Since the beginning of this book I have barely referred to butterflies, but sixty years ago they did indeed fly into my soul; and they have never flown out. For a long time, I did not know how to categorise what happened to me in Sunny Bank, at the age of seven, since experiences which mark you for life, as a child, generally arrive as dire or at least, disturbing ones, be they physical or psychological; yet this experience, although it came in a time of turmoil, was not in itself distressing, although it was most assuredly powerful – and that I have always understood, as it has exercised a form of dominion over me ever since. It was as if it had implanted something permanent into my nervous system: a receptiveness to butterflies which was almost a whole new instinct. A lepi-empathy, if you like. It has been a peculiar part of me, a quirk of personality like a limp or a lisp, like a quick temper or a meanness with money, and it will last until I die. I say again, this did not mean I became a butterfly obsessive – I was not Fowles’ Frederick Clegg and there were long periods when I gave no thought to Lepidoptera, turning my adolescent enthusiasm to birds, as I have described – but it did mean that there has always been present in me the possibility of an intense response to butterflies, especially when the encounters were unexpected.
All down the years.
For example, it happened in April 1968, when I was twenty and a student at the University of Toulouse, and was spending the Easter holidays hitching around Italy to look on the monuments of the Renaissance, and I had been to Florence and seen what everybody sees, but most particularly the young Lorenzo de’ Medici, who was one of my heroes, portrayed on horseback in the Gozzoli fresco of the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem – there was still a tide mark across the painting from the calamitous flood of the Arno eighteen months before – and I had marvelled at the Piero della Francesca Resurrection in the little civic museum in Sansepolcro, and I had admired Federigo da Montefeltro’s palace looming over Urbino, and a French couple in an Alfa Romeo – funny the details you recall – had driven me down from the hills and then on to Rimini, where I slept on the beach. I had run out of money. With the last of it I had bought two loaves and half a dozen eggs, which I had hardboiled in the youth hostel in Arezzo; and the next morning, which was a Saturday, I remember, I made my way to the Rimini entrance to the autostrada and took stock. I had three eggs left and a loaf, no cash, and about seven hundred and fifty miles to hitch, back to Toulouse, but I reckoned I could do it easily enough, over the Alps from Turin down to Marseille where the widow of a friend of my father’s lived, and she might bale me out, and anyway it had been worth it, God yes . . . I had stayed in the castle in Lerici from where Shelley set out and was drowned, and I had squeezed into Savonarola’s cell, and I had discovered the portraits of Bronzino which excited me more than anything else and then I saw the swallowtail.
It was on a roundabout, a traffic island – one which had not been landscaped with lawn or flower borders but was simply in-filled with autostrada construction rubble and thus was full of weeds or wild flowers, however you want to describe them – and it was catching the bright spring sunlight of the Marches. I forgot about the Renaissance. I forgot about hitch-hiking logistics. I was electrified. Here was something from the far corner of my imagination, one of those early dream-species from The Observer’s Book of Butterflies which I had continued willy-nilly to dream about and which in Britain, then, was the rarest butterfly, as it was confined to one small area of the country, the Norfolk Broads. It was also the biggest butterfly species, but even more than that, it was . . . I find it hard to get away from the word glamorous. It was the most glamorous British butterfly, and I had never set eyes upon it until this moment in north-eastern Italy.
By glamour I suppose I mean something like beauty with built-in excitement. Clichés beckon. Movie stars. But there was undoubtedly something in this insect’s appearance, in its banana-yellow slingback wings slickly transected by bold jet-black stripes, which set it apart. Its was not a calming colour scheme. It was flashy, it carried a hint of risk, even of danger, and today, with innocence long gone, I might say there is even something almost tarty about it, as if the pair of black needletails to the hindwings were stiletto heels. I was mesmerised entirely. I watched it intently for perhaps three or four minutes, until it finally flew off and I waved it goodbye, excitement slowly subsiding, and planted my Union Jack-decorated rucksack at my feet and got out my thumb. That night, as I climbed into my sleeping bag under a pine tree on the outskirts of a small town near Alessandria called Tortona, about seventy miles short of Turin, my left lung collapsed and the events which followed changed my life, but when I think back to that day, the swallowtail is what I remember first.
