All posts by Ian Alexander

Book Review, Natural History

Book Review: Dazzled and Deceived, by Peter Forbes

Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage, by Peter Forbes
Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage, by Peter Forbes

The effect of natural selection on how animals look has attracted the
attention of naturalists from the birth of modern natural history, starting even before Darwin’s Origin of Species.

Visual appearance can affect an animal’s survival in numerous ways.
Camouflage makes it hard for predators to find a prey animal; warning coloration advertises that a potential prey is poisonous or distasteful; Batesian mimicry allows an edible species to pretend to be distasteful; and Müllerian mimicry allows a distasteful species to be sampled less often by young inexperienced predators, by resembling a more common distasteful species. And within these areas, there are infinite possibilities.

Butterfly Mimicry: mimics on the right, the imitated 'models' on the left
Butterfly Mimicry: mimics on the right, the imitated ‘models’ on the left

But as the cover art suggests, Forbes does not stop there.  Camouflage has military uses; and the history of two World Wars reveals extraordinary interactions between naturalists like Hugh Cott (author of the greatest twentieth-century book on camouflage, Adaptive Coloration in Animals, 1940) and Peter Scott with the military – Scott was a naval captain, so he had a foot in both camps.

Much of the book concerns the natural history and biology of butterflies – they include many of nature’s best mimics, and provide incredibly complex examples of visual evolution at work, as the mimic species adapts to each of the many geographic variants of the host or model species. It’s even possible for multiple forms to appear in a single brood. Forbes describes the research workers, their controversies and their heated opinions, right or wrong. Truth wins in the end, but that doesn’t prevent a messy process along the way, just as in evolution.

Today, new light is being shed on the mechanisms of mimicry and coloration in general by evolutionary developmental biology, which Forbes insists on calling “evo devo”. The result of such inquiry will one day be an explanation of the observed, very complex, natural history at multiple levels – genetics, developmental biology, visual appearance, and natural selection, all of which will have to fit together exactly. Pieces of the puzzle are becoming clear, as in the genetic and developmental mechanisms for producing eye-spots. These can be “impressionistic” – they do not have to mimic a cat’s face, as long as a wing-flash gives a bird predator an illusion of eyes-suddenly-jumping-out-at-me; for we suppose that birds have
an escape reaction triggered in some such way. Thus the explanation must take into account ecology too – the behaviours of both predator and prey are needed to explain why eyespots evolved.

Forbes can’t resist putting an artistic and literary take on the natural
history and science: Sir Ernst Gombrich the art historian was deeply
fascinated by visual illusion, while novelists like Vladimir Nabokov (a keen naturalist) were intrigued by truth and lies. Sometimes the analogies go rather far from natural history (electronic warfare is a case in point: it may be deception but it certainly isn’t visual). But Forbes is always precise, and invariably entertaining.

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Book Review, Environment, Love of Nature

Book Review: The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane
Robert Macfarlane

Macfarlane knew Roger Deakin (see my review of Wildwood), and was inspired by meeting him and visiting his extraordinary house. As a young, tree-climbing academic in the distinctly tame countryside of Cambridge, just sitting in the top of his favourite tree outside the city simply wasn’t enough to satisfy his craving for wildness.

The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane
The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane

So, for The Wild Places, Macfarlane sets out to the farthest shores of the British Isles, trying both to redraw his map of these islands – not with roads and cities, but coasts and mountains and woods and bogs, linked by ancient footpaths and holloways (roads worn down into the land by centuries of feet and cartwheels), and to define for himself what wildness really means.

In the space of fifteen carefully-crafted chapters, with titles like
Beechwood, Moor, Grave, Holloway and Saltmarsh, Macfarlane introduces us to some of his favourite places, views, treasures – in the form of found stones and shells and bits of wood, in a Deakinesque manner.

Where Jay Griffiths (see my review of Wild) is passionate, even overheated, and Deakin is calm but subtly warm, fiercely rooted in wood, Macfarlane can seem at first rather cold and intellectual: skilful with words, but oddly bloodless. It takes some chapters to start to realize the quality of The Wild Places; a desire to immerse oneself in wildness (both Deakin and Macfarlane favour swimming the wild way, Deakin notably traversing many of our wilder rivers
in his book Waterlog).

There is a plan to the book: around the British Isles, upside down; around the different kinds of wild place – high, low, wet, dry, hard, soft, empty, populated. The last is plainly a surprise to Macfarlane, who travels from an initial rather romantic conception of the places unaffected by man (as if), to places with strong energies of their own, and the people who naturally go with them. There is a bit of dialectic about all this – a thousand student essays on Man vs Nature, perhaps – but it becomes clear that Macfarlane is coming down to earth, and warmth creeps into his writing.

