For me words are a way of touching. I am touched by words and I offer words as a means of touching others. Naming is at the heart of language and infants are enthusiastic about it. Naming locates and separates out – a way of framing. It invites associations, images, feelings and connections. Names are magical – even the most simple ones. For me, naming isn’t about boxing in or defining, which is just limiting and alienating. Naming creates a magical space around something or someone that can allow perception to deepen and become playful. Our minds want to name – but so do our hearts. There is a pleasure and some kind of desire expressed in naming. It creates “the other” that we can then try to somehow touch and to know, despite them being always intrinsically unknowable. In the deepest sense, there is something erotic about naming. That is how I have viewed the naming of birds.
Using a book, I have named flowers in hedges, fields and woods – always experiencing the pleasure of naming. But flowers want to be seen – they are dressed for it – and they stay still. Birds have always moved my heart – even without being able to name them – and I have felt a ridiculous thrill whenever I have been able to name one. For the most part, they do not want to be seen by the likes of us, and only want to be heard by us in order to tell us to go away. Their colours, songs and calls are for others of their own kind. I have found books of limited use in naming birds. To name, you have to know where to find them first, know what details to observe and then get them to show themselves enough to observe those details. Naming by ear is a wonderful skill that hugely increases the naming possibilities when out walking, but is not learned from books. I can identify a few birds by sound – the ones that are most present in my immediate environment: house sparrow, wood pigeon, swift, magpie, crow, blackbird, buzzard. But there are even sounds that some of these birds make that I can’t distinguish. You have to repeatedly put the sound and the sight together. Best to have a teacher and guide. For me, that has been Nigel.
Nigel always insists you have to earn your birds. His ability to name birds by sight and by sound outstrips anyone else I have personally known. He is definitely not interested in naming as simply a way to define, and thereby limit, anything. I feel he appreciates the mystery, the undiscovered and undiscoverable of everything in nature – while still being insatiably curious. This made him my perfect teacher.
Early on, Nigel taught me to begin learning to what he called “jigsaw”: to try to name a bird by the flying silhouette against the sky. This opened me up to the sheer beauty of bird shapes in the sky – how they fit there just so. I realised I already knew some basic jigsaws, mostly the same birds whose sounds I knew, and I began to take more interest in the aerial shapes around me. I was very pleased with this growing ability, a part of the pleasure in naming. Then I stayed in a campsite south of London and saw a shape in the sky heading for a very tall tree – a shape I felt somehow didn’t belong there – not a proper part of the puzzle. I busily jigsawed away. Was it a pheasant? No, flying too high – wrong shape. Was it a corvid? Definitely not. It was when I heard it that the penny slowly dropped. I had seen my first parakeet in the British skyscape! Pleasure is too tame a word for my feeling at this naming. Here are just a few of the naming experiences that Nigel has enabled for me:
Naming With Nigel
Dipper disappearing under a bridge –
later bouncing on a boulder in the River Teign.
Fieldfares in a field (where else!).
Many Brent Geese on a sand bar.
Red Kite infiltrating the Dartmoor sky.
Siskins whispering in woods.
A pair of Shoveler Ducks sieving at the edge of a lake.
Ring Ousel on a granite gatepost.
Crossbills, like flames flickering
On the top of tall pines.
Reed warblers repeating themselves in reeds.
Meadow Pipits undulating across the moor.
Oystercatchers and Greenshanks in shallow estuary mud.
Cattle Egrets strolling through a water meadow.
Wrens shouting their songs out from bushes and hedges.
I grow more confident in my naming.
Here are some I have done on my own:
A Chiffchaff chiffchaffing on a hawthorn tree
just a few feet above where I am lying
in the grass on a Dorset hillside.
A flock of glittering Goldfinches surfing the treetops.
A Great Black-backed Gull gliding below my eye line
as I stand on a cliff over the sea, awed by its wingspan.
A pair of Ravens pulling worms in a field before flying
into the woods, gronking to each other as they go.
A Garden Warbler singing every day from a telephone line
stretching across a midsummer garden.
Curlews calling in the black and pink dusk at Topsham estuary.
A Kingfisher dancing above the Thames near Reading (my first ever!).
Swifts, Swifts, Swifts and more Swifts, swooping
through my garden and over the neighbours’ houses!
I know them so well yet can’t even imagine what they really are –
and always I call out “Hello Swifts!” to them.
Naming in this way is not just a pleasure.
It is ecstatic!
A few meandering thoughts …
I enjoy your passion for naming and it stimulates me to explore a different relationship with the Buddhist ‘naming’ as a meditative and movement practice.
Reading this Desire to Name blog, I feel delight, wonder, amazement and my belly feels warm.
I feel the extraordinary diversity of being, the colours and shapes and sounds of the ‘horizontal’ human life
When I read your haunting poems about Longing in the previous blogs, I feel a familiar pulling up and forwards and an emptiness inside that murmurs that it will never, can never be filled , can never be satisfied. I have often wondered in my many times of longing, in my habit of longing whether it is a misplaced impulse, longing for something or someone on the’ horizontal’ when in fact , the impulse belongs to a craving for the Divine.
Longing for me is definitely not desire – in fact, I feel as if it stands in the way of desire, tempting me to step out of the moment, into a condition of non-commitment.
I’m really interested in the twin aspects of naming – that it can limit and objectify and classify and distance and that it can also reveal intimacy and expand awareness and empathy and connection and understanding. I agree that there is something urgent about the moment of recognition and being able to name a plant or a bird. I remember seeing a bird flying across the rice fields in Bali and recognising the flight and knowing that it must be a member of the same family as our woodpeckers for its swooping flight. And there is the inheritance of knowing/naming – the birds and flowers I know are largely the birds and flowers my dad knew and taught me.
I am thinking about my inheritance of naming – I lost what there was of it when I left my country of birth. And I mostly had to source my own names as a child the best I could – my parents being too absorbed in their adult lives to teach me much about the beautiful natural world we lived in. I do remember somehow finding out that the name of the amazing flower I had come across in the woods when walking on my own was a trillium! I knew the name of the American Robin and the Cardinal. Once a semi-tame Raven came to stay for a while in our garden. My first boyfriend was a nature lover – and he taught me a lot. I think that is partly why the American nature writers/poets like Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver and Pattiann Rogers feel special to me – I hear the American landscape and it’s wildlife in their words. When I first came to this country, I found myself in London with pigeons and sparrows. I do have a special love of Lapwings which were one of the first British birds I learned to name. Only in recent years have I really gone to great efforts to name the wild life around me, bringing great joy.