On the Marsh

by Simon Barnes

  It was up there among the beams, baffled by the fact that you can see through the roof but you can’t fly through it. It seemed an impossible thing at first: a small furry rugby ball – a small furry striped rugby ball – suspended in the air with no immediately visible means of support. After a slight adjustment of the mind I could see the wings as a form of mist. There was pink on the fur of the body and in the wings.

  I got the net, but I wanted to spend a few moments looking at the marvel before I performed the brief miracle of freedom.

  ‘It’s a moth, Eddie. Remember the moth we saw on the flowers when we were on Alderney?’

  A huge effort of memory.

  ‘Humm . . . humming . . . hummingbird!’

  ‘Brilliant, Eddie! You’re such a good observer. Hummingbird hawk-moth!’

  Every summer the RSPB and other wildlife organisations get calls from people thrilled to report a hummingbird in their garden. In a way, the creature they have just seen is a greater miracle than a hummingbird crossing the Atlantic to sup nectar in the wrong hemisphere.

  Hummingbird hawk-moths have adopted the same strategy as hummingbirds. They have highly developed hovering skills as well as the ability to fly backwards. They exploit these talents to feed from flowers, without resorting to the banal expedient of perching. This freedom from the need to find a foothold makes many more flowers available to them: they can feed on nectar despite their bulk. If either hummingbird or hummingbird hawk-moth tried to alight on their food sources, their weight would often be too much for the plant. So they both feed on the wing. In other words, the same solution to the same problem has been reached by a radically different evolutionary route: like swifts and swallows but still more dramatic, since the relationship between the two is incomparably more distant.

  It’s called a convergence, or convergent evolution: insects, birds, pterosaurs and bats all – quite separately – evolved the ability to fly, and they all use quite different bodily structures to do so. Perhaps still more intriguing, squids and octopuses evolved intelligence from a quite different route to us vertebrates.

  Eddie called Joseph and Cindy for a moment to enjoy the moth, and then I took the net and eased it from beam to beam – their tendency to fly on the same spot made this comparatively easy, much easier than those hot-rod dragonflies – and soon it was out in the open. I was hoping it would start feeding from the buddleia or the other nectar-rich insect-tempting plants we have in the garden, but this one was clearly glad to get away. He switched from hover to straight and level flight and went hammering off towards the marsh.

  Hummingbird hawk-moths turn up in this country in most summers, more frequently down in the warmer south, crossing over from the continent. This was the first we had seen at our place: and it made a resounding conclusion to Wild June.

  Is that a squadron of flying cats or have the buzzards just fledged?

  One of the sudden pleasures of this season is the fledge-out: the day when quite suddenly the place is full of birds, all in a gang together, all the same kind, all very eager to get on with life but not quite sure what birds are supposed to do. ‘Someone’s opened a can of blue tits,’ Cindy remarked. It was as if blue tits were about to conquer the world, reach plague proportions, drive humanity out of house and home. It’s an illusion, if a merry one: it’s all about numbers, and the fact that few if any will survive their first winter.

  Not that you think such grim thoughts, of course: and anyway, it’s not really all that grim, or no grimmer than most facts about life. If one blue tit, in the course of its brief lifetime, succeeds in fathering or mothering a chick that goes on to raise chicks of its own, then it has won life’s lottery. Many species adopt a strategy based on large numbers: codfish lay eggs a million at a time with the same ultimate aim in view. Tsetse flies, as I routinely explain to clients on safari in Zambia, are not evil monsters. They are a touching example of maternal care: the female will raise a single grub inside her own body. The grub will go through three larval stages, nourished by a milky substance that the female secretes. It’s about the trade-off between parental care and numbers, and that’s about assessing the odds and responding accordingly. Any bookmaker would understand evolution in an instant of time.

