My Natural History (2 page)

It was in such places I found myself whenever times were hard at Sunnyhill. Oh, not hard as many people know it: it was hardly Dickensian. Mrs Watson never hit me: no doubt she had more sense than to try it on with boys with middle-class parents. Or maybe she knew she didn’t need to. No matter. She was a vile woman: but I was able to rise above her. The point is not my childish
tribulations
; but that I was able to soar away from them on the wings of a greater horseshoe bat. The bats, the shells, the dinosaurs, all the billion billion creatures that had ever
populated the earth and my imagination – I didn’t come to them because I needed consolation in hard times. I already had them. The refuge they provided from the Watsons and the Millers of this world was just a bonus. I didn’t turn to wildlife because I was bullied and oppressed, I turned to wildlife out of love, and love helped me in a bad time, as love will. But love is far more than comfort. I was to learn that lesson more thoroughly as time passed, but I already knew the basics. There was more than mere escape here: there was also meaning, purpose, beauty and, especially, love. I reached these things through the power of the wild world and through the power of my imagination. And so far as I was concerned, the two things were indivisible.

2. Indri

I
ndri indri

M
r Gray wasn’t my favourite teacher. I only saw him for things like Chess Club and School Play. But there were other wonderful teachers, and their mark is on me. S Vere Benson, for example. Not that I ever met her. But hers is a name that rings for ever in the minds of
birdwatchers
of a certain age. She wrote
The Observer’s Book of Birds
, and for years, it was the only readily obtainable book of bird identification. It was first published in 1937, sold three million copies and had a shelf-life of half a
century
. It originally cost half a crown, or 12.5p if you must; by the time my father bought me mine, it was five shillings or 25p. I treasured it like a Gutenberg bible, finger pondered it nightly until I knew it by heart. It was the essential book in my life. Every illustration was like a
revelation of the divine vision. By the time I was ten, I had to buy a new copy, because I read the old one to bits.

I was always poor at arithmetic; my natural ineptitude combined with the teaching of Mrs Holland was a fatal combination. It was decided at home that I must “learn my tables”; that is to say, to get the multiplication tables by heart. My father wrote them out for me in his speculative italic hand, and I duly learned them. I still know them: if you ever want to know what nine eights are, you have only to ask. It was a triumph of corruption: I pulled off this feat because I had been bribed. I was entitled to choose any book in the world, other than, I suppose, a Gutenberg bible. I acquired something far more precious:
A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe
by Roger Tory Peterson, Guy Mountfort and PAD Hollom: a trio of teachers that made me forget Mrs Watson and all her works.

I read this to shreds also. It had far more birds than
The Observer’s Book
: nearly three times as many. S Vere Benson described 243; Roger Tory Peterson and his pals told me about a mind-spinning 500-plus, and then went on to talk about more than 100 accidentals. So many birds! Birds and birds and birds: I had not thought life had created so many. I knew about buzzard, of course, “easily recognised by its mewing cry”; and S Vere had mentioned rough-legged buzzard in a throwaway paragraph. But now I could learn about honey buzzard and long-legged buzzard as well, and
pore over many pictures of every species: so many
buzzards
! So many different kinds of legs! And how could anyone tell these buzzards from Bonelli’s eagle and booted eagle and short-toed eagle? How could you see an eagle’s toes? I knew about golden eagle: but now I had to wonder: was imperial eagle still better? I mused on the question night after night, turning the pages. I thought I was
learning
about birds: in truth, I was, for the first time,
beginning
an understanding of a subject that in those days didn’t even have a name. Despite that, it had me enthralled then, as it has enthralled me all my life. I was learning the greatest lesson of my life, and it was not arithmetic and not the recorder. The name of the subject is biodiversity.

Those accidentals, they were the most marvellous thing of all. Time and again, I would turn to the terse paragraph that described wandering albatross
Diomedea exulans
: “Largest ocean bird (11 ft wing-span). Mainly white, black wing-tips…” Imagine that. Imagine seeing one. And
imagine
I did: my imagination was haunted by birds, and
particularly
the wandering albatross. In the
Field Guide
, all the birds described fully and illustrated had been “
officially
recorded” in Europe at least 20 times. An accidental was, I learned, a bird that had made even fewer
appearances
. In other words, it was very, very rare: so rare it hardly existed. So rare it was almost a myth. It was a bird that nobody would ever see, a bird of the imagination. Naturally, I looked for the wandering albatross all the
time: off the shore at Southsea and Paignton, but without any expectation at all of seeing one. I just looked out and imagined: and look! There it was! Coming in past the pier, or perhaps cruising over from Torquay, a nonchalant
master
of the winds and the waves, banking with airy grace on its giant wings, and I alone was there to understand. But I don’t think it was the glory of seeing one that really
mattered
to me. It was the glory of being one. I too was an albatross, I too was an Accidental, I too was a rare being, I too was to be treasured in my wandering isolation.

Rare, rare. The more precious because rare: the more precious because so few. I hadn’t grasped the point that albatrosses are rarely seen in Britain and Europe because their heartland is the Southern Ocean; that their only
reason
for coming so far north is, indeed, accidental. The poor things only come here when they get lost. But I
preferred
the idea of a mighty bird of devastating fragility: a magnificent warlord in need of protection: a vulnerable conquistador: a glorious oxymoron. I believed that there were just a few lone birds sadly and patiently working the endless seas on their enormous wings: unicorns with feathers, birds that told us humans of better times,
long-lost
times when there were more beautiful things than we could ever imagine.

