The elusive corn crake
by Nancy Corson Carter
From May 30 through June 8, 2013 my
husband Howard and I joined a band of 42 pilgrims gathered by the Shalem Institute for Spiritual
Formation. This pilgrimage was to the small
Hebridean island of Iona. This tiny island, measuring only about three miles
long and one mile wide, lies off the west coast of Scotland. Here, the Celtic
monastic community, alive in the fifth and sixth centuries and not dispersed
until the 13th
century, participated in a unique flowering of art and education, based on
scripture and upon God’s revelation in Creation.
“The shared intent of our pilgrimage, entitled “Earth Care—Earth Prayer,” was to:
• listen deeply for God’s
invitations to pray and care for our wondrous Earth
• open to the spiritual treasures of
holy Iona, the Iona Community, and our
own pilgrim community
• deepen our awareness of the Holy One’s
radiant Presence, and to
• praise God.
What I found on Iona reminds me of
Isaiah 58:11: “You shall be like a watered garden, like a deep spring that
never runs dry.” That verse gives me courage when I am close to despairing in
my avocation of Earth-caring; it correlates with a deeply refreshing
companionship that I felt on Iona—because of the land itself, its creatures,
its hallowed history, and the pilgrim circles within and beyond our gathering.
Even though I use the first person in this meditation, I am always aware of a
great, encompassing “we.”
J. Philip Newell’s The
Book of Creation: An Introduction to Celtic Spirituality was a welcome companion to this pilgrimage. His commentary
about John Scotus Eriugena, a ninth-century Irishman, particularly encouraged
my receptivity to revelations from all forms of life on the island, even birds
I had never heard of—the Corn Crakes!
[Eriugena]
taught that God is the ‘Life Force’ within all things. ‘Therefore
every visible and invisible creature,’ he
said, ‘can be called a theophany.’ All
life manifests something of the One who is the essence of life. . . . Through
the letters of Scripture and the species of creature’ the
eternal Light is
revealed.
(xxi)1
Though Eriugena was accused of
pantheism, it is clear that he saw creation not as God in itself, but as God’s
dwelling place; he said each creature is a “manifestation of the hidden,” or in Newell’s
words, “a showing forth of the mystery of God” (67-8). That so many
Celtic saints are associated with creatures of Earth, sky, and sea affirms
human creatureliness as a relationship to cherish and honor rather than to
deny. Indeed, it is a gift “at the heart of who we are" (71 ff). If we open
ourselves to reciprocal caring with the whole creation, we will discover much
that we might otherwise never know.
“Hiddenness” is a word often indicating secrets or withheld
information. However, it makes me think of “seeing through a glass darkly” or “the cloud of unknowing.” “Hiddenness” may suggest mystery yet to be revealed as we continue on
our journey.
I found the theme of hiddenness by
entering briefly into a somewhat comic relationship. Soon after our arrival on
Iona, I became aware of a mysterious bird called a Corn Crake. It is also known
as a Landrail; its Latin name is onomatopoetic for its rather grating call: Crex
crex. In a little photographic display in
our hotel’s central corridor of unique creatures which sometimes
visited Iona, I first saw a Corn Crake’s
image. It looked to me like a long-necked light brown chicken with gangly legs
and feet, a bit, I’m sorry to say, like a rubber chicken. With the guidance of
one of my fellow pilgrims, I quickly learned to recognize the strange grating
utterances of the males. It’s said that they can be heard a mile away. In the early
breeding season, they sound often during the day and intensively
at night—one bird may call more than
10,000 times between midnight and 3:00 am. (A Gaelic name for this bird is Cleabhair
coach or “mad noisemaker.”) But the strange thing is that while they
call insistently for mates in voices extremely hard for humans to miss, they
crouch so low as they creep along through the open meadow grasses that they
rarely even ruffle a stem. They really seem to be invisible.
