Category Archives: Environment

Conservation, Environment, Gardening

London Orchard Project’s 5th Birthday Party, in City Hall

City Hall and the Shard
City Hall and the Shard

In the evening I went down to Tower Hill and walked across Tower Bridge to City Hall, where the London Orchard Project was celebrating its 5th Birthday.

The City and The Tower of London: 1000 years of growth
The City and The Tower of London: 1000 years of growth

The amount of new development is a shock after the relative quiet of west London, but I had a strong feeling (presumably the City Hall architect’s intention) of being right at the centre of a great and bustling city.  Across the river is the quiet symmetry and antique military splendour of the Tower of London: it’s even beautiful in its stern way. But right next to it is the bulging, up-thrusting, grey glass, steel and concrete disharmony of the City, former giants like the NatWest tower and the Gherkin already dwarfed by newer demonstrations of financial might, brazenly shoving their manhood  up into the sky. It’s jarring.

But then, I reflected, there are Roman walls near the Tower and at the Barbican: this city is 2000 years old. It was already ancient when the Normans came and rudely shoved the White Tower with its four-square pinnacles and Might Makes Right foreign invaders’ pennants to fly high over a thoroughly defeated, despondent and disgusted Anglo-Saxon (i.e. English) nation.

Little Red Riding Hood (symbol of Idunn, goddess of Apples and fertility) would have been proud of the baskets of bright red donated fruit
Little Red Riding Hood (symbol of Idunn, goddess of Apples and fertility) would have been proud of the baskets of bright red donated fruit (image not enhanced)

Once inside City Hall, after the brisk initiation with airport-style security (at least I didn’t have to remove shoes and belt), it was down and round the ridiculously long spiral ramp – what a grotesque waste of space compared to stairs and lifts, but how distinctive also (presumably city politics takes you round and round and never seems to get anywhere, hmm), I stumbled into a meeting room decked out with fruity bunting, maps, photographs, fruit juice, cider, apples, apple cake and bowls of dried fruit and nuts.

Some of the Project's Apple Juice to try
Some of the Project’s Apple Juice to try

I learnt that London Orchard Project had been founded by two friends, Carina and Rowena, who had just realized that our parks didn’t have to consist of nothing but inedible London Plane trees and grass. They emailed a lot of people and within four days had 120 groups who wanted to join in! Since then, 12 old overgrown orchards have been saved and restored, and an extraordinary 83 new orchards have been planted all over our city: soon there will be 100. Even after 2000 years of urban growth and development, I reflected, there is still space and energy and enthusiasm and collegiality for a hundred beautiful spaces full of healthy, vigorous,  productive fruit trees.

Carina, Rowena, Lewis and Amber cutting the cake ... with a fiercely serrated pruning saw
Rowena, Kath, Carina, Merrin, Lewis and Amber cutting the cake … with a fiercely serrated pruning saw

All the talks were remarkably interesting. Lewis McNeill gave practical tips for healthy fruit trees, from pruning to fertilising, and gave away root cuttings of Comfrey, a herb which grows vigorously and gathers minerals in its leaves, making it ideal as a mulch for Apple trees. London Glider cider-makers described their first few years, going from newbies to experts: unlike beer, which you make, sell, and then do the next batch, cider is made in the autumn, sold in the spring so you need a lot of storage: they do 7,000 litres a year, the limit before paying excise duty on every litre.

Amber Alferoff, a project manager (she’s on the right of the photo) spoke on the folklore of apples – all those fertility goddesses like Astarte/Ishtar, Aphrodite, Freya, Idunn and the Roman goddess Pomona (that was an easy one) have names that mean Apple, apparently, while Adam and Eve are offered the Apple by the Snake/Dragon, a combination that goes right back to ancient Babylon long before the bible, apparently.

