On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  I have a pair of ultra-close-focusing binoculars and they’re wonderful for looking at detail. At least, they are once you’ve got something lined up. But focus is both critical and elusive with these binoculars. When you’re trying to get a bead on a fast-moving creature like a dragonfly, you are likely to get frustrated and to irritate those around you by your inattention.

  There’s a species of dragonfly called the Norfolk hawker. They’re not much found outside the county but, by rights, they should turn up here. In fact, I’d be prepared to bet a fair amount of money that they already do; it’s just that I’m such a poor observer, especially when it comes to dragonflies.

  Years ago, I wrote a book called How to be a Bad Birdwatcher, and I am a bad birdwatcher to this day. But I think I can claim without undue modesty that I’m a good bad birdwatcher. Perhaps decent non-League standard, though when it comes to song and call I might just scrape into the old Fourth Division.

  I am a pretty bad butterfly-watcher, not often moving beyond the basics, though I remember a glorious moment when I was in Scotland and saw a butterfly I had never seen before. ‘That must be a Scotch Argus,’ I said, not quite facetiously. I looked it up – on an app on my phone – and blow me, a Scotch Argus is exactly what it was. I laughed out loud: life – wildlife – should be like that.

  But there I was in Norfolk, and there was a dragonfly, but it wasn’t a Norfolk hawker. Which was really rather a poor show.

  Looking at dragonflies always seems to me a deeply useful thing: not least because it demolishes the Expertise Fallacy. Perhaps that’s a disease of the technological age: the period that began when television first became a factor in human lives. You can switch on and see all kinds of experts: on politics, on economics, on art, even on wildlife. And while it’s always good to learn, there’s a rogue circuit that cuts into our minds: if you’re not an expert there’s no point in even looking for yourself. Delegate the task to the expert. I can’t tell a song thrush from a blackbird, but David Attenborough and Bill Oddie and Chris Packham can, so I’ll leave it to them. Why bother trying? Why bother trying to improve when I start a level so far below that of the experts?

  We have forgotten that there is all the difference in the world between knowing nothing and knowing a little. The expert still knows far more than me, but so what? I have learned a little and that’s not only a small adventure, it’s brought me a little closer, not to the expert but to the subject that caught my interest.

  My shaky knowledge of dragonflies is both an embarrassment and a thrill. Ignorance is an adventure – or rather, it’s like Bag End, the residence of Bilbo Baggins: the ideal place from which to embark on an adventure. By trying and usually failing to identify dragonflies, I am spending a great deal more time looking at them, being taken up by them.

  The dragonfly

  can’t quite land

  on that blade of grass

  A haiku from Basho, the 18th-century Japanese poet: one of his eternal vignettes. I suspect Basho was also a bad dragonfly-watcher.

  Red pepper

  put wings on it

  red dragonfly

  But this was not red but blue, with a pure, unapologetic blue tail, and when it landed – on that bladed iris leaf – it folded its wings up together, rather than holding them in two parallels, which meant it was not a dragonfly but a damselfly: in fact, it was a blue-tailed damselfly.

  Life should be like that.

  There was another and larger insect: a proper dragonfly this time. After a while I gave up trying to hallucinate green eyes and looked at the dragonfly for what it was: rather burly, amber in main body colour, and with a dark spot on each transparent wing. Four wings, so four spots. Hang on . . . isn’t that a . . . four-spotted chaser.

  Huzzah!

  Wild June was off and running.

  Home. Butterflies dance to the music of the sun.

  A four-spotted chaser is different to a broad-bodied chaser, and a Norfolk hawker is different to a common hawker and a migrant hawker, and a blue-tailed damselfly is different both to a banded demoiselle and to a beautiful demoiselle (and that’s not a gratuitous valuation from me, that’s the name of the species: beautiful demoiselle). That’s the point: and it’s also the meaning of life. Life works not by making that same thing over and over again, but by making all kinds of different things. There’d be no point in a peregrine trying to hunt like Dusky and Pale, or for a kestrel to hunt at night. Better leave that to the owls.

