The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (28 page)

Some of these species, such as the large yellow underwing, are common; but not the Clifden nonpareil. No sir. It is not only exquisite, it is very rare, with only a few sightings each year, and it has been hugely prized by all those interested in Lepidoptera since it was first observed in the eighteenth century at the Thameside estate of Cliveden in Buckinghamshire (where Nancy Astor famously held court between the wars, and where in 1961 the Conservative minister John Profumo met the young would-be model Christine Keeler and began the sexual scandal which forever bears his name). It’s been a legendary treasure, a holy grail for moth enthusiasts. Mystery hovers about it.

For myself, a Lepidoptera lover and an unashamedly nerdy moth man, I dreamed about it, I longed to see it for years and years, without success. I thought I never would. But one autumn, in early October, the charity Butterfly Conservation (BC)
announced that there had been an influx of rare moths from the Continent, and this included a spate of Clifden nonpareil sightings, three of them by one of BC’s moth experts, Les Hill, in Dorset. A day or two later I was Dorset-bound, to see if Les could produce one for me. When I arrived at dusk he had his moth trap out in his garden and I was prepared for a long vigil, but Les had startling news; his colleague Mark Parsons, the charity’s head of moth conservation, had half an hour earlier actually found a Clifden nonpareil on the wall of his cottage, thirty miles away, and caught it. He had it still. We drove pellmell to the other side of the county and eventually, in a plastic box in Mark’s kitchen, there it was. Asleep. (Do moths go to sleep? Well, torpid, then.) Motionless but miraculous. For when Mark gently touched the silver-grey forewings, they shot open, and there were the bands of that glorious lilac-blue. I couldn’t believe I was seeing it.

It began to stir then, and shortly began to fly slowly around the kitchen. I was open-mouthed. It was as big as a bat – a bat of sensational colours. Eventually it settled on the kitchen wall, and before Mark released it, I persuaded it to crawl on to my hand. It felt like a dream. The hyperbole cannot be helped. Astonishment at the world, that it can contain such a thing.

•

I have looked at
how
we may feel wonder in nature through my experiences, as you may doubtless feel it sometimes through your own. I could offer more, from rarity to abundance, from gazing spellbound on the lady’s slipper orchid, the single plant that for fifty years and more was the rarest organism in Britain, looked after by dedicated carers in complete secrecy, to marvelling at the profusion of life still remaining in the countryside of Romania, as yet undefiled by intensive farming: the hay
meadows overflowing with wild flowers (twenty-seven species in the first one I looked at), the hillside grasslands more spectacular still, above Viscri in Transylvania, where I walked through millions of blooms of dropwort and yellow rattle forming an endless carpet of white and gold which was crowded with insects like shoals of fish in the sea (grasshoppers and crickets, exquisite beetles like the rose chafer, stunning butterflies like the poplar admiral, the Hungarian glider, and the clouded Apollo), and the bird fauna just as rich, with red-backed shrikes everywhere and golden orioles giving their fluting whistles from the poplar trees (and there were bears in the woods . . .). But
why
we may feel wonder, is a yet more fascinating question.

To me, the ability to experience it implies some sort of preexisting relationship between us and the natural world; that is, an inherent one. The perception of the object of wonder does not fall on infertile ground. There is some faculty inside us which receives it and engages eagerly with it, and Wordsworth realised that with his ‘sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused’,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky,
and in the mind of man
. . .

Something dwells already in our minds; and I believe it is the bond, the bond of fifty thousand generations with the natural world, which can make aspects of nature affect us so powerfully: as with joy, so with wonder. The wonder in Sunny Bank is a case in point; when I looked up at the buddleia bush, I had not been socialised to react to the beings I saw upon it. You may say, you must have seen books about butterflies at school, or pictures at least, and perhaps I did; but if I did, I have no memory of them. I was seven years old. I did not feel, Ah, these are the butterflies about which I have read so much. I merely
reacted to what was in front of me. And I have noticed, throughout my life, that virtually all small children react strongly to new creatures. They become absorbed in them instantly. They are very rarely indifferent. It is another human universal. That was the reason why zoos were so successful, until they fell out of favour –
Daddy’s taking us to the zoo tomorrow, we can stay all day
. It was not books, or pictures previously seen, which bound me to the butterflies in Bebington. But it may well have been that observer in prehistory, my distant hunter-gatherer ancestor, who waited for a swallowtail to settle, the better to look upon it, and then marvelled at what was there in front of him.