London Orchard Project founders Rowena and Carina cut the birthday cake
London Orchard Project founders Carina and Rowena cut the birthday cake

Carina and Rowena joined the celebrations by cutting the cake with a viciously sharp doubly-serrated 70-cm pruning saw (and the obligatory hard hat for tree work). There are 1200 volunteers; hundreds of Orchard Leaders; 50 public events; 3 tons of apples; a new apple variety, “Core Blimey”; and they even met the Queen. They worked fulltime for the project for a while but have now taken a well-deserved back seat as trustees.

In the driving seat now is Kath Rosen, Chief Executive, who spoke energetically about progress and the future, which most immediately is to start work in other cities including Manchester. That means the project has to be renamed to the Urban Orchard Project, as it’s no longer just London: growth indeed.

And Rich Sylvester, wearing quite a hat, told stories and made us sing an adapted version of ‘I’ve been a Wild Rover / For many a year’ only it was all about orchards.

But for me the most inspiring talk of the evening was given by the community team from the Orchard Estate in West Greenwich. The photographs told the story: a bleak estate of tall ugly brick-and-concrete towers surrounded by blank areas of grey concrete and dustbins. The residents never spoke to each other. Then in 2012 with the Olympics, money was on offer for a dozen projects, just a proposal was needed. They had a go and won: now there’s an outdoor gym area, popular with all ages; a large square of grass dotted with neatly mulched circles around handsome apple trees; and a veggie polytunnel and a dozen allotment plots, where neighbours come out to sit, chat and enjoy working together. The effect on wellbeing and genuine community (what an overused word that is) was immediate. Now the London Orchard Project has got them to act as tree nursery for the whole project, as they have enough land for it, and willing people too.  When they said that now they were extending the orchard with more trees every year in a new area of the estate, there was cheerful and rightly appreciative applause. We learnt, too, that visits to other orchards were always enjoyable, always a time to learn more. The name “Orchard Estate” had come, by the way, from a real orchard that the concrete had destroyed, the architect soullessly naming each hideous tower after a kind of apple – Worcester Pearmain, Egremont Russet and so on. Now, full circle, a tree of each of those varieties has been planted: all but one, now uncommon, which is being sought. Life goes on, and together, if we work as a community, we really can be in harmony with nature and each other.

 

Conservation, Environment, Love of Nature, Philosophy

Love of Nature? Man vs Nature? How Very Odd

There is something distinctly odd about the British love of nature. I mentioned the subject at a book launch the other day, and the person I was chatting to said, between sips of the very nice white wine and a nibble of the focaccia, that he thought the British were not really in love with nature any more as a personal activity, but were just consumers, passively and vicariously absorbing what is offered up as a commodity. I said that was ‘interesting’.

The ‘in love’ view of the British perhaps blends several different stereotypes. One is the obsolete stiff upper lip, the naturalist out in some far outpost of forgotten empire, enthusiastically carrying on studying phasmids like James Wood-Mason, writing obscure papers in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal for the benefit of anyone of similar inclination.

Another is the hugely enthusiastic amateur naturalist – the keen birdwatcher, entomologist or botanist with telescope, moth-trap or vasculum always to hand, hoping to add a species or two to a county list.

Yet another is the happy gardener, always outside – rain or shine – pruning, digging, composting, planting, watering, weeding.

The stereotype that my wine-sipping acquaintance had in mind was presumably rather different: couch potatoes, relaxing with a remote in the sitting-room, allowing an hour of television gardening with Monty Don or a year in the life of some wildlife area – the Canadian Rockies or the Great Barrier Reef, the Patagonian plains or the last surviving bit of the Sundarbans, or worse, all of the above, cut together by an editorial team with a high concept of Surviving Against All the Odds or something – to wash over their minds, leaving no particular trace other than a feeling of having seen a lot of colourful flickering images.

Personally, I doubt that picture is fair, though like all stereotypes it must make some contact with reality somewhere. People are all different, and everyone needs to relax sometimes.

