Like so much that we don’t notice, this one small bird contains a staggering multiplicity of things within it.
The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.
– J.A. Baker, The Peregrine
My first thought is that the tree has sprouted a secret fruit, enticingly within reach, plump with the promise of its ripeness. But I soon dismiss fruit as too ordinary a word to catch it. It seems more like some intimate arboreal essence budded into being, the spirit of the tree’s sap and heartwood given form. It feels as if I’ve stumbled on a fir-soul made manifest, hidden behind the shielding of the foliage. As I look, the fact that it’s something crafted becomes apparent—though it’s easy to see why I mistook it for an integral part of the tree. The perfection of the construction and the natural materials used give it the semblance of something living. The white and silver dusting is the gossamer of cobwebs, a network of binding filaments woven through the structure, holding its substance together and securing it to the branch from which it’s hanging. Even at a glance, the softness of the gathered moss is evident. It’s as if the eyes can feel the quality it would have if touched. The blended greens and yellows announce their tactile quality as surely as if it was another color. But there’s an element of tensile strength as well. Examined closely, I can see wiry fragments of lichen embedded in the moss like strands of chainmail.
The cupped shape, hidden from below, becomes more evident as I pull myself level with it. The fact dawns on me that this is a cushioned capsule designed to hold treasure, rather than being that treasure itself. If any doubt remained that I’d found a gem of a bird’s nest, it’s dispelled by the appearance of its builder. On a branch just above me, no more than an arm’s length away, a tiny bird appears. It angrily scolds my intrusion into its domain. I recognize it immediately as a goldcrest. I’ve never been so close to one before. I can see its throat vibrating as the shrill notes sound, denting the green plumage in time to their insistent rhythm. Judging by the fiery orange centre of the crest, this one is a male. Females’ crests are pure yellow. I wonder if his mate is sitting out of sight, deep within the snugness of the mossy orb. Unlike many birds, the female goldcrest isn’t easily frightened from the nest; she sits tight in the face of all but the most extreme disturbance.
I’m amazed at the bird’s tininess, its perfection, and its fearless determination to object to the giant animal that has lumbered its way threateningly close to the sanctuary of the nest. I feel a keen sense of trespass. Savouring a last look at bird and nest, I descend as quickly and quietly as I can—and am promptly caught. My hide-and-seek playing companions laugh delightedly at my ineptitude. I mention the nest to no one and don’t go back to it. But in the days that follow I keep watch on the tree from our side of the road. In due course I’m rewarded when I see a peppering of tiny birds darting in and out of the topmost branches like sprays of catapulted seeds.
The fact that I remember it so clearly is testimony to the power of this cameo scene from childhood. For all its mossy softness, the nest hit me like a meteorite and left my remembrance cratered with its impact. At the time, in the instant of the moment’s unfolding, I was struck by the beauty of bird and nest. But I’d no idea then that it would leave such a lasting mark. Nor, as an entranced nine-year-old, did I realize how much I didn’t see. Of course I knew what it was, I was able to name it. In those days, children enjoyed a degree of freedom few are allowed today. I and my little band of friends routinely played in the fields and woods around where we lived, spending hours beyond the reach of adult supervision. Did we run wild? Perhaps. But we came to no harm and, through the slow osmosis of being there and noticing what was around us, learned to identify the flora and fauna that shared—constituted—our little territories. By the time I climbed to the goldcrest’s nest I was well versed in the basics of nature’s local curriculum, simply through daily immersion in it. This meant that when I saw the goldcrest I knew what it was, in a way I fear many kids today would not. It’s sad so many of them grow up in surroundings that have been despoiled, impoverished. As a result, the lessons nature holds are bleak. Increasingly, it’s the curriculum of loss that dominates.For all its mossy softness, the nest hit me like a meteorite and left my remembrance cratered with its impact.
