The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (8 page)

Not that I registered it, when I walked out on to the Dee that summer with my new bins slung proudly around my neck and my spirit still in thrall to the scintillating images of Charles Tunnicliffe: I saw it simply as a bird area, an ornithological extension of the Wirral itself. The bottom, southern half of it was saltmarsh; the top, northern half, where the estuary met the sea, consisted of the intertidal zone, mudflats and sandbanks daily covered and uncovered by the tide. Initially I explored the saltmarsh edge, as that was nearer to where I lived, and I found lapwings and kestrels, skylarks and meadow pipits, herons and reed buntings; but I soon realised that there was even more happening at the estuary’s mouth, at West Kirby and Hoylake, where flocks of wild duck, and especially waders such as ringed plovers, redshanks, oystercatchers, and curlews, fed and roosted on the bare mud and sand, but were pushed off by each incoming tide and so were active and very visible.

There were thousands of them: the Dee was overflowing with life. And the more I watched, the more I came to feel, as I still feel today, that the birds which live where the land meets the
sea are among the most alluring of all God’s creatures.
Waders
is the English word, which describes their method of motion; Americans call them
shorebirds
, referring to their habitat. It is a useful term I will also sometimes use. Spindly-legged, nervy, refined, they epitomise elegance on the one hand, and on the other, wildness: they will not come to your garden, sit on your fence, hop on your lawn or sing for their supper; they remain in their own wild places, eternally untameable.

Yet at the heart of their existence, and of our feelings towards them, is a paradox. They are the gift to us of mud. Mud we find repellent, a substance a step away from shit; but the inter-tidal ooze at the edge of the sea is the richest in invertebrates of all habitats, able to hold in a single square metre thousands of tiny molluscs, crustaceans, marine snails, and marine worms, and waders are linked to it inextricably, having evolved to feed on it, indeed, to divide it all between themselves. The term in ecology is ‘
niche partitioning
’: different shorebird species take different invertebrates from different places, and the main differentiation mechanism is bill length. Short-billed birds such as ringed plovers take organisms on the surface; medium-billed species such as redshanks start to probe into the mud for small gastropods; longer-billed oystercatchers probe deeper still, able to find cockles; and curlews with their decurved beaks, the longest of the lot, can find lugworms and ragworms at the bottom of their burrows. But all of them are united by a feat impossible for people: in moving over mud and slime and goo, they are never less than graceful.

They have something else about them to attract free spirits: they are world-wanderers. Many species in shorebird families such as sandpipers and plovers are highly migratory, journeying every spring to the High Arctic. From around the globe – not only from Europe, but also from Asia, Australia, and the Americas – they head for the far north, to the tundra at the top of the world, which in its brief but bountiful summer, with insect
superabundance, extended daylight in which to feed, and relatively few predators, is a superlative place to fledge their chicks. They then return to spend the winter in mid-latitudes such as Britain, or push further south into the tropics, even penetrating deep into the southern hemisphere; and on the Dee, the end of the summer brought to the tidal flats, the mud and the sand, a great influx from the north. I encountered for the first time Arctic-breeding birds in their winter plumage such as sanderlings, grey plovers, greenshanks, turnstones, curlew sandpipers, dunlin, and above all the knot, the medium-sized sandpipers which formed immense flocks of tens of thousands of individuals, so colossal that when I first saw them in a shape-shifting dark murmuration, far in the distance, I thought I was looking at a billowing cloud of smoke, and wondered how big the fire must be.

But gradually I became aware of more than the birds. I started to become conscious of the place, of the estuary itself. You could not but be affected by it, if you spent time there. It was a realm apart. Like the waders themselves, it was wholly wild and untamed, even though it was a mere six miles from my home, in a suburb on the edge of a major industrial city. The sheer size of it was its most imposing aspect, especially if the sort of open spaces you were used to in your suburban existence were football fields or slightly larger municipal parks with bandstands and railings, litter bins and stern notices about dogs. This estuary too was a defined open space, but it was about 13,000 hectares in extent, or 35,000 acres, or 10,000 football pitches, and from one shore to the other, it was entirely devoid of human artefacts, being simply saltmarsh, sandbanks, and mudflats.

