THE ‘HUT’ IS a couple of insulated portable cabins, with a few smaller sheds containing generators, fuel, wind turbine parts and so on. There is a chemical toilet, a wash basin, basic cooking facilities. Two or three of us can share the hut at a time, but there is not normally a need for more than one to keep an eye on the equipment. Resources being tight, lately we tend to come out on our own.
In all honesty, I prefer it this way. Birds draw out the solitude in us. They repay patience and silence – long hours of a kind of alert, anticipatory stillness. The days begin to blur into each other; weekends and weekdays becoming arbitrary distinctions. I find myself easily losing track of the calendar, birds and weather my only temporal markers. I watch the migration patterns, record their altering plumage, study the changeful skies. I could not be happier.
There is just one thing to spoil my contentment, but even that, I am confident, will soon be behind me.
I will finish the paper.
IT SOUND EASY, put like that. A vow. A recommitment, a redoubling of my own efforts. One last push.
But I have been here before.
It started easily enough – the usual set of objections, no real hint of the trouble to come. Very few papers ever go through without some amendments, so none of us were bothered that there were a few issues that needed addressing.
But when we had fixed those, the anonymous referee came back with requests for more changes.
We took care of those. Hoped that the paper would now be judged fit for publication. But still the referee wanted more of us. This kept going on. Just when we think we have addressed all possible doubts, the referee somehow manages to find something new to quibble with. I do my best to be stoic, reminding myself that the anonymous referee is just another scientist doing their job, that they too are under similar pressures, and that I should not feel under any personal attack.
But I only have to glance at their comments.
The authors are inconsistent in their handling of the normalisation terms for the correlation function of the velocity modulus. I am not convinced that their treatment of the smoothed Dirac delta-function is rigorous across the quoted integral.
My blood boils. I entertain a momentary fantasy of meeting the referee out here, on some lonely strip of marshland, of swerving violently and running them into a ditch.
Asking, as I watch them gag on muddy water: “Rigorous enough for you now?”
THE BASIS OF our experiment is a ring of twenty tripods, arranged in a two kilometre circle. The hut is on one side of the circle, the wind turbine the other. During the day I check all the tripods, picking the least waterlogged path in the 4WD.
Each unit carries a pair of stereometric digital cameras. The lenses need to be kept the power and electronic connections verified. The cameras should be aimed into the middle of the perimeter, and elevated sufficiently to stand a good chance of catching the murmuration’s epicentre. The cameras are meant to be steerable, but not all of the motors work properly now.
Beneath each camera is a heavy grey digital control box. The boxes contain microprocessor boards, emergency batteries, and the blue plastic rectangles of their internal ethernet modules, flickering with yellow and red LEDs. The boxes are supposedly weatherproof but the rain usually finds a way into them. Like the motors, there have been some failures of the circuit board, and our spares supplies are running low.
About one in five of the stations have more equipment. On these units we also included laser/radar rangefinders and Doppler velocity recorders. These in turn require extra processors and batteries in the control boxes, which is yet more to go wrong.
The effort is worth it, though.
The equipment allows us to track the instantaneous vectors of anything up to two hundred and fifty thousand birds, perhaps even half a million, in a single compact formation. Our spatial/temporal resolution is sufficient to determine wing movements down to the level of specific feather groups. At the same time we also gather data on the attentional shifts implied by eye and head tracking of individual birds.
The human eyes see a blurring of identities, birds becoming the indistinguishable, amorphous elements of some larger whole. The cameras and computers see through all of that. I know the science, I know the algorithms, I know our data-carrying capacity. All the same, I am still quietly astonished that we can do this.
When the cameras are checked, which can take anywhere between three and six hours, I have one final inspection to perform. I drive to the wind turbine, and make a visual inspection of the high grey tower and the swooping blades. More often than not there is nothing to be done. The blades turn, the power flows, our electrical and computer systems work as they are meant to.
The rest is down to the birds.
IT’S ODD, REALLY, but there are times when I find even the hut a little too closed-in and oppressive for my tastes. Sometimes I just stop the 4WD out here, wind the window down, and watch the light change over the marsh. I like it best when the day is overcast, the clouds sagging low over the trees and bushes of the marsh, their greyness relieved only by a bold supercilial swipe of pale yellow above the horizon. Birds come and go, but it’s too early for the roosting. I watch herons, curlews, reed warblers – sometimes even the slow, methodical patrol of our resident marsh harrier, quartering the ground with the ruthless precision of a surveillance drone.
Beyond the birds, the only constancy is the regular swoosh of the turbine blades.
It’s a good time to catch up on work or reading.
I pull laser-printed pages from the unruly nest of the glove compartment, along with tissues, cough sweets, empty medicine packets, a scuffed CD without a case. I rest a stiff-backed road atlas on the steering wheel, so that I can write on the pages.
I’ve already marked up certain problematic passages in yellow highlighter. Now I use a finer pen to scribble more detailed notes in the margins. Eventually I’ll condense these notes into a short email to the journal editor. In turn they’ll forward them on to the author of the paper I am refereeing.
This is how it works. I’m engaged in a struggle with my own anonymous referee, half-convinced that they’ve got it in for me, while at the same time trying to be just as nit-picking and difficult for this other author. Doubtless they feel just as irritated by me, as I am irritated with my own referee. But from my end, I know that there’s nothing personal in it. I just want the work to be as good as it can be, the arguments as lucid, the analysis as rigorous. So what if I know the lead author, and don’t particularly care for her? I can rise above that.
I hold one of the sheets up to the yellowing sky, so that the band of light pushes through the highlit yellow passages. I read back my own scrawl in the margins:
Sloppy handling of the synthetic correlation function – doesn’t inspire confidence in rest of analysis.
Am I being too harsh with them?
Perhaps. But the we’ve all been through this mill.
STARLINGS GATHER, ARRIVING from all directions, concentrating in the air above the copse of trees and bushes near the middle of the study area. They come in small numbers, as individuals or in flocks of a few dozen, before falling into the greater mass. There is no exact threshold at which the concentration of birds becomes a recognisable murmuration, but it needs at least a few thousand before the form begins to emerge as a distinct phenomenon in its own right, with its swooping, gyring, folding cohesiveness – a kind of living membrane in the sky.