scaring crows  SCARING CROWS* HAYDEN LORIMER abstract. A long-form essay, arranged in a sequence of eight segments, in which I travel the countryside in search of a missing person: the scarecrow. Different aspects of the centuries-old practice of scarecrow making and bird scaring are described. Traditionally constructed as a likeness of the human form and erected in newly sown fields as a visual method for warding off feeding birds, the existence of this striking farmland contraption is variously reported: as having all but vanished and yet of making unexpected reappearances; as materially functional and complexly meaningful; as a figure summoned up by cultural memory and personal recollection; and as a focus for mixed feelings of loss, nostalgia, estrangement, and community. A version of “geographical portraiture” accumulates, in which a single, scenic landmark stands as the essay’s central fascination and simultaneously operates as a cipher for stories old and new, of agricultural society, country life, landscape politics, and rural values. Keywords: countryside, culture, landscape, memory, scarecrow.
How often when travelling, interest is aroused by some object seen from the train about which our fellow travellers (even did we care to ask them) probably know nothing. Maybe a fine old house, a distant spire, a specially beautiful scene, awakes the justifiable curiosity of the traveller, and yet how seldom can one obtain any information as to the places seen. London & North Eastern Railway,  “That’s strange.” The thought first occurred in passing. “They’ve all gone. Nowhere to be seen. Just vanished.” Cultural loss registered in the lay of the land, while shuttling cross-country. Fellow rail passengers dozed off the aftereffects of buffet trolley ploughman’s sandwiches. The open laptop idled. I window gazed. By rights these most basic contraptions should have been everywhere about, peopling the fields. This was the season after all. Early wheat, not long since sown, was just starting to show. Emerald tips hazed the fields, sprouting along deadeye drill lines. The barley crop was a bit farther on, unbroken sea green waves rolling over the land; just as verdant as Microsoft’s iconic desktop vista. Ragged black, birds bent their backs to the task, pecking, boring, tugging, and pulling. It’s said by country types that freshsown seeds and sweet young shoots make for the richest pickings. And all this new growth was so clearly in need of protection. The breadbasket awaited its standing guard. So where exactly were the scarecrows? Their absence having registered as conspicuous, I tried looking harder, absorbed by the search. * My thanks to three anonymous referees for their helpful appraisals of an earlier draft of this work. For bookshelf prompts, digital prods and regional pointers: William Hasty, Joe Gerlach, Maggie Bolton, Aire Wishart, Helen Macdonald, Mark Cocker, David Featherstone, Paul Hodge and Drew Mulholland. This essay benefitted from the contributions of unusually diverse audiences at Helpston Parish Church, the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh and the Excursions Symposium, University of Glasgow.
Dr. Lorimer is a reader in geography at the University of Glasgow, Glasgow  , Scotland; [hayden.lorimer@glasgow.ac.uk]. The Geographical Review  (): –, April  Copyright ©  by the American Geographical Society of New York    
His coat was black, and his head was bent, And as the wind shook him, the crows took him to the end. Mike & Lal Waterson,  By tradition, he’s the crudest kind of mannequin, styled somewhere between the grotesque and the carnivalesque. He has a head, two arms, and a torso, though often no legs to speak of. Instead, a single vertical stake, which serves as his spine, is driven deep into the loose, tilled earth. The line of his shoulders and outstretched arms is formed by a broom handle, this second spar of wood nailed at a right angle high up on the length of the other. He is dressed in cast-offs, or simple sacking. Depending on the fashion of the period (or the land that he calls home) he might sport a smock, knee-length jacket, waistcoat, oilskins or dungarees, and checkered shirt. Hemlines and cuffs can be snipped and frayed so to loosely flap when disturbed by the wind. Sometimes, a one-piece boilersuit does the job of masquerade just fine. His torso and limbs are filled up with straw, the best packing material available. A turnip or pumpkin makes do for a head. Few would spare a penny for his thoughts, and yet we quickly afford him an inner life of his own. Rough cuts in the flesh open up holes where, by human rights, a pair of eyes and mouth ought to be. He has been known to wear a wide-brimmed hat. For practical purpose, to hold a bottle-blond hairpiece of straw in place and to shade the fact that most often he lacks finer facial features. Further accessories and props (scarf, gloves, belt, and bag) are optional. Small arms can be carried: a wooden cudgel or, more often, a plank whittled into the shape of a gun. The scarecrow seldom seems