WE SPEND over a third of our lives with our eyes shut as we sleep; and, logically, being diurnal creatures by nature, most of this shut-eye is taken during the hours of darkness. This means that by the simple act of changing your activity pattern, you can open up a whole new world of experiences, a parallel world superimposed over the topography of a landscape that is more familiar. It’s a real frontier to be pushed at, an opportunity that should be irresistible to the inner adventurer; it’s a time to push your own physiological boundaries as well as to conquer some intellectual and physical challenges. The potential for adventure is huge. Those eight hours a day are there for the taking.
A stroll at night, even in the built-up confines of the city, can open up a new, fresh world. Simply being on your own, away from the crushing confines of the rest of our species, can release us, so turn off your phone, tear yourself away from the mesmeric trappings of modern life, and step out into the welcoming, exhilarating blackness of the night. I say blackness, but it isn’t really.
To experience the dark – I mean real, complete, utter nudity of light, where not a photon can find you – you have to be underground in a cave system or ten thousand metres below the ocean’s surface in the Mariana Trench, and even here creatures exist that mess with your senses – oddball life forms, each owners of their own light-producing technologies.
To be underground or that deep underwater is not a normal place for a human; we are, quite literally, out of our depth. Such places are properly scary to me. I’ve been four kilometres underground in a cave system, with no lights; I’ve even dived in them. Trust me, and I’m not afraid to say it, these are places darker than your imagination. Even the fact that you might be imagining them now requires you to illuminate them in your mind’s eye. I’m talking about total darkness, not a glimmer, not a single photon of hope. My fear of these places comes from a complete and utter reliance on our own cleverness, our own technology and life-support systems in order to be able to visually perceive them.
No, the dark I really want to explore is the accessible one that few of us deliberately go out of our way to experience – the night, the non-dark. It’s a time in the daily cycle which, at best, we reluctantly tolerate, when we’re walking home from the pub or dashing between the front door and the car.
Out there, beyond the arc of the streetlamp and the hypnotising artificial glow of seductive screen, one that is persistently pedalling counterfeit self-improvement and phoney escapism, lies a liminal, alternative world of new experiences. It’s a calming walk into the wild of your inner turmoil. Disconnected from the source, these spectres of artifice fade away in the face of what is real. A walk that takes us beyond what is familiar and into the present in a way that is profound. It tests our senses.
Dance with your demons – the fear of the night
The rasping, dissonant scratch of its fur as it slid along the skirting board towards my bed woke me with a start. Quivering beneath the duvet, I could distinctly hear the hollow tap, tap, tapping of its curled nails on the painted wood draw closer. A metronomic counting of seconds before it got to me. It materialised out of the moon shadows, a spidery form, misshapen limbs scampering and lurching towards me… those bony fingers. Tap, tap tapping into my psyche.
As far as I know, I’m the only naturalist to get the night frights around one of the rarest and most threatened lemurs. I’ll qualify that before you lose faith in me. I was afraid of aye-ayes.
It was probably a half-watched late-evening documentary while I was less than awake that started my irrational fear of this Madagascan rarity. My imagination would take hold and I would turn the rustle of a mouse in the loft space above my head, the shadows playing on my wall and the crumpled, discarded clothing on my bedroom floor into demons. The problem with a fear of the dark is that it isn’t the dark we’re afraid of at all; it’s what the darkness may hide.
I have since spent a night alone in the Madagascan forest, I have faced my childhood nocturnal demon. I awoke to it pattering through the branches and to its eerie mechanical ticking and clicking as it percussively foraged, tapping the branches in search of the hollows and burrow chambers of insect grubs beneath, acoustically sounding them out, before winkling them out with that same peculiar, slimmer-than-a-pencil bony middle finger. Facing fear is what it’s all about. Pretty quickly I realised that my aye-aye, although looking very much like a harbinger of all sorts of bad news, was a pretty eccentric and huffy, harrumphing character of the Madagascan night; an endearing and highly endangered unique take on an ecological niche normally taken by woodpeckers. Only these birds never got a zygodactyl toe-hold on Madagascar, so the lemurs got in there first.
An interesting aside to this is that while I was getting to know the aye-aye, I discovered that my childhood fear of this creature, while being completely irrational, was not something so odd to the Malagasy people. Who, it turned out, saw the aye-aye as an animal of ill-omen, a creature of the spirit world, one that was in their language fady.