I could tell you something similar from nearly a decade later, from May 1977 when I was in Rondônia in the Brazilian Amazon as a reporter for the Daily Mirror – the pre-Robert Maxwell Daily Mirror which had tried to become the Guardian for ordinary working people and which I loved and believed in – and for a Mirror series called ‘The Last Frontiers’ I was writing about the settlers swarming over the rainforest like ants on the carcass of an elephant, in the first great wave of Amazonian deforestation. They were grim young men from the south in straw hats, everywhere slashing and burning the trees so that the landscape of flaming and smoking stumps looked like the aftermath of an armoured battle. I was focusing on the fact that they were encroaching on the territories of Indian tribes, some of which had only just been discovered or contacted, and which FUNAI, Brazil’s national Indian foundation, was trying with difficulty to protect. I was engrossed by it all, this rising human tide, this vast irresistible surge of destruction which a decade later was to obsess the world but which then was only just beginning, and at the same time I was engrossed by the thoughts of a woman thousands of miles away in America, a woman who was forty-three while I was twenty-nine, a woman who, although I had been in love before, had presented me with my first experience of passion, and everywhere I went I saw her heart-stopping face and her fire-red hair, in Rio, then in São Paolo, then in Brasilia, and then in Porto Velho as we reached the Amazon, and then in the tiny frontier towns and settlements as we got deeper into the jungle until eventually we found ourselves, four of us – myself, the photographer, the interpreter, and the guide – at a log cabin at the end of the farthest path from the farthest track you could possibly go down. The cabin had been put up several months earlier by a settler and it was in the territory of the Suruis, an Indian tribe which had only been contacted three years before, in 1974, and it was illegal, as it was built in the Surui reservation which FUNAI had demarcated, the demarcation post being clearly visible back down the narrow path through the rainforest along which we had hiked after leaving the Land Rover. We talked to him, the settler – his children had a Surui arrow, we noticed – and he was staying, he wasn’t going anywhere, and a rifle was hung behind the door, and he cheerfully took us across a fallen-tree bridge over a small river to show us the fruits of his labours, a patch of virgin jungle half the size of a football pitch which he had cleared himself and planted with bananas, and I realised that this was the sharp frontal point, at that moment, of the human invasion of the Amazon. (And even there, I saw her face.) Beyond, beyond the packed impenetrable trees, was the Surui village, ten miles away, maybe fifteen, nobody really knew because the only way you could reach it was to fly to the small airstrip FUNAI had built, but they weren’t going to take us so how could we get there – that was the problem. This was a great story but it was only half a story; we had to go and see the Suruis themselves – that was what I was pondering as we left the banana clearing and scrambled back over the fallen-tree bridge and said goodbye to the settler in his cabin and headed back down the track to the vehicle as quickly as we could because the rain was coming and that would make the track impassable, how could we get to the village, that was the question, and the morpho flew out of the forest.
I stopped dead in my tracks. I had never seen anything like it in my life. Never such a creature. Never such a living thing. A substantial chunk of the pure blue cloudless sky which had fallen to earth. It was probably, I suppose now, Morpho peleides, or maybe Morpho menelaus – I can’t make a judgement because I was too stunned to note down any details. I was rooted to the spot, even as the others turned and shouted, Mike, come on, the rain’s coming! for it was enormous, not only in physical size but in its blueness, its iridescent metallic blue, its brilliant blue, its burning blue, its incandescent blue . . . I forgot about the deforestation of the Amazon. I forgot about the Suruis and their inaccessible village. I even, beshrew me, forgot about the heart-stopping face, for the first time in weeks, and nearly four decades later, when I close my eyes and think of the rainforest and the morpho flutters out of the trees, I smile when I realise that, even if momentarily, it actually eclipsed the passion, and I would have said to you, then, I would have sworn to you, that nothing, nothing whatsoever, could do that.
Over the years I have had a number of such encounters, such as my first silver-washed fritillary, floating down through the oak woods of the Haddeo valley on Exmoor, and my first Camberwell beauty on a forest track in Provence, and my first monarch in a Boston garden – they might be common to Americans, but they aren’t to me – and what has characterised them all has been intense emotion, a feeling almost of being struck dumb, and I have gradually come to understand it, and to realise that this is what I experienced in Sunny Bank; and its name is wonder.
