4
IN THE PICTURE
In which our author really looks at a heron, faces the reality of 23,000 photographs, drops in on Thos Bewick, and drinks from the abundant keg of avian glory
I have a blank piece of paper, and I have a pencil. I can do what I like with them. I could write a poem, draw a musical stave and compose a ditty, or I could write out from memory Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’, the only poem I learned as a child to survive the intervening forty-five years intact.
I choose to do none of those things. Instead I draw a tufted duck.* Or at least something you could give someone and they might say, ‘Is it . . . a duck . . .?’
My credentials as an artist are thin. I’d go further and say they’re non-existent. Art has been lodged in my head for decades as ‘something I can’t do’, and I’ve never seen any reason to prove myself wrong. Why would I do that, when the results would no doubt induce queasiness in anyone unfortunate enough to catch a glimpse of my efforts?
My speciality, aged nine, was what I called ‘one of my landscapes’. My landscapes consisted of one line gently curving across the page from the left (a hill), intersecting with another line gently curving across the page from the right (another hill). Sometimes there would be a car on one of the hills, sometimes not. According to whim I might also add a bird or two, and a sun (or two).
I never progressed from my landscapes, nor attempted to, and so came to the inevitable conclusion that I ‘couldn’t do art’.
It is often the case that we are interested in that which we cannot do. My fascination with the works of the great artists is accordingly tinged with an awestruck reverence. This reverence differs from the respect I afford great composers and writers, whose skillsets and tricks I am more or less familiar with. Art, to me, is a form of sorcery.
But sometimes you get the urge to dabble in sorcery.
I blame birding. A couple of years spent practising this noble hobby brought with it a sketchy understanding of its associated skills, known to the experts as ‘fieldcraft’. Some improved simply by dint of doing them often. My ability to identify a blue tit from a fleeting glimpse of its disappearing arse, once a pipe dream, is now a source of pride; I can now bring my binoculars to my eyes and focus on the place I need to look at without whacking myself in the nose; and if pushed I can give a quick description of where in the featureless landscape my birding companion should direct their gaze. But if these skills are in my grasp, or at least near to it, I have resolutely resisted developing one of the most important: sketching. I have a camera. If I want to record a bird for later identification, I use that – quicker, easier, and no faffing around with sketchbooks and pencils and having to be good at it.
But then I see other people’s sketches, posted online, and the prospect seems somehow alluring. Just a few lines to give the overall impression of the bird – body and head shape, tail length, distinguishing features like eye stripes and wing bars and such like. Wouldn’t that be a good thing to be able to do?
It would.
Not trusting a live bird to sit still long enough for my purpose, I go to my photo collection. Soon enough a suitable candidate presents itself. A heron,* standing in beaky isolation against a backdrop of reeds. Should be simple enough. Herons are monochrome birds, well suited to pencil sketching. And they have a distinctive shape, recognisable to even the most casual park visitor. Pointy dagger beak, round eye, scraggly shawl. That should do it.
It doesn’t.
The bill is unequivocally the wrong shape, the head is more like a donkey’s, and is somehow hanging from the body in a way that makes it look as if the bird is halfway through being beheaded. And quite what a heron is doing wearing a toupee is anyone’s guess. It looks like a heron drawn by someone who has heard a five-second description of a heron, in a language they don’t speak, by someone who once met a guy who heard about a heron that visited their grandmother’s home town fifty years ago.
I try to fix it, changing a line here, adding one there, rubbing out the toupee and drawing a crest.
Now it just looks like a heron that has been drawn by a heron.
Drawing is every bit as hard as I thought.
I look again at the photograph. It’s a lovely one, the bird’s profile strong against a blurry background, and with nothing intervening to complicate matters. Why is it so hard?
I abandon the drawing and try again.
My second effort looks like the work of a bright six-year-old.
I call that progress of sorts and, undaunted, have one more go. And it’s only now that I realise the basic error of my ways.
I have never looked at a heron. Not properly.
I’ve looked at them many times, both with the naked eye and through binoculars. I recognise the shape instantly, whether it’s standing with infinite patience in the local park, flying overhead with those slow, lapping wingbeats and distinctive bulgy neck, head back between its shoulder blades, or, as on one memorable occasion, landing on our shed roof, scrabbling against the unexpected camber, then flying away with an aggrieved grawk.
I know what a heron looks like.
But at the same time, I realise, I don’t know what a heron looks like. There’s a difference between recognising something and knowing how it’s put together. It’s the difference between being able to order paella y dos cervezas, por favor, and actually holding a conversation in Spanish.
I spend a few minutes examining the photograph, taking in the precise angle of the tip of the bill, the rate at which it thickens towards the head, the precise configuration of its base, how that relates to the elongated nostril on the top. The eye – near the front of the head, level with the top half of the bill – has a thin black ring surrounding it, and then there’s a thick black stripe sweeping back, dominating the top of the head, thinning out a bit, and topped with a few wispy streaks of feather which form a perky little crest.
This realisation is one thing. Making my hand reproduce it is quite another.
I make a tentative line – the top of the bill. It wobbles. I try again, willing myself to be more confident. Now it’s too long, too heavy.
Third time lucky.
Bingo.
And now the bottom of the bill, being careful – but not too careful – to get the angle right.
I build the basic outline of the bird, referring back to the photograph time and time again to check my progress, and eventually I lay down the pencil. It’s as good as I can make it. It’s finished.
