South Walney

Notes from a residency - 20 to 25 September 2017

21 September

Thinking about S Walney while eating toast and drinking coffee in Coastguard Cottage Number 2.

You remember Niko Tinbergen, or you think you do: there was a graphic in a children's book which showed how gull chicks would peck at a red spot. The red spot stood for the red on the beak of the parent. Pecking at the red beak would stimulate the parent to present food, was the theory. The chick would make this rudimentary identification and display this rudimentary pecking behaviour from very early on, perhaps from birth, as you remember. Recognition of the red dot led directly to the pecking behaviour which led directly to the food presentation or regurgitation behaviour ie these were instinctual behaviours. Note regurgitation: a more or less uncontrolled reflex. Gull behaviours, was the the implication or the direct assertion, were a matter of instinct. They were not eg learned.

Consider the other graphic you recall: a shape consisting of a blob with an elongated extrusion is passed over and above the chick. When passing over with the extrusion leading, the chick notices the passing object but it does not respond. The chick takes the shape for a goose flying overhead. If the object is passed over the chick in the other direction, with the extrusion behind, the chick, we are told, takes the shape for a bird of prey: the extrusion is the bird of prey's trailing tail now, rather than the neck of a goose. In this scenario, the chick immediately adopts a crouching, frozen posture, we are told, to avoid detection. It uses its speckled camouflage among, as we now understand, the pebbles, sand and shingle flora of South Walney to hide from danger overhead. Again we undestand these behaviours occur from early on, perhaps with newly born chicks. Again this can only be, we are told, instinctive behaviours. How else could we account for them, occurring as they do, we are told, from hatching?

As so often, we are presented with a distinctive double message, aimed at children: how clever the little chicks are, it is implied, to accomplish these behaviours when they are so small! At one and the same time: how clear it is, we are told, from these examples, that the behaviour of the chicks and indeed of the adults, has little or any element of choice about it. The pecking, the regurgitation, the crouching or not crouching, occur, it seems, automatically, the way a machine executes a task in response to the press of a button; or an actor speaks a line in response to a cue.

These are strong messages, you think. All your life, you can say, you are informed and strongly shaped by these stories and graphics, in turn informed by the research of Niko Tinbergen, here on the island or near-island of South Walney in Cumbria, on the North West coast of England, quite near the border with Scotland.

So that South Walney, we can say, is a key site and even an iconic site for the development of ideas about animal behaviour, and especially we can say: instinct driven behaviour of not human animals.

At the same time we know from Vinçiane Despret that the actual activities and ways of living with animals of Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen's mentor and collaborator and with whom Niko Tinbergen shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, along with Karl von Frisch, stood at least partly at odds with the rigorous behaviourism of his Nobel Prize winning theories, and the methodologies designed to test his hypotheses. However seemingly systematic and even automaton-like Niko Tinbergen's research activities may have been, we gather, space is left for a wider range of kinds of performance, perhaps.

In this sense, while we can say that South Walney is an iconic site for the development and testing of behaviourist theories, we can also say that it is at the same time a place of fissures and potential openings in those theories and methodologies, as perhaps any systematic body of work contains the seeds of the points of leverage for its deconstruction.

Even as it appears to be a key site for the establishment and maintenance of boundaries between humans and non humans specifically through distinguishing between degrees of freedom informing their behaviour, something causes those boundaries to be in doubt even as they are being set up and maintained.

Niko Tinbergen moved his field station from Ravenglass to Walney from 1966 until the early 1970s, with a large caravan and an encampment of tents around it in the dunes.

As an island, or almost island, South Walney, contrary to the impression given by many maps, definitions, commentaries, legal demarcations, is a shifting territory - if it is a territory. It can be thought, we can say, as a complex, we can say of flows: fluxes, or zones of fluxes, which constantly pour in and out, so it is by turns thick and thin: wide and narrowing to next to nothing, at which point for a few hours at exceptionally high tide, it becomes the island it almost is, at other times.

Describe the flows of gravel and sand and water

At the same time as these constant flows disturb and displace the island or almost island of South Walney, the wind constantly encounters its surfaces, ruffling, shaking, agitating, stroking the vegetation and structure of the landscape with long and short gusts, blasts, draughts of air moving in off the Atlantic in constantly changing flows.

