On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  Eddie looked sensational. The heronry wasn’t looking so bad either.

  Heron takes flight from the dyke: reed between the lines of his beak.

  No doubting the strength, the liveliness of nettles. I walked along the areas opened up by Lancelot Gobbo and his dinosaur: no bare earth to be seen. The first time he had performed this service I was convinced that the drastic treatment would let loose the ancient seed deposited years ago in the soil, and a thousand flowers would bloom. We got nettles.

  Now as spring advanced, the bare earth was colonised by bright green, eager nettles, all ready and willing to sting. By the time high summer was here they would be five and six feet high: impenetrable thickets of serrated and vindictively green leaves. They seem like a smug reproach to us humans: you think you can do what you like with this landscape, but you can’t. You have to do what we like. Go on! Bring out the weedkiller! You’ll poison everything else, but we’ll survive and we’ll come back.

  The reason for this eager proliferation is simple enough: nitrogen. Fertiliser runs off the agricultural land all around us. It’s used to enrich the meadow grass and to grow the arable crops. Nettles love nutrient-rich places and so they come crowding in, dictating terms and frightening off any human who might want to get close.

  Plantlife is an excellent charity: dedicated, as the name suggests, to the conservation of wild plants. And they don’t care too much for nettles. More delicate plants are ‘bullied out of existence,’ said Trevor Dines, Plantlife’s botanical specialist. He said that nettles were ‘thuggish’ and that we’ve been ‘force-feeding the natural world on a diet of nutrient-rich junk-food’.

  Which is all very well, but it seems to me that the world has had rather too much of the rhetoric of intolerance of late. On the whole I’d prefer it if the world of conservation shied away from it. We’re about life, not death, are we not?

  And so yes, nitrates in the system and the over-enrichment of the environment is a bad thing: eutrophication, it’s called, or too much of a good thing. Many plants – many wild plants – do better on poor soil. But nettles – and cow parsley – thrive on the roadside verges in and around farmland. Plantlife reckon that this over-enrichment of our soil is a more serious problem than climate change. I won’t argue. But on the other hand, I don’t think the answer is the demonisation of nettles. In fact, every garden should have some. Most do, whether the gardener wants them or not. But if you have a garden, it’s worth cultivating a nettle patch because they’re food-plants for most of our favourite garden butterflies: small tortoiseshell, peacock, red admiral and comma. The comma, with raggedy-edged wings, is even better than a peacock at looking like a dead leaf when its wings are closed: when it opens them it reveals gorgeous wings of orange and black. Commas were heading towards extinction 100 years back: now they are – in the nicest possible way – commonplace. It would be mischievous to suggest that they have benefited from eutrophication, but it’s true that some creatures thrive in conditions that are murderous to others. Who decides which creatures we encourage?

  Morning ride. The small tortoiseshell has chosen colours to go with my horse.

  If you get used to a place, you respond to sudden change. Horses have the same instinct, but even more strongly. If there’s a plastic bag in the hedge that wasn’t there yesterday, Mia will give it a good old stare: a change could mean danger, and a prey animal must check that out.

  It was this capacity for registering change or responding to a new pattern that brought me my sighting of the lions of the marsh: I was aware that the pattern had changed – and my mind leapt to its gloriously wrong conclusion.

  So it was that I saw the Wrong Harrier. I had been looking at female marsh harriers all winter: and they’re chunky things. I was aware of a harrier on the marsh: and suddenly it was a fire-brigade moment because it broke the pattern. It wasn’t chunky at all. Nor, as I realised a second later, was it brown – and it was certainly too pale for a male marsh harrier.

  I got the binoculars on it: and saw the ash-grey colour, the black wing tips, the slight, elegant build combined with the usual wavering vee-shaped harrier flight: and glory be, there was a little swash of black on the upper surface of the wing.

  If you’re a birdwatcher you’ll have worked out that I’m describing Montagu’s harrier: known to birders as a Monty. I have seen them on the Spanish Steppes, where they are almost common. It seems impossible that they can be so much like the familiar marsh harriers, and yet so unlike.

