Introduction
Welcome to the Cathedral on a splendid autumn morning.
You know I have never quite got used to standing up here and talking. In some ways it’s all too familiar. The climb up the stairs, the slightly faded service sheets left out for the convenience of the clergy, the microphone and occasionally the box for the more vertically challenged preachers. But I also find myself thinking, with some trepidation, about those who have stood here before me – the Bishops and Archbishops, the Deans and Archdeacons, the statesmen and women, the great and the mostly good. That sense of history, of what has gone before and the responsibility that that brings is inescapable.
That’s exactly as it should be – and it should feel a bit like that for everyone who comes here for a service. Let’s face it, for over a century and a quarter schoolboys (and girls) from Bishops have been sitting in serried ranks in the nave and transepts – sometimes fidgeting, perhaps wondering whether to sing or not, occasionally even almost asleep. There’s nothing new …
Whether this is your first proper Cathedral service or your fiftieth, whether you are at the back, front or side, whether this feels like home turf or an away fixture, can I encourage you to make the most of the next 40 minutes? Look around you, soak it up, don’t just ‘get used to it’. This really is not a standard school experience. Listen, think, take part – and take something away in the way of ideas. It is, after all, your service, so enjoy it!
Main Reading
I make no apology for focusing this morning on a story, one in which I have played a very small bit part, like the most minor of film extras, fitfully glimpsed from time to time as the set changes. The story concerns a bird called the Red Kite, and its rise – and fall – and rise again. The Kite is a proxy measure – an indicator of the health or otherwise of our environment, a barometer for creationtide in the southern English chalkscape.
To start my story I have to go back through time to 1970. I was just 9 years old – in other words in Year 4 in primary school and I had been a birdwatcher – a junior ornithologist – for a couple of years already. For my birthday that year my mum and dad gave me this – The Reader’s Digest/AA Book of British Birds. Now for a 9 year old that’s a big book – but by 2 months later, I had read it cover-to-cover. Bird description, behaviour, breeding, feeding, migration, regional distribution, social hierarchy, evolution and population trends became my specialist subject. I just soaked it all up, internalising the full range of British breeding and none-breeding types as well as those visitors – migrants and vagrants to our island shores from far-flung, exotic places across land and sea. From Europe, Africa, Asia and even the Americas, birds are blown to Britain and there was the evidence as their pictures graced the back of my book. I even learned to tell the difference between a lesser yellow legs and a long-billed dowitcher. How sad is that?!
Now exotic wanderers often generate excitement and interest which is intense but short-lived, the super-novae of the ornithologists universe. More important are the resident species, as these are the birds that you’ll see more often and with less travel. I cut my naturalist’s teeth on the birds of the Kentish countryside and coast – common partridge, quail, sparrow hawk and kestrel, with wildfowl and marsh harriers featuring from summer holidays on Romney Marsh. Lots of interest and diversity then, but it was immediately evident to me that everything was not so healthy for some of the birds in my book. Raptors – birds of prey – were on the slippery slope towards extinction as they ingested the bio-accumulative pesticides DDE and DDT. These chemicals led to thinning of eggshells and populations plummeted, including that of the Red Kite. Some pages of my book, evidently, depicted birds that I was never going to see.
That feeling of pessimism persisted through my teens and early twenties, and despite travelling the length and breadth of Britain, I had never actually seen a Red Kite first hand.
That changed, finally, when I went to mid-Wales to do some research. There, between 1982 and 1986 on the reserves of Dinas and Gwenffrwd I was working in the only place in Britain where Kites were breeding. There were perhaps just 20 pairs – 40 birds in the whole of Britain, and yet I would see them daily as they drifted on drooping wings above glorious Welsh hillsides. I did some work to help on the reserves while I was there – what an absolute privilege, and yet still I knew that I was engaging with a species on the very brink of disappearing altogether.
This all sounds very gloomy and very familiar too - yet another case of environmental loss, with action coming too little and too late. But it’s not and the evidence comes remarkably from a couple of Saturdays back when I was watching football at the Ray Mac. About mid-way through the first half, Salisbury were 1-0 up against Hartley Wintney and my attention wandered away from the action on the pitch to the horizon to the north of the ground. And there, circling in the thermals over the fields beyond the Old Sarum Estate was a Kite. I honestly don’t think anyone else was aware but for those few brief moments I was transfixed by the beauty of that distant shape, floating languidly across the skyline. Now, in the past decade, the Kite is back – throughout southern Britain, in its rightful place – brought back by reintroduction, by protection, by research and by stewardship. Peripeteae brought about by science too, through the banning of those toxic pesticides. Just like shares, indicators of environmental health can be turned around it’s not an inexorable downward slope.
A story then about the fall and the rise of the Red Kite, but a story that is also a clear example for how humankind has the power to manage the environment in a sustainable way, even reversing damage, that has been done over decades of ignorance or complacency I think that stories like that of the Kite give hope – and creationtide is exactly the time of year when that hope – and action – is needed.
