Tight Clothes, Nature and Angst

When I worked with the wise and delightful Monty Don on Radio 4’s Shared Planet, I remember him saying someone had asked him the secret to being happy and content. His answer struck me as worth spreading around – wear loose clothes and spend time outside. Now that is sensible. Wearing tight clothes can have the effect of making our brains feel constrained too, I certainly can’t relax or breathe so well when I am aware of edges, buttons, belts – things that inhibit.  I think it is harder to give out to the world when your body feels drawn in.

Monty Don

And going outside – well how much more evidence do we need to show that breathing outside air, feeling soil, smelling the scent from trees, grass and flowers, feeling rain and sun, seeing green and grey and blue – all calm our emotions and help healing.  I only wish major international meetings on war, weapons, refugees, the environment and so on happened outside in a meadow or wild garden, instead of inside constraining rooms.  I think we would come to different decisions.

Some trees are particularly good at helping.  In days gone by German village elders would hold judicial meetings under lime (linden) trees, and that is not a surprise.  Lime trees were said to evoke wise thoughts.  The scent of lime, particularly in the summer, is intoxicating and was said to help cure epilepsy, headaches, insomnia and bad nerves. This poem is by Wilhelm Müller

Der Lindenbaum

By the fountain, near the gate,
There stands a linden tree;
I have dreamt in its shadows
so many sweet dreams.
I carved on its bark
so many loving words;
I was always drawn to it,
whether in joy or in sorrow.

Today again I had to pass it
in the dead of night.
And even in the darkness
I had to close my eyes.
Its branches rustled
as if calling to me:
“Come here, to me, friend,
Here you will find your peace!”
The frigid wind blew
straight in my face,
my hat flew from my head,
I did not turn back.

Now I am many hours
away from that spot
and still I hear the rustling:
“There you would have found peace!”

The Japanese have a word for the sense of peace you get from a woodland walk -  “wood air bathing” shinrin-yoku, breathing in the healing, enriching oils emitted from trees that lowers blood pressure, boosts the immune system and calms thoughts. Throughout Japan there are shinrin-yoku walks where families have picnics and be together to de-stress.

Last week Iseemed to come across yet more horrible stories of  young children increasingly suffering panicattacks, depression, stress and low self-esteem and many other words for a mind in turmoil.  Teenagers too.  I know of a few young people now who have dropped out of university recently because of depression.  How much of this is related to the increasingly indoor, removed-from-nature life so many of us lead today is unsure, but it is hard not to draw some connections between the two. Children live virtual indoor lives, not real out door ones.

I watch the school kids from the local secondary school walk home each day along our very city-centre street right in the centre of Bristol.  They are bursting with that feeling of wanting to run, shout, mess around, kick balls or whatever.  But in the middle of the city there is nowhere to do that – just cans to kick, and swear and shout and lots of pushing each other around, which annoys middle-aged people who shout at them and complain to the school. I wish they had a big field to go to, somewhere to let off steam, and maybe even find something interesting to look at that for a short while takes the mind to other realms.  But this doesn’t happen, instead all of this youthful energy gets bottled up and who knows where it goes.

So – would a GCSE in Natural History help encourage kids to go outside? Get them to really look, smell, touch, sense the world they live in – even a local park? Would it help give their minds a break to think where swallows come from or how snakes shed their skin and why an egg is the shape and colour it is? And if it taught the connection between well-being and nature – would that help?  And if, through having access to nature-literature, they learned ways of expressing feelings that only natural things evoke  – would that go some way to stemming this awful spread of youthful angst? Concentrating on awe, wonder, joy, beauty, mystery, fear, trepidation, etc.  Those are the feelings that come from knowing the natural world.  Re-engagement with who and what we are on a living, breathing, vibrant planet can only ever be good.  We are a long way from that at the moment - let’s do something to try to change it.  Please sign the petition.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/176749

The Hills are Alive

Its all kicking off in curlew land, they are streaming back to breeding grounds now and is great to get the reports from all over the country. People are posting on Twitter about hearing them and seeing them, and on Facebook, they are working their magic again this year.  The harbingers of spring are back and ready for action.

