7

CAPTIVITY AND FREEDOM

In which our author goes to the zoo, dabbles in ethics, and, thanks to Sir Peter Scott, meets a Very Good Swan

There’s a fracas over the tapir enclosure. Not that the tapir’s taking any notice – he seems so disinclined to do anything he might as well be stuffed. I’ve admired his black and white colouring (evolved as a camouflage tactic), his body (somehow both delicate and lumbering at the same time), and in particular his long, fleshy, prehensile nose, with its mesmerising flexible top lip – so useful for those times you just need to get one more leaf into your mouth. He is a fine and admirable beast, but the fracas distracts me for a second.

The fracas is the responsibility of about twenty black-headed gulls. They are, when the fancy takes them, magnificently acrobatic birds, and their swoops and tumbles are accompanied by a frenzied squawking. Something’s got them excited, but whether their squawks are a result of gullish exuberance or because they’re actually having a barney, it’s difficult to tell. Nevertheless, their display offers momentary distraction from the crazy antics of the tapir. Not that the crazy antics have started yet, but they’re about to, any moment, I can tell.

The tapir is one of nearly six hundred species kept at London Zoo. It’s an impressive list, ranging from corals to gorillas, and encompassing such snappily named beasts as the giant banded tailless whip scorpion (Damon diadema), the scarlet lady cleaner shrimp (Lysmata grabhami) and the giant thorny walkingstick (Heteropteryx dilatata). For all this diversity, though, most visitors are drawn to the glamour species – lions and tigers and bears* and so on – so I follow the crowds towards the gorilla enclosure (or Gorilla Kingdom, as they have it, which does make it sound more enticing for the gorilla).

I have no particular viewpoint on the gorillas.^† They are magnificent, obviously, and while I’m tempted to snark about how much more magnificent they’d be in their natural habitat, that’s the easiest of swipes to take at a situation which, as always, has more nuance and complexity than plain right and wrong.

When it comes to ethical arguments, my logic circuits habitually chase their own tails in an endless effort to reach a definitive conclusion. Animals shouldn’t be kept locked up, but on the other hand these animals are endangered in the wild and the organisation that has them in this enclosure does extraordinary work around the world to help endangered species, but on the other hand surely they need more space to roam, but on the other hand the people charged with their care take great trouble to provide a suitable habitat, and besides, they know much more about that subject than I could ever hope to, but on the other hand don’t they look miserable, all slouchy and glum, but on the other hand that’s lazy anthropomorphism, perhaps it’s just having a bit of a rest, and look at that one, chirpy as all get out, but on the other hand . . . and after a few rounds of this, I end up with about forty-six hands.

The easily disappointed* are quick to find fault with the zoo experience, citing the expense, empty enclosures, and the general failure of the animals to put on a show for them. But my fellow clientele on this bright spring day don’t seem disappointed. There are twenty of them immediately around me, and their noise levels and excitability give the black-headed gulls a run for their money. For a moment I wonder what evolutionary adaptation makes me particularly suited to attracting large groups of small children while walking round zoology-based visitor attractions, but I quickly realise that such things are merely an occupational hazard. In any case, if the gorillas are, for the moment at least, not playing ball, there’s plenty in the behaviour of the children to interest the budding anthropologist. There is, naturally, a fair amount of milling going on, along with more running than their teacher can handle. But four boys stand still next to me, transfixed by the gorilla nearby. It stares vaguely towards us for a few seconds, has a bit of a scratch, turns its head again, then gets on with the fine art of sitting still. A gaggle of starlings hustle around on the floor near it. Like the black-headed gulls, they are interlopers from the wild, free to come and go as they please, unrestrained by cages or clipped wings. But they’re canny blighters, these birds. They know where the free food is. The gorilla, for its part, is monumentally unbothered by them.

If the gorilla is notable for its stillness, the same can’t be said for the boys. Trying to catch its attention, they jump up and down, waving their arms and making ‘oo-oo’ noises. One of them calls out. ‘Hey! Gorilla!’

Nothing doing. The gorilla continues with its mooching, a master of the art, in the face of fierce provocation. I suspect it’s had a lot of practice.

Three of the boys tire of their game soon enough, and dash off to torment a Bactrian camel instead. But the fourth stays for a few seconds, standing still and looking at the gorilla in silence. He seems to be looking at it for the first time. It’s worth looking at, a living statue of dark, bulky nobility. The boy drinks it in.

