My Natural History (19 page)

It is also one that functions to a very large extent on communication between partners. This works best on a one-on-one basis, between people who are both colleagues and friends. A shared aim presides over all that matters. Or perhaps I should say a shared love. The best kind of
wildlife
conservation has its basis in love. Love of the forest, love of its creatures, love of the wild is something you simply can't fake. I know: I share it, and when I meet
people
in the forest or out on the savannah, people I have never seen before, I know at once that there is a
conversation
, for there is always a conversation when you have a big thing in common. And what we have in common is love. So it was that Burton was in yet another meeting with friends/colleagues when David and I made a trip into the forest with Vladi.

And I am deeply sorry to say, deeply ashamed to say that we stole Burton's love from him. Perhaps it is true to say that we usurped the privilege of the love he had borne longer and deeper than either of us. Burton is a
mammal-man
before anything else. He is there to save the forests: he is also there to savour them, for his ambition to save these places has its basis in love. In this tract of Belizean forest, he, more than any other single person on the planet, has caused it to continue existing, and with it, all the creatures that have their being there. But he was denied the fruits of that love, and these were, foolishly, recklessly and capriciously, given to me instead. I've been trying
to repay him ever since.

All the same, I am glad that I was not offered a choice before the trip. If anyone had said to me, what would you like better, to see a jaguar, or to kiss Darryl Hannah? there is only one choice a red-blooded male could make, and I'd have been sad to miss the kiss. But I am getting ahead of myself. There, walking down the road, in glistening,
rippling
, muscling, maculated perfection, was a jaguar:
el tigre
: the mammal that everyone who comes to New World forests wants to see and which so few do. Burton, in all those trips, never got so lucky. Vladi had only seen 16
jaguars
in six years in the forest. This was not a privilege I had earned: but one I had a duty to cherish.

It was the perfect evening for a night's crocodiling. The lagoon before the field station was a great place for Morelet's crocodile, a species that loves the fresh waters of the Yucatan peninsular. We set off by boat once night had fallen, and by dint of good luck and masterful shoving, I found myself sitting next to Darryl. Now I have a gambit that can hold women of a certain sort fascinated for hours. I am a horseman, I keep horses at home and horse-talk captivates me. “Tell me about your horses, Darryl.”

So she was off: she had some rescue horses, all with long flowing tales attached, and she told me them all: their individual stories and their individual charms of character. We talked the horse-talk with great delight as we chugged over the silent black lake, spotlighting for crocs. The
Morelet's don't get big, not by the standards of the Nile crocs of the Luangwa River, but they can still reach eight feet long and it's better not to pick a fight with them.

Darryl, it soon became clear, had a powerful and totally unfocused love for animals and for the wild world. She spoke in a breathless, slightly girly voice that was rather at odds with her heftiness. “Are they really blind?” she asked as a bat made a millimetre-exact pass over our heads. At one stage she fished a drowning moth from the water and attempted to dry it out and restore it to life. The attention she gave this was for a while all-consuming. I watched in fascination for some time, and then asked, perhaps
unfeelingly
: “Why don't you try mouth-to-mouth?”

“Moth-to-moth?”

And then she was telling me of her encounter with wolves. She had a friend who was making a wildlife
documentary
, and he had a wolf pack staked out. Darryl begged permission to get close to these wolves, and no doubt bowled over by the full Darryl charm, the friend agreed: “But you must just observe. Don't do anything but observe. Right?”

So Darryl waited and waited and eventually the wolves appeared: “And I couldn't help it, I just got down on all fours and said: ‘Here doggy! Here doggy!'

“And the lead one came up to me and sniffed and I just kept real still and then he took hold of my lower lip between his teeth, and then he gave it a little shake. And
then he led everyone off.”

