The Once and Future World

by J. B. MacKinnon

  We tend to associate this deep, almost innate awareness of nature with the Stone Age or with tribes of hunter-gatherers, but it isn’t so distant even in Western culture. Professional hunters in Germany in the eighteenth century were expected to be able to look at a wolf’s tracks and determine not only its size, sex and rate of travel, but also whether or not it was rabid. We remember England’s “terms of venery”—the jargon of hunting—for giving us specific words for groups of animals, such as a school of fish or a pride of lions, and also for such quaintly forgotten phrases as “a tiding of magpies” and “a kindle of cats.” Experts suggest that many of the terms that amuse us today—“an unkindness of ravens,” “a shrewdness of apes,” “a disworship of Scots”—were fanciful even in their own time and never in common use. The true language of venery, however, did more than describe beasts by the bunch; it richly evoked their behaviour. The lark’s habit of flying into the air to sing was known as “exalting.” The nocturnal song of nightingales was called “watching,” from the idea of keeping a watch through the darkness. Venery’s description of animal sounds was poetic, but also accurate: weasels really do “squeak,” mice really do “cheep.” Goldfinches chirm, boars girn, starlings murmur, geese creak. The seemingly slow, ambling walk of bears was referred to as “slothing.”

  Ordinary life in the past had an intimacy with other species that today we mainly associate with trained biologists and dedicated naturalists. Many plants and animals were burdened or blessed with superstitions, such as claims that the houseleek* would protect your home from fire or that toads drank milk from cows’ udders, yet there’s no denying the daily communion that’s revealed in such forgotten facts as that homemade cowslip-flower wine was once a popular beverage or that “the usual manner” of making a salad in seventeenth-century England was “to take the young buds and leaves of almost everything that groweth, as in the gardens as in the fields.” Into the nineteenth century it was typical of men to be able to imitate the cries of game animals, and many birds once had common names that suggest observation or even neighbourliness: the species that today are called shrikes were formerly better known as “butcher birds” for their habit of impaling captured insects on thorns for storage, while today’s chaffinch and reed bunting were known as Jack Baker and Bessie Blackers, respectively.† When Benjamin Franklin objected to the bald eagle as a U.S. national emblem, it was because he knew the bird from real life—its almost simpering cry and tendency to steal or scavenge; it was, he said, “a bird of bad moral character.” The older names of flowers involved a similar degree of awareness; we might guess at the qualities of plants called hound’s piss and goodnight-at-noon, but it took real intimacy to name a flower courtship-and-matrimony: its sweet scent fades after picking.

  Musicians still write songs about the meadowlark, though few people know the bird’s song, often including, I suspect, the songwriters. We use phrases like “bald as a coot” or “thin as a rail” without knowing that a coot is a type of waterfowl with a smooth, white forehead, while a rail is a slender, secretive bird built to slip through thickets of marshland reeds. You might argue that we have forgotten such facts because they are no longer useful in the way they once were. Is that true? Is a meadowlark’s song—which never had much to offer to our daily survival—less meaningful today than it was to our ancestors? Far more likely is that the meadowlark and the coot, the shrike and the bear, the weasel and the lion, are simply no longer a part of our lives.

  It has been said that a nature writer is a person who sees the same things as the rest of us but thinks he sees them better. There is a grain of caustic truth in that, but it hardly decides the argument. The issue today is not whether you see heaven in a wildflower, but whether you look at the flower at all.

  To many, the idea of paying deliberate attention to nature may sound ridiculously old-fashioned. So is breathing, I suppose. An awareness of nature is not first and foremost a sentimental or spiritual practice, but a profoundly realistic one—a way of binding ourselves to the simple truth that human beings depend on ecological systems for our survival. Awareness is a countercurrent to the feedback loop of modern life. Pay attention, and we will value nature more. When we value nature more, we work harder to reverse its declines. Reverse the decline in variety and abundance, and nature becomes steadily more fascinating, more spectacular, more meaningful.

