Richard Herley

Author Outtakes

2011-12-23T19:56:00.000Z

Jairus Reddy at Hobbes End Publishing has kindly published an Author Outtakes interview with me - link.

Author rankings

2011-12-22T10:48:00.001Z

Writing is a solitary craft, and many writers seem to be less outgoing than the norm. For such people, self-promotion is a nightmare. They see it as little more than boasting, which I suppose it is. Sometimes, in desperation, the writer crosses the line from boasting to begging, and then it’s even more painful to behold.

In theory, especially in the past, the publisher relieved the writer of this unpleasant chore. The writer might have been expected to do the odd reading, or bookshop signing, or – if he or she were at least semi-famous already – make an appearance on radio or TV. But the bulk of the puffing was done by a publicity manager, typically an extrovert who saw nothing wrong with hyperbole. In practice, nowadays, publicity budgets tend to get spent on authors who are already successful: the money is used to retrieve an inflated advance. B-list authors are expected to promote themselves.

Writers should write; publishers should make things public. The imminent collapse of traditional publishing has changed all that. What hasn’t changed is the underlying need of readers to find new talent and for new talent to be given a chance.

In a TeleRead article in October 2008 I suggested one solution, in the form of a dedicated ebook-review site, but now I can’t see that ever getting off the ground. Each ebook distributor (e.g. Amazon, Sony, Apple) has its own set of reviews, on its own site, put up by readers who just happen to use a Kindle, or a Reader, or an iPad. Yet more reviews are scattered all over the Web, at Smashwords, on blogs and boards and social networking sites like Goodreads.

The number of new ebook titles is growing at an explosive rate. Buried in all the self-deluding dross are some really good books – but how is the reader to find them?

For the sake of what follows, we’ll take Amazon as an example.

Books are already ranked there, and that’s fine, but I propose a ranking system for authors as well. Part of this would be an option for a reader to ask to be notified of an author’s next book. The notification could take the form of an email automatically generated when the book-file goes live at KDP. It would contain a link to the new book’s page. Or Amazon could simply send a sample to the reader’s Kindle without further ado. The reader should at any time be able to withdraw permission to be notified about any or all authors, and will need assurances about privacy.

The more notification requests an author racks up, the greater will be his or her ability to satisfy and intrigue readers. Data about the number of reviews posted for that author and their star-ratings, “likes”, etc., could be added to the mix, together with an indication, like a tag-cloud, of the genre or genres the author’s books are in.

The rankings could then be organized in various ways. Overall movers and shakers, who’s hot and who’s not in each genre, who has the highest-rated reviews per book, who’s popular in which country – the details need to be worked out by someone more computer-savvy than me, but you get the idea. A wonderful new writer with only one book would at least get a chance to be noticed.

All this would cost money to implement, but Amazon would be amply rewarded by the increase in sales and loyalty. Notified readers could even be offered a discount, or an exclusive opportunity to read the book before the official publication day. There are all sorts of possibilities, and I must say that Amazon, in particular, would be brilliant at exploiting them.

However, any of the distributors could take up the baton. Indeed, it would give them an edge against Amazon’s dominance of the market. If they all used author-rankings, readers would have a much easier time in finding new books.

As for the writer, he or she would have more time to write. This alone would improve the quality and quantity of the work, but there would also be an incentive to become technically educated, which many beginners are not. For the new novelist this means learning about story structure, dialogue, viewpoint, and all the other skills that must be mastered to make a novel come alive. It also means learning to be professional with respect to editing and presentation: readers don’t like typos and bad covers any more than they like cardboard characters and wooden dialogue.

The net effect would benefit everyone – reader, author, distributor. We would be taking a decisive step away from the capricious and often mistaken judgments of the traditional and self-appointed gatekeepers, and allowing, at last, true merit to rise.

The bottom line

2011-12-09T14:16:00.001Z

Hachette have "leaked" a memo explaining why they are necessary.

One of the many germane comments about the article is this, from Linton Robinson:

BTW, anecdotally, of the writers I know who are making decent livings from published books, about half are either letting contracts lapse or heavily considering it, while putting out books on their own.

This is what will kill Hachette and the rest. They cannot compete with the independent author on price. It is as simple as that. The indie has no back office to support. He makes more from an ebook at $3 than he would through Hachette were it priced at $10. He could even sell it from his own site and keep the whole $3!

The big publishing houses are nearly all owned by giant media corporations for whom book-publishing is small potatoes and whose only interest is the bottom line. The future is not hard to predict.

Some good people will have to find other jobs, which is tough. As for the rest ...

Yeah. That's it.

2011-11-28T10:11:00.001Z

From Key Largo (1948)

Frank McCloud: He knows what he wants. Don't you, Rocco?
Johnny Rocco: Sure.
James Temple: What's that?
Frank McCloud: Tell him, Rocco.
Johnny Rocco: Well, I want uh ...
Frank McCloud: He wants more, don't you, Rocco?
Johnny Rocco: Yeah. That's it. More. That's right! I want more!

... the 1% capturing the economic and political system of the United States and using it to ransack the wealth of the formerly working middle class. The fatal flaw which will ultimately result in a fitting end for the powerful elitists is their egos. They are psychopaths, unable to feel empathy for their fellow man. Enough is never enough. They always want more. Life is a game to them. They truly believe they can pull the right strings and continue to accumulate more riches. But they are wrong. They are blinded by their hubris. There are limits to growth based solely on debt and we’ve reached that limit. The world is crumbling under the weight of crippling debt created by these Wall Street psychopaths, while the corrupted bought off politicians try to shift the losses from the bankers who incurred them to the citizens who have already been fleeced.

Jim Quinn's passion takes him over the top in some places, but fundamentally this is what's going on.

H/T: Zero Hedge

My first fountain pen

2011-11-20T22:00:00.000Z

Image: BenFrantzDale

Writers are obsessed with stationery. The lure of a stationer’s – or even the stationery shelves at some soulless hypermarket – is hard for the scribbler to resist. And for the real addicts among us, the ultimate fix is the fountain pen.

Such pens have gone the way of vinyl records (a bit cultish, or favoured by fogeys who can’t get on with technology) and more’s the pity, because when I were a nipper the range on offer was wide and wondrous.

My very first, a pearlescent Osmiroid, was given to me on my seventh birthday. By then I was practising joined-up letters, making the prescribed loops and curlicues and keeping within the dotted lines: for at that stage I knew no better, more or less, than to comply. My classmates and I were issued with wooden pen-holders into which fitted steel nibs, which in turn were dipped in small, white, porcelain inkwells set in the top right-hand corners of our bijou folding-top desks. The caretaker filled these with blue-black ink. In his store-room (which doubled as a dungeon where criminals were sometimes banished for half an hour), he kept a carboy of the stuff, provided no doubt by the County Council, and my memory of his ink is entwined with that of his grey, smelly mop in its galvanized, perforated squeeze-bucket nearby.

Thus we began our writing adventure with official nibs and official ink. The inkwells, besides being decidedly handist, or whatever the term is for something that discriminates against the sinistral, were prone to collect detritus – paper fibres mostly, and dust, I should think, but also other matter exuded by small, ingenious and malevolent boys (the girls in my class were all angels, especially Her Serene Highness Catherine Williams, are you reading this, my agony, my woe, and my heart’s delight?) In dipping one’s pen it was essential to stop short of the squidgy mess at the bottom. A sixteenth of an inch too far, a moment’s inattention, and the copybook was ruined.

The primary school was populated by middle-class children. Many of us were able, typically at Christmas or birthdays, to graduate from the statist to the free-market solution and embrace the fruits of capitalism. I remember that my Osmiroid cost 7/6d (37.5p), which I considered a huge sum, since my weekly pocket-money had that day been raised to 7d (2.9p), one penny for every year of my age. I also remember my pen’s first proper outing.

I had admired the Osmiroid minutely at home, of course. Its plastic barrel was lined by a black rubber reservoir. A lever operated a metal bar to compress the rubber. When the nib was dipped in ink, this compression and decompression effected a filling. The received wisdom was to operate the lever seven times. After that one held the top surface of the nib for a moment against the edge of a sheet of blotting paper, made a few test squiggles and, if all was in order, screwed the lid back on the bottle of Quink (Royal Blue, Washable, Suitable for School and Home Use, Available in 1, 2 or 20 oz Sizes, Made in England by Parker & Co., Ltd).

Our classroom that year overlooked lawns and trees, though its picture-windows had no view to the west, where, far beyond the playing field and the watercress beds, a wooded rise was surmounted by a distance-hazed avenue of colossal limes. Dew still sparkled on the grass and as, pausing between words, I looked out into the April sunshine, I spied a solitary jackdaw standing there, also in a moment of pause: at this remove I surmise that it was listening for invertebrates in the turf. It had its left side towards me. I see even now the small, whitish eye, the smaller dark iris, and the hoariness of the jackdaw’s nape. The world then was completely fresh and new, and my eyesight was perfect.

The bird was about fifty feet away. More than that I cannot honestly recall, whether it then flew off, or was joined by others (they are very gregarious). All that remains is the association between my birthday pen and this pristine vision of a creature I may never have seen before. At any rate, that is the first jackdaw I can remember.

My earliest books were composed on a typewriter, but some of the drafting I did with a fountain pen. The keyboarding has merged into one big blur. Long-carriage Imperial, Olivetti portable, Adler Gabriele, computers from 1984 onwards, yet I can still remember the circumstances of – what infused and lay around – the paragraphs I wrote with a nib. Indeed, some recollections are vivid enough to include what I had been doing during the preceding hours.

For all the benefits of word-processing, we have lost something by leaving the pen behind. The ability to polish as one goes has dampened spontaneity. Discipline and concentration are needed to commit our words to paper straightway, and with less of these a piece of writing is poorer. And we have also lost the intimacy between mind and hand and nib and flowing ink, between the imagination and the point of metal moving on the page, which for the author creates a special web of private associations that colour his work. Such is the price of automation. I’m just glad that I was born early enough to receive, not an iPod or a mobile phone, but a pearlescent Osmiroid in the year of my passage from the infants’ to the junior school.

H. L. Mencken on politicians

2011-11-18T08:59:00.000Z

Germany has drawn up secret plans to prevent a British referendum on the overhaul of the EU

As the sinister ambitions of the European political elite become ever more visible, we need someone over here like H. L. Mencken to cut through it all. Here are some of his observations on politicians and their henchmen and lickspittles.

... politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people’s money. No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.

One hears murmurs against Mussolini on the ground that he is a desperado: the real objection to him is that he is a politician. Indeed, he is probably the most perfect specimen of the genus politician on view in the world today. His career has been impeccably classical. Beginning life as a ranting Socialist of the worst type, he abjured Socialism the moment he saw better opportunities for himself on the other side, and ever since then he has devoted himself gaudily to clapping Socialists in jail, filling them with castor oil, sending blacklegs to burn down their houses, and otherwise roughing them. Modern politics has produced no more adept practitioner.

No government as such is ever in favor of the freedom of the individual. It invariably seeks to limit that freedom, if not by overt denial, then by seeking constantly to widen its own functions.

The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Says it all, really

2011-11-02T14:45:00.000Z

More here ...

If you have enjoyed a free copy of THE PENAL COLONY ...

2011-10-27T13:54:00.002+01:00

First, I am glad that you liked it. Secondly, you are under no obligation whatever to do anything more, but if you want to show some appreciation, consider sampling one of my other books. The Penal Colony is a loss leader, made free in order to bring my fiction to wider attention. It is far from being my best book. The others available are these:

The Stone Arrow (approx. 71,000 words). My first published novel. It won a prize, putting me in the company of people like Shiva Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro, which astonished me (in case there had been some mistake, I hurried to the bank on my bicycle to deposit the cheque for £500 – nearly as much as the entire advance I received from the London publishers). It's set in Sussex in the latter part of the Stone Age, when the native hunter-gatherers are being displaced by immigrants from the near Continent, agriculturalists practising slash-and-burn. The form is that of a thriller, with lots of derring-do. It's very ingenious in parts, though I say so myself.

The Flint Lord (72,000 words) seemed like a good idea at the time, a sequel to the above. One reviewer described it as "dour", and I agreed with that. However, on a later reading it seemed quite inventive and entertaining in its way, and the violence peculiarly innocent. The Flint Lord himself is a proto-Nazi, and to get through the business of writing about him I listened to Wagner via headphones. The book was generally well received, and if you like its predecessor you'll probably like this too.

The Earth Goddess (74,000 words). This follows on from The Flint Lord, and completes a trilogy I named The Pagans. It is much less violent than the other two, and the most interesting of the three. The late Neolithic and early Bronze Age threw up the first priestly class in Europe and their achievements (e.g. Stonehenge) were remarkable. The hero is a bit of a pill, and I ended the story too abruptly (by then being deeply disillusioned with my publishers and hence the whole idea of authorship), but the rest of it I still like.

Refuge (83,000 words). A post-apocalyptic thriller, my least favourite child. Publishers' readers complained that the villain, in an earlier draft, was insufficiently unpleasant, so I obliged them and rather wish I hadn't. Nonetheless, some people really like the grittiness of this book, especially in the action sequences.

The Tide Mill (125,000 words). Set in the 13th century, this describes two conflicts: one private and very personal, an illicit love affair, and the other grand and public, between the Church of Rome and the King of England. We see at first hand how a medieval manor worked and learn quite a bit about medieval engineering, but above all this is a gentle and rather touching coming-of-age story.

The Drowning (125,000 words). My latest and most overtly literary novel. It will appeal especially to British readers over the age of 50. I consider this to be some of the finest work of which I am presently capable.

Follow the links in the "Find My Books At ..." tab at the side and download the sample(s) of your choice from the website of your choice, free of charge of course. Or you can simply browse the text at Smashwords.

Feedback and the rise of e-reading

2011-10-22T13:06:00.004+01:00

I trained as a biologist, and one of the most powerful phenomena in biology is the positive feedback loop, in which a behaviour or process reinforces and perpetuates itself by virtue of its own nature. Feedback loops are seen in many other disciplines, of course, including economics.

This post on the Thing-ology Blog at LibraryThing is nearly a year old, but it is remarkably insightful and prescient: the author's predictions are coming true at an astonishing speed.

He identifies a number of the positive feedback loops which are destroying paper publishing, at least of mass-market fiction. Here, in abbreviated form, are some of them:

1. Ebooks win on convenience
2. Paper books depend upon economies of scale; as demand for them falls, their price must rise
3. Ebooks are already cheaper than printed books
4. As books drop out of print, ereaders become a necessity
5. As ereaders proliferate, ereading does too
6. Ereaders become more powerful as you buy more books; you can carry your library with you

Do go and read the whole thing. The comments are fascinating, too.

Hat-tip to commentator gous at TeleRead

Michael Hart, Prophet of Abundance

2011-10-20T11:10:00.000+01:00

I've just found this appreciation of Michael Stern Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, who passed away on 6 September. It's well worth reading for anyone interested in ebooks, culture, and human progress: and a salutary antidote to the self-interested panic now engulfing the publishing industry.

I only corresponded with him once, about uploading a text I had edited, but found him friendly, businesslike and completely ego-free. He was too young to die.

Hat-tip: The Digital Reader

Thank you, readers

2011-10-03T22:13:00.001+01:00

Amazon is sometimes portrayed as the 800-pound gorilla in the ebook jungle, and maybe it is, but for an author who wants to be read that gorilla runs the biggest game in town. In mid-September The Penal Colony was offered there for nothing (after I’d zeroed the price at Smashwords), and it quickly climbed the freebie charts. Since then, many tens of thousands of copies have been downloaded, and the number of reviews is growing.

About a year ago I posted a piece here, in which I opine that:

If you write “creatively” at all, the only valid motive is self-realization. You should not expect, and certainly not demand, that other people should read your output, still less pay you for it. If they do either, you’re well ahead of the game – especially if they pay.

When a reader takes the time to read your book, he or she is doing you an honour. That has an uncharacteristically sentimental sound coming from me, but I believe it to be so. Every reader creates a new version of the novel’s world, informed by a unique set of experiences and values; each individual sees the characters differently and places different emphasis on this or that aspect of the story. It’s both intriguing and sobering for an author to know that, all over the world, hundreds or even thousands of different people are simultaneously engaged on a unique creative act inspired by his original, and now rather distant, imaginings.

It’s also intriguing to get such vivid feedback as the online reviews and to see the range of reactions expressed there, some diametrically opposed to the signals I thought I was giving out. For example, one reviewer suggests the depiction of the “Village” is something of a right-wing wishlist, which surprises me, because the book was written partly as a warning: I thought I had made it evident that the whole setup was (a) a Bad Idea and (b) being run corruptly. Indeed, during the Conservative Party Conference in October 1987, just before the London publication, a pressure group called Tory Action prompted the tabloid headline “Cage the thugs on an island, say Right”.

Some readers complain that the ending is too abrupt and would like to know what subsequently happens to the characters. This is flattering indeed, because it means they have almost become real people in those readers’ minds! Let me say that I was working to a space limit, not especially strict, but at 103,000 words the book was already pushing at the acceptable length for a thriller of that sort. During a lunch with Judith Kendra, the sympathetic commissioning editor at Grafton Books who encouraged this project, I believe I even mooted an extent of 80,000 words. More importantly, I conceived the story as being the experiences of the protagonist vis-à-vis the island, and the moment they cease so does the narrative. A generally favourable outcome and the abolition of Category Z may be assumed …

Thank you, then, readers, for giving my novel a new lease of life and for validating the work that went into it all those years ago. It’s an extraordinary feeling.

Civic pride

2011-10-01T10:32:00.000+01:00

I don't think much of politicians, but I'd probably vote for this guy. The Ig Nobel judges did!

The subconscious in fiction

2011-09-26T16:02:00.002+01:00

The promenade at Selsey

In several posts on this blog I have referred to my belief that an author’s subconscious does most of the heavy lifting. His or her conscious mind is just a willing amanuensis who puts the boss’s ideas into motion.

The subconscious is the big-bellied, smoke-blackened cooking pot where experience gets rendered down, a process that most of us, quite rightly, take for granted. If we didn’t, life would be unlivable. For the artists among us, however, things are a little different. By creating an artefact, the artist (author, painter, sculptor, whatever) is left with something tangible to ponder. A conscious mind is able to survey a product of its subconscious and can try to understand some of its complexities.

My last book, The Drowning, came together almost magically. I had the feeling that it was writing itself. The choice of start-date for the main narrative, July 1965, was arrived at pretty much by chance, but yielded a rich field of circumstance (e.g. the timing of the civil war in Nigeria) which in turn suggested the mechanics of the story. This was the first time I had attempted a full-length novel without a synopsis, and I was pleased by the integrity of the structure that finally emerged.

At this remove, six months after finishing the first draft, I am no longer wholly sure what the book is about. It explores Buddhist ideas about the quest for release from suffering, and compares Buddhist and Christian notions of morality. But under the surface (quite literally, in some respects) more is going on. The opening scene describes a man’s escape from a ruined submarine. In a closely following chapter the agnostic protagonist is sitting in a cathedral; rather against his will, he overhears a reading from the Book of Jonah. My choice of this text did not arise from an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Old Testament: instead I opened a Bible at random and, having turned a few pages, lighted on the opening of that book. Something told me to use it. I was unaware, then, of the congruence between an escape from a submarine and being disgorged by a big fish.

The Book of Jonah is about anger and redemption. An evil deed arising from the escape of the submariner blights the lives of several of the principal characters, especially the heroine’s mother and in consequence the heroine, Elspeth, herself. Elspeth is a Buddhist. Through a selfless adherence to Buddhist morality, she quashes the repercussions of that evil deed and prevents them from doing further damage. It is hinted that, like the proverbial dewdrop slipping into the shining sea, she thereby clears the final hurdle and achieves nirvana.

An influential scene comes early in the book. Elspeth, her sister and younger brother, together with the protagonist (her brother’s tutor) visit the seaside for a day’s bathing. The metaphors there are obvious; what is not so obvious is the choice of Selsey for their picnic.

Selsey is a resort in West Sussex that I know well. However, it is an improbably long way from Winchester, which, somewhat remodelled, and renamed “Alincester”, is the city where Elspeth’s family live. A more obvious choice would have been a resort further west, such as Southbourne. Crucially, though, Selsey has a lifeboat station.

Only when partway through writing the Selsey sequence did I remember that fact. A visit to the lifeboat station fitted in beautifully with the theme of shipwreck and suggested in turn a further tightening of the plot, yet my choice of Selsey as the picnic venue had been directed merely by a vague feeling that it would be right.

Ablution, especially in the form of showers, features unusually often in the story. I only realized this once I had finished, but these are of course a metaphor for baptism, absolution, submersion, and all the rest of it. I describe a shower taken by Elspeth’s bridegroom, shortly before the newlyweds move to Nigeria. While showering he is thinking about his coming job in Lagos. Oil has recently been discovered in the Niger Delta.

Even without the oil, it would have instructive to be on hand to follow Nigeria’s political development. With it, conditions had become as explosive as the methane now flaring in the skies above the mangrove swamps.

Charles turned off the shower valve and stepped from the enclosure.

Thus the oil – its potential for igniting a civil war – is drawn into the general theme. Fire is the opposite of water. Moreover, turning the valve temporarily cuts the flow, raising the pressure in the pipes: Charles has been having misgivings about his bride. Elspeth in turn feels, at heart, that her wedding was a mistake.

When she arrives in Lagos she has a horrible time. Before she rises above it, she also takes a shower.

The club was air-conditioned, the bungalow also, but the car-ride back made her crave another shower. While standing under the lukewarm sprinkles, she noticed that the bottom of the plastic curtain, where it rested against the tub, had started to go mouldy. The curtain had been new only a fortnight ago.

For “curtain” in the last sentence, read “marriage”. In the last few months I have uncovered more of such stuff, but the foregoing gives you the general idea.

Readers are turned off by symbolism. Allegory has long since gone out of fashion. Yet in constructing a plot, especially a flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants plot like this one, the author cannot help subconsciously building it in. He defers to his judgement, or taste, or whatever you want to call it, and lets it ensure all the arrows are pointing in the right direction.

I submit that the reader’s subconscious picks up these signals. Unless the reader is a student of literature given the job of analysing a piece of prose, the signals usually escape the conscious mind, but they play an indispensable part in making a story satisfying.

Yet it is fatal to the author, while writing, to be too aware of them himself. If that happens the work becomes portentous, its vitality snuffed out at the very start. What the writer needs to produce is an apparently realistic and unpretentious narrative. The conscious mind of the reader enjoys it because what happens is interesting, amusing, or identifiable.

One need not understand why this book or that is satisfying or otherwise: the benefit from a well-made novel is derived silently, internally, moulds itself to the sensibility, and becomes thereby a part of one’s outlook on life – and that, I suggest, is the underlying purpose and value of fiction.

E-Ink cut the cable

2011-09-15T19:32:00.000+01:00

Mike Cane ran a post the other day entitled Tweet Of The Day: Print Publishing Is Sinking, prompted by this tweet from literary agent Jonny Geller:

I decided to make The Penal Colony free at Smashwords (and hence Smashwords’s partners), knowing that Amazon would follow suit and reduce the $2.99 price to zero. For some reason, Amazon does not allow publishers to set a zero price directly. I don’t check my Amazon stats very often, but yesterday I noticed that The Penal Colony was being offered free at amazon.com, and that some 4,300 copies had been downloaded in September. Just now (20.09 GMT on 15 September) I looked again and the total is up to 10,649; the title is now at No. 10 in “Free at the Kindle Store”.

This seems an effective way for an author to bring his work to wider notice. Obviously it would be nice if some of those downloaders decided to explore my other books; Refuge is a better novel than Penal Colony, and The Tide Mill and The Drowning, in my view, are far better still.

The main point is the illustration these figures make of the power of Amazon.

Print publishing, of mass-market fiction at least, is not just sinking. It’s hurtling down the lift-shaft.

Playing FLAC files on an Apple Mac

2011-08-11T10:52:00.000+01:00

Please note: this solution is for Macs with Intel chips only. Before bothering to read on, check “About this Mac” to see whether you have an Intel chip.

FLAC is what’s known as a “lossless audio codec”, which means it’s a music file format able to retain all the information from the original source. Many other music file formats (like MP3) are “lossy” – in order to save disk space, they leave out some of the data.

If an MP3 file has been made at a high enough bit-rate (the maximum is 320 bits per second), hardly anyone can tell the difference. Lossless codecs, however, are perfect for keeping an exact copy of your music, whether for archiving or as a guarantee against further changes in technology: once you start converting one lossy format into another (MP3 to AAC, for example) there is a rapid fall in quality.

FLAC has other advantages as a lossless codec. Unlike WAV, it is able to store metadata – track titles, etc. It uses a clever technique of decompression on-the-fly, a bit like ZIP, so that, while FLAC files are themselves compressed, they are unzipped as they play. Finally, FLAC is Open Source software, non-proprietary, with no restrictions on its use.

If you’re reading this, I assume you already have a collection of FLAC files, possibly acquired while you were using Windows or Linux as a computing platform, and now wish to play them on a Mac without the tedious business of conversion to some other format.

iTunes does not support FLAC, though you can use Fluke. Many people dislike iTunes itself, though, and want a lighter-weight alternative. The ones I know about are:

Songbird
Cog
Vox
Clementine
Amarok
Fidelia
VLC

Songbird is not a particularly lightweight program and I believe development has ceased, or the project has changed hands, or become commercialized. In any case my experiment with it was not a success. Cog failed to run altogether on my Mac. Vox is nice, but ignores track numbers – it plays tracks in alphabetical order, which is especially disastrous for classical music. It apparently also has problems with Lion, the latest OS X. Although Clementine looks promising, it’s in its early stages; my copy refused to work. Amarok is primarily a Linux player, but the OS X version is very definitely in beta. Fidelia is commercial software and I am too cheap to go down that road – the MacBook I’m using for this is on its last legs.

VLC is great, and if you just want to play one album at a time and are completely familiar with your collection this is the one to use (hint: sort the playlist by “Author” to get the tracks in the right order). If on the other hand you want a music player that builds a database to allow browsing and searching, as far as I can see your only native-Mac options are iTunes + Fluke, Songbird, Clementine, Fidelia and Amarok.

My favourite music player is foobar2000, which runs on Windows. It works reasonably well under Wine in Linux: and Wine is also available for Intel-based Macs.

Installing Wine on a Macintosh is not a trivial matter for a non-geek like myself: a tutorial is here. I went off in search of a disk image. You can find one listed at Softpedia (be sure to get the 1.2.2 binary).

Once the disk image has downloaded, click on it in the usual way and follow the prompts. In Wine-speak a Windows program is called a “prefix”. Grab a copy of the latest foobar2000 installation package here, click on it, and again just follow your nose.

Click to enlarge

Tell foobar where to find your music (File > Preferences > Media library). If it’s on an external hard disk, keep going up one level in the file browser until you come to a list of technical, Unix-looking stuff, then open “Volumes” and you’ll find your disk drives listed. You can then drill down to the folder where the music is stored.

The senescent MacBook in question runs OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard). If you have another version of OS X your mileage may vary, but this is worth a try. Some features of foobar don’t work: checking a file’s properties with Alt-Enter, for example, and the equalizer fails, but software equalizers are not a good idea anyway. If your stereo doesn’t have tone controls, you’re probably not the sort of person who’d use a software equalizer anyway.

Finally, when shutting down foobar, be sure to eject an external hard drive from the Mac before turning off its power supply. Next time, turn the drive on before opening foobar.

The riots

2011-08-10T20:58:00.001+01:00

Harriet Harman, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party (the party of government in Britain, 1997-2010), debates the riots with Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education. (Background: she was prominent in the 1977 Grunwick dispute and met her future husband, Jack Dromey, on the picket line.)

For the most concise analysis of the causes so far, see The Disastrous Death of Common Sense by Charles Crawford.

HMS Victory

2011-08-02T09:54:00.003+01:00

Image: Ballista

I have a friend who, as a child, was proudly informed by an uncle that he had made a model of HMS Victory from used matchsticks. My friend’s response – “Why?” – left his uncle not only speechless and very annoyed, but (later) somewhat ruminative as he pondered the entire course of his life.

The sheer pointlessness of human endeavour is one of its charms, and our creativity in devising pointless activities has paradoxically enabled us to become the dominant multicellular life-form on this planet. (It can be well argued that bacteria, or single-celled fungi, or even viruses, are King.)

Sometimes bathos descends into pathos:

Puzzled Jack Harris spent more than seven years completing a 5ft (1.5m), 5,000-part jigsaw – only to find the final piece was missing

He started work on the mammoth jigsaw in 2002, after it was bought for him as a Christmas present by his daughter-in-law, Eve.

Mr Harris, 86, of Shepton Mallet in Somerset, said the crucial part of The Return of the Prodigal Son may have been eaten by one of his daughter-in-law’s dogs.

The perfect burglar deterrent

2011-07-26T22:44:00.000+01:00

Source : Imgur

Click to enlarge

Pay the writer

2011-07-16T11:33:00.003+01:00

Notice this is on YouTube ... free to view, download, embed ... and I'm glad to say Mr Ellison is still with us.

PyRoom - a distraction-free editor

2011-06-25T23:04:00.001+01:00

PyRoom is a full-screen text editor: it adopts a minimalist approach, largely doing away with icons and menus. Your screen shows the text being worked on and nothing more until you invoke a simple help screen or the preferences dialog.

It’s a clone of WriteRoom for the Mac and runs under Linux. Other full-screen editors are listed at this Wikipedia page.