to have cross-dressed, perhaps because commonly he is the product of male labor. For the sake of accuracy, he had a farmhand’s thin physique, or alternatively, was made to a likeness of the better-fed figure of the squire. His posture and body language (forever shooing things away) is intended to be indicative of a protective, even proprietary, attitude. The story goes that in the past his outfit comprised articles removed from a dead man’s wardrobe; one source, it would seem, for the scarecrow’s long-standing association with things sinister and presences supernatural. But it is also his sentinel positionstationed apart from, and yet so clearly a part of, the rhythm of country lifethat gives shape to uncanny stories of possession and concealment, shifty movements and slow transformations. When spotted he is always alone, keeping no company, set up to stand out, over yonder, right in the heart of the field or on the brow of a long ridge. Gaunt and solitary, he is a watcher and a keeper. Fixed, in a permanent state of wakefulness. Flapping, but entirely unflinching. No clockwatcher. He goes unpaid, but is uncomplaining. Nameless, his vigil sees out all weathers. A knot of mysteries. An old soul. Honest to himself. Foursquare. Or so it seemed. scaring crows  By the scarecrow’s downfall and disappearance might the fate or fortune of the pastoral myth of rural life be read? Quite possibly, though not just yet. When defined solely by purpose, he is, plain and simple, a deterrent. His job rolls together action and consequence. Scaring! The dispersal of rooks and crows, it need hardly be pointed out. But many other sorts of seed-stealing farmland birds too: great massings of starlings, the skylarks that settle to feed on oilseed rape (canola), or marauding flocks of wood pigeons and sparrows that might otherwise descend to plunder newly sown corn, picking a field clean of the farmer’s precious future.
For how hard it is to understand the landscape as you pass in a train from here to there and mutely it watches you vanish. W. G. Sebald,  The search-and-rescue job should have been easy. Railway carriages have picture windows perfectly shaped for field studies. To either side, the rectangular panes fix a frame around the rural scene, finding a rhyme in the squared-off geometry of farmland. Table-seats, forward facing, offer the best vantage point. High-speed trains should be avoided. The speed of cross-country services feels about right, passing through landscapes at a pace suited to the quick scan but without any nauseating side effects. For long stretches, embankments lift sight lines clear of any obstacle, opening a full field of view. Your eyes are never quite so elevated as to command the higher reaches, sometimes dropping down to flicker with the fence lines. But for the most part, midrange features and background are thrown wide, awaiting inspection. It doesn’t rank as proper survey work, of coursenot in the traditional sense, anyway. Rapid eye movements are always hurrying onward, quickening to meet the approaching scene, before a second glance, far less a lingering look, can be taken. “Locomotion should be slow,” argued Carl Sauer, “the slower the better, and often interrupted by leisurely halts to sit on vantage points and stop at question marks” (, ). Forefathers from an older disciplinary generation might have been generous enough to call my method an “unsystematic transect.” And me? It’s the caffeinated commuter-geographer’s opportunist way of taking a sample of farmland and spotting signs of change in the ways it’s being worked. Skimming along the cut of line, you approach working landscapes as if always appearing from around a long corner. By this deception, glimpses can be taken, of country life happening without, it seems, any great expectation of your arrival. Deer chew at the margins. Buzzards quarter the rough grazing. Lone tractors turn tight at field ends. Herds stand stock-still or are all of a sudden sent frisky. Minor roads rise and fall from view. Crows lift a little, then drop to earth just as soon.     And everywhere about, there is a contented sense of things that are mostly in keeping with custom and expectation. Evidence mounts up of the careful work of unseen stewards. Landmark features confirm a just-so geography. Enough to invite a child’s-eye view of the country, where there’s a place for everything and everything is in its place. All but for the absence of scarecrows, that is, and the vexing question of what has become of them. Of course, if you watch the world fiercely enough, persistence can eventually pay off. Midway between one side of the country and the other, I finally caught sight of my first working scarecrow. A modern variation on the theme: rust-red, the Ford Fiesta was parked up permanently, mid-acres. Several stops along the line, a spindly band of minimalist contraptions (formed by spearing a plastic chemical container onto pole tops) peopled another field. Success of sorts, but it still felt like a meager return for  miles of close attention.
