In the introduction to this collection of 41 “new and collected essays”, Helen Macdonald suggests that we think of her book as a Wunderkammer – one of those ornately constructed cabinets of curiosities that became so fashionable from the 16th century onwards. In each cubbyhole you would find a natural or man-made object that was placed with no regard to formal classification. The pleasure came instead from spotting continuities and distinctions between unlikely neighbours – an enamel miniature next to a feather, a miniature musical instrument adjacent to a piece of coral. Macdonald hopes her essays might function in the same idiosyncratic way, although she suggests a more literal translation of Wunderkammer. Rather than a collection powered by “curiosity”, with its greedy needing-to-know, she prefers “wonder” which speaks instead of receptive rapture.
That doesn’t mean, though, that Macdonald’s work feels passive or diffuse. One of the great pleasures in this collection of pieces is seeing how determinedly she picks away at conundrums first encountered in H Is for Hawk, her hugely successful memoir of 2014. At the heart of that book lay her attempt to escape the messy world of human grief by training a falcon to soar above the earth as her beastly proxy. Macdonald is still testing the possibility of crossing the species barrier. On one occasion, while working in a falcon-breeding centre in Wales, she clucks softly at an incubating egg and weeps when the tiny grey gremlin inside the shell calls back. Another, fiercer, time she goes gonzo, smears her face with mud and crawls on her belly in an attempt to infiltrate a field of bullocks.
Visceral pieces such as these are balanced by some marvellously cool-headed analyses in which Macdonald brings to bear her expertise as a historian of science. In “Birds, Tabled” she describes how for centuries the land-owning classes have created their own particular elite version of nature. Geese and ducks, their wings partially amputated so they cannot fly away, continue to swim in literal and metaphorical circles on man-made lakes. And mostly we’re fine with that. So how is it, Macdonald asks, that any working-class person who insists on keeping a finch or budgie in a cage is viewed as morally suspect, even criminal? Especially if they go in for the kind of selective breeding that results in a bird as big as a baby, or one whose tweaked voice blends the trill of a hothouse captive with the metallic notes of wild ancestors? Macdonald makes us see that the love and pride that disenfranchised people lavish on their captive birds is as fierce and contradictory as that of a squire surveying his mallards through binoculars.
If class riles Macdonald, nationalism fills her with dread. Throughout these pieces she returns to the point that birds pay no heed to political boundaries, and yet we still insist on incorporating them into our fantasies of homeland. The most ridiculous example is the hawfinch, which is so associated with old, precious English buildings that it has become a virtual avatar for the National Trust. Yet Macdonald reveals that these bullet-headed birds didn’t make their home in Britain until the mid-19th century, when a few prospecting pairs flew over from Europe to Epping Forest. From there they spread throughout the juicily deciduous southern counties, feasting on the hawthorn, cherry and elm of well-endowed country estates.
Then there’s the Bewick swan, a pretty little bird which appears to be wearing yellow eyeliner and settles each winter in the Fens. Under the aegis of Peter Scott in the mid-20th century, the swans at the Welney Wetlands Trust were given names including Victoria, Lancelot and Jane Eyre as a way of turning them from flocks to family. This was despite the fact that, on their return each spring to Russia, the Bewicks might, for all anyone knew, actually answer to Anastasia, Peter and Anna Karenina.
As a final example Macdonald tells us about a stork called Menes who was satellite-tagged in Hungary in 2013 as part of an avian-migration tracking project. After leaving his nest, Menes travelled across south-east Europe and the Holy Land before fetching up in the Nile valley, where he was taken into police custody. His “suspicious electronic device” made the Egyptian authorities think he was a spy.
Macdonald does much more than simply repeat this as an amusing anecdote. Returning to her abiding theme of border crossings, she points out that as a wild stork Menes was completely free. It was only at the moment he became an animal-human hybrid, of the sort that she has herself longed so many times to be, that he became a danger to the world and so to himself.
• Vesper Flights is published by Jonathan Cape (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
