 Good evening, I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this forum with Helen MacDonald as she discusses her new collection of essays, Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald's best-selling debut, H is for Hawk, brought the astonishing story of her relationship with her goshawk, Mabel, to global critical acclaim, establishing her as one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers. In her review in the New York Times, Vicki Constantine Cook observed, writing a great bird book calls for poetry and science, conjuring and evidence. In H is for Hawk, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book Award, Helen MacDonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor's fierce essence in her own with words that mimic feathers so impossibly pretty we don't notice their astonishing engineering. While the background of H is for Hawk is memoir, the book also features a shadow biography of T. H. White, an author best known for his Arthurian novel, The Once and Future King, who also wrote a book on goshawks which Helen MacDonald read as a child. I note that here because Ms. MacDonald conducted much of her research at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, the repository of the T. H. White archival materials, a potent reminder of the power of historical records to illuminate the present. In Vesper Flights, Helen MacDonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private Vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen MacDonald invites us into her most intimate experiences, observing massive migrations of songbirds from the top of the Empire State Building, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's popular forests. It's a pleasure to welcome tonight's moderator back to the National Archives. Tom Putnam is the former director of the Kennedy Library and served as the acting director of the Office of Presidential Libraries before becoming director of the Concord Museum, home to a number of iconic artifacts from our nation's history, including for example the world's largest collection of objects related to Henry David Thoreau, one of the 19th century's most important and insightful nature writers. At the conclusion of tonight's conversation with Helen MacDonald, the Concord Museum will officially launch a new website that is part of a $3 million gallery redesign effort that received major grant funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities. This new interactive and multimedia microsite uses artifacts and manuscripts to bring Thoreau's work to life for national and international audiences. Lastly, we are pleased that this evening's forum falls between two virtual film screenings featuring classic documentaries from the motion picture holdings of the National Archives in partnership with the 2022 Environmental Film Festival in the nation's capital. This past weekend, we aired Pair Lorenz's 1937 classic, The River, about the exploitation and misuse of the Mississippi River. This Sunday afternoon, please join us for a screening of The City, which was produced for the 1939 New York World's Fair as a call to rebuild America's cities in the form of planned communities. I thank all of you who are watching this evening for joining us at this special hour since Helen MacDonald is coming to us live from her home in England. Let me conclude by stating what a great fan I am of Helen MacDonald's writing and have enjoyed reading these new essays about observation, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense of the world around us. It's a pleasure now to introduce Tom Putnam and Helen MacDonald. Thank you for tuning in this evening and a special thanks to you, Helen, for joining us to discuss really such a delightful new collection of essays. Again, I should note I'm coming from here from Concord, where we've also just opened a new temporary exhibit called The Live with Birds, William Brewster and Concord. William Brewster was a self-taught ornithologist at Harvard who did his field work here in Concord and we're doing that exhibit in consultation with Mass Audubon because William Brewster was the first president of Mass Audubon. But before we dig in and sample some of these essays, Helen, just tell us about the transition from writing memoir to using the essay form to captivate your audiences. Thank you so much. It's such a joy to be here and that was such a great introduction. I sort of feel I was too humble to speak. I'll try to do my best to be articulate and interesting. Yes, it's funny. Essays were always, I used to hate this word essay. It was a terrible fear of mine, mainly because I was the world's worst student at school. I would never do my homework. I would never finish essays. And I think partly that was just that I'm very, very disorganized person. So there was a kind of terror associated with the term. So memoir was, it was an extraordinarily long period that they just took to write because my father died in 2007 and I knew there was a story after that year with my hawk that had the kind of quality of myth almost. It was a sort of trip to the underworld and back with this hawk by my side. And I thought, this is a story that's bigger than me and older than me. And I want to write it. But I had to wait five years really before there was enough distance from that time to be able to write that memoir. And I think it's a book largely about love and grief. And I think that there are two different ways to write about grief. You can write in the middle of it like Joan Didion, for example, did in her extraordinary, you know, the year of magical thinking. That's a field madness. And then the ones where you have to you look back and you can treat yourself as a character and I had to do that. So that book came out and I remember, you know, being frightened of even sending the manuscript by publishers, I was convinced it was nonsense and completely content free. And, you know, it was just terrible. And it became a success quite to my astonishment. And then from that, I began to be commissioned to write pieces, partly for very many different places, including the New York Times magazine. And at the same time I was on tour. So wherever I was on tour doing book talks, I would try and sneak off with my binoculars and do a bit of birding or nature sort of walking. And these all kind of came together into a series of essays. And I began to really love the form. And a lot of those essays are sort of refigured or rewritten here and there are lots of new ones. But basically, you know, cut to the chase, hello. What I love about these essays is that they are, they seem to be little kind of, they're very much like walks with a reader. There's