Then, to nobody in particular, he says, ‘It’s sad’, before dashing off to join his friends.

It’s not clear whether he’s referring to the specific emotional state of that individual gorilla or the prevailing situation worldwide. Either way, his willingness to do a bit more than goad the gorilla into putting on a show gives me a sliver of hope. Better for a child to see a gorilla and feel its sadness than not to see a gorilla at all. And if Gorilla Boy makes my mood a shade more buoyant, it’s upgraded to ‘perky’ by Penguin Girl.

There’s something about penguins humans find irresistible. Perhaps it’s that they stand upright like us; perhaps it’s the impression they give of noble endurance in extreme conditions; or perhaps it’s the contrast between their comical incompetence on land and their mastery underwater.

Whatever the reasons, the penguin beach at London Zoo* is popular with children and adults alike. Its occupants, Humboldt penguins (Spheniscus humboldti), are declining in the wild, their official status Vulnerable. Here, these captive bred birds are safe from the attentions of guano-gatherers, oil spills, seals and sharks. Whether they benefit from the open-mouthed adoration of the paying public is debatable, but they get it anyway. They know how to put on a show, and the penguin beach has been designed to maximise the quality of viewing conditions. You really can get close and examine them. I spend a few minutes admiring their ease, speed and grace in the water. A couple of yards to my right, a small girl does the same. Her mother, behind me, apparently unengaged by the penguins, is chatting to a friend. The girl is unimpressed.

‘Mum.’

Chatting continues unabated.

‘MUM.’

Still nothing.

‘Look! Mum! Look! LOOK!’

Third time’s a charm.

‘What is it, darling?’

‘PENGUINS!’

The mother can barely mask her indifference.

‘Yes. Lovely.’

I’m firmly on the girl’s side, and come within a toucher of turning on the mother. Because yes. Look. Penguins. But I hold my tongue, and the moment passes.

On the one hand it’s dismaying. The mother has paid handsomely for this trip; it seems perverse to ignore one of the main attractions. But then I remind myself that the main thing is they’re there. And even if the girl’s fascination with the penguins is temporary, the image of their tubby black and white bodies is now in her head somewhere, added to the tumbling mass of images and sounds and thoughts and experiences that shape our understanding of the world. Given the ever increasing competition for our attention,* this counts as a victory.

A trip to the zoo remains a popular way to spend a morning. More than 1.25 million people visit London Zoo every year, and on today’s evidence at least 1.249 million of them are under the age of thirteen. Whatever the reasons for their presence – whether it’s a school trip, a way of keeping the kids occupied for a couple of hours while you catch up with a friend, or a genuine interest in conservation – engagement is better than complete unfamiliarity. When you meet an animal, stand close to it, observe it, maybe even interact with it in some way, your connection with it is greater, and it follows that you’re more likely to want to protect it.^†

Zoos have come a long way since the formation of the Zoological Society of London in 1826, and the spread through Europe and America of zoological gardens – intended primarily for scientific study – over the next fifty years. Once they were opened to the public, the remit expanded to entertainment, education and enlightenment (not necessarily in that order), and these priorities didn’t give way to the less human-centric concerns of conservation and ecology until the 1970s. Despite the earnest efforts of zoos to big up their conservation credentials, with captive breeding programmes in zoos and extensive work protecting endangered species in the wild, you don’t have to look far to find people who advocate banning them altogether.

But while my internal debate about the ins and outs of the ethics of zoos veers towards the ‘in favour as long as they’re done right’ camp, I find myself wondering how I’d rationalise their existence to someone entirely unfamiliar with the workings of our planet. Humans are, as far as we know, the only beings in the history of the planet to show concern for the welfare of other species. That they mostly do so only as a reaction to the plight inflicted on those species by other humans is one of those ironies that would make it difficult to explain zoos to a visiting alien. At the heart of this irony is the parallel fact that humans are almost certainly the only species ever to understand the concept of guilt.

These penguins know no other world. They were born and raised in the temperate climate of central London, and are provided with plentiful food and a decent (if not infinite) expanse of water in which to swim. They would, like nearly all their fellow inmates, fail to survive if released. On the whole, they seem, for want of a better word, happy. But who am I to judge?

The girl presses her nose up against the glass, follows the progress of a penguin as it does laps round the pool, gives it a little wave, and says, ‘Bye, penguin.’ Then she scurries off to catch up with her mother.

