Tag: History

Author interview with Michael J Warren: The Cuckoo’s Lea

Weaving together early literature, history and ornithology, The Cuckoo’s Lea takes the reader on a journey into the past to contemplate the nature and heritage of ancient landscapes. It explores the stories behind our placenames, alongside historical accounts of bird encounters thousands of years ago, their hidden secrets, the nature of places and more. 

Michael J. Warren is a naturalist and nature writing author who teaches English at a school in Chelmsford. He was an honorary research fellow at Birbeck Colledge, curates The Birds and Place Project, and is a series editor of Medieval Ecocriticisms. We recently had the opportunity to speak to Michael about The Cuckoo’s Lea, including how he first became interested in birding, what he discovered throughout his research for this book and more. 

Firstly, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, and how you became interested in birds and birding?

Professionally I do many different things, but birds, the natural world, conservation and environmentalism are central to all of it. I’m an English school teacher as well as an academic working in the environmental humanities (my PhD was on birds in medieval poetry), so literature, language and history are always intertwined with my love of nature and nature writing. I was formerly chair of the New Networks for Nature group and am currently a trustee for the charity Curlew Action, where I advise on education as it relates to the forthcoming Natural History GCSE. 

I’ve been into birds and birding for as long as I can remember, having been encouraged by my uncle and aunt who are both keen naturalists themselves, but most of all I was inspired by my parents as they did one of the best things I think any parent can do for a child – they educated me in the great outdoors. By which, I meant that all our holidays were in various wild locations across the UK, involving ramshackle cottages in remote valleys and by secluded rivers, from which my brothers and I were free to roam, exploring and playing each morning. I have a deep passion for British landscapes and wildlife, and I am who I am today because of those early experiences. They shaped me profoundly, and I’m now trying to do the same with my two daughters (which is working so far, but they’re still young and impressionable right now!) 

What inspired you to write a book on the history of place names with avian origins? 

Initially this idea came from my academic research on birds in medieval literature and culture. When I started to explore the presence of bird species in place names – in the realm of medieval studies by default as most English place names are Old English in origin and can be traced back to the Middle Ages – I was astounded by just how many there were. I knew there was something really fascinating to examine, including what these names could tell us about people’s ecological knowledge and relationships over one thousand years ago. Every name is a story. 

One of my reviewers has kindly described The Cuckoo’s Lea as a ‘Rosetta stone for our ecological knowledge’, but it’s the place-names that are the stone. They provide us with a portal into the imagination of early people who were encountering and interacting with these environments. I realised that placenames were the perfect subject for my first narrative nonfiction book as it combines birds, landscapes, medieval history and ecological history, while also providing the opportunity for me to travel to different places, experience them first hand, and collate all these elements into a personal narrative with broad appeal. 

Eurasian Cranes at St. Benets Abbey by Nick Goodrum, via Flickr

Each chapter focuses on a different location and species across the UK. How did you decide which areas to focus on and which of the many species that reside there to highlight?

I went back to the drawing board a lot with that one! 

I wrote this book alongside becoming a father: six years of raising two daughters through those early years combined with six years of research, travel, and writing at 4am in the morning because that was the only way to carve out writing time until I got my book deal with Bloomsbury. As such, practicality determined a lot of it – I travelled to locations I could feasibly reach within my budget (at one point we were living on my part-time salary and my wife’s statutory maternity pay) and the restricted time available. Under other circumstances I would have liked to have travelled farther afield for the book – to Ireland, for instance.  

My selection was also determined by the range of species that I thought would most appeal to readers. So, although there’s a danger of over-featuring certain birds in nature writing, I knew I had to include cuckoos, cranes and nightingales in the book because everyone loves them! These three species were also popular in medieval culture too, so it made sense to feature them, and I lived in Cranbrook (Kent) for most of the time I was writing the book, so that provided an obvious starting point. 

I also thought hard about the range of ideas I wanted to explore relating to how birds evoke and define place for us and allowed this to lead me towards particular birds and/or places. For instance, I wanted to write about the soundscape of birds as a phenomenon that both animates or shapes place – a recurring idea in the book. This meant that owls became important as, to me, they exemplify this enthralling idea that our ancestors naturally and happily recognised bioacoustics as distinguishing properties of a place’s atmosphere. Finally, and again practically, it was also imperative to have some geographical range to my adventures so any reader would be able to read about somewhere in their home county or a nearby county. 

