Mark Cocker
'It takes a whole universe to make the one small black bird'
Photos of the month
Speculating on Spectacle
Almost nothing has inspired fear (in me ) like the blank you-don’t-exist-to-me stare of a lioness. At dusk! 
The Wash wader roost is one of my top ten British spectacles but I wd be keen to hear about yours 
Vulture feeding station in Spain. Here it was momentary drama, the faux ferocity of the birds and the light amid the duststorm they created. 
Five cheetahs around a warthog that they despatched and consumed in 30 minutes. Barbarous spectacle and beauty in one 
And it is surely the exuberance created by so many individual lives altogether with the beauty of their momentary collective shapes that affect us with starling murmurations 
No British location (IMO) matches St Kilda. At any one time scores, possibly hundreds, of thousands of birds are visible at any moment 
The owl roost at Kikinda, Serbia was truly unforgettable for the blend of silence, ordinariness (it is in the streets, by the bank and the school) and the unaccustomed closeness of so many usually inaccessible birds 
I am a sucker for hirundines but hirundines in big numbers. Wow! The exquisite liquid shapes, liquid sounds and the colour of them 
But when we want European colour and visual drama a flock of waxwings can move you to tears 
It is not all drama. Yews are this incomparable mix of silence, stillness, age and what I call an almost hideous beauty 
ditto 
Woods can evoke most of these feelings also, especially in autumn 
Then there is the ephemeral power and spectacle of flowers in big stands 
The machair in the Outer Hebrides was among the most remarkable floral places I have ever seen 
To capture spectacle is almost always a challenge and part of the spectacle itself 
Spectacle is ungraspable, elusive, hard to hold 
…. and capture in images or words 
Sometimes it is the strangeness of life – and fungi have it more than most organisms – but waxcaps in vast numbers are magical 
Sometimes a good old tree-rotting honey fungus can possess it 
And things don’t always have to be big to be impressive. My affair with spectacle began when I was 12 in Rhodes, the Greek island, where i visited the Valley of the Butterflies. -a moth-rich dale where they gather to avoid the heat in immense numbers. That was 54 years ago and I still feel it and sort of remember it 
even one insect can be spectacular when you adjust your own sense of scale and get down on your knees – a posture appropriate to all natural spectacle 
where we can pray, or prey 
This tarantula was affecting for the blend of horror and pure tenderness (see her babies on her back!). And may be spectacle always invokes a blend of irreconcilable or at least, opposed feelings in us 
Of course size is never a barrier and often a precondition of what we think of as spectacle. The Flow Country is thus Britain’s most spectacular place 
And often it is simply the light … here on the Aegean Sea 
Or on the Staffordshire moors 
And sometimes spectacle entails a sense of completeness, that all of us and all of life are present and all are perfectly imperfect
Speculating on Spectacle
Next year I publish a book The Nature of Seeing (Cape Oct 26) which, while full of descriptions of animals, plants and places I’ve seen, is also an examination of the philosophical and moral implications of how we look at the world. I’ve been thinking about natural spectacle. What it is? Why we think something is spectacular? Why it moves us? I’ve assembled c30 images to illustrate some of the ideas, but what I am really interested in is what others find moving when they meet their fellow creatures and the others parts of life. and what you think makes a spectacle?
Where we often start is with drama – large and even dangerous animals. No land animal has filled me with greater sense of compelling terror and joy than lion. But these moments are rare and more often it is simply the exuberance of life expressed in abundance. That idea deflected me on to moments when it isn’t some momentary unfolding, like a flock of starling or waxwings, but the lives that have been in one place for centuries, like a tree, wood or flower meadow. Sometimes, of course, it is some shift in perspective that makes us see how small things contain their own kind of grandeur. For example, here the compound eyes on a dragonfly or the mixture of horror and tenderness expressed in a tarantula carrying her scores of baby spiderlings. Then it might be nothing more than the sky and the sea and the light playing upon one another that moves us. I’ve added some captions to some of the pics to unpick these thoughts further but I would love to know what you think.
Mark Cocker 