From afar it looks like geometry, a tessellation of yellow, white and black. Only when you get closer do you see that each triangle has its own identity. They’re the faces of Bewick’s swans – lots of Bewick’s swans – each one in three poses, like a repeating gallery of cygnine mugshots, facing left, right and forwards. There are dates and there are names. Names like Flighty, Forklift, Goblet and, more disturbing, Y-Front and Chrimble.

You see the point of it only if you look closely. This isn’t Warhol for swan faces. All these beak patterns, like fingerprints, are subtly different. One, O’Hara, has a thick band of yellow – the yellow of ripening quinces or silver birch leaves on the turn – running all the way down from the forehead, constrained by the thinnest threads of black; next to it, Cattie has a Rorschach Test bill, black blotches on hi-vis yellow reminding me of a snail in silhouette, antennae standing to attention.* Others, more black than yellow, are lent a glowering look. Infinite variations, bestowing individuality on birds so uniform of plumage.

These thumbnail sketches, pages of them, are in a notebook. It was once owned by Sir Peter Scott – conservationist, artist, Olympic sailer, British skating champion, naval officer, politician, writer, television presenter, founder of one of the leading wildlife charities in the world, and the kind of high achiever you instinctively want to hate, but can’t because it’s abundantly clear he was loved and admired by everyone who came into contact with him.*

I look at the sketches while standing, more or less, where Scott stood when presenting the television programme Look, which brought him and his work to a wider audience in the 1950s. It’s a large room – studio, office and sitting room combined – in Scott’s house in Slimbridge in Gloucestershire. Dominating it is a huge window – ten feet across and eight feet high – through which we can see a lake. And on the lake are birds. A lot of birds. I don’t have a clicker with me for a more accurate count, but I’m guessing three hundred or so. There are tufted duck, pochard, shelduck, pintail, mallard, greylag, teal, wigeon, coots, moorhens, mute swans and Bewick’s swans – and those are just the ones on the water. As we watch, a flock of two hundred lapwings (again, I’m guessing) swarms across the sky; a similar number of dunlin whizz round behind them – a mesmerising, undulating ensemble of striking unanimity of movement; starlings dart about busily; four carrion crows . . .

But you get the idea. There are, as I say, a lot of birds.

Beyond the lake, behind a bank, is an expanse of grassy salt marsh. And beyond the marsh is the River Severn, the Forest of Dean a looming presence in the distance. Scott described the view as ‘a picture of endless beauty’, and I’m not about to disagree with him.

I’m on a guided tour of the house, so, much as I’d like to leaf through the notebook, touching it is off limits. Barbara, our guide, has been friendly but firm. No touching. No leaning. No sitting. No photography. I understand the reasoning – the house has only recently been opened to the public, and the last thing they want is unnecessary breakages. But having been told all the things I’m not allowed to do, I now have an unexpected urge to do each of them, one by one, in alphabetical order.

There are eight of us in the group, shuffling round the house, diligently steering clear of anything that might be damaged. There are designated chairs in each room for those who need a rest – not the comfy armchairs and sofas, worn and used and loved by the Scott family, nor even the 1950s window bench in the kitchen that meant they could watch the activity on the lake while eating their breakfast, but generic wooden ones offering respite to those for whom long periods of standing are problematic. One of our number – game of spirit but frail of body – takes every available opportunity to do so, balancing her sticks between her legs and allowing her body to rest while Barbara tells us about the history of the kitchen table, or the time Prince Philip came to lunch with the Scotts and ended up carving the chicken, or the provenance of the goose egg on the sideboard.

It is hard for her, this tour. I can see it in her every move, the single step up from the entrance hall to the corridor requiring care and the support of her companion, fatigue quickly setting in, pain either ever present or lurking beneath the surface. Watching her, I suddenly become self-consciously aware of my own able-bodiedness. I can go wherever I like, whenever I like. I don’t have to plan ahead, look up accessibility statements, consider every part of the trip, how it will affect me, how debilitating it might all be. Like all privilege, it’s the easiest thing to take for granted. I try to imagine what it would be like if any of it – sight, hearing, walking, anything – were taken away from me.

I fail.

I suspect I would become irascible,* impatient, beset by feelings of impotence, a strong awareness of all the difficulties and injustices of life. But, equally, I would like to think that were my contact with the natural world restricted in any way, I would be able to find it within myself to appreciate what was left, to experience everything available – the view over the garden from the kitchen window, the local park, whatever it might be – even more closely, to be able to savour the small things, the easily overlooked, to take some pleasure from them.

