Category: Nature

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Culture Nature

More crakery from the canon

I didn’t want my post on rails and crakes to suffer from poetry bloat, so I didn’t quote it before, but John Clare isn’t the only Dead Famous English Poet who mentioned corncrakes in a poem.

This is the mowing scene from Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax by Andrew Marvell. I went through modernising the spelling and capitalisation, because frankly I can’t see any advantage to keeping it old-school, so if I’ve missed anything, my apologies:

And now to the abyss I pass
Of that unfathomable grass,
Where men like grasshoppers appear,
But grasshoppers are giants there:
They, in their squeaking laugh, contemn
Us as we walk more low then them:
And, from the precipices tall
Of the green spires, to us do call.

To see men through this meadow dive,
We wonder how they rise alive.
As, under water, none does know
Whether he fall through it or go.
But, as the mariners that sound,
And show upon their lead the ground,
They bring up flowers so to be seen,
And prove they’ve at the bottom been.

No scene that turns with engines strange
Does oftener then these meadows change,
For when the sun the grass hath vexed,
The tawny mowers enter next;
Who seem like Israelites to be,
Walking on foot through a green sea.
To them the grassy deeps divide,
And crowd a lane to either side.

With whistling scythe, and elbow strong,
These massacre the grass along:
While one, unknowing, carves the rail,
Whose yet unfeathered quills her fail.
The edge all bloody from its breast
He draws, and does his stroke detest;
Fearing the flesh untimely mowed
To him a fate as black forebode.

But bloody Thestylis, that waits
To bring the mowing camp their cates,
Greedy as kites has trussed it up,
And forthwith means on it to sup:
When on another quick she lights,
And cries, “he called us Israelites;
But now, to make his saying true,
Rails rain for quails, for manna dew.”

Unhappy birds! what does it boot
To build below the grasses’ root;
When lowness is unsafe as height,
And chance overtakes what scapeth spite?
And now your orphan parents call
Sounds your untimely funeral.
Death-trumpets creak in such a note,
And ’tis the sourdine in their throat.

I think it calls for a couple of  vocabulary notes. The ‘scene that turns with engines strange‘ is a reference to stage machinery in the theatre; ‘Thestylis’ is a poeticism for a female mower; ‘cates’ are delicacies, and ‘sourdine’ is some kind of musical instrument. The dictionary can’t decide whether it’s a miniature violin or a woodwind of some kind, but presumably it’s a reference to the distinctive sound made by the corncrake.

I think this passage is a fair illustration of what a magnificently odd poem Upon Appleton House  really is. Especially since the genre—a poem about a country estate designed to flatter its powerful owner and his family—seems so doomed to the formulaic. Perhaps he felt that the more remarkable the poem, the more effective the flattery. Or perhaps he was just enjoying himself. Or showing off.

Not all of this conspicuous ingenuity is equally successful, but sometimes it’s remarkable; the image of men bringing up flowers to prove they’ve sounded the depths of the grass is a brilliant way of making a relatively obvious comparison vivid and memorable. And the bit where Thestylis breaks out of character by commenting on something he’s just said is so unexpected. I can’t decide whether I think it’s effective as a literary device, but it’s certainly surprising in a C17th poem.

It’s good to be reminded occasionally that ingenious, peculiar, unconventional, clever-clever poetry isn’t just the preserve of Modernism.

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Nature Other

I and the Bird #44

I and the Bird‘s latest edition is now up at The Greenbelt with links to all sorts of birdy goodness.

I particularly enjoyed the post about American Woodcocks at woodcreeper.com. Which reminds me: I think I read once that their display flight is the slowest powered flight recorded in any bird species which isn’t actually hovering.

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Nature Other

Evolved belief?

Scavella asks:

And the real question is why. What evolutionary purpose has this tendency, whose existence, even among the most rational of us, suggests that the search for transcendence may be hard-wired into human beings?

I would need some persuading that religious belief is a specific adaption; i.e. that we have evolved the tendency to believe in the same sense that we have evolved opposable thumbs.

