On the Marsh Page 25

  3. Disguise, like a stick insect

  4. Misdirection, like a peacock butterfly

  5. Dazzle, like some grasshoppers

  6. Decoy, like the lit-up lure of an angler fish

  7. Smokescreen, like the ink of a cuttlefish

  8. The dummy, like flies and ants

  9. False display of strength, like a toad inflating itself

  Cott spent a day trying to photograph the cryptic camouflage – an example of category one – of a female grey partridge on a nest. He had staked out the nest and set up his camera and waited all day for her to return to the empty nest. No show. Eventually, he gave it up as a bad job, but he took some photos of the nest anyway, in case it should be useful.

  When he examined the resulting photographs he saw that the partridge had been on her nest all along.

  I think it’s called a horsefly because it’s nearly as big as my horse.

  It was the moment when the year holds its breath. It’s like the moment between thought and action, stretched out over a matter of weeks. It’s the heady pause between high spring and the urgent movement of migration. The marsh was not exactly silenced – never that – but it was quiet: bursts and murmurs of song. The hard work was done.

  Birders talk about the ‘summer doldrums’: the time of year when there’s not much going on. The great peak of the Maytime breeding frenzies are long gone; the craziness of October, when anything might turn up anywhere, was a long way ahead. And so birders turn to butterflies and dragonflies while they wait for things to start hotting up again.

  I have never found this lessening of intensity a difficult time myself. I am more interested in the birds’ rhythm than the birders’ rhythm, though I intend no snobbery in this. Crash-hot ID-people need to exercise and hone these skills, and a quiet season makes them restless.

  What I like is the productivity behind the quietness. It may be a quiet time for you and me; for the birds, it’s just about the most important time of the year: finishing the job of breeding, fledging the chicks, going further along the road towards becoming an ancestor. How many of those chicks will survive the winter? Some will spend it nearby, some will go on short journeys, some will cross half the planet. How many of those chicks will survive and breed in their turn? This is the moment of achievement, the year’s biggest moment of all: but it also asks a million questions. Or maybe just one: what happens next?

  And yet, even as this most urgent of all questions must be asked, there is an air of quiet repletion about the marsh and the world. Eddie took supper on the marsh and I accompanied him. It was an evening for contemplation rather than urgent looking and listening . . . but what were those ginger beetles crawling up the stem of an umbellifer? I knew them: soldier beetles, small and relatively long, rather square in shape. Perhaps they look like little guardsmen on sentry duty, and their red jackets are traditionally military. Not that they were acting in a particularly military fashion: they’ve acquired the nickname of hogweed bonking beetles, and they seem to spend their entire adult lives in lovely copulation bliss on bliss. In rare breaks from this activity they feed on pollen, aphids and nectar and are useful pollinators. And then—

  ‘Eddie! Look here!’

  He looked at it for a while, and then the cogs meshed gloriously: ‘Hummingbird hawk-moth!’

  That’s one of the things about all comparatively unusual creatures: when you see one they act as if it is the most natural thing in the world. Nothing could have been less self-dramatising than the insect’s meticulous, even fussy attention to the flowers of the marsh: a sip here and a sip there. I had once, ludicrously, taken part in a port-tasting (after a while they all tasted of cough medicine) in which the finest wines available to humanity were sipped, swilled round the mouth and then spat. The moth had the same seriousness of demeanour: flap-flap, sip-sip, and now let’s try the next one, please.

  It was a delight to see one untrapped, doing what hummingbird hawk-moths (and for that matter hummingbirds) do with such aplomb: such huge aeronautical skills used with such nonchalance. What are you staring at? It’s what I do. It’s what I’m for. But Eddie and I watched, entranced. There was a soft, almost reflective little hint of song from the willow warbler in the sallows.