It’s fair to say that quite a lot of us are afraid of the dark, and with good reason. We’re not really designed for it. We are, after all, visual creatures who need light for our eyes to work, and seeing is our primary sense. We need it to make sense of our immediate surroundings. When the light is turned off, or, since it is the sun we’re talking about, when we’re slowly rolled away from it, we become less functional. Sensorially deprived, understandably we start to feel vulnerable. This vulnerability was probably originally rooted in simple survival. At night, those creatures over which we would have held dominion by day suddenly become our retaliating masters. Many animals without the compromised visual perception we have, and with other super-senses, now would hold the whip hand. The hunter becomes the hunted, the table has turned. Crippled by the thickness of the night, we freeze, retreat, hide. This is fear of the dark at its most rational. In a paper published in 2011, one thousand lion attacks on humans between 1988 and 2009 were analysed in relation to the time of day the attacks occurred. The results are certainly enough to make you think twice about being active after dark: 60 per cent of these sometimes fatal encounters occurred between 6 and 9.45 p.m. If you live in Tanzania, you have good reason to be much more cautious after dark. So, despite evolutionarily climbing down from the trees and becoming clever primates, led more by our intellect than by our innate instincts, it seems that the second the light goes out, the candle is snuffed or the switch is flicked, some of us immediately revert to our primal state. Our wild self.
The irony isn’t lost on me that now I’m going to encourage you to take a step into the dark and, for most reading this, that’ll be into a land that is missing its big predators, which are, in many cases, the ultimate goal of rewilding. However, many of us still need the ‘fear’; it’s a cerebral requisite. We need to be scared of something so, while once this reaction was rational, in our modern world, for most of us at least, we demonise other creatures, people, spectres, and replace the real with the products of our imagination.
The best way to conquer this nyctophobia, as with any fear, is to work your way through it, to face the very thing that challenges you. You need to confront your aye-aye, whatever that may be. You’ll find a walk at night is not only liberating, but opens up many other opportunities and benefits to you as a rewilding soul. I appreciate there is often a ‘human element’ to this fear of the dark. Many of us simply can’t face the media-enhanced risk of meeting a less-than-savoury member of our own species. So with this in mind, it’s probably best to start in an environment that feels ‘safe’ in this sense. You’ll quickly find your enhanced perceptive abilities will empower you to own the night and eliminate many of these fears too.
Why it’s good to go out at night
Our modern existence means that what was once a time of reflection, a time for the processing of the day’s events, whether at school or at work, is no longer sacred. In our ever-switched-on life, an electronically generated ‘ping’ punches through all. Where once the nine to five meant that we could partition and separate our working lives, whether professional or educative, from our personal existence, now we are bombarded with electronic detritus. We inhabit a place of incessant communication; phones, no longer tethered to walls, follow us, a phone book of ‘friends’ you’ve never met stalks you from the shadows of your pocket. E-mails can get us at any hour, we live in constant fear of missing something; Facebooking, tweeting, 140-character digital epistles can sidetrack our thoughts and push us out of the moment any time we might try and have one. Our modern world effortlessly and rudely pushes into the dark hours from dusk to dawn. We can be inconveniently ‘jumped’ by our gadgets of convenience, ambushed into believing that a response is demanded right now. Ever desperate to get ahead, we live in fear of missing out, fear of abandonment. A new-world fear in the night?
Our digital persona encroaches on what was once a very personal time, a time of recuperation and reflection, a place for cognitive processing. That fact alone is a good reason to go out at night.
Being able to night walk, to step into the cool air, allows us to take back something that is rightfully ours. At its most fundamental, it’s calming, a moment to decode and regain clarity, but it is also something empowering; it’s a survival tactic. To face and overcome what you fear is one of the primeval thrills, a pragmatic matter of being able to deal with the demons in case you ever get caught out in the dark, something I’ve heard hill walkers term ‘benightment’. But it also enriches our understanding of our habitats and environs. Even the most familiar daily constitutionals acquire another meaning when they are taken after dark, and to understand this and get a true sense of place is essential.
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Recently, I reached the summit of Mount Kinabalu in Borneo and while it’s probably one of the most accessible and highly visited of the world’s big mountains, what made it so unique and special for me was the fact that I got to the top in the dark. Admittedly, I wasn’t alone, I was with a motley assortment of ages all scrambling up the sometimes glassy-smooth granodiorite slopes to get to the summit before sun-up. It was noisy; there was a cacophony of clinking kit, rustling waterproofs and energy-bar wrappers as well as the talking, laughing, puffing and panting that goes with large herds of humans. Setting off from the rest house at around one o’clock in the morning seemed at one with the sacred mountain, although the head torches that were insisted upon for safety were not. Though I tried to avoid the glare of LED headlamps that nearly everyone was wearing, I was often left dazzled and, because of the pace of the climb, I found myself falling back on the necessity of using my own. In between the incessant blindings by those with poor headlamp etiquette, I did at least get to experience the celestially abundant sky, its clarity and contrast, the falling moonlight casting pools and saturating fissures, all unlike any experience I have had at home. And, of course, the whole point of leaving at that god-awful hour was to get to the summit, all 4,095 metres of it, to watch the sunrise over Borneo.