  Awareness can be its own reward. One particularly endless February, when the grey and damp of the season had crept into life itself and good news seemed to have gone out of fashion, I noticed that the heads and necks of glaucous-winged gulls were changing, almost overnight, from the smudged brown of winter to the waiter’s-apron white of breeding season. The traditional first sign of spring—the arrival of the first robin—was weeks away at most northern latitudes, but here was a more subtle, much earlier reminder that, yes, one day the sun would again beat down upon our backs. There is much to be gained and nothing to lose in these small acts of reconnection.

  Nature remains a more hopeful place than the news about it might suggest. I recently joined three professional biologists for twenty-four straight hours of birdwatching (or birding, as aficionados call it, because the birds are often identified by sound rather than by sight). We started at 1 a.m., climbing high into the mountains in order to spend the day descending through every possible kind of habitat on our way back to the valley floor. By the following night, we had encountered 117 species of bird. The biologists were disappointed, but to me, it seemed miraculous. One hundred and seventeen species. It was more kinds of bird in a single day than I had knowingly seen in my entire life. They were everywhere, from spruce grouse pecking across the snowfields to an enormous great horned owl, outraged we had discovered him in his canyon lair.

  There was a time when religious scholars sought to relate every species to the primacy of human beings—lice are our incentive to cleanliness, deer keep our meat fresh until we need it, horse shit smells sweeter than other turds because horses are chosen to live alongside us. For the most part we have left such thoughts behind, yet the way we shutter ourselves away from nature has much the same effect today, making it easy to believe that only our own species is at the centre of creation. It’s a difficult world view to sustain in the presence of the ruby-crowned kinglet, a bird that weighs less than a handful of coins and sings in forests so cold and high that no human culture in history has ever lingered there for long.

  The biologists and I didn’t only see birds. We saw bats and beavers and a pine marten. We saw snakes and two black bears. We saw what is not meant to be seen: the twin tips of a mule deer’s ears where it hid in a stand of cattails, and a doe in secret stillness on her day bed. And we were able to see with our own eyes the vulnerability of so many creatures: the way that Lewis’s woodpeckers appeared only in a solitary gully of wildfire-blackened trees, or cliff swallows gathered the damp clay to mud their gourd-shaped nests from a single puddle between a highway and a parking lot.

  So much life, and such precariousness of life. In only a single day of careful observation, the wild landscape came to seem infinitely more alive, more abundant, more full of purpose than I had remembered—and because of that, more worthy of care. It remains a beautiful world, and it is its beauty, far more than its emptiness, that can inspire us to seek more nature in our lives and in our world.

  In a final kind of experiment, I spent a month taking daily swims in the ocean. It’s odd that I had never done something similar before—for twenty years, I’ve never lived more than a half-hour’s walk from salt water. Yet I sometimes go weeks without truly noticing the Pacific, which, after all, is the world’s largest ocean, at its widest five times the diameter of the moon, at its deepest more than two kilometres deeper than Mount Everest is tall.

  The beach where I swam every day was far from home; it happened to be the point where the Guadalquivir River spills into the Atlantic Ocean in southwestern Spain. The shore there was a perfect illustration of where the human relation
ship to the sea has taken us: Other than crowds of people sunning themselves, there was not a lot of life. After two weeks of afternoon swims, I had seen precisely zero fish of any size. I explained this away with the fact that the water was silty and the colour of caramel, but the birds, too, passed by mainly in the distance, and even seashells amounted to just a scattering on the sand. The main fish stocks that run between the Guadalquivir and the ocean—various species of eel, shad, mullet and lamprey—have shrunk in their distribution through the river and its tributaries by an average of 77 percent in just the last fifty years. The biggest of those fish, the European sea sturgeon, which can reach nearly four metres in length and outweigh me by five times, is at extremely high risk of extinction in the wild and has been extirpated from the Guadalquivir River. Typical cuisine in the area includes batter-dipped flatfish so small you eat them bones and all; shrimp so small you eat them without peeling off the carapace; and snails so small you eat them without pulling them out of the shell. I found a dusty book at the local library with photos of the fish market from the 1940s and ’50s, and the fish were larger, but not by much. That’s how far baselines have shifted in much of Europe and Asia: the golden years for fishing were a thousand years ago.

