Ten Million Aliens

by Simon Barnes

  It’s not just the endlessness of the forms that has this curious mental effect; it’s also their deeply contradictory nature. The great edge that birds have – you might say the whole point of being a bird – is that they can fly. Some birds have developed flightlessness, and that works fine until conditions are altered, as we have seen, and that’s all very right and proper and understandable. But evolution doesn’t stop there. Indeed, evolution doesn’t know when to stop: that’s almost the definition of the term. And so the forces of evolution have stood all that sort of logic on its head and produced a non-flying bird that’s a fish.II

  We all have a basic idea of what a bird is: a feathery thing that flies. So here is a penguin: a complete contradiction, a smooth thing that swims and can’t fly at all. We’re back to Walt Whitman; very well, I contradict myself: for nature and evolution are every bit as large even as old Walt, and therefore every bit as capable of self-contradiction. The class of birds has given us hummingbirds that fly backwards like helicopters – you could put a hundred in your hat – and earn a living by flitting from flower to flower in the warmth of the sun. And penguins. The penguin stands, waddles and swims as living proof of the extraordinary way that nature has of taking things to a logical extreme and then going back in itself and doing something completely different.

  But are penguins really so flightless? There are zoos where you can walk through a transparent underwater tunnel and watch the penguins doing their stuff all around you: water is a thicker medium than air, and penguins propel themselves through it with their wings. They are flying all right: it’s just that their mobility is in rather than over the water: emperor penguins can dive to depths of 565 m, 1,850 feet, and stay submerged for more than 20 minutes. They are as well adapted to the water as seals, and like seals they must come ashore to breed. Eggs tie all birds to land for at least part of their lives: but the great oceans are the places where penguins live most of their lives.

  There are 17–20 species of penguins, depending on whose taxonomy you agree with, and they are mostly confined to the southern hemisphere. They are associated in our minds with the Antarctic, but in fact ten species are found in temperate parts of the world and one species, the Galapagos penguin, lives right on the equator. They all follow a very similar body pattern and strategy: the classic penguin (Penguin Classic?) has stout wings that have become flippers, with counter-shaded bodies, dark above, pale below, so that from below they look like sky and from above like sea: a colour scheme designed to foil predators. The cross-ice journeys of king and emperor penguins in Antarctic are famous: the bigger species live in the colder parts of the world. That’s a general pattern across the wild world: the bigger you are, the further your vital organs are from the freezing temperatures, and the easier it is to maintain body temperature. It’s to do with the ratio of body surface to the stuff inside. Basically, bigger is warmer.III

  Penguins are considered endearingly preposterous: comic waddlers across the ice, their upright carriage giving them a droll and faintly human look. They were always a logo waiting to happen. They are creatures that amusingly pop up from the sea like champagne corks when there’s a leopard seal in the water. Under the sea they are very different. Their feet, set so far back on their bodies, may make them look funny on land but underwater, that configuration helps them to become flying machines, capable of reaching 12 kph, 7.5 mph, in the water, which is pretty swift in a viscous medium. They can more or less double that when escaping from predators.

  The human point of view limits our understanding if we don’t use a little imagination. See a penguin from a penguin’s point of view – or from a leopard seal’s point of view – or for that matter, from the point of view of their preferred prey, krill, squids and fish – and you see an evolutionary triumph of speed, endurance and skill.

  * * *

  I. Old muso’s joke: what is the difference between a lead guitarist and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist…

  II. Of course, evolution has also produced a fish that’s a bird: if you have ever witnessed the flight of a flying fish you’ve seen one of the most joyous contradictions in creation.