It reminded me of the joys of being out at night. You really don’t have to go to the ends of the Earth or indeed the peaks of its mountains to experience the same magic. Experiencing the moonlight playing on a puddled rut, gleaming on the frosted rind of a winter’s meadow or casting bewitching shadows behind a twisted thorn is a very rare and wondrous thing – it’s there all the time, but it’s just something few of us actually go out of our way to experience.
Try it and you will find it’s like discovering a different side to a best friend. A walk through the moonshine and shadows makes even the most familiar and mundane magical. A little extra bonus is that in the temperate regions where winter days draw short, sometimes we feel a rush to get back to the hearth, to return at a pace, running ahead of the rapidly falling night, tripping over ourselves to avoid the enveloping dusk. Why? Walk confidently in the face of nightfall. If this is something new to you, here are a few basics to ease you in safely. If you are armed with knowledge and a bit of preparation, a night walk is one of the most thrilling, soulful and easy-to-achieve everyday adventures.
How to moonwalk
The earth has turned again, we’ve rolled away from day, the last light has faded in the west, things have got darker, and we’ve made the transition to the shadowy side of things. So let’s get you out of the door. The first thing most of us who don’t live in the perpetual daylight of the city do is grab a torch. This dependence on our technological salvation is what we touched on before. As a species we’ve managed to stretch the day into night, to invade the dark sanctuary with the arc of our artificial illuminations. Darkness is a modern inconvenience that we’ve learned to modify; we tackle night armed with Tungsten, Halogen and Fire, our own personal constellations and non-lunula light. There is a case for artificial light when exploring the night but first let’s go native.
It may come as a surprise to you but at least on some nights we all have a degree of night vision, and while you’ll have to give up on stimulating the colour-sensitive cones in your retina, you mustn’t forget the special qualities of your rods. They come into play when high sensitivity is required.
Night-time is never a lacking-of-light time. For a start, there is the crepuscular light of dawn and dusk: on a clear night, the sun’s fingers take a surprisingly long time to let go of the day and to fade to black, and even then it has never truly disappeared. There is always a degree of lunar luminosity to be had. Even if it is being reflected off the moon, the sun still has an influence of some kind, albeit minimal on a new moon. When there is a full moon, that silvery disk is still reflecting 7 per cent of the sun’s light down to us, a light that mainly peaks at the blue end of the spectrum. This provides us visual monkeys with plenty to work with. Eyes can still perceive this light, even if it isn’t flooding our visual cortex with information in the same way as it does in the day-time. Night vision sounds like another fanciful super-human quality, yet we all have the ability to pull back that velveteen veil that descends on the last curtain call of dusk.
The iris of the human eye, the coloured bit, works like the diaphragm of a camera and is controlled by paired muscles. These cause the iris to contract or dilate, and this in turn controls the amount of light getting through to the retina. So when the light is bright, the iris contracts and the pupil, the window through which the light has to pass, gets smaller. However, at night the eye needs as much light as it can get; your pupillary window is thrown wide open, which, in a young person (the ability and strength of the muscles that do this wears off over time), means a diameter of seven millimetres. I say ‘thrown’ – this is misleading; it suggests an instantaneous reaction, and you will shortly see why it is relevant to your night vision. It takes about fifteen minutes for a pupil to dilate to its maximum aperture. That’s fifteen minutes after sunset – or, indeed, any other light stimulus, be it torch, headlight, streetlight or lamp – for your eye to let in its maximum amount of light, and another half an hour or more for your retinal cells to adjust. Remember the detailed explanation where I blinded you with science? That stuff about photoisomerisation, retinal and ‘dark adaptation’? Well, this is where it becomes relevant: that half-hour or so is the amount of time the free rhodopsins in your rods take to reset themselves, to recombine with unaltered retinol. Your cones are resetting too and, much faster, but because they will not be turned on by the low light levels you’re experiencing at night, they’re as good as useless.
So, in total, that’s around forty-five minutes – three quarters of an hour in order for your eye to work at its most efficient at low-light levels.
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The first step to better night vision and to releasing your full potential is to starve your eye of artificial light. My favourite way to do this is to simply ride the dusk, to allow the night to fall on me. This is what is natural, this is what we evolved to do. In nature, lights rarely just come on. The slow and gradual switch from cone-led coloured vision to black-and-white tonal sensitivity of the rods is a gentle and gradual affair, a secret transition to night mode. This feathering into night is what I had done, unwittingly, prior to meeting up with my young night-walking disciples mentioned at the beginning of the previous chapter. The problem was that they had not.
