On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  Stable chores on Christmas morning. Curlews merrily on high.

  We would set off – never before two in the morning – to The Venturers, the all-night cafe in the Cumberland Basin in Bristol. The route took us through the docks and over the lock gates, towards a dredger that seemed permanently moored there, a great chain of buckets draped over its deck. As we passed it on our way to bacon sandwiches and pints of tea, we would make a ritual reference to an ancient joke: the dredger was in fact an eccentric millionaire’s luxury yacht. It’s probably unnecessary to add that we were students at that time.

  My friend Tone often accompanied me on these late-night excursions. And he was reminded of it when I took him for a ritual walk around the marsh. It was a few days after Christmas, the tree still shining, the cake not quite eaten.

  Tone, like many of my friends, is broadly sympathetic to the cause I have adopted, and the way I have given practical expression to it with these few acres of marsh. He gets it intellectually: but he doesn’t really get it in his heart and soul and guts. (He has his own cause, which is saving the NHS.) So I took him out for a walk around the marsh and he couldn’t have been more supportive. In fact, he understood the place perfectly in every way but the way I did. So much so that when we stopped for a while and drank tea from a flask, I saw the place a little as he did: just rather a mess. It’s really not at its best in January: cold, windblown, silent. What’s the point of it? It was then that Tone laughed and told me: ‘It’s like the eccentric millionaire’s luxury yacht.’ Meaning, I think, that it didn’t look much to the average passer-by, but it meant a great deal to the owner. Who had got it right, then? The passer-by or the owner?

  Another friend from those days pointed at a painting in a gallery and spat out the words: ‘That is a great work of art – if you but knew it.’

  Now I know how he felt.

  Among my trove of excellent Christmas presents was a megalomaniacal torch: the sort that throws a beam thousands of yards, with several million candlepower behind it, so you can sweep the beam around like a lighthouse. I have used such powerful beams in Africa, looking for creatures of the night, and it is the most excellent sport. On a big night you can find leopards.

  Less chance of that round these parts, but there is always scope for a person with a truly offensive torch. What you’re looking for is eyeshine: the reflection of your light in the eyes of the mammal you’ve trapped in your beam. We primates mostly lack that reflective patch – the tapetum lucidum – because we tend to be exclusively daylight beings. But most of our fellow mammals have this device, which is a great aid to night vision.

  So I swung my torch across the darkness and found two jewels shining out of the black: a deer on the meadow, having slipped through the post-and-rail fencing that separates it from the marsh. I suppose I should have sworn at it for taking the grass from the horses’ mouths, but I merely nodded and, after a moment, turned my beam away apologetically. I felt for a moment as if I had produced the deer from my hat.

  Prizefight in the sky: cawing crow v battling buzzard. Must be Boxing Day.

  Charlie Burrell, knight baronet, farmed the 3,500 acres of the Knepp Estate with the most colossal intensity for 20 years. And still failed to turn a profit. So he put a fence round it and let it do what it liked. The most violent form of action, in short.

  The details of the story are complex and there were any amount of official problems in the setting-up and the maintenance of this gloriously demented project, but that’s the essential truth of it. He threw his hands in the air and told the place to get on with farming itself. (You can read the full story in Isabella Tree’s excellent Wilding.)

  The idea was to recreate the ancient fauna of this country, to see what they did to the ancient flora of the place. He put in free-ranging English Longhorn cattle to play the part of the extinct auroch or wild ox. Instead of wild boar – you can’t have free-ranging wild boars; it’s against the law – he put in Tamworth pigs. He also introduced ponies and fallow deer.

  ‘The whole thing is process-led,’ Charlie explained when I made a memorable visit there. I asked him to elaborate, and he did so, but I still wasn’t quite clear. Then I thought I had it.

  ‘You mean you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing?’

  ‘Precisely!’

