by Simon Barnes
There are 15 National Parks in Britain, but the Broads Authority is the only one that has to deal with navigation. The waterways must be kept open if they are still to be navigated, and that involves dredging and reed-cutting. There was a time when the loudest voice among the stakeholders was that of the boating people, who rent craft by the week and by the day. They insisted time and again that the area depends for its livelihood on open waterways, and anything – anything at all that got in the way of this – was economic suicide.
This idea of turning those 125 miles of waterways into something like an aquatic M25 is no longer the central part of Broadlands management. The Broads Authority’s publication ‘A Strategy and Action Plan for Sustainable Tourism in the Broads 2011–2015’ stresses the importance of wildlife. Looking for or at wildlife is the third-most frequent activity among visitors. The report stresses consumers’ concern with environmental issues: they want to feel good about visiting the Broads. In other words, the tourism industry needs wildlife whether it likes it or not.
‘The Broads is renowned for its biodiversity,’ boasts the Broads Authority website. ‘It is home to more than a quarter of the rarest wildlife in the UK.’ (A quarter of what? Species? Population? Well, never mind.) The visitor may or may not see cranes and bitterns and swallowtail butterflies: but there is still a deep joy in being in the places where such wonderful things have their being. It follows, then, that to get a reputation for the active destruction of wildlife and wild habitats would be disastrous.
How could this frosty morning give birth to a butterfly?
From my desk I watched as a marsh harrier – a female, dark with a creamy head – cruised over the marsh. It disappeared behind the blobby sallow and then reappeared. Damn it, I really must get rid of that bush.
You know, there is no excuse for ever doing a moment’s work here. The desk is in the hut overlooking the marsh; I also have a place in the house where I work, but I prefer the hut. Who wouldn’t? It’s a short walk from the house, a walk that in itself often throws up jolly bits of wildlife, like a late cloud or crowd of red admirals, flying defiantly on into the autumn. Not a bad old commute.
It replaced a more modest hut on the same site, and getting it erected brought us into direct contact with the Broads Authority. Cindy designed it, of course. She sent precise sketches and plans to the planning office. She was at pains to make it clear this was a nice hut, one that would look comfortable in the wild and semi-wild landscapes of the Broads. It turned out this was a wrong tack. Kindly but firmly, they said it was altogether too magnificent a notion. They would look more kindly on a something that looked like a cattle-shed. Or a bird-hide.
Cindy came up with a re-draw, a more modest and self-effacing structure, more or less wedge-shaped with a sharply sloping roof heading down towards four windows at the front: a hut that functions as a bird-hide. Is that all right?
Hm, said the planners. It’s OK, I suppose. But why are the windows so big? So we can see the bloody birds, she replied, though not in those exact words.
After due thought, they said yes, reminding me of my days on local papers when I frequently had to report that planners had given the green light or the thumbs-up or the go-ahead to some project or other that would make a massive difference to the Borough of Reigate and Banstead.
So as this narrative unwinds and I refer to birds seen from my desk, picture me sitting before a computer screen. Behind it a wall covered in pictures of personal significance: horses, me and my father walking round Cornwall, Africa, that linocut of gannets. On my right, quite a lot of books about wildlife, a picture from the film Withnail and I to make me laugh, and a wonderful wooden cut-out of a plunging otter. This last was of course made by Cindy; it carries the words ‘Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet’ in gloriously weedy calligraphy. Behind me a glass door.
And to my left all the glories of the marsh. That female marsh harrier, she looked as if she was going to stay on here for the winter.
Good. It’s what the marsh is for.
‘Daa-aaa-aad?’
‘Yee-eee-ees?’
‘Why are buzzards such good fliers?’
Dad, what’s the meaning of life? What is life for? How does it happen? What is it going to do next?
I once wrote a wildlife book for children. It was called – not my title – Planet Zoo; I wanted Unicorn Century. In either case the subtitle was 100 Animals We Can’t Afford to Lose. In the course of writing one chapter, I realised that before I could get out of it, I would have to explain the problem of inbreeding depression in words a smart 11-year-old could follow. Oh, and in no more than two short sentences or you’ve lost your audience.
The real problem was not finding the words, though that was hard enough. It was being completely confident that I understood what inbreeding depression actually was. Writing for adults is different: I can assume you understand it, I can write as if you do understand. I can do that even if I don’t fully understand it myself. Or if you don’t. I can flatter you that you’re the sort of person who understands these things, and by doing so, I might even get away with it. I can attempt to bluff because you might be bluffable: plenty of writers work on that principle. We let them get away with it because we’re too cool to ask the obvious question. But when you write for children, you have nowhere to hide. Every bluff gets called. If you don’t understand it – understand it at some fundamental level – you’re buggered.
Eddie’s question about buzzards goes straight to the point: how does evolution work? That’s easy, son: it works by means of natural selection. That answer might satisfy an adult reader, but it certainly wouldn’t satisfy Eddie. So I had to explain how natural selection works, and in terms he could grasp.
