The Jay, The Beech and the Limpetshell E-Book

Richard Smyth

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 285

Beschreibung

'Generous, moving and alive. A gift' - Tim Dee, author of Greenery 'Intelligent, thought-provoking and always, always interesting' - Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment 'Smyth writes with warmth and engaging perception about our relationship and understanding of the natural world on our doorsteps' - Jon Dunn, author of The Glitter in the Green 'Fresh and tender and playful' - Patrick Galbraith, author of In Search of One Last Song Weren't they richer, rock pools, wasn't the seashore busier, when I was a kid? Richard Smyth had always been drawn to the natural world, but when he became a father he found a new joy and a new urgency in showing his kids the everyday wild things around them. As he and his children explore rockpools in Whitley Bay, or the woods and moors near his Yorkshire home, he imagines the world they might inhabit as they grow up. Through different objects discovered on their wanderings - a beech leaf, a jay feather, a limpetshell - Smyth examines his own past as well as that of the early natural historians, weaving together history, memoir, and environmentalism to form a new kind of nature writing: one that asks both what we have lost, and what we have yet to find.

Leseprobe

Published in the UK and USA in 2023 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents

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ISBN: 978-178578-802-4

eBOOK ISBN: 978-178578-804-8

Text copyright © 2023 Richard Smyth

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Text designed and set in Monotype Dante by Tetragon, London Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

For my family, up and down

CONTENTS

Author’s note

Prologue

1. CHAFFINCH NEST

Hirst Wood, September 2020

2. OWL PELLET

Rombald’s Moor, March 2021

3. JAY FEATHER

Moorhead Lane, July 2020

4. LIMPETSHELL

St Mary’s Island, August 2020

5. BEECH LEAF

Hirst Wood, all the time

Epilogue

Further reading

Acknowledgements

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book was not written in the order in which you’re probably reading it. However, my children, who appear at times herein, chose unhelpfully to age as I wrote, and in a conventional, linear fashion. You’ll see as you read on that their ages jump about, with the bigger one being three here and two there, the smaller one being at one point a toddler and at some later point a baby. I’m sorry if this is confusing. There was very little I could do about it. I will say one thing. Genevieve, if you’re reading this, don’t worry – because I know it bothers you, sometimes – you will always be the big sister, and Daniel will always be the little brother, no matter how big he gets.

Prologue

HOBBES: Whatcha doin’?

CALVIN: Looking for frogs.

HOBBES: How come?

CALVIN: I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.

HOBBES: Ah, but of course.

CALVIN: My mandate also includes weird bugs.

BILL WATTERSON, Calvin and Hobbes, 13 March 1995

My daughter’s pockets are empty. She’s three, and she doesn’t want to put things in her pockets – what use are they there? The things we find, shells, sticks, feathers, pebbles, leaves, fragments of ice, she wants to carry them (handle them, taste them, break them) or she wants Daddy or Mummy to look after them. There’s the long cone of a pine tree from Northumberland in the pocket of our car’s offside front door. There’s a daisy wilting in an espresso cup of water on the kitchen windowsill. There’s a small stack of sticks in the hall (‘Have you got a dog?’ the postman asks). My own coat pockets fill up with snail shells and alder cones. She doesn’t know a lot about any of these things – she’s three, give her a break – but I know she’ll learn.

Then there’s our son. He was born at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. He knows what crows and blackbirds are, that ducks go ‘quack’ and frogs go ‘ribbit’. He’s watched a lot of David Attenborough (we binge my old boxsets in the early mornings). He can snap his jaws like a crocodile and nearly say ‘elephant’ (efefe). He’s been walked and wheeled and carried a long way along footpaths, towpaths, park paths, river paths. He’ll learn, too.

I wonder what sort of world they’ll learn about. It won’t be the same world I learned about when I was a kid. They’re already used to the cork-on-glass squealing of rose-ringed parakeets in the local park. They’ll soon come to know the silhouettes of red kites. My daughter knows that the big bird that sometimes comes to sit on the mill chimney by our house is a peregrine. None of these birds would have been here when I was a kid.

