by Tom Cox
If you visit the footpath leading down to Buckfastleigh town centre from the ruined church at the top of the hill at dusk on a rainless summer night, you’ll see precisely what Anna means. It’s like a bat motorway: dozens of horseshoes speeding up the leafy corridor towards Dartmoor, weaving expertly between branches and your face, like X-wing Starfighters negotiating the artificial canyons of the fragmenting Death Star. I luckily managed to photograph a couple of these bats on my second visit to the spot. In the background of one shot is a ghostly figure that I would like to boast is one of Devon’s infamous Green Lane sprites but was actually another bat spotter, further down the hill. Bat spotting is a common hobby here. Earlier in the year, Chris, who co-runs the community radio station where I volunteer as a DJ, had been walking in the area at nightfall and saw a gang of tough-looking adolescents approaching who appeared to be up to no good. Their threatening aura dissipated when he noticed that all of them clutched bat detectors in their hands.
A top-of-the-range bat detector will set you back well over a hundred quid but, on a tip-off from Bea, another Devon Wildlife Trust volunteer, who hosted a bat walk in the village of Dartington earlier this month, I discovered that Argos do a surprisingly good children’s version for around a tenner. Sadly, when I went into Argos in Exeter and typed ‘bat detector’ into one of their terminals, the item turned out to be out of stock. The woman behind me in the queue saw and offered a look of sympathy, perhaps less in recognition of my disappointment and more because I was the kind of person who goes into Argos and types ‘bat detector’ into one of their terminals.
In June, at Berry Head Nature Reserve, I sat with twenty other bat enthusiasts with more advanced bat detectors and waited for the local horseshoe population to emerge from their roost in the old quarry overlooking the sea. The age of my fellow enthusiasts ranged from early twenties to late sixties, and no archetypal bat enthusiast attire was in evidence, although I could not help noticing one younger couple who looked about as much like bats as any two Homo sapiens I had ever seen. Their style was something that stepped boldly and spikily beyond goth: an all-black mix of tough fabric, elaborate piercings and violently angular hard-glued hair that suggested a life lived in darkness, on the wing and on the edge. Sadly the batlike couple appeared to have a muttering disagreement part-way through the evening, and made a low-key but semi-dramatic exit towards the car park so did not get a chance to witness any actual bats. All we’d really done as a group by that point was root through some cowpats for dung beetles, which I found fascinating but am aware might not be everyone’s idea of a quality Friday night.
The pipistrelles came out first at Berry Head, common bats you’ll see in most rural areas of the UK in summer, only around a quarter of the size of a greater horseshoe. We were instructed to change the range on our detectors ten minutes later, when the greater horseshoes emerged, since they echo-located at a higher frequency to the pipistrelles: around 80 kHz. Several bat experts had told me that the noise horseshoes made was like nothing else on earth. Bea described it as ‘like a long wet fart’. To me it sounded like the highfalutin work of a rural acid house DJ who lived by his own rules. It mixed with the music drifting across on the wind from a nightspot in the nearby town of Brixham to create a mash-up that many would have agreed managed to be simultaneously rinsing and banging. Three teenage fishermen walked up the hill past where we were sitting and turned goldfish-mouthed. ‘I’m going to say something damning about this scenario,’ their faces said to each other, ‘but I will need to take a number of hours to process it first.’
Bats are divided into microbats and megabats, but it gets confusing as you get large microbats which are bigger than some of the smaller megabats. Greater horseshoes, which can live until they are thirty and are one of suprisingly few species of bats that actually hang upside down, are an unusually large microbat. People often expect and want categories to be clearly defined in nature, as if when weasels were invented they were all brought out on a large tray marked ‘Weasels’, which was very separate from another tray, which contained all the planet’s original stoats. But that’s not always the case. As the ecologist John Walters explained to me in an orchard just outside the village of Stoke Gabriel, the line between butterflies and moths, for example, is not a line at all, as it does not exist. Some moths are surprisingly cool with flitting about in the daytime; some butterflies are a bit reclusive and nocturnal. Some moths have a Laura Ashley beauty to their markings that they don’t get nearly enough credit for. Some butterflies – such as the numerous marble whites in the orchard with us – are a bit mothlike in their wing decor. You get the feeling Donald Trump could learn a lot about the complexities of genetic identity by spending a day in a never-fertilised, insect-heavy field such as this, but of course, as a massive closedbrain fuckshined pissface, he wouldn’t. He’d be too busy nuking it and turning it into a golf course.
I could have got flat on my stomach in the orchard, as I did in my parents’ garden in Nottinghamshire so often on summer days when I was six or seven, and watched the activity in that tiny never-fertilised jungle for hours, the communities-within-communities playing out their lives between the reeds of grass. I could then have gone home and identified everything I’d seen, but I’d still not have known a fraction of what there is to know. There are apps on phones for that kind of thing nowadays but they’re not always a guarantee of help. My friend Jenny, who had joined me in the orchard, had been walking along a path near Totnes a few weeks previously and stopped to let a furry orange caterpillar cross. A crowd of walkers soon gathered around the caterpillar, fascinated as to what kind it could be, since it looked quite exotic. Nobody knew the answer. An authoritative man in the crowd told everyone not to worry as he had just the thing, then photographed the caterpillar and fed the information into the appropriate part of his high-grade smartphone. There was a dramatic pause as the crowd waited anxiously for the voice on the phone to reveal the identity of the insect. ‘Orange caterpillar,’ said the phone, finally.
