A World Without Certainties
Patrick Galbraith, In Search Of One Last Song: Britain’s Disappearing Birds And The People Trying To Save Them
William Collins, 320pp, £18.99, ISBN 9780008420475
reviewed by Richard Smyth
This isn’t a bad time to be a suburban nature writer. For one thing, it isn’t a bad time for suburban nature: there are peregrines and rose-ringed parakeets and foxes and things, and if all else fails we can always get a beehive or write about the time our adorable child met a woodlouse on the front step. There are relatively few barriers to our voices being heard, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, seeing as many more people live in suburbs, or indeed actual urbs, than live up hills and down glens, and our nature matters too — but our lives and our views, like all lives and all views, are limited, our travels circumscribed (we keep to the paths, except where we execute the odd performative trespass, thumbs-up to the camera from the wrong side of a livestock fence — in your face landowners), our grasp of the dynamics of the living countryside partial at best (we enjoy the countryside, but have no idea how it works).
It’s hard to be sure whether most suburban nature writers experience imposter syndrome — it’s rare, I would say, to leaf through an acclaimed work of nature writing and think, this fellow lacks self confidence — but if they don’t they should. We are imposters (it’s quite important that I say ‘we’, because I am a suburban nature writer, there are peregrines near our house, my work is replete with both woodlice and adorable children). In some general and fundamental ways the countryside is ours as much as anyone’s; in other ways, ways that have to do not only with ownership and property but also with human geography, family, memory, labour, it’s hardly ours at all. We might be good at what we do but it would be idiotic to believe that when we talk — and my god, we talk a lot — we aren’t talking over others; that we aren’t gatecrashers, barging in and playing our own music, to each other.
Thank god for Patrick Galbraith. In Search Of One Last Song is framed around a selection of declining (indeed, vanishing) bird species, lapwing, bittern, turtle dove, grey partridge and so on, and if that were all there was to the book then it would be a good and worthwhile thing, a sound addition to our literature of landscape and loss. But in fact this is a book about people — one hesitates to say declining people, vanishing people, but certainly the kinds of people from whom, in the main, I haven’t previously heard a great deal. Galbraith is the editor of the Shooting Times, whereas I potter about in the centre-left press and on Twitter, so it’s natural that our reading lists and contact books might differ, but there’s more to it than that: Galbraith works hard, and travels far, to listen to voices other than his own — the voices of the people who care more than the rest of us for these disappearing birds, and who will hurt more than the rest of us when they are gone. What he's created here is one of the great oral histories of British nature and the British countryside.
It's a pity there aren’t more books of this kind. I can think of Tim Dee’s Landfill, with its pages given over to the reflections of gullers and rubbish-heap ecologists; there’s Horatio Clare’s Orison For A Curlew, in which human voices crowd in to fill the space left by the presumed extinction of the slender-billed curlew. It’s not enough. We know that — despite the impression given by television documentaries — wild things live in human landscapes (practically all landscapes are human landscapes). If we’re to concern ourselves with their lives and deaths we must concern ourselves, too, with the people who live alongside them.
Perhaps it’s just because nature writers tend not to be people people. We’d rather sit in quiet wooden boxes and stare at reedbeds than engage face-to-face with hedgelayers or gamekeepers or raptor monitors or urban lapwing enthusiasts. I know I would. So again, thank god for Patrick Galbraith.
It would be a mistake to call the people in this book real people — I wouldn’t want to collaterally create a category of unreal people, not least because I’d be in it — but they are certainly people from a busy and confusing world, a world without certainties (however certain they sound), a world that is more hinterland than not, a world that I am comfortable calling the real world. It’s refreshing, in a modern nature book, and it’s a shame that it’s refreshing. The effect is more striking because Galbraith, I suspect, is a disarming interviewer; often a quiet presence, sometimes awkward, frequently lost, seldom not snacking, occasionally pushing a talking-point, he draws from his subjects an unguarded and sometimes startling candour (the fenland naturalist Nick Acheson, for instance, is strikingly frank on the subject of rewilding).
Like all good nature books, this is a book about change. It’s about changing landscapes and changing lives. More than that, it’s about obsolescence: ways of working, ways of farming, ways of doing business grow outdated or unwanted, and Galbraith’s book is about the struggles of birds and people to adapt. The accent on the agricultural is inevitable: farmland — if not the actual difficult, complicated business of farming — remains pretty central to the British conception of Britain, and there’s a compelling, ironic dissonance between how, culturally, we regard farmland birds (corncrake, grey partridge, lapwing, turtle dove) and how, in reality, we treat them.
Galbraith’s interlocutors are sometimes quietly heroic, sometimes bombastic, sometimes wrong, sometimes a bit on the odd side. They all know, at least up to a point, what they are talking about; most, one way or another, are fighting battles for their birds, and very often exasperation is the emotional keynote. They are exasperated by foolhardiness, ignorance, impracticality, bureaucracy. They are exasperated by hawks and foxes and badgers (badgers come out of this book very badly, pretty much across the board). They can see things they love — things they have always loved — slipping away forever, and nobody will help them stop it, and they can hardly stand it. There’s a lot of practical talk, a lot of stolid can-doism, some optimism, some it-is-what-it-is pragmatism, but underneath that there’s a lot of heartbreak.