My children’s world will be warmer, wetter, more populous, more depleted (less greenery, fewer animals, fewer sorts of animals). Will it be worse? I don’t know. I know – I think I know – that however bad it is, they’ll make it better. I know that from some perspectives the decision to bring more humans into a world already replete, overstuffed, with humanity is a contentious one; that children are quite frankly problematic, and not only in the eating-the-soap and shaving-the-cat sense. The short version of my argument on this is that humans are all right really. In the main, on balance, at bottom, when all is said and done, they’re all right. We’re all right. Let’s carry on and see what we can do.

So here we are, my wife and I, with these children of ours. Here are woodpigeons on the roof, magpies in the road, owl calls in the night, finch songs in next door’s laburnum, snails in the yard, frogs in the lightwell. Here are songs about bunnies, toy lions, bath whales, fox socks, penguin T-shirts. Here are YouTube videos where enthusiastic young Americans explain about awesome sharks and cool crocs and amazing bees and incredible octopuses. Here are Maddie Moate and Steve Backshall on the television; here are JoJo and Gran Gran going birdwatching or pond-dipping; here are Octonauts and Peter Rabbit, Ferne and Rory’s Vet Tales and Down on the Farm; here’s The Jungle Book on DVD and Ladybug on Amazon Prime. Here are books, dozens, thousands of books; Sharing a Shell, Handa’s Surprise, The Last Polar Bears, TheBad-Tempered Ladybird, There’s an Ouch in My Pouch!, Who’s Afraid of the Dark?, Sleepy Places, Snuggle Up Sleepy Ones, Hunwick’s Egg.

Here, in short, is a child’s world full of wild things, and here’s us trying to figure out how to make sure they grow up to know it, and love it, and look after it, and, who knows, maybe even save it. Where do you start?

I’ll start here: with the stuff we’ve picked up, the things we’ve collected. The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich saw the whole world, all that is made, in a hazelnut. This shell, these bones, this lost feather, this beech leaf: I think there are worlds to be seen in these things, too.

Charles Waterton, a squire of the early 19th century who lived in Walton, near Wakefield, just down the road from where I grew up, was one of the great early naturalists. His biographer, Julia Blackburn, has written that throughout his life ‘he maintained a tactile approach to the external world. He wanted to taste it, to roll in it, to get closer and closer still to everything which invited his curiosity.’ At the age of three he swallowed the egg of a meadow lark. As an adult he tried to eat part of a swallow’s nest, to determine its flavour (‘I have chewed a piece for a quarter of an hour but found it absolutely tasteless’). These days, Waterton is mostly remembered – if he’s remembered at all – as an eccentric. He was certainly quixotic. He was a bold and kind-hearted conservationist; he was also, in very many ways, childlike.

Our urge to touch and grab is one that comes to us – takes hold of us – very early, and one that we very quickly learn to deny. Look, don’t touch, is the standard injunction (the second warning, when I was small, usually took the form you look with your eyes, not with your hands). Confronted with something interesting, something that looks interesting and looks like it might feel interesting, or, even better, looks like we might be able to seize it and do interesting things with it, little hands steal out almost unbidden, almost more like antennae, ‘feelers’, mobile sense organs, than hands. It comes to us early and it never goes away. Think of, say, an art gallery: don’t your hands just itchtofeel the cold curve of sculpted marble, the textured oils of an impasto painting; don’t you want to heft that rare ceramicware in your hands, just for a moment, just to see if it’s heavier than you thought, or lighter than you thought, to see where its balance lies, get a sense of its gravity?

I can’t not pick up a toad if I find one. A toad, discovered under a stone or a rotting log, is, somehow, a very there thing. It’s compact and complete and still and it will as a rule sit fairly stoically in the cupped palm of your hand for a minute or so before it decides it has somewhere else to be. I don’t know what exactly I’m looking to learn by picking up the toad. I’m not going to advance herpetological knowledge in any meaningful way; I just somehow feel that until I’ve held it I haven’t really seen it.

You look with your eyes, not with your hands. Perhaps that’s not quite as true as it seems. I’ve no desire to smell or taste the toad, but touching is different, holding is different. These things somehow seem closer to knowing.