Darryl, it seemed, has a genuine affinity for non-human life, of a somewhat unconventional kind. She was
prepared
to risk everything – as SJ will tell you, looks are quite important for a film star and there is not much work for beauties with savaged lips – for a chance encounter with a wolf. And I thought well, if the wolf is howling, the Darryl is barking. I also thought her extremely wonderful as we chugged side by side across the black lake. We found our croc too, a six-footer that stayed in the light for a good few minutes, passing right under the boat, before
eventually
disappearing into the depths. And so we returned through the black Belizean night: Burton trying to buy up the entire world, Tomlinson with his little camera and his telescope, SJ with his make-up, Alison with her notes and her ailments, Darryl with her lupine memories and her dead moth, me. As mad a ship as ever I have sailed on.

Darryl cheek-kissed farewell with us all, and said it had been an unforgettable trip. She wanted to be deeply involved with the WLT, but nothing came of it. Alison's piece made
Hello!
, and Nana's pictures (and Darryl's face) looked gorgeous. Emma had a damascene experience, resolved to work for conservation instead of the luxury market, and now does the PR work for the WLT. Nana, also enthralled, contributes pictures for the WLT
whenever
she can. SJ moved into event management, and is planning a big one for the WLT. David went back to the
Home Counties a more worldly man. And me, I was asked to become a council member for the WLT, and have done my bit for this remarkable organisation ever since. 

22. Badger

Meles meles

I
have written about sport for
The Times
since 1982. Sport is part of my life. I talk sport all the time, by way of business, or for the fun of it: the new England cricket captain will do a great job, or maybe he won’t; the new England football manager hasn’t got a clue, or maybe he has. These conversations are part of my life: they’re an important part of the way many people relate. It is one of the great male traditions: your friend’s wife has just left him, so you take him to the pub and talk about Arsenal. It also tends to be one of those things that pass from father to son: to this day, my father and I energetically talk
cricket
and rugby.

We played cricket in the garden when I was young and still thought my father could play; he eventually turned
out both for and against the cricket team I co-founded, when I still thought I could play. When it was my turn for fatherhood, I made sure Joe had bats and balls as soon as he could walk. His response from the earliest age was to ignore the bat and toss the ball into a bush. Then he got on with something interesting. Eddie, however, loves a ball, and we have invented a number of curious games that suit his take on the world. Throwing the ball up and down the stairs is a favourite, and there are strange garden games that involve the slide and the bushes, or best, a precipitous bank. He stands at the top with me at the bottom and throws at me forcefully and ambidextrously and
occasionally
accurately.

But Joe has never played a ball game in his life. Energetic and crazed movements on the trampoline have given him pleasure across the years, but the idea that
anyone
could enjoy kicking a ball or catching it baffles him entirely. He has never watched a second of televised sport of his own volition. I watch a fair bit: when Joe catches me at it, he politely walks away. These things no more involve him than a discussion of
Finnegans Wake
. I have occasionally attempted to explain it to him – sport rather than the Wake – and though he has listened amiably enough, it is clear that sport will never touch him. He is mildly intrigued that this rum stuff absorbs me: but sport is something we will never share.

He looks a bit like me, with a long bony face. He has
long hair, as I do, which he ties back, as I do. He is
home-schooled
, being a natural not-fitter-inner: I was
self-employed
for 24 years, so I can relate to that. On the other hand, at 15 he is six foot three, already six inches taller than me.

He doesn’t read much, which saddens me. Narrative enthrals him, as it has always enthralled me, but not so much in book form. I read him all The Chronicles of Narnia and then the Harry Potter series until he was old enough to read them for himself, so that was something. I read him
My Family and Other Animals
two or three times. He loves comedy. When he was nine, he discovered
Dad’s Army
: I purchased the entire series and it kept us going for months; years, really: we watched the lot and then watched it all over again, and we still watch favourite episodes. We share other ancient sitcoms –
The Good Life
is a favourite – and some carefully selected modern comedians. Laughter and narrative: great things.