Being able to identify a bird is, at one level, laudable. Having the vocabulary to name things helps us to see what’s there. But often the names we use have an air of dismissal as well as identification. You affix them like a label and that’s that, the matter’s closed and our attention moves on to something else. It has taken me longer than it should have to realize what it was my childhood self saw in our neighbor’s tree. “Goldcrest” alone grasps only the smallest fraction of it. It’s excusable at nine to mistake the fictions of conventional description for the way things really are. To a child, our ordinary diction seems unproblematic; it offers a way to parse and catalog whatever falls upon the senses. But as we age we should become more wary about assuming the adequacy of language, learn to see behind the simplifications it purveys. Too often, the world around us is obscured by how we talk about it. Nature is ill-served by the categories with which we dice and confine it; it’s left depleted, cheapened, by our words.
The goldcrest is Europe’s smallest bird. To emphasize this, descriptions of it almost always include mention of its weight, together with a comparison to help us grasp how slight it is. Coins are often used for this. We’re told the goldcrest’s weight is equivalent to a five-, ten-, or twenty-pence piece, depending on what point in their typical weight range—4.5 to 7 grams—is being selected. Though I guess our familiarity with coins makes them a reasonable enough thing to reach for, beyond the raw equivalence of weight I think they bring the wrong connotations into the comparison. A coin is hard, metallic, cold, and dense—none of which are goldcrest qualities. Nor does the clink of quotidian commerce sound any note that’s attuned to them. Perhaps if a coin was made of gold it would be on the right wavelength, echoing the sunburst burnish of the bird’s name-giving crest, and giving a sense of something small that has high value, buying into the jewelled perfection the bird possesses. Ordinary coinage, minted in base metal, simply seems mismatched.
When it comes to conveying the breathtaking littleness of a goldcrest’s weight, beyond the hard-to-grasp abstract of a number, I like Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald’s suggestion. This is made in a Ladybird nature book, part of a children’s series that supplemented our in-the-field learning. He says that the goldcrest “weighs only the same as an envelope and half a sheet of notepaper.” That comparison, first read years ago, helped to shape the way I pictured goldcrests. I suspect it still exerts an influence on how I see them now.
An envelope suggests the form a bird presents to the eye is just a shell, an outer casing, something that contains a cargo, a receptacle for carrying whatever’s sealed inside it. It made me wonder what was written on the flesh beneath the feathers, what blueprint was packed into blood and nerves and cells, what secrets might be found if this living reliquary could be opened, its contents carefully unwrapped.
I realize now how questionable it is to think of birds like this, as if they consist of an outer husk around some inner essence, that the body merely envelops and transports what matters—rather than itself being part of the essential package. A goldcrest is an integral whole, a single thing. How could it be separated into carrier and what’s transported? It bears the cargo of itself, part of the bloodline of the species.
However flawed this envelope-inspired way of thinking about goldcrests may be, it does have one thing to recommend it. It nudges attention away from the imperatives of sight to which, as strongly visual creatures, we’re so susceptible. Usually, our understanding of things is dictated by the eyes. This privileges the present, makes us focus on what falls upon our retinas in the immediacy of lived moments. I relished the visual delight of bird and nest, and it’s a pleasure that still attends my sightings of goldcrests. But Vesey-Fitzgerald’s envelope and half sheet of notepaper have been helpful as a counterweight, a corrective that makes me think beyond appearances. I wonder about the letters of this species, where their tiny individual missives originated, where they’re headed, what’s imprinted on the manifests they constitute, what saga is being told by the totality of correspondence conducted by this little life-thread.
Photo by Medgyesi Jenő, courtesy Pixabay.
It’s easy to let the tininess of a goldcrest lead to dismissive assumptions. Surely a lifeform of so few grams is negligible, unworthy of attention. Granted, it’s far removed from the scale of, say, an eagle, elephant, or tiger, but is that any reason to suppose it’s of lesser interest or value? In our assessments of the creatures around us, is there a correlation between size and worth? Often it seems we must imagine so—what else explains our attitude of, as Joy Williams puts it, “Save the whales but screw the shrimp?” One of the reasons goldcrests appeal to me so much is that they reset my attention to a scale that makes me focus on what’s often overlooked.