The same issue applies if you are going out later, whether you’ve been driving, been indoors, or, indeed, have looked into a torch. Just a moment of exposure to any source of bright light and your eye is reset to default, your cones are stimulated and respond fast, the iris shuts down, the rods are swamped and your night vision is once again temporarily compromised. Night vision is therefore a fragile thing, slow to develop and yet speedily lost.
The reason the majority of us are not confident at striding out into the night is that few of us have even experienced that full nocturnal capability of our eyes.
It’s a sensory handicap we probably unwittingly have given ourselves, from the time we first huddled around a fire to escape and diffract the terrors of the night. Since the moment we discovered fire, humans have been stranded, isolated from the night, swimming around nervously in their own pool of light, peering into the periphery of the penumbra of the darkness – which, if we were to pluck up the courage to turn that light off or blow it out – would reveal a world that would seem a little less scary.
There is no short cut. However you might want to experience the night, you have to give yourself a period to condition your eyes. This is something I learned, partly by chance, the hard way.
One lesson that sticks with me is a fairly spectacular accident that involved my heading out into the woods to watch a family of foxes with cubs. Setting off for my high seat in a rush, I wanted to make the most of the dark hours before my curfew; it was a school night and I had to be back at home before it was too late. Without wishing to seem a bit long-in-the-tooth, these were the days before efficient batteries or, indeed, bright, portable lights such as we’re blessed with today. I got to my high seat, a home-made affair, an old rotten wooden Windsor chair pilfered from the local dump. I had sawn its legs off and tied the remaining portion with homemade knots to a tree branch.
The whole crude and rustic construction was precarious to say the least, but when I was seated in it, I could sit some six metres above, and out of the wind of this rather boisterous family of foxes. The only challenging bit was not the climb up the tree, I could do that with my eyes shut – a series of easy horizontal boughs and a natural lattice of ivy, with perfect footholds and handholds – it was the jump and twist required to get from facing the tree trunk to flipping around and facing the other direction, while landing in the delicate homemade high seat. I had done this dozens of time to date fairly uneventfully. This night I got into position in good time and without incident. However, I had forgotten to check the charge on my torch before I left the house. By the time the fox family had emerged, scratched, played and performed their querulous antics and then had got bored and had slunk off to find mischief elsewhere, it was dark. My time was up, and now I had to get down. I flicked the switch, and just before I hung the torch around my neck to perform the tricky flip manoeuvre in reverse, there was a gentle tink and the light went out. I desperately flicked the switch back and forth with my thumb, trying to coax a little more life from the battery. I only needed a few seconds, the rest of the ten-minute journey home I could probably manage at a stumble; I had done it so many times that it had become first nature.
However, I had no light and just as little choice. I had to try for the tricky gymnastic manoeuvre not only in the dark but now also while I was night-blind. I had one go at this and I blew it. A bumbled footing, a missed handhold, and I was hurtling towards the ground. I plunged to the woodland floor, painfully making contact with all the branches that had been my friends on the way up. Now each of them sucker-punched me as I bounced off them, each leaving me with a bruise that would turn purple by the morning. I hit the ground with a thud, having first passed through a bramble thicket. I ended up flat on my back, gasping for a breath that seemed to take an eternity to come. A school of hard knocks indeed.
At about the same time as I was tumbling out of trees, I got my hands on a copy of a book that inspired me to make friends in the night. A magical book by Chris Ferris called Darkness Is Light Enough (from which I borrowed this chapter title). It is the story of an inspiring woman, plagued by back pain and insomnia, who walks the woods and fields around her home in the Scottish borders at night. It’s an enthralling account of a naturalist and the nocturnal wildlife she shares the night with. The book is packed with information on animal behaviour and the less-than-savoury intentions of poachers and those intent on illegal badger baiting. It had me hooked, it rang true, and in so many ways her observations had mirrored many of mine – but the bit I couldn’t really get my head around was how she describes walking around without a torch, following her animals as they went about their nightly business. Up until that point I had only ever been stationary in my night-time watch. I had a torch with me, and if I ever did stumble across a badger, fox or deer while I was out after dark, on nearly every occasion up until that point in my life, the animal fled, in a thudding, crashing sort of panic, the sort that creates as much distress in the human protagonist as it does in the animal. It was as if the woman had super-human powers, something I thought I could never aspire too, mainly because I imagined them to be artistic licence, untruths used to aid the otherwise believable narrative. That was until I tried it myself.
I would walk to the bottom of our long, narrow garden, far from the warm glow of the kitchen window, and wait for the security light back at the house to go off, then I would turn off my torch. I would be completely blind. To keep walking was self-inflicted madness; I would often stand, paralysed, as soon as I reached the limit of the ambient light that issued forth from the lit windows of the house or the moment the torch beam was extinguished. But not blessed with patience and without the knowledge of what I know now, I would try and force things along.
