One thousand wings, lifting
Attention as an act of protest
On the eastern edge of this island is a rock that juts out of the sea like a lone tooth. It is tall and craggy and surrounded by a swallow of ocean. In the winter it stands quiet and bleak, stoic in the throat of all the violent water, but in the spring it comes alive: a cacophony of sound and smell and sight. Puffins and razorbills and guillemots and fulmars nest on its cliffs. They chitter and chatter, squabble and preen. The rock sings with colour and noise.
One spring afternoon, on the cliff-path next to the towering tooth, I watch as the birds scatter. The puffins, usually ambling around their burrows, take to the wing or shuffle underground. The fulmars, ever-watchful from their open nests, screech and fly. A ballet of bird takes to the air. The sound of feather whooshes through the sky along with the shrill warning calls of a thousand birds. A harmony of panic.
Years ago, I might not have paid much attention to this. I might have thought, oh, wow, look at all those birds, then carried on walking, chasing the tail of whatever thought was whirling around my mind. But now I stop, scan the sky. It could have been any number of threats that panicked the birds, but I have an inkling of who the culprit is. And there – flying like a warplane, built like a tank – I am right. A great skua.
There is something formidable about the skua. Something hard to pin down. When I first moved to the Orkney Islands, I hadn’t seen one before. I first noticed one, without knowing what it was, as I watched a group of gulls foraging on a beach. Among them was a dark bird that everyone else seemed to be avoiding. Wherever the dark bird moved, the other birds rippled away. It had an aura of mischief and loneliness and menace.
When I got home I looked it up. A great skua. A species that bullies other birds until they vomit up their food (the skua then eats the vomit), that preys on the eggs and chicks of other species, and that have been observed working together to take down birds as big as gannets. Mischief and menace, indeed.
So when the great skua comes slicing through the air above the suddenly quiet and colourless tooth of rock, it is not a surprise. I have been expecting it.
It, however, has not been expecting me. It cuts through the air, over my head, close to my face, its eye glimmering black as it inspects me.
It is a beautiful bird.
It has the sort of presence that makes you feel small.
I have not always paid attention to the wild in this way. Really, I am still learning how to.
Part of the challenge has been learning how to get out of my own head in order to notice what is going on outside it. I remember a friend once telling me that her thoughts were neatly categorised inside her mind, as if her brain were an apothecary table. She would get stressed when she didn’t know exactly where a thought should go. It sat on top of the table and she hated that. She needed to find its drawer. Once she’d found the right drawer and put it away, she felt calm again.
Let me tell you, I was baffled.
It took me a while to figure out how to describe the inside of my mind. In the end, I settled on tangled headphones. I always used to have a pair tangled up in my pocket, and I’d have to spend a good five minutes untangling them before I could use them. Often they’d be so knotted up that they’d only be half-working by the time they were untangled, and the music would reach my ears sounding hollow and spacey, as if I were listening through a wall. This is what my thoughts felt like, but each thought was a pair of headphones and they were all stuffed away in various pockets and there was no system for categorising anything and I always felt rushed to fish out whatever I could find and begin The Untangling.
My friend looked just as baffled by my tangled headphones as I was by her apothecary table.
That sounds stressful, she said. And not very efficient.
Well, she’d got me there.
I used to spend a lot of time all caught up in the process of untangling my thoughts. But I have, slowly, been learning how to turn my attention outward.
It was a necessity, really, to learn how to pay attention. For my work, I needed to be able to observe the world carefully and methodically. My research involved observing and recording the social behaviour of wild jackdaws and, later, monkeys. This involved many hundreds of hours of watching… well, not-much. Just hours and hours of jackdaws going about their daily lives (which involves a lot of doing nothing), then of monkeys doing the same (also, a lot of doing nothing), and waiting for a behaviour – sometimes less than a second in duration – to take place.
I could not look away. I could not think about other things. I had to watch. My job was to pay attention.
Through this work – the enforced practice of doing this day-in, day-out, the enforced quiet and stillness that it demanded – I learnt how to focus my mind, to step outside of my head and absorb the subtleties of another’s existence. How to hear the chatter of a jackdaw and know her partner had just returned to her. How to watch the peeking of her head out of the nest and know that she had seen a dog, or a person, or a fox. How to know the alpha female had just come into view of the monkey I was sitting with. How to notice that the gentle coos of one hundred monkeys meant that rain was coming.
I learnt how to be still, how to see.
Some people are born with a talent for paying attention to others - people, animals, the world around them. Some people are raised in cultures that teach and encourage this skill. Some come to it later. Either way, in this world where many of us are constantly told to keep moving, to keep hustling, to keep producing, where our attention is controlled, directed, interrupted and distracted, learning how to give something our full and quiet attention is an act of protest.
Attention is powerful.
Attention is political.
Learning how to pay attention has been one of the greatest gifts and privileges from my scientific training. Some people know how to do it instinctively. I’m not one of them.
I watch the skua fly back to the open ocean.
The puffins and razorbills, guillemots and fulmars return to their rock. They are a little unsettled, a little more vigilant than they had been.
So am I. I am scanning the horizon for the skua. I am wondering if the glorious, menacing tank of its body will come swooping over my head again. And I am also thinking how beautiful this is. All of it. The feathers and clatter and colour, the sudden panic of the birds, the way I could tell – not only from the sound of one thousand lifting wings but also from the hours I have spent watching these animals, the hours I have spent noticing the intricacies of their lives – what would happen next.
I exist outside of my mind as I think this. I am not myself. I am a part of something bigger, a small thing woven into a tapestry of one thousand other small things, gifting each one, each life, each wing, the small kindness of my attention.
And, in turn, I am gifting attention back to myself.
Because that is part of the magic of learning to pay attention: you learn how to pay deep, authentic attention to yourself, too. It is a sort of cleansing. A sort of spaciousness. A sort of untangling.
And what is that, in this culture of disconnection and speed and greed, if not an act of protest?
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A bonxie’s a hard bird to love. Once I saw a bonny pair of mergansers on the loch by our house and went to get the binoculars. By the time I looked again a bonxie was ripping the male to pieces and eating it while the female looked on, bemused. A years ago a bonxie lifted all five cygnets, one by one while the parents could do nothing. And yet, they’ve been hit so hard by bird flu, I’m now relieved and glad when I do still see one or two. They’ve been very scarce here lately. I do miss that squat Spitfire bird and the ripple of disquiet that surrounds it. Beautifully observed writing, thank you.
How to describe trying to organise one’s own thoughts? The apothecary drawers, the tangled ear buds, those are such interesting analogies! I‘ve never thought of trying to describe it to someone else. It‘s got me thinking!
And your words about how you learned to focus your mind outwards through your work - beautiful. And yes, important and a kind of protest. What a great read. Thank you.
I‘ll forward this to my daughter who told me about seeing skuas when she was diving up that way.