  And that spirit of boldness has seen a number of extraordinary and unexpected things happen on this land, including a population of nesting nightingales in a habitat that was previously considered useless for them; huge numbers of purple emperor butterflies, previously considered exclusive to mature woodland; and a glorious invasion of hideously endangered turtle doves, again in circumstances not recommended by traditional conservationists.

  So what about that closed-canopy oak forest? Plenty of oaks around on his land, but no sign as yet of a takeover. That’s because the large grazing mammals keep parts of the ground open, while the pigs turn over the soil when digging for roots. They change the dynamics of the habitat as surely as a plough and flail.

  So what’s natural and what’s not?

  Out in the darkness the Chinese water deer got on with their job of managing the habitat. Whatever that is . . .

  Morning chores in a mist of sterling silver. That slightly less dense patch is a barn owl.

  I have known Ian Robinson since he was smashing up reedbeds for a living, so it’s always good to see him when he drops round, even if he does look at our own reeds with a slightly dangerous expression on his face. He was the great pioneer of reedbed destruction, and it’s a title he rightly carries with some pride. Here was intervention at its most drastic, and it certainly didn’t meet with universal approval. Not at first, anyway.

  He was number three at Minsmere, the great RSPB reserve on the Suffolk Coast, at the time. That was 1990, and research had indicated that the great reedbeds of Minsmere – the reserve’s signature habitat – were no longer suitable for bitterns. The birds were continuing to decline fast, despite all kinds of concentrated conservation efforts.

  Bitterns are seldom-seen birds that lurk below the level of the seed heads in the reeds; in the spring the males announce their presence not with song but with a glorious far-carrying hoot that is, despite the wrens’ best efforts, the loudest bird noise in Britain. The conventional thinking in conservation was that if you made sure there was a decent expanse of reedbeds, you would get plenty of bitterns. But apparently not. Even at Minsmere, the birds were declining.

  It wasn’t just about the acreage of reeds, the researchers declared. It was also about their quality. The bitterns needed young, fresh, wet, vibrant reedbeds. The stuff at Minsmere was too old, too dry, and no longer held the life that bitterns needed to feed on. The reedbeds had been intensely managed, and the encroachment of scrub and bramble was routinely under check at times of the year when the bitterns weren’t trying to breed. There was no danger of the reedbeds becoming an oakwood . . . but all the same, they were too dry. They were old and tired. The suggested solution was radical: dig the beloved and precious reedbeds right out. Destroy them so they could start again with their feet in water.

  Ian was in charge of delivering that. It was a heartbreaking business that involved extensive trashing of reedbeds. Not everyone was convinced that this was a good idea. It looked exactly like the mad, wilful destruction that the RSPB was there to try and prevent.

  Ian doesn’t do half-measures. His life has shown a pattern of complete devotion to the cause of wildlife conservation. And as the young, green, new reedbeds began to rise up in the places he had reduced to mud, it was the beginning of vindication. It turned out that the research was right: and the bitterns multiplied and thrived. The great comeback had begun. Since then Ian’s work has been replicated at reedbeds around the country.

  Ian is now in charge of the RSPB’s work in the Broads. Before he got to know the place, he was worried that his job would be about navigation and dredging and the rights of pleasure boats over everything else that moves. Like me, he bec
ame a convert. This is a landscape he understands and longs to do more with.

  We walked round the marsh, the brief snow now quite gone, and he recommended that we dig a scrape: a wide shallow pool. This was a thrilling suggestion. Such a feature would bring in waterbirds: it would be a feeding-station for those passing through, and a major resource for any birds that chose to hang around and breed. The most famous scrape is at Minsmere, where Ian worked for all those years. It’s the best place to see avocets, the bird on the RSPB logo: they went extinct as breeding birds in this country, but came back after the Second World War. The land on the Suffolk coast was flooded to make invasion from Holland more difficult and, quite by chance, this created the perfect conditions for avocets – so it was an air force of avocets, rather than the German army, that did the invading. Ian was convinced that a scrape on our bit of marsh would work, and he had great experience.