Maybe just another line here?
No. Leave it be. You’ll ruin it.
But there’s—
No.
It’s the easiest mistake to make. Fiddling for fiddling’s sake. Thinking that the next little amendment will be the thing that transforms it, when in fact you might have been better off getting it right in the first place.
I look at my heron. At the very least, it resembles something its mother might recognise, so I’m taking that as a win.
It’s not just the sense of achievement that gives me a boost. There’s something more. I realise that, while I was drawing this heron, my mind was occupied with one thing only: drawing the heron. Whether you call it mindfulness or meditation or just concentration, that focus – the single-minded devotion of one’s energies to completing a task – feels like a healthy thing. Throw in the strangely relaxing physical sensation of making the marks – the smooth sweep of drawing a curved line, the staccato tapping when doing the speckly bits, the obscure pleasure gained from filling in the eye with little circular movements until there remains the tiniest speck of white, the life-giving gleam of it – and you have pure therapy. And I’ve ignored it for nearly five decades.
What a pillock.
An old room in an old house. I’m alone. Alone, that is, apart from seven black and white heads, each one much larger than life in a way that could easily distress me if I thought about it too much. They’re papier-mâché models of seven British birds: heron, cuckoo, roseate tern, tree sparrow, blackbird, dotterel and great black-backed gull.
There’s a circle of chairs in the middle of the room. I can take my pick. I choose to sit under the baleful gaze of the heron.
Dotted around the room are speakers, voices talking.
‘. . . I feel powerful. It’s a food chain . . .’
A human, pretending to be a bird.
‘. . . they’re all killing something . . .’
The words, if I’m not mistaken, of a great black-backed gull.
‘. . . we just happen to be killing something people like . . . like puffins.’
My visit to Thomas Bewick’s house, Cherryburn, has coincided with an installation, and it’s very much my kind of thing. The artist Marcus Coates has gathered leading figures in the world of nature in a recording studio and asked them to talk about their lives, the only trick being that they have to do it in the character of a bird of their choice.
‘. . . the birds that are thriving are the ones that have found niches as part of the human world . . .’
A few people look in at the door. They don’t stay, possibly put off by the massive bird heads dominating the room. Outside, a wood pigeon sings its lilting, syncopated song. ‘Ho-HOO-hoo, ho-hoo. Ho-HOO-hoo, ho-hoo.’
‘Never trust a bird with a penis.’
Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk, having a whale of a time being a cuckoo.
‘I have an unjustified bad reputation. Humans hate cuckoos because we reflect their own anxieties about whether their children are theirs.’
She’s really getting into her role. This is high-level anthropomorphism – frowned on by scientists, but almost inevitable nonetheless. We can’t know what goes through the head of any animal, and any attempt to do so can be made only from a human perspective. And it’s enjoyable listening to knowledgeable people trying.
‘The migrants are intruding.’
Geoff Sample, naturalist and wildlife sounds expert. Also, for now, a blackbird.
‘They come over here, from Scandinavia, invade our territory, compete with us for resources . . . young blackbirds muscling in on my patch. The old blackbird culture’s not there any more. I’m getting old . . . might move out to the country . . .’
The discussion is played on a loop. I listen to it all twice, sitting quietly on the hard chair, drinking it all in. On the one hand, it’s a playful exercise, but it also encourages us to look at things from a different angle, in a different way. It’s one thing looking at something closely so you can draw it; quite another trying to get into its head.
‘. . . in the end, you learn from whoever’s around . . .’
The recording reaches the beginning again. It’s dark in the room, warm and sunny outside. I go out to the yard and sit, looking over the Tyne valley across the Northumbrian countryside. Cobbled yard, low brick wall, trees to one side, rolling hills stretching to clear blue sky. I can see why young Thomas bunked off school.
A small tortoiseshell butterfly lands next to me. Colourful, delicate. Lovely. If it were a moth, brown and drab, most people would dismiss it. Our view of nature is relentlessly coloured by sentiment, our insistence on imposing human values on non-human things. Colours and patterns are interesting; plainness isn’t. Gulls are bastards, robins sweet, otters cute, snakes slimy.
But if you look at behaviour, not image, none of them are any of those things. And they’re all here, alongside us, for one reason only: they have survived.
The small tortoiseshell basks on the wall next to me, wings spread. I open my sketchbook and do a quick, inaccurate sketch, deficient in almost every respect. It flies away as if disgusted.
A blackbird hops up onto the wall, levers its tail slowly upwards. I have my sketchbook open. I also have a camera. As I switch it on and wait the few seconds for the zoom to reset, the blackbird cocks me a look and flies away.
Cheeky buggers, blackbirds.
In 1789, at the same time as Gilbert White was publishing one wildlife masterpiece, Thomas Bewick was putting the finishing touches to another.
It was a time of burgeoning interest in natural history. Explorers were coming back from far-off lands with descriptions of exotic beasts;* the great and the good assembled collections of one thing after another – flowers, shells and, where budget and space allowed, animals; and scientists were busy nailing down the vexed question of what exactly was what. Over a hundred years earlier, the great naturalist John Ray had classified over two hundred British birds; Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s monumental 36-volume Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière, with illustrations by Jacques de Sève and François-Nicolas Martinet, appeared piecemeal through the second half of the eighteenth century; and the contribution of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, whose binomial classification system is still in use today, took the science to another level.