And before we succumb to the temptation of equating the goldcrest’s slightness of physical form with fragility, we would do well to note that they can migrate over impressive distances. Every autumn, northern populations cross the North Sea, seeking warmer climes as winter approaches. As ringing records show, goldcrests have reached Britain from Norway, Sweden, Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania. I’ve crossed the North Sea from Bergen to Newcastle at this time of year. It’s astonishing to think that these tiny feathered coracles can safely navigate their way across the same inhospitable route plied by ferries many thousand times their size. The wind and waves are often fearsome.
Before we were able to track their journeys, it was thought to be impossible that such small birds could make a North Sea crossing unaided. So began the belief that they hitched a ride on larger species that appear on our coasts at the same time of year. This is the reason goldcrests used to be known as “woodcock pilots.” People imagined that they boarded the larger bodies of woodcock and steered these weightier vessels across an expanse they could not by themselves traverse. The truth is more incredible than the folktale that arose to explain it. Light as an envelope holding half a sheet of notepaper, goldcrests are yet capable of this daunting sea crossing.
Sometimes on stormy autumn nights, when the noise of the wind wakens me, I lie in bed and think of goldcrests. Their migratory journeys are mostly made in the dark. One study from the Czech Republic, monitoring their autumn migration in the Krkonoše Mountains, reported that of a total of 20,647 birds recorded during the period of observation, 1,444 were seen during daytime, 19,203 at night. Similar figures have been found elsewhere. The goldcrest’s favoring of nightime migration is partly because there’s less chance of attack. The sparrowhawk, their main predator, is a daylight hunter. Seagulls are likewise less of a threat at night. But the most important factor is meteorological. As Frank Gill points out, the more stable conditions after dark include “weaker horizontal winds and less turbulent vertical motion.” Also, the cooler and more humid night air “favors heat loss and water retention.” In short, migration happens at night because that’s when weather conditions are likely to be optimal for long periods of flight. I imagine goldcrests above the trees, above the waves, above the fields, above thousands of sleeping, oblivious people, tiny feathered morsels of life forging their paths through the gigantic expanse of the dark. It is an extraordinary feat of endurance.
The goldcrest’s robustness is also evidenced in its prolific breeding record. Every spring, they produce two clutches—the second often laid (in a second nest) before the first brood has flown. Each clutch contains seven to 12 eggs, tiny pale orbs flecked with a darker peppering of red-brown marks. A successful pair can produce 20 or more offspring in a season.
Though severe winters may cause fatalities, they are well insulated against the cold and, as temperatures fall, the birds will often roost communally. Two roosting side by side reduce heat loss by a quarter; three by a third. A huddle of several goldcrests makes for even greater insulation, clusters of bodies pressed close together to create little communes of shared, life-sustaining warmth. It’s estimated that the breeding population in Europe is somewhere in the region of 20 to 37 million pairs. Worldwide, the species is thought to number between 98 million and 165 million individuals. The spread of countries in which they flourish is further proof of their vigor. These are birds with an ability to survive across a wide range of territories. Beyond the British Isles, where the goldcrest is a well-established and widely distributed resident, they can be found in over 60 countries, including Afghanistan, China, the Faroe Islands, Japan, Lebanon, Nepal, Switzerland, and Tunisia. Even though the goldcrest’s population trend now seems to be decreasing, the IUCN Red List categorizes them as a species of “least concern.” That title may sound demeaning, but it’s one I fervently hope they retain. Their spread and number should offer some protection against the new lethality of the Anthropocene, but it should not make us complacent. “Least concern” does not mean “no concern”, as the just-published fifth report of the Birds of Conservation Concern series makes clear. It notes that we’re witnessing “a continuing decline in the status of UK bird populations.” The goldcrest may not be one of those immediately imperilled, but—like every species—it must contend with the environmental devastation we inflict.
