The Yellow Bittern by David Higgins

31 July, 1917. The Western Front, near Ypres. The British have launched a huge assault on German lines. Soldiers from the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers toil, mired in mud and death. They are worn out by months of active service and days of incessant bombardment. Their task is to lay down beech planks, bolted together to form one of the wooden paths vital for the army’s advance. They stop to drink tea. A shell explodes. A young man, broad faced and strongly built, is blown to bits. His identification disc reveals that he is the Irish poet, Francis Ledwidge.

Despite the chaos and suffering he experienced as a soldier, Ledwidge’s writing remained largely hopeful and lyrical up until his death. In a letter written a few days earlier, he described his plans to finish his next book if granted leave in the autumn, and his longing for the sounds of home: ‘the swish of the reeds at Slane and the voices I used to hear coming over the low hills of Currabwee’. But his intense attachment to the landscape of his youth was inflected by turbulent politics. The previous summer in Slane he had written would what become his best-known poem, ‘Thomas MacDonagh’. The elegy’s pastoral tranquillity belies its origins. MacDonagh, a fellow poet and one of Ledwidge’s heroes, had just been executed by firing squad in Dublin following a secret court martial. This was punishment for his actions as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, the armed rebellion against the British government in April 1916. In his last letter, MacDonagh wrote of his heartbreak about leaving behind his wife and children but expressed his firm belief that the Rising marked the beginning of Irish freedom. Ledwidge was himself a committed Republican and had been a member of the Irish Volunteers, a force which played a prominent role in the Rising. When the First World War broke out in 1914, however, the Volunteers had split: some called for Irish neutrality, while others supported Britain’s war in Europe. Ledwidge’s reasons for taking the latter view were complex, although he later summarised them with the claim that ‘I joined the British army because she stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilisation’. Given his divided loyalties, it is unsurprising that the failure of the Rising, and the killing of his friend by British soldiers, caused him deep distress.

Ledwidge transmuted his turmoil into a short elegy that can be read as an allegory for the rebirth of Ireland. I am most intrigued by the first two lines: ‘He shall not hear the bittern cry / In the wild sky, where he is lain’. They likely refer to the fact that, like the other leaders of the Rising, MacDonagh was buried without ceremony at the military cemetery Arbour Hill, in Dublin, rather than his native Tipperary. His body was therefore far from the rural landscape of his youth. This would also happen to Ledwidge; what was left of him was buried near Ypres. But while living in Ireland, it is unlikely that either man would have heard a bittern. They had been extinct as a breeding species there since the middle of the nineteenth century. A few Continental vagrants might have appeared every winter, but finding a bittern, let alone hearing its flight call, must have been exceptionally rare.

Ledwidge chose the bittern rather than a more obvious species, such as the grey heron, in allusion to MacDonagh’s translation of the eighteenth-century Irish language poem ‘An Bonnán Buí’ (‘The Yellow Bittern’) by Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna. This is a strange and memorable text: an elegiac drinking song built around an aching sense of loss for a wild creature. It begins with the sottish speaker encountering the bird’s decaying body. He does not mourn for ‘common birds’ such as ‘the black-bird, the corn-crake, and the crane’. (Read in the present day, even these lines convey loss: cranes have been extinct in Ireland since the eighteenth century and corncrakes only survive in small numbers.) Instead, he mourns for ‘the bittern that’s shy and apart / And drinks in the marsh from the lone bog-drain’. He addresses the bittern directly, telling him that if he had known of his impending death, he would have run across the marsh to revive him. The poem’s central conceit is that the bittern has died of thirst, despite his watery habitat, and therefore offers an instructive lesson. While the speaker’s ‘darling’ warns him to stop drinking alcohol, he concludes that, to avoid the bittern’s fate, he should drink as much as possible. The poem ends obliquely. ‘A bittern calls from a wineless place’ and tells the speaker that he will return over the sea when it is summer. But the speaker fears that the bird ‘may fail in his flight’: a fear that he can only assuage by further boozing.