But I just don’t know. You can’t, unless it’s forced on you, unless you have to live with it every day.

Ten yards away, a tufted duck – in the rich velvet brown of its winter plumage – floats across the lake and out of our view. Off to the left, three Bewick’s swans are being harangued by a mute swan, their larger cousin. It chases them away whenever they encroach on its patch in front of the Peng observatory. This seems harsh treatment for birds that have just flown in from the Arctic tundra and are probably in need of a bit of peace and quiet, but no doubt things will settle down soon enough and the swans will see out the winter in the peace and harmony traditional to this part of the world.

Despite the room’s size, any more would be a squeeze. We’re not allowed near the window for fear of disturbing the birds, and the room, like the rest of the house, has been kept more or less as it was when the Scotts lived in it, with chairs and sofas and desks and, most tempting, a pair of binoculars on a tripod. They’re an imposing pair, suited to a naval officer. If I stepped forward a couple of paces and squatted down I could watch the Bewick’s swans through them. Or I could be really naughty and pick up the little telescope on the desk, which once belonged to Thomas Bewick and which Scott was delirious to discover when it came up at auction. But despite the synchronicity this would lend my own personal journey, such things would be a breach of etiquette, trust and the rules of the guided tour. This is just as well, because left to myself I’d run amok. There are bookshelves to explore, a wall and a half of them. A lot of birding and nature books, naturally, but I also discern from my position in front of the fireplace the reassuring and familiar heft of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians – all nine volumes of the 1954 fifth edition. There are gramophone records, too – Mozart and Sibelius, Barbirolli and Menuhin – and any number of whatnots and trinkets dotted about the place. But most of all there is art. Paintings and drawings and sketches.

Scott was self-deprecating about his art, in that particularly English way: ‘I’ll never be a great painter; not even a very good one.’ But to my eyes the painting over the fireplace is at least very good. Four geese, flying. There is a weight to them, an idiomatic expression of their angle of bank, and an evocative quality to the light behind that places you in the scene. And if the orange of three of the geese is on the edge of luridness, a deliberate exaggeration of the effects of the setting sun on the birds’ undercarriage, then that’s nothing to the fact that the fourth goose is blue.

Blue is not a colour associated with geese. In fact, as many people pointed out to him, there are no blue geese. His reply was unvarying.

‘Ah, but don’t you wish there were?’

This combination of practicality and imagination – presumably the result of having an explorer father and sculptor mother – made Scott ideally suited for conservation. He saw the problems, and didn’t hesitate to implement solutions.

And he knew his geese.

It was to Slimbridge that Scott came in 1945, fresh from distinguished war service as a naval officer, in search of the lesser white-fronted goose, a bird that at the time had been recorded just once in Britain. The skills required to separate this bird from its close relative the white-fronted goose* are considerable – a matter of being able to spot a yellow eye ring at five hundred paces, and other similar subtleties, all of them befuddling even to the initiated.

Scott’s credentials in that department were impeccable. A fair chunk of his Cambridge undergraduate career had been spent shooting wildfowl from the back of a punt, and he had also made trips to the great plains of Hungary and the Caspian steppes in fruitless pursuit of red-breasted geese. Given that his main preoccupation at the time seems to have been blasting these birds out of the air, you would have got long odds against his becoming the pre-eminent conservationist of his age. His youthful relationship with wildfowl was straightforward – he saw no contradiction between his love of the living birds and wanting to kill them. It was man’s primeval instinct and so on. But people change, attitudes evolve, and by the time of his 1945 visit his motives were entirely benevolent.

He saw the lesser white-fronted geese. Of course he did. He was, like his father, a man of action and achievement. But the trip had a more enduring effect. He decided there and then that Slimbridge would become not only his home, but the home of what would turn into one of the leading players in worldwide conservation. In 1946, the Severn Wildfowl Trust – now the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, or WWT – was formed.* As well as its primary goals of scientific study and conservation, Scott added a third: it would be open to the public. For an organisation of this type, this was a revolutionary move. Zoos were one thing, but the intention at Slimbridge was to show people the glories of wild birds alongside a collection of more exotic, captive birds. It’s a formula that has proved seductive to this day.

