Why the birds are singing

Feeling gloriously pummelled by our two day escape to the sticks of Dinant. Same area as the weekend before, but this time we brought our bikes and went a little further afield. On Sunday we arrived in Dinant, and then rode the 15 minutes or so to Anseremme, where we got a super cheap hotel room at Ansiaux; that was the same place we rented kayaks from the next day. After buying a picnic at the Spar underneath the giant motorway bridge, we rode our bikes to Furfooz:


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The bit where it goes down from Anseremme along the river was nice and quite flat, but the bit where it goes back up again into the little peak was uphill, and there were several times I caught myself panting for air like an overexcited Jack Russell. But I enjoyed panting for air there. It was clean and pure and didn't smell like anything except trees and/or cowshit. And it was a series of beautiful views and vistas, what's more - forests, one castle, and those fantastic limestone cliffs that water and time have sculpted in the most 'whaaaaaaa?' ways.

Speaking of, a bit attraction of Furfooz Park are its strange caves. Strange stories attached to them - of a golden fleece, of a race of mortal but magical dwarves called the Nutons who would do work for the villagers in exchange for sweets - and a long history. The park had been continuously occupied over several thousand years and had some Neolithic burial grounds in it. A creepy, beautiful place, to which we didn't bring cameras, because of what we got up to the next day - more kayaking - and this time, rather wetter.

We took the five hour trip (from Houyet to Anseremme) instead of the three hour one (from Gendron), and I believe we stretched it out to six or seven. Fewer people on the river this time and we each got a monoplace kayak, so we could arse around a bit until we started feeling like we knew what we were doing. I was continuously challenged by my disabilities in discerning right from left, as I will be when I hit the road with a driving instructor - oh boy - but very quickly it started feeling like second nature. So manoeuvrable, so comfortable, so soothing. I think when we move back to a country with space we'll buy a couple of real kayaks and be serious about it.

But in the meantime, in this country without space, it was very beautiful. Most of the route was clearly inhabited, with chip stands and caravans and little dogs barking, but in the first two hours especially, from Houyet to Gendron, we often had the feeling of paddling our way through a wet, primeval forest, much like our predecessors might have.

In Canada as well, during any sort of nature adventure, that is a feeling that stays with me and makes the experience charming - going across the lake on a canoe, hiking through a forest, sitting next to a fire - thinking 'this is much like our predecessors might have done.' It's as much a part of the experience for me as the beauty of the nature itself, because as I look there's the knowledge that I'm seeing it from the physical perspective that people have been seeing it from for thousands and thousands of years. And it casts me onto wondering about how perceptions of beauty may have changed, or, before that, if they came into existence. It's hard to believe that they didn't always exist.

Part of thinking about that was looking at the beautiful birds on the way, including two I hadn't seen before, the European kingfisher and the little egret - both very beautiful, and I don't know if there's a more dramatically coloured bird in northern Europe than the kingfisher. At first I only noticed them as electric blue flashes darting over the river, like massive dragonflies, but as I learnt how to stop being so damn splashy with the oar I saw them roosting or waiting to kill fish - saw their bright gold bib as well as their insane blueness. And the whole way, without all the screaming Wallonians of last weekend, was filled with birdsong.

And it made me ask myself: when we think of male-to-female display in the the natural world, and most dramatically in the bird world, doesn't it make rather more sense to assume the lady birds have some abstract notion of 'ooo, that's a lovely one' than some concrete notion of 'ooo, that plumage/trilling indicates that the male bird is in a fine state of health, which means if I let him fuck me our offspring will be in a good competitive position in regards to the offspring of less well-plumaged/trilling male birds'? Doesn't it make rather more sense to assume, that is, that a well-developed aesthetic sense is probably innate in many, many species?

If you consider people, for example; men have cocks that hang outside their bodies even when they're not using them, although all our closest relatives do not - chimpanzees keep them nicely tucked in, as do gorillas (who are hung like crickets, by the way). I believe the consensus is that this is because cocks are instruments of male-to-female display in our species, wherein men and women are rather closer to the same size than they are in our relative's races, making straightforward rape an untenable reproductive strategy more than some of the time.

And considering the scientific idea of natural selection is only a century and a half old, and that the similar idea of animal husbandry is probably only about 17,000 years old, but that cocks have been awesome for at least 200,000 years (I expect that the ancestors of homo sapiens also had awesome cocks, but for some reason this is never mentioned in the speculative scientific literature *cough written by male scientists cough* that I've read on the subject), I think the assumption that women, at least, have had a well-developed abstract aesthetic sense ('ooo, that's a lovely one') since the dawn of our species can be taken as true.

And I think a corollary of that is that you can expect a sense of beauty in any species where the sexual dimorphism is slight enough to make reproduction about the female response to beauty, rather then big males competing with each other for the privilege of mounting their little sisters. I wonder what sort of poem a bird would write if it could. And I wonder if we would be so casual about killing them and taking their stuff if we believed that they would write it if they could.