Taking a Gander

I dropped out of university halfway through my first year. I had set my sights on a life in the country, so I left London for my late grandfather’s farm in Kent, secured a place at the Royal Agricultural College for October, and went to work in a farm office for the intervening months. I moved into the old farmhouse, heated by log fires and a temperamental Aga, with the kitchen tended by a family of enterprising mice who must have moved in when the owl took up residence in the barn. Sitting alone by the fire, I’d hear that owl hoot in the silence of long evenings after work, his call only thickening the stillness that crept in over dark fields to the little blaze of light in which I read.

The books that I chose were resolutely factual. I was determined to leave behind the pretensions of the English Lit. student in me, the one who might casually let Paradise Lost or The Prelude or even the later works of St Augustine drop from his bag as he surfed into a café after lectures. This would not do for my new life of practicality and outdoor earthiness. Skipping over anything with footnotes, I found company among the fading spines and yellowing pages of books so untouched as to have thick ditches of dust along their tops. In the old farmhouse there was plenty of James Herriot, a bit of Edward Thomas, a natural history of hedgerows and various guides to the birds of England, Scotland and, rather ambitiously, Africa. Then I found Dillon Ripley’s A Paddling of Ducks. The title set me thinking of a pushy mother duck leading a splash of little squeaks across a pond, which was rather comforting, so I settled down to read it. A Paddling of Ducks (1957) is a memoir filtered through the trials and tribulations of an aviculturalist, and its author’s bright enthusiasm for waterfowl glows in every sentence. We follow him from his first experiments with a duck pond to his adventures through Southeast Asia, India and England. Ripley spent a large part of his childhood tending a small duck pond near his home in Litchfield, Connecticut, and went on to become a significant and prolific ornithologist, but here we find him putting up fences, diverting streams and adventuring to sea-tossed rocky outcrops for the eggs of eider duck, carried home in Tiffany jewellery boxes to his obliging hens. His early experiments in raising ducks of all kinds meet with varying success, from the satisfaction of two adult wood duck becoming five over one summer, to the dismay at the rapid thinning of his duck population by eagle owls, weasels and other mischievous predators. The early disappointments do not discourage him, but rather feed a determination, leading him to remark with some gusto that ‘it is astonishing how resilient is the spirit of an aviculturalist’. He goes to Yale, then reluctantly to graduate school, all the time thinking how he would much rather have ‘gone off somewhere to look at birds’. I sympathized. Ripley got his chance to do just that during the Second World War when, if we are to go by the experiences he recounts in Paddling, he spent his time in Ceylon canoeing through swamps and rushes in pursuit of rare waterfowl. He neglects to mention that he was posted there as an agent for the Office of Strategic Services’ Secret Intelligence branch. Indeed, his entire experience of the war is only mentioned in terms of its disastrous effects on his duck pond: with no one there to look after them, the ducks have to be sent off to a zoo. Nevertheless, he is rather pleased to be able to use his positionin the OSS to make an avifaunal survey of Ceylon. While his fellow spies pose as ornithologists to gain access to restricted territories, Ripley is an ornithologist posing as a spy to get funding for his research trips. Such work is not without its perils. On one trip his team disturbs a herd of wild water buffalo. While they sit in grim silence, unsure whether the animals will come charging through the reeds at any moment, he cannot help recalling that ‘the Ceylon papers had recently been full of how a Mr Coomaraswamy had been dispatched by the inopportune intrusion of a wild bull buffalo at a picnic’. There is a lively sense of understatement in that ‘inopportune intrusion’, and this subtle humour ripples through the book. A buffalo does indeed turn up later on, but this time in India, tethered to a post in view of a Maharaja’s marquee. Ripley and other guests are taking lunch when a tiger materializes. It pounces, then kills and eats the water buffalo with a snap and a crunch and a soft purr. This is the Maharaja’s afternoon entertainment, but the sight rather puts Ripley off his pâté sandwiches. Although A Paddling of Ducks records Ripley’s travels across the world – trekking through a sticky New Guinea rainforest, being chased by a bull elephant in south-east Ceylon or harangued by touts in a Calcutta market – he always returns to thoughts of his domestic projects and his plans for his duck pond. Making a small detour on his way home to America, he calls in on the Duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey. The Duke takes him on a tour of his vast estate, which is roamed by herds of rare deer and troops of Golden and Lady Amherst pheasant. It’s the sort of broad parkland fantasy where, ‘at a small pond in a grove of oaks, a flock of ashy-headed geese from Tierra del Fuego took wing’. In contrast to Ripley’s rapture at so many rare and beautiful things, the Duke is laconic: ‘They nest very well here.’ They round a hedge and come in sight of the abbey, ‘a magnificent pile of gray stone in the ordered grandeur of the height of the Carolinian style’. But for Ripley, the house is merely a backdrop. What captures his imagination is the sight of red-breasted geese on the lawn and lake in front of the house:

Near the water a gander arched his neck, the feathers curving down the nape in a miniature mane, peculiar to this species, looking more like the arched neck of a Grecian horse in stone or bronze. He made a little rush at an imaginary rival, then returned to his mate . . . Then a whole group came forward, stepping with precision and grace, as if in a minuet. The balustrade, the pond, the formal greensward, the gray mass behind were all part of a scene from an eighteenth-century painting, a Watteau perhaps, harlequins and pierrettes performing a stately dance.

Ripley’s skill is to bring to life the world of the birdwatcher, to combine literary and artistic allusions with careful notes on the peculiarity of a species, its markings and behavioural patterns. The effect is bewitching. As I sat reading the book on the farm, worrying over my life plan, I dreamt of the grand task of the rural estate manager. Of course, I would be advising on best woodland management, ensuring the profligacy of species-rich meadows, buying and selling land and timber and crops. But quietly, inside, I would be crafting a landscape and habitat that would inspire a host of Watteaus. I might even erect a swing here and there.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 41 © Galen O'Hanlon 2014