What appeals to me about such writing tools is their simplicity. For many years I used a DOS word-processor called XyWrite; this, despite an unfriendly interface and a potential for infinite, time-wasting customization, can offer an uncluttered working screen. It’s perfect for immersive writing, when the machine becomes transparent to the user and all that matters is the text. Except under emulation, I no longer use DOS at all, or Windows for anything except a music server.

PyRoom is not a word processor. Its files are pure ASCII, and it does not support smart quotes or highlighting of any kind. Those need to be added when the first draft of your text is complete. (Just adopt some arbitrary characters to denote the beginning and end of bold or italic regions.) PyRoom is fast: even on a humble netbook it loads a 125,000 word book almost instantaneously.

The working screen looks like this:

Click images to enlarge

The theme preferences dialog lets you choose the colours of the “ink”, “paper”, and a border if you want one, together with the size of the text area relative to the screen. I set up the grey-blue theme illustrated because I find it restful on the eyes.

The general preferences dialog is largely self-explanatory.

The “indent” option is nice because it permits a book-like appearance and obviates a double keypress at the end of every paragraph. However, increasing the line-spacing produces a slight extra space between paragraphs, which I find unsightly, so I chose a font which is small on the body.

The PyRoom command-set is as follows:

Control-H: Show help in a new buffer (a “buffer” is a full-screen window)
Control-I: Show buffer information (buffer name, file path, number of characters, words and lines)
Control-P: Show preferences dialog
Control-N: Create a new buffer
Control-O: Open a file in a new buffer
Control-Q: Quit
Control-S: Save current buffer
Control-Shift-S: Save current buffer as
Control-W: Close buffer and exit if it is the last buffer
Control-C: Copy
Control-X: Cut
Control-V: Paste
Control-Z: Undo last typing
Control-Y: Redo last typing
Control-Page Up: Switch to previous buffer
Control-Page Down: Switch to next buffer

The Linux mouse-buffer works: text highlighted with the mouse can be pasted elsewhere by clicking the middle button. Highlighted text can also be dragged into a new position.

And that’s it. There is nothing more to play with or distract you. At first I felt the absence of a search function, but soon realized that I had formerly wasted much time on looking for repetitions of phrases and constructions – something that is much better done at the polishing stage, using a full-blown word-processor.

Once you have set up a theme to your taste, all you can really do with a distraction-free editor is compose the first draft. There is no potential for electronic pencil-sharpening; the software brings you to the coal-face more quickly and lets you spend longer there. I think I’m becoming a fan.

Speed Riding

2011-06-14T22:40:00.001+01:00

Speed Riding Aiguille Midi et Diablerets

For most vertiginous results, go Full Screen!

The Drowning

2011-05-31T07:58:00.011+01:00

I have just released a new book. The title is The Drowning and the extent about 125,000 words. It is set in England and Nigeria between 1944 and 2015 and represents something of a departure for me in that it is a purely literary novel.

One of the nicest things about independent authorship is freedom from the shackles of genre. Publishers, especially these days, have become timid. They expect their authors to produce more of the same: hence the popularity of series novels. That puts the author in a quandary. Should he continue on the treadmill, writing the same book over and over again? Why is he even bothering with authorship at all? There are many other treadmills in this world, and nearly all of them pay the operative more.

My previous books have all been more or less classifiable, but the classification is arbitrary and restricting. It exists for the benefit of booksellers, not readers – unless they are of that variety that likes to stick with what it knows and regards reading as an activity akin to chewing the cud. Nothing much wrong with that, I suppose, it’s harmless enough, but supplying fodder to such an audience was not really the siren call that lured me into this trade in the first place.

No, I like to tell stories. The setting and the “genre” are important only so far as they feed into and reinforce the narrative. Thus The Tide Mill had to be an “historical novel” because of the level of technology required to make the plot work. The mill itself, its dependence on the moon and tides, its function, its politics and legal status, and its place in the religious beliefs of the time, all act as a framework and a metaphor in the account of human relationships I was trying to portray. On their own, tide mills are not especially gripping for the general reader, and to find out about them you would be better off looking at textbooks.

The Drowning is about conscience, the phenomenon that may or may not be the end of a thread leading into the most mysterious labyrinth of all. Exploring the labyrinth – trying to understand the apparently senseless fact of our existence – is the proper business of the novelist. Of course, on the journey he has to intrigue his companion, the reader. Partly the reader must be entertained and informed, but more importantly he must be offered the chance to compare his own life with that of the characters, to wonder how he himself would react in similar circumstances, and to draw from the story whatever meaning the author has consciously or otherwise built into it.

If a book remains with the reader after he has finished it, then it is a success. I believe The Drowning may be such a book, but giving a verdict on that is not the proper business of the novelist: it is yours.

Review by Ru Viljoen at Goodreads

Dec 09, 2011

Rated: 5 out of 5 stars

This book is beautiful. Romantic, subtle, politically insightful and philosophically insightful.

I always enjoy books that span a lifetime. It makes the reader re-appraise their priorities from a more distant perspective than is usually used.

I would recommend The Drowning as heartily as it was recommended to me.

Text-to-speech as a proofing aid

2011-05-10T18:01:00.001+01:00

Even when an author thinks he has spell-checked, grammar checked, thoroughly eyeballed, and otherwise checked to death a piece of writing, errors always remain. Sometimes a grammar check will overlook extraneous words (usually little ones like “a” or “to”) left behind by moves; sometimes it will not pick up words omitted or even repeated.

Because of the compensatory way the brain works when reading, it can be hard or even impossible for the author himself to notice these errors – first because his brain elides missing words or ignores extraneous ones, and secondly because he already knows the text so well that he re-reads too quickly to pick them up. That’s why it is so useful to have other people proof a text, but even they are fallible: their brains compensate too.

The Amazon Kindle has a text-to-speech facility. The technology is not quite there yet, and I wouldn’t want to use it as a substitute for an audio book, but I have found the Kindle’s robot an ally when proofing text. If you read along with the speech, errors are made obvious. Moreover, reading aloud can pinpoint subtler problems and suggest rejigging certain sentences to make them flow better.

While there are more sophisticated text-to-speech systems available, the Kindle has one built-in and lets you proof anywhere. I suppose you could annotate the text, but it’s quicker just to make a written note of a faulty phrase that can be found later on the computer with the search function. Once I encounter a mistake, I switch off the speech using Shift-Sym, make my note, then switch on again. When the speech resumes it starts from the top of the “page”, so to minimize repetition I enlarge the text and the margins to get about eighty or a hundred words on a screen. (Note for non-geeks: use KindleGen to create a MOBI of your text. KindleGen eats HTML, which is easily generated by the “Save As” function of Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Writer.)

While text-to-speech may not save you the expense of a professional editor, it’s a valuable addition to the writer’s armoury.

A Sunday outing

2011-04-02T10:51:00.003+01:00

Image: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen

One day last September I went to Moreford to visit my old schoolfriend, Edward, and his wife, Jocelyn. Just between ourselves, the household is unusual. Edward is a keen taxidermist. He also keeps birds of prey and with the assistance of a buzzard brings home rabbits which Jocelyn casseroles. Lunch consisted of just such a dish. Edward (a zoologist) is wont to identify the various bones on his plate: between mouthfuls he invites one to admire a radial fossa or zygomatic arch, then elaborates its function.

After lunch we repaired to what he calls his “mews” – an old barn where he keeps his birds. The smell, to which he is immune, is vile; the interior is gloomy, paved with dank stone, and recedes into half seen stalls and cubicles which one has no desire to investigate.

Pride of place, on the front bench, as it were, was given to his latest acquisition: a harpy eagle named “Harriet”. The species, Thrasaëtus harpyia, is native to South America, and is one of the largest of all raptors, ranging as far north as Mexico, where it is known as the “winged wolf” or “lobo volante”. It has a wing-span of some two metres and feeds on fawns, sloths, foxes, and, for preference, monkeys. To avoid the dangers of the forest floor, these monkeys take to the tree canopy, where they fondly imagine themselves secure.

When first I set eyes on Harriet I confess I felt a twinge of fear. She easily dwarfs the other birds. Her somewhat owl-like facial mask and startling crest give her an expression of stern puzzlement, as if she is unable to comprehend anything that does not involve extreme violence, terror, mayhem, blood. The deep musculature of her chest, the massive flight-muscles, and above all the development of the beak, legs and talons: all these create an impression of overbearing ferocity.

She is so heavy that Edward can barely carry her on the glove. Moreover, she is so highly strung that, for fear of being attacked himself, he must keep up a continuous babble of babytalk. Nonetheless, once the hood is in place she becomes docile enough.

An outing to Petersfield Heath had been mooted. On the way there in Edward’s van (with Harriet seated on her perch in the back), the tactics for the afternoon were explained. I was to be dropped off by the recreation ground next to the Pond, while Edward, Jocelyn and Harriet continued to the other side of the heath.

Heath Pond is a pleasing expanse of water, lined for the most part by trees. It is popular with anglers and dog-walkers, is visited by the odd heron or sea swallow, and also has a collection of rowing boats and canoes that may be hired by the hour. To the east and north lies a golf course. On the western shore are swings, an ice cream kiosk, a flock of noisy Canada geese, and the tame ducks which appreciate the cubes of Hovis tossed to them by children and their parents.

On Sunday afternoons the place is busy. The perimeter path has been resurfaced so that wheelchairs may use it. At intervals there are benches giving views towards War Down and the Queen Elizabeth Country Park.

I installed myself on one of these benches and removed my binoculars from their case. An old retriever, grey-muzzled and obese, limped past, preceded by its equally ancient owner on a leather lead. Further on, a spaniel was defecating on the path itself: its owners pretended not to notice and, once it had finished, called to it to catch them up. Black Labradors, and a couple of yellow ones, were in evidence: these are the essential fashion accessory sported by the sort of people who wish to be thought countryfied.

Allowing the glasses to range about, I noticed, out on the water, a hired rowing boat being propelled by a young man in a blue top. Opposite him, at the tiller, sat a young woman in yellow. She had set a course to the far side of the Pond. Behind the rower, on a sort of plank across the bows, stood a corgi. It was drawing attention to itself by continuous barking, whether occasioned by innate neurosis or fear of the water I cannot say.

Knowing the cast of Edward’s character, I kept a special eye on this boat.

I did not have to wait long. Emerging in silence from a stand of pines, the menacing and alien shape of a gigantic bird of prey, buoyed along by broad and sweeping wingbeats, cast its speeding shadow across the surface of the lake.

I began to hear startled cries from the more observant strollers.

No more than thirty seconds elapsed before Harriet reached the boat and, barely pausing in her flight, snatched the corgi aloft.

As she gained altitude, she adjusted the disposition of her burden, even letting it go for an instant before catching it again. She may have heard the cries of astonishment and rage from below, especially from the man in the boat, who had now stood up, shaking his fist: she may have heard them, but remained indifferent, circling round to the east, a superb spectacle when seen above the trees on the southern shore.

A commotion at the recreation ground drew my notice. Mobile phones were being deployed. An attendant of some kind was being beseeched by shocked parents. Few of these, perhaps, noticed the man in the blue top losing his balance and falling into the lake, upsetting the boat and so also depositing the woman in the water.

Harriet reached the stand of pines whence she had started. Here, I supposed, her keeper was waiting. But instead of meekly yielding up the prize, she retained it. Instead of flying to the glove, she ended her flight at the top of the tallest pine.

There, on the bleached prong of a dead branch, and with one foot clamped on the dog, she looked about her. Even at that distance I detected malice in her glare. She was defiant, but also guilty. She knew her behaviour was at fault: but it was at fault only by the grubby and artificial standards of humans. Perhaps she wished to believe herself, however briefly, back in the rainforest.

Then she seemed to have second thoughts, took wing again, spilled air, and vanished into the vegetation below.

My rendezvous with Edward and Jocelyn went off as predicted, smoothly. After an irate search-party had hurried past my bench, I walked back to the roadway near the swings. As I heard a distant siren, the van came along, with a hooded Harriet once more on her perch.

During the ride back to Moreford and tea, Edward quizzed me as to what I had seen and spoke animatedly about his lifelike collection of small pedigree dogs. And as he talked, I was left to reflect on the eccentricity of some of my friends and to wonder whether my address-book could do with a little pruning.

Writer at work

2011-03-26T12:04:00.000Z

Terrific insight from Michael Frayn, a writer I very much admire:

Q. Where do your ideas come from?

A. Ideas for things come into one's head, or bits of ideas; you feel there's something – there's some meat on the bone, there's something there that lures you on. The more you think about it the more you're led into this new world and the more of that world you see. And part of having an idea is having some notion of how you would tell the story. It's not just thinking it would be nice to write something about the Crimean war, it's having some particular way in mind of writing something about the Crimean war, and the idea for the way to tell the story helps you to see what the story is. The story suggests the means, the means suggests the story; it's mutually dependent. And you don't have very much choice in the matter. Ideas come, characters suggest themselves, and the nature of the story and the nature of the characters dictates how it's going to be done.

I suppose if people are not writers or painters or whatever they see the life of the artist as being one of great freedom, but it's not really; it's as constrained as anyone else's by the material that's available. The thing seems to have some kind of reality in one's head; it seems to be something that one is discovering, rather than inventing. I see that as a kind of psychological trick on oneself, because the whole point about fiction is that it's invention. It doesn't really seem like it at the time – it seems as if you are slowly discovering something that already exists and seeing how the different parts of it relate to each other.

And

Q. Do you have a routine? What tools do you use?

A. It's very difficult when each day you start with a sort of cold brain and nothing happens. In my case I look back over what I was doing the day before and make a few small corrections, often to typing errors, then maybe a few grammatical errors, and then I see a better way of putting something, and gradually you get drawn into the world you've created and you start rewriting what you did the day before and gradually coming up to the point where you left it the day before and going on. And certainly at the end of each day's work I try – when my brain is hot and stuff is happening, but when I'm really too tired to go on – to make hasty notes and write down bits and pieces of what's going to come, anything that's already in one's head, sort of scatter it down on the page so that when you start the next day you've got some stuff there to work on.

And

Q. What sort of a relationship exists between writers and the people they create on the page?

A. Well, you do get very obsessed with them. You can't help thinking about them a lot. However much you think in advance, however much you plan, the events will get changed as you come to them and work on them. And the events are the characters, the characters are the events. So they are in flux. It's not like thinking about friends, or people one knows, whose lives are not under one's control. With characters, you are actually creating their lives with them. It does seem – and I realise this is a psychological trick and it sounds very coy – but it is as if they are speaking and leading those lives. It's a very symbiotic relationship. You do seem to be with people who have minds of their own, thoughts of their own, but at the same time you're very much involved in leading their lives with them.

His is just one interview: you can read the others here (Guardian UK).

Using OpenOffice Writer for drafting

2011-03-12T19:09:00.000Z

I have just finished drafting a new novel. It was composed using OpenOffice Writer running under Linux, and has now migrated to Microsoft Word on a Mac for further formatting.

OpenOffice uses a much more compact file-format than Word. The finished book occupies 305 Kb in odt format and 1.5 Mb in doc format. At the end of every working day during the drafting period, I saved what I had written so far with a name like “101103.odt” (being the saved file for 3 November, 2010). The result is a directory containing 121 cumulative versions of the book, totalling 16.7 Mb.

Thus I have a permanent record of the drafting process, complete with all the errors, cul-de-sacs and general groping for direction that accompanies the construction of any novel, no matter how well planned it may be – and on this project I dispensed with my usual synopsis and flew by the seat of my pants.

I am making this post for the benefit of other authors. Such a record might prove instructive long after composition. It retains ideas and passages that, even if at first rejected, you may decide to use later. Finally, it provides incontrovertible proof of authorship, should there ever (heaven forfend!) be a need to produce it.

OpenOffice has become very stable and sophisticated, and if you haven’t checked it out recently or at all I recommend that you do. It crashed three times during perhaps 500 instantiations, which beats Word on the Mac hands down; and only crashed at all when I was doing unusual things. The autosave feature is configurable. Very little is lost even if a crash occurs. The flavour of Linux I used is Linux Mint, which is an Ubuntu derivative I can also recommend.

Nature Writing

2010-12-05T20:52:00.003Z

I have just uploaded this title to Smashwords. Here is the Introduction:

My enthusiasm for natural history was probably first sparked by Richard Jefferies, whose Bevis fevered my imagination for two or three months in 1962, when I was twelve. My recreational reading consisted thereafter mostly of books about nature. Many of these I bought with my pocket money, so they tended to be second-hand and out of date.

British nature-writing reached its heyday in the late nineteenth century. The drift to the cities had produced a rich vein of nostalgia for the countryside, and this was assiduously mined by the publishers of the day. Besides essayists like Jefferies and W. H. Hudson there were any number of authors who produced handbooks of the flora and fauna. All these books were written in a formal style and edited to Victorian standards of literacy. I didn't realize it at the time, but they were having a profound influence on the way I produced, and was ever to produce, written English.

Nature as a subject for a child's pen is ideal: it is inexhaustible. There is also scope for original observation and plain description, especially if the child is lucky enough to have been born into a literate household and attends a school whose teachers have high expectations of their pupils.

The first part of this collection comprises a series of articles published during 1984-5 by a local newspaper in my home town, Watford, on the outskirts of north-west London. After these are four short pieces I wrote purely for pleasure. These begin with Hunting Sparrowhawk.

Finally I provide a series of brief extracts – often no more than a sentence or two – from the nature journal I have been keeping since 1963. Read in sequence, these provide a curious picture of a boyish enthusiasm gradually maturing. They also give a glimpse of a disappearing world. Alas, my old school is by no means what it was, children are no longer free to wander the woods and wild seashore at will, and the English countryside is even more degraded now than it was then.

This ebook contains all the "Natureview" pieces published on this blog, together with some other essays and a selection of excerpts from my personal nature journal from 1963 onwards.

Please note: this title is not available from Amazon

Curvature

2010-12-01T17:38:00.000Z

Summer 2009

Summer 2010

A newly arrived German friend, on being driven through West Sussex, became pensive. Somewhere around Graffham she remarked on the wildness of the countryside and especially the curving, apparently haphazard course of the lanes, exclaiming, “In Germany it would not be allowed!” Having myself been to Germany, I knew just what she meant.

The thoroughfares hereabouts are just as incomprehensible to the Teutonic mind. I cannot offhand think of any section of minor road, lane, byway, bridleway or footpath which is straight for more than a couple of hundred yards together. Some of those curves surely go back to prehistoric times; are echoes of who knows what needed to be circumvented, whether from convenience or fear. Others must reflect ancient squabbles over land rights, grazing, pannage, timber, crops – who can say? But most are probably due to the innate Englishness of the people who have trodden the ground for centuries.

These reflections were prompted by the late re-emergence of a public path across a local arable field.

Each year, usually, the footworn line of the path (about 360 yards) is ploughed up. For 2009 (aerial view, above) the tractor-driver remade the path by driving his machine along its length, but that was the exception. Normally the pathway must be forged by the boots of walkers. They pound it to a clayey hard-pan, cracked in dry weather, glutinous in wet.

Since I often use this path, and since I walk quite far enough on my excursions as it is, I have long been seized by the absurd notion that it should be as straight as possible. But every year (except when the tractor-driver intervened) the new-made course turns out curved.

Resenting being made to walk further than necessary, I used to try to ignore the wanderings of the new path and adopt a straight course. To no avail. Once or twice, when I was the pioneer, I went so far as to flag the line out, using plastic bags tied to two hazel sticks jammed in the ground at about 120 yards from either end. These I positioned by using binoculars and taking note of some oddly shaped clod or flint that happened to lie precisely on the line.

The sheepishness of subsequent walkers was confirmed by the way they obeyed the flags: their Englishness took expression in the lack of consistency as to which side they should pass the hazel sticks. One was passed to the south, the other to the north, producing a serpentine course.

A metaphor lies not far below the surface here, as well as a warning. The diversion produced by even the most wayward marking of the path amounts to no more than a few yards. To cross the field itself burns fewer than 17 Calories; the mental exertion involved in straightening the path (never mind the foraging for sticks and the making and positioning of flags), worrying about the problem, or becoming mildly exasperated by my fellow-men, dwarfs the expense of the detour.

So now I walk the two sides of the field, on the headland, when the soil is rough, and leave it to others to make me a path. Whatever they do is fine: it eventually gets me from here to there, just like all those other thoroughfares which, in Germany, would not be allowed.

Writer’s Block

2010-10-31T11:47:00.000Z

My phone still works, but I have lost my broadband connection. It stopped functioning three weeks ago, whereupon I entered the labyrinthine nightmare of getting it fixed. First, of course, I had to check my own equipment, which involved dragging out a heavy cabinet to get at the wires and socket. The router and Airport seemed to be OK, but I had to be sure.

As a music server in the living room I use an ancient Toshiba laptop with a faulty keyboard. The keyboard doesn’t matter: the computer lives in a cupboard with the amplifier and whatnot. A small and elderly flat-panel monitor sits on top of the cupboard, and I can work the software solely with a mouse and, occasionally, an onscreen keyboard. Anyway, I needed to find out whether a USB modem would give an error message. That meant using the Toshiba: it runs Windows XP, the only OS for which I have a driver for the Thomson modem the ISP supplied a few years back, right at the start of our accursed contract.

Are you with me so far?

Having disconnected the various cables and interfaces from the laptop, I got it out. By now the battery is completely defunct, so I had to power it from a mains socket. I then had to delve into my stock of junk, upstairs, and find an external keyboard with a USB connector. Then I discovered that, having been forced, last summer, to reinstall the heap of malodorous dung that is Windows, I hadn’t reinstalled the ISP’s software. Another trip upstairs and more searching eventually produced the right CD (I tried the wrong one first, of course).

At long, long last I was ready to connect.

No dial tone.

So it was them, not me. Now the fun really began: the automated call centre, at 5 pence a minute even when I was hanging on, listening to what they thought was music and being told how important I was. At long last an Indian voice with an improbable English name, how can he help me. I explain. He does things. Which lights are glowing on my router? He tells me I am connected, will I try Google? The page won’t load. All right. Is my router plugged into the main socket? It is. Will I change the filter? The other one is downstairs: this phone’s base-station is using it. All right, try it later. Will I check all the connections? 5p, 5p, 5p. Do I have a spare CAT cable? I do. I go into another room, taking the phone. The magic string is in a big plastic sack full of such nonsense. I drag out the required length of cable, bypass the Airport, and plug straight in to the Ethernet port on my MacBook. No dice. He will give me a fault number, the engineers will call me on Tuesday (this is Sunday) between one and three. HOWEVER, he says, in capitals, I want you to change the filters and diddle some more. I diddle. No dice.

Tuesday comes. No call. I am very busy indeed with a new book. I decide to call on Wednesday. The music, I am important, 5p, 5p, 5p, 5p. An Indian lady this time, rather more abrupt than “Terry” had been. She apologizes in a pyrotechnic display of insincerity. The engineers will call me on Thurday, between three and five.

No call.

A heavenly friend comes on the scene, by telephone: she happens at the moment to be working in Japan. She will sign me up with another ISP. I give her my credit card details, the password to my email account, the whole ball of wax, and she goes into action.

She did her best as usual, but the net result, if you will pardon such an execrable pun, is that I can get no hard-wired connection until the second week of November. At least.

I live in the country, and the nearest place that sells USB broadband dongles is 20 miles away. I went and bought one, £24.99; I shall use it to upload this post. It works in my house, but only on GPRS and at a glacial, pretty well unusable, speed. To find a 3G hotspot, I must drive into town, an 11-mile round trip.

That’s what I have just done, and that’s the reason you’re reading this. (Well, I’m in Chelsea now, and I’ve written this beforehand, but you know what I mean.)

While my ISP problems were going on, I hit a big problem in my plot. I realized to my horror that what I had written was not credible: the character simply wouldn’t have jumped off a cross-channel ferry. Nor, given the disability he has, would he have been physically able to. The rest of the story, I thought, depended on that crucial scene. Without it the whole book seemed to be shot. By now I was very tired, having been awake in the early hours for a week or two of consecutive mornings, thinking about the book. Despite that, I went for an afternoon walk and tried to clear my head, but things only seemed worse. What I had written so far, 30,000 words of it, was obviously rubbish. It would all have to be scrapped.

That night I slept much better. When I woke up I recognized the old signs of writer’s block. Having recognized the signs, I knew that not all was yet lost.

Writer’s block occurs when the author has made a mistake. He may not be aware of the fact, but at some point in his story he has taken a wrong turning and led himself down a path where events or motives are not believable. He needs to retrace his steps, find the wrong turning, and decide on the right one.

This is not an easy thing to do, especially if the mistake is many thousands of words back. He has invested much labour in his prose. Besides, the vanity that informs all fictioneering makes him reluctant to admit that anything is less than perfect.

The biggest problem is to accept that a mistake has been made. After that, it is simply a technical matter of finding out where it is. If left unfixed, the mistake can be fatal to a writer’s confidence. He finds himself blocked. The longer the block persists, the more thoroughly his confidence is undermined. He may find himself unable to write anything at all. That is why blocked writers are advised to start writing at random; but the advice is poor, because it does not recognize the root of the trouble.

I loaded the file and sat calmly with a cup of tea, checking each chapter in sequence. What, I asked myself, was the function of the suicide? The death of that character was essential to the rest of the story and could not be circumvented. Then I perceived a deeper problem: a violent death would disturb other patterns and tendencies that needed to remain low-key. Illness would be better, a short-lived but fatal illness. Immediately the difficulties dissolved away. The two latest chapters, about 6,000 words in all, would have to go, but they contained dialogue and some paragraphs that could be adapted to the new scheme. In fact, they fitted the new scheme better. It was as if, while drafting those chapters, I had already been subconsciously aware that I was heading in the wrong direction.

Flowing as easily as anything I have ever done, a new linking section appeared on my screen: 1,500 words in about two hours. As it appeared, so did the entire vista of the story emerge from the fog. Regions that had been indistinct now stood out clearly. I began to get excited again. Not only did the first 24,000 words not have to be scrapped, but they were correct.

To any blocked writer reading this I would say: don’t just hang on, listening to muzak at 5p a minute. Don’t diddle with your cables. Take no notice of Terry, he’s got his head up his arse. Leave your music server where it is. Just give your ISP the push, start again, and before much longer you’ll be back online.

Moles

2010-10-09T17:15:00.003+01:00

Image: Kókay Szabolcs

The onset of the frosts often brings signs of renewed mole activity, especially on pastureland. One morning it seems that freshly turned molehills are everywhere. There appears to be no pattern to them; an army of excavators has been at work; but if carefully studied it emerges that the heaps usually belong to a single burrow system inhabited by a single mole.

The “moudiewart” is not much of a socializer. Except when male and female briefly meet, of necessity, in the early spring, any encounter between moles usually leads to a fight, often vicious, and sometimes to the death. They are subterranean hermits, irascible and solitary. Their world, just a few inches underfoot, is quite bizarre; and they are wonderfully adapted to it.

Few people have seen a dead mole, never mind a live one, but of those who have, most are surprised by its smallness. A really big buck, so called, is no more than five and three-quarters inches long and tips the scale at something under five ounces.

Yet, for its size, the mole is one of the world’s strongest animals. In just twenty minutes it can evacuate as much as ten pounds of soil, or fifty times its own body-weight. A twelve-stone miner would have to shift four tons in the same period to work at a corresponding rate.

To fuel this tremendous effort, moles have a voracious intake of food, consuming about half their own weight every day. The main item of diet is the earthworm, but other soil invertebrates like slugs and leatherjackets are taken too.

The burrow system serves to trap whatever stumbles into it. The mole makes regular patrols, snapping up food as he finds it. When caught, a worm is seized with the jaws and pulled through the huge forelimbs in a special way, which cleans it of much external dirt and at the same time helps to void the contents of its gut. This done, the worm is either devoured in a matter of moments; or, in some circumstances, bitten in the head, to immobilize it, and stored to be savoured later. A mole’s pantry may contain many worms: the record is 470, weighing almost two pounds!

Periods of frenetic activity lasting about four and a half hours alternate with periods of about three and a half hours in the nest, sleeping it off. The cycle goes on regardless of day or night.

Some foreign species of mole are completely blind, with the eyes not only reduced but actually covered with skin. Our mole has not quite reached this stage. If you blow gently, you can part the plush pile of the fur to reveal tiny bead-like eyes. They can just distinguish light from dark, but probably not much else.

Nor is hearing of great importance. The external ear has gone altogether – it would only get in the way during burrowing – and the internal ear is not specially well developed. Taste and smell are also rather rudimentary.

Of much more interest are the mole’s other senses. It is keenly sensitive to touch, and can detect minute vibrations in the soil. Groups of tactile hairs are found on the chin and muzzle and the tip of the tail. The snout, pink and hairless, is covered with thousands of papillae called Eimer’s organs. These are specially sensitive, particularly when the slightly erectile tip of the snout is gorged with blood.

The function of these Eimer’s organs is not really known. They certainly register subtle changes in touch, and perhaps in smells too. They may also be affected by changes in temperature and infra-red radiation, enabling the mole to “see” in the dark.

Even more remarkably, it has been suggested that Eimer’s organs might also work as “teletactile receptors”, sensitive to minute changes in air pressure. By this means the mole could tell at a distance when it was approaching an obstacle or even a prey animal. The vibrissae may also help the mole to detect compression waves in the air, and certainly warn it of approaching obstacles.

If a mole’s senses are well adapted to the underground life, his anatomy is better adapted still. A mole is a digging machine, a furry bulldozer purpose-built for the job. The whole animal is tube-shaped. Its skeleton is heavily reinforced for attachment of the digging muscles and to allow free rotation of the shoulders, which are powerful and relatively massive. The forepaws are developed into efficient shovels, fitted with strong claws.

