by Simon Barnes
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I. Recounted at length in My Natural History.
II. As told in How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher.
III. In the American edition of the above; birds of prey encounters tend to have a tremendous significance.
IV. I was visiting the falconers at Banham Zoo in Suffolk.
V. Gliding is unpowered flight and therefore, by definition, downwards: a good glider is the one that falls least quickly. Soaring is the unpowered gaining of height. You can watch seagulls using the updrafts from cliffs, and many birds (not just birds of prey) will spiral upwards on a column of warm and therefore rising air, which is called a thermal.
Lobsterisimus bumakissimus
Oh dear. Back to bums again. That’s nature for you: never far away from the next bum.
“The worst job I ever had was with Jayne Mansfield. I had the terrible job of retrieving lobsters from her bum.” This from the notorious album Derek & Clive Live, by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, released in 1976. It was 19 years later when what is arguably an even worse job involving lobsters was discovered by the scientists Reinhardt Kristensen and Peter Funch. It was also the discovery of a new genus: a genus that didn’t fit anywhere else in the Animal Kingdom and so constitutes its own phylum. These creatures were discovered on the mouthparts of the Norway lobster. Related creatures were subsequently found on the mouthparts of the European and American lobsters. It was the first phylum discovered since 1983, when the loriciferansI were first described; this phylum is called Cycliophora.
They are also called symbions, for their interdependent life-style, and they go through two main life stages. They begin with an asexual feeding stage (like a caterpillar) when they take small shares of the meals consumed by their pet lobster: the lobster works for them as surely as the lobster of the French romantic poet Gérard de Nerval did for him. (Nerval used to take his pet lobster Thibault out for walksII attached to a blue silk ribbon in the Palais Royal.)
The symbions don’t do much walking, though; they remain attached to the mouth by a sucker, taking advantage of their host, another sucker. They can propagate by budding. But they will also move into a second life stage, and become either male or (you’ve probably guessed it) female. The males abandon such things as mouths and anuses (bums, if you prefer) and set off as free-swimmers to seek a budding female, which they will then impregnate. The female subsequently separates but she will retain her digestive system, although digestion is no longer its prime function. Impregnated, she leaves her host and finds another. As she does so, her digestive system morphs into a larva, which escapes from her when she dies. The sex cycle is triggered when the lobster moults its skin in order to grow.
Just a few of them, then, in just the one genus, so far as anyone has discovered. There may be many more, but that requires an awful lot of looking at very small things, and not many people are qualified to do it. For most of us, it would be the worst job we ever had. All the same, people like Kristensen and Funch are in the same position as the space pioneers of fiction, travelling beyond the human experience to find new creatures living in a manner previously unimaginable. How alien – that is to say, remote from human ideas of life – can you get in the Animal Kingdom? Here is a creature as different from an earthworm as it is from a human being, living its strange but practical and effective life in the mouth of lobster, the female with a gut that turns into her own child, but only after she has been impregnated by a bumless male.
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I. See page 200
II. “Why should a lobster be more ridiculous than a dog? Or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gnaw on one’s monadic privacy like dogs do.”
The dark side
Owls are not all that closely related to the diurnal birds of prey we’ve been talking about. Some say they are closer to nightjars, which are nocturnal fliers after insects. They have come down a separate evolutionary road, and their ripping beak and killing claws represent another convergence. Primarily, they have evolved for darkness. So much of evolution is about seeing a gap in the market and filling it, and for an owl, the USPI is that they can work in the dark. Not the pitch dark of a cave, as a bat can: but when it comes to working in low light, they are the best birds in the world. The diurnal birds of prey have the hours of daylight to themselves – and a bat hawk and some others can exploit conditions at dawn and dusk – but the true night is for owls.
There are 249 species in the superb Owls of the World,II starting with barn owl and ending with marsh owl. I’ve seen both, though alas, there are a fair few in the middle I haven’t; Usumbara eagle owl and Maria Koepcke’s screech owl, to name but two.
Owls all have the bright two-eyed face that reminds us of ourselves. Perhaps that explains why we equate them with exceptional intelligence.III Owls are about seeing in poor light, they are about hearing, and they are about silence. That is the triple package that defines them and the way they make a living. The forward-facing eyes give them binocular vision, and therefore an acute three-dimensional image of what is before them. This operates over a relatively narrow field of view; this stereoscopic view covers less than 50 degrees. The eyes are fixed in their sockets, so to compensate, owls have a disturbing, and really rather human way of turning their heads.
This becomes superhuman relatively quickly: a long-eared owl can turn its head though 270 degrees; it has 14 neck vertebrae to pull off this trick. The African scops owl, among others, has false eyes on the back of its head, so its potential prey can’t tell which way it is looking. The eyes are widely spaced. Owls improve their three-dimensional vision by bobbing their heads comically to get a fix on what they are looking at.
