Review: Field Notes From a Hidden City by Esther Woolfson

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What makes one creature vermin or a source of terror and another a suitable motif for a Christmas card? Neil Stewart reviews Field Notes from a Hidden City, in which Esther Woolfson examines our relationship with the wild things of the urban landscape

Field Notes From a Hidden City review

Esther Woolfson’s big-hearted book depicts a year in the life of her local environment, the “hidden city” of Aberdeen. Much of the book is given over to a nature diary chronicling the year’s cycle – its weather, the plants that grow, bloom, and fall dormant, and the animals and birds that share the city, more or less happily, with its human population.

Interspersed are essays focusing on individual species; it’s something of an eye-opener to realise that the non-domesticated creatures one might expect to encounter in the urban environment – foxes, pigeons, creepy-crawlies – is almost entirely congruent with the group of animals considered to be pests or vermin. (An equally boggling moment comes when Woolfson sees two young women recoiling from a pigeon rushing skyward from a pavement in the centre of town, and reflects that this may actually be the closest these girls ever come to a “wild” animal.)

These thoughtful and engrossing essays are the highlight of Field Notes From a Hidden City. Having shared her home for several years with semi-domesticated birds – Bardie (a cockatiel) and Chicken (a rook, whose listing in the book’s index threatens to become an infinite regress) has made Woolfson a conscientious and precise observer. Woolfson’s “close readings” of the habits, lifestyles and idiosyncrasies of, among others, foxes, spiders, slugs and pigeons are charming but unsentimental: she notes (and successfully avoids) the criticism that nature writing, mishandled, can easily stray into “mystical” territory.

I still felt a cold creep of fear on encountering a life-sized drawing of one such domestic eight-leg at dead centre of an otherwise blank page

It’s a noble aim, seeking to educate readers so that the objects of phobia become less “other”, but despite a passing mention of research that suggests arachnophobia, contrary to what I’d assumed, is less a kind of atavistic self-preservation system and more a learned behaviour which can be overcome, I must admit that no matter how fascinating I find discussion of spiders’ habitats, physiognomies and behaviours, I still felt a cold creep of fear on encountering a life-sized drawing of one such domestic eight-leg at dead centre of an otherwise blank page, as if, during its production, this book had hastily been slammed on it. Some readers will have trouble, I suspect, reconciling education with deeply embedded prejudice.

At times the essays grow breathless. Here’s Woolfson, hesitating over clearing a spiderweb from one corner of the ceiling: “When you’ve accepted that parts of your house may be yours in the technical sense only, that they’re the sovereign territory of another realm and that your exclusive rights are subsumed by the needs and interests of others, it becomes easy, for, if you’re going to live with other creatures, abjure cages and confinement, there’s bound to come a moment when, like a state negotiated treaties, you accede suzerainty – in our case, over rooms and space rather than countries: the upper reaches of the kitchen, the utility room – and set about some sort of attempt at maintaining appropriate boundaries and relationships” – a splendidly constructed sentence that nonetheless seems to have grown rather confused (what is “it becomes easy” actually referring to?).

Along with this building, and catching, enthusiasm, it seemed to me that the book grew more elegiac as it went on. The theories and visible consequences of climate change are discussed, as are effects on animal populations, say, or the lifecycles of plants, struggling to readjust to what seems a gradual levelling out of the year into one generally damp, not very warm mono-season. The planet is changing around us, but it’s impossible, amidst it all, to say whether the change is for the good or the bad, or even what that means – although, as I was writing this review, a news headline popped up online: “Most UK species in decline”, which rather suggests a negative.

It reads as if Woolfson too is striving, in real time as you read, to come to terms with a changing world – one where ecological activism is dismissed as crankery, or comes a distant second to human concerns, as though humans existed in some other, superior ecosystem to everything else on the planet (an ungenerous system which relegates almost any form of wildlife whose habitat overlaps with our own to “vermin” status).

“you don’t often find socially minded, intelligent, empathetic [crows] depicted on Christmas cards”, she laments; “Only territorial, aggressive robins”

In a flawed kind of compensatory gesture, we are accustomed to adopting – seemingly at random – certain species to our hearts, based on very little logic. Woolfson investigates the reputation of the now nearly vanished red squirrel, now seen as the victim of the aggressive “invader”, the grey, and discovers that the “traditional” red was treated as vermin too, until a seemingly arbitrary shift in allegiance mere centuries ago.

She’s scathing, too, of our tendency to anthropomorphise our favoured animals and birds, usually for superficial aesthetic reasons: not only do we “portray animals in caricature [and] distance ourselves from their needs and nature”, we makes totems of the unworthy: “you don’t often find socially minded, intelligent, empathetic [crows] depicted on Christmas cards”, she laments; “Only territorial, aggressive robins”. Woolfson’s own writing respects the alienness of her subjects, and it’s a shame that the book’s illustrations – pencil-and-wash whimsies – work against the author’s argument, reducing their wild subjects to soft-faced cuties. (All except the spider.)

Robins are seldom seen around my territory up in North London. However, I did find myself, out and about during the time I was reading Field Notes From a Hidden City, paying more attention to the birds I saw while I was out and about: noting the white chevron across the wingspan of a magpie, the iridescent sheen on a pigeon’s slate-grey shoulders, or the strange little white-spotted black band around the neck of a collared dove (the clue should have been in the name). This is a quietly enthralling, generous book; Woolfson’s sympathy and precision of observation makes new observers of her readers too. C

 

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