Bewick sensed that a reliable, accurate and exhaustive survey of animals would find an eager audience, and since 1781 had been planning such a book. He had already produced thumbnail-sized engravings for A New Lottery Book of Birds and Beasts in 1771, but the plan for A General History of Quadrupeds was far more ambitious. He worked with Ralph Beilby, the Newcastle engraver to whom he’d been apprenticed in 1767, and in whose workshop he had learned the intricacies of wood engraving. Beilby wrote the texts describing the animals, although these were also liberally peppered with memories from Bewick’s own childhood. They drew on the work of Ray, Buffon and Linnaeus, as well as Thomas Pennant, author of British Zoology and one of Gilbert White’s correspondents in The Natural History of Selborne. The clash of the various classification systems caused them endless headaches when it came to working out the animals’ order of appearance in the book, a dilemma they never truly resolved. But if the resulting book, for all its many qualities, was an energetic muddle, it proved a popular one.
It’s easy to see why. A General History of Quadrupeds mixed the familiar – horses, cows, sheep – with the outlandish – zebra, dromedary and the wonderful cameleopard, or what we now know as a giraffe. Beilby’s descriptions of the animals are successful enough, but it’s the illustrations that give the book life and popular appeal: more than two hundred wood engravings of animals, plus another hundred or so ‘tale-pieces’ – vignettes of country life, usually telling a little story – at the end of chapters.
Unsurprisingly, the most successful illustrations are of the animals Bewick knew best. A ‘cart horse’ exudes lazy charm, rough of coat, heavy of limb, its somnolent eyes half-closed, contrasting with the wide-eyed and well-groomed ‘improved cart horse’ of the following plate. A common goat, with straggly hair and beard, has elegantly curved horns and an indefinably goaty look in its eye. And he somehow captures the blend of vulnerability and strength in a recumbent fallow deer, its palmate antlers delicately perched on its head.
Bewick’s desire for anatomical accuracy was somewhat undermined by an inconvenient truth: he had never seen many of the animals he was portraying. Relying on other people for drawings and descriptions naturally compromised the accuracy of some of the illustrations, so if the folds of skin on his rendition of the rhinoceros are somewhat exaggerated, giving it the impression of wearing a coat several sizes too large, this is both understandable and forgivable. It is in any case a striking and memorable image, as is the magnificently ungainly dromedary – a lumpy and shambolic animal of the kind you’d like to get to know.
And then there were the ‘tale-pieces’, which exuded a lively wit, and packed a lot into a small space. In one of them, two people try to get a mule going – the rider by waving his hat, the accompanying pedestrian by flaying it with a branch. A windmill behind them recalls Don Quixote – the absolute stillness of the mule an accurate rendition of the impotence of humans in the face of animal stubbornness. Another shows a man trying to hold his balance in driving rain on a narrow plank over a stream, his hat blown off and his dog straining at the leash. A third has a man with a bunch of sticks on his back, small dog in front, trees with rooks’ nests in the background, the weariness evident in the stoop of the man’s back, the dog bounding off ahead of him.
For a reading public newly switched on to the wonders of nature, these illustrations would have opened up a new world of understanding, both of the natural world around them, and of the unfamiliar and exotic. And it was all underpinned by a level of observation that had become a habit since a childhood spent skipping school and roaming the countryside around his home, drawing everything he saw.
Bewick’s preferred medium, engraving on close-grained boxwood, was out of fashion when he started his apprenticeship. Recent advances in metal engraving offered cleaner, more elegant lines than the somewhat rough standard prevalent in the woodcuts of the time. But Bewick felt at home with wood, and cut his teeth in Beilby’s workshop, learning and perfecting the techniques that would serve him for the rest of his life. It helped that he had an innate ability to see and think in negative – backgrounds were black, the design coming from what was taken away, not what was added. But most of all he saw that you could produce variations of tone by adjusting the depth of incision in the wood, a technique not available in metal engraving. He also developed a deep understanding of how best to print from woodcuts, which meant he could produce work of superior detail and quality. And his manual dexterity and control – as with all things, a mixture of natural ability and practice – allowed him to achieve an unmatched level of fine detail.
The final engraving in Quadrupeds is the only one without a name:
An Amphibious Animal . . . about the size of a small cat . . . its bill is very similar to that of a duck . . . its eyes are very small, it has four short legs . . . the fore legs are shorter than those of the hind, and their webs spread considerably beyond the claws . . . the hind legs are also webbed.
Given that the waterways of Northumberland weren’t exactly overflowing with them, the accompanying illustration of a duck-billed platypus isn’t half bad.
Quadrupeds was just the beginning. Bewick’s biggest project, the one for which he became known, and the reason his name has been given to two bird species,* was A History of British Birds, published in two volumes over eight years around the turn of the eighteenth century. It was a mammoth undertaking, not made easier by the influx of work – ranging from coats of arms for public offices to bar bills for local taverns – that resulted from the popularity of Quadrupeds.
British Birds builds on Quadrupeds in every way. The engravings are more uniform in quality, less prone to inaccuracy. The descriptions† are more detailed and evocative. And the ‘tale-pieces’ have developed, some of them packing astonishing amounts of detail into tiny spaces, and many offering trenchant social commentary in the scenes they depict, giving us a picture of rural life of the time. In a way, for all the brilliance and importance of the animal illustrations, it’s these vignettes that tell us more about the man and his times.
