Helen Macdonald: the forbidden wonder of birds’ nests and eggs

The author of H Is for Hawk explains how an appreciation of bird habitats enables a unique connection with the natural world

A bird's nest containing three eggs
‘I knew, when I was small, what nests were about. They were secrets.’ Photograph: James Windsor/Artangel
Helen Macdonald

Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 07.33 EST

When I was small, I decided I wanted to be a naturalist. And so I slowly amassed a nature collection, and arranged it across my bedroom sills and shelves as a visible display of all the small expertises I’d gathered from the pages of books. There were galls, feathers, seeds, pine cones, loose single wings of small tortoiseshell or peacock butterflies picked from spiders’ webs, the severed wings of dead birds, spread and pinned on to cardboard to dry, the skulls of small creatures, pellets – tawny owl, barn owl, kestrel – and old bird nests. One was a chaffinch nest I could balance in the palm of a hand, a thing of horsehair and moss, pale scabs of lichen and moulted pigeon feathers; another a song thrush nest woven of straw and soft twigs with a flaking inner cup moulded from clay. But those nests never felt as if they fitted with the rest of my beloved collection. It wasn’t that they conjured the passing of time, of birds flown, of life in death. Those intuitions are something you learn to feel much later in life. It was partly because they made me feel an emotion I couldn’t name, and mostly because I felt I shouldn’t possess them at all. Nests were all about eggs, and eggs were something I knew I shouldn’t ever collect. Even when I came across a white half-shell picked free of twigs by a pigeon and dropped on a lawn, a moral imperative stilled my hand. I could never bring myself to take it home.

I was raised at a time when the set of acceptable amateur bird-appreciation activities had shrunk to watching, feeding and counting them. Naturalists of the 19th and early 20th centuries had routinely collected birds’ eggs, and most children who grew up in semi-rural or rural surroundings in the 1940s and 50s had done it too. “We only used to take one from each nest,” a female friend told me, abashed. “Everyone did it.” It’s simply an accident of history that people two decades older than me have nature knowledge I do not possess. So many of them, having spent their childhoods bird-nesting, still see a furze bush and think, linnet, and can’t help but assess the ability of last year’s laid hedge to hold a chaffinch’s or robin’s nest. They possess different wordless intuitions from me, ones relating to how one holds the landscape between head and eye and heart and hand. In my own history of the countryside, nests weren’t things that were made to be found. They were carefully maintained blind spots, redacted lines in familiar texts. But even so, they had special salience when I was very young. For children, woods and fields and gardens are full of discrete, magical places: tunnels and dens and refuges in which you can hide and feel safe. I knew, when I was small, what nests were about. They were secrets.

‘Nests were like bruises: things I couldn’t help but touch, even though I didn’t want them to be there.’
‘Nests were like bruises: things I couldn’t help but touch.’ Photograph: James Windsor/Artangel

I followed the flights of blackbirds and tits and thrushes and nuthatches through my garden. And every spring their nests changed how I felt about home. To have the presence of these birds shrunk down to that one point of attachment, the nest, made me anxious. It raised questions of vulnerability, made me worry about predatory crows and cats, made the garden a place of threat, not safety. Though I never searched for nests, I’d find them, all the same. I’d be sitting at the kitchen window eating a bowl of Weetabix and I’d spot a dunnock flit into the forsythia, a mouse-sized bird, all streaks and spots and whispers. I knew I should look away, but I’d hold my breath at my transgression and track the almost imperceptible movement of leaves as the disappeared bird hopped up and across through twigs to its nest. Then I’d see the blur of wings as the bird slipped free of the hedge and was gone. And once I’d determined where it was, and saw that the adults were gone, I needed to know. Most of the nests I found were higher than my head, so I’d reach my hand up and curl my fingers so their tips touched what might be warm, glossy, smoothness. Or the unbearable fragility of small flesh. I knew I was an intruder. Nests were like bruises: things I couldn’t help but touch, even though I didn’t want them to be there. They challenged everything that birds meant for me. I loved them most because they seemed free. Sensing danger, sensing a trap, sensing any kind of imposition, they could fly away. Watching birds, I felt I could share in their freedom. But nests and eggs tied birds down. They made them vulnerable.

The old books on birds that lined my childhood shelves described nests as “bird homes”. This confused me. How could a nest be a home? Back then I thought of homes as fixed, eternal, dependable refuges. Nests were not like that: they were seasonal secrets to be used and abandoned. But then, birds challenged my understanding of the nature of home in so many ways. Some spent the year at sea, or entirely in the air, and felt earth or rock beneath their feet only to make nests and lay eggs that tied them to land. This was all a deeper mystery. It was a story about the way lives should go that was somehow like – but not anything like – the one I’d been handed as a child. You grow up, you get married, you get a house, you have children. I didn’t know where birds fitted into all this. I didn’t know where I did. It was a narrative that even then gave me pause.

