IT’S RIGHT there, use your eyes, open them up.’ Mamy, my
Malagasy guide, was beginning to sound desperate, as a sense of building frustration snagged on those last words. His pride was at stake here if he failed to get me to see what was clearly blindingly obvious to him.
‘Follow the main trunk down, see the second branch you come to, it’s to the left of that. You can see his eye clearly.’ I couldn’t. In my defence, I was trying to pick out the ‘king of crypsis’ – a leaf-tailed gecko, an animal that seems to be almost as much tree as it is lizard.
Not only does it resemble closely the tree it rests on both in colour and tonality, but its fine scaled body is decorated with such an accurate garniture of colours as to create an almost photorealistic effect. Lichen only just does lichen better than a leaf-tailed gecko.
To top this, nature’s masterclass in camouflage, the body is squished flat, like a lizard that’s been worked over with a pastry roller. In fact, every part of this lizard, from toes to tail, seems to be a handful of millimetres thick. A frippery of fringing to break up the outline even more, even a transparent eye-lid complete with a peach-stone filigree, a reticulation which means that even that dead-cert point of reference is well hidden. You can’t see it, but the leaf-tailed gecko always sees you. It’s a phantom of a reptile, a membranous slither of lizard life invisible to all in the Madagascan forest – all, that is, except Mamy.
What was getting Mamy so exasperated was that the gecko was so clear to him that it might as well have been painted Day-Glo orange. A fact further emphasised by the way in which he spotted it in the first place while driving past. But no matter how I stared at it, using all of what I thought were pretty good wildlife-spotting skills, I simply couldn’t make a lizard out of the textured trunk. What made this even worse for both of us was that the lizard was also very close.
So close that we hadn’t even got out of the car; the small leggy sapling of a tree sat on the edge of the laterite road, and I could have wound down the window and reached out and touched it. I’ll be honest: at this point in time that was something I was very much tempted to do. You see, a leaf-tailed gecko’s next mode of defence is arguably as spectacularly shocking as its camouflage is effective.
Touch one and what was tree bark a split second before magically pops up; a gargoyle materialises in a flinch. It opens its flip-top, fringed, almost crocodile-like head and screams like a banshee, while displaying the scarlet interior of its mouth.
A display that is so shocking it’s made me drop my torch on more than one occasion before. My pride wouldn’t let me do it, however. Even getting out of the car, and changing my angle, defocussing my eyes a bit, like you do with those equally infuriating magic-eye pictures, didn’t work; and then, with the tree between me and Mamy, who was still in the car and holding his head, a small red-winged dragonfly briefly landed. There was a minuscular twitch of the bark, and suddenly my eyes and my brain seemed to click into agreement. A toe, unmistakable with its flattened distal tip, briefly curled up a tiny bit, then nervously flattened again and resumed its optical illusion. That was all the point of reference I needed; I could now slowly trace the shape of its outline on the tree. I was drawing by numbers, however, missing some of the really clever bits but linking enough of the lizard’s perimeter for the illusion to dissolve, and the unmistakable outline of the lizard to materialise. A second or two and I had it, finally.
This first ‘leafy’ of the trip was difficult enough; I earned my stripes, though, even if Mamy nearly had a breakdown while I was going through the process.
Much of my professional life has been about beating nature at its game, challenging those rules and strategies that have taken millions of years to perfect. Some of my employment has been deploying skills that nobody in their wildest imagination would have thought could deliver a pay packet later on in my life.
As a caterpillar hunter, I spent weeks, day in and day out, bent double or prostrate, literally crawling around on my hands and knees, scouring the crispy, dry leaf-litter of last year’s bracken for a small caterpillar. This insect, the larval stage of a rare and threatened butterfly here in the UK, the high brown fritillary, is no more than a few centimetres long and it’s not only of the same auburn, black and grey mottling as its immediate habitat, but it’s also decorated with a texture and patterning that makes it look exactly the same as a pinnae of the dead ferns on which it basked in the spring sunshine.
An entomological ‘pin in a haystack’. My job was to locate them and, when I had, I was required to take various measurements of the micro-habitat in which they resided.
I was also instructed to tell my boss, by phone, when I had found them. For the first few days, I admit it now, I didn’t find any; not a single one.