If my nine-year-old self had ignored the goldcrest’s scolding and intruded further, looked into—even reached into—that exquisite nest, what would he have found? Would some or all of the eggs have been laid? Would the female have been sitting? Might there have been tiny hatchlings? I remember no sound except the male’s insistent alarm. But I’m not sure if even a child’s sharp hearing would catch the cheeping of goldcrest chicks; it might be set at a pitch beyond what we can register. Certainly the adult goldcrest’s song—like the squeaking of a bat—is in that first sad tranche of audio loss that befalls us as we age. In any case, even if there had been calls coming from the nest, they would have been muted by its mossy insulation and whatever sounds provided the white noise on that day, surrounding my goldcrest encounter with their unnoticed background buzz—my breathing, loud with the exertion of tree climbing, the soft shushing of the breeze as it rippled through the branches, an occasional vehicle going past on the road, the voices of my friends, a dog barking in the distance.I’m not sure if even a child’s sharp hearing would catch the cheeping of goldcrest chicks; it might be set at a pitch beyond what we can register.
Had I seen any eggs they’d no doubt have charmed me with their perfection. I fear I might have taken one. I’m reminded of the story the great French entomologist J.H. Fabre tells about removing a blue egg from a stonechat’s nest when he was a boy, and the mingled sense of pleasure and guilt that it engendered. Later in life, this “inimitable observer,” as Darwin called him, reflected that the bird’s egg is “one of the simplest and loveliest forms of life,” its appeal lying “in the beauty of the circle and the ellipse.” More recently, Tim Birkhead has suggested that eggs draw us because their “wonderful curves” possess a sensual allure. Whether the appeal of eggs is geometric or erotic, I know I was susceptible to it. I’m glad that on this occasion my sense of trespass meant I retreated before the temptation of plundering the nest’s precious cargo presented itself.
By nine I would have had a basic grasp of the rudiments of incubation. As well as learning from our natural curriculum, an aunt kept hens and we often helped her feed them and collect the eggs. But what I had no inkling of as I marvelled at the goldcrest’s nest, was how all the eggs in it are kept at an even temperature. Her size means that the incubating female—and females are the sole incubators in this species—can only have two or three eggs in direct contact with her body’s warmth at any one time. What of the remaining half dozen or more? Nest design helps preserve warmth. In addition to the mossy exterior, the inside is lined with animal hairs and perhaps as many as 2,000 downy feathers. A middle layer mirrors the exterior, made with moss and lichens (but no spiders’ webs). Many nests are also fitted with what Svein Haftorn calls a “feather door.” Instead of the open-topped cup design of most birds’ nests, across the top of the goldcrest’s, feathers are often affixed, their tips all pointing to the centre. This helps to trap warm air in the nest’s interior. But neither the triple layers nor the feather door would be enough to ensure that each egg is kept uniformly warmed.
Bear in mind that the female goldcrest is incubating an egg mass that’s greater than her body weight. It’s clear from Haftorn’s careful observations that the bird’s sensitivity to changes in outside temperature, and her response in terms of length of sitting time, operates with great finesse. The correlation between behavior and weather conditions is perfectly aligned. This, plus the insulated nest, constitute essential factors in the temperature control that’s needed to fire the eggs to life. But as impressively designed for the task as they are, these features still don’t fully explain how the goldcrest manages to warm all the eggs to exactly the right degree for hatching, and to maintain the whole clutch at that temperature for the requisite period (16 to 19 days).
The final piece in the puzzle of the bird’s mastery of heat management was discovered by Ellen Thaler in her work with captive goldcrests. She noticed that the legs and feet of females leaving the nest to feed after a period of incubation were bright red rather than their usual brown. This inflamed colour soon faded when the female was away from the nest, only to blaze back again after another bout of sitting on the eggs. This led to the discovery that female goldcrests increase blood flow to their legs and feet during incubation—using them like thermal rods plunged into the depth of eggs beneath them. Thaler measured a significant difference in leg temperature when the bird was incubating, compared to when it was off the nest. Thaler also established—by eavesdropping via tiny microphones placed in the nest—that the bird shifts the egg-load with the warming prongs of her feet and legs, paddling through them regularly to keep turning and shifting their positions so that all are able to bask equally in the warmth they need (a constant 39°C) in order to develop and hatch the embryos within them.Female goldcrests increase blood flow to their legs and feet during incubation—using them like thermal rods plunged into the depth of eggs beneath them.