This kind of argument is discussed at more length in that article you linked to, but my version of it would run something like this:

Let’s assume that a need to explain and understand things is hard-wired into human beings by evolution. We know so little, really, about how the mind works, that even that assumption is arguable, but it’s probably less of a leap than asssuming religious belief as an evolved tendency. But there are a lot of things which it is virtually impossible to understand by just looking around and being observant and thoughtful: weather, disease, earthquakes, existence, morality. Not only is religion in a position to fill in the gaps, but it may actually often be preferred to the true explanation because it’s more psychologically satisfying. Just because we evolved reason and a desire to explain things doesn’t mean we will always settle on the most accurate explanation.

An analogy would be poetry. Poetry of some sort is pretty much a human universal, but I don’t think it needs to be explained as an evolutionary adaption. Having evolved language, there was a situation where those people who could find ways to use it that were powerful—exciting, moving, funny—would be able to use it to gain status, in a broad sense. Or just find pleasure in it for themselves. The evolution of language created an opportunity; from that point, normal cultural development seems a sufficient explanation for the invention of poetry, story-telling and so on.

I think also it’s easy to talk rather glibly about something being a ‘universal’ human trait. Language is universal: if an adult human has no language, there is something wrong with them. The same is true of psychological traits like empathy or fear. It’s not clear to me that the same can be said of religious belief or a search for transcendence. it might be hard to find anyone who was completely free of irrational beliefs and superstitions, but there are plenty of people who aren’t religious. Not just those who are explicitly atheist or agnostic, either; even in societies where everyone is nominally the member of a faith, I would suggest there are plenty of people who are believers in name only, and people for whom it just isn’t very important.

Religious belief clearly isn’t counter-adaptive, and if it isn’t hard-wired, it is at the very least well-suited to the human way of thinking. But so what? The history of science is one long process of learning the hard way that our intuitions about how the world works are usually wrong.

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Nature Other

Birding the dictionary 2

I’ve been investigating more avian etymologies, looking for things of interest. There isn’t much to say about most bird names, because they’re self-explanatory (oystercatcher, wagtail) obviously onomatopoeic (chiff-chaff), or just dead-ends. For example, checking up on ‘merlin’, the dictionary says:

merlin (mɜ:lın). ME. [– AFr. merilun, aphet. f. OFr. esmerillon (mod. émerillon), augment. of esmeril :– Frankish *smeril = OHG. smerlo, smiril (G. schmerl).] A small European falcon, Falco æsalon.

Which is admirably thorough (and useful if you’re ever travelling in Old High Germany and need to talk about falconry) but doesn’t actually get us any closer to an ‘original’ meaning.

Water Rail, originally uploaded by markkilner.

Another word whose origins the OED refuses to offer an opinion on, beyond mentioning that it’s from the Norman-Picard (no relative of Jean-Luc), is ‘rail’. Fortunately for us, the American Heritage Dictionary is recklessly willing to take a guess:

rail n. Any of various marsh birds of the family Rallidae, characteristically having brownish plumage and short wings adapted only for short flights. [Middle English raile, from Old French raale, perhaps from Old French raler, racler, to scrape, from Old Provençal rasclar; see raclette.]

Raclette, originally uploaded by Alfesto.

Dictionary.com describes raclette as ‘a [Swiss] dish made by heating a piece of cheese, as over a hearth, and scraping off the melted part onto a plate: served with boiled potatoes[…] the cheese used in making this dish’, which is why the name is derived from ‘to scrape’. But what about ‘rail’? Well, I think it must be onomatopoeic. The only bird referred to as a rail by British birders today is the water rail, as pictured above (but also see the fabulous picture here). Water rails make all sorts of noise, including, according to the Collins Bird Guide, ‘a discontented piglet-like squeal, soon dying away’, as well as ‘a weary, ‘all in’, choking moan’, but none of them sound much like scraping. However, as well as the water rail, there is a bird which used to be known as a ‘land rail’, and now usually called a corncrake.