I got tangled in fences, fell in the old bath tub (sunk in the ground and used as a pond by our domesticated ducks) and stank of anoxic pond water for days, hit my head on branches and committed myself to spectacular trips, stumbles and unintentional roly-polys down embankments. It wasn’t going well.
There is no rushing things, which is probably why the majority of us don’t see the night through the right kind of eyes, through our unfettered wild eyes, that is. We live in a world of no temporal space, with no time to catch our breath. Frenetic rushing and racing, never a minute wasted, never a minute to spare. There is no instant gratification when it comes to realising your nocturnal potential. Can you imagine not looking at a screen of any kind for forty-five minutes? That means not a call, not a tweet. Most would have a technological meltdown. Then there is the other conundrum: what can you do in those minutes? That’s why it’s easier, if you’re a beginner, to simply go out for a walk while there is some daylight and then you can naturally slip into night-time mode. Otherwise, you can meditate, practise some mindfulness, or even do some stretching and warming up; the more supple you are, the less likely you are to injure yourself if you do stumble or fall.
Fifty thousand shades of grey
To make it even easier, certainly if you’re new to night walking, choose a night with a full moon. Assuming you’ve got a clear sky or at least only a thin veil of cloud, it is in these conditions that you will have the maximum 100 per cent reflectance of the moon’s shine that’ll keep you company from as soon as the sun fades at dusk to when it reappears at dawn. Tuning in to the moon’s phases like this is an awareness that once was vitally important to pre-domesticated human culture. A full moon simply means that it is in line with the sun – with us, Earth, in the centre. Therefore without our obscuring shadow, it shows its full face to us. It was a welcome one to our predecessors; it was a clear point of temporal reference. Compared with the sun, it marked the passing of time with clarity and a night full of moonshine was always a special one. Our modern almanacs are still based on these movements of celestial bodies in relation to each other, our months or ‘moonths’ originate from watching and counting the appearance of celestial bodies in the sky.
Before effective modern lighting was available, a full moon would have provided an extension of our diurnal activities. In the Northern Hemisphere the moon’s complete disc is given descriptive names that reflect its importance by its various nature cultures, nominal notions of the seasons with a far greater meaning and resolution than a mere monthly moniker. Descriptions such as hunger moon, snow moon, moon when geese come home, hunter moon, sap moon, planting and beaver moon, all illustrate a practical and, in many places, previous significance. To know the moon is to really know where you stand in the calendar, rather than relying on the cold and the digital, a knowing of the moon is a vital part of understanding the world, and gives those open to rekindling this relationship a solid step up the ladder of rediscovery. To know it so is not born of a sentimentality or nostalgia. It’s a cycle, around which much of the natural world is attuned, and therefore to discover a sense of place, you need first to become familiar with a true sense of time.
For your first moonwalk, it is essential to have a full moon and calm conditions, with little or no wind, in order to build your confidence. Some would even go as far as to say that good conditions are better than a good moon. A quiet night means that your other senses, which you’ll start to use to a higher degree too, now that you’re walking on the dark side, will not be compromised. There is nothing like a stiff wind blowing to set you on edge, and heighten tension. The incessant agitation of the flexible. The knocking together of countless leaves and stems, the rattle and scratch of innumerable clave and gong, this is the timpani of nature, and is of course part of the music, but it also competes with other clues as to your whereabouts, and this disassociation with such a critical sense and the feeling of anxiety that naturally comes with it possibly again relates to a deeply buried rational survival mechanism. The footfall of a predator cannot be heard. Even now the sudden, whirring flight of a startled woodcock as it springs from a woodland path, croaking into the night, makes me jump out of my skin more on a breezy night than on a quiet one; maybe I can hear the more subtle precursors of the bird tensing up for flight? This nervousness is also shared by many other night walkers – nocturnal wildlife, birds and mammals are more jumpy and nervously predisposed too. It makes for a much more difficult task to watch anything, from rhino at a watering hole to hedgehogs in the herbaceous border, if they’re on high alert.
Walk where there is a clear view of the sky; the closest you can get to pitch-blackness is when you’re under a leafy canopy or moving through a coniferous forest. Another enjoyable way to wait out the period of dark adaptation, to adjust and find that magical state, is to simply watch the sky. Look out for the first celestial lights to show – this will usually be a planet and may be in the sky opposite the setting sun, as here there will be less interference caused by the sun’s remaining rays bouncing about. This familiarity with the night sky then takes on another dimension. Become familiar with the planets and constellations and you will engage with the world in a way that was familiar to early navigators. When you’re advanced, this will serve as your compass and aid in your navigation while night walking.