  Then the swallows in Norah’s stable fledged, and if it was not the banishment of worry about that species, it was certainly an un-turn-downable invitation to set worry aside for a while. There over the meadow the swallows were making their first attempts at being intrepid intercontinental aeronauts: working on the circles and esses and arabesques and spirals that are the essential life skills of the swallow. I remember Joseph – never a great one for crawling – ambitiously taking his first steps while Cindy and I surrounded him like slip-fielders.

  The swallows were making their baby-steps: tumbling from the nests and in an instant becoming accomplished whizzers and whirlers, as if Joseph had taken his first steps and instantly danced the lead in Swan Lake.

  I once watched a fledge-out when the young swallows decided – or were shown – how swallows drink: swooping low over the water and taking a sip, wings raised high to keep them dry and to facilitate the brief shallow glide, and as they reached the water’s surface they ducked their heads and drank. It was gloriously comic. Sometimes the young swallows missed altogether, timidly going in too high, sometimes one would go too deep and crash: tumbling and splashing before fluttering away in a shower of sunlit drops. It was a fine thing to watch: showing that the flying skills of a swallow are only innate to a certain degree; a good deal of it also has to be learned. To what extent were the parent birds deliberately showing them what to do? If at all? Either way it takes hard work to be a swallow.

  And then a fledge-out of kestrels. I’ve never been able to work out where they nest: some way off, I suspect. But there were three of them flying over the marsh: not really a serious bit of hunting practice, rather a joyful celebration of kestrelness: why look for food when you’ve got a sibling you can swoop on from a dizzy height? They crossed the big sky, playing Spitfires and Messerschmitts, exulting in the new life flowing their veins.

  This detonation of new life felt for moments at a time like being young again myself: full of bounce and vigour and no idea at all how to organise such things, only the vaguest inkling what human beings actually do but eager to get on with it – well, parts of it – as soon as possible. Friends! Beer! Books! Travel! Adventure! Girls!

  Perhaps all those fledged-out swallows went back from loop-the-looping the meadow to receive the congratulations of their parents. Well done, little one! And in a few weeks, we’ll have another little flight. Cape Town!

  In the vastness of the Norfolk sky even a crane is small and hard to find.1

  It’s rather throwing to share your name with a friend. Simon and I also shared a flat sometime back in those days of being young. It’s always good to see him, if only to see what mad craze currently possesses him. Simon might be classified as a satisfied Toad. When Toad took on a new craze, he invariably made a hash of it: but when Simon takes on something new, he generally masters it. Few people have worked as a top-end chef, a potter and a website designer and done all three triumphantly.

  He arrived and immediately gave us a handful of wooden spoons, all of which he had carved himself with delicate strokes of a curved knife. He told us he had brought a drone with him, so the next morning – after a long evening of talk aided by a little drink – he launched the drone over the marsh and surrounding countryside; his work provides the basis of the map in this book. The pictures also went to the parish because they own the land next door where Jane grazes her sheep, and to the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. They were good pictures, and the drone was handled with notable competence: what you’d expect from that Simon, though not from this one.

  He and I spent an afternoon on and around Hickling Broad, hiring an electric day boat. This is lovely way to travel: almost completely silent, so the reed warblers, sedge warblers, reed buntings and bearded tits could be hea
rd with perfect clarity. And as we travelled, sometimes talking, sometimes enjoying the silences, a pair of cranes flew across the reeds before vanishing.

  There is a real thrill in their unEnglishness: flying with long neck stretched out in front of them and longer legs trailing behind, and five feet or more from end to end, they seem impossibly exotic. If any bird symbolised hope in the wild wetness of Norfolk, it’s the crane, back with us after 500 years of absence. If we can undo half a millennium of harm, we have scope to put a few more things right.

  Would cranes be the ultimate wonder for our own stretch of marsh? Perhaps so. Cranes as regular visitors . . . cranes as breeding birds . . . well, no one can say it’s not possible. It hardly seemed possible that cranes would return to England after five centuries of absence.