  I always get the feeling that Ian would love to spend a day trashing our place. In the nicest possible way. One of the things about being a practical conservationist is that you get to see land as a project. You are constantly aware of the way land changes over time, and you can always see something different in the land before you. Conservationists are used to looking at land and seeing how it would look in five, ten, 30 years’ time, or even a century or two. It was something I was beginning to learn myself.

  Ian would like to take out a great deal of the scrub and the rank grasses. In some moods he would love to enclose the place securely for livestock and put a herd of, say, Highland cattle – a great favourite of conservationists – onto the marsh for the autumn to eat the place down. He looks at this scruffy, scrubby patch and sees a field full of orchids. And while I have plenty of time for orchids – we have had southern marsh orchids in fair numbers out there – they’re not my priority.

  And managing land is always about priorities. That’s true if you are growing sugar beet down the lane or growing bitterns at Minsmere. That’s true if you are growing geraniums in a window box or pumpkins by the house.

  Morning ride. Is that’s what’s left of the sparrowhawk’s dinner?

  A week or so later, the place was transfigured. We had a good chunky fall of snow – one of those classic transformation scenes: hair down, glasses off, my God, you’re beautiful! Perhaps you remember the scene in Pretty Woman when Julia Roberts meets Richard Gere after she’s been to the posh shop in Rodeo Drive. She’s looking a million dollars . . . and yet just about everyone who ever watched the film – every heterosexual male, anyway – says, well, she was just as gorgeous – even more gorgeous – when she was wearing the hot pants and the boots with a safety-pin zip. Transformation is a wonderful thing, but often it reveals what was there all along – something you were, for some reason, unable to see. It’s not that the beauty is new-formed: it was always there – if you but knew it.

  All so very white, the sky a rather ridiculous shade of blue, and out of sight, from the water on the far side of the river, the sound of greylag geese. It wasn’t the thickest fall of all time, but enough to give the ground an uneven coating, just as Eddie managed with the icing on the Christmas cake. Deep and crisp, uneven. There was just about enough snow for Joseph to pelt Eddie with snowballs; enough for the two of them to make a tiny snowman that would have been only slightly too big for the cake.

  And out on the marsh, time too was frozen. Here in the sudden change was a record of time past: by walking out today I could see what happened last night: here passed deer, and here, an otter, the webbing between its five toes clearly visible in one especially clear footprint. In this long, fragile moment before the weather changed again, each seed head of the reeds bore a few crystals of snow, precariously balanced, the sun shining through it in a beauty as self-conscious as Julia herself in her Rodeo Drive finery. The black branches of the sallows wore white shirts of impossible cleanness.

  Tone’s notion of the marsh as the eccentric millionaire’s luxury yacht was about gratification of a non-obvious kind: beauty hidden to all except those who did the owning and the managing. Under this fall of snow, it was as if the dredger had been hung with a million fairy lights, its beauty suddenly and rather provokingly obvious to all. The marsh, bracing and untidy and scrubby, had been transformed into this exquisite Sisley landscape or perhaps into that Parisian snow scene painted by – you’ll know the picture even if you’ve forgotten the name of the artist – Norbert Goeneutte. So there was the marsh, decked out as the Boulevard de Clichy under snow. It has shifted to a charming but hackneyed beauty: the Boulevard de Cliché.

  But no wild beauty is truly hackneyed: it’s all in our own reading of it. Behind the beauty lay a killing cold: and all around me – and, for that matter, below – there were creatures struggling to survive. Somewhere out in that snow there were peacock butterflies, passing the winter in diapause, waiting for the time to take wing in multicoloured, many-eyed glory. The true beauty of the snowfall was the pause between the falling of the snow and the rising of the peacock.

  Morning walk for me means a morning gallop for a hare.

  Mr Wright’s driver arrived with his digger to perform his act of transformation. How strange our bit of marsh looked with that great monster of machinery turned loose on it. Earth-moving machines always look like dinosaurs: here was a Jurassic marsh with Triceratops – or some other beloved beast from my boyhood favourite, The Golden Treasury of Natural History – roaring his defiance at time and space. It would surely be the dinosaur’s world forever.