Macfarlane is at his best describing the wonderful diversity of life in the Burren: a rainforest in miniature, in the deep narrow grykes between the clints, the hard, dry exposed slabs of limestone pavement: an endangered habitat if ever there was one. And his love for Coruisk, beyond The Bad Step in the Cuillin Hills of the Isle of Skye, shines out despite any clever word-schemes or devices.

Buy it from Amazon.com (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

See also Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Book Review, Love of Nature, Natural History

Book Review: Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees, by Roger Deakin

Roger Deakin
Roger Deakin

Deakin died just after finishing Wildwood, so this book is automatically poignant: not just a celebration of life and wildness, but also an epitaph for this wonderful, crazy, brilliant, down-to-earth
craftsman of wood and words.

Wildwood, by Roger Deakin
Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees, by Roger Deakin

Deakin was very comfortable with wood, and in woods. Indeed there was a timber merchant named Wood in his family, and one of his father’s Christian names was Greenwood, so he tells us. It is at once personal, uncompromising, and captivatingly narrated. There is no academic or intellectual lamentation about how we have lost touch with nature, no vague generalisation: but the truth emerges, clearly and naturally.

He rebuilt his ancient moated house, from a mossed-over, wooded-up ruin, into a lovely, light, airy place: in the process getting to know every one of the 300 beams (“300 trees: a small wood”) that made up the ancient oak frame of the house. He describes the carpenter’s marks on the beams – cut ready to fit together, then transported and assembled on site.

His wanderings about Britain may seem random, but are highly directed: to the places where the Green Man may be found in a dozen churches; to the home of that most English of plants, the Cricket Bat Willow; to the places where those old badgers, Cobbett and Ruskin, protested the injustices meted out to the common man. There is nothing “quaint”, no “folklore” here: just a constant delight in nature, a steady slow-burning fuse of evidence, of hard-won knowledge lightly worn.

Or he shares his visit to the Pilliga forest in New South Wales,
describing in careful but lightly-told detail how the forest of today is not what it seems; how Charles Darwin saw an open park-like woodland, not the dense and lovely tangles that people imagine is the ancient wooded landscape of Australia. He tells from intimate knowledge of the species of trees that used to dominate; of the skill of the Aborigines in managing the land with fire; of the extinction of the local Kamilaroi language, ironically just as the first and last dictionary of that lost tongue was published.

Deakin is not afraid of seeming tame: he is as much at ease telling us about a Bluebell picnic – on a lawn with a woodland view, accompanied by a posse of Cambridge botanists – as roaming the Outback. His knowledge is deep, even encyclopaedic: he collected facts as he collected interesting pieces of wood, stones, feathers – kaleidoscopically. It’s just a pity that there’s no index in the current paperback edition – let’s hope the publisher rectifies this soon.

Wildwood is, quite simply, a delight. You will want to visit the places described; you will look afresh at the wild places you know; and you will be glad that you met Deakin, in the only way that is now possible, through his graceful and supple writing.

Buy it from Amazon.com (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

See also the review of Deakin’s Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

Book Review, Love of Nature

Book Review: Wild, An Elemental Journey, by Jay Griffiths

Wild, by Jay Griffiths
Wild: An Elemental Journey, by Jay Griffiths

Griffiths gave up her job and sold everything she had to go and spend seven years of her life travelling in the world’s wildest and loneliest places, and living with the rugged, capable and wonderful peoples who still know how to survive in the wild.

In the Amazon, she asks what is the worst thing that could happen to her.  La muerte, claro (Death, of course) is the blunt reply. It does not put her off.

Jay Griffiths
Jay Griffiths

The parts of Wild are Earth, Ice, Fire, Air, and Mind. Each one takes
fifty or eighty pages in the telling – and represents a year or more of
Griffiths’ life. It is an astonishing undertaking, indeed truly “elemental”.

Griffiths was a journalist, but in Wild she consciously chooses to abandon “the bounds of my tribe (physical bounds and intellectual bounds)”, preferring “the real outside”. Her descriptions are accurate, but intensely coloured by her experiences – alone on the ice or in the rain forest; in the company of the Inuit, the Aborigine, the Amazon tribes.

She is not afraid of ‘purple prose’ here and there, nor of admitting anger with white man’s racism – the despoliation of Australia, the scorn for “the idea of there being a famously large number of words for snow in Inuktitut”. For there really are many:

“When Igloolik residents were asked for [a] compilation of words for ice and snow, they provided a hundred or so.”