One of the most visually impressive finds when Jenny and I were with John in the orchard was a large emperor moth caterpillar, a beautiful plump specimen with a punk-rock back of soft yellow studs. After pupation John will sometimes release a female emperor moth on Dartmoor, up on one of the high points above Postbridge. ‘Within seconds I’ll see about a hundred randy male emperor moths flying over the ridge, having caught its scent on the wind,’ he told me. Since the previous autumn I had been following John on a few of his talks and expeditions, trying to soak up some of his vast entomological knowledge and sometimes carrying his butterfly net for him. At home John has a glass bee house, where his bees sometimes sleep on their backs. In March, at a talk in Dartington Village Hall attended by Hayley and me, he showed his audience photos to prove this, as well as his stunning watercolour illustrations of insects, snakes and birds, all of which he composes live, outside, in front of his subjects. ‘I can’t do it any other way; I’d have no way of capturing the movement,’ he told me. John also took the first ever photo of the extremely rare horrid ground-weaver spider and will tell you a great story about a fellow naturalist who once escaped unharmed after having an adder up his trouser leg on Dartmoor and reacted to the experience with Buddhist equanimity.
I remember that outside the village hall that night, as Hayley and I set off in the direction of home, there was a full moon, and Jupiter was clearly visible next to it. The planet burned so bright I began to worry if perhaps they had trouble up there with a fire. There was a pregnant feel to the air, as if spring was behind an invisible wall, scratching to be let out, and not far behind it was summer, yawning and rubbing its big eyes. But that summer, as a lot of people in this area knew, could signal an ominous change for the local ecosystem. A couple of hundred yards behind Dartington Village Hall is one of the most fertile small valleys for rare wildlife in the area, a refuge for dormice and another horseshoe colony. Beside it is the social housing of the Brimhay development, occupied by
over-sixties and built by the same 1930s architecture firm which constructed many of the utopian buildings of the nearby Dartington Hall estate. These are slightly draughty structures, tired and in need of an update, but they were designed with community vision and kindness, and placed in a sociable green space, abutting the wild and precious valley. For many of their residents – such as Liz, a nature lover I met who’d not long recovered from a broken spine – the proximity of the valley has a huge bearing on quality of life. The council, however, had decided to bulldoze Brimhay and a large portion of its wildlife to make way for gardenless blocks of flats in which its residents were to be rehoused.
In a court case a few months later, a proposal put together by the Don’t Bury Dartington campaign for a more moderate, more wildlife-friendly and significantly cheaper alternative for Brimhay was put forward. Heroically, Dartington won the case, the result of eighteen months of hard work by Liz and Trudy, the founder of the campaign. ‘If they’d gone ahead with their plan for the flats, nobody who lives here would see each other any more,’ Liz told me. ‘As a community, we socialise because of the layout of our houses and gardens. At the moment, when I’m in my garden I see owls, jays, two different types of woodpecker. I’ve got flowers and butterflies everywhere. All that would have been gone.’ Liz and Trudy raised the £17,000 needed to fight the court case through neighbourhood curry evenings and a groundswell of community support, Liz making the long journey to London despite health problems. The case turned, apparently, on a chewed nut, which was submitted as evidence of the presence of dormice in the area. The outcome represents a simultaneous victory for people, dormice and rare bats, and perhaps the question is, why should the needs of people, dormice and rare bats ever not be mutually compatible?
Weird is a word with two very polarised meanings. Good Weird can be the best thing ever. If someone whose opinion I revere tells me a film or book or record is weird, and I can tell from the tone of their voice that they mean Good Weird, it means I need to consume it as soon as humanly possible. Bad Weird is very different: it’s a warning. It could mean a lot of stuff, none of it particularly salubrious. I can kid myself that loving bats and insects is generally thought of as Good Weird, but that’s because I spend a lot of time hanging out in a cocoon of people who love bats and insects. I know that a lot of people would view it as Bad Weird. I know that not giving a nocturnal flying fuck about horseshoe bats and wanting to park your four-by-four and executive home on top of their rapidly diminished habitats is the norm. I know that not wanting a moth in your house because you’ve just vacuumed and Colin and Sue are coming over later is the norm, as is getting Brian to come in and swat it. This view – seeing a love of nature as Bad Weird – seems to be at the root of so many of the ecologically damaging decisions made, big and small, by humans. ‘Oh, look at the oddballs fighting not to kill all these innocent creatures and to keep the entire world from turning into an unfeeling concrete monolith. What’s all that about? Ignore them. They’re just oddballs. They probably don’t even own any new coats.’ Too often, nature is perceived as an outsider’s hobby. In reality, though, it’s not some quirky extra to the main business. It is the main business.