The first curlews arrived back in lowland areas in February, the more upland birds are just getting there.  In Northern Ireland the curlews in Antrim are said to come back to the hills on St Patrick's Day - which was the 17th March.

Slemish Mountain, Antrim, where St Patrick was held captive.
From http://mountainviews.ie/summit/667/

Mike Smart, a curlew watcher and recorder in Gloucestershire, and all round good egg, wrote a great description a couple of weeks ago of two birds that had just got to a meadow in his area:

"They seem to me to adopt very characteristic behaviour; they are generally in twos, stalking round in a rather proprietorial sort of way, a little way apart, feeding quietly, and not getting very close together.  Sometimes however, they move quite close together and start courtship display, in a moderate way: running around quite quickly together, sometimes in parallel, sometimes one ahead of the other, often picking up bits of grass or vegetation as they go, and throwing it down again; this can last for ten minutes.  On one occasion, the male opened his wings slightly and did a couple of flaps, and seemed to hold his tail up, rather like a Snipe; but I haven’t seen the slow ballet with outstretched quivering wings yet."

Others are reporting the same kind of behaviour, and Noel Kiernan who watches curlews on the wild and beautiful islands on Lough Ree in S Ireland also noticed 5 pairs behaving as though they were gearing up to breeding. That lovely bubbling call will soon be trailing over the meadows and moors of Britain and Ireland - well I hope so.  Actually, not so much in Ireland as there are only 130 pairs left, but where they still hang on these wild songsters will be adding joy to people's lives in a way that cannot by valued by money.

Lough Ree from http://www.viewmounthouse.com/things-to-do/places/lough-ree

All of us curlew lovers will be watching and waiting to see how this season progresses and if curlews can hang in in our very human world. To keep this wild sprite though is a challenge, we may not be prepared to do what it takes to make room for uneconomic species, no matter how lovely and joyous they are. But I don't actually believe that - I think we will make it happen, because we are not just consumers, we are so much more.  No one just thinks about money.  We have so much in our lives that we don't put a pound sign next to. We don't charge for the time it takes to read a book, or walk outside, make a birthday cake, spend time with someone who needs us. We don't think about money when it comes to love, affection, respect, - those soul moments.

Photos by permission of Tony Cross

Post the Ireland and Slimbridge conferences more people are now involved in monitoring the birds and working out the best way to protect them - in ways that are suitable for their bit of the world.  perhaps that is putting signs up to tell dog walkers to keep dogs on leads around a known nest site until mid July.  Or maybe nests in some places may need electric fences to stop the eggs being eaten (but they won't stop the chicks being got unfortunately). Or even some lethal predator control is required in certain problem areas for the time of breeding?  Stocking density might have to be reduced.  It is all about what is needed where, and we need to have open and positive discussions about the way forwards.

But so far, the 2 conferences have shown just how much we British and Irish love these birds (and so much else too).  We don't want them to disappear, we don't just want to make money out of the land. It is clear to me we want a singing planet, not just a money-making one.  

If you are on Twitter search for curlew or curlews and you will get some great pictures and heartening tweets about the birds.  I am so grateful for those who write to me to tell me what is happening - and for being involved in the curlew groups as they gear up for the next few months.

Curlews are in a better place than they were a year ago - thank you to everyone who has been so supportive and for those rolling up their sleeves now and getting down to the serious business of looking after our birds.

Author Kathryn Norbury (The Fish Ladder) suggested making a Year of the Curlew.  Bit late for this year - but next?  Seems a great idea!

Guest Blog for Mark Avery on Curlews

Photo by John Walters

My guest blog for Mark Avery on why I love curlews and what I'm going to do to help them recover.

500 miles for curlew

Please help spread the word about my walk for curlew, beginning April 21st.

