Every evening, I watch the BBC News to get the latest data
on COVID-19, supplemented by images of patients in intensive care, and knowing
that their numbers are increasing. It’s grim for all of us and, as I have a
temperament like A. A. Milne’s Eeyore, I feel a strong need to escape from the
current situation. I do this by reading and by walking.
Taking a break from a succession of novels by Anthony Trollope,
I have thoroughly enjoyed “The Consolation of Nature: Spring in the Time of Coronavirus”
by Michael McCarthy, Jeremy Mynott and Peter Marren [1]. The three authors all
write beautifully about their observations of Nature, set against the backdrop of
the first wave of the pandemic. This coincided with the glorious weather of
Spring 2020 and the book ends with the easing of lockdown and the transition
into summer.
Michael lives near Kew, Jeremy in Suffolk and Peter in
Wiltshire and they all kept diaries of the local walks they made; entries being
edited during joint sessions held to fit the publishing schedule. As Jeremy writes
in a splendid blog post on the “Winged Geographies” website [2]:
There was another, self-imposed
intensity to the writing, since we agreed with a publisher at the outset that
we would deliver a complete typescript in June if they would publish it in October,
a demanding schedule that had us every day walking out from our front doors to
see what we encountered, notebooks in hand, writing up our discoveries later,
and then sharing our copy every evening for some rapid and ruthless joint
editing. In the event, working so fast was surprisingly liberating – our experiences
not so much ‘recollected in tranquillity’ but penned with an al fresco
spontaneity.
Jeremy’s post also provides an excellent taster for the book.
I love the enthusiasm expressed in “The Consolation of Nature” (even forgiving the
occasional lapses into anthropomorphism) and I wish I had the skill of the three
authors in being able to identify all that they saw, especially the birds. As
they remark, many birds are identified by their song and, unfortunately, this
is something that I never learned and never will learn, as I am now rather deaf
to high frequency sounds. I can recognise the commoner birds by sight, and was
able to identify most of the butterflies and some of the wild flowers that I
saw in the warm spring, but it was the smells of the walks that most affected me.
The scent of honeysuckle always bowls me over and Michael describes the familiar
aroma of elderflowers and Peter the characteristic smell of privet, the latter
always taking me back to the warm days of my childhood and walking through the local
park to go trainspotting. That association works every time for me.
Some sections of “The Consolation of Nature” had a special
appeal for me and these are given below in the form of a dialogue. They are
just a small selection of my responses to the many delightful observations in
the book. The initials of the author of each quote are given, together with my
comment:
JM – [In discussing the names of
moths] …you can have a pretty good evening just reading the index of a moth
fieldguide!… …it will be a spiritual tragedy if we risk losing, along with the
moths, this treasury of the most extraordinary and beautiful names given to any
animal group.
RW – Agreed, but among many other
groups, I think the extraordinary and beautiful names of sea anemones run those
of moths very close [3].
PM – [Who has chalk streams in his
walking “patch”] In chalk streams, most of the small life of the river clings
to the underside of stones, or finds other refuges in the waterweed – our champion
ranunculus, which puts forth its gorgeous yellow-centred white blossom in May
(its botanical name is the stream water-crowfoot).
RW – I also live within walking distance
of chalk streams (that are very rare worldwide). In addition, I have been
involved in a research project that investigated “ecological engineering” by Ranunculus.
Individual stands of water crowfoot alter the pattern of flow in streams and
this serves to keep the finely-divided leaves at the margins clean, while
sediment builds up under the plant to provide nutrients. The leaves of each
stand are also colonised by huge numbers of tiny invertebrates that transform
organic matter, so each plant is a mini-ecosystem of its own.
PM – [On a visit to a spring
feeding a chalk stream]. I fish about in the gravel bed to see what is living
in these gin-clear cold springs. Looking down on it, you would think the water
to be near lifeless, but remove some of the stones into an enamel dish and life
appears, scuttling, wriggling, crawling, or, in the case of the tiny black
limpets anchored to the flints, just sitting there. There are caddis cases
attached to the stones, a few young stonefly nymphs with their double-pronged
tails, and numerous shrimps, named Gammarus pulex from their resemblance
to Pulex, the flea. There are also skeletons of last year’s leaves, as
black as Florentine lace.
RW – As we are terrestrial animals,
we are not familiar with aquatic life, whether marine of freshwater. As Peter
points out, taking some stones from a stream and placing them in a dish of
water shows us what is living there. The limpets move slowly over the surface using
a rasping tongue to feed on algae and bacterial biofilm adhering to the rock. Stonefly
nymphs are either predators or feeders on detritus, and the freshwater shrimps,
often very abundant indeed. feed mainly on decaying vegetation – contributing to
the lacy appearance of the leaves provided by the strengthened veins that are less
favoured in the diet of the shrimps. Gammarus is found throughout the
year, so what sustains the high population densities, other than the supply of vegetation
in autumn? I think I know the answer, but interested readers should seek out research
papers on the topic to find out more (with apologies for the sense of mystery).