On South Walney your ears are always full of wind. The wind disorientates you. You begin by imagining it could be removed. You end by attending to the wind itself, as it becomes audible through different kinds of vegetation and obstruction. Wind is revealed in the different barriers it encounters on South Walney, you think, as thought is revealed by its obstacles, for Bion.

Autumn wind in scrub, over the fields, around the Fuwa checkpoint

Bashō
Ruins near Sekigahara, Mino Province, Autumn 1684

If this is what Walney represents, you think, the question is how to re present this (representation) across the bay in Barrow.

The starting point of this residency has been to create an installation or performance or presence in the covered market in Barrow in Furness across the bay, which references or includes in some way that open microphone you have set up on the beach with members of the Cumbria Wildlife Trust and Octopus Collective, with the aim of relaying sounds of birds, seals, wind and weather, as part of the emerging Cumbria Open Microphone Network (COMN). How to approach that.

The question of where you sit - how and where you sit and the kind of chair you sit on, where you sleep - what kind of bed you are sleeping in, at night, how you get your food - what kinds of food you eat, while you are in a place, is closely connected with the way you think about a place, the way you explore and imagine it, while you are there.

What the weather is like: when you arrive, when you get up on the first morning, when you emerge from the first hide, that morning, at daybreak

You wonder where Niko Tinbergen was staying, at the time he was conducting his Nobel Prize winning research into gull behaviours on South Walney - what kinds of foods and arrangements he had access to, what kinds of mixtures of solitude and sociability he sought, and found. What kinds of groups - of humans and of course non humans, were assembled on the near island, at that time.

Look that up.

You wonder how those contingencies can have informed, perhaps, the texture - the consistency and especially the inconsistencies in the theory and practice of that research and those research activities.

Wind
Studies of wind in / on different materials / borders / obstacles With an illustration for each clip?
Cp the Bashō poem

22 September 9.33

Listening to the S Walney stream from the spit. The buzz is gone. You changed the microphones. But something is rattling, sounds like a stone on the lid of the streambox, go out at low tide and fix it. The main activity and untertaking of people, that artist was saying, at the Whitechapel, as you remember, is not making. The main activity is repair. Our attentions are focused and our society is preoccupied with production, whereas carrying out repairs is our distinctive activity. [Ref]

There's a high wind. You hear the wind on the spit on S Walney and it rattles the stone or whatever it is at unpredictable intervals. And you hear the drone of the wind turbines, you think it is, on the horizon. Or it's a plane. It's a plane or it's both. Very occasionally you hear a bird - a twite perhaps, or a linnet, in the low vegetation of the spit, blown on the wind. Sounds blow in and out on the wind - the microphones are holding up well - stuffed with all the sheep wadding Andrew Deakin put in there to stop leaks of wind. The wind leaking into the streambox was creating distortion, and clipping, Andrew Deakin felt, and he stuffed all the cracks with wadding and put sheep's wadding around the microphone capsules. You can't hear the seals. Yesterday while you were working on the stream you were hearing the seals with their singing calls at intervals over the lip of the shingle. The sun was shining from behind and all your equipment was scattered out on the concrete plinth on the beach and on the shingle. The curlews rose and cried as you approached along the track behind the beach. Then they returned to the wet ground then they were quiet. You were working away. Now and then the seals would utter their calls form where they were lying, as you knew, not far away on the beach, where the shingle dropped away towards the sea. The sea was rough grey. Structures marking the channel stuck out of the sea, decorated, we can say, with cormorants sitting. Black cormorants sat on the structures and boats sometimes passed. Planes sometimes passed over. The ground was grown with the distinctive flora of the Walney shingle: the Walney geranium, sea lavender, yellow poppies, grey and green leaved low growing plants with thick cuticles against the salt wind and spray, rooted in the shingle, which shifts. Material is constantly eroded from the West side of Walney and carried by the water and deposited in an extrusion: an elongated and constantly extending spit of gravel and sand along the South edge of South Walney in the shape of a finger bent back towards Barrow. That finger spit of material is where your stuff was all scattered out as you were trying to work out what was causing the buzz in the stream by changing everything out, part by part, until it seemed there was an intermittent buzz in the microphones and when you changed the microphones the buzz was gone. now there is a rattle. a rattle has replaced the buzz, which dominates the stream, but it can be fixed. you hear the seals. you can hear them faintly, you think, over the roar of the wind, the rattle of a stone or a cable blowing, from time to time. From time you time you hear them and when they are not heard you remember them feintly. You hear them feintly, then you remember them, feintly, you can say. As in remembering the present, not the past. With De Certeau, we forget to remember the present, then we do remember it, it is recalled to memory, that is the effect of the flux. The flux brings back to memory what we forgot, what we set aside, or put aside. In the sense of Bateson, we set something aside - the lake into which the waste will flow - and we allow that lake - that reservoir - to persist outside memory. our there it stays, inaccessible. The flux, which extends the audition of the present, returns to memory those zones we have set aside: it brings them back to haunt us: waste places. in some cases, those waste places, like the Fukushima Exclusion Zone, in addition to places of horror, are also places of exuberant new activity: not humans and newly liberated companion species - cows - are roaming in those areas, calling, while others - Schlegel's tree frogs, cicadas and crickets of various kinds - are calling exuberantly, we can say - in those areas. their exuberant calls delight the listener and the rhythms created by their mutual interference are of a new and exciting quality. the exercise of repair in this sense creates startling openings and possibilities. at the same time, in some case what we discover appals us: areas of dereliction and damage. holding together these double resonances: of resurgence and damage, at different time scales and in different registers, we imagine activities around repair and the exension of the auditorium by groups of the curious - subject groups, we can say, interested in listening activities linked to activities of repair, perhaps