Put down on almost any surface but concrete, paving, or asphalt, a mole will immediately dive into the ground. A breast-stroke action is used, frenziedly repeated until the tip of the tail vanishes. Once underground the mole progresses with alternate motions of either forepaw, the other being used, together with the hind feet, as a brace.

In soft earth the spoil may simply be compacted into the sides of the tunnel, but in firmer ground it is ejected at intervals through specially made vertical shafts, and forms the molehills which are the bane of gardeners and greenkeepers. Sometimes, in very soft soil, moles make tunnels so close to the surface that the ridges may be clearly seen.

If he is lucky, a young mole will inherit a tunnel system ready-made, but often as not he has to start, so to say, from scratch. The construction of a complete tunnel system is a colossal task. Without seeking planning permission, tendering for contract, putting up a signboard, or bothering with a starting ceremony, the mole just gets on with it.

The system always incorporates a nest, a spherical chamber lined with hay and leaves. Here the mole sleeps, or if she is pregnant, gives birth to the tiny pink molelets. In places liable to flooding, the nest may be sited in an abnormally large molehill. These big hills, or fortresses, can be a foot high and a yard across.

Once the basic system is dug, it is refined and enlarged with other tunnels, crossing and branching and on a variety of levels. From then on most of the mole’s work consists of keeping it clear of obstructions.

When the weather turns cold, the mole moves into deeper tunnels which might not have been used since the spring. Repairs and alterations produce spoil; and it is this spoil that appears above the ground at the start of frosty weather – as sure a sign as any of the coming winter, and an outward clue that matters proceed in the industrious, hermitic life of the mole.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

This is the last of the Natureview pieces suitable for reproduction here. I hope you have enjoyed at least some of them.

Richard

Googlable Description

2010-10-08T14:22:00.000+01:00

It’s always a probem to know how to describe a character’s physical appearance. Often the best course is to say as little as possible, especially if it isn’t relevant to the plot. Better for the reader to form his or her own picture. The more effort the reader puts into this, the more personal and intense will be the imagined result. That’s one of the reasons why films of favourite books often prove so disappointing, and why authors who have any sense will oppose the depiction of characters on covers.

In the new novel I am working on now, the heroine is merely described (so far) as having “kindly, beautiful, greenish eyes”, while her identical twin has “auburn hair”. The rest of it can be deduced by the reader according to the reaction she produces in the other characters.

A hoary and overworked ploy is to tell the reader that the character resembles some famous person. Long ago I read a novel by John Barth in which the protagonist looked just like Gregory Peck. That was OK to the extent that everyone at that time had seen Gregory Peck at the pictures; not OK to the extent that, while Greg was to a large extent typecast (e.g. his roles in Cape Fear or To Kill a Mockingbird), he also played the weapons-grade nutter, Ahab, in Moby Dick. As a result, stray ideas intruded on Barth’s characterization.

Barth was also hamstrung by the paucity of people whose looks were widely known to his readership. It would have useless for him to say that his character resembled, say, Antonio Gramsci, because almost nobody would have known what he was talking about.

In a passage I was writing yesterday – having so far failed to give any hint at all about my hero – the heroine is thinking about him. I suddenly realized I could now get away with this:

Singer. Was that a Jewish name? He even looked a bit like Mahler, she had decided, on first meeting him. The young Mahler. Good-looking, really, in that intellectual way. Widely read. Cultured, unlike Michael Fitzgibbon. Or even, she was tempted to concede, Charles. No: she closed that avenue off.

(“Charles” is her fiancé.) Now, this story is aimed at the sort of people who will know who Mahler was, so that part of it is all right. Many of them will own CDs of Mahler’s music, and so may well have been exposed to images of the great man. But for anyone who doesn’t know what the “young Mahler” looked like, and can be bothered to take the trouble, enlightenment is only a click away.

As reading migrates more and more to the electronic, we can expect to see ebooks embedded with hyperlinks, easily accessed via pop-up windows activated by the equivalent of a mouseover. But these need not be restricted to strictly factual or technical matters: we may be at the start of a change in the way novelists interact with their readers’ imaginations.

Leaf-fall

2010-10-02T17:15:00.003+01:00

Image: Lukas Riebling

All but one of our native British trees are deciduous, shedding in a few weeks of autumn their canopy of leaves. The leaves contain green chlorophyll, held in bodies known as chloroplasts. It is in the chloroplasts that the main business of the tree is carried out – photosynthesis, the manufacture of sugars and other organic compounds, using carbon dioxide, water and trace elements, the whole reaction being powered by sunlight.

As much attention to detail is lavished on an individual leaf as on the whole tree. Each one is a miracle, a factory filled with chloroplasts. To work properly the chloroplasts must be kept wet, so the leaf is enveloped in a waterproof envelope and air is only allowed to enter through special pores which can be opened or closed at will.

Then of course the products of the chloroplasts must be conveyed to the rest of the tree, and waste matter taken away, so the leaf is provided with a complete network of veins.

When you think how many leaves are put out each spring by, for example, an oak tree, it seems an insane act of wastefulness to throw them away again at the end of the summer. Yet, such is the cost of maintaining a broad leaf in working order during unfavourable weather that it actually pays the tree to adopt the deciduous habit if its leaves are of that type.

In equatorial forests most broad-leafed trees keep a perpetual canopy of foliage, shedding leaves in small numbers all the year round. The same is done here in the temperate zone by a few broad-leafed trees, like the evergreen oaks, and the world over by pines, spruces, and the other “official” evergreens. In fact all trees everywhere regularly shed leaves which have reached the end of their working lives. Looked at like this, the autumn leaf-fall does not seem quite so profligate.

If a branch is killed, the leaves merely wither. They do not fall: the autumnal leaf-shedding is a carefully controlled operation, involving the least possible loss to the plant. Preparations for it have been going on since the summer.

Whenever a plant deliberately sheds an organ – be it a leaf, a petal, a whole flower, a fruit – a special separation layer is formed where the split is to take place. The layer is made of cells with an inherently weak jelly-like middle. Meanwhile, below this the tree forms a sealing layer which will keep out bacteria and fungal spores when the separation finally comes.

As the growing season reaches its end, the tree reclaims whatever it can from the leaf. Valuable trace elements are resorbed. The chloroplasts are gradually allowed to die, losing their green colour. The delicate conducting vessels which, all summer, have carried sugars out of the leaf, are one by one shut down and their point of entry into the system sealed off. All that remains are the tougher, woodier, water-conducting vessels.

Having lost its chlorophyll, the leaf is given colour by its residual pigments. Chief among these are xanthophylls and carotenes, which have an important job to play in the chemistry of the leaf. The autumn yellow of, say, the birch or sycamore is solely due to these.

There are other pigments, too. The golden yellow of beech leaves is produced by a brownish pigment, probably tannin, which is present in addition to the xanthophylls and carotenes. The more promiment reds and purplish-browns of the autumn woods come from a group of compounds called anthocyanins – which also give the red, purple or blue colour to many flowers.

The best autumn pageant comes only when the weather promotes the development of anthocyanins, when there are extended periods of bright, clear, dry weather with cool but not freezing night temperatures. This weather is the norm in autumn in New England, where the display of maples, oaks, and cherries attracts large numbers of admiring visitors every year.

The display in our own woods and gardens is not bad, either. Our native trees have a marvellous range of yellows, reds, and browns. The beech, of which different individuals turn at different times, offers perhaps the most beautiful show of colour, but such trees as the field maple, willow, rowan, and wild cherry can sometimes put in a really glorious performance. Then there are all the introduced trees, many of which have some fine autumn tints.

By the time the leaves are at this stage the whole metabolism of the tree has undergone a profound change. The hormonal balance – for plants, like animals, control their tissues with hormones – has tipped in favour of the dormins, a group of compounds prominent, as their name suggests, in the dormancy of seeds and buds. The growth-promoters of late winter and spring have been largely replaced by growth inhibitors. There is a build-up of these compounds in the area of the separation layer.

A leaf on the point of falling is held in place only by its separation layer, its outer skin, and the woody water-conducting vessels in the middle of the leaf-stalk. Wind and gravity between them work to free the leaf’s hold; the end often comes after a hard frost, which freezes the jelly-like middle of the separation layer, making it expand and forcing the cells apart.

Each breeze then thins the foliage, revealing more and more of the winter skein of twigs. The tree, the sugar factory, has shut down until spring: but next year’s leaves are already formed, crammed into buds.

When they reach the ground the old leaves are seized upon by an army of invertebrates and broken down into rich soil ready for future generations of leaves, and for future generations of trees and for all the other plants and animals that depend on them. So in the end nothing, really, is wasted after all.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Sleeping Rough

2010-09-25T17:15:00.005+01:00

Image: Matthew Woitunski

In Cassiobury Park at dusk I noticed a man of middle years, a little way ahead, making a slow and strangely aimless progress under the trees. Dressed in a dark overcoat and of outwardly normal appearance, it was at once apparent that he was anything but normal. His very walk betrayed him as one of society’s misfits, mentally or socially deficient, unable to make sense of the crazy set of rules devised by the rest of us. He had the air of utter solitude, the desolation and loneliness that mark the tramp: and a moment later he stooped to examine a discarded cigarette packet.

There are others sleeping rough in the park and woods. Occasionally, in out-of-the-way places, their shelters may be found: comfortless lairs of brushwood and polythene, with a cache of empty old tins and packets nearby.

Our own shelters are scarcely more permanent. We are separated from the wilderness only by the thickness of a pane of glass. Out there, as the winter begins to bite, conditions at night are frequently lethal for the soft, warm, high-tech machinery of our bodies.

The human animal evolved in the tropics, and is designed to work best in tropical temperatures. As man slowly migrated northwards he had to adopt new strategies for survival. The endless forests of temperate Europe teemed with game: the trade-off between cold and hunger was well worth the effort.

First he lost most of the pigment in his skin. It was no longer needed to protect the body from too much ultraviolet radiation, and even proved a handicap, for much of the body’s vitamin D is produced by the action of sunlight on the skin.

To help with heat insulation, he became more hairy. Of more importance, he developed the practice of wearing clothes, using the pelts of prey animals. Clothes are as old as northern man himself: the arguments of nudists that it is more natural to go without them in these latitudes are utterly fallacious.

The most important asset of all was fire. The earliest true men, belonging to a species called Homo erectus, used to keep a fire burning perpetually. Probably one member of the tribe was charged with tending it; when on the move, the fire was nurtured in the form of smouldering embers.

The capture and taming of fire represents one of the key feats in man’s mastery of the environment. It must have happened independently many times and in many places over aeons of time. Fire occurs spontaneously in nature, often following a lightning strike. It has no substance, yet gives pain and destroys. Its forms and colours are those of a spirit. Early men must have viewed it with terror.

But they must also have noticed how a bush fire drives the game before it, and must have taken advantage of the opportunities spontaneous fires gave. Any animal which died in the fire and was part roasted would have been eaten too, and they would have noticed with pleasure how much better this flesh tasted and how much easier it was for them to eat.

Then, sooner or later, one individual, more daring than the others, made the leap of imagination that even then was the stamp of genius.

The invention of friction-fire is even more remarkable. As any Boy Scout will tell you, it’s not just a question of rubbing two sticks together. Lighting a fire by friction is a difficult operation, as well as being hard work.

Another brilliant invention – the bow and arrow – gave rise to the bow-drill, in which the string of the bow is looped once round a stick. If the top of the stick is then held in place using a slightly hollow pebble, and the bow worked back and forth, the stick revolves at high speed. Result: smouldering punk-wood in a few moments, fire in a few moments more.

With ready fire and warm clothing, man moved ever northwards. The Inuit, whose unique way of life is now becoming a thing of the past, reached the ultimate in ingenuity with their igloos, houses made of snow itself.

The ingenuity of our ancestors in southern England led to winter pit-dwellings which must have been extremely cosy. Excavations at Stone Age campsites show an impressive degree of co-operation and skill in the construction of these pits. Roofed with branches and ferns and lined with skins, such a house would be occupied by a whole family group. Each occupant acted as a radiator, and after a very short time the interior temperature would be well up into the comfort zone.

In building these dwellings, as in a vast range of other techniques, the people who used to roam this landscape were experts at survival. Nearly all their skills depended on mutual co-operation and division of labour within the tribe. Solitude for a Stone Age man meant certain death, and probably, as in some primitive tribes still clinging on today, expulsion was the ultimate punishment.

The unfortunates sleeping rough in modern Britain have none of ancient man’s knowledge, nor can they draw on the inexhaustible supply of food the forest provided. Whippendell Wood would barely support even one family. The ecosystem has effectively been wrecked: the tramp must depend on the grocer’s shop along with the rest of us.

The grocer’s shop relies on an agriculture which would be virtually impossible without chemicals. If for some reason the supply of chemicals ceased, the whole structure of our society would collapse.

The old and unfit would simply die. For the rest, the black-and-white laws of survival beyond the window-pane, now faced only by the tramp, would become the new reality.

On an early-autumn night, that is a sobering thought indeed.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

My Ebook Filter

2010-09-21T11:46:00.000+01:00

Just a word to say that I have started a complementary blog. All is explained over there.

Fungi

2010-09-18T17:23:00.001+01:00

Lamellae of Amanita muscaria

Image: W.J.Pilsak

Most English people instinctively fear and dislike fungi, and waste no opportunity to kick a toadstool to bits. A native of the continent, especially of eastern Europe, would find such behaviour quite mad, and would no doubt add it to the long list of eccentricities for which we are internationally renowned.

In all lands but this, wild fungi are gourmet fare. But here we eat only the insipid mushrooms that come in a safe plastic punnet, and leave the best to rot. Of all the hundreds of sorts of mushrooms and toadstools to be gathered from our fields and woods, only a few are dangerously poisonous. A large number will give you indigestion, even more are tough, tasteless, or otherwise inedible, but many of the rest are absolutely delicious.

Unfortunately it takes detailed knowledge to decide which are safe to eat. There is no general rule, no substitute for knowing each species – and its lookalikes – well. In England we have no tradition of such learning passed down from parent to child. What knowledge we have must usually come from books.

Overcoming this English phobia and finding wild mushrooms for the table often leads on to an interest in the fungi themselves. More than an interest: a fascination, an obsession. A walk in the woods becomes a treasure-hunt. The fungus-seeker’s eyes are rarely raised from the ground, unless it is to scan the boughs overhead for bracket growths.

Fungi are now classified into their own kingdom, quite distinct from those of plants or animals. They are far stranger than any Martians. The range of forms and colours, of smells and textures and tastes, and of strategies for survival, shows a boundless cosmic imagination at work.

The majority of the world’s 50,000 or more named fungi are microscopic. They have colonized almost every conceivable habitat, from pigeon droppings to the fuel tanks of Concorde. In a single teaspoonful of garden soil there may be as many as 2 million individual fungi existing either as spores or in active growth.

All but the single-celled fungi are built to the same basic plan, being made up of hollow filaments called hyphae. The hyphae combine in a mass, the mycelium, which constitutes the body of the fungus. In a field mushroom, for example, the mycelium lies mostly underground as a network of threads; the mushrooms themselves are the fruiting bodies of the fungus and of course only appear at certain times when conditions for spore dispersal are favourable.

A toadstool is a masterpiece of design, custom made for the job of spreading as many spores as possible. This it does in various ways, depending on the group to which it belongs. In the gill fungi, which includes many of the larger and more familiar mushrooms and toadstools, the gills are covered with tiny club-shaped projections called basidia. Each basidium carries four minute stalks, with a spore on the end of each one.

A mushroom with a 10-centimetre wide cap has a gill area of some 1200 square centimetres. During an active life of 5 or 6 days, it will release something like 16,000 million spores – an average fall, day and night, of over 30,000 per second. Each of these spores is discharged in an ordered manner. Pressure is steadily increased at the point where the spore is attached to its stalk. The mechanism is not yet fully understood: but when the spore is discharged, it shoots away from the stalk to a distance of about 0.1 mm, or about 15 times its own length.

Then, falling down between the gills, it is carried away on air currents. Even the lightest movement is enough to bear it away. The other three spores on each basidium are shot off at intervals of a minute or so.

In order to achieve a free flow of spores, ripe basidia are evenly distributed among discharged ones and among those that are yet to fire. Both the stem and the cap respond to gravity, keeping the gills perpendicular to the ground and minimizing the chance of a spore sticking to an adjacent gill. The gills themselves are spaced and arranged for maximum efficiency. And, finally, most gill fungi take care to fruit in the autumn, when winds are strong, temperatures are right, and the weather is ideally damp.

Unlike green plants, fungi have no chlorophyll and so cannot make their own food. They must get it from other sources. Some fungi are symbionts, growing on or in other living organisms (even other fungi); some are saprotrophic, feeding on dead material. Symbionts may be of benefit to the host, or may weaken and eventually kill it, in which case the fungus may itself die or switch to saprotrophy. The distinctions are not always clear-cut.

The usual mode of feeding is via the hyphae, which ramify into a network invading the food source. Hyphae secrete chemicals which break down the food and allow it to be absorbed. The variety of things which fungi can use as food is staggering. Virtually any organic material – even the kerosene in Concorde’s tanks – can be grist to their mill. Without them, much of the decay in the world would be not happen and life for other forms would be difficult if not impossible.

Most of the larger fungi belong to an advanced group called the basidiomycetes (those fungi having basidia), and it is usually with this group that an interest in, even a love for, fungi begins.

The fungus fanatic could have no happier hunting-ground than Whippendell Wood, near Watford. The fungus flora there is so rich that during just a few visits I found well over 100 different species, and I would by no means call myself an expert. The commonest sort overall is one named Russula ochroleuca, with white stalk and gills and a yellowish cap, found growing singly or in small parties in the leaf litter under trees. Among the others are several of the most poisonous species known to man, and some of the most tasty.

Next time you take a walk in the woods – and what better month for that than October? – spare a minute to look at some fungi. Even if you’re not sure of their names, you may find that the previously despised, overlooked, and, perhaps, kicked to bits, is admirable after all and, in its own peculiar way, both impressive and beautiful.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Collared Doves

2010-09-11T17:16:00.010+01:00

Image: Horia Varlan

The practice of keeping dovecots is now largely a thing of the past, which is rather a shame, because a few white doves add greatly to the charm of a garden or courtyard. Better than domestic doves, though, are those born and bred to the wild. They make ideal “pets”, because they are free to leave at any time, and there is none of the compulsion which to my mind mars the usual relationship of human with animal.

Unless you are very unlucky, you will have your own wild doves – Collared Doves – not too far away: slender, stone-coloured birds with a distinctive cooing song. They are fond of suburban back gardens, smallholdings, farmyards, and similar places, and where unmolested can become quite tame.

At a distance a Collared Dove looks almost uniformly greyish brown, but seen close to, especially in sunshine, it is a most elegant and attractive bird. The plumage is very delicately contoured and shaded, and a softly vinous flush on the breast harmonizes perfectly with the claret-coloured legs and feet. The eye, too, is in this register of red: when the sun catches it at a certain angle, it looks exactly like a ruby.

In its flight and habits the Collared Dove is a gentle, fastidious creature; the partial black collar, edged with white, is reminiscent of the velvet chokers once worn by dowager duchesses. The impression is completed by one of the bird’s often-used calls, a loud uhrrr, uhrrr! uttered as if in horror at the violation of its genteel sensibilities by the appearance of some unspeakably uncouth ruffian – perhaps even a flasher.

The Collared Dove has become so much a part of the local scene that it is hard to believe it bred in this district no earlier than 1966. The first arrivals were the subject of a series of excited notes on a brand-new card in my index box. The magic date was 25 May 1966, when a male was seen – studied at 30x through my telescope! – and heard singing on the roof of the house. By 4 June it had a mate and both birds remained in the area till the end of the year. Definitely not a domesticated form. Very good views frequently obtained when seen drinking from gutter 15’ from window. Wary and unapproachable.

Few bird-watchers now would bother to record “very good views” of the Collared Dove. But how and why has this bird become so common where previously it was unknown?

Nothing is ever static in the living world. Even the most apparently stable community of plants and animals is in perpetual flux, brought about by changes in climate or other environmental factors, or by changes in their own genetics and evolution. Change is in fact one of the chief characteristics of living things.

Normally this change is quite slow, taking the span of many human lifetimes to become obvious. Sometimes, though, it can be quite rapid, and occasionally, as in the case of the Collared Dove, it can be spectacular.

The most sudden changes come in the wake of some catastrophe, a natural disaster such as a forest fire, an earthquake, or volcano, which wipes out one community and gives a clean slate for the formation of another. Or the natural disaster may simply destroy one part of the community and alter its balance, allowing certain new forms to invade.

Man’s influence on the environment can be seen as a series of natural disasters, both large and small, of this second type. Many species have lost out; some have gained from the opportunities inadvertently put in their way. When a species not only has a new set of opportunities put before it, but simultaneously undergoes a genetic or behavioural change enabling it to exploit new territory, then you can expect some fireworks.

The Collared Dove was originally a bird of the Indian sub-continent. Its principal food is grain, which pre-adapted it to benefit from Man’s increasing use of agriculture. As farming slowly became more successful the Collared Dove began to spread slowly north and west, reaching Asia Minor in the 16th century. By 1925 it was well established in the Balkans.

Then, suddenly, something happened. It may have been a slight genetic change enabling some individuals to breed more successfully; it may have been a behavioural change making the Collared Dove even more tolerant of Man. Whatever did happen, the slow northward expansion of the previous few centuries became a full-scale invasion.

A record of its progress across Europe looks like one of those animated maps showing the advance of the Nazis: from Belgrade it reached Hungary in 1928 and Czechoslovakia in 1935. Austria fell in 1938, Poland in 1940. It reached Germany and Italy in 1944, Holland in 1947, Switzerland and Sweden in 1949. By 1950 it was breeding in France: the first (unofficial) British sighting was in 1952, the first breeding record in Norfolk in 1955. It first bred in the London area in 1962, and in our own district, as already mentioned, in 1966.

The earliest colonists were often to be found in the vicinity of chicken-runs, or at zoos or other places where spilled or otherwise free grain was to be picked up. This opportunism in feeding is one key to the Collared Dove’s success. Another is its liking for conifers in which to nest – almost to order we busily planted our suburbs with Lawson’s Cypress, ready for its arrival.

But the main key to its success is its fecundity. In mild weather the breeding season may begin as early as January and go on till October. It can tend the young of one brood while incubating the eggs of the next, and will tolerate levels of disturbance that would make most other birds desert.

The increase is still going on. In Britain it is extending its range into other habitats, especially farmland. Abroad it is still moving north and west, having reached Iceland, where this gentle invader may even be readying itself for the final, really big challenge, the one that even the Nazis couldn’t get near: Canada, the USA, and all points south.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Aristocrat Butterflies

2010-09-04T17:24:00.004+01:00

Proboscis of Peacock Butterfly, Inachis io

Image: Ian Dury

The fermenting juice of rotting windfalls brings many wasps and flies, the odd hornet, and, with luck, butterflies. If nearby there are also September flowers – especially Michaelmas daisies and buddleia blossom – the chance of butterflies is increased still more.

By this time of year the majority of butterflies still on the wing are those that spend the winter as adults, rather than as eggs or larvae or pupae. Typical of this group are certain members of the nymphalids, a family which contains some of the showiest and best-known British butterflies, such as the Peacock, the Red Admiral, the Comma, and the Small Tortoiseshell.

So entranced were the early lepidopterists by this family that they called many of its children the “aristocrats” and gave them names to match. The Purple Emperor, the White Admiral (the word Admiral is a corruption of “Admirable”), the Camberwell Beauty, and the Large Tortoisehell are rare in England today. A frequent cause of a butterfly’s decline is increasing scarcity of the plant or plants on which its caterpillar feeds. In the case of the Large Tortoiseshell, for example, the major food plant is elm, and, through Dutch elm disease, we have lost twenty-five million trees since 1970.

But not all is gloom. Many sorts of insects – a number of aristocrats among them – depend either partly or completely on the nettle for food and shelter. The nettle is highly nutritious for hungry caterpillars and, best of all, avoided by grazing animals. It is usually found in association with man, thrives on waste ground, and may be locally abundant.

The Red Admiral, the Peacock, the Small Tortoiseshell and the Comma are all partial or exclusive nettle-feeders, so it is no surprise that these are the aristocrats commonest today. The Comma – a tawny butterfly with its jagged-edged wings spotted with black – has in fact been increasing its numbers since about 1925, for reasons not fully understood.

The Comma gets its name from a small, comma-shaped mark in silvery white on the underside of each hind wing. The rest of the undersides are camouflaged with brown and darker brown pencillings, so cleverly that when a Comma closes its wings it can seem to disappear. Its caterpillar, which leads a solitary life, goes one better in the camouflage game and looks very much like a bird dropping. The adult butterfly is often seen in gardens, where it may form an attachment to a small area – sometimes of just a few yards square – with its own favourite leaves for resting and basking in the sun.

The Peacock and the Small Tortoiseshell also have drab, disguised underwings which contrast with the ostentatious patterns above. The Small Tortoiseshell, marked with orange, brown, contrasting patches of black and white, and with a tracery of tiny blue half-moons along each trailing edge, is perhaps the most familiar of the garden aristocrats.

The Peacock is almost as common. It is so called from its four large “eyes”, the ones on the hind wings being especially like those on peacock’s feathers. The colouring and texture of its wings are almost unbelievably subtle and complex, more inventive and in far better taste than even the most costly Oriental carpet. However long you study a resting Peacock, always apprehensive that at any moment it will decide to flit away, your eye can never take it all in; the brain can remember no more than the crudest essentials of the pattern.

It is no answer to catch and kill the insect and pin it to a board, for then, with its life, its vibrancy is lost and the colours seem to fade. Butterflies must be admired in their totality, and that includes sunlight and air and the liberty to fly away.

The fruit-strewn turf of a neglected orchard is a fine place to see Red Admirals. Drunk on cider and greedy for more, they are more approachable than usual. The wing-pattern is predominantly black, with a scarlet band across each forewing, another on the trailing edge of each hind wing, all offset by white splashes and touches of azure. As it sips the sweet, intoxicating juice the butterfly continually opens and closes its wings as if in ecstasy. The scene is almost one of decadence. In places two or three Red Admirals jostle with Peacocks and wasps for the best places on the decaying fruit.

This taste for decay is reminiscent of some of the really big tropical butterflies which flock to putrefying carrion. At one time Purple Emperors were baited with dead rabbit; besides rotting fruit, the Red Admiral likes the rich sap oozing from damaged oak trunks.

The Red Admiral, like several other nymphalids worldwide, is a migrant. It arrives in May, having flown here from North Africa or Southern Europe, and lays its eggs, singly, on the upper surface of nettles or related plants. These eggs give rise to the resident summer generation; some of the butterflies feeding in the orchard may be on a return migration, for the Red Admiral is unable to withstand the northern cold and does not hibernate north of the Alps.

The Peacock, the Comma, and the Small Tortoiseshell, though, are able to withstand it, and in the next few weeks will be seeking safe places to hide for the winter. With their wings closed, leaving only the camouflaged undersides showing, they are easily missed by predators. They are also easily missed by humans: when giving the garden shed its autumn turn-out it is worth remembering that some of these butterflies may well have staked their all on a crack or crevice in some dark corner.

There they remain, month after month, motionless and with their body functions almost at a standstill. A few warm days in March are enough to wake them, which is why Peacocks or Small Tortoiseshells are among the first butterflies to be seen in spring. Then there is no rotting fruit to attract them; they must break their fast with a purer nectar sipped from banks of heather or other early blooms.

It might be preferable to think of them at that spring, rather than this autumn, equinox, and, tiptoeing a retreat through the dew-soaked grass, leave the orchard and its inhabitants to their orgy of decay.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Dr Johnson’s Patron

2010-09-04T08:58:00.002+01:00

With much pleasure I am re-reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and am reminded not only of Dr Johnson’s wit and good sense, but also of his superhuman command of the language. Who today could deliver an insult as smooth and studied as that comprised in his letter to Lord Chesterfield?

In seeking a patron for his Dictionary – a work which laid the foundation for all subsequent English dictionaries and which he completed alone but for the assistance of six clerks – he addressed “Philip Dormer, Earl of Chesterfield, then one of his Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State; a nobleman who was very ambitious of literary distinction, and who, upon being informed of the design, had expressed himself in terms very favourable to its success.”

Boswell goes on: “Johnson told me, that there never was any particular incident which produced a quarrel between Lord Chesterfield and him; but that his Lordship’s continued neglect was the reason why he resolved to have no connection with him. When the Dictionary was upon the eve of publication, Lord Chesterfield, who, it is said, had flattered himself with expectations that Johnson would dedicate the work to him, attempted, in a courtly manner, to sooth, and insinuate himself with the Sage, conscious, as it should seem, of the cold indifference with which he had treated its learned authour; and further attempted to conciliate him, by writing two papers in The World, in recommendation of the work. ...

“This courtly device failed of its effect. Johnson, who thought that ‘all was false and hollow’, despised the honeyed words, and was even indignant that Lord Chesterfield should, for a moment, imagine that he could be the dupe of such an artifice. His expression to me concerning Lord Chesterfield, upon this occasion, was, ‘Sir, after making great professions, he had, for many years, taken no notice of me; but when my Dictionary was coming out, he fell a scribbling in The World about it. Upon which, I wrote him a letter expressed in civil terms, but such as might shew him that I did not mind what he said or wrote, and that I had done with him.’”

Boswell secured a copy.

“TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL OF CHESTERFIELD

“February 7, 1755.