  Eddie and I decided to walk on and sit for a while on the second set of benches. It was that kind of evening. As we arrived at the pond – the pond that we decided was not to turn into a reedbed – there was a female mallard, but she made no immediate decision to spring into that splashing vertical take-off from water that mallards are so good at. The reason for this was clear a second or two later: ducklings!

  Count them, then. Three, four – no, five! And then there was a sixth doing that sudden catch-up thing that ducks do, as if it had suddenly mounted an invisible underwater bicycle, and it pedalled like Chris Hoy storming the finish line in the velodrome, back into the group.

  Few things are more enchanting than a hatch-out of ducklings: not fledged yet – of course not fledged by a long way – but fluffy little scraps of life, floating high on the surface like bath toys. The sight of creatures so tiny and so young – a few days at most – actually swimming is always rather disconcerting. Yes, of course you know intellectually that ducks are born to swim: but that they can leap straight from the egg into the water and do it with such confidence is boggling and beguiling. It’s like the shock you feel when you travel to France and find that everyone – even very young children – can speak French. And there was a small example of management in action: the open water that we allowed was now allowing the mallards to live their watery lives. It was an infinitely pleasant savouring of the God illusion: as if we had created those ducks and had seen that they were good.

  That night I was awoken by the sound of oystercatchers. A restlessness had infused them. They would be on the move soon, if they weren’t already gone. I suspect that in that nocturnal call they were declaring the summer doldrums closed.

  The rooks in the rookery murmur their togetherness. Esprit de corps.

  Mid-July – my birthday still a few days off – and the oystercatchers had declared the beginning of autumn. Shocking how early this season of movement and change is upon us. When Carl and I had paid our respects to the late Sowerby’s beaked whale, on our walk back through Titchwell reserve we had seen a delightful gathering of golden plovers. They were still in their summer breeding plumage – black below, dazzling spangles on their backs and wings – and yet these sumptuous colours were beginning to fade, were already a little rough round the edges.

  They had gone over. They had completed their breeding: they were on the move. For them, autumn had arrived. Just think: all those people getting ready for what they thought were their summer holidays, unaware it was already autumn.

  Jeremy Sorensen, former warden of the RSPB’s Minsmere nature reserve in Suffolk, used to claim that summer didn’t exist at all. Looking at the world in his entirely bird-centred – avicentric – way, he was convinced that there were three seasons only: you might call them breeding, dispersal and survival. We were already in the second of those two seasons, so far as some species were concerned. Those that bred were beginning to return to the life less hormonal, ceasing to sing, abandoning life as a half of a pair, often becoming part of a flock instead. An entirely different way of life, almost as radical a change as the metamorphosing freshwater mussels. For a few weeks the males are tough, amorous, protective, ever-ready to risk all: next they are self-effacing, meek, concerned only about themselves. Many species adopt quite different modes of existence for different seasons: some even look completely different. To all intents and purposes they really are different animals: and will remain so through the long months of survival. And if they do indeed survive, the males will change back into the rampaging, singing conquistadors, the great lovers and fighters they had once been.

  We’d be off on our own autumn holidays soon enough. And Eddie was leaving school: ahead after the holidays lay three days a week in college, learning
life skills, and another day at Clinks Care Farm.

  The season of the summer doldrums is the season of change. Like all other seasons.

  Here is another parable: the parable of the robin in the house.

  There’s always something slightly terrible – cosmically wrong – about a bird indoors. We once had a bloody great carrion crow in the hall: that was exciting. He was so bewildered – or was he? – that he let me wrap him up in a tea towel and pinion his wings. He remained perfectly still as I carried him outside. They’re birds of considerable intelligence – every bit as smart as an ape, some scientists have claimed. So what was going through his mind as he allowed me to catch him, hold him firmly enough to stop him escaping, and then let him go, tossing him skywards with a great din of feathers as he took off without a caw of thanks? Perhaps he was shocked into apathy. Or perhaps he worked out that submission would lead to freedom. Who’s to say?