They also come with risks attached. The European toad, for instance, carries, in the bulging parotoid glands behind its eyes, a substance called bufotoxin, which is related to digitalis, the foxglove toxin. It isn’t dramatically harmful to humans, but it’s unpleasant. That’s how most of the living biohazards here in the United Kingdom are best described: unpleasant. A nettle sting is unpleasant. A nip from a red ant is unpleasant. We get rashes and hives, sore spots, prickles, scratches, swellings. A wasp sting hurts for a bit. A hornet sting hurts for a lot. Step on the spines of a lesser weever fish while paddling in the sea and you’ll know about it (numbness if you’re lucky, excruciating pain if you’re not). An adder bite is about as serious as it gets here – but there have been only fourteen recorded human deaths from adder bites since 1876, and none at all in my lifetime (it may or may not be a comfort to know that you are far more likely to die from an allergic reaction to a wasp or bee sting: around ten people a year die in the United Kingdom this way).

I remember my first bee sting quite vividly. I remember that I had it coming. I was quite small. I don’t remember exactly what I was doing or trying to do with the honeybee, but it was probably not in the honeybee’s best interests. I remember the onset of a sudden intense curiosity, and then a sudden panic as the bee latched on to my thumb tip, all six legs closing tight like the bucket of a grab crane, and its abdomen lifted, and the stinger went boink straight into the fleshy ball of my thumb, and I yelled the house down. I had it coming, like I said.

I’ve often read, usually in books by older naturalists, from a more careless time, about how stinging insects like bees and wasps are quite easily picked up from behind with a firm finger and thumb about the abdomen. I’m very sure it is easy, but I still can’t do it. Try it. I just tried it with a bee on our campanula out the back. As your finger and thumb creep closer, the humming of the bee’s wingbeats rises warningly in pitch (or does it just seem that it does?) – then, if you’re me, something inside you, something that feels quite basic, quite deep in the system, says nope, and you take your hand away. I’m always amazed by how hard this is for me to overcome. It’s only a bee, man! Pull yourself together! But there it is, still: nope.

‘Put it on my hand,’ Genevieve said yesterday when I found a millipede in the front yard. She said it without hesitation. Clearly this is what millipedes are for. So I did. The millipede, a ‘snake’ millipede I think, an inch long and glossy coffee-brown, crawled smoothly and steadily up over her palm and across the heel of her hand and over the summit of the pisiform bone in her wrist, all its many little feet busy in a rolling shuffle, its many little footsteps all but imperceptible.

Living in the United Kingdom, we can allow ourselves to be pretty cavalier about this sort of thing. Some of our millipedes release bad smells if they feel threatened, but that’s about it.

In fact, there are no venomous millipedes anywhere in the world. Millipedes are the gentle vegetarians, the browsing herbivores, of the topsoil: humus cows, leaf mould sheep. Centipedes – fewer legs, more attitude – are a different proposition: they are hunters, and they do carry venom, but still, they can’t do much damage to a human, even a three-year-old one. I’m not sure Genevieve would enjoy one scampering up her inner arm but it wouldn’t hurt.

For all the manufactured bug panics that periodically infest our tabloid press – mutant fleas! killer wasps! four-inch craneflies! (and this in a country where some hold out hope of one day reintroducing wolves) – there isn’t very much to fear here. Of course, a wolf spider on the counterpane will give you pause. Of course, no one is fond of an unexpected earwig, especially if one drops without warning out of the nectarine you are cutting up for your breakfast and starts performing a wild dance of freedom on your plate (as happened last summer to my wife: it sounds like a lost chapter from James and the Giant Peach, but the event left us badly shaken and neither one of us will ever fully trust a nectarine again). But we do not have the katipō or the redback or the black widow spider, we do not have the Asian giant hornet, we do not have the deathstalker scorpion, we do not have the velvet ant Dasymutilla occidentalis,better known as the ‘cow killer’.