  I looked out at our own patch of marsh: particularly at the lower, drier, less scrubby part that we bought from Barry almost a year back. It didn’t take much hard work to see a pair of cranes high-stepping across, dipping their long necks to peck in their fastidious way at the life of the place. You never know what wild thing will turn up next in a place – so long as the place itself is suitably wild.

  Outdoor supper is good even though little owls heckle the conversation.

  There are times when I think the greatest blow to civilisation in the 21st century is prosecco. It’s a nice drink, but it’s not a substitute for champagne.

  There are certain kinds of birds – cranes, for example, or Savi’s warblers – that are undeniably Special. The idea of specialness is very dear to us humans; it’s part of the human condition. We took the 28-day lunar month, divided it into four parts of seven days each, and in order to come to terms with the rhythm of passing time, we made one day Special. When I was a boy, Sunday was church followed by roast dinner. These days on Sunday evenings we sit down to a great curry feast: I cook it myself and love the lingering smell of spice across the house.

  Champagne is used to mark special events: birthdays, wedding anniversary, a new bird for the list, the publication of a book, the sale of a significant piece of art, and so forth. But the great thing about champagne is that it also works reflexively. It can be used to mark a special occasion: but it can also be used to make any occasion special.

  And so it was that evening. Cindy and I sat in the garden, the light fading without hurry. Pop and clink and sip: golden wine on a golden evening. This was, as I remember, the cheapest champagne sold by the Co-op. The temperature was perfect – of the wine, of the evening: a rare time of stillness. It was as if the marsh, as if the year itself had taken a moment to pause and appreciate how far it had come: how long it was since the chill days, when it seemed that the world must be forever cold.

  And then the yelping began: a hooting, rather exuberant kind of yelping, and with them came the little owls. If this wasn’t the actual moment of a fledge-out it was pretty close: the little little owls were still fluffy at the edges with their baby down. They looked delightfully absurd as they lined up along the fence and tried to do the things that little owls are supposed to do.

  There are moments of perfection: complete and unabashed. They come rarely and fleetingly, but when they do they often have that weird stretchy quality that destroys time as an objective quantity and makes it a purely personal affair. Such moments come more readily when they follow a glass of champagne drunk rather quickly. I poured again: this one to be drunk more slowly. Us, the marsh, the owls, the bubbles, the yelps, the silences: a moment lit up with the flames of eternity.

  * * *

  1 A reference to Big Blue Whale by Nicola Davies.

  16

  THE YEAR HOLDS ITS BREATH

  Cancel the morning walk. I need protection from the storm of butterflies.

  The moment when the hidden becomes suddenly and dramatically visible is an experience known to us all. It’s associated with moments of glory and moments of horror. It’s something all film directors work on: the sudden revelation. And it’s part of the routine of wildlifing: now you don’t see it, now you do. I remember finding the carcass of a majestic male otter by the roadside: good news and bad news. The bad news is obvious; the good news is that the sad find revealed that otters were quite clearly back in the local river system.

  So when Carl asked if I would like to join him on a visit to a dead whale, I was up for the treat. It had beached itself in North Norfolk, near the great RSPB reserve at Titchwell. Carl is Norfolk’s cetacean – whale and dolphin – recorder, so it was his job to take measurements and a DNA sample and to gather other information.

  It wasn’t a massive creature, though big enough: a good 17 feet long, we ascertained. I had the important job of holding the other end of the tape measure, and it was a task better performed on the windward side. After a fair amount of thought, Carl was pretty convinced this was a Sowerby’s beaked whale; the DNA test later proved him right. They are extraordinary creatures even by the standards of whales. They dive – and they dive deep. They can stay down for half an hour, holding their breath while they hunt for squid, which they consume by sucking them in with toothless jaws.

  In the sad, sagging flesh it was possible to make out the ghost of the streamlined, athletic creature this once was. Carl thrust his gloved hand inside the whale’s mouth and found no teeth. Males have two teeth, used exclusively for fighting, rather than squid-eating. So with the information recorded, we retreated back into the fastness of Titchwell for a few deep breaths and a few nice birds.