My inauguration as a caterpillar hunter was far from what I expected. I thought I was good at this kind of thing – after all, that is what I told my new employers when I first applied for the job. Now I was in a quandary; my pride was severely dented, my caterpillar hunter’s ego was deflated.
What did I do? I lied. For the first few days, I told my boss by phone that all was well, caterpillars, although few and far between, were being found, but the neat boxes on my data sheet remained unfilled.
I knew I had placed myself in a predicament; failure to find any of the larvae was not now an option. I just knew that they were here. They had to be. I was not going to be beaten, and even if I had to turn every brown crinkled leaf to find them, find them I would.
I was reminded of Dian Fossey, when she first arrived on her study site and there was not a gorilla to be found. It wasn’t until the third day, after two hours of searching, that I found one. I nearly burst with the relief of it. This perfect little thing, honed by evolution to play the trick on the eyes of anyone or anything that wanted to see it. But I had cracked it. Now I had found one, others rapidly followed. It was as if someone had unblocked a pipe and removed a constriction on my optic nerve; the caterpillars of the high brown fritillary now seemed to be etched on both retinas. It was never hard to find them again that season, although I did have to relearn the process in subsequent years after effectively taking ten months off.
I’ve had other analogous quests for hyper-cryptic species, including great green grasshoppers, stick and leaf insects, earth-star fungus, the minuscule eggs of a tiny brown hairstreak butterfly – even seahorses. No matter what the species or the kingdom to which it belongs, I’ve found that the strategy is essentially the same.
Fundamentally, it’s the process of being a predator. While I personally have never consumed a caterpillar, satiated myself with a seahorse, chowed down on a gecko or poached a butterfly egg, the fact is, I’m simply deploying what behavioural ecologists call an optimum foraging strategy – not for actual sustenance, but the function is the same; the job at hand feeds me indirectly, it puts bread on my table and milk in my fridge.
The first lizard, insect, fish etc. takes a while, but when you’ve tuned in to your quarry’s size, colour and texture and, to a lesser extent, the more subtle nuances of the sorts of places they like to hang out, then the discovery rate increases. My Madagascan trip, while a little slow to start with, was a good example of this. Before long, I was finding my own leaf-tailed geckos, though I never had Mamy’s success – possibly because I was less reliant on my own abilities, for if I failed, Mamy was sure to succeed.
But as a solo, lone caterpillar hunter, I got spookily good at finding these canny creatures. The perceptual tool that helped me is exactly what an actual caterpillar-eating species would use – something called a ‘search image’. The concept of a search image is that, when repeatedly presented with the same visual puzzle, you can learn to solve it. Famously, this was demonstrated with blue jays trained to peck at pictures of moths: if the jay pecked at an image with a moth on it, it got a reward; if there was no moth, it got nothing and had to wait some time for the system to reset and the experiment to continue. However, if the pictures of the cryptic moths were of random, different species, the jay’s hit rate wasn’t so effective, but if it was shown the same species, it got increasingly better. We are capable of the same. A set of visual cues are collected up with experience and seared into the mind’s eye; a visual pattern, a shape that seems consistent in a chaotic environment – you’re subconsciously tuning in to some really subtle cues, your high-resolution retinas and your processing power has found a friend, a short cut. These search images are very useful but you need to invest time in learning them, and you’ll also find that they don’t stick around unless you’re using them, which is why, on another caterpillar season or trip to Madagascar, I will have to go through the whole frustrating and infuriating process all over again in order to crack these anti-predatory adaptions.
The same light is bouncing off the cryptic animal and into your eyes, whether you see it or not. Mamy’s eyes were receiving exactly the same wavelengths of light, the very same colours as mine – they had to be; my head was right next to his, but something, born of his previous experiences and his accumulated knowledge of where to look and what patterns and search images to look for, gave him the foraging edge. He was in nature and by her rules a more successful predator than me.
It’s clear that looking and seeing are very, very different things. When we are immersing ourselves in nature, we need to be fully aware of what is around us. We need to be open to everything, every clue, every nuance of the environment. For a naturalist this takes a bit of time to develop. Rather than a recipe which clearly shows the way, this is more about superimposing experiences one on top of the other, to provide a deeper knowledge. This is an accumulative natural wisdom, a true understanding, customised by your own desires and drives. In short, learning to see is not something you get out of books.