•

After I came back from South Korea, from having borne witness to the destruction of Saemangeum, in April 2014, I wanted to know how the spoon-billed sandpipers which had so depended on the lost estuary were faring, the ones which had been brought to Britain in the attempt to establish a conservation breeding programme, and so I got in touch with the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in Gloucestershire, which was looking after the birds. Its director of conservation, Dr Debbie Pain, invited me to Slimbridge to see them.

It was an enormous privilege. The biosecurity around the specially built aviary was formidable, and Debbie herself could not accompany me, as she had a cold, a potentially lethal danger to the ‘spoonies’; so after various scrubbing routines and the donning of sterile overalls and clogs, I went inside with Nigel Jarrett, the head of conservation breeding at WWT and the man who had godfathered all the birds since they were eggs in remote Chukotka.

This was another occasion for wonder, to be suddenly in among this flock of some of the rarest birds on the planet:
preciousness personified. There were twenty-five of them: tiny, bright-eyed and graceful, and quite unafraid, they were incessantly active, foraging around my feet through the aviary’s imitation tidal pools; they were just coming into breeding plumage, exchanging the grey of winter for the russet head of their lovely summer dress. Nigel pointed out the increasing skittishness of their behaviour, chasing each other, one male raising a wing as a territorial warning, and all diving for cover when an oyster-catcher – perfectly harmless – flew overhead calling. Previously they’d been living together as a flock and had been quite happy with each other’s presence, he explained, ‘but now there’s a surge of hormones going through their little bodies, causing them to moult, and be interested in each other. They’re like highly strung teenagers.’

When we left the aviary we went back to Debbie’s office to discuss the breeding programme and we talked widely of wild-life and the natural world. Debbie was an inveterate wildlife traveller and had just come back from a trip with her husband to Ladakh, where they had managed to see snow leopards in the wild, and Debbie said, a friend of hers had remarked that such a sight had to be the best wildlife experience ever, and she had been about to agree when she thought for a second, and said to her friend,
No. No, it wasn’t
.

I was intrigued. ‘So what was?’

Debbie said: ‘Bioluminescent dolphins.’

‘What on earth are they?’

Debbie explained that she and her husband had gone on a whale-watching trip to Baja California, taking in the San Jacinto lagoon – the very area which Mark Carwardine focused on – and she echoed Mark in her feelings for the cetaceans they saw, the dolphins especially. ‘I love cetaceans,’ she said. ‘I feel a real connection with them somehow. Dolphins are amazingly joyful animals, they’re forever leaping out of the water and going in the bow of the boat, and I’m a scientist, I think there has to
be a reason for it, but actually I think they’re doing it because they’re just having a really good time . . . they’re having . . . fun, you know? That’s what I really want to think.’

One night, she said, the bioluminescence appeared in the sea – the green light given off, under certain conditions, by billions of tiny plankton (the older word for it is
phosphorescence
). It was a remarkable spectacle. ‘The beauty of bioluminescence . . . it’s such an incredible thing, when you get no moon and certain sea conditions . . . it’s glowing green, it’s stunningly beautiful to see, even if it’s just coming off the spray. And to see shoals of fish in it, that’s amazing. You can see these outlines and these streaks and these huge glowing green areas where a whole shoal comes towards the boat and then they dart off in all sorts of directions, leaving this glowing trail behind them – they look radioactive. It’s just astonishing.’

But not as astonishing as the dolphins.