Bewick’s mastery of wood-engraving techniques allowed him to show the birds’ plumages in extraordinary detail, somehow rendering the subtleties and nuances of soft materials in a hard medium.
Some of the birds sit nicely, as if for a portrait. Not so the cuckoo. It’s caught in mid ‘cuck’, mouth open, tongue half out, chest thrust forward, long tail reaching for the sky at a defiant angle. The upper parts, slate grey in real life, are composed of innumerable fine notchings, sweeping back from the head along the back, subtle variations in length and intensity portraying the plumage’s infinite nuances, delineating the join between body and shoulders, the layering of the wing feathers. And if the monochrome illustration can’t capture the yellow around the eye, it compensates by somehow showing us its livid gleam, portrayed, I now see, not by showing it as a circle, but as a crescent moon, surrounded by the finest filament for an eye ring.
What he has captured, I realise as I examine this bird in minute detail, is the cuckoo’s cuckooness.
I think of him sitting at his table, working with concentration on these fine details, matching the tool for the task, moulding the wood with craft and patience, varying the depth of his incisions to give the nuances of tone and detail that set his work apart. A serious, jocund, perceptive man, a rare and original artist whose work introduced thousands of people to the world of nature.
I look at his cuckoo, take a piece of paper and a pencil, and try again.
The seven birds featured in Conference for the Birds represent a decent cross-section of British species, from ubiquitous to scarce. If you’re not going to struggle to see a heron or a blackbird, the same can’t be said of the tree sparrow – population down more than 90 per cent in the last forty years – or the roseate tern – now restricted to a few coastal breeding sites in Britain. But if you had to pick one of them as an example both of a famous British bird and one in steep decline, a lot of people would choose the cuckoo.
You don’t often get to see cuckoos – they’re relatively secretive birds. Nowadays, you don’t often get to hear them either.
But sometimes you just get lucky.
There is a good place for them. I try to get there at least once every year. You can never be sure – they might not have arrived, or they might be out and about that day – but the RSPB reserve at Northward Hill in Kent is a reliable cuckoo haunt.
My desire to seek them out is, I suspect, fuelled by a desperation to cling on to the past, to recapture a sliver of something that in my childhood was as natural as breathing. The cuckoo’s two-note call was a summer constant, just part of the soundtrack.
I go there for the nightingales too. Another lost sound. And it’s the nightingales I hear first.
I stand where the path divides. There is a terrific greenness all around, bushes and shrubs and trees all throbbing with life, possibility and, frankly, sex.
In the background, a chiffchaff – monotonous, repetitive, but somehow uplifting. Further away, a blackbird, the complexity of its song putting the chiffchaff to shame. All around, a selection of other hopefuls, their vocal fecundity driven not by a desire to please the human ear – although this is a bonus from our point of view – but by evolutionary imperative. I stop and feast my ears.
And then it starts, not far away, dominating the soundscape as if amplified by the bushes. The richness of the nightingale’s song has been celebrated since time immemorial, and it’s one of those things you have to experience live. Recordings, though useful as a guide to recognition, simply don’t do justice to the depth and richness of the sound. And here there are two of them in competition.
I drink from the abundant keg of avian glory until I’ve had my fill, and then I move on, walking slowly, as the idyllic nature of the scene demands.
A brouhaha overhead. An aggrieved chattering, a kind of strangled squawk. Birds unknown, bothering each other high in the canopy.
I’m better than I used to be at finding these things, at hearing something, locating it, synchronising sound with sight. But still it eludes me. The canopy is too thick.
The brouhaha intensifies. It’s now verging on a ruckus, possibly even a stramash. And with the stramashery comes visibility. Branches sway, leaves flurry, and the two birds tumble briefly into view, the larger bird landing, to my intense satisfaction, on a branch to which I have a direct sightline.
It’s a cuckoo, and it’s mighty pissed off.
I can see the barring on its front, the livid eye, the head turning this way and that to fend off the bombardment of fury from the smaller bird, which doesn’t stay still long enough for me to get a handle on its identification. And the sounds it’s making are at such a pitch of incoherence that they’re unlikely to appear in any lexicon of bird sounds except under the heading ‘Generic Small Bird Fury, Incandescent’.
An image pops into my head of King Kong at the top of the Empire State Building, swatting away the swarming planes.
The battle between the two birds transfixes me, and then, as soon as it started, it’s over. The smaller bird, identified as a whitethroat just as it departs, gives up the ghost, and no sooner has it disappeared than the cuckoo ups sticks and the canopy is restored to a semblance of peace.
And here’s the thing.
I had my camera. It would have been the work of a few seconds to bring it to my eyes and fire off a burst. Point, press, hold. Twelve shots a second, maybe five seconds’ worth. Point again, press again. Repeat. Upwards of a hundred, two hundred photos through which to sift at my leisure, deleting the unsatisfactory ones until a handful remain. And that handful would be 85 per cent leaf, 10 per cent blur and perhaps, if I got really lucky, 5 per cent aggrieved cuckoo face. Maybe.
But none of them would come close to the memory of it. And it’s just possible that by not photographing the scene, by focusing instead on drinking it in, observing every detail – experiencing it – my mind holds it in the memory just that bit more firmly. Apart from anything else, if I’d opted to get out the camera my focus would have been on getting a decent photograph rather than the scene itself.
