Dark Skies

by Tiffany Francis-Baker

  We crept out of the village and made our way westwards through tangled conifers whose branches blocked out the darkening sky above us, and after a while the track plateaued on a vast hilltop, carpeted with heather and gorse. No flowers bloomed here; the gorse had been burned as part of a heathland conservation scheme and now stood dark and twisted against a slate sky. It was a beautiful and stark landscape, and one that hadn’t changed much since the days when Wordsworth and his friends walked here together. In his poem ‘The Thorn’, Wordsworth tells the story of ‘a woman in a scarlet cloak’ who sits beside an ‘aged Thorn’:

  No leaves it has, no prickly points;

  It is a mass of knotted joints,

  A wretched thing forlorn.

  It stands erect, and like a stone

  With lichens is it overgrown.

  Beside the thorn, he writes, lies a ‘heap of earth o’ergrown with moss … like an infant’s grave in size’, and goes on to describe how nobody knows what lies beneath the heap of earth. The woman was once pregnant out of wedlock, and jilted by her lover who ran off with another woman; many believed she ‘hanged her baby on the tree’, while others said ‘she drowned it in the pond’ nearby. Nobody knows what happened to her child, but now she sits on the moor all day and night, crying ‘Oh misery! oh misery! / Oh woe is me! oh misery!’

  These stretches of thorny heathland are one of the main characteristics of the Quantocks, together with thickly wooded slopes and deep, narrow valleys called combes that each contain their own miniature landscapes and microclimates. To the north we watched gulls drift over the Bristol Channel. Nearby, in a marshy copse beside the path, historians believe Coleridge and the Wordsworths took one particular night walk that would later inspire Coleridge’s poem ‘The Nightingale’:

  All is still,

  A balmy night! and though the stars be dim,

  Yet let us think upon the vernal showers

  That gladden the green earth, and we shall find

  A pleasure in the dimness of the stars.

  And hark! the Nightingale begins its song,

  ...

  A melancholy bird? Oh! idle thought!

  In nature there is nothing melancholy.

  ...

  ’Tis the merry Nightingale

  That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates

  With fast thick warble his delicious notes,

  As he were fearful that an April night

  Would be too short for him to utter forth

  His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul

  Of all its music!

  While nightingales were more abundant when this poem was written, their song can still be heard across the south of England, like beads of rain falling onto a lake, a rare and precious voice in our landscape. The nightingale’s song, whose name originates from the Old English for ‘Night Songstress’, features heavily in literary history as one of love and passion – such a beautiful song, in fact, that in the nineteenth century, bird-catchers tried to capture large numbers of nightingales for the caged songbird trade. Most of the birds died quickly in captivity, but some survived until autumn, when they killed themselves by dashing their bodies against the cage bars in an attempt to follow their migration instinct.

  Many of the poems referring to the nightingale’s song often mistake the singing bird as a female, but it is actually the male that sings. They do this predominantly at night to serenade migrating females who might be flying over, tempting them to come down from the sky and mate with them. A recent study at Freie Universität Berlin found that, although we might find nightingale song beautiful, for the females it is more about decoding the song to discover complex information about family values, and how much support the male is likely to offer its family. The more complicated nightingale songs are much harder to sing, and therefore indicate good physical condition. All of this information can indicate his age, where he was raised, the strength of his immune system and how motivated he is for the family.

  We passed the marshy copse and continued to climb, our route ascending to the summit of a barren peak where we discovered a heap of stones piled together by travellers as a passing gesture. We added a couple more to the pile and continued, dropping down into deciduous woodland and stopping suddenly on the path. We could hear something in the half-light ahead of us, like running water but with a beating thump coursing through it: there before us, a herd of red deer started crossing between the trees, alarmed and cautious at our footsteps, seeking safer ground. This breed of deer move around most at dawn and dusk, when they are less likely to be disturbed by ramblers and hikers, and in the day they spend hours ‘lying up’, resting quietly between feeding bouts.

  In the early twentieth century, the Quantocks was a popular destination for stag hunters, but the red deer that lived here then – and still today – were imported from nearby Exmoor specifically to provide game for hunters. As red deer are adapted to colder climates like those in the Highlands, they survived easily in the milder habitats of south-west England, growing much bigger than the other deer that lived here and making them even more of a target for hunters. During rutting season, stags will visit the more boggy areas of the Quantocks’ lower combes and roll around in the wallows, coating their fur in peat that will then dry to give them an ominous, black appearance. Naturalists believe they do this for a number of reasons: firstly, to make them look more frightening to the other stags, which will give them an advantage when trying to prove themselves as a dominant male; secondly, by urinating in the mud before they roll, they coat themselves in musky pheromones to make them more attractive to the females. In spring, the females then join the stags in their wallows, as it also helps the males and females moult their winter coats.

