Vesper Flights

A collection of essays by British writer, naturalist, and historian of science Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights draws on memoir, nature writing, reportage, and cultural criticism to explore the human relationship to the nonhuman world. In her introduction, Macdonald frames the collection as a modern Wunderkammer, a 16th-century cabinet of curiosities whose disparate objects kindle wonder through their proximity. She identifies her central subject as love for the natural world while insisting that humans unconsciously view nature as a mirror of themselves. The essays interrogate such projections and seek ways to recognize and love difference during the planet's sixth great extinction.

The opening essays establish Macdonald's lifelong entanglement with nature. In "Nests," she recalls her childhood unease at possessing birds' nests, which challenged her understanding of birds as creatures of freedom. The essay traces egg collecting's intersection with class and post-war British nationalism before arriving at a personal revelation: Working at a falcon-breeding center in Wales, Macdonald traced her distress in the incubation room to her own premature birth and weeks in a hospital incubator. Her twin brother did not survive. The essay closes with her speaking through a falcon eggshell to a chick that calls back, connecting isolation, communication, and the possibility of flight. In "Nothing Like a Pig," she meets a captive wild boar whose physical reality is nothing like what medieval literature had led her to expect. The gap between our stories about animals and the animals themselves becomes a recurring concern.

Several essays examine how knowledge of species shapes experience of the world. "Field Guides" traces the evolution of bird guides from Victorian collector's manuals to Roger Tory Peterson's landmark 1934 guide and argues that learning to name species transforms a "background blur" into intricate variety (23). "Tekels Park" recounts Macdonald's childhood on a 50-acre estate in Surrey owned by the Theosophical Society, a spiritual organization whose eccentric residents and a nine-acre wildflower meadow shaped her identity as a naturalist. She returns in her forties to find the meadow repeatedly mowed until all its life is gone, and distinguishes ecological loss from nostalgia: When habitats are destroyed, what vanishes are exquisite complexities and all the lives that compose them.

The collection moves between intimate personal essays and reported pieces. "High-Rise" follows Macdonald to the top of the Empire State Building, where she joins researcher Andrew Farnsworth of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology to watch migrating songbirds passing through the night sky. More than 100,000 birds die in New York City each year from collisions with lit buildings. "The Human Flock" watches Eurasian cranes roosting by the thousands in Hungary and connects the spectacle to the Hungarian government's razor-wire border fence against Syrian refugees, arguing that it is dangerously easy to perceive displaced people as a singular entity rather than as individuals seeking safety. "The Student's Tale" sharpens this point through an interview with a refugee who fled religious persecution and arrived in Britain hidden in a freezer truck. Macdonald observes that the hardest things he says, he says twice, and links this to neuroscience research showing that the brain records two simultaneous tracks of memory.

"Symptomatic" uses Macdonald's chronic migraines as an extended analogy for humanity's failure to act on the climate emergency. Just as her migraine symptoms appear unrelated to the headache that follows, the systemic causes of ecological breakdown, from agricultural production to trade agreements, are things we have been conditioned not to connect. A friend suggests this failure of recognition may itself be a symptom, because "some things are structured so that not seeing them, not comprehending them, is part of the experience of what they are" (70). She argues against fatalism, insisting that massive cultural action is required. "Sex, Death, Mushrooms" accompanies an amateur mycologist through Thetford Forest and reflects on fungi as manifestations of an essential yet hidden world without which forests could not function.

The title essay, "Vesper Flights," is the collection's conceptual center. Macdonald describes swifts as the closest things to aliens on Earth: creatures that never land, mate on the wing, and fly continuously for years after fledging. Twice daily at twilight, swifts ascend to the top of the convective boundary layer, the humid zone of everyday weather, where they can see distant storm systems, sense wind patterns, and calibrate their magnetic compasses using polarized light. Research by Cecilia Nilsson shows that swifts ascend as flocks in the evening and singly in the morning, averaging their individual assessments to reach the best navigational decision, a strategy scientists call the many-wrongs principle. Macdonald draws an explicit analogy: Swifts live most of their lives in thick, complicated air, but to know what to do next, some must rise above it. They become her fable of community decision-making in the face of oncoming bad weather.

Other essays circle questions of nationhood, tradition, and belonging. "Swan Upping" joins the annual voyage to mark young swans on the Thames after the Brexit referendum and examines how heritage traditions can serve exclusionist dreams of unchanging Englishness or embody craft knowledges that resist simple national narratives. "A Cuckoo in the House" examines Maxwell Knight, an officer in MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence service, known as "M," who hand-reared a cuckoo in the 1950s, revealing how his animal-keeping and agent-running operated according to nearly identical principles of gaining trust and distanced control. "Birds, Tabled" contrasts a middle-class birding fair with a working-class bird show to argue that attitudes toward nature are shaped by class, noting that keeping a goldfinch in a cage is condemned while pinioning, or amputating the wing-tip of, a duck on a stately home lake is legal and unchallenged.

Personal grief and mortality thread through the collection. "Eulogy" waits for nightjars in a Suffolk forest at dusk while mourning the falconer Stu, a terminally ill friend whose reassurance in the hospice, "It's OK. It's not hard" (258-259), banished Macdonald's lifelong terror of death. "Rescue" narrates Macdonald's release of a rehabilitated swift from her open palm, the bird transforming from a creature of paper towels and plastic boxes into one whose home is thousands of miles of air. "Dispatches from the Valleys" recalls four years at a falcon-breeding farm in Wales, where killing a suffering ostrich and stalking a herd of semi-wild cattle became emblematic encounters. She interprets the cattle-stalking years later as a subconscious warning to escape a life headed nowhere good.

"Deer in the Headlights" confronts Macdonald's deliberate ignorance about deer, using deer-vehicle collisions to examine the cost of valuing animals only for their capacity to surprise. She resolves to buy a book called Understanding Deer, acknowledging that ignorance prevents genuine sympathy for creatures with their own lives and needs. "The Numinous Ordinary" explores her relationship to religious experience, drawing on Rudolf Otto's concept of the numinous, a mystery outside the self that is both terrible and fascinating, to argue that nature can produce experiences secular language fails to capture.

The final essay, "What Animals Taught Me," synthesizes the collection's themes. Macdonald traces her evolving understanding from a child who assumed animals were just like her, through an adult who used animals to disappear from social difficulty, to her present conviction that trying to imagine what life is like for another creature is doomed to failure but remains valuable. The essay closes with a rook flying over her house and briefly tilting its head to regard her. The comfort she takes from this exchange comes not from imagining she can feel what the rook feels, but from knowing she cannot. Their separate lives coincide for a moment, and the glance stitches her back into a world where both have equal billing.