Beneath the Stream

Ultima Thule

2012-01-31T13:14:00.000Z

Autumn and early winter for birdwatchers is a season of relative plenty. We descend on the marshes and coastal fields to have aural and visual blitzkrieg experiences with volumes of flesh normally only associated with the grasslands of Africa. Vast and heaving flocks of wildfowl arrive on our shores with the comforting regularity of the most punctual of colleagues and our friends whose Christmas cards always arrive first. As anyone who’s been there as the sun rises on the marshes and wetlands of north Norfolk will testify, seemingly endless skeins of geese pouring in waves overhead with the added spice of sound, temperature and tricks of watery winter light create an experience not to be passed over lightly. Likewise the vast flocks of knot and dunlin.

One of the most deeply felt aspects of this experience for me is the message that these birds bring with them. They come for the most part, as they have done for countless millenia, from the North. They come from lands that are always slightly beyond imaginative limits.

In mediaeval thought and cartography this place was given a name: Ultima Thule. The very farthest of places. In some references this is a very literal place like Iceland or Greenland. But in most geographies of the dark ages, and for our own purposes, that is too narrow a definition. Ultima Thule is much more than just a tangible place. It signifies what is most distant and what lies beyond the places we can map and codify.

In some cases we can visit the Ultima Thule of the pink footed geese in Iceland but it strangely gets us no closer to understanding the enormous significance of their journey. These migrations stand as testaments to the rhythms of an earth that are by inches being knocked out of true. These beings from the north country arrive, defying us to understand how, why and by what curious clockwork they live and move. They are our connection with Ultima Thule. Furthermore, when we finally reach the point where there is a judgement on whether we’ve been able to correct the mistakes made in our stewardship of our planet, they will prove to be a more meaningful connection than a wire between us and Longyearbyen or Reykjavik.

How much choice have we got?

2012-01-22T22:17:00.002Z

“I am not free to think as I wish. I can only live in relation to the dead of my race. They, and my country’s soil, tell me how I should live.” These are the stirring and thought-provoking words of Maurice Barres. He was a late nineteenth century French politician, novelist and agitator who keenly felt the blood of his ancestors in his love of the Alsace-Lorraine region of north eastern France.

Of course, Barres was a deplorable anti-Semite, an intractable nationalist, an appalling bigot and is generally to be completely ignored. But, like all the most charismatic and terrifying people, he had one hell of a way with words. So, on this occasion, was he right or wrong?

In today’s global rotating sushi bar of choice and second-by-second information revolutions it seems easy to lose sight of the differences between the peoples of our planet, between you and me. I, like others, have a tendency to glance backwards into our bloodlines to find a clue as to what we’ve been getting wrong. We don’t always find what we’re looking for.

In many cases we are easily seduced by a world that was less on edge and, let’s face it, had a lot fewer people in it; in our predecessors time the planet hadn’t yet reached its carrying capacity. But just as often, we find wholesale historical ecological destruction and human tragedy that fits uncomfortably with the view we’ve constructed around our own family histories.

The opposite situation exists in our time. Some languages, traditions, rites and knowledge have already been reduced to an entry on Wikipedia and the things we talk about everyday are having real effects on real people. "I don't know what global warming is, but what I do know is that this lake is dying and we are all dying with it." So says Muhammadu Bello, a fisherman on the rapidly shrinking Lake Chad. But we do know what it is because the equal and opposite reaction of dying local cultures is awareness that they’re dying. And with that comes a chance to put it right.

Berres was partly right but not in the way he wanted to be. We are free to think as we wish but the dead of my race (or even its older members) do tell me how I should live, their worst mistakes providing the lessons required. We cannot make the same mistakes. “One planet, one experiment.”

The Singer and the Song - Part 1

2012-01-16T13:22:00.001Z

The traditional music of England, represented by a vast repertoire, contains chilling echoes of remorseless violence, resignation and vivid and precarious human emotions that fit anything but the comfortable stereotype so often attached to it. As a music of made of deep-running undercurrents it has long acted as a mirror and guage of social change as well as a clear cut chronology of events.

But after many years of listening to and sometimes performing this most human of music it has become clear that it can act as a catalogue of our relationship with the landscape and the natural world. In the classic imitational mirror of life and art it has tracked our changing priorities and attitudes.

The witnesses to this are everywhere. The sea has long been painted in traditional song as escape route, taker of young lives, lifeline and reflector of mood. In the Welcome Sailor the singer reminds us that her ‘heart is like the sea, always in motion’. In the songs of whaling and whalers there are constant shifts of mood and outlook. There is the romanticism of the decision to ‘ship aboard a whaler’ and the enticement to ‘you trawlermen, forget your snapper and your prawn…we sail, fishing for the humpback whale.’ In some songs, the danger of the exploit is treated as adventure but in other times and places the taste of whale oil, blood and blubber begins to taint the air and the singer becomes embittered; it becomes a life of slavery, where years of one's life is given up for little pay, in a freezing ocean where ‘of right whales there are none.’

These seemingly fickle changes are no different to mankind’s (generally) shifting attitude and is repeated in the indigenous music of many cultures. The focus of the song changes with our understanding of the precarious nature of the relationship and the even more desperate situation of the world we live in. This works on so many human levels and the music of someone like Chris Wood, exploring John Clare’s poetry as a chronicle of our landscape’s mistaken identity is one of many powerful examples. So looking back, are we able to view these songs as testimony of how far we’ve come, a casebook of our worst crimes or a roadmap to find our way back again?

It's complicated...

2012-01-13T13:16:00.001Z

With all of the phlegm I can muster from my Fenland upbringing and East Anglian ancestry, and all of the fatalism I can summon, gifted to me by my Welsh forebears, I make occasional desperate attempts to play the recalcitrant and reluctant writer. At these moments I portray myself as the coldly disassociated observer (an idea I’ve played with before) coolly and calmly setting out the arguments as to why people behave as they do. I generously turn my steady and penetrating gaze upon the deeper ecological and psychological issues of the day, make judgements upon man’s relationship with his fellow non-humans, subtextually declare it the last word on the subject, put my pen down and congratulate myself on job well done. Perhaps, as a reward to myself, I will then join the rest of the human race for a while by addressing more mundane matters such as how to pay for the repairs to the roof.

After long periods of this kind of cock-a-mamy behaviour I get tired and bored and end up being myself for a while. This inevitably means soaking up the real and tangible landscapes and backyard wildernesses of the chalk hills that sit, patiently waiting for me to look up from my work, just outside my study window. And when I finally do look up, stand up, walk out and touch and feel the outdoors then that is when the thousand channels of history, emotion and feeling are at their fullest and busiest. It is rush hour in my visceral senses when I can, perversely, switch off but tune in.

It is the opportunities to simply be there, without any purpose except that of enjoying myself, that are most replete with chances of reflection. It is when I’m poised, notebook in hand, grasping for an answer to a question, that I am at my narrowest. Where I’m sure there are times that this is appropriate, the return on my investment is small when I’m focused on a single point of contact with my landscape. Spend too long there and it becomes a vanishing point.

And damn it all, I’ve just spent three paragraphs analysing what it’s like not to analyse. I’m going for a walk. If only to stitch in some more threads and also contemplate how I can use the word cock-a-mamy more in conversation.

Between the Harpoon and the Whale

2012-01-10T14:28:00.000Z

Sea Shepherd. Now there’s two words that divide opinion. And just how controversial is one allowed to be on a blog?

I recently took part in Planet Whale’s Whalefest event in Brighton, UK and Sea Shepherd were there, well supported and represented. Just their presence, nestled amongst artists, writers, wildlife tour companies, musicians, film makers, scientists and armchair cetacean lovers, caused either restless discomfort or highly vocal support. And almost nothing inbetween.

The methods of direct action groups such as Sea Shepherd is something we have to get used to. But it feels as if deciding whether or not you agree with direct action presents the age old black and white conundrum: You can’t claim to be on the side of the wildlife and the oceans if you don’t agreethat saving just one whale through direct action is a good thing. But I’m convinced that black and white rarely exists on such a planet as ours.

Direct action groups have been known to denounce one another publicly, normally divided along the axis of to what extreme they are prepared to go in pursuit of their cause. The more restrained party accusing the other of crossing a line of violence and potential harm, the more active party accusing the other of passivity and being ineffectual. While this arguing is relentlessly pursued the onlooker has chance to reflect on what they really think. And when that happens, the questions spill out.

Behind the charisma of the leaders, is ego driving positional posts more intractably into the ground? After all, it must be a terrifying and motivating thought to wonder whether or not history will show you up to be the one that was wrong. What available evidence is important to me: Growing numbers of the animal of choice? Change in attitudes? How, therefore, can I tell whether it’s doing any good or not?

Although I would never condone violence I am still left undecided. Whaling is cruel and unnecessary but through the fog of claim, counterclaim, blame and cultural division, I’m struggling to see where the dice for the animals is falling. In the case of whaling, I worry that while we wait to be convinced, the inherent immovability (which I’m not sure can ever be of use) of the parties involved might ultimately drive greater attitude-forged, cultural wedges between us and those that kill whales. And that is a much more treacherous strait to navigate than the short stretch of water between the harpoon and the whale.