  We stood mesmerised as the herd slipped away into the woods, and continued our journey through the trees until we reached the road that would take us back to the camper van, past thickets of wild garlic and a sleepy herd of cows who licked my hand as we passed. Soon, the sky became swathed in wisps of cloud and it started to rain heavy, cooling droplets that remained slow and fat, those delicious swollen raindrops that form puddles on your skin and yet never seem to create a proper downpour. We passed a livery, empty of horses who would probably be roaming across the fields nearby, and on the road outside I pocketed a rusted horseshoe lying in the rain.

  While landscapes forge and reshape themselves over the centuries, there was something comforting in knowing the paths we walked that evening were once crossed by Coleridge and the Wordsworths 200 years ago. These writers’ journals and letters show they liked walking at night, crossing the Quantocks when the paths would have been more worn – not just a place for Sunday walks, but a throughway for traders and travellers. Coleridge and the Wordsworths told the locals they were roaming the hills and ‘making studies’, but even then their innocent pursuits were misinterpreted. In the midst of the French Revolution happening just across the sea, the local people suspected that these literary visitors had other ideas. They weren’t originally from the area, spoke French and held radical views, and residents believed they might be helping with preparations for a French invasion along the Bristol Channel. At one point a government agent was even sent to investigate these rumours, convinced the three writers were searching for navigable rivers through which the French ships could sail inland.

  Growing up in the nearby town of Ottery St Mary, Coleridge had already experienced one night in the wilderness, although it wasn’t quite the same as the inspira­tional, educational walks he would later experience with his friends Dorothy and William Wordsworth. According to a letter he wrote to his friend Tom Poole, he recalled that when he was a young child, he had an argument with his brother over a plate of cheese. They ended up in a fight, and when their mother came to break it up, Coleridge fled from the house and ran ‘to a hill at the bottom of which the Otter flows’, 1.5km from his house. Here he allowed his anger to die away and read a little book of prayers he had in his pocket, before falling asle
ep and rolling slowly down the hill where he awoke several times ‘wet & stiff, and cold’. A search party was dispatched by the family, and he was eventually found by the Ottery town crier, who had heard his sobs and found him lying under a gorse bush. Coleridge recalls how he was carried back home, where:

  I remember, & never shall forget, my father’s face as he looked upon me while I lay in the servant’s arms – so calm, and the tears stealing down his face: for I was the child of his old age.

  In the eighteenth century, people of the poorer classes living in the country would have been accustomed to lower levels of light, living and working outside when they could. Cottages were fitted with small windows, and candles were luxury items made of precious beeswax or rendered animal fat called tallow. Moving about in the darkness would have been something they were more accustomed to, and unlike today, most rural people would have known how to use the night sky to navigate their way across the moor. The sky would have been even darker and more dense than it is today – even in the cities, where light-pollution levels would have been much lower. On a clear night the stars would be bursting from the sky, and if travellers kept a specific star or constellation within sight, it would have helped them keep to the right path or at least move in the right direction.

  If the sky was cloudy, the stars might not have helped, but one theory suggests that travellers carried white stones with them that shone faintly in the dark, dropping them along the route like breadcrumbs to help them retrace their steps and find the return journey home. In 2002, environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy created the Chalk Stones Trail, a collection of giant balls made of chalk, a material originating from the skeletal remains of marine creatures deposited 70 to 100 million years ago, when a warm sea covered most of southern England. The South Downs are based on chalky soil, giving them their rich abundance in wildlife, and the Chalk Stones Trail takes ramblers along an 8km route into the heart of West Sussex. At night, the stones are said to glow in the moonlight, marking out the trail just as the dropped white stones would have done for those walking in the past.

  Aside from the sense of wonder we gain from looking up at the universe at night, why do we need our skies to be dark? Is light pollution genuinely a problem or is it just something that doesn’t fit with our visions of a perfect landscape? It is only in the last 100 years or so that some of Britain’s skies have stopped being naturally dark, not just around urban areas where light pollution spreads far into the sky, but also above small towns where residential areas direct large amounts of light upwards. It is these sources of light pollution, and excessive use of artificial lights, that the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) combats, first founded in 1988 by two astronomers. The IDA is a non-profit organisation based in the United States, with more than 60 local groups around the world that advocate for the protection of the night sky through the reduction of inappropriate and unnecessary light-pollution levels, including light shining directly into our eyes, called glare, and light shining above the horizon, called skyglow.

  With climate change, pollution and illegal trophy-hunting making most of the headlines in environmental circles today, protecting the night sky might seem like a low priority on the list of problems to solve. But the truth is that by resolving many of the issues that compromise the darkness of our skies at night, it will lead to benefits for the greater environ­mental cause. Like most aspects of the ecosystem, the ‘health’ of the night sky is connected with the health of everything else on the planet.

