Atlas of Nooks and Crannies by Michał Książek

Introduction

The city centre is its very own manifestation of urban life. At the stations and crossroads, in the business districts, we can see the attributes of the city as if through a lens: the sterile buildings made of glass and metal with which disoriented birds collide. The French cultural anthropologist Marc Augé called them “non-places”. Locations devoid of the element of biography, permanent proprietor, history. Augé wasn’t talking about wild, non-human life; but a lack of inhuman/non-human beings is the perfect complement to the concept of the non-place. What kind of world is it with no birds, insects or greenery, where only a single species exists?

Foraging Flight

The flight of a creature bringing food to the nest is unmistakable. It occurs along a flight path mapped of concern. What I have in mind here is the small birds, the tits, tree sparrows and black redstarts. But also the larger birds – like blackbirds or jays, and the birds of prey –sparrowhawks, for example. And even insects.

The short-toed treecreeper, house sparrow and tree sparrow fly a distance of roughly fifty metres to find food for their chicks. The Eurasian blue tit covers between fifty and 100. The great tit in Bielański Forest averages 100 metres, and the starling up to 500. Gulls can bring food from rubbish tips several kilometres from their nests, and the peregrine falcon sometimes embarks on an even longer journey. But none of them outdo the common swift, who might seek out food hundreds of kilometres from home. To feed their young, they can fly from Warsaw to Stockholm, just like that.

This flight, the foraging flight, seems very deliberate at every stage. It practically radiates purposefulness. You can distinguish the immense motivation, the knowledge of the route, the businesslike haste. And something else familiar. Something that we all do when we’re hurrying somewhere and we’re a bit tired. Something that birds and mammals do when they have children, or someone else, under their care.

May 9th

Świętokrzyska Park

The Eurasian blue tit feeds among the young, still-soft leaves of the linden tree. Its search method is reminiscent of controlled falling: nimble downward leaps interspersed with flurries of artistic wing flapping. On and on, down to the lower branches, closer and closer, within arm’s reach. It is amusing to observe how it stands on one leg and uses the other to pull a nearby leaf closer. It studies the leaf carefully from top to bottom, looking for insect eggs. Its task is made easier by its specially-adapted eyes, which see as if through a magnifying glass. Under one leaf, it finds a caterpillar. The bird doesn’t devour it immediately, despite its evident zeal, but holds it between its claws and methodically eats out the caterpillar’s insides. As if it were eating something straight from the packaging. I pick up the discarded skin and squash it between my tongue and the roof of my mouth. To begin with, it tastes pretty good, but a moment later I get a trace of bitterness. Could that be the reason the bird left so much food?

We spend nearly twenty minutes there together. Suddenly, the blue tit takes off in the direction of the metro station and disappears into the corner of the park. I run after it, jostling passers-by and scaring away the pigeons along the path. It’s time: the blue tit is sitting at the opening to a tree hollow, ready to dive inside. The dark hollow lies at the top of a linden tree, five metres high, perfectly hidden amongst the leaves. The linden is anatomical in shape, with a tiny, white carpet of delicate mushrooms at its foot, probably split gills, Schizophyllum commune. I’m taking it all in, standing in a dense crowd of passengers and pedestrians at Świętokrzyska Metro bus stop number 3.

A moment later, the blue tit is already perched in the neighbouring tree. It is busy, fidgety even, as if some kind of sumptuous choreography was allowing it to observe the leaves from various perspectives, as if it were easier to move its body than its head. It studies something carefully, pressing its eye to the surface of a wide leaf before moving away. In a flash, it’s already back in the tree hollow.

So it’s a parent feeding its young. I know, because it went right inside. If it were a male feeding a brooding female, as tits tend to do, he’d have passed her the food from the outside or called her out from the nest onto the branch with a gentle song. You can’t tell the sex from their appearance, males and females look the same. And just because a blue tit is singing, it doesn’t mean that it’s a male, as we believed for many years. Female blue tits sing as well. The same as most species of the songbird suborder (Oscines) to which tits belong.

Ten Grams

The linden tree with a hollow by the bus stop was her choice, and it was she who built the nest. However, before this difficult decision came numerous mutual inspections. Hundreds of moves of the head, glances and chirps. From the beginning of April, every day – shortly after waking – the female tit would have flown here from her overnight hollow and laid a single egg. A little white ball weighing one gram: a tenth of her own body weight. After laying the egg (which takes about half an hour), she would cover it tightly with soft down and fly off in search of food until evening. Over two weeks, she laid between ten and fifteen eggs – more than her own weight.

She needed to eat a lot during that time. No wonder, then, that the male spent the whole day by her side, proffering various delicacies, perhaps even pieces of snail shell (rich in the calcium needed to make the eggshells). They slept in separate places. Fully grown tits don’t snuggle up together – they are close only briefly, when the male perches or manoeuvres himself on top of the female for a second or two and the delicate ends of their reproductive systems kiss.