“How old are you?” asked Susan. “All manner of ages,” replied the scarecrow. “My face is one age, and my feet are another, and my arms are the oldest of all.” “How very, very queer,” said Susan. Barbara Euphan Todd,  “Scare-Crow.” Two syllables, designed for a winged reaction: fright and flight. A defining feature and a repeat figure, in fields worldwide. Instantly recognizable, he is a premodern form of deception devised, it is thought, by the earliest pastoral peoples (Sax ). One of the first life-size effigies of the human form, the scarecrow is a universal and primary representation of our selves. And so, he sinks a taproot deep into the human history of the ancient world. Rich in symbolism, he demands our emotional response, coded as phantasmagorical, allegorical, or plainly substantial. Onto his figure much has been projected. He speaks of hunger pains and harvest hopes. He is a physical manifestation of claims to property, of a faith that the seasons will turn, of material want and family need. In medieval times, he is thought to have played a mystical part in pagan ritual, as a surrogate for human sacrifice. In the landscapes of the pastoral poets, he is benign and avuncular, posing no actual menace to farmland birds. Along the western frontier of the New World, he offered standout proof of richest bounty found or the bleakest, hardscrabble existence. In the fast-enclosing shires of England, he is a durable figure still required amid the unpretty business of agricultural improvement. The scarecrow mannequin can be figured as a labor-saving device, apparently doing his landlord’s bidding, replacing real men who were less compliant or reliable in character. By this reading of agricultural history, and the changing structures of the countryside, personhood falls away, he becomes it, just another contraption, marshaled into sharp politics and brutish economies, ranking along- scaring crows  side the threshing machine, stone wall, and parliamentary act as examples of agricultural technologies necessary for successful capital accumulation and resulting in peasant dispossession and rural depopulation (Jefferies ; Williams ). In the scarecrow’s case, this seems too forcefully put. He served as right-hand man to the great improver, progressive farmer and the struggling smallholder, spanning entire eras of crop husbandry. Whomever his master, a permanent field posting was far from certain. When birds were no longer kept in check, or where crops were badly pillaged, food security for family or market had to be achieved by other means. Until the early twentieth century, real human scarers were paid to pace field perimeters, equipped with a wooden rattle or clapperboard, to sound a likeness of the shotgun’s sharp retort, causing enough of a stir to startle opportunist feeders and harass repeat offenders. For the youngest lads or oldest men in the village it was one way to eke out a living. In his early boyhood years William Cobbettrenowned radical, journalist on horseback, and author of Rural Rides in the Counties ([] )earned his corn by scaring small birds. If farmers were fickle in their choice of weaponry for waging a never-ending war with the birds, avian attitudes could quickly turn against the scarecrow too. Growing familiarity with a dumb, long-standing foe manifested itself in behavior that communicated a mixture of comfort and contempt. A gallery of country art mocks (or mourns) the scarecrow reduced to a shadow of a man, keeling sideways, no more than a convenient perch for the birds. In this imagery, he operates as a threshold figure, betwixt and between warring species (rather than as the enemy of a peasant class), defining the limits and overlaps between human and nonhuman lives. Other images depict his end times, as a fallen figure, face down in the dirt, a husk of humanity, lying prone, innards disgorged, torn at by the very creatures that once kept a respectful distance. A chastening reminder of the human condition. His demise the stuff of a darker arcadia. Final comeuppance delivered by most vengeful beaks.
