My Natural History Read online

  Those accidentals, they were the most marvellous thing of all. Time and again, I would turn to the terse paragraph that described wandering albatross Diomedea exulans: “Largest ocean bird (11 ft wing-span). Mainly white, black wing-tips…” Imagine that. Imagine seeing one. And imagine I did: my imagination was haunted by birds, and particularly the wandering albatross. In the Field Guide, all the birds described fully and illustrated had been “officially recorded” in Europe at least 20 times. An accidental was, I learned, a bird that had made even fewer appearances. In other words, it was very, very rare: so rare it hardly existed. So rare it was almost a myth. It was a bird that nobody would ever see, a bird of the imagination. Naturally, I looked for the wandering albatross all the time: off the shore at Southsea and Paignton, but without any expectation at all of seeing one. I just looked out and imagined: and look! There it was! Coming in past the pier, or perhaps cruising over from Torquay, a nonchalant master of the winds and the waves, banking with airy grace on its giant wings, and I alone was there to understand. But I don’t think it was the glory of seeing one that really mattered to me. It was the glory of being one. I too was an albatross, I too was an Accidental, I too was a rare being, I too was to be treasured in my wandering isolation.

  Rare, rare. The more precious because rare: the more precious because so few. I hadn’t grasped the point that albatrosses are rarely seen in Britain and Europe because their heartland is the Southern Ocean; that their only reason for coming so far north is, indeed, accidental. The poor things only come here when they get lost. But I preferred the idea of a mighty bird of devastating fragility: a magnificent warlord in need of protection: a vulnerable conquistador: a glorious oxymoron. I believed that there were just a few lone birds sadly and patiently working the endless seas on their enormous wings: unicorns with feathers, birds that told us humans of better times, long-lost times when there were more beautiful things than we could ever imagine.

  I had other teachers too. Gerald Durrell ripped away the solemnity of the birdy text books, and their traditionally awful prose, and never thought for a second that jokes compromised love, still less reverence. I read all his books, many of them many times. Television brought untold wonders right into the sitting room in Streatham. Peter Scott presented a programme called Look which seemed to be broadcast for me alone. Everything he said, everything he showed me had an added vividness because I knew the story of Scott and the nene, the Hawaiian goose brought back from extinction by the Wildfowl Trust. Imagine doing such a thing – and imagine I did. Savour the words: the rarest goose in the world. It is found – and I loved that slip into the passive voice, that technique beloved of serious bird books, something that seemed to imply a strange and portentous mystery, as it indeed did – only in Hawaii. By 1952, the wild population was down to 30. Then Scott took a hand and started a captive breeding programme at the headquarters of his Wildfowl Trust in Slimbridge, Gloucestershire. This led to a successful re-release programme: and there are now about 500 wild nenes honking their stuff – their name is an onomatopoeia – about Hawaii.

  When I left Sunnyhill, I got a prize. So did almost everybody except Peter Miller, so far as I remember. I got, for we were allowed to choose, Zoo Quest for a Dragon, by, of course, David Attenborough. I have it on my shelves still, so I can remind myself that in 1962, it was presented to me for Attainment and Good Work In English. (Attainment meant getting a place in a Good School.) The book contains Attenborough’s signature, because my father knew him from his work at the BBC. I read the book and enjoyed it: but it was the pride of possession that was the main thing. It was Attenborough’s television performances that overwhelmed me. It was not just the fabulous places and the fabulous beasts: it was the fact that he really cared. You could see him caring. You could see him not faking it. He cared like I cared. Here was a grown-up who thought it really mattered that an animal should live rather than die. It was as if Attenborough gave me permission to care. Attenborough told me that my anguish and my joy in the wild world had a real value: that love of the wild was not something you grew out of.

