manchester as part of my project of reading the books I
already own. As some followers of this blog will know, Gregory and I have now moved again, this time to the Quaker Community in the beautiful Peak District (see www.quakercommunity.org.uk - as you can tell, hyperlinks are still beyond me). The eponymous books travelled with us, but have now been joined by many more of their fellows. We have more space in our new living quarters, and - surprise, surprise - Gregory has filled a certain amount of it with books. Finally he has fulfilled a life-long dream of having bookshelves made of planks laid on bricks, in the manner of a French intellectual or somesuch. The bricks were liberated from the bike shed adjacent to our previous home, where they had evidently been sitting in piles since the flats were built, and the planks were foraged from the considerable collection here at the community. The resulting shelves, I have to say, look great, and the joy of my husband was well worth the labour of transporting the bricks by van and wheelbarrow.
Despite this expansion of their numbers, my efforts to keep dipping into the original selection of about 150 books continue - and so to Crow Country. The inscription on the
flyleaf tells me that it was a present from Gregory's sister and brother-in-law
for Christmas 2007, shortly after its publication. G was deeply
impressed by it and spoke of it often, usually when flocks of rooks or jackdaws flew overhead while we were out walking. Finally I have picked it up myself.
Cocker first got interested in corvids - as the genus is called - when he moved with his family from Norwich to the countryside outside it. The ubiquity of the birds didn't put him off, and as he began to track their movements around the Yare Valley his attraction increased, almost to the point of obsession. Cocker's attempts to understand these most commonplace yet symbolically potent birds took him the length and breadth of the UK and through the pages of countless texts on the subject. Yet the image that remains from his book, for me, is of the author himself leaving his house at dusk, crossing the fields, searching for the right spot in which to station himself and waiting for the magical moment of the birds' departure for the nightly roost. There's so much fascinating detail in this book, and so much wonderful writing, that it's hard to choose an exemplary passage. This one, however, describing the dusk flight of a group of rooks and jackdaws, gives some flavour of the simplicity and intricacy that characterises Cocker's prose:
It begins almost casually. A single concentrated stream of birds breaks for the trees, the stands of trees that have remained almost unnoticed until this point. Inconsequential while the drama built all around them, the woods known as Buckenham Carrs have grown steadily darker with the onset of night. Now that they have moved centre stage they have become a brooding cavity in the landscape. The birds pour into the airspace above it in ever-growing numbers, and they mount the air until there are so many and the accompanying calls are so loud that I instinctively search for marine images to convey both the sea roar of sounds and the blurry underwater shapes of the flock. It becomes a gyroscope of tightly packed fish roiling and twisted by the tide; it has the loose transparent fluidity of a jellyfish, or the globular formlessness of an amoeba - one that spreads for a kilometre and a half across the heavens. (p. 4)
I read Crow Country while spending a week in the tiny Gloucestershire village where my father spends most of his time. I found myself choosing to go out for walks at around five or six o'clock in the afternoon: prime roosting time. I've often complained about people who stop and start when they walk - I prefer to keep the rhythm of my stride going, and get irritated if I can't do so - but on these excursions I found myself pausing, listening out for the crows, trying to
work out where they were coming from and where they were going, distinguishing
between rooks and jackdaws by their shape and call. None of this can be done whilst on the move - I had to stand still and pay attention. As I stopped for some minutes by a tree that was
obviously a roost, picking out the different sounds emanating from it, I reflected
that this was how Mark Cocker must have stood, gleaning the material for passages on the variety of the birds’ calls and how they reflect their
mood. I’ve known the Coln Valley for twenty-two
years, since I was twelve, but now it was becoming legible, alive: the birds
were more than background noise, the landscape more than a pleasant backdrop to my
own exercise-induced musings. Perhaps the greatest gift of nature
writers like Cocker is their habit of patient observation, the time they've spent honing the quality of their attention. Gregory is also a close observer of the natural world, and the most frequent recipient of my exhortations to just keep moving, but as I stood by that tree I had a glimpse of that elusive thing: the inner life of one’s partner. He would stand just like this, I thought, watching and listening, and this is what it feels like.
Nature writers sharpen our awareness of everything around us; and perhaps there's no true environmental witness without this kind of attention. Books like Cocker's invite us to
slow down enough to learn to read the natural world, and from there to
understand the smallness of our place in it.
Through them, the intelligence of other species becomes observable, as pattern layers itself on pattern and the infinite richness of life reveals itself. The same is true of the kind of environmental witness based on bringing care and attentiveness to everyday actions: being sufficiently present not to over-fill the kettle or
let it boil longer than it needs to, or any other of the endless ways in which
we can try not to take up quite so much space in the world. Can we slow down enough, then, to minimise the damage we do? Time, it turns out, is the currency of a slower, greener, more satisfying world. Time to spend with each other, so we don’t
need to consume to fill the gaps in our lives.
Time to grow vegetables and then cook them from scratch, time to make bread, time to gather
and chop wood. Time to go for a walk and appreciate what's out there. Time to read.
