Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (2011) 226–232

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Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological andBiomedical Sciences

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Militarised natural history: Tales of the avocet’s return to postwar Britain

Sophia DavisMax Planck Institute for the History of Science, Boltzmannstrasse 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 28 November 2010Received in revised form 28 November 2010

Keywords:OrnithologyBird protectionNature conservationAvocetNational identityMilitarism

1369-8486/$ - see front matter � 2010 Elsevier Ltd. Adoi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2010.11.027

E-mail address: sdavis@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de1 This comment was in one of a series of BBC radio2 Adams, J. ‘Menace of the sparrows’, Guardian Count

about immigrants (see Coates, 2005).3 On these town-country tensions see Loweson (198

a b s t r a c t

Absent as a breeding bird from Britain for at least a century, avocets (Recurvirostra avosetta) began nestingon the east coast of Britain, in Suffolk, shortly after the end of the Second World War, having homed in ontwo spots on Britain’s coast that had been flooded for war-related reasons. The avocets’ presence was sur-rounded in secrecy, while a dedicated few kept up a protective watch over them. As the Royal Society forthe Protection of Birds (RSPB) took over responsibility for the flourishing colony, they claimed the episodeas a symbol of success for British protection, later making the bird their logo. Counter to the RSPB’s storyof protecting a British bird, I read the narratives of events in terms of making a bird British. I show how, aspostwar Britain slumped economically and spiritually and tried to rebuild itself, the birds became a vehi-cle for formulating national identity: of Britain as a home to which to return and belong. Exploring thethemes of returning servicemen and closed territories, the paper also examines the episode in terms ofthe naturalisation of the military and the militarisation of nature.

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1. Background

The popularity of birdwatching increased immensely throughthe 1930s, fuelled by the formation of organisations like the BritishTrust for Ornithology (BTO) in 1933, who collated observationsfrom a nationwide network of amateurs. By 1937 the anthropolog-ical project, Mass Observation, was characterising birdwatching asan expression of a ‘‘popular unconscious’’ (Madge & Harrison,1937, p. 41). It had considerable cultural prominence by the early1950s, with a growing publishing record including hundreds ofbooks, a popular magazine and field guides (Macdonald, 2002,pp. 56–57). In concurrence with the rising popularity of watching,the birds also gained cultural significance. Early in the war the im-mensely popular Julian Huxley described birds as ‘‘expressions’’ ofthe nation, portraying the birdwatcher as better able to be close totheir country, through knowledge of its birds,1 and James Fisher de-scribed birds as ‘‘the heritage we are fighting for’’ (Fisher, 1940, p. 3).Birds were also used to articulate a range of social concerns. Forexample, a 1942 article in The Guardian’s country diaries, ‘Menace

ll rights reserved.

talks, which were later published: sry Diary, April 1942. National identi

0), Matless (1998).

of the sparrows’, described sparrows sitting ‘‘chirping’’ and ‘‘squab-bling’’ harmlessly, before warning that when they migrate fromthe towns to the cornfields they constitute a menace to agriculture.2

Conflicting ideas of what constituted Britishness had surfaced duringthe wartime mixing of different groups, and this article enroles thebirds to express the countryman’s concern that townsfolk wereuncivilised.3 Wartime fears about social disorder were also projectedonto birds; certain species’ new habits of pecking through milk bot-tle tops and tearing of strips of wallpaper were frequently, porten-tously remarked upon. The projection of human issues onto birdswas widespread and varied.

Arriving into this context, the avocet captured the public imag-ination, provoking enough excitement to incite hostile sarcasmfrom across the Atlantic. In May 1950, an American newspaperarticle opened: ‘‘Englishmen fascinate me to death’’, continuing:

With the cold war going on, the H-bomb discussion at itsheight . . . what do you think is the hottest topic of discussionin England today? Stalin? No. The Marshall Plan? No,

ee Huxley (1949).ty was mapped onto American sparrows as well, as an expression of anxious concern

S. Davis / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (2011) 226–232 227

again. . . . It is the avocet. What do you suppose the avocet it? Itis a bird. . . . this country is as full of bird watchers as heaven isof angels.4

Following the bird’s arrival in 1947, in 1949 the RSPB bought thetwo nearby sites where they had appeared, Minsmere Level andHavergate Island on the Suffolk coast. After being approved in1955 as a symbol on the RSPB’s new tie, the avocet was eventuallymade the logo for that society in 1970: a symbol of their success inprotection. By 1954 a newspaper article could mention casually: ‘‘Itis perhaps almost unnecessary in these days to explain that Haver-gate Island is the scene of the welcome return, as a British breedingspecies, of the elegant, long-legged, black and white wading bird,the avocet’’.5 The bird’s return appeared as ‘‘Among the chief orni-thological events of the post-war years’’ in William Payn’s book onSuffolk’s birds (Payn, 1962, p. 128), and in 1966 the RSPB’s Secretary,Philip Brown noted it as ‘‘a sensational postwar scoop which hit theheadlines with a vengeance’’ (Brown, 1966, p. 47).