“MY LORD, I have been lately informed, by the proprietor of The World, that two papers, in which my Dictionary is recommended to the publick, were written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished, is an honour, which, being very little accustomed to favours from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.

“When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address; and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself Le vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre; – that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending; but I found my attendance so little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in publick, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I had done all that I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.

“Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a Patron before.

“The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.

“Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Publick should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.

“Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation, my Lord, your Lordship’s most humble, most obedient servant,

“SAM JOHNSON.”

Boswell adds: “There is a curious minute circumstance which struck me, in comparing the various editions of Johnson’s imitations of Juvenal. In the tenth Satire, one of the couplets upon the vanity of wishes even for literary distinction stood thus:

“‘Yet think what ills the scholar’s life assail,
“‘Pride, envy, want, the GARRET, and the jail.”

“But after experiencing the uneasiness which Lord Chesterfield’s fallacious patronage made him feel, he dismissed the word garret from the sad group, and in all the subsequent editions the line stands

“‘Pride, envy, want, the PATRON, and the jail.”’

Dan Brown Tops Oxfam's 'Least Wanted' Chart

2010-09-03T21:39:00.001+01:00

In a snobbish but interesting piece, the Guardian lists the top ten chart of books donated to Oxfam. Dan Brown is at Number 1 and is categorized as the author whose books people most want shot of; while Ian Rankin, at Number 2, is far more charitably treated. Frankly, books is books, and any book is better than no book; and no one, but no one, especially a journalist, has the right to judge others’ tastes in reading.

Besides its run-of-the-mill charity shops, Oxfam also has a number of dedicated bookstores, and is “the third-biggest bookseller in the UK, and Europe’s biggest high street retailer of second-hand books”.

The number of books being donated has fallen by about 15% over the summer, while the number of books being bought has increased by 6%. The charity’s Head of Retail Operations blames the quagmire of austerity into which we have blundered.

These figures may indicate that people are (a) buying fewer new books and (b) buying second-hand instead. One should not read too much into them, but I suspect that the rise of electronic reading may also be having an impact, particularly on commerce in the sort of paperback fiction that is rarely re-read. Austerity or no, Oxfam should prepare itself for a steep decline in book donations.

The article doesn’t raise the moral questions about Oxfam’s trade in books, questions as complicated as life itself.

Pro

1. Charitable works are funded.

2. Books are recycled, saving trees, printing ink, and whatnot.

3. The books are not burnt, keeping their carbon content out of the atmosphere, which is a merit if you believe in anthropogenic global warming.

4. Nor do they go into landfill, an undoubted merit.

5. People pay, on average, a mere £1.60 for a book, so reading is encouraged.

Con

1. It has been argued that authors, literary agents, publishers and the sellers of new books are deprived of income every time a second-hand book is sold, depressing the literary trade – but I am not so sure of this: like public libraries, second-hand bookstores may act as showcases for little-known writers.

2. Oxfam ships the books around the country, burning fossil fuels, a demerit for AGW believers.

3. Are we secure in the knowledge that the largesse dispensed by Oxfam finds the right home?

4. Further: is the mere existence of such an NGO an indictment of the West’s failure to trade fairly with the developing world?

5. Further still: might Oxfam’s beneficiaries be incited to tackle the corruption and incompetence endemic in their ruling elites, the source of so much misery, if charitable donations, like foreign aid, were withheld?

I don’t pretend to know the answers to the last three questions, but even something as apparently simple as giving your copy of The Da Vinci Code to a local charity shop turns out not to be simple at all.

Such complexity is the province of the philosopher rather than the journalist; it is also the province of the novelist, whose philosophizing is dressed up in the trappings of fiction. And the more fiction one writes and the longer one lives, the harder it is to take any newspaper story at face value ... especially where money is concerned.

Black-headed Gull

2010-08-28T17:16:00.012+01:00

Image: Gidzy

As summer comes to its close, the annual influx of gulls gathers pace. By autumn they are everywhere in the district, feeding on pasture and arable and parkland, by and on water of all kinds, and, ever on the lookout for a meal, patrolling the skies above back gardens and industrial sites.

There are five common sorts which visit us here, and the commonest of these is the black-headed gull. This is the smallest and the slenderest of the five, and can be told by its red bill and legs, and the long white triangle on the leading edge of the wings, which have pointed rather than rounded tips.

Despite its name, the black-headed gull’s head is not black. In spring and summer the adult has a chocolate-brown hood, which is moulted in autumn to leave the head pure white except for two dark smudges, the larger one behind the eye and the smaller one just in front of it. The immature bird is more mottled in appearance, but still has the white triangles on the wings and, at all seasons, the smudges on the head.

In grace, buoyancy, and agility of flight the black-headed gull has few equals among our winter birds. During autumn it makes a habit of following the plough, and a hundred or more at a time can be seen swirling like snowflakes against the freshly turned soil. The same sort of prey – wireworms, millipedes, earthworms, and so on – attracts it to football fields and similar grassland; but our local black-headed gulls find their shangri-la on pasture that has just been sprayed with Hydig, the fertilizing sludge produced at Maple Cross sewage works, just south of Rickmansworth.

The sewage works themselves are also an attraction for gulls. In the grounds is a disused gravel pit which, during the 1960s, was filled with solid matter rejected during the purification process. A long black outfall pipe led from the works into the middle of the pit. Some of the outfall consisted of sand, so that the pit slowly became silted up, but it also contained grain, as well as a comprehensive assortment of the things that get dropped or thrown into the lavatory (among them many children’s toys such as rubber Donald Ducks, combs, nailbrushes, pairs of spectacles, and any number of sets of false teeth.)

Among all this detritus the gulls used to gather, picking over the spoils. At irregular intervals there came a distant rumbling in the pipe. At this the gulls’ excitement mounted, and with expectant cries of “kwarr” the flock drew closer to the broad mouth of the pipe, flying up when, with a rush, it disgorged a fresh supply of sludge.

During hard weather this was an important source of food for the gulls in the Colne Valley, and as many as 400 birds could be seen there at once. The dumping has finished now, but the sewage works still draw plenty of gulls. After detailed observation the same individuals can be recognized returning day after day, for some birds have peculiarities such as a deformity of the bill or an odd pattern of plumage. A few of the gulls carry aluminium leg-rings, put there by ornithologists perhaps in other countries.

One ring seen on a living bird bore the number C-17122 or C-1722. From this and a description of the pattern the British Trust for Ornithology were able to say that the ring was of Finnish origin, and in fact many of the black-headed gulls which winter with us breed in the countries round the Baltic Sea, especially Sweden and Denmark.

In Britain the black-headed gull breeds, especially in the north, on saltmarshes and sandhills close to the sea. Yet it is also the most inland of our gulls and nests on marshy islands in lakes and moorland pools far from the coast. In the early 1960s a few pairs even bred at Maple Cross, but the colony was soon abandoned.

It is difficult to imagine today that all gulls, even the black-headed, were once very rare in this area, being seen only when storms at the seaside blew them off course. Their success is attributable directly to man: they have learned to exploit the many opportunities, like the sewage outfall pipe, we have unwittingly put in their way.

The only problem for gulls inland is the need of a safe roost. The first gulls to appear in any numbers in London arrived in the bitterly cold winter of 1894-5, and they roosted then mainly on the Thames at Chiswick Eyot, or at the small Lonsdale Road Reservoirs.

At the turn of the century there was a big increase in reservoir-construction. The huge Staines Reservoir was completed in 1902 and quickly became a major gull roost. The other reservoirs in that part of Middlesex and north Surrey, some even bigger than Staines Reservoir, as well as a chain of reservoirs in the Lea Valley, provided further roosting. Today well in excess of 100,000 gulls roost in the London Area during winter.

When it was filled, in 1955, Hilfield Park Reservoir near Aldenham soon became an important roost, attracting something like 5,000 birds. Many of our local gulls roost there, and at dusk make their flight-lines in that direction. The rest of our birds roost, or did roost, at Staines, and the birds from the Colne Valley can be seen flying south at the end of day. This is where the Maple Cross birds roosted, arriving there 25 minutes after first light, having taken that time to fly, at 40 m.p.h., the distance from Staines.

But now these opportunists have found a way to cut their commuting time. A vast gravel pit, Broadwater, has been dug at Denham, large enough to make a safe roost, and many Staines-bound gulls have adopted it as their own.

A gull roost as it fills is an extraordinary sight. The sheer spectacle of so many birds in one place is not soon forgotten. To see them arriving, each with a different experience of the day’s foraging, is a powerful reminder of the adaptability of living things and the effect that man has had on their world.

As the gulls come in, you tend to forget about their feeding habits and are conscious only of a sense of wonder and beauty. If only all our activities produced a result like that.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

What Every Creative Person Should Know About Writing for Money

2010-08-27T11:55:00.006+01:00

The Famous Writers School was co-founded by Bennett Cerf, who also co-founded Random House, the publishing company. The Wikipedia entry for FWS is here; the exposé by Jessica Mitford is here.

It was fronted by various (at the time) well known names from the world of publishing, such as Rod Serling.

Talent is innate. No one can teach it to you. You can be taught how to use tools and how to operate within the market where the fruits of your talent can be sold. Otherwise, you’re on your own.

I am suspicious of any course purporting to teach “creative writing”. The student’s time and money would be better spent in (a) living life and thereby furnishing his subconscious with the stuff of which stories are made; and (b) reading, reading, and reading some more, thereby furnishing his mind and sensibility with the stuff from which his own technique can be wrought.

A former neighbour of mine once approached me as I was washing my car. She said that a friend of hers had fallen on hard times and needed some quick cash. This friend had had the idea of writing a novel. Did I have any tips; could I recommend any shortcuts?

Another acquaintance, approaching retirement from his job with the Forestry Commission, told me he was thinking of taking up freelance writing and asked me my opinion of the idea. I replied: “If you have any soul left to destroy, writing is a good way to go about it.”

No one with an ounce of sense sets out to write for money. In fact, no one with an ounce of sense sets out to write at all. One writes because one is compelled to do so; because failure to write, to get the words out, results in a malaise that cannot be relieved in any other way.

Writing is a form of addiction. The writer craves the opioids that his own brain generates during composition. The habit often begins early, at school, with praise from a teacher for an essay or poem. The confounded teacher notices a spark of talent in the wretched child and with unthinking words at once sprays butane on the embers and condemns the pupil to a lifetime of addiction.

Of course, the dopamine habit also grips the untalented, as a glance at any slush-pile, paper or electronic, will confirm.

If you write “creatively” at all, the only valid motive is self-realization. You should not expect, and certainly not demand, that other people should read your output, still less pay you for it. If they do either, you’re well ahead of the game – especially if they pay.

The desire for payment will expose you to rejection on an industrial scale. It will compromise your output. You will have to stifle innovation by tailoring your prose to a presumed “market” (i.e. the work already on sale). You will also have to collaborate and accept criticism, not only from editors but reviewers.

But, in the first instance, the desire for payment will leave you vulnerable. The world’s greatest con-artist, “Count” Victor Lustig, once declared that it was impossible to swindle an honest man.

My advice to my neighbour’s friend? “Don’t do it!”

PW Select: A Quarterly Service for the Self-Published

2010-08-25T11:12:00.000+01:00

Publishers' Weekly – that bastion of the traditional publishing world – has announced that in future it will deign to review certain self-published books.

The author should send his book packaged according to PW's eco-friendly desires:

Please, please send your book in a bio-sensitive package (i.e., no bubble wrap or plastic envelopes). Also, please use packaging appropriate to the book you are submitting: no boxes full of packing peanuts or paper stuffing. We recommend reusable and recycled paper envelopes.

Before doing that, however, he must send PW a decidedly bio-insensitive $149. This buys his book a place in the quarterly draw, together with a six-month subscription to the online magazine.

The entire PW editorial staff will participate in a review of the titles being considered for review, and we'll likely invite a few agent friends and distributors to have a look at what we've chosen. No promises there, just letting some publishing friends take advantage of the opportunity to see the collection.

Ooh! What a thrill!

At least 25 of the submitted titles will be selected for a published review.

So no guarantees that your book will be reviewed, or subjected to anything but filing under "B" for Bin. It's a lottery, then. It is also redolent of the dodgy world of vanity publishing; and it is a sign, I think, that PW is becoming uneasily aware of the rumbling noise that presages a catastrophic and terminal earthquake in its industry.

Hat-tip: Mike Cane

The Moon

2010-08-21T16:53:00.003+01:00

Reflected Moon on Paddy-fields in Sarashina

by Hiroshige Utagawa

The full moon of August will be with us tomorrow. In one ceremony of ancient Japan this moon, seen reflected in water, symbolized more than anything else the mystery and transience of life. But to see the Moon at any time, and at any phase, can be an awe-inspiring experience. Whether you are in the comfortable north-western suburbs of London or camped out on an Antarctic ice-floe, the Moon presents the same inscrutable visage.

It is a true wilderness, remote, aloof from our concerns, and, except for the assorted junk left behind by space programmes, as yet unbefouled.

The familiar pattern on the Moon (representing a man’s face, a hare, a beetle, the Madonna and Child, or a dozen others, depending on your culture) is made up of the darkness of plains contrasted with the brightness of mountains. Seen with binoculars, the pattern disappears at once, and it is only then, with the Moon filling your field of view, that you get some idea of its majesty and size.

For, although the Moon is held to be a mere satellite of the Earth, it is much bigger than the moons of Mars or Jupiter, being over 1/5th the weight of the planet Mercury. Indeed, according to one theory of the Moon’s origin, it was once a small planet, with an independent orbit.

This theory suggests that, at some time at least four billion years ago, the Moon passed sufficiently close to the Earth to be “captured” by the Earth’s gravitational field. As the Moon passed there would have been huge tides, miles high, in the Earth’s oceans. The energy to produce these tides was thus transferred from the Moon to the Earth, slowing the Moon down and preventing it from getting away.

There is a theoretical limit at which any satellite can remain intact, called the Roche limit, which, in the case of Earth, is about 3,700 miles from the planet surface. Once the Moon reached the Roche limit it began to break up, losing half its mass to the Earth, especially the heavier rocks containing iron. This material became the present continental land masses.

The remnants, now just outside the Roche limit, gradually reformed into a sphere and began to retreat, towards the Moon’s present mean distance of almost 240,000 miles from the Earth.

An older theory was that the Moon was originally torn from the substance of the Earth, leaving behind the scar which we now call the Pacific Ocean. Recent understanding of the way continents drift makes this idea seem less likely, as does the fact that rock samples brought back by the Apollo missions prove that the geology of the Moon is very different from that of the Earth.

All the planets in our solar system, and their satellites, were formed by clouds of gas from the Sun, but not all were formed at the same time or from the same cloud. Another theory of the Moon’s origin is that the Moon has always been in the Earth’s orbit, but was formed from a different cloud. Of the three theories, the first is perhaps the most favoured today. Since we do not yet even know in detail how the Earth was made, it may be premature to expect firmer knowledge just yet.

These are matters for the physicists and mathematicians to ponder. But it requires no special knowledge to look at the Moon, and if you have even an old pair of opera glasses you can follow in the tradition set by Galileo, who first turned a telescope on the Moon in 1610. Although he probably knew that no large expanses of water were to be found there, it was he who named the dark areas maria (seas) and the light ones terra (land).

These terms have survived to the present day, inappropriate as they are. We now know that the Moon’s surface is almost unbelievably harsh. When Neil Armstrong took that “giant step for mankind” on 21 July 1969, he stepped into a desert of black, basaltic dust and rock, baked during full sunlight to the temperature of boiling water and frozen during the lunar night to the temperature of liquid air.

On the Moon there are mountains higher than the Himalayas and craters up to 180 miles across and 2,600 feet deep. The atmosphere is extremely thin, for the Moon’s gravity is only 1/6th that of Earth. This means that there is almost nothing to protect the Moon from the impact of meteorites, the chunks of rock which, hurled out perhaps thousands of years before by some disintegrating star, travel on and on through empty space until they meet an obstruction. Most of those striking the Earth get burned up by friction with our thick atmosphere: not so on the Moon.

The surface of the Moon is buried to a depth of several feet in meteorite debris. Its entire surface is pockmarked with craters, from the microscopic to the gigantic. When the impact is especially great, splashes of moondust are thrown in all directions. These bright splashes are called “rays”, and, until disturbed by further impacts, may clearly be seen from Earth.

One of the most perfect craters, as yet virtually undamaged by subsequent impacts, is Tycho. This is in the southern hemisphere, at about the same latitude as New Zealand is on Earth. The 54-mile wide crater has a sharp central peak and walls which rise to 16,000 feet.

The splashes radiating from Tycho have spread out across almost the entire visible face of the Moon, one ray even being seen to cross the Sea of Serenity in the northern hemisphere. The best views of the Moon are usually to be had at other phases, when the slanting sunlight makes the surface stand out in sharp relief, but full moon is the time to see the rays of Tycho.

The full moon – and what better than the August one, traditionally the moon to be viewed – is also, perhaps, the most impressive and the most suitable way of reminding ourselves of the true value and scale of things.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Salvador Dalí on "What's My Line?"

2010-08-21T12:08:00.000+01:00

Spotted flycatchers

2010-08-14T17:22:00.000+01:00

Image: Andrew Easton

A new little bird appeared yesterday morning at the corner of the road, perching on a telephone wire high above the pavement. It first attracted attention by its call – a characteristic wee tuc-tucc, wee tuc which, once heard and learned, is never forgotten.

The owner of this cry is just the sort of small brown bird to puzzle the beginner, with mousy plumage above, paler underparts and a few dark streaks on the breast. But its upright, watchful posture and, above all, its behaviour, confirmed the identification at once.

From its perch on the wire the bird made repeated swooping sallies at flying insects, swerving in mid air to return to the same spot. After a short rest it ventured forth again, returning this time to a bare twig in one of the trees that line the road here.

Gilbert White, in his letter to Thomas Pennant of 4 August 1767, says: “The stoparola of Ray (for which we have as yet no name in these parts) is called, in your Zoology, the fly-catcher. There is one circumstance characteristic of this bird, which seems to have escaped observation; and that is, it takes its stand on the top of some stake or post, from whence it springs forth on its prey, catching a fly in the air, and hardly ever touching the ground, but returning still to the same stand for many times together.”

The good curate of Farringdon, in Hampshire, was as precise in this as in all the observations contained in his Natural History of Selborne: the bird on the corner was indeed a fly-catcher: a spotted flycatcher, to be exact, the Muscicapa striata of our zoology.

It was still present this afternoon, although it had moved a few yards along the road. It is on its way to Africa for the winter and, as flycatchers do, has taken a sudden and unaccountable liking to this place.

The preference of the flycatcher for one location over another is something of an enigma. On the one hand the bird tolerates man, often building its nest close to a busy path; on the other it seems attracted by the tranquillity of an unfrequented garden or woodland clearing.

One pair which nested in a small copse adjoining the school swimming bath were, with their fledglings, much in evidence when no one was about, perching now on the close-boarded fence by the grass, now on the diamond-mesh fence running from the changing shed to the filter house. The sound of the filters, the smooth surface of the deserted pool, the blue reflections and refractions, the dense foliage of the oaks and lindens of the copse: all this gave the place an air of magical seclusion of which the flycatchers seemed to form a natural part.

They were brought here by the many insects attracted to the water. Even when the flycatchers’ domain was invaded by a solitary swimmer they continued to feed. But as soon as more people arrived, the birds withdrew, emerging again only later when peace resumed.

Flycatchers are like this in gardens too. Best of all is a garden untenanted, overgrown, with plenty of neglected corners to bring the insects and a sufficiency of bare twigs for feeding-perches. Next best is a garden frequented, if at all, only by one or two gentle souls with trugs and secateurs. The passage flycatchers appear at hedge-clipping time. They do not object to the click of hand-shears, but vanish at the whine and rattle of electric cutters, or at the noise of all the other mechanical abominations with which even the smallest garden now abounds.

Yet the spotted flycatcher is one of the few species – the others are the chaffinch, great and blue tits, song thrush, blackbird, dunnock, and wren – that can thrive in the gardens of Inner London. They are able to do this because their requirements for food and nest-sites are comparatively unaffected by lack of undergrowth. Flies may be found almost everywhere, and their catchers are content to nest on a beam or branch close to a wall or tree trunk, or in a crevice in masonry. Thus flycatchers are among the few species able to breed in the Royal Parks or in the squares of Mayfair or Bloomsbury.

There is another sort of breeding British flycatcher, the pied flycatcher, with a more westerly distribution. This bird has been seen in the district only on a handful of occasions, usually on autumn passage. The spotted and the pied are typical of the flycatchers found in Europe, with flat, rather broad bills surrounded by bristles which help direct the prey into the gape.

Elsewhere in the world, especially in the tropics, there is a large and diverse array of birds of the flycatcher tribe. Some are brilliantly coloured, as small as wrens or as large as thrushes; many have habits nothing like those of our own native species. In New Guinea, for example, many of the fifty or so breeding species behave more like warblers, chats, or even shrikes than flycatchers. In Madagascar live species which live sociably in the tree canopy, just like our native blue tits and great tits. In south-east Asia are flycatchers which keep to the shadows of the undergrowth, like our robin.

But they all share a certain special elegance and grace, and give a peculiar impression of rightness in their habits and form. The flycatcher on the corner, by choosing this place for his halt on the journey south, has, in his own small way, conferred on it the accolade of his approval and made it better than it was before.

Probably he will be there tomorrow too, but the following day he may well be gone, leaving behind a sense of flatness, emptiness, and loss: a sense of impending autumn.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Dragonflies

2010-08-07T17:30:00.003+01:00

Anax imperator

Image: Agnieszka Urbaniak

The dragonfly is the heraldic emblem of these August afternoons. It is a creature of the heat, its darting activity and purposefulness a direct contrast to the lethargy that overtakes the canal, the river, the weed-choked ponds and streams. Its colouring belongs more to the tropics than to the English lowlands; and in its ferocity the dragonfly reminds us of the merciless insect-war going on, mostly unseen, everywhere in the dense vegetation of summer at its height.

Throughout the whole animal kingdom, indeed, there are no more brilliant colours than those of certain dragonflies. Insect colours are produced in various ways and for various reasons. Some pigments are mere by-products of other bodily processes, with no special significance, but most have some function, however obscure.

The bright yellow laid down in the cuticle of, say, wasps or bees, gives notice that the animal is not to be trifled with. Reds and oranges often signify that the owner is unpleasant to eat. Many other colours and patterns are important in camouflage, courtship, mating, or the defence of territory.

In some insects, colours are produced by intricate structural effects as well as by simple pigments. Iridescence in the more dazzling hues of many butterflies, and the metallic bronzes and greens of beetles, for example, results from an interference effect – involving the reflection of certain wavelengths of light from successive layers in the insect’s scales or cuticle. These colours are brilliant enough, but the dragonflies have gone one stage further.

Besides having a wide complement of pigments, they make use of a phenomenon called Tyndall scattering. In this, light is dispersed in all directions by irregularities in the cuticle surface or by granules laid down just beneath it. The size of the irregularities or granules is minutely adjusted to the wavelength of the light which is to be reflected.

Tyndall scattering is responsible for the incandescent blues and greens of many of our dragonflies. It depends for its success on a dark masking layer below the granules, provided by a brown-violet pigment, an ommochrome.

Ommochromes are widespread in insects. As well as providing brown, red, and yellow body-colours, they have a more specialized use as masking pigments in vision, isolating the individual elements of the compound eyes and enabling them to function.

This leads us to another remarkable feature of the dragonfly’s life, the refinement of its eyesight. Dragonflies are normally day-flying insects. They rely almost entirely on their eyes: the antennae, the seat of taste and smell, are poorly developed. In some insects the compound eyes may contain only a few widely spaced elements; in the dragonfly there may be ten thousand or more in each eye, closely packed together in a hexagonal formation.

Each element in the compound eye sends a signal to the brain, forming a sort of mosaic image. Compared with the human eye, focusing ability and acuity are not very impressive, but the dragonfly’s eye is supremely well adapted to detecting movement. There is very rapid recovery of bleached visual pigments, a high so-called “flicker rate”, enabling the animal to make sense of the landscape as it races past, and enabling it to see and catch its prey with lightning speed.

The prey consists mainly of flying insects, sometimes other dragonflies. It is caught with either the jaws or legs. The legs are found well forward on the thorax, which is itself tilted in such a way that they form a basket to scoop an insect from the air and hold it steady while the mouthparts are brought into action.

There are two sub-orders of dragonflies. The first contains the damsel-flies, and the second the larger, more powerful dragonflies such as the fearsomely named Anax imperator. The eyes in this second group reach an astounding peak of size and development, covering most of the surface of the head.

Much time is expended by the insect in cleaning the eyes with special movements of the forelegs. The head is balanced on a delicate suspension mechanism which allows it to swivel, giving all round vision. So delicate is this mechanism that if the dragonfly hits head-on even a lightweight obstruction – such as the folds of a collector’s net – irreparable damage will be done.

Set beside the technical achievement of constructing just one dragonfly, human efforts to date in the fields of cybernetics and microelectronics look distinctly clumsy. To be fair, the craft of dragonfly-making has had some three hundred million years in which to be perfected: the dragonflies were among the first of the insects to evolve.

The individual adult dragonfly also has a long time in which to develop. Most of a dragonfly’s life is spent underwater, as a nymph, a fierce carnivore which repeatedly moults its skin as it grows in size. There may be a dozen moults in all, and the underwater period varies from one year in the damselflies to a dozen in the largest species. When the time comes for the final moult – usually in June or July – the nymph crawls up a plant-stem, often during the early hours, and, with frequent pauses for rest, breaks out of first one part of the skin and then another.

By dawn the newly emerged, or teneral, dragonfly resembles a mature adult in all respects except for its pale colouring and the flaccidity of its wings and body. As the sun rises the wings harden and become ready for flight. The cuticle hardens also, and within a few hours the insect is ready to fly: the colours develop over a period of days.

In the few weeks of life remaining to it the dragonfly must mate. Females are actively sought out by the males, which frequently are strongly territorial, maintaining one stretch of water as their exclusive property. The eggs are laid in vegetation, or simply scattered in the water to sink to the bottom.

With the first frosts the remaining adults are ruthlessly cut down. Together with hundreds of millions of other insects, they have betrayed themselves by leaving eggs to perpetuate the race. They are no longer required. Thus does Nature treat the most intricate fruits of its creation: and thus vanishes the magical dragonfly, emblem of this brief English summer.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Balsams

2010-07-31T16:37:00.014+01:00

Small Balsam

Image: André Karwath

Much is achieved by specialization in the study of natural history, but a more open and discursive approach is often more enjoyable and can lead to some unexpected byways, and, finally, to a deeper understanding of the subject as a whole. For one feature of the living world always holds pointers to another, and another, and so on, a chain of fascination and discovery without end.

The first link in the chain is usually forged lightly enough, with an idle speculation. On a walk through Cassiobury Park, for example, an unusual, weedy-looking plant may be found at this time of year. It grows abundantly in the gloomy woodland near the canal and River Gade in the southern end of the park, especially by the paths in the vicinity of the commercial watercress-beds.

With small yellow flowers and large, toothed leaves rather like those of the Dog’s Mercury, this plant is the Small Balsam, a close relative of the Busy Lizzie which makes such an easy and attractive pot-plant. It is a native of Siberia and Turkestan, and was introduced to this country in the last century, having first been found growing wild here at Battersea in 1851.

In Hertfordshire it occurs mainly in the vicinity of certain towns, including Hemel Hempstead and Watford. Its distribution in the county can be understood when it is known that one of its favourite habitats is timber yards and that seeds were presumably imported in the 19th century as stowaways in consignments of exotic timber from the east. The presence of Small Balsam in the Gade Valley may not be unconnected with the Corner Hall Wharf at Hemel Hempstead of W. H. Lavers & Sons, the well known local timber merchants.

Having been inadvertently introduced, the Small Balsam spread out as far as it could, being checked only by its own needs for moisture and shade. Most balsams are a bit like this, never being found far from water or damp ground. The Busy Lizzie likewise needs plenty of water to keep healthy.

A second alien balsam, the Orange Balsam or Jewel-weed, is also found in Cassiobury Park, as well as elsewhere along the line of the Grand Union Canal. In fact, a map of its distribution in Hertfordshire is tantamount to a map of the course of the canal. A larger, more handsome plant, with orange flowers spotted with crimson, the Jewel-weed got here from eastern North America as a garden introduction, first turning up in the wild in Surrey in 1822. It is now locally common along most of the waterways of the Thames basin and is apparently still on the increase.

Yet a third alien balsam, the Himalyan Balsam, variously known as “Policeman’s Helmet” (from the shape of the flowers), “Jumping Jack” (from its explosive seed dispersal mechanism), or “Nuns” (for no discernible reason!) can be found in the park. A big clump grows beside the third bridge over the Gade (counting downstream), adjoining the most luxuriant growth of the Small Balsam.

Policeman’s Helmet is an even showier plant than the Jewel-weed. It can reach a height of six feet or so, has thick and often reddish stems, and large flowers in every shade of purplish-pink. Again it was introduced in the 19th century as a garden plant, a native of India and the Himalaya, and was cultivated at first as a greenhouse annual. It soon escaped from captivity and by 1855 was to be found spreading rapidly along waterways.

Now these three foreign balsams illustrate a number of the laws by which nature seems to govern her affairs. The vigour with which they have taken over our waterways shows how alien genetic stock, freed from the competition at home, can have an unfair advantage over the home-grown organisms – for it is the same with fauna as with flora. The native stock has not had time to evolve defences against them: the checks and balances built up over tens of thousands of years no longer have any meaning.