•
In a book about joy, this is a digression of sorts, but a necessary one, for wonder is the other great feeling which nature can trigger in us, and that we might experience it, seems to me even more remarkable than the fact of the joy experience. I have written about it, fairly briefly, in the past: I once described as a sense of wonder the emotion felt by myself and my then eleven-year-old son in listening together to a nightingale sing a few feet away from us, deep in a wood at midnight; and I think that many people may have experienced such a feeling in their encounters with the natural world, and been greatly moved, without perhaps understanding exactly what the sentiment is. To explore it therefore seems worthwhile, as my instinct is that wonder as much as joy may show us the way to our nature bond, which was forged in the psyches of our distant ancestors and is surviving in ours today.
Today, though, wonder is much like joy in the popular mind, in that it is discounted: in a secular and sceptical age, it is not a notion we have much to do with, and it figures little in our everyday discourse. Yet it is there in the repertoire of human feelings as much as it ever was. It is related to joy, perhaps, but there are significant differences: one, that it is harder to define. There is no doubt that joy is a concentrated happiness, however we characterise its overtones, while wonder is a concept on which thousands of words have been expended, without a generally agreed definition being arrived at.
The Concise Oxford has a useful stab at it: ‘An emotion excited by what is unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable, esp. surprise mingled with admiration or curiosity’. I would put it rather differently: I would say wonder is a sort of astonished cherishing or veneration, if you like, often involving an element of mystery, or at least, of missing knowledge, but not dependent upon it; for true wonder remains when the mystery is no more, or when the missing knowledge is supplied. It involves ‘an astonishment which does not cease when the novelty wears off’ (Kant, quoted by the British philosopher Ronald Hepburn).
My sense of it is of an emotion by which we are overcome, comparable to the religious experience, on the one hand, or the aesthetic experience, on the other, and it signifies that there is something very special to us about its object, perhaps through what that object makes us feel about our place in the world. I think deep down the feeling is, that we are astonished to be in a world which can contain such a phenomenon – the nightingale singing in the darkness, say – and somehow, the astonishment then reaches out beyond the sense of our place in the world, merely, to the fact that we exist at all. Human existence is taken for granted virtually all the time, of course, it is the greatest of our complacencies, but experiences of wonder can jolt us into the realisation of how remarkable not only our own but all existence actually is – Why anything? Why not nothing? – and an arresting illustration of this was given by Ralph Waldo Emerson at the start of his essay, Nature, with a flight of fancy as charming as it is vivid: ‘If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!’
And yet we do not have to glimpse the full glory of the universe to experience wonder: it can be triggered in our personal lives by art (by classical tragedy especially), and by spiritual epiphanies (rare as hen’s teeth now), and more to the purpose here, by aspects of the natural world. Let me give another example. In June 2004 I took my two children, Flora and Seb, on a half-term holiday to a fairly remote Greek island, Alonissos in the Sporades (my wife Jo had to stay behind at the last minute because her father had fallen dangerously ill). Flora was twelve and Seb was just coming up for his eighth birthday, and one morning the three of us joined a trip on an old-fashioned local boat, a kaïki, in the past used for transport and fishing but now pressed into the service of tourism. We were bound for the even remoter island of Kyra Panagia, to visit its ancient monastery and have lunch, and in the sunshine the silvery-blue Aegean was quite unusually still: by the time we were halfway there the surface was as glassy and flat as I have ever seen it, without a ripple or a wavelet, it was a true mirror-calm over which the kaïki dreamily glided in the heat haze, and the dozen of us who were passengers were relaxed by it to the point of sleepiness, when the water next to the boat exploded. A pod of common dolphins, half a dozen of them, suddenly surged out of the sea to look at us and play around us. Every soul on board cried out in amazement and delight, and as we looked on spellbound, they performed an acrobatic display in and out of the water for three or four minutes, all about the boat. Then they simply disappeared, and the sea was flat as a millpond once again.
The whole company was stunned. It was hard to take in exactly what had happened. We seemed to have been subject to a visitation: these large, strikingly beautiful, fierily energetic creatures had purposely come to see us, out of nowhere, and they seemed to have intelligence, and friendliness, and even an exhilarating sense of fun, and we realised at that moment what increasing numbers of people have realised over the last thirty years or so, from the decks of boats: how singular are the cetaceans – the whales and dolphins – and in particular, how extraordinary they can seem, in their interactions with us. They may be wonder-inducing, above all other animals; and in exploring wonder in nature, they are a good place to start.