always a reader rubbing my shoulder when I write them. And very often they are caused by something that I've seen or experienced or something that's puzzled me in the natural world or somewhere, you know, some analogous kind of frame. And I really want to puzzle them out. So I just try and work out as I write the essay, what is going on? Why do I think or feel or experience things the way I do? And that's really how they come about. And you really are a presence in the essays and they beautifully weave together both nature writing but also history, politics, culture. Talk to us about the weaving, it's in your own training that allows you I think to be so fast on both fields. Yeah, I think it's, I mean, it's not a, it's a more political book than I just for Hawk for a number of reasons. One of which is a very simple reason the world seems a much darker place since HSV was written with this sort of great, great rise in populism and all sorts of political, kind of the climate crisis becoming far more frightening, all sorts of things happening. And I was trained as a historian of science which is an amazing discipline to have been trained in. And basically what it says is, we are led to believe that science is a purely objective way of looking at the world. And of course, the way that science works, yes, that's how it proceeds. But the questions we ask of the world and the way we ask those questions are indelibly shaped by our society and our culture. And the way we value creatures and landscapes is also shaped by these things. And I always think of that the quote from Baudelaire, the greatest trick that the devil ever played was to persuade us he didn't exist. And that's what we do with nature. We're told that it's the one place free of human meaning but it's where we put all our deepest and darkest meanings. And I think trying to work out why we value certain things the way we do and why we don't value other natural things it has enormous importance in terms of conservation priorities and also just trying to work out where we are right now. I love the essay and it's the one I quoted when I invited you to the Numinous Ordinary in which you write that one encounters Numinous in those moments where mystery arises from the meeting of human art and unpredictable natural phenomenon. And I thought, let's start with human art and I say that opened actually with a painting. Swan's fill this book and tell us a little bit about the essay, Swan Upping and the painting that opens that essay. This is a really wonderful assignment I was given. I was asked by the New York Ties Magazine to write about Brexit. And of course, I did so by writing about one of the most bizarre and eccentric English nature rituals that is and that is Swan Upping. So Swan Upping is a kind of a yearly procession in small boats along the River Thames. All the swans in Britain are owned by the Queen, of course except for the ones on the Thames which are shared between, this is so England. They're shared between the Queen and two medieval trade guilds. It is what it is. So every year these boats with men wearing uniforms, red uniforms with swans feathers in their hats, they row down the Thames and they catch all the swans and they work out which ones belong to whom. It's apparently was renowned in the old days for being extremely drunken. But now it's quite scientific. They put sort of special metal bands and they do demographic studies on the swans. So it started with looking at this painting by the very glorious, the odd English artist, Stanley Spencer, who lived in a village called Cookham. And he did a painting of Swan Upping which involved someone carrying a swan by the river. And some of it was written before the First World War and those parts of the painting are very bright and shiny and sort of optimistic and sort of flat and beautiful. And then he finished it after he got back from the trenches. And those parts of the painting are very strange and muddy and dark. And the painting to me seemed to kind of symbolize a schism in the national moment in European history. And I saw that painting and did this just after Brexit and I felt again that there'd been this schism. So I went out with these swan uppers from Cookham on the boats and watched them do their thing and became totally absorbed in this kind of mythical, golden English era. It was like Agatha Christie meets kind of Downton Abbey. The whole thing was so glossy and these kind of political intuitions are very strong. And so it's really a sort of sense of accompanying these guys on this bizarre expedition while wrestling with what Englishness means to me and what it means to the country and where we are now. And there's lots of things, for example, there's a lot of talk about, immigrants killing and eating swans. And it turns out these are all pretty much mythical imagined kind of crimes. And but those reports still appear in the newspapers where the swan stands as the English body politics. So nature is a great place to look for stuff like this. I promise the archivist, I would ask a question to a book again about your archival research. So how did you stumble upon the history of that painting? Is that a well-known that he painted half of it before World War I? Or where do you do that kind of historic research? It's a really good question. So being trained as an academic for my sins, one of my favorite things in research. So give me a puzzle and I will instantly head to a library or now mainly just sort of sit on Google and order books and get very excited. So I knew of the painting, I looked at it online and I became fascinated by it. I ended up reading the biography of Stanley Spencer. And then that led to another biography of Stanley Spencer and eventually led me to this wonderful account of Spencer traveling to China in the 50s with a trade delegation or cultural delegation and having this bizarre conversation with Xihuan Lei, the Chinese Premier, and I'm sorry I'm going on but it's such a great moment. Oh, that's great. So he was this sort of chap in a raincoat. All these very great political people were on this trip and there was this weird weirdo with, he had his sandwiches in a little box and he had a raincoat. And there was a big speech where the Premier stood up and said, this is why I love China. And at the end of the speech, he said to all these assembled English people, how do you like, tell me how you like China? Do you like China? And Stanley Spencer stood up and said, do you know, have you ever heard of Cucum? Do you know Cucum? And all of the other delegation members were appalled by this, but it sparked this incredible conversation where the Chinese Premier and Stanley Spencer talked a lot