Corncrake at Balranald, originally uploaded by citrineblue.

To see a corncrake in the UK now, your best chance is to go somewhere like North Uist, where that photo was taken, but they used to be common. A poem by John Clare; it’s on the long side but I think it’s worth quoting in full. Of all the poets who have been called ‘nature-poets’, John Clare is by far the most observant and the one who comes closest to being a naturalist-poet.

The Landrail

How sweet and pleasant grows the way
Through summer time again,
While Landrails call from day to day
Amid the grass and grain.

We hear it in the weeding time
When knee deep waves the corn,
We hear it in the summer’s prime
Through meadows night and morn;

And now I hear it in the grass
That grows as sweet again,
And let a minute’s notice pass
And now ’tis in the grain.

‘Tis like a fancy everywhere
A sort of living doubt,
We know ’tis something but it ne’er
Will blab the secret out.

If heard in close or meadow plots
It flies if we pursue,
But follows if we notice not
The close and meadow through.

Boys know the note of many a bird
In their bird-nesting rounds,
But when the landrail’s noise is heard
They wonder at the sounds;

They look in every tuft of grass
That’s in their rambles met,
They peep in every bush they pass
And none the wiser yet,

And still they hear the craiking sound
And still they wonder why—
It surely can’t be under ground
Nor is it in the sky,

And yet ’tis heard in every vale,
An undiscovered song,
And makes a pleasant wonder tale
For all the summer long.

The shepherd whistles through his hands
And starts with many a whoop
His busy dog across the lands
In hopes to fright it up.

‘Tis still a minute’s length or more
Till dogs are off and gone,
Then sings and louder than before
But keeps the secret on.

Yet accident will often meet
The nest within its way,
And weeders when they weed the wheat
Discover where they lay,

And mowers on the meadow lea
Chance on their noisy guest
And wonder what the bird can be
That lays without a nest.

In simple holes that birds will rake
When dusting in the ground;
They drop their eggs of curious make,
Deep-blotched and nearly round—

A mystery still to men and boys
Who know not where they lay
And guess it but a summer noise
Among the meadow-hay.

As Clare makes clear, the corncrake is famously difficult to see, and usually found via its ‘craiking’ call. Pleasingly the corncrake’s Latin name is pretty much a transcription of the call: Crex crex. You can listen to the call of the corncrake here. I’ve heard you can attract a corncrake by scraping the spoon from a miniature tub of icecream along the zip of your waterproof jacket (and if you’re birding in the Outer Hebrides, you will have a waterproof jacket with you), or by rubbing a comb across the edge of a matchbox. But I’ve never had a chance to try either trick.

So what about the word ‘corncrake’? That’s obvious—it’s clearly derived from the call, right? Well, not directly. ‘Crake’ is derived from the Old Norse krâka, which means crow, and that’s the first meaning the OED gives:

1. A crow or raven. north. dial.
2. A name of birds of the family Rallidæ, esp. the corn-crake (also bean-crake) or landrail
3. The cry of the corn-crake

We’re told that

In sense 2, perh. orig. the same word (corn crake = corn crow), but now viewed as directly derived from the grating cry of the bird, as in sense 3

The Old Norse krâka is itself onomatopoeic (‘croak’ is derived from the same word), and if ‘corn crake’ did originally mean ‘corn crow’, it was in reference to the call, but still, I find the idea of a ‘corn crow’ surprising and appealing. The word ‘crow’ is, not surprisingly, also originally onomatopoeic but from the Old High German crâwan.

Cormorant, originally uploaded by Rune T.

One last bit of related etymology. Cormorant is from the French cormoran with a ‘parasitic t’; i.e. the ‘t’ has no particular linguistic logic, it just got glommed onto the word by analogy with words like ‘elegant’ and ‘reluctant’. The same is apparently true of ‘peasant’ and ‘pheasant’ (paysan and faisan in French). Cormaran in turn is deduced to have been something like corp marin in Old French, and is derived from the Latin corvus marinus: ‘sea raven’.