  The sitting room is mostly conservatory, glass-roofed and walled, so it was hard for the robin to find a way out. The last thing you want to do is panic the bird and have it crashing into the windows that it mistakes for moving air. Eddie was deeply alarmed: something about flying things very close to him makes him jump. The bird is trapped in your human world, and to stay is death.

  All doors, all windows open, Cindy and I at opposite ends, trying to will the bird towards the double door, hoping that it wouldn’t fly over our shoulders and head for the stairs. You want to explain the principles you’re working on, so that the bird knows you have nothing but its own good at heart. The sound of fluttering and scrabbling, the occasional sick clonk as the bird strikes glass . . . and then it’s as if the obstructions had dissolved, fallen away, turned to dust, and the bird is through the door, away from humanity, barrelling away at top speed, waiting to find a safe perch where it can pause for a moment and wonder what the bloody hell that was all about.

  When we humans enter the wilder world it’s a great and gratifying adventure. When a wild bird enters the human world it’s pure horror. Even when the humans are on his side.

  Birthday message from my new moth-trap: there are tigers at the bottom of our garden.

  There’s more than you think. That’s the essential truth of nature. It’s true even in these depleted times, and it’s a truth that reflects the inadequacy of our thinking. Our minds jump to the assumption that if we are unaware of something – or unable to understand something – it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even exist.

  Cindy gave me a moth-trap for my birthday. I thought this was a nice idea, but the tiniest bit misguided. I knew very little about moths. I knew they existed but I wasn’t aware of their existence in any meaningful way. I was by no means convinced that the moth-trap would be a major asset to personal, still less to family, life.

  A moth-trap is basically a box and a light. The light is eerily bright and runs on mercury vapour. The box is built on the principle of the lobster pot: easily in, but not so easily out. Once inside, the trapped moth finds a lot of egg boxes, and creeps into one of the compartments to wait for release.

  We talked it through with neighbours John and Louise and, being generous people, they said yes, of course, go ahead. Now they wouldn’t think it was the light from an alien spacecraft at the bottom of the garden. We walked back to the house on the evening of my birthday with the glow of mercury uncannily shining out in the twilight. I wondered what creatures would be summoned by its spell. I also wondered if we would have any idea at all what we might be looking at. I had the right books; what I lacked was the right skill, the right knowledge. I didn’t even know where to start, which page to start looking.

  There are times when almost complete ignorance is thrilling: or rather, confronting that ignorance is thrilling. Stepping off a plane in a new country, that sort of thing. You realise how much more there is than you could possibly know. Dante is sometimes said to be the last person to possess all the knowledge and understanding of his culture: even as the renaissance was beginning, here was the very last renaissance man. These days all of us have vast areas of ignorance all around us. We can never be Dante: but trying and failing is a worthwhile exercise.

  Dedicated moth-ers have told me that visiting the moth-trap of a morning is like coming downstairs on Christmas Day. I was wondering if it would feel as if I had been given a library of books about astrophysics: glorious but altogether beyond my scope.

  Eddie was excited about the possibilities. On our trip to Alderney he had taken part in a moth morning. He is wary of creatures that fly too close to him, as the robin in the house showed. There was a time when he was alarmed by butterflies. It’s understandable, when you think about it: one moment they seem to be part of a flower, next moment they are tearing off. It’s that moment of transition that seems so unlikely, and to Eddie, so alarming. But he was so intrigued by the Alderney moths that he forced himself to look and admire. He liked the moths for themselves and also for the way they set off his own increased daring. He got close, but backed off when offered a moth to hold on his finger.

  So we made our visit to my new moth-trap on the morning after my birthday. We were prepared for disappointment and damp squibs . . . and got something close to a nuclear explosion.

  The very first moth we saw was enormous and beautiful and its picture was actually on the cover of the field guide to moths: so we not only had wonder, we had wonder with a name. There, in gorgeous shades of pink and green, was an elephant hawk-moth.