The basis of the collection came from Scott’s friend Gavin Maxwell, at that time running a shark-fishing business in Scotland, but later famous for his otter habit and resulting book, Ring of Bright Water. He was keen to find a taker for his collection of about fifty geese, so this was one of those rare occasions when mutual needs are satisfied with minimum fuss.

An early addition to the collection was a pair of endangered nene^† geese from Hawaii. And as I leave the tour of the cottage and make my way out onto the reserve, it’s a nene goose that tries to entangle itself in my flappy feet.

Attractive bird, the nene. Not massive for a goose, with plainish buff-and-black colouring given added interest by a deeply furrowed neck. The temptation to give this fabric-like plumage a little ruffle is overwhelming, but I suspect this would be frowned on, not least by the nene itself.

When Scott took delivery of his nenes there were fewer than fifty of them in the world. Endemic to Hawaii, the bird suffered the usual depredations of any faced with new threats. Spend thousands of years with no predators, and the sudden appearance of mongooses and cats and suchlike presents quite the survival conundrum. It’s fair to say the nene might now be extinct but for the success of Scott’s captive breeding programme.

This one, now walking expectantly a yard or two ahead of me, has a busy feel to it. Its call – from which it gets its name – is quiet but assertive. It feels as if it’s saying, ‘You did know that you can buy bird seed at reception for £2.50 a bag, didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU? Go back and get some NOW.’ Cruel to the core of my being, I spurn its advances.

A walk through the wildfowl collection at any of the WWT’s twelve reserves would be enough to endear anyone to wildfowl. Here you will find exotic species from all over the world. In fact, you won’t just find them – you’ll be hard pushed not to trip over them, so inured are they to the presence of humans. My first visit here was injected with a bit of twilight excitement when a pair of mute swans took it on themselves to encourage me towards the exit with hisses and clicks.

Some of the birds are endangered in the wild, and there are information boards everywhere giving details of their status, habitat and voting intentions. Others aren’t endangered at all, but I’m never going to pass up an opportunity to see a goldeneye or smew up close.

The seasoned birder walks past these birds, dismissing them for the simple reason that they’re captive. I’d argue that while they might have their wings clipped, rendering them unable to achieve more than the most desultory attempt at flying, they’re still birds, and therefore by definition things of beauty and fascination. But I know what the birders mean. The thrill of seeing an animal in the wild is incomparable. That primeval instinct the eighteen-year-old Peter Scott was so keen on still pertains, even if we’ve largely swapped shotgun for binoculars or camera. Offer a birder the briefest glimpse of a bittern, skulking in the depths of the reed bed, versus a sit-down meeting with one of the tamer-than-tame eiders floating about the place doing their Frankie Howerd impersonations, and they’ll pick the bittern every time.

I understand what the WWT have done here, and I appreciate it. Slimbridge is cannily laid out. There are play areas and an outdoor cafe and a small not-much-adventure playground. And if, while they’re adventuring and playing, children should happen to be approached by an inquisitive mallard then so much the better. And to get to them you have to walk through the birds. It’s a kind of nature education by stealth. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll be inspired by this close contact with the birds to head out to one of the hides and sit freezing their nadgers off in the hope of seeing a distant stonechat. It’s a tough world out there, and it’s best to learn young.

I make my way through the captive collection, savouring the vivid pink of a gaggle of flamingos, communing briefly with a petulant mallard, admiring the opportunism of a bunch of starlings – wild birds profiting from the abundance of free food. I run into the woman with the sticks, now warmly ensconced under a blanket in a wheelchair, trundling slowly round the reserve, chatting to her companion over her shoulder. She recognises me, smiles, and in tacit agreement we go our separate ways before a conversation can break out.

My destination is the Peng observatory. Carpeted, centrally heated, and just yards from the same bustle of activity on the Rushy lake we witnessed from Scott’s sitting room round the corner, it offers a birdwatching experience of unaccustomed comfort. Here you can sit in warmth while swans and geese and ducks disport themselves just yards away.

Or you can be diverted, as I am, by a dead pheasant, lying on its back near the window, wings splayed. Its throat is ripped open, a violent crimson gash against the softness of its plumage. A lesser black-backed gull is pecking at it, making the most of the opportunity. This little Herzogian scene of death and violence is ignored by all the other birds, which go about their business like commuters ignoring a homeless person.

Two Bewick’s swans float across, taking advantage of their antagonist’s temporary absence. They are notably elegant birds, slender of neck and pristine of plumage. One of them heaves itself up onto an islet a few yards away, and I’m afforded a good look at its identifying leg ring. I tilt my head to check. ZBN.