There’s a humility to In Search Of One Last Song — the work of a white male middle-class writer whose first instincts are to listen, and to learn — that is wholly admirable, and all too rare. For me at least it’s a humbling book too (as well as a wise and sad and honest and important and often very funny one). You don’t have to agree with the opinions expressed here (you’d need to be a maniac to agree with all of them: there’s real diversity here, it’s a very far cry from a Countryside Alliance vox pop). The underpinning principle of Galbraith’s book can be applied as much to the understanding of birds and their lives as to the understanding of the working countryside: search out, ask, and for god’s sake pay attention.
It’s hard to be sure whether most suburban nature writers experience imposter syndrome — it’s rare, I would say, to leaf through an acclaimed work of nature writing and think, this fellow lacks self confidence — but if they don’t they should. We are imposters (it’s quite important that I say ‘we’, because I am a suburban nature writer, there are peregrines near our house, my work is replete with both woodlice and adorable children). In some general and fundamental ways the countryside is ours as much as anyone’s; in other ways, ways that have to do not only with ownership and property but also with human geography, family, memory, labour, it’s hardly ours at all. We might be good at what we do but it would be idiotic to believe that when we talk — and my god, we talk a lot — we aren’t talking over others; that we aren’t gatecrashers, barging in and playing our own music, to each other.
Thank god for Patrick Galbraith. In Search Of One Last Song is framed around a selection of declining (indeed, vanishing) bird species, lapwing, bittern, turtle dove, grey partridge and so on, and if that were all there was to the book then it would be a good and worthwhile thing, a sound addition to our literature of landscape and loss. But in fact this is a book about people — one hesitates to say declining people, vanishing people, but certainly the kinds of people from whom, in the main, I haven’t previously heard a great deal. Galbraith is the editor of the Shooting Times, whereas I potter about in the centre-left press and on Twitter, so it’s natural that our reading lists and contact books might differ, but there’s more to it than that: Galbraith works hard, and travels far, to listen to voices other than his own — the voices of the people who care more than the rest of us for these disappearing birds, and who will hurt more than the rest of us when they are gone. What he's created here is one of the great oral histories of British nature and the British countryside.
It's a pity there aren’t more books of this kind. I can think of Tim Dee’s Landfill, with its pages given over to the reflections of gullers and rubbish-heap ecologists; there’s Horatio Clare’s Orison For A Curlew, in which human voices crowd in to fill the space left by the presumed extinction of the slender-billed curlew. It’s not enough. We know that — despite the impression given by television documentaries — wild things live in human landscapes (practically all landscapes are human landscapes). If we’re to concern ourselves with their lives and deaths we must concern ourselves, too, with the people who live alongside them.
Perhaps it’s just because nature writers tend not to be people people. We’d rather sit in quiet wooden boxes and stare at reedbeds than engage face-to-face with hedgelayers or gamekeepers or raptor monitors or urban lapwing enthusiasts. I know I would. So again, thank god for Patrick Galbraith.
It would be a mistake to call the people in this book real people — I wouldn’t want to collaterally create a category of unreal people, not least because I’d be in it — but they are certainly people from a busy and confusing world, a world without certainties (however certain they sound), a world that is more hinterland than not, a world that I am comfortable calling the real world. It’s refreshing, in a modern nature book, and it’s a shame that it’s refreshing. The effect is more striking because Galbraith, I suspect, is a disarming interviewer; often a quiet presence, sometimes awkward, frequently lost, seldom not snacking, occasionally pushing a talking-point, he draws from his subjects an unguarded and sometimes startling candour (the fenland naturalist Nick Acheson, for instance, is strikingly frank on the subject of rewilding).
Like all good nature books, this is a book about change. It’s about changing landscapes and changing lives. More than that, it’s about obsolescence: ways of working, ways of farming, ways of doing business grow outdated or unwanted, and Galbraith’s book is about the struggles of birds and people to adapt. The accent on the agricultural is inevitable: farmland — if not the actual difficult, complicated business of farming — remains pretty central to the British conception of Britain, and there’s a compelling, ironic dissonance between how, culturally, we regard farmland birds (corncrake, grey partridge, lapwing, turtle dove) and how, in reality, we treat them.
Galbraith’s interlocutors are sometimes quietly heroic, sometimes bombastic, sometimes wrong, sometimes a bit on the odd side. They all know, at least up to a point, what they are talking about; most, one way or another, are fighting battles for their birds, and very often exasperation is the emotional keynote. They are exasperated by foolhardiness, ignorance, impracticality, bureaucracy. They are exasperated by hawks and foxes and badgers (badgers come out of this book very badly, pretty much across the board). They can see things they love — things they have always loved — slipping away forever, and nobody will help them stop it, and they can hardly stand it. There’s a lot of practical talk, a lot of stolid can-doism, some optimism, some it-is-what-it-is pragmatism, but underneath that there’s a lot of heartbreak.
There’s a humility to In Search Of One Last Song — the work of a white male middle-class writer whose first instincts are to listen, and to learn — that is wholly admirable, and all too rare. For me at least it’s a humbling book too (as well as a wise and sad and honest and important and often very funny one). You don’t have to agree with the opinions expressed here (you’d need to be a maniac to agree with all of them: there’s real diversity here, it’s a very far cry from a Countryside Alliance vox pop). The underpinning principle of Galbraith’s book can be applied as much to the understanding of birds and their lives as to the understanding of the working countryside: search out, ask, and for god’s sake pay attention.