The only native balsam, the Touch-me-not, is, in plant terms, something of a failure. It puts forth its flowers in damp woods in north-west England and north Wales, being very local even where it is found. It cannot compete effectively. Man’s mistreatment of the environment is going hard with it, while its foreign cousins are actually taking advantage of man and his activities.

The four British balsams, one native and three introduced, are all closely related and are obviously descended quite recently from a common ancestor. In size, though, they show a clear differentiation. Each species occupies a slightly different niche, has a slightly different role to play: this is how new species evolve. They rarely trespass on each other’s terrain. The Small Balsam, for example, is pollinated by hoverflies, the Touch-me-not by bees, and the Policeman’s Helmet by bumblebees. As for the Jewel-weed, it may dispense with pollination altogether, its flowers often all being of a type known as “cleistogamous”.

Cleistogamy (literally, “closed marriage”) is an unusual and somewhat degenerate response to the heavy cost of producing flowers as a means of reproduction. Cleistogamous flowers are of simplified form, with few pollen grains, and automatically self-pollinate at the bud stage. Among our group of balsams there is a pretty smooth gradation in this habit, from the Policeman’s Helmet, in which it is unknown, through the Small Balsam and Touch-me-not, in which increasing numbers of cleistogamous flowers are found, to the Jewel-weed, in which cleistogamy has assumed major importance.

A study of cleistogamy in these four plants would lead us deeper and deeper into the realms of genetics and evolution. A study of their habitat preferences draws us into the fields of plant physiology, ecology, and climatology. A study of their origins takes us to the history of human trade and commerce, 19th century tastes in timber and veneer, the exploitation of Russian and Asian forests to meet those demands ...

And so it goes. Many, if not all, the scientific investigations ever undertaken have had just such trivial beginnings as a stroll through the local park and an idle question like: “What’s the name of that plant?”

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Lichens

2010-07-24T17:10:00.003+01:00

Image: Ericd

The tenacity of living things sometimes surpasses belief. There is scarcely a square mile of the planet surface, no matter how forbidding, which does not support at least some form of life. The richness and diversity of living systems reach their astounding zenith in the tropical rain forests; their nadir is at the polar icecaps, especially that of the south.

Even in the polar wildernesses of rock and scree, and even, in places, in the ice itself, life may be yet found. The forms here are usually quite simple, single-celled animals and plants. Where conditions relent slightly, if only for an hour or two a day at midsummer, the terrain is colonized by lichens.

In fact, over great tracts of the world’s most inhospitable regions, lichens are the only multicellular organisms able to thrive. They grow abundantly in such daunting places as rocks which are alternately washed by the sea and baked by the sun. They will grow on walls, roofs, tree-trunks, on the bare soil. Some sorts even secrete acids which enable them to grow inside rocks, waiting for the surface to weather away before fruiting.

The key to their success is as strange as it is wonderful, and may be studied here in suburban Hertfordshire as well as in Antarctica or the Sahara desert.

Though given a single scientific name, a lichen is really a partnership of two separate sorts of organisms – a fungus and an alga. Fungi do not have chlorophyll, and so cannot use photosynthesis to manufacture their own food, as green plants (including the algae) do. On the other hand, most algae cannot, unaided, survive extreme conditions. By entering into partnership, the fungus receives sugars and vitamins from the alga, while the alga in turn gets minerals and protection from extremes of dryness and illumination; and both organisms are then enabled to colonize places previously out of bounds.

A handful of the familiar mushroom-type fungi undergo lichenization, as the process is called, but the vast majority belong to a more primitive group, the Ascomycetes.

So specialized have these lichen-fungi become that few are now able to survive for long without an algal partner. The algae, however, especially if conditions are favourable, can often exist independently. Free algae of the right sort must be available for the formation of a new lichen by sexual reproduction, for it is the fungal element alone which produces spores. The fungus is the senior partner, makes up the bulk of the lichen’s structure, and gives the lichen-plant or thallus its characteristic shape; the thallus usually has one of three main types of form: shrubby, leafy, or crust-shaped.

The clustered thalli can appear quite fantastic, like creatures from another world, or the vegetation dreamed up by an artistic imagination on the verge of madness, and the colours, which are always marvellously subtle and soft, come from Nature’s most ethereal paintbox. At different seasons and in different states of dryness the appearance may change dramatically, for during adverse conditions the lichen “shuts down” and waits for things to get better.

Unless conditions are exceptionally favourable, most reproduction is by vegetative, or non-sexual, means. Many sorts produce little powder-dusted pores which also help to keep the thallus aerated; the particles of powder are called soredia, each of which, when dispersed by the wind or by sticking to animals and birds, can grow into a new thallus. Even simpler and more common is dispersal by fragmentation: bits of the parent thallus get broken off, for example by being trampled, and blow away to develop elsewhere.

The pores in a lichen ensure that there is free flow of gases between the photosynthesizing algae and the outside world. Lichens are often efficient at absorbing whatever substances are in the environment, which has had dire consequences for those Lapps and Eskimoes who depend on caribou and reindeer for food.

One of the main components of the vegetation of the northern tundra is the Reindeer Moss, which, despite its name, is a lichen. It bulks large in the diet of the reindeer and caribou, and is the main source of carbohydrate in that particular food chain. Unfortunately, Reindeer Moss is exceptionally good at absorbing the radioactive fallout from atom-bomb tests which finds its way into the upper atmosphere and is then distributed all over the planet surface. High levels of radioactive caesium and strontium have accumulated in the bodies of the grazing animals, becoming even more concentrated in the bodies of the northern people.

So good are lichens at absorbing toxic substances that they have been used as indicators of atmospheric pollution. The lichen flora of, say, North Devon or rural Scotland is rich in species: 1400 in all have been recorded in the British Isles. But as you approach the industrial centres the number of species falls off rapidly, as does the luxuriance of growth of those that remain.

Our local lichen flora is badly impoverished, simply because the air here is so dirty. The main pollutant is sulphur dioxide, produced by the inefficient burning of fossil fuels. But others, in far smaller quantities, and even more dangerous, are contributing to the continuing decline in lichens: fluorides, heavy metals such as cadmium and lead, agricultural and garden fertilizers and pesticides, and a whole catalogue of other industrial wastes – the list is depressingly long.

Lichens may be regarded like the coal-miner’s canary. We ignore their death at our peril. The few species that remain to us in south-west Hertfordshire survive mainly by growing on alkaline surfaces, such as walls, asbestos roofs, limestone paving, and concrete, which offset to some extent the acidity of the rain.

Yet the ability of the lichens to colonize inhospitable terrain is undiminished. By poisoning the atmosphere, we have altered the balances that have remained unchanged for millennia, and those types which have become adapted to them will die. But already there are new and – almost – sinister types of lichen emerging, able to thrive in the new conditions. One, the aptly named Pollution Lichen, was unknown in Europe before 1860. A recently published guide chillingly gives its status thus: Widespread in industrial and densely populated parts of Europe. Abundant in England.

The writing, plainly printed in lichen thalli for anyone to see, is on the wall.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

What’s Your Excuse?

2010-07-17T21:59:00.004+01:00

My bonedome

This is a seemingly straightforward article about the benefits of wearing a helmet when cycling. The author adduces various examples of cyclists having their heads bashed in and lectures us on the irresponsibility of going helmetless. The article is worth a few minutes of your time, but the comments are worth more. As you’ll see, nothing in this life is straightforward.

After the introduction of a helmet law in Australia, apparently, cycle use declined, as did injuries to cyclists; but the proportion of head-injuries rose. Maybe that was because a newly helmeted cyclist feels himself less vulnerable and more prepared to take risks.

A number of commentators remark on the fact that the occupants of cars should wear helmets, since they are by no means immune to head injuries. Two or three simply raise a middle finger at the author. One says, “... an overweight woman riding in an SUV leaned out her window to yell at me, ‘Wear a helmet!’ I thought about yelling back, ‘Ride a bike!’”

This last contains the nucleus of the argument. First, the woman’s eating habits have put her health at risk and placed a possible future burden on the state. Secondly, her choice of personal transportation is spewing pollutants into the atmosphere. If she swapped her SUV for a bike we might all be better off.

But why should she?

The reason that this argument, and others like it, rages is simple. Once a government provides healthcare, it has purchased, with your money, the right to lecture you on how to minimize risks to your health. By extension, other taxpayers (such as the woman in the SUV, or the author of the article) have also purchased the right to nanny you. The harangues delivered are partial, contentious and poorly researched. Smoking and drinking are obvious targets, whereas other risky behaviours, such as the the reckless replication of genetic defects, are currently ignored.

Now that smokers have been demonized, the next target will probably be fatties, even though evidence is emerging that much obesity is the result of addiction mediated by self-generated drugs such as dopamine and adrenaline. After that, your guess is as good as mine.

There are some things that only governments can do, but there are many other things that governments also do and that they should not.

The typical career politician today has never had a job in the real economy; has gone straight from law-school or university into some position as policy wonk or PR stooge. Such a creature, once elected, can then be given control of the ministry governing healthcare. All a politician in office cares about is promotion; or retaining that office. The health of the citizen is necessarily a secondary concern. I speak from personal experience of a lifetime’s exposure to Britain’s National Health Service.

In Britain, where healthcare is sponsored by the state, the individual’s responsibility for himself is lessened. If we had to pay directly for healthcare we might think twice about indulging in certain behaviours.

Anyhow, I shall continue to wear my cycle helmet, not because anyone tells me to, but because I have followed the arguments pro and con, and have decided that, for me, pro wins out. But (as one of the commentators points out) a “bicycle mirror is far more beneficial than a helmet.” Amen to that! I have a mirror on each of my two bikes, and have lost count of the times they have saved my bacon.

That’s my choice. Yours may differ, and amen to that too.

Hat-tip: Longform.org

Preening

2010-07-17T17:10:00.004+01:00

Image: Hariadhi

The old stone bird-bath is much weathered now, cracked by past frosts, and in places its square, layered pedestal has become encrusted with grey and yellow lichen. It stands at a point in the garden a fair distance from the house, in the middle of a quartet of rose-beds virtually surrounded by yew hedges. On three sides there are trees of varying sorts and ages, some quite large.

Human disturbance is minimal; there is no dog in the household, and the only cats are occasional and unwelcome visitors from neighbouring gardens, so the place is a haven for birds. Kept topped up daily with the watering-can, a bird-bath provides a focal point for the garden and an endless source of movement and interest.

The most compulsive bathers are starlings, which create a tremendous amount of spray as they attack the water with their wings. Just now, in mid July, the greyish-brown juvenile starlings are especially numerous, and crowds of them are all trying to get into the water at once, leaving the less pushy dunnocks and song thrushes waiting on the grass nearby.

From time to time, when the starlings permit, almost all the birds in the garden will come down to drink or bathe, and this is often the best chance to get a view of shy or otherwise hard-to-see species. This afternoon a blackcap has been down, as well as a willow warbler and, earlier, a great spotted woodpecker.

They expose themselves to view because they must. Bathing for these birds is essential to maintaining the plumage in good order. Its function is not primarily one of cleansing, but of preparing the feathers for what comes next. Indeed, most birds are careful to avoid getting their plumage drenched, because this eventually renders the feathers brittle and, more importantly, robs the bird of its power of flight.

The water-bath is a carefully controlled wetting, spreading an even layer of moisture over the feather surfaces. Having repeatedly ducked its head into the water and flicked spray over its back, the bird performs special shaking movements to rid itself of surplus water. The exact pattern of these movements varies from group to group; some birds, such as gulls, can shake their feathers even while flying.

A bird like the blue tit is typical of the garden bathers. Immediately it has finished at the water, it retires to a less exposed position in order to preen in safety.

The great majority of birds have a special gland just above the root of the tail. The gland secretes oil which keeps the feathers supple and waterproof. Preen oil has another function too. Birds, like humans, cannot synthesize vitamin D inside their bodies. We manufacture it in our skin, provided we are exposed to the sun. Vitamin D synthesis likewise takes place in the oil; the vitamin is then either absorbed through the skin or ingested by the bird while preening.

The first act of preening is to stimulate the oil gland with the bill; oil is then quickly transferred to the plumage with quivering and stroking movements. The bird must work fairly rapidly because the oil hardens on exposure to air. The fact that the feathers are damp delays the hardening and enables the oil to be spread more evenly.

Having made a quick distribution of the oil, our blue tit, as soon as it has the opportunity, moves on to the next, longer and more leisurely, phase of preening. The outer feathers are ruffled up, to make them easier to get at, and each area receives its share of meticulous attention. A bird’s plumage is one of its most important assets, and much time each day is devoted to its care, both in these special sessions and during any odd moment.

There are two main types of preening movement. With the bill closed the bird sleeks down disarranged feathers and flicks away foreign particles. With it open, individual feathers – especially those of the wings and tail – are lightly combed.

The structure of a feather is a miracle of design. A large flight feather consists of a central shaft fringed on each side with about a hundred filaments, each of which, in turn, is fringed with smaller filaments or barbules. Each barbule has several hundred minute hooks which interlock with neighbouring barbules; there may be a million such hooks in a single feather. The combing action helps to restore the interlocking pattern and produce once more a smooth and continuous vane for flight.

Besides preening, birds in the garden may be seen maintaining their feathers in other ways. A favourite pursuit, especially of thrushes and blackbirds, is sunning. The bird, feathers ruffled and wings drooped, squats with its back to the sun, apparently just enjoying the heat: but the light helps to disturb parasites among the feathers, and makes them come out into the open where the bird can preen them away. A more extreme sunning posture has the bird sprawled with one wing fanned out towards the sun, its body tilted sideways and the tail swung round to the same side.

Dust-bathing is also indulged in by some birds, including sparrows and wrens. Its purpose is not clear, but may also have something to do with discouraging skin parasites. The same is true of the strangest feather-maintenance practice of all, anting.

In this the bird puts ants among its feathers, or simply squats over an ants’ nest, allowing the ants to crawl into its plumage. It is thought that the exudations of the ants, like preen oil, help to keep the feathers in good condition. The type of ant usually chosen secretes formic acid when it is angry, which certainly acts as an insecticide, and the ants themselves may attack any parasites they come across. Hundreds of species of perching birds have been observed anting, but starlings, crows, and especially jays, are particularly addicted to it.

In fact there are starlings on the lawn at this moment, taking ants from a nest halfway down the path.

This is the kind of ornithology anyone can study, whether from a window or a deckchair. All you need is a sharp pair of eyes – and a bird-bath. It need not be elaborate; an old dustbin lid will do, as long as it provides a shallow gradient and its site a measure of seclusion.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Nettles

2010-07-10T18:05:00.001+01:00

Image: Jerome Prohaska

Near the abandoned watercress beds, within a few yards of the stream, the ruins of an old cottage adjoin the footpath. The rubble is overgrown with stinging nettles, which protect the precincts of the cottage from intrusion.

By the middle of July the nettles have reached their greatest height. They grow here so well because the soil is rich in nitrogen – bequeathed by the middens and latrines of the former occupants. The plants are getting old and tough now, and even more uncompromising than they were in the spring. A bed of “stingers” is agony to walk through with bare legs and arms, and usually receives a punitory slashing from the countryman’s stick.

Is this punishment deserved? The nettle, after all, is only protecting its own, and uses the same irritant, formic acid, that is found in ants’ stings. Both weapons have the same purpose – to repel invaders.

The nettle’s stinging organ is simple but effective, a modified hair, long and hollow and with a swollen base into which the acid is secreted. The point of the sting is formed by a very sharp, very thin scale of silica (the basic ingredient of sand or glass). The scale is so sharp that even the slightest contact causes it to break off in the skin, making a tiny wound, and the acid is then squirted into the wound by contraction of the base, rather as in a hypodermic syringe.

If the plant is wilting, dried, or cooked, the mechanism will not work; and if you “grasp the nettle” you will not be so much stung, for many of the hairs will be bent or crushed before they have a chance to act.

The sting was probably evolved as protection from the browsing lips and tongues of deer and wild cattle, for the nettle was originally a plant of lightly shaded woodland and clearings. It is dioecious (having “two houses”), which means that the straggly catkins of male and female flowers are found on separate plants. The male flower has four stamens, each bearing a pollen-laden anther at its tip. The stamens are sharply bent inwards to the centre of the flower, being released like catapults to send their pollen dust drifting on the wind.

The flowers are rather reminiscent of those of the cannabis plant, and inside a big nettle bed, especially after a long spell of dry weather, the smell is distinctly redolent of the forbidden weed – which is not to be wondered at, because the two plants belong to closely related families.

Like cannabis, which provides the hemp fibres used still in making rope, the nettle also yields fibres which can be woven; at one time in Europe, especially in Scandinavia, nettles were widely used for this purpose. Fragments of nettle cloth have been found in a Bronze Age grave in Denmark, and cloth was produced commercially in Silesia as late as 1920. Indeed the Germans, during World War I, turned to the nettle when their cotton supply was cut off, and used it for making military clothing. Over two thousand tons of fresh plants were taken from the wild, although it needed nearly ninety pounds to make just one shirt!

Nettle makes an unexpectedly good fabric, strong and light and fine, and a nineteenth century Scottish poet, Thomas Campbell, writes of sleeping in nettle sheets and dining from a nettle tablecloth. The stalks are picked in late summer, dried, stacked, and then wetted so that they begin to rot. Next they are dried again, and beaten to remove the rotten tissue from the fibres. The fibres can then be spun into thread, like flax or cotton (though nettle fibres are not so long), and woven in the ordinary way.

The commercial growing of nettles in England in medieval times is perhaps echoed in such place-names as Nettlebed (near Henley-on-Thames) or Nettleden, near Hemel Hempstead.

Besides the cloth, nettles will make the dye, provided it is fixed with the right mordant, alum. Admittedly the colour is rather a dull green, but it was this very quality that led to our use of nettles in the Second World War. We used hundreds of tons of them for dyeing camouflage nets.

They also provided a ready source of chlorophyll. The nettle is rich besides in calcium, potassium, iron, sulphur, and vitamins A and C. The young shoots, which do not sting, can be eaten in spring as a salad or cooked like spinach and served with butter and pepper. When dried, they make a herbal tea. A year or two ago I experimented with some wild herbal teas, and although most were pretty disgusting, the nettle tea I could at least drink more than once. It had a delicate aroma and was curiously warming, like a glass of brandy. When added in small quantity to an Oriental tea, the nettle imparts a most unusual and exotic flavour which is well worth sampling.

Nettles figure in a number of herbal beauty formulae. An infusion of young or dried leaves is supposed to make a very good skin toner and an astrigent bath additive.

It is as a medicinal herb, though, that the nettle really comes into its own, and has been used, with greater or lesser success, in recipes to treat a wide range of maladies, including bronchitis, whooping cough, pleurisy, and other chest complaints; diabetes, dropsy, gout, rheumatism, varicose veins, menstrual problems, diarrhoea, constipation (yes, both!), stomach ulcers, and piles.

Some of these cures are undoubtedly effective in some cases, and the nettle was a highly prized addition to the pharmacopoeia in former times.

In return for all this bounty, our ancestors were able to forgive the nettle its sting. Next time we pass this ruined cottage by the stream and feel like wielding the big stick, perhaps we should do the same.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

The Aquatic Ape?

2010-07-03T17:40:00.017+01:00

Image: Hooper Natural History Museum

Even here, lying on a towel in the sunshine by the swimming pool, there is plenty to occupy the student of natural history. For the final focus of the naturalist must be his own species, Homo sapiens, the animal that has inherited the Earth.

The planet has been waiting for this creature for over 4500 million years. There was a false start: the age of dinosaurs would probably, in time, have produced a two-legged lizard with the power to classify and manipulate its environment. But the age of dinosaurs was cut short, perhaps by the crash of a gigantic meteorite causing a centuries-long chill which the reptiles could not endure. The cold would favour one of evolution’s newer experiments, the warm-blooded mammals.

At that time the mammals were primitive, nondescript, tiny animals, unlikely forerunners of the final inheritor of the kingdom.

Even during the next tens of millions of years no real candidate seemed to be emerging. The most advanced of the ancestral apes so far discovered was a primate called Ramapithecus. The next most advanced primate we know of is Australopithecus, a man-like ape which is believed to be a forerunner of the genus Homo, which of course includes modern man.

Between Ramapithecus and Australopithecus there is a quantum leap in potential. We owe our position in the scheme of things to a number of factors, two of which are of supreme importance. The first is the ability to walk on two legs rather than four, freeing our forelimbs for manipulation of tools. The second, eclipsing all else, is the power of speech.

Speech requires language, which is the ability to classify. This ability gives rise to abstract thought, logic, foresight, and the handing on of knowledge to succeeding generations. With the invention of writing, speech can be preserved indefinitely. Writing gives rise to science, to mastery of the environment.

So how and where did this quantum leap take place? No one yet knows for sure, but clues might be here today, at the swimming pool.

Why is it that human beings are drawn so much to water? Other modern primates – the chimpanzee or gorilla, say – are generally afraid of water and will do anything to avoid swimming. Yet, at every available opportunity, it seems that Homo sapiens takes his family off to the beach. If he cannot get to a beach he will go to a specially constructed waterhole instead, like this one.

Observe if you will the infants in the shallow end. There is a baby with its mother, too tiny even to sit up on its own. gurgling and splashing as if water were its natural habitat. Observe also the other adult humans who, like yourself, are sunbathing between swims.

They are without fur; they have (some more than others) a layer of fat under the skin; and if you look closely, you will see that they have the vestiges of webbing between their fingers and toes. All of these are uniquely the characteristics associated with aquatic mammals such as the whale or dolphin. None of them is to be found in any other living primate.

Several of the sunbathers are overheating and beginning to sweat. The possession of abundant sweat-glands has been described by one professor of dermatology as a “major biological blunder”, costing the human animal vast amounts of precious water and depleting the system of essential salts. Strange that in a creature so perfectly fashioned there should be such an evolutionary mistake – assuming, of course, that Man evolved entirely on dry land.

Notice again the mother and baby in the shallow end. The mother is walking about on the bottom, holding her baby on the surface. The same technique of wading is used by primitive fishermen, enabling them to exploit food supplies denied to land-bound animals.

As yet there has been no fossil evidence to support it, but some zoologists have put forward the idea that the seeds of the genus Homo were sown some time between 9 and 3.7 million years ago. when a huge area of East Africa became flooded. Populations of forest apes were marooned and had to adapt or die out.

Man’s pelvis, unlike that of other modern primates, is angled so that, when stretched out in the water, he is able to swim “in line”, exactly like a penguin or dolphin.

Another feature which man shares with aquatic animals is the “diving reflex”, in which the heart rate slows down during diving, reducing oxygen consumption. Expert pearl divers can remain submerged for up to 3 minutes and reach a depth of 262 feet, during which their heart rate falls by about 50%. The diving reflex is usually found together with a marked improvement in breath control – and breath control is one of the essentials of speech.

The colonization of a new medium, water, requires the acquisition of a whole new set of locomotor skills: swimming, diving, an acute sense of balance and direction. An increased locomotor repertoire, as it is called, leads to an increased brain capacity, a phenomenon which is plainly to be seen among the highly intelligent whales and dolphins. These animals, incidentally, also have superb breath control and a complex system of calls which might, if we could only understand it, turn out to be a language of abstract as well as concrete ideas.

When the floods receded, the mooted semi-aquatic ape then had to adapt all over again, enlarging its locomotor repertoire still more. Already adapted to going on two legs, the advantages of this method of walking encouraged evolution to refine and perfect the systems that make it possible. From the region of the flood the apes gradually migrated, spreading out along the Rift Valley, which is where the remains of Australopithecus were found.

From Australopithecus to Homo sapiens is quite a jump: from the Tiger Moth to the Space Shuttle. But that is nothing like the earlier jump that had to be made to give man his unique set of advantages. It is a fascinating subject to speculate on; and fascinating to wonder whether echoes of the aquatic lifestyle of our remote ancestors live on today, here in the blue waters of Bushey baths.

But that’s quite enough theory for now. I think I’m going in for another dip. Coming?

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Lapwings

2010-06-26T17:01:00.014+01:00

Image: Mirko Thiessen

This is shirt-sleeve weather, a day to increase still more the contrast between your forearms and the band of pale skin under the watch-strap, the sort of day when the lubricant loosens in the focusing barrel of your binoculars. The blueness of the sky has been taken up by the air itself. Each detail of the scene appears almost supernaturally clear and sharply defined, given somehow an even greater clarity by the fresh breeze hissing in the leaves of the lakeside alders.

Summer is officially less than a week old, but for some among us autumn is already here. The return migration of the lapwings is nearing its height. During the next two or three months many thousands will pass through the district, slowly making for their winter quarters in the south and west.

Lapwings are birds of the plover family, quite large, seeming black and white at a distance, with wispy crests and characteristically rounded wingtips. They breed in open places, especially on farmland, and can be seen in spring performing spectacular aerobatic display-flights, twisting and tumbling, keeping up a barrage of wheezing cries: frenzied variations on the ordinary note of pee-wit from which the lapwing gets its other common name.

Our breeding birds may winter as far away as Spain, while others visit us in winter from the continent. The movements are quite complex and difficult to decipher on the ground, but computer analysis helps us to make sense of the records. The autumn migration is leisurely and large – leisurely because the urge to find a territory and mate is no longer present, and large because of the presence of the young of the year.

The period between the spring and autumn peaks is slightly less than five months. One of these months is spent reaching the breeding area, and another in returning. The intervening time is taken up in rearing the young.

More interesting are the figures for record size. The average clutch size in the lapwing is four, and mortality among the young is about fifty per cent, so that, for every two lapwings passing north in spring, roughly four can be expected to pass south in autumn. The computer shows that the autumn migration is indeed virtually twice the size of the spring one, although the picture is complicated by the presence of non-breeding birds and the early arrival of winter visitors.

Migrating lapwings bring with them a sense of adventure, of viatic excitement, and, in the autumn at least, give an overwhelming impression of lassitude. For the adults, the great labour is over for another season. For the young, the vastness of their trek is just becoming apparent. They are like an army in retreat.

In this area, the valley of the Colne is the lapwings’ chief highway. Loose-winged, shabby and moulting, they pitch in straggling flocks, breaking for food and rest in traditional places where they know they have a chance of remaining undisturbed.

There are about a dozen favoured sanctuaries along the valley. Later in the season, large numbers will congregate on the stubble by the main road, within yards of the traffic. Against the sun they are hardly visible: not one driver in a hundred knows they are there.

At this time, though, the birds prefer to keep even closer to water. On the sloping pastures near Hampermill, hidden among the gravel strands and islands at Stocker’s Lake, on the wide lawns at the Maple Cross sewage works, or here beside the glittering water of Moorhall Gravel Pit, they doze with heads on backs, preen, or pick desultorily at a spider, worm, or insect in the turf.

A hundred yards or more of water lie between you and the birds. Seated on the grassy bank of the causeway between Moorhall and the much larger Broadwater at your back, you are studying the flock and trying to count the number of adult and juvenile birds.

There is a class of bird-watchers, called “twitchers”, who seek only to add sightings of rare species to their checklists; ornithology is not a matter of train-spotting, although every bird-watcher is pleased and excited if something unusual comes his way. No: it is a matter of coming to know the birds and their places with an intimacy which allows you to share, if only slightly, in their lives. To know where these lapwings are from and what they are doing here is a pleasure a hundred times more rewarding than adding yet another name to a list.

There is a complacent satisfaction too to be had from living in the same district for a long period of time. Only in this way can you experience the subtler pleasures of bird-watching – such as a true appreciation of this June afternoon at the gravel pits when compared with all the cold, damp, or blustery days of the winter.

The lapwings are spread out along the ragwort-dotted pasture, among a grazing flock of Canada and grey lag geese. Those not feeding look numb with fatigue, torn between the urge to rest and the urge to travel on.

From here their upperparts do not seem black at all, but a bronzy brown. The edges of the wing feathers especially are paler, almost cream-coloured, where they are abraded and worn.

The birds are almost all facing north-east, into the breeze, but, since many of them are feeding and the geese are also moving about, an accurate count as yet has been impossible.

And now it is too late. Two trespassing boys have just ducked through the barbed wire fence. The flock takes wing: black and white now, in wavering formation, there are still too many to count. Perhaps a hundred and twenty.

They turn west, rising against the trees. By now they are above the main road, above the glass and metal and the roar of the traffic, and, with a few scarce, reedy cries of joy, are beyond the old Denham film studios and again on their way south.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Snails

2010-06-19T16:52:00.001+01:00

The author of a fanciful but intriguing study of ancient man has analysed the rock-carvings at a Stone Age temple in Ireland, and deduces that the priests or shamans who built it had discovered one of the secrets of the cosmos, the underlying plan on which all growth and development are based.

The calculations are beyond me, but the idea is that all development can be reduced mathematically to a single pattern: the spiral, or helix. The spiral is seen in the shape of galaxies, in the flow of water, in the growth of plants following the sun, in the structure of DNA (the basic substance of genes), and, more abstrusely, in a thousand other aspects of the natural world.

Nowhere is this pattern more perfectly expressed than in the shell of the humble snail, such as the one I found this morning on the garden path. Certain species have a shell so regular, so much in accordance with the mathematical theory, that it could have been constructed for the sole purpose of giving it tangible form. But then everything in nature conforms to the rigorous laws of survival, and simplicity and beauty are mere by-products of this strict adherence to function.

The helical shell is a brilliant piece of design. Because of its shape, it can be continuously enlarged without the need for moulting. Insects must cast off their hard outer skeletons at regular intervals during growth, but the molluscs (the group of animals which includes the limpet, periwinkle, and snail), by inventing the shell, have secured permanent protection for themselves.