  When we first had the marsh we were worried that the dykes were getting clogged up. The water – sluggish at best – had in many places stopped flowing altogether, and as more and more stuff grew up, we were worried we would lose them: no longer waterways but long, damp patches of scrub, scrub that was all the time drying out. What should we do? The costs of hiring heavy machinery and the people to operate it were frightening. When Mr Wright first turned up, it was a miracle cure for anxiety.

  It was also a rather odd feeling: we were not alone. The way we manage our land affects other people. It’s important that the dykes are kept open. It’s the landowner’s own choice, but the fact that the dykes can be kept open without trouble and at minimal expense stresses the fact that what you do with your own piece of land is not a personal and private decision. It affects our neighbours. And, in a larger context, it’s easy to see that the way you manage any piece of land has implications for the surrounding area – for the country – for the planet. Example: if you concrete your front garden in a suburban street you add to the problems of flooding because you have taken away a place where heavy rain can soak away. Every decision you make about land is ultimately the business of everyone else on earth.

  The digger-driver was perfectly willing to take on a little additional work for an appropriate sum, and we showed him where the scrape should be: basically an extension of the pond that Barry had dug a few years before. Not too deep, and not too uniform a shape, and long shallow edges: a scrape has become a conservation classic.

  He knew all about this, of course. So we asked him: could you please make us a scrape? He was perfectly willing to do this: he just told us it would never work, we were wasting our money, the water would seep away, the peaty soil would never hold it, we’d just be making a big shallow hole. Mud was all we’d make: no water would stay and no watery bird would come.

  He left us to consider this while he went about the job of clearing the dykes. It’s always instructive to watch people whose skills have gone so deep they no longer require input from the conscious mind, giving the false impression that the task is easy. There was no swagger, but the absence of conscious striving added a wonderful illusion of nonchalance. I’ve noticed this same thing when very close to top-class athletes at practice, with Joseph playing arpeggios and scales, with Cindy shaping a piece of wood that will become a tiger or an otter. Here the digger transformed the dykes into frank, untangled waterways, stopping them in their tracks as they were in the process of
taking the early steps towards becoming an oakwood.

  Cindy, persuasive in most areas of life, was unable to inspire the driver with belief in the viability of the scrape. She reasoned rightly that there was no point in cajoling a craftsman into a job he believed doomed to failure. However, he agreed to clear the pond of reeds: so my idea of a reedbed for a possible reed warbler went back to open water. I hoped that was the right decision, but even if it wasn’t, the reeds would come crowding back as fast as they could.

  There is always something rather fine about inspecting the marsh after such a transformation has taken place. The day had shifted gear on us and become one of sudden warmth. As I walked along the bare earth of the dyke, I could hear great tits, blue tits and dunnocks in song. Two buzzards flew overhead, also two herons: there was a warm, thrilling, pairy-uppy vibe beginning to spread across the landscape. Two great tits fizzed across one of the open dykes, one in full pursuit of the other. I couldn’t tell whether this burst of action was punitive or amatory – and that’s one of the great ambiguities of spring. Love songs and war songs sound the same, and every pursuit is equally likely to end in copulation or chastisement. Only the birds themselves know the difference.

  I sat by one of these new-shaven dykes, the mud soft and fresh and wet, a thrilling smell of potential growth, the vegetation shoved aside by adroit gestures of the digger bucket. A little egret dropped down and began to feed. There is always something slightly incongruous about a bird as exquisite as an egret feeding with such enthusiasm: it’s like a stained-glass window of an angel eating a Marmite sandwich. It’s a classic clash between human fantasies about birds and the birds themselves. They are out there seeking life, no matter what symbolic load we heap on their shoulders. Perhaps it’s the tension between these two states of being – birds as they are, and birds as creatures of the human imagination – that gives birds their special fascination for humankind. Certainly I enjoy egrets as angels just as much as I enjoy them as a small species of heron.