During the egg-laying period, the male didn’t visit the nest, and the female went there just once a day to lay an egg. When she could feel ten, even fifteen of the white drops beneath her tummy (we will never know exactly how many), she began sitting on them, a stage that ended just a few days ago. For two weeks after laying the last egg, she kept the embryos warm at a temperature of up to 41 degrees Celsius. This time, it worked. But it can happen that someone comes along and cuts down the tree that she spent such a long time selecting, or the bush where she finds her food.

“And you observed all this here? By the bus stop?” asked an elderly lady with incredulity when I told her about Warsaw’s blue tits in springtime as we stood at Świętokrzyska Metro bus stop number 3. She liked the story so much that she waited for the next bus.

The Second Pair

I find another hollow with a family of blue tits the same day, also thanks to the foraging flight. The bird arrived from the other side of the Palace of Culture and Science, by the Wisława Szymborska Passage that runs from the Centrum metro station to Warsaw Central railway station. The nest is situated in a lamp post. When I noticed the bird, I was certain it was a parent with food, though I didn’t even register the beak, just the outline distorted by the food it was carrying. The choreography of a flight of this kind exudes confidence and excellent calculations of the route, along which the blue tit also makes skilful use of the cover of leaves and tree crowns. I see only movements, motility, but accompanied by certainty.

The blue tit disappears into its safe hole in the old, concrete pillar. A spindly linden branch as thin as a finger has scraped away at its mortar over the years, until it eventually carved out a tiny hole, which got bigger and bigger, and was finally big enough for a bird to fit inside. The birds don’t seem to mind that the branch is still nestled inside the hollow. Plus some leaves, shading and sheltering the pillar. As a result, the light, temperature and humidity inside are close to the optimal conditions found in the crown of a tree.

Palace of Culture and Science

Świętokrzyska Park is a rectangle of greenery and compacted earth squeezed into a patch of concrete so tightly that the last mole died or escaped some half a century ago. Sometimes I fantasise about releasing a few moles here, entirely by accident, and bringing about a restoration of the species. There aren’t even mice here these days. The longer sides of the rectangle form a slightly raised terrace at the foot of the Palace of Culture and Science and along Świętokrzyska Street; the shorter sides delineate Emilii Plater Street to the west and Marszałkowska Street to the east. In the middle, the 280 tired, old trees are slowly being replaced by young trees with the arithmetical conviction that in biology, the substitution of one piece for another comes out equal. Falling across it all, the shadow of the rocky structure, a mountain of limestone, marble, granite, concrete, sandstone and wood, stacked with the help of mortar in the style known as socialist realism. Until quite recently, it was the tallest building in Poland. Since 2022, the nearby Varso Tower has towered above it. The Palace is 237 metres tall, and Varso Tower is 310.

If you were to look at the Palace through the eyes of plants and animals, it would be a huge, warm mountain with steep sides. The area of the sides adds up to ten hectares, as much as a small farm. In this mountain there are many cracks and fissures, and 1,416 openings known as windows. But when a monument arises from 400 million bricks, there must appear some additional, unplanned gap. Many micro-recesses are also created by attempts to imitate the Art Deco style, abundant in decorations, various textures and materials. Even sculptures. The Palace only looks smooth and hermetic from a distance. It’s no surprise that 111 plant species can be found growing on its surface, including trees and shrubs. There are ten bird species nesting here, and as many at the mountain’s foot. The best known are the peregrine falcons, though personally, I prefer watching the city pigeons on which they prey. To avoid death, the pigeons perform miracles of agility. Just like on a real mountain, I have also counted here seven species of moss, five lichens and one liverwort. There’s even a fern. We know little about the mammals, other than Homo sapiens. Just that rats and mice are also keen to reside in the Palace, so the management board employs eleven cats.

May 19th

Świętokrzyska Metro number 3

I usually start my walk from Świętokrzyska Metro bus stop number 3. The familiar blue tits, whom I have named the Lindens, are feeding intensively. Their springtime mating colours have already faded, leaving them looking tired, even slightly dirty. They fly all the way to the other side of the park to get food, well over 100 metres. Under the blue tits’ linden, amongst the meadowsweet, a Eurasian blackcap has made its nest. Passers-by sometimes piss into the bush, threatening the little nest with its five white eggs.

