Natural history and COVID-19

 

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

 

A moving discovery in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum

Father and Son by Edmund Gosse is an account of the author’s difficult relationship with his father, the distinguished Natural Historian Philip Henry Gosse. It is regarded by many as an important work of English literature, despite Edmund’s reputation for inaccuracy, and is available as a Penguin Classic. The different personalities, and beliefs, of the two men caused a rift between them, but Edmund acknowledges that there was a time when they were very close.

After the death of his wife, Emily, in 1857, Henry Gosse moved to Torquay with Edmund on 23rd September, two days after the boy’s eighth birthday. They lived in a new villa, named Sandhurst, and this had the advantage of being close to the sea and in an area with which Henry had become familiar on previous visits. If the grief of bereavement wasn’t enough to bear, there was also the hostile response to Henry’s book Omphalos, published in November 1857. This was an attempt to reconcile the developing ideas of geological time scales with the account of Creation in the book of Genesis in The Holy Bible, and it pleased neither the religious, or scientific, communities. It is little wonder that the two were drawn closely together and they spent much time collecting animals along the shore, many of which were brought back to Sandhurst and kept in tanks. As Ann Thwaite writes in her biography of Edmund [1]:

Day after day,..the middle-aged widower and the small boy combed the rock pools at Anstey’s Cove, at Oddicombe, at Petit Tor, or took longer excursions to Maiden Combe northwards or Livermead to the south. Edmund was ‘his constant and generally his only companion’.

When Henry was away from Torquay giving lectures, there was a loving correspondence between them, with hugs and kisses sent by both [2]. Then, on Henry’s return, the visits to the shore could re-commence. Once material had been collected, Henry became absorbed in studying them and in making illustrations that would lead to further books. While Henry was busy, Edmund used a small room at the top of the house as his own “study”. He modelled himself on his father and this is what he wrote [3]:

I, the son of a man who looked through a microscope and painted what he saw there, would fain observe for myself, and paint my observations. It did not follow, alas! that I was built to be a miniature-painter or a savant, but the activity of a childish intelligence was shown by my desire to copy the results of such energy as I saw nearest at hand.

In the secular direction, this now took the form of my preparing little monographs on seaside creatures, which were arranged, tabulated and divided as exactly as possible on the pattern of those which my Father was composing for his Actinologica Brittanica. I wrote these out upon sheets of paper of the same size as his printed page, and I adorned them with water-colour plates, meant to emulate his precise and exquisite illustrations. One or two of these ludicrous pastiches are still preserved, and in glancing at them now I wonder, not at any skill that they possess, but at the perseverance and the patience, the evidence of close and persistent labour. I was not set to these tasks by my Father, who, in fact, did not much approve of them. He was touched, too, with the ‘originality’ heresy, and exhorted me not to copy him, but to go out into the garden or the shore and describe something new, in a new way. That was quite impossible; I possessed no initiative. But I can now well understand why my Father, very indulgently and good-temperedly, deprecated these exercises of mine. They took up, and, as he might well think, wasted, an enormous quantity of time; and they were, moreover, parodies, rather than imitations, of his writings,..

Of these efforts by Edmund, Ann Thwaite writes [2]:

It was his greatest pleasure to imitate his father and produce little learned treatises of his own. They were for his father, as is obvious in one of his booklets on butterflies, written and illustrated when he was ten. Under the ‘Green veined White’ he has written: ‘It is common in most places in England, and has been taken in Newfoundland, (by yourself), Europe generally and Siberia.’

While examining the collection of art works by Henry Gosse held by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, Holly Morgenroth and I discovered one of the sheets of butterfly illustrations made by Edmund (see above). On the reverse, several of the butterflies are named in Edmund's handwriting and, at the bottom of the sheet, Henry wrote “By EWG in the spring of 1859”, so we know that Edmund was 9½ years old when the illustrations were made. They copy the style of unpublished work by Henry Gosse in Entomologia Terra Novae [4], a page from which is shown below. Henry made these paintings in 1833, when he was 23 years old, and they show well his accuracy and love of settings, in this case vegetation. Edmund is likely to have seen these illustrations and they probably formed the basis for his own efforts. Did Henry label, and keep, the sheet by Edmund because it reminded him of his early days, despite his reservations about its quality?

When looking at Edmund’s illustrations in the Museum in Exeter, it was impossible not to feel close to the story of Henry and Edmund in the late 1850s. In October 1859, Edmund was baptised as a member of the Brethren, fulfilling the last wish of his mother and an ever-present wish of his father, both being devout believers. In many ways, this marked a turning point, for it was the rigidity of Henry’s Christian faith, together with developing personality differences, that began the breakdown of the relationship between father and son. The sheet that Holly and I found in the Gosse collection at RAMM is a memento of an earlier, warmly affectionate, time and it is painful to know what was to come.

