On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  And when I saw those two harriers – always separately, never two at once – I knew them as individuals. Dusky was most often on the right towards the buzzard wood; Pale more often to the left, nearer the heronry. I hadn’t seen either of the females for a few weeks: I hoped very much they were both hunkered down on eggs.

  This is all pretty rough-and-ready stuff, of course: not exactly good scientific data, meticulously recorded. I lack the skills and the temperament required to acquire and collate such data. Like those harriers, I too am an individual. Like the blackcap, I sing the song of myself and hope for a favourable audience – and as with the blackcap, it’s not me who decides whether my song is any good.

  I am what I am, in other words. I don’t sing the song with the same level of defiance as Eddie, but then I don’t need too. People get the same wrong idea about individuality with Down’s syndrome. We have often been told, especially when Eddie was younger, ‘they’re very loving, aren’t they?’ The whole ‘they’ thing became one of our running jokes: the idea that all people with Down’s syndrome are pretty much the same. But Eddie is no more a number than the Prisoner.

  A blazing little sun instead of a head. Yellowhammer morning.

  I saw Pale twisting and tumbling in the air, taking advantage of a sprightly wind, and wondered why he was doing it. There seemed to be no food-gathering going on. I wondered: was he doing this to amuse himself? After all, if you could fly like that, you’d twist and dive, plummet towards the ground and then with a single twist of the wing, catch the gust and rise up again as if you were in an express lift. I had been out on my horse, playing the same sort of game, enjoying the day, putting my skills through a mild workout and savouring my own mild success. It’s called fun, and surely it’s not restricted to humans. Mind you, I never saw Dusky behaving in a playful way: was that a point of difference between them? Or did I just never catch Dusky at it? And if it was a difference, which was the more desirable bird: Playful Pale or Sobersides Dusky?

  I don’t suppose I’ll ever know, but even asking the question took me closer to the birds and the place where they lived, the place where they expressed their individual natures.

  An hour or so later I took a turn round the marsh by myself and sat on the bench, as the marsh did its stuff all about me. That same willow warbler was singing his same excellent song. And then damn me, but Pale came heading right at me. He was going flat out, which for a marsh harrier isn’t all that fast, but in straight and level flight – in a rhythm of half a dozen powerful wingbeats followed by a power-glide – he was a pretty impressive sight. I kept dead still, of course, and he carried on coming towards me about eight feet off the ground: perhaps straight over the bench was a favourite route of his. The bench might even have been a favourite landmark. And then suddenly he saw me and veered hard left along the dyke. If I’d made one of the great goalkeeper-dives of my youth I might just have tipped his tail over the bar, he was that close. The only time I’d been closer to a wild marsh harrier I was holding him in my hand; that was when I spent a day with the Hawk and Owl Trust and they put wing-tags on a nest of chicks.

  It’s all right! I’m on your side! You don’t have to worry about me. You don’t have to go charging off up the dyke just because I’m here. But there’s no convincing some birds. Off he went, wings held in that perfect dihedral: a marsh harrier and his marsh. All his, so long as Dusky wasn’t around. This bit of marsh seemed to be a bit of territory in common to both; certainly it wasn’t aggressively defended by either. Who did it belong to, then? Pale? Dusky? Neither? Both? The one sure thing was that it wasn’t mine . . . and from all this, I gathered that the pickings must be pretty good round here. Well-filled stomachs are a good first step towards world peace.

  There were two things vexing me in this fine and song-filled May. The first was the state of my knee; the second, the shortage of swifts. Neither the globe nor my body was working quite as it should. The offending joint had been scanned and diagnosed: I had a problem with the cartilage and it was to be operated on in a few weeks. I was looking forward to walking without inconvenience; I was not looking forward to the stuff I had to go through first.

  And there just weren’t enough swifts about. There didn’t seem to be any of the screaming parties: those joyous gatherings of young, unpaired swifts, yet to take on the responsibilities of domestic life, racing each other and screaming at the tops of their voices as if in the advanced throes of Beatlemania. Shame David Attenborough can no longer hear them. Joseph and I used to reserve one evening every year, back when we lived in Suffolk, and take a bench outside the pub and watch the swifts from head on, screaming their way down the village street, using the houses on either side to delineate their racetrack, 20 and 30 at a time.

  Not hard to see how this bird got its name. One swift was timed at 69.3 mph in a screaming party, and the average speed of the pack is around 50 mph. They can’t sustain their top speed – as some ducks, geese and waders can – but when it comes to a sprint, swifts are champions.

  And I was seeing very few of them. I had hoped this would change as the spring advanced. And certainly things were a little better: I saw a mixed flock of 30 swifts and martins flying over the marsh. But it really wasn’t good enough.

  The love of wild things has long been driven by the sense of loss. Wilderness was once something to be avoided: fearful, dangerous, desperate, deplorable. When Omar Khayyám finds that Wilderness was Paradise enow, he is paying the highest possible compliment to Thou – who you will remember was hypothetically beside the poet, singing in the wilderness. Why, if she could make even wilderness agreeable, she really must be something.

