YOU’RE A proud owner of the most important toolkit you could possibly ever own, and it’s the one you were born with. Assuming you’re new to all this it might feel as if you’ve just got the tools out of the box. You might have tinkered with them a bit and checked that all the bits work, and now comes the moment of truth, the fun, rewarding bit, the whole point of what this has been about – it’s time to take yourself out for a spin and use your new-found awareness to its full effect.
Put all the ideas and thoughts presented in the previous chapters together and apply them, and, by definition, yourself, to the wild world. This thrill is free and it costs you nothing but time, but it has the potential to give you back bucketfuls of benefits.
It’s good not only for your mental health, but also for your physical health, it gives you insight into an ecocentric, more natural way of existing, and by increasing your own awareness of the natural world, wherever you may find or experience it, it opens your eyes up to the influences that we as a species have. When armed with this knowledge we have a good basis for making decisions and minimising our impact and for improving our future relationship with the world of which we are a part.
Seeing the beast
The bird just vanished. One moment it was perched on the rock, a king on its mossy castle isolating it from its riparian backdrop, a moat of wild, frothing, kinetic river water. The next, it had spread its wings, but rather than purr off in the bird-like manner that would seem appropriate, this bird, a dipper, dropped headfirst into the raging riffle. Within the blink of an eye it had gone, had vanished beneath the surface.
At the time, my young mind was having trouble computing all this. Small birds just didn’t do this sort of thing in my picture books. Ideas no doubt buzzed around my head. Had this been some awful accident? Had I witnessed a strange suicide? Was the bird sick or had it fainted?
Then, after what must have seemed an eternity, up it bobbed again, like a cork held deep in the bathtub. With a blink of its nictitating membranes (a very special third eye-lid, which shows up as a white flash to the distant observer, but acts as diving goggles to protect the eyes when it is foraging) it was back up on the rock. A quick flick, sending a shower of mercurial water droplets tumbling, and it assumed the pose, almost tempting my disbelieving mind to think that I had imagined the whole incredible thing. This was probably my very first birding or, for that matter, wildlife-watching experience. I would have been maybe three or four years old and I had accompanied my dad on a fishing trip in Braemar, Scotland.
I remember the moment as clearly as if it was yesterday; it was a spellbinding, seminal moment in my life: a wild creature, a mere fishing rod’s length away from where I sat on the river bank. Its trusting presence permanently altered a part of my brain. Somewhere deep in my hippocampus things would never, ever be the same again.
Frequently, I find my life as a modern human dull, burdened by responsibility and the drudgery of paying bills and taxes, and, like many of us, a lot of my time is concerned with mundane decisions. I find myself obsessed with details that really, in the greater scheme of things, are not that important. I get a bit depressed by the state of the world, the politics I don’t really understand, the fact that nobody but me, it seems, is concerned about the felling of that tree, the abuse of that hedgerow, the amount of plastic I am forced to discard. These are fundamentals – not the fripperies that society’s lack of consideration makes them out to be.
It’s the cost of being ecologically aware – things get to me, they niggle and needle into my happiness and, ultimately, get me down. As I sit, tied by necessity to a computer and keyboard as I often am, relentlessly hammering on the keypad, one finger at a time, putting down words in some kind of an order, more often than not I’m describing the things I want to be outside looking at and experiencing. I’m not alone in this, I know: we would all rather be on the beach, sand between our toes, feeling the dry rattle and buzz of a heath, or slumped on a velveteen mossy rock in an ancient oak woodland staring at the canopy. But, like me, you’re probably stuck in the humdrum of being a modern human, in an overly comfy cocoon, numb to experiences that truly stimulate the senses we’ve talked about.
A lot of my material, I’ll be honest, I collected when I was ten years old. It’s an irony that I exist in a world where the younger generations need to buy a book about, or go to a forest school to learn about, things that were, only some fifty years ago, free and part of a common knowledge. I write about things a nipper in the 1950s would have taken as a given, and it was free for the taking too. These children didn’t need someone to show them the pleasures of finding frog or newt spawn, birds’ nests, big caterpillars. These kids would know which trees made the best spears, whistles and firewood and which were the best for climbing or which gave free snacks. We’re losing those experiences, that natural knowledge which we have as a species.
I often find myself getting into a downward spiral and right old funk about my species and its predicament. I want my daughter to know a better place than this, then I get maudlin about whether anyone will read this, does it make any kind of a real difference, and then, just when I’ve reached a new level of low – a robin lands on the feeder tray that is stuck to my window.