2. A British bird?

I begin my version of the story with the bird itself. From thebeginning, it appeared as ‘‘that dainty thing in porcelain blackand white’’, the newspapers ringing with the ‘‘charming’’ avocet’s‘‘beauty and grace’’.6 This image of the avocet received perhaps itsmore poetic expression in a long account of a guided visit to Haver-gate Island in The Times in 1953. The writer saw ‘‘avocets steppingdelicately over the ooze on their blue stilts, scooping the mud withtheir incredibly slender, up-curved bills, or preening their snow-white plumage so beautifully patterned with black’’. The mostremarkable part of the article, though, is the author’s sudden excla-mation: ‘‘Ballet! There I have it. That pinpoints the beauty and graceof the avocets’’.7 Anthropomorphism has a long tradition of use foranimals, and here aligning the birds with a human activity, or ‘per-sonhood’, precipitates the relieved feeling of comprehension to theauthor,8 but the choice of ballet in particular is revealing. Going towatch the ballet was hardly a working-class activity, and this classimplication was strengthened when the writer closed his article add-ing that he watched ‘‘with a seat in a box, too’’.9 In The Times, with itsupper-class readership, the hide on Havergate becomes a means fora bird-watcher to reaffirm the class in which he is fixed. A similaridea appeared a decade later, when Philip Brown retold the storywith the avocet’s poised slender body, elegant legs and delicateup-turned bill all combining ‘‘to give it the air of an aristocrat’’(Brown, 1962, p. 188, chap. 4). A particular way of seeing the birdsdominated, and was unconsciously linked to class.

This image gains significance when we realise that the choicewas not as obvious as it seemed. Occasionally, a counter-currentof aggression and violence surfaced. Mostly absent from the publicsphere, the birds’ violent streak came largely in Brown’s longerpieces on avocet behaviour. Brown was the RSPB’s Head of Sanctu-aries when the avocets first arrived and was one of the first to see

4 McLemore, H., ‘Avocet Captures England’s Attention’. Newspaper article from Rhode ISandy, file 05.02.40.

5 The Times 10 March, 1954, p. 56 The Times 24 February 1948; The Times 21 March, 1949; Stanford (1950, p. 4), Brown7 The Times 2 June 1953, p. 3.8 Jamie Lorimer (2007) describes ‘aesthetic charisma’ as the aesthetic characteristics of a

proposed in the possession of characteristics of a human face (Jones, 2000) or the hand‘personhood’ or ‘human extensionism’.

9 Exposure to ballet was not strictly limited by class, occupying the central theme ofreferring specifically to going to the ballet. On that film, see McLean (1987) and Kavaler-A

10 The Times 2 June 1953, p. 3.11 For an excellent exploration of the use of animals to define human moral codes, see M12 The Times 24 February 1948; The Times 3 March 1950; The Times 10 January 1950.

them. In a British Birds article (1949) and his book, Avocets inEngland (1950), he described two behaviours that which promptedhim to deny Julian Huxley’s (1925) assertion that avocets are ‘‘asingularly peaceable’’ species: communal fighting and ‘dive-bombing’ of other species. In the former, between four and ninemale and female birds suddenly gather in a tight circle, bow andpipe intensely for a couple of minutes, and then break off into twosto spring and flap at and peck one another with their wings, beforedispersing as rapidly as they came together. The popular peacefulimage was actively policed by such writers as the ballet-preoccu-pied columnist above. After mentioning that ‘‘Now two or threeavocets are dive-bombing the sitting gulls’’, he immediatelysmoothed over the incident: ‘‘it amounts to nothing more thanwing-buffeting, and on the whole the birds seem neighbourlyenough’’. Going nearer to the nests, he found the chicks frozemotionless and the parents ‘‘flew around, yelping musically butanxiously’’, and although Reg Partridge, the warden, told him thiswas a ‘distraction display’, he dismisses that explanation: ‘‘I pre-ferred to think of ballet dancing’’.10 Feigned injury and distractiondisplay are reminders of the more savage side of nature red in toothand claw, but the author frames cries as musical and insists on dress-ing the avocets in tutus.

One way to interpret this covering over of any behaviour relatingto inter-species aggression concerns the contemporary differencebetween sentimental and scientific modes of seeing birds. As HelenMacdonald (2002) shows, opposition between organicist, senti-mental birdwatchers and scientific observers became marked inthe 1930s, and was reflected at an institutional level in the RSPBand BTO, respectively. The tension was still present, although lessmarked, in the 1950s, when some still persisted in sentimentalmodes ways of seeing. I also propose another reading, relating tothe use of non-humans to define the moral human.11 As WendyWebster (1998) has demonstrated, in postwar Britain violence andbarbaric behaviour were associated with black ‘immigrants’, not withthe white English. Aggression was not part of the idea of Britishnessbeing produced at the time, and the avocets articulated this throughbeing branded as a returning British bird. But how British were they?

