PATRICK GALBRAITH
Patrick Galbraith is a journalist and writer whose first book In Search of One Last Song was published by William Collins in April 2022. A travelogue at once romantic, gonzo, and at turns very funny, the book sees Patrick travel all over the UK, from Orkney and the Western Isles to Yorkshire’s grouse moors and the Norfolk Broads, in the hope of encountering ten of our most endangered birds, including the nightingale, corncrake, capercaillie, black grouse and grey partridge. Just as important as the birds are the people working tirelessly to try and save them. Blending conservation, folklore, history and art, and featuring a rich array of musicians, poets and writers whose work is inspired by Patrick’s chosen birds, In Search of One Last Song is an urgent and vivid account of rural Britain and the cultural landscape we risk losing if we do not protect our wildlife.
Interview by Jan-Peter WestadPortrait by Jack Taylor
Jan-Peter Westad The book is a series of encounters with people who are absolutely dedicated to the different endangered birds. What first drew you to this subject and these birds?
Patrick Galbraith It began with a sense that things had changed where I grew up in Dumfries, just over the border in Scotland from Carlisle. A neighbour used to tell me how when she was a little girl the peewits and curlew would come crying across the fields in spring and there were so many black grouse that nobody would ever have believed you if you’d said that one day they’d pretty much be all gone. It was sitting in those quiet fields that got me thinking about how things that are lost are quickly forgotten. If you understand the loss of those birds, you start to understand the way the landscape has changed, as well as the people who live and work there and the whole cultural landscape. The bird, in a sense, is the top of the pyramid of a whole ecosystem. They call them indicator species and when you visit these places where the birds have started to disappear, you find ghosts, wispy hedges and empty farms. In the book I’m trying to engage with that change and loss.
JPW How did you settle on the ten birds? Are there others that should be considered endangered that are not included?
PG I started with birds that are deeply embedded in the British cultural landscape, such as the nightingale. It seems shocking given its importance to British literature and art and even our identity that the nightingale is at risk of being lost. But I soon discovered that there were many other birds, like the lapwing, which don’t get the same attention, but which are facing many of the same issues, such as environmental degradation, leading to smaller and smaller populations. I was also very interested from the start in the way people understand place, so I identified birds that are almost totems of a particular place and groups of people. Although this idea of place did also raise an interesting question of perspective. I initially objected to the publisher subtitling the book “Britain’s disappearing birds” because the corncrake, for example, spends a third of its time in Britain, a third time in the air and a third of its time in Africa. A Bulgarian girl I knew once who told me that the turtle dove in Bulgaria has promiscuous connotations; I can’t guarantee this is true, but it’s certainly the complete opposite to how we understand them as birds that represent faithfulness.
JPW A lot of the people you speak to are poets and artists interrogating these cultural contexts. I’m thinking of Tom Pickard, the British Poetry Revival movement agitator, or Katrina Porteous, the nature poet, or Orkney-based sculptor John Cumming. Why do you think birds are such enduring sources of artistic inspiration?
PG I think it was Katrina who said to me that birds are deeply embedded metaphors. They matter to people because they allow people to understand the world. When I was holding a tiny nightingale in Suffolk I was holding a bird that has flown halfway across the world at such a height that nobody would be able to see it from the ground. They give you a sense of your own rootedness and your own stasis. In the book, James Walsh, an activist and rave organiser from Manchester, tells me how when his father was working on the docks it was a hub that people from all over the world would pass through. It was this hugely cosmopolitan place, but now it’s practically abandoned and the migrating birds are the only things that connect it to the wider world. They represent both a local sense of place, but also possibility and freedom.
JPW As well as a connection through time. Katrina Porteus tells you in the book that: “We get very excited about ancient ruins, but in birds we can hear the same sounds as people were hearing 10,000 years ago. Those corncrakes I heard as a child. That’s a sound that Bronze Age people would have known. I find that really reassuring.”
PG They give us a unique sense of continuity and change and that’s why they are such brilliant artistic muses. At the same time, there were fishermen whose way of understanding time was dependent on birds returning to the coast. When the swallows returned and the corncrakes called again in the night, they knew that spring was coming and it was time to paint their boats. When those birds are no longer there, a way of understanding the world disappears.