A Game of Placid Beauty

2011-12-06T12:20:00.000Z

This was how one chess grandmaster described game 6 of Bobby Fischer’s eventual win over Boris Spassky in 1972. Overshadowing any discussion of this tournament, which has now passed into legend, preserved only on grainy film images, is the knowledge that Fischer, who outwardly played a chess game of such reverent grace was inwardly pursued by a thousand demons; demons of genius, turmoil, narcissism and his own sense of hopeless fate. These were demons that were eventually to overtake his mind, forming a forward guard to the degenerative renal failure that killed him.

Watching Liz Garbus’ superb documentary on Fischer recently, I was reminded of Victorian studies of Dunnocks which, when published, shocked the naturalist establishment because they revealed nature not as a bucolic paradise, but as a place of savage struggles. What’s more, they were presented with a bloody struggle for survival that took nature beyond the imaginative limits of what they once thought possible as they gazed on the outward grace of birds on the wing.

Without wanting to sound to glum, it is the most natural thing in the world to die. Staying alive requires hard-won resources and a battling instinct. The truly awe inspiring fact is that the fight to stop ourselves falling into this permanent state is what makes life on earth infinite in its variety and wonder. Every animal and plant adaptation we count and codify is there for the reasons of being able to patrticpate in the struggle to simply not die.

This is a prosaic outlook but also provides a foothold into understanding what our relationship is with the wildlife that surrounds us: To know that the nictating eyelid of the gannet is a flourish of nature, put there to garnish the wealth of adaptations necessary to furnish his plunge-diving lifestyle as he searches for food; to dive into the desalinisation plant contained in the head of the arctic tern that means that the liquid he needs to live can be gained from an environment that would mean death to you and I. These and more are testament to why nature is not a game of placid beauty. It is bustle, purpose, fight, reach, stretch and death.

But, like the observation of any master perfectly discharging his craft with the knowledge that all is raging inwardly, these testimonies of nature’s bloody truth are not, and should never be, barriers to the appreciation of the beauty with which those truths are executed.

Memories are made of…the Weapon Focus Effect

2011-11-15T13:39:00.000Z

During research for some writing I’ve become intrigued by the delicate interplay between emotion and memory and, moreover, how this manifests itself in our relationship with the natural world. Perhaps quite obviously, scores of cognitive psychologists have experimented with the effects of emotion on our memory and find that highly charged emotional reactions to experiences drive deeper markers into our memory than most ‘normal’ experiences.

The experiences we have, running on the cross-cut axes of whether they’re soothing or exciting, positive or negative, contain all manner of cues or stimuli that combine to help us remember something; whether that’s a simple connection between memory and birdsong or memory and love or more complex correlations, these are the things that web together to define what our memories look like.

But in 1959 one J A Easterbrook, in his cue utilisation theory, suggested that the more emotionally aroused we become, the fewer of these cues will hit home; only the principal, most stimulating elements of the experience will be encoded in our memory, while the peripheral details will become fuzzy and only lightly adhere. This was further defined by something termed the Weapon Focus Effect, where witnesses to violent crime can tell you what colour the knife was but cannot say whether the perpetrator was wearing a white tuxedo or a balaclava.

In recent times I’ve been unsure what my most potent memories of encounters with wildlife are made up of. I have publicly entertained theories that every cue and element of the experince has somehow been used and I’m still not convinced that it isn’t. But in all my many thousands hours spent in the natural world, feeling bucolic and sensitive but where nothing out of the ordinary happens then I can, with certainty, tell you that I was feeling relaxed. But couldn’t give you a single reason why I know that. This is because I don’t remember it.

Conversely, the times I have been visually bludgeoned by rampaging superpods of oceanic dolphins or incised with surgical precision by the vision of a stooping peregrine have hammered markers into my memory that are almost immovable. The weapon is permanently fixed in my mind. In some cases these are less markers than they are obscenely large, flashing neon signs. What’s more, the effect of the strength of these memories on my ability to recall them means I can escape to this Las Vegas strip of memory whenever I chose to debauch myself in all the finest sights and sounds of the planet has to offer.

But that leaves me with one more question: What might the lasting effect on us and the planet be if we were to arrive at a point where every encounter with the wild comes to us loud and clear regardless of its distance in time?

Reflected in my eye

2011-11-04T12:11:00.001Z

I have been looking through the most recent portfolio of photographs from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year as well as some of the images in this year’s Society of Wildlife Artists (SWLA) annual exhibition. Moving well beyond the technical aspects of aperture settings, shutter speeds and compostion there isn’t a single one of these images that does not deliver revelations to the imagination as well as the eye.

The great achievement of these images of the natural world is that they grant us visions of the subject that we might not otherwise see, whether that’s in another, more conventional image or whether it’s in an actual encounter. Yes, there is no substitute for personal experiences of the natural world but in the hands of photographers and artists who are masters of their art then even the most familiar wildlife, encountered perhaps on a daily basis, is elevated to a different status.

Sometimes, the image says something about a place or a subject that we, if only we had the skill, had always wanted to say. We see and image and inwardly give a little cry of recognition: “Yes, that is what that animal is to me, they’ve ‘captured’ it!” Joyously, this also happens with the most abstracted images. Fields of poppies, the colours of leaves and pigment, reduced to their most basic shapes and colours give an extra dimension built of layers of emotional reactions to the natural world.

Just as the first photographers removed their lens covers to allow the image to burn onto the glass plate, the newly discovered connections that these images uncover for us, latch on to our consciousness. As well as helping us see the natural world in a different light, they can just as well grant us new visions of ourselves.

Latest Publication

2011-11-02T22:25:00.000Z

Orion Magazine invite 4 writers every two months to share their experience of a landscape that's special to them. Click on the link below to read my piece from the November / December issue.

http://www.colin-williams.com/news/

I Smell Winter

2011-10-18T16:02:00.000+01:00

I do not enjoy the height of summer. It’s true I am no sun worshipper but the summer, in all its drowsiness and listlessness seems, in some respects, so dead. There is nothing driving life on. Don’t get me wrong, few things are as pleasurable as a river in summer where light, reflection and colour show off their craftsmanship to dizzying effect. However, the world seems, perversely, to liven up as winter approaches with the urgency of migration and preparations for winter. Flocks are larger and noisier, mammals are louder, trees are showing off and everything becomes that much closer. Last year, the Quarry Cottages were wrapped in snow and I found this in one of the pages of the electronic diary I’ve been keeping.

“Dylan Thomas has reminded me to look at the ‘bandaged hills’ and I can see them as I type, the edges of the bandages picked out by hedgerows that disappear criss-cross into the fold of the combe. It is a stark but grey day and the falling snow produces that unique bright stillness that is peculiar to the north; light and perception are filtered just as the ice crystals stitched a vast lunar halo around yesterday’s moon. Anna and I stood at the front porch and looked at it and I wondered how such a prosaic phenomenon could produce such a poetic vision.

Icicles interrupt the top of my vision through the window and a brambling is flicking through the snow at the bottom of the bird table looking for the scraps that the dunnock has missed. Behind the stock fence at the side of the garden sheep, fairly distantly, gather round the steel manger of hay fed by the two dark tracks of a Land Rover. Closer to the fence four pheasants are, seemingly, idle in the white doing nothing but looking around nervously. The ancient apple tree, planted in all probability when the house was built has, on each apple, a cap of snow but fieldfares have pecked away at many of them. The buzzard perches stately on his favourite bough on the wood verge to the north and I imagine myself closer to him where I can see the large flakes of snow falling across his yellow iris. He sits on the edge of a small wood that was planted around the old quarry, now a lake.

Behind me, on the downs the short eared owls are probably hunting, as they do each winter. They are visitors here and they come to bob on their balsawood wings above the rank grass at the field margins. Everything here is close and the snow brings it closer. At first light on Sunday from our bedroom window we saw the solitary hare, potent and pagan symbol of all that is wild, belting across the pure white field.”

The verdict on winter? I am in love with the spring but it is this deepest season that really sends my senses racing. The stillness and intense quiet makes me feel more human than at any other time.

Owl vs. Goose: Winner Takes All

2011-09-29T08:38:00.000+01:00

Our perception of the natural world continues to take its place as the virtue that divides mankind. But what these perceptions represent has changed and is changing.

Take the two images above: the one on the left is Egyptian and, in an almost anatomically perfect way, depicts red breasted geese. The one on the right is from northern Europe and represents, in a highly stylised way, an owl. Both wrought by human hands, both produced around 2000bc. The striking differences do not need listing. But considering that the people that made these images were at the same point in human history how can they possibly be so different?

The differences in artistic culture that clearly exist between the two civilisations is not the point; these images speak of different attitudes to the animal. That the same human hands can see similar animals and yet reproduce them so differently suggests a divide that, in a different context, still exists today.