The Curlew Walk - Flyer

H is for Hawk - review

I've now finished this powerful book.  It reads like acid dropped onto carbonate - it fizzes and explodes with emotion and pain.  Yet there are sliver threads shining in this dark material as she describes her intense love for Mabel (her goshawk), her dad and the landscapes she hawks through.

I'm not sure I enjoyed it as much as got wrapped up in it.  But as I said in a previous blog - pain and blood drip from the pages, so it not an easy read. I left her sinking into manic depression after the death of her father and taking on a goshawk to train as a kind of medicine. This she interweaves with the sad and raw story of T E White who wrote The Goshawk, a classic account of training a goshawk which is brutal.  A desperate taming of a bird through misplaced guilt at his sadistic tendencies (a product of a cruel childhood) and homosexual desire.

As Helen withdraws from normal life to concentrate on training the hawk, she becomes mentally ill. She tries to become a goshawk, wild and free, away from the memories of houses and society. She lives on her own in a bird-filled world where all that mattered were the mood and weight of the hawk and the times when they could fly and kill.  She became fascinated in the act of death and the moment in time when life turned into food.  She loses her ability to be "normal" in society and her paranoia increases.

"Sometimes when light dawns it simply illuminates how dismal circumstances have become.  Every morning I wake at five and have thirty seconds lead-time before despair crashes in...I know that I'm not trusting anyone, or anything any more.  And that it is hard to live for long periods without trusting anyone or anything.  It's like living without sleep.  Eventually it will kill you."

But through this increasing depression she sees the world with heightened senses, as though the rawness of her wounds increases the sensitivity to landscapes, atmospheres and feelings. Some of her descriptions of places are truly wonderful. You feel you are there with her walking through a frosty, translucent meadow where realities shift with the shadows cast by a weak sun.  Or you can hear the quarrelsome rooks in the black skeletons of winter trees.  You can see Mabel flash through thin air, feel the blood of a rabbit held alive in the clutches of lethal talons.  Her observations of this wild world are dream like - as are the images she paints so skilfully.  A cinereal stratus - a cloud that has the ashen face of death.

Perhaps there is too much of the death and despair at times, one too many near misses when Mabel almost flies away and she panics, as though the ghost of her father is disappearing too.  Perhaps also too many horrible references to nasties such as Nazism and the physical effects of myxomatosis. These, combined with her own cries from the heart leave the reader with a sense of contorted darkness.

But as she lightens, as either the anti depressants, or time, or both, take effect the book seems to lift out of the hands.  You get a feeling rather like taking off a heavy rucksack after a day's walk, you are almost weightless with relief.  And so it is when she sees beauty again, as in her walk onto chalk downland.

"I take a deep breath and exhale, full of the ballooning light-headedness of standing on chalk. Chalk landscapes do this to me; bring an exhilarating, on tiptoe sense that some deep revelation is at hand."

Anyone who has walked through flowery downs will know what she means. This is where history, both natural and manmade, merge in a heady expanse of loveliness.  Where megaliths place their feet in the white earth but their heads look out over millennia. And this seems to be part of the healing journey where she comes to know that she cannot be a hawk, cannot run to wildness to get away from pain, cannot escape the hard reality that her father is dead and gone.

At the end of the book she visits the old cottage that used to belong to White when he had his goshawk. Despite seeing the owner gardening she resisted the urge to talk to him.

"White is gone. The hawk has flown. Respect the living, honour the dead. Leave them be...And then I turned and walked away. I left the man who was not a ghost, and I walked south. Over the bright horizon the sky swam like water."

And so it ends.

Ultimately this is not just about hawks and grief, it is about a love that is deeply and tremulously held for her father and for natural world in every hue.  It is about mental illness and the awfulness of depression that very nearly destroyed this talented woman.  Helen comes across as both fragile and strong, obsessive and loyal.  Someone who is intriguing but I imagine quite hard to get close to.