The avocet arrived in the country after its presence as a breed-ing species had fallen out of living memory. Its status as native wastherefore questionable, but commentators preemptively deflectedany doubt over this. In early reports of the birds’ arrival, newspa-pers told of ‘‘the return of a ‘lost’ British bird’’ and mentioned thatthe avocet had been ‘‘lost for a century as a breeding bird in Eng-land’’, and Brown (1950) reflected on how recently ‘‘this lovely birdhad to be numbered among our ‘lost’ breeding species’’.12 In thisphraseology, the function of the term ‘lost’ is ambiguous. Althoughit appears to be the nation that experienced the loss of a breedingbird, there is also a strong sense in which it is the bird who had lostits way. The nation appears somehow essential to the bird; avocetshad been lacking something and now have regained it. Furtheremphasising that avocets were former habitants of the country,many of the early newspaper articles defined the species by

sland, USA, sent from J. K. Stanford to P. E. Brown, 15 May 1950: at The Lodge, RSPB

(1962, p. 188).

species’ behaviour that trigger strong emotional reponses in humans. Some locate this(Baker, 2003), while Kay Milton (2002) associates it with the broader concept of

Powell and Pressburger’s film, The Red Shoes (1948), but the Havergate journalist islder (1996).

atless, Merchant, & Watkins (2005).

228 S. Davis / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (2011) 226–232

reference to the length of time they were away.13 Brown in particu-lar continued to stress the avocet’s nativeness, describing HavergateIsland for a local hotel’s publicity in 1954 as the summer ‘‘home’’ ofavocets but only a winter ‘‘feeding ground and resting ground’’ forducks and waders.14 In the early 1960s he was still writing ‘‘The avo-cet is a true native of Britain’’ (Brown, 1962, p. 189, chap. 4). This la-boured explicitness indicates that the bird’s Britishness still requiredbolstering. Why, though, was it so important to portray this speciesas native to Britain? The only other option was for the birds to beimmigrants, and over this point we see again the role of national ide-ology in this superficially highly local story.

The avocets came to Britain’s coast from nearby Holland, butthat country is notably absent in the first few decades of versionsof the story. Philip Brown drew attention to the possibility of a con-nection to Holland in 1950, but conceded only: ‘‘Perhaps the sur-prising thing is that throughout this period [of absence fromBritain] the birds continued to flourish in the breeding-coloniesin Holland, only a little over one hundred miles across the NorthSea from East Anglia’’ (Brown, 1950, p. 8). Brown may have meantto locate his sense of shock in the geographical closeness of theother avocets, but it is the fact that they nested in Holland at allthat comes across as surprising. Avocet distribution appears unat-tributable to causal factors, as if England has simply been unlucky.This obfuscation of the avocet’s absence from Britain is not iso-lated. Elsewhere, Brown lists the factors to which the avocet’snineteenth-century disappearance is commonly attributed (habitatdrainage, egg collecting and shooting), before giving a counter-argument for each and suggesting ‘‘there was probably some othermajor factor which adversely affected the species. We shall neverknow’’ (Brown, 1950, p. 7). Making mysterious their disappearancein this way, he preserves the avocet’s status as belonging rightfullyin England. In contrast, the linkage of the two countries’ birds laterbecame commonplace. A 1973 study of rare British breeding birdspointed out that the recolonisation followed a marked increase innumbers in the Netherlands (Sharrock & Ferguson-Lees, 1973, p.15). Herbert Axell suggested more directly that avocets came fromwar-disturbed Holland, adding ‘‘A nice twist of fate if so, and thethought that they might have lent us a few of their avocets to re-establish the British breeding stock has given pleasure to ourkindly Dutch colleagues’’ (Axell & Hosking, 1977, p. 176). This kindof bird-facilitated international relations was not present in late-1940s and 1950s reporting.

Although fears of encroachment on ‘deep England’ had its rootsin the 1920s and 1930s, wartime and postwar immigration pro-voked new anxieties. In general the British public were firmlyagainst Commonwealth migration to Britain for the first threepostwar decades, according to polling data, although it was not un-til 1962 that policy-makers closed down Britain’s borders.15 WhenRex Weldon Finn’s The English Heritage came out in a revised versionin 1948, the reader was told: ‘‘Britain indeed attracts the primitiveimmigrant’’, that ‘‘there are few obstacles to an easy landing onher shores’’ in the south and east, and that ‘‘the immigrant finds itpossible, even easy, to penetrate the hinterland’’ (Weldon Finn,1948, p. 22). Similarly, in Graham Clarke’s Prehistoric England(1940, p. 5), we hear that ‘‘From the moment that geographical con-tinuity with the continent was broken our insularity became a factorof immense significance’’, as Britain became the ‘‘natural victim ofthose who coveted her natural wealth.’’ Instead of threatening for-eign visitors, the avocets were described as returning Britons, andin this act of returning home they were not alone.

13 E.g. The Times 21 March 1949; 16 January 1950.14 P. E. Brown to M. G. Philips, 11 August 1954: at RSPB Sandy.15 On this fear and ‘deep England’, see Wright (1985, 1995). On attitudes to immigration16 On returning servicemen’s representation in films, see Murphy (2000), and in fiction, se

for this.

