Helicopters and Hawks

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 805, 24 December 1954, Page 9

Helicopters and Hawks

Dy

SUNDOWNER

NOVEMBER 23

FTER two years as Editor of A The Times and’ eight as Director-General of the BBC, Sir William Haley has made the depressing admission that he still reads three books a week. I can't help thinking that it would be better for him, better for The Times, and better for the thousands of people in the world whom The Times still in-

fMuences, if milked three cows a week, or caught

three rabbits, or dug three rows of pota-

toes. Although there are men who claim that they read a book a day, and some who perhaps do, Sir William’s claim is that- he "absorbs, digests, and remembers" what he reads. I think it was one of the New Yorker’s reviewers who said once that he read two books a day, and sometimes three, but he did not claim that he digested or remembered what he read, and if he had made that claim I would not have accepted it. If a man reads three books a week without injury he is abnormal. If he is normal and does it, someone else is making his thoughts and controlling them. I am as suspicious of the ceaseless reader as I am of the man who does not read at all, and boasts of it. There was widespread laughter a few years ago when one of our Prime Ministers went to the Franz Josef to think. It would have been wiser to pretend that he had a book or two in his bag, but not wise to get them out. O. A. Gillespie paid a fine tribute in The Press the other day to the almost forgotten Harold Williams. I was glad to see it, and hope it was widely read. But I found it more depressing than stimulating. Men are not made to set such a pace as that, to learn 58 lan- — guages, and excite their brain | sixteen hours a day with the sorrows, dangers, or injustices of the world. They die young when they do that, and fight ineffectually;. as Williams did. It is better to turn back to the sheep with David Ben Gurion. ; Up to a point Sir William Haley agrees with all this. He was not arguing ‘for more reading when he made. the admission with which I began, but rather for jless-suggesting that men who say they can read more than three books a week are careless readers’ or bad counters. I think three is too many by two.

NOVEMBER 25

bead bd T always gives me pleasure to see buyers bidding against one another for a house with a view, or giving its value and half as much again for a section on the side of a hill. In this flat’ city of Christchurch people will give almost as much to look down on their neighbours as they will to live beside the best people; and since the

best people don’t increase very fast the demand for elevated sections rises while we sleep. This is not wishful thinking

inspired -by ‘the knowledge that I live on a hillside

myself, came here for the view, and could offer little else of value if I wanted to move out again, It is the evidence of my eyes and my ears, and gains strength daily. But it had not occurred to me, until the idea was suggested by an article I read recently in The New Statesman, that the world for an increasing number of people is becoming more and more difficult to see. We don’t expect to see much of it if we spend the daylight hours in cities and go home to sleep. But even when we make long journeys, cross continents, or go right round the world, we no longer see what every traveller saw 30 or‘40 or 50 years ago. I recently travelled 1250 miles by train in Australia without seeing more than 300 miles of country. The. rest slipped by. in darkness. I flew 1250 miles home without seeing anything but stars above me and clouds below me. If we fly by day, and it is a day without clouds, we fly too high and too fast to see anything below us distinctly. When I rode a horse I thought that the best of all methods of seeing the countryside. I was high enough up to see over the fence’, had not to éxert myself to keep on moving, and lost none of the view around me by watching the ground under my feet. I still think there is nothing so good as that if we ride, as I always could, with comfort. But the New Statesman writer suggests that helicopters in a year or two will be the traveller’s joy-first because they will move reasonably close to the ground, second because they will not travel fast enough to blur the objects they pass, and third because the traveller will be high enough above the earth to have a clear view. I have not yet been in a helicopter, and can think of snags: the straight look down, perhaps, which is so disturbing in the nose of a plane. But the picture in general is tempting. ws ae

NOVEMBER 26

~~ ALF an hour ago, when I was sitting with my back against a rock enjoying the sun, I heard fluttering and chirping in a pine tree a little distance below me, and when I looked for an explanation I saw a hawk moving slowly along a limb examining the nests of the sparrows. It is a very old tree with a very big limb, ten or twelve inches in diameter and almost horizontal, so

that the hawk was moving in a straight line as if

It had been on the ground. But it was not moving easily. It kept overbalancing, and recovering with its wings, and.I had not a clear enough view to see whether its claws were free or already holding plunder. But it kept going for eight or ten feet, and on the way examined four nests-a sight I have never in my life seen before. It must happen fairly frequently that a hawk stands beside a nest and robs it; but if it is a common occurrence I can’t understand why I have never seen it until today. Hawks like to keep flying and do their dirty work with their feet. Even when they find a rabbit in a trap they do some cruel work with their talons before they settle and start eating. (without killing). But this hawk used its wings only when it lost its balance, (To be continued)