  There was one series in particular. It was the series of 1961, Zoo Quest to Madagascar. The details are vague in my memory, but I remember the awful, the beautiful anxiety as Attenborough hunted for a lemur that had never before been filmed. It was a revelation of the terrible fragility of the wild world: the first time that such an idea had struck me. Not that the programme dealt with the threat of extinction, for Attenborough was never one for scare stories, never one for going off half-cock. It was some years later that the accumulating weight of evidence made him the most forceful and vivid campaigner for the endangered wild on the entire planet. But for me at least, there was a strange presentiment of this future orthodoxy in the story of the indri, in this tale of a great man, the best possible substitute for me, travelling round a wild and remote place in an apparently hopeless quest for a strange and lovely creature that nobody had heard of and nobody could find.

  Years later, years and years later, I met Attenborough when we were both doing some work for the conservation charity, the World Land Trust. I was taking drinks, as good conservationists do when business is over, in the glorious double-decker library of the Linnean Society in Piccadilly, and as extraordinary coincidence would have it, I found myself by the table with the drink on it, clutching a bottle. I turned to find Attenborough with an empty glass beside me, so I filled it. As a result I was able to ask a question that had been troubling me for years: “What was the lemur? The one you tried so hard to find and thought you never would?”

  I had wondered if my description and my memory were too vague. But not a bit of it. There was only one possibility: “Indri!” And a flood of reminiscence and anecdote, wonderfully told over a diminishing glassful: Attenborough is as great a performer for one as he is for millions. It was, and still is, a question of caring about the subject. It was, and always is, a question of love. Attenborough was, and for that matter, still is, my favourite teacher.

  Indri! The biggest surviving lemur, weighing up to 29 pounds, a teddy-faced jumper with a taste for music: the great singer of the Malagasy forests. Lemurs are primates, like us: one of the earliest forms in which our group took shape. They were out-competed on mainland Africa by monkeys and apes (like ourselves) but they somehow got to Madagascar after it had separated from the African mainland and set about a great adaptive radiation. Presumably the pioneers got there by rafting, by getting lifts across the strait – accidental lifts – on tumbled and floating vegetation. There the lemurs ceased to be losers and became winners: virtuosi of evolution, creating more and more new species to fill one niche after the next: from extinct giants to tiny little things like the pygmy mouse lemur, from lemurs that live much as monkeys do, to the aye-aye that sneaks about in the dark and thinks it’s a woodpecker. (It has a middle finger three times the length of the others and pokes it into holes in tree trunks for larvae.) The name lemur is from the Latin; lemures are spirits of the night. Perhaps it is the haunting song of the indri that prompted this name. It is a sound I have never heard in person, and it is as strange a din as nature has come up with. The indri is something of a tree-bound whale.

  And I revelled in Attenborough’s search for the indri: the elusive, the near-lost, the all-but-unfindable beast, the myth of the Malagasy forests. But he found it: wonder of wonders, he found it, and there he was, in black-and-white images caught on a clockwork camera, brought to our sitting room, brought even to the postal district of SW16. Surely, I thought, it is a wild world out there, a world in which wonderful things exist, but one in which they can’t take anything for granted.

  All was not as it should be in this world. I knew that after the search for the indri. I knew then that it was not possible to love the wild world without knowing pain. Though Attenborough found his indri, I knew that it might just as easily have come out the other way: almost, I could see him on television apologising for the fact that he had been unable to find an indri, th
at there weren’t enough indris to find. And this would not have been an admission of a failure of the human ability to find things: it would have been an admission of a failure of the human ability to keep things. To look after things. I knew that if I chose to continue loving wildlife, I would be choosing a way in which sadness was unavoidable. And I embraced it willingly.

  3. Beadlet anemone

  Actinia equina

  It troubled me that I didn’t love the sea. Such loving was required behaviour. It was essential that I loved Cornwall with a deep and special passion, and that meant loving the sea. Cornwall was the land of our holidays: family all together, father not at the BBC, mother not writing or lecturing, school forgotten. It was the land of treats and everything could only ever be marvellous. To believe anything else would be an unthinkable crime; worse, a kind of blasphemy. But I swam poorly, and the Cornish seas, even in August, sucked the warmth and, it seemed, the life from my body. Most of my encounters with the sea involved brief immersion followed by agonies of teeth-chattering.