It flicks its wings, its red breast an ember to my tinder-dry soul, it cocks its head and looks at me with those deep dark eyes, and that’s all it takes: I’m alive. It’s my bear moment again but this time in miniature. As I look, I’m seeing, and as I see, I fall into its wild world. This moment threads together every moment I’ve ever spent with a wild creature. It’s part of an interconnected whole, a life experience, and it has come full circle. It started like this nearly forty years ago with my dipper and it’s taken me all around the world. I’ve similarly stared into the eyes of shark, whale, gorilla, cobra and hornbill and here we are again. All of these experiences are very different but at the same time they share a common fundamental: they all move me and pull me in closer. This robin is not my robin, he just shares the space with me, living just the other side of the glass. The robin makes my soul soar, it lifts me in some inexplicable way, makes everything right. This simple contact with a wildling puts all the other nonsense in life into perspective. All the things that worry me in my small world get thrown into the part of my brain’s mental filing system that is labelled ‘superficial’.
This robin – but it could just as easily be a beech tree, or a woodlouse – and whatever sensory door I choose to let him in through is something raw and powerful and encapsulates what it is I’m trying to get across in the pages of this book. If I could just find the words to describe what happens in this moment when wild comes knocking, it would save an awful lot of typing.
Mr Robin is so close. I trail my eyes over the different textures of feathers, each with a specific job to do, and I notice the strange arrhythmic pulsing of his chest and wings. Then he bobs and grabs a mealworm and makes a very quiet call, and is joined by another, its mate. I now know it’s ‘Mr’ Robin as the second bird starts to play all soppy and begs like a chick. He feeds her, stuffing a mealworm in her gullet. This is courtship feeding, they’re a pair and he is feeding her up, making sure she’s full and able to give everything to the gruelling process of laying eggs which lies ahead.
Nature just let me in on one of its secrets, but more than that, there’s a connection here to a long line of robins – the ancestors of which messed around opportunistically grabbing insects disturbed by the hooves of wild boar and the aurochs in the great post-glacial wildwood. Have no doubt, this bird is a little robin-shaped shard of wild and we’re in and amongst it. If you just open up to it a little, you’ll see it everywhere.
Any contact with nature like this can provide the sort of genuine, bona fide thrill which is becoming increasingly rare in our modern world. Not rare in the regular sense, the raw materials are all around us, but rare in our pure and simple appreciation of it.
To see a wild animal – I mean to really see one, to watch it go about its business, to experience it in all its wildness and become a part of its world and not a cause for alarm, the threat, the thing that sends it scuttling off into the safety of the great beyond – is one of life’s real experiences.
It’s a way of pitting your wits against the wild and it’s not really something that happens by accident. What I mean by this is that you have to put in the groundwork, you have to be open to the experience, and in order to do this you need to hone your own skills to a level that might have been familiar to our ancestors. If you like, you are finding your inner functional hunter-gatherer and you are then deploying him or her to the pleasurable task of getting as close to your quarry as you possibly can.
It’s these intimate moments with the natural world that last; seconds spent watching a diaphanous butterfly unfold from its chitinous prison, or a moment in the presence of a badger as it goes about its business in complete nescience, are experiences that you will hold on to and replay over and over again. In my experience, it is these real moments that outlast and endure, not that bargain you got on eBay or the highest score on Donkey Kong 3. There is a school of thought that says I’m wrong and that it is only experiences that are important to us that change the synapse patterns in our brains and cement themselves as a permanent memory. So it could be argued that if you dedicate all your life to achieving that highest score on a computer game, then this will become your top-trumping memory, simply because it is important to you. My argument is that a wild experience in nature, if we allow it to happen, lights up the neural pathways that lie dormant or underdeveloped; we have this natural value system deep inside all of us and a genuine moment actually engages with something deep in us, so much so that after a magic moment we feel a real sense of purpose and deep satisfaction.
Our artificial, safe, increasingly urban lifestyle is a pretence of a world, manufactured to our own specification, making the processes of our everyday life as easy, clean and comfortable as they can be. There is little in it that represents a real taxing challenge, other than the sheer mental will to carry on doing the same thing day in, day out. There are no exercises for the innate beast in us all. To find this real significance, to discover the point in it all, we need to explore and find the edge of our comfort zone, to go out and make genuine connections with the world. It’s about reconnecting with our own inner beast, the creature that lives within us all, by immersing ourselves in a world where the wild things are.