It is not uncommon for passers-by to attack a Scarecrow; stabbing and mutilations being the most common. . . . It is well known that some of the most carefully made Scarecrows, complete with a face, are stolen, literally vanishing in the night. Colin Garratt,  A single cultural history of the scarecrow has appeared in recent times. Peter Haining’s  The Scarecrow: Fact and Fable focused on a history of cultural representation, charting the place of the scarecrow in cinematic and literary landscapes. For adult and child audiences, he featured variously as a queer fellow, an amiable shape-shifter, and an inscrutable but demonic presence. Collecting together textual reference points, trading between currencies of fact and fable, Haining also sketched a dialect map of scarecrow names once in use across different regions of     Britain. In the shires of southern England he was most commonly the “mawkin,” and sometimes the “Jackalent” or “hodmadod.” In Yorkshire he is said to have gone by “mammet,” or its variants “murmet,” “mummer,” and “mommet.” To the west he was known as the “tattie-dooly.” Over the border in Scotland he was the “tattiebogle” or “craw bogie.” To begin to chart the scarecrow’s life and times according to local lore is, by implication, to wonder at how he ought rightfully be regarded. One way to see him is as a visual expression of local identity, and thus as vernacular art form. This is to look beyond the scarecrow’s existence as a functional reflection of basic human need, or as a minor figure appearing in novels, plays, and films, and instead to consider him as a form expressive of cultural tradition that can be read for signs of social style and taste. To do so is to recall a longer tradition of research dedicated to documenting vernacular life and its calendar of folk crafts and customs. In the middle years of the twentieth century, admirers and collectors created catchall titles, such as “popular art,” for the traditional, cultural forms to be unearthed in out-of-the-way communities. Popular art was the stuff of the rural everyday, a naturalistic kind of expression, open-faced and awkward, crafted out of gritty circumstance. It was unearthed by self-styled experts, declaring themselves newly literate, willing to travel the byways, forging paths into the backwoods and borderlands, to places where rustic artistry emerged from plainest industry. To go farther afield was to demonstrate a particular sort of cultural discernment, signposting new directions for aesthetic appreciation, far distant from elitist subjects of study in the fine and decorative arts. Margaret Lambert and Enid Marx, pioneers for the idea of popular art as a cultural category in Britain, considered it an entirely new aesthetic category for collection and exhibition (). Today the spectrum of their fascinations reads as if from a remembrance-service program for a bygone geography of agricultural society: corn dollies, clay pipes, door knockers, weather vanes, gingerbread stamps, horse brasses, wood carvings, ships’ figureheads, shop signs, and snuff boxes. Fearing that cultural memories was already only half-remembered, Lambert and Marx campaigned for “native survivalism,” a technical idea about the public value of craft that (perhaps unsurprisingly) failed to marshal widespread support. Later connoisseurs like James Ayres took a lead from the established mode of inquiry already operating in North America, opting for the descriptive label of “folk art” (). Other alternatives, such as “outsider art” and “found art,” implied a naive aesthetic magically conjured up between the practitioner’s eye and hand. The label “unsophisticated art” pointed up a stark geography of cultural “haves and have-nots,” separating the rude or rustic origins of an artifact from its positive reception in metropolitan or scholarly art circles. Social anthropologists, preferring the label “primitive art,” found a domestic world of creativity paralleling their interest in creative expression and material culture among indigenous peoples overseas. Each variation on the theme generated its own tension, out of the very effort of claiming expert knowledge. scaring crows  This same tradition is recalled in Folk Archive, a project by the contemporary artists Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane (), who used the cataloguing and display of popular art from across the regions of Britain as a way to invite wider appreciation of working-class tastes and cultural habits. Willfully chaotic and eclectic, their celebration had one common aspect: “that all contributions have been authored by individuals who would perhaps not primarily consider themselves artists” (p. ). Among photographs of wrestling costumes, mantelpiece ornaments, tea cozies, quilts, graffiti tags, and customized cars, appear a handful of scarecrow portraits. Colin Garratt is a kindred spirit and author of the only photographic book dedicated entirely to the scarecrow, documenting differences according to design rather than geographical distribution (). Fifty striking portraits depict working scarecrows, as discovered in the landscape. The collection is something of an agricultural freak show. Scarecrows appear backlit by sunset, moonrise, and flashlight, under towering summer cumulonimbi and wreathed in winter mist, ghoulish in the silent watches of the night, gaily waving arms over cabbage and kale crops, with firearms trained to blow away intruders at point-blank range. Imperiled survivors have been Garratt’s career specialism. His staple subject is the steam locomotive, photo-documentary journeys taking him to six continents and resulting in thirty-five other book titles. Garratt and I have at least one thing in common. Rail travel gave us reason to pull the alarm chord for the passing of a familiar landmark. His and mine is a simple trackside calculation: daydreams divided by acreage. When it comes to landscape nostalgia, I’ll concede to being as susceptible as the next cultural geographer. Arguably a little more so; finding comfort in the old rather than the new, and prizing landscape’s historical associations. I can tell when the pangs are coming on, to a point where parody often seems like the best antidote, or the easiest way out. So, perhaps the scarecrow should be lined up with old maids bicycling, lapwings, and lost cricket grounds, in a paradise lost of twentieth-century Britain; just another small thing going the same way as many other signs of rural life, dating from the last days of the analogue age. James Meek, critic, essayist, and novelist, recently noted how it’s no coincidence “that since the internet became ubiquitous toilet graffiti has almost disappeared” (, ). You get your cultural kicks where you find them. Whether in public conveniences or agricultural implements, there seems a new sensibility of critical sentimentality abroad, a vein of romantic antiromanticism if you will. Here the promise held in the idea of a return is something very different from shamelessly going back to the future. Rather, it is a stylistic turn, raising possibilities for writing subjectively and affectively about what is to be cherished in vanishing landmarks. Where the divination of “geographical personality” was once suggested as the most rewarding outcome of regional fieldwork (Sauer ), in its stead might emerge “geographical portraiture” as a template for experimental landscape writing in the contemporary discipline. The list of scenic features as future subjects is near limitless.    