A truth, though, that everyone who likes some kind of experience of nature, live or through book, film, photograph or website, is that if we’re studying or watching nature without doing something to help protect it, we are ignoring a very large existential threat indeed. Assuming we manage not to destroy ourselves in a nuclear war, we are going to have to work out how to survive an ecological disaster of our own making. Its epic proportions are becoming clear: the last time anything like this happened was at the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago. Whether Luis Alvarez was right that an asteroid or comet crashed into the Earth to form the Chicxulub crater, the debris thrown into the atmosphere causing something like a nuclear winter, it is certainly the case that huge numbers of species became extinct very quickly, including all the world’s large dinosaurs (yes, I know we have the birds still with us, and they’re in the dinosaur clade) along with perhaps three quarters of all other kinds of living thing.

You may perhaps feel somewhat untroubled by the idea that the world of your grandchildren might have no tigers or rhinoceroses in it; or even that there would be no areas of rainforest outside national parks – the Amazon and the forests of Sumatra and Borneo are well on the way there already.

You might be slightly less thrilled at the news that many of the world’s hotspots for variety of animals and plants will be gone completely: as South Africa becomes warmer and drier, the whole Cape region as understood by botanists will move southwards – into the ocean – and disappear forever, that incredible wealth of flowers, all those extraordinary Proteas, will remain only as a memory.

Perhaps even that isn’t too worrying, just news from a far country? Well, the sea level will rise by several metres when the Antarctic ice-cap melts, flooding coastal plains and threatening to drown many cities.

Not a problem? Global warming, whatever may have caused it, is already making deserts expand. Droughts will become year-long from California to southern Spain, Sahel to Australia. Food prices will rise drastically; wars will be fought over water and other critical resources.

Still not your problem? Farmland all across America and Europe is already denuded of crop pollinators, especially honeybees and bumblebees. Grasses like wheat and rice are not affected, but much of your food, and vital fodder crops for farm animals – from alfalfa to zucchini – is utterly dependent on pollination, and it’s in free fall.

What is all this about? How have we got into the crazy situation that half of us – some of us anyway – love the idea of nature, love to look at it (at least the pretty bits), while the rest (ok, possibly nearly everyone, whether we like nature or not) see themselves as separate from it? How separate can we be when we depend on it absolutely for the air we breathe – all the oxygen produced by green plants – and the food we eat – all our food coming from animals and plants? What are all those student notes in English literature about ‘man v nature’? We are part of nature. It isn’t even that nature is our survival blanket. We, like all other living things, are part of an ecosystem. The mosquitoes that bite you on holiday are in no doubt that you are edible. You eat chickens or carrots, beef or beans. Billions of bacteria in your gut share that food with you, consuming some, helping you absorb the rest. Eventually, bacteria will consume you, if you don’t get yourself cremated first. You are part of nature, no doubt about it.

So, how are you going to change what you do, to help keep this system working? Right now, it’s already badly broken, and getting worse each year. We haven’t got long to fix it.

Conservation, Environment

The Unchanging Woods, Maybe

You enter the wood — and you might just as well be in the Middle Ages. When I hear people speak of the Dark Ages, I remind myself how in those days the sun shone in just the same way as it does now, and the flowers glittered in woods where there was no difference from what we see today. … Inside the wood we are in the past as well as in the present.

With these thoughts, John Stewart Collis draws his book Down to Earth, now the second part of the combined volume The Worm Forgives the Plough (see my book review) to a close.

And in a way his thoughts from 1947 are still true today: nature is timeless, specially in a wood.

But in another way, the woods of 2014 are very different from those of 1947. The old practice of coppicing is all but dead: a few nature reserves struggle to practise something approaching it; enlightened landowners fell woods in patches rather than clear-felling whole landscapes, approximating the mosaic of new glades, fine old trees, brushwood, young trees and woodland edges bursting with songbirds that characterise true coppice. Often, in the old way of things, coppicing deliberately left behind a few ‘standards’ here and there, fine straight oaks or other hardwoods to grow large timbers for building ships or roof beams. Now, woods are more likely to be managed industrially for timber, or are sadly neglected with ivy on every trunk, brambles all around the forest floor.