Get the perfect conditions and walking under the moon becomes a magical experience, almost super-natural. It doesn’t seem right, but you can see almost as well as by day. Your rods are revelling in the relucent qualities of night; they’re filling your visual cortex not with just black and white, but with, some say, up to fifty thousand shades of grey.
Where you walk is worth bearing in mind too. Certainly on your first few attempts walk in places that you know, choose landscapes that are familiar to you. Even the most un-stimulating twenty-minute constitutional takes on a new lease of life when carried out under the veil of night, so don’t get too ambitious on your first attempt. Ignoring my own advice, I’ve managed to end up on the edge of a small quarry by a cliff, hidden by a dense stand of bracken on a slope that I had thought I was as familiar with as the back of my own hand. Let my walk home, covered with purple bruises and bramble pricks after that oversight, be your lesson.
Find yourself a location where there are few physical obstacles – one without too much in the way of challenging topography and trip hazards is the perfect classroom. In short, don’t take too big a section of the night; keep it really simple. Choose places where the paths are big and wide and also, ideally, somewhere not too far from roads or other access, just in case you feel the need to bail out at any point in the venture.
Reflective water can be a boon to the nocturnal wander. The surface on a still night shows a bright reflection of the sky. Moonlight bouncing from saturated potholes, ruts and puddles illuminates like the emergency floor lights in an aeroplane showing you the path. Larger bodies of water, lakes and rivers not only give you some clear boundaries at night, but they also bounce more light back into the surroundings.
The night can disorientate you and if you’re not used to it, you can get lost in time and space very easily, so, in addition to choosing familiar ground, certainly at first, learn to navigate – and I don’t mean by Google maps. Handy though the smartphone is, its batteries don’t last forever. I’ve had a GPS system running in my phone, keeping a track on my nightly ambles before. It’s fine, but it tends to eat up battery life fast – a battery that you might need for an emergency call. You can, I know, take a booster pack with you, but then you need to carry that, plus the cables to make the connection, and, before you know it, you’re lumbered with stuff. The technological burden you’re trying to get away from now has you laden like a stumbling camel. No, when I mean you should learn to navigate, I mean in the tried and tested analogue way. If you’re truly into self-wilding, then I recommend you go on a natural navigation course; the environment holds plenty of clues as to where you are on the compass, and there are lots of folk who teach this old but essential off-grid lesson. A compromise between the two is a map and a compass – but don’t just pack them. Learning to use these simple and beautiful tools is in itself a useful life-skill.
For me it’s a time of solitude. Night walking is a time of personal reflection, when I can let my consciousness expand into the limitless night. I can let my senses heighten and I can settle into the blanket of the night, attuned to its rhythms.
An important part of the experience can pop like a bubble when the person next to you decides it’s time to unwrap and eat a Murray mint they’ve just found in the fluff at the bottom of their hand-warming pocket. People are lovely but they do make a lot of noise, even if they’re trying to be quiet.
What you get out of a night walk or nature in general is often something very personal to yourself. Nobody walks, behaves, senses or interprets the same thing. It’s what makes it so special in the most basic sense of the word.
We’ll cover this in more detail later, but if you’re on your own, you can concentrate on the night, you’re not followed by the background rustle and clump of another human, you don’t feel any kind of obligation to stop, start, look or not look, and you’re not plagued by that social human impulse to talk. Having said all this, sometimes for your first go at it, or if you’re still at an age when your parents would rather you had company, then accompaniment can help a bit. What this does, however, is to detract from the main goal, which is a rewilding of yourself. If you take someone else with you, you do, to some degree, become a little less empowered by the night; you miss out on the thrill, the buzz, which is the coming to terms with some of your primal fears, fighting them out of your head and being able to experience night at its most pure.
Think back to what you’ve learned about the mechanics of your eyes. Because the focal point of your eye, the fovea is crammed with cones which only work by daylight, looking directly at an object, be it animal, plant or landscape feature, isn’t much use. The act, which is born of muscle memory or instinct, of looking directly at what interests you, needs to be relearned at night.
The highly sensitive rod cells surrounding the fovea are the vital components you need to use at night, which means you have to look off-centre. Is that a wallaby or a wombat? Look to its right or left and you’ll be able to tell, as you are now training the image onto your rods. While the resolution and therefore the detail will not be as good as a similar experience in daylight, because rods don’t do resolution very well, you will at least see something, which is more than can be said for relying only on your cone cells, as they haven’t even been roused into action by the moonlit scene. Something you may also notice when looking at subjects more on the periphery of your vision is that your rods are much more sensitive to movement. Often it is a flick of a wing or a nod of a nose that you pick up on in your periphery view which leads to you noticing that roosting robin or the giant jumping rat scenting the air at its burrow entrance.