Originally all molluscs lived in water, and the majority of them are still to be found there, whether in the sea or in fresh water. In making the transition, those sorts that colonized the land met with a new set of problems.

The shell was the main asset that allowed them to make the change, protecting the animal from water loss. The shell is laid down in two layers. The inner one is made mostly of calcium carbonate, but the outer is hard, virtually impermeable, and horny. In unfavourable conditions, a snail can seal the mouth of its shell, either with a horny plate or with a temporary shield of dried mucus, and survive until conditions are more to its liking.

Every advantage, though, has its disadvantage, and the disadvantage for the snail is the weight of its portable home. While saving the animal from extremes of dryness and heat and from smaller predators, the shell slows it down and makes it easy prey for larger ones. A revolting and unmistakable sound made by badgers is heard when crunching snails; and of course song thrushes are well known for their habit of making an anvil – a favourite stone on which snails are bashed to bits. One such anvil I found recently was surrounded by the debris of a least a dozen shells.

Snails do not have a very appealing image, and still less do their relatives, the slugs (which, wisely or not, have dispensed partly or wholly with that cumbersome shell), but they are fascinating and admirable creatures for all that, and deserve a better response than the customary “uurgh” when found lurking behind a leaf or under a stone.

The colours of living snails are very subtle and beautiful, and, looked at dispassionately, so are those of slugs. But it is for their biology and behaviour that these animals are most worthy of study.

Both slugs and snails are most active by night, hiding out during the day in some damp place. With a few exceptions, they are vegetarians, eating especially plant material which has begun to decay. That is the reason they can be a pest in the garden: cultivated plants are often much softer and flabbier than their wild counterparts. The food is rasped to pieces between the upper jaw and rows of horny teeth on the tongue; these teeth grow continuously from behind. Snails restrict their wanderings to the surface of the soil or above, but slugs can dig into the ground as far as a metre, and are often the culprits when root vegetables are attacked.

As a student I once had to dissect a snail, which is an experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy; and we will not dwell here longer than absolutely necessary. Nonetheless the internal organs, if you can sort them out, comprehensively fulfil all the functions that a snail could wish for.

Most complicated, perhaps, are the organs of reproduction. Snails are hermaphrodite, with a single gonad, which produces eggs for a short period each year and sperms for the rest of the time. As in most hermaphroditic animals, self-fertilization is rare, and the courtship of the snail is not without its own bizarre charm.

The eyes are tiny, usually on the tips of one of the two pairs of tentacles, and the vision is poor, so it is unlikely that the lovers’ eyes meet across a crowded shrubbery. Neither could they rush together to consummate the embrace; by the time they made contact they would both have forgotten what they were doing.

No: contact is probably made by smell, for the tentacles are equipped with sensitive olfactory cells. The two snails circle each other, frequently touching, and form in the process a platform of accumulated slime. Finally, the partners discharge at each other what are known as “love darts” – sharp spicules of calcium carbonate, variously shaped, but often winged in cross-section like the feathers of an arrow. The dart lodges in the tissues, where eventually it is absorbed.

It serves as a stimulus for completion of the act. The snails align their reproductive openings, and coupling begins. Sperms are exchanged in the form of packets; fertilization may not take place for up to a year after mating, but egg-laying usually follows fertilization within about a fortnight.

The eggs are laid in the soil. The baby snails resemble the adults in most respects but size, and, if they survive, can expect to reach maturity in about a year. The shell is incremented in stages, with material added to the leading edge, so that “growth rings” can be seen on a shell, rather as on a tree stump. When adulthood is attained, the shell usually stops growing and a thickened lip is formed at the mouth.

So ends the mathematical growth of the helix. I wonder if the brown and cream-banded snail I found on the garden path knows or cares much about the underlying forces of the cosmos.

Somehow, I doubt it.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Badgers

2010-06-12T17:14:00.002+01:00

Image: Orland

Unless you are observant and spend plenty of time out and about in the woods and fields, it is unlikely that you will ever suspect the presence of one of the most charming and yet most ancient of Britons – the badger. For, despite a disturbing increase in the depraved and sadistic practice of badger-baiting, the badger is by no means rare in many parts of England, including our own.

Because of this persecution, it would be irresponsible to name the places where badgers may be found. What safely can be said is that the badgers now have, in the shape of the Hertfordshire and Middlesex Badger Group, a body of dedicated and knowledgeable champions. One of the aims of the Group is to survey the badger population of the two counties, and I was fortunate indeed to be invited by one of the members to accompany her on a badger-watching expedition.

Badgers are sociable and gregarious and live together in a burrow, or set, often excavated on sloping ground. They are industrious workers and can shift surprising quantities of earth. If a set has been established a long time it may become quite a feat of engineering – one in the West Country had 12 entrances and 94 tunnels with a total length of 310 metres, and it was estimated that 25 tonnes of soil had been moved in the process.

The set we were to visit is also well established; according to one nearby resident, it has been in continuous occupation for at least 60 years. The situation of the set is pretty well ideal, in a quiet, little-frequented wood not far from fields which provide a further source of food.

Radiating from the tunnel mouths is a system of narrow, well-defined trackways leading to favourite feeding areas and drinking places, or to other sets in the vicinity, for badgers are fond of visiting their neighbours. Where much used, these trackways become so well worn that they look like human paths, and in fact many of our paths through the woods probably originated as badger-trails.

To a badger, the trails are an informative amalgam of scents: each animal has its own distinctive musk, secreted from glands beneath the tail. Furthermore, badgers of the same social group will put their scent on each other, so that the whole group acquires a unique and corporate musk, quite different from that of its neighbours.

Territories are marked with scent, and with dung, which is often placed in shallow, specially dug pits placed at strategic points on the boundary or beside main trackways. Badgers are fastidiously clean animals, spending much time grooming and scratching, and have in addition special latrines well away from the set.

They also regularly change their bedding, which consists of dry leaves, bracken, and so on. In winter, when fresh bedding is hard to come by, the badgers will wait for a sunny day and leave bedding outside the set for a few hours to air.

The badger is mainly nocturnal, emerging at dusk or shortly beforehand, spending the night feeding or playing, and returning in the morning to sleep. Where undisturbed, as here, the badgers tend to come out earlier, and to be on the safe side we arrived at the wood about an hour before sundown.

Heavy rain had fallen during the day, and the air under the trees was warm, humid, and heavy with the odour of fresh earth and bluebells. The sky had cleared, and there was hardly any wind – a good omen, for even the slightest breeze can carry a trace of human scent to the set. Selecting a place to sit, 25 yards or so from the main tunnel, and with our silhouettes disguised by the background of vegetation, we settled down to wait.

Successful badger-watching demands two things – fortitude and patience. The watcher must keep quiet and still. In winter he or she must endure the cold, in summer the attentions of midges. Then the time of emergence can vary a great deal; the badgers may not even come out at all.

As a newcomer to this activity, I was keeping my fingers crossed and anxiously watched the mouths of the tunnels for movement. None came.

Time passed. The light began to go, and still there was no sign of the badgers. My companion whispered her misgivings. With badgers, as with all wild life, nothing can ever be predicted.

By now we had been quiet for so long that our ears were keenly attuned to the slightest sound. From the dense undergrowth between us and the set came the high-pitched squeaking of a shrew; as the air cooled, condensation dripped from the canopy of trees. Still no badgers. It was beginning to look as if we had drawn a blank.

Then, from the field edge thirty yards away, came a faint rustling, followed by silence. A minute or two later came another rustling, further to the right, and another. There was definitely something moving about. Presently we heard a brief, whickering cry. One of the two cubs – there are two in this particular family, both well grown – was calling. This was followed by a sort of quick bark, made by one of the adults.

The light was now so bad that it was impossible to discern detail with the naked eye. With binoculars, though, a little could still be seen.

Suddenly, there were the badgers, on the bare, worn soil near the main entrance to the set. There were at least four, probably the two cubs and their parents. Obviously, contrary to all expectations, they had emerged even before our arrival. They must have been in the fields all evening, perhaps feeding on earthworms, one of the staples of their diet.

In the gloom, the black and white facial markings stood out plainly. Moving about, attentive to one another, the badgers appeared a ghostly silver. To be seeing such genuinely wild creatures was a privilege; it gave meaning to that overworked word, “thrill”.

Unhurriedly, at their ease, the badgers vanished into their labyrinth.

The light had now gone altogether. There could be nothing more for us to see. The badgers had been in view for only a few minutes, but the long wait had been well worth it. Standing up, aware at last of our aching limbs, we reluctantly started for the path.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Glaciers

2010-06-05T17:02:00.003+01:00

Image: Wikimedia Commons

At school we were shown how to make a model of the landscape. Using cardboard and papier mâché, and taking our measurements from the contour lines of the Ordnance Survey map, we gradually built up a rather clumsy version of the local hills and valleys.

Even coated with paint (green for the fields and woods, grey for the built-up areas, and an improbable ultramarine for the rivers, canal, and gravel pits) it was a sorry-looking object, and was quickly put out of sight by the geography teacher. I believe he may have hidden it behind the scout hut. In any case it was not in evidence when Open Day came round.

The forces which moulded – and are still moulding – the real landscape make a much more convincing job of it. They are incomprehensibly vast and slow-moving, like the glaciers which were responsible for carving out the valleys of the Gade, the Chess, the Ver, and the Colne.

The last Ice Age ended here about 12,000 years ago. We are presently in a mild interglacial period: another Ice Age is probably on its way.

The origins of this cyclic advance and retreat of the ice are thought to lie in the behaviour of the southern ice cap. The core of the Earth is still molten, and the heat must escape continuously from the planet surface. There reaches a point when the accumulation of ice in Antarctica is so great, the thickness of the ice-sheet so tremendous, that this geothermal heat is trapped. The base of the ice-sheet melts, is freed from the friction of the underlying rock, and begins to spread over the ocean as a floating mass.

What happens next affects us in the north. When the Antarctic ice reaches an area of about 10 million square miles, its white surface reflects back so much sunlight that the net input of solar heat is reduced by the critical figure of 4%. The planet cools, the northern ice cap enlarges (aggravating the reflection loss), and the glaciers start to advance.

The process goes into reverse when the icecaps reach the warmer oceans nearer the equator. Then the ice shelf is weakened by warmth and physically eaten away by the erosion of the waves. The area of white begins to contract, and the input of solar heat increases.

Here in south-west Hertfordshire (not that such names mean much to a glacier), the vegetation at one time was that of a tropical forest. The valley of the Thames was a steaming swamp very much like something to be found today in, for example, Malaysia. This was about 63 million years ago: over the next 61 million years the climate cooled and our flora became more typical of the temperate zone.

The first major glaciation came somewhere between 800,000 and 590,000 B.C. Since then there have been half a dozen more: the third from last, the so-called Lowestoftian glaciation, was the most extreme of all and reached as far south as the Thames basin.

The ice of the Lowestoftian advanced across England in a generally south-easterly direction, flowing and rolling like a slow-motion tidal wave. With it the glacier carried a vast amount of debris, billions upon billions of tons of fragmented rock torn up in its path. Where it met resistance it altered course to some extent through the softer rocks.

In the general trend of our local valleys – from north-west to south-east – we see evidence of the glacier’s passage. Nowhere is this more obvious than at the junction of the Rivers Gade and Chess. Both valleys are quite deep, separated, near the junction, by a wedge-shaped nose of land which we call Croxley Green. The Green itself is at the summit of this particular ridge, but even on the Green the land is beginning to slope downwards. The slope accelerates at Scots Hill, and the two valleys converge just north and east of Rickmansworth.

This was the site of a contest between three giants – the iceflows from the Chess and Gade, and the larger flow making its way south along the modern course of the Colne. The battlefield was the wide expanse of Croxley Moor.

The opposing forces then united and continued south, along the present Colne Valley. The glacier got another twenty miles, as far as the Thames, before the climate began warming up again.

In its retreat, the glacier abandoned the rock debris it had brought. This, washed and pounded further by the torrents of meltwater, was left behind as the gravel which has since been excavated in such quantity along the valley of the Colne.

The ice destroyed almost all living matter in its path, and the British flora is the poorer because of it. The landscape after its retreat must have been utterly desolate, and silent but for the sounds of wind, rain, and flowing water.

Since then the harsh contours have been softened by the gentler forces of the weather; the land has been recolonized by plants and animals (including ourselves) from the south. The effect that man himself has had on the landscape, profound as it is, is nothing compared with the work of the glacier. Its scale makes all human efforts seem puny, and puts into perspective our present worries about politics or the price of bread.

However, there is talk of averting the next Ice Age before it even starts. Technically it would be possible, using nuclear explosives, to break up the ice in Antarctica as it formed, and so change the course of geological history.

Comforting as it may be to know that the next glaciation might be stopped, it would be a pity to feel that we had gained control of such a monster as this. Some things should remain sacrosanct.

Perhaps we ought to put this scheme behind the scout hut, where it belongs.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Weasels

2010-05-29T17:33:00.002+01:00

Image: Keven Law

It has been noticeable in the past ten or fifteen years that the rabbit population is recovering after myxomatosis, and numbers must now be approaching something like their pre-1953 level. The new breed of rabbit seems not only more resistant to the myxoma virus, but also more enterprising in choosing a site for a warren.

Along part of Under the Heavens Lane, a deep and narrow thoroughfare running the length of a dry glacial valley, the northern hedgebank is riddled with rabbit holes. The rabbits themselves are multiplying as only rabbits do, and may often be seen sitting by their burrows basking in the sun, or making excursions into the adjoining field for titbits of salad.

The lane is fairly quiet, and the warren, now that farmers have more profitable things to do than set snares, is reasonably safe from disturbance.

Recently, though, this paradise was violated by what must seem to a rabbit like the Angel of Death. From my bicycle this morning I glimpsed a lithe, upright form seated arrogantly on the sawn surface of an old fence post. Its fur, as soft and luxuriant-looking as anything at Harrods, was marked with a pattern of umber and champagne, and made a bandit’s mask round the eyes, which had the fierce, mad gleam of the professional murderer.

In the first instant the word “polecat” flashed into my mind; but this animal was too pale to be that, and besides, there are no longer any polecats in this tame, thoroughly domesticated region of the Home Counties. No: it was an escaped ferret, and it had taken up residence in the rabbit warren, to the terror and consternation of all those within.

Now the ferret was living the polecat’s life, a far cry from guest appearances at the village pub or spending the evening in someone’s trousers. On taking its freedom, it had immediately gone native, true to its nature and ancestry, for the ferret and the polecat are members of one of the most bloodthirsty groups of carnivores there is – the genus Mustela.

We have two more members of this genus living hereabouts, the weasel and the stoat. The landscape may be ordered and manicured now, and entirely dominated by man, but their independence remains intact. They are both killers, at or near the top of the food chain, and their style is unmistakably that of the assassin.

The weasel is about seven inches long, three-quarters the size of the stoat. In general pattern they are both, like the ferret, short-legged and long-bodied, built for pursuing their prey through tunnels and burrows. Both have brown upperparts and white underparts, and small, rounded ears which are usually held at an upright and inquisitive angle.

The stoat can always be told by its longer tail, tipped with black. In winter the stoat usually turns white, and then its fur is called ermine, but the black tail-tip remains. In more northerly climes than Britain the weasel turns white in winter too.

Despite rigorous persecution, they both manage to survive in fair numbers, and the weasel may even be said to be common. The most that is usually seen of a weasel is a rapid, low blur as it streaks across the road from one hedge to another. But if you have the time and patience, it is not a difficult animal to observe.

Occasionally you will disturb one in the act and it will drop the mouse or vole it has just killed and flee. Keep absolutely still, wait, and the weasel may very well return, giving you the privilege of perhaps half a minute’s clear view.

The best place for observation, though, is at the nest, if you can manage to find one. Weasels breed twice a year, giving birth in April-May and again in July-August to a litter of about half a dozen young. The nest is placed in a hollow tree-trunk or a burrow speedily vacated by a family of rats. Now, at the end of May, the first litters are beginning to be weaned.

The female alone usually rears the young, and she decides when it is right for her brood to leave the nest and take their first lessons in hunting. She will show them what is edible and what is not, and how to deliver the coup de grâce with a quick, savage bite through the back of the neck.

The main prey of weasels consists of small mammals, especially mice and voles. After man, the weasel is the worst enemy of the mole, as is shown by the number of weasels caught in mole-traps. Shrews, though, seem hardly to be taken.

The appetite of a hunting weasel is prodigious. As it is so small, the animal’s surface area is large compared with its volume, and it will eat anything up to a third of its own body-weight a day. In practical terms, that means a family of weasels can put paid to two thousand mice and voles a year.

Besides small mammals, weasels are not averse to the odd bit of carrion, to birds’ eggs, and to the birds themselves – having been known to attempt one the size of a lapwing. They are fearless, invested with the same instinct as the tiger or puma. In the weasel, and the stoat, there is another element of ferocity too, bordering on the insane.

The cause might be traced to a nematode, a parasitic worm with the unpronounceable name Skrjabingylus nasicola, which is present in 10% of young and 70% of adult weasels. The worm progressively attacks the bones of the skull. It may be that stoats and weasels are driven by their own private demons.

I don’t know whether ferrets, gone wild, suffer the same fate. If so it would account for that mad gleam in the eyes; and if so, it does not augur too well for the rabbits of Under the Heavens Lane.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Plant Odours

2010-05-22T17:19:00.003+01:00

Hound’s-tongue flowers

Image: Fornax

The accurate identification of wild plants is not always easy, and the botanist must use all his faculties in trying to track down a name for his specimen. One of the most useful yet unreliable senses is that of smell: unreliable because no two people ever seem to react in quite the same way to the same odour. To quote Linnaeus, the founding father of modern systematic botany: “... a scent which is disgusting to a boy is most pleasing to a hysterical woman. A countryman entering a drug-store turns faint with the scent of the perfumes, but recovers when a heap of cow-dung is presented to his nostrils ...”

Besides which, smells usually defy description. The human sense of smell is not very acute, and our language simply has insufficient words for the job.

One of the strangest and most characteristic odours in the plant world is generated by the foliage of the hound’s-tongue, which smells of mice. For me this invariably generates memories of the north Norfolk dunes where I found my first specimens: a commingling of marram, hot sun, and the resinous drift of the air through Corsican pines. Any description that I attempted of the smell of hound’s-tongue would be coloured by this, and meaningless to anyone else.

Nonetheless, a plant-smell, once learned, can be a powerful aid to the memory, even if this knowledge must remain a personal thing and incapable of being accurately transmitted to others.

Animals have no such problems. They have no urge to classify or analyse, and smell is simply one part of the whole which makes up their existence. In some groups smell is just as, if not more, important than vision or hearing, and this is true of many insects, for whom, in the main, plants produce their rich and bewildering variety of scents.

The chemistry of plant odours is immensely complicated. The scent is produced by the oxidation, on exposure to air, of essential oils. The oils are stored in special glands, whether in the flowers or elsewhere in the plant. Glands may also be found in the outer skin of stems and leaves, or the oils may be stored in capsules deeper in the tissues, so that the scent is only released when the plant is crushed.

In flowers, these glands are on the upper surface of the petals, or on the sepals or bracts if these replace the petals. The oils are produced continuously; in the final stage of manufacture, the fluid is left as a mixture of oil and sugar, and it is not until this mixture starts to ferment that the scent is released.

The fragrance given off by a broad bank of wild thyme or a hawthorn hedge in bloom will carry a long way, in insect terms. One function of plant odours is undoubtedly to attract pollinating insects: the brighter and showier the flower, the less likely it is to have a strong perfume. Certain moths and butterflies secrete scents similar to those produced by plants, and in many cases these insects will only visit the flowers which smell like themselves.

On the whole, though, scent is thought to be relatively unimportant in bringing pollinating insects from a distance. It is much more important at close range. In experiments with porcelain flower-models, insects approached in the ordinary way, but would not enter until the models had been brushed with scent from a real flower. So it would seem that the scent modifies the behaviour of the insect in some manner, encouraging it to go through those actions which lead to pollination.

Another function of plant odours is to serve notice on a would-be browser that the plant is distasteful or poisonous. The chemicals adopted here are often trimethylamine and propylamine, which are present in the early stages of putrefaction, or indol and its related compounds, which likewise have a horrible smell. When the depredations of leaf-cutting insects and their larvae are taken into account, this must be vital to survival.

Protection from attack by fungi and bacteria is equally important: it has been estimated that the essential oil of thyme is twelve times more antiseptic than carbolic acid. The oils of lavender and rosemary are just as strong.

Thyme, lavender and rosemary are all members of the Labiatae, the family of plants which includes many of our best-known herbs, such as basil, mint, and marjoram. Labiates tend to be plants of dry, open ground and sunny places, and as such need some protection against excessive water-loss. As part of their armoury they are usually thickly coated in fine hairs, which help to reduce evaporation from the open pores or stomata on the leaves.

The aromatic oils produced by these plants also help to reduce evaporation. The oils are not soluble in water and create a haze round the plant, reducing water-loss but still allowing the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide to continue in the leaves. Labiates often grow clustered in dense patches, and it is intriguing to think that they create their own protective shell using nothing more substantial than odour.

But how to explain the smell of hound’s-tongue? To know that it is caused by esters of certain fatty acids does not get us very far. Nor does it help much to know that the same odour occurs in the entirely unrelated lizard orchid, although both plants are pollinated by bees.

Unless plant-nibbling insects are put off by the smell of mice (or goats, as some people describe it), we are left with as curious a puzzle as could be hoped for. Such are the pleasures of botany.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Swallows

2010-05-15T16:56:00.001+01:00

Image: Beentree

“One swallow does not make a summer”, but tens of thousands do, and now that they are here in force we can safely say that summer, in its broadest sense, has arrived at last.

The swallow is not the first of its family to appear: the sand martin is usually the earliest. The swallow itself is next, and then the house martin. Finally, on or about 23 April, comes the swift – which is of course not a member of the swallow family at all.

The four birds each catch their insect food in flight, and although superficially similar, are not difficult to tell apart. The swift is wholly dark except for a pale patch on the chin, and has very long, scimitar-like wings and a short tail only moderately forked. The three hirundines also have forked tails, but their wings are shorter, and they are all white or whitish below. The sand martin has earth-brown upper-parts, the house martin and swallow dark blue, but the house martin has a distinctive white rump by which it can be told even at a great distance.

It would be hard to think of a more pleasing or attractive bird than the swallow, or of one which adds more charm to the countryside. Its generally low, graceful flight is marvellously smooth and controlled, swooping over a cornfield, endlessly quartering the broad expanses of pasture where sheep or cattle are grazing, by whim turning to left or right when coming to an obstacle, or, inches from the turf, skimming among the boles of standing trees.

The swallow is such an exact and delicate artist of flight that it drinks on the wing, dipping its lower mandible into the surface film of the river to scoop up a little water. When it wishes to bathe, it descends an inch further, douses itself, and then rises to complete its toilet in the air. It rarely settles on the ground, except to collect particles of gravel for its gizzard or materials for its nest, and almost all of its food – mainly gnats, flies, and small beetles – is taken on the wing.

The elegance of the swallow’s flight is matched by the beauty and rightness of its plumage. The dark blue upper parts have a metallic sheen, varying almost to dark green depending on the angle of the light. In the adult male especially, the outer tail feathers are attenuated into streamers which are can be fully two inches longer than the next feathers in. The tail feathers are not blue, but a deep bottle-green, marked on their inner webs with spots of white. Below, the swallow is buff on belly and underwings, with a metallic blue band across the chest and, setting off all the rest of the colours, a dark chestnut throat and face.

The female is normally rather whiter below, with shorter streamers. She and her mate always return, if possible, to the same nest-site year after year. The favourite place is a ledge or rafter in a barn or outhouse, although at one time the deep recesses of large, old-fashioned chimneys were much used.

Before the widespread construction of buildings, the swallow must have been quite a rare bird in England, for its presumed natural nesting sites – caves and sheltered hollows in rock-faces – are few and far between. Since the time of the Romans, it has become completely adapted to using human “caves” for its nests, and is now one of the few species, like the house sparrow, which is more at home with man than in the wilderness.

The nest itself is made of mud, collected from puddles and riverbanks and reinforced with shreds of grass. It in is the shape of half a saucer, and is lined with the softest bents and feathers (the latter often collected in flight).

The eggs, normally 4-6, are white, blotched and speckled with russet and grey, and are incubated mainly or completely by the female. They take a fortnight or so to hatch. Both parents feed the young, which must be a daunting task, bearing in mind the slightness of each catch. This could be one of the reasons why the young take a comparatively long time – about three weeks – to leave the nest. As soon as they can fly and feed themselves, the parents begin another brood, and there may even be a third.

So strong is the urge to depart in the autumn that when, because of bad weather or through some other delay, this third brood is late in the year, the nestlings may be abandoned and left to starve.

For the early naturalists the swallow was the summer visitor which most exercised their curiosity. In one camp were those who believed, as the Greeks had done, that swallows and martins spent the winter either in the mud at the bottom of ponds, or in hibernation in a hollow tree-trunk or cave; in the other were those who believed in migration.

The advent of modern travel and bird-marking with leg rings settled the matter, and now we know that the swallows which nest here winter as far south as the Cape.

There they remain until late February or March, when, covering a hundred miles or more each day, they begin to make their way northwards. Once over England, the swallow migration progresses in a broad front, with a tendency to follow river-valleys where these run in the right direction.

And finally, within a few days on either side of 6 April, the swallows again return and bring their delightful presence to make us yet another summer.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Bluebells

2010-05-08T16:45:00.002+01:00

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Among the many sights and sounds to be treasured from this evening’s walk through the woods and fields is one which never fails to come each spring, yet never fails to surprise.

Each day now the twilight lasts longer and longer, and once the sun had set the thrushes continued singing almost until darkness. A cuckoo was calling very late, and after nine o’clock I passed through the northern end of Harrock’s Wood, where, under the hazels, a seemingly solid yet insubstantial mass of bluebells stretched into the wood for as far as the eye could see, the colour deepening and becoming more mysterious with the dusk.

For those plants which grow in the woodland understorey, the single most important factor is the amount of light available, and most of them, the bluebell included, must get their flowering finished before the full canopy of leaves is out.

In the first half of May the leaves of the dominant woodland trees begin to emerge from the bud-cases in which they have passed the winter. At first the leaves are pale-green, soft, and almost translucent, but they quickly harden as the chloroplasts – the chlorophyll-containing bodies – are brought into use, and within a week or two the tree is a fully functional factory, running on sunlight and producing sugars and oxygen.

The bluebell is tolerant of shade, but does not need it and grows well in full light. The reason it is primarily a woodland flower probably has something to do with the greater humidity to be found inside a wood: bluebells have exacting requirements for moisture, and the soil must be neither too damp nor too dry. They also like ground, such as that in a wood, which remains undisturbed for many years, and the best displays are always found in old-established woodland.

With its blade-shaped leaves and long hollow stalk or scape, the bluebell is a typical member of the lily family – which also contains such oddities as the asparagus, tulip, onion, and garlic. The flowers are bluish-violet because that colour appears most prominent to the ultraviolet-sensitive eyes of the insects which pollinate them, and are carried, up to sixteen at a time, in gracefully drooping, one-sided racemes. The anthers are creamy white, unlike the blue anthers of the garden or Spanish bluebell, Endymion hispanicus.

The wild bluebell is rather puzzlingly called Endymion non-scriptus, or “not written-on”. Gerard, the herbalist, in 1597 described the “Blew English Hare-bels, or English Jacint”, jacint being another spelling of “hyacinth”. Among the ancients, jacint or jacinth was a rare gem of blue colour, probably sapphire. Then, recounted by the poet Ovid, there is the legend of Hyacinthus, a youth “beloved of Apollo”, as the phrase discreetly puts it. Hyacinthus was accidentally killed by Apollo (another version blames Zephyrus, the West-wind), and on the spot where he died a flower sprang up – the lily or hyacinth. On the petals Apollo inscribed the letters AIAI (the Greek word for “alas!”), which can indeed be seen on certain sorts of lily to this day.

The early herbalists tried to describe everything in terms of classical learning. The bluebell was plainly a hyacinth of some sort, and was originally placed in the genus Hyacinthus, but the word AIAI was not to be found on its petals – hence it was non-scriptus.

William Turner, in the third part of his Herbal, published in 1568, recommends the bluebell as a remedy against spider-bite, an idea pinched from the Greek writer Dioscorides, who was anyway describing another sort of hyacinth. Turner also says that the boys in his district “scrape the roote of the herbe and glew theyr arrowes and bokes wyth that slyme that they scrape of”, and indeed the slimy sap of the bluebell can be boiled down to make a strong and practical glue.

This sap covers the fingers of those who indulge in the mindless and illegal habit of bluebell-picking. The peculiar noise and feel of the stems when they are broken has given rise to one of the bluebell’s most vivid vernacular names, “snapgrass”. The Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in his journal: “The stalks rub and click ... making a brittle rub and jostle like the noise of a hurdle strained by leaning against”, which is as apt a way to put it as can be imagined.

He also describes the bluebells making “falls of sky-colour”; bluebells are seen at their best where they grow in sheets and clumps and spread a broad carpet of blue. As soon as they are picked, within minutes, they begin to droop, and in a vase or jamjar at home they look completely miserable and out-of-place. It is much better to leave them for others to admire.

If the truth be told, picking the flowers does less harm than treading on the leaves, which are fleshy and easily damaged. The bluebell spends the dark summer under the trees in renewing the food reserves held in its bulb, and if the leaves are squashed the whole plant will become sickly or die.

