Bethan Roberts chats to acclaimed nature writer and birdwatcher Tim Dee about writing nature, books and birds, and literature and science.

  

BR: Hello Tim. It's wonderful to have you here with us in Liverpool, even if a gull did - somewhat fittingly - defecate on your shoe immediately upon your arrival. To begin, I was wondering if you could you say something about your experience of birdwatching. You’ve written a lot about the relationship between birds and what other people have written about them. Is that on your mind out in the field?

TD: I think the primal thing is still the encounter, which is driven by the naming urge, the identification urge. That’s the place you come into nature, a kind of contact to the point of identification, which I’ve been doing ever since I was a little boy really, when I first got switched on to birds. I feel anything to do with an internalised or subjective version of that species is secondary. Anything else is subsequent to naming, but it does happen almost simultaneously. So, I’m also looking at the context, I suppose, which is partly assisting identification. You know what time of year it is, the type of landscape and habitat, that’s fuelling your thinking about what birds you might be seeing and what birds you do end up seeing. But then once you’ve got the bird named you might have a chance to think of the bird in situ and that has a different sort of excitement and different sort of connection. Partly it chimes with previous encounters with this bird. Naming is fuelled by that as well, but every time you see a wood warbler, say, a beautiful spring migrant, denizen of west country oak woodlands, every wood warbler you see somehow tops up all the other wood warblers you’ve seen, and accumulates, so that then might release something beyond naming and beyond the beautiful facticity of the thing (while that still remains the entry point). What goes beyond it is both the connection with previous experience, it’s all to do with your own life and where you’ve seen these birds before and how many more you have to see in your life and all those sorts of things, along then with some little spark sometimes of other people’s accounts of it, or your excitement at connecting with something you know has been significant in other ways to other people. The wood warbler hasn’t really penetrated enormously into the literature of the British Isles, although we do know that Gilbert White was the first person to separate the willow warbler from the chiffchaff and the wood warbler so something like that, little bits of knowledge that you carry with you, in your own mental baggage, then play across the surface of the bird in the wood as you’re looking at it and that’s exciting. And you don’t talk about that, because birdwatchers don’t talk about that, it’s private and probably a bit wanky, except I do, because I’ve decided to splurge, but it will always begin with naming.

It’s interesting for me now, I’m married to a South African and increasingly spending time in South Africa and I’m adrift ornithologically and imaginatively from the birdlife of South Africa, because it’s new to me and its deep grammar hasn’t gone into me. The British or European birdlife I learnt or absorbed beautifully, wonderfully, almost innately. Now as an adult, moving into a new birdlife, everything’s about this struggle to place the bird, to identify, to decide whether it’s even a bird or an insect, or a cricket or a frog that you can hear. So that’s interesting to me, and further underlines the nexus of experience and small yet substantial embedded understanding of your own place in the scene of the bird in the UK and Europe when they’re so familiar because you’ve seen them over many years.

BR: Have you had many encounters with so-called ‘British birds’ – the nightingale, the cuckoo and so on – in Africa?

TD: I saw my first nightingale in Africa at the beginning of last year, in fact I’ve just written a chapter in my book about it [Greenery, out now!], the experience of that, the kind of happy wrench of that, realising the bird was totally at home where it was, was not ours or mine in any way, was a really good and suitable thing, yet mind-wiping, correcting; so I got interested, troubled, agitated by that, and many situations in Africa: the barn swallow, wintering in Cape Town at Christmas…. I see swallows that we might see here in April, May, June, and that’s had a profound impact on me, of wrenching, twisting, at your sense of the globe and of home, at your sense of the lives of these birds, that lovely sense of the shared hospitality we have with these birds, and yet there they are brazenly carrying on in South Africa and then of course that makes you think about – and – this is again what I’ve been writing about – you think about all the bits in between as well. Where is the swallow’s home? Where is the nightingale at home? Wonderfully, science is now telling us all sorts of things that further twist and excite the mind when we begin to consider them, like where a bird grows its feathers and how we now know through stable isotope analysis that the feathers of the nightingale are actually made on its wintering grounds, so although the bird hatches in England, say, if we’re lucky enough to still have nightingales, its first feather set or plumage, will be made from the soil and insects of the English wood in which its raised but then it will leave that English wood in the early summer time, fly south and will have a staged moult halfway along its journey south, then it has its second moult when it gets to its wintering grounds where it replaces its first feathers with new feathers and written into those feathers is the place the bird has lived in. So, hey presto, that’s wonderful isn’t it when you think about that tearing apart, beautiful music that we think of as somehow so placed and laden with significance in its own place in which we hear it, when actually the bird is carrying a passport from the Congo.