  It was only when we began to destroy wilderness that we began to see its point. It was only once the Lake District became accessible that Wordsworth was able to get there and celebrate it. He was able to appreciate daffodils and rocks and stones and trees because he had seen the beginnings of industry and the increasing pace of urbanisation. The Romantic Movement discovered nature as a thing to love for itself – wild nature, wilderness, wildness and wet – because they were already deeply familiar with its dark, satanic opposite.

  That process has been continuing ever since, and at ever-increasing pace. You can read the journals of birdwatchers from just a few decades back and hear them grumbling that there was nothing to be seen that day but a flock of 5,000 turtle doves – a bird now in danger of extinction in Britain. These days seeing a single turtle dove is a triumph, and one you share with your local wildlife trust, to make sure they are aware. Talk of 5,000 is the stuff of fantasy.

  Conservationists talk of ‘the shifting baseline’, which sounds like one of Bach’s musical techniques. It refers to the change in expectations: the new normal. These days it’s normal to see a few lapwings, abnormal and remarkable to see large flocks. Ditto curlews, as already discussed. Conservation was invented from the same sense of loss: and yet few of the wonderful and highly motivated young conservationists at work today have seen a few thousand lapwings all together. For them, a few dozen lapwings here and there on arable land and a few more in a nature-reserve hotspot is what nature is: the ideal we should try and conserve at all costs.

  Some say a sense of loss is part of the human condition: loss of childhood, loss of mother–child bond, loss of innocence, loss of youth. And yes, an inevitable loss of mobility, I could relate to that all right. We must all cope with those things, of course, so perhaps it’s not loss that defines us but the way we cope with loss.

  Loving nature is about coping with loss. It’s about plenty of others things too, of course, and many of them are gloriously uplifting. But the glory is always underpinned by the sense of loss.

  I will never keep goal again. I still ride, but those demented joys of cross-country jumping events lie in the past. When I dismounted I made sure I landed on my left foot, because my right knee wasn’t able to hold me.

  There were herons back in the heronry. There were harriers – once extinct as breeding
birds in this country, remember – cruising the marsh. But there were very few swifts screaming overhead and, as yet, no swallows building nests in the barn.

  The bath-toy ducklings chase their mother up the dyke on over-wound elastic.

  Most weekends Eddie and I bake a cake. There was a time when we made fancy yeast-leavened fruit loaves with enriched dough, and they were immensely satisfying, but these days Eddie is gluten-free. This has had the most excellent effect on his digestion, but an initially depressing effect on our baking. A number of cakes fell apart or had the texture of sand. But we got better and now we have a series of recipes that give excellent results. They tend to be simpler than the ones we made in our glory days, but that’s because these days Eddie does the weighing and measuring and mixing and cooking himself, with me offering shrewd advice from a distance, as I do when he is lunging a horse. Cakes have been one of our adventures.

  One of the routine favourites is marmalade cake, sometimes of course referred to as the Paddington Cake. It uses getting on for a full pot of marmalade, and if you choose a good one with plenty of bitterness, the result is a cake you could introduce anywhere.

  We have all enjoyed the two Paddington films, Eddie and I especially. I was a great fan of the Paddington books in younger days.

  ‘Are you Russian?’

  ‘Well, I am in a bit of a hurry,’ said Paddington.

  Two words – ‘said Paddington’ – make the joke funny.

  The films took the ideas behind the books and made them explicit. In the closing sequence of the first film, Paddington is writing home to his Aunt Lucy back in Peru: ‘Mrs Brown says that in London everyone is different. But that means anyone can fit in. I think she must be right because, although I don’t look like anyone else, I really do feel at home. I will never be like other people but that’s all right . . .’

  The film makes a nice pair with Paddington 2, which came out the following year. The first film is about the importance of welcoming strangers, and the way Paddington’s arrival makes the Brown family a great deal happier. The second film is about the benefits Paddington brings to every community he finds himself in: his kindness, openness, good manners and willingness to find the good in everyone make those around him better and happier people.

  I shan’t labour the point, but Eddie is not a drag on the community he lives in. He gives people the gift of being able to help someone who needs it, and that’s a rich thing for starters. He also brings his own kind of kindness.

  Down’s syndrome is getting rarer because we’re better at predicting it. It’s widely seen as a bad thing, and most pregnancies with certain, probable and even possible Down’s syndrome are terminated. People must make their own decisions on such matters, but they should make them from a full knowledge: understanding that people who have Down’s syndrome can be a positive asset to the world in which they live.

  Marmalade cake tends to bring such thoughts into my head, and besides, Eddie and I had decided to take tea and a couple of slices onto the marsh.

  Some would see the marsh as a wasteland, one that should be better put to more productive use – meat production, for example. And some see a person with Down’s syndrome as a mistake that should have been pre-empted.