If we did, we perhaps wouldn’t be quite so gung-ho about putting millipedes on our children. Our relationships with our bugs, our insects, arachnids, arthropods and all the rest – and then, by extension, with the rest of the wild things among which we live – have been shaped in these mild British landscapes by the general geniality of most of our local species. We can, if we want, be pretty cosy with these creatures; we can, if we’re sensible, and do what must be done about allergies and hygiene and so on, and teach good lessons about gentleness and care (kind hands, I yell, standing over my bug-hunting children like a rugby union referee over a ruck, kind hands!), try to raise our little naturalists to be hands-on.

There is an obvious caveat: don’t let them eat anything. We can’t be alone in having dealt with a variant on that old joke about the only thing worse than finding a worm in your apple. What’s worse than finding your toddler playing with a slug?Finding your toddler playing with half a slug.

It would be wrong, anyway, to overplay this idea that only those of us raised in relatively harmless ecologies regard nature as a sort of open-access petting zoo. My guess is that everyone everywhere starts out that way; it’s just that some people, in some places, have to learn pretty quickly that that’s not always how this works. On Twitter the other day I saw an entomologist share a picture someone had posted of their cupped hand holding a pretty-looking red-and-black insect. Someone just posted this photo on Reddit asking for an identification, the entomologist wrote, and just looking at it makes me wince.

It’s a cow killer – the velvet ant, actually a wingless wasp, but whatever you call it the possessor of one of the most painful stings in the insect world (its closest rival is the bullet ant, so called because its sting feels like you’ve been shot: I’ve consulted an authority, i.e. a guy on YouTube who lets himself get stung by stuff, and his exact words were oh my gosh, d’oh my gosh, d’oh my god, it’s really bad, oh my gosh, it is like, oooorrrggggg, it’s really HOT). My tip: don’t hold one in your bare hand.

It was illuminating that even someone in the eastern United States – where cow killers are not rare, and there’s no shortage of other small things that could cause you serious pain – wouldn’t think twice about picking one up to say hello. But even more illuminating was one of the replies to the tweet. Stung by 1 as a child, wrote @MandytheFerret. Was my fault. I had known what it was BEFORE messing with it, so I did it when my folks weren’t at home. They had no sympathy. This strikes at a fundamental truth about kids and bugs, and, therefore, about bugs and all of us. Do we want to be stung? No – not exactly. But we do want to see, to see in the richest sense, in the sense that goes some way beyond the collection of photons on a retina, the processing of images in the brain’s occipital lobe. We want to see – and if getting stung is part of that package, then so be it. When we actually get stung (or bitten or mauled or chased or prickled or poisoned or infested or eaten) we may regret the bargain. But it’s a bargain we’d strike again in a heartbeat.

On Genevieve’s first – and so far only – trip to London, in the winter of 2018–19, we took her to see the animals. She was about four months old.

We saw walrus and brown bear, gorilla and painted dog, hellbender salamander and Qinling snub-nosed monkey. We saw a grey whale calf breaching the waves of Magdalena Bay and a spotted-tail quoll breaking cover to hunt birds in a New South Wales rainforest. We saw an iguana peering from the eye socket of a rotting sealion carcass. We saw a Galápagos ground finch pecking blood from the living body of a Nazca booby.

Genevieve was in the forward-facing baby sling, and I held her literally nose-to-nose with each backlit photograph as we made our slow way around the exhibition. The colours of the images – ice white, blood red, tiger orange, the gold and baby-blue of the snub-nosed monkey – washed across her face. She was wide-eyed (she was never not wide-eyed, at four months, unless she was asleep). It all went in. I don’t know much stuck.

It had become a Christmas tradition for us, for me and Catherine: each year, we’d visit my brother James and his wife Clare in London, and over the course of a December weekend we’d see a show, go for dinner, take in something festive in Hyde Park or at Kew, and – of course! – visit the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum in Kensington.

We haven’t been since – first there was pregnancy and Danny, and then there was the pandemic – and I miss it.

