Avian flu has cast our feathered friends in an unflattering light, but Eileen Battersby finds a reminder of their enduring grace and beauty
A robin sits close to the top of the tall pine tree. The large yellow star occupies the highest point. A full beam of winter sunlight briefly bleaches the tree, fading it from green to white. The robin becomes pale, ghost-like. Then the light weakens, allowing the tree, and the robin, to reclaim their colour. This particular pine does not stand in a forest clearing; it is a Christmas tree dominating the large living room of my as yet unfinished house. The robin flew in through the open door, and settled as I write this in long hand for want of electricity.
All year round, from the height of summer to even now in these grim days of January, during the ritual of migration, birds are omnipresent - in our daily lives and throughout the cultures and mythologies of the world, from creation myths to fairy tales. This self-possessed robin and the heron that patrols the nearby riverbank are as fascinating as the exotics peering from the pages of Graeme Gibson's The Bedside Book of Birds.
Scientists, artists, poets, storytellers and musicians have always looked to the birds of the skies for information and for inspiration, while others have long since plundered their plumage for ceremonial dress as well as the extravagant headwear seen at Ascot.
"The language of birds is very ancient," wrote Gilbert White, "and like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical: little to be said, but much is meant and understood."
From the pretty garden birds, to the screaming gulls skimming over most modern city skylines, to the commonplace crows browsing roadside hedges, birds are everywhere.
Yet nowhere are they as vividly fixed as in the imagination. While en route to Hood Island in the Galapagos, Canadian writer Graeme Gibson first saw an albatross: "Enormous and powerful, effortless as sleep, it crossed our wake and then was gone in another squall. While some would say this sighting was merely luck, others might call it grace. Suddenly any memory of whatever I might have learned about the albatross seemed irrelevant. It was enough to have seen it at that moment, and I was left with an enchanted sense that I had received a gift."
GIBSON WAS RIGHT: a chance encounter with a bird on its own terms is a gift and a privilege. It was his experience with the albatross that inspired him to pursue the ways in which humans have responded to birds. A late recruit to the joys of bird-watching, Gibson has amassed a beautifully diverse collection of classical and contemporary writings about birds; the factual and the fanciful. The Bedside Book of Birds: an Avian Miscellany makes for pleasurable reading. But it is the glorious images of the birds themselves, as graceful and surreal as any painted by the great 19th-century American bird artist, John James Audubon, whose work is well represented in it, which makes this book a wonder to behold.
Sources include the Bible and the 14th-century Peterborough Bestiary. Naturalists such as Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace are represented, as are Saki and Kafka. Ovid explains in The Metamorphoses how the jeering Macedonian women "saw feathers sprouting from their nails and plumage covering their arms. They looked at each other, watching their faces narrow into horny beaks, as a new addition was made to the birds of the forest . . . They had become magpies, the scandalmongers of the woods. Even now, as birds, they still retain their original power of speech. They still chatter harshly and have an insatiable desire to talk".
In a sequence from Jungle Peace, American writer William Beebe describes the excitement of finding hoatzins, a South American fowl-like bird, in upstate New York, having set out to photograph them. He and his colleagues watched baby hoatzins beginning to assert themselves.
"They crept on all fours, they climbed with fingers and toes, they dived headlong, and swam as skilfully as any Hesperornis of old," he writes. "This was, and I think always will be, to me, the most wonderful sight in the world. To see a tiny living bird duplicate within a few minutes the processes which, evolved slowly through uncounted years, have at last culminated in the world of birds as we find it today - this is impressive beyond words. No poem, no picture, no terrible danger, no sight of men killed or injured has ever affected me so profoundly as this."
GIBSON TELLS US that the Norse god, Odin had two ravens, "one named Thought (Huginn) and the other Memory (Muninn). Each day they flew about the world, and on returning told the god what they had seen. Much of Odin's power is attributed to his 'raven knowledge' as second sight is called in parts of Scotland". They cannot open large carcasses, but ravens tend to wisely follow hunters, such as wolves, bears and humans.
Elsewhere, Gibson quotes preacher and Methodist founder John Wesley from what appears to be a diary entry dated April 9th, 1790: "I met with one of the most extraordinary phenomena that I ever saw, or heard of - Mr Sellers has in his yard a large Newfoundland dog, and an old raven. They have fallen deeply in love with each other, and never desire to be apart. The bird has learnt the bark of the dog, so that few can distinguish them. She is inconsolable when he goes out; and, if he stays out a day or two, she will get up all the bones and scraps she can, and hoard them up for him till he comes back."
In a story by Calvino, a young soldier watches a raven and wonders if seeing one means death. The soldier warns a boy who is nearby shooting pine cones - but it is the soldier who is shot in the chest.
Birds are collected and kept in cages and killed as specimens; Audubon killed his models before fixing them with wire to paint them. Genghis Khan, during his conquest of China in AD 1211, ordered his Mongol hordes to tie inflammable material to the tails of 1,000 cats and 10,000 swallows and ignite them, and "when the creatures were released, they fled home, setting each city on fire - Genghis Khan easily stormed the burning cities".
Travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor reports the 19th-century plight of hummingbirds in Trinidad. No less than 15,000 were "stuffed and exported weekly to the hatters and dressmakers of Europe". A Hawaiian chief, intent on overshadowing his peers, ordered a yellow cape, made from the yellow tail feathers and rumps of 80,000 Hawaiian mamo birds, a type of starling.
Poetry has a presence. Cowper's The Jack Daw is quoted in full, as is Wild Swans by Edna St Vincent Millay ("Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying"), and most moving of all is Hardy's The Darkling Thrush:
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small
In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
Yet none of the many myths, observations, eulogies or revelations can compete with the glories of the dramatic illustrations. The triumph of Gibson's singular treasure chest - from its opening pages featuring owls by Theodore Jasper to its closing 15th-century image of the head of a brown pelican - lies in the achievements of the bird artists who sought to replicate the beauty of their subjects, and in some instances almost do.
The Bedside Book of Birdsby Graeme Gibson, designed by CS Richardson is published by Bloomsbury (£20)