However, there are a few tricks and exercises that will help you. But first, I want to draw your attention to the following which will help you understand that we can always be more aware.
A common belief is that people deprived of one sense can develop the others to a higher degree, and there is some evidence that a degree of replumbing of neural pathways can occur utilising the processing powers of other parts of the brain, but the science and the understating of this is complicated and beyond the scope of this book.
A study by Gallaudet University in Washington, DC came to the conclusion that people with impaired hearing probably cannot see any better than those with full sensory capabilities, but what they do is see differently.
In the complicated visual world in which we live, we are bombarded with stimuli. We stand in the centre of a three-dimensional world; there is information about where we are and what is going on literally anywhere we look, and we cannot process all this information at once, so we have to decide what to give our attention to, at the expense of something else. How we prioritise this incoming visual information about the world, and therefore how and what we perceive in that world, is down to us as individuals.
An eye is an eye, after all. There may be small differences in how it’s built from human to human, but, like a camera, the laws of physics work the same from individual to individual, from you to me. What is different between someone who notices that there’s a moth resting on that tree trunk or that there is a wren preening beside the path and someone who doesn’t is known as ‘visual attention’. To continue the camera analogy, assuming it’s a digital one, it’s how we process that information, what the camera or the image-processing software on the computer does with the information we’ve given it that makes the difference.
If you have a full complement of senses, then you literally have ‘all-round’ perception; your other senses, particularly your hearing, help the eyes out. Think of yourself as the centre point in a sphere. Whether a sound or a visual stimulus grabs your attention, with a quick movement of body, head or a flick of an eye, you can be ‘on it’. If you are deaf, it is as if someone has taken this sense away – you can now only see 180 degrees on the horizontal and 100 degrees in the vertical – what we call your field of view. However, studies have shown that those who cannot hear are much more sensitive to moving stimuli in the periphery of their vision; their visual attention is heightened. Without getting too deep into the neurology and the current research that is helping us understand how our eyes and brains work together, let’s look at it from a rewilding point of view.
I’m going to assume that your eyes are healthy, that they work, and that if you need corrective prescription lenses, either glasses or contact lenses, then these are up to date. Otherwise, no amount of awareness trying will be able to help you out.
When we look at a scene, our eyes are flicking about all over the place, scanning what is in front of us because we have a fovea, a relatively small area of the retina on which to pick up high-resolution information. It means that we have to flick it around a bit, rotate our eye in its socket by tiny increments, training this highly sensitive part of the retina on various points of interest within our field of view. Thanks to the power of our mighty oculomotor system, we can make these discrete shifts of gaze two to three times every second, something known as a saccade. The eye then pauses on the points of fixation before jumping on again. This is part of our exquisite design and it’s what we naturally do. So much so that staring at a single point and fixing on it for more than a few seconds feels highly uncomfortable and exhausting.
Lift your head up…
So how do we become better at looking? Well, the first thing is to actually hold your head up. I tend to watch people as I would an animal; it’s something I do, I can’t help myself, it’s a learned behavioural trait that delivers for me in my work and pleasure.
The first thing a naturalist notices is how an animal or bird, or even a tree, holds itself. This gives us a massive clue to its identification.
It’s the ‘J’ in the phonetically and etymologically confused word ‘jizz’ – which is something a bird, butterfly or dragonfly watcher might use to instantaneously identify a species of their quarry when they clap eyes on it. One theory as to its origin as a word is that it originated as an American acronym for identifying enemy aircraft and stands for General Impression, Size and Shape (GISS).
What I’m getting at is that I’ve been noticing something, something that is slowly becoming more entrenched in our own daily and social behaviour, an insidious creep of technology into our daily norm. Ever since phones became mobile and no longer connected to a wall with a curly wire, they’ve stolen our sight. We’re going blind and the phone is our technological glaucoma. Our eyes are our primary sense; we’ve evolved to be stimulated that way, but they can’t be looking everywhere at the same time. We’re no longer ‘saccading’ over a bigger scene; we’re being mesmerised by the LCD screen.
As a species we are suffering from a collective tunnel vision. At a bus stop in Lhasa, Tibet, every one of the eighteen people I stood with was gazing, mesmerised, at a retina phone screen. Downtown, even the older generation, dressed in traditional sheepskin chubas, could be seen in doorways or leaning against temple walls, their faces illuminated by the cold blue glare of cell phone and tablet – even here, where nature culture is still close to the surface, phone culture is prevalent.