3. Returning birds, returning servicemen

The figure of the returning serviceman began appearing in med-ical journal articles, feature films and literary works even beforethe war was over. With recurring themes of the problems in psy-chological and social readjustment, these men’s relationship toBritain was also under question.16 The paths of the returning menand birds intersected in ways that illuminate wider issues facingboth of them, with the birds and their environments taking on arecuperative role for the men. In order to explore this, I take a moreliterary approach.

One of the first men to see the avocets at Minsmere Level, J. K.Stanford, wrote a fictional short story based on the events. Origi-nally appearing in the conservative Blackwood’s Magazine as ‘Bled-grave Hall’ 1948, the story was then published in England (1950,1953), and in America as The Awl-birds (1949). After serving inthe First World War, J. K. Stanford spent his interwar years inBurma with the Indian Civil Service, publishing on Burma’s birdlife,and then joined the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in WWII, beforeretiring. In Bledgrave/Awl-birds, ex-sapper Derick Gloyne returnsfrom war to buy his uncle’s old home on the Suffolk coast, wherehe had spent much of his childhood. Stanford had spent much ofhis own childhood in a large country house near Minsmere, andhad seen the avocets when staying at his brother’s house there.The Awl-birds house was practically ruined after the area had beenused by the Army for battle training, but Gloyne slowly repairs it.Discovering avocets nesting in the marshes, he keeps secret theirexistence during a three-week, dawn-to-dusk watch over them,but a chain of coincidences leads a committed egg-collector to hearof them and hunt them down. Gloyne chases him away, and thebook reaches an extraordinary climax of patriotic, vicarious mur-der when Gloyne purposefully holds back from warning the fleeingegg-collector as he runs towards the minefields of Bledgrave’smarshes.

The Bledgrave/Awl-birds story is shot through with militarism.In some passages Gloyne intermingles wartime memories of theminefields he laid in Libya with his present-day view of Bledgrave’smine-ridden marshes; the two blur together. Bomb craters andmines feature prominently in Stanford’s non-ficiton too. His fore-word to Brown’s Avocets in England relates his disbelief at his initialdiscovery of the birds, after wading ‘‘through that shallow waterwhich was still pocked with the mortar-bomb craters of a war-time battle school’’ (Stanford, 1950, p. 3). In Bledgrave it was themines that saved the avocet eggs conclusively when ‘‘From upthe heath came a heavy detonation followed quickly by two more’’,as the egg-collector perished (Stanford, 1949, p. 86). In brief, themarshland in Stanford’s writing functions as a continuation of hisexperience of land in war: both metonym and metaphor of thewar. Gloyne’s continued military status is also apparent. Whenrunning after the egg-collector ‘‘his sapper’s brain was busy withcalculations’’, and as the empty-handed collector ran towards theminefield he ‘‘looked at his watch mechanically’’, waiting (p. 78;85). The militarisation of the land and the man extended further,to the birds: ‘‘There was no place so wild and desolate that birdscould not colonise and beautify it, but they were always at war’’(p. 71). Nature and the military are intertwined in the narrative,as if Stanford’s protagonist is fighting for his country, symbolisedby the avocets.

In a counter-current in the narrative, Bledgrave was simulta-neously Gloyne’s sanctuary from war. It was the marshes that

see Hansen (2000).e Mengham & Reeve (2001). Mass Observation (1944) also produced a book to prepare

S. Davis / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (2011) 226–232 229

‘‘his whole being had yearned for’’ during the war, which ‘‘had dri-ven him blindly to Bledgrave for peace and quiet and now he foundmore peace among the ruins than when it had been a thrivingfarm’’ (p. 23; 40). Living alone in the ruins of battle simulation, itis as if Gloyne is one of the only survivors in a place wrecked bywar. It is his place for repairing from the damage induced bywar, physically and emotionally. Early on, Gloyne’s estate agentthinks to himself that he ‘‘Must be cracked slightly like so manyof these sappers’’, and through the book, his tendency to ‘‘fly offthe handle’’ diminishes, and his hand stops shaking (p. 14; 19).Drawing together the two aspects of Bledgrave—a continued mili-tary-zone and sanctuary from such places—Gloyne’s seclusion atBledgrave parallels that of the birds; he may go as far away fromwar as possible and into the heart of his deep England, but he willremain at war.

The idea of birds healing a returning servicemen’s war-inducedimpairments was not unique to Awl-birds. It recurred in anothersemi-autobiographical story, this time about the little ringed plo-ver’s postwar colonisation of Britain, in Kenneth Allsop’s Adventurelit their star (1949). Allsop was injured in the RAF in 1943, leadingto the amputation of one of his legs, and was strongly influencedby the romantic, emotive nature writing of Henry Williamson.17

At least half of Allsop’s Adventure is devoid of human characters, toldinstead through the eyes and emotional responses of the birds. Thestory resonates with the Awl-birds on many levels. Its protagonist,Richard Locke, is an injured serviceman, slowly recovering fromtuberculosis after years of flying planes for Coastal Command. LikeGloyne, Locke keeps vigil over the birds. The site of the birds’ nestis a de-requisitioned military site, which had been taken over bythe Petroleum Warfare Board in 1941, after which ‘‘the birds werethe only unauthorised beings to see the strange scenes enacted inthe secrecy of the basin, for it was barred to all except the menengaged on the secret experiments with mobile flame-throwers’’(Allsop, 1949, p. 145). Both the birds and landscape are clearlyrecuperative, the crucial features of the latter being its emptinessand ex-military nature. Finally, the birds are again the victim of anattempted raid by an egg-collector. Adventure clearly deals with sim-ilar themes to Awl-birds, but it is their point of difference that inter-ests us here.