BR: This interview is going to appear on our Literature and Science research hub webpages and I was wondering about your thoughts on the relationship between the two. In The Running Sky you write that ‘nature writing, if such a thing exists, lives in [the] territory where science and poetry might meet’. I’ve also been thinking about the vast history of writing about birds, Gilbert White, James Fisher, John Buxton, to name just some, who all negotiate the literature-science relationship in different ways: where do you see your own writing in this tradition?

Well, this is a topic that I think about all the time. It was really important to me to discover I had a relationship with birds before I thought of being a writer about thos birds, to have had a relationship based on the direct encounters you have when you’re growing up and beginning to learn things, being curious about them and going out and seeing them - that seems to me to lie behind a better class of looking, if I might say so. I’ve always thought it was important for my own writing, to feel that I had a pre-writing relationship with a landscape or a bird or a moon, or whatever it would be, so to try not just to go out into the field and come away with material of a merely writerly kind. I wanted always to connect back to - as I was saying earlier - to those less mediated experiences. These, incidentally, needn’t always be to do with childhood, they could be things that happen now that I haven’t clocked as being writing worthy. So it’s important for me, looking at other nature writing, if such a thing exists, the best ones to me give off a tang of experience that has been accumulated without necessarily the intention of transforming that into writing. I was thinking about this today: I’m hopeless on flowers. I’ve never progressed beyond day one with flowers, and I’ve struggled with this in my new book. I’ve had to say, you aren’t going to get any flowers in this book because I don’t really know flowers and therefore I don’t really do flowers. I was thinking on the train north here to Liverpool and thinking if I knew the flowers this would have a bigger meaning to me, the ordinary bankside flowers, and each one would have a specificity and a context, and would have a history with me, as the birds do. So it would be really interesting to try to write, and maybe this picks up on my experience of going to a new country and trying to write nature without knowing anything about nature – how does that go? I’ve been a policeman of bad nature recruitment in all sorts of places in my life, I’ve always ticked off my colleagues at the BBC when they’ve used inappropriate birdsong on their soundtracks. I can tell whether a book is likely to be good for me if the birds are right, even as the most incidental dressing or scene-setting in a novel. If the birds are good, that lends a degree of confidence to the project as far as I’m concerned.

It’s possible of course to learn things, this doesn’t all have to be about the wonderful seed time of the soul, our early days and intensity of your childhood, we can learn things later in life. And you want reported observations to be new-minted, so it’s possible for a newcomer to say new things about flowers, birds, landscapes, places, of course, I don’t think that’s impossible. I suppose in some weird psychoanalytically-dodgy place I feel that I actually own the birds more than people who’ve come to it more recently, which is a totally illegitimate thing to say or believe, but I know it’s very important to me to test myself (not other writers) in this way. I might be making weird metaphors and similes out of these things, pushing them as far as I can, bringing in all sorts of atemporal, quotidian, contemporary descriptive words to describe them, and seeing whether than can work. I’m always testing that as a writer myself. I’m also a reader of other peoples’ stuff and test it too, whether they can really make that metaphor or that descriptive sentence feel accurate. But it always comes back to naming as the primary bringing into language: without the naming we’re lost. I’ve said this many times, if you don’t know the difference between things you struggle, getting the difference right is importannt, the difference tells.

BR: You write in Landfill about how naming takes us closer to birds, and other parts of the natural world, but is also a form of loss, is in some sense elegiac. Could you say a bit more about that?

It’s a wonderful joining, a connectivity, but there’s always that negotiation backwards and forwards, I think. For me Kathleen Jamie is an amazingly adept artist in both her prose and poetry. Her approach is so beautifully delivered, but it’s mostly beautiful because it comes to a barrier almost always in her work where she says I can’t go any further: it’s not that I don’t have permission to go any further, more I can’t extend my arm – or my imagination - across the gap. So that approach and retreat, can be the most beautiful, to me, truest form, of nature writing which is an acknowledgement of what you’re asking, of, the anxiety that’s associated with naming, the estrangement to the curious packaging and distancing that comes when we do that. But it is something bigger than that, as well, not just to do with names, is to do with other species. Our species’ history as users of other species and all those sorts of things.