One the one hand we have something that is elemental, almost god-like in its appearance; simplified and, to a certain extent, anthropomorphised with those very human shaped eyes. The owl is suddenly more than just a bird and becomes totemic, emblamatic of a fear or a reverence. On the other, a homage to the animal itself; represented in detail, in all its beauty. Not only shape and physiology but plumage and, in the background, the realist tufts of its natural, marshy habitat. The geese, then, are not symbolic but represent a certain prowess in depicting the natural world.

These perceptions are no less acute in today’s world but exist in more highly evolved permutations, few of which seem exclusive. There are those whose reverence towards the natural world borders, or sits entirely within, a spiritual boundary, a boundary into which (in some cases) few rational incursions take place. Others may occupy the DMZ where scientific understanding diplomatically mixes, sometimes uncomfortably, with an unabashed enjoyment of the wild. Still others will take a road that continues to gaze upon the environment as nothing more than a wilderness to be tamed or a resource to be exploited.

It may be true that perception divides us. A more terrifying thought is that the balance in which our planet is said to hang may depend on which perceptions come to dominate human thought.

The Great Gig in the Dry

2011-08-24T16:53:00.000+01:00

If he's not advising governments and conservation organisations on what to do to feel closer to the animals they're striving to protect, or writing another knock-out essay on human-animal interaction then the legend that is Jim Nollman can probably be found with a guitar on the deck of a boat, trading chops with a killer whale.

For longer than I've been alive Jim Nollman, David Rothenberg and the rest of the good people at interspecies have been peeling back the babel-like layers of language that have built up between humans and animals over countless years. And as they do they're not only unlocking secrets about how these animals communicate and why but also opening a door for us to realise that the distance between us and wildlife is shorter than popularly supposed.

We have fallen into the habit of being the observer. We seem to have set ourselves apart as a higher mammal that is there to keenly describe the relationships that exist between animal species. Indeed, we seem to think it an imperative. But amongst the sheaves of descriptive text we may have neglected to leave space to understand and make use of the relationship between 'us' as one species and 'them' as another.

The instruments that people like Jim Nollman use to 'talk' to animals like whales and dolphins are, to a certain extent, just a metaphor for how close we could come if we allowed ourselves to step outside of the confines of what fills the bell jar. Yes, it's true that animals such as the great whales are "gifted with extensions of the senses that we have lost or never attained" and are "living by voices we will never hear" but that doesn't mean that either voice is unintelligible to the other. We just have to adjust our sense of what's understandable.

NEWS: Latest in-print publication

2011-08-11T11:15:00.000+01:00

Look out for the November/December issue of Orion Magazine where one of my short pieces will be published.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/

All watched over by machines of loving grace

2011-08-08T13:41:00.002+01:00

I’ve been reading about the perturbation effect. And I am perturbed.

The perturbation effect occurs when an intervention to control something creates the opposite, an increase in that which is trying to be controlled. This has come up in the badger culling debate where the original study showed that attempts to contol the badgers meant that the animals became ‘perturbed’ and ranged further away from their home territories, thus increasing contacts with more cows and thus increasing the incidence of bovine tuberculosis. Or, to put it another way, they get afraid of all manner of human-induced crap and run away, fast. But, badger fans, easy on those hammers, because this isn’t about your stripey friends. This is about us.

We all have our limits and we can quickly reach a saturation point that means that we feel we have to escape disturbances and move to a different place. And that place is so often wild and natural. We frequently refer to our brushes with nature, whether it be a countryside walk, a bit of birdwatching or a determined trek into wilderness, as being part of an ‘escape’. An escape from the pressures of everyday life, escape from the idiots at work who ring you only to ask if you’re on the phone, escape from the relentless pile-up of technological barriers put there in the name of progress. We’re perturbed. And this is both wonderful and tragic.

Wonderful because we still recognise its necessity. Incongruously we place ourselves in exposed and wide open spaces to find sanctuary because it’s a place where the modern predators no longer stalk us. They migrated to the cities long ago and we can be left alone to forge links that have become weakend over time.

Tragic because, for the majority, we now treat these experiences as unique and ones that have to be sought after. It takes effort to experience them and needs a concious plugging-in of the wires that connect us to the natural world. But when we do, those connecting wires sing with a thousand messages.

All things considered, there has to be another way. It seems that if we can find a way to experience (or at least feel) our place as one of the planet’s species regardless of our time and place then that’s better than feeling the need to escape when things become too much. Ahead of his time, in 1960 Kenneth Allsop said it best. "In this technologically triumphant age, when the rockets begin to scream up towards the moon but the human mind seems at an even greater distance, anger has a limited use. Love has a wider application, and it is that which needs describing wherever it can be found so that we may all recognise it and learn its use"

A Gyrfalcon for a King

2011-07-25T16:47:00.000+01:00

“An Eagle for an Emperor, a Gyrfalcon for a King; a Peregrine for a Prince, and a Saker for a Knight; a Merlin for a lady, a Goshawk for a Yeoman, a Sparrowhawk for a Priest, and a Kestrel for a Knave” – The Boke of St Albans, 1486.

There are some experiences, which are in retrospect even more powerful, where the solitude, the landscape, the time of day, the wildlife and any amount of other emotional and physical variables (perhaps my own state of mind?) combine to create something affecting and physical. And it was in Iceland that I saw her. The Gyrfalcon. The King’s bird.

I didn’t see her until she was upon me. I was sitting deep down beneath a small volcanic cliff amongst the boulders sloping down to a shingle beach into the sea. Nearby, the carcass of a juvenile killer whale gave the air a taste and in the bay the head of grey seal watched the shore as if keeping a watchful eye over the sleeping but still lethal orca, it’s dorsal fin clearly visible as it lay on the beach. Little auks were whirring close over the surface of the water and behind me the silent hulk of the volcano, covered in cloud.

And then, from my left, just a few metres away, she came. Over the edge of the small cliff where the peaty turf hung in ribbons over the rock. She was not alone. Behind her trailed a ragged streamer of mobbing birds; wheatear, oyster catcher and a purple sandpiper. At least five of them testing their will and speed against the gyrfalcon. Amongst the melee she seemed almost motionlessly calm, beating her powerful way in slow motion. The feeling of muscular and taut control was pervasive, a visceral and tangible presence. She moved so perfectly that she could have been on a rail.

She passed over my head and over the opposing cliff bank before disappearing over the volcanic grassland pitted with sink holes and caves. I stood up to climb the bank but was not able to see her as her speed had already taken her behind some upstanding volcanic rocks.

And then, just as a red sky gives away the presence of an invisible sun, I knew she was there, but I couldn’t see her. I saw a sign of her presence, a ripple of clamour in the sky where she had passed.She had scythed over the surface of the ground putting waders and other birds up and now all that was left was a pair of merlin climbing and stooping down to a spot that was still invisible to me. She was there.

I walked over the rough ground until I could see her and, thinking that my sudden and intermittent appearances over the tussocks and mounds would scare her, I sat and watched from a distance. But soon I pressed on to get closer. She sat, seemingly impervious to the screeching of the merlins, at the very top of a tall, grass covered volcanic stone. The merlins shyed away from my presence long before the falcon who looked at me with cool and quick precision. At that moment the Gyrfalcon was absolutely in its landscape, full of sorrowful tundric beauty.

I watched her for few heavy minutes before she dropped away from the edge and circled around to my right, disappearing behind the seaward cliffs. The thrill of the encounter passed, I was left lying where she’d left me, looking up at a grey sky. But her presence had tied me into that moment and that place.

The presence of the living animal had forced me to take a fresh view of the landscape and my place in it. This is what it means to be human. As an animal in the landscape we can be observer or particpant. But to be separated from it? To move around in our own world instead of the one we’re already a part of, to live impervious to the potential effect on us of our natural environment, is a form of surrender; a self-imposed exile which is ultimately found lacking, lonely and fruitless.

Old Whatsisname

2011-07-20T13:41:00.002+01:00

I will confess to you now, I did once use the latin name of an animal in a conversation but, and I wish to make this absolutely clear, I didn’t inhale.

It’s true, that in scientific names lies a kind of poetry but, like bardic Welsh, it has a meter and a scheme that only a few people can truly unlock. And if they choose to try and do so, its carefully constructed rhythms stand at risk of being butchered. If that happens with the beautiful and primal Welsh language you get covered in phlegm. If it happens with scientific names one can come across as, to use a technical phrase, a bit of a tool.

It’s also true that in those names lies an originality, something vestigial and primitive; these were names granted before some scientific truths were uncovered and as a result they can be wonderfully evocative of their time. Take the Tawny Owl for instance: Stryx aluco. I’ve heard tell that this means Brown Witch. And to spend time in the dark of a woodland listening to their screeching and tumbling calls is to be reminded why nature may have appeared so unsettling to the people who first thought to call them witches.

But on the whole, it’s the common names of things that hold the real power because they hold a more personal place in a recognisable language: The cloaked minor, the vestal, ingrailed clay, the uncertain, white satin, pale prominent or oak lutestring. Poems all. These are the names which the pastoral moth collecters of previous centuries have left with us, the use of the word ‘the’ as part of the name lending the moth a familiar but imperious air. So which would you rather have, The Gothic or Naenia typica?