  Eddie and I sat on the marsh and ate our cake and drank our tea and listened to the clatter and the chatter from the heronry. Their own parental responsibilities were at a peak: the young ones were getting big, and we could occasionally glimpse movement through the branches, as a young bird exercised wings that had yet to fly. Young herons exercise with great enthusiasm in preparation for their maiden flight. A heron is a big bird, which means that flight is a big deal. A little scrap of a thing like a wren, a bundle of feathers that weighs no more than a pound coin or two, they’re so small and light that being in the air or on the ground isn’t that much of a transition for them. By the time the young have fluttered around the nest area, usually inside a hedge or a clump of brambles, they are beginning to know what they’re doing. It’s like learning to ride a bike in the back garden. But for a heron, it’s like taking your first drive in a ten-ton truck. Harder: they must not only descend from the top of a tall tree, they must also land their not inconsiderable bodies without causing themselves damage. So warming and developing those powerful wing muscles is essential.

  Spring is back. To celebrate, the hedges throw singing whitethroats at the sky.

  The marsh harriers were also getting on with the job of parenting. Dusky flew past my hut – where the blob bush once stood – and naturally I suspended the current piece of work to watch him. He was about ten feet above the marsh, the classic marsh harrier height for hunting. For harrying, or for harrowing: providing a harrowing experience for anything he might find.

  The OED’s first definition of harrier is ‘one who harries, ravages or lays waste’. And there was Dusky, harrying for his life and for the life of his chicks, and all of it above our own little Waste Land. He continued that exploratory flight, slow and meticulous and of course deadly. He reminded me of the sort of screen villain who drawls, and takes things ever so slowly, never in a hurry, savouring the nuances of power. For the harrier, this is an efficient form of hunting that has developed over countless generations: those aerofoil surfaces, that easy dihedral, that comfortable rhythm of flap-flap-glide. That’s his power. Buzzards hunt one way, kestrels another, sparrowhawks another and peregrines yet another: harriers have developed their own method across the generations and it works.

  And then, without drama, he was gone: interrupting the rhythm of the wavering flight to drop with silent purpose – like a parachute, Eddie – down into the reeds. He stayed down, too: he’d got something. I missed the moment when he rose again: but no doubt it was a good day for his nestlings. The year was once again turning: the establishment of territories and pairs was no longer the priority for many species; it was about hatching eggs and raising young.

  It’s thrilling and occasionally problematic to have responsibility for eight wild acres of Norfolk. What must it be like to be responsible for 10,000? The Earl of Leicester owns land that is designated a National Nature Reserve. It was formerly managed by the statutory body – that is to say, representing us – that was then called English Nature and is now Natural England. These days the Earl – ‘Hello, I’m Tom’ – has responsibility for it himself, answering to Natural England. I had paid a visit there (to write a piece for a magazine) a few weeks earlier, and he very kindly invited me back to witness the wonders of late May.

  Sarah Henderson, his conservation manager, met me, and we went by Land Rover to a small patch of wet woodland that lies down in a dip. The trees stand with their feet in water and they are breathtakingly full of birds and their nests: cormorants, herons and little egrets. And among them a dozen nests of spoonbills: the only place in Britain where they breed.

  There’s always something to watch in a big nesting colony: the toing and froing of the parents, the squabbling with neighbours, the repairing of nests, the feeding of young, the young at various ages, changing from fluffy dinosaurs to sleek creatures ready for the air. We saw a spoonbill make its maiden flight: a thrilling mixture of over-confidence and self-doubt, like every other teenager. It landed staggering but without a crash: a small triumph. These young birds have much smaller beaks than their parents: birders refer to them as ‘teaspoons’.

  Land management – like anything else in the world – is about deciding what matters. What really matters. And quite often, that’s not money or even power. And what was once considered waste is sometimes the most valuable thing of all.

  Morning chores. In the stables the swallows outnumber the horses.

  And then one evening, as I brought the horses in, a cry of alarm from Norah’s box. And from it there exploded a swallow, closely followed by another swallow. I stood for a moment, watching them sketch circles and spirals over the meadow, and felt a sweet relief flowing through me. A late start, but at least a start. They were birds in a hurry. I c
ould almost hear them say, with Withnail in the film: ‘I’m making time.’ They would need to.

  ‘May’s nearly at an end, Eddie. Do you know what happens next?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘June. And do you remember what June means?’

  ‘Wild? Wild June.’

  ‘June means 30 Days Wild.’

  ‘30 Days Wild!’

  He remembered that all right. We’ve done it the past three or four years, ever since the Wildlife Trusts came up with the idea. Simple, like all great ideas: do something wild every single day in June.

  And as we’ve done before, we would both blog every day we could: putting the stuff up on my own website, with links to and from the Wildlife Trusts website.

  An imposed discipline or structure like this is a good thing, a helpful thing. It would get us out there: and it would get us both telling the world about what we’d been up to.

  And what would that be? It’s possible that the odd beer, apple juice and picnic on the marsh might come into it.

  14

  RUNNIN’ WILD

  Morning ride. Enough small tortoiseshells to make a flying Galapagos giant.

  There was a southern marsh orchid by the pond in the middle of the garden. Even I knew that: even I could recognise that dense cone of tiny purple florets. Beside the orchid, the flag irises were waving their yellow banners, so Cindy, Eddie and I took some refreshment, sitting on the grass around the pond. Easy conversation was not a straightforward business because I kept staring at the pond through binoculars, trying to will every dragonfly to possess green eyes.