Spring is teasing us. On the one hand we have lengthening days, blooming snowdrops, birds clearing their syrinxes in preparation for the free-for-all of the breeding season; on the other, temperatures remain on the put-on-your-winter-underwear-and-don’t-forget-your-hat-and-gloves-and-how-about-a-nice-cup-of-hot-chocolate-when-you-get-home end of the spectrum.
These in-between days test our patience, but there’s still much to appreciate. In the park, great spotted woodpecker drums, goldcrest pipes, greenfinch garbles. A nuthatch pock-pock-pocks in the distance. I count fifty redwings, our reminder that winter’s lease still has time on the clock. They chatter and flit, lean and busy. An egyptian goose fracas breaks out a few yards away, apparently prompted by nothing at all. One of the two birds complains loudly about something for five minutes, then flies off and sulks in a tree, only to be taunted by three ring-necked parakeets.
Business as usual in Crystal Palace Park.
But while my local bird population seems in fine fettle, the same cannot be said for Dexter and Nigel.
Dexter is an emotional support peacock who was denied access to a United Airlines flight this week; Nigel was a gannet who died after spending five years wooing a concrete replica of himself.
That paragraph, by the way, isn’t satire. We live in a world where the phrase ‘emotional support peacock’ not only exists but elicits barely more than a raised eyebrow – this thought alone is enough to make me need a bit of a sit down with a cup of tea and a finger of really good shortbread.
If you missed Dexter’s story, here’s a short summary.
Tiresome self-promoter performance artist Ventiko wanted to take her pet bird emotional support peacock on her flight. United Airlines told her ‘no’. Three times. She turned up with Dexter anyway. They said ‘no’ again.
A brief perusal of Ventiko’s website and Dexter’s instagram feed seems to suggest that Dexter isn’t so much a support animal (a concept whose validity I’m entirely ready to accept, by the way) as a handy attention-grabbing accessory. But perhaps I’m being less than generous. In any case, my sympathy is entirely with Dexter. Let’s leave it at that.
Nigel’s tale is more involved. If you haven’t read it, the full story is here, but briefly, it’s one of love unrequited, life unfulfilled, death unaccompanied.
Nigel was lured to Mana Island by a colony of concrete gannets installed by conservationists. He took a fancy to one of them, unsuccessfully wooed it (I refuse to enter the minefield of gender fluidity – in my book, a concrete gannet, whatever the circumstances of its romantic life, remains resolutely neuter), and then, three weeks after the arrival of the only three other gannets to arrive on Mana Island in forty years, died what would seem to be at the very least a tetchy death, as if his whole life had been scripted by Douglas Adams.
The assumption has been made that Nigel’s life was wasted because he didn’t breed. But here’s the thing: he didn’t breed, but he also didn’t leave.
For five years, undeterred by the blatant lack of interest from the stony-hearted (and, obviously, stony-everything-elsed) object of his desire, he wooed this concrete gannet. He built a nest, chatted to it, even groomed its ‘chilly concrete feathers’. He did all these things, but he didn’t leave. If he’d been miserable, surely he would have gone somewhere else? No, he stayed, the very embodiment of the concept of hope over experience. There’s something touching about that level of devotion. Or maybe sinister – I haven’t yet decided.
The real tragedy of the story lies in the timing of Nigel’s death, just three weeks after the arrival of those three other gannets, whose company he shunned with an obduracy you can only admire. It almost feels to me as if his death was an act of defiance, two gannety fingers stuck up at an unfeeling world that denied him true love and then rubbed his nose in it by reminding him of the existence of other gannets, flesh and feather ones. By that time it was too late. He died where he lived: next to a concrete gannet.
Nigel’s story has garnered a deal of attention, a lot of it even more appallingly anthropomorphic than the screed above. There’s a good reason for this. It taps into human ideas of happiness and sadness, loneliness and love. It is, in its own way, a perfect tragedy, its inevitability only making it stronger. We ignore, of course we do, the fact that gannets aren’t humans. We want Nigel to have a character like our own. We want him to woo and win the gannet of his dreams, but we also love the idea that Nigel is some sort of tragic hero, condemning himself with his own unbreakable cycle of behaviour. He’s a safe proxy for our own failings. RIP Nigel.
Personally, I have a sneaking sympathy for an animal that would literally rather die than endure the company of even a small number of its congeners. I’m like that when I’m out birding. I’m not naturally shy, but give me a pair of binoculars, a spotting scope and an empty bird hide and I’m as happy as a curlew in mud. If ever I hear the dread click of latch on hide door, I groan internally and rapidly brush up on my polite birding talk with a muttered curse. There are exceptions, but the thought of exchanging platitudes with a complete stranger who’s just pointed out twelve birds I saw half an hour ago… Well, to be honest, I’d rather woo a concrete gannet.
The last time a gannet occupied my mind for more than a few seconds, I was walking back from just such an expedition, at Newtown Nature Reserve on the Isle of Wight. Great place for birding, Newtown. Water birds galore, little flitters in the woods, not a human in sight. I’d seen a goldeneye. I’d seen two red-breasted mergansers. Two kingfishers had just whizzed past me in a blur of peacock blue, no further than five yards away, writhing in and out of each other’s slipstreams like Maverick and Iceman.
Engulfed in a fog of thought and suffused with a general feeling of just-right-ness, I barely noticed the Vauxhall Nova parked by the side of the road. The greeting that came from it as I passed was something of a shock.
‘See anything interesting?’
An older gentleman. Usually when I say that I realise that such people are probably my age, but he was definitely older, his lined face telling of a life lived.
‘Oh. Hello. Morning. Umm, yes… well, there was a goldeneye and a couple of red-breasted mergansers, and I’ve just seen a couple of fantastic kingfishers fly in front of me, just back there.’
Silence. Not one of those comfortable silences you hear about, where two companions are happy to sit immersed in their own thoughts while exchanging no more than grunts and nods. This was a silence of deep thought, of angst almost, after which little less than a weighty pronouncement on the state of the world would have been appropriate. He took a breath, made to say something, changed his mind, fell silent again. For some strange reason I didn’t feel I could leave him. An awkward ‘Oh well… bye then…’ died on my lips. I shifted uneasily from foot to foot.
‘There was a gannet here once.’ He nodded at a fence post twenty yards ahead. ‘Landed on that post. Stayed all morning, then flew away.’
‘A gannet?’
‘A gannet.’
My trouble is I can never make birding small talk. Beyond ‘Oh’, and ‘How lovely’, or perhaps an awestruck ‘Cracking bird, that’, there’s little I can dredge up to keep this kind of chat going.
‘A gannet… how… unusual.’
‘Sat there all morning.’
‘How lovely.’
‘Then flew off.’
‘Oh.’ Still no opportunity to leave. I was in deep, frantically treading water in a mire of my own making. ‘Cracking bird, the gannet.’
Silence. The vague sense of gloom that had been hanging about the place settled slightly more heavily on his shoulders. I had to find something else to say.
‘Recent, was it?’
He turned his head and looked at me, that older man, sitting in a Vauxhall Nova by the side of the road for no reason that I could think of. He spoke carefully, as if the words held hidden meaning.
‘No, it was in 1996.’
And there was another silence, long enough for me to feel the weight of those intervening twenty-one years, in which no more notable ornithological phenomenon had crossed his path than a perching gannet. He turned his head again, stared a stolid stare through the window, eternity stretching behind and ahead of him. A light breeze ruffled his greying hair.
‘But they still talk about it.’
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