In terms of literature and science, I’m married to an ornithologist who tells me off all the time and who is my first editor. I find a kind of poetry in the science actually. Even in earnest journal abstracts there is a kind of poetry. If I was on the psychiatrist’s coach at this point I’d say it is no more true than poetry. I recognise it as an approach, a gesture towards one of the ways that we have to approach a creature, but is it any truer than a poem? We might look at the science and describe it as the truth for now, as a poem can be too, this is just what we know now. The truth, and my wife tells me this all the time, is really important, we know now about this species that is actually happening in its life, this is what natural selection is doing, this is how evolution is working, and that’s beautiful, but knowledge and understanding is always changing, is evolving as much as much as the species under study, so it still seems to me good to think of it as the truth for now.

BR: Could you say a bit more about the history of bird writing and ‘nature writing’? What are your preferences? You have spoken of your love for John Buxton’s The Redstart?

I love John Buxton. He was a poet first, then became a sort of accidental scientist by being a prisoner of war captured by the Germans during the second world war and wrote this amazing book about the redstart where he continued to defy both sides in a way of his background and wrote a book where what he was talking about in the end was how little he knew about the birds he was writing about even though he knew them better than anyone else who’d ever lived at the time he was writing that book. And yet he wanted to give the birds back to themselves at the end of that book in the most beautiful way. He wrote about making the loved world more lovelier still: you couldn’t get away with that in a paper in ‘Nature’ these days. I think for me that’s led me to all sorts of comparable writers: Mark Cocker whose book about rooks is fantastic. Kenneth Allsops’s book, In the Country, his columns from the Daily Mail, Richard Mabey’s writing has always been good to me, but I love the incidental appearances of nature in other people’s writing who we don’t consider to be nature writers. I’ve just been writing a little bit about Samuel Beckett as a nature writer: there’s an incredible sort of cracked pastoral feeding into lots of Beckett’s work, and brilliant, truthful observations of corncrakes and things from the days when there were corncrakes outside of Dublin so I love that in some ways as much as the full on, paid up, school. Of course, Gilbert White sort of writes the book of the green man in a way that very few others have been able to do, but I also love the mess of Coleridge’s notebooks as nature writing,, amazing documents. Of those who might have thought themselves naturalist-writers  - I think Edward Thomas is the one. Richard Jeffries, WH Hudson - are versions of second generation Romantics  and can feel creaky now. They traded on the last gasps of connectivity between man and nature, but maybe we now feel because that period of writing – late nineteenth century, early twentieth century – was at the threshold of modernism, industrialisation, etc,, it feels further away from us weirdly, than Coleridge, Thomas Browne. It’s weird how modern Thomas Browne now feels – his nature observations, his sharp-minded, investigative, sceptical intelligence, seems to be much more contemporary, weirdly, than the lushness of Jeffries or Hudson. It would be good to recover more of the modernist nature writers – Beckett, as I said, Virginia Woolf, WS Graham, poems by DH Lawrence, the best writer of flowers in the English language, ‘fucked into being’, as he said they were  ‘between sun and earth’. That’s good to work with isn’t it? I think that would be a really interesting place to study, and in some ways Alexandra Harris’s book Romantic Moderns started something there. It wasn’t such an absolute separation, things continued into the Modernist sensibility.

BR: ‘The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel’. I know you have a fondness for that quotation. Today you’re here in Liverpool to us about gulls. What’s it like to take part in the existence of gulls?

TD: It’s a brilliant corrective to anything nice. I’ll be talking about this now, but I think it’s a really great way of thinking talking modern nature, about the world that we’ve made, and the world that nature is now obliged to share with us, or whatever it is we call nature, the gulls being this interesting mix to me of surrendered, and free-living, still. They’re approaching: they’re coming closer to us,we know this is happening ecologically but also therefore as animals we might think with. They’re spending more time in our company. They’re physically coming closer to us, they’re living off our stuff. And yet they are of course, not. They haven’t become yet feral pigeons, they’re still unsurrendered in that way. And so therefore they work on this lovely pliant stream, that is for me like a news bulletin from how the world is now. If we believe in the Anthropocene, or whatever we call it, whereby we’re calling the shots, our controlling stamp is so stamped that everything else has to make its way with us, or alongside us, there is no separate place for it anymore in nature, then the gulls are really articulate at this moment of where that’s going . So they’re good to think with, and also they’re a real good corrective to received ideas of what is nice nature, nature isn’t nice, and they’re really excellent demonstrators of that.

Thank you Tim Dee!