Think of what’s beneath the female goldcrest as she sits incubating in the nest. Within each egg, an independent exterior womb, a life is fusing together as microscopic developmental processes lock into place in precise balletic sequence. Tidal changes are happening unseen as cells differentiate and grow, sculpting raw organic matter into goldcrest form. The biochemistry of maturation always makes me think of fireworks, controlled detonations cascading and sparkling within the crucible of each egg. Beneath the hard cuticle of the shell, the catalyst of the bird’s body heat fires the yolk into new individual being. The first cardiac contractions can be detected only 35 hours after incubation begins. In the period between the first heart-designated cells following their structural pathways, folding and torquing into the necessary chambered shape, to the strong pumping beats of a hatchling’s heart, this vital organ will have increased its size by over a thousand times. A controlled life-storm rages within the calm confinement of each egg; the clutch is like a nebula of birthing stars, part of the galaxy of goldcrest.
My nine-year-old tree-climbing self was delighted to find the goldcrest’s nest and see an adult bird at such close quarters. It’s an experience I’ve come to cherish, and the charge it carried was strong enough to burn a facsimile of the moment into the fabric of recall. But the more I’ve discovered about these birds, the more I realize how little I understood what I was seeing that day—or on the numerous occasions since then when goldcrests have crossed my path. It’s only recently, as I’ve started to watch them more deliberately, think about them more seriously, and find out more about the detail of their lives, that I’ve begun to grasp something of what they really are.
Of the world’s roughly 10,000 species of bird, over half—including the goldcrest—belong to the order Passeriformes (a derivation from the Latin, meaning “sparrow shaped”). Any bird belonging to this order is called a passerine. These are the so-called perching birds, distinguished by the arrangement of their toes—three pointing forward, one pointing back, ideal for closing around the twigs and branches on which they perch. The goldcrest that scolded me at its nest had its toes curled around a fir twig, gripping in the manner this ancient design allows. The fossil record suggests that the first passerines appeared around 50 million to 60 million years ago, though recent molecular studies would push such estimates back considerably further. Whenever their exact point of genesis occurred, it’s clear the passerines were born from earlier avian forms that evolved from the therapod dinosaurs some 150 million to 165 million years ago. These, in their turn, emerged from still earlier forms—the stepping stones of creatures in the great flow of nature, eventually tracing back over three billion years to the moment of life’s beginning.
Goldcrests separated from firecrests—their most closely allied species—around 48 million years ago. Since then, the emergence of various subspecies in Asia, the Canary Islands, and the Azores, over the last two million to four million years or so, shows how divergence and geographical isolation continue to act on the bloodline, moulding it into new shapes. These tiny birds contain so much more than a glimpse of one suggests. Every goldcrest I’ve ever seen represents the present manifestation of an ancient lineage. It points back not just to the dinosaurs—a favorite punctuation mark because they’re easy to picture—but to whatever life preceded them. It’s almost as if these birds are embers from a fire kindled aeons ago. It still burns brightly in them, the flame of Regulus regulus passed life-to-life-to-life as if through a chain of little beacons.
The word “goldcrest” tends to bring to mind pictures showing male, female, and juvenile birds in the way they’re typically presented in field guides: clearly delineated illustrations showing the slimmed down wren-shape, each one clad in its livery of greens, the adults marked with the tell-tale yellow slash of crest so bright it draws the eye. They’re presented on the page in poses that flagrantly exhibit their visible characteristics. This is what we label “goldcrest” and what, in ordinary discourse, the name is taken to refer to. It might also suggest nest design and color of the eggs, and the characteristic quick movements, how the bird darts and flits and hovers. Essentially, though, “goldcrest” means what appears before the eye. But the more I’ve watched them, found out about them, thought about them, the more my imagination reads their name as something that can’t easily be pictured.The name hints at something fluid, a glittering filament that spans a massive temporal distance, ancient yet still dynamic; a mercurial rivulet of life.