Private, relatively untrodden woodland, like Harrock’s Wood, is the place to see bluebells in the mass; but even in overused woods, litter-strewn hedgerows and spindly copses, bluebells in healthy groups are still a frequent sight. Perhaps they are more resilient than they look.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Hydra

2010-05-01T17:10:00.013+01:00

Image: Stephen Friedt

It is an hour after tea and from the row of deckchairs comes an occasional ripple of light applause. The home team is all out for a respectable score, and the visitors have just gone in to bat.

What could be more innocent and peacefully English than a village common? But behind the cricket pavilion is a small pond bordered with rushes, where not all is what it seems.

Earlier today, using our trusty grapnel, we took a few strands of weed from the middle of the pond and placed them in a large jar of water. By lunchtime a good many of the small creatures in the weed had made themselves evident.

The animal we were seeking was among them. Clinging to the glass were several threadlike specimens, two or three brown, but mostly green, of one of the strangest and most treacherous denizens of the underwater world, a tentacled relative of the Portuguese Man-o’-War, of the sea anemone and the coral, with a name from Greek mythology and a ferocious armoury of poison darts with which it spears its hapless prey.

Luckily for those who like to walk the common in safety, all this goes on in miniature. Not counting the tentacles, the biggest specimens are not much more than half an inch long.

Hydra – for that is the creature’s name – consists, besides its half-dozen or so tentacles, of a tube-like body and little else. The base of the tube is formed into a disc-shaped foot, with which it anchors itself to a stone or frond of weed. If all is well, the tentacles are extended and gently waved, and Hydra waits for chance or the current to bring it what they may.

In common with most of the coelenterates (the group of “hollow-bodied” animals to which it belongs) Hydra is equipped with stinging cells called nematocysts. In its most highly developed form a nematocyst consists of a capsule filled with poison and containing a long, hollow filament, at the end of which is a more or less elaborate arrangement of barbs.

Projecting from the mouth of the capsule is a short trigger, which, when activated by a passing prey-animal – often a water-flea – sets off the release mechanism. The capsule violently contracts and the barbed head of the filament is shot out like a harpoon, puncturing the body-wall of the prey and releasing the poison inside.

Besides these, so-called “penetrant” nematocysts, Hydra’s tentacles have “volvent” nematocysts also. Volvents are likewise used in feeding. Once the prey has been stunned or killed by the penetrants, the volvents are discharged. They have no harpoon or poison, but their filaments are designed to coil round bristles and other projections on the prey. Muscle cells in the tentacles then contract and the prey is brought inexorably to the mouth, which is no more than a hole at the apex of the body, in the middle of the ring of tentacles.

Digestion is a pretty straightforward business for Hydra. The cells lining the body cavity secrete enzymes which help to break down the food, and mechanical action (which occurs whenever Hydra moves about) does the rest. Nutrients are absorbed and dispersed either by simple diffusion or by cells which migrate about inside the animal, taking the food where it is needed. Unwanted material is egested through the mouth.

Nor is Hydra’s sex-life much more complicated. Usually it does not bother at all, and merely grows buds which, enlarging, eventually drop off and become a new individual. This enviably simple process is only suitable as long as the water remains warm, for Hydra cannot survive the winter in adult form.

In autumn, then, certain cells develop in the body wall which become testes. Lower down on the body an ovary also develops, but not at the same time, so that self-fertilization is rare. The covering on the testes finally ruptures, releasing sperms into the water which seek out a ripe egg. The resulting zygote develops into a cyst which sinks to the bottom of the pond and lies dormant till spring, when it soon hatches and grows into an adult Hydra.

The mythical Hydra had frightening powers of regeneration, growing two heads for every one that was cut off; and our local Hydra is not far behind. It can replace a mutilated, or even a completely amputated, tentacle. Even if the body is cut up into tiny pieces, each one will develop into a new individual.

This is made possible by a layer of “interstitial” cells, each of which is a basic and undifferentiated cell, waiting to turn into whatever is needed. The interstitial cells are the reservoir from which the nematocysts are replaced, and from them the sexual organs develop too; it is likely that a new Hydra could grow from a single interstitial cell.

The green Hydra gets its colour from the presence in its body wall of Chlorella, a single-celled plant that is a degenerate relative of the free-swimming algae present in almost any bit of stagnant water. Chlorella and Hydra exist in partnership: the plant absorbs carbon dioxide and minerals from the animal and gives back oxygen and excess sugars.

Having studied our specimens long enough, it is time to put them back. The cricket is still in progress; by now a number of those in the deckchairs seem to have fallen asleep. It would be a shame if their dreams were ever inhabited by monsters as fearful as those which, as we empty the jar into the pond, are now returning to their own murky world.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Tring Reservoirs

2010-04-24T17:15:00.003+01:00

Image: Gavin Stewart

The Chinese are credited with inventing (besides gunpowder, spectacles, and the concept of money) the canal lock, enabling boats to travel uphill and down.

It is a clever idea, but has one drawback. Every time the lock gates are opened, tens of thousands of gallons of water must be released downstream. If there is much traffic, a serious water shortage can develop.

The Grand Union Canal, despite making a number of detours to avoid the highest ground, must somehow get past the Chiltern Hills on its way from London to Birmingham. The summit is reached just north of Tring, and there is a series of closely spaced locks in both directions.

To help supply the water for these locks, reservoirs had to be provided, and were dug out by teams of “Navvies” on marshy ground near the village of Marsworth.

Four were built in all. The largest, at 120 acres, is Wilstone Reservoir; the other three, Tringford, Marsworth, and Startopsend Reservoirs, are grouped together a little way to the east and total 90 acres between them. In total they hold a maximum of 460 million gallons; or about 10,000 locks-full.

Thirty years ago the Nature Conservancy leased from the British Waterways Board (then the British Transport Commission) the banks and woodland at the reservoirs, and the area was designated as a National Nature Reserve.

Situated as they are on ancient marshland, the reservoirs have an interesting flora, with such rarities as the orange foxtail grass, round-fruited rush, and mudwort, and some quite scarce insects which are also relics of the former marshland.

But it is for birds, especially water birds, that the reservoirs are best known. It was at Tring that Julian Huxley carried out his pioneering study of the great crested grebe, and ornithological history was made in 1918 when no fewer than three pairs of black-necked grebes bred, the first ever confirmed breeding record in England. History was made again in 1938 when a pair of little ringed plovers brought off three young at Startopsend – the first known breeding in Britain of a species which has now colonized much of the country.

Startopsend is entirely surrounded by embankment, but the others have partly natural shores, with extensive reed-beds at Wilstone and smaller ones at Marsworth. The reeds provide a haven for surface-feeding ducks – mallard, teal, shoveler, and wigeon – and on the open water are diving ducks such as tufted duck and pochard and, during winter and early spring, goldeneye too. Rarer ducks can also be expected at any time, as well as wild swans and geese.

The site of the reservoirs, at a gap in the Chiltern escarpment, makes them ideal for attracting migrants, which tend to get “funnelled” through geological features such as this. The reservoirs are especially attractive to migrating waders, which otherwise might not make a landfall in the county, and it is for unusual waders that Tring is perhaps most visited by bird-watchers.

The spring wader passage is now nearing its height; the autumn passage, which is generally heavier, with a greater variety of species, peaks between late July and September. The water levels fluctuate a good deal, as might be expected, usually being highest in winter and lowest in late summer. The best time to see waders is when the level is somewhere in between, for their feeding areas are found in zones of soft mud and shingle which are covered when the water is too high and tend to dry out if it gets too low.

The early morning after a night of drizzle, with overcast skies and a persistent north-easterly wind, is the perfect time, provided the levels are also right. One such morning in August, after a night of gale force winds, produced common, green, and wood sandpipers, greenshank, ringed plover, snipe, lapwing, and even a red-necked phalarope. On other mornings there were dunlin, redshank, little ringed plover, ruff, little stint, and curlew.

Among the most productive spots are the broad expanses of shingly mud at Tringford, the southern corner of Startopsend, and, at Wilstone, both the marshy area at the southern end and the long sweep of the south-eastern shore, which, fringed with reeds and backed by aspen woods, is very lovely.

Indeed, the reservoirs have their attractions for humans as, well as birds. Whether visited for bird-watching or simply a stroll, they rarely fail to raise the spirits. Even on sultry afternoons there always seems to be a breeze blowing across the wide water of Wilstone. The air comes through the gap in the hills; distant views of the Wendover Chilterns, stretching right round from the south to the north-east, give a sense of openness and freedom, and, from the slight hillside which rises above the aspens, there are extensive views of the vast emptiness of the Aylesbury Plain.

The Grand Union Canal, built between 1793 and 1805, was one of the biggest engineering projects of the age, comparable with the construction of the M25. Doubtless little thought then, as now, was given to the effect it was having on the countryside; but with the canal system, where transport is conducted on a gentler scale, we have been lucky, and, for Tring Reservoirs, must not forget in our gratitude to acknowledge those wily Chinese.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Introduced Trees

2010-04-17T17:20:00.001+01:00

In recent years hundreds of thousands of evergreens have been planted by English gardeners, whether for hedging or as specimen conifers. Many of the trees sold here belong to a species called Lawson’s Cypress, which has been bred into a bewildering variety of cultivars and crossed with other cypresses to make such hybrid forms as the Leyland Cypress. The Western Red Cedar or Arbor-vitae is another common kind, and there are several others.

Most of these come from the western seaboard of North America. The climate there is mild and equable and ideal for trees: the giant redwood is one of the most famous inhabitants of the forests at California and Oregon.

Our own climate is also oceanic and in certain ways is even better for the growth of trees. What some people might not guess is that the tiny conifer bought today at a garden centre may – unless it is a specially-bred dwarf form – have the potential to grow to a height of a hundred feet or more.

The suitability of Britain for trees is not reflected in the diversity of the native tree flora. Britain was cut off from the rest of Europe at a fairly early time. This, together with the fact that the ice sheet came as far south as the Thames, combined to deprive us of many sorts of plants, including trees, that are common on the Continent, and our native flora only has about thirty-five species of trees.

However, conditions here are just about perfect for the sustained slow growth which makes the finest specimens, and our introduced tree flora is one of the most varied in the world – containing at least 500 species to be found generally, along roadsides, in parks and gardens, and over 1,200 more in special collections. One such arboretum at Westonbirt, in Gloucestershire, has no fewer than 540 different species.

Once started, tree-watching can become a compulsive hobby. All you need is a good book – trees have the great merit of not running or flying away when you get near them, and can always be revisited with a more knowledgeable friend if you are not sure of your identification.

The charm of trees is not easy to convey in words. Their obvious qualities of permanence, grace and silence lend them nobility. Each species has its own particular style, its own solution to the problem of life, that colours everything it does and every particle of its substance.

When you are examining closely, under a lens, a spray of pungent Incense Cedar, or a shoot of Hornbeam or Silver Maple, you enter another realm where normal scale does not apply. Each leaf is perfection, complete in itself. No matter how many times it is replicated, the quality is maintained, the flavour of the tree remains intact. The flavour extends to the shape the tree makes in the landscape, and here again each species is unique. An expert can tell one kind of poplar from another while passing in the train.

For tree-addicts there is no arboretum locally, and excluding Kew and the London parks, the closest collection of any merit is at the Savill Garden, near Windsor. Nonetheless, you do not have to go far to find unusual trees – probably no further than your nearest street-planting or municipal park.

Cassiobury Park, for example, is the next best thing to Watford’s own arboretum. Especially in the area near the Shepherd’s Road to Stratford Way path, there are many fine specimens of North American oaks – including Red, Pin, and Scarlet Oaks. To the east of this path are specimens of such exotics as Hupeh and Kashmir Rowans, Sweet Gum, Indian Horse Chestnut, and Monterey Pine. Nearby, standing with Cedars of Lebanon, is a young Giant Redwood and, by the croquet lawn, a Japanese Red Cedar.

Further down the hill is a Tulip Tree, and near the paddling pool are many Western Balsam Poplars; by the river, next to the children’s railway, is a single specimen of the Swamp Cypress, a native of the southern U.S.A. and one of the few trees in the world able to thrive with its roots submerged in water. The black, boggy soil by the Gade is perhaps the best place for it but even so it looks ill at ease, like an animal in a zoo cage, and you come to realise that it really has no business there.

However much fascination exotic trees add to the view, there are not many to compete with our own natives in planting schemes, formal or otherwise. The colours of the beech and oak are in complete harmony with the colours of English skies; and to these trees, and to the kind of forest they make, our native animals and lesser plants are completely adapted.

The exotic trees are comparatively lifeless. Some birds, including the Greenfinch, are slowly learning to exploit the sterile conifer hedges, but compare the number of nests to be found in a hedge of hawthorn or yew. Pressure on land is now so intense that there can no longer be much justification for planting alien species.

And, if you are thinking of buying a conifer this weekend, it might be a good idea to leave enough money in your will for your children to buy climbing irons and a pruning saw!

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Bumblebees

2010-04-10T17:00:00.005+01:00

Image: Andy Potter

Spreading along the base of the house wall is a large and old-established clump of Aubrieta, making a mass of small, purplish-lavender flowers. Because the wall is sheltered and faces south, the flowers always come out early and attract any bees that may be in the vicinity.

At lunchtime, when the sun was especially warm, a bumblebee was clambering from flower to flower, taking nectar and pollen. It was a large bee, a queen, with long, silky and luxuriant fur, black except for the buff collar, belt, and tail. Close inspection revealed that the hairy “pollen baskets” on the hind legs were not being filled. Instead she was feeding directly, as if stoking up after a long winter spent underground.

Although a few individuals of some species break their hibernation as early as February if the weather is mild, most emerge in April or early May. Like the smaller honey-bee, the bumblebee is a social insect and nests in colonies. Unlike the honey-bee, though, no worker bumblebees survive the winter. When she emerges in spring, the queen bumblebee must found a new colony from scratch.

Many of the really common species nest underground. Once she has replenished her reserves of fat, the queen searches for a likely site. Often an old mouse- or vole-nest will be taken over, and the bedding left by the previous occupants is rearranged according to her taste, forming a hollow chamber about the size of a fist, lined with the finest of the nest material.

Insects are cold-blooded, but bumblebees are able to generate heat, both by changes in body chemistry and by a muscular movement rather like shivering. During and just after nest-building, the queen becomes “broody” and her body temperature rises. She may sit in the nest chamber for long periods before the eggs are laid, and her body warmth removes any trace of dampness from the bedding.

Once the chamber is ready, she goes out foraging for nectar, which she brings back in her crop. Some of this is smeared on the inside walls of the chamber, helping to consolidate the nest material, and serving also as an emergency supply of food in the event of bad weather.

The eggs of a bumblebee are white and sausage-shaped and about two millimetres long. They develop in eight tubes which arise from the two ovaries, so that, in some species, only eight eggs are laid at a time; others may lay sixteen.

During her foraging the queen also brings back pollen, which she moulds into a lump in the centre of the chamber. The eggs are laid in this pollen, and then covered with the wax which she secretes from glands in her abdomen. The wax canopy extends to the floor of the chamber, helping to hold the egg-clump in place. The queen sits on top of the clump, using her body-heat to brood it.

Wax is also used to make a special pot for holding a reserve of nectar. The pot is usually placed near the entrance, so that the queen, while she is brooding, can extend her tongue to feed. She faces the entrance as she broods so that she can repel intruders – predators, other queens who may want to take over the nest, or queens of the cuckoo-bumblebees which will destroy her own brood and put another in its place.

The eggs hatch after about five days. The grubs feed on the pollen in the clump, which the queen now replenishes with further foraging trips. She must not spend too long away from the nest at this period, or the temperature of the clump will fall and development of the brood may be retarded. If the temperature drops below 10°C they may even die.

The grubs turn into pupae, spinning papery cocoons for themselves. At this stage the queen scrapes most of the wax from the clump and constructs a new layer or row of cells in which the next batch of eggs is laid.

The pupal stage lasts about a fortnight. About five weeks after the first eggs were laid, the first generation of young bees emerges. These then become the first workers, helping with the care of the later broods. The workers are always females, which are produced as a result of sexual reproduction. The males, or drones, are produced from eggs which are not fertilized. They are born towards the end of the life of the colony, and play no part in foraging or nest-maintenance.

At about this time the new generation of queens is also raised. Queens differ from ordinary females only in the care that they receive in their early stage, being supplied with very much more food than a developing worker.

The males leave the nest almost as soon as they are able to fly, and spend an idyllic, if short, existence, lazing about on flowers, needing to feed only themselves, and engaging in elaborate ceremonial flights designed to attract a mate. When the young queens emerge from the nest, they locate the males at visiting-places which are usually marked by scent and may have been used for the purpose by generations of bees. Most females will mate only once, and then, a supply of sperm stored in their bodies, seek out places in which to spend the winter months.

Meanwhile the workers of the old colony gradually die out – foraging is a dangerous business, with many casualties – and, by the onset of autumn, the queen herself, exhausted after all her efforts, is also dead. The first frosts kill off any stragglers, leaving only the young queens to carry on the species.

And now, after a winter spent in suspended animation, they are groggily emerging, like the queen feeding on the Aubrieta by the wall. Soon she will have to find a nest, and then it will begin all over again.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Croxley Moor

2010-04-03T16:00:00.003+01:00

Some of the best places for the naturalist are those that, on the face of it, seem the least promising or prepossessing.

The Holywell industrial estate, on the borders of Watford and Croxley Green, is an example. Until the recent redevelopment of Dickinson’s Mill and the expansion of the rest of the estate, it was always worth a visit, especially in the evenings and at weekends when not too many people were about.

The expanse of mown grass, in season, sometimes produced passage wheatears. The thistles and burdocks attracted many cardueline finches – mainly goldfinches and linnets, but also redpolls. The streams, ditches, and wet thickets provided breeding for blackcaps and sedge warblers, with woodpeckers in the older timber.

A sizable birchwood at the end of Greenhill Crescent – good for fungi in the autumn – has now vanished and its site is buried under factories. The area of woodland and scrub between the Sun Printers and the canal has been razed, destroying a number of notable botanical sites.

Not far from the old Sun Printers clock tower, for instance, among the concrete foundations of a derelict building, was a good variety of grasses, some common and others less so, but all growing untrampled and undisturbed. The surrounding scrub, neglected for years, was, thanks to the buddleias, sallows, and other shrubs that had established themselves there, one of the richest places in the district for butterflies and moths. The waste ground yielded many interesting exotic and alien plants, notably a colony of cypress spurge and, not quite so unusual, but colourful in the late summer, a mass of purple toadflax along the wire fence of the Post Office compound in Ascot Road.

The uses to which man puts the land are often, if not usually, detrimental to other living things. But, immediately his intervention stops, nature begins to take over again. Within a week of its opening in 1973, a new section of the Watford road system had been invaded by several species of weed, growing in cracks between the brand-new concrete blocks.

The new factories, once they have served their purpose, will eventually fall down. Whether it lakes fifty years or five hundred, nature will get the land back.

At the edge of the Holywell Estate this process can already be seen in action. The old railway line from Oxhey to Rickmansworth was dismantled in the seventies. No longer sprayed or weeded by the track crews, the shingle bed, running beside Croxley Moor for much of its length, quickly became home to a great variety of beautiful wild flowers. Among these were Pyrenean and long-stalked cranesbills, fumitory, moon- daisy, valerian, and two species of poppy – nothing especially rare, but all plants which are less and less easily found these days.

A little further along, the course of the railway runs between a small marsh on one side and the river moor on the other. Part of the moor has been dug for gravel, leaving a network of flooded pits. The water vegetation has encroached on the embankment and the track itself, and a yard or two from the shingle is a reedbed with nesting reed warblers. When the air is momentarily quiet, the breeze in the stems generates exactly the same magical rustling that can be heard in the vast, wild marshes of the Danube or the Camargue. If the warblers are singing the illusion is complete.

The track has also been invaded by trees. The young alders and willows form a corridor lined in spring with catkins. Elsewhere there are birch saplings, lots of them, providing shelter for insects and winter food for birds. The birch is a pioneer species, always ready to colonize vacant ground. It is tough, hardy, but short-lived, and provides shelter for more durable trees that come in its wake. Already there are several small oak trees among the birches; if left to themselves they will continue to grow for centuries.

The absence of maintenance has allowed a hawthorn bush to develop into a huge, densely thorned mass, ideal for nesting blackbirds and long-tailed tits.

If you squat on your haunches, or better, kneel down with a lens, there is another, miniature flora to be seen on the thin soil that has already accumulated on the surface of the roadbed. By the end of February the tiny white flowers of whitlow-grass are in bloom, supported on threadlike stems no more than an inch or two high. Later come other dwarf flowers, all adapted to exposed conditions or thin soil. Among these are both our native species of sandwort, with minute flowers which can only be dissected by means of the finest needles.

Where the line used to cross a small stream there is a little bridge in grey engineering brick, which now supports a microscopic flora of its own. Besides the velvety cushions of moss there are grey lichens, strange organisms which share the characteristics of both fungi and algae. And then, yet further along, the mortar of the bridge over the canal is home to a colony of a curious little fern called wall-rue. Swallows nest under the bridge, swooping in and out through the echoing space above the water.

Or at least they used to. There are new earthworks going on now, and lorries rumble back and forth over the bridge. This spring the swallows will probably choose another site. But, so soon as the lorries have gone – next year, the year after, or even the year after that – we can hope and reasonably expect the swallows to come back.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Herons

2010-03-27T16:25:00.008Z

Image: Karen

The telescope is set up on its tripod and turned to medium power. In the clear circle of light there is a grey, fluffy, and rather comical-looking head, poking above the edge of the nest.

A moment later another head rises behind it, another chick: there are three in all, and they have just become aware of the return of one of their parents. Reducing the magnification, we are just in time to include within the circle the adult heron as it arrives, ruffles and then sleeks its plumage. Zoom in again, to maximum power, and we see the adult bird lean over and open its bill.

All three chicks strain upwards to be fed, but only one is selected, either through the discretion of the parent, sharing the food out equally, or because the chosen chick is more pushy than the others and does not scruple to take the food intended for its fellows.

With a gulping motion the parent bird regurgitates the contents of its crop and passes to the chick a semi-digested mash of fish, with a leavening of frogs, perhaps, or a rat or water-vole – delicious for baby herons and, for the moment, the chief interest of their lives. The parent has spent an hour or two collecting it, at any distance up to twelve miles from the colony, but probably no further away than the adjoining lakes and streams.

Only in recent years have herons begun to nest locally again. Several decades ago there was said to be a small heronry at Charlotte’s Vale, near Grove Mill at Watford, but otherwise the only nest-site was at Marsworth Reservoir, Tring. Then, in the seventies, herons began to take an interest in Broadwater, a large flooded gravel-pit near Denham.

Before excavation took place, the contractors agreed plans to leave a specified number of islands in the lake. The largest group of these, in the southern end, has now become covered with alders, birches, and willows, and provides a sanctuary for a variety of breeding and roosting birds.

For years the herons were to be seen hanging about the islands during the breeding season. Finally, after a number of false starts, some nests were constructed and the colony began. By now there are twenty or more nests to be seen every spring: bulky platforms of sticks, lined with twigs and other bits of vegetation, sometimes built from scratch, but more often based on the previous year’s and enlarged. The female does the building work, while the male provides the materials.

The breeding season begins early, for the heron is a large bird and its young take a long time to grow. The eggs, normally three to five in number, are laid in February or March, and are incubated for about twenty-five days. The young are ready to leave the nest about seven or eight weeks later.

By the end of May or early June, the young herons, wearing the drab grey plumage of the juvenile, have flown the nest. Some remain at Broadwater, loafing about on the islands or shore or perched on the colony trees, but the rest disperse quite widely over the surrounding district.

The colony at Broadwater has proved a great success, and an offshoot has now been established among the wooded islands and gravel strands at Stocker’s Lake, a couple of miles to the north.

As a result, the heron, once noteworthy away from its recognized haunts in the Colne Valley, is now becoming a frequent visitor to many sites where previously it was virtually unknown.

While they show no sign of breeding again at Charlotte’s Vale, the herons have adopted one particular field there as a daytime roost. Here they wait, digesting their food, until darkness falls and it is safe for them to return to the streams and rivers which, during the hours of daylight, are prone to human disturbance.

The field is broad, sloping, and roughly triangular, bounded on one side by Grove Mill Lane, on another by a narrow strip of woodland beside the River Gade, and on the third by more extensive woods adjoining the golf-course. On a high part of the slope is a single large cedar of Lebanon; the herons either perch on its branches, or on the ground elsewhere in the field – often beside the wire fence parallel with the river. As many as fourteen birds congregate here during the day from September to March, although four or five is a more usual number.

By late January most of the breeding birds have already returned to the Colne Valley to stake their territories among the trees and repair the nests in readiness for another generation of young.

Gravel workings such as these at Broadwater are often criticised for the damage they cause to the environment, and certainly much has been lost here – the botanically rich Harefield Moor has been virtually destroyed. None the less, there are compensations, of which the heronry is one of the most interesting and exciting.

On this cloudy afternoon at the end of March, the colony is in full swing, with as many nests occupied out of sight as are in plain view. The air above the trees is full of parent birds coming and going, and it looks as if a bumper crop of chicks is again to be brought off this year.

Hares

2010-03-20T17:38:00.014Z

A Young Hare by Albrecht Dürer (1502)

April is still ten days away, but out there, across the broad expanse of dark-brown furrows, the air is already shimmering with heat. Seen from this low angle, from this quiet vantage place beside the hawthorn hedge, the heat haze seems concentrated and condensed; the white geodesic dome of the Chenies weather-radar looks misshapen and wobbling on the shaky substance of its tower.

The air is filled with the song of many skylarks, and from the asterisked lines of barbed wire by the bridle path come, over and over again, the same jangled notes of a corn bunting. A thrush is singing, and just now a woodpecker drummed from the direction of Baldwin’s Wood, but otherwise the place seems devoid of life. The fields here are too open, the hedgerows too sparse. The arable is a desert, a harsh and unpromising place for wild creatures.

Earlier this morning, though, when the sky was still grey with dawn and the light was only just good enough for the human eye to perceive detail, these same furrows were the scene of a prolonged and spectacular contest. Two buck hares, mad March hares, were fighting, either for territory, or for possession of a doe which remained unseen and, more than likely, indifferent to the outcome.

The contest, or ritual, was enacted as a chase in which the two hares displayed to the full their agility and powers of running, dashing across the clods, the subordinate animal doing most of the giving way. Occasionally, however, it mastered its timidity and stood its ground, rearing up on hind legs at the approach of its antagonist. Often as not it would think better of this tactic and again resume running, but once or twice it held firm and a few rather ineffectual sideswipes were exchanged.

These boxing matches are seldom seen nowadays. Changes in land use and farming methods have made the hare very scarce. Once it was a common animal, a feature of all landscapes such as this. It was included in the traditional list of the five beasts of the chase – the Hart, Hind, Hare, Boar, and Wolf – and occupied an important place in the tradition and lore of the countryside.

Nevertheless, for such a large animal (it can weigh upwards of seven pounds and is considerably bigger than its relative, the rabbit), the hare is adept at keeping a low profile. It can remain unsuspected in a district for many years, known only to those who are out and about at dawn and dusk, when hares are chiefly active, or who are lucky enough to glimpse one at some other time or find its traces.

This stretch between Flaunden and Chenies remains ideal hare country, with a fair amount of open and semi-permanent pasture, arable land, and a substantial amount of woodland, for the hare is just as much at home under the trees as it is in the open. Formerly there was a small but constant population of hares on the golf-course and in the adjoining Whippendell Wood at Watford, but human disturbance there is now too great and all but a few have gone.

The hare’s main requirement, besides a supply of food, is a quiet, safe place where it can lie up during the day. Such a place is called a form and is usually a mere depression in the turf, preferably with overhanging grass stems or other vegetation to keep the hare out of sight. One hare may have many such forms in a small area, and when flushed from one will run to another to hide.

It is usually very difficult to flush a hare from its form, and it will remain there until the last moment, almost until you tread on it. Like most vegetarians of its size, it relies on being overlooked by predators. The eyes are so placed that it sees better to the rear than to the front; the eyes themselves are large and efficient and designed to give early warning of danger. Together with a very acute sense of smell and sensitive hearing which is enhanced by the large and controllable external ears, the eyesight makes it all but impossible to approach a hare undetected. You can be sure that if you can see the hare, the hare has long ago known all about you.

Once it does start running, the hare can cover the ground at up to thirty miles an hour, making short work of rough terrain. For preference it will run uphill, to get the best from those long hind legs. It is an able swimmer and will not hesitate to cross even quite wide rivers.

Unlike the young of the burrow-nesting rabbit, the newbom leverets are fully clothed and can see almost immediately. Two to five in number, the brood is placed in a special form by the mother and left alone while she goes off to feed; she suckles them at night.

Waiting here at the edge of the field, it seems that the hares are not going to reappear today. The bucks are in their forms, and so is the doe. Perhaps she is already pregnant, and, as you start for home at last, you wonder whether there will be leverets again this spring in the same place by the edge of the wood, where the grass is sweet and tussocky, under the resinous young branches of the Scots pines. As long as there are, all is not lost for our countryside.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

The first chiffchaff

2010-03-13T20:00:00.010Z

Image: א

From the wintry thicket of sallows across the river come two silvery notes, in colour like the March sunshine itself, repeated several times in succession, rising and falling in an irregular and unpredictable cadence. The sound, noticed just a moment ago, brings with it a surging feeling of freedom and release, as if a long and tedious series of obstacles had finally been overcome. The first chiffchaff has arrived, so it must be true: spring is here, and that really means that winter has gone at last.