As well as focussing more on the birds’ interior emotional life,Adventure dwells on the interior landscape of the human protago-nist. While in the Awl-birds the value of the birds is indicated byGloyne’s actions, Allsop makes it more explicit the birds’ lives givepurpose and meaning to Locke’s own life during his recovery. Atthe story’s peak, as Locke waits in the dark for the egg-collector,

A loneliness stole upon him . . . his mind returned to scenes andfaces of other years. They floated up hauntingly through thenight, and for the first time for months he knew a deep and ach-ing nostalgia for the war, for the knowledge of purpose andimmediacy that had gone. He lost value of time and place . . . Insome way the little ringed plovers reached him, soaring high tomeet him in the stellar space, and he saw them no longer asjerking shapes held briefly in the lenses, but near and real, thebreath of those wings crossed his brow and whose eyes werebright and alive, whose presence was companionship in his sol-itariness (pp. 216–217).

Here Locke imagines himself into a state where he becomes one ofthe birds, and through them finally re-visits buried wartime

17 Williamson also found it difficult to adjust to postwar conditions after the Great War, mhis portrayal of nature throughout his life. See Andreson (2005).

18 On becoming-animal, see also Deleauze & Guattari (1987).19 Humphreys, A., ‘Is the avocet home to stay?’, Daily Mail, 13 February 1948.20 My PhD thesis (Davis, in press) deals with this topic in detail.21 This notion of a ‘cultural tracer’ can be found in Secord (2000, p. 3).

memories. Adventure thus sheds light on a process implicit in theAwl-birds. Gloyne shares with Locke a prophetic dream of the birdsin trouble, and we hear it would ‘‘break his heart if anything cameto spoil their chances’’ (p. 68). Jamie Lorimer (2007, pp. 921–922)describes ‘becoming-animal’ as a moment of ‘epiphany’ in whichthe person is reterritorialised, discovering a new relationship tothe land.18 The birds offer returning servicemen a medium throughwhich to make sense of militarised landscapes. This effect was notlimited to fiction.

The real avocet story was intimately linked to the military. Interms of the main actors, after Lieutenant-Colonel J. K. Stanfordand Brigadier H. N. Stanford first saw the avocets at Minsmere,the watch was led by Captain Stuart Ogilvie, the owner of theMinsmere estate, and Major E. Lynn-Allen of nearby Scott’s Hall.The RSPB negotiated the purchase of Minsmere from Ogilvie. Theperceived importance of the key players being from the officerclass was indicated by R. S. R. Fitter (1962, pp. 9–10) when hedescribed the return of the osprey, avocet and godwit. Fitter ex-tended militarism to everyone involved: ‘‘The preservation ofthese birds has been the joint achievement of a legion of birdwatchers and local residents, but it is the privilege of the com-manding officers to be decorated for the valour of their troops’’.Here the birds stand for the nation-to-be-defended, while ‘birdlovers’ become the army. The second mode of militarism con-cerned the land, since the avocet’s return hinged on the physicaleffects of war, not merely in Holland. They settled first at Mins-mere, a battle training area since 1943 that had been flooded asan anti-invasion measure, and soon after at Havergate Island,where a stray bomb from the practice bombing range at Boytonhad damaged one of the sluices, again causing flooding. Thebirds’ continued presence was also aided by the wartime exclu-sion of civilians from the coast. That military connectionsstrengthened the appeal of the avocet story is wonderfully clearin one of its first newspaper appearances:

In a suite of old-fashioned offices . . . a group of men are anx-iously waiting to hear of an air invasion of Britain. The news willcome to them from watchers along the East Anglian coast, whoare keeping as alert a look-out as they did in 1940 for theGermans. But this time, instead of looking for aircraft with blackmarkings, they are hoping to see streamlined recurvirostraavosetta, which have white, as well as black, markings. Unlikethe Luftwaffe, these invaders will be most welcome.’19

Contrasting with that mode of description, in contemporary coun-tryside writing on Suffolk, traces of war were over-looked in favourof an aestheticised, romanticised version of the countryside: part ofa growing trend of nostalgic, anti-modern writing.20 The rolesplayed by the military in the avocet story offer insight into superfi-cially-denied perceptions of the militarisation of nature. Regardingthe becoming-animal theme, for example, if that experience recon-figures perceptions of one’s surroundings, then the birds prompteda re-viewing of military ground. As Awl-birds ends, we read Gloyne’sfinal view of the land: ‘‘Stangers had come to disturb the peace ofBledgrave and Bledgrave had swallowed them as it had swallowedso many earth-shaking events in the last four hundred years. Warscame and went but Bledgrave remained’’. In Gloyne’s reorientationto the land, his deep England triumphs over war. We can take theavocet story much further in this role as a cultural tracer for percep-tions of militarism.21

oving to remote Devon to write Tarka The Otter (1927). Allsop remained obsessed with