‘We were in the boat, on the bow, and we saw these streaks coming in from the distance, coming towards us, we saw the outline of them, glowing green, and then they came up, below us, four feet below us, glowing there – and it just takes your breath away.’ There were tears in her eyes. She said: ‘I’m almost in tears being transported back to it. They played around the boat. Glowing green. They were just heart-stopping. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And the same for my husband. He just came up and grabbed my hand and said, we are never going to forget this, and we stood on deck for about an hour after they’d gone. Not wanting to go in. Not wanting to go to bed.’

She said: ‘It was about midnight, when they came.’

Then she said: ‘You know what the feeling was? Above all?’

‘What?’

‘What an amazing place the world is.’

She looked into the distance, lost in the memory. She shook her head, at the wonder of it. Then she turned to me and smiled.

‘I think it will be the last thing I will ever remember.’

8
A New Kind of Love

What does it all add up to then, the snowdrops and the mad March hares, the coming of the blossom and the coming of the cuckoos, the bluebell woods and the chalk streams, the corn-flowers and the harebells, the magnolia warbler, the Clifden nonpareil, the salmon leaping the weir, and the mournful fluting of the wading birds drifting over the marshes – one person’s lifetime delight in nature? I stand by what I said at the outset: defence through joy. But is that not in fact a hopeless idea, like some hippie in 1969 saying, we must win over the skinheads? How could an increasingly stricken planet, subject to the fiercest forces of destruction, actually be protected by human happiness? The answer lies in what the joy we find in nature may tell us about ourselves, and what that then may lead to.

Looking back over it all, I would say once more that the fact we might love the natural world, that we might give our hearts to it instead of just taking what it has to offer and tiptoeing around its pitfalls, still seems to me almost too extraordinary for words, and to mark us out as unique animals almost as much as language does, or the possession of consciousness. The singularity of the basic premise, that we might love nature at all,
never seems to be remarked upon:
why
can our feelings be engaged by the dawn chorus, or by dolphins visiting us from their different dimension? Compared with why people vote the way they do, say, or why people’s attitudes alter with age, or why people sometimes commit murder, there is no investigation, the question is never put: does anyone ever go out with a clipboard and ask it? Yet these feelings are real, and remarkable.

It should be recognised at once, of course, that plenty of people, perhaps a majority, do not share them. But it is not in any way my contention that the love of nature is universal. What is universal, I believe, is the
propensity
to love it; the fact that loving it is possible for people. That propensity seems to me to be not an occasional trait to be found in certain individuals, but rather a part of being human, and a very powerful one: it is part of the legacy of the fifty thousand generations of the Pleistocene, our undying bond with the natural world, and it is no surprise that it lies buried in the genes, since it is covered over by the five hundred generations of civilisation we have lived through since farming began and we ceased to be part of nature ourselves as hunter-gatherers; and it is covered more than ever now by the frenzy of modern urban living. Yet covered only; not destroyed. It’s still there. It can be uncovered; we can connect to it, all of us, and if we do, one realisation, one truth, may be illuminated for us more than any other: that the natural world is our natural home, it is the natural resting place for our psyches. And the most striking evidence of all for that is simple: it can bring us peace.

Having experienced a childhood in which there was disturbance, I am much taken with the idea of peace. I am only too aware that I belong to the luckiest of all generations, we who grew up in the rich West during a time of unheard-of, luxurious peace, after our parents and grandparents both had to endure world wars; but I suppose that the peace which particularly engages me is not peace between nations, crucial though that is, but peace at the minor scale: peace that may come, sometimes,
to the troubled mind. For I believe it is possible; and I find haunting, and often think about, the refrain of the wonderful motet by Vivaldi,
Nulla in mundo pax sincera
– there is no real peace to be had in this world – as I disagree with it. (The idea, of course, is that true peace can only be found in Jesus, and it is the setting of an anonymous Latin poem which is actually quite bitter – it speaks of the venomous serpent found among the blossoms, and you wonder about what had happened in the life of the unknown author. Although it is ostensibly written to the glory of God, what actually comes through is the melancholy, which somehow pervades and adds to Vivaldi’s exquisite melody.)