  According to studies by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Arizona, poorly aimed and unshielded outdoor lights waste more than 17 billion kilowatt-hours of energy every year in the United States alone. The US Department of Energy estimates that 13 per cent of home electricity usage goes towards outdoor lighting, and with more than one-third of the light produced being lost to skyglow, this means that residents are spending $3 billion on wasted light. In the meantime, around 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide are being released unnecessarily each year by wasted outdoor lighting, which would mean around 600 million trees would need to be planted to offset these carbon emissions.

  Aside from energy wastage, which contributes directly to climate change and global warming, light pollution has been proven to affect the habits and behaviours of various species of wildlife. Many animals, like snakes, salamanders and frogs, restrict their movements when the moon is full in order to avoid predators spotting them in the moonlight. This means they tend to hunt more on moonless nights, but as artificial light pollution is spreading further across the habitats of these species, they are spending less time hunting and more time waiting for the light to dim – and as it’s not a natural light with natural rhythms, it never does.

  One experiment in Pembroke, Virginia, saw ecologists string a line of white holiday lights along transect lines to test the effects of artificial lights on amphibians that usually emerge about an hour after dusk to hunt for food. They discovered that when the string of lights were turned on, the animals stayed hidden for a whole extra hour, meaning not only were they spending less time looking for food, but by the time they emerged they had lost an hour’s worth of food to other predators.

  Another research paper found that many species are susceptible to night blindness. In trying to find ways to reduce deer–vehicle accidents in the United States, local authorities had increased artificial lighting along highways, but studies suggest this actually makes it more difficult for nocturnal mammals to avoid collisions with vehicles. Many nocturnal animals use rod cells in their eyes to see in the dark but, when suddenly faced with a rapid change in brightness, they are unable to switch back to normal sight quickly enough and are unable to work out which way to run to escape the vehicle. Their retinas become saturated by the lights and the animals become ‘night blind’, which is what is often called the ‘rabbit-in-the-headlights’ effect.

  It’s not only a sudden change in lighting that causes animals to become disorientated, but the presence of brightly lit areas in their paths. The wild puma, found across the Americas, travels between territories at night in a corridor, but researchers have found that when their path is interrupted by artificial lighting, they will often stop in their tracks and end their journey there. This is because the puma is another animal that is susceptible to night blindness, and when they come across a brightly lit town or industrial centre, they are unable to see the dark wilderness beyond; rather than risk the unknown, they will wait until daylight to move beyond that point and continue their journey.

  Birds also use the moon and stars for navigation during their biannual migrations, often travelling at night to avoid detection by predators. According to one story, in 1954 over 50,000 birds died at Warner Robins Air Force Base in Georgia, United States, over the course of two nights, after following the artificial lights and flying straight into the ground. The Leach’s storm petrel is another species that is particularly drawn towards lights, spending most of their time offshore feeding on bioluminescent plankton in the sea. These birds can be attracted to lighthouses, offshore drilling platforms and the high-intensity lamps used by fishermen to lure squid to the surface of the water, all of which can result in the deaths and injuries of hundreds of birds.

  Along the highly developed coastline of Florida, the beaches are home to a number of rare turtle species, including loggerheads, leatherbacks and green turtles. Females come ashore at night to lay their eggs, but researchers have found their visits are declining, discouraged by the bright lights of human development. Local authorities have asked residents to turn off beachfront lights during turtle nesting season, but this doesn’t address the larger problem of skyglow above the cities. When the eggs are laid, the newly hatched turtles are struggling to find their way back to the sea. Usually guided by the stars and moon, hatchlings are starting to crawl back inland towards the artificial lights of the towns, or even crawling aimlessly down the beach until dawn, when they are more likely to be eaten by predators.

  I
n cities, wild birds are shifting the start of their early-morning dawn chorus to avoid light pollution from urban developments, although researchers suspect this could also be due to noise pollution. One study conducted at five airports in the UK found that birds had started to anticipate the morning rush of planes on the runway, changing their song times in order to avoid the noise and make themselves more audible to other birds. As the dawn chorus usually takes place just before it is light enough for the birds to navigate and forage for food, by singing earlier this means they are increasing their efforts without the opportunity to replenish their energy stores immediately afterwards. It also makes them more susceptible to nocturnal predators whose active hours are more likely to overlap with those of the birds.

  It isn’t only wildlife that suffers when light-pollution levels go unchecked. Recent studies have linked artificial light at night to an increased risk of diabetes, obesity, depression and cancer, as well as numerous sleep disorders. When we don’t spend enough time in darkness, our bodies don’t make enough melatonin, the hormone that maintains our sleep–wake cycle and helps to regulate the rest of our hormones. According to one study at Stanford University, California, people living in urban areas are exposed to artificial lighting that is three to six times more intense than people living in small towns and rural areas. The study showed that those living in intense light areas were 6 per cent more likely to sleep less than six hours per night, and were also more likely to wake up confused during the night, and feel unnaturally tired in the daytime.