Steadfast
Contents
- issue 17 Summer 2006
Steadfast Demo 
England: the mother of modern sport - Robert Henderson
Letters
Progress for the English Community - Tony Linsell
Birds of the Seashore - Edward Canfield
The Legacy of William Barnes - Don Briggs
Law & Democracy - Lawrence Middlehurst
Birds
of the Seashore
Edward Canfield
This magazine has published
several articles about H.J. Massingham and so has taken a stand in reviving
interest in his writing, his ideas and the causes he espoused. So when
I found myself in 'Scarthin Books', a treasure-house of second-hand
books in Derbyshire, and came upon a 1936 reprint of Massingham's Birds
of the Seashore, I bought it without hesitation.
Birds of the Seashore might seem a rather bland title for those readers
of Steadfast who are expecting directly political commentary but the
project, surely, of this magazine is to explore our English ethnic identity
in its wide-ranging cultural as well as in its narrowly political aspects.
Bird-watching is an activity which English people enjoy to an extent
unrivalled among the other nations of the world, with the possible exception
of the Dutch and Scandinavians. Over a million of us are members of
the RSPB, whose lavish journal, Birds, has a massive circulation of
620,000. So very many of us find delight in our wildlife and feel concern
over the well-being of the wild birds and beasts with which we share
our homeland that these features of our mentality and behaviour have
become national characteristics which help to distinguish us from other
human populations crowding this planet. Massingham's love of birds revealed
back in the thirties was a signifier of his Englishness then, much as
it was of W.H. Hudson a hundred years ago, of Thomas Bewick a hundred
years before that, of Gilbert White even earlier in the 18th century
and of Sir Thomas Browne back in the 17th. All these bird-observers
have been much-loved and repeatedly published writers. Our fascination
with birds can be traced even further back in our national memory. The
first printed book in England giving detailed descriptions of our bird
life was published as early as 1544. We can find the names of a hundred
different breeds recorded in the literature produced at and before the
time of Chaucer when our ancestors struggled free at last from the legal
domination of French and Latin and could speak English as a language
of education and government again. In the even earlier years of our
nation in this island the characteristic of bird-love can still be distinguished.
Our Early English literature from before 800AD mentions at least 60
species while the literature which has survived from even earlier Anglo-Saxon
times, that written sometime before 700AD, reveals the names of some
fifteen distinct bird species. It is obvious that a fascination with
birds and wildlife is deep-rooted in our national culture.
Massingham's book must have appealed not just to the lovers of birds
in the nineteen-thirties but to anyone who valued the writing of well-crafted
and lyrical English. Birds of the Seashore is no average text, aiming
only to transmit bare information. To make this observation more understandable,
I include an extract from such an average guide for birders, The Birdwatcher's
Almanac. The fowl described is the Pink-footed Goose.
In late September Pink-feet arrive from Iceland and Greenland. They
frequent estuaries, mud-flats and fields and are more likely to be seen
among root crops than any other grey geese. Many thousands of Pink-feet
winter in central Scotland, the Solway Firth and areas on the east and
west coasts of England.
Here is another typical bird guide, this time the much used Collins
Bird guide written by Richard Perry.
It breeds in the Arctic Circle and winters on west coast saltings and
east coast estuaries. It may be spotted flying inland to feed on stubble
or potato fields by its babel of high-pitched yelping metallic calls.
Very large.
And this is Massingham on the same fowl.
As a winter visitor, arriving between September and October-ends and
whirling homewards with loud fanfares to its summer of mists and lurking
storm at the end of March, it is perhaps the most abundant of the Grey
Geese along the east coast, and in areas like the Dee Estuary. …
It seldom takes the air in that mighty impetus the wild geese have without
bursting into full chorus. If the far-volleying, wild, exultant trumpeting
is continuous, you may guess with some precision that the skein passing
overhead so precipitously and yet in a defined formation that seems
in touch with the motions of the stars above - is one of the Pink-footed.
The note is a deep clanging and when falling from a lofty skein at dawn
or dusk, grandly melodious.
A similar contrast in the tone of description can be seen in the account
of other birds, such as the Storm Petrel. Here is The Birdwatcher's
Almanac again.
A small black bird with white rump and square tail. Appears to walk
on water, fluttering its wings as it picks tiny morsels from the surface
of the water. Follows in the wake of ships.
This is Massingham on the bird:
It is indeed the very phantom of the rollers, wavering in sooty cloak
above their crests, dabbling its long legs among their hollows, tossing
about their shifting hillocks and sliding down their green ravines.
As its feet skim the surge and it bobs its wild head into the yeasty
surface or in tern fashion waves long wings in flight to all points
of the compass among the slanting rain beating into the sullen roll,
it seems more like some dusky emanation of that labouring wilderness
than bird in very truth, the one speck of agile life upon it.
Massingham, it is clear, is not aiming to produce a handbook of interesting
and observable facts about birds but, in describing the bird life of
our shores, he is persuading us of the enchantment of the sea. He is
revealing to us that the creatures around us do not just exist as material
beings whose appearance and distribution can be plotted and measured
but as inherently mythic beings whose presence within a landscape enriches
that landscape with a new significance, with a meaning which can bond
us closer to the rhythms and surging patterns constantly at work around
us.