  Biodiversity. The central principle in life: nothing less. We appreciate this at a relatively deep level, and respond in our different ways: by revelling in the difference between a red admiral and a peacock butterfly; by trying to see as many species of birds as possible; by looking at mammals and wondering how it is that straw-coloured fruit bats and blue whales and northern sportive lemurs and elephants and lions and us humans could all be part of the same group of getting on for 5,000 different species.

  Is that a bird of paradise in the garden? Or a jay? Yes!

  Here’s one of Eddie’s Wild June blogs. As usual, he dictated it to Cindy, who’s always been his Boswell.

  ‘I went on the marsh with Dad. It was warm and sunny, but the marsh was damp from the rain. Before we sat down we looked under the tins to see if anything was there, like we always do. And this time there was a grass snake. It was rolled up. We could see his head on top of all his coils. He looked at us for a minute then he slid away under the grass. He was extraordinary. He looked black – Dad said dark green – and he had a little yellow collar around his neck. I felt excited to see him. We enjoyed our sit. I had baked beans in a jar and pasta with cheese and tomato. We had a nice long sit in the sun and listened to the birds singing.’

  The snake was a good three feet long. That’s about the size at which a snake seems to me to become a proper snake. The movements – the lateral undulations – are bigger and slower and more deliberate, and it’s immediately clear that these are uncompromisingly backboned animals, for there’s nothing wormy about them whatsoever. For all their difference of shape, they’re quite obviously one of us.

  That sit was memorable for a bird that flew over. It was a tufted duck: not, you will agree, a bird that normally occasions much excitement. They are diving ducks, generally seen further out from the shore than mallards because they tend to exploit deeper water, looking more for animal life rather than plants to feed on. And there it was, a male strongly black and white, flying over in that whirring-winged, direct flight that ducks go in for.

  I looked it up on the Marsh List and sure enough, it was the first tufted duck I had recorded from our place.

  New bird.

  Huzzah!

  Marsh tit sneezes. He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases.

  Early one morning the sun was shining; I was lain in bed, neither asleep nor awake, aware and unaware of the June plenty going on just the other side of the wall. The cuckoo was singing out still, hard at it. I had an urge to get up and join him out on the marsh; I had an urge to do nothing of the kind and the second urge won. At least, it won the gross physical battle. The spiritual battle was another thing, for my spirit slipped out of the window and went roaming round the marsh even as I slumbered and snoozed and thought about the day ahead and the chores I needed to do while relishing the pleasure of not doing them quite yet. Quiet savour of guilt: what a hog I was!

  The cuckoo called again and again, that being the cuckoos’ way. And I dozed again, that being my way, at least that morning. Come: you’ve got nature to look at, words to write and horses to attend to. Well, five more minutes, then. Cuckoo! No more than ten, all right?

  Did I not hear a sudden rich bubbling? Certainly I woke from the latest doze convinced of it. Was that really a female cuckoo? And was it the same individual cuckoo that had been singing round the marsh for week after week? Almost certainly yes, for my money: but had he struck lucky for the second time?

  I was fully awake now, and there was no convincing myse
lf that the horses would wait contentedly any longer for their feed. And yet again, there was a story with the last page torn out. I always quite liked the What Happened Next feature on the television programme A Question of Sport: was it a goal? Or did he kick the ball clean out of the ground? Or was he rugby-tackled by a mad fan?

  The cuckoo mystery was just like that, but Sue Barker would never show me the right answer. There’s a passage in A Dance to the Music of Time in which Anthony Powell – or his narrator, Nick Jenkins – muses on the potential biographies of those who die young, stories which ‘possess the mystic dignity of a headless statue, the poetry of enigmatic passages in an unfinished or mutilated manuscript, unburdened with contrived or banal ending’.

  If you watch the same wild place and the shifting cast of creatures that live in it, you constantly come up against the same kind of mystery: all the more vivid for being forever uncompleted.

  Hooked, stogged, dripping in a tree like an abandoned umbrella . . . marsh harrier in the rain.