I just had another look at the shortlisted pictures from that year. Some have stayed with me: a multitude of lost mayflies captured in streetlighting on a bridge over the Ebro by José Manuel Grandío; Ricardo Núñez Montero’s haunting picture of a mother gorilla with the long-dead body of her child. Others I don’t remember seeing at all. Again, I wonder which, if any, made a mark on my daughter – if only for their shapes and colours, or the contrasted brightness of an eye or a feather, or for something Mummy or Daddy or her uncle or auntie might have said (‘Jesus!’, ‘Not keen on this one’, ‘Right place, right time, I suppose’, ‘Unbelievable’, ‘Bloody hell’).

I’ve been trying to think about what single image made the greatest impression on me as a kid – did the most, I mean, to inspire or nourish my fascination for nature, for the wild, for living things. And I think the answer is a room full of dead things. Specifically, the room full of dead things curated and kept by Jean-Henri Fabre.

Fabre was a French entomologist and writer, noted for his close observations of the behaviour of insects and other creatures. He was born in 1823 and grew up poor in Aveyron in the rural south of France; when he was a boy, local people would see him crouched motionless over an anthill, a spider’s nest, a weevil on a vine, and take him for an idiot. Toward the end of 1879, after leaving a career in teaching and settling near Orange, close to Avignon, Fabre published Souvenirs Entomologiques, his most celebrated work. On the profits, he acquired a property at Sérignan-du-Comtat, which he named ‘Harmas’. It’s now a museum that bears his name and houses his collections.

It’s a little ironic, a little unfair, that when I think of Fabre I think of his collections, because he was one of the first naturalists – Charles Waterton was another – to place a proper emphasis on field observation, on real-world observations of living things. ‘His writings,’ Gerald Durrell wrote in The Amateur Naturalist, ‘meant that you were suddenly transported out into the open air instead of, as with so many Victorian naturalists, into a museum.’

Those collections, though. In the photograph I remember – taken from a corner of the room, cut across by a shaft of Provençal sunlight through a high window – it’s not always clear what all the things are.But to me, at seven or eight, they are, as Howard Carter whispered to Lord Carnarvon at the door of Tutankhamun’s tomb, wonderful things.

There are preserved spider crabs framed on the wall, seaweeds pressed in a book, a case of what might be flight feathers or razor clam shells, blown eggs couched in cotton wool, obscure specimens in cork-stoppered jars, plant cuttings laid out on blotting paper, things kept under glass bell jars, and I know, I know I should find this all depressing, but I don’t, I can’t – I think it’s wonderful, I think it’s magnificent.

There are 1,300 ‘pieces’ held at the Harmas, but that hardly tells the whole story – a recent inventory of 82 plant bundles collected by Fabre, for instance, identified 14,000 different specimens. Fabre was known as an entomologist, and of course there are drawers full of beetles and butterflies, but it’s obvious that he was interested in everything.

There’s a term I’ve come across that describes the frenzy in which a writer can find themselves when they’re seized by the urge to cram everything into a book, to grasp and set down the whole lot, all of it, all of life, in words, on paper: ‘everythingitis’. I think most great naturalists have a form of everythingitis. I think most children have it, too.

The great nature photographer Eric Hosking recalled a childhood of searching around in hedges and on beaches: ‘I commandeered anything in the natural history line, and what I found I wanted to keep.’ An early phrase of his, spoken at the age of two or three, was: ‘Wouldn’t it be awfully decent if we could catch some beekles and put them in a mashbox.’

We kept tadpoles, and then froglets, for a few springs. I caught and fed and eventually hatched a privet hawk-moth caterpillar (a huge fat thing, all eyespots and spike). We made a wormery, pinching sand from the building site at the top of the road. There wasn’t that much else. But I played at being a naturalist in other ways. I kept scrapbooks and made pamphlets, wrote booklets, drew worksheets copied from, I don’t know, Young Ornithologists’ Club magazines, that sort of thing; for a while, one summer, I established what I thought was a sort of wildlife laboratory on the back lawn, a ring of bricks with my nature books set out on them, until my dad said I had to move it so he could cut the grass; I was fond of my kit, my third-hand binoculars that my mum had painted green, my little set of plastic jars with magnifying lids. Not just natural history but being a naturalist – that was what I wanted.