Reeves' Muntjac, introduced from China, are now widespread across Britain and Europe
Reeves’ Muntjac, introduced from China, are now widespread across Britain and Europe

And it gets worse. Where Collis took for granted that woods in springtime saw the primrose, then the bluebell, with here and there an orchid, our wild flowers have declined markedly for reasons to do with human interference. Visitors from the cities pick nice-looking flowers, or dig them up to plant in their gardens. Accidental introductions of deer, especially the Muntjac, graze native flowers down to nothing. Many flowers listed in field guides as common are becoming hard to find outside nature reserves.

Numbers of deer in general, including our native Roe and Fallow, are increasing (and they are spreading into the suburbs) as gamekeeping declines. Since all our large native predators like bear, wolf, lynx, wolverine have long ago been hunted to extinction, there is nothing but human hunting to control deer numbers, and current levels of hunting are insufficient. Maybe George Monbiot is right: our woods need rewilding.

 

Conservation, Environment, Natural History, Nature Reserves

Gypsy Moth plague

The Gypsy Moth, Lymantria dispar, is  a notifiable pest listed by DEFRA, or at least it was when that document was published back in 1997. The insect was announced to be “a serious pest of trees and shrubs” and nurserymen and landholders were required to notify DEFRA or the PHSI HQ immediately.

Gypsy Moth caterpillar on birch trunk
Gypsy Moth caterpillar on birch trunk: blue warts at front, red warts at back. The black-and-white pattern may also be aposematic

It has arrived in the Gunnersbury Triangle with the hairy dark caterpillar larvae with blue and red warts on their backs all over some Birch trees. The infestation is rapidly defoliating them, and causing substantial damage to some Oaks too.

Lymantria means ‘destroyer’, quite a well-named genus. The caterpillars are aposematic, their hairs and bright coloration warning off predators; the hairs are irritant, containing diterpenes, complex organic ring compounds found in wood and plant resins for defence against microbes and fungi, and retained by the caterpillars for defence against predators.

It will be interesting to see how the trees cope. Oaks can generally recover even when thoroughly defoliated; the Birches may suffer more. People can hardly use pesticides in the nature reserve, even given the means to spray whole trees safely, but biological controls are imaginable. The caterpillars are parasitised by Ichneumon flies, which may well be keeping Gypsy Moths under some sort of control in Europe. There were no controls in place to halt the spread of Gypsy Moth in America, however, where the pest was accidentally introduced in 1869 from Europe by the amateur entomologist Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. He was hoping to cross-breed them with silkworms to improve their disease resistance; he is remembered instead for starting a disastrous continent-wide caterpillar plague which still continues. Attempts with other pest species to introduce their predators or parasites have often proved unsuccessful and sometimes disastrous in their turn.

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

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.

 

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.

 

 

Environment, Nature Reserves

The Ghettoisation of Nature

I suppose you are familiar with the ghettoisation of Britain’s towns and cities. To take a few rather random examples, Bath, Bradford-on-Avon, Edinburgh, Marlborough and Oxford are seen as ‘nice’ (terrible word),  become populated with the middle class, Waitrose, estate agents and boutique shops, and suffer enormous rises in house prices, while nearby places are seen as less desirable, acquire sink housing estates, crime, and scruffy concrete jungles where once there were perfectly decent town centres. Areas of London do the same, but in a more rapidly shifting way, as the sheer pressure of population, and the desperate shortage of housing, forces people into scruffier areas which thus become ‘gentrified’ (though hardly by landed gentry, actually).