  There’s often charm in our moral stories of non-human animals – the tortoise’s victory over the hare, the robin who plucked the thorns from Christ’s wounded head and who bears on his breast the colour of Christ’s blood to this day – but they are stories about humans, not animals. (It’s the same with Paddington, of course.) Modern notions of saintly dolphins and angelic choirs of whales follow a similar pattern. But it’s not the job of non-human animals to tell us humans how to live.

  It’s not as if there weren’t bad things happening out there in the loveliness of the cuckoo-echoing June. There were still remarkably few swifts. I looked at the sky and once again, I fretted. Of course, they might just be dodging the dodgy weather with a side-trip to the Bay of Biscay . . .

  If you learn how to look at a landscape correctly, you can see at a glance how much is no longer there. Almost, it’s as if by loving wildlife you are wilfully bringing sadness into your life. My mother used to say that acquiring a pet was an investment in sadness. That didn’t stop her acquiring dogs and loving them. And besides, what she said about pets is true on a much wider field: if you love anything that lives, you will have sadness in your life. That’s the deal. Most of us accept it. We love, knowing that love will bring sadness. That’s because we also know that living without loving is not life.

  But that shouldn’t really be true of the wild world, should it? If we form an attachment to wild individuals, sure, they’re likely to predecease us – but an attachment to the wild world itself really should be safe enough. The wild world itself is forever self-replenishing.

  But it isn’t, of course. To love the wild is to accept sadness as an inevitable part of your own existence. That’s because we keep losing stuff: not as part of the eternal round of birth and copulation and death, but to the lumbering juggernaut of destruction.

  I looked at the sky for swifts, I looked in vain, and I felt the pain of sadness. And, well, if that’s the price you have to pay for loving wildlife, I embrace it willingly.

  Above me a brief dagger and a flash of pink. It’s like being a fish . . . kingfisher.

  Richard the farrier took off one of Mia’s back shoes. It bent almost in an S-shape as he did so. In the middle it was worn almost to the thinness of a knife-blade. Well, between us we’d been giving those shoes a lot of hard wear. All good.

  There’s a lot of hanging about, the day Richard comes. Mostly it’s about being there in case there’s a problem, and to keep the horses calm and content. So we talked the eternal horsey talk, never a hardship, and there were also periods of companionable silence, broken by the sharp rhythm of the hammer on shoe, on nail, on anvil. Every so often I go to and from the house. Richard likes his coffee more or less intravenous.

  It follows that there is plenty of opportunity for looking at the sky above the marsh, so I keep a pair of binoculars to hand in case there’s something worth a second look. The white stork, probably the biggest rarity that’s turned up in our time here, flew over while the horses were being shod: there it was, powering on strongly from A to B, its neck and great red beak stuck out before it, long red legs trailing behind.

  This time there was a red kite: a sudden instant vision of beauty: vivid sunlight making the bird glow red almost as bright as a robin, one of those little gasp-making moments. Basho would have caught this bird, this moment to perfection. I watched it, passed the binoculars to Richard, who enjoyed a brief inspection before picking up the rhythm of the hammer once again.

  The red kites, as we have already seen, are another success story. So many birds of prey doing so well: hen harrier, red kite, peregrine, back from the brink.

  The only blip in the pattern is hen harriers.

  Cape Irago

  nothing can match

  the hawk’s cry

  Hawk? I bet that was a kite. Probably a black kite, rather than a red, but they are both very vocal birds. So yes: a vista of beauty, flying in direct from the 18th-century thanks to Basho.

  But it doesn’t have to be beautiful. And it doesn’t have to be beautiful in order to be wonderful.

  I have written a great deal about sport, and have often argued about whether or not sport is entertainment. Well, sport can be very entertaining: compelling, dramatic, full of revelations of character and beauty. But for the most part the athletes aren’t trying to create beauty, they’re seeking victory. If they try to please the spectator, they betray both sport and themselves. Their duty is to victory and to the pursuit of excellence. And if this process is sometimes – or even often – entertaining, it’s because sport is incidentally entertaining.