Two foraging flights further along, I sit down on a low wall along Świętokrzyska Street, beneath a maple with a crow’s nest. From there, I can see a third pair of blue tits, this time in a nest box. Two crows are waiting nearby, one on a branch of the tree with the nest box, and one on the ground, listening to the sounds coming from the box. They know about the family of blue tits and they’re well aware that the chicks will be easy prey during their first flights. A third crow, a fledgling, emerges from its nest on a bough of the tree beneath which I’m sitting and begins throwing twigs at me. I bend down to pick them up and note that the only place moss has grown on the wall is under the tree, taking advantage of its shade and moisture. I don’t know if I’m sitting on Schistidium, Orthotrichum or Grimmia – without a magnifying glass, it’s hard to tell them apart.

Right under the nest box, there’s a party going on, spread over two benches. Bottles, cake, music. Several people are sipping beer, sprawled as if they’re in a bar. Even though the blue tits are feeding right above their heads, the revellers don’t notice a thing. Urban birds are not as timid as forest birds. It seems they value humans’ presence – it protects them from cats, minks and sparrowhawks. But not from the crows, which lie in wait for the fledglings and at the same time go after the cake.

The young tree sparrows from the next nest box are already making quite a noise. The parents work valiantly to feed them and copulate joyfully between feedings, revealing their wild pleasure in life. Afterwards, they don’t immediately go their separate ways, like the pair near the Korczak monument, but sit side by side for a while. This moves me more than it should, so I glance at the third nest box, still empty, although it is new, all spick and span. While the overall number of tree sparrows has fallen in recent years, in some Warsaw neighbourhoods there are more than ever. Probably because of the nest boxes.

Further, towards the Drunk Cherry bar, someone has put up boxes for blue tits and starlings. They are arranged close together, every few metres, as if the landscape architect believed that animals, like officials, enjoy geometry and regular intervals. The large, dreamlike beech tree with its spruced-up nest box usually stops me in my tracks, as do the ancient olive trees nearby. The trees in Świętokrzyska Park were planted in the years 1954-1955, though the olive trees seem older. Perhaps they were growing in some pre-war courtyard.

Out behind the bar, in a maple tree’s sheltered hollow, a fourth pair of blue tits have laid eggs. The hole is very narrow, its border reminiscent of an eye, the entrance a black iris. Like a pupil of cornflower blue, a small bird peers out from the hole again and again. Inside the hollow, a nestling the size of a sour cherry is trying to raise its head, a fact of which the drivers turning from the nearby Emilii Plater Street onto Holy Cross Street are quite unaware.

On the alley of silvery maples that runs along the terrace in front of the Palace’s “Youth Centre”, in a hollow created by a severed branch, a fifth pair of blue tits is up to something. Time after time, they enter the dark hole and emerge with bits of rotten wood. They lug them a long way, far off, somewhere among the trees. They don’t drop a thing, no one would know the hollow was being cleaned. They repeatedly disappear into the darkness, sometimes both at once. When the male flies in, he sometimes sings a little longer. Then his voice becomes more muffled, as if it were coming from somewhere nearby.

I rarely have enough time for the other part of the park, on the Marszałkowska Street side. There, as well as the blue tits, starlings and tree sparrows, a common redstart is showing off with its sophisticated song, but I can’t spot the hollow in which it is hiding. House sparrows fly down from the Palace, collecting crumbs and larger pieces of burger bun (dark, seeded bread is particularly in demand). Up in the branches, I can also hear a greenfinch and an Icterine warbler, doing a good impression of a great reed warbler. The Icterine warbler is the only bird in Poland that lays pink eggs; it would be good to find its nest. There’s also a chaffinch here, and a wood pigeon. Rarely, a jay flies in; even more rarely, fieldfares. You can often hear the great tit, though there’s just one in the entire park.

All these places play their obvious roles, allocated long ago, in the theatre of the city. The bar where you go for a fruit liqueur, the benches for drinking vodka, and the bush by the bus stop, for pissing in. But there is another reality in which their ontological status is flipped upside down, because everything turns out to exist differently, to be something else. A breeding territory, though small – fifty square metres – marked out by song. A sought-after home, carefully selected from many locations. I once estimated that the male blue tit can sing for up to five hours a day, warbling the praises of his home.

CAVITY NESTERS

Birds that have overcome claustrophobia and build their nests in hollows, holes and burrows. Cavity nesters include both our sparrow species, woodpeckers, treecreepers, the wood nuthatch, starlings and tits. Also owls, and some ducks, like the mandarin or mallard. There are two classifications of cavity nesters: primary, those that carve out the hollows themselves; and secondary, those that use already existing hollows.

Some tits, such as the willow tit or the crested tit, also carve – or, in fact, poke – hollows in the soft wood of a dead aspen or birch. Certain species clean out existing hollows, making them larger. The wood nuthatch makes the entrance to its hollow smaller with a mud “doorframe” so that martens can’t reach inside (in doing so, it can end up walling in a boreal owl). Sometimes, hollows created in living trees begin to heal over and narrow, in which case, the tits dig away at the wound tissue closing the entrance. Select species, such as the blue tit, crested tit or willow tit, can set up home in the soil, in a mouse or vole hole. Or a hole in a tree stump. The common merganser also sometimes uses a burrow.

