Ospreys on the Dyfi Estuary

To the Dyfi Osprey Project today. There has been a small nature reserve here for some time before the ospreys arrived and made it famous. Not far away is the larger RSPB reserve at Ynys Hir. But it was not there that the ospreys chose to nest but in this wetland reserve run by the Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust. From the entrance a boardwalk traverses the wet ground where bog myrtle, cotton grass, yellow flag iris and ragged robin grow in and around the boggy pools. Among the high-growing reeds there are bittern according to the information board. I’d love to see - or even hear -one. No such luck, though a sedge warbler rises and then descends in a ripple of song. Beyond the reserve, along a water course, I spot a heron and follow it through binoculars as it drops out of sight into rushes.

The boardwalk arrives at a large wooden structure built with lottery money to provide an observation point for the osprey nest. The viewing area looks directly towards it on a flat platform on what looks like an old telegraph pole. The nest appears to made mainly of driftwood from the estuary, at least from the outside. The head of the female sitting on her eggs can just be seen. We are told the male is just out of sight on a fence post below. We wait. A dozen or so people stand around the viewing room, some exchanging bird notes and occasionally checking the nest through one of the telescopes trained on it. Then a sudden burst of activity! The male appears: binoculars are up, cameras are clicking behind tele-photo lenses. The bird disappears for a while behind trees, then flies back towards the nest, changing places with the female who glides away towards the river. For food? Apparently not. She returns with a large twig for the nest and the male moves out and drops down to his perch out of sight behind the trees.

Drama over. The flurry of activity subsides in the viewing room and gallery. We withdraw, lingering along the boardwalk to watch a pair of water buffalo that have been brought in to graze the wet meadow at the top of the reserve. You can watch the activity at the nest live on a webcam HERE. But there is no substitute for going there, not just to see the ospreys but to spend time in the wetland habitat that attracted them. They have been given names, but I prefer not to appropriate their identity in that way. They are wild creatures in a wild place and there are sufficient ironies in the structures we build to make such places accessible without adding to them unnecessarily.

Hawks and Wildness

I’m currently reading the book H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. It is a powerful combination of autobiography, biography and nature writing being a narrative about the death of the author’s father, her decision to train a young goshawk and her references to a book she first read in childhood by T. H. White about his attempt to train a goshawk. It is an imaginative compilation of these overlapping themes and narratives, beautifully written and engaging to read. But it is an aside to these main narratives that I want to notice here. She is invited to review an art installation so leaves the hawk at home and goes to the art gallery. The main feature is a life-sized reproduction of a bird observation hide, the original of which is in California. Visitors enter the hide and can go to the viewing window to see a projected film as if they are looking across the valley in California where the hide is situated and watch the nearly extinct Californian condor flying across the view. Part of her response to this is as follows:

I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing - not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen The rarer they get , the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an item of extinction. There’s little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss? …… I know that some of my friends see my keeping a hawk as morally suspect, but I couldn’t love or understand hawks as I do if I’d only seen them on screens. I’ve made a hawk a part of a human life, and a human life part of a hawk’s, and it has made the hawk a million times more complicated and full of wonder to me. ….. She is real. She can resist the meanings humans give her. But the condor? The condor has no resistance to us at all. I stare at the attenuated, drifting image on the gallery screen. It is a shadow, a figure of loss and hope; it is hardly a bird at all

This seems to me to be making an important point about the way we respond to nature. It is interpreted to us in programmes on television showing creatures most viewers will never encounter, not just in faraway places but in our own lands. In many ways our lives are not their lives and it is inevitable that we objectify them. This in turn can lead to sentimentality and a concern for them based on a lack of understanding about what it is like to live as part of nature. To many in cities the whole of nature is a sort of art installation. And often those who do still live close to it are regarded as barbaric and intrusive, like vandals trying to sabotage the art. This is understandable and we are all prone to it wherever we live as urban values characterise the life styles of most modern humans, even those who do not live in towns or cities. So it might seem that we have no choice but to see nature as other. Perhaps this is true. Helen Macdonald’s relationship with her hawk might be little more than a gesture towards contact with wildness. But if so, as she observes, the world is diminished; and so are we.