Field Notes: THE GREAT CRESTED GREBE
Hello and welcome,
If you've found your way here it means something in this month's Field Note caught your attention, which is good to hear. What follows is an attempt to flesh out a little what was in April's note. For such a stunningly visual bird it is strangely lacking in cultural attachments... but hopefully I've managed to dig out enough of interest, even if I have had to stretch the boundaries from time to time.
Some you may already know and some of it, I hope, will be new. Take your time. Follow whatever catches your eye. And if something here leads you somewhere unexpected, my efforts have been worthwhile.
Enjoy,
Emerson
If you've found your way here it means something in this month's Field Note caught your attention, which is good to hear. What follows is an attempt to flesh out a little what was in April's note. For such a stunningly visual bird it is strangely lacking in cultural attachments... but hopefully I've managed to dig out enough of interest, even if I have had to stretch the boundaries from time to time.
Some you may already know and some of it, I hope, will be new. Take your time. Follow whatever catches your eye. And if something here leads you somewhere unexpected, my efforts have been worthwhile.
Enjoy,
Emerson
Colin See-Payton 'Podiceps Cristatus' (detail)
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Art
Adriaen Collaert was a Flemish engraver working in Antwerp at the turn of the seventeenth century, producing extraordinarily detailed natural history prints at a time when the scientific illustration of birds and animals was still in its infancy. His print of the Bustard and Great Crested Grebe is one of the earliest accurate depictions of the bird in European art — the tippet rendered with remarkable precision for an image made four centuries ago. Colin See-Paynton is one of Britain's finest living wood engravers, working in a tradition that places him in a direct conversation with Collaert across four centuries. However the movement and energy in his work, such as Podiceps Cristatus sits in direct contrast to Collaert's earlier work. Dionisio Minaggio was an Italian gardener at the Spanish Governor's Court, Milan in the 1600s. He spent years assembling The Feather Book which is made up of 156 images constructed almost entirely from real feathers, bird skin and even beaks. The results are extraordinary collection of birds, hunters, musicians, commedia dell'arte figures. Nobody is entirely sure why he made it but it is certainly compelling. |
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Words
In 1920 the British government debated a bill to prohibit the importation of exotic feathers — the same trade that had reduced the Great Crested Grebe to fewer than fifty breeding pairs sixty years earlier. Virginia Woolf wrote a short polemical essay entitled The Plumage Bill in 1920 as a response, ostensibly about the bill but really about something much larger — the injustice embedded in the language of the debate itself, in which women were simultaneously blamed for wearing feathers and excluded from the conversation about banning them. Scholars now consider The Plumage Bill a direct prototype for A Room of One's Own - one of the 20th Century's most seminal essays. Even though Evelyn Waugh didn't seem that impressed by the Great Crested Grebe, he used it in his savage comic novel Scoop (1938). The grebe runs through it as a sustained satirical device. From the moment William Boot's gentle nature column Lush Places is sabotaged by his sister, the readers of his column are baffled, with the misunderstanding spiralling out of control, until by the novel's end the owner of the Daily Beast has become convinced that the government should be deeply concerned about the grebes — though nobody ever explains why, and nobody thinks to ask. It is one of the great comic novels and definitely worth a read and seems especially relevant in these days of 'false news'. Poet Deryn Rees-Jones celebrated collection Erato (2023) features one of the only actual poems about grebes I could find. The Great Crested Grebe sits among other explorations of desire and myth, using the birds' intricate courtship display to extend the collection's wider concerns. On the night of June 23rd 2009, Edwin Rist — a twenty-two year old American flautist and obsessive Victorian fly-tier — broke into the Natural History Museum at Tring, the same Tring where Julian Huxley had spent his fortnight watching grebes ninety-five years earlier (see History section) and stole 299 irreplaceable bird specimens. Kirk Wallace Johnson's account The Feather Thief published in 2018 is a gripping piece of narrative non-fiction. It is also a meditation on obsession, collecting and the strange persistence of the Victorian relationship with feathers into the present day. |
Arvo Pärt
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Music