[1] Ann Thwaite (1984) Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape. London, Secker and Warburg.

[2] Ann Thwaite (2002) Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse 1810-1888. London, Faber and Faber.

[3] Edmund Gosse (1907) Father and Son: A Study Of Two Temperaments. London, William Heinemann.

[4] https://canadianmuseumofnature.wordpress.com/2014/04/11/a-rare-19th-century-manuscript-chronicles-the-quest-of-an-amateur-naturalist/

The illustration of the sheet by Edmund Gosse is reproduced with permission. ©The Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. Thanks to Holly Morgenroth, the Curator of Natural History, for letting me see the works by Henry and Edmund Gosse that led to this blog post.

Nature Printing

Many Natural Historians in the Nineteenth Century faced a challenge when illustrating their work. Unless they were gifted painters, like John James Audubon or Philip Henry Gosse, they could either make “word pictures” of what they saw, or produce sketchy illustrations. Of course, they could commission an artist to produce work, but this could never have the personal touch conveyed by the Natural Historians themselves. Drawing and painting skills could be acquired, but constant practice and the development of technique was then needed. Even with this practice, success depended on talent, both for observation and for the meticulous use of brushes, pens or other tools.

In the age of digital photography we can all produce excellent images of plants and animals, although not all of us have the eye of someone like Matt Coors, and we can use photomicroscopes and electron microscopes to obtain images of minute objects. In earlier times we had photographic film, the first being produced in 1884, and before that plates had to be used. Plate cameras required long exposures and were therefore not suitable for obtaining images of moving objects, or even those which swayed gently in the breeze, and certainly not those which were only a short distance from the observer.

One solution to the problem of illustration for the Nineteenth Century Natural Historian was the development of Nature Printing, especially for producing images of butterflies and moths. These insects were collected enthusiastically by explorers, missionaries and colonisers, resulting in pinned collections of dead insects in drawer after drawer of cabinets, or mounted into an artistic display. We are all familiar with herbarium collections of dried plants and the use of pressed flowers in illustration but they are not permanent, whereas Nature Prints are. They provided descriptions of butterflies and moths for those who could not visit museums and other collections to see preserved specimens, and adherents of the technique believed it was superior to any painting or drawing.

A handbook for those interested in Nature Printing butterflies and moths was published by “A.M.C.” in 1879.¹ He details five separate methods, the best known of which is the Gum Process, which had its origins in the preparations made by French missionaries in India. Firstly, a piece of high quality paper is folded and the inner surface coated with Gum Arabic (“the very best and clearest which can be had”) using a finger. The wings are then cut from butterflies (or moths) and laid on the paper which is then re-folded to ensure that each side of the wing is attached to the glue. Then begins a lengthy rubbing process to ensure adhesion of the scales and this ends with a rapid pulling apart of the folded paper. The wing membrane should now remain, with the scales of the upper and lower surface stuck into the gum. After drying, the paper is cut around the outline of the wings and each preparation is then ready for mounting.

Wonderful examples of Nature Printing are given in Joseph Merrin’s book Butterflying with the poets; a picture of the poetical aspect of butterfly life ² produced in 1864, thirteen years before A.M.C.’s handbook. Thanks to Valerie McAtear, the Librarian of the Royal Entomological Society of London, I was able to look closely at a copy of this book and also take photographs, a selection of which is shown below.

Merrin mounted each paper outline and then used pressed bodies of the butterflies to give a “realistic” appearance, although the antennae were drawn in ink in all the illustrations. It is a lovely book and the author writes:

... the process of Nature-Printing, as applicable to the Lepidoptera, which the Author has improved, rend[ers] possible the permanent transfer to paper of the scales, and consequently the colours, of the insects themselves. By this means all the delicate varieties of shade, marking, and colour are faithfully preserved, and a brilliant reality given to the representation, of which the most carefully finished portrait of the artist would be deficient. The number of specimens obtainable is, however, so limited, and the manipulative labour required to prepare the impressions from them so great, that the price of any work giving this novel and beautiful species of illustration, must necessarily be high and the numbers of copies executed very limited.

So, there we have the downside of using the technique and we can only wonder at the industry and patience that must have been required; all for little gain in terms of the few books produced. It makes handling a volume like Merrin’s a privilege, especially in our current age of instant, high-quality illustrations.

¹ “A.M.C.” (1879) A guide to nature-printing. Butterflies and Moths. [Read in facsimile edition published in 2010 by General Books.]

² Joseph Merrin (1864) Butterflying with the poets; a picture of the poetical aspect of butterfly life. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green.