  III. A principle known as Bergmann’s rule

  One more twist

  The rest of the molluscs are gastropods. It’s a huge class, second only to the class of insects in terms of species; mind you, that’s still a pretty distant second, since practically every animal species is an insect. But gastropods are still impressively diverse, with up to 80,000 known species spread over 202 families. They’ve also done something that insects have never managed and exploited the riches of the sea.I They have also adapted to deserts, and between these extremes, rivers, lakes, marshes, woods, gardens, estuaries, mudflats, oceanic abysses, hydrothermal vents and perhaps the toughest of all habitats, the intertidal zone, where they must cope with twice-daily extremes.

  The shelled gastropods are the most famous and most thrillingly various and most wonderfully beautiful. The homes/overcoats they create for themselves out of calcium carbonate are hugely desirable things, and not just for humans seeking collections or cash. I remember sitting on a black sand beach in Colombia with the alarming acid-trip feeling that the entire beach was shifting about in front of my eyes. It appeared to be doing so because it was. Every one of those one-doored gastropod shells was walking about, with a rather random number of legs protruding from beneath in a Dali-esque fashion. The entire beach was alive with moving shells: a quick double-handed scoop would have picked up a couple of dozen with no effort whatsoever. Most were about the size of a thumbnail. These were hermit crabs, crabs who parsimoniously decline to waste their own resources by growing a shell, and instead borrow the discarded shell of a late gastropod. Or possibly a late hermit crab: who knows how many hermit crabs can make use of a single gastropod shell once the original owner has discarded it? The shells were all constructed in the most elegant coiled spiral.

  There is a touching sequence in one of the great Modesty Blaise novels,II in which Willie Garvin is emotionally shattered by the ordeal Modesty has gone through. Modesty does all she can to talk him round, and he makes a huge effort to master himself. As a token of his return to his normal state of profound (though never sexual) companionability, he forces himself to speak.

  “ ‘Did you know… did you know, Princess… only about one whelk in four million is left-handed?’

  Tension drained from her body. She knew she had won.

  ‘Left-handed? No. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know whelks had any hands, Willie.’

  ‘Not ’ands, Princess. Their shells are twisted right-’anded. You could work all your life with whelks, and the chances are you’d never see one with a left-’anded shell.’ ”

  And then they get off together and kick hell out of the bad guys.III

  The shelled legions of the gastropods are things of wonder: ribbon bullia, rugged vitularia, Australian trumpet, zebra volute, distorted triumphis, bubble marginella, large perverse turrid, Japanese wonder shell. But there are many gastropods that don’t have shells, or have internal shells, or very small shells. They manage to survive in environments that can’t provide calcium carbonate to make shells, and so they simply do without.

  We have already met the slugs in their sexy extravagance. There is a quite different group called sea slugs, which can be beautiful in their own right, coloured vibrantly and gliding through the water breathing through feathery, clearly visible gills. They are called the nudibranchs, because they have naked gills. They too come in some considerable diversity: the Spanish dancer in deep crimson, the elegant sea slug in pink and yellow, Anna’s sea slug in purple and blue with white and yellow, as lovely a slug as anybody is capable of imagining.

  There is also a mystifying group called sea hares, which are related to sea slugs but have long sensory head-stalks, which you could say look a bit like ears, so they make a kind of acid-stoned maritime hare. There is another distinct group called the swimming sea slugs, and they
include a species called the common sea angel.

  It’s not a shell that gastropods have in common, then: it’s the torsion. In the course of their development, each individual gastropod twists along the head-to-tail axis. By doing so it loses some aspects of its bilateral symmetry, which is a puzzler, because though technically a bilateran, it is not actually bilaterally symmetrical; the wild world is always capable of muddling any certainty, making yet one more variation, one more contradiction, one more twist in the plot. The torsion has nothing to do with Willie’s twisting of the shell: all gastropods do it, shelled or not.