about these specific things that happen in small villages. Both of them grew up in villages. They talked about looking after ducks and not wanting to be bombed and it was one of the most incredible diplomatic moments. And that made me start to think about how, looking at the small and the particular and the local can actually be quite a radical political act. So that again, the politics came out. But yeah, research is my thing. I'm like a dolphin in the surf when it comes to books like that. There's also a bit of serendipity. I think, I don't have a quote in front of me, but you're right. If you go out to have enlightenment, it doesn't come at all. But at one point, I think you're sitting on a park bench in a swan and swaddles up and sits next to you. It was very weird. You know, I'm not a, there's a lot more sort of spirituality in this book than I thought there would be. But there was this one time when I was kind of heartbroken for some terrible romantic disaster. And I was sitting by the river in Cambridge, feeling very sorry for myself, staring at the gray water. And this swan got out of the water and stomped towards me. And I was quite nervous. You know, these birds can genuinely break arms with their wings. I mean, they're very powerful. And it came right up to me and turned around with it sort of pressing against my side and then just sat down and went to sleep. And it was completely and utterly unexpected. And I got incredibly emotional about it. There's lots of emotion in this book. I just felt very, very full of gratitude. It was unexpected and beautiful. And, you know, I never liked swans, but this book is full of them. You know, they really, they became real to me, I think, in that moment. Well, if swans represent the British monarchy, probably nothing represents the United States more than the Empire State Building, tell us about the SA high rise and what you did on the top of the Empire State Building. Yes, I went bird watching from the top of the Empire State Building, which is not my usual haunt. I've long been fascinated by migration. Bird migration is one of the great mysteries and astonishments of the world. And I know that there is a flyway up and down the east coast of America, which is just phenomenal, even today in the amount of birds and the amount of biomass that sort of carried. And a lot of it is very high up. So, you know, these birds fly so high you can't see them from the ground. And they're tiny, these little warblers and sort of things. So I went up there and met this wonderful guy from Cornell and who studies, you know, the migration and watched birds uplit by the lights of the city below through binoculars. And again, it was very, very moving. You know, these birds were, they looked like trace of fire or embers coming through the air. And that experience, learning about that sense of what is in the air at that height completely changed the way I felt about not only the atmosphere and the air as a place but also the nature of cities. Because it turns out there's a whole new scientific discipline that studies the ecology of the air. It's called air ecology. And, you know, I just assumed that it was just wind and rain and clouds and sun, but it's full of life. You know, there's tons of insects passing over our heads during the summer and all the animals that feed on them there's spores and bacteria. And just thinking about, you know, you look up on a summer's day and it looks like nothing but in fact, it's rolling with life was one of those moments where again it's almost a spiritual moment where the world kind of shakes itself like a dog and then it just comes out and it's slightly different afterwards. So that was a very sublime experience even with a saxophone playing for half of it on the observation deck. I was gonna say there's a dark part of this story and it has to do with light. Tell us about the concern about light with these birds. Yes, so these birds, the way they navigate is extraordinary. You know, there's been a lot of work into how these tiny birds navigate north in the spring and then south in the fall and they use a combination of different ways of finding their way. And, you know, they can smell the wind. They use the gradients on the wind to locate themselves and they use kind of magnetic cues as well but a lot of them use light and they'll use the stars to navigate in the moon. And they become very disoriented by light, by human-made light. And, you know, as you can imagine the whole of that sort of the Eastern seaboard is lit up like a sort of, you know, bonfire at night and they get disoriented, they get exhausted, they hit windows. I mean, anyone I think who's been after a big migration night in a big city alone, you know, in many parts of America have found birds dead on the ground that have hit windows. They don't understand glass. You know, it's not something flat surfaces that don't really exist like that in nature. So there's lots of wonderful, you know, movements to try and turn lights off on very heavy migration nights. And I think the most moving of all is the tribute in light sculpture in, as you know, the 9-11 sculpture or installation in New York where these twin hugely powerful beams of light are sent up into the sky to commemorate that terrible day. And those beams, the drawing birds like tractor beams and there are these, if you look on YouTube, there are these videos and you can see them there. It's like there's a bit like a snow globe, you know, it's just full of these warblers just circling in the light. So Andrew Fonsworth, the man I went up there with actually is what part of a group that actually they monitor it and they get to turn the lights off every so often to let the birds of freedom from the light and let them go on. It's a very symbolic and moving and astonishing moment to witness. So let's talk about the title essay for flights and talk about swifts. First, there's a couple of essays about swifts but let's start with the first one. What does the term best for explain to the viewers what best for flights means? Best for flights. So it's a real term and it refers to these flights that swifts do. So swifts, as many of you know, are probably the most aerial of all birds. You know, most things like martens and swallows you'll see them perching on wires and on roof lines but swifts don't really land. You know, they have tiny feet like little mouse feet. They can't really walk. If they land, they find it almost impossible to take off again. They live their entire life in the air and they have it like fish in habit to see and they only really land to lay eggs and because you can't obviously lay eggs in the air and they will nest inside little sort of