The absence of a bad photo from my library hasn’t expunged the incident from my mind. Far from it. And when I sift through my photos, gradually reducing the strain on my hard drive, there are any number of images that seem pointless and one-dimensional compared with the vividness of that cuckoo.
I’ve taken thousands of photos. Birds, deer, trees, butterflies, lizards, dragonflies, rabbits, bees, spiders, flowers, snails, bracket fungi sprouting from tree stumps, mosaics of autumn leaves, patches of scrubby foliage nudging through the bars of cemetery railings, earlymorning sunlight streaming through the gaps in the canopy, fields shrouded in atmospheric mist, bluebells carpeting the woodland floor.
And ducks. Loads of ducks.
I do this mostly because I find these things attractive and would like a record of them. I also do it because it is cheap and easy. Too cheap and too easy. Phone out of pocket, point, click.
At the time of writing I have nearly 23,000 photographs on my computer. If I took the time and trouble to delete the dross, duplicates and inexplicable screenshots, no doubt I could bring that number down by at least 50 per cent. But that’s still too many, the equivalent of whole drawers of prints, none of which ever get looked at except when you decide to have a good clear-out and then spend an afternoon sifting through old photos – oh my God, look at our hair! – before putting them all back in the same drawer.*
Why exactly do I have thirty-six bad photos of a black-headed gull? Because I couldn’t be bothered to delete them. Do they remind me of the day, place me back in the moment, experiencing what it was like to see that black-headed gull? Do they perhaps give a unique insight into the bird’s psychology or behaviour? Do they serve any purpose at all?
Nah. I probably took them because I thought I’d get a few likes on Instagram.
Some of them stick. Looking at a particular photo of two hundred jackdaws and crows spreading across a dusky winter sky, I am taken back to that chill December day in Gloucestershire, can feel the crisp of frosted mud underfoot, the bite of the wind on my gloveless fingers. And a wren, perched on a reed, head thrown back, mouth open, pouring its punchy song up to the sky, places me on the path in the warm spring sun at RSPB Rainham Marshes, a general sense of well-being enhanced by the exuberance of that tiny shouter.
And if some of these photographic success stories serve a purpose, triggering memories or acting as a record of an occasion, there are others that are interesting or worthwhile images in their own right, eliciting a response in other people. It might be because the framing is interesting, the light dramatic, or some other aspect of the photograph that triggers pleasure; or it might just be a happy accident, a confluence of factors beyond my control, conspiring to make it memorable in some way.
But no matter how striking any of my photographs might be, no matter how nearly perfect, they will always lack the evocative magic of the very first photographic images of nature, taken nearly 180 years ago.
In the 1830s a revolution was afoot. The possibilities afforded by combining specific chemicals and exposing them to light were becoming apparent, and the pioneers of photography were conducting experiments that would eventually lead, albeit indirectly, to that bane of modern life, the selfie. If only one could invent a time machine to go back and nip this dangerous process in the bud.*
In France the pioneers were Louis Daguerre and Hippolyte Bayard; in England, John Herschel and Henry Fox Talbot led the way. And it was Anna Atkins, using a process invented by Herschel, who produced the first photographically illustrated book about anything, anywhere.
Atkins’s motivations to produce Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions were manyfold. She was a keen botanist† – in this she was encouraged from an early age by her father, John George Children, a renowned scientist, secretary of the Royal Society, and notably liberal parent for the time. She was also a talented illustrator, producing 250 engravings for her father’s translation of Lamarck’s Genera of Shells in her early twenties. And she was fascinated by the new discipline of photography.
In particular, she was intrigued by the possibilities of cyanotypes, which her friend John Herschel* invented in 1842. This technique – mix chemicals,† paint them on paper, expose to sunlight, rinse and dry – was quicker, simpler and cheaper than film photography, and while the results were less detailed, they were ideal for Atkins’s purposes.‡ William Henry Harvey’s otherwise definitive reference volume, A Manual of the British Algae, published in 1841, was admirable in many ways, but it had no illustrations. For someone as visually engaged as Atkins this was hugely frustrating, and in cyanotypes she saw the opportunity to produce a companion publication of illustrations to fill the gap.
In recognising the power of the photographic image, its importance in communicating the beauty of nature, and the difference between a human’s representation of an object and the real thing, she was ahead of her time. The wood-engraving technique mastered by Thomas Bewick remained the default method of book illustration, but for all the beauty of skilfully rendered artwork, and while a good botanical drawing was still useful as a scientific guide, cyanotypes spoke to people in a different way. Their novelty was one thing – their translucent beauty sealed the deal.
Atkins published the first instalment of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in 1843, with further volumes appearing over the next decade. It was painstaking and meticulous work, requiring skill and patience. The specimens were fragile, and had to be handled carefully and quickly, before leaving them exposed to the sun for exactly the right length of time. She printed a limited edition for private distribution – algae, then as now, weren’t big business – and today just seventeen copies remain, each one in a different configuration. These aren’t things you can just turn up and look at, but you can examine them online.*
The character of the images is enhanced by Atkins’s decision to write the text out by hand – a pleasing personal touch. Her handwriting is careful, neat. There is an elegant curl to the loop of her ‘g’s, a soft rhythm to the listing of the scientific names. Lichina pygmaea, Polyides rotundus, Porphyra linearis.
