Vesper Flights

In her introduction, author Helen Macdonald hopes Vesper Flights will serve as a Wunderkammer, a Cabinet of Curiosities, a cabinet of wonders. And it is. It truly is.

Macdonald explores all sorts of things she is interested in, most of which are closely associated with nature. Birds' nests and birds' eggs, and whether or not it is right to collect these. The miracle of wild boars (don't, under any circumstances, tell a US naturalist this). Field guides. The meadow near her childhood home. Seeing migrating birds from a high-rise. Flying common black ants. Migraines, and how her inability to recognize the onset of a migraine is similar to apocalyptic thinking. Collecting mushrooms. Seeing solar eclipses. Trying to find life forms on Earth that might resemble those that could potentially live on Mars. Hares. Swan upping (you have to read the book to find this out, if you, like me, are American). Deer and the danger they pose to motorists. Falcons nesting in old towers. Swifts. Caged birds. Berries. Watching animals from a blind. And (and I love this) the numinous ordinary.

So much in such a short book.

“At times of difficulty, watching birds ushers you into a different world, where no words need to be spoken.”

“Later (swifts) gather higher in the sky...And then, all at once, as if summoned by a call or a bell, they rise higher and higher until they disappear from view. These ascents are called vesper flights....Vespers are evening devotional prayers, the last and the most solemn of the day, and I have always thought ‘vesper flights' the most beautiful phrase, an ever-falling blue.”

“Swifts aren't always cresting the atmospheric boundary layer at dizzying heights; most of the time they are living below it in thick and complicated air. That's where they feed and mate and bathe and drink and are. But to find out about the important things that affect their lives, they must go higher to survey the wider scene, and there communicate with others about the larger forces impinging on their realm....Not all of us need to make that climb...but as a community, surely some of us are required, by dint of flourishing life and the well-being of us all, to look clearly at the things that are so easily obscured by the everyday.”

“Nature reserves are places in which we can experience the past—the British environmentalist Max Nicholson once described them as outdoor living museums.”

“(T)he world is full of people busily making things into how they think the world ought to be, and burning huge parts of it to the ground, utterly and accidentally destroying things in the process without even knowing they are doing so. And that any of us might be doing that without knowing it, any of us, all the time.”

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