Birds for Christmas

Ten days ago I woke at 6 am and saw a sleeping animal shape on the path by the river, big enough to be a deer but lying awkwardly like a round fur puddle.

Then half of it got up, a huge fox with a white-tipped tail, and then the other half, a paler vixen.

I returned to sleep, wondering for no good reason how such a fox would fare against the large flocks of swans which share these Thames banks.

A swan's wing is a better known weapon for we river-dwelling humans than is the fox.

It packs a heavy-feathered punch.

Hard to say how a clash would go, I decided.

Two hours and a walk to the waterside later, the reason for the beasts' sleeping and the human waking was clear.

My foxes had been resting from a dawn of clinical destruction.

A large swan, a favourite swan, had only a bloody windpipe where a foot-length of its neck had been.

Apart from that neat red blemish it was was untouched - dead, perfect, ready for fox breakfast. 

This worried me more than it should.

I'm not a natural countryman. Ridiculous as I seem to myself, I somehow think that beautiful swans and equally beautiful foxes should just get on.

Stupid but heck.

Yesterday a substantial and  impressive book arrived at the TLS which showed what should have happened.

'Birds' by Katrina Cook has the size and scale that the great collectors of bird paintings demanded in the past.

There is MacGillivray's Sandpiper, Audubon's Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Tunnicliffe's Song Thrush - in the sort of dimensions that their artists intended.

And on the opening double spread, 'The Threatened Swan' painted in 1650 by Jan Esselyn, reproduced very poorly above.

This magnificent creature was not going to be fox food.

Any beast with a white-tipped tail would have been beaten to retreat.

This book is going to stay open at these pages until the opposite reality has subsided.

At £50, in these Christmas present times, the perfect answer to other anxieties too.

Comments

[Levi Stahl]

It looks like a lovely book--though I think you may have the price wrong: looks to be £25 rather than £50.

[Levi Stahl]

This looks lovely, though I think you may have the price wrong: looks to be £25 rather than £50. If that's correct, I'd hate for any potential gift-givers to be scared off by the higher price (i.e., what it will cost us Americans in our sinking dollars!)

[Susan Balée]

Um, the image with the post appears to be woodpeckers, not swans. However, when I clicked Esselyn's name, I did indeed find the threatened swan.

I'm surprised the swan got taken down by the foxes; but, then, the swans I've met are not the loving Coole kind, but more the malevolent type that raped Leda. Having been chased by the ferocious swans of Lac Kir in Dijon -- they thought I still had food when I didn't -- my victim's eye view of their black thrusting tongues, cruel beaks, and dirty plumage suddenly made clear how it is that they're descended from reptiles. Snaky, spooky tongues -- I shudder at the memory!

So, I've no great love of swans, despite their purported beauty -- which, like tigers and other lovely animals, usually doesn't hold up on close inspection. Up close you see the fleas, mange, dirt, etc.

However, as a symbol, none better. Yeats knew; ditto Blake. But back to your real life experience: I wonder why the foxes would rip the swan's throat out and then leave it? Did you disturb them by waking up?

[Susan Balée]

Duh-- now I see the swan up at the very top of the post. The other birds further down threw me off....

What do you think happened to the swan? Why did the foxes not eat the bird they'd killed? Living near woods, as I do, my first thought is rabies. Only human predators purposely kill what they don't intend to eat.

[Nigel Beale]

I interviewed the designer of another delightful book about birds called The Bedside Book of Birds, written by Graeme Gibson, Margaret Atwood's husband.

C.S. Richardson and I talk about C.S. Lewis, the role of the book designer, the award winning Bedside Book of Birds, ‘thumbage,’ how the best book design is invisible, the best designers currently at work in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, published by Chatto and Windus in England, and Knopf in the U.S. as one of the best designed books in recent memory.

Here's the interview for those interested in listening: http://nigelbeale.com/?p=504

[Dion Per Sona]

Now that the most compromising material on swans has been archived, four swan-like divos offer a rare treat:
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=3906861&cl=5532684&ch=4226726&src=news

[Jim T]

"A swan's wing is a better known weapon for we river-dwelling humans"

for WE?

This is a problem for I.