One for the sparrow, one for the crow, one to rot and one to grow. Anonymous, n.d. The month of May began on a Sunday. The spring sky was set fair, in robin’s-egg blue. Time to set things in motion again. Before the house was properly up and about, I recruited a fieldwork assistant with the promise of schoolboy adventure. A missing-person hunt, mixed up with a game of “I-Spy the Unusual” (). It wasn’t a tough sell, and required no parental hustle. We chatted about those whose job it was to guard the cereal and what might happen if they disappeared for good. He was all signed up before the Cheerios (Nestle’s patented combination of wheat, oats, and corn) filled the breakfast bowl. We’d go outward bound, to see what we could see. The search effort would be redoubled. Bags were packed: father-and-son binoculars, notebooks, pencils, camera, and Ordnance Survey local area maps. Scanning these words back, I realize how happy-families the story must read (akin to when the Hanna-Barbera studio animators meddled with the storyboard, lumbering Scooby-Doo with Scrappy, his junior charge and coinvestigator.) But you’ll have to take my word for it because that’s just the way it happened. Out from the city, we headed west into the shire, making for what I reckoned on as the likeliest country. We stuck close to the best of the arable system, traveling haphazardly by minor roads, cornering at right angles, directions determined by field boundaries. We passed road ends, leading to what once were familyrun farms but now are properties with signs studiously avoiding topographical reference points, instead spelling out a new rural economy of logistical operations (“support,” “service,” “strategy”) in the flat language, abstract insignia, and clean font nowadays preferred by agro-industrial contracting outfits, sometimes establishing that these acres are a small protectorate of a new master, the multinational supermarket retailer. Gearing down to a crawl, we sighted collapsed roofs and rotting hay bales; the telltale tatty architecture of farmstead abandonment. An hour passed. Then two. We kept scouring. There was nothing to see by way of human figures or their scarecrow surrogates. We did sight a few bamboo canes, with torn strips of fertilizer bag and iridescent steamers tacked on top. Only the lightest breeze disturbed the strands. But they hung limp, looking desultory. Our efforts at photography failed them. Not worth the trouble, we reckoned. Meanwhile, our checklist of farmland birds grew steadily: skylarks, pheasants, and wood pigeons. Even a few lapwings, whose future I still fear for. Gulls waddled about among the field furrows. At the car’s passing, finches were flushed from roadside bushes, and riots of rooks rose from treetops. A mid-morning break was pushing at the edges of lunch. We pulled in. Neat, gravel car parks in the country seem somehow out of keeping. But then so too is the accompanying world of The Farm Store: trim wooden fencing, rimmed around the kids’ play park, all that high-end produce, and the waft of fresh-brewing organic coffee overpowering other potent smells of the farmyard. The place was scaring crows  packed. New parents mostly, ushering (sometimes marshaling) excitable little ones between the clean-swept sheds, display pens for pet lambs, and parked machinery. “Combine Harvester! Climb aboard! But be careful on the steps!” An Open Day, where the tension between extending a warm welcome and committing to standards of public safety is measured out in exclamation marks. We rounded a building and found the farmer mid-spiel. His audience, a crescent of kids and urban dads, in flip-flops, sunglasses, and knee-length shorts. The accepted Sabbath getup. This son of the soil stood out proud, a ruddy picture of health. Scuffed Blundstones. Denims whitened at the kneecaps. Checkered shirt, sleeves rolled up tight above the elbows. We listened attentively to his minilecture on the patient operations and practical science of crop husbandry, leavened with the odd wry remark thrown in for the adults present, about market fluctuations, financial anxieties, and fathers bound always to think they know better. The older man was there, set off a little in the wings, hands leathery, face well seasoned, ready to play up to the gentle jibes. Seeing my chance, I sidled