The botanists and ornithologists were prose poets too. I want to stumble across ploughman’s spikenard, touch the stem of the rue-leaved saxifrage and be repulsed by stinking iris. I could also wax lyrical about the churring call and soft-as-breath dusk flight of Caprimulgus vociferus or Caprimulgus carolinensis but (while in the USA at least) I’d rather talk about the beauty of the onomatopoeic Whip-poor-will and Chuck-will's-widow, just two of that country’s enigmatic nightjars.

The odd thing is, I envy my scientific colleagues that can catalogue latin names in their mind as easily as they can the names of their children. And, before I appear too hard on them, for the majority of named species it’s absolutely necessary given their tiny size and vast family trees. But I will probably always reach for the accessible, the familiar. After all, it’s the same name that was called out in identification by the people who stood in the same spot a hundred years ago and that’s a powerful continuum.

NEWS: Latest on-line publication

2011-07-08T13:01:00.000+01:00

A short piece based on my latest post below is now one of the featured posts at Orion Magazine:

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/place_where_you_live/view/the_wash_east_anglia_uk_6389/

The Writing is on the Wall

2011-07-08T11:16:00.003+01:00

Could you deconstruct and describe the sensual ingredients that make up why being outdoors makes us feel a sense of wellbeing? I’m not sure. Probably not.

But on a particular part of the Wash there is a wall. It is the sea wall. It is a barricade, there for your protection. It’s here you can go no further. You have to stop the car, climb the bank by grabbing the tussocks of grass and look out over the marsh. And most of the year it is a marsh, covered only by the sea at the spring and neap tides.

And that’s what we called it: The Marsh. In the village where I grew up this place is what is meant by The Marsh. It certainly isn’t The Seaside. The Seaside is amusement arcades and ice creams and promenades. It isn’t The Coast, either. The Coast is cliffs, spits and crashing waves. This is The Marsh; unnamed and unnameable. On one side of the sea wall are the fields and on the other side is The Marsh. And only now (having lived away for so long) I wonder why this is. I also wonder whether all of the villages around the wash call their section of creeks and wind The Marsh.

But what a place. It was here that I saw my first marsh harrier. Here that I swam in the salty cuts and picked up salty gashes. Here is where we collected samphire and here that every ingredient of the sheer experience of being out of doors is driven home by a sensual assault.

The salt marsh provides a gluttonous visual diet of greens and huge pulsating bundles of waders and geese rolling their way across the mudflats. Your nose can take in the salt of the mud and under your feet and hands you can feel either the sharp edges of coastal grasses or the slippery but unforgiving marsh mud with its black core and brown skin. This is big sky country and the utter flatness creates indescribably vast and distant cathedrals of cloud. The sorrowing curlew calls. In your ears roars a wind arriving, almost without interruption, from the steppes. Any stunted hawthorns lean landwards and you know what Sylvia Plath meant when she wrote that “the wind Pours by like destiny / bending Everything in one direction.”

It’s a place like this that teaches you what to be aware of. Everything here is so immediate and definite. Everything here is without compromise, softened and blunted by nothing. It magnifies all your senses. Makes you realise they’re there and what they’re for. It forces you to count each wave of experience. And instinctively we assimilate them to create a feeling for which, frustratingly but joyously, we can count and name the components but cannot begin to describe. And it probably doesn’t matter that we can’t. Because for me it’s the sea wall, for you it will be somewhere different. All that matters is that the place exists for everyone. Go back there and enjoy the indescribable.

Where the Wild Things Are

2011-05-31T14:17:00.003+01:00

I’m not abundantly blessed with patience. Now, when I read that back it suggests that patience comes in at number 3 or 4 (or at least in the top ten) just below tenacity and understanding. The fact is that me and patience aren’t really acquainted at all. We probably met once but it would have been at a party where the music was very loud and we didn’t get beyond asking each other what we did for a living before politely excusing ourselves and going off to talk to more interesting people. No. It’s safe to say that I’m not the most patient person in the world and the good people who know me are currently exchanging knowing looks. This sometimes manifests itself in a splenetic fury over the smallest things. OK, it’s usually tinted with irony and is more of a rant than real anger but some people can be really annoying can’t they!

So what is it that allows me to spend many a fallow hour staring out to sea in the hope of seeing a whale or a dolphin? I’ve spent less time buying a house than I have staring at a seemingly empty void. So what’s different? I think I know. I think it’s the ocean. The Sea. The Raging Main. The Deep. Deep Blue. Davy Jones’ Locker. The Ocean.

I have never met a person who doesn’t think the sea is a wonderful place. Not everyone is happy to swim in it, paddle in it, dive in it, row across it or sail on it (all some people do is vomit in it) but in everyone there is an innate sense that it’s special. Think back to your days of childhood. I grew up very near the coast but, nonetheless, on family holidays it was a moment of pure elation when I could look above the green coastal verges and see the grey, blue, purple, turquoise, many-coloured sea for the first time.

For me, for us, for the whole human race it continues to be a thing of wonder; an undiscovered country where stuff we just don’t understand happens; where beings of infinite variety and impossible anatomy move and live as easily as we do on dry land. It also has the added quality of consisting of another medium altogether. Moving from the dry and open air into the water is more, much more, than walking from one habitat into another. Doing so, in our imaginations or in reality, is to step from something manageable and understandable into something where physical laws change. Standing on top of a mountain we can perceive the height and depth of where we are. Floating on a boat over the deep blue we have no such conceptions and our normal senses of position no longer work. Our perception of our environment involuntarily changes.

And this is no more acutely apparent, in my experience, than when we see the creatures of the sea from the largest wanderers such as the great whales to the smallest and most delicate petrels. Being out on the open ocean unbalances our internal and spiritual compasses. But that moment when the animal appears sets the needles of our compass spinning wildly, frantically. You just don’t know where to put yourself because these animals put out of kilter what our imaginations are able to deal with.

And that’s what defies my own impatience. I know that if I spend days out on the ocean without a glimpse of a whale or a dolphin or a specialist of the marine air then the presence of the great cataract of the sea beneath me and the mysteries of what abides there unseen and unseeable is a connection I can’t, and don’t want to, live without. As the source of ancient first life, the home of the planet’s most majestic residents and a place of fear and wonder the sea is, in one man’s words “the great unifier, man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: We are all in the same boat."

What would you say?

2011-01-13T12:06:00.002Z

I read a great news report just yesterday about a postgraduate student who works for the charity Froglife. She’s just been funded to undertake a project which seeks to understand how biodiversity and our relationship with wildlife has changed within living memory by collecting oral histories from people. Imagine that. Recorded memories of what people remember about the wildlife of their childhood and younger years.

Now what a beautiful idea that is. How many times have we or someone else, seen something and said “I haven’t seen one of those for years!” Now, we could be talking about anything there. A mangle, for instance. But this is about wildlife. What a powerful thing it is to understand how the most detailed threads in the web of life have changed in recent decades through the feelings and thoughts of people who have lived and died in the environment. That not only provides a clue as to what is no longer there but, from a conservation perspective what should be there. But best of all, it will (I sincerely hope) show how our attitudes to the animals and their environment have changed and why they’ve changed.

So what would you say? If someone stuck a microphone in your face and pressed record what memories of your changing observations and attitudes to your natural world would you pass onto the next generation?

Would it be as simple as remembering the large flocks of house sparrows that are no longer around? Would it be how you felt when you saw your first fox hunt? Or how you felt when you saw your last? Would it be to remember skylarks over the allotments? Or otters on the river whose banks are now roads called Kingfisher Avenue? Would it be the childhood elm trees that are almost nothing more than memories in today’s Britain? The loss of the hedgerows near your house that were once so numerous? Will it be freely accessing land or coastline that you can no longer access? Will it be the feeling that there was once a bird that sang in the hedgerow? Or will it be the memory of how you didn’t used to see so many buzzards or red kites as you do now?

As such, I don’t expect it will all be a litany of loss and mourning. I think it will be a rich collection of differing feelings and changing times for good and bad in equal measure. Whatever memory it is you’d choose to leave then please leave it and make sure it really means something to you because that, surely, is the only true measure of its value.

The Return of the Native

2011-01-12T14:07:00.003Z

If I was asked to pinpoint the moment and species where I learnt by heart my first birdsong then that’s an easy one: Skylark, allotments. Now that’s no great achievement for a person of any age unless they happened to be deprived of vision and hearing because the Skylark is one of natures great show-offs; singing and careering around the sky for the pure joy of it. It happened in this wise…

When I was growing up, in some kind of effort to save money, we had an allotment for a short while which was a shame because I think they were quite difficult to come by. But yes, the committee who looked after such things had dressed in their ceremonial robes and whilst burning incense in a back-room of the village hall and chanting the index of a seed catalogue had pulled my Dad’s name out of a jewel encrusted chalice. I don’t know much about these things but I’m pretty sure that’s how the allotment of allotments is decided.