230 S. Davis / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (2011) 226–232

4. Secret birds, private nature

The richest expression of the relationship between militarism andnature came through notions of secrecy and enclosed territories.When Brown and Gwen Davies (editor of the RSPB’s publications)heard of the avocets at Havergate Island, they immediately took stepsto ensure that the news was kept secret by the island’s custodian,(Theo Harvey Davies, 1962, p. 164, chap. 3). In the first nesting year,two groups of local bird-enthusiasts kept a constant watch over thebirds at Minsmere Level and Havergate Island, but the groups didnot know of each other; apparently the only person who knew the se-crets of both sites was Geoffrey Dent, chairman of the RSPB’s Watch-ers’ Committee (Axell & Hosking, 1977, p. 177). Avocet articles in thefirst two years, in British Birds and the national presses, gave the loca-tion simply as East Anglia, and only after the third nesting season wasover in 1950 did the RSPB publicise Havergate Island. The identity of athird breeding site at Orfordness was not revealed publicly until 1966(Brown, 1966, p. 50). Even when the secret was out, physical access tothe breeding grounds remained guarded and limited.

Such secrecy and privacy was not new to this landscape, asmany areas of coastal Suffolk had operated under conditions ofmilitary secrecy and concealment, especially during the SecondWorld War. There were dozens of RAF and USAAF airbases; a largesection of land near Minsmere became the Saxmundham BattleTraining Area; a few miles south, the villages of Sudbourne andIken were evacuated just inland of Havergate Island to make theOrford Battle Training Area; there were aeroplane, armamentsand weaponry proving grounds either side of Havergate Island atOrfordness and Shingle Street; and finally, a ten-mile wide stripalong Suffolk’s coast was made a limited-access Defence Area.22

Although all of these sites were secret and off-limits, in the popularwartime book, How to see the country, Harry Batsford proudly de-clared that: ‘‘The country remains ours to the full, to explore and en-joy in peace and in war. We can still roam its fields and woods inspite of restrictions . . . No one has yet succeeded in thwarting ouraccess to the hills and valleys of our native land’’ (Batsford, 1940,pp. 3–4). I propose that such deep subversion of the experience ofa landscape full of inaccessible military enclosures can be unravelledthrough narratives of the avocet episode.

The secrecy surrounding the avocet was primarily directed ategg-collectors, since that hobby still thrived at the time.23 Earlynewspaper articles on the avocets overtly linked the two, and inthe Awl-birds story, Stanford’s egg-collector appears anti-patriotic,as ‘‘vermin, a menace not only to his beloved Bledgrave but toEngland. He was as much a saboteur as any Hun in the war’’(Stanford, 1949, p. 83). Here, both the birds and the act of protectingthem appear as a crucial part of Britishness. Later, Stanford (1954, p.200) told of his first night as a watcher at Havergate in 1948, where:‘‘Keyed up by the general air of secrecy, we sat till long after dusk,prepared for anything, even an amphibious raid by armed oologists’’.The figure of the egg-collector offered a convenient, perhaps unsur-prising passage point between militarism and the avocets’ guardedprivacy. But the connection between the military and ornithologicalsecrecy was pervasive, as indicated by the way that: ‘‘Those in theknow referred to them confidentially as ‘zebras’, for avocets are

22 On the military history of this area, see Bowyer (1986), Browne (1981), Hayward (20023 The Association of Bird Wardens and Watchers had been established in 1937 and aft

Oological Association, but war prevented the two societies from making a lasting settlem24 R. P. Donaldson to B. Tucker, 3 September 1947; P. E. Brown to B. Tucker, 29 Septemb25 Unknown newspaper, 14 February 1948; Daily Mail, 13 February 1948. Both at RSPB S26 P. E. Brown to B. Tucker, 29 September 1947; R. P. Donaldson to Captain Ogilvie, 15 Au

05.02.40.27 R. P. Donaldson to C. Morley, 29 September 1947; J. K. Stanford to P. E. Brown 18 Feb28 The Times 10 January 1950.29 Yeates had published many articles in British Birds as well as his well-known book on b

to G. Davies, 23 September 1949. Both at RSPB Sandy, file 01.05.20(H1).

dazzling birds striped most neatly in black and white, and the secondwar had produced a welter of code names’’ (Stanford, 1954, p. 198).It was not only the outsider to the RSPB’s version of bird-watchingwho caused concern; the sense of privacy was far-reaching.