up. Who better than an agricultural elder to answer hushed questions about the modern condition of the scarecrow? He had a few ideas, pausing in search of fuller explanations. Habitat change. Hedgerow removal, mostly. “And fewer copses now too, so no easy roosts for the bloody wood pigeons.” Modern twists to the old calendar conventions of cultivation were having impacts too; most especially the trend for sowing fields in the autumn months, not in spring. One by-product of this latest turn in the wheel of the year, initially designed to bring in higher yields, was the lesser threat posed by bird populations, generally at their hungriest in the breeding season. The most recently available statistics support his hunch. The numbers of birds that forage and nest on British farmland have fallen  percent in the past forty years, marking a record low. I stopped short of asking about “environmental degradation” and the renewed threat of a silent spring. So we chatted about preferences nowadays for scaring methods, other than the traditional scarecrow. They vary wildly. Compact discs hung from sticks are known to spook birds by the bright glints of light they throw to some considerable distance. He mentioned certain farmers, the stewardship kind, who now mount kestrel boxes on trees at the fields’ edge, to offer a ready-made home for birds of prey. They “had their merits.” Alternatively there are “hawk kites,” designed to fly from poles in the wind and hover as if ever hungry above the field: “Bloody daft looking if you ask me.” Not to be overlooked was the enduring pleasure in “a wee bit of sport” to be had with an air rifle aimed out the side of a van. Some, swearing by the intelligence of birds (and in particular the mischievous habits of corvids), stick with a macabre method that makes examples of those caught thieving. Strung up by the neck on a rickety gibbet, a murder of crows is left to twist and turn, warding off the more wise or wary among their kind. To close, he mused on great claims of effectiveness attributed to auditory devices for bird scaring. Presentation over, the group dispersed slowly in the sunshine, father and son giving us fathers and sons a final, friendly reminder to buy up the best the store had     to offer. Admitting defeat, and with arms laden with fresh salad leaves, speciality sausages, unwashed carrots, beetroots, and packets of honey crunch bakes, we headed to the car and turned for home.
Type “auditory scaring devices,” and then strike the return key. Alternatively, begin your search with the term commonly in use among activists in the know: “gas guns.” Sonic bird scaring is a hot topic online, at its liveliest on bulletin boards debating the resulting realities of contemporary rural life. Levels of complaint registered about the misuse of this modern machinery for scaring have been sufficient in number and in volume for the National Farmers Union (nfu) to undertake a nationwide consultation exercise. The century-old organizationfunctioning as the “voice of British Farming” with a mandate to “champion British farming and provide professional representation and services to its Farmer and Grower members”has circulated a leaflet outlining a code of best practice for auditory scaring devices and guidelines for general compliance. These moves seem wise ones, although they are not legally binding (nfu ). For those without first-hand experience, propane-powered gas guns issue a periodic explosion. The “BANG!” can reach a volume in excess of  decibels, issued direct from the gun’s tubular cannon, although this loud report can be channeled and baffled by the arrangement of hay-bale battlements. At a considerably greater distance the noise issued is loud enough to be a very real irritant in the lives of residents in nearby properties: disturbing sleep patterns, leaving pets in an anxious state, fraying nerve ends, and being regarded generally as a noise nuisance, potentially injurious to mental health. The specifications supplied by one online retailer are revealing. The “Broadside Bangalore” is a market leader, offering overprotective farmers a variety of specialist features, beyond the standard allpurpose cannon and block. Listed are, variously: “the most realistic gun-shot sounds ever!”; a solar panel to keep the battery charged indefinitely, even in