  * * *

  I. Insects have, however, adapted to the air, something gastropods have never got close to. Flying snails are very rare.

  II. Sabretooth by Peter O’Donnell, first published 1966.

  III. Fascinatingly, this is not the only shellfish reference in the major thrillers of the 1960s. James Bond finds Honeychile Rider in Dr No after she has been gathering shellfish; the chapter is called “The Elegant Venus”. Honey explains, with fine appropriateness, that she has been gathering specimens of Venus elegans. This is a real shellfish, though the name is now obsolete; it is a bivalve, rather than a gastropod. In the film Ursula Andress, as Honey, makes her famous entrance carrying two conches; these of course are gastropods.

  Hijoputido

  It was the kind of sinister weather you can get on the coast of East Anglia: dark sky, a marginally darker sea and a wind that cut like a razor. There was a feeling that the sky was capable of any enormity: white-out, blizzard, face-stripping sleet, concussive hail, rain that might penetrate any number of layers. My fingers were clamped round the binoculars in a death-grip and I wondered how long the skin on my face would stay put. This was sinister weather in a sinister place: Shingle Street, which has strange legends of a failed German invasion during World War Two and of a pub destroyed by a bomb developed at Porton Down.

  And in an instant there were 60 birds flying around me. Extremely ordinary little birds, bounding rather in their flight, with odd flashes of white. They seemed quite a mixed bag, a species that was sloppily carrying on without a proper uniform. A non-birder would have thought nothing of them: wondering only what these sparrows were doing on the beach. And further north, much further north, the same birds happily fill the house sparrow niche around Inuit settlements – so for them, the weather was balmy: certainly conditions in which they were relaxed and confident. They were snow buntings, the world’s most northerly breeding bird, perfectly capable of raising a family up to and beyond the 80 degree parallel. And they are passerines: but then most birds are passerines.

  As you look through the Animal Kingdom, every now and then you come across a basic design that works incredibly well. Well, all designs of living species have to be said to work, or the creature wouldn’t be alive: what I am getting at here is that some designs are capable of immense variation.I We looked at gastropods in the previous chapter: we will look at the same principle again, and again and again when we come to insects. Among mammals, rodents provide the biggest variation: but there are more species in the order of passerines than there are in the entire class of mammals: getting on for 6,000. About 60 per cent of all bird species are passerines.

  They tend to be roughly the same shape, a sort of bird-shaped bird, if you see what I mean. A few of them, like the whydahs, carry spectacular decorations, but stripped down, the body plan is largely similar to that of their fellow passerines. The USP is in the legs. Passerines all have feet with three toes in the front and one behind – standard bird layout, really – and they all have a muscular mechanism that locks the foot closed. This means that they can perch: but better than that, it means that they can sleep perched without falling off. From my place in the winter I often see large numbers of jackdaws and rooks coming in to roost, wheeling, jacking and cawing, as they take their places in the summits of half a dozen trees. Here they will sleep the night. And not fall off.

  In Britain the passerines range in size from the raven to the goldcrest: globally the range of size is much the same, the prizes for the extremes going to the thick-billed raven at 1.5 kg, 3.3 pounds, and the short-tailed pygmy tyrant at 4.2 g, 0.15 ounces. And they come in their thousands. The small brown bird that you can’t identify is always a passerine: British birders call them LBJs, or Little Brown Jobs; Spanish birders, more imaginatively, call them hijoputido, a bird from the order of little bastard passerines.II

  Most of the birds on your bird-table are passerines: robins, blackbirds, thrushes, greenfinches, goldfinches, linnets, nuthatches, sparrows, dunnocks, starlings, great tits and blue tits. The only exceptions will be the pigeons and doves, and if you’re lucky a great spotted woodpecker. Just about everything is a passerine. The order includes birds as exquisite as the firecrest, moving like a clockwork toy with its head on fire through the pine needles, and species as commonplace as the sparrow.III There are passerines that people cross the world for, like the birds of paradise; there are passerines that even the most obsessive birders wouldn’t cross the street for. I have sat in a rainforest in Sri Lanka while the astonishingly confiding Sri Lankan blue magpie, one of the island’s many endemicIV species, got on with their business all around me;V I have walked for miles along Cornish cliffs with the sea on one side and the skylarks and meadow pipits on the other, forever with me.