Those within the RSPB fared no better than egg-collectors. Afterthe first breeding season, Brown discussed publishing the newswith R. Preston Donaldson (the Secretary of the RSPB) and BernardTucker (the editor of British Birds), as well as Captain Ogilvie andMajor Lynn-Allen. Brown and Donaldson were the direction-drivers, pushing their view that the publication should be in ascientific journal rather than the RSPB’s journal, Bird Notes. AsDonaldson told Tucker, an article in Bird Notes ‘‘would at once at-tract a flood of enquiries from over-enthusiastic bird watchers’’,and Brown echoed this sentiment: they ‘‘do not wish to give pub-licity to these birds which will result in a whole crowd of ‘‘tally-ho’’bird-watchers arriving to view them’’.24 When the story reachedthe national newspapers this distrust of the crowd was passed on.One article declared that the RSPB ‘‘appeals to bird lovers not tolet their curiosity outstrip their interest’’, while another reportedthe RSPB: ‘‘is fearful that bird-lovers and the curious may uninten-tionally disturb the avocets and send them once more into exile’’.25

In addition to over-keen birdwatchers, the avocet protectors wereanxious about locals and their rumours. Brown worried in 1947 that‘‘a good many local people appear to know all about’’ the site of thecolonies, and Ogilvie blamed the Southwold Ornithological Societyfor the avocets being such an ‘open secret’.26 On hearing that the Suf-folk Naturalists Society intended to publish the avocet news in theirjournal, Donaldson tried to intervene, but the article appeared inearly 1948, causing Stanford great distress that they had ‘‘blownthe guff badly about the avocets’’.27 This tension between the keyprotectors and the locals underlines the fact the former were, likethe birds, outsiders. H. M. Stanford and Stuart Ogilvie stood outsidethe local way of life in their large country houses, and J. K. Stanfordand Brown were both visitors to the area.

Whereas these self-designated wardens made the avocets pri-vate, bird-watching had been becoming an increasingly cooperativeactivity from the mid-1930s, carried out by communicating groupsof amateurs as well as professionals. By the mid-1950s, amateurswere contributing around 40% of publications to the BTO’s journalBird Study (Bibby, 2003, p. 201). As the RSPB came more officially intocare of the avocets in the late-1940s, struggling with its funds andpaid for by subscribing members, it was under pressure to presentits protective work as beneficial to the wider birdwatching commu-nity. Brown wrote (anonymously) in a newspaper article in 1950that ‘‘the RSPB is anxious that people who wish to see them shouldbe able to do so’’,28 but in reality only a small number of people couldvisit Havergate. In 1950 only six permits could be issued on four daysper week, and by 1958 this had still only risen to twelve permits perday on four days. Both local residents and the birdwatching commu-nity were anxious about access to the birds and the place.

In September 1949 the well-respected ornithologist and birdphotographer, G. K. Yeates, wrote to Gwen Davies expressing con-cern that the RSPB would ‘‘keep them in a sort of privileged zoo forthe next few decades’’, adding later that that friends in East Angliahad told him the avocets were totally ‘‘fenced in’’ by the RSPB.29

1), Kinsey (1975, 1981).er gathering a modest following began forging links with the egg-collectors’ British

ent. See Evans (1992, chap. 3).er 1947. Both at RSPB Sandy, file 05.02.40.andy, file 05.02.40.gust 1947; Captain Ogilvie to R. P. Donaldson, 16 August 1947. All at RSPB Sandy, file

ruary 1948. Both at RSPB Sandy, file 05.02.40.

ird photography (Yeates 1946). G. K. Yeates to G. Davies, 13 October 1949; G. K. Yeates

S. Davis / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (2011) 226–232 231

Yeates feared the avocet case was symptomatic of a more generaltrend, writing: ‘‘The protection of birds by means of the sanctuaryand the reserve inevitably leads to the creation of a sort of ‘privilegedclass.’’’ He recalled the kites in Wales, which seemed to have been seenby only a special few over the last forty years. Two years earlier, JamesFisher had reminded Bird Notes readers that the kite is ‘‘one of thetouchiest birds there is and is extremely likely to desert its nest or evenits young’’, and had asked RSPB members ‘‘most emphatically and spe-cifically to STAY AWAY from the Kite country’’ (Fisher, 1947, p. 10).Yeates felt that those who RSPB supporters should have more access:‘‘One does get the feeling—perhaps wrongly—that unless we areamong a certain band of elite, we are not very welcome’’. Yeates’ stand-ing in the ornithological community brought him special treatment;Brown immediately invited him to talk on the birds of Iceland at theRSPB’s next AGM, and gave a detailed account of the events at Haver-gate, explaining that ensuring the conditions for successful recolonisa-tion (such as water level) took priority over providing facilities forseeing the birds. 30 Yeates warmed to the account, praising the RSPB,but since he only received this account because of his status and hisboldness in having written the letter, his prior impression must havebeen widespread among birdwatchers.

