Tag: Natural 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: Alexander von Humboldt

***** A factual and nuanced picture, and a critical interrogation of previous portrayals

I read and compared this book to Andrea Wulf’s widely-read The Invention of Nature. Historian Andreas W. Daum shows that good things come in small packages and delivers a factual, nuanced, and admirably concise biography. Straight off the bat, you can tell that this will be a different book. At 208 pages and 13 × 21 cm, it is swallowed by Wulf’s book. Though both authors are German, as a historian actively researching Humboldt’s biography, Daum is just that bit more qualified. Originally published in German, Daum was actively involved in the book’s English translation, revising and expanding it in the process.

A more detailed comparison follows at the end as I first want to judge this book on its merits. Daum discusses Humboldt’s life in six chapters, giving equal attention to periods that were less glamorous than his American and Russian expeditions. A short interlude reflects on his scientific approach, while the book ends with a chronology, a very useful narrative guide to sources and further reading, endnotes, and a selected bibliography. Daum has a clear mission statement: to examine Humboldt’s life “through a refined biographical lens [that] avoids both mystification and vilification [and] to suggest a more nuanced interpretation, portraying a multifaceted Humboldt” (p. 3). Two aspects stood out to me.

First, throughout, Daum pushes back on previous portrayals of Humboldt. Wulf’s and Meinhardt’s book are characterised as “popular, heroic accounts” (p. 162) that portray Humboldt as “a singular intellect way ahead of his time” (p. 2). He adds a clear barb at Wulf’s address by writing that Humboldt did not invent nature. He equally objects to postcolonial criticism that casts Humboldt as a gentleman colonizer. Though a necessary corrective, it needs to be combined with a fair assessment of his progressive sides. Portrayals of Humboldt as a second Columbus are similarly scorned as simplistic colonial tropes that are simply not true: “Humboldt was not venturing into unknown territory. Nowhere was he the ‘first'” (p. 55). Daum furthermore distinguishes between Humboldtian science and Humboldt’s science. Humboldt’s call for systematic collection of geomagnetic and climatological data by networks of observatories, later pursued by both Russia and the UK, has been called an example of *Humboldtian* science by historian Susan Faye Cannon. Daum counters that this is a later, idealized archetype that “jettisoned his emphasis on the aesthetic” (p. 124). *Humboldt’s* science, in contrast, was far more tentative, trying to balance empirical science with one’s subjective experience of nature. He did not have it all figured out before or after his American expedition. To suggest otherwise is “a retrospective projection” (p. 52) that does not do him justice. Finally, though Humboldt is venerated in South America and he welcomed declarations of independence, he played no role in them, nor should be labelled the “father of Latin American independence” (p. 109).

Alexander von Humboldt, by National Endowment for the Humanities.
Alexander von Humboldt, by National Endowment for the Humanities.

Second is Daum’s nuanced picture of Humboldt. Take, for example, his political stance, or lack thereof. Though remembered for his liberal values and criticism of colonialism and slavery, he feared bloody violence, such as seen during the French Revolution and favoured more gradual reforms. When Prussia took the fight to Napoleon and occupied Paris in 1814, his brother Wilhelm supported the German cause while Alexander refused to, “souring relations between the two” (p. 105). Humboldt helped prevent the Paris Museum of Natural History from being looted and drew criticism back in Germany when lobbying for stolen German artworks to stay in Paris. He supported and found patronage for French and German scientists alike and, by refusing to pick sides, easily moved in different social circles. When he later returned to Berlin with its increasingly conservative political climate that curbed freedom of expression, he swam against the tide by offering free public lectures that became incredibly popular.

Daum gives a similarly nuanced picture of Humboldt’s way of working. Hearing of his grand plans for the American expedition, his brother was already concerned he would overreach. Indeed, he habitually bit off more than he could chew, always had multiple manuscripts on the go, and left a legacy of unfinished projects. Kosmos, the magnum opus he laboured on for the last two decades of his life, was not necessarily a resounding success, despite the high sales. Some contemporaries considered it challenging or requiring too much prior knowledge. Ironically, the proliferation of simplified versions and explainers meant that Humboldt succeeded, sort of, in popularizing science, though it “had taken on a momentum that the author could no longer control” (p. 142). Daum characterizes it as synopsis of material rather than a coherent synthesis, which buttresses his conclusion that Humboldt is remembered not for coming up with “a clearly defined theory that fundamentally changed scientific and social thinking”, but for leaving us with “myriad complex thoughts and incentives for further research” (p. 151).

Alexander von Humboldt, by Smithsonian Magazine.
Alexander von Humboldt, by Smithsonian Magazine.

Given the number of people who will have read Wulf’s The Invention of Nature, a comparison is in order. My one-liner is that Daum’s book is less fluff, more facts. The book’s brevity is partially achieved by omitting all the biographical material on other people that Wulf included and partially by mentioning rather than describing events in lively detail. This is particularly noticeable when it comes to Humboldt’s expeditions. Now, before you conclude that Daum’s book contains less material than Wulf’s, let me stop you there. For all its brevity, there are numerous details here not mentioned by Wulf. Beyond factoids, there are the above-mentioned aspects, attention for his lesser-known works, a more informed opinion on his sexuality, and many other things besides. In a mere 153 pages, Daum concisely offers a full yet nuanced picture of Humboldt’s life and work.

If you have already read The Invention of Nature, should you read this biography? Next to being a quick read, hopefully by now you are convinced Daum’s book is worth your time by offering a different perspective and much new information. I found reading them together an instructive and rewarding exercise. If you insist on me recommending just one book, answer me this: do you read history books to be informed or to be entertained? In the former case, choose Daum for a more scholarly take; in the latter, choose Wulf for an entertaining book that indulges in digressions. I hasten to add that I am talking shades of grey here: Daum prioritising the facts does not mean his book is boring, just as Wulf prioritising storytelling does not mean her book is inaccurate.