  Nick was different. Nick, son of my parents’ close friends, had a light covering of adipose tissue, but despite this, was athletic and courageous. He never felt the cold, and swam in the sea for endless hours, completely at home in its icy embrace. He revelled in every second: he was every parent’s ideal of how a boy should enjoy Cornwall. I envied the approval he won with his exploits: envied him, to an extent, the pleasures he found in the water. I used to tell him that he was a seal. He really did look like a seal, but in truth, he was a human supremely adapted for the aquatic life in a hard climate.

  We went daily to Rinsey Beach, descending the dizzying cliff path with swimming things and picnic baskets, hours later making the long and wearisome stomp back up again, Nick pleasantly fatigued from his congress with the waves, me exhausted from hours of shivering. As you looked down, you could see the rock pools that punctuated the beach: ancient cracks and fissures flushed and refilled twice a day with the advancing and retreating tides. They were limpet-lined, a strange unexpected shade of pink below the surface, weed-hung, and decorated with sea anemones. They were strange, alien places, more unlike Streatham than anything it was possible to encounter. These pools were my favourite thing about Cornwall, but I was, of course, an outsider, a mere gazer-in. And not just with rock pools: most of nature was like that for me, either imagined, or just a little beyond my scope.

  Now Nick, having wealthy parents, wanted for very little. He was also deeply generous and would lend you anything. So one day I borrowed his snorkel. I don’t know what possessed me to do this. It just seemed a nice toy. In those days, very few people visited Rinsey, and most of those that did were known to us. Because of this, we were able to make our camp in the same place every day, in front of the same rock pool, one in which both my sisters learned to swim. So that morning, I entered it, not without that terrible gasp when the water rises above your crotch, but I endured this hardship, being cautiously in the mood for adventure. I placed the mask over my face. It was an old-fashioned, one-piece snorkel: a tube rising from the mask itself, so if you breathed through your nose, you could continue with your face submerged. I was nervous of it: the act of putting your face under water and then breathing does, after all, go against nature.

  First I tried to place the mask in the water without getting my whole face wet. This was an instant and dramatic shock, making me gasp and pull my head up again. It wasn’t the breathing that shocked, but the seeing. The transformation was extraordinary. The vista revealed by the second-long glance was no longer a blurry, shifting, distorted mess of colour: it was a clearly-seen world of hard edges and living, breathing things. It invited me in with a seduction so intense that gasping was inevitable. It was almost as if the water had turned warm.

  It took a few tries before I was able to do the actual breathing, and a few more before I was able to swim and breathe at the same time. But swim I did: at once transforming myself from an inadequate water-shy human to a great hovering bird, gliding above a vast landscape, looking down benignly on crabs and sudden, scuttling blennies. At once the remote became near: the foreign became familiar: the separate became unity. Nature, wild things, me: we were all the same thing. That day I lifted my head from the pool only to eat and to shiver. I had found my love.

  Cornwall was wild; Streatham, for the most part, was tame. Cornwall was where we went in search of wildness. True, finding actual wildlife was not at the top of everybody’s agenda: or not knowingly. That was as true for me as it was for everybody else. But certainly, we went there in order to be surrounded by nature. We sought reasons to believe in the total and utter specialness of Cornwall and of Rinsey, and everything that confirmed this was a joy, from the casual mastery of the seagulls to the emerald lights of the glow-worms along the cliff path.

  My mother had a special love for the choughs that thronged the cliffs, tumbling in the wind and calling “Jack! Jack!” to each other. It will be clear here, at least to the birdwatchers among my readers, that my mother’s sense of what was appropriate was more sharply honed than her powers of observation. At the time, choughs were extinct in Cornwall, surviving only on the county coat of arms. The bird had long been part of Cornish life, and was still part of Cornish folklore, but it was no longer there in flying and nesting reality. It was jackdaws that stall-turned and barrel-rolled in the updraughts along the cliffs.

  My mother loved being in Cornwall more than anywhere else, with the family together and harmonious, and partaking of ritual meals together on a nightly basis, and with friends constantly coming round for food and drink and laughter. Cornwall’s specialness mattered to her even more than it did to the rest of us: she, I think, set the tone for specialness. But her choughs were the choughs of imagination.