I had other teachers too. Gerald Durrell ripped away the solemnity of the birdy text books, and their
traditionally
awful prose, and never thought for a second that jokes
compromised love, still less reverence. I read all his books, many of them many times. Television brought untold wonders right into the sitting room in Streatham. Peter Scott presented a programme called
Look
which seemed to be broadcast for me alone. Everything he said, everything he showed me had an added vividness because I knew the story of Scott and the nene, the Hawaiian goose brought back from extinction by the Wildfowl Trust. Imagine doing such a thing – and imagine I did. Savour the words: the rarest goose in the world. It is found – and I loved that slip into the passive voice, that technique beloved of
serious
bird books, something that seemed to imply a strange and portentous mystery, as it indeed did – only in Hawaii. By 1952, the wild population was down to 30. Then Scott took a hand and started a captive breeding programme at the headquarters of his Wildfowl Trust in Slimbridge, Gloucestershire. This led to a successful re-release
programme
: and there are now about 500 wild nenes honking their stuff – their name is an onomatopoeia – about Hawaii.

When I left Sunnyhill, I got a prize. So did almost everybody except Peter Miller, so far as I remember. I got, for we were allowed to choose,
Zoo Quest for a Dragon
, by, of course, David Attenborough. I have it on my shelves still, so I can remind myself that in 1962, it was presented to me for Attainment and Good Work In English. (Attainment meant getting a place in a Good School.) The
book contains Attenborough’s signature, because my father knew him from his work at the BBC. I read the book and enjoyed it: but it was the pride of possession that was the main thing. It was Attenborough’s television
performances
that overwhelmed me. It was not just the
fabulous
places and the fabulous beasts: it was the fact that he really cared. You could see him caring. You could see him not faking it. He cared like I cared. Here was a grown-up who thought it really mattered that an animal should live rather than die. It was as if Attenborough gave me
permission
to care. Attenborough told me that my anguish and my joy in the wild world had a real value: that love of the wild was not something you grew out of.

There was one series in particular. It was the series of 1961,
Zoo Quest to Madagascar
. The details are vague in my memory, but I remember the awful, the beautiful
anxiety
as Attenborough hunted for a lemur that had never before been filmed. It was a revelation of the terrible
fragility
of the wild world: the first time that such an idea had struck me. Not that the programme dealt with the threat of extinction, for Attenborough was never one for scare stories, never one for going off half-cock. It was some years later that the accumulating weight of evidence made him the most forceful and vivid campaigner for the
endangered
wild on the entire planet. But for me at least, there was a strange presentiment of this future orthodoxy in the story of the indri, in this tale of a great man, the best
possible substitute for me, travelling round a wild and remote place in an apparently hopeless quest for a strange and lovely creature that nobody had heard of and nobody could find.

Years later, years and years later, I met Attenborough when we were both doing some work for the conservation charity, the World Land Trust. I was taking drinks, as good conservationists do when business is over, in the glorious double-decker library of the Linnean Society in Piccadilly, and as extraordinary coincidence would have it, I found myself by the table with the drink on it, clutching a bottle. I turned to find Attenborough with an empty glass beside me, so I filled it. As a result I was able to ask a question that had been troubling me for years: “What was the lemur? The one you tried so hard to find and thought you never would?”

I had wondered if my description and my memory were too vague. But not a bit of it. There was only one possibility: “Indri!” And a flood of reminiscence and
anecdote
, wonderfully told over a diminishing glassful: Attenborough is as great a performer for one as he is for millions. It was, and still is, a question of caring about the subject. It was, and always is, a question of love. Attenborough was, and for that matter, still is, my
favourite
teacher.

Indri! The biggest surviving lemur, weighing up to 29 pounds, a teddy-faced jumper with a taste for music: the
great singer of the Malagasy forests. Lemurs are primates, like us: one of the earliest forms in which our group took shape. They were out-competed on mainland Africa by monkeys and apes (like ourselves) but they somehow got to Madagascar after it had separated from the African mainland and set about a great adaptive radiation. Presumably the pioneers got there by rafting, by getting lifts across the strait – accidental lifts – on tumbled and floating vegetation. There the lemurs ceased to be losers and became winners: virtuosi of evolution, creating more and more new species to fill one niche after the next: from extinct giants to tiny little things like the pygmy mouse lemur, from lemurs that live much as monkeys do, to the aye-aye that sneaks about in the dark and thinks it’s a woodpecker. (It has a middle finger three times the length of the others and pokes it into holes in tree trunks for
larvae
.) The name lemur is from the Latin;
lemures
are spirits of the night. Perhaps it is the haunting song of the indri that prompted this name. It is a sound I have never heard in person, and it is as strange a din as nature has come up with. The indri is something of a tree-bound whale.

And I revelled in Attenborough’s search for the indri: the elusive, the near-lost, the all-but-unfindable beast, the myth of the Malagasy forests. But he found it: wonder of wonders, he found it, and there he was, in black-and-white images caught on a clockwork camera, brought to our sitting room, brought even to the postal district of SW16.
Surely, I thought, it is a wild world out there, a world in which wonderful things exist, but one in which they can’t take anything for granted.

All was not as it should be in this world. I knew that after the search for the indri. I knew then that it was not possible to love the wild world without knowing pain. Though Attenborough found his indri, I knew that it might just as easily have come out the other way: almost, I could see him on television apologising for the fact that he had been unable to find an indri, that there weren’t enough indris to find. And this would not have been an admission of a failure of the human ability to find things: it would have been an admission of a failure of the human ability to keep things. To look after things. I knew that if I chose to continue loving wildlife, I would be choosing a way in which sadness was unavoidable. And I embraced it willingly.