1 Early Summer
From Munich we take four regional trains
southeast, watch spruce and fir and limestone
erupt in the distance, like a jagged outcrop of
mushrooms sent up by the mycorrhizal collision
of the Eurasian and African plates. Their hard grey flesh
remnants of Tethys: a primeval ocean that found itself
sky bound thirty million years ago, and which, in today’s
warmth, produces in us a feeling of the coastal. An ocean that
inadvertently led to the early industrialisation of this place. The first
recorded mine in the region opening in 1517. The first taste of
capital buried in rich salt deposits. And somewhere between tourists
glued to glass and a group of young girls getting pissed on beer, i imagine
two Bartgeier above the tree line, perched on a rocky ledge—orange beards
like lion manes aflame in the July heat—looking through a light haze
to shadows sharpened by peaks. How they’d stand and stretch their wings,
lift bodies into the thermals, and swim out across this jagged amphitheatre,
tracing ridgelines, rivers, ravines. Or tracing the way one Geier pivots, circles,
looks to its partner. Then together, turning and circling to lock into a descent.
Lock onto the collapsed architecture of a carcass wedged between some
crevasse. And somewhere between Berchtesgaden and Königssee, i tell you
of the way they prefer bone to meat, can swallow bones the size of a human arm,
or, if too large, fly up and shatter them over rocks. A technique for which they’ve been
dubbed the “Knochenbrecher” (bone breaker). Their 0.7-pH stomach acid as severe
as a battery, making their digestion the most corrosive of any animal, allowing them
to decompose bone to a white chalk that a tour guide—a few valleys over and a few
days later—might use to write on the wall of an old hardwood hut, listening to the playful
high-pitched disgust of school children squealing with joy. And beyond that familiar noise,
we don’t need to imagine the snow speaking fast. The way snow melts to a human
tongue that carves out the land like an ice cream, to find the clear waters of
Königssee, where we sit with pretzels, Obazda, and an Augustiner, watching
tourists ferried across the lake in small wooden boats. Ducks at the shore
waiting for lunch. The Bartgeier somewhere back above, resting
amid the fossilised remnants of ancient crustaceans, watching
the light river between peaks. All the angles we see and can’t see.
2 Das Aussterben
In 1913 the last Bartgeier of middle Europe was shot
in the Aosta Valley of Italy. A black-and-white photograph
confirming its extinction. Three men in rugged sporting attire
holding the largest bird of the Alps up to a camera. Its wing- span
over two metres, stretching from edge to edge. The man in
the centre holds up what would’ve been the bird’s drooping head.
The man on the right, a hint of lips through beard, smiles towards a future
with a particular confidence. A future he couldn’t have known or should
have known but couldn’t. Life not easy to comprehend for men raised on
the routine death of animals for food, for currency, for sport. Who learnt
young to view the nonhuman as if through a glass-bottom boat. As if a painting
frozen, framed, and hung on the walls of a Munich museum. Who learnt through
stories-turned-to-myths-turned-to-“facts” that the Bartgeier was in fact a “Lammergeier”
(lamb vulture) and “Kindsräuber” (child thief), despite the bird never hunting
fresh flesh. In Appenzell one was said to have carried off a child in front of his
parents. In Urnerland a woman tells of how she was abducted by one as a little girl.
On the Silberalp another swooped down on a shepherd boy, tearing him to pieces.
But the animal not only made extinct from the Alps through language but
human settlement. Its key prey—ibex, chamois, red deer—almost all driven
to extinction here. And even when the Bartgeier was able to find a feed,
they often died of the poison it had been laced with. And after our lunch,
across the lake, in Gaststätte St. Bartholomä, we find a 400- year-
old painting of two Bartgeier on a wall. A life-sized depiction
of two adults who, according to the inscription, were shot
above a nearby chapel on 9 and 10 March 1650.
The central adult depicted with its wings extended, much
like the 1913 photograph, but with the addition of a small
lamb between its feet. The reason for its death illustrated
by a text that traces the wingspan in old Fraktur script.
On the left: “Because of the harm done by the bearded
vulture, people also go after him.” On the right:
“The 127th one—Hans Dürner has killed it.”
3 Solastalgia: An Interlude
Through pine forest we trace the lake’s edge, get
naked, and swim out into the cold burn of
clear reflections. Across the water a
flugelhorn traces the tectonic
texture of the valley, where
today Bartgeier live like
the first of their kind, and
where i think of what lies
at the centre of this desire
to restore the world to a
past that is as real as it is
imagined. To fix a point
on a specific time in place
and say: See here? That’s
when things were in per-
fect motion. When we,
as humans, held a sense
of earthly unison.To say
it’s like walking alongside
a friend or stranger and
noting how the footsteps
fall into sync with one
another. To say, now
imagine those feet fall-
ing back into sync with
the “other.” But what of
the “others” we take on
this ark of conservation?
That path of re-creation
as much as recreation.
What do the others think
of our ambition to redis-
cover ourselves in their
image? To other ourselves
through a desire for attach-
ment. A desire to replicate
the idea that things never
change in a world that
never stops changing. To
replicate the way humans
think things should be . . .
Solastalgia is a term that
describes homesickness
for a place irreversibly
damaged by human
activity. But what term
do we give to the re-
versal of such actions
in a world where such
reversals will become
just a poor man’s re-
enactment? By the lake
we sit and feel the sun
shiver, disappear behind
peaks, raise the hairs on our arms
and legs, watch smooth grey stones recede
into the shallows, the shadows, this turning Earth.
4 Sprachlos
In 1986 the first Bartgeier were successfully reintroduced
to the Alps in Austria: a breeding program drawing on cousins
in Asia, Africa, and southern Europe. And yet today they are
still threatened by rogue hunters working through the re-
circulation of myths. By animal carcasses riddled
with lead ammunition, which kills them almost
instantly. The strange evolutionary blessing
of a 0.7-pH stomach acid also then a corrosive
curse. And for this reason lead ammunition banned
in some Alpine regions. For this reason, an EU-wide ban
currently being sought in 2025. And as we leave the lake, catch
a bus back to Berchtesgaden, board four trains back to Munich,
i tell you of their names: Bavaria, Wally, Nepomuk, Sisi, Dagmar,
Recka, Vinzenz, Wiggerl. How the colour red has always been more
than a colour. How we discover such ideas through encounters. The way
red can trigger an increase of blood to the cock. The way like this the colour
turns the birds on. Or so some say. And so whenever the Bartgeier can,
it bathes its body in pools of iron-rich oxide mud, sits and dries like a
Pacific cormorant in the sun. How some say it is an act of flirting, to turn
the other on. The way a teenage boy, before a party, will wax his hair,
shave uneven stubble, and spray his acne-covered face with an
aftershave an advertisement on TikTok told him was slay.
The birds known to couple all their lives, but also known
for their promiscuity. So too for their queering. Three males
in Tirol routinely mating only to find there’s no eggs but still
mating again, for the thrill, the love, the fuck of it. As we arrive
back in Munich and i find a tape measure, show you how their
wingspan is the width of your bedroom. How i sit down to write
something that might capture a reason for why we do this.
Why we seek to give language to the sprachlos. The
speechless. Or how our language is a speech laden
with the loss of some mycorrhizal resonance.
How outside the window, on Bereiteranger street,
it’s not hard to imagine the sound of wings
cutting through the warm evening of another
early summer. How, if you listen closely enough,
you might glimpse a Bartgeier down by the Isar
feasting on a greasy box of chicken bones.