11.34

it s raining on walney - the weather changes fast - there's a very high on an off in the right channel, there s a deep note coming in from the right - a passing boat, perhaps - a boat passing offshore, you wonder if you will be able to get back out to the spit to install the preamp - the old edirol R-1 you have here on the table, in coastguard cottage number 2, you wonder if the high pitched sound in the right channel is an artefact, you listen to the raining falling on objects on the spit, on the plinth and on the ground around, on the walney shingle, as you listen to the rattle, on and off, of a stone in the wind, a stone or a cable, the rain intensifies, it's pouring on walney around high tide, fluxes converge on the almost island, close to cutting it off, close to submerging the island and breaching it, the sound of the surf approaches - on the microphone the sound of the surf can be heard approaching - rolling in from the Irish Sea - it rolls in from the Atlantic, but in fact it is buffered by the Irish Sea, as the sound of rain is buffered by the streambox, with its timber and slate construction, modelled on a small building, it's a small building, the call of seabirds cuts across, to the left, the turbulence of south walney returns, after a calm morning - it was calm, you think, as you walked around the island, in fact it was windy - by any standards it was a windy morning, you think, whereas for south walney, you think, it was a calm morning, it was cold, the wind was cold in the sun and your hands took about an hour to warm up, while you were making breakfast, doing the washing up, your hands were warming and your fingers were struggling to hold the sponge, the wind was fierce, on that calm morning, you think, whereas now the wind whips the spit, uninhabited by humans, densely inhabited by flux of birds and seals, in and out of water, in and out of wind, and touched, you think, by the extended auditorium of the acoustic commons. the acoustic commons, you think, is composed of subject groups (Guattari), curious communities of inquiry (Haraway), unlikely assemblages of people, not humans and machines in states of repair. in response to states of insecurity, you think, people and machines and non humans group together in unlikely coalitions, to undertake repair, to complain and bitch about the state of insecurity and harp back hopelessly to better days, which of course they can't remember, because never happened, not really, and to hark forward - the sea is rolling now, deeply, a long deep swell. the vibrating rock or cable will pause for a while now and then and then it will rattle again - reminding the listener of failure and repair, reminding them of the state of insecurity of fragile coalitions, unlikely assemblies of listening, in heavy rain, in beating rain and fierce squally wind off the north atlantic, barely mediated by island masses, with the wind striking every object differently, striking, stroking, meeting every object differently, so it resonates: surprisingly: surprise is the nature of listening towards the future: the coming community of agamben, in which the single hawk spotted by Bashō, perhaps, illuminates the halo, opens the world of objects to new relations - these heavily veiled objects, muffled, withheld, exhausted - a seabird passes - a sea bird crosses the sonic field the way a bird of Braque crosses the painted field - it articulates the space and it interpellates the listener, who is in their house, reminding them how it is to be in a state of exposure - the redshank, that tall bird - rising and calling in descending tones, calls the listener back from forgetfulness even as they slip into a sense of insulation - the redshank, recalling the failure of insulation via insertion in the audio field, as by its inhabiting of turbulent fluxes between air, water and wet ground, recalls exposure to the elements and the atomic composition of matter - atoms or waves. from the beach, fully obscure to the eye, we sense rather than see the cuboids of the _________ nuclear power station, just as we sense rather than see or hear the iconic Sellafield site further up the coast. we're on the nuclear coast between the constant thrum and rumble of wind turbines, generation of nuclear power stations and nuclear fuel processing facilities - a flock of twites is calling - whether twites or linnets, the contact calls of small birds over the roaring of the wind and the pounding of the surf especially in the right channel do in fact re articulate the space of the sky, the air, on the verge of drowning out by surf - the surf will wash over, you think. however, whereas we think fixedly of fixed areas of land - islands, established territories and pieces of land, fit for demarcation and division and sub section, allocation and seizure, we think, nevertheless, the state of land is in flux we think, here on south walney where you are sitting now, at this old machine, this complex of fluxes, where red boulder clays, sands and gravels are constantly being eroded, especially we can say in the course of violent storms, beating rain and high winds which batter the west coast of south walney, scouring the west coast and carrying away quantities of sand, gravel and clay, carrying them in suspension or moving them, rolling and sweeping them south and re depositing them in a a constant fluctuation movement along the extended spit at the south end of walney , the southermost finger of the south walney island or near island, in an extrusion of land or almost land curled back towards barrow like a finger,
you think
so that not only is the physical width of walney in constant flux due to the continuous coming and going of the tide, the almost 10m tide of walney which sweeps in and out every 12 hours more or less (less) in conformation with the orbit of the moon - in response to the orbits of the moon, in conjunction with the position of the sun vis a vis the earth (so that the gravitational pull of the moon and sun either cancel or reinforce each other, creating different heights of tides) - the width of south walney is constantly in flux, at the same time as the southerly extent of walney is in permanent play, as it is scoured southwards, so the island moves, something like the mythical island of doctor doolittle, or ever more like the actual island of biomass documented by Sukanta Majumdar and the film crew of The Lady of The Lake, where people equally and at a faster rate inhabit shifting barely-land barely territory - the sea is high - the tide is at its highest at 1.23 pm (9.73m) in a little over an hour

