To Newborough Forest with The Naturalist, on a very cold but dry day that turned into a beautiful evening.
The Forest is home to a large roost of ravens. It's smaller than it used to be, but still very impressive.
They are in themselves fascinating and impressive creatures. I learned that they are a very succesful, strong and intelligent species, and much besides about how and why they roost as they do, until each of them finds a feeding territory and a mate of their own.
As always with The Naturalist, this was far from a dry listing of disparate facts. As always, he linked things together - season, weather, time of day, trees