He has talents I don’t begin to understand, still less
possess
. For some years he made thrilling models of animals in clay, with a natural sense of proportion and drama. He makes model stage sets for
Doctor Who
and
Torchwood
, initially from cardboard boxes, more recently from
plywood
. He has a natural dexterity that is utterly foreign to me: a love of practical solutions that leaves me bemused. He recently completed a scale model of the moon-buggy from the James Bond film
Diamonds Are Forever
. The
tricky thing was the wheels; he eventually mastered them with a soldering iron. I have never soldered anything in my life, nor will I. He uses these sets and props for
animated
films, and they tend to end with the whole lot going up in flames. The stars are plastic figures that he creates himself. He buys conventional figures and transforms them with knife and putty and paint. As a virtuoso piece of work, he created Bertie Bassett, the Liquorice Allsorts man, out of a figure of Batman. Inevitably, he can also do extraordinary things with a computer, and uses these
baffling
skills for his tales and his videos. He now devotes himself to the guitar with an extraordinary passion.

All this is quite beyond me. The story, the cliff hangers, the jokes, the imagination: all this I can relate too. But to see him paint the smile on the face of the Joker with a paintbrush three hairs thick is something that makes me say: who is this guy? What on earth has he got to do with me? What on earth is fatherhood, what does it mean, what kind of legacy is this, a son who towers over my head and makes working cars and animated films?

Parenthood is a perpetual compromise between neglect and pushing. The last thing you want to do with anything that matters to you – art, books, wildlife – is to ram it down their throats, as the process is always called. I didn’t try to ram animals down Joe’s throat, but the first word he spoke was bird. I started taking him to the zoo as soon as he was able to deal with it. There are a lot of bad things
said about zoos, and I’ve said some of them myself: that they don’t celebrate the animals, they celebrate the cages, that the subject is not wildlife but bars, that they don’t teach about our kinship with our fellow-animals but the barriers we erect between them and us.

But if that’s the lesson zoos are supposed to teach, it was just one more lesson that Joe didn’t pay attention to. Right from the first, as other families hustled past at high speed – “I don’t think much of that!” “He isn’t even
moving
!” – Joe would settle down for a good long gaze, silent and absorbed. I told him about a survey done at Antwerp Zoo, in which it seemed as if the researchers were working on the famous chimp colony. In fact, they were working on the visitors. The most frequent remark they recorded was “I could watch them all day”. The average length of stay was one minute. Joe laughed at this: and settled down to watch, to seek an involvement, to establish a
belonging
.

When I was young, I sought the wild through books and through the imagination. Joe had the real thing. Cautiously, anxious at all costs to avoid the dreaded
ramming
-down-throat scenario, I introduced him to accessible wild things. Gradually, we acquired a double pattern: that of relishing the wildlife all around us, the sort of thing casually encountered in the garden or on journeys, and that of making expeditions to enjoy special things. We have been to Africa, to the Luangwa Valley, of course, to
see the great beasts. We went to Slovakia to find bears. And we have made other, shorter journeys. I have shown him the wild, and we have done things together that, when I was his age, I had believed were for ever beyond my scope. Joe enjoys the occasional morning’s birding at Minsmere, without getting too obsessive about
identification
. If he undertakes these trips in a small way to humour me, then I am honoured. Mammals touch him more
deeply
. We have been to look at the red deer rut, and walked among the belling stags and the coolly assessing hinds. We have watched foxes at play, we have watched water voles at swim. All this I do to enjoy the moment, the expedition and the companionship: and yet, I can’t quite stamp out the spark of fatherly ambition, the hope that each trip is an experience that will keep him interested in wildlife for the rest of his life, that will, by no means incidentally, give us something to share for as long as I’m around to share things. Naturally I want him to enjoy wildlife: how could I not wish him one the greatest joys available to
humankind
?

But of course, I also want to have stuff we can enjoy together, and in this, I suppose that I am seeking some kind of confirmation that he is, at heart, ever so slightly like me: that the something of me in him can show itself in a way that brings us both joy. It’s a rum and complex business, but anyway, he was unambiguously pleased when I
suggested
that we spend an evening badgering. It’s something
we had done a couple of times before, the first time when he was no older than ten. Both times, the badgers came, we had our reward and it was all great. But now he was 14, absurdly tall and with more and more complicated
teenager
things in his life.