The appreciation of their unusual qualities is very recent in the rich industrialised West and represents a fascinating cultural shift, but one not often remarked upon as such, since it is hard to categorise. Under what rubric do we discuss it? Psychology? Zoology? Tourism studies? Whales and dolphins figure strongly in ancient folklore, of course, especially in the legends of peoples who lived near the sea. In Genesis, they were the first animals to be brought forth by the Lord – ‘and God created great whales’ – while for the Greeks, dolphins were among the stars of the natural world, fresco favourites, major mosaic motifs, and the stories of them saving people from the waves figured not only in myths (and on coins) but also in serious history; Herodotus recounts, as something to be believed, the story of Arion the poet, who was tossed overboard by the treacherous sailors of his Corinthian ship and brought to shore by a friendly dolphin. But in the farming and then industrialised culture of modern Europe and America, down the centuries, cetaceans played virtually no part, other than in Herman Melville’s strange and spell-binding Moby-Dick (published in 1851 but not widely read before the 1920s), until a series of events in the post-war years brought them out of obscurity and into a new folklore of our own times.
The first was the vogue for performing dolphin shows which swept the rich world from the early 1960s, inspired by the Hollywood film Flipper and its spin-off TV series; at one time there were no fewer than thirty-six dolphinaria, aquariums with dolphins, in Britain alone (by 1993 they were all gone from the UK, but according to a 2014 report, more than 2,000 dolphins, 227 beluga whales, 52 killer whales, 17 false killer whales, and 37 porpoises were still being held in 343 captive facilities in sixty-three countries – I can’t imagine any of them are happy). The second was the emergence, in the 1970s, of new environmental pressure groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, who began campaigning for an end to the commercial hunting of the great whales, with its egregious cruelty, crying out the archetypal slogan of the modern Green movement: Save the whale! As a result of these events, cetaceans swam into the modern consciousness, and there they have stayed, growing steadily more prominent because of a third development, the emergence from the 1980s onwards of organised whale watching.
The recreational observation of whales, dolphins, and porpoises in their natural habitat is now a substantial activity across the world: the most recent survey estimated that 13 million people took a whale-watching trip in 2008, and my family and I were among them. For after the visitation on the voyage to Kyra Panagia, we all wanted to see as much of cetaceans as we could, so whenever possible, whale watching was included in holidays. Over the years we managed to get close to Dall’s porpoises and gray whales off the coast of Vancouver Island, to humpback whales off Cape Cod (with the spectacular sight of a humpback breaching, leaping clear of the water), to the bottlenose dolphins of Cardigan Bay (with a mother and calf coming close to the boat), and to a pair of spirited and vivacious common dolphins which had taken up residence in a sea loch in the Scottish Highlands; we have also enjoyed briefer glimpses of harbour porpoises and minke whales.
We were thrilled by them all. From the moment we caught sight of them, we were energised and excited, we thought they were special, even though we did not have the remarkable experiences of close contact in the water which people can sometimes be blessed with, and which make them feel that whales and dolphins are different in nature from all other non-human animals, and of a higher order, with jaw-dropping characteristics: not only their complete mastery of another world than ours, but their real wish to interact with us, their seeming intelligence, their playfulness, their friendliness and gentleness, their apparent, occasional singling-out for attention of people who are in some way troubled. To read about this in detail, or to talk about it at length, as I have done with Mark Carwardine, the naturalist and TV presenter who knows more about cetaceans than anyone else in Britain, is to enter a sort of no-man’s-land between slowly developing science and rapidly accumulating anecdote. Formal research is making it increasingly clear that cetaceans are indeed exceptional in many ways: to take but two examples of many, dolphins are now known to possess among their vocalisations ‘signature whistles’, in effect personal names, raising the question of whether they also have self-awareness; while some bowhead whales are now believed to live as long as two hundred years, or even more. But it is the encounters with people over the last thirty years, encounters subject to no experimental protocols but often mere haphazard events, which are generating the real wonder and a new folklore. As a scientist who leads whale-watching trips, Mark is in the middle of it; he follows current research closely and is fully aware of the dangers of anthropomorphising, yet after many years of close observation he is in no doubt, for instance, that dolphins ride the bow-waves of boats, not, as some scientists would still maintain, merely as a way of getting from A to B, but simply for fun.