  The snag was that it was still March. The equinox had just passed, and the hours of light were now outnumbering the hours of dark, and that was a fine thing. But it was still too early for a Monty: they are migrant birds and should still be making their leisurely way towards the few breeding grounds they have in this country. At this far northern edge of their global range, they’re very uncommon. There’s a handful of breeding pairs in Britain every year: no more than that. They nest around the Wash, and on downland in Hampshire and Dorset, but they’re birds that are kept secret because of the value put on their eggs by the mad, criminal subculture of the egg-collectors.

  I’d been told that a pair nested pretty close to our bit of marsh just a couple of years ago. They never showed up at our place, alas – or if they did, they chose a time when I wasn’t looking. So if there was a Monty at my place, it was a significant thing. So I’d better do the proper thing and make sure the right people knew.

  Carl knows all the right people and, what’s more, he’s as good a birder as ever looked through a pair of binoculars. His instant response was that it was too early – and if there was a Monty about in Norfolk, he’d know. He’s in touch with the birdwide web, and every vibration of it reaches him. So I thought, well, fair enough. But I got in touch with the British Trust for Ornithology anyway, and spoke to Andy Clement, not only a good egg but a very knowledgeable one.

  ‘Thanks for telling us, but I’m sure it’s not a Monty. No one has reported one. So it has to be a male hen harrier. If you’ve been looking at marsh harriers all winter, a male hen harrier is going to look much slighter and more elegant. And they have a dark trailing edge of the lower wing: and it’s very easy at distance to see this as a black line on the upper wing.’

  I thought that was letting me down very gently. So no addition to the marsh list, but it’s not exactly a bad thing to see a hen harrier. He was no doubt heading north to those uplands to try and breed. At least he had the chance to refuel at my place. He was a welcome visitor – and if you happen to bump into a Monty, tell him he’s also welcome here any time.

  Oh, and good luck on those moors.

  Pale male hen harrier passing through. Steer clear of Sandringham, fella!

  It was now clear that there were two female marsh harriers regularly flying over the marsh. The third had moved on or met some accident. I was able to work out that there were two of them for two very good reasons. The first was that one of them bore green tags on her wings, so she had been marked by the Hawk and Owl Trust as a nestling. The other was untagged. And just to make things crystal clear, I occasionally saw the two of them together. Neither acted aggressively towards the other, or if there was aggression it was very subtle. But there was a question lurking in the background: whose marsh is it anyway? And how would things work out when we got to the business end of spring?

  Only two days of madness left . . . six hares making the most of them.

  The gabbling and honking from the marsh made me think I was back in Africa. But this time there was a better excuse. There was no hallucination: this was a pair of Egyptian geese establishing their shared interest in a nice wet-country breeding site. I woke to this sound every day for a couple of months when I made a long stay in the Luangwa Valley, and many times since then: so it’s part of me. And like many other sounds, it’s capable of transporting a person through space and time.

  Involuntary memory: Proust’s Madeleine: the most famous biscuit in history. (Outside Italy anyway, elsewhere it’s mor
e famous than a Garibaldi.) The sound of the Gypos took me back to the Valley as surely as the sound of a spoon striking a plate took the narrator of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu back to a train journey made years earlier. To the narrator it sounded like the hammer striking a wheel of the carriage in which he had been sitting, years earlier, while he was struggling to open a bottle of beer: clong! – and he was back on the train. (It’s not widely known that Proust’s last words were ‘I could use a cold beer.’)

  The sound of the Gypos was a suitable prelude to a visit from Brian. Egyptian geese are found all over Africa: they’re also found unmistakably on the papyrus of Ancient Egypt. In the 19th century the British nobility took a fancy to them and introduced them on the lakes in front of their country houses. The Gypos liked it here. And like the Chinese water deer, they broke out of their stately homes and went feral: now they’re a workaday part of the British list. Brian too is found all over Africa but now, in advancing age, he lives in Dorset.