  We retain the myth of the sea as boundless, so large and powerful that we are like specks at its edge—“Man marks the earth with ruin, his control stops at the sea,” as Lord Byron wrote. Modern ecologists argue that this persistent belief is a delusion that blinds people to a worldwide crisis in the oceans. I had heard those scientists’ words, but had never acknowledged their meaning until I made those daily visits to the shore. Looking down the beach at the tide of humanity in their bright swimsuits, I had a sad epiphany: the wild ocean has been tamed.

  Then one afternoon I descended the cobbled streets to the now-familiar seaside and found it was no longer familiar. A full-moon tide had washed in and rearranged the beach. The whole bay, in fact, had taken on a different aspect, a new pattern of sandbars and pools. The sea had gently, beneath a clear sky and light breeze, moved the land around with the force of an aerial bombing run. On shore there was no hint of any change in the seasons—no twilight goosebumps, no lowering of the sun’s gaze. Yet the sea was on a new path. It trembled with chop; el poniente, the west wind, steepened the faces of the waves. The tourists began to retreat. When a school holiday ended, the beach turned nearly empty overnight. The next day—the very next day—I waded into the water and was startled by a shoal of silver fish. I swam, but somewhere in the murky water I cut my hand on something hard and spiny, and crawled anxiously to shore, suddenly afraid of sharks. How did the fish know? How did they know to return at exactly this time, their schedule precisely tuned to our own? When we look closely at the living world, what we ultimately see is the mystery—we see how much we cannot see.

  After that, the ocean came steadily back to life. More little fish appeared, and bigger fish to chase the small ones. Shells washed onto the beach. Tiny shorebirds arrived, running back and forth at the edge of the water as if afraid to get their feet wet, and then gulls—how strange to realize that even gulls had been a rare sight until then. A tall, white egret appeared, and then the rare Spanish imperial eagle. The beach bars folded their tents and at last I was the only swimmer left, though old men and women still dotted the shore, studying the sea as if it was the only thing on earth worth thinking about. And on the day before I left for a colder and more landward place, I took one final swim—just a way of saying farewell to a new friend. I was wading ashore, already feeling nostalgic, when some creature lashed out from the sand, stung my ankle, and then zigzagged off into the murk. Nature may not be what it was, no, but it isn’t simply gone. It’s waiting.

  * A friend pointed out that the scene I witnessed at my local pond might have been more likely to attract people’s interest on the internet. I found a number of online videos of eagles hunting ducks, including one with more than 150,000 views, along with a photo series featuring a passerby who fails to notice even a high-speed mid-air collision between two eagles, one of which crashes into the water. The photographer suggests that the bedraggled eagle that comes ashore “symbolized America in its current trials.”

  * Also known in the past as welcome-home-husband-though-never-so-drunk, though the root of the name is unclear.

  † These common names are taken from the U.K., where one species of shrike (the red-backed shrike) has since been extirpated, and the reed bunting is listed as a priority for conservation.

  Chapter 6.

  GHOST ACRES

  Great Britain is not a wild place, but for all the black panthers. A colour variant of the familiar spotted leopard, black panthers turn up across the whole of the island, from the heathery moors of the Scottish Highlands to the chalk cliffs that face across the English Channel to France. By the most informed estimates, there may be one hundred or more sightings each month. For animals that can weigh as much as a heavyweight boxer and are feared man-eaters in other parts of the world, the British panthers are remarkably deferential, subsisting mainly on deer and rabbits rather than people or even livestock. Other big cats are seen in Britain as well, such as puma and lynx, but the vast majority of reports involve the panthers. According to one tracker, there are perhaps twenty black panthers in the southern county of Dorset alone, despite a human population density approaching 300 per square kilometre.