The cyanotypes themselves are striking. Some plants, the less frondy ones, are merely patches of white – blobs, in some cases – against a blue background. But the ones that exert a particular hold are the straggly ones, myriad tiny white lines reaching for the void.
One, Ectocarpus fasciculatus, is suspended near the top of the sheet, giving it the impression of floating in the sea, seen from underneath as if you’re a diver looking up, the algae silhouetted against the sun. Another, Gigartina acicularis, looks like an overhead map of animal migration routes, its paths straying off in various directions, intertwining, crossing each other and gradually fading out until just one faint trace wisps its way towards the top of the page, the lone survivor.
You can lose yourself in these images. They offer a pleasing contrast to the sepia tones of other contemporary photographs, and the variety of patterns created by the algae – skeletons in the sea – take on a vivid luminosity against the depth of the Prussian blue background. Their abstract other-worldliness offers respite from the seething abundance of nature images in the modern world, and you quickly become used to it. And their historical importance shouldn’t be understated. Those glossy coffee-table books, lavishly illustrated with stunning images of everything from the New York skyline to birds of the world – they all owe a small debt for their existence to Anna Atkins.
There are times, when looking for wildlife, that you know you’re going to have a duff day. The ominous calm from the moment you park, the empty lake, the seemingly permanent lull. Today is not one of those days. The moment I see the first flash of blue under my nose, a minute after parking the car, I know I’m in for a good time. It zips across ahead of me and towards the small pond by the boardwalk, a blur of movement and activity in the stillness of the heat haze. I follow its trajectory, find it, head towards it.
A damselfly – along with its dragon cousins, one of the surest harbingers of summer. Their jewel-like appearance and aerobatic mastery combine to exert a rare fascination, although there are admittedly frustrations attached. Their moments of stillness seem perfectly synchronised with my ability to identify them, the simple equation being that they sit or hover still for exactly one second less than the time it takes for me to hazard a guess as to their identity.
This one is, to my relief, one of the few I’m fairly confident of, its metallic blue sheen almost as mesmerisingly attractive as its latticework wings and, indeed, its name. Banded demoiselle. Words that positively invite you to deepen your voice half a step and say them slowly, with an inviting half-smile.
The apparent delicacy of these creatures disguises a robustness that has seen them survive for about 300 million years. Our modern Odonata (the genus encompassing both dragonflies and damselflies) might not have the two-foot wingspans of some of their ancestors, but there is still something of the primeval about them. But, most of all, their outstanding aerial abilities make them a source of constant fascination.
The mechanics of their flight enable them to manoeuvre in pretty much any direction, including backwards. Four light, strong wings can produce power disproportionate to their weight, and they can angle their body to enable flight that combines nimbleness with speed in a way almost unmatched in nature. It’s taken us thousands of years to develop technology that comes close to what evolved naturally.
This specimen treats me to a short display before zipping across to the other side of the pond, and I continue on my way.
I’ve come to Thursley Common in Surrey. A 350-hectare area of heathland just off the A3, with terrific biodiversity, it’s an enticing venue for a south London wildlife-lover with a yen for something a bit different from the local patch. Where I’m used to blue tits, jackdaws and the occasional squirrel, Thursley offers a broader palette, including the already seen dragonflies and extending to lizards. It’s prime lizard weather, so my eyes scan low down ahead of me as I set out along the boardwalk that threads its way across the wetter part of the common, looking by the posts and around the edges for odd shadows, strange disturbances in the regular board-gap-board pattern.
And sure enough, within a minute my vigilance is rewarded. It’s average sized for a common lizard, about five inches, sleek of appearance, and, as lizards always are, looking poised for action. It’s something to do with the set of their feet.
To take a decent photo I’m either going to have to stand directly above it and look down, emphasising the dramatic silhouette of its body and the barcode pattern on its back against the dull grain of the wood, or I’ll have to get down to its level. Not wanting to disturb it, I opt for the latter.
My dodgy knees are already protesting at the thought. This will be worth it, though. And to be absolutely fair, it’s not the getting down so much as the getting back up.
I make sure I’m still a few feet away as I lower myself slowly to my knees. The lizard stays there, still, wary.
I lie on my stomach. It’s strangely relaxing. And now I inch forward using my elbows until I’m close enough to see its occasional blink. But I’m aware that getting too close will scare it off.
Lizards are, by any standards, fascinating creatures. Like dragonflies, they exude a hint of the prehistoric. More than a hint, in fact. A shedload. If we need a living connection with the history of this planet, lizards tick all the boxes. More so, in fact, than many birds. It’s the feel of them, the impression they give of being terribly ancient.
I suspect, though, that many people don’t even realise Britain has lizards. They’re associated with warm sunshine; Britain is not.
My usual procedure when taking a photograph is to fiddle around with the settings until it feels right. I’m well aware that this is not the prescribed method. I’m also aware of the three pillars of photography – shutter speed, aperture size, ISO – and the effect changing each of them will have on your photograph. I know this, and I understand it. And yet my preferred method is still, and will always be, to fiddle around with the settings until it feels right.
This is why, when I take a halfway decent photograph and people compliment me for it, I flap them away like a spheksophobe dismissing a wasp. Real photographers are rather more organised in their approach to the discipline.