  One of the facts that cement many a friendship is that some conversations are hard to find. They are not the reasons for the friendship, but they’re an essential aspect of it. Ralph is the only person I can talk about schooldays with. We don’t, very often, but it’s nice – perhaps important – to know we can. A reference to the teacher known as The Loob or to Jim Burke’s illegal boots can enrich a discussion of quite different topics. There are conversations about sport I can only have with others who, like me, have spent too long on the road covering big events.

  With Brian I can talk about lions. His knowledge and experience of lions is greater than my own, but we have the same fascination. Lions are always somewhere in the background of our conversations, a bit like the lions I saw – or didn’t see – on the marsh. We walked around the place and revelled in the early quickening of spring. It’s always nice to show the place to someone who gets it: who understands – on a relatively deep level – why we have the marsh. For him, it’s nothing like the eccentric millionaire’s luxury yacht; it’s a thrilling adventure, it’s life.

  I showed him the Doris-tossed branches that were, for nearly a full second, a pair of lionesses, and we talked about the fascination of error. ‘The man of genius makes no mistakes,’ said Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. ‘His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.’

  But for all of us, errors can be the portals of discovery. The Monty That Wasn’t told me things about the two species of harriers, and the way they fit in with the world. How many errors did I make – did any of us make – between the ages of 18 and 21? As many as the grains of Libyan sand. They weren’t volitional and they certainly weren’t the marks of genius, but they were portals of discovery all right.

  The road to even modest expertise in any subject is littered with error. Every birdwatcher knows that. And that’s why I say to everyone who has a fancy for the wild world but is nervous of deeper involvement: go out there and start making mistakes. You’ll be the richer for every one.

  There was a moment of sadness as Brian and I were crossing the marsh. In a stand of trees on the far north-western side, a bird suddenly burst out singing. ‘Chiffchaff!’ I said. Not because Brian needs telling, but to make the song a shared thing. Like saying ‘cheers’ when you raise a glass.

  ‘Can’t hear it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Lost it a couple of years ago, damn it. Goldcrests a couple of years before that.’

  It happens. People tend to lose the upper range of their hearing as they get older. It’s a thing many people hardly notice, but a birder can measure it. The high, thin trickle of golden notes that comes down from the top of a conifer – goldcrest and firecrest – are usually the first to go. And now Brian had lost chiffchaff, so he could no longer cheer or say ‘yes!’ when the first migrant sings in the spring. I told him that David Attenborough can no longer hear the screaming of swifts: Brian was glad that he still had that one.

  Life can be pretty mean. Not just in great things – the things that bring immense courage from the most unlikely people – but in tiny things as well. Would Job have cursed God had he lost the ability to hear the song that summons the spring?

  We made a short journey to the chain-ferry that crosses the Yare, a pleasant little adventure that always gives savour to a pint of beer. We found a windless corner outside the Ferry Inn and for the first time that year, away from Eddie’s company, I had a drink outside. We had pints and sandwiches and watched butterflies – small tortoiseshell and red admirals – supping from the hanging baskets.

  And we talked lion. Brian wrote a book called The Marsh Lions, the marsh in question in Kenya rather than Norfolk. He spent five years on the project and got to know the individual members of the pride as old, if not entirely trusted, friends. Lions are the only truly social cat, and they seem to make up the rules of sociability as they go along. They have nothing like the sense of order and decorum you get in a wild dog pack, in which everybody knows his place and is happier that way. The tension between the lions’ love of companionship, their brilliant co-operative hunting, and their outbreaks of quarrelsomeness, are strangely compelling.

  That, and the danger. We have both experienced the terror that comes from a fractional misjudgement around lions: and we both understand the savage mixture of love and fear that comes with lions. There’s no species on earth I would sooner spend time with, and this is the only species that gives me nightmares.