So I organised a visit to a badger hide set up by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust, and when we arrived we took a pot of peanuts from the stash provided and cast them in front of the little hut. The hide is a comfortably appointed place set up for long vigils, and we entered and began to wait as the light started to change. We sat behind sealed windows: it was not just our shapes we needed to conceal, it was also our smell.

But a bad thing happened as we closed the door and took our places. Someone raced an engine flat out,
screaming
it, again and again, for a sustained period, maybe five minutes, the sound ripping apart the mild Suffolk air. It was enough to keep any sane animal hunkered down and out of sight for hours.

So we sat. We sat, gazing out at the small patch of wood that lay beyond the sealed windows. It was – and I had plenty of time to think about this – a place odd to human eyes, one where no paths exist, which has no human logic, which a human can only cross with a scramble and a fall and stinging. Even a scrap of English woodland is wilder than we know. Below us, in the voluptuously diggable earth, we could see the great ramparts of a badger’s palace:
a grand project that had continued for years from one generation to the next, a great narrative told in friable earth. And the light faded and we saw the odd bunny, and once a rat. We heard the sudden scream of a jay. We ate sandwiches. I drank a can of beer, Joe drank a bottle of water. We exchanged a couple of remarks in whispers. A joke, a muffled laugh. Occasionally I shifted position, or Joe did. The light was almost gone. There was a rather perfunctory dusk chorus. I was beginning to prepare in my mind the right sort of thing to say: well, that’s wild
animals
for you. They’re not tame, you know. That’s the point, eh? We’ll try another time, but there it is, we’ll put this one down to experience. Sorry it’s been a bit of a
disappointment
, but hey, that’s wildlife. Hoping that even after this wasted evening, he’d give the wild another chance.

It’s a big thing for a teenage boy to sit in silence and stillness for three hours. It’s a big thing for a teenager to have anything at all to do with the wild, for the years of adolescence are a time – there is even research to prove it – when you are at your least responsive to the non-human world. The need to establish a social identity and a
personal
view of life takes up all your energy. For most
people
, the years of your teens are the lost years of the wild: the years when tamelife dominates everything that you do, to the exclusion of things even slightly wild.

Come, I thought. We’ll give it another 15 minutes. I
glanced over to Joe. He won’t be able to take much more, I thought. And then, like an angel appearing in answer to a prayer, a big stripy nose emerged from the earth: a
creature
as improbable as any I have seen in my life. The badger that appeared in front of us looked almost absurdly like Mr Badger of
The Wind in the Willows
. It is when I see a badger that I am most conscious of the inseparable nature of the wild world and the world of the
imagination
.

A second badger appeared, and then a third. We could hear them snuffling, for badgers are great snufflers, as they hoovered up peanuts in the most tremendous hurry, as if the long wait after the roaring of the engine had given them an appetite. The pear-shaped bodies, the immensely powerful back end, the corpulent grace, a little like that of sumo wrestlers: these are creatures made for the earth. It was now almost dark, but our long staring had given us our night vision, and we could make out the badgers from the flashing of the white on their faces, so dazzlingly set off by the black stripes. Is that what the stripes are for: for nocturnal signalling? And then they vanished, each one in a different direction, foraging, munching, revelling in the night, the dark: each one knowing that he had the sett and each other to return to. A badger is a very secure animal: top predator, a full social life, and everything based around the monumental diggings, the great underground castles.

So we left, taking our rubbish, locking up, leaving the
key and the empty peanut pot in the right place, and returned home. “Sorry we had such a long wait.”

“That’s all right.”

“I thought they wouldn’t come.”

“I thought they probably would.”

“I was getting a speech ready about… Never mind, that’s wildlife.”

“Why?”