It really shouldn’t be a surprise – skiers know half-a-dozen words (powder, crust, firn or neve, ice, junk, sugar, slush, piste, drift, mogul …) and that is based on far less experience than the Inuit’s.

“Pukakjiujaq is hard snow turning ever so slightly soft; the
best for igloo-building because it will heat faster.”

This is precise knowledge, both on the part of the vanishing Inuit hunters – nowadays they live in heated houses in towns, with freezers and televisions – and on Griffiths’: her journalist’s eye for attributable facts serves her well. Wild is a unique book: passionate, informed, deeply-researched, intellectual, scorched by the earth’s wildest places. It’s not easy to put down.

Buy it from Amazon.com (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

Astronomy, Natural History, Wildlife

Vixen Moon

In the evening, the full moon rose between the housetops, a huge, orange-yellow circle, slightly squashed into an ellipse by refraction through the atmosphere. A thin wisp of cloud in the otherwise clear sky gave her yellow glow a ghostly appearance. The moon’s dusty ‘seas’ glowed grey-brown,  distinct in outline.

The night was warm. I rose, sticky with sweat, washed, drank, tried to sleep.

A vixen barked, once, twice, faded. I dozed, tried to dream.

The vixen returned, gave her brief yelping bark, louder, nearer, coming closer. I parted the curtain. She was running from left to right along the middle of the road, tail down, nose to ground, shoulders lower than rump, legs moving swiftly in a short trotting gait, grey-brown in the sickly yellow streetlights.

Behind her, on the far pavement, a ghostly shape similar to hers appeared and disappeared, seeming to flicker in the light, vanishing behind the parked cars, more a movement than a shape, her yearling cub, under the vixen moon.

 

Environment, Gardening, Natural History

The Foxgloves are early, the Nasturtiums flower all winter

 

Foxglove
Foxgloves, growing in a shady corner of the garden

My foxgloves are beautifully in flower. They began around the 11th of May and are now in full bloom. Most are dressed in traditional purple with the insides of the “gloves” spotted deep purple in white areas, as if the pigment had been dragged together into clumps. Some are in unspotted white: creamy when closed, dazzling greenish-white in full bloom. This is seemingly a naturally-occurring variation, with perhaps a single mutation preventing pigment development.

Nothing extraordinary there? The clue is the date. Back in the 1940s in Dorset, John Stuart Collis calmly states that Foxgloves come out in August.

The odd science of Phenology tracks the dates when natural events occur in different years, thereby building up an accurate picture of changes in many species. The idea is seen in one of the classics of natural history, Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789), which includes observations of the first Swallow to arrive, and so forth, and in some editions actual tables of phenological observations. These are described as “A comparative view of the Naturalist’s Calendar as kept at Selborne in Hampshire by the late Rev. Gilbert White MA and at Catsfield near Battle in Sussex by William Markwick Esq FLS from the year 1768 to the year 1793.”  For the record, White notes Foxglove from May 30 to June 22; Markwick notes the same species from May 23 to June 15.

So in this case the anomalous datum looks more like Collis’s than mine. Still, flowering does seem to be earlier; explanations could include that London is warmer than the countryside, that plant varieties may differ, and climate change.

Mind you, even Gilbert White would have had a hard time recording the phenology of the Nasturtium this year. Without a winter frost, which usually kills them in December, the plants survived all through the winter, and have remained in flower essentially continuously. “1 January—31 December”, I suppose.

Nasturtium
Nasturtium, all natural. The colour is as the camera saw it, and the water droplets are rain or dew, where nature left them.

 

Philosophy

Natural is Best, Isn’t it?

As I washed the dishes by hand with some very pleasant Ecover natural washing-up liquid, having cooked some natural tofu with mushrooms in cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil, served with home-grown spinach and then home-made apple pie, I reflected that “natural” is a hard-working word.

The connotations of nature are perfect for marketing. Happy cows peacefully chomp lush green grass in a rolling hill country with a tree, a winding road, a gate, a hedge, blue sky and yellow sun, at least that’s how it looks on the side of the dairy product carton. Actually the cows are probably in a shed, the fields are very likely poached, muddy and puddled by hundreds of heavy feet, the sky lead-grey, and the hedges long since grubbed out to gain the hedge-grubbing efficiency subsidy. But hey! This is marketing. Nature to the rescue! Happy cows in pretty “natural” landscapes sell more yoghurt, specially when it’s low-fat organic natural Lactobacillus bifida yoghurt.