  With the dead, there is an eternal regret that you can’t tell them things any more, or show them things. I can’t show my mother my children and her grandchildren; I can’t show her this book; I can’t show her choughs. For it is a matter of sweet sadness that the choughs came back to Cornwall a dozen years after she died. It is a strange and deeply cheering tale. A number of farmers had been persuaded, with financial inducements, to manage cliff-top land in a manner sympathetic to choughs, for choughs traditionally feed on rough pastures near the sea in frost-free places. Cornwall lost many of its rough pastures when farmers took to tractors and no longer needed horses for farm work. Once these pastures were re-established, the plan was to release captive-bred birds and see what happened. But before this could take place, the choughs came back by themselves. As I write, there are half a dozen pairs and family groups, and one of these is regularly seen about Rinsey. I remember the extraordinary pleasure I had in seeing them for the first time: deeply black birds with firered beaks and legs, flying together in family groups in the big cliff-top winds, looking like a handful of old dusters. And they don’t say “Jack!”. Instead they give out a long drawled “chooooow!”. It was the voice, one I had heard a few times elsewhere, that drew me to them first: and in disbelief. I found them with my binoculars and waited till the sun caught their legs and their redness to give me full certainty. They were choughs all right, but I couldn’t tell my mother about them, and I regret very much the pleasure it would have given her: pleasure in the wildness, in the specialness, and perhaps above all, in the appropriateness. The Cornish chough was back in Cornwall.

  But she did have one glorious and unforgettable birdwatching experience in Cornwall: and this from someone who was never a birdwatcher, had poor eyesight and was never much at good at observation of any kind. She was sitting by the window in the cottage in Cornwall, reading, or more probably, doing the Times crossword, for it was a disappointing day when she failed to complete it. She looked up, no doubt thinking of an anagram or a quotation, and saw a bird. And it took her breath away. At once, she was in a world of wonder and delight and disbelief. It was as if she had dived into my rock pool.

  For the bird was a hoopoe. A hoopoe! How did she know this?
I wonder. True, a hoopoe is remarkable and extraordinary and unmistakable: she must have come across the bird somehow in the course of her eternal task of reading. A hoopoe is the most exotic of occasional dropper-inners, salmon-pink, black-and-white wings, a huge and ridiculous crest, and a flight like a demented butterfly. It is the most eye-catching of birds, even in the places where it is common, and my mother’s eye was well and truly caught. She rang me to tell me about it that evening, breathless in the excitement of the telling, saying, without a shred of irony: “It really was one of the most wonderful moments of my life.”

  All her life she had been caught up with the telling of tales: often recounting the lives of great humans for the children’s television programme, Blue Peter. She liked cities. She had deep sentimental feelings about Rome. She loved to sit in that campo or this in Venice and take a glass of something cool and cheering as Venice performed for her benefit. But all her life, she had this nagging, scarcely understood nostalgia for wild things. After she had her first terrible stroke, she was filled with a thousand regrets, and one of the greatest of those was that she would never be able to go to Africa. She understood, too late in life, that this was something she had always longed to do. And I remembered Alice and the beautiful garden, the garden she can’t get into because the key is on the table and she is too small to reach it. Alas, when she grows tall enough to reach the key, she is too big to get through the door and can only peer along the short passage to the place of perfection that lies beyond.

  The entire wild world was like that for me, even in Cornwall: there, but just beyond my reach, just beyond my scope, just beyond my understanding. I remember my almost hoopoe-esque delight when a couple of gannets came close enough on shore to be seen with the naked eye, plunging crazily into the water with their spear-beaks. I remember a pair of common terns, diving as dizzily but somehow more daintily. I thought these were miraculous appearances: I know now that they are available for anyone with the desire to see, with the right understanding, with the knowledge of how to look. From Rinsey cliffs you can see terns passing by as a regular thing, and if you look out to sea, you often see distant gannets cruising the airways and, every now and then, swivelling on a wing-tip-tip to make a crazy-lethal plunge at the waters below.