JPW The book is not all poetic inspiration; it’s refreshingly honest at points. It doesn’t force deeper meaning or sublime or transcendent experiences, which are common tropes in some nature writing. I enjoyed the almost comical moments where you describe feeling that you should be responding in a certain way, but the emotions just weren’t there. For example, when you see that lapwing in Manchester.
PG It’s true. Despite being with James who has dedicated much of his life to saving lapwings and is still so enthusiastic about those birds, I didn’t find seeing that lapwing on the edge of a concrete platform on a canal by a holly bush to be a transcendent moment. Seeing lapwings flocked up in autumn, though, did feel like a more thrilling moment. Nature writing can reach for the sublime in an often-cloying way, but at the same time, when you see these birds in the landscape in which they are meant to exist, it has more of an impact. I’m glad you found those moments comical; I think humour is often lacking in nature writing. If you read Robert McFarlane’s Underland, for example, that’s 500 pages or whatever and nobody’s laughed once. Humour can help to bring in the outsider.
JPW As someone who grew up in the suburbs and lives in London, I would consider myself an outsider in terms of knowledge or experience of rural life and I learned a lot from the book. At the same time, it doesn’t pander to any one kind of reader. There was plenty of terminology or local dialect I didn’t know without looking up, for example. I was reminded of how Tom Pickard describes encountering his first black grouse; he says it triggers something that is hard to pin down, but which “enables you to realise something is going on and you want to be attuned to it”.
PG Definitely. When the book first came back from a proofreader, I said to them, “You’ve given all of the characters elocution lessons.” It didn’t make sense to me for the Orcadian fish merchant to speak like the reed cutter from Norfolk. The only things that connects those two people are the herring that run down the coast. It was essentially homogenising these voices, which is exactly what I set out not to do. There’s a very palpable sense of our culture becoming more homogenised, which is caused by lots of factors and especially urbanisation. The book is trying to resist that. Some readers might not immediately be able to understand everything a character says or thinks or feels, but to me that’s not a failure of the book, it’s saying something more about society.
JPW The book also challenges certain preconceptions people might have about the countryside and the ways it should be managed. It seems counterintuitive, for example, that reducing badger culling puts lapwings at risk as badgers can eat their eggs and young, or that rewilding in some instances could be harmful to other birds.
PG We’ve fucked around with things to such a tremendous extent that we can’t just suddenly go hands off in every instance and expect nature to recover, which is the most basic form of the rewilding narrative, one that gets a lot of attention. In the case of the bittern, which lives among reeds, not cutting the reeds would mean they grow too thick for the birds to inhabit. Traditionally reed was cut to supply thatchers. There are no easy answers. The grey partridge is a good example: the group working hardest to try to hang on to them in Britain are people who gain an enormous amount of pleasure from shooting them for sport. We can’t shy away from that reality. The chapter ends with a man from Michigan shooting the bird we’ve just been learning is endangered. I want the reader to ask themselves, are they OK with that? He was a big guy; I hope he took it home and ate it. Writing the book I was surprised how much the “culture war” is being fought in the countryside. There’s this argument on one hand that we need mass trespass and rewilding as the way forward, which is valid to a degree as it reconnects people with nature, but then on the other side, there is a strong sense of patrician custodianship over land. There are a lot of people who have strong views about how the countryside should be managed, which often aren’t really related to what’s best for the species that live there. It’s more related to the way that they see the world and their cause. I played with a few titles for the book and one of them was “But If You Listen Carefully”, which was said to me four or five times in the book, by various people. It became an echo that reverberated throughout my travels visiting these birds. Rather than present any solution or position, this is a book all about listening; I guess that is the solution. We have got to the stage now where we can’t afford division; we need to be open and hear all sides if these birds are to be saved, and we need people to recognise the enormity, culturally, of what we’re set to lose if we don’t. ◉
From top to bottom: corncrake, hen harrier, capercaillie. All illustrations Ⓒ Robert Vaughan