Several weeks later, I took a short walk into the city centre of Winchester – a quick nip to the shops to pick up a pint of milk and a pasty for my lunch. I thought I would do a quick survey of all the people I passed on the street. Of the eighty-seven folks on the pavement, forty-six of them were looking at a screen.
It’s no wonder that when I talk in the pub about the pair of peregrine falcons that I see regularly roosting on the cathedral and the urban drama when one of them takes out one of the pigeons in a puff of feathers right in front of the busy comings and goings of city folk, people look at me in disbelief. Most aren’t aware that this bird shares their city. It’s why these observations of naturalists can seem so otherworldly and fantastical, as if we’re some kind of guru trained in an exotic, mystic skill. We’re not; we just have our eyes pointing in the right direction most of the time. Scary proof of this modern myopia is the town of Bodegraven in the Netherlands – here, at pedestrian crossings at traffic junctions, the local council has installed light strips in the pavement that change colour. Red for ‘don’t walk’, green for ‘go’ – all so that those itinerant mobile users don’t need to lift their eyes from their screens in order to see whether it is safe to cross or not. Is this the future?
I partly blame this handheld technology, although our perceptions of the natural world are changing at other levels too. The innate need in all of us to be needed or loved means that we scan our screens almost constantly, filling up ‘looking’ or, more importantly, ‘noticing time’ with visual information that isn’t directly relevant. With all our attention focussed on what is immediately in front of us, the delicious, visually sumptuous backlit graphics, we are rolling down the blinds on our window onto the real world. It’s all i-Phoney; we’re staring down a never-ending digital tunnel, never quite reaching the dazzling promise at the end.
This is not just a behavioural change in the city either, I see it in the countryside – people walking their dogs, but not watching their dogs or, indeed, enjoying the scene they are romping through. This technology-driven crumpling of our posture means that our heads are down. Runners may also suffer from this head-down position as they look down at the ground immediately in front of them – nervous about what they might step in perhaps? This has all sorts of knock-on postural issues which create tensions in the neck and back. But for now we’ll just tackle its influence on what we see.
Now compare this modern domesticated (in the living-in-a-built-up-environment sense of the word) world with those of native cultures, people still living an eco-centric lifestyle. They look up, they scan the distance, looking for a prediction, a clue as to how the future is going to shape up, from incoming weather systems, which have an immediate implication for all manner of activities, they look for clues about food, plants and animals that can be eaten and, more importantly, they check their social status, and give each other updates, assessing how they are received by friends, family and associates by looking them in the face. Compare this with the married couple sitting at a restaurant table gazing lovingly into… their phones.
You could argue that the need to look out for predators, or for dinner, has been functionally replaced by the equally significant modern need to see whether your boss has called, whether you got the job, or if your bid on eBay bagged you that bargain. However, our bodies don’t know this; our intellect has, once again, outsmarted our physical nature, our wild needs.
In our natural form, we are not designed to spend hours and hours, days upon days, sitting in front of and scrutinising near objects. We are supposed to be looking up, looking out – looking out for a threat or for food. It’s a much more natural posture.
Slow down – have yourself a look, see and listen
The next thing is to slow down. There are many reasons for this, but the primary one is that if you are moving more slowly, you simply give yourself a fighting chance of noticing the details of what’s around you. It sounds so obvious but in an increasingly abstruse world looking for complex answers, sometimes it’s the really simple stuff that is so easy to overlook.
My first ever trip to the Neotropics was a case in point. This wasn’t just my first trip to South America; it was my first ever trip to any non-European country, the first time I was to experience the bountiful biodiversity of a tropical ecosystem. As I grew up during the seventies and eighties, reasons for ‘saving the Rainforest’ were well known to me. It was the ‘lungs of the world’, home to 1,300 of the world’s birds, 430-odd species of mammals, at least 450 reptiles, an estimated 2.5 million species of insect – and the musician Sting. I had been given the opportunity to experience the exaltation of life in all its plenitude. I was more than excited.