The fact that I believe it’s possible is, you might say, the founding principle of the Barneses. My father, Edward, was a producer on Blue Peter for BBC Television; he went on to invent John Craven’s Newsround. He passionately and loudly believes that you can explain anything to children. ‘Never talk down!’ You just avoid grown-up vocabulary – and grown-up pretensions – and tell it straight.
My older sister lectures on the history of art, sometimes to audiences of children, often very young. (I should add that she also lectures to grown-ups on the same subject and in three languages.) She once asked a small Scottish child for his interpretation of the painting of Caravaggio’s ‘Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist’ in the National Gallery in London. ‘I think he’s taking a wee head for his tea.’
It follows, then, that when Eddie asks me a serious question I do what I can to give him a serious answer.
Say a buzzard has four chicks. And one of the chicks is a better flier than the others, so when he grows up he’s better at finding food. So this best-flying buzzard finds a female buzzard and they have four chicks. Let’s say that one of these chicks is even better at flying than her dad. And she grows up big and strong because she’s so good at catching food. When she has chicks of her own, perhaps one of those chicks is still better at flying, and still better at finding food. The buzzards that are the really good fliers will often have chicks that are also really good fliers. The best fliers are the ones that have the best-flying chicks. And so, after years and years and years, all the buzzards we see are really good fliers.
Eddie nodded thoughtfully. For a moment or two he’d got the idea. No doubt he’d ask me the same question again soon enough. No problem there. After all, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with my answer. Seemed to me to imply a teleological explanation for evolution, and that would never do.
A great howling mew from above us, and a buzzard rocked back across the sky.
‘Good flying,’ I said.
‘Gliding,’ Eddie corrected.
Correctly.
Chores on a desperate morning. The blackbirds are paler than the sky.
What we see is a function of the kind of person we happen to be. That’s not mysticism, that’s physiology. The eye only receives information: we can’t use it
until the brain has processed it. A birder inhabits a different visual world to a non-birder. We have trained our brains to respond to birds. Our brains are stocked with visual information about birds.
I remember taking a walk with Keith, a non-birding friend, who was at the time my sports editor. A movement caught my eye: I looked up and flying at quite a height, three birds. Without raising the binoculars I told him: ‘Black-headed gulls.’
He made a gesture with his head: one that acknowledged my knowledge and at the same time showed a certain bewilderment as to why I had taken the trouble to acquire it. ‘Don’t know how you can possibly see the colour of their heads from down here.’
‘I can’t,’ I told him. ‘And even if I could, they wouldn’t be black.’
It’s true. Black-headed gulls don’t have black heads in the winter, and even in the summer their heads aren’t really black: more like a neat little brown hood. All the same, I could see the birds better than Keith could because my brain was better stocked with visual information about birds.
The subjective nature of seeing fascinates me, perhaps because I came back to birding after a long time away. Such birding skills as I possess have been painfully acquired – but as a result of this late acquisition, I am aware, at a relatively deep level, that I see the world differently to the way I did in 1981, when I had my Damascene conversion. I hadn’t grown up in the same visual world: I made a more or less conscious decision to change it. To change my brain. It’s something we can all do, at any stage in our lives, if we wish: I’ve written books attempting to show how it can be done.
The centre of your vision is the macula. All of us primates have two-eyed front-facing sight that enables us to judge distance with immense precision: that’s why lemurs and monkeys and gibbons can jump so accurately from branch to branch. Stereoscopic vision gives us focus, depth and precision. But we also gather information about our environment from way beyond the centre. Peripheral vision stretches out sideways and even a little behind us: say 110 degrees. At these far edges of vision we’re not so good at colour, detail and shape – but we’re crash-hot at picking up movement. A predator, for example. Or prey.
We’re becoming less good at using it. Too much screen time, it’s suggested. But here’s a thing: if you have anything to do with the wild world, you find yourself constantly picking up movement from the extreme edges of sight.
My writing-hut is perfectly set up for the testing of peripheral vision. My main focus is on the computer screen, but through the window at my left there is a world full of wild movements, and often I find my head moving, turning without conscious decision towards a movement I wasn’t aware that I was aware of. Sometimes it’s a hunting barn owl, silently demonstrating a barn owl’s power.
Today it wasn’t.
It moved past in a series of soft bounds: bounce-pouncing its way across the open ground that lies between the hut and the dyke. Glowing orange fur, startling white chest just showing up between the forelegs, fierce, neat little head with teddy-bear ears, and a long tail with a black tip.
Stoat.
I love the stoat stand: up on his hind legs, front paws a-flop, claws facing down, nose higher than his ears, look this way, look that way, in the classic meerkat manner. But stoats are mostly soloists and must look out for themselves: living in that uncomfortable zone in which they can be both predators and prey. Lord, but they can punch above their weight as predators. I once saw a stoat catch hold of a rabbit twice its size and perhaps four times its weight: the rabbit took off, leapt this way, leapt that way, and the stoat was body-slammed from one side to the other a half-dozen times as the struggle spilled over on the tarmac of the road. But the rabbit couldn’t break the stoat’s hold and hopped, in the end, almost with resignation into cover, where the stoat – still attached – would complete his work.
