Watching Wildlife
A new title for Saraband’s In The Moment series of books about meaningful engagement with the outdoor world
The introduction to Watching Wildlife, cheerfully titled The Bit at the Start
IT RECURS again and again, it has done throughout my nature writing life, and I cannot imagine it will stop until I do: it is the question, often couched in hints of scepticism, “How come you see so much wildlife?” The answer is a prosaic one. It’s because I spend such a disproportionate amount of time looking for it. And perhaps it is more accurate to say, waiting for it to turn up. At its most disproportionate, I studied a single mute swan territory for roughly thirty years. I did other things as well during those thirty years, but the study itself occupied literally thousands of hours. The swans’ lifestyle broke all the rules and contradicted all the field guide generalities. Their landscape was a reed bed in a bay at the north end of a long, narrow, curving loch tucked under the first mountain of Highland Scotland if you travel north-west out of Stirling. That landscape has been my workaday habit for decades. They shared that landscape with two kinds of eagles, two kinds of deer, otters, pine martens, badgers, beavers, foxes, fluctuating hordes of wildfowl, Atlantic salmon, pike and a heronry. To my certain knowledge, the principals of the study – the original cob and pen – lived for at least thirty and twenty-five years respectively.
Quite apart from the raw beauty of their chosen landscape and the constant walk-on parts for their diverse wildlife neighbours, the swans were required to overcome a formidable natural adversity almost every year: their nesting season was routinely tormented by floods that washed out nest after nest and clutch of eggs after clutch of eggs. In one spring and early summer that was painful to watch and is still painful to recount, they lost four nests and four clutches of eggs and finally hatched a single cygnet on a fifth nest in July. Mute swan nests are vast. The labour involved was as heroic as it was bloody-minded.
Even so, I hear you say, you watched for thirty years? Yes, and it does sound disproportionate. And yet, and yet: that swan-watching project led directly to a series of radio programmes on BBC Radio 4, two books – Waters of the Wild Swan and The Company of Swans, a BBC television programme in the Wildlife on One series, and a long-standing working relationship with the BBC Natural History Unit radio producer Grant Sonnex which would take me to Alaska for three weeks, and to Iceland and Norway for a week at a time, all of which helped fuel a passion for wolves, grizzly bears, humpback whales…as well as various tribes of wild swans.
There is also this. The wildlife encounters I write about are the fruits of the memorable days and these are outnumbered (my hasty guess) ten to one by those days when very little or nothing at all happens, and no-one wants to read about those any more than I want to write about them. But even these days have a value for the nature writer because you learn more about the landscapes where you work, about patterns and rhythms in the wild year, and if you go often enough for long enough you bear witness to incremental change in those rhythms and patterns and you try to reason why.
The title of this series of books, In The Moment, is a perfect summarizing of what follows. Each chapter centres on a species with which I am reasonably familiar, and the particular encounters have been chosen because to my mind they constitute defining moments in the inexact art of watching wildlife, in my writing life. And being in the moment is the ultimate reward. It is not television, it is not reading about someone else’s moment in someone else’s book, it is participating, it is being part of nature yourself. The inevitable result is that your respect for nature deepens, as does your own awareness of your own place within nature.
Never in human history has it been more important that we develop a deeper respect for our planet. So go and find yourself some moments in nature’s company.