I'm not sure I understand falconry any better, despite all the explanations and pleadings.  I don't have the desire to tame the wild, but if you do then this book will have an extra dimension.

Would I recommend it?  Oh certainly I would.  But with caution if you are carrying painful grief of your own.  Is it a masterpiece?  Yes I think it is.  And I salute Helen for her honesty.  Even if I had a fraction of her talent I'm not sure I could put myself out there like this. Lay my soul on a marble slab for dissection.  It takes courage to tell the world about your heart in such vivid prose.  Well done Helen, you are inspirational. You stand alongside White as a writer of a goshawk classic - but I'm not sure you would feel totally comfortable with that.

A Birdy Bird

Some non-naturalist friends asked my husband to describe a corncrake. He said, "Well, its a birdy bird with a birdy beak." I think that is quite a clever description.  A corncrake has the shape of an archetypal bird, similar to what a child would draw.

Goshawk in the woods.

I'm reading H is for Hawk at the moment, a searing book by Helen McDonald.  It is ostensibly about training a goshawk, but it is so much more than that.  It is a book about loss and obsession, history and wildlife. It tells of her response to her terrible grief at the unexpected death of her father, interweaved with the emotional trauma of training a goshawk as a kind of memorial.  She constantly refers back to the famous T E White book The Goshawk, published in 1951, another searing book, but this one is brutal, "a metaphysical battle" as McDonald describes it.

To say that McDonald's book is emotional is a tad understated.  Blood and tears seep out of the pages, and swirling around them is a mist of madness.

"The world around me was growing very strange indeed.  The light that filled my house was deep and livid, half magnolia, half rainwater.  Things sat in it dark and very still.  Sometimes I felt I was living in a house at the bottom of the sea.  There were imperceptible pressures.  Tapping water pipes.  I'd hear myself breathing and jump at the sound. Something else was there, something standing next to me that I couldn't touch or see, a thing a fraction of a millimetre away from my skin, something vastly wrong, making infinite the distance between me and all the familiar objects of my house....And I walked and worked and made tea and cleaned the house and cooked and ate and wrote.  But at night, as rain picked points of orange light against the windows, I dreamed of a hawk slipping through wet air to somewhere else.  I wanted to follow it"

I haven't finished it yet, but with these images sharp in my mind yesterday evening I walked through Blaise Castle woodland near Bristol.  It was pouring with rain and getting dark, producing another humid, close night.  All the while a piercing, incessant cry kept forcing its way into my thoughts. When people say cries "rent the air" it is a good description, it really did seem to tear the fabric of the woods.  I followed this demonic sound down a track to an opening and found a man and his son stooped over a young female goshawk.  The bird was beautiful but crazed.  It constantly yelled as it tore at a bloodied carcass.  If he tried to put a gloved hand near her she attacked it. Grey and striped with black and rust, she had a weapon for a beak and her beady black eyes had the stare of a devil.  She kept lifting her head and screaming, looking at me, then him, then my Jack Russell. "I'd call her away if I were you," he advised, "she's protective over meat."

"In real life, goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats.  Bigger, yes.  But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier, and much, much harder to see.  Birds of deep woodland, not gardens, they're the birdwatchers' dark grail."

I asked the man if she was hard to train.  "Of course, all she wants to do is hunt," he said.  "They are supreme predators and I have to gain her trust.  She's screaming out of frustration that I have to feed her and that she can't catch birds herself. In the US its easier to train them, they can let young birds hunt in the wild straight away, but we can't here, so I have to give her meat and she hates it.  She hates being dependent."

I watched for 15 minutes, mesmerised by the shrill, vibrating bundle of feathers and talons.  Eventually I left them, hunched over against the rain and failing light, waiting for the bird to devour the remaining scraps of red.  It was almost dark, but the cries of a raging, frustrated goshawk followed me all the way to the car and back home. I felt like a character in the book.