He wrote the world’s best-selling guide to cetaceans; he is the man who presented the celebrated radio series (and subsequent book) about vanishing wildlife, Last Chance To See with Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (and later reprised it as a television series with Stephen Fry). ‘I’ve run hundreds of trips, to see all sorts of animals all over the world, gorillas, elephants, rhinos, tigers, and they all have a big impact on people,’ he said to me. ‘But what I’ve noticed over the years is that whales and dolphins have a different and a greater impact. It’s not just because I’m biased. I’ve seen it time and time again.’ One of the biggest impacts is when he takes people to the San Jacinto lagoon in Baja California in Mexico, where gray whales come down from the Arctic to give birth to their calves, and where in the past they were slaughtered by whalers. Now the females and their calves come up to whale-watching boats to be stroked; and considering the history of the place, the trust they display sometimes leaves the strokers overwhelmed. ‘People can be completely changed by the experience,’ Mark said.
We did not enjoy this sort of intimacy, myself, my wife Jo, and our children Flora and Seb, and yet the whales and dolphins we did see on our trips undoubtedly filled us with a sense of wonder. When I was first trying to analyse why, I was at something of a loss, but a conversation with Flora, the most enthusiastic whale watcher of us all (who was by now twenty-two), opened doors in my mind. She said: ‘They’re like beings from a different dimension.’ I was much taken by this, and we talked about it further, and in the end I asked her to write her thoughts down so I could remember them.
She wrote:
Why I like whales is something to do with the fact that they are ‘other-worldly’ – manifested in their physical strangeness (i.e. so big, so slow, out of time with the rest of nature) – and almost a throwback to the dinosaurs. Their other-worldliness relativises and undermines our world view – i.e. life is richer/stranger than we remember on a daily basis. There are other hidden dimensions (e.g. the ocean) that are just as much a part of the earth, but which are so forgotten by us on a daily basis, and quite literally, invisible to us, as the deep ocean has no sunlight.
She concluded: ‘So, whales are so magical because when they surface, they offer a physical/visible token of another realm which is veiled from us, but which also comprises part of our planet.’
In other words, they offer mystery; there, is one of wonder’s prime sources.
•
There are a number of triggers for wonder, in the natural world; for example, besides mystery, we may readily observe a couple of specific conditions, diametrically opposed but equally capable of sparking amazement infused with delight, and they are rarity and abundance; yet there are also some aspects of nature which are less obvious, but which, when encountered, can produce wonder at the very existence of the earth and our existence upon it. One of them is simply the age of things: so very much has gone before us that it cannot be justly computed; rather, all that can be registered is the scale of it:
Very old are the woods;
And the buds that break
Out of the brier’s boughs,
When March winds wake,
So old with their beauty are—
Oh, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose.
Walter de la Mare understood it: the extent of All That’s Past. And there is another less familiar facet of nature which can also seem wondrous: its ability to transform. The idea of transformation is one of the most resonant of our imaginings: we are fascinated by people changing identities, by things becoming different things, by frogs which turn into princes. Shakespeare lives on such stories; Ovid’s Metamorphoses was not only a bestseller in the Rome of Augustus, it was probably the most popular book both of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Obviously, there are different directions which transformations can take, including the tragic, the humorous, and the ironical; but it seems to me that the two basic ones are down and up. Down is the transformation of ill-fortune, of being changed from banker to beggar, of being King Lear losing everything; but surely the transformation which most appeals to us is the transformation upwards, when people or creatures or things which are merely mundane become special, or even resplendent. That idea seems to strike a deep chord within us, to touch some primal longing. It is much more than the idea of gaining wealth or status, or even the idea of the ordinary girl who becomes a princess, say; it is something at the heart of myths and religions, including Christianity, the notion that with all our faults, we might aspire, silly though we know the idea is, to perfection. And one spring I gave a lot of thought to this, in trying to understand the effect on me of a particular phenomenon of the natural world: the dawn chorus.
For several weeks I had been trying to finish a long piece of writing, and to do that I had taken to working through the night. If you work through the night you see the dawn. Or rather, you hear it. At eight minutes past four in the morning of 21 May that year, a sound came to my ears; I stopped typing, got up, and went and opened the kitchen door to the back garden. Light was flooding the eastern sky, a great rising tide of pale light, although the surrounding houses and trees were black silhouettes against it; a misty moon still shone; there was no wind, only an absolute stillness; and from the top of a tall copper beech tree two gardens away, liquid and clear on the air, a blackbird was singing.
There was no other sound. The blackbird sang his unending phrases as if the stillness were intended specially for him, for they were floating on the quiet, every one precise, hypnotic in their music and their purity; and then, from a nearby rooftop television aerial, a second blackbird joined in. Shortly after that there was a robin; then a blue tit; then a goldfinch: the dawn chorus had begun.