There was something more than its size, though, which added to the estuary’s appeal to me. It sat on the shoulder of Wales. From the Cheshire side you looked across to Flintshire, which was in a different country, a nation with its own language and history and mountainous bearing (in stark contrast to the horizontal tranquillity of the Cheshire plain) – a country of
otherness for which I had already conceived a deep attachment that has lasted all my life, and the fact that its slopes and summits were what you saw when you looked out over the Dee, for me, was spine-tingling: all the way down the estuary you could see the ramparts of the Flintshire hills, and behind them you could glimpse the tops of the Clwydians, the first mountain range; and if you went to the estuary’s mouth at West Kirby and Hoylake, on some days you could catch sight of Snowdonia itself, you could see the Carneddau, Carnedd Llewellyn and Carnedd Dafydd, shadowy peaks in a dim and distant land.

I began to appreciate it all properly in September when I started exploring at the other end, at the head of the estuary, where it began, at a sandstone outcrop called Burton Point. Not far beyond it, at Shotton, was heavy industry, the giant steelworks of John Summers & Sons, but somehow this didn’t detract from the landscape, and in fact, surrounding the steelworks were Shotton pools, a group of man-made lakes which formed a major birding site. I wrote to John Summers and they sent me a birdwatching pass giving me access to the pools, and to reach them I rode to Burton Point, hid my bike among the rocks, and walked the length of a mile-long embankment.

On one side of the embankment was an army rifle range; on the other, the estuary of the Dee. You were at its base, and you could turn outwards and view the whole of it, with Wales and its mountains on your left, the Wirral on your right, and the immensity of the estuary in between stretching to the level horizon, with its hint of infinity – that was the sea, more than ten miles away – and the great open skies. It was a very isolated and solitary spot (I never saw another soul there). I had gone looking for birds, and I had stumbled upon wilderness, as near as you will find it in the lowlands of England. I started to sense then the specialness of it all, it started to stir other parts of me; what brought it to a climax was music.

It was the music of the waders. I had come to know their
calls and come to love them. The commonest was the piping of the oystercatchers, most often a forceful
peep!
, which had an anxious air about it. I was also strongly drawn to the triple call of the greenshanks,
tew-tew-tew
, and even more to the two different sounds of the curlews, the sharp, carrying
cour-LEE
call, and then the strange melancholy bubbling song, which Dylan Thomas evokes in the Prologue to his 1952
Collected Poems
, apostrophising ‘the curlew herd’:

Ho, hullaballoing clan

Agape, with woe

In your beaks . . .

It’s hard to remain unmoved when curlews are bubbling – it’s a sound which alters the landscape, especially in the spring – and I think the birds had an added mystique for me because when I was much younger, I had read and been captivated by Eleanor Farjeon’s fairy tale
The Silver Curlew
, her reworking of the Rumpelstiltskin legend, set in Norfolk when Norfolk had a king, and I had ever after felt that curlews were creatures set apart. But it was another bird that moved me most.

It was a sandpiper, the redshank; and it had a call which, unusually, the bird book then used by every birdwatcher seemed to have set down accurately. I say unusually, because transcribing bird calls into human sounds is very much an inexact science, but
The Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe
, by Roger Tory Peterson, Guy Mountfort, and P. A. D. Hollom, had with the redshank pretty much got it right.

‘Usual call,’ it said, ‘a musical, down-slurred,
tleu-hu-hu
.’

I thought it was amusing to see it written down baldly like that, in consonants and vowels.
Tleu-hu-hu
: it could be a verb from an exotic language. But it did convey fairly closely the lilting, mournful sound the birds gave when they took flight, which could be borne far over the marshes on the wind, and
which I found touched me more than anything else – finding that for sure one day which I know was in October, although I kept no specific record of the date.

October 1962 saw several great events full of contingent influence upon my life. There was the Cuba crisis, the cold war’s most perilous nuclear stand-off, when I lay on the floor of the bathroom saying rosaries like other people were smoking cigarettes, and begging God to save us – no one not alive then can imagine the terror of that week – and the Second Vatican Council, opened in Rome by Pope John XXIII, Papa Giovanni, who began a rethinking of the severe creed in which I was being brought up, that eventually led me to rethink it myself – and the release of a first record,
Love Me Do
, by a local rock band from across the Mersey (although in those days we didn’t call them rock bands, we called them beat groups) whose name was The Beatles, a record which by December had reached Number 17 in the national charts – something I remember chattering about excitedly at the school Christmas fair.