Here in front of my hut was one of those little vignettes of hidden life. Stoats are not rare, despite legal persecution from gamekeepers, but rarely seen. They don’t often go out into the open, they are pretty wary of humans, and they give only scanty clues of their existence. Their long, slender shape makes them adept at hiding in slender places. They are happy to live most of their lives out of sight. You catch one in your peripheral vision and if you have trained yourself to respond to such stimuli, you turn your head and are rewarded, sometimes with an extended glance, as I was that day, and sometimes with an impression that lasts maybe half a second: a fleeting gracile shape, a hint of fast-moving ginger and then a black coda: a coda being literally a tail, as it is also the tail-piece in a piece of music.
Another of those instantaneous dramas played to an audience of one.
Would another person, sitting in that chair, getting on with work with the same degree of concentration, have turned to watch that brief drama? Some would, some wouldn’t. It all depends on your brain. And what you’ve done with it. Would you have turned yourself, dear reader? I hope by the time you finish this book that you will always turn, and so bring more wild things into your life. They’re there all right. True, we’re losing them at an unacceptable rate, but we’re also losing our ability to see what’s left. We can do something about both – if we have a mind to.
Music and horses: robin on lead vocal, farrier on percussion.
Phenology is the study of the seasons. It’s the science of the way the year moves around us from equinox to solstice to equinox to solstice. The first cuckoo, the first snowdrop: that sort of thing. It’s a science of ever-increasing relevance in these troubled and shifting times. And it has a snag: it’s easy to respond to the first when it arrives, but harder to respond to the last.
Is that the last butterfly of the year? But every day there was another. Sometimes quite a lot of others, even as the days cooled. Day after day there was yet another last butterfly, and every one of them a red admiral.
Eddie and I have a song that we sing when we see a wood pigeon fly over, often after we’ve first mistaken it for something more thrilling, like a falcon, even a peregrine . . . anything but a pigeon. But it’s a pigeon all right, that epitome of the commonplace, and so we sing a song of our own composition:
It’s not exciting!
It’s not exciting!
But it probably is, at least in its own mind, as it performs a great territorial glide, flashing its white wing-bars at the world. Our failure to appreciate a pigeon demonstrates only our limitations. Red admirals are certainly commonplace: what if they were impossibly rare? How much would we admire them, that emphatic black, that bloody red, that artful white? And how much we would gloat about the impossibly strong way it flies: in powered straight and level flight they eat up distances with immense confidence, abandoning all the traditional notions of flittering and fluttering butterfly-mindedness. These are insects of power and purpose.
And another day: and another last butterfly, another last red admiral, looking young, fresh and strong, and as if the paint was still wet on its wings. Here is a classic example of the miracles that lie under our noses. Sometimes I think a miracle could take place in our hip-pocket and all we would notice would be an itch in the arse.
To counteract this tendency, I looked up the details of the journey they were about to take. I knew they were migratory butterflies – and that’s a hard concept to cope with in itself – but these are very serious travellers indeed. Most of the red admirals we see in spring and early summer are not hatched in this country. They come barrelling in from the continent, belting across the Channel in a northwards flight, coming here to get on with the excellent and necessary task of making more red admirals.
And the red admirals we see at the start of autumn, so bold and so active, have no intention of staying here for the winter; all but the mildest British winters are too much for them. They don’t hibernate, as peacock butterflies do.
In their full strength they go hammering south again, back into continental Europe. Often they fly high; radar has caught them rising effortlessly on columns of warm air before e
xploiting favourable winds to hitch a ride back into central and southern Europe – covering the whole distance in a single journey that takes two or three weeks.
Here, they find that the nettles are recovering after a hot dry summer, and their regrowth is perfect for red admiral caterpillars – and so they breed among the sweet nettles of the southern autumn, allowing the task of making yet more butterflies to continue as it should.
This, then, is a remarkable animal: equipped for making journeys that seem impossibly long and yet capable of all the delicate manoeuvring required for nectar-feeding at the beginning and end of their heroic travels. And yet, because it is common, we seldom stop to celebrate it.
We suffer – all of us, even the best observers, even the most poetic souls – from blindness to the commonplace. The miraculous nature of everyday life is concealed from us. We live surrounded by miracles, but because we see them so often we are sometimes incapable of seeing them at all. The migration of the monarch butterflies the length of North America is a thing of wonder that has been rightly celebrated again and again. The migration of the red admiral is hardly less wonderful a thing: and I, who might claim to know about such stuff, had to look up the details to be sure.
If red admirals turned up in only one or two places in Britain, and for one or two brief weeks, we would worship those strident colours. But as it is, we see them, we note that yet another red admiral has passed by, and then we pass on by ourselves.
Next time you see a red admiral, pause. What a powerhouse this animal is. We use butterflies as images of frailty: who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? One of the notions of chaos theory – that great events can have tiny causes – is always illustrated with the example of the tornado that was started by the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly. It’s called the Butterfly Effect.
These butterflies didn’t look fragile to me as I completed a few autumnal tasks around the stables. They looked as if they could fly through a brick wall. A dozen of them could start a hurricane, easy.