crevices and sort of crannies and buildings under eaves and in cliff faces species I'm talking about. So when I was a kid, you know, they were these birds that represented everything I couldn't ever get close to. They became these kind of almost transcendent creatures in my mind. And that's the flight to these every night they the birds will gather in on mass these extraordinary screaming wheeling flocks and they all ascend. I mean, it's such a magic metaphor and they ascend into darkness and people always thought they just went up there to sleep but it turns out that's not what they're doing at all because they come down again and they feed at night. They'll eat insects at night just like, you know in darkness. And scientists have only recently found out that these Vespa flights happen just before dawn as well and these birds will go up to maybe 8,000, 10,000 feet and they reach the apex of these flights precisely at the moment of nautical twilight. And what they're doing is orienting themselves. So they are profiling the temperature of the air as they climb and they're getting so high that the only wind that they feel comes from these sort of large scale weather systems. And also they can look up at this point and they can see the very clear polarization patterns in the sky that happen around that time and they can see the stars and they can see clouds and be 130, 140 miles out. So basically they're predicting the weather and they work out what they're gonna do next and they do that by watching each other and seeing where everyone else is going. And this became, as soon as they found out about it such an extraordinary metaphor for humanity. We all live our lives in the sort of complicated lower air with all those sort of taxing things that happen to us day to day. And this thinking about the Swiss made me think about how if we have the opportunity and we have the privilege it's important to climb higher and look at what's coming on our horizon and work together communally to predict and to fix problems. And I wrote this piece before the pandemic and now when I read it, it's all it seems to be about. It was published just after the pandemic began and it's difficult reading it now, knowing that the dark clouds on the horizon were a comfort. This is not an idea original to me but your essays similarly communicate with each other. There are themes that run throughout the book and it's really kind of a lovely thing. And that, I mean, Vespers is a word that we humans use as well and there's a bit of your own portion of you and a ritual that you had to talk about that and that lovely essay. Yes, Vespers are the last prayers of the day and some denominations and they just, it just means evening, you know. And I had my own little evening devotions when I was a child and I used to, it's still slightly embarrassing to say out loud. I used to lie in bed after a really rough day and to calm myself down and sleep, I used to count all the layers between me and the center of the earth. I used to go down, you know, cross to the middle and then I would count up through the sort of stratosphere and up and I do all the layers and I found this intensely calming, this sort of sense that there were all these spaces where there were no problems, no human things, nothing at all, but just to know that they were there, it was very, very grounding. So I think I had my own little imaginative sense when I was a child that used to ground me and make me feel calm. And now I just listen to audiobooks, which is a very different thing, but similarly meditative and similarly gets me off to sleep. In fact, so much so that I can't listen to the radio when I drive if it's human voices because I just feel like I'm drifting off, which is very dangerous. Well, let's turn to the other essay about Swiss, which is a rescue and tell the audience like your friend Judith and then that might set you up to do a short reading for us. Yes, Judith, dearest Judith. Judith, I'm very sorry to say, a very dear friend of mine passed away last year. She had been unwell and I feel so grateful to have known her and I'm very glad that I got to write about her. So she was this very quiet, quite precise woman who used to work, she's very English, but she worked for a while at one of the US Air Force bases in Britain in one of the offices there, but her special interest in love was natural history and she became a world-renowned rearer of orphaned swifts. And I got to finally got to hang out with actual swifts in front of me and hold these bizarre creatures and she would rear them and then she would release them. And these baby birds are astonishing as you can imagine, when these birds are in the air flying, they don't touch anything, they don't land, they don't read, they're not very sociable. But when they're babies, they are intensely cuddly, they're like kittens, they snuggle up against each other and they're constantly preening each other and she's keeping them in these boxes. And I had the opportunity to release one of these birds and I mean, I'd love, and may I read a bit? I'd love to read a bit about what it was like. Let's have a look. So again, very English setting, we went out onto the village cricket green to release them. And some people say that when you release a swift, you have to sort of throw them in the air. This is a very bad idea because if they can't fly properly, they'll just crash down and injure themselves. So what you do is you lay the bird flat on your palm and you lift it into the facing in the wind and you just wait. So that's what I was doing with this baby bird. It stares into the wind for a while then starts shivering. Anticipation, I think. Functional explanations. This bird is warming up its pectoral muscles already for flight. Emotional explanations. Anticipation, wonder, joy, terror. The sensitive plumes growing between the feathers of its wings and sleek sides are being brushed by the breeze, feeling their element for the first time. Nothing has visibly changed, but something is happening. Like an aircraft avionics system coming online as it powers up, blinking lights, engine check, check. But that doesn't work though, not quite as an analogy because what I am watching is a new thing making itself out of something else. There is no doubt in my mind that this is as much a transformation as a dragonfly lava crawling from water and tearing itself out into a thing with wings. On my open palm, a creature whose home has been paper towels and plastic boxes is turning into a different creature whose home is thousands of miles of air. Then the swift decides. It tilts the pug-sharp tiny tip of its beak upwards, arches its back and drops from my flattened palm making