My husband Howard, a friend, and I
were walking the path by the field below the Iona Cultural Center when I saw a
Corn Crake pop up on the stone wall about 50 feet ahead of us. I knew what it was because I’d
studied the photo, and I excitedly pointed and exclaimed “It’s
a Corn Crake!” “It’s
a Corn Crake!” Our friend hadn’t
studied the hotel photo; he was doubtful, but I knew. The Corn Crake made an awkward jump into flight, crossed
the path ahead of us, and skimmed over the opposite stone wall. We scurried to
catch another glimpse, but it disappeared without a trace into the grassy
field. Soon we heard the familiar call, but we’d
had our one look
for our visit even though we tried hard for a repeat sighting.
Corn Crakes are rare enough that
birders go well out of their way to come here so that they can add them to
their life lists. These aficionados come by cruise ships as well as by ferries,
and they often tote cameras with enormous lens, yearning to snap a photo or
two. We’re not sure why, but we’ve
heard that the locals’ name for them is “twitchers”? We saw many of them clustered hopefully around
the fences of the fields where the hidden birds made their loud, unmistakable
calls. One lady said she’d been steadily looking for them, but that she had managed
to see “only a few legs.”
A review of the general habits and
recent past history of the birds in this region demonstrates why it’s
rare to see even those “few legs.” The Corn Crakes travel from their wintering
grounds in Africa to arrive on Iona for breeding usually by late April, leaving
before the end of September. Friends from our hometown who visited the island
in late July didn’t hear them at all. Corn Crakes were once widespread in
western and central Europe, extending east as far as Siberia, but they were
lost from most of the UK after the 1930s. Local ecologist John Clare writes
that “Iona, and to a lesser extent the Ross of Mull, are now two
of the few places in the British Isles where Corn Crakes nest in any numbers.”2
Conservation measures and reassessment
of large and apparently stable populations in Russia, Kazakhstan, and western
China have restored them to the category of Least Concern on the IUCN Red List,
but they continue to be carefully monitored. The focus of conservation efforts
in Europe is to change the timing and method of hay harvesting; later cutting
gives time for breeding to be completed, and leaving uncut strips at the edges
of fields and cutting from the center outwards reduces casualties. Hayfields
with limited cutting or fertilizer use (which I assume includes those on Iona)
are ideal.
As though the Corn Crake were
emissaries of approaching transition, I have begun to understand the idea of
hiddenness personally. A friend recently gave me Henri J.M. Nouwen’s The
Inner Voice of Love, and I was somehow led (like the
little Puritan mouse that nibbled to the Bible passage God intended to be read)
to open to one of his “spiritual
imperatives” titled “Keep Trusting God’s Call”:
As
you come to realize that God is beckoning you to a greater hiddenness, do not
be afraid of that invitation. Over the years you have allowed the voices that
call you to action and great visibility to dominate your life. You still think,
even against your own best intuitions that you need to do things and be seen in
order to follow your vocation. But you are now discovering that God’s
voice is saying, ‘Stay home, and trust that your life will be fruitful even
when hidden.’ (89)3
Without ignoring the irony of the
admonition to “stay home,” I ponder what a difficult lesson Nouwen
suggests. My Type A over-active Martha (vs. Mary) self constantly confuses me
with guilt over “not doing enough” and a lack of discernment over what is mine
to do. I pray for clearer knowing, for a
deepening trust that God is leading me to find. Again, I turn to Nouwen, whose
book seems written expressly for this stage in my life, a “stage” that could be called “later life” or “elderhood.” He counsels that
…you
have not fully acknowledged this new place as the place where God dwells and
holds you. You fear that this truthful place is in fact a bottomless pit where
you will lose all you have and are. Do not be afraid. Trust that the God of
life wants to embrace you and give you true safety (15).
So here I am—I venture that God might
see me as goofy as the Corn Crakes appear to me, yet I yearn to be lovingly
encouraged to fulfill my own creatureliness. It’s a
large hope, and I am always looking and listening for allies on this journey. I
have been reading Václav Havel’s Letters to Olga, written from prison where he was sentenced in 1979 to 4 ½
years of hard labor for his human rights activities in Czechoslovakia. In the
middle of his incarceration, he writes of a growing “mood” of “contemplation,” which he defines as “the manifestation of a deeper, more spiritual relationship
to the values of the world and my life” (204). What Havel says about this “mood” strikes a chord for me as I explore the “hiddenness” the Corn Crakes have roused me to ponder:
It
is an experience of the manifestation—the vivid presence—of an otherwise
hidden, yet all-determining dimension of the spirit, that is the presence of
faith, hope and the profound conviction that there is a ‘meaning’ (205).