If we’re to grasp what a goldcrest is, we need to pack a great deal more into its name, ensure the range of connotation that it carries is extended so that it echoes with more than a few of the obvious visible features it possesses. Sometimes now I think of goldcrests not as anything that admits of straightforward description and portrayal in a drawing or a photograph of single birds. Instead, the name hints at something fluid, a glittering filament that spans a massive temporal distance, ancient yet still dynamic; a mercurial rivulet of life. Held in its waters are the repeating patterns of nest-building, egg-laying, incubation, embryo development, hatching, feeding, growing, migration, mating, dying. These iterations and their variations occur over aeons, obedient to the nanoprocesses and structures that are laid down in the cells.
Part of what a goldcrest is, of course, is the bird you see. But it’s so much more than that. It’s also the latency of liquid pre-existence, what’s held in egg and sperm, and the sculpting of their union via the delta of tissue-pathways taken as the embryos develop. “Goldcrest” means the flesh and blood that form every chick there’s ever been, the marshalled arrays of cells whose regiments arranged just so create feathers, color, bone, muscle, flight. “Goldcrest” is the intricate interlocking of history and histology, astrophysics and anatomy, the forces that have created the semaphore of crest and plumage. “Goldcrest” is each fresh-hatched chick within each nest, the successful first flights, the flights that end in sparrowhawk talons. “Goldcrest” is the adults on migration, flying in the dark, high above the waves, the scales on their tiny held-tight-to-body legs a signature of their reptilian heritage. “Goldcrest” should take in the eggs so skilfully warmed in nests built in ancient forests millennia before there were humans to fell them, and those warmed in unnoticed nests in today’s neglected urban margins. “Goldcrest” should resonate with every bird frozen in a hard winter, the tiny bodies falling to the ground as gently as leaves—whether in the Stone Age or next year—scarcely denting the snow, their deaths making only an infinitesimal impression on the fabric of the moment. They seem at once forged of something durable as steel, yet with an evanescence and fragility that leaves them vulnerable.
I sometimes wonder what befell the goldcrest that scolded me, and the brood of chicks that hatched from the nest in our neighbour’s tree. Of course they’re all long dead. Their lifespan is brief, only between eight and 24 months. But perhaps some of their direct-line descendants are flourishing somewhere in the world right now, their hearts beating out their rhythms at this exact moment. Think of that. As your eyes fall upon this sentence, imagine goldcrest blood being pumped around the maze-ways of veins and arteries, flooding through the delicate small-bored tubing of the capillary networks that percolate every tiny nook and tuck of flesh, carrying life-sustaining tides in regular warm surges. Or maybe this particular line has been snuffed out. Hard winters, sparrowhawks, cats, magpies, human encroachment on habitat—there are perils aplenty for them to contend with.
Thinking about what happened to this small cluster of lives, the possible fates that they encountered, makes me picture generations of the birds coming and going, blinking into life and out of it again as the seasons turn, the years and centuries pass, each individual following whatever contours of happenstance are forged by circumstance—the whole slew of interior and exterior factors that determine their paths through time and space (their bodily form, the weather, the availability of food and nest sites, the incidence of parasites, disease, and predators). I find it terrible to realize that—as with countless other species—the greatest threat to them is us.
How many generations of goldcrests have there been since the tiny heartbeats of this species first sounded in the world, millions of years ago? How many more generations will unfold in the years ahead, until the last ever goldcrest breath is taken, the last ever heartbeat quivers in the breast? I imagine a network of golden filaments cast through time and threaded through an acreage that takes in many countries in the world—the veining of existence with the presence of this species. If we learned to see them as they really are, might that not engender a sense of wondering protectiveness?
If I had to give account of how my life’s been spent, provide a tally of the time apportioned to all the things that have claimed it, my encounters with goldcrests would amount to precious little. But each occasion has left its mark, meant something special, possesses a value that’s not reliant on frequency or duration. I feel fortunate that I’ve been touched by them, that I’m not one of the millions for whom, effectively, they don’t exist. It’s sad there are so many people who have never seen one, wouldn’t care much if they did, and would have no idea what one was beyond some little bird they couldn’t put a name to. Not to know they’re there, living in the world alongside us, not to grasp something about these beautiful cotenants of our time and space, seems sad, a wasted opportunity to come face to face with treasure, a missing of something that can inform and delight, if only we would let it. They are something incredible that invites amazement. Like so much that we don’t notice, this one small bird contains a staggering multiplicity of things within it.