an aching series of stiff and creaky wingbeats. For five or six seconds, everything feels wrong. The bird is a mere foot above the grass and my heart is beating fast. Up, up, up, calls Judith. But nothing is broken. We're just watching a bird learning to fly. Hitching as if pulling into gear, swift starts to ascend, flickering up and up into a sky straight with evening cirrus. It describes one careful circle above our heads, then lifts even higher and straight lines it to the south. I look down at my palm. There's a little scratch on the meat of my thumb where its claws had gripped tight before letting me go. Gripped tight to the hand, it was the last solid thing the bird would touch for years. That was a great moment. And you've captured it so beautifully. Thank you. There's a lovely essay on nest, which you write. You observe, nests are always woven from things that are partly bird and partly human. And as the cup or the wall of a nest is raised, it raises questions about our own lives. And that, I think, piece that you just read. Okay, I'm gonna switch to now some general questions. Yes. And since I'm here in Concord, beginning with Thoreau, I mean, he's often viewed as this hermit and he sometimes gets dinged because he walked back into town to have dinner with his family. But he does represent this notion that the best way to experience the natural world is to seek private communion with it. And you write that that was when you were younger, you had a similar thought. But in your essay about solar eclipse, your thinking has evolved about whether one can only experience nature in these kind of private communion moments. Talk to us about that. It's very complicated, isn't it? It's very complicated. Yes, I mean, we're all as to that romantic transcendent as kind of tradition of having moments where you sort of see the world or see the natural world in this intimate, personal, revelatory way. And that runs through both British and American nature writing courses through it. And of course, practically, if you wanna go out and look for animals, it's kind of better to be on your own, isn't it? Because you're quieter and I remember as a child being furious, going out for walks with my parents and their friends and they just chatter away and I'd be like, ah! So there's a practical reason for going out there on your own. But I think there are difficulties with it. And one of the difficulties is a very simple one and that is if you go out on your own and you look at a mountain or a hillside or a forest, you know, it's gonna prove, it's not gonna, it can't argue with you, right? It's gonna just reflect your own assumptions about the world right back at you and it's gonna tell you that they're right. There are no other voices, no conflicting points of view that are gonna mess with your own. So I think, you know, and I think that the pandemic has also done a number on this desire to be on one's own with the natural world. You know, when I was a kid, I would go out with friends and family and I'd go and there's a lovely plant, bluebells in Britain, they have this, you know, they're extraordinary, you know, in the spring, you know, these forest floors are just coated and covered with these lilac flowers and this extraordinary smell and crowds would gather to look at them. I remember going out with, you know, and again being quite grumpy that there are all these other people there because I was a sort of, quite a snotty child and I was, you know, it's supposed to be on your own to get the proper relationship with nature. And I was thinking about that. I went for a walk a few months ago and I saw a song thrush, something a bit like a sort of speckled American Robin and it had just had a bath and it was kind of wet and preening and it was joyfully preening its feathers. And I felt this real pain that I was the only person that could see it. And I realized that what I was missing was sharing the natural world with others. And increasingly I feel that solitary nature appreciation is extremely important but it also has to be cut and, you know, meshed with communal experiences like that which are very familiar in the American tradition. You know, the whole notion of the sublime as something that you see with others is a very American tradition. So I'm definitely up for that. Yeah, definitely going out with other people now. It reminds me, I climbed about Katahdin this fall with my son and I'm a traditionalist. So you get to the top and you have your lunch and he gets to the top and he gets grumpy because there are all these other people up there. It's also quite a teenage thing, I think, in my thing. So I was very, we take in the view and then we hike down and then we find a pretty VISTA to have our lunch in a quiet spot and he's gonna have to do that. Did you have a Thoreauian moment of kind of horror up there on Katahdin or you, it's not like that anymore? Well, except how badly out of shape I am. But no, it was a beautiful day and it was snow covered when we were there, it was October but not too much snow until we got to the very top. It was a lovely experience. I'm gonna stick with this. Well, you have a H's for Hockey open by visiting Brecklands which you call broken lands or the broken forest and often many of your essays have to deal with this, again, this interplay between nature and humanity. A lovely essay about peregrine falcons and urban settings. Talk again about this mix between nature and humanity. Yes, I mean, I always think of how we don't like to, the quickest way into thinking about this always for me is thinking about wildlife art. If you go and look at wildlife art, you never see kind of industrial facilities in the background or street lamps or old cars or roads or anything, it's always this pristine, kind of perfect natural background. And I increasingly begin, particularly in this, the era that we're beginning to turn the Anthropocene, the notion that there is an untouched nature out there is dangerous. This notion that somewhere out there is a pure wild that somehow we can reach and interact with that we're always in a human world. And again, this fits with my desperate attempt to get across that when we encounter an animal, we're never encountering initially anyway, that a real animal, we're always encountering our idea of the animal. And again, I adore Annie Dillard, I love Annie Dillard, I just worship her work. But her most famous essay is when she meets a weasel and she looks into the weasel's eyes and the weasel looks back into her eyes and they share a moment, it's a really powerful essay and she talks about how we should all live like weasels, we should kind of go after what we want and grip tight to it and not