It’s easy to look at history and find out when a king or despot was born or died but hard to pinpoint precisely when a prevailing attitude shifted. Most history is written by old people who, despite being wise, often have very poor memories, which means it is rife with factual inaccuracies. Nonetheless, it can be said with some certainty that at some hard-to-specify point in the past man lived closely connected with nature, not viewing himself as especially, if at all, superior to it. Then one day he started to view himself as more important and nature as being something to subjugate and treat without respect. Of course this was nonsense and soon created more problems for him as well as for nature. Despite regularly using face scrub, I am nowhere near as pretty as a small magpie moth. I am not better than a bat because I am able to watch Netflix and a bat is not. If anything, this probably makes me worse than a bat. In fact, out of solidarity with bats I recently cancelled my Netflix subscription. I am also almost 100 per cent sure I ate at least a couple of midges when I had a drink in the dark with the bedroom window open the other night. Now I just have to learn to echo-locate and fly through the overhanging branches of an overgrown drover’s road and I will be very nearly there, in full eternal unison with bats.
Naturally, we all have our favourites and our black spots when it comes to nature. I, for instance, try not to spend time around hamsters, as they push me towards a melancholy state of mind. But as soon as you start getting too specific and prescriptive about what it’s OK to like or not like in nature, you become the equivalent of somebody who holds the view that all people who wear hats are dickheads just because they wear hats. I try my best to endorse it all, and I want to be better at accepting that nature is better than me, but I know I have work still to do on this score. Bees are easy to love. It’s taken me years to fully forgive wasps their trespasses and accept that they are much cooler than me in terms of both physique and artisanal craftsmanship. But I am sure I will swear violently at another wasp before my life is over. After one particularly heavy day of insect bites, not long after my final bat walk of the year, I was bitten harder still by another horsefly on my cheek. I raised my hand to squash the horsefly, but I managed to resist. I considered the horsefly for a moment. It had not bitten me because it had taken offence at an out-of-context screenshot from a piece of my writing, or because I liked a piece of music it didn’t, or because I voted Remain in the EU Referendum, or because I sometimes splash out and buy carrots from a supermarket unbefitting my low-born nature. It was just a horsefly who had seen a juicy, half-decent, freshly suntanned cheek, and was being a horsefly. And its equivalents in future generations of insects would probably continue being horseflies long after my kind and I had wiped ourselves out, and somehow there was a curious comfort to be taken from that.
6
THE BEST WAVES
The tiny Victorian terraced house where my nan lived for most of my life was on a steep, narrow street where cars drove a little too fast, children shouted a little too obnoxiously and dogs defecated a little too freely, in the same Nottinghamshire town where, as infrequently as possible, I attended secondary school. At lunchtime on the majority of school days for five years I walked to my nan’s house, which took an average of eleven minutes. I turned right out of the school gates then left into a council estate of pebbledashed post-war houses, where in the summer of 1990 a boy called Ian threatened to hit me with a hammer, then towards the newsagent where my friend Bushy had once legendarily pointed to a jar of halfpenny chews and asked, ‘How much are halfpenny chews?’ From here I cut half-right down a jitty and downhill across a small patch of parkland to the railway embankment, which was frequently peppered with white dog turds and seemed to wear a permanent invisible cloak of its own past, both dark and light, but mostly dark. Afterwards I turned sharp left along a short public footpath, then sharp right, past the town brewery. This was a beautiful, proud, sprawling, red-brick Victorian building which, because I lacked an enquiring mind, only interested me due to two things: a tunnelled footbridge, which I thought was kind of cool, and the fact that Josephine Shaw, the mum of my classmate James Shaw, worked in the reception there, because when you are a fourteen-year-old boy the fact that your classmates have mums can be a surprisingly enduring form of amusement.
My nan’s house was one of the first row you reached after the brewery. The town is called Kimberley, which its residents generally pronounce as ‘Kimbleh’, leaving their mouths open for a fractional but noticeable moment on the final syllable. The street is called Hardy Street and is named after the beer-making brothers who erected the brewery in 1861.
I normally walked to my nan’s alone or with Graham Basten. At school my social life awkwardly spreadeagled the cool, tough, sporty kids and the more nerdy kids, whose maths and science work I could sometimes copy and towards whom
, as I became more mentally and physically absent at school, I gravitated increasingly. Graham was one of the latter. He lived on a new estate five minutes further up the road from my nan’s, and his dad was a butcher, not a supplier of sustainable timber and building materials, although my memory sometimes alters this due to the fact that his dad was a dead ringer for the man who fronted the TV adverts for a famous supplier of sustainable timber and building materials. Graham and I saw ourselves as mild and well behaved, but I now realise that was less to do with us being mild and well behaved and more to do with having plenty of contemporaries to compare ourselves with who were the diametric opposite of mild and well behaved. If we were feeling a bit lairy, we would shout, ‘Josephine Shaaaaaw!’ at James Shaw’s mum as we passed the brewery entrance then run away up the hill. Further up the hill from my nan lived a tall hairy man with big teeth who always wore para boots and an anorak and was, so my nan alleged, a poet. Sometimes when we walked past him, or anyone else who strayed from the tight parameters of late 1980s Kimberley fashion, Graham and I would say, ‘And there it is!’ just loud enough for our targets to hear us.