I’m lucky to live somewhere goldcrests still thrive. There’s a healthy resident population that’s augmented every autumn by an influx of migrants. If, as I often do, I walk from my house to an area of woodland not far away and just attend closely for an hour or two to the currents of life that are always flowing there, the chances are I’ll see one. It gladdens me when I do; I’m disappointed when I don’t. It’s hard to convey without sounding disproportionate how much of a difference to my day a sighting of this tiny bird can make.These two birds flew into my window as I was midway through writing this essay. What are the chances of that happening?
But my best encounters have all been accidents. The nest found when I was nine. The goldcrest I watched on a bush in my garden two years ago, feeding intently on something so small I could only infer its presence from the bird’s behavior. I was able to observe it for half an hour, at close quarters, as it feasted on this invisible bonanza. And once, walking to the bus-stop on my morning commute, I saw one hovering at a coniferous hedge. It let me get near enough to hear the whir of its wings. Judging by the shreds of moss in its beak, it was gathering material for a nest and, I think, starting to lay down its foundations in the secluded innards of the hedge. I watched it for so long that I missed my bus, was late for work.
My most recent accidental encounter was so oddly serendipitous it felt almost that it must be meant. It was, of course, just chance. I heard a soft noise against the window. Investigating, I found that two goldcrests—both females—must have hit the glass. They’d come down, stunned, on the flat roof of an extension. One, I gave up for dead. It was lying prone, a wing stretched out. It seemed crumpled, broken, and its breathing had been knocked out of balance, leaving it panting through a half-open beak. The other—only inches from its stricken companion—was sitting still and seemed intact, though dazed. Looking down from the window to where they were, their gold crests were particularly striking set off against the dark asphalt of the roof. The fact that it was a dull October morning also made the yellow flashes on the top of each head seem brighter than they would have looked in sunshine.
My guess is that they were migrants. I don’t live far from the Isle of May where, in October 1982, 15,000 goldcrests were recorded, as European birds made first landfall in Scotland. That figure gives some indication of the waves of birds that reach our shores every autumn, albeit not always in such concentrated profusion. As they move further inland, seeking the wooded habitats they favor, their route takes them past my house. The dazed bird stayed for maybe 20 minutes, motionless except for rapid head movements as it looked around. Then it flew into a nearby rowan tree. Several bullfinches, which happened to be feeding on the berries, looked gigantic by comparison. The goldcrest’s flight from roof to tree was direct, unhesitant—it seemed to have regained complete air-worthiness.
To my surprise, the bird I’d given up on, thinking it was fatally injured, righted itself from its splayed-out position. It then sat quietly for a while, scarcely moving. Gradually, it grew more animated. Head turning became frequent, as if it was checking coordinates, orienting its sense of direction. Now and then the wings shivered with tremors of exploratory movement. Fifteen minutes after its companion had departed, it too flew off. I’d stayed close, partly to make the most of this opportunity to observe them, partly to stand guard in case a magpie or a seagull might have spotted them. But I’d resisted the temptation of trying to give them food to revive them, reckoning that any such approach would have risked causing fresh trauma to birds already perilously shocked. In any case, feeding a goldcrest would be far from easy.
These two birds flew into my window as I was midway through writing this essay. What are the chances of that happening—and, happening, that I should hear the noise and notice them? Their appearance was a reminder of the threads of life that happen alongside ours, mostly unnoticed, part of the astonishing tapestry of nature that’s daily woven around us.