There’s a large touchscreen in the corner. Swan information at your fingertips. My experience of these things doesn’t give me much hope, the cumulative effect of dozens of sticky fingers most often rendering them temperamental at best.

But I’m in luck. The screen works perfectly, and you can enter a bird’s ring information and find out all about it.

Z. B. N.

Bingo.

The information comes up. I read it, turn to look at the swan, look back at the screen, and finally look at the swan again, suddenly more attached to it than I could have imagined.

This swan, a male, has been given the name By Brook. He weighs 6.5 kilograms, he is eighteen years old, and in his lifetime he has travelled 90,000 miles.

Ninety. Thousand.

There are birds that travel further. I know that. The Arctic tern takes the prize – 12,000 miles or more, from north to south, then back again, every year, in pursuit of perpetual summer. And there are older birds, like the Manx shearwater that was ringed as an adult in 1957 on Bardsey Island and retrapped nearly fifty-one years later.

Eighteen is old for a Bewick’s swan. The oldest recorded was twenty-four years old. And now I think of those eighteen return trips, hazardous journeys from Gloucestershire to the Russian tundra, returning to the same place each time. It’s impossible not to wonder how many more he’ll manage, when it will all become too much, when he’ll no longer have the energy to heave his bulky body all the way there, will finally think whatever the Bewick’s swan equivalent is of ‘Fuck it, you know what? That’s enough.’

And it’s also impossible, as I look at his bill pattern, trying to memorise it so I’ll remember him, not to think of By Brook as a person, almost a friend.

And that is how Peter Scott saw them. They came back every year, and he stood at his easel, painting them. And then one year he noticed the differences in beak patterns, and he and his wife and children gave them names like Y-Front and Chrimble, and now the staff at Slimbridge follow their lead and know all the birds by their facial tessellation, give them names,* and greet them like old friends on their annual return, and it is a fine and heart-warming thing.

Another swan hobbles up to join By Brook on the islet. I look at the ring. 915.

Allington. Male. One year old. Parents: By Brook and Keynell.

I sit and I look at the father and son, and I have a little moment, a silly moment of sentimentality and anthropomorphism, there on the folding seat in the empty observatory, thinking of journeys and parenthood and the unfathomable wonder of life.

Scott’s last painting,^† on display on an easel in his studio, was an example of what he referred to as ‘SFS’ (Standard Formula Scotts). Ducks and geese coming in to land on water. Clouds above, reeds below, silhouetted birds all around.

But there is one difference. In the background there are buildings. Blocks of flats, arranged in a pattern that is even now, with all its additions, recognisable as a London skyline. The idea of a fullblown nature reserve close to the centre of London might seem absurd, but this was his vision, and he had a specific site in mind: the four reservoirs at Barn Elms, in Barnes, which were about to be decommissioned.

Approaches were made, and soon he received a call from Thames Water.

‘Ah, Sir Peter, I understand you want to buy some of our reservoirs?’

‘No. I want you to give them to me.’

He was a man to be reckoned with.

The ensuing partnership between Thames Water and the WWT saw the repurposing of the reservoirs, and the eventual opening of the London Wetland Centre, in 2000, eleven years after Scott’s death.

It’s to Barnes I go early every spring, to see the newly arrived sand martins; it’s to Barnes I take any small child* who comes across my radar, to watch the feeding of the short-clawed otters that are the centre’s pride and joy; and it’s to Barnes I go in winter if I want to see a bittern.

Fifty years ago you wouldn’t have seen a bittern in Barnes – nor, really, anywhere much else. They were close to extinction in the UK.^† But conservation can work wonders, and the re-establishment of fens and marshes and reed beds means their population, while still small, is now relatively stable. And most winters, once the breeding season’s done, a couple of them spend their downtime at Barnes.

How to see a bittern: find a place where there has been a recent sighting; sit; wait.

It’s not easy. Their streaked plumage looks like a reed bed, and that’s exactly the kind of habitat they like to skulk in. It is possible to sit twenty yards from one and not know it’s there. And sometimes they refuse to come out. A good way of insuring against disappointment is to set low expectations. So I go into the hide resolutely prepared not to see a bittern.

The hide is empty, which, without wishing to throw shade at my fellow humans, is how I prefer it. I’ve had many pleasant encounters in wildlife hides. Temporary friendships have been forged, information shared. I have learned a lot. But sometimes all you want is solitude. And in that solitude, when all the elements are in alignment, a fine thing can happen.