  Now, to proper moth-ers this is all like boasting that blue tits come to the nut-feeders, but to us it was as if a phoenix had come to the bird table. We could have stopped right there and it would have been a day of wonder: we could have thrown away the moth-trap at that moment and it would have been the most wonderful present.

  But we didn’t. We opened up the egg boxes and found more.

  Hawk-moths are impressive insects: so big they are sometimes referred to as honorary birds. And there among the egg boxes were four more hawk-moths: creatures with uncannily rigged and scalloped wings. They looked like scale models of flying machines to be flown by magnificent men. These were poplar hawk-moths: and there was one perched on my finger almost as big as my hand.

  And there was a moth on Eddie’s fingers. After a series of advances and retreats, he went for it: and there sat this monster insect, with Eddie looking at it, awed by the moth, awed by his daring, and behind him stretched the marsh from which these fine creatures had all been recruited in the hours of darkness.

  Who knew they were there? Not us, that’s for sure. And there was the gaudy and lovely moth called a garden tiger: a moth with Bridget Riley op-art wings that, when folded forwards, revealed hindwings of black and orange.

  We photographed most of them and released them all, with care, into the surrounding bushes: the idea of moth-trapping is not to give a free meal to the birds – let ’em work for their living like everybody else. Some we identified quite easily, some we identified after a good old search, and a good few we had to give up on. It’s about learning patterns, and that’s not an overnight business.

  Eddie wanted to take this further, and so with Cindy’s help he drew a garden tiger and an elephant hawk-moth, colouring them himself with absorbed accuracy and neatness. And I was lost in wonder that there should be so many creatures living so close to us – not only nearby but common, for that’s what the book said – that I knew nothing about. I knew nothing because I never looked, I never asked. As the Sowerby’s beaked whale swims hidden beneath in the depths of the sea, so the elephant hawk-moth flies hidden beneath the depths of the night.

  It was as if I had hardly noticed a bird in my life before, and had always been content with one word to cover them all. It was a bird, wasn’t it? How much more detail could anybody possibly want? And then, in a single morning, being shown a swan and an eagle and a flamingo and a hummingbird and a bird of paradise. Or as if I had been content to refer to all wild mammals as ‘animals’: and then in the space of a single morning
having an encounter with both an elephant and a tiger.

  For that’s more or less what happened. Down at the bottom of our garden there are elephants and there are tigers. And I never knew.

  Graduation Day. Eddie was leaving school. Going to college next term. Big adventure.

  The occasion was marked by a ceremony at the school. It was a lengthy business. Each leaving pupil was required to stand on stage while one of his teachers delivered a eulogy.

  It was a good occasion. These teachers are good people, who take on children with all kinds of social difficulties and educational problems. Some of the children can be rather overwhelming; others have a default tendency to disappear into a silence. Eddie’s first four years there had been pretty miserable. It was only towards the end that he made friends and felt supported, and that made it all bearable. Certainly, when there was any doubt about whether or not Eddie was well enough to go to school, he always and loudly cast his vote in favour of going. This was not because school was much cop: it was more about Eddie’s bravery – and his strong desire not to be different from the rest. The more different he felt, the keener he was on fitting in.

  His eulogy was appropriately affectionate. He was inclined to bask in the atmosphere, which was sentimental ma non troppo, for all the kids were good kids now. He stood there in his new suit – a dashing little number in quiet but unmistakable purple – as his teacher spoke, making a big play about the way Eddie had sorted out something to do with his school lunch. He had found a certain situation difficult, and he had taken steps and sorted it out. So far so good, but it was presented as the most marvellous thing he had done in five years of schooling.

  There never was a parent yet who thought the school had done his child full justice. But all the same, here was a boy who could lunge a horse, write poems, make a damn good marmalade cake, recognise a blackbird by its song, explain the different dentition of carnivores, rodents and the blue whale, and tell you how a bat finds and catches food. As well as knowing a barn owl’s power.