If you’re going to need artificial light at all, and sometimes you will be grateful for it, use red light. As we’ve seen, being kind to your rods is the best way to see in the night. To understand how they work, and the fact that they simply didn’t evolve to work in a world where a headlamp or smartphone screen would suddenly flash at them in the dark, helps us to get the best out of them. To know that their light response peaks in the region of blue light is also useful; after all, these rods are designed to work under nature’s night lights. The moon’s reflection of the sun is not silver, it’s actually blue – our eyes are naturally tuned to the blue moon.
This effect can be seen in some interesting phenomena. A red rose, of course, looks red under daylight conditions, those colour-sensitive cones rule, they predominate, they allow the rose to pop out at us against the somewhat more subdued green of the leaves in the background. But as the light fades at dusk, the cones start to shut down, no longer stimulated by the lower levels of luminosity, and the rods take over. The rods are not stimulated by the long wavelengths of light from the red flower, but before they switch over completely to night vision the much shorter wavelengths of the green leaves predominate and there is a period where the green appears much brighter. It’s a brilliant demonstration of how the eye works and a fun way to while away that forty-five minutes at dusk.
This human insensitivity to red light is also the reason aircraft cockpits and some modern cars have red dashboard illumination and why some pilots wear rose-tinted spectacles – it reduces the risk of being dazzled and left in the dark. An added bonus for the nocturnal naturalist is that other creatures are not very sensitive to red light either, it’s practically invisible to them.
Returning to the back of the eye: nocturnal animals operate on their light-sensitive rods, just like you do with your torch switched off. They operate at a peak spectral sensitivity somewhere in the region of a wavelength of 505 nanometres (the cyan-blue of moonlight), meaning that anything longer, such as a deep-red light of around 650 nanometres, is invisible to them. However, because we have those colour-sensitive cones, we, conversely, are able to see this light and therefore perceive detail, and thus are able to watch without being seen.
A trick I used to perform before the days of the Internet made sourcing materials so easy, and before the evolution in torch technology, was to collect red sweet wrappers, or red cellophane – a rare commodity in packaging back then – and stick them together to form a filter big enough to cover the end of my torch. This had the effect of creating a red light. But it was an unsatisfactory one due to the poor optical quality combined with the low power of my torch. The whole affair made for such a pathetically dim glow that while it probably didn’t disturb nocturnal animals visually, there was always the risk of the excruciating sound of crinkly sweet wrappers if I wasn’t careful. More often than not, I was reduced to watching creatures I could crawl right up close to, those that didn’t have ears – snails and beetles rather than deer and badgers!
Nowadays you can purchase torches with built-in red filters for just this purpose, and modern LED technology can push out so many lumens that even with a red filter, the light can be thrown far enough to see more distant subjects. So, if you start to get serious and can justify the financial outlay, buying a good modern torch with a red-light filter is well worth hours of stumbling around blind or standing around waiting to become acclimatised to your surroundings again.
Even on the most illuminated of nights, when a distant woodland seems as three-dimensional as it does by the light of the sun, the dark veins of hedgerows are traced over the silver fields, and night creatures as small as a mouse can be viewed as long as they shy away from the shadows, the details and textures will still be missing. This unfortunate lack of perception occurs because the laws of physics have reached the limit of your lucidity; your rods are great at finding the little light that falls on them, but they’re no match for the tightly crammed, super-high resolution of the cones that are stimulated by daylight, the sort of visual resolution that a diurnal primate has become accustomed to. So a student of the night has to decide on the experience he or she wishes to gain from the venture. The micro-magic of the smaller inhabitants of the night are as much part of it as the moon itself, yet to those intent on perceiving the night as a natural experience, untainted by electronic lumens, they will remain invisible, unless you blind yourself to the moon and the stars.
Take the ethereal glow of the female glow-worm – she glows a yellow-green light from deep in the anarchy of the grass and briar and she’s an embodiment of the romantic notion of a night walk; we all love to see anything generating its own light, from fungus to millipede to beetle, bioluminescence is such a rare and delicate thing that it requires completely settled and fully adjusted night eyes to see it properly. Yet due to our own internal physics and chemistry we are denied experiencing, in the way we’re used to, the whole. Can we be satisfied with only the mystical, cool light generated from within the beetle’s abdominal tissue, knowing there’s so much more to see? After all, the natural light is only a small part of the story of our understanding of what is unfolding deep in the tangle of the path verge. I want to experience and possess this light, own this knowledge some more. I want to experience what the bug-eyed winged male might feel when finally he homes in on her quilted, egg-heavy body, maybe even get a double-whammy of luck and see him as well, to catch him out, already lured into the love-light?
