The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (27 page)

She wrote:

Why I like whales is something to do with the fact that they are ‘other-worldly’ – manifested in their physical strangeness (i.e. so big, so slow, out of time with the rest of nature) – and almost a throwback to the dinosaurs. Their other-worldliness relativises and undermines our world view – i.e. life is richer/stranger than we remember on a daily basis. There are other hidden dimensions (e.g. the ocean)
that are just as much a part of the earth, but which are so forgotten by us on a daily basis, and quite literally, invisible to us, as the deep ocean has no sunlight.

She concluded: ‘So, whales are so magical because when they surface, they offer a physical/visible token of another realm which is veiled from us, but which also comprises part of our planet.’

In other words, they offer mystery; there, is one of wonder’s prime sources.

•

There are a number of triggers for wonder, in the natural world; for example, besides mystery, we may readily observe a couple of specific conditions, diametrically opposed but equally capable of sparking amazement infused with delight, and they are rarity and abundance; yet there are also some aspects of nature which are less obvious, but which, when encountered, can produce wonder at the very existence of the earth and our existence upon it. One of them is simply the age of things: so very much has gone before us that it cannot be justly computed; rather, all that can be registered is the scale of it:

Very old are the woods;

And the buds that break

Out of the brier’s boughs,

When March winds wake,

So old with their beauty are—

Oh, no man knows

Through what wild centuries

Roves back the rose.

Walter de la Mare understood it: the extent of All That’s Past. And there is another less familiar facet of nature which can also seem wondrous: its ability to transform. The idea of transformation is one of the most resonant of our imaginings: we are fascinated by people changing identities, by things becoming different things, by frogs which turn into princes. Shakespeare lives on such stories; Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
was not only a bestseller in the Rome of Augustus, it was probably the most popular book both of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Obviously, there are different directions which transformations can take, including the tragic, the humorous, and the ironical; but it seems to me that the two basic ones are down and up. Down is the transformation of ill-fortune, of being changed from banker to beggar, of being King Lear losing everything; but surely the transformation which most appeals to us is the transformation upwards, when people or creatures or things which are merely mundane become special, or even resplendent. That idea seems to strike a deep chord within us, to touch some primal longing. It is much more than the idea of gaining wealth or status, or even the idea of the ordinary girl who becomes a princess, say; it is something at the heart of myths and religions, including Christianity, the notion that with all our faults, we might aspire, silly though we know the idea is, to perfection. And one spring I gave a lot of thought to this, in trying to understand the effect on me of a particular phenomenon of the natural world: the dawn chorus.

For several weeks I had been trying to finish a long piece of writing, and to do that I had taken to working through the night. If you work through the night you see the dawn. Or rather, you hear it. At eight minutes past four in the morning of 21 May that year, a sound came to my ears; I stopped typing, got up, and went and opened the kitchen door to the back garden. Light was flooding the eastern sky, a great rising tide of pale light, although the surrounding houses and trees were
black silhouettes against it; a misty moon still shone; there was no wind, only an absolute stillness; and from the top of a tall copper beech tree two gardens away, liquid and clear on the air, a blackbird was singing.

There was no other sound. The blackbird sang his unending phrases as if the stillness were intended specially for him, for they were floating on the quiet, every one precise, hypnotic in their music and their purity; and then, from a nearby rooftop television aerial, a second blackbird joined in. Shortly after that there was a robin; then a blue tit; then a goldfinch: the dawn chorus had begun.

I do not know – no one is quite certain – exactly why songbirds all sing together at first light and then fall silent (they are likely to be either proclaiming their territories or inviting mates); but I do know that, having gone out to listen to it a dozen times in the weeks which followed, as it got earlier and earlier (until one morning it began at 03.34), it is entrancing. At first I thought it was simply the symphony of birdsong itself which moved me so much, but now I know it is something else as well: its transformative power. For I live in suburbia. I live in a land of neat gardens, estate agents’ boards, car ports, walked dogs, lawnmowers, endlessly similar houses and nothing much happening, a land which no one would ever describe as resplendent. Yet the dawn chorus clothes suburbia in wonder. Like the visits of Father Christmas or Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant, it takes place while most of us are still asleep and so we miss it, and I felt, after those few weeks, as if I had discovered a secret: that in the chorale of birdsong silvering the silence, the stillness and the great bursting dawn overhead, for a brief half-hour even the land of the lawnmower can approach perfection.

