Birdsplaining: A Natural History

New Welsh Writing Awards 2021

WINNER

Birdsplaining

A Natural History

Jasmine Donahaye

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© Jasmine Donahaye, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-913830-17-5

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Thanks to the kind support of RS Powell, sponsor of the New Welsh Writing Awards: Rheidol Prize for Writing with a Welsh Theme or Setting, and partners in the prize, Curtis Brown, Literature Wales, Tŷ Newydd Writing Centre and Gladstone’s Library.

Contents

Birdsplaining: A Note Before Reading

1. Reading the Signs

2. Field Guides

3. Mansplaining the Wild

4. Boggy Ground

5. Curious Bodies

6. Uninvited Guests

7. Meetings at Dusk

8. What’s in a Name?

9. The Promise of Puffins

10. To Gawp at Birds

11. The Regard of Equals

12. Gannets

13. Risk Assessment

14. An Unkindness to Birdwatchers

Notes and Bibliographical Details

Acknowledgements

To Dr Edwards, Dr McKeogh, and Dr Mohammed

Birdsplaining: A Note Before Reading

Birds explain nothing to me. I am often unsure what they are or why they matter. The presiding mode in this book is therefore inevitably one of uncertainty. Perhaps the response to that uncertainty might be, Go do some research! Make up your mind. Enough with the words ‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’, ‘I wonder whether…’. That would be fair. Many people present their ideas and opinions with the certainty of expertise, and many do it well. I am grateful for expertise – that form of knowledge accrued over years of research, experience, engagement with others’ work, and learning from mistakes – and I am glad to be able to rely on it (my doctor’s, for example). But many pass off opinion as expertise. Certainty is certainly not authority.

Uncertainty is also a way I have of relating to others in a more personal way. I often find myself asking, ‘Does that make sense?’ after I’ve made a statement or answered a question, whether in a private or public setting. I used to kick myself for doing that, because I thought it was an embarrassing equivalent to uptalk, for which young women in particular are criticised. But perhaps uptalk has a similar function: it seems to ask the other person, Are you coming with me along this conversational path? Are you still here? I realise that I ask if something makes sense not because I am unsure of what I’m saying, but because I’m unsure if I have expressed it clearly, or if the other person has understood. It’s a form of checking in, an invitation to an exchange or a response, an are you with me? What do you make of that?

Some might object to the term ‘mansplaining’, from which birdsplaining derives, as anything but inviting, instead seeing it as reductive, judgemental, and even coercive – a new form of silencing. I have some sympathy with that objection. After all, I have mounted a personal war and now a rearguard action against the term ‘relatable’ (possibly this war is, in itself, relatable). ‘Relatable’, to many who use the word, is a neutral term that allows you to identify a feeling of connection to someone (a person, a character) or something (a film, an attitude, a book – perhaps even this book). But to me it suggests that the only valuable characters, experiences or cultural productions are those that you can in some way identify with. It seems to enable a maybe dangerous value system that gives precedence to what is comfortable and familiar, over what might be alienating or difficult. A wholescale loss of critical thinking, complexity and nuance appears to me to be at stake, although defenders of the term might counter that it carries a whole range of complexity and nuance.

The way in which I find use of the term ‘relatable’ to be simplistic, reductive, and judgemental probably maps quite tidily onto the way in which some see the use of the term ‘man-splaining’. Mansplaining is certainly a judgemental term. It laughs at men – or, when a man uses it about himself, he is often apologising, or rueful, and laughs at himself. It carries layers of social observation, and subtle humour, even as it undoubtedly simplifies and reduces. But its usefulness depends on a shared way of seeing. Those whom it aggravates perhaps reveal themselves to hold a view of the world in which men are permitted to explain things to women unasked, without any awareness that they might be exercising a power that they deny they have.

Of course, new words – mansplaining, relatable, perhaps even birdsplaining, if it were to catch on – can be threatening. A new word can change values; it can change our understanding of the past. After Rebecca Solnit’s ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ appeared in 2008, the new term it gave rise to did just that. For some, an allegedly innocent (and now notorious) 1950s Texas campus sculpture of a man and a woman has become ‘mansplaining’ personified: the sculpture depicts a man standing with one foot up on a bench, actively explaining to a listening woman who is passively seated with a book (no doubt he is explaining the book itself). Retroactively, the meanings of the sculpture, and perhaps the intentions of the sculptor, have changed as a result of what it has come to represent.