  I have stood in a Suffolk marsh and seen one of the great sights in British birding, perhaps in world birding, when a starling flock performs its nightly miracle. The magnificent aerial ballet – a murmuration – seems to be a celebration of starlingkind: an expression of togetherness, a way of strengthening and revelling in the immense sense of contentment and safety that comes from the great rich numbers of the flock. And I remember my first morning in Africa, stepping from my hut by the Kafue River and finding not sparrows on my doorstep but birds of the most improbable shade of powder blue: blue waxbills, welcoming me to a world of altered possibilities. I was never quite the same after the waxbills.

  All these are passerines: and passerines go on and on, many of them discreet and secretive and hard to identify in their littleness and their brownness, others taking a more extravagant line. Passerines are everywhere and always with us, and as such, they set the tone for the places we live in and the places we visit and the places we pass through. Anywhere we can get away from concrete, passerines define our world, and even among the buildings, there are passerines. Pied wagtails in Britain have a great affinity with car parks and flat roofs and will danceVI across them in search of insects. But any open space, with a bit of earth or grass or shrubs or trees, will take its character and its meaning from the passerines that make use of it. More than any other group in the entire Animal Kingdom, more than any other group in the entire class of birds, passerines define the place and the time. There is a sense in which passerines define ourselves.

  * * *

  I. This is not an unvarying pattern, of course. There are some species without close relatives, some creatures that are more or less a one-off. There are some mammals and some birds in which one species constitutes not just the genus but the entire family: the family is, then, monotypic. These misfits include some of the weirdest creatures on the planet: platypus, koala, aardvark, pangolin and the Ganges and Indus river dolphin; and in birds, the hammerkop, oilbird, shoebill and wallcreeper.

  II. Hijo de puta, son of a whore, is a routine Hispanic insult. David Beckham was sent off during his Real Madrid days for trying it out on a linesman.

  III. House sparrows have declined, most notably in London, from super-abundance to relative obscurity. There are many suggested causes for this, but no one has nailed it. Probably it comes down to a complex suite of causes. This is worrying because the more complex a situation, the harder it is to reverse it.

  IV. An endemic species is a species confined to a single place; it is most frequently used (especially in birding circles) to refer to an animal that lives only in one country. Zambia’s only endemic bird is Chap
lin’s barbet, which has been patriotically renamed Zambian barbet.

  V. Many Sri Lankan birds are astonishingly bold and will perform for visiting humans without self-consciousness. This gratifying trait has been put down to the country’s Buddhist history. The suggestion is that the traditional respect for non-human forms of life has given birds an unusual confidence in human beings, and with it a reduction in the traditional flight distance.

  VI. For an Italian, every wagtail is a ballerina.

  Creeping like snail

  The contemplation of extremes is always helpful. The best way to do the contemplating is by being there, sharing the same space, clapping eyes on, sometimes touching, sometimes even picking up and holding. It’s all very well knowing that the blue whale has a tongue the size of an elephant: it’s quite another to see a blue whale for yourself. And in the same way, it’s amusing to read about the bumblebee bat – sometimes called Kitti’s hog-nosed bat – that’s found in Thailand and Burma, but when one of those absurdly tiny little things flies over your head it adds another layer to your understanding. You need that sense of wonder if you want to reach for the secrets of the universe, and the gosh response of the child – and for that matter, the fuck-me response of the non-cynical adult – is the best way to nurture the process. And very few things can do this quite as simply and straightforwardly as size. I have, for example, sat in a canoe looking up at drinking elephants, three massively ivoried bulls who would have been impressive at any angle. But from a few yards away and in a position that started lower than the feet of the elephants, I was impressed as never before by the sheer elephant-ness of elephants: the ah-ness of elephants, if you prefer: the trunks as they are, the tusks as they are.