PM – [Describing his observation of
“pond slime” using a binocular microscope]. I have to say that, even as pond
slime goes, this isn’t prime material. This is very low-grade gunk. The delight
I used to take in microscopy as a boy was in large part due to its revelation
of beauty in surprising places. There are wonders in the leg of a flea, the
tongue of a fly, even the guts of a worm. The disgusting sludge on your slide
dissolves into a microcosm, the world of single cells, shaped like stars. bananas,
violins, boats (one of the commonest algae is Navicula, the ‘little ship’).
RW – I spent much of my research career
looking at material using a binocular microscope. Not only did that provide
insights into a world hidden to the naked eye, but it also enabled measurements
to be made and, after various stains were used, the ability to see the location
of materials on/in the bodies of organisms and in the slime to which Peter
refers. Then, a compound microscope allowed observation of organisms and detritus at a
yet finer scale, including bacteria and other microorganisms. When I retired, I
decided to leave that world behind and I have rarely used a microscope since.
What I can never forget is all that accumulated knowledge and I carry it with
me on walks. It gives me a sense of understanding of what might be going on at
a very fine level and adds a great deal to my enjoyment of Nature – alongside the
birds, insects, wild flowers, trees and all the rest. As readers of “Walking
with Gosse” will know, I was introduced to microscopy as a boy and was delighted to
spend half hours in the tiny world, to quote the title of a book published at
the end of the 19th Century. That century saw the development of the passion
for natural history, and books by some talented authors, of whom Michael, Peter and
Jeremy are the literary descendants.
JM – [When considering the world
of fungi] People sometimes recoil from fungi, because of their associations
with decomposition and their other-worldly appearances, but they play a crucial
role in the world’s nutrient cycles and ecology.
RW – Much of the folklore associated
with fungi comes from our observations of fruiting bodies and most of us know
little about the mass of filaments that form the mycelium. Yet it is these filaments
that are involved in decomposition and there are very many fungi that do not
have obvious fruiting bodies. Together with the bacteria, they are the great
decomposers and, as Jeremy says, they have a vital role to play in the turnover
of organic matter. It is the colonisation of dead leaves by decomposers that
makes them attractive as food for animals like Gammarus and many terrestrial
invertebrates and they, in turn produce masses of faecal pellets. If decomposition
incites recoil in people, a consideration of faeces does so even more. Yet our
compost heaps contain extraordinary numbers of pellets and it is these, together
with their colonising microorganisms, that provide many nutrients for growing plants.
MM – Beauty right in front of me,
beauty in the distance – it is a fitting end to the coronavirus spring, the loveliest
spring that ever was. I have never looked so closely at nature before, and I
think I have learned something worthwhile: the more you observe it, the more
there is to observe, and you realise that the richness of it is infinite.
RW – I agree so much with this statement
in the coda of “The Consolation of Nature”. We are discovering more and more,
yet that makes us realise that we know only a smaller and smaller fraction of
what is out there – the infinite to which Michael refers. Towards the end of my
research career, I realised that I could never get answers to the myriad of
questions that I had about how ecosystems actually “worked”. It was humbling
and I turned to other types of research, but I will always be a natural historian
and my knowledge accompanies me on my solitary walks. There is so much to see,
hear and smell throughout the year.
Reading “The Consolation of Nature” in this second, major wave of COVID-19 makes it easy to conjure up how we felt in the first half of 2020. We have yet to have the warm and sunny days described and, indeed, the bleakness of the data on the pandemic are matched by the current bleakness of the landscape. Yet there is still much to see and I walk as regularly now as I did then. Solitary walks in nature have always appealed to me and I know of their beneficial effects [4]. However, there are occasional disappointments. The image below was taken in one of the country lanes that is part of a favourite walk of mine and, on seeing the fly-tipped refuse, I initially felt anger that then softened as I walked on. Maybe it was a case of “out of sight out of mind”, but I certainly remembered the unsightly mess and I wonder whether the people who dumped it have any appreciation of Nature at all? Our local Council is good at cleaning up this kind of mess (unfortunately, it occurs fairly often) but, even if they didn’t, plants, animals and microorganisms would get to work on it and either decompose the contents or hide their presence.
As I wait, with millions of others, for vaccination and the
first signs of the Spring so well described by McCarthy, Mynott and Marren, there’s
still an exhilaration in solitary walks and also in the simple pleasure of
watching birds in the garden. A consolation indeed and I’m lucky to be aware of
so many aspects of Nature and yet so few. It keeps “Eeyoreness” at bay.
[1] Michael McCarthy. Jeremy Mynott and Peter Marren (2020) The
Consolation of Nature: Spring in the time of Coronavirus. London, Hodder
& Stoughton.
[2] https://www.wingedgeographies.co.uk/post/the-consolation-of-nature-spring-in-the-time-of-coronavirus
[3] https://rwotton.blogspot.com/2019/09/pufflets-pimplets-and-muzzlets-gosse.html
[4] https://rwotton.blogspot.com/2014/10/solitary-walks-in-nature.html