I do not know – no one is quite certain – exactly why songbirds all sing together at first light and then fall silent (they are likely to be either proclaiming their territories or inviting mates); but I do know that, having gone out to listen to it a dozen times in the weeks which followed, as it got earlier and earlier (until one morning it began at 03.34), it is entrancing. At first I thought it was simply the symphony of birdsong itself which moved me so much, but now I know it is something else as well: its transformative power. For I live in suburbia. I live in a land of neat gardens, estate agents’ boards, car ports, walked dogs, lawnmowers, endlessly similar houses and nothing much happening, a land which no one would ever describe as resplendent. Yet the dawn chorus clothes suburbia in wonder. Like the visits of Father Christmas or Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant, it takes place while most of us are still asleep and so we miss it, and I felt, after those few weeks, as if I had discovered a secret: that in the chorale of birdsong silvering the silence, the stillness and the great bursting dawn overhead, for a brief half-hour even the land of the lawnmower can approach perfection.
But finding wonder in the mundane is exceptional: transformation is indeed required. Finding it in the mysterious, as in the whales and dolphins which come to us from a different dimension, as it were, is much more likely, even though the most notable characteristic of mystery today is how fast it is shrinking. We regret this. Mystery matters to us. Which is curious, for, if we define it as the phenomenon of not knowing, it has in the past been a principal cause of stress, as not knowing is something to which humans temperamentally are not indifferent; it is probably at the basis of religion. The otter does not worry that its river may dry up in a drought, as far as we know. But we worry. What causes that disease? What causes those crops to fail? Will my future be good or bad? Who are we, and why are we here? Once possessed of consciousness, human beings were never able to sit calmly alongside such ignorance, but had to do something about it; and what can you do, other than dream up all-knowing, all-powerful supernatural beings, whom then you may propitiate?
Since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, however, we have been steadily eroding mystery, and now we generally know what causes that disease or causes those crops to wither, if not, alas, what form our future will take. Yet mystery’s retreat from our lives is by no means widely welcomed, for, paradoxically, we seem to be as much attracted by it now as we have been frightened by it in the past, and we regret its disappearance (and you could write a very saleable tome on the Decline of Mystery, with a cover featuring, say, Neil Armstrong’s bulbous boot treading the moon’s mystery down). Now that its terrors are lessened, mystery appears fascinating; it seems to have definite qualities, not least, to appeal to the problem-solving part of our nature, which I suspect goes back to the fifty thousand generations, just as much as the fear of the unknown does. ‘Mystery has energy,’ says the character Conchis in John Fowles’ The Magus. ‘It pours energy into whoever seeks an answer to it. If you disclose the solution to the mystery you are simply depriving the other seekers of an important source of energy.’ It also confers an undoubted allure. Wouldn’t you like to be thought of as mysterious? I know I would (some hope). And so with the natural world.
We are hugely drawn to mysteries in nature. Does the supposedly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker still exist in the wild woods of Arkansas, as the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology so loudly proclaimed in June 2005, to headlines around the world, or does it not? Since no one has been able to repeat the Cornell Lab’s sightings, a decade on, and the greatest American expert in bird identification says the blurred video put forward as conclusive evidence shows a pileated woodpecker, not an ivory bill, the question mark over the claim is very large; but that only enhances the mystery. We are gripped by it. I am gripped by it, anyway. I was completely gripped by the talk I had with one of the Cornell team, Melanie Driscoll, who said to me: ‘I’ve been treated like a fantasist, and I’ve been treated like a rock star, but I know what I saw.’ I have been gripped by such things ever since, as a young man, I first came across a book by a Belgian zoologist which reverberated through my imagination, and does so still to this day.
First published in 1958, it was called On the Track of Unknown Animals and its author, Bernard Heuvelmans, examined the idea that there were still large, wild creatures left to be discovered, and that some of them might be remarkable relicts from the past. Heuvelmans’ book formalised an area of enquiry – an enthusiasm, if you like – which came to be called cryptozoology: the search for animals whose existence has not been proven. Cryptozoology has unfortunately morphed into pseudo-science, fixated as it is with the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti, and the Bigfoot of the American north-west (now generically referred to as ‘cryptids’), not to mention ABCs or alien big cats – seen the Surrey puma lately? Or the Beast of Bodmin? – and indeed, it quickly shades into preoccupation with UFOs and the paranormal, and features prominently in publications such as Fortean Times, specialising in weird news.
