The Running Sky - of birds, books & runners in rotation

In Nottingham's Wollaton Park after this year's English National Cross Country Championships, there was a moment as the sun was going down when a large number of crows (yes I know the collective noun is 'A Murder') began circling above the hill where shortly before thousands of runners had circled on the last lap of their races. It felt like they were echoing the cross country race itself, though presumably they do it all year round, the park being home to 'a large corvid roost made up of rook, jackdaw, and carrion crow' (wikipedia)

It reminded me of a passage I'd read earlier that  day in Tim Dee's The Running Sky: A Birdwatching Life, describing not crows but a similar flight of seabirds:

'To see vast numbers of birds in silent movement is beautifully strange. In this crowd of so many moving things, the eye leaps constantly from individuals to the whole event. These are not flocks but countless single birds caught in a storm of life. Individuals fly fast but the ensemble seems to be moving at dream speed. The rush of the single bird somehow slows in the crowd. I cannot focus for long on a puffin with its hurrying wings in the wheeling cloud; instead I see a tumbleweed of birds rolling out from their grassed lawns and terraces over a gulf of air, a slow motion collective rotation'.

I’d been reading this book on the journey up to Nottingham – with a title like the Running Sky it got some curious looks on a train full of runners. But of course it is not a running book but a reflection on the author's lifetime fascination with birds.

While I have never been a fully fledged adult birdwatcher, I was and am interested in them as I have mentioned before. At primary school an enthusiastic teacher enrolled me in the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds' Young Ornithologists Club, something I recalled recently when I went to a bird themed art exhibition at the old library building on Walworth Road, near the Elephant and Castle (the building, which housed the Newington library and Cuming Museum has been closed following a fire, hopefully it will fully reopen permanently in the not too distant future).

From 'Natural Selection', Andy Holden and Peter Holden

Natural Selection combines the scientific perspective of Peter Holden, sometime national organiser of the Young Ornithologists Club, and the work of his artist son Andy Holden who is as interested in the aesthetic properties of birds, their nests and indeed the illicitly curated hordes assembled by illegal egg collectors.  Without undue anthropomorphism he wonders whether in some circumstances individual birds make choices about their use and display of materials in a way that can be regarded as akin to artistic activity. 

The display includes a case of birds nests arranged on piles of books - the importance of which cannot be overestimated. A recent thread on Twitter started by nature writer Robert Macfarlane asked people to share which bird, animal and plant books they had learnt from as children. It reminded me of how much those of us with childhoods before the Internet or even widespread colour TV relied upon books like the Observer's Book of Birds and the various Ladybird bird books among others. In fact it was in some ways the colourful plenitude of these lavishly illustrated volumes that made bird life seem so appealing, even if most of us would only get to see a handful of the species in the feather and flesh. I was particularly taken by a series of early 1970s 'Hamlyn All Colour Paperbacks' illustrated by Ken Lilly, I still have my copies of Seabirds and Birds of Prey, though along the way have lost my Tropical Birds.

In the wild, birds are rarely to be viewed in fine detail up close and still, but as we catch glimpses we fill in the gaps in our visual perception with the mental images we have stored from drawings and photographs. But no bird book can really capture the social phenomenon of flocks of birds in 'slow motion collective rotation', like runners racing around a field. And what does the birds eye make of the crowd of humans down below as they jostle for position, each dwelling in their individual exertions and largely oblivious to the pattern they create as they weave in and out of each other, moving together and separately at the same time. 

(The Running Sky takes its title from a Philip Larkin poem, which rather gloomily asserts the pointlessness of dreaming of flying or running as loss and loneliness are all that await...

'If hands could free you, heart,

Where would you fly?

Far, beyond every part

Of earth this running sky

Makes desolate? Would you cross

City and hill and sea,

If hands could set you free?

I would not lift the latch;

For I could run

Through fields, pit-valleys, catch

All beauty under the sun—

Still end in loss:

I should find no bent arm, no bed

To rest my head'.

Natural Selection continues until 26 November 2017, I strongly recommend going to see it (visitor details here) 

On a similar theme to ‘Natural Selection’ here's the wonderful Band of Holy Joy with the Observer's Book of Birds Eggs:
'it was the first book I ever owned, the Observer's book of birds eggs, fully illustrated and described in natural colours, and yay it was mine. I devoured every page from the hooded crow to the ptarmigan' (incidentally lead singer Johny Brown ran the Royal Parks Half last month after doing the Great North Run last year).

Nature is your guide - pathfinding without GPS

'Nature is your guide: how to find your way on land and sea by observing nature' by Harold Gatty (1903-1957) was first published in 1958, and was later republished as 'Finding your way without map or compass'.  

Tasmania-born Gatty was an experienced navigator himself, flying around the world with Wiley Post in a record-breaking eight days in 1931 and in the Second World War writing the US military's 'Raft Book' with survival tips for those adrift at sea in life rafts.

 'Nature is your guide' expanded on the Raft Book to provide a fascinating compendium of ways in which people can find their way not just by observation of the sun, moon and stars but by paying attention to other natural phenomena such as birds, weather, trees and the patterns of snow fields and sand dunes. Among the many other 'Methods of pathfinding' he mentions include 'the study of reflections in the sky,… The direction of the prevailing wind, the observation of wind polished rocks and of the movements of high clouds, the directions of sun and shadows'.

Did you know that termite mounds in the desert areas of Australia are almost always oriented north-south? Probably more useful in the UK, many trees 'develop more foliage on the side which receives most sunlight', so in the northern hemisphere 'oak and beech trees in exposed positions are more heavily branched and have greater foliage on the south side'.

Sailors, nomads and other travellers have used these methods for thousands of years, but these skills have largely died out because with modern navigational aids they have become obsolete. I have a compass now on my phone, not to mention GPS mapping - but what would we do if  left to our own devices? (or rather left without our devices).

There is some archaic language in this book about 'primitive' people, but the author's point is that their skills in pathfinding were not due to biological differences such as possession of a mysterious 'sixth sense' of direction but to their acute observations of the natural world and their development of 'mental maps'.

For runners much of this pathfinding lore would probably only be useful on long unmarked trails in remote areas, though being able to know what direction you are heading in without GPS or compass could be a lifesaver in some situations.

In non-threatening circumstances I was pleased recenlty to be able to find my way lost in the woods by observing the direction of a stream, other than that the only use I have made of this knowledge is to run the shortest distance between two points.

As Gatty notes, moving in a straight line is not as easy as it seems and people who are lost often end up walking in circles - 'in walking almost every person tends to veer in one direction or another in a consistent way... this error is due in most cases to the difference in length of any individual's two legs'. In trail blazing,  'The traveller must pick out distant landmarks and work to them or by them. It is elementary practice to find two landmarks ahead and line them up, and to do the same thing looking back. Back marks are just as important as, if not more important than, fore marks' for finding your way home.

I have got into the mental habit now when I am racing of looking ahead to the most distant point on the course in a straight line ahead and then finding another nearer point which lines up with it - such as a divot or a bush  - and then heading towards that. Of course I only use points that are actually on the course - no sneaky short cuts for me!