Cormorants

The Cormorants Hat Bowler saw off the Pembrokeshire coast when he was six became more than a passing sight: they formed the memory through which he describes both the bodily intensity of living and the beginning of his lifelong attention to birds. Their flight is recalled as something he tried to inhabit in imagination, not as a literal transformation; its force lies in how vividly it opened his perspective beyond his own.

The Pembrokeshire Encounter

On a family holiday, Hat sat on a beach beside a rough sea and watched two cormorants hurtle along just above the waves, perhaps a foot above them. He imagined what it would feel like to move through the air at that speed, with the ocean surging below and breaking waves seeming to reach upward. The imagined flight was physical: he pictured cold spray striking the birds’ bellies as they skimmed the water.

The scene holds together the birds’ swift movement and the sea’s threat. Hat’s effort was not simply to admire their appearance from shore, but to imagine the conditions of their passage through air and water. When asked whether he managed it, he said that he could just about imagine the physical sensation as a child; with adulthood, he had come to know what it felt like through living itself.

A Memory That Changed How He Watched Birds

The encounter did not end with the holiday. Hat said he never forgot the cormorants and remembered feeling that, at six, he had flown with them for a little while. Afterward, whenever he saw a bird, he tried to see things as the bird saw them. His interest gradually shifted from what he liked to pretend birds were doing toward what they were actually doing and learning about their behavior.

That distinction gives the memory its lasting consequence: imaginative identification led not away from observation, but toward it. Hat’s attention to birds began with an attempt to share their perspective and matured into curiosity about their real lives. The cormorants remained singular in his memory even as his interest widened to birds of every kind.

Meaning in the Conversation

Hat recounts the memory to Lavinia Maciver in a conversation that turns an apparently small childhood episode into an account of how he understands life. The cormorants’ flight supplies a bodily image for that understanding: speed, exposure to the force of the sea, and the nearness of danger. Lavinia listens compassionately and tells him that his account makes more sense than almost anything she has heard in the preceding days.

The birds are not presented as speaking or as knowing that Hat is watching them. Their significance arises from the distance between their actual flight and the child’s effort to imagine it. In the adult recollection, that effort remains both an early act of imaginative connection and the beginning of a more attentive way of seeing.