Arvo Pärt wrote Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror) in 1978. Two instruments moving in slow, precise, mirrored reflection of each other, the same phrases turning and returning like two things that cannot quite separate. He didn't write it with grebes in mind. But anyone who has been lucky enough to watch the grebe's ritualised mating ceremony will definitely see the connection. Igor Stravinsky wrote The Firebird as a ballet score for The Ballets Russes in 1910. Based around a Russian folk tale about a magical bird of fire whose feathers bring both fortune and danger to whoever possesses them. The connection to this month's Field Note is somewhat oblique but genuine — the firebird is another version of the human conviction that certain feathers carry something beyond their material reality, a notion that has been carried through form the Ancient Egyptians, to Edwardian ladies and a young feather thief in the 21st Century. |
Emily Williamson
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History
The Great Crested Grebe was hunted not only for its ornate tippet but for the dense, silky feathers of its breast — so fine in texture that the Victorian trade sold them not as feathers at all but as fur. Grebe fur was used to trim coats, line muffs and decorate hats, and commanded considerable prices in the London and Paris fashion markets of the mid-nineteenth century. The birds were shot on their nesting grounds during the breeding season, when their plumage was at its most ornate and their behaviour made them easiest to find. This trade alongside the fashion for plumage in hats drove the grebe to the edge of extinction. In 1889, Emily Williamson founded the Society for the Protection of Birds with a single purpose: to challenge the fashion for feathers and exotic plumes that was pushing species such as little egrets, birds of paradise and grebes towards extinction. Frustrated by the inaction of the all-male British Ornithologists’ Union, she established an all-women movement dedicated to protecting birds. Her efforts quickly gained momentum, and after joining forces with Etta Lemon and Eliza Phillips, the society grew in both influence and support. In 1904 it was granted a Royal Charter, becoming the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and its campaigning ultimately contributed to the passing of the 1921 Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Act — the organisation’s first major legislative victory for nature conservation. In the spring of 1912, a young zoologist named Julian Huxley spent a fortnight at Tring Reservoir in Hertfordshire with binoculars, a notebook and, as he later admitted, a good deal of patience. What he recorded there — the “weed dance”, the mirrored courtship sequence, and the birds’ uncanny upright posture on the water like “ghostly penguins” — formed the basis of his 1914 paper The Courtship-Habits of the Great Crested Grebe, a foundational text in ethology. Looking back on the experience, he noted that he had spent two weeks watching them and that it was “the most delightful time I have ever had" - something Evelyn Waugh might have disagreed with. |
A Note on How to Find Everything - I've provided links (just tap on either the names or the illustrations).
If you'd like to listen to any of the music mentioned here, Bandcamp is the best place to find it. Artists receive a significantly larger share of revenue through Bandcamp than through the major streaming platforms — and on the first Friday of every month Bandcamp waive their own fees entirely, meaning every penny goes directly to the artist. This month that falls on Friday 4th April — worth timing your purchases accordingly.
For the books, your local independent bookshop is always the first port of call. If you need to order online, Bookshop.org supports independent bookshops across the UK and is a genuinely meaningful alternative to the obvious options — you can find them at uk.bookshop.org. Worth noting they currently deliver within the UK only, so overseas subscribers may need to seek out a good independent bookseller closer to home.
Until Next Month
Thank you for sticking with me and swallowing some of the more oblique links. Rest assured I have already started on May's subject and it is packed full of myth, music and poetry.
In the meantime subscribers to Field Note gain access to an exclusive discount code over on my Etsy shop. Each month the discount will change so just click here to see what is available this month. Discounts will automatically be added to your basket.
If you'd like to listen to any of the music mentioned here, Bandcamp is the best place to find it. Artists receive a significantly larger share of revenue through Bandcamp than through the major streaming platforms — and on the first Friday of every month Bandcamp waive their own fees entirely, meaning every penny goes directly to the artist. This month that falls on Friday 4th April — worth timing your purchases accordingly.
For the books, your local independent bookshop is always the first port of call. If you need to order online, Bookshop.org supports independent bookshops across the UK and is a genuinely meaningful alternative to the obvious options — you can find them at uk.bookshop.org. Worth noting they currently deliver within the UK only, so overseas subscribers may need to seek out a good independent bookseller closer to home.
Until Next Month
Thank you for sticking with me and swallowing some of the more oblique links. Rest assured I have already started on May's subject and it is packed full of myth, music and poetry.
In the meantime subscribers to Field Note gain access to an exclusive discount code over on my Etsy shop. Each month the discount will change so just click here to see what is available this month. Discounts will automatically be added to your basket.