  More than a dozen books have been written about Britain’s big cats, which are darlings of the media—even beers have been named after them. Still, there is no conclusive proof that they actually exist. It’s not impossible that they do: The panthers are said to be feral cats that have escaped from zoos or circuses or been released by owners who’ve grown tired of caring for large, demanding predators. At any given time, there really are many such animals in private hands; a 2006 survey of Britain’s licensed exotic pets turned up 154 big cats, including fifty leopards. Still, the sceptic awaits a convincing photograph, a decisive video, a free-roaming panther found dead at the side of the road.

  Great Britain is one of the least forested and most crowded regions in Europe—you can’t hide a yeti there the way you might in the Himalaya mountains, or a sasquatch the way you can in the Canadian wilderness. But a black panther can fade into the smallest patch of shadow. They are famously silent, reclusive and hard to find. They hunt by night. And they are certainly fierce and frightening enough to epitomize the wild. “Either massive numbers of country people are experiencing social psychosis, or there is something out there that is worth investigating,” says Alayne Street-Perrott, a geographer with Swansea University in Wales. It may be, though, that it is the landscape of the imagination that should be investigated. Whether or not black panthers are lurking in the British countryside, it is clear that a lot of people want very badly to believe that they are.

  The natural world of the past is not simply gone and forgotten; in many ways it is still with us. The presence of absence is an idea that dates back at least to Plato, and is instantly understandable to anyone who has traced a family tree and seen the patterns of his or her own life reflected in the personalities, historical wounds and turning points of distant ancestors. To recognize that what has been lost is a part of what remains, however, still leaves questions of scale and character. How large an absence are we talking about? Where do we see its effects? What is the complete inventory of the missing? The answers to these questions not only shape the way we measure the world around us, but also help reveal the character of nature itself—including human nature.

  Of all the regions on earth, Britain, which is geographically the island that houses England, Scotland and Wales, may tell us the most about how we accommodate the diminishment of the living world. The British countryside is deeply loved, globally influential—and almost entirely unnatural. In distant times, Britain was a peninsula joined to the rest of Europe, so that by the time it was ringed by rising seas, it was full of Eurasian animals, including such megafauna as lions, hyenas, wooll
y mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, cave bears, bison and the enormous Irish elk.* Unable to migrate southward in periods of intense cold, some of these species may have been wiped out by ancient shifts in climate. As with so many of the world’s lost megafauna, however, most of these species’ disappearance from Britain is typically blamed on a combination of climate change and human influence. It’s hard to overlook the strain of denial that runs through this claim—when we say that both climate and people drove the animals to extinction, we really mean that we did it. Before the arrival of people, the megafauna had weathered the coming and going of ice ages for millennia.

  Cause and effect become clearer with time. Five thousand years ago, Britain was covered in forests that are now pleasingly remembered as “wildwood.” There were sprawling oak woods, stands of birch, pine and hazel, and forests of lime, which is now uncommon as a naturally occurring species even as individual trees. As much as 50 percent of those woodlands were already gone two thousand years ago. By 1900, Britain’s original forest cover had dipped below 5 percent and has since recovered to around 10 percent—there’s that number, again. Today’s woodlands are heavily managed; nothing that can truly be called a wildwood remains on the island.

  It was a similar story for the animal kingdom. Britain was once home to the aurochs, a species of wild cattle that probably spent most of its time in marshes and bogs. Do not picture the sedate, domestic modern cow: In Roman coliseums, bull aurochs proved powerful enough to kill tigers and bears. In Poland, where the last aurochs on earth, a female, died in the Jaktorów forest in 1627, the animal is said to have been fast enough to spin around and toss its own dung with its horns before it could hit the ground. Scholars at Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge still drink from an aurochs horn on special occasions, but aurochs were wiped out in Britain two thousand years before the species was declared globally extinct.* Other early losses include reindeer, as well as Alces alces, the animal known in Europe as the elk and in North America as the moose. Brown bears—the same species as North America’s grizzlies, though typically smaller—were probably extirpated from England, Scotland and Wales during the days of the Roman Empire. Wild boar and beavers followed in the thirteenth century, the Eurasian lynx in the 1500s and wolves by the early 1700s. By that point, Britain had lost all of its large wild animals but deer and red deer, the latter known to North Americans as elk. Deer watching is now a popular pastime.