It would be foolish to suppose that the sentences we write perfectly trace out the contours of what’s there, match our subjects point for point. Language doesn’t work that way, however much we wish it did. No matter how carefully we craft them, our words can only give simplified pictures. The descriptions they let us weave help us navigate a way through life, but they leave out so much it might be better to see them as attenuations rather than accurate accounts. I’ve tried to convey a sense of what a goldcrest is, beyond the superficial label of its name. But the most I can give are glimpses of its nature. What it really is, shrugs off words, dodges efforts to contain it. I hope the glimpses I’ve recorded here, partial though they are, will at least have some incendiary impact. Too much of our language acts as a kind of fire-blanket, smothering the wonder of what blazes beneath it, blotting out nature’s numen with our dull nomenclature. The more I think about it, the more I recognize how incredible a phenomenon a goldcrest is, and how impoverished are our usual ways of apprehending it. Compared to what it actually represents, what we say about it, our casual “there’s a goldcrest” when we see one, does so little justice to it that it seems more travesty than truth.Too much of our language acts as a kind of fire-blanket, smothering the wonder of what blazes beneath it, blotting out nature’s numen with our dull nomenclature.
I marvel at what each bird carries, what each one is. Specks of a bloodline distilled and moulded over millions of years into this precise shape. Each one is saturated with invisible coding that bears the skill to gather moss and cobwebs and make a nest, each one is equipped with a sense of timing so that it knows when to mate, when to migrate, how to create the ideal microclimate for the eggs. Attuned to catch the minute creatures they harvest at exactly the right rate to fire the intricate processes of their metabolism, the isobars of a goldcrest’s inner weather are exquisitely aligned with the niche they’ve colonized so successfully for so long. Their ancientness and tininess prompt me to think beyond them, to picture other life-forms following their own routes through time as goldcrests whir and flit unnoticed beside them. The minute perfection of their form, the miniaturized heart-brain-eyes-lungs-veins, summons more gigantic things: eagles and condors, blue whales and elephants, sequoias and redwoods, the varied expressions of life through its stupendous spectrum of shapes and sizes. Whenever I see a goldcrest now, I remember John Muir’s comment: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” For all their littleness, there’s a weighty sense of embeddedness and interconnection about them. As they use cobwebs to hold and hang their nests, I wonder what the thread of goldcrest secures, wound around the world for so many millennia, and what we’d lose if it was cut or unravelled. Looking at them, looking at us, it’s hard not to think of precious and precarious being far too close.
Details of their evolution, incubation, and migration provide texture for wonder to get a grip on, lay down a bedrock of fact to ensure its traction comes from the grit of what’s there. Far from being built on hazy imaginings, my sense of amazement at these birds is firmly grounded on what they are. I’m left reeling by the fact of them, by the timeline of which each bird is an expression. Seeing one, it’s hard to credit that you’re encountering a spark of life whose incandescence has glowed across so many millions of years. The gold on their crests, the exquisite balance of the intricacies behind it, have been present in the world across expanses of time that make their North Sea crossings look negligible, and in whose light our tenancy of Earth seems tenuously brief and recent.
I still remember the fresh perspective I was given by my childhood climbing of our neighbor’s fir tree. Looking across the road at my own house and garden from my elevated position meant that they appeared in a new light. Re-seeing the world around us, recalibrating the value we give it, has become an urgent necessity. We can no longer afford to keep seeing in the same familiar—lazy—way. Is it possible to use language differently, to forge our descriptions according to new reference points, so that our words create perspectives that are as eye-opening as the view from the fir tree was for nine-year-old me? If we could make a modest beginning, start with the magnificent mite of life that is a goldcrest, learn on the manageable scale it offers how to see the nature of nature, perhaps we could then widen that vision, bring other creatures within its gaze. Wherever that might take us, it would surely be preferable to the brink of catastrophe, which is where the common way we see and talk about the natural world has left us.
Chris Arthur is an Irish writer currently based in Scotland. He’s author of eight essay collections, most recently Hidden Cargoes, which was listed by the California Review of Books in its “Ten Best Books of 2022.” For details of his work see www.chrisarthur.org.
Read other essays by Chris Arthur appearing in Terrain.org: “Blood Owls” and “Images of Hallow Hill.”
Header photo of goldcrest by Alex Cooper Photography, courtesy Shutterstock.