An owl’s hearing is reckoned to be ten times better than a human’s. It is helped by the wide facial disc, which focuses the sound, in the same way that we can cup our hands round our ears to hear better. Most birds hear through two small holes in the skull; owls have a huge half-moon shaped vertical slit. Some species have their ears set asymmetrically, which allows them to get a cross-bearing on the source of a sound: snowy owls can drop precisely onto a lemming hidden in a tunnel beneath the snow. Obviously, precise hearing wouldn’t be very effective if an owl’s ears were filled with the sound of its own progresses, but owls can fly without making a sound. Their wings are fitted with feathered silencers. This is not only helpful for stealth – it helps that a short-tailed field vole can’t hear a hunting barn owl – but also essential if the barn owl is to use its sense of hearing to get an exact cross-bearing on the creature it is hunting. Owls tend to fly very slowly, the better to examine the world through their two principal enhanced senses, and in near-complete silence. Barn owls are less committed to night than some species, and are particularly fond of dawn and dusk – crepuscular is the pleasing word to describe this, but I have often seen them hunting during the day, especially in winter, when they like to patrol the shaggy edges of a field following the line of a hedge. The field voles they look for are as hidden in the daytime as they are at night, for they move in tunnels between the stalks of rank grass. But an owl can hear them.IV
If you are a creature of the night, no matter how good your eyes are, you’re still going to find it hard to relate to your own kind, simply because you don’t see them all that often. As a result, owls tend to be very vocal. They call to each other often: keep-offs and come-hithers and calls that mean I’m-here-where-are-you? This is technically known as a contact call. The land behind my house is full of tawny owls. It’s autumn as I write this chapter, a season when owls are on the move: young owls must leave the place in which they were brought up and seek their fortunes. Especially, they need to seek a place where they can hunt. So at this time of year there are frenzied debates about ownership, precedence and gender. The wavering hoot from every horror film you’ve ever seenV is answered, sometimes by birds w
ho can’t really hoot properly, being too young to have got the knack. The mature and assured hoot of a full adult must be a dismaying sound to them. Tawny owls will also make a sharper two-syllable call, often transcribed as “kee-vit”, with the stress all on the last syllable. This sometimes leads to frenzied nocturnal duets in which one owl’s sharp contact call is answered by a territorial hoot. A tawny owl doesn’t go tu-whit tu-whoo, it goes tu-whit and it goes tu-whoo. But there is nothing mechanical about it: the two calls can be uttered at differing intensity, frequency and tone, and at times, the two calls can merge.
Owls calls are always evocative. The wood owl in Africa asks: “Now then, whooooo’s a naughty boy?”; the European scops owl makes a sound like a submarine’s sonar; the African eagle owl goes in for a basso rhythmic grunting while a juvenile Pel’s fishing owl is said to make a sound “like a lost soul falling into the bottomless pit.”
Owls tell us about the versatility of the wild world. It is a mistake to think that every single possible ecological niche has a creature filling it, but nature is always prepared to have a damn good try. It came up with all those birds of prey to dominate the day, and did the same for night, and it did so in its usual bewildering number of forms, with the elf owl that weighs no more than an ounce, 31 grams, and is no more than 5 inches long, to the Eurasian eagle owl that weighs 4.5 kilos or 10 pounds.
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I. Unique Selling Point.
II. Owls of the World: A Photographic Guide by Heimo Mikkola.
III. Though Hindus traditionally see owls as stupid. And Owl, in Winnie-the-Pooh, pretends to be clever while actually being rather daft. He signs himself WOL.
IV. A kestrel also hunts short-tailed field voles without seeing them very much, but it still relies entirely on its eyes. A kestrel can pick out a vole by sighting the fresh scent trails that the vole makes with its urine. The kestrel can see them because its vision takes in ultraviolet light.
V. Most night creatures have a sinister reputation, often associations with death and sorcery. But it’s not owls that humans fear, it’s the dark, which was the time of maximum danger for our savannah-walking ancestors. An owl cry tells us that this is the time to be afraid.
Is-ness
What’s the point if it all? In the bad days and worse nights when Winston Churchill’s black dog sneaks through the window and lies fawning at your feet, the question seems unanswerable. My mother said it wasn’t a dog: “I like dogs, I wouldn’t mind if it was a dog. It’s a black cloud.” Depression is a terrible thing, and most of us know the taste of it, while some must live on the stuff for day after day: black nourishment for a lost soul trying to be found. And the worst thing that the dog or cloud can inflict on you is that sense of purposelessness. There really is no point; I’m just existing. Nothing I do matters, nothing I do will ever mean anything, nothing I do will last. I just get up and go through the motions of the day and then lie down at night and sleep, or try to. For a human it’s the most terrible thought in the world. A human needs to be worth something. A human needs to matter. A human can’t just live. Or if that’s what we do, we need some illusion of mattering.
But as we look at the Animal Kingdom spreading all around us in the broadest way immarginable,I we are forced to realise that just being is what many of us do. A human being can sometimes find it hard to see the point of his own existence: what, then, to make of the life of a gnathostomulid? All you can say of such a creature is that it exists in order to exist. These are worms that live between grains of sand, and they are sometimes called jaw worms. Their great talent is that they can live in places with very little oxygen: in sand and mud beneath shallow coast waters, where they can operate their second great gimmick, their jaws and teeth. They are the Father William worms – he was the old man in Alice, who ate up the goose “with the bones and the beak”. He explains that in youth, he took to the law
“And argued each case with my wife,
And the muscular strength that it gave to my jaw
Has lasted the rest of my life.”