The very fact that Havel has found
this understanding in prison inspires me with the power of the human spirit to
meet despair-inducing adversity with hope, daring to probe beyond surfaces to
deeper meaning. It’s a bit of a stretch, and I do not wish to appropriate his hard-earned
wisdom glibly, but I like to think that Havel and I and the Corn Crakes are
kindred spirits, expressing in quite different languages our kinship with the
community of all Being. Finding even glimpses of what such hiddenness may mean
is a gift as I travel a new path from middle age into later years.
When I think of the wholeness of
Creation which Celtic Christianity claims as God’s
intention, my thoughts go to places where it is now disrupted by threats of
extinction. Within the context of a sacred universe, the loss of any form of
life diminishes all of us; it takes away something from the “whole book of our meaning.” As an educator, a seeker, a
pilgrim, and one committed to advocacy for Earth care, this is of great concern
to me.
Among the animal species, we are
perilously close to losing such treasures as the California condor, the
Bactrian Camel, the Hawaiian Monk Seal, the Mountain Gorilla, the Iberian
Lynx—all are included among the“25 most endangered species on Earth,” and
this list names only ones we know about.
Extinction is not the hiddenness I’ve
been discussing so far, though it may be useful to compare them. Extinction as
we now use the word, is a death, an ending of some life form that prevents its
continuity. Extinction as a conceived crisis of species being torn from the
fabric of creation surely must be one of the worst sins. In this case, it may
mean that we humans have acted with the arrogance of hubris, not
admitting the possibility of anything
hidden or unknowable as we pollute, mine,
toxify, clearcut, kill, and otherwise
abuse Creation as a “resource” for our use.
On the spiritual level, however, the
idea of hiddenness shows us the absolute unknowability of the universe, let
alone the unfathomable intricacy of the Earth itself. Stepping out into the
depths of spirit, we are called to walk in a way that may be visible only one
step at a time. Hiddenness requires a surrender to mystery that precludes any
attempt to cleverly devise a map and run ahead; we must wait and trust
invisible Being.
Iona itself was threatened when it
went up on the auction block in 1979; luckily the Fraser Foundation purchased
it back from the Argyll Estates and presented it to the nation. The National
Trust now owns much of the island. In 2000 the Iona Cathedral Trust passed the
abbey, nunnery, Reilig Òdhrain,
and St. Ronan’s into the care of Historic Scotland.
I began this meditation with a
fascination with Corn Crakes, but the more I thought of them, there in the
great matrix of Celtic Christianity, the more I felt that they expressed
important aspects of the spirit of holy Iona: that too was invisible but
strongly present. It had been threatened but it survived. I did see one Corn Crake, but I’m
still trying to decode its message, a beguilingly quirky yet resonant one. What
is hidden draws me onward in a mysterious adventure!
Nancy Corson Carter, professor emerita
of humanities at Eckerd College, has published two poetry books, Dragon Poems
and The
Sourdough Dream Kit, and three poetry chapbooks. Some of her poems,
drawings, and photos appear in her nonfiction book, Martha, Mary, and
Jesus: Weaving Action and Contemplation in Daily Life and in her memoir, The
Never-Quite-Ending War: a WWII GI Daughter's Stories.
1J. Philip Newell, THE
BOOK OF CREATION: AN INTRODUCTION TO CELTIC
SPIRITUALITY (New York: Paulist Press 1999),
pp. xxi, 67-8, 71ff.
2 John Clare, Iona and Mull CORNCRAKES ( Mull, Scotland; Moving Stationery Ltd.,
2010), p. 1. This pamphlet is also the source of the photo
included.
3 Henri J.M. Nouwen, THE INNER VOICE OF LOVE (New York:
Doubleday, 1996), p.
89, 15.
4 Václav Havel,
LETTERS TO OLGA (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 205.