It was Gerald Durrell’s fault. Durrell, of course, was one of the great boyhood collectors; for him, a mashbox of beekles wasn’t the half of it. Growing up lawlessly in Corfu in the 1930s, the young Durrell assembled a half-wild menagerie of ‘magenpies’, scorpions, terrapins, tortoises, snakes, gulls and owls – he documented all this in his memoirs, beginning, famously, with My Family and Other Animals, which I adored. But The Amateur Naturalist is the book that made me the amateurish naturalist I am today. Published in 1982, co-written with his wife Lee, and probably undertaken to fund the inexhaustible Durrell’s relentless adventures in conservation and animal collection, it’s a book that tells you about wildlife, habitat by habitat, garden, shrublands, seashore, jungle, but much more than that it hammers home this idea of nature as something you do. Each chapter begins with a gorgeously assembled array of specimens and kit: an old wasps’ nest, a butterfly net, a killing jar, an alga skeleton, a cuttlebone, a gull skull (‘picked clean by crows and carrion beetles’), boar droppings, a ‘hand lens’, a larva tin. My favourite chapter was the final one: The Naturalist at Home. ‘The naturalist’s workroom is a most important place,’ Durrell begins, ‘and it must be efficiently laid out, since it is here you keep your specimens and conduct experiments that would be difficult or impossible to carry out in the field.’ This was all dangerously exciting. There’s a section on ‘dissecting tools and their uses’; there are neat diagrams of notebooks and index cards, useful tips on display cases, step-by-step guides to studying ferns and fungi and microscopic creatures; he tells you how to keep aquatic insects and butterflies and slow-worms, he tells you, most memorably of all, how to skin and stuff a mouse.

I never did much of this. I never had the patience or the practical skills. I never knew where I was meant to find a length of muslin for a butterfly case, or some mothballs for getting insects out of a bird’s nest. If I did try anything it never turned out tidy enough or complete enough. Here, as much as in Corfu, Durrell represented an ideal I could never really hope to meet.

Genevieve might enjoy pressing wildflowers, though (‘if you haven’t got a professional plant press’, you can always use ‘an improvised tennis racquet press’). Danny would love a pooter (‘very much like a vacuum cleaner for invertebrates’). I don’t know if either of them would be into stuffing a dead mouse – no, I do, they would, they would both love it – but there’s lots to do before we get to that.

They might turn out to be naturalists, but it doesn’t matter if they don’t. They might fill our home with insects and reptiles and birds and small mammals, but it doesn’t matter if they don’t. They’ll find their own way into it all – they already are, they’re already halfway there – and they’ll figure out, soon enough, what they want to do about it all. Maybe just watch. Maybe just think. Maybe just care. That’s fine, too.

I sometimes feel like I came to nature arse-about-face, because I began with books.

Charles Waterton, writing in 1838, warned against the new breed of naturalist who spends ‘more time in books than in bogs’. This was me – not, of course, that Waterton had in mind such books as The Young Birdwatcher or Let’s Go Birdwatching! or the Usborne Spotter’s Guide to Birds (the biggest natural history book of 1838 was Gideon Mantell’s two-volume, 795-page The Wonders of Geology:Or a Familiar Exposition of Geological Phenomena).

My grandad was the birdwatcher in our family – the only one, as far as I knew. When I was a kid, he was in his late sixties, early seventies. Chronic bronchitis meant that he couldn’t get about much then; by the time I was ten he was seldom out of his armchair. He’d talk, a bit, about the things he’d seen, in arcane places – a firecrest at Grange-over-Sands, a marsh harrier at Martin Mere. He might as well have been talking about volcanoes on Mars or the moons of Saturn, but it was something, it was a start. What was more – what was better – was that he had books.

The bookcase in my granny and grandad’s house never changed much – even after my grandad died, most of the same books stayed sitting there for years, Granny’s and Grandad’s together, the Poldarks, Georgette Heyer, The Cruel Sea, Catherine Cookson, Norah Lofts, the Cadfaels. And three wildlife books. I’d guess you could find the same three books on any post-war birdwatcher’s shelf. There was The Hamlyn Guide to Birds of Britain and Europe (1970), a roller and some bee-eaters on the front, the stiff paperback covers crimped by use. There was the AA Wildlife in Britain (1976), each chapter dedicated to a different region of the United Kingdom (by and large I had use for only one of these – Yorkshire, obviously – but I also gave some time to the section on Scotland, which seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, a half-real utopia of eagles and wildcats).