Part of the effectiveness of the term mansplaining is its adaptability to other situations where there is an imbalance of power – where there is the member of a majority group presuming to ‘explain’ to a member of a disempowered minority what they ought to think or feel or do, or what their predicament really means (’whitesplaining’, ‘goysplaining’). The derivatives proliferate as a kind of shorthand to how social power is exercised in so many situations.

Certainly, in some of these essays I react to privilege and power exercising its prerogatives to talk over, talk down to, and explain others’ experience for them, and to disregard others’ expertise. ‘Birdsplaining’ as a term can represent how that plays out in the world of birdwatching. But I have tried to put the term birdsplaining to a more constructive use as well, exploring birds as a means of understanding social relationships and human relationships to the living world of which we are a part, and seeking to do something different from presuming to assert authority or claim expertise.

I have no claim on expertise except that of my own experience, and, as with everyone else, no one has authority about my own experience except me. So exploring some ideas based on personal experience seemed a sensible place to start. A lot of how I make sense of experience has to do with the animate world in general, and birds in particular – hence the term birdsplaining also, for me, denotes understanding experience through birds.

There’s a lot of heated taking up of positions based on instant expertise, bolstered by a bit of overnight googling, but I prefer a conversation to an argument, which is so often merely a series of reactions to opinions with opinions (no doubt I’m guilty of some of that here too). By contrast, a conversation can be a shared exploration. These essays are an attempt at starting that kind of conversation – more a case of ‘May I tell you what I’ve been thinking?’ than ‘Here’s what you need to know I know.’ Of course there’s no getting around the fact that writing for publication is an offering of opinion without invitation – except that a book by its nature is only ever an invitation to read, not an injunction.

1. Reading the Signs

In the waiting room, a man is holding the edges of his newspaper so tightly that he has crumpled the pages. He stares at the news, his eyes not moving. Somewhere beyond the pale beech veneer door with its heavy steel handle, the woman he loves is stripping off her shirt, undoing her bra, laying them on a chair; she is stepping up to the machine, leaning into it as instructed, trying to relax her arm, which the radiographer places out of the way like a discarded scarf. She is pulling her other breast away from the descending plate; she winces as the plates meet, and this organ of pleasure and nourishment, slack and misshapen, is squeezed flat. She gasps at the surprising grip, and the man she loves is weeping in the waiting room, staring at the page of his paper which he has not yet turned, which he will never turn. What is happening in the world has blurred and cannot be retrieved. All this week and next there will be no news but the static of a radio caught between stations.

In a few minutes, she’ll be done. Turning away from the radiographer, she’ll hook-and-eye her bra in a strange new modesty, and pull on her shirt. She’ll come back through that heavy door and he will stand up, fast, laying down the paper without folding it. They’ll go home. He’ll make them tea, and they’ll drink it together; they will lie down together and make love quietly, mid-morning, not knowing what is to come, whether this autumn, this shit-and-maggots season, is the shit-and-maggots season of their love.

What did they secretly count or note, what private readings and understandings did they create out of what they saw as they drove here this morning? If the sun breaks through the cloud… if the traffic light turns green before I count to twenty-five… if there’s somewhere to park straight away, then everything’s going to be OK; she’s going to be all right. And what dread clutched him when, by the count of twenty-five, the light had not after all changed, nor by thirty, by thirty-five? How did he qualify it, extending the permissible count? And how could he ignore the sign when, afterwards, a single magpie flew up from the red dogwood by the used-car forecourt?

Soon it will be my turn: they’ll call my name, and I’ll go through the door, as I do every autumn. All summer it has been building to this: the turn of the year, and what I want to forget.

The dull clustered blackberries have begun to bulge at the edge of decomposition, and sycamore leaves shrivel at the edges, not so much changing colour as losing colour. Tortoiseshell butterflies have started to explore the cool interior of the house, but I don’t want them with me, or their signal of the year’s end. They creep into small gaps, into the cracks in cobwebby beams, dark niches and retreats where they will hole up but from which they emerge sometimes on a harshly bright day in winter, when the ground is glittering with a crunch of frost. I know they can’t survive, but they batter at the condensation-wet window panes, wanting out into that killing light.