The allotments were on the edge of the village and we had to drive to get there. The toil was predictable: hoeing, pulling, scraping, picking and planting. In order to make the work easier, at some point or other (and for an even briefer period) an old yellow rotary cultivator arrived on the allotment. This was inevitably, although I can’t be sure, purchased from ‘a chap I know’. ‘A Chap I Know’ was the absolute and unquestionable source of every second hand piece of dripping machinery that found its way to our house. Either Dad knew a lot of chaps or one particular chap used to sell us an awful lot of rubbish for not much money.

Now I’m sure you know what a rotary cultivator is but in case you don’t it’s the freakish and schizophrenic offspring of a clandestine three-way liaison between a lawnmower, a tractor and the man who invented napalm. It is a petrol-powered creature which you push effortlessly through the soil while to rotating blades coolly churn and till the soil. At least that’s the theory. This particular rotary cultivator was different.

The most popular sitcom on television at the time was Open All Hours. In this piece of very British comedy the miserly Arkwright kept his cash register draw so tightly sprung that it would nearly take the fingers off when closing. This particular roto-vator (to give it its generic name) was the Arkwright’s till of the village allotments. Goading this thing into life was a hazardous moment as it seemed to live on the edge of murdering its operative and any onlookers. My brother and I would be asked to stand well back at a safe distance while my dad tentatively primed the fuel, switched the choke and, heart-in-mouth drew the starter chord. If it fired then you had to be pretty quick because it would be off, dragging you uncontrollably through the potato rows. Once he’d managed to clamber onto the back of this marauding beast and tamed it by clicking it off then my dad would often stand back and, in a fairly weak effort to save face, admire the crazy network of barely turned soil running in a snake-like line over the whole area and say “Yes, I’m quite pleased with that. Excellent but probably enough for today.” These are pretty much my only memories of the allotments but for those skylarks. Those genre-defying skylarks.

I can remember, and the memory is fresh and strong, looking across the flat fenland in the blinding sunshine and hearing that song and my Dad telling me what it was that sang it. From then on the skylark was there, ‘dropping silver chains of sound’. The song of the skylark then became talismanic; forever associated with the fields, farms, the sky and that place. But that song, so difficult to describe or put into words, (and scores of poets have tried) is so easy to understand in its context. Since then I’ve seen thousands of skylarks perched on posts or sitting on the ground and I can recognise them as skylarks. But perched on a post it’s only half a bird, only a picture in the round view of the binoculars. Only when they take to the wing and hover high up, trilling their complex and dipping cadenza does it properly become a skylark, filling the whole space and showing us why it’s there. It shouts out to be admired and looked-at and heard. Once it’s in the air then binoculars are useless, or rather they should be abandoned, in favour of taking in the whole of the picture: the fields, the crops, the grass, the big big drifting sky and that sound. It is absolutely and indescribably part of the landscape. And it pushes me back in time thirty years to those allotments.

In more recent years that song and its presence or absence have become totemic of whether or not we’ve stuffed up our countryside completely. And to me, it’s also become a sign of whether I have my priorities right or wrong. Can I still make time to walk and sit and listen? Do I still have the ability to attune myself to the landscape and its inhabitants? If the answer to either of those questions is no then I’m in trouble. Big trouble.

Just for the record, I like scientists

2010-11-12T09:09:00.006Z

And now I’m going to cry! Not great floods of tears (after all, it’s not as if Wales have won the Six Nations again) but a definite welling; a lump in the throat. Because there He is. Just a short distance away – I don’t know how far, the water makes it difficult to judge and distance is the last thing on my mind – is the blue whale. The sea is calm and there is still snow on the mountains around the bay. As He surfaces you can see the muscular blowholes burst open and we hear His mighty, exploding gasp of breath. With little warning He displays the tell tale signs of preparation for a deep dive. And as surely as the earth spins His flukes are lifted from the water. There is an awestruck murmur. From one person a cheer. And He’s gone.

Now there are animals and then there’s the blue whale. Finding adverbs for how He moves is a fruitless task. You couldn’t say that He was cutting or scything through the ocean, His progress is too stately. It’s certainly more than just swimming. The arc of His back as He rolls between air and water, stitching the sky and the sea together with long undulating needle strokes, is graceful enough to make you believe in sea serpents.

Finding new ways to describe their size is equally useless so I’m not going to bother. Go to Google, look for the superlatives. Suffice to say that these beings are on a scale that is still alien to us. In a world where we’re frustrated by the things we can’t catalogue, quantify, codify and categorise there are entities like the blue whale that will continue to cloud our sense of what’s possible. At the very moment we think we’ve mapped the life we experience the blue whale appears from beneath us bringing us a message that we may have named and categorised His race but that He is still representative of deeper mysteries of understanding; and most elusive of all, we haven’t begun to understand why He makes us feel as we do. His appearance makes us tear up the map and want to start again.

But it’s ironic that He just seems too big to deal with. Does the strange way we react to its presence make us want to put it away so we can deal with our feelings later? Is the blue whale so awkward? And is this why the world is so obsessed with beginnings at the tiniest scale? At the Large Hadron Collider they’re looking for something to explain the beginnings of the universe. But within yards of where I was standing was something much more tangible that explains what the universe means to me, to us. And what it means here and now, not 6 billion years ago.

So scientists of the LHC, I invite you to remove your hard hats, your fetching white rubber wellies and your one piece contamination suits. Put plastic sheets over your microscopes and take off your goggles. Close down your spreadsheets and silence the oscilloscopes. And when you’ve done all of that go whale watching. Come and feel what it’s like to share a brief moment with something that will defy analysis and description; something that you can’t put into a formula. Something that’s so big (and not just in its physical size) that in all your academic brilliance you will not be able to see the beginning or end of the theory behind it. I promise you that all you will be able to do is stand and realise that, as Goethe has it, “I am here to wonder.”

Wildlife Rock n' Roll

2010-11-04T12:53:00.003Z

I don’t really know what the intelligent conservation community of the UK thinks of Terry Nutkins. I suspect there are quite a few people who dismiss him as little more than a grubby-fingered children’s entertainer; engaging in his own way but hardly a natural-history heavy weight. Furthermore, I can imagine that there are quite a few people who weren’t too enamoured by him keeping a sealion (or was it a seal?) at home in what couldn’t have been much more than a big bath.

But the fact is that Terry, Tezzer, along with Johnny Morris, were the only people on television when I was a nipper talking to children about animals in a way they could understand. We had El Attenborough of course and whereas we knew exactly what he was going on about, his job was to show us the wonder of the natural world which he continues to do, unrivalled, to this day. But Nutkins used to explain stuff and, best of all, he’d jump straight to the most gruesome and enthralling facts; how poisonous it is, how it could kill you, how quickly it could kill you, how long its teeth are and how big it was compared to our dog. This, I assure you, was what we wanted to know, was the reason we tuned in.

And the absolute coolest thing about yer man was the fact that he had a missing finger. Or at least half a missing finger. I can recall getting close up to the TV and pointing it out to my brother; “There!” I would say, putting my own finger against the screen. And my eyes would follow the finger that wasn’t there as Nutkins gesticulated on Animal Magic.

And I distinctly remember, at least I’m sure I remember, him once holding it up to the camera and saying that it was bitten off by a Scottish wildcat. Now that is pure, octane-fuelled, wildlife rock n’ roll! Here was a man that had lived wildlife in its reddest form. I wanted something wild to deny me a digit! To a seven year-old, having your finger bitten off by an animal is perhaps the coolest way to lose an appendage and I held up the back of my hand and bent my middle finger into the palm (just as I’m doing now) to see what I would look like. The answer: very dashing with a rakish whiff of danger.

It turns out I'd created a false memory. It wasn’t a wildcat. It was one of Gavin Maxwell’s otters that took off Tel’s finger. But the excitement is undimmed. I wanted, and still want, to get close enough to wild animals to feel their electricity, look into their eyes, feel their sense of being perfectly adapted to the cold and dark that we, as a species, have decided to remove ourselves from. And maybe, just maybe, I will one day have the chance to lift my sleeve and say “See that scar? Scottish wildcat.”

Writing to Ronald Blythe

2010-09-30T10:51:00.001+01:00

Whaddya mean you’ve never heard of Ronald Blythe? Actually, I’m not surprised. He’s a writer, but no-one’s ever taken a film option on one of his books. He’s never been, to the best of my knowledge, on The Times bestseller’s list and has never appeared on Loose Women or sat (thank goodness) on Richard & Judy’s couch. He is to most people relatively invisible. You’re unlikely to see him on Twitter and you’d be disappointed if you searched for him on MyFace. In fact, despite being the author of many fine books and an intellectual heavyweight you can find his regular ‘blog’ updates in the pages of his parish magazine for which he still faithfully writes a piece each month.

He is well into his eighties now and has for the last forty or so years been writing breathtaking books about ordinary people, their history and their landscape. His most recognisable work is Akenfield but my familiarity with his work came about largely by accident. My exasperated A-level English tutor (an inspired and saintly man rejoicing in the name of A.R. Wooll) sent me and my facetious questions about Hardy’s Wessex to a section of the school library labelled - curiously, mysteriously and patronisingly - ‘Pastoral’. And it was there, amongst Adrian Bell’s Men and the Fields, Ewart Evans’ Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay and John Stewart Collis’ The Worm Forgives the Plough, that I found Akenfield.