So far, so wacky. But Heuvelmans himself was a classically trained zoologist (his doctoral thesis was on the teeth of the aardvark) and his book is a scrupulously sober amassing of information not only on beasts which are formally unknown to science, but also on animals which had been unknown but had been discovered fairly recently, such as the pygmy chimpanzee (the bonobo) and the Komodo dragon, the giant monitor lizard of Indonesia, as well as on creatures which had gone extinct in the recent past, such as the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger. The method is far from fantastical; it is straightforward assessment of evidence in numerous cases, showing that this one had been found, and that one had disappeared, and this other one was perhaps waiting to be discovered. Some of the cases he highlighted were potentially sensational and have greatly excited adventurers; other suggestions were more restrained, and some of them seemed to me plausible.
One such was that of the woolly mammoth, which we generally think of as dying out tens of thousands of years ago, but which we now know (from carbon dating of its remains) survived on Wrangel Island, off the coast of Siberia, until at least 1650 bc. Heuvelmans’ proposition, based on scattered, obscure reports from Russian hunters, was that isolated, relict populations of mammoths might still survive in the taiga, the endless conifer and birch forests of the Siberian mainland. We are far more familiar with the Amazon rainforest, yet the Siberian taiga is bigger, with enormous areas wholly unpenetrated by roads, even today; and I thought when I read his suggestion, and I continue to think: why not?
For in our arrogance we assume we have mastered the natural world; yet its power to surprise us persists. Even though we have substantially shrunk the unknown part of the planet, and mystery with it, I rejoice in the fact that in my lifetime there is still enough of it left to contain creatures of which we have no knowledge, and which are wondrous in their discovery. This is the case with two habitats especially: the remaining rainforests and the deep oceans. In recent years the rainforests of Indochina in particular have been bounteous in yielding up big unknown animals, largely, of course, because war put the jungles off limits for so long to explorers and naturalists. The most spectacular has been the ill-fated Vietnamese rhinoceros, discovered in 1988, poached to extinction by 2010 – nobody knew beforehand there were any rhinos in mainland Indochina at all – but we have also been vouchsafed the saola, or Vu Quang ox, a sort of cross between an antelope and a buffalo with long, backward-sloping horns and a white-striped, mournful-looking face, discovered in 1992, as well as at least three new species of Vietnamese deer. Meanwhile, just since the start of the new millennium, alongside numerous fish and other organisms, two completely new species of whale have swum into our ken (Perrin’s beaked whale and Deraniyagala’s beaked whale), while one previously known only from skeletal remains, the spade-toothed whale, has been seen in the wild for the first time; and there will surely be more.
We may well feel wonder at them. We certainly would were the woolly mammoth to reappear, or the ivory bill. In fact, I am not sure which, in the end, would seem the more wondrous, since although the mammoth might have a prehistoric air, when all is said and done it is more or less just a shaggy version of the Asian elephant, while Campephilus principalis is so dazzling a creature that it was known as the Lord God Bird, as those lucky enough to catch sight of this acme of all woodpeckers sometimes could not refrain from crying out Lord God!
But even creatures still definitely present in the world about us have mystery which may shade into wonder, and one has long possessed my imaginings: the Clifden nonpareil. This is a moth whose name proclaims that it is without equal entirely; and I agree. It is the most magnificent moth to be found in the British Isles. Not only is it enormous, in moth terms, it has another characteristic that sets it quite apart from our other 867 larger moth species: blueness. That hue again! Moths generally favour browns and greys, though sometimes red and yellow and orange and cream, and occasionally green; but apart from the odd fleck, such as in the eyespots of the eyed hawk-moth, blue as a colour is, from the British moth fauna, missing completely.
Yet not from Catocala fraxini. Its other English name is the blue underwing, and when it opens its silver-grey, delicately patterned forewings it discloses underwings (or hindwings) of black, each crossed by broad bands of a stunning smoky lilac. It’s a shock, and that’s the point. There are a dozen or so ‘under-wing’ moths in Britain and all employ the same use of colour as defence-through-startling, in a way I referred to earlier, with the Jersey tiger. The forewings are cryptic, perfectly camouflaged to blend in with a daytime resting place, a stone wall or the bark of a tree, but if a predator such as a bird does notice it, the moth will suddenly snap its forewings open and display an underwing colour flash, bright enough to confuse the bird for that extra second to help it get away.
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.’