On this occasion, my fiddling proves reasonably effective, and I manage some respectable shots before the disruption arrives.
The lizard feels it first. A distant vibration. And it’s off, darting down under the boardwalk, safe refuge from the approaching monster. And now I’m aware of it, can feel and hear it coming towards me. Thubb – thubb – thubb – thubb.
It’s a jogger. An athletic one, too, springy and lithe and fast, showing all the right signs of exertion without that desperate look you sometimes see in a runner’s eyes, that look that says, ‘I’m doing this because I think it’s good for me, but honestly, kill me now.’
He clumps past, showing no sign of incredulity that there’s a middle-aged man lying on the boardwalk. For my part, any incredulity I have is reserved for other people’s athleticism, and it’s really more of a simmering low-level envy. I prefer walking to running for many reasons, pain and discomfort prominent among them. But while I’m not averse to building up a head of steam on a brisk walk – preferably with the help of a stout stick – I would also be open to the possibilities afforded by more strenuous exercise. I have it on good authority from those who run regularly that the exercise brings with it a heightened appreciation of one’s surroundings. But to counterbalance this is the knowledge that nothing beats a really good dawdle. The fast walker or runner might be getting an endorphin hit and a decent cardiovascular workout, but they run the danger of missing out on the goldcrest flitting about in the cypress just there, or that really good bit of hairy lichen.
So I waver between dawdle and stride, never quite summoning up the energy to discover the joys of running.
I haul myself back up and continue, setting my default pace to ‘stride with the occasional dawdle should the need arise’.
It arises.
A Dartford warbler plays hide-and-seek behind a clump of gorse; a redstart sings from a nearby copse, pops out to say hello, pops back in again; a willow warbler tirelessly gives its melancholy descending song from a few yards away.
And now a different sound.
Cuck-oo.
My directional hearing isn’t what it was, but a few repeats lead me to believe that it’s over there. I follow the sound, hoping it won’t suddenly decide enough’s enough.
It’s quite loud now. There’s a time for dawdling and a time for striding. Now is the time for striding.
I reach a long row of trees, with a field behind. I can just see enough through them to be aware of a presence. And as I approach, following a rough path through the low scrub and gorse, I catch sight of them.
Photographers. Sitting in a crescent, lenses trained on a spot I can’t see through the trees. They’re real photographers, too. Male, camouflage gear, telephoto lenses the size of the Blackpool Tower.
I feel that mixture of satisfaction and disappointment you get when stereotypes turn out to be solidly grounded in fact.
The equipment ranged before these photographers might not be familiar to their predecessors – the pioneers of nature photography over a hundred years ago – but their technique will be. They have come to this place knowing that a specific bird will disport itself for their photographic pleasure. Those early hobbyists, alive to the possibilities of the new technology for nature photography, adopted a similar approach. They would go to where they knew the birds were – usually the nest – and take their photographs safe in the knowledge that their valuable resources wouldn’t be wasted.
But one person adopted a different strategy. Emma Turner preferred to set up her hide near a feeding station and wait patiently to see what turned up. This ‘wait and see’ method might not have had the reliability of the more widespread technique, but it produced more memorable images than the generic ‘bird at a nest’ type common at the time.
Photography back then was, to put it mildly, a palaver of the first order, but Turner went about it with a zest that would put many modern exponents of the craft to shame. Cheerfully enduring the hardships of bad weather and discomfort, she thought nothing of lying concealed on the ground for hours, her camera poking up through a layer of rotting vegetation, the better to photograph whatever might come by: ‘Once or twice I felt the slender bill gently prodding my cheek all over, and once it was thrust into my ear . . . The rubbish-heap method of photography was absolutely exhausting, but it had lively compensations.’
This description of an encounter with a snipe, from her book Broadland Birds, written in 1924, sums up her approach, and the results were groundbreaking. Her photographs of young bitterns, taken in 1911 at Hickling Broad in Norfolk, weren’t just confirmation that the bird was breeding in Britain again after an absence of fifty years – they were a slap in the face for the prevailing orthodoxy that proof of sightings could be obtained only with a gun. These photographs, and others like them, paved the way for the gradual exchange of one type of shooting for another.
How far we have come since then.
The procedure Turner would have used to take a photograph was, by today’s standards, unthinkably tiresome. For one thing, the weight and unwieldiness of her apparatus would have made any photographic excursion physically demanding. And the hit-and-miss nature of exposure times, as well as the lack of any compensating features for light quality and so on, must have led to huge frustrations.
The camera was a box to which a lens was attached. You focused the lens using a focusing screen, which you then removed so you could insert the photographic plate. You exposed it for just the right length of time (you hoped), removed the plate, reinserted the focusing screen and started again.
If Emma Turner were around today, I would show her my phone with some sheepishness.
‘Yes, I just, you know, take it out of my pocket and press the screen, and I can do that as often as I like, and, well, just look at this picture of a heron.’
This is the nature of progress. The quality of photograph I can take with my phone was unthinkable ten years ago. Go back another fifteen and the expression ‘I’ve just taken a photograph with my phone’ would earn you a blank stare. The cameras of my childhood are now museum pieces, yet even those would have represented unimaginable luxury to Turner. And what she was doing would have seemed almost like sorcery to Anna Atkins in the 1840s.