What was the most surprising discovery you made whilst researching this book? 

I think it was the sheer number of species represented in Old English placenames.  

I don’t think you would expect birds to turn up so frequently in placenames, given that you’d want a place-marker or identifier to be reliably solid, present and static – and birds don’t tend to remain static much of the time. Some of the species that can be found in our placenames, such as swallows and cuckoos, aren’t even in Britain for much of the year! On this basis, wrens, buntings, snipe, dunnocks and sparrows aren’t species I expected to find. 

There’s also nowhere that really matches the range of species in English placenames. Gaelic does have a good range across both Ireland and Scotland, but it’s difficult to trace the origins of the names beyond the 19th or 18th centuries as the cultures were oral, so names often weren’t recorded until the first OS maps were produced. 

On the flip side, I was also surprised by the species that aren’t in our place-names – nightingales, for instance. This species was highly prominent and celebrated in both medieval art and poetry, and would have been much more populous than they are today, so how is it that they didn’t find their way into placenames? (That doesn’t stop me having a chapter on nightingales, by the way.) The same goes for corncrakes. There was an Old English name for the bird, and their calls would have undoubtedly been an unavoidable and loud sound of summer throughout the land. Herons only appear once or twice, and, perhaps most surprisingly, the robin (or ruddock in Old English) doesn’t feature at all! 

Cuckoo at Thursley Common by Alan Shearman, via Flickr

Finally, can you tell us what you’re working on at the moment? 

Right now, I’m focused on making a success of The Cuckoo’s Lea! 

Alongside booking readings, signings and talks, I’m also creating a website titled The Birds and Place Project (birdsandplace.co.uk) which aims to record the birdsong of all the species mentioned in English placenames – which is quite an undertaking! It will be a lifelong project as I’d like to extend it beyond England and the English language to include other countries and languages found across Britain and Ireland. I see it as an extension of my book; and as a site for anyone to find out about this fascinating, but currently little-known, aspect of our natural history and heritage. 

Beyond that, I’ve got my eye on my second book, provisionally titled Hibernal: The Obsessions of a Justified Winter Lover. I’m a serious winter fanatic, so I’ve known for some time that my second book will be a meditation on my favourite season. It will be an emotional and personal journey into my obsession with winter, including encounters with those living and surviving the season in the far north, as well as those who can’t stand winter and suffer terribly in the darkness and cold. Plus, it will highlight historical stories about the importance of winter, how previous times and cultures coped with it, and discuss how winter as a season is changing because of climate change. I don’t think there’s much chance of me commencing this book in 2025, but then again, if this book is going to take me another six years, I can’t waste a single winter… 

The Cuckoo’s Lea is available here

Book review: Every Living Thing

Every Living Thing cover.***** An epic history of taxonomy across three centuries

Linnaeus was not the only seventeenth-century scholar trying to get to grips with life’s diversity; French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (Buffon hereafter) was another. Though the two men never met, their ideas did. Author Jason Roberts provides a biography of Linnaeus and Buffon, writing an epic history of their work and intellectual legacy. It has quickly become one of my favourite books this year for introducing me to a new scientific hero.

In the first two parts, Roberts charts the lives and works of Linnaeus and Buffon, alternating between the two as he goes. Having just reviewed The Man Who Organized Nature, I could not resist immediately checking his reference section. Broberg’s books is not amongst them, though he has consulted several other biographies Broberg recommended. His coverage of Linnaeus follows the major beats of his life but leaves out much of the extraneous details that Broberg provided, focusing on his taxonomical ideas. It quickly becomes apparent that Broberg was respectful, even mild, just reporting the facts of Linnaeus’s life but rarely passing judgment. Roberts has no such reservations, calling him out for his arrogance and immodesty. He also covers Linnaeus’s apostles who were sent on collecting expeditions to uncharted parts of the world with often fatal outcomes. True, they went willingly and were not the only ones to do so at the time, but they provided a number of harsh lessons. Roberts particularly holds Linnaeus’s feet to the fire regarding his scientific racism. “Later apologists have attempted to absolve Linnaeus of racism” (p. 180), but not Roberts. Sure, others would make the message more explicit and amplify it but modern race science “has a genealogy that can be traced directly to the pages of Systema Naturae” (p. 181).