I think of the Eurasian bittern, Botaurus stellaris, as more brown than yellow, but then they are not easy birds to observe. They stopped breeding in Britain as well as Ireland during the nineteenth century. A slow return in the twentieth century stalled and by the 1990s only a handful remained. Their recovery this century in England and Wales is a remarkable conservation success. I occasionally stumble across them. At Fairburn Ings south of Leeds, where gigantic spoil heaps from coal mining have been transformed into a wetland reserve, I walk along the Coal Tips trail looking down into the valley to the right. I am searching for green woodpeckers, birds that are pleasingly easy to identify through their hysterical calls and bright yellow rumps as they fly away. A great white egret floats up from the valley and drifts past majestically at eye level. As I approach the lake to my left, I notice a slight anomaly in the far corner. Perhaps some stray reeds, perhaps not. I look in my binoculars, which does not help much, but something is odd. I move closer. Now I am not sure why I ever doubted that it was a bittern. Its body is hidden, but its head and neck are sticking out at a 45-degree angle. It looks like they are floating magically suspended in the air. The bird is completely still, the kind of stillness that I cannot imagine a human ever achieving. It is a clear, crisp morning, and the light reveals the intricate patterning of the bittern’s head. Its bill looks sharp and deadly. I wait. It waits. Then I move further along the path, round the edge of the lake, so that we are only a few yards apart. I pray that no cyclists or dog walkers appear. It moves its head quizzically. It has not looked at me, or acknowledged my presence in any way, but it knows that I am watching. It stares, apparently unconcerned, into the middle distance. Eventually, I move away. In apparent synchronicity, it vanishes back into the reeds.

At North Cave Wetlands in East Yorkshire, I search unsuccessfully for a green-winged teal within the massed ranks of common teal. A bittern emerges from the bank just below the hide. It makes a wing-assisted and ungainly leap across a narrow part of the lake to perch at the edge of the reeds on the other side. The morning sun is behind me, and I can see its upper half clearly in my binoculars. Its stance is erect, with its beak and head pointed directly upwards. This is sometimes known as ‘bitterning’, which allows it better to blend into the landscape. I try to get my scope on it to examine the complex streaking of its plumage: shades of buff and brown, with black markings that are most prominent on its crown and neck. Here my birding skills fail me, as I spend precious seconds picking it out. Most of its bulk merges into the patterns and shadows of its environment. There is a magical fluidity at work: water, reeds, bittern intermingle. I manage a few moments admiring the bird’s striking head and bill, which make an elongated triangle against the sky, before it crouches down and fades away into the dimness of the vegetation.

My favourite bird identification guide describes the bittern as ‘a remarkably cryptic heron-like bird of waterside reed/sedge beds: often very hard to see’. When I first read this, I was unaware that ‘cryptic’ has a zoological meaning. The book seemed to be making a philosophical statement: that the bird’s enigmatic nature makes it an insoluble puzzle beyond human understanding. This may well be the case but, as a technical term, ‘cryptic’ specifically refers to the bittern’s colouration and camouflage. As the guide explains, the bird is ‘yellowish tawny-brown, marked with black-brown all over’. It has a ‘black cap, streak from bill; long stripes on foreneck’ and green legs. Bitterns often lurk deep within the reeds that their plumage so closely resembles. The best chance for an encounter is to catch them in flight – especially when they are searching for food during the breeding season – or hunting at the edge of the reeds. I think of them as a little shorter than grey herons. ­­Their necks are not so long and elegant, but their bodies seem broader and chunkier. If herons are built like runners, bitterns are more like weightlifters. Often their full size is not obvious, as they move in a hunched-up crouch. Despite their bulkiness, therefore, they are creeping creatures, apparently able to appear and disappear at will.