  It’s the same with the wild world. It is sometimes – often – beautiful, but its beauty is incidental. The creatures aren’t out there trying to please humans: they’re trying to get through the day by Not Dying, and they’re trying to pass on their genes and become ancestors. There are no marks for artistic impression in Darwinian competition.

  We tend to veer from one extreme to another when it comes to this question. We say that a wild creature – and by extension all nature – is either beautiful or ugly, attractive or repulsive, an example of what we have risen above or an example of what we should aspire to. The brutal nest-parasitism of cuckoos shows how far we have risen above nature; the perfect society of dolphins shows us how far we are from true grace.

  Both ideas are equally wrong. Eddie is fascinated by bees and wasps: and if I were a better entomologist I would be able to point out to him the species of hunting wasps that use the marsh to make a living. These wasps care tenderly for the children they will never meet – a joyous example of selfless maternal care. The mother buries an egg and then furnishes the hole with a collection of small paralysed creatures: insects and small spiders. She doesn’t kill them because she doesn’t want them to rot. So she keeps them as a living larder: and the larvae hatch and eat their way through their slumbering snacks as they make the precarious journey towards adulthood.

  You can find a conceptual beauty in this, I suppose. Or not: that’s your choice. But it’s not about us. It’s about them.

  Five swallows came barrelling out of the stables. You know, I could have sworn that only two went in.

  So here is a parable about beauty.

  I spent two or three days of Wild June in Morocco, chasing wild birds. We were mostly there for Eleonora’s falcon, a small and elegant bird that breeds in colonies along the migration routes of smaller birds. They breed late in the year and feed their chicks on birds that had been attempting to fly south on their way to warmer places. Instead they get a warm welcome from the falcons. (So the Eleonora’s falcons are beautiful, if you like. And by being so mean to the gallant migrants, they are morally reprehensible, if you like. But it’s not about you and it’s not about me.)

  I was travelling with Rod Tether, an old friend from Zambia. He worked for 12 years in North Luangwa National Park. Some of the most beautiful birds you could ever see are a daily pleasure in the Luangwa Valley: lilac-breasted rol
ler, all iridescent blues; the cherryade colour of carmine bee-eaters, in hundreds and sometimes thousands; the softly bugling crowds of crowned crane; in the wet season the red bishop shines out like a live coal and the male paradise whydah somehow manages to fly with a tail longer than himself. Extravagances beyond our imaginings are a matter of routine. People come to see the big mammals and they go home birders. This is a place to inspire minds and change lives, as it changed mine.

  The food in the tourist camps – always amazingly good – is cooked in open-air kitchens beneath thatched shades. Here the cooks bake bread daily in a tin buried beneath the fire and pull vast sticky cakes from the same unlikely place. One day in camp the kitchen staff called Rod.

  ‘Come and see – come and see! We have a bird in the kitchen – and it is the most beautiful bird we have ever seen!’

  They were entranced, in awe, knocked sideways by loveliness.

  Rod hurried to the kitchen. He had no trouble identifying the beautiful bird, even though it was the first time this species had been recorded in the North Luangwa National Park.

  House sparrow.

  Meadow brown. Meadowsweet. Sweet meadow.

  There was a painted lady on the buddleia. And it was beautiful. Of course. Just the one, but welcome for all that. This is a butterfly you can never quite rely on, so it’s always a small thrill when you meet one. I suppose they too are a parable.

  They are boom-and-busters: sometimes – like 2009 – present in huge numbers; at other years, like this one, there were far fewer. They have one of those deeply complicated lifestyles: you learn the facts and wonder how the hell did they ever come up with that? The reason they did is beyond our understanding: it’s Time. It’s about Time deeper than we humans can understand it: Time not as three score year and ten, or Time measured in generations back to our grandparents’ childhood, or Time back to 1066 or the arrival of the Romans. That is Shallow Time, historical time, Time as we humans understand it. It’s not Time as life on our planet operates.