I don’t have a single word for it, but in my head it is this: the particular calmness engendered by sitting alone in a bird hide, looking out on an expanse of water on which nothing particular is happening but everything is happening – the fossicking of a snipe, the dabbling of a shoveler, the flitting of a loose group of starlings, the serene floating of a pintail, whatever it happens to be on that occasion – and not focusing on one element in particular, but letting the entirety of the scene wash over you and seep into your consciousness until the mind, at first so active and distracted, is becalmed, and your breathing slows and soon the nothing of it becomes everything and you slough off the cares and worries of everyday life and just for a bit all is well.

Sometimes you focus on the activity of a single bird – that little grebe, say, floating insouciantly, then diving with a little jump and coming up thirty seconds later, twenty yards to the left of where you thought it would. Or you regard it as a game of Where’s Wally?, scouring the mudflats for the jack snipe someone saw earlier that morning. Or you just sit and allow the whole scene to wash over you, bathing in its peaceful glow.

And sometimes, just occasionally and only if you are in the right place, you might catch a glimpse of an otter, an actual wild otter, not the tame ones that come out at feeding time because they know which side their bread is buttered, but a wild one that has writhed and wriggled its way to the water’s edge just to be with you.

Or that’s what it feels like, anyway.

Water is, I think, an important component of this particular piece of mind-resting. Everything is 10 per cent better by water. We can theorise as to why exactly this is – whether it taps into our own composition, or whether it’s to do with the calming influence of water’s myriad rhythms and shapes, or any one of another thousand reasons or a combination of them all – but whatever the reasons, I regard it as fact.

No doubt there’s a word in German for this feeling, engendered by this particular situation. You might call it ‘mindfulness’, if you’re so inclined. A specific kind of mindfulness.

Birdfulness, maybe.

It doesn’t always work. It’s all very well wafting around the countryside saying ‘Hello, birds; hello, sky’ but we can’t expect nature to make everything right just like that. And nor should we imagine it’s a failsafe. That places too much responsibility on it, too much pressure. Sometimes your mind isn’t in that place. But today it is.

Ten minutes into this visit, I have reached a state of 38 per cent birdfulness. I wonder idly if the reported bittern is around.

And now, as if conjured by the thought, it’s there, morphed from the reeds themselves, treading gingerly on the ice, head forward, thick neck slung low. A most unbirdlike bird in many ways. An awkward, streaky tube of strangeness – the product of a margin doodle.

It gives me just five minutes before sloping back into the depths. Five minutes of the deepest satisfaction, during which I imagine Peter Scott’s delight that his fantasy project has yielded such riches.

Birdfulness level: 100 per cent.

Another Barnes visit. A different hide.

A small gaggle of birders sits in calm contemplation of a peaceful grazing marsh. It is undemonstratively teeming with bird life.

I am one of the gaggle. My son Oliver – submitting willingly to birding indoctrination – is another.

We’re enjoying the swoopings of the sand martins bringing food to their chicks in the holes in the sand bank to our right. Oliver identifies a pochard from the loose raft of ducks floating in the middle distance, and I near as dammit say out loud, ‘That’s my boy.’

Nothing is happening; everything is happening.

Behind us, a quiet thud, dully resonant on the hide’s wooden floor.

He’s sixtyish, white, ruddy-faced. On another occasion I could imagine exchanging birding pleasantries with him. But not today.

Today he is engaged in mortal combat with a telescope and its tripod. It is clearly new and clearly expensive, and he is clearly having one of those days.

It takes an act of will not to turn and stare. We scan the grazing marsh with unnatural intensity, aware of the wrestling match playing out behind us, but determinedly admiring the acrobatics of lapwings, the serene floatings of wigeon, the prehistoric legginess of herons. The man’s struggle starts as background noise to this tranquil scene.

– click thud clunk bugger scrape rattle clank sodding thing will you just bloody well shuffle clink thlunk bollocks –

A little egret takes off, Persil-white stark against the drab marsh behind, wings languid, legs trailing.

– smiffle clump thwack THUDDDDDD –

An instant of silence containing all the suppressed energy of one man’s frustration, its intensity signalling the strength of the outburst to come.

‘FUUUUUUUUUUUCK! YOU FUCKING CUUUUUUUUUUUUUNT!’

Oliver is twelve. He has never heard those words.*

He has now.