I think differently of home, now. It’s a place that you carry within you, not simply a fixed location. Perhaps birds taught me that, or took me some of the way there. For some birds’ nests are homes because they seem indivisible from the birds that make them. Rooks are rookeries – birds of feathers and bone that are also massed assemblages of twigs in February trees. House martins peering from the entrances of their nests under summer gables are beings of wings and mouths and eyes but also all the architecture of gathered mud. And some birds’ nests seem so far from nests at all that the word itself drifts and almost loses purchase. The form of one such nest is: chips of old rock and bones and hardened guano, where the overhang supplies shade. The form of another is: a raft of weeds that rises and falls with the ebb and flow of water. Another: a dark space under roof tiles where you can crawl on your mouse feet and your wings drag like feathered blades the colour of carbon steel. Peregrine. Grebe. Swift.

‘I recognised the power of eggs to raise questions of human hurt and harm.’
‘I recognised the power of eggs to raise questions of human hurt and harm.’ Photograph: Andy Holden & Peter Holden

These days I wonder about how nests seem to be one kind of entity when they contain eggs and a different kind of entity when they contain chicks. How nests and eggs are good things to think about when considering matters of individuality, and the concepts of same, and different, and series. How the form of a nest is part of the phenotype of a particular bird species, but how local conditions foster beautiful idiosyncracies. How we humans are intrigued when birds make nests out of things that belong to us: house finches lining their nests with cigarette butts, nests of bullock’s orioles fashioned from twine, kites decorating their tree platforms with underwear stolen from washing lines. A friend of mine found a ferruginous hawk’s nest wrought almost entirely from lengths of wire. It’s satisfying to consider the incorporation of human detritus into the creations of birds, but it is troubling, too. What have they made out of what we have made of this world? Our world intersects with theirs and our habitations are strangely shared. We have long rejoiced at birds building nests in unusual places. We love the robin rearing chicks in an old teapot, a hen blackbird sitting tightly on a nest tucked above the stop bulb on a traffic light: these are nests that gesture towards hope, as birds use our things for their own ends, making our technologies redundant, slowed down, static, full of meaning that is no longer entirely our own.

But that is what nests are. Their meaning is always woven from things that are partly bird and partly human, and as the cup or wall of a nest is raised, it raises, too, questions about our own lives. Do birds plan like us, or think like us, or really know how to make knots, or slap beaks full of mud in series, or is this merely instinct? Does the structure they’re making begin with some abstract form, a mental image, to which the bird plans, rather than thinking, step by step, there. That is where that goes? These are questions that pull on us. We make things according to plans, but all of us also have that sense of where things should go. We feel it when we arrange objects on mantelpieces, or furniture in rooms. Artists feel it when they construct collages, when they sculpt, when they bring pigment to bear on a surface, knowing that the dark smear of paint just here provides or provokes a sense of balance or conflict when viewed in relation to the other marks upon the scene. What is it in us? We are fascinated by the difference between skill and instinct, just as we police the differences between art and craft. If pigment is smeared on to a guillemot’s eggshell as it rotates before being laid in drip-splashes that resemble in their exuberance and finesse the paintings of abstract expressionists, what is our delight in those patterns saying about us? I think of that need to collect that sometimes is billionaires hoarding de Koonings and Pollocks and sometimes welders hiding plastic margarine tubs full of exquisitely marked red-backed shrike eggs beneath beds and floorboards.

We see our own notions of home and family in the creatures around us; we process and consider and judge, and prove the truth of our own assumptions from a hall of twigs and mud and shells and feathered mirrors. In science, too, the questions we ask are commonly woven this way. I think of Niko Tinbergen’s eminence in the field of ethology – and remember, too, his patient attention to the way ritualised gestures appeased aggression in colonies of nesting gulls, and how they related to his anxieties about the relationship between overcrowded cities and human violence. I think of the young Julian Huxley, full of all the sexual confusion of youth, spending one spring watching the courtship of great crested grebes, speculating on mutual sexual selection and ritualised behaviour. And I see interwar anxieties about marriage everywhere in Eliot Howard’s work on bird behaviour; he puzzles over the concept of territory, of nest building, of extra-pair copulations, and is desperately keen to understand the reasons behind the sexual attractiveness of particular females who lure males from their established mates. And in literature, too, everywhere. Nesting birds naturalising the English class system in TH White’s The Once and Future King, where seabird nesting cliffs of auks and kittiwakes make “an innumerable crowd of fish-wives on the largest grandstand in the world”, exclaiming phrases like “Is me hat on straight” and “Crikey, this isn’t ‘arf a do!”, while White’s skeins of aristocratic pink-footed geese pass high over the slum, singing Scandinavian goose-themed sagas as they fly north.