let go. This is kind of faintly Nietzschean weasel that's sort of a country in my mind when I read this. And I think to myself, yes, that's what we think of weasels but maybe weasels also have kids and they have her legs and they sun themselves in the sun and they get lost. Like there's much more to a weasel than just that notion of will and domination and ferocity. And I think the real meshing between human and natural worlds that I'm interested in is the sense that always try and interrogate those meanings we've given the natural world when we encounter it. Because if you do that, if you can kind of hold in your head why you think owls are supposed to be wise, they're not. Why you think a hawk is ferocious? It's just a chicken with talons. Sometimes you can kind of look past those meanings and you can see something approximating the actual creature. And that can be a life-changing moment. You can see a creature who the entire world is different from them. They live in a different world from you. Their sensory world is different. What they need in the world is different. Everything is alien. There's an astonishing story by Te Chiang about this, about Puerto Rican parrots that live around, they're endangered, living around what was the Arecibo Observatory. This observatory desperately trying to find signals from outer space, radio communication with aliens and all these parrots that have culture and they have language and no one's interested in that, right? They're interested in interstellar kind of stuff. So I think this, yeah. So what might seem at first to be a bit of a weird self-absorbed obsession with human understanding of the natural world for me is really a clarion call to just try and look past them and see what's really there and understand, I think, that the world doesn't just belong to us alone. It's astonishing. The scale of it, the complexity of it, one teaspoon of soil can contain five billion microscopic cells, thousands of different species. We don't see any of that because we are human sized and we don't live very long. So I think this book very much is trying to sort of not only suggest that the world belongs to everything, not just to us, but we should pay attention to it and paying attention to it doesn't just help us love it and preserve it, but also can change who we are too I think for the better. It's a bit of a grand claim, but that's kind of what I was trying to do. Lovely. You've mentioned climate change and again the issue of diminishing biodiversity I was thinking of the rose famous line and wildness is the preservation of the world in reading your quote, you're talking about the condor. You say the condor is an icon of extinction. There's little less to it now, but being the last of its kind and in this lies the diminution of the world. Talk to us about your concerns about climate change and again, the essays are beautifully done and inspiring and a little political, but they're not polemical, you know, anyway. I'm very bad at that. I'm very bad at polemical stuff. I'm one of those people that can't be told what to do. I'll do the reverse. Ask my mother if you ever meet her, she'll confirm that. So I know I'm not very good at controlling. I'm not very good at yelling. I'm good at pointing at things and saying, look at this, you know, that's kind of what I do and trying to complicate and instill wonderment I think is what I do. The condor is a great example. I mean, I'll get on to climate change, but I always think of how our lived experience with the natural world, with animals is thinning more and more. And I'm as guilty as, I'm guilty of that. During the pandemic, I wasn't out in the forest. I was watching television and drinking ice cream out of the tub and crying on my side and playing on Twitter. I didn't get out as much as I should. But the less we know about animals and day-to-day experience, the less complicated they are and the less they mean to us. And sometimes a creature's rarity can basically mean all that it is now. So condors, I've had the joy to actually interact with those at the Peregrine Fund in Idaho. And they're really complicated, phenomenal animals. They're great, they're extraordinary. But in most people's minds, understandably, they're just the last of their kind. And that's such a flattening of what an animal really is. I mean, climate change, yeah. I mean, I wrote this whole essay that was initially gonna be about migraines, but ended up being about climate change. It's the joy of not knowing where an essay is gonna go when you start it. And I was thinking about how I have all these symptoms when I have a migraine before the migraine starts. And they're very weird that I start buying banana milk and I eat beetroots and I get very tired and I don't like birdsong. They don't seem connected at all, right? And I never know that these are the symptoms of a migraine coming until the migraine hits. Even though I can tell you now, when they're happening, they become invisible. And I began to think about how climate change kind of works a bit like that. It's a very crass analogy, I know. But the causal symptoms, a bit like my banana milk and beetroot, are things that they seem so different and so unconnected that we don't realize their causal symptoms. Things like international kind of, the way that late capitalism has particular kinds of trade, the sort of supply chains, agricultural systems, various forms of like, those things are actually creating climate change, but we're not supposed to look at those. We're supposed to look at the fact we're not supposed to use plastic straws anymore or maybe drive a little bit less. It's always about individual consumer choice. So I think a little bit like the Swift's, I think that essay ended up being a clarion call to say, this needs to be a collective act. We need to rise up and fight for the continued existence of the planet. And I love to think about the way that we use the term apocalypse. We're living in deeply apocalyptic times. And the earliest meaning of the word apocalypse wasn't the end of things. It meant an unveiling of things that were there were hidden from our understanding. And I'm hoping that, you know, I mean, despite the world feeling more frightening and it's more full of horror than I'd ever known it, there may be some clear sight about where we can go. But we are, we're in very desperate times. Yeah, I'm sorry to be more hopeful about it. The book is very hopeful that there are moments of true joy and wonder that you convey. It's interesting you referenced the pandemic. So I ended up being in my hometown in Maine and my, our neighbors, we would kind of bake treats and leave them on one another's porches. But anyway, one