Malta bird hunt

A quick update.  I've been in touch with Steve Micklewright from Birdlife Malta re the spring hunt of migrating birds.  He says the Catholic Church there is still "sitting on the fence" but hopes that "as the referendum approaches we hope that they will be able to make a clear statement."  He also thinks they are embarrassed by the bizarre firing of guns from the top of a church to celebrate the patron saint of hunting  - firing blanks into the sky at birds.   What an extraordinary state of affairs.  It really does echo my thoughts given in the National Justice and Peace talk recently (see previous blog for text) that the Church so often is afraid to rock the boat and can't decide what it really thinks about nature.  This is such an obvious issue to lead from the front and I really am at a loss to understand the reticence.  Keep going Birdlife Malta.

National Justice and Peace Conference Talk

Yesterday I gave a talk at the National Justice and Peace Conference, which as ever is full of people who make you realise goodness is alive and well and thriving in our community as yeast in a dough.

My talk challenged the Christian churches to speak out about the life and landscapes that share this planet.  I stress I don't expect an alliance with Greenpeace but I do expect and opinion or contribution - and I won't accept total silence on many of the big environmental issues of the day.

At the end of the talk, literally right on my last word, there was a huge clap of thunder, bright lightening and all the lights went off!

National Justice and Peace Talk by Mary Colwell

Nurture In His Name - film series

Here are the first 3 films in a series called Nurture In His Name - aimed at clergy and church communities to encourage environmental care.  We will do more, but so far there is an Introduction, one on Nature and one on Solar Power.  Do pass them around if you think they can be useful.

The Purring Dove

picture from Eco Tourism Blog

Turtle Doves have a habit of getting under people's skin. Perhaps it is the insistent, soft purring call that soothes, like feathered kittens. Their gentle call heralds warmer months - if swifts and swallows are the visual clue, then the turtle dove is the sound of summer. Or was.

This site, Macaulay Library, has a recording of their call - in Kenya.

Solomon refers to them: Song of Solomon 2:12:
The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.

And Jeremiah 8:7
Even the stork in the sky knows her seasons; and the turtledove and the swift and the thrush observe the time of their migration; but my people do not know the ordinance of the Lord.

They are a dove of woodland edge, open forest and scrubland, arriving in the spring and leaving again in July, back to south of the Sahara. But in the last 25 years their population has catastrophically declined by 90%.

It is a great sadness that a beautiful dove, once so common flocks of them could be seen sitting on telephone lines, is now mainly restricted to a few parts of the SE.

Changes in Africa? Changes here? Is the flight now too perilous? We share a common humanity with our brothers and sisters in Africa - and we share many of our birds. I hope we can all find a way to reverse this trend. Everyone should hear Solomon's dove.

Arctic Wonders

Location of Colville River

Colville River Delta

Jim and Teena's house on Colville Island

One of the blogs I follow is Jim Helmericks - Arctic Smoke Signals. Jim and his wife live in one of the most remote places on earth - an island in the middle of the Colville Delta on the North Slopes of Alaska. The Colville river drains a wild part of Alaska, empties into the Arctic Ocean and is entirely above the Arctic Circle, it is frozen for 6 months of the year.

I stayed with Jim and Teena when I filmed the Spectacled Eider, a trip which has informed and influenced so much of my thinking. Jim and Teena are kind, solid people who have lived a life most of us can barely imagine, bringing up their 4 sons in a wild place that is totally isolated from the rest of the world. Their house is only accessible in the winter by a 2 day trek on a snow mobile, in the summer by plane.

Jim's father was one of the earliest bush pilots in Alaska and wrote a fascinating book about delivering mail across the North Slopes; he passed away in January.

Have a look at Jim's website, his extraordinary photos of astronomy and wildlife and marvel at people who really do live life at the edge.

Here are some recent photos from his blog:

Musk ox by the house

King Eider on the island

Jim fishing

Arctic fox pinching a fish Jim has just caught!

Common cuckoo - first sighting on Colville Island

Frozen boat with Aurora

purple finch

weasel