And so I found myself in my local library at a loose end and I asked myself if it would be slightly weird if I were to write to Ronald Blythe to tell him how much I admired him and his work. Now if I’d asked that question out loud to my wife she would have immediately told me that I was, in all but criminal record, a stalker and that I should desist. But seeing as she wasn’t there, then my rational senses told me that there was nothing wrong with this plan at all. So I leafed through Who’s Who and found Dr Blythe’s address. I won’t bore you with what I said but I thanked him, told him why his work was so meaningful to me and that I’ve begun to try my hand at writing.

And he wrote back. He told me that to understand the living world around us is to understand who we are with a “…deeply personal precision.”

“I live in an ancient farmhouse…and not a day goes by without some fresh revelation of people, climate or plants. It is inexhaustible. Landscape is amazing, with its multitude of statements and variations.”

So here’s to you, Ronald Blythe! A true statesmen of the best in nature writing and social history. I’m glad I wrote and glad you wrote back. I’m glad no-one told me that it was a daft thing to do because he also said that “writers have little or no idea where their words go” and I feel better that he knows, at least from one person.

Having a whale for dinner...

2010-09-27T17:10:00.002+01:00

The question why? must have rung like a siren in the heads of our greatest scientific forebears, people like Lamarck, Wallace and Darwin and they didn’t rest until they had answers. On a recent whale watching trip I was glad to see that this zealous spirit of enquiry is alive and well when one of the whale watchers asked ‘if you could invite any species of whale to dinner, which one would it be and what questions would you ask it?’ This question was not exactly expected but, ever the professional, I thought I’d better give it a stab so as to avoid disappointment.

For a start there are some species of whale and dolphin that, wonderful as they are, would be a dinner host’s nightmare. The last thing you need is a spinner dolphin leaping spectacularly but messily into the soup and, worst still, decimating your tropical fish collection. Likewise, you’d think twice about turning your back on a killer whale between courses. Furthermore, for whatever reason, I see the minke whale as being slightly effete, nonchalant, fussy. Maybe it’s the starched white collars around the fins. No. There are some that just wouldn’t get an invite.

The chance here would be to get answers to the big questions, to see what they see; to finally understand the biggest and deepest secrets from a world so improbably inaccessible; a world which we only get glimpses of when they surface to share a brief moment with us and then are gone; a world which we know only from the grainy floodlit images of the bow of the Titanic.

So to get answers to these deep questions, who do I invite? For me at least, it would have to be the grizzliest and most ancient warriors of the oceans: the bowhead and the sperm whale. These are true elderly statesmen; creatures that are imbued with the deepest magic of the very coldest, oldest and darkest waters.

The sperm whale is the biggest predator on earth, by far the largest toothed whale and man’s target for centuries. Its amazing shape, unique physiology, behaviour and shared history means that in our collective imagination it has become much more than just a species of whale: It has become a representative of all its kind, a mirror for all our fear and wonder associated with deep water. It is Jonah’s predator, Ahab’s tormentor and man’s lamp oil. It is more than a species: it is Whale. And he could answer some questions…

What creatures do you see in the torch beam of your sonar when you are 2 miles down in the inky black? How does it feel to have the ocean’s weight pressing on your senses? In your landscape of the sea bed, do you see man’s influence and detritus in the folds of the deep canyons and arteries?

And then there’s the bowhead. He is uniquely an animal of the frozen north; a creature from a place that is not only deep and dark but made more inhospitable by the face-burning cold. The bowhead truly comes from a place where it feels we’re not supposed to be. It is said that where you find belugas, you find the bowhead, its sedate progress being tracked by glowing ghosts, deep water outriders. You can see the appeal in the photographs and footage: The unique quality of light underneath the ice creating a cathedral of glinting spears around the whale.

It is true that old bowheads killed by the Inuit peoples were found to have ivory spear heads buried deep inside their blubber, survivors of hunts up to 200 years ago. And that’s why he’d get my invite: What have you seen in your long life? What changes has the ocean undergone? What is it like to move under the blue glow of the ice sheets during the hard arctic sunrise?

I’d want my questions to be vital and thought-provoking. Otherwise it’s the same as queuing next to the red carpet at a premiere only to ask your favourite film star what it’s like being famous. So what would you ask? How badly do you want to know? What do you really want to hear?

So at the end of the questions, when you think you’re slightly closer to understanding their place on the planet and, more importantly, their vital place in our imaginations and just why they make us feel so uplifted when we see them, what would you say? Would you say ‘thank you’ or would you say ‘I’m sorry’?

"You weren't there, man..."

2010-08-21T19:27:00.004+01:00

It's hard to convince people that Cilla Black was one of the great voices of the 60s. Hell, it's hard to convince anyone that Cilla is a great voice full stop. For her contempory generation they have a few isolated hits to cling onto and for another generation we have the faded image of the warbling presenter of Surprise Surprise and Blind Date. Neither are much to go on. But let me tell you, I think there's something that could change your mind.

The story goes that when her manager suggested she record Bacharach's Alfie as the theme tune to the film she joked "I'll do it if Burt comes over and records it in person". And he did. Footage exists of the session in the cavernous Abbey Road studios with Burt at the piano and a full recording orhestra. And Cilla knocks it out of the park. She absolutely owns it. That running first line and the lilting finish set the scene and from then on she's right inside the music and the voice is like a steam drill and weighs a ton. Seeing it instantly changed my mind about Cilla because I could see the commitment. I was transfixed.

I've just returned home from guiding a whale watching trip and much the same effect was and is evident. People who haven't been close to whales and dolphins in the wild sort of know somehow that they're amazing animals and are normally willing to accept why other people love them. But to see them is a different matter. To see them means that you become utterly convinced and completely transfixed. They become, as it were, true believers in something that was before a matter of faith.

Some people who had never seen these animals had their head in their hands, shaking their head in a sort of bizarre disbelief. Was that leviathan truely rising to the surface to share a space with them? A brief moment of elation that stays in the blood like an antibiotic, its effects being felt long after the injection of the encounter. It is a moment of complete connection which is mainlined: a hundred-channel experience.

The estimable Henry Beston said:

"We patronise the animals for having taken form so far below ourselves and therein we err, and greatly err. In a world older and more complex than our own they move finished and complete, living by voices we will never hear, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained. They are not brethren, they are not underlings. They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time."

Blood and Earth

2010-04-21T15:47:00.001+01:00

In his book The Peregrine, J.A. Baker writes in the opening chapter that it is futile to spend too much time describing the landscape. Because, he rightly says, what makes the difference between one valley and another is what we, the observer, imbue it with. He talks of different shades of love but whichever emotion is at the surface of our imagination at the time is what is projected onto the landscape; the landscape that then becomes ‘ours’.

What’s so powerful about this notion is the questions it creates in my mind as to how this happens. Is there a tipping point at which we suddenly become involved? Is there a system of feedback in which we feel part of the natural world because it involves us? Or are we influenced by other people’s experience of the same landscape?

As I drive home each night I pass over the same familiar chalk downs and, like any familiar route, even the trees become friends which you recognise in profile and stature regardless of the time of day and the principality of the sky. The scots pines that huddle together on the rises are also recognisable as small families in silhouette in which the imperceptible growth of the smaller trees over the years will leave me, like the children of good friends, in no doubt about who they are despite their changing appearance. But this has only been my home for ten years. When did this landscape become mine?

I was born in the fens of Norfolk but you’ll have to decide whether I’m Welsh or not. My parents are both Welsh, three of my Grandparents are Welsh and their parents etc etc. Let’s say, at the very least, that Wales is a place that is to a larger extent in my veins. The Welsh landscapes that are most recognisable to me (the Radnorshire black mountains, Herefordshire border country, the vale of Clwyd, the Pembrokeshire coast) are the ones where my parents, grandparents and endless antecedents have lived and, in many cases, farmed.

The pictures I have of these people, taken over 100 years ago, and my own experience of the world in which they toiled means, to a certain extent, that the landscape was already mine without me having to live there. The faces that look straight at me from their positions in front of the hay barn and my being able to stand in front of that same barn links me to them; common ground of both blood and earth. The fields, hills and streams that we have both looked on may have been more familiar to them than to me but it is the fact that they were there that triggers my imagination and therefore I gift the landscape my emotion and I’m suddenly involved.

"But can you imagine it nailed to a door..."