the weakest winter sunshine, “meaning you never need to trudge up the field to recharge”; for extra control, an add-on “Screamer Kit” that imitates the cries of a bird in distress; and a seven-day timer such that the Bangalore Broadside can “know what day of the week it is” and thus remain in compliance with nfu guidelines on use (www.birdscaring.co.uk/). The makers do not advise the use of less systematic scare tactics. But reports persist of farmers, far from model in conduct, who set off bangers and rockets in early-morning salvos to clear their crops of birds. It’s a curious kind of pest control, and a noisy way to wage a war with nature. Some of the angrier residents of English country parishes who claim that their standard of life has been seriously infringed have come out fighting. “B-ooom” (“Bang Out of Order Mate!”) is an archetypal single-issue lobby group, spreading its campaign message via a dedicated Web site (www.b-ooom.co.uk/) and Facebook page. Its informal membership is dedicated to “fighting the use of gas gun bird scarers.” B-ooom’s objectives seem reasonable enough: to “restore peace and tran- scaring crows  quillity to the countryside,” “to improve quality of life,” “to protect our heritage from this unnecessary noise pollution,” and “to encourage the use of traditional methods of ‘bird control’ to protect crops.” Members of the public who find their household plagued with antisocial noise are encouraged to collect documentary evidence of overuse, inconsiderate use, pointless use, and disproportionate use. But there is also a whiff of the rural vigilante about the windblown, handheld field reports documented on video, and uploaded to YouTube, with accompanying commentary that names-and-shames the culprit farmer. A case is being built about adaptive bird behavior. Pigeons can grow so accustomed to the sound of gas guns that they actually associate the noise with an available food source; supported by footage of the birds feeding contentedly directly beneath a working contraption. Hostile testimonials, archived as online feedback, leave the nfu in little doubt about the public’s depth of feeling: “an utter nightmare,” “a year-round nuisance,” “the bane of my family’s life,” “like a war zone some mornings,” “a scandalous Noise Nuisance in our English Countryside” (www.nfuonline.com/news/Download-ourbird-scarer-guide/). On bulletin boards, insults and taunts are traded, often in capital letters. Tales of rude awakenings, even on Sundays and bank holidays, are endless. And there are threats of violence and vandalism; further evidence, were it needed, that sleep deprivation is one of the most effective forms of torture. For the neutral reader, this does not seem like the late-night online handiwork of Have-a-Go hotheads, or “whinging townies.” Some poor souls seem driven near enough to their wits end. Scroll for long enough and you’ll encounter the odd gentle reminder that complainants should to do more than sound off; instead utilizing the formal bureaucratic mechanisms put in place by local authorities’ Environmental Health Teams. Occasionally, a placatory statement surfaces from the farmers’ side: “Just pick up the phone, we don’t bite!” An Environmental Health Officer, reflecting on his experiences as a peacemaker, reported on difficulties encountered actually tracking down the owners of problem guns. No longer is the job as simple as knocking on the nearest farmhouse door. Instead, he struggled to navigate the complex structures of agribusiness where “everything seems to be contracted out to consortiums based miles away. . . . [T]hat partly explains why the guns are out far too earlyit saves them time . . . managing the fields and getting around to them all.” He stressed to protestposters the ease with which we overlook close interdependencies with those whose work it is to put food on the table: “I also appreciate that farmers have to raise and protect their cropsdon’t forget, we use their final products be it oilseed rape, peas, linseed, or fruit. That is the balancing act I have to follow in these situations.” In this shifting political landscape, a case is made repeatedly for the virtues and effectiveness of the old-fashioned, silent, standing scarecrow. There are no signs here of rural nostalgia, just desperation and embittered relations.