The concept of the cavity nester covers many other species of animal, including insects. They escape into the cities because the old forests and avenues have been felled. In the cities, cavity nesters remain cavity nesters. They need holes to live.

NECROSIS

A depletion in the side of a tree trunk, revealing its inner layers. It occurs as a result of damage to the bark and tissue, perhaps many years ago (an impact by antlers in the forest, or by  mechanical means in the city). There is no tissue at the site of the damage, but new tissue grows in around it, creating borders of varied shape: oval, spindle-shaped, vaginal. It looks like an old mirror with a designer frame, or just a frame waiting for a picture.

In forestry, necrosis is considered a flaw in the wood. In ecosystems, it is a desirable trypogenic (hole-forming) phenomenon. Hollows are often created at necrosis sites. Sometimes, fungi consume the inside of the tree, and we find a void in place of the necrosis. The tree responds to the loss of equilibrium by transforming the frame of the necrosis into cambial columns. The columns are the hard borders of the large, spindle-shaped (shrine-like) hollows formed from the cambium tissue at the ends of the cavity. They are shaped like involutes, rolled inwards. They are highly resistant to decay and have special mechanical properties.

Sample (pp. 11-34) translated by Kate Webster

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Michał Książek, Atlas de agujeros y grietas

28 de julio

el erial

Les basta con el margen entre el seto y el bordillo. Es el hueco para existir entre las losas de la acera. Incluso en las estrechas juntas del pavimento. Convierten las grietas del asfalto en líneas verdes de vida, tan sugerentes como los fragmentos de mapas que describen lugares remotos. Especialmente pintorescas son las de los patios de las calles Nowy Świat y Chmielna, cubiertas de hepáticas de las fuentes (Marchantia pofymorpha) —¡y qué ejemplares! Ninguna unión está lo suficientemente cohesionada como para sellar el cuerpo de la ciudad.

Junto al muro de la Sala Filarmónica, en la calle Jasna. A poca distancia, a lo largo de la valla tras la que se está construyendo el Museo de Arte Moderno. Rodeando la base de la tubería que sostiene la señal de tráfico de la calle Marszałkowska. Con sigilo, entre los peldaños de las escaleras y los pies de los transeúntes. Entre los lugares y accidentes surge siempre una especie de «no-lugar». Una franja de tierra de nadie. Una costura fallida, un borde grueso, una coyuntura. Un «entre» en el que se introducen y del que hacen su centro.

Según las plantas, los musgos y líquenes, tanto la arquitectura humana como la animal son aptas para la vida. El gótico no restaurado le es favorable a las semillas y brotes del álsine y la galinsonga, y en las partes inferiores de los muros. Sobre las piedras de iglesia y las tumbas prosperan los siguientes musgos: el musgo de hoguera, el tornillo de pared, el musgo torcido o el de hilo plateado (estos últimos se parecen bajo una lupa a las siemprevivas que conocemos de los jardines). El Renacimiento y el realismo socialista, repleto de esculturas, albergan —además del tornillo de pared y el musgo plateado— el musgo de alfombra y algunos líquenes-joyas : la caloplaca, la candelaria y el dorado liquen de las tapias. La arquitectura de madera es a veces el refugio del liquen de borde, los encantadores musgos, las plantas paraguas y,      de nuevo, el liquen de tapia. Al parecer, el liquen de tapia es amante de todos los estilos y corrientes. También del final de la era Gierek^[1] y de los exuberantes años noventa. Para ello, el liquen de tapia cuenta con el respaldo del musgo de alfombra.

Espontáneamente, sin un trazado, las plantas ocupan resaltes, encabezados, varillas para cortinas; alféizares, relieves y consolas. Los revoques: sus texturas, defectos e irregularidades. Fijaciones para canalones y lámparas, cornisas que funcionan como repisas rocosas. Pero también ocupan restos de los nidos de golondrinas y grajos. Por todas partes, en los recodos de las distintas épocas arquitectónicas, se ha acumulado algo de polvo, pelusas, hojas podridas que aspiran al estatus de tierra. De forma un tanto precipitada, las semillas y las esporas les conceden dicho estatus de buen grado.

Traducción: Amelia Serraller Calvo

^[1] Edward Gierek (1913 – 2001) fue el líder comunista o secretario general de la Polonia Popular entre 1970 y 1980. Se le recuerda por abrir el país al Bloque Occidental y por sus políticas económicas basadas en préstamos extranjeros. Fue destituido una vez que las huelgas de los astilleros en agosto de 1980 condujeran al nacimiento del sindicato Solidaridad. (N. de la t.).