A skein of wild swans forewarning the blizzard and passing overhead
in saga fashion gives the observer whose heart leaps a new interpretation
of the ancient swan-song. It is a song sung not with the voice but the
wings - measured and harp-like, as heroic as the white figures that
strike it out upon the cold air. The two notes, though treading on each
other's winged heels, are distinct and make an indescribably wild wail
through the threatening night. If poets were naturalists, what terrifying
music might they not make of the wailing wings of wild swans outspeeding
the storm!
This is writing to stir within us who read sympathetically and responsively
an appreciation of the wild enchantment that we can find in the beauties
and grandeur of our sea-shores.
This finding of enchantment within the wild-life of the sea is no matter
of mere whimsy. If we allow the sea to be established within our thinking
as no more than a depository of objects, material phenomena and economic
resources we are on the way to allowing the sea to be desecrated. Because
of the technology which mankind now has at his disposal, desecration
means utter destruction. I quote from Birds, the RSPB magazine:
This year the cliffs of these Northern Isles fell eerily silent as tens
of thousands of seabirds failed to raise any young at all. … All
of our large arctic tern colonies in the north isles failed. …
The once-thriving kittiwake colony at Marwick Head is down from 3,800
to 1,300 pairs and that at the Noup has fallen from 17,500 to 4,700
in the same period. … Even fulmars are suffering, with only half
the normal number of occupied sites on Eynhallow.
The RSPB believes that it knows the answer to the question of why the
sea-birds are failing to reproduce adequately. This was the collapse
of the sandeel population in the North Sea.
Nearly all of the species affected have one thing in common - they depend
on an abundant supply of sandeels, lance-like silvery fish rich in oil,
to nourish and raise their chicks to fledging. Sandeels have been in
short supply in Shetland, … in recent years but this year's failure
of sandeels to appear was catastrophic in its severity.
The RSPB blames climate change which, it speculates, is driving the
plankton further north but another factor is over-fishing. Despite cod
joining mackerel in commercial extinction in the North Sea, exploitation
of species such as sandeel, the foundation of the food chain, is still
going ahead. Our whole marine eco-system is now threatened by unscrupulous
over-fishing. Not just seabirds but other sea creatures too are suffering.
Hundreds of dolphins and porpoises are being killed every year as 'by-catch'
of the boats pair-trawling for sea-bass. Despite protests from the Wildlife
Trusts to the European Fisheries ministers, the practice of pair-trawling
around our coasts has been allowed to continue.
This is why the writing of Massingham in Birds of the Seashore is so
important. The wilful destruction of seabirds, of sand eels, of porpoises
and of dolphins is possible because we have become content to regard
the sea as nothing but a depository of exploitable resources and not
as an inheritance of cultural and spiritual significance. When we read,
visualise and recall Massingham's images of the pink-foot goose, the
petrel or the wild swan, we cannot but be aware that the loss of our
coastal wildlife is a loss to our experience and feeling as human beings.
Birds of the Seashore is not just a compendium for ornithologists of
the old school. In offering to his readers such vivid images of landscape,
weather and the sound and movement of birds, Massingham is surely attempting
to stir up within us greater feeling, a recognition among his readers
that an umbilical cord should be connecting us to our seas, our coasts,
our shores and strands and to the creatures dwelling therein.
The sea around our island home is not just moving water but the site
of natural activity and this natural activity contains another realm
of meaning besides the directly material or physical. It is enchanted
in the sense that present within that realm lies the obscured memory
of former patterns of experience, belief and loyalty forged by the needs
of life interwoven with the furies and awesome loveliness of the elements.
The sea and shore are enchanted because they can recall the obscured
memory of ancestors who have experienced, seen and felt natural life
in ways which we too could yet be doing or might once have done. This
is what enchantment is, the presence within the direct physical world
of another layer of meaning and reality which, once recognised, can
transform our understanding of what lies directly before us.
Massingham's Birds of the Seashore suggests that the seas and shores
of England contain messages about both our past and our present reality
as a nation. Our understanding of those messages can help to bond us
to our ancestral past and help us comprehend the true nature of the
follies of our tarnished present. One message is that we are an island
people who for centuries have found employment, sustenance and recreation
in and on the sea. Another message is that for centuries we have managed
a sustainable relationship with the sea. Dying seas confront us with
the reality of how unsustainable, destructive and corrupting our way
of life is now and provides some indication of the measures which we
must undertake if we are to reverse the current tide of frivolity, waste
and abuse. The sea, moreover, bonds us to our farther ancestors who
came across that sea, the Gannet's Bath, from our folk lands in Angeln
and Saxony. It holds within it the story of our ethnic origin as a people.
Just as the geese and swans span the broad expanse of waves as they
migrate across the northern oceans, so have our own ancestors, as the
poet of The Battle of Brunanburh recalled,
Engle and Seaxe up becoman,
Ofer brad brimu, Brytene sohtan,
Wlance wigsmiþas, Wealas ofercoman,
Eorlas arhwate eard begeatan.
We must root ourselves in our inherited past and seek out what aspects
of it we have neglected and recognise within our suppressed collective
unconscious that we are a people set besides a northern sea, a people
bonded to the northern waters by ties of wind, wave and ancestral memory.
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