In contrast, Buffon (1707–1788) emerges from this book in a far more positive light. Inheriting a fortune at age 10, by 1739 he was nominated as intendant of the Jardin du Roi, gaining both the ear and the financial support of King Louis XV. That was vital for the project that would dominate the rest of his life: Histoire Naturelle. Intended as an encyclopedia of all creation, he wrote 36 large and painstakingly detailed volumes, covering the mineral kingdom and part of the animal kingdom. Like Linnaeus, Buffon was a polymath and became captivated by life’s diversity, but that is where the resemblances end. I admit to knowing little about him before reading this book, but he was a fascinating character! He was the morally more upstanding person of the two, vocally opposing slavery and treating the women who crossed his path as equals. At home, “Buffon designed a life of maximum efficiency” (p. 64), having his valet wake him up at 5 AM every day (even if it meant being dragged out of bed) for a strictly scheduled day of writing in his spartan room, with breaks for meals and some socializing. It was a lifestyle he would stick to for the next 50(!) years, delighting in his “rigorous cultivation of solitary focus” (p. 66).

Who Was Carl Linnaeus? via The Collector.Who Was Carl Linnaeus? via The Collector.

As if that quirk was not enough to endear Buffon to me, his thinking was decades if not centuries ahead of his time. In his writings, he speculated about extinction, common descent and the evolution of species, the cellular basis of life, the finitude of natural resources, and an impending epoch of humans. Roberts provides relevant context to explain the rhetorical safeguards Buffon employed to sidestep censors and is careful to avoid grand claims: we should be careful not to retrofit today’s knowledge to his hunches and speculation back then. He also disentangles the “thicket of significant linguistic differences between Buffon’s era and ours” (p. 199), pointing out that e.g. evolution as we understand it had not yet been coined. Even so, Darwin admitted that Buffon’s ideas were “laughably like mine” (p. xi).

Of relevance to the history of taxonomy, and the leitmotif of this book, is the rivalry between the ideas of these two men. Roberts captures the contrast beautifully early on: “To Linnaeus’s mind, nature was a noun. All species remained as created during Genesis, representing an unchanging tableau. To Buffon, nature was a verb, a swirl of constant change” (p. 7). Linnaeus, like most naturalists at the time, believed in the fixity of species; evolution and extinction implied that Creation was imperfect. Buffon believed that species evolved and went extinct, even if he did not yet know how. Their differences reflected a deep philosophical divide. Linnaeus believed in absolute universal truths, in Aristotelian essences, with species being real entities. Buffon, in contrast, considered systematics and species useful concepts but also flawed human constructs.

Comte de Buffon via the British Library.
Comte de Buffon via the British Library.

What elevated the book for me is that Roberts leaves himself a comfortable 110 pages in part 3 to describe what happened next and what the relevance of their ideas is to us today. The grand arc that he traces is that, after his death, Buffon’s ideas were quickly sidelined by Linnaeus’s adherents but over time have regained their significance. He takes you through the French Revolution and its aftermath, giving terribly interesting profiles of famous naturalists who embraced Buffon’s ideas to various degrees. He also discusses Britain’s lukewarm reception and then slow acceptance of Linnaeus’s ideas, with his collections ending up in England and leading to the founding of the Linnean Society of London. Simultaneously, Buffon influenced Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, and his grandson Julian Huxley who lived through the rise of genetics.

Today, Linnaeus’s taxonomical hierarchy has started to creak under the sheer magnitude of the planet’s biodiversity and has increasingly been abandoned, leaving just binomial nomenclature and a hierarchy of categorical ranks. Buffon’s observation, that life is like a web or network instead of a thread, seems more relevant than ever. Meanwhile, species concepts remain troublesome beasts, and some scholars propose we consider species “snapshots rather than static points”, which hews closer to Buffon’s idea they are “an entity of reason rather than a physical fact” (p. 352).

Though Roberts is not a science historian, he has done his homework, going back to source material wherever possible. He is not shy to judge both men by modern standards with Buffon emerging as the clear moral victor. He leaves ample space to discuss the aftermath and modern relevance of their ideas, which is a welcome stroke of brilliance. If you are new to the history of taxonomy, I have no hesitation in recommending that you start here; Broberg’s book is a more advanced text on a more circumscribed topic that will make for good follow-up reading.