23 SEP 10.17

Listening to the stream now, a sense of distance. Feint sounds far away. Constant churning of the wind turbines. Small birds, twites or linnets perhaps, in the drying plants behind the beach. Or distant feint seabird cries from the shoreline where the water has withdrawn. As time passes, towards high tide (9.52m) at 1.58pm, you think, the sounds of seabirds will draw closer: the island will contract and its sounds will concentrate.

Towards installation / performance at Barrow Market

Could eg:
-- Re present some Tinbergen experiments - show the film?
-- Wind studies with field recordings and images / drawings
-- Tour of the near island with a remote transmitter, shown on a projector, perhaps with image feeds by eg snapchat or Periscope
-- Talk / performance: fluxes eg a slightly mad presentation that would bring all these threads together
-- Fungi
-- Gulls
-- Tides and tide charts and tables: tidal rhythms, contraction and dilation of the land - flux

Notes

Tinbergen studied with Lorenz - whom Vincian Despret writes about. See Sarah D's copy of the Tinbergen
Migration

Resources

Lesser black backed gull remote monitoring by Univ of Amsterdam: http://www.uva-bits.nl/project/seabird-windfarm-interactions-walney-2/

Sarah's private link to the SMS feeds from the tagged gulls

General description of the project:
http://www.uva-bits.nl/

South Walney Nature Reserve: a haven for birds
Cumbria Wildlife Trust leaflet (A3 folded)

The Natural History of Walney Island by Tim Dean

The Herring Gull's World by Niko Tinbergen

South Walney Nature Reserve
Cumbria Trust for Nature Conservation

Tinbergen film (DVD from Sarah)

Schwitters

Ruskin

Vinçiane Despret: What would animals tell us if we asked the right questions?

Makoto Ueda: Bashō and his interpreters - Selected hokku with commentary

Grant Smith