2010-03-26T09:44:00.005Z

You can have a fiver if you can guess what that particular comment was referring to. Go ahead, let your imagination run wild. It’s neither door knocker, Christmas wreath nor petition. Nor is it any number of theses by Martin Luther. Nor is it theses by his less successful younger brother, Barry. No. It’s none of those things. It’s a barn owl. Well, obviously. (As an aside, I'd have liked to have seen Owl Nails included in that Two Ronnies, 'four candles' sketch: "You know, nails for owls")

On a recent trip to do some birding with some good chums in Norfolk we unfortunately found ourselves completely outsmarted by the fog. Now fog isn’t, you’d have thought, a formidable intellectual opponent but whatever we tried, the fog was two steps ahead of us at all times. As you’ll be able to reason, seeing birds that were anymore than 20 metres away became difficult so we pretty much gave up for the day praying that Sunday would be better.

Turned out it was slightly better if not the stark blue wintery skies we were hoping for. And it turned out that Holkham, like some feathery supermarket, had put on a ‘see-one-get-seven-free’ barn owl promotional bonanza. They were all over the place. Now, if there’s a bird you’re never going to get tired of then it’s the barn owl.

For some time in different locations we watched these birds doing what they do best: that impossibly shaped profile in the air which, in flat flight, looks bizarrely lopsided. But when that disc turns flat towards the ground and the translucent wings begin to silently beat the air then the bird suddenly becomes something even more beautiful. The strange whiteness and burnished brown of the animal against the greens and browns of a coastal landscape draw the eye. It’s not a boring, seaside, herring gull white but a white that is captivating and unsettling all at the same time. You just have to look. More than that, you find yourself staring. The way that it hugs the ground connects the rank grass and the winter trees with the senses and what would otherwise be any flying bird in an empty sky becomes some kind of total experience.

For no reason other than they just do, the barn owl is, in its landscape, a living thing that sets the senses and the imagination racing. In our collective imaginations and consciousness it’s become more than just a species of owl. It is all of its kind. It is Owl.

It was Wordsworth’s bird of death and because of its immense owly-ness a bird of heavy portent for many people. The rural people of this green island, with their pagan, fable-soaked sense of Christianity saw the barn owl as a forebear of unimaginable doom. It’s screeching at the window of the sick would spell certain death and, for some, its very presence a reason to abandon hope. Could I imagine these things? Yes. Can I see why it is named by some the Ghost of the Farm? Yes. Can I imagine it nailed to a door? No. But right up until the middle of the 19th Century the warding off of evil from the borders of the farm was achieved by nailing the barn owl to the barn door. Evil fends off evil.

In recent years of course the barn owl has penetrated further, becoming less of a reason to abandon hope but more of a reason to hang onto it. A bird that came perilously close to unsustainable scarcity is returned and can once again insinuate itself into our minds. Just by being there it makes us stop and stare and wait for it to disappear. As long it’s there, even if just a dot against the hillside, we will watch and watch. Because we have to.

This Place Has a Name

2010-02-12T11:35:00.002Z

I have an old atlas where the British Empire is coloured a faded mauve and the colonies are marked boldly and clearly to display the extent of the Empire’s domain. Leaving aside (easy to say) the bloody and violent history that accompanies our conquering of these foreign sands it naturally follows that we probably had something to do with the naming of the towns, cities and localities of these countries.

So why? Why on this purple-empired earth did we end up giving all the fantastic place names to them? Stand well back and allow me to demonstrate:

While the good ole boys across the pond have such visionary and poetic names as Memphis, Yazoo City, Erie, Albany and Buffalo, we have Dunstable, Kettering, Droitwich and Stoke Edith (no, I didn’t make it up).

Clicking play on the CD player gets us such great tunes as Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again and 24 Hours from Tulsa. Whereas we get Sir Paul telling us, pleading with us, desperately trying to convince us, to think about the Mull of Kintyre with the same poetic yearning.

Georgia was so cool that the Devil went down there AND so sweet that it was on Ray Charles’ mind. A lot. Can you really imagine someone singing “Stuck inside of Nantwich with the Chorley Blues Again”? You can’t. And if you can you really need to get out more.

So before this turns into one of my “…and another thing!” rants, what’s my point?

Well I should first say that, names aside, I’d much rather go to the Mull of Kintyre than I would Memphis. But secondly, there are always a few exceptions to the rule and, for me at least, those exceptions are part of the reason why I love those places so much: Their name is rooted in the history of the landscape they inhabit.

This is never more so a thing of reality for me than in the names of the fenland landscape where I grew up and spent 18 years of my life. I hesitate to call them ‘landmarks’ because in the fens, a burnt-out Fiesta counts as a landmark. But it is the names and the stories that flow out of them that make the place with its black earth and impossible skies so visceral, so vital, so present. I can still tick them off as I drive, in my minds eye, across a landscape that, uniquely, can be so forbidding and so astonishingly beautiful all at the same time.

Middle Level Drain, Popham’s Eau, Morton’s Leam, New Bedford Sluice, Sixty Foot Drain, Eau Brink and countless others; each one reeking of the stories that accompany their construction of a tamed but unstable landscape and their destruction of a seasonal nightmare arriving in the nocturnal, freezing, flooded dreams of the peoples that made their homes here before drainage.

It is not hard in a landscape as immediate as the fens to sense the stories that claim that Archbishop John Morton was a mediaeval Stalin, emptying his gulags and using prisoners from the 100 years war to dig and tramp out the middle level navigations that bear his name. Likewise, we sense the hard drive to reclaim when Vermuyden and his Dutch Adventurers first set out to cut the New Bedford River, leaving behind them Dutch names in their children and displacing the fenland peoples, many of which, it is said, were witches.

For me at least, these names, places and the stories that lay beneath them leave a kind of vestige of fear and wonder; a restlessness in the brain which tugs at my sense of comfort but at the same time cements my sense of place. It scratches at the windows of the car as I drive, insisting that the landscape was claimed from the wilderness but that the water maintains its rights to the fens whenever it chooses to exercise them.

We are storytellers

2010-02-09T09:01:00.001Z

whether we like it or not. So I’d better learn to live with it and move on.

My Grandfather was a great storyteller and a first rate sigh-er. Sighing was his way of expressing enormous disgust and exasperation with anything unsatisfactory that was going on within earshot.

This was particularly evident when we wanted to switch the TV on. Under normal circumstances in my Grandfather’s house the watching of “my programme” required the applicant to submit in triplicate and at least three hours in advance the proposal that one wanted to watch “my programme”. In his august committee of one, this required careful reading of the Telegraph listings page (to cross-check the information being given) and after careful consideration of the application Granddad, with a due sense of exhortation and warning, would grant his permission.

However, if the TV were to be turned on without this lengthy consultation then the sighs would ensue. Massive, despairing sighs denoting that his grandsons had clearly given up on life and that their cathode ray, teak-laminated drug dealer in the corner had them in its icy grasp and there was put simply, no escape and no hope.

Because my Grandfather was a storyteller.

I’m not talking about the happily-ever-after kind of story or empty, made-up, frighten-the-children stories. No. I’m talking about real stories about real people and real things. Sit down and have a conversation with him for half an hour and you’d find out that “there was a house, which has since been knocked down, where…” and a thousand other tales like it.

Where did all this stuff come from? And why was he carrying it around?

He had it in his veins. So do you. So do I. He didn’t know you didn’t have to talk about this stuff. He did it because he was grounded in every experience he’d ever had and every person he’d ever met. He collected their stories not because he wanted to but because they collected him; stuck to him like tics. And it doesn’t stop there.

The sharing of these stories roots you and the subject in a time, a place, a landscape, a house, an emotion, a moment. What is the sadness behind the boarded-up house? Who was it that gave that wood its name? Why am I not the first person to walk this path by the river? Making that connection helps my own feelings about that environment somehow swim into slow focus. Think, just for a moment, of a place that is special to you: because your predecessors also knew it was special; because they used to take you there; you know why it’s special because you know its history; because someone told you.

These stories, these curiosity-tingling, stranger-than-fiction, five-minute, wide-eyed, heart-rending stories, not only connect the teller and the listener but the listener with the landscape. I believe, and my long-dead Grandfather seems to concur, that the more we listen and the more we tell, the more we understand our own sense of time and place.

The Beginning.

Bring on the Night

2010-01-11T13:12:00.004Z

A friend of mine has just got back from a week in New York. Now, this particular friend is not exactly a city slicker; he needs open spaces and wild places like others need oxygen. But, nonetheless, I’m happy to report that he had a good time. I asked him what the highlight of his trip was and he said that it was spending a long evening on the rooftop garden of a restaurant overlooking the lights of the city and just enjoying the view and the company of his friends and family.

Now, although I’ve never been to New York, I recognised that some of my most memorable moments, either at home or somewhere else, happened at night, or at least at dusk. Why is that? What is it about the evening, dusk or night time that makes these magical moments?

Is it that sound travels further in the evening air? (it does, you know, it’s proper science n’ all that) Is it that, for us wildlife watchers at least, that many elusive animals come out in the dusk and dark? Is it that although the morning can provide great sunrises, there’s nothing to touch a sunset? It is all of those things and more. In Norway they, rather wonderfully, call the dusk ‘the velvet hour’. And if May is my favourite month then dusk is my favourite time of day.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote about the ‘solitude of the night’, saying that ‘the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details’. Think back to the last time you were in a wild place on a clear day, watching the last dregs of the day, drinking in the unique colours and sounds; perhaps you were on your own or with someone you love. Were you thinking about the washing up? That idiot at work? Probably not. Like Jorge says, idle details.