The muscular strength of the jaws of the gnathostumulid allows them to gnaw living matter from grains of sand. They are simultaneous hermaphrodites, perhaps a consolation in what seems to be rather a restricted life.
But all lives are restricted: or all lives are meaningful. Gnathostomulids live and reproduce and die: and that’s glory enough. Perhaps a creationist can tell us why God made them, a dull creature for a dull day. But what is relevant, to them at least, is that they live. There are more than 100 species of them, and there are probably very many more, if we could be bothered to look for them, but gnathostomulid experts are thin on the ground compared to birdwatchers.
Life comes up with these strange, and to us, pretty pointless creatures, not to show off or even because it can, but because it does. The forces of life make creatures and what these creatures do is life. If they become ancestors, then the line continues. Students of Zen poetry talk about the ah-ness of things. This is a concept better shown by example than explanation. Here is a classic example of ah-ness from the Japanese haiku master Basho, a poem about flowers.
The ominaeshi, ah!
The stems as they are,
The flowers as they are.
It reads a trifle awkwardly, I know, but no doubt it flows in Japanese. The idea of ah-ness is about explaining in words that the matter in question goes too deep for words: so it’s a canny little paradox, the grace of words conveying the emotion of wordlessness. A haiku poet often experiences such a moment when a cuckoo announces the arrival of spring.II I have touched on the same sort of emotion in recent chapters when I have written, or tried to write about, encounters with a bateleur and a lammergeier.
So let’s move from ah-ness to is-ness, which I think is a related phenomenon. Is-ness is shared by all living things. A gnathostomulid is because it is. It requires nothing more than existence to be worth existing. Life is about being alive: life is what life is and because life is. We can say with the gnathostomulid: “I is therefore I am.”
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I. Another line from Finnegans Wake.
II. The cuckoo in question is the lesser cuckoo, Cuculus poliocephalus. We shall get to cuckoos in due course as we circle through the birds. The lesser cuckoo is called in Japanese hototogisu, a fine word that few haiku writers have been able to resist. Here’s an 18th-century example from Kagami Shuko, a fine poem about the frustrations of birdwatching, trying and failing to get a good diagnostic and above all tickable view of a cuckoo and failing.
Hototogisu – can’t get my head through the lattice
Both these poems are taken from The Classic Tradition of Haiku, edited by Faubion Bowers.
Crisis relocation
Crisis relocation is a bit of jargon from the Cold War and it means being somewhere else when the crisis happens. If there are a hundred nuclear missiles heading for Washington it’s a good idea to get the powerful people in government and administration away: preferably a good while before the missiles are on their way down. It’s a principle of anticipation. And though the terminology dates from the 1970s, the concept goes back to the dawn of life. Whenever a crisis strikes, the best place to be is far away. Just as a wise batsman plays the demon fast bowler from the non-striker’s end, so the greatest strategy for avoiding a crisis is not being there when it happens.
The better you can fly, the more adept you are at crisis relocation. That puts birds ahead of any other class of animals on the planet. Winter is a crisis that strikes the planet once a year in every place outside the tropics, but not in all places at the same time. There are around 10,000 species of birds: something like 1,800 specialise in crisis relocation. That is to say, they are long-distance migrants. When winter strikes and there is nothing to eat and the killing chill settles over the once-friendly and fecund expanse of countryside, they are somewhere else. And of the remaining 8,200-odd, many, if not most, take smaller journeys, often gathering in peripatetic flocks that follow the foo
d sources, flocks that break up once the warm weather arrives again and it is time to think about breeding and to stop being one of many and start being half of a pair.
So let’s talk about racehorses. It’s hard for me to explain, bit by bit, detail by detail, the difference between a superfit racehorse and a nice horse that likes a bit of a gallop. I could talk about relative length of leg, about the different build, about the fineness of the head, above all, about the way it moves, the way an ultrafit horse will overtrack – that is to say, it will plant its rear hooves some inches ahead of its forward hoof-prints. But that’s not what I actually look at when I see a top horse. I see a sort of elasticity: a stretchiness of movement that indicates the trained-to-the-minute athleticism of a thoroughbred racehorse. It’s not so much an analysable quality as a vibe. That’s not a horse, that’s a horse.
So what is the difference between a common tern and an Arctic tern? Both are lovely and graceful birds. The Arctic has shorter legs, longer tail streamers, no black tip to its bill, translucent wings. Not that I’ve ever really noticed. When you see an Arctic tern and you say, that’s a tern, then you’ve got the idea. Elasticity, yes, especially in the way the body rises and falls with each wingbeat, as if to get maximum value from each stroke, the sense of a flight more delicate, with faster and shallower wingbeats and shorter and narrower wings.