Having eventually called off the search, it was entirely predictable that the very next day we would find exactly the person we were looking for, only in entirely the     wrong kind of place and when all sense of urgency had faded. As it happened, we were walking home after school, swinging along the street, by the terraced houses opposite the Spar convenience store. “Look! Down there!” A miniature man, much smaller than might have been hoped for, but a scarecrow nonetheless. Just fifteen house numbers from our place, sharing the same postal code. He was occupying a strange wayside retreat, propped up in a neighborhood front garden, smiling enigmatically in the midst of shrubs and bedding plants. Presumably he’d been there all the previous times that we’d passed by. Of course, in the months since that neighborhood sighting I’ve done my homework, got my eye in, and followed my nose to find new patches for the scarecrow’s redeployment. He’s rather like the foxes that once knew their way around country boltholes but have long since found the alt-ecologies of an urban lifestyle more comfortable. Adaptive and prolific opportunists, scientific theory refers to these species as “r-strategists.” There’s decent work to be found in the city, and a new niche. Or kitsch. The urban scarecrow is to be spotted on allotments, in primaryschool vegetable patches, shelved alongside the glossily painted gnomes and other decorative tat in the local garden center, and on city guerrilla growing spaces tended by art students. And a scattering of country and county hotspots do remain. Scarecrows crop up annually as a popular form of rural craft, made not for the fields but as a means to enter into lighthearted village competitions and civicweek festivities. This regional map of new beginnings runs the length and breadth of Britain; in Minginish on the Isle of Skye, Auchenblae in Aberdeenshire, Kettlewell in Yorkshire, Bentworth in the South Downs. Put up in front gardens and on roadside verges, some of these scarecrow mannequins impersonate local worthies and civic officeholders, but just as often their creators tap the cultural zeitgeist and roll with the news cycle, taking chances with telling social commentary and as a mute expression of public anger. Straw men are a requirement in troubled times. In recent summers, scarecrows have appeared in the guise of city bankers, global media barons, London mayoral candidates, embattled cabinet ministers, X-factor contestants and judges, and a host of other unquiet spirits or peoplelike creatures of the modern age. However, the art form is no longer intended for dissimulation, but for exposure. In a couple of instances, the edgy addition of a comic noose ought not go unmentioned. Meanwhile, the calendar occasions of a royal wedding and a queen’s diamond jubilee have offered loyal British subjects the creative space for scarecrow making that reflects more respectful invention and the renewal of the social contract between citizenry and monarchy. Downsized, reborn as a carnival accessory and public scapegoat, migrating to the heart of the village as temporary public art, all these developments extend the social standing of the scarecrow. These varieties of guise speak of a cosmopolitan national life, one in which the scarecrow is not necessarily diminished by postagricultural status. He always was a raw and playful art form, a person to whom the anxieties of one social class or another have attached themselves. That he should become a chosen medium for scaring crows  contemptuous feeling and choleric protest about authority figures or the unaccountable accumulation of power and wealth in societyand, at the very same time, a medium for the confirmation of conservative community valuesseems entirely apt. The scarecrow has been all these things, and in years to come, doubtless will be yet more besides. But way back then, up there on Clifton Road, we were happy to tick off our first find. So we snapped a photo and hurried on home, setting plans for dinner. References Ayres, J. . British Folk Art. London: Barrie and Jenkins. Big Chief I-Spy. . I-Spy the Unusual. London: News Chronicle. Cobbett, W. [] . Rural Rides in the Counties. London: Penguin. Deller, J., and A. Kane. . Folk Archive: Contemporary Popular Art from the UK. London: Book Works. Garratt, C. . Scarecrows. Newton Harcourt, U.K.: Milepost ½. Haining, P. . The Scarecrow: Fact and Fable. London: Robert Hale. Jefferies, R. . Landscape and Labour: Letters and Essays. Bradford-on-Avon, U.K.: Moonraker Press. Lambert, M., and E. Marx. . English Popular Art. London: Batsford. London and North Eastern Railway. . On Either Side: Depicting and Describing Features of Interest to Be Seen from the Train between London (King’s Cross) & Edinburgh (Waverley), Fort William, Inverness & Aberdeen. London: London & North Eastern Railway. Meek, J. . Short Cut. London Review of Books,  November, . NFU [National Farmers Union]. . Bird Deterrents and Bird Scarers: Protecting Your Crop and NFU Code of Practice. [www.nfuonline.com/news/Download-our-bird-scarer-guide]. Sauer, C. O. . The Personality of Mexico. Geographical Review  (): -. ———. . The Education of a Geographer []. In Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer, edited by J. Leighly, –. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sax, B. . Crow. London: Reaktion Books. Sebald, W. G. . Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, –. New York: Random House. Todd, B. E. . Worzel Gummidge, or the Scarecrow of Scatterbrook. London: Penguin. Waterson, M. and L. . The Scarecrow. Bright Phoebus. LP recording. Williams, R. . Cobbett. Oxford: Oxford University Press.