day our neighbor Val left this book for my wife and I. It's my introduction to you. And actually I read it before I read H's for Hawkeman. I found out that that little town I was in actually makes a cameo appearance and H is for Hawke, Kenny Bunkport. Tell us maybe just a little bit about how a British nature writer ended up in a little fishing village of Cape Porpoise. But then you use it in H's for Hawke to talk a little bit about class and hunting. And anyway, I'll let you read it. Yeah, yeah, no. It's one of the great griefs of the pandemic. I mean, not great griefs, it's a small grief. There are terrible griefs everywhere. And I feel like I can't believe I just said that. But, but, but, you know, I have very, very dear friends that feel like family in, in, in Maine, in Canabunport. And my friend Aaron, I, I met when I was a volcano many years ago and I would sort of go back and forth to his house and a family and they ran an inn in Canabunport. And I, it was my first real experience of America. And I just fell in love with the place. And, you know, if, if I could live anywhere that isn't here, I think Maine would be the place. You know, I still sometimes wake up with the sort of memories of kind of, you know, blue jays calling and loons and stuff. I mean, it's, you know, it's possibly far away now. But, sorry, I completely, I'm getting so twisted. I'm gonna, I'll give you the quote. So you, you notice when you're in Maine, quote, hunting in Maine is not obviously riven with centuries of class and privilege. There are no vast pheasant shoots where bankers vie for the largest bag, no elite gross s'mores or exclusive salmon rivers. All the land in Maine can be hunted over by the virtue of common law. And locals are very proud of this egalitarian tradition. Hell yes, I think is the expression. So the hunting is really fascinating. As you know, phenomenon, it's extremely contested. And, you know, I, I, you know, having, I'm not really into hunting, except, you know, of course I'm either falconess. So, you know, that's hunting, right? Watching a bird do its natural behaviors is, it's hunting. And, and, and, you know, I was not stranger to death when I had Mabel. But yeah, the class system, classes, right the way through this book, you know, you can't write about England at all without, you know, bumping up against it, you know, whether or not it's like, you know, certain conservation organizations saying you shouldn't have painted model nest boxes in the shape of pubs and houses because it upsets the birds. It doesn't upset the birds. It's just not classy, right? So, hunting, yeah. So, so in this country, I was so used to it being something that only happened if you have rich. There are these sort of traditions of, you know, people around here, they, there are, you know, pheasants everywhere. It's like a sort of free range pheasant farm out there. And these really designed, these pheasants have been bred to be very, very small and they fly very, very high. So they're hunting to shoot. And it costs thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds to get a place on a pheasant, on a good pheasant shoot or a portrait shoot. And they really become opportunities for, you know, high status individuals to get together and have a day out. Whereas, you know, I think of walking up pheasants where it's just you and a dog or like, you know, a partridge or what a, you know, grouse in the, in the Northwoods, you know, much more like all the Aleopold would have, you know, been familiar with and many of my friends in Maine. That involves an experience of being immersed in the natural world that I feel has significant benefits. You become, I feel, part of, you have to understand, you have to have fieldcraft, you have to understand the way that the landscape works in your own consequential presence in it, which you don't with driven shooting at all. So I feel that, you know, yeah, I'd come down pretty hard on the side, on the side of that kind of hunting, not to say that the other forms don't exist in America, but certainly class has not left its mark in quite the same way. So we do have one question from the audience. It's maybe two questions. Is there a bird you wish to see that you haven't yet seen or a phenomenon related to birds that you wish to experience? So many, I didn't know where to start. So people sometimes say, what's your favorite bird? And I say my favorite bird is one I haven't seen. And maybe that's how it should stay. But there is a vulture called a bearded vulture and it is vast and sort of is a little bit like a cross between an old man in a raincoat and a phoenix. I can't really explain this, but if you look on the internet, you'll see there these devastatingly dramatic creatures with kind of, they haven't got bare faces. They've got these sort of very fierce eagle-like faces with a long beak and a kind of little bit of a moustache here. And they stain their feathers orange by bathing in iron-rich streams and they're huge, they're absolutely massive. And they live off bones. Their old name was Bonebreaker or Lamiguy, a lamb killer. They don't kill lambs. So what they would do is pick up bones from carcasses and they will fly up to heights and drop them and then they will come down and they will literally eat the shattered bones and they live off this stuff. So, you know, so metal as the kids would say. And I've never seen one and they are doing pretty well in some parts of Europe and you can find them in Africa. So that's the bird I wanna see. As for a phenomenon, I have always wanted to see oil birds, which are a very weird nightjar kind of with poor will kind of creature and they live in caves in tropical regions and they have a kind of sonar. They communicate through clicks and they're deeply weird and hard to see. And I think to recall that quite often people they go into these caves, there's a weird sickness that you get. So there's kind of, you know, Indiana Jones kind of mystery to them as well. So yeah, I think oil birds would be the one that if I could be adventurous enough to go find them, I would. The great question. So I have two last questions. One's about science and then one a little bit more maybe spiritual, so the one about science I'll give you the quote, it's your quote. We so often think of science as somehow subtracting mystery and beauty from the world. This vast stretch of sky, the gulls, the imperceptible ants is a working revelation of the interrelation of different scales of existence and it's a once exhilarating and humbling. Tell us again why science is such an inspiration to you. It's, yeah, no, absolutely. I think the Swift we talked about a little bit earlier are a very, very good