I think it was Sting that sang the words ‘bring on the night’, (mind you, Sting also sang the words ‘de doo doo doo, de daa daa daa’ so his poetic skills should be treated with extreme caution) and even if it's a drive home in the dark or sitting in the garden at dusk then the night is where the wild things are. But the velvet hour is also where so many other things are too, just waiting patiently for us to realise.

In an Ordinary World

2010-01-06T16:44:00.003Z

My name's Colin and I've never seen a humpback whale. I’ve seen plenty of whales and I’ve even been whale watching in places where I should have seen a humpback. But the fact is, I’ve never seen one.

But the thing is, and please don't write me horrible letters, I'm not that upset about it either. Don't get me wrong, I really would like to see one (that impossibly long, arctic-white pectoral fin, and the heaving acrobatics) but it turns out I'm just as contented when I see a bottlenose dolphin or a harbour porpoise.

On the one hand (and ask any birder) it's seeing the out-of-the-ordinary that is the thrill: that gut-twisting anticipation that there is the chance, the slimmest of all possible slim chances, that out of the improbably deep canyons will emerge that animal; whether it's a beluga or a northern right whale or even my own blubbery holy grail, the bowhead. But on the other hand there is that feeling I still get every time I'm out on the water; that there is a good chance, a really good chance, that I'll see a cetacean. And, for me at least, it doesn't matter what cetacean it is. And believe me, I've heard some pretty blasé comments on the deck of a boat: “Oh, it's just another common dolphin"

Common they may be but 'just another' is not a phrase that should be applied to cetaceans. Simon Barnes reckons that "it is the same sudden soul-deep sense of privilege: to be alive on such a planet and see such a thing of wonder." Regardless of how many times I've seen, say, a bottlenose dolphin, to me they're still astonishing, gun-metal grey, sleek, muscular, grand-slam knockout animals (and we'll take it outside if you think otherwise), but compared to the rarer or more enigmatic species they're relatively ‘ordinary’.

But ORCA spends a lot of time on ordinary things. We've been looking at predicting where harbour porpoises like hanging around and therefore where we should offer them, and perhaps other species, protection. It's early days but if we tried doing the same work with a handful of records for a rarer species then we'd be fumbling around in obscurity for a long time. Using the harbour porpoise at least gives us a foot-hold because they're tangible and present.

So the point is that ordinary is great. Ordinary is why we're here. Ordinary is a sign that the world might not be quite as out of kilter as we think. So I probably will see a humpback whale one day but until then I'm content to raise my glass to every extraordinary cetacean no matter how ordinary..

"Ever seen a whale?"

2010-01-03T08:32:00.004Z

I (and ORCA) believes that this is a question that should be asked of everyone. So, at dinner with a friend and ORCA colleague a few weeks ago the waitress was just putting our plastic through her machine when I did it, I asked the question:

"Ever seen a whale?"

"No…who's card is this?" It had obviously been a long night.

"Ever seen a dolphin?" There was a pause. She was either thinking very hard or thinking that the tip we had decided on didn't really justify us being able to ask such stupid questions. And if it did it certainly didn't justify an answer.

"Yes, I did once. But only from the shore. In the Canary Islands."

"How did you feel when you saw it?" I thought the look in her eyes said that she'd heard a few chat up lines in her time as a waitress but this was definitely the first time that dolphins had featured heavily. But I was wrong.

"Brilliant" was what she said. And she needed no more prompting. She told us that every time she's on a boat she's always looking out of the window in the hope that she might see a cetacean and described the disappointment when what she thinks is an animal turns out to be wave. "I even sit by the window in planes and look down into the sea, even though I know I won't see anything from that far up."

We all recognise that feeling. This person had only seen one cetacean in her life and yet felt an urgent need to see another one. It's that feeling of really wanting to see something in the ocean. We seem so desperate to share a space with these animals, to make some connection and to experience that brief rush when it shows itself above the margin of the waves and then is gone. Henry Beston called them "other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time" and we are, despite not being able to follow them, connected with them and that’s why we believe that if we can show people a whale they will want to help protect them.

But, of course, it's not just about cetaceans. It's also about being out there and experiencing what the ocean and the natural world have to offer us every time we step outside the door. The chances are that everyone has experienced the same elation when witnessing our planet's richness. So next time you get the chance, ask it, ask the question. "Ever seen a whale?"

Local Animals for Local People

2009-12-18T11:04:00.002Z

As surprising as it may seem, I have a friend. His name is Steve and he lives in Oxfordshire, near Didcot. (Well someone has to) He's not part of the conservation world, he's not a birder, nor does he survey cetaceans (although he is pretty handy at wild flowers). In fact he's a building surveyor. But he just loves wildlife, thrilled when he sees almost anything regardless of whether he knows what it is or not. But he always wants to know.

But the curious thing about Steve's love of wild places and wild things is that ask him what wildlife sight he'd most like to see and he'll say something like an otter or a peregrine falcon. Now although these animals are 'way cool' as my nephew would say, they aren't particularly exotic. But this doesn't concern Steve in the slightest because it's the stuff in his backyard that interests him most. Offer him the choice of a trip to West Wales or the South American rainforest and Aberystwyth would win every time. It's just the way he's built: his home is part of who he is and the wildlife around him is the wildlife he cares about most.

So, despite the restraining order, he took me out on a walk to the outskirts of his village because he said he wanted to show me, as he put it, "my water voles".

I sort of feel the same about cetaceans. I love being abroad and seeing the cetaceans that I'm unlikely to see from Southampton docks but when I see them from British shores or in our own waters there's a different kind of satisfaction there: they're my cetaceans.

In a curious way that somehow makes me want to make sure they stick around more so than if they were animals I never saw because they were on the other side of the world. Now, obviously, just seeing them makes them as much mine as seeing a picture of Nicole Kidman makes her my next date, but you get the idea. For instance, there's a guy in Pakistan who's spent 15 years protecting the Snow Leopard but, get this, he's never even seen one. As much as I admire his sense of dedication I couldn't do what he does: protecting the invisible.

With cetaceans filling British waters then doing something to protect the marine environment is as good an opportunity we're going to get to not only see the animals but also to say that they're cetaceans that we've had something to do with: they're our cetaceans.

Tonight is Music Night

2009-12-17T16:56:00.003Z

“Let’s have a music night where we write down a list of our favourite pieces of music, play one and explain why we like it. Then the others can pick one or more of your list that they’d like to hear.”

Thus sprach Zarathustra. He didn’t actually. It was Kathy that sprached that particular idea. I say ‘idea’, I mean impending atrocity. As ideas go it’s not exactly up there with, say, electricity or the steam engine or Later With Jools Holland. They’re ideas. This was a recipe for disaster. I’ll stick my neck out and say (in case you hadn’t guessed) that I wasn’t keen on the idea.

The problem is that I’m a musical snob. The idea of sitting listening to someone explain why Chicory Tip’s Son of my Father is actually a heavyweight work exposing the cruel realities of 70s working-class Britain did somehow not appeal.

Nonetheless, I gamely agreed. After all, I thought, it’ll be good preparation for when the Desert Island Discs invitation arrives in the post. (By the way, Kirsty, if you’re reading this I’m still waiting.)

I should have guessed the outcome: I ran out of room on the paper. By the time I got to a 75 pieces of music I stopped. Until I remembered all the great music I’d forgotten. In fact I got to looking at the back of Who’s Next by the Who and just wrote “…tracks 1 – 9” and something similar occurred with David Bowie’s Hunky Dory.

I just love it. Everything that music offers; the aggression, emotion, volume, insanity, intensity, broodiness, quietness, loudness, class, ugliness and beauty. The first time I heard The Clash it incited in me a similar emotional impact as when the world first clapped eyes on Picasso’s Guernica. And don’t get me started on Since I’ve Been Loving You by Led Zeppelin, Fisher Boy by Eliza Carthy, Exit Music by Radiohead or Allegri’s Miserere. Perfect, perfect, perfect.

Believe it or not, there was a time when western civilisation heard harmony for the first time and of that experience the Bishop of Chartres wrote…

“When you hear the soft harmonies of the various singers, some taking high and others low parts, some singing in advance, some following in the rear, others with pauses and interludes, you would think yourself listening to a concert of sirens rather than men, and wonder at the power of voices … whatever is most tuneful among birds, could not equal. Such is the facility of running up and down the scale; so wonderful the shortening or multiplying of notes, the repetition of the phrases, or their emphatic utterance: the treble and shrill notes are so mingled with tenor and bass, that the ears lost their power of judging. When this goes to excess it is more fitted to excite lust than devotion; but if it is kept in the limits of moderation, it drives away care from the soul, confers joy and peace and transports the soul to the society of angels...”

I’ll take those Angels. But I’ll also take the washed-up bums of Tom Waits, the monochrome world of Gavin Bryars the stark landscapes of Chris Wood and the devotion of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Here’s to every single one of you.