Clearly something unnatural is going on. Are the happy cows in a “state of nature”? Hardly. They belong to a farmer, who bought them in a market, or bred them via artificial insemination, browsing the online catalogue to choose the best bull for the farm’s soil, climate and breed of cow. The cattle themselves were bred to maximise productivity through many rounds of such artificial selection by farmers and animal breeders.

Well, is the yoghurt in a state of nature, leaving aside the unnatural state of the cows it came from? Did it go sour all by itself when its Palaeolithic minders left it in a bark bucket overnight, only to discover to their astonishment the next morning that it had somehow turned solid, acquired an interesting sour taste, but was actually nicer than the milk it had replaced? Well, that may once have happened, but it certainly wasn’t how the stuff got into that carton on that supermarket shelf today.

So, why’s it called “natural” yoghurt then? Oh, you mean because it’s plain, as opposed to being full of pineapple chunks with a minty flavour? Nature = Vanilla flavour? Well, that’s a useful meaning.

But if that’s what “natural” is, why is my washing-up liquid natural? It’s scented with camomile and mango, or turnip and artichoke, or something. Surely natural would mean unscented, just as it comes. Oh, you mean it’s natural because it’s not full of synthetic chemicals, the soap is all extracted by a team of a hundred doughty washerwomen with brawny arms, pounding bales of organically-grown soapwort with lye and goat’s urine to extract the natural saponins? No? You mean the saponins were extracted in a chemical factory? Doesn’t sound terribly natural to me.

And why are we praising the benefits of natural olive oil, is it inherently better than any other oil? Sure, we now know that hydrogenated vegetable oils aren’t too clever, that was a piece of processing too far. But the olive oil has been made from trees planted in rows in an orchard, weeded, sprayed if need be, pruned, harvested. The fruits have been soaked in brine, then crushed — that’s the first extra virgin cold pressing bit — to squeeze the oil out. It’s been put in tins or bottles and carted hundreds of miles to get here. It’s as natural as the pollen in a bumblebee’s leg baskets, in fact. Not.

Well, what about the tofu, the mushrooms, the home-made apple pie? Go on, it’s your turn, work out their life-histories for yourself. I’ll return your scripts to you next week.

So why are people claiming the epithet “natural” for all sorts of things? Part of it is a more-or-less deliberate confusion with the warm feelings we have for a lovely view, a nice day in the countryside, a holiday in the mountains: nature is somehow good and right. The happy cows in the mescaline-bright mock Dorset countryside on the dairy carton are tapping into this feeling about nature. Being natural makes a product warmer, cosier, safer, more familiar: separate from the nasty cold modern world of dairy processing plants and integrated supply chains. Only it doesn’t, really.

The marketing man’s deliberate sleight-of-hand is one thing: at least we know that’s his game, and we sophisticated consumers know to discount his warm fuzzy claims, don’t we? Possibly.

But there’s a worse confusion out there. “Natural” = good, beneficial, health-giving, right, even somehow spiritual. This was the basis of the whole round-about-1900 back-to-Mother-Nature movement, in which Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach and his proto-hippies in their Himmelhof (“Heaven House”) commune went about in flowing robes, barefoot, with flowers in their hair — yeah, you thought all that began in the 1960s — seeking to absorb goodness from Nature.

Diefenbach and his communards at the Himmelhof, near Vienna, 1897-1899
Diefenbach and his communards at the Himmelhof, near Vienna, 1897-1899

Well, nature may be flowery and pretty, but pufferfish tetrodotoxin is straight from nature, and one drop will kill you. Tree-frog curare arrow-poison, that paralyses your muscles so you fall down, conscious but helpless, is totally natural too. So is tetanus toxin, and food-poisoning and clostridium gas-gangrene toxin, and so is … Oh, that wasn’t the sense you intended? You didn’t mean that Mother Nature could kill as well as give life, you wanted to focus on the positive. Right. As long as you’re clear about it.

Love of Nature, Quotation

Love of Nature is deep in England

Quote

Love of Nature is deep in England

The love of Nature is deep in England. And I think that what is behind this love is the instinct that Nature has a secret for us, and answers our questions. Take that foxglove over there… It stands singly where there had been such a wonderful display of bluebells that it then looked as if a section of the sky had been established upon earth… That foxglove with its series of petal-made thimbles held up for sale to the bees, puts me at ease upon the subject of — progress. It is quite obvious that the foxglove cannot be improved… The fact is we get perfection in this form and in that form… There is no point in our gazing raptly into the future for paradise if it is at our feet.

—John Stewart Collis, The Worm Forgives the Plough. Vintage, 2009. page 253.

