Field Guides. (3rd October 2018) - Pearson, Mike
Abstract : In this article, Mike Pearson challenges what Guy Debord suggests is 'the primary urban character' of the dérive. Following a memorable encounter with a pair of European Nighjars, he reflects upon how birds might occasion, guide, lead and dramaturgically orchestrate drifting and upon choreographies of bird watching. How, in their quest, birds engender expectation and urgency, necessitating preparation – going equipped with specialist optical tools, clothing, footwear – and precipitating heightened senses of attention and concentration. How their appearance and encounter sets and punctuates the tempo and rhythm of the excursion. How this leads to adjustments: of timings – halting, lingering, waiting, rushing to follow; of ways of seeing – negotiating looking up and out simultaneously, getting one's eye in, accustoming it to colour and movement in this terrain, oscillating between near and far, scanning, rapid shifting; of listening – cocking an ear, focusing direction. Above all, of posture, gait and locomotion: moving in slow motion, walking sideways, holding the body at odd angles, crouching, crawling, twitching. Conjuring improvised responses of concealment and revelation in relation to a landscape: of becoming attuned and absorbed – another feature of this place. How it prompts memories of similar occurrences here, of this place at different times, of these birds in other places … 'Field Guides' points of reference are J.A. Baker's The Peregrine (1967) in which the author trails the raptor across the flat Essex marshes; Mark Cocker's Crow Country (2012), the memoire of a 'rook-following man'; John Berger's essay 'Field' (1971) in which 'Finches chasing each other from bush to bush' might constitute a 'first event' – that fixes ones attention and that then leads you to apprehend further events within a field; and the hypotactic conflations of optic and haptic in John Clare's poetry – 'With every smell and sound and sight beguiled' ('The Village Boy').