  We get it wrong about nature. We turn away from city life and look at a pleasant chunk of countryside in search of peace. We’ve escaped from the rat race, we’ve left stress behind: we’ve come to the place where everything is calm and still and full of peace. And the chiffchaff sings out and adds to the peace, but his song is powered by death: the death of many caterpillars and other invertebrates. We have a particular love for the sight of an expanse of water overflown in high summer by jinking, spiralling swallows: never troubling that each jink is a little death. The consumption of flying insects is needed to power the flight of the swallow, but we don’t think of that when we watch swallows of a summer evening.

  If you have spent time with lions – learning, not in your intellect but in your bowels, that we humans are prey just as much as the caterpillars and the aerial plankton – then you see nature as something more than the bringer of calm to harassed city-dwelling humans.

  Not that I’m about to start raving about redness in tooth and claw. When people do that, they are either making a contrast with the civilised way that humans live or justifying the savage nature of human existence. Wildlife isn’t one unending round of brutality. But all the same, it’s important to remember that that wildlife is also wilddeath: the two held together in complex and exquisite balance.

  I told Brian about the pride of lions I had seen as they were being woken up and bullied into setting off on a hunt by the alpha lioness, the ones that should have been singing ‘When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet.’ Then I waited for him to top this story. Two small tortoiseshells came together for a few seconds and then parted.

  The sheep have got onto the marsh again. Get off! You’re baaaaaaed!

  There are some errors you can show off about: you need to be pretty cool to make this mistake. I heard a redshank calling: a loud, clear, triple-note, strong stress on the first syllable. This is a nice wader, mildly unusual round here, so I stopped in the middle of the outside chores to listen. The call was repeated once. And then again.

  Ha! You can’t fool me. Well, you can, but not this time. That’s not a redshank, that’s a song thrush: a song thrush imitating a redshank. If you arrived at this place blindfold and heard that thrush you’d know it was a thrush – and you’d also know you were in a watery landscape.

  Song thrushes are not slavish or compulsive mimics, but when they hear a sound that’s in their arc, they often appropriate it. A wide repertoire is a good thing: it shows that the bird is experienced as well as smart. Females are attracted to more complex songs: and males are less likely to
pick a fight with a singer of complexities. The repertoire can be seriously wide: an individual can possess between 104 and 219 songs, with an average of 130, and each song consists of a phrase repeated two or three times. There is a record of a bird duplicating only a single song in a sequence of 85; another bird repeating 60 songs in a sequence of 203.

  A song thrush will gather appropriate sounds and turn them into song, make them their own, in the process known to literary scholars as intertextuality. ‘Immature poets borrow, mature poets steal,’ T. S. Eliot once wrote. A grownup song thrush is most certainly a mature poet, or rather, a mature musician: he will add his own interpretation, and with a certain bravura. What he takes remains his. They like to mimic some birdsongs more than they do others. Often they are mad for the song of nuthatch, with all its varied piping and whistling – but you won’t hear nuthatch round the marsh because we don’t have the stands of big mature trees that nuthatches like. Without nuthatches, the song thrush has no way of learning that song, so our song thrushes don’t sound like the song thrushes you find in woodland. But redshank: that’s another matter. You won’t get a song thrush imitating a redshank in the middle of an oakwood.

  So, like me, this song thrush was keeping an idiosyncratic and unreliable list of the species that come to the marsh: concentrating on the species he happened to like. Song thrushes will also chuck in human-generated sounds: whistles, tractor-reversing warnings, lawn-mowers. A few years back, they were very keen on Trimfones.

  The evolutionary explanation for the extensive repertoire is about dominance and sexual attraction – intra-species competition – and it’s unquestionably correct. But I often wonder if the song thrush thinks of it that way. Did Slash learn to play the guitar in order to be the alpha male and get all the prettiest girls? Or was he just lost in the music? Did he think: if I master this scale and this arpeggio and produce this piece of music, I’ll be able to go to bed with the loveliest women in the world? Or did he play the music because he’s a musician, and the women came as a rather acceptable bonus?