Presently you manage to glimpse the bird, a small, slight warbler with dark legs and a faint eyestripe, the plumage dusky olive above and lighter below. It is flitting about in the branches near the water, tirelessly searching for small spiders and insects, which it takes with a deftness and delicacy almost too quick for the eye to follow.

The song is abandoned; the chiffchaff has become more absorbed in its feeding, and flits now to an elder bush whose oily, dark-green leaves are already well out. The bush holds no interest, and the chiffchaff moves on a few yards to the north, to the red-stemmed dogwood thicket, where it again begins to sing. Chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff, chaff-chiff, chiff-chaff.

But “chiff-chaff” is too harsh a way to represent the song. The Germans call the bird “Zilpzalp”, pronounced “Tsilptsalp”, which comes a bit nearer the truth, though the notes, like nearly all bird sounds, are impossible to render accurately in any human scheme of phonetics. Later in the spring the song will be heard away from the river, in woods and wooded scrub, well-timbered parkland and gardens, but the earliest arrivals nearly always appear by water.

Although one or two chiffchaffs frequently spend the winter along this stretch of the Colne, this bird, with its song and the way it is progressing from bush to bush northwards, is almost certainly a migrant.

The chiffchaff is usually the first in the annual tally of our local summer visitors. A day or so later comes the wheatear – scarcely to be found in this district now, unless sometimes on the broad arable fields above West Hyde; next, the willow warbler, outwardly almost identical to the chiffchaff but with a completely different song; next, the sand martin, tree pipit, and yellow wagtail; and then, in quick succession, the swallow, blackcap, house martin, and all the rest, ending with the turtle dove, normally the last of the common migrants to arrive, in the latter days of April or the first of May.

Most of these birds winter in Africa, some as far south as the Cape. How they manage to navigate is still not properly understood. Some species, the blackcap, for example, have been shown definitely to take their bearings from the stars. All can steer by the sun and have the acute sense of time which this necessitates.

It is believed by some scientists that certain species have an inbuilt compass sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field, though no one has yet found any tissues which might perform such a function. A compass would certainly explain some of the more spectacular feats of bird navigation, in fog or on cloudy nights; but then, these are the very conditions most likely to confuse and disorientate most migrants.

Leaving aside the technical difficulties of nagivation, the main problem for migrants is the sheer expenditure of energy needed to complete the journey. Larger birds, such as eagles and storks, which have wide, high-efficiency wings, are able to climb to altitudes where they can take advantage of the wind. Small ones, though, like the chiffchaff, tend to progress yard by yard on the ground, and this method of travelling is called “bush-to-bush” migration.

Set against all the difficulties and dangers of migration, the advantages to the species are very great. It is able to breed in latitudes which, uninhabitable in winter, have immensely long summer days compared with those nearer the equator. At midsummer in England there can be as many as eighteen hours of daylight in which to find food for the young. This enables more and larger broods to be raised, and the increase in breeding success must outweigh the losses of adult and immature birds on the spring and autumn migrations.

Our chiffchaff this morning has probably wintered no further away than the Mediterranean. Nonetheless it has had to cross the whole of Europe and, worst of all for such a small land-bird, the English Channel. Having made land on the Hampshire, Sussex or Kent coast, it has moved steadily northwards, following wherever possible the river valleys, which are both sheltered and provide the most abundant supply of early insects.

Yesterday or the day before, some combination of landmarks in the broad valley of the Thames near Staines directed it northwards along the Colne. Twenty miles later it appeared here.

Now it has passed on, several hundred yards upstream. The urge to move north and breed is irresistible, of a pattern with the daily increase in the power of the sun.

Having been silent for a while, the bird is heard singing once more, faintly, a new arrival at some fresher and more northerly stretch of the river.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Wind

2010-03-06T16:48:00.004Z

Image: Lesley Potts

Two thousand miles away, in the weather cauldron of the Atlantic, air swells above the surface of the ocean and the pressure rises. The Arctic pack ice will soon be breaking up: spring is coming to the northern hemisphere. Powered by the sun, vast changes are at work in the patterns of the sky.

The brunt of the sea wind is taken by the rocky western coast. By the time it reaches this far inland, on the field edge by a small Hertfordshire wood, it has only enough strength, at first, to move the leafless twigs and branches of the trees. The sound it makes in the canopy is gentle and sweet, but insistent, the token of stronger wind to come. Where the sky is clear, it is unusually blue, and the clouds are white, making huge, luminous mountains and ravines. Their terrestrial shadows must struggle to keep up, lumbering westwards, towards London.

By fits and starts the wind grows in strength all day. Down here in the dry valley, the buffets are absorbed one at a time by the wood. Trees moderate all extremes, of wind, of heat and cold and rainfall, and for the moment they are still in full control.

But the wood is only a remnant of what once was, and an artificial one at that, allowed to stand for the sake of the breeding pheasants. From most of this landscape the forest was stripped long ago, and now even the hedgerows are going, leaving flinty pastures divided by barbed wire, and nothing to challenge the late winter winds on their long sweep in from the west.

Up at the farm, on an exposed hillside, the wind is already a force to be reckoned with. The fence wires are taut and moaning, and the cattle have moved nearer the farm buildings.

The energy of the wind, if only we could convert it efficiently, would put a nuclear power station to shame. It appears to us to be squandered, thrown away, but in the natural world nothing is ever wasted, not even the wind.

In the landscape that was, the winter gales cleansed and purified the forest, weeding out dry branches, bringing down old and sickly trees so that saplings were given a chance. The spaces formed in the canopy allowed light to reach the forest floor, encouraging a rich variety of plants which lasted as long as the clearing did. The fallen timber itself gave opportunities to a wide range of specialist insects, mosses, lichens, ferns and fungi, and to all the creatures that fed on them in turn.

The wind not only causes the final crash of dying trees: it is also the chief agent of decay, spreading, by the hundreds of thousands of billions, the spores of timber-rotting fungi, so that no broken branch or wound in the bark is anywhere safe from infection.

Besides death, the wind broadcasts life. Migrating birds make use of favourable winds; all manner of seeds, from thistledown to the spinning blades of ash and maple seed, are dispersed on the air; and if a flower does not have nectar or a showy set of petals, it is probably pollinated by the wind rather than by insects or other animals.

Like the fungi with their spores, wind-fertilized plants produce their pollen in staggering quantities. In summer no part of the atmosphere is free of grass pollen, and even well away from the hayfields the levels can be high, as allergy sufferers know to their cost.

Grasses are highly evolved plants, and their flowers show a reduction and simplification of structure which is shared by most wind-pollinated flowers. Quite often the female stigma is feathery or sticky, or both, to give it more chance of catching pollen, and quite often the flowers, instead of having both male and female parts in the same structure, are of separate sexes. The male plants then usually outnumber the females, and cover large areas of ground.

Among those sorts that must coexist with broad-leaved trees, flowering comes early. The hazel catkins appear in the first fortnight of February; a little later come the small grey mice of the sallow flowers, and this week, at the wood, the dog’s mercury is coming into its own – a plain, simple-looking plant, related to the spurges and more distantly to the nettles, which is a classic of wind pollination. With each gust its pollen can be seen drifting in faint yellow clouds. The female plants grow in clumps surrounded by carpets of males, so that whichever way the wind blows they are sure to be pollinated.

The sight and smell of dog’s mercury pollen always come with the March wind. So too does a special transparency of air, a clarity and subtlety of colour. Up here, there is nothing to obstruct the vision. The range for the eyesight goes on and on, away towards Bovingdon, towards Aylesbury, away past the horizon, and beyond, to the incoming cloud mass and the pure, wild air above the sea.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Frogs

2010-02-27T17:27:00.004Z

Image: P. Matthews

Just about now, as the sun grows stronger and the soil grows warmer, the frogs are coming out of hibernation. They have spent the winter in a state of torpor, hidden in mud at the bottom of ponds and ditches, or in compost heaps and other damp places.

Frogs are cold-blooded. When the temperature falls their vitality is lowered. Although they have lungs, they also breathe through their skins – provided they can be kept damp – and the small amount of oxygen they absorb in hibernation is enough to keep them ticking over.

During the long winter months, gradual changes have been taking place in their body chemistry. Hormones have been at work. On awakening in the spring, the frogs are immediately ready to breed.

The males have developed a large, swollen pad on the ball of each “thumb”. With this the male grips the unfortunate female in a cold, clammy and muscular embrace which may last for days on end. In their frenzy to mate the males are none too choosy; they have even been known to grapple a good-sized goldfish, and clumps of half a dozen frogs or more can form which would even make the author of the Kama Sutra blush.

The males cling on, waiting for the females to exude the streams of spawn, which are fertilized as they emerge. A slimy coating on the eggs swells almost immediately on contact with water, so that the spawn floats close to the surface, close to light and warmth.

A fortnight later the tadpoles begin to hatch. At first they resemble the fry of tiny fish, minute black slivers clinging in clusters to fronds of weed. Within a few days the mouth is fully developed and they start to forage on minute algae and other vegetable matter. They breathe using two pairs of feathery gills, external at first but later internal. The tail grows longer, and the body fatter.

Then, a few weeks after hatching, two buds appear which develop into hind limbs; the body becomes flatter and the eyes migrate to the top of the head. Next the forelimbs emerge. At this stage the lungs are already well developed and the gills, like the remains of the tail, are absorbed. The metamorphosis from larva to adult is complete. Three months after hatching, the tadpoles have become froglets.

The casualty rate among spawn and tadpoles is high. Besides fish, their enemies include many sorts of insects. Among the most ferocious of these are dragonfly nymphs, sometimes called the “Tigers of the Pond”, and the even more ferocious and aggressive backswimmers, bugs with the scientific name Notonecta.

By the time the young frogs leave the water and are ready to start exploring the damp vegetation nearby, their chances have improved somewhat, but they are still at risk, although from a different set of enemies. A number of water birds – including herons and ducks – are partial to frogs, and so are brown rats, foxes, and water shrews.

For defence the frogs rely on their powerful hind legs, with which they can spring out of danger, and on the cryptic colouring of their skin. The spots and blotches help to break up the shape of the frog and make it harder to see, and the colours themselves – green and brown and dull yellow – blend in well with the background.

In addition the frog can change colour to some extent, like a chameleon. There are special cells in the skin containing dark pigment. In dark, wet, or cold conditions the cells expand, making the frog look darker; in hot, dry conditions they contract and the frog can appear almost sand-coloured.

Adult frogs have two modes of feeding, both quite effective in their way. The upper jaw, but not the lower, is equipped with a set of backwards-pointing teeth. The prey – mainly worms, slugs, and large insects – is seized and held with the jaws and then swallowed whole.

The other mode of feeding is more colourful and makes use of the frog’s excellent eyesight. Glands in the roof of the mouth exude a sticky goo; the tongue is long and forked and rolled back on itself when at rest. Should a suitable insect alight nearby, or even cruise past, the tongue is uncoiled at lightning speed, brushes past the glands, and the insect is glued to the tip, whereupon it is brought back to the mouth and swallowed with a complacent blink of those big, bulbous eyes.

Frogs have set migration routes and a sort of inbuilt memory of ancestral breeding grounds, returning year after year to the same spot, even when the pond or ditch has long since been filled in. They have suffered badly in this district from the activities of man, and tadpoles should never be kept in jamjars: much better to leave them in the wild.

For all their promiscuity at breeding time, frogs are to be welcomed in the garden, as they destroy vast numbers of slugs; and anyway, March would not be March without their quiet, lascivious croakings, the plop as they dive into the goldfish pond, or the tapioca-like masses of spawn which signal the start of another spring and another summer.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

A moorhen

2010-02-20T16:41:00.005Z

Image: Mehmet Karatay

The spring equinox is only a month away. During the past week or so, the sun has been trying out its strength as if in rehearsal for the season to come. Between showers and periods of cloud, it has lit up the hills and pastures and sent experimental patterns of reflection up into the old willows by the canal.

During these warm interludes the seesaw song of the great tits can be heard most loudly; the rugged bark of the willows seems almost to expand in gratitude. Fraction by fraction the puddles on the towpath are shrinking. The river is no longer so full. The wind is being given a chance to do its work, and, on balance, the countryside is beginning to dry out. Winter, with all its rigours and privations, is nearly over at last.

There have been many casualties among the small and weak, and especially among those animals which are deprived of their food by ice. Quite early on in the snowy weather the kingfishers went elsewhere. Some have perished. The water rails also fared badly, but their larger relatives, the moorhens, for the most part stayed and stuck it out.

Even in one horizontal blizzard, when the sheer density of driving snow obscured the wood on the hill, the moorhens were to be seen among the stubbles, searching for whatever they could find to keep themselves alive. They endured night after night of freezing fog, sleet, granite-hard frost. They survived the attentions of foxes which were themselves driven to desperation by hunger and cold. Each morning the moorhens’ tracks – large, backwards-pointing arrows in the snow – could be seen crossing and recrossing the riverbank and the towpath and the lawns adjoining the water.

Now all that is forgotten. What lies ahead is spring, summer, the breeding season, the time of plenty. In April and May there will be the satisfaction and damp warmth of a deep nest filled with eggs, hidden somewhere safe and silent among the flags. Afterwards there will be the chicks, like small black powder puffs with beaks, frantically swimming behind their parents and trying to keep up.

There is one moorhen, though, which, if you are not careful, will not even live to see tomorrow, still less the breeding season. It is caught up in the middle of a thorn bush beside the towpath. Had a slight fluttering of dark feathers not attracted your attention you would have gone breezing past.

The thorns are sharp and tear at your wrist where it is not protected by the glove. The moorhen thinks you are going to kill it. Terrified, it tries in vain to burrow more deeply into the tangle of branches, but its movements are hampered anyway; a few moments more and you make contact. Holding the bird as gently as you can, and moving branches aside with your free hand, you slowly and carefully begin to bring it out.

Your fears are confirmed as the moorhen comes free of the thorns and you are able to examine it more closely. The wings and legs have been snared by several yards of discarded fishing line. The bird’s struggling attempts to get free have made matters worse: the thin, translucent filament is wound into an inextricable maze of knots and tight loops, some so tight that the flesh on the upper legs has been deeply cut. Each movement of the bird tends to widen the wounds.

The moorhen makes no sound. Its beak is slightly open and its small, button-like eye seems no longer to register fear, but resignation. It is waiting to be dispatched, in accordance with the law. Big eats small. That it understands. But it cannot understand why or how it became ensnared. Nothing in its ancestry or experience has prepared it for nylon line.

Using fingernails alone, you would never be able to get the knots undone. They are simply too tight, too small, and too complicated. A penknife would not help; even a fine pair of scissors would be too clumsy. Luckily, since having seen a dead thrush trussed in this stuff and dangling from a tree, you now always carry a very thin, sickle-shaped scalpel blade. It is brand new, and gleams through a smear of grease as you take it from its cardboard sleeve.

Sharp as the blade is, the job is difficult and takes a long time. The moorhen slowly becomes more placid, sensing perhaps that it is not to be killed after all. One wing comes free, and then the other. Being especially careful, cutting one strand at a time, you free the legs. At last the final bit of filament is removed.

Unnoticed, the sun has gone in again. None the less there can be no doubt about it: spring is on the way, and for the moorhen now as well.

Its wounds will heal quite quickly. Birds are hardy and resistant; there are no fears on that score. It is already able to walk unaided. As you stand clear, it slightly stretches its wings. After a moment’s further trial, the moorhen launches itself and takes off and, legs dangling, flies across the ditch, beyond the nettles, and disappears from view.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

Authorship in the Information Age

2010-02-17T11:45:00.004Z

I have just ended a two-year experiment. Readers were invited to download six of my novels and send me a fee if they enjoyed any of them. You can see the original proposition here.

The experience bears out much of what I have read about online content. Of more interest, it also got me thinking about the practice of authorship in the Information Age.

Downloads and payments

At least 36,568 ebooks were downloaded from external, authorized sites, and well over 100,000 from my own. Some titles were posted on torrents. Originally the requested payment varied with the title (85p and up), but PayPal took too big a slice of that so in 2009 I increased the rate to a flat £1.50 per book.

The gross income (after PayPal) was £522.28, net £258.38 pre-tax, or about 0.19 pence per download. 144 payments were made. The smallest was 85p; the largest a remarkable £50, which followed £10 from the same donor. Some other people paid more than the requested amount, a few less. A British reader sent me a £10 Amazon gift certificate on finishing The Tide Mill, while some members of the MobileRead Book Club (which made one of the titles its monthly choice) paid even though I gave them a waiver.

By far the greatest number of payments came from the U.S. and Canada, followed by Britain and then the rest of Europe. There was a handful from Australia, and a very generous one from a reader in Singapore. Despite the fact that Chinese visitors were almost as numerous as Americans, no other payment was received from Asia.

I am most grateful to all those who paid, many of whom wrote supportive or even flattering emails, blog comments, or messages in the PayPal dialog; and all of whom gave me great heart and confirmed my belief that there are plenty of thoroughly nice people out there.

Non-payment

Failure to pay can be ascribed to six motives:

1. Didn’t read
2. Didn’t like (at all or enough)
3. Liked but decided not to pay
4. Liked but forgot to pay
5. Liked but had trouble with the site (it was down for a while)
6. Liked but didn’t want to deal with PayPal (I had a couple of messages about this)

Of course, you never know how many downloaded ebooks are even looked at, never mind read. Of those that are read, you don’t know how many are enjoyed. Conversely you don’t know how many are duplicated and sent to friends. It is no use trying to guess how many readers enjoyed the books but didn’t pay. However, given that some people did pay, it is safe to conclude that a number of the others chose option 3.

For an analysis of this behaviour, take a look at a 2008 blog post by Stephen Poole, who conducted a similar experiment. The comments are especially illuminating; there’s no need to rehearse them here.

Attitudes to books

A common theme seems to emerge. Internet content is widely, but not universally, regarded as free: if it isn’t, then it should be “liberated” and shared via torrents. Of more concern to authors, what is printed in books is also widely, but not universally, regarded as free, an attitude fostered by (a) the free-at-point-of-service provision of books during education or by public libraries, (b) the existence of the public domain, and (c) the nature of paper books.

This attitude is consistent with a flourishing culture. It is reinforced early, by (a); (b) provides a vast and growing body of literature out of copyright; and with (c), once you have bought a paper book you own it and can transfer ownership to someone else.

Few readers, I should imagine, are much exercised about copyright. They might know it to be a limited contract society makes with creators in order to encourage creation, and that depriving an author of a royalty should piously be deplored. Into the mix, however, despite the perennial background bleating of authors, goes also a vague notion that every writer is a millionaire.

Authors and their agents and publishers depend on copyright for their living. We hear a lot these days about digital duplication of copyright works: this I believe is one of the main impacts on authorship, since readers appear reluctant to reward the producers of freely distributed books. There are other impacts too, nearly all related to computers.

A buyers’ market

The number of people who can write is dwarfed by the number who think they can but can’t. Press stories of huge advances paid to unknowns heap the slush piles even higher. The mountain of manuscripts is so big that few mainstream publishers will even look at an unsolicited submission: everything now has to go through agents.

The attitude of publishers to authors is a product of this buyers’ market, and has probably got worse in recent years. I won’t detail the Kafkaesque tribulations of my own dealings with publishers in the twenty years to 1997, but let me say that London publishing at that period was regarded as a socially desirable occupation. Perhaps it still is. Many staff were recruited by class and connection rather than ability. If an author’s sales shot into the stratosphere he was treated with shameless sycophancy; otherwise he was never allowed to forget his place.

I cannot imagine that some of this attitude doesn’t seep down to readers. When a reader enters a bookshop or library he is reminded of just how many books are begging to be noticed. The Romans had a proverb: quae rara, cara – what is scarce is valued – and the converse surely holds true.

The effect of computers

Word processors have made the physical composition of text much easier than it was in 1971, when I started out. The slush-pile is becoming not just a mountain, but a lofty and majestic range. As ebook displays and the internet loosen the publishers’ stranglehold on the means of production and distribution, so is a lot of that slush-pile finding its way onto the Web.

The availability of professional works is increasing too, as authors and publishers convert their backlists into ebooks: and, thanks to Project Gutenberg, more and more public domain material is coming online. And then there is Google Books.

All this is bad news for aspiring writers, but both good and bad for readers. Good because they have more choice and prices will tumble; bad because it will be harder and more time-consuming to find new books of quality. Not only will these be outnumbered by rubbish, but I predict that the means whereby they arise – the craft of authorship itself – will become a niche activity.

A dying craft

In his essay, Why I Write, George Orwell says:

I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in – at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own – but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centred than journalists, though less interested in money.

(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

(iv) Political purpose. – Using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time.

Writers, then, are born with sundry traits and defects which come together in a pathological urge to tell stories. This is even true of non-fiction, but since my experiment involved fiction I will concentrate on that type of writing here.

Inventing a story is a creative act, needing talent. The storyteller’s rhythm and taste will develop as he grows, informing and refining his talent, but if he lacks the techniques to tell his stories effectively he will never fulfil his potential. The craft of fiction requires thousands of hours of preparation based in extensive reading, besides the acquisition of a large writing vocabulary and expertise in grammar, usage, and the structure and exposition of plots. A skilled editor needs only a few hundred words to tell if a writer knows his stuff.

If would-be writers are unable to acquire these tools of the trade, the standard of work must plainly fall. A writer needs time to learn and experiment, to find his voice, and he needs some sort of encouragement to sustain his efforts. For many of us time is in ever shorter supply. As for encouragement, that can be as nugatory as the hope of success. In the past, new writing had far less competition. Recognition of talent was more likely. The printed word was more precious than a fleeting collection of pixels on a screen, and in order to produce a script for submission you had to type the thing yourself – or pay plenty to have it done.

Hyperlinked reading

There could be even worse in store. I read the other day that the internet is supposed to be altering the way young people think.

Documentary presenter and social psychologist Dr Aleks Krotoski said: “It seems pretty clear that, for good or ill, the younger generation is being remoulded by the web. Facebook’s feedback loops are revolutionising how they relate. There is empirical evidence now that information overload and associative thinking may be reshaping how they think.” ...

Dr David Runciman, political scientist at Cambridge University, added: “What I notice about students from the first day they arrive at university is that they ask nervously, ‘What do we have to read?’ When they are told the first thing they have to read is a book, they all now groan, which they didn’t use to do five or ten years ago. You say, ‘Why are you groaning?’ and they say, ‘It’s a book. How long is it?’”

People brought up on hyperlinks will not be receptive to the linear experience of a novel or short story. Still less will many of them wish to tell tales in that way or have the patience to learn the craft.

The word according to Jobs

Steve Jobs was vilified for his observations on the Kindle, “which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading”. Unfortunately, he has been right about such things more often than he has been wrong, and anyone who thinks that iBooks will amount to anything but a minor aspect of the iPad is mistaken.

It’s all a bit glum if you love books.

As long as there are old fogeys like me around, there will be a market for them, but (if Mr Jobs and Dr Krotoski are right) as we die off the audience will become smaller and smaller, with ever less incentive for storytellers to choose linear writing as a medium. Linear fiction will never die out, but will become a backwater served by authors who have independent means and write purely to be read.

At the age of eleven, 20% of British children are functionally illiterate. I’ll say nothing more about educational trends, both here and in the United States, except that judgment on these is probably implicit in Jobs’s remarks.

Back to the experiment

The willingness of MobileRead Book Club members to pay, even though they were not obliged to, is especially interesting. As member of that forum myself, I had engaged in the discussion and the others knew they were dealing with a real person.

The number of downloaders who enjoyed the books and did not pay could be smaller than I suppose. The site at first allowed simultaneous download of all six books, two clicks away from the home page. Many visitors simply downloaded the files and took a glance, if that, at the rest of the site. They did not engage with me at all: they just wanted the “free books”. Those who downloaded from other sites had even less of a connection. How many copies were read all the way through, with the attention and pleasure that establish a relationship with an author?

When I first made my offer I tried to make my site as informative and engaging as possible. My subsequent disappointment at the low rate of return did not take into account the typical behaviour of people – of all primates, indeed, perhaps even all animals – in situations where they are anonymous and have no relationship with the provider. Add in our conditioning to the value of books (especially those we “borrow”); add in also the amount of reading material freely available on the net, and I think I did quite well to gross £500.

I am still offering my ebooks, but this time through Smashwords. Five are for sale; one is offered free, as a loss-leader, and you are very welcome to grab a copy. You needn’t read it, buy the others, or engage with me if you don’t want to. Keep it somewhere safe, though: fifty years from now it may turn out to be a curious antique.

Staines Reservoir

2010-02-13T16:30:00.004Z

Image: Hugh Venables

It would be hard to find a worse example of urban blight than the area round Heathrow airport. The country there, twenty miles south of Watford, where the Colne meets the broad valley of the Thames, was once, long ago, a place of rushes and placid water, of willows and marsh. But the Thames gave birth to London, and London grew.

The river plain makes an ideal site for one of the world’s busiest airports. An airport of course brings development of the road system, which in turn brings factories. Besides this, the valley floor is replete with gravel for the construction industry.

We see today the result of all this. The area has been devastated. Everywhere the eye falls there is ugliness: pylons, motorways, industrial estates, concrete hotels, scrap yards. The very landscape seems to be in continual turmoil, ceaslessly being bulldozed and reshaped. Once every two or three minutes an airliner leaves and another one arrives, and even with today’s quieter jets the noise is inhuman, intolerable. The people who live there must shelter behind double or triple glazing, and some shelter behind tranquillizers.

What is very surprising to learn is that this district is one of the best in England to see birds. The birds care nothing about aesthetics. Their main concern is food. Once, at the Perry Oaks sewage farm beside the airport, I saw a party of waders happily feeding while a Boeing 707 tested its jets on an adjacent runway. The noise was so horrendous that I had the alarming experience of feeling my whole diaphragm, my ribs and chest, beginning to vibrate.

The sewage farm is destined to be buried under a new terminal*, and, ever since terrorists threatened to shoot down an airliner at Heathrow with a surface-to-air missile, members of the public are no longer allowed there.

But, if the sewage farm is no longer accessible, there are other places that are. A little way to the south, just by Stanwell Village, lies one of the most famous birding sites in the country, Staines Reservoir.

When it was completed in 1902, Staines must have been seen as a wonder of modern engineering. Its surface area of 424 acres is divided in two by a ruler-straight causeway, 1100 yards long, aligned from east to west. The reservoir is so large that it has its own miniature tides; the water is hardly ever still, and even a light breeze drives it into waves which break against the concrete slabs of the leeward side.

The fame of Staines Reservoir began with a series of papers in The Zoologist for 1906 and 1908, written by G. W. Kerr, who reported seeing as many as 80 great crested grebes there – quite an event at that period.

In Edwardian times bird-watchers were few and far between: regular observations at Staines were resumed only in the early 1920s, by such stalwarts as W. E. Glegg and A. Holte Macpherson, who established Staines’s reputation as a major site for wintering waterfowl. The recognition of reservoirs as unofficial bird sanctuaries began with their work and has now spread all over the world.

The sheer size of waters such as Staines allows wildfowl to rest undisturbed during the day. At night many of the ducks find feeding elsewhere along the valleys of the Thames and Colne – on the rivers, gravel pits, wet grazing, and streams of Middlesex, Berkshire and Surrey.

But the reservoir itself also provides valuable feeding opportunities. Unlike, say, the upland lakes of Cumbria which are often pretty barren of life, the reservoirs drain from the fertile valley of a lowland river. The water is rich in plant nutrients, and, taken directly from the Thames, already contains a wealth of seeds, plant fragments, and small animals like annelid worms, insect larvae, and molluscs.

Except at the margins, though, the water at Staines is too deep to provide much for those ducks, like the tufted duck and pochard, which get their food from the bottom, or those, like the mallard and teal, which dabble in shallow water. These birds use Staines mainly as a resting place, often in large numbers. Flocks of 500 tufted duck and 300 pochard are not unusual in winter.

The species favoured are those which chase and catch fish, and Staines is an excellent place to see those scarce and beautiful winter visitors, the sawbills. The name comes from the serrations on the bill, which enable a firm grip on the prey. Largest is the goosander, the drake predominantly cream with a bottle-green head and red bill, the duck grey with a brown head and white throat. Upwards of 20 are regularly seen here.

As the winter deepens the tiny smew come in. The male is a pure, startling white, marked with elegant pencillings; his consort is, like the duck goosander, grey in the body with a white and chestnut head.

Red-breasted mergansers also occur, as well as even rarer species like long-tailed duck and scaup. And Staines is a favourite site for the scarcer grebes, especially black-necked. On one afternoon in January no fewer than four species of grebe were present: great crested, red-necked, black-necked, Slavonian.

Whenever one side of the reservoir is drained for maintenance, an expanse of mud and pools results which brings not only large flocks of teal and mallard, but waders, some of them extremely rare, including, in recent years, a number of American vagrants. Besides snipe, lapwing, redshank, dunlin and ringed plover, the drained bed often holds, in season, ruff, greenshank, little stint, grey and golden plover, godwits, little ringed plover, and spotted redshank.

If you have a warm coat and gloves and don’t mind the wind, there can be few more exciting bird-watching outings than a winter visit to Staines Reservoir. From Watford, take the M25 to the Heathrow turnoff and turn south along the A3044 towards Staines. At the traffic lights turn left along the B378, and follow this road round into Stanwell Village, turning right at the pub on the corner. Keep on the B378 for another 0.6 miles; the gate leading to the path up the embankment will be on your right (O.S. reference TQ 056732).

* Terminal 5, now finished and operating.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)