So I resort to default and turn on my torch – it’s killed the magic at one level, but sometimes it’s worth it. Now I can understand the topography of the light source, I can see her very un-beetle-like form, a gentle curled ‘C’ clinging on to a grass stem with six stiff, spiky legs, the muted fleshy pink of her flanks soft against the hard integument of her dorsal. The glow of a glow-worm is only one side of the coin; the other is actually to see that it’s not a worm, to understand this weird beetle, to really get to know it as a creature and to recognise it, when it’s out of the context of the night, when you’re flipping a stone or when it’s out wandering. This is, of course, just as valid and lends another level to your experience and understanding, part of the ongoing accumulation of your knowledge of the night. I always carry a torch and, while I try to resist the temptation to turn it on, it is there in case of emergencies or in case of glow-worms and other minutiae that I might otherwise miss.
Another technological advancement that aids our understanding of the night’s inhabitants is the night-scope or image intensifier. I love them and loathe them. As a daydreaming (or nightdreaming) kid, during my pre-badger-watching days, I remember fantasising about being able to see at night, as if it were day. I wanted more than anything to see wildlife and the bigger and furrier the creatures, the more elusive they seemed. But just imagine what you could see if your eyes could penetrate all the intimate details of the night as an owl can – I could watch the foxes floating along field edges and the bumbling silhouettes of badgers would be so much more rich in texture, pinging with detail.
All this was complete fantasy – until, that is, my university days, when my mammalogy lecturer let on, in a moment of foolishness, that he had in his procession an ex-military night-scope. After much begging and pleading he succumbed, whether to fuel my enthusiasm or to simply shut me up I couldn’t tell. The long and the short of it was that that night I headed out with his treasured bit of Russian technology. It was about eighty centimetres long with a diameter at the larger end of a good thirty centimetres. It was a beast: having to be carried over the shoulder on a strap, it looked every bit the piece of military hardware it was – the impressive heft was further compounded by the fact that it had a large magnifying screen which you could screw on to the eyepiece.
Dressed in a long black overcoat and black, brimmed hat, and with what looked like a bazooka slung over my shoulder, I set off into the woods behind campus and hunkered down not far from a badger sett. The first badger emerged. My pulse was up, I chose my moment when I guessed, by the scratching noises, that several of the animals were up, and then click, I flicked the switch. But no matter how slowly I performed this act, a noise was made: a definite well-engineered Russian click, but it proved no more than a rude interruption causing several striped heads to freeze. The very high-pitched whine of the unit then made the heads bob a bit, and although there was a momentary, reasonably good view of a group of greenish badgers staring down the end of the sacred scope, it was short-lived; they were off, freaked out by the alien experience I had just unleashed on their evening.
I had a little more success when I bumped into animals out foraging; they were a little more relaxed, and, also, there were other noises around campus which drowned out the continuous whistle of the light-gathering machine. However, the same couldn’t be said for the amorous couple, students who had driven up to a quiet part of campus after the clubs closed to do what young folk (other than those running around with Russian night-scopes) do on a Friday night. The appearance of a man in black, curious about the noises of the wild night, with a face suddenly illuminated by a soft greenish glow, was not something they expected to see. They departed as fast as the badgers did earlier, crashing through the undergrowth. The night of mixed highs and lows had one last surprise for me: I was stopped by a patrolling police car on my way back home. This was my introduction to night-scopes.
Night-scopes are much better now. The newer generations have much clearer, cleaner image, with less fuzziness; they’re also quieter on the whole and many are much smaller, with some being compact enough to fit in the pocket. However, the biggest downside is that, like torches, they will give you night blindness. The image down the eyepiece has the same effect on your retinas as looking full-on at the lens of an illuminated torch. If you’re already set on using a torch, then maybe they have a place in your kitbag. But for me, given the expense of these toys, a much richer, natural, less intrusive and cheaper experience can be had by simply using a torch.
The pessimistic Boy Scout in me says plan for the worst. Put together a small grab bag of essentials – a phone, map, whistle, ID, compass and a walker’s first-aid kit are important elements and can easily be carried in a small backpack or in your pockets. Food supplies and liquid are a good idea too (you can get surprisingly hot and sweaty climbing hills after dark); it’s not natural to think about dehydration at night, but if you’re out for a long one, then it’s worth taking this into account.
No matter whether you intend to use it or not, always take a torch along with you; you just never know, and even if you don’t use it, a torch can be a useful signalling device if, for example, you take a tumble and break or sprain something. While I recommend going solo on nocturnal trips, it’s always a good idea to let someone know what you’re up to. I know it’s not a sense we’re covering much in this book, but common sense is a useful addition to your repertoire.