So there you are; corn-crows and sea-ravens.

[ Unless noted otherwise, dictionary extracts are from either the Shorter Oxford Dictionary or the slightly insane ‘compact’ OED (the whole 2nd edition printed in such tiny writing that it fits in one huge volume). The poem is from “I Am”: The Selected Poetry of John Clare, edited by Jonathan Bate. As ever with Clare, the punctuation is editorial, that version of the poem is presumably © Jonathan Bate. The photographs are all from Flickr and © the respective photographers. ]

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Culture Nature Other

Darwin’s prose

I recently found Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary, being posted ‘live’ on the internet with a mere 175 year time-lag (see also Pepys, Thoreau).

He’s only just reached Brazil, so there’s plenty of time to join the fun. This is from today’s entry:

The houses are white and lofty and from the windows being narrow and long have a very light and elegant appearance. Convents, Porticos and public buildings vary the uniformity of the houses: the bay is scattered over with large ships; in short the view is one of the finest in the Brazils. But their beauties are as nothing compared to the Vegetation; I believe from what I have seen Humboldts glorious descriptions are and will for ever be unparalleled: but even he with his dark blue skies and the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth. The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind, if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over, if turning to admire the splendour of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future and more quiet pleasure will arise. I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another Sun illumines everything I behold.

A little on the flowery Victorian side, but still a fine bit of prose. What’s interesting is that you’d never know he could do it on the basis of The Origin of Species, a book which is well written but rarely sparkling. But in the diaries, notebooks and letters he can be a lively, engaging writer. One of my favourite quotes from the notebooks: ‘He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke’.

Categories
Culture Nature

Digiscoping and Lomography

I was looking back at some of my old digiscoped pictures yesterday.

‘Digiscoping’ is the trick of using your birding telescope as very high-powered telephoto lens. At the simplest level, you just hold the camera up to the eyepiece and shoot through the scope; to get the best results you need more sophisticated equipment. You could do this with a film camera, of course, but it makes it a lot easier to have a screen so you can see what you’re doing, and to know that you can just delete the ones that don’t come out.

Anyway, I was vaguely wondering what they reminded me of, other than themselves.

I realised that it was ‘toy camera’ pictures. You may not have encountered this trend, but there’s a [recent?] fashion for taking pictures with very basic old mass-market compact cameras, like the Soviet Lomo, or the Chinese Holga. The poor construction of these cameras, including plastic lenses and light leaks, produce distinctive pictures with lurid colours, dodgy focus, vignetting and other technical flaws. Which sounds crap, but actually the pictures have a rough-edged immediacy which can be very attractive.

My telescope doesn’t have plastic lenses, of course. But it wasn’t designed for taking pictures, either. And my adaptor consists of the bottom of a film canister glued into the lid of a pill bottle, with a hole cut through them. It serves to keep the camera roughly in the centre of the eyepiece, but it doesn’t keep it properly lined up along the axis of the telescope or keep it steady.

When I took them, I was doing my damnedest to take the best possible pictures despite the technical limitations of my equipment. The results aren’t going to win any wildlife photography prizes, but some of them do have something of that same weird vividness that I find attractive in toy camera pictures.

This kind of lo-fi aesthetic probably doesn’t appeal to everyone. But I might as well enjoy it in my own pictures. Not that I feel defensive about them; I enjoyed the challenge of taking them and never expected them to be anything other than holiday snaps. I’d never really tried bird photography before — they don’t make an easy subject and it’s difficult enough trying to see them normally — but if birding is the main point of a trip, it’s a treat to have a record of birds instead of just places.

I liked these pictures anyway. Does a spiffy aesthetic context make me like them any more? Should it?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. I just wanted to note the comparison.

» All pictures are from Flickr and are links so you can click through to the relevant pages. The birdy ones are by me; the child was taken with a Holga by john.makarewicz and the Peruvian valley was taken with a LOMO by phoosh.