The avocet episode in fact stood at a key period in the develop-ment of British nature conservation. J. K. Stanford’s attitude tobird-protection was known to be ‘‘the old-fashioned one, that se-crecy is better than publicity’’ (Meiklejohn, 1971, p. 58). In theAwl-birds, when Gloyne discovers the avocets, he trembles withexcitement at the thought of the natural historical community’srecognition of his discovery, but immediately thinks twice, imagin-ing all the societies and photographers that would ‘‘peer aroundand disturb not only his peace, but the whole of Bledgrave. . . . Allthe secret individualist in Derick Gloyne revolted. It was far betterto keep this secret of his ‘under his hat’ (Stanford, 1949, p. 50). Aswe saw earlier, the privacy of the man, the landscape and the birdsare imaginatively interlinked. The countryside element also comesthrough elsewhere in Stanford’s writing, when he claimed bird-protection should be ‘‘not a matter of Acts of Parliament and sched-ules hung on police-station walls, but a combined effort by peopleliving in their own countryside to save . . . some portion of thebeauty in our marshlands which our forefathers too often allowedto perish’ (Stanford, 1950, p. 4). At a time when the postwar Labourgovernment was nationalising key industries and utilities, Stan-ford’s high Tory views creep into the avocet events, attributingresponsibility towards the countryside to those living in that Ches-tertonian ‘corner of a corner’ of England.31

Further linking the countryside and the individual, Stanford’sex-military protagonist kept his land to himself by clearing onlya narrow path through the mines on his land, feeling ‘‘that the pri-vacy for which he had yearned for so many years was almost invi-olate’’ (Stanford, 1949, p. 38). From the mid-1940s through the1950s, it was feared that the intense co-operation of wartimewould give way to extreme selfishness and individualism inreturning servicemen. This is demonstrated in feature films, fromthe war hero turned psychotic by war experience in Mine Own Exe-cutioner (1947) to the reckless ex-flyer of They Made me a Fugitive(1947), and from the strained post-war relationship between thegunboat crew in The ship that died of shame (1955) to the nightmar-ish, wrecked ex-soldiers in Tiger in the smoke (1956). Gloyne’s needfor seclusion should be read along these lines, but there it is pro-jected onto both desire for the birds’ solitude and a localised viewof the countryside. To summarise, the older model of bird protectionism,

30 P. E. Brown to G. Yeates, 17 October 1949: at RSPB Sandy, file 05.02.40.31 On the Little England of G. K. Chesterson and Hillaire Belloc, see Belloc (1912 [1906],32 On the history of British nature conservation and the Nature Conservency, see Adams33 The Times, Aug 21, 1954. See also Nicholson (1957).

exemplified through Stanford, was connected to military experi-ence and perceptions of landscape.

A new type of conservation was emerging though. In theplanned world of postwar reconstruction, a new government bodywas created, charged with designating protected areas of nature:the Nature Conservancy (NC, established 1948).32 The group whopushed for this during the war years updated the idea of protection-ism to that of conservationism, and stressed the importance of nat-ure conservation to science, especially the young and potentiallysocially useful science of ecology. After its directorship passed toMax Nicholson, the keen ornithologist and well-respected govern-ment planner, the NC bought Havergate and a stretch of Orfordnessin 1954. The avocet story’s secret and private nature therefore cameinto conversation with wider currents of thought.

At that time Nicholson described the two-fold purpose of re-serves, as ‘‘open-air laboratories for research and observation’’and ‘‘living museums for the preservation of areas important eitheras examples of characteristic types of plant and animal communi-ties, or for their geological or physiographical features’’.33 The RSPBwere used to focussing primarily on single bird species, but at Hav-ergate and Orfordness the two bodies co-managed the sites. Therethe RSPB began trying out their ideas on habitat management andthe use of observation hides, which they then brought to Minsmere.It was at Minsmere that the most obviously pioneering work tookplace, when the RSPB developed principles of scientific site manage-ment and environmental control there from the early 1960s, soonattracting avocets back there and stamping their authority over birdprotection with their artificially created ‘Scrape’ (Axell & Hosking,1977). Having stayed low in the 1950s, RSPB membership startedan almost exponential climb in the mid-1960s, which is only juststarting to plateau after reaching a million in 2000 (Bibby, 2003,pp. 202–204). As the power and resources available to conservationorganisations grew, the place of nature reserves as physically sepa-rate places became entrenched. Separation was also brought to oper-ate inside reserves, where visitors were channelled along specifiedwalkways and into hides.

5. Conclusions

Birds joined the ranks of the organic and threatened version ofEngland that had flourished in the 1930s with respect to agricul-ture and the countryside. As physical expressions of the idea ofan endangered Britishness, birds were positioned as somethingthe war was being fought for, and afterward they became a wayto recover from it. What makes the avocet episode so interestingis the close relationship in it between militarism and birds, whichgives it the capacity to make perspicuous this relationship. I havediscussed ways in which the history of our ideas about the se-cluded protection of portions of nature is intertwined with mili-tarisation. Elsewhere I take the avocet story further, using theevents to give insight into the development of the still-young sci-ence of ethology, where the authority of this field science woveits authority through the hide (Davis, in press). The avocet alsoplayed an important role in the development of natural historyfilm, as two amateur phenomenally popular films of HavergateIsland and Minsmere, made in 1950, laid the ground for the RSPB’sestablishment of a Film Unit in 1953: the same year the BBC’s newnatural history programme Look! was first broadcast. A new formof access was thus brought to the exclusive nature reserves and

p. 104), Chesterton (1994 [1907], pp. 56–58).(1997), Evans (1992) and Sheail (1995, 1998).

232 S. Davis / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (2011) 226–232

bird sanctuaries. Through hides and film, ways of seeing natureand ourselves were challenged at the avocet reserves.

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