But finding wonder in the mundane is exceptional: transformation is indeed required. Finding it in the mysterious, as in the whales and dolphins which come to us from a different
dimension, as it were, is much more likely, even though the most notable characteristic of mystery today is how fast it is shrinking. We regret this. Mystery matters to us. Which is curious, for, if we define it as the phenomenon of not knowing, it has in the past been a principal cause of stress, as not knowing is something to which humans temperamentally are not indifferent; it is probably at the basis of religion. The otter does not worry that its river may dry up in a drought, as far as we know. But we worry. What causes that disease? What causes those crops to fail? Will my future be good or bad? Who are we, and why are we here? Once possessed of consciousness, human beings were never able to sit calmly alongside such ignorance, but had to do something about it; and what can you do, other than dream up all-knowing, all-powerful supernatural beings, whom then you may propitiate?

Since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, however, we have been steadily eroding mystery, and now we generally know what causes that disease or causes those crops to wither, if not, alas, what form our future will take. Yet mystery’s retreat from our lives is by no means widely welcomed, for, paradoxically, we seem to be as much attracted by it now as we have been frightened by it in the past, and we regret its disappearance (and you could write a very saleable tome on the Decline of Mystery, with a cover featuring, say, Neil Armstrong’s bulbous boot treading the moon’s mystery down). Now that its terrors are lessened, mystery appears fascinating; it seems to have definite qualities, not least, to appeal to the problem-solving part of our nature, which I suspect goes back to the fifty thousand generations, just as much as the fear of the unknown does. ‘Mystery has energy,’ says the character Conchis in John Fowles’
The Magus
. ‘It pours energy into whoever seeks an answer to it. If you disclose the solution to the mystery you are simply depriving the other seekers of an important source of energy.’ It also confers an undoubted allure. Wouldn’t you like to be
thought of as mysterious? I know I would (some hope). And so with the natural world.

We are hugely drawn to mysteries in nature. Does the supposedly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker still exist in the wild woods of Arkansas, as the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology so loudly proclaimed in June 2005, to headlines around the world, or does it not? Since no one has been able to repeat the Cornell Lab’s sightings, a decade on, and the greatest American expert in bird identification says the blurred video put forward as conclusive evidence shows a pileated woodpecker, not an ivory bill, the question mark over the claim is very large; but that only enhances the mystery. We are gripped by it. I am gripped by it, anyway. I was completely gripped by the talk I had with one of the Cornell team, Melanie Driscoll, who said to me: ‘I’ve been treated like a fantasist, and I’ve been treated like a rock star, but I know what I saw.’ I have been gripped by such things ever since, as a young man, I first came across a book by a Belgian zoologist which reverberated through my imagination, and does so still to this day.

First published in 1958, it was called
On the Track of Unknown Animals
and its author, Bernard Heuvelmans, examined the idea that there were still large, wild creatures left to be discovered, and that some of them might be remarkable relicts from the past. Heuvelmans’ book formalised an area of enquiry – an enthusiasm, if you like – which came to be called cryptozoology: the search for animals whose existence has not been proven. Cryptozoology has unfortunately morphed into pseudo-science, fixated as it is with the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti, and the Bigfoot of the American north-west (now generically referred to as ‘cryptids’), not to mention ABCs or alien big cats – seen the Surrey puma lately? Or the Beast of Bodmin? – and indeed, it quickly shades into preoccupation with UFOs and the paranormal, and features prominently in publications such as
Fortean Times
, specialising in weird news.