  There have been 30 species of cetacean recorded off the shores of Britain, and 20 in Norfolk. So next time you look out to sea, think of the fabulous and enormous creatures that live there out of sight, yet breathing the air just as we do. We can look out at the sea and have no idea that they’re there at all: no awareness of their existence, no understanding of what kind of damage we may be doing to them.

  Sky-writing lessons for young swallows. They’re getting the hang of S and O.

  Cindy found a shell alongside one of the dykes. I was thrown at first: it looked like the kind of seashell she sells on the seashore. That is to say, it wasn’t like a snail shell: a univalve with a single door. It was a bivalve, like an oyster or a scallop, with two doors held together by a hinge. Was this something pushed in by the complex movements of tides and current? Or was it a souvenir of the long-retreated seabed? Then the penny dropped and the heel of the hand struck the centre of the forehead with a hollow thud: of course! I knew it all along. It was a freshwater mussel: we have six species in Britain.

  The shell was a supremely graceful oval, a luscious line that Barbara Hepworth would have loved and probably used, perhaps 1,000 times larger: I could imagine it standing tall and proud on the banks of the Thames by the Oxo Tower. This shell was one of those impossibly lovely things that the wild world throws up on a routine basis.

  I had no idea there were mussels in these surrounding waterways. Like most of us, I had never given it a thought. And yet they matter, these humble and lovely things. Not only do they indicate that the water in which they live is in good shape, but they also help to keep it that way. They are one of those keystone species: species whose presence or absence plays a crucial role in the entire ecosystem in which they have their being. Keystone species can include large carnivores, beavers and these bottom-dwelling beasts.

  That’s because they are siphon-feeders: a big one – some can get up to six inches across and live for 100 years – can process 40 litres of water in a day, so a big colony changes the nature of the waters they live in: taking out nutrients, algae, bacteria and pollutants. There can’t be many on the river: it’s routinely dredged to keep it open for boating. I wondered how many there were in those wide, generous dykes: had the agricultural chemicals and the passing river-traffic done for them? How old was the shell I held in my hand?

  The lives of the adults are not too exciting: they mostly stay in a single place, siphoning away. But they have a wild youth, living as quite another kind of creature. There are species of mu
ssel larvae that produce long sticky strings, and those that win the lottery manage to snag a fish. They then winch themselves up the string, attach themselves to the fish and operate as blood-feeding parasites till it’s time for them to drop off and start life as siphoning adults: another classic example of the extraordinary things going on beyond our sight and below the threshold of human awareness.

  Did this mussel shell mean that there was a living, siphoning, fully functioning population down there? Or was it an ancient thing that had turned up by chance, a souvenir of days long gone?

  Tea with butterflies. No milk, no sugar. Just brimstone, please.

  Here is another parable: the parable of the partridge.

  I have an intermittent and fascinating – I’m the one being fascinated – correspondence with Philip Howse, author of, among other works, Seeing Butterflies. He is fascinated by camouflage. He has taken the idea of the peacock butterfly’s mimicry of an owl and radically extended it. He occasionally sends me an image of a butterfly or moth: ‘To me this looks extraordinarily like a small mammal with a pink nose. Any thoughts?’ The other day he sent me an image of a butterfly that was exactly like a tiger seen from above.

  One of my earlier thoughts in this correspondence was ‘just how much LSD did you consume in your wild youth?’ The answer was none whatsoever: he is just extraordinarily gifted at seeing. And he supplied me with a parable about hidden life.

  It concerns Hugh B. Cott, zoologist and expert on natural and military camouflage; he played a significant role in the Second World War. He listed nine different kinds of visual deception: I list them here because it would be a shame not to.

  1. Merging, like hares and polar bears

  2. Disruption, like a great-spotted woodpecker