The flight got into Georgetown, Guyana late; it was as dark as the hides of the cows that lay on the road, the same dozy bovines that the taxi driver neatly swerved to avoid on at least three occasions on the short trip to the hotel. En route, the sounds of a tropical symphony hung in the heavy air. For a young naive naturalist, the stridulations, creaks, whistles and farts of countless crickets, cicadas, frogs and nighthawks leaked tantalisingly in through the cab’s windows. I was bursting with anticipation, it was a real dream come true, something I never expected to experience, even in my wildest biophilic schoolboy fantasies.
The following day, before dawn, I was on the flat roof atop the main big city hotel waiting for my first eyeball full of tropicana. It started well: dozens of birds of every colour started waking up and decorating the dawn. They were mostly tanagers, but a rainbow of feathers, and I was reduced to shouting primary colours to the hazy rising sun. However, my joy was short-lived.
As soon as I headed out away from the capital and into the wilds and found myself immersed in the primary forest of the Guyanese Rainforest, a green curtain fell over my enthusiasm. There was, it seemed, nothing but a palette of every kind of green and brown known to the universe, as well as mosquitoes.
Where were the snakes coiled around every tree? Where were the multitude of vibrant parrots, the dozens of butterflies, the frogs, the lizards? Where was the party? It felt that I had been fed a lie all my life. I remember settling myself back against a substantial buttress, feeling more than a little disappointed and underwhelmed.
But the forest felt my disillusion and, first, it presented an ant. A tiny offering of tropical biodiversity, but a morsel of animation to catch my eye, tether my conscious thoughts and focus my attentions. Fortunately, this ant was not one of the more plain or difficult species to identify, with which the tropics are blessed in plenitude, but a leaf-cutting atta cephalotes.
This little golden girl was making small purposeful strides down the razor-backed horizon of the buttress, carrying her heavy load, a disc of leaf, measured and cut to optimum size by the sharp calipers of her own jaws.
This ant species was a well-known character to me, a super-star of the myrmecophilous world, a pin-up for the myrmecologist and a species of fascination in my bookish childhood. To meet this insect in person was bringing the pictures on the pages of my encyclopaedias to life. She tottered off across the forest floor, green flag held high. As I followed her with my eye others seemed to materialise – an identical, leggy sisterhood all heading along the same path. But they had been there all along. It was as if my calm, respectful, patient presence was being rewarded.
The longer I sat still, the more I was gifted. Other ants of different designs appeared: soldier ants, thick-headed brutes armed with scimitar jaws and guarding not one but several scintillating tentacles of ant highways, now seemed to disclose themselves while others headed in the opposite direction to the first. The forest was alive with them; every turn of my head was met with ants, ants and more ants. Then a procession of things seemed to come trooping out from the wings – the green curtain was being lifted slowly and, in the next hour, the theatre of the forest was revealed. Hummingbirds dazzled in the spotlights of the sun’s rays filtering through the canopy; a parrot snake dropped its jungle vine facade; a burnished feathered jacana armed with a rapier bill cut a dash to skewer butterflies. After I had absorbed as much as my senses could process and still retain some meaning, I got up and wandered back to camp. As I did so, it was as if the world had sped up – as I purposefully stomped off down the path, I slowly become less and less aware of any animal life. An inversely proportional relationship between speed and the creatures seen. Progress and experience at odds with one another.
If you remain stationary and quiet for long enough, after a few moments, those eyes present when you arrived will, with no threat perceived, carry on their business. Others new to the scene will appear, and you will become no more of a threat then a wormy dead tree stump or fence post, accepted almost as part of the scenery. If you sit still, like a pop-up book, life will make itself known as you gradually tune in to your environment.
This is an illustration of a technique in ecological immersion that I’ve been practising for years, at first without even knowing it. Initially, with a fishing rod in my hand, it was a pleasant side-effect of angling, something to distract me in between bites, but over time, it became a necessity, an activity all on its own. The faster our lives become, the further from our start we get and with that the ability to be, the purpose of being, stationary becomes more and more distant. So while staying put and not moving is a sort of default setting for our nature and therefore our relationship with nature, it becomes a switch we rarely get to flick. It’s seen as a waste of time, doing nothing when, in reality, it is an opportunity to be doing so very much more. It is noticing, it is beginning to see and, when you can see, you start to connect.
Open your eyes
The ability to read a landscape, to carefully and consciously look over everything, to search as much for natural patterns as for things that don’t fit those patterns, to know how to scan the landscape for signs of the enemy, is considered an essential and basic part of military training. It’s not, if you think about it, anything new. Again, it’s a basic skill-set that our ancestors and those still living directly from nature utilise to this day. It is a skill that you can work on and develop yourself, but it requires focus.