So far, so wacky. But Heuvelmans himself was a classically trained zoologist (his doctoral thesis was on the teeth of the aardvark) and his book is a scrupulously sober amassing of information not only on beasts which are formally unknown to science, but also on animals which had been unknown but had been discovered fairly recently, such as the pygmy chimpanzee (the bonobo) and the Komodo dragon, the giant monitor lizard of Indonesia, as well as on creatures which had gone extinct in the recent past, such as the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. The method is far from fantastical; it is straightforward assessment of evidence in numerous cases, showing that this one had been found, and that one had disappeared, and this other one was perhaps waiting to be discovered. Some of the cases he highlighted were potentially sensational and have greatly excited adventurers; other suggestions were more restrained, and some of them seemed to me plausible.

One such was that of the woolly mammoth, which we generally think of as dying out tens of thousands of years ago, but which we now know (from carbon dating of its remains) survived on Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, until at least 1650 bc. Heuvelmans’ proposition, based on scattered, obscure reports from Russian hunters, was that isolated, relict populations of mammoths might still survive in the taiga, the endless conifer and birch forests of the Siberian mainland. We are far more familiar with the Amazon rainforest, yet the Siberian taiga is bigger, with enormous areas wholly unpenetrated by roads, even today; and I thought when I read his suggestion, and I continue to think: why not?

For in our arrogance we assume we have mastered the natural world; yet its power to surprise us persists. Even though we have substantially shrunk the unknown part of the planet, and mystery with it, I rejoice in the fact that in my lifetime there is still enough of it left to contain creatures of which we have no knowledge, and which are wondrous in their discovery. This
is the case with two habitats especially: the remaining rainforests and the deep oceans. In recent years the rainforests of Indochina in particular have been bounteous in yielding up big unknown animals, largely, of course, because war put the jungles off limits for so long to explorers and naturalists. The most spectacular has been the ill-fated Vietnamese rhinoceros, discovered in 1988, poached to extinction by 2010 – nobody knew beforehand there were any rhinos in mainland Indochina at all – but we have also been vouchsafed the saola, or Vu Quang ox, a sort of cross between an antelope and a buffalo with long, backward-sloping horns and a white-striped, mournful-looking face, discovered in 1992, as well as at least three new species of Vietnamese deer. Meanwhile, just since the start of the new millennium, alongside numerous fish and other organisms, two completely new species of whale have swum into our ken (Perrin’s beaked whale and Deraniyagala’s beaked whale), while one previously known only from skeletal remains, the spade-toothed whale, has been seen in the wild for the first time; and there will surely be more.

We may well feel wonder at them. We certainly would were the woolly mammoth to reappear, or the ivory bill. In fact, I am not sure which, in the end, would seem the more wondrous, since although the mammoth might have a prehistoric air, when all is said and done it is more or less just a shaggy version of the Asian elephant, while
Campephilus principalis
is so dazzling a creature that it was known as the Lord God Bird, as those lucky enough to catch sight of this acme of all woodpeckers sometimes could not refrain from crying out
Lord God!

But even creatures still definitely present in the world about us have mystery which may shade into wonder, and one has long possessed my imaginings: the Clifden nonpareil. This is a moth whose name proclaims that it is without equal entirely; and I agree. It is the most magnificent moth to be found in the British Isles. Not only is it enormous, in moth terms, it has another characteristic that sets it quite apart from our other
867 larger moth species: blueness. That hue again! Moths generally favour browns and greys, though sometimes red and yellow and orange and cream, and occasionally green; but apart from the odd fleck, such as in the eyespots of the eyed hawk-moth, blue as a colour is, from the British moth fauna, missing completely.

Yet not from
Catocala fraxini
. Its other English name is the blue underwing, and when it opens its silver-grey, delicately patterned forewings it discloses underwings (or hindwings) of black, each crossed by broad bands of a stunning smoky lilac. It’s a shock, and that’s the point. There are a dozen or so ‘under-wing’ moths in Britain and all employ the same use of colour as defence-through-startling, in a way I referred to earlier, with the Jersey tiger. The forewings are cryptic, perfectly camouflaged to blend in with a daytime resting place, a stone wall or the bark of a tree, but if a predator such as a bird does notice it, the moth will suddenly snap its forewings open and display an underwing colour flash, bright enough to confuse the bird for that extra second to help it get away.