You might say it was the month that the sixties began, October 1962, when the great gates of change began to creak open. My own significant event from it holds no significance for anyone other than me, but it does still resonate with me strongly. I remember about the day itself, that I saw a goldeneye first. I had biked to Burton Point and started trudging down the embankment to Shotton pools and halfway along, I slipped down to the marsh itself so that I would not be silhouetted as I reached the pools and could come back up with stealth; and when I eventually did, and peered over the embankment top, there was a real prize: not fifty yards away on the water was the goldeneye, a splendid duck from Scandinavia which I had never seen before but recognised at once from the
Field Guide
.

I spent, I suppose, about an hour watching the pools and then headed back, and the weather was somewhat unusual for Britain: sunny, with a stiff breeze. The whole of the Dee was
on my left hand, at peace in the golden light of October, and I began to hear faint sounds: redshank calls.
Tleu-hu-hu
. The birds were calling from somewhere invisible to me, out on the marshes, but their voices were being carried on the north-west wind which was blowing straight down the estuary’s whole length towards me, and looking at it all, I stopped, sat down on the embankment and listened, and another call drifted to my ears, and it suddenly seemed to be pulling everything together, this ethereal mournful fluting, all the beauty of the untouched estuary and the great skies and the distant mountains, all its richness of life, and I realised for the first time where it was coming from: from the very heart of wildness.

Whatever it was that had captured the spirits of Thoreau and his successors, looking on the untouched landscapes of nineteenth-century America, in that moment on the Dee estuary captured mine. I saw a part of the earth in a way I had never seen it before. Or perhaps, I saw it with a different part of me.

Before, had you asked me about it, I would have said that the estuary was broad. It was long. It was flat. It was green. Or, sometimes, it was wet.

Now I would say something different: it was wonderful.

I loved it with as intense a love as I had ever experienced, and there, sitting on the embankment, in the sunshine and the wind, with the wild calls drifting to my ears, I looked on the natural world, and I felt joy.

3
The Bond and the Losses

So many powerful minds have addressed it, the unrelenting destruction of nature around the globe, so many experts have looked at the economics and the ecology and tried to reconcile them, so many thousands of detailed policies have been worked out and applied, so much intellectual effort and so much idealistic concern have been thrown at the problem, year after year after year, that the question presents itself at once: how on earth might it be the basis of a better defence, a better defence of the natural world, the fact that one autumn afternoon, more than half a century ago, a teenager sat looking down an estuary and suddenly felt happy?

We think of ourselves, especially since the decline of Christianity in the West, and its replacement by our current creed, liberal secular humanism, as rational beings entirely; we pride ourselves that, faced with a Problem, with a capital P, we may employ Reason, with a capital R, and naturally find a Solution, with a capital S. We believe that this will deliver, every time. Rationality is ingrained in a million mindsets. Yet the world does not always work like that (as those who lived through the two world wars, mired in chaos and evil, knew
only too well). And there is another way of going about things, in dealing with the mortal threats that our planet now faces, which is to consider, not what we do, but who we are.

Most of us probably think we know. We do not give it a second thought. But in the last thirty years or so, a new understanding, by no means yet widespread or popularised, has begun to dawn of what it means to be human, based on a simple but monumental perception: the fifty thousand generations through which we evolved as hunter-gatherers are more important to our psychological make-up, even today, than the five hundred generations we have spent since agriculture began and with it, civilisation. We possess the culture of the farmers, the subduers of nature, and the citizens who came after with their settled lives and their writing and law and architecture and money, yes of course we do, but deep down, beneath culture in the realms of instinct, at the profoundest levels of our psyche – the new vision has it – we remain the children of the Pleistocene, the million years-plus of the great glaciations, when the natural world was not subdued and we lived as an integral part of it, in coming to be what we are. The legacy inside us has not been lost, and in many ways it is controlling.