The words ring round the hide, sinking into the bare wood. They’re in the building’s fabric now. Whenever I visit this spot, I will hear their echo. It’s safe to say they’re not exactly in the spirit engendered by Sir Peter Scott, and I imagine his brow furrowing in disappointment and consternation at their use – not particularly because of the choice of words, but because their sheer volume is likely to disturb the birds.

There is a peculiarly British scene at play here. The suppressed rage, the infuriated outburst at an inanimate object, the decibel level worthy of a Canada goose in full spate – all point to a particular form of suppressed emotion. Yet his outburst is met by a conspiracy of silence from the other occupants of the hide. There might be shock, disapproval, sympathy, a mixture of reactions. Perhaps, like me, they recognise how easily it might have been them doing the swearing.

While his mumblings were background material, it was possible to ignore him.

Not any more.

I turn my head. He meets my eye, the simmering fury momentarily under control. By his feet, the telescope and tripod remain tragically unconjoined. I want to offer help, maybe a word of sympathy, but something about the look in his eye warns me off. He’s not ready. Not yet. And he has a weapon.

It would take a hard heart not to have some sympathy; equally, it would take the nature of a saint not to stifle an internal laugh. In my case it’s not a laugh of mockery – not entirely, at least. Because I know this fury, the unquenchable rage reserved for recalcitrant inanimate objects. I have felt it, and expressed it. I like to think it has calmed down over the years, and certainly it rears its head less often since the calming influence of parenthood.* But its potential remains.

I look out at the grazing marsh again. The birds go about their business as usual, unaware of the human drama afoot.

I want to beckon the man across, invite him to forget about the telescope and tripod, show him the pintail that has just flown onto the marsh, help him remember why he’s here.

But then I remember I’m British, silence my inner busybody, and mind my own business. We leave the hide, and I hope against hope that his fury will be assuaged by a few minutes of birdfulness.

* There are no bears at London Zoo, which is probably good for the bears, but not so good for my analogy.

^† I do, however, take great pleasure in the knowledge that their scientific name, Gorilla gorilla gorilla, is one of the very few tautonymic trinomials – scientific names where all three words are the same. Other examples are Bufo bufo bufo (European toad), Giraffa giraffa giraffa (South African giraffe), and, superbly, Francolinus francolinus francolinus (western black francolin).

* You’ll find plenty of that abundant human subset on TripAdvisor.

* Which, because of reasons, we now have to call ZSL or something.

* At this point you might think I’m going to have a pop at screens. I’m not. Screens are fine. I love screens. I’ve learned new things, met new people, had experiences I wouldn’t have had without screens. But, like chocolate, alcohol and buying books you’ll never have time to read, you can have too much of a good thing.

^† The same goes for plants, by the way, as anyone who witnessed my fury when a stand of relatively scrubby trees down the road was cut down for a new development will understand.

* You, no doubt, would see something different, which is kind of the point.

* He was, of course, the son of Robert Falcon Scott – Scott of the Antarctic – his mother Kathleen was an eminent sculptor, and his godfather J. M. Barrie. Anything else? Oh yes, his first wife was Elizabeth Jane Howard, who went on to be a successful novelist (The Cazalet Chronicles). And the main protagonist in Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose was unloosely based on Scott. I think that’s the lot. For the moment.

* Yes, even more so.

* In both cases, the ‘front’ refers not to the chestal area but to the forehead – knowledge I discovered only after several confused hours in muddy fields and bird hides wondering why the birds’ ‘fronts’ were a sort of muddy beige streaked with black.

* One of its early supporters was George Bernard Shaw, then ninety-one, who wrote a postcard to Scott: ‘I have sent in the documents and am now, I presume, a wildfowl.’

^† Pronounced ‘Nay-nay’, and not to be confused with the identically spelled valley in the east of England where, confusingly, Scott lived before moving to Slimbridge.

* There’s a distinct tendency towards Game of Thrones names, I notice.

^† In the bottom corner, under his signature, you can just read the words ‘Finishing touches Keith Shackleton September 1989’.

* Some of them are small children in spirit only, but the principle remains the same.

^† Having recovered, you’ll remember, from actual extinction as a British breeding bird in the nineteenth century. It’s a topsy-turvy business being a British bittern, but let’s hope the curve is continually upward from here.

* Allow me this small fiction in the interest of storytelling.

* My family, reading this, is no doubt stifling snorts of laughter.