A guillemot’s egg.
A guillemot’s egg. Photograph: James Windsor/Artangel

Friends of mine who grew up in marginal rural communities mostly have little truck with the mainstream rules of nature appreciation and the laws that enforce them. Most of them hunt with longdogs. Some of them poach game, or trap cock goldfinches to pair with hen canaries, before rearing their young as singing finches called mules. Some of them have collected eggs. Some of them probably still do, though I don’t get to hear about that. Most have limited financial or social capital, and their claim on the landscape around them is through local field knowledge, rather than literal possession. Egg collecting in this tradition makes me wonder about the terms of ownership, investment and access to pleasure that economically deprived communities are allowed to have in the natural world. I think of Billy, the boy in Barry HinesKestrel for a Knave who refuses to play football, refuses to work down the mine, rejects all the models of masculinity he’s given. What opportunities for tenderness does he have? He strokes the backs of baby thrushes in their nest. He keeps a kestrel that he loves. What kinds of beauties can be possessed? If you are a landowner, you get the whole compass of the watered-silk sky and the hedges and the livestock and everything in it. But you’re a factory worker? There’s the rub. Egg collecting requires skill, bravery in the field, hard-won knowledge of the natural world. It can become an obsession for minds gripped with stilled beauty. It is a practice that stills time. The collectors grant themselves the power to withhold new lives and new generations. And egg collecting is also, at the same time, a one in the eye for the elite and all their rules about what is and what is not an acceptable way to relate to nature.

Egg collecting was especially derided in the cultures of natural history operating during and after the second world war. At that time, British birds were laden with new significance. They were what the nation was made of, what we were fighting for. They became symbolically nationalised; to truly know your birds was to truly know your country, and to be a birdwatcher was a gloriously eccentric, British activity. In this milieu, species with a perilous foothold on British soil, such as avocets, little ringed plovers and ospreys, had their rarity bound up with imperilled nationhood. Thus, the theft of their eggs was now to be seen as an act akin to treason. And protecting the birds from the depredations of collectors was analogous to military service. Again and again, in books and films of this period, injured servicemen who have proved their bravery on the field of battle now show their love for their country by protecting rare birds trying to raise families. JK Stanford’s The Awl-Birds, for example, where the threatened nest belongs to avocets, appeared in 1949, four years after the end of the war, and Kenneth Allsop’s Adventure Lit Their Star, published the same year, where it belongs to little ringed plovers. The historian of science Sophia Davis has written on how the villains of these books are egg collectors, routinely described as “vermin” and “a menace to England” and how the nests in their pages are guarded by heroes with the fate of the nation close to their heart. And indeed, gangs of egg protectors guarding the nests of rare birds were a true-life legacy of the war. After years in a German PoW camp, the ornithologist George Waterston sat with his colleagues by the first Scottish osprey nest for 50 years and kept it under observation through the telescopic sights of rifles. And in the 1950s, Stanford wrote of his own experiences guarding avocets. “Keyed up by the general air of secrecy,” he wrote, “we sat till long after dusk, prepared for anything, even an amphibious raid by armed oologists.” Egg collectors today tend to be characterised as beings in the grip of hopeless addiction, simultaneously suffering from great moral failings. These characterisations were codified in the cultures of postwar ornithology as threats to the body politic.

Eggs and war; possession and hope and home. In the 1990s, years after my natural historical collection was disassembled and my childhood home was gone, I worked at a falcon-breeding centre in Wales. In one room were banks of expensive incubators containing eggs. Through the glass, their shells were the mottled browns of walnut, of tea stains, of onion skins. This was before the advent of newer incubators that mimic the press of a brood patch through hot air-filled plastic pouches. These were forced-air incubators with eggs on wire racks. We weighed them each day, and as the embryo moved toward hatching, we’d candle them: place them on a light and scribe the outline of the shadow against the bright air cell with a soft graphite pencil, so that as the days went past the eggshell was ringed with repeated lines that resembled tides or wide-grained wood. But I always left the incubation room feeling unaccountably upset, with a vague, disquieting sense of vertigo. It was a familiar emotion I couldn’t quite name. I finally worked out what it was one rainy Sunday afternoon. Leafing through my parents’ albums I found a photograph of me a few days after my birth, a frail and skinny thing, one arm ringed with a medical bracelet and bathed in stark electric light. I was in an incubator, for I was exceedingly premature. My twin brother did not survive birth. And that early loss, followed by weeks of white light lying alone on a blanket in a Perspex box had done something wrong to me that echoed with a room full of eggs in forced-air boxes, held in moist air and moved by wire. Now I could put a name to the upset I felt. It was loneliness.

That was when I recognised the particular power of eggs to raise questions of human hurt and harm. That was why, I realised, the nests in my childhood collection made me uncomfortable; they reached back to a time in my life when the world was nothing but surviving isolation. And then. And then there was a day. One day when, quite by surprise, I discovered that if I held a falcon egg close to my mouth and made soft clucking noises, a chick that was ready to hatch would call back. And there I stood, in the temperature-controlled room. I spoke through the shell to something that had not yet known light or air, but would soon take in the revealed coil and furl of a west-coast breeze and cloud of a hillside in one easy glide at 60 miles an hour, and spire up on sharp wings to soar to see the distant, glittering Atlantic. I spoke through an egg and wept.

Natural Selection, an exhibition of films, archive material and found nests, by Andy Holden and Peter Holden, is at the Former Newington Library, London SE17. Artangel.org.uk.

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