example of that. I could stand on my lawn and watch Swift's overhead for forever in white a piece about them that would have been, would be, I guess, pretty, right? But I would not have known about Vespa flights and radar ornithology and aerial ecology and all these kind of ways in which the world has become an astonishingly complex and beautiful place in my mind without reading the science. You know, the way that, and there are some very good books coming out. I think I believe, you know, there's an astonishing Ed Young, for example, as it was written in a book which I had the privilege to read on animal senses and how animals live in different life worlds and, you know, how they encounter the world, you know, through all these different ways through sonar, through touch, through sound. And reading that book is not just a kind of collection of gee whiz moments like, oh my God, how is that possible? But also it's a real testament to the fact the only reason we know this is because science progressed enough, there's enough technological and, you know, theoretical basis to actually look at this stuff and understand what's going on. So I think of science and it's a very complicated phenomenon but without it, I think the world would be a much, much flatter place emotionally for me as well as intellectually, yeah. Well, let's talk about that emotional element because it infuses. I mean, the book almost has a spiritual quality, it provides the smallest or almost a bomb for our times. And I'll just do two quotes. One, an H is for hawk, you write. Looking for goss hawks is like looking for grace. It comes, but not often and you don't get to say when or how. And then the introduction to Vesper flights, you write. Every writer has a subject to them underlies everything they write. It can be love or death, or trail or belonging, home or hope or exile. I choose to think that my subject is love and most specifically love for the glittering world of non-human life around us. Maybe ref on that for a moment. It's true that there's a, that's my subject. And I write a bit about this in the penultimate essay in the book. I've always been very shy of talking about spirituality and, you know, coming big, big British. But what sort of taken me there to be much more open to kind of forms of spirituality in the natural world was actually, it was a formal problem I was having trying to write about nature. And it was that I was trying to write about experiences that I had using language that didn't fit. So I would try and write about these moments of grace with language that was drawn from philosophy or from, you know, literature, just didn't work. And I ended up opening some books, some, you know, elementary books on the theology of the religious experience, the quality of religious experiences on theology. You know, these are books that, you know, I should have read years ago. And there was where there was the language I needed. That was, you know, that these notions of numerous experiences where you encounter moments of something terrifyingly sort of big and, you know, really, really, really astonishing that is usually perceived of as the existence of the divine. And that essay is about, I think, about these moments where I think all of us have had them, hopefully, where, you know, you're out in somewhere and you'll see something and somehow it will, a little bit like my experience of the birds over the Empire State Building, you know, it can change the world at an instant and stop time, you know, and they can be very small things. I remember, you know, the pattern of raindrops on dry ground or, you know, or a feather swinging on a cobweb, you know, in the sun, these little moments where everything just seems to stop, you know, a bit T.S. Eliot. And I talk about how, you know, you can't go and look for those experiences. They're given to you and how that to me, again, isn't personally, I wasn't raised in faith. It wasn't a religious experience, but it's certainly a moment where the scale and astonishment of the world and the bafflement that I was born and I'm alive and, you know, to see it, to be there at that moment and see something like that is one of the most deep emotional experiences I think I have. I mean, it's all there, it's everything. And your readers are so fortunate that if those experiences are given to you, you then share them and illuminate them with us. And we thank you so much. Thank you. Stay with us for a minute. We'll do this quick launching of the Thoreau website and then I'll like to thank you. Oh, I can't wait to see this. So we're gonna conclude as David Ferriero announced with a brief two minute video to launch a new microsite. It's been designed by Richard Lewis Media Group and the curatorial team here at the Concord Museum. As David mentioned with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We recently redesigned our permanent galleries here, but we know that not everyone, including Helen, can come to Concord. So this is our effort to take some of the artifacts related to Henry David Thoreau and share them with a national and international audience. So this is just a little demonstration of how this new website works. So Brian, let's roll the tape. My music was a tinkling stream which meandered with the river and fell from note to note as a brook from rock to rock. Perhaps the best evidence of an amelioration of the climate is the snowshoes which lie about in so many garrets, now useless. I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking. Again, that's just a little taste of the way folks can explore and Helen and I were talking about the importance of material culture and the importance of these artifacts being these in particular were saved by Henry David Thoreau's sister who donated them to what was then Concord Antiquarian Society and they are now proudly displayed in our museum along with Thoreau's death. So we welcome you all to come and we hope to check out that website again. It's Thoreau'sworld.org. But Helen McDonald, let me thank you. First, I know on your behalf we thank all the viewers who tuned in this evening and for shining a spotlight on the luminous of your writing where mystery arises from the meeting of human art and unpredictable natural phenomenon. It's been a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you. It's been an absolute joy and I should be all over that website looking at Thoreau's snowshoes and walking sticks and other objects. Thank you everyone. It's been a joy. And the book is best for flights. We hope you'll all buy it from your independent bookstore and be illuminated and enlightened as I was in reading these wonderful essays. Thank you and good night. Good night.