Turner’s bittern photographs are, by any measure, remarkable, capturing the bird’s intrinsic weirdness, its alien quality, to perfection. I would be more than happy to take a photograph half as good – so, I suspect, would most proper photographers, including the ones arrayed before me in an expectant crescent.
They appear to be playing the ‘wait and see’ game favoured by Turner, but in truth they know for certain that their vigil will be rewarded.
I walk on a bit. The path takes me slightly away from the trees, but now I can see what the photographers are looking at. A large branch sticking up from the ground. Perched on top of it, an indistinct grey shape. I bring my binoculars to my eyes.
Hello, Colin.
Colin the cuckoo has been coming to Thursley Common for at least six summers now. All the way from Africa to the exact same spot. He’s achieved some celebrity with local birders, and especially photographers, because of his apparent love of the limelight.
Redstarts and stonechats and other heathland birds will come to the perch when he’s not there, and no doubt they’re welcome, but really they’re just the warm-up acts. Colin is the main attraction. He comes and goes, but the consensus seems to be that if you wait long enough, and are armed with the necessary inducements in the form of mealworms, he will disport himself quite happily for a few minutes while you take enough photos to sink a battleship-shaped hard drive.
As I watch, he flies up, does a little loop, then flies back. Colin the Performing Cuckoo. Thrill to his acrobatics! Marvel at his skills!
Even more interesting is the visible awakening of interest among the circle of photographers. I’m too far away to hear them, but I can imagine the flurry of shutter clicks at Colin’s every move.
I can see why they’re there. You’ll never get a better chance to see a cuckoo up close, to get pin-sharp photographs of one in all sorts of poses. And they’ve waited patiently for their reward. The ability to sit and do nothing for hours, just for that one perfect shot, isn’t one I have. I’m too impatient, too keen to see what else is around.
I toy briefly with the idea of joining them, but I quickly dismiss it. No doubt they would be friendly and welcoming, but I’m in the mood for solitude, and with my small lens and general confusion about f-numbers and stopping down and filters and anything more complicated than fiddling around with the settings until it feels right, that circle is not the place for me.
Besides, I have the memory of my own cuckoo moment to keep me going through the long winter months.
I turn round and head back to the car. Colin will manage fine without me.
Back home. Instagram. Twitter. Scroll, scroll, scroll. I share my best lizard photograph. I don’t have to do this. I could keep it to myself, but there are people on there who I know will enjoy it. I know from the occasional interaction that a small but significant number of my followers* have mobility problems, are unable to move far, or even at all, beyond their own homes. For them, photographs shared by people from all over the world are among the great pleasures afforded by the rise of social media. I know, too, that this enforced immobility leads a lot of them to be supreme observers of things, looking closely at the world in a way I, with my instinct for relentless busyness, find counter-intuitive. It’s a decent photograph, too, capturing the lizardness of the lizard at close quarters. But there’s also an element of ego, as there is with all social-media posts. By posting it I’m saying, ‘Look at this beautiful thing’, but also, ‘Look at me, how clever I am to photograph the beautiful thing.’ If I struggle with this aspect of social media, I’m also not strong enough to break free of it, so I scroll, scroll, scroll.
An image breaks the flow. It is, by any standards, strikingly beautiful. The composition is unusual, the subject viewed from a low angle, catching the setting sun behind it. And it’s an action shot, capturing the speed and energy of the subject while somehow retaining astonishing clarity and focus.
The subject is Colin, coming in to land on his perch. The bars on his chest, the set of his wings, the fervent gleam in his eye – they’re all in perfect balance, and given a warm glow by the setting sun just out of shot. It’s an image to retain in your mind’s eye. It brings Colin to life, captures his essential character, stands out from the dozens of photos I’ve seen of this much photographed bird.
I give it a ‘like’ and a retweet, because that’s what you do. And I file the image in my memory banks, in a little virtual folder called ‘cuckoos – pleasing images’, where it rubs shoulders with my own mental images of a cuckoo fending off a whitethroat.
Perhaps all that hanging around was worth it after all.
* Easier, on the whole, than drawing a slithy tove or a mome rath.
* Ironically enough one of the few birds that is likely to stand still for a long time while I fuss around with sketchbook, pencil, and especially eraser. But why brave the freezing wilds of Brockwell Park when I can sketch in the comfort of my own sofa?
* Not always accurate, as Joseph Banks’s description of a kangaroo – ‘as large as a grey hound, of a mouse colour, and very swift’ – illustrates.
* Bewick’s swan (Cygnus columbianus bewickii) and Bewick’s wren (Thryomanes bewickii).
† Written by Beilby for the first volume, but by Bewick alone, following a falling out with his long-time partner, for the second.
* I have those, too, obviously.
* I am being a curmudgeon. Pay me no heed.
† In 1839 she became one of the first women admitted to membership of the Botanical Society of London.
* The son of William Herschel (who discovered Uranus), and a distinguished astronomer in his own right. His aunt was another astronomer, Caroline Herschel – more of her later.
† An 8.1 per cent solution of potassium ferricyanide and a 20 per cent solution of ferric ammonium citrate, chemistry fans.
‡ The cyanotype became the default method of reproducing designs in the architectural trade, known – of course – as ‘blueprints’.
* Thank you, New York Public Library.
* Really I’d like to call them ‘acolytes’, but I suspect that would be considered unseemly.