And there was the Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds (1969), Proust’s madeleine, Kane’s toboggan, for a certain generation of birdwatchers. You might know it: it’s the most successful bird book of all time. Like most nature books of the period, it is largely brown; a tawny owl (which can’t be far off life-sized) stares black-eyed from the front cover.

There’s no single author, just a long list of expert consultants, presided over by the prolific Richard Fitter. Fitter was an unassuming giant of post-war natural history (Mark Cocker has called him ‘one of the great perennials of British wildlife’). It’s strange to me to think that he died only in 2005, as his books seem so redolent of a black-and-white austerity-era birding culture, heavy binoculars and flasks of tea, pencil entries in leather notebooks, bicycle rides to gravel pits, Observer field guides in the pockets of anoraks – but then it’s also strange to me, too strange, to think that 2005 was nearly twenty years ago. Fitter’s first memory was of watching ducks on Tooting Bec Common in south London; as a boy, he was a keen egg collector. He went on to write more than 30 books, mostly on birds and wildflowers. I have three or four on my shelves: The Ark in Our Midst, an ahead-of-its time study of the UK’s non-native species; London’s Natural History, his first book – written while he worked for RAF Coastal Command towards the dog-end of the Second World War and published in 1945 – and the biggest seller; and the Collins Guide to Bird Watching, a supplement to his ground-breaking Collins Pocket Guide to British Birds of 1952 (‘ground-breaking’ may sound strong – what Fitter did was to rejig the ordering of the species in his book, grouping them by habitat, size and colour, an ad hoc taxonomy that aimed to be helpful, not scientific – but field guides, for naturalists, are formative texts: a good one can shape the study of natural history for a generation – as, indeed, can a bad one).

I picked up a second-hand copy of the Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds not long ago. The first thing I did when I got it was open it up and press my nose into it. I don’t want to be one of those ohh-the-smell-of-old-books people, but in any case I wasn’t after the classic old-book smell, the antiquarian bookshop smell of must, dust, mould, mice, but something a little sharper: I was after the smell of the pages, the chemically treated glossy paper of illustrated 20th-century nature books (and other books, I daresay, but who cares about them?). I don’t know how the paper was prepared – modern books don't have quite the same whiff; maybe their pages just haven’t yet properly matured, been properly aged – but no doubt it involved coating or steeping in some polysyllabic synthetic polymer or some highly refined mineral soup. Whatever it was, it smells, perversely, of the countryside – it’s what wildlife smells like, to me.

In any case, I’m glad Richard Fitter was responsible for the Book of British Birds, but it was not so much the text of the book that caught my attention as the artwork. No, so much more than just my attention, it caught my imagination, it transported me, in as much as a small boy can be transported while eating Kraft cheese sandwiches and drinking squash on his grandparents’ lounge carpet. Eight artists contributed drawings to the book but the full-colour portraits – and the owl on the cover – were the work of Raymond Harris-Ching.

In the late 1960s, the Reader’s Digest, in partnership with the publisher William Collins, conducted an exhaustive search of British wildlife painters to identify potential lead artists for the ambitious work that was to become the Book of British Birds. None seemed really up to the job – an undertaking they expected to take up to six years and involve the production of 230 colour portraits – until Ching turned up. He was a New Zealander, not long since arrived in the United Kingdom. Here, finally, was an artist whose work had the dynamism they’d been looking for, the vibrancy, the drama to snag the casual book-browser (not for them the functional field-guide columns of birds in dutiful eyes-right poses, stiff as royals, static as the dead, each bird like the last in a different costume). What was more, Ching made the mad promise to do the lot in a year.

The effort nearly did for him – he ended the year ill, exhausted and skint, but my goodness, Raymond, look what you made. Without Raymond Ching, the Book of British Birds would still be wonderful, but it would not be magical.

Ching’s birds are startlingly alive, irrepressibly there