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Buy it from Amazon.co.uk

Love of Nature, Quotation

In the Garden of Eden

Quote

In the Garden of Eden

The Worm Forgives the Plough, by John Stewart Collis (Vintage Classics edition)
The Worm Forgives the Plough, by John Stewart Collis (Vintage Classics edition)

I turn off the road, enter the wood, and sit down under the tree. The sun gleams upon everything, there is glittering and shining everywhere. A green caterpillar is lowered down by an invisible thread in front of me, and as it swings about, the sun shines through its transparency… A bush over there is glittering with rain-drops, little white lanterns fastened to the lower side of twigs; but if I swing my head slightly to one side, some of those lights turn colour, becoming red and purple…

We have invented a word for it: beauty. I am surrounded here with law, order, and beauty, and am myself absolutely happy here… I begin to grasp the obvious fact that this place is — perfect. And suddenly I realize where I am! I am in the Garden of Eden.

—John Stewart Collis, The Worm Forgives the Plough. Vintage, 2009. pages 232-233.

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Conservation, Environment

Irreversible Retreat: The Glaciers of West Antarctica

NASA has just announced the findings of a study of the enormous glaciers of West Antarctica. The immense ice sheet slopes down, basically smoothly, into the sea, drained by the Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith, Haynes, Pope and Kohler Glaciers. Pine Island Glacier alone stretches over an area of 160,000 square kilometres. All of them are thinning quickly, by up to a metre a year, and moving fast. Their bed is rather smooth: there is nothing to stop them continuing to thin until they collapse. When they do, the sea level all round the world will rise by 1.2 metres — four feet: enough to overwhelm many existing coastal cities. Worse, there are other glaciers which may do the same, adding more metres of sea level rise. The scientists state unequivocally that this is now irreversible, past the point of no return, a runaway process. There’s no diplomatic hedging and statistical mumbling: the analysis of forty years of data is about as conclusive as science can get. The line where the Pine Island Glacier meets the sea and starts to float has retreated, not a little bit here and there but tens of kilometres, as the sea melts the front of the ice, and the rest of it thins and accelerates. It’s certainly going to collapse, probably in the next few centuries.

This blog is intended to celebrate nature, to delight in its beauty and endless variety: the Web equivalent of going for a fine airy walk in the hills, a stroll by the river with binoculars and notebook, an hour in a flowery meadow stalking butterflies with a macro lens. Fun, flowers and fabulous insects, in a word.

But while celebrating nature, it is impossible not to notice that something is going terribly wrong in this Garden of Eden. Forests are being cut down. Whole populations of fish are being scooped from the sea: one of the greatest of all of them, the Atlantic Cod of the Newfoundland Grand Banks, has completely collapsed and despite years of waiting with fishing abandoned, has not begun to recover. Maybe it never will. Meanwhile, the world is unquestionably warming, on the most spectacular scale imaginable. The Sahara and other deserts are growing. On all the world’s mountains (how much evidence can anyone need?), glaciers are retreating, at a speed that nobody could imagine even 30 years ago. The Arctic Ocean is opening up to shipping and mining: how much pollution and destruction will that cause? Even the fabled Northwest Passage may be open to ships, speeding trade —every cloud has a silver lining.

I said it was impossible not to notice all this. Unless you’re in denial, of course. Humans have an extraordinary capacity for denialism, if that’s a word. Men can carry on as their marriages, careers, companies, societies collapse all around them. Dictators, for instance, can bring their countries to utter ruin and bankruptcy, with bombed-out cities, millions of refugees, starving women and children, the lives of whole populations blighted, entire economies destroyed, beautiful centuries-old monuments sacred and secular smashed to dust. It all counts for nothing as long as the big man is safe in the bunker below the presidential palace, ignorant of everything, his henchmen loyal, his money hidden away.

Many plain facts about nature are denied in the face of overwhelming evidence. Rising CO2 in the atmosphere. Global warming. Climate change. Overfishing. Sea level rise. Ocean acidification. Loss of rainforests. Extinction. These things are all connected? You don’t say.

The lights in the control room are all flashing red. The klaxon is sounding. Alarms are queued on the console screens. The operators sit back quietly, chatting amongst themselves, sip drinks, flip through magazines, laugh, occasionally silence an alarm, talk about promotion opportunities, make lewd remarks about the pretty girl in Catering. They couldn’t care less. The lights always flash. It’s nice when you can turn the klaxon off. Stupid programmers. Inspectors, always complaining. Everything’s fine. Outside, fuel is spilling from a storage tank. The site’s fire service has been stood down. There’s only one fire tender, and it’s old. It will only take a spark now, it’s only a matter of time.