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| Julian Hoffman and Julia Henderson |
Ed.
note: Today's guest is author, amateur naturalist and avid walker Julian
Hoffman, author of the award winning book, The Small Heart of Things: Being at
Home in a Beckoning World. Julian and his wife Julia Henderson make their home
beside the Prespa Lakes in Northern Greece, in a natural area of the Balkans
sharing the borders of Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia. There they monitor vulnerable
bird species being impacted by proposed wind farms. Julia provided the photographs for Julian's
beautiful piece about remembering to keep a keen eye open in our daily
lives.
Julian's fiction
and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals. He is currently working on a collection of
short stories, and a new non-fiction book about the human interplay and connections
with wildlife and natural areas.
I'm very grateful for Julian's
generosity in sharing his eye with us.
Read it slowly; it merits savoring. You can find more of Julian's work at this link. --Jana
More
than Meets the Eye
“The least I can do is keep my eyes open.
Attention is what I want to spend. I don’t ever want to feel inside me a whole
storehouse of unused binoculars, magnifying glasses, telescopes.”
~ Barbara Hurd, ‘Sea Stars’, Walking
the Wrack Line
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| Julian perusing the wilds |
Here in the mountains of northern Greece,
we never know what kind of a winter we’ll have until it’s over. In some years
deep snow mantles the valleys and slopes like a rippling white sheet has been thrown
over the world, the temperatures steadily sinking until the smaller of the two
nearby lakes is glazed with ice and our village water pipes freeze solid until
spring. In other years, though, winter simply feels like a long extension of autumn,
when lizards continue to scatter over the stony hillsides and butterflies drift
through the pale and slanting light, worn to a faded memory of their earlier
sheen, as if in deference to the supposed season.
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| Julian surveys the blanketed estate |
This winter has been one of the hard ones
so far; the kind of winter when wild snowstorms are followed by a piercingly
cold brilliance – the night skies so deep and refulgent that the clarity of vaulted
starlight is haunting. But these winters, however beautiful and stilling I find
them myself, are tough on the wild species we share this valley with, and so
just before Christmas I hung our bird feeders from the snow-sleeved apple trees
in the garden and loaded them with seeds. It took a few days for any birds to
find them, the feeders swaying like censers in the whistling mountain winds,
but when they did, their calls went out across the valley, echo after echo
until a carnival of winged creatures turned up one morning in the snow.
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rosie chaffinch holding out against
all those great tits. photo: julia henderson |
The main beneficiary of the bird feeders is
the great tit. A relative of the North American chickadee, the great tit is one
of the commonest species that exists here, an everyday sight around the village
in any season. It’s joined in these roving winter flocks by birds that are no
less unusual to this valley - chaffinches and tree sparrows that love to feed
on the spill of small seeds at the foot of the trees. We’re so used to these
particular birds that it’s easy for them to go unremarked, to see them simply as
part of the outdoor furniture. The usual
suspects – that’s what my wife and I often call them when we ask one
another if there’s anything on the feeders.
Last March I travelled down the west coast
of the United States on a book tour. It was my first time in that particular part
of the world and everything about the journey – the people, places, landscapes
and wildlife – was new to me, brushed with a unique light, the unmistakeable
signature of first experience. My days carried a corresponding intensity. One
of my stops that month was in Corvallis, Oregon, where I stayed with my friends
Charles and Kapa. Along with their generous hospitality, and our long
conversations and shared laughter, something else of that stay stands out for
me: my time spent watching their bird feeder.
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left lower great tit, high right great tit.
they're everywhere! photo: Julia H. |
Charles has a ground-floor study facing the
garden and he’s hung a bird feeder just beyond the window. Leaving for work one
morning, he kindly said I could use the space to get a close view of its
visitors. I settled in that morning with a mug of coffee and a field guide, and
within minutes that simple pane of glass that framed a feeder had become a
window onto another world. Something small flew in and foraged seed from the
ground. It was black-eyed and shy, keeping close to the edges, the same cryptic
colour as falling dusk. Another bird arrived, sporting rich chestnut flanks and
startling ruby eyes beaded black at their cores. I watched, mesmerised by the
sheer beauty of these birds that were new to me. As I turned the pages of the
field guide, trying to assign names to a cast of colours, shapes and sizes, a
bright flash caught my eye. I looked up from the book to see a large bird of
deepest azure peering in from the other side of the glass. It carried the wash
of a glacial lake on its head, tail and wings, as if an emissary from the far
north. It sprung from the feeder and oared away on its own river of blue, but
those few seconds in its presence were magnetic.
Charles asked me how I’d got on when he returned
from work that afternoon. My excitement and delight must have been noticeable
as I rattled on about the birds that had graced my day, their names alone a
litany of mystery to me: dark-eyed junco, rufous-sided towhee, scrub jay. It
turns out – and I should have known, given that it was a garden feeder - that
these birds are some of the commonest around, the everyday Oregon equivalents
of our great tits, chaffinches and tree sparrows. But that morning, staring
through a pane of glass at a suite of elegant and astonishing creatures that
were completely new to me, they were anything but ordinary. We tend to honour
the first of things in our perceptual experience, elevating newness over
repetition, rarity over regularity. It’s the novelty of the encounter that
often sharpens its impression for us. Of course no matter how frequently we see
a particular bird, becoming so used to its presence that we can sometimes turn
indifferent to it in the process, the bird itself never alters at all.
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| Julia surrounds the usual suspect |
Whenever I look out the window in the
direction of the apple trees I try to keep that bird feeder in Oregon in mind,
as if it were my first time in this snow-filled valley instead of being midway
through my fifteenth winter here. I watch the great tits with the same keenness
of eye that saw juncos, towhees and scrub jays blaze into my world as if forged
new from a fire, resolving to be attentive not only to the things that are
unexpected, but to those that are ever-present as well. The great tits are a
blur of steely-blue wings against the snow, jackhammering sunflower seeds
against the limbs of the tree. They send the bird feeders spinning like
merry-go-rounds when they land on them at speed, twirling together until they
finally slow, their feathers the colour of lemon peel and coal. I’ll see these
birds throughout the year, long after I’ve cleaned the feeders and hung them
from a beam in the shed, wondering what kind of winter will grace us next time
around; creatures so commonplace that they’ll put in daily appearances as I sow
and weed the garden and then harvest its fruits, but no less wondrous for their
familiar and predictable presence.
--Julian Hoffman, January, 2015
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