Bitterns are easier to hear than to see. What tends to be heard, though, is not their ‘cry / In the wild sky’, but the male’s remarkable booming call emerging from reedbeds in the breeding season. The nineteenth-century English poet John Clare states that ‘putting ones mouth to the bung hole of an empty large cask & uttering the word “butter bump” sharply would imitate the sound exactly’. Blowing over a bottle gives you some idea of the call’s timbre, although not of its intensity and range (which can be several kilometres). To my ear, it varies considerably: sometimes it is two or three distinct notes, sometimes only one. The stressed-unstressed-stressed metre of ‘butter bump’ (one of the bittern’s many colloquial names) captures the emphasis of the three-note calls, but not their pitch: often the second note is a couple of tones lower that the first and the third a tone higher than the second. The result is mournful and melodious and unlike anything else you are likely to hear. Traditionally, the boom was thought to presage tragedy. As a child, Clare was told that it came from ‘a bird larger then an ox that coud kill all the cattle in the fen if it choose & destroy the villager likewise’. However, ‘all the harm it did was the drinking so much water as to nearly empty the dykes in summer and spoil the rest so that the stock coud scarcly drink what it left’. I wonder if a similar tale was known to the composer of ‘The Yellow Bittern’.

Deep in the gloomy December of 2021, when I had just started writing and thinking about bitterns, my father died suddenly. He was a heavy drinker and that likely contributed to his death. Certainly, it permeated and scarred his final years. I learned from him how alcohol can move gradually, imperceptibly, from being a source of fun, to a crutch, to a debilitating addiction. When I think of him now, I sometimes connect him to Clare’s bittern drinking the fen dry; to the speaker of ‘The Yellow Bittern’, desperate for more booze; and to the bittern himself, dying alone and trapped forever in a ‘wineless place’. A good friend has pointed out that, by doing so, I am following the alcoholic logic of the poem’s speaker, who projects his own compulsion on to the water-drinking bittern. I also fear that I am turning my father – a complex and talented man – into a cipher by focusing on a single aspect of his life. And yet, just like him, I find it hard to resist obsessive ruminations.

Since Dad died, I have thought too much about loss. I think about what his old age could have been, and what it was. I think of him lonely, disconnected, too parched to cry for help. I think that I should have done more to support him. I think that, like him, I struggle to commit to anything bigger than myself. I think about John Clare, photographed two years before his death, old and paunchy from being confined in asylums for decades, eerily resembling my father. I think about Francis Ledwidge: a writer of remarkable promise, snuffed out in an instant. I think about Thomas MacDonagh’s readiness to die for the Irish cause, even if that meant leaving behind his beloved family. I think about my own death, sometimes with vague discomfort and sometimes with abject terror. I think about my children and how much they need me, and how I desperately want to see them grow up, even as I fear for their futures. I think about our planet’s diminishing habitats, including the bittern’s wetland strongholds, always in danger of being destroyed by development. I struggle, right now, to think beyond stories of precarity and decline: personal, political, ecological. But there are always other stories. Sometimes I think about bitterns, and how they were nearing extinction in England and Wales, and how they have returned because enough people believe that they matter: not because of any supposed ‘services’ that they provide, but just because they matter. Their range is expanding, and they now breed as far as north as Teesside and as far west as Anglesey. Perhaps, in time, they will cross the Irish Sea.

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Sources and Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Kiera Chapman, Claire Connolly, and Pippa Marland for their help and encouragement. I draw on Alice Curtayne’s biography of Ledwidge (New Island, 2017) and Ledwidge’s Selected Poems (New Island, 2017). The bird guide mentioned is Britain’s Birds (Princeton University Press, 2016), by Rob Hume, Robert Still, Andy Swash, Hugh Harrop and David Tipling. For Clare and bitterns, see John Clare’s Birds (Oxford University Press, 1982), edited by Eric Robinson and Richard Fitter. For a fine selection of bittern calls, see https://xeno-canto.org/species/Botaurus-stellaris

David Higgins is Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Leeds. He is writing a book about bitterns.

Photograph by the author.