After two years, after three, after seven, the signs of these days around the equinox remain the same – and the regret: that I didn’t go, immediately; didn’t drop everything, grab my passport, drive the five hours to the airport, catch a plane, any combination of planes, fly the twenty-four hours from Heathrow or Manchester to Dubai or Hong Kong or Singapore, and from there the eight to Brisbane – so that I might have seen her; so that I might have held her; so that I might have told her.

On the way here to the city for the test, this Tuesday morning, for my annual ritual reading of the signs, I drove in slashing rain, then sun through rain, then sun breaking through to shine on the heavy cloud massed above the city – burnished dread light, a kind of apocalyptic mid-storm reprieve. The herring gulls had come inland, flashing white against the dark sky, delighting to let themselves be shunted, and then turning about into the wind as if in defiance of that element we hardly know at all – wind like the force of death or birth; wind entering you, surrounding you, embracing and throwing you, like a man who loves with rage, unable to contain the incredulity of his hurt, of his confusion, yanking you to him, and flinging you from him. Then the gulls, letting go their defiance, slipped sideways into the wind’s violent embrace.

No matter what I see in them, I know that birds are sovereign, autonomous, not subject to the projections of my small needs and anxieties. The natural world is not glorious, a respite, but a matter of implacable drives. Still I read it for signs as I have always done – as I did some thirty years ago when a cloud of tortoiseshell butterflies emerged from the patch of nettles on a late September day, the morning I was to leave with a man I hardly knew. What were they a sign of – the cliché of freedom that I was about to lose, or a mad, hopeless dash towards frost? Ten years later, sitting on the top step of the stairs to the basement, wondering how I was going to explain my injury if I went to A&E, realising that it would have to heal itself, as I would have to heal the rift again, I remembered that day watching from the upstairs window as the tortoiseshells emerged from the patch of nettle.

Yesterday there was a bird in the house. It was just a small sound at first, a shifting in the chimney. Then, later, I heard it in the pipe behind the woodburning stove. Somehow a bird had got in through the opening under the chimney cap, had become confused, or been injured, or had dropped down inside the pipe for shelter, or as an escape from a predator. Then it became trapped in the dark, unable to spread its wings to fly back up, unable perhaps to see light beyond the bend in the pipe. It shuffled there behind the stove, scratching with small claws.

I thought I might have to sit there all day listening to its efforts to get out, hearing the stirring of soot, its claws scraping on the metal pipe, imagining its feathers blackening, bedraggled – by degrees losing energy, losing time, losing hope. And then afterwards I would have begun to smell its death.

But somehow, perhaps seeing the light through the narrow flue, it struggled out of the pipe and into the stove. It stirred up the ash, and ticked with a small beak at the tarred glass of the door. I knelt before it, supplicant, and the tiny ashy creature squatted, exhausted, wings spread, beak open, watching me. I got up and closed all the curtains and opened the back door, and then I unlatched the stove door, and the bird flung itself towards the light outside.

I know what a bird in the house means. This morning, driving down, warding off bad news, I discounted the solitary magpie clattering into an ash tree, and her ominous message. Determined, willing the outcome to be joy, I looked for a pair with their oracular capacity, hoping that they might erase the sign the first magpie gave me, but one after another they told me sorrow, sorrow, sorrow – that one, rising from the fox carcass; that one by the slaughterhouse, launching itself across the road; that one perched on a telegraph pole, watching me pass.

Everything else was a sign to something I could not read: the curlews stalking in the stubble; a pale fox trotting along an invisible path; a heron awkward and humped on a rusting gate, and the purple willowherb merely bare and drying canes.

Now, waiting for my name to be called, thinking of that ashy, unrecognisable creature ticking at the inside of the stove glass, I tell myself that there have been other birds in the house and no death occurred – and deaths occur at any time, all the time, so why suppose it’s to do with me? Nevertheless, in unguarded moments, bearing in on me is the certain knowledge that a bird in the house foretells not any death but a specific death: a death in the family. Scrabbling away from it, I lie to myself that people have always