As you read this, you’re reading from left to right; it’s a habit you’ve been taught and you’ve almost certainly got into the habit of skipping words and predicting the placings of verbs, adjectives and nouns, understanding the sense without necessarily tracing every letter or syllable. Your eyes are jumping ahead of what your thoughts are processing. However, try reading backwards. Start on the right and scan along the line to the left – you slow down, you’re swimming against habit and have to pay much more attention to each letter and sound; you have to really concentrate.
This is an amazingly effective little trick with which to look at the world. Once you’ve retrained your brain to be able to do this, to be super-aware, to really look and see every little detail within the limits of your vision, you can start operating in all directions. Combine this with the ‘sitting’ still technique. Find yourself a spot outdoors, as wild as possible, and settle yourself down comfortably. Now work the landscape in front of you from right to left, run your eyes up and down every line, imagine you are sketching the scene with a pencil and let your eyes trace these same lines. Look for things, give yourself tests – how many living creatures can you see, imagine what the trees, stems and leaves feel like, mentally crawl through the scene, turning stones.
Expanding your view is not something you can physically do anything about; your field of view remains fixed, that’s the physics of the situation. But what you can do is try and train yourself to be more aware of what it is and its limits. Explore your visual periphery. Work on your visual attention. Hold your arms out straight at shoulder height and wriggle your fingers while looking straight ahead. Adjust with forward or backward motion the position of your arms until you are aware of, but not looking directly at the movement of your fingers on either side: that is the horizontal limit of your field of vision. Now do the same in other directions, up and down, and every other position in between. You’ve now felt with your fingers around the very edge of your visual field. It’s a very physical demonstration you can do with yourself that gives you a clear idea of how big a space you can scan.
It’s similar to an experiential game I’ve played with kids to help them get better at being visually aware of their wide-angle vision. I call it ‘Being a Buzzard’, though of course you can substitute any bird of prey. The basic idea is that your outspread arms are your wings and you have to fly around until you find a perch (seat) overlooking something you might find interesting, then you sit there really, intently exploring your domain. You look around it, imagining that you’re a bird, looking for prey, thinking about the habitats and what animals might live in them, using the awareness of your full periphery to check and be aware of the trees, clouds, grass, hedges and herbs moving around in the breeze. Once the children have played around with this a bit and expanded into their full visual panorama, I tell them they can start hunting, trying to find the movement of birds, insects, anything that might be prey to a buzzard.
While carrying out these exercises which will start as being real, consciously focussed efforts, you’ll almost certainly fall into the trap of concentrating too hard. Remember the field of vision’s natural dynamic state – your eyes need to dance about a bit; if you try and fix on an object, you’ll get tired and part of the idea of being aware is being at peace and relaxed with yourself before you can be expected to become comfortable with your surroundings.
I hinted at this earlier on. The processing of the image and the ability to superimpose and use your imagination based on experience is an accumulative thing. When a child has his or her first experience of something in nature, it is full of a primal fascination, wonder and curiosity; it’s the same experience repeated by generations of hominids, it’s the exploration of the environment at its most basic.
When I look at a scene, I like to imagine that I can zoom in on things that I can see. If I’m looking over a steep-sided valley at a hanging western oak woodland, sparkling silver in the spring, in my imagination I become Ant-man: I zoom in, I let my imagination carry me in an instant to the other side of the valley, and when I’m there, I land and climb over the textured surface of a lichen as if it’s an undulating hillside. I imagine the herds of microscopic insects, bark lice like micro-bison on the prairie. The reason this is possible is that on some past adventure I have explored that other side. I know what grows there; the redstart that nests in a knot hole on an old planted sycamore; a dead oak limb which sticks up at a forty-five-degree angle and which, last year, harboured a nest of lesser-spotted woodpeckers; the dormice in the thickets of the hedge; that there will be caterpillars of pearl-bordered fritillary butterflies nibbling the violets’ leaves while they peak their purple heads through… the list goes on. It’s a world of interconnectedness and again, simple though it is, every single experience, no matter how brief and fleeting or incomplete it may feel, has a place, adds a pixel of detail to the understanding of your patch, your environment.