Perhaps the ghettoisation of nature is a little less familiar. As a boy, I was allowed out to go and do as I pleased in between meals (ah, those happy days when we didn’t know about paedophile celebrities: mind you, nobody is actually suggesting they stalked the countryside attacking random children, they had more subtle means of approach. But I digress).  We used to go down the stream and build dams — the farmer never seemed to mind, and I guess our small engineering works of sticks, mud and stones never lasted long. It was tremendous fun watching the water well up, and exciting to run for more materials as the level rose and the water found new places to escape; I don’t think we ever tried to construct an intentional spillway anywhere. Or we wandered out in autumn to gather blackberries, returning with heavy plastic bags full of the squashy fruit, demanding blackberry-and-apple pie for supper like latter-day Peter Rabbit siblings. We scarcely remarked on the Yellowhammers in every hedge, Song Thrushes in the woods, Lapwings, Skylarks and Grey Partridges in the open fields: they were just there. There were Spotted Flycatchers, Swifts and House Martins nesting in the village, too; we noticed these last as the upstairs windows couldn’t be opened for months to avoid breaking their nests.

Leaving aside whether parents will allow children to go out unsupervised nowadays — kids have to learn to take care of themselves eventually, and the sooner they learn to be sensible, the better, specially if they have fun and play adventurously at the same time, a visit to the countryside today will, on average, involve less than half as many farmland birds as in 1970, and far fewer than that in the case of Lapwings, Skylarks and Grey Partridges. The countryside has emptied of birds — and of bumblebees and primroses and much else.

Instead, if you want to see Nature (the capital letter is intentional) you go to an official Nature Reserve. If you want to see a traditional village you study the web or the official Heritage handbook, fuel the car, pack a picnic, and travel to the official Heritage site, or rather to the official Heritage car-park complete with high-visibility-jacketed attendants and ticket machines, and walk down the officially landscaped path (keep off the official bit of woodland with bulbs underfoot to the officially declared bit of Heritage. It looks pretty attractive, but for the hordes of amateur photographers taking pictures of hordes of amateur photographers, ice-cream lickers, picnickers, dog-walkers, beer-swillers and motorcycle enthusiasts (why do oily chains, throbbing Harley-Davidsons and polished chrome go with pretty places? Answers on a postcard, please) in every street.

The official Nature Reserve also has a car park, which is at least generally free, at least to members. There is a big official sign with a colourful map, sometimes painted with happy butterflies, frogs, foxes and woodpeckers — the more conspicuously coloured species seem to be favoured in this form of natural selection, perhaps aposematism has something to do with it. There are quite often free maps and nature trails, even colouring sheets and clipboards for crayon-carrying children. Sometimes the trees and flowers are officially labelled as well, complete with Heritage notes about what Comfrey used to be grown for in the days when real people lived in the countryside (it was to help healing of bones, if you’re curious), or what Hazel coppicing was and why it was practised (tufts of small straight flexible wands, cut and used to make hurdles to fence in animals temporarily, and so on).

All of this effort is quite admirable in its way: relaxation, getting out of the house for the day, being together as a family, learning a little history, a little about nature.  But what has been lost in the process is more striking: freedom, simple personal discovery and exploration (think blackberry-picking, dam-building, just coming across birds singing and bees buzzing). Don’t get me wrong, given the lack of nature in ordinary farmland there is a pressing need to rescue at least some areas of habitat; and given people’s cramped urban lives, it’s right they have some attractive places to visit. All the same, Nature, like Heritage, is being ghettoised. The process has not yet run to completion in Britain — there are still magnificent areas of mountain, moorland and coast where you can wander free of twee signs and uniformed attendants — but the paraphernalia are spreading: you can find them on Access Land in Northumberland, for instance.

As Joni Mitchell sang long ago, “Take all the trees / Put ’em in a tree museum. Charge all the people / A dollar and a half just to see ’em. Don’t it always seem to go / But you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. / They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.”

 

Conservation, Environment, Love of Nature, Quotation

An Innate Need to be in Contact with Nature

Quote

An Innate Need to be in Contact with Nature

Without wishing to question the wisdom of the Ancient Greeks, with their six kinds of love, I do think they missed out one of the most crucial varieties. And that is love for the natural world, for the wilds from which we sprung and of which we are still — though we may fight against the idea — a part.

I am drawn to the concept of ‘biophilia’, the idea that we have an innate need to be in contact with nature. It strikes me that the word could be used to express the seventh variety of love. Clearly we need those other varieties — erotic love, the love of friends, playful love, pragmatic love, self-love and universal love. But I believe we also need love of nature.

—Hugh Warwick, The Beauty in the Beast: Britain’s Favourite Creatures and the People Who Love Them.  Simon & Schuster, 2012. page 305.

Buy it from Amazon.com
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk

Environment, Nature Reserves, Wildlife

Star Species of a Seven-Warbler Walk was … Skylark

I did wonder, before I began writing a nature journal here, whether half the entries wouldn’t be ‘nothing much to report today’. Well, so far I haven’t been there.

I went down to Wraysbury again in the hope of finding the Lesser Whitethroat. I arrived rather early, driving out of town only to see a gigantic queue of cars crawling in the other way, trying vainly to beat the Tube strike. No-one was about as I wrapped up in an extra pullover and listened intently to the morning chorus.

My day was already made when I actually SAW a Cetti’s Warbler – for about a second, before the rich brown bird with the rounded tail dived for cover. A Cormorant flapped heavily, taking off from the lake like a lumbering military transport, showing glossy blue-black plumage like a giant crow, circling three times to gain height. Two pairs of Gadwall (only one pair last time) swam shyly near the far side of the lake; Green Woodpeckers laughed their loud ringing call.

Comfrey flowerhead just starting
Comfrey flowerhead just starting

Blackcaps were singing all over; Song Thrushes too, at least three of them; a considerable flock of Long-Tailed Tits made their extraordinary “Tsrrrrrp” noise (try it); Chiffchaffs spoke their name, and (Common) Whitethroats sang their rasping songs or chattered from inside their thornbushes. Great clumps of Comfrey, the medicinal herb used in mediaeval times to knit bones, have suddenly sprung up with their dark, foxglove-like leaves and clusters of flowers in a range of anthocyanin colours – reds and violets.

There were more Willow Warblers and Garden Warblers, too, making them easier to find; more must be arriving each day now.

Whitethroat habitat
Whitethroat habitat: Hawthorn bushes in damp open scrubland

I made my way over the bridge and out into the dry scrubland. Whitethroats were all around now, singing competitively; a few Blackcaps joined in. Then, yes, I heard the simple, flat trill of a Lesser Whitethroat. I sat down and listened, heard it a few more times to make sure: it was a Seven Warbler Walk, I think actually my first, at least when I’ve taken the trouble to count them and write them down. I took a swig of water; an Orange Tip and a Brimstone butterfly flickered past.

DSCN0214 Roe Deer slots (with penny for scale)
Roe Deer slots (with penny for scale)

Looking about the bushes carefully, I noticed a trail of Roe Deer prints, medium and small. Their numbers have been increasing steadily, certainly since 2007, and they are close to becoming a nuisance. About 350,000 are culled each year; another 74,000 or so are killed on the roads, without limiting their growth. Clearly we need some predators, though what our farmers would say to having Lynx back, let alone Wolverines, is easy to imagine.  Where they are most numerous, woodland shrub vegetation and bird numbers are suffering.

On the way out, some Goldfinches sang near the road, and a Swallow flew overhead by the river Colne. I felt I’d had a good day, and braced myself for a tricky drive home. On a whim, I went via the airport road. It’s a bit slow but not uninteresting, and there’s a nice tunnel. Waiting at one of the sets of lights, I opened the window, and at once heard a Skylark singing its rippling song. I looked up, and there it was for a moment, a little flickering dark shape against the bright sky, pouring out its aerial music. The lights changed, and a jet growled in to land, the air whistling over its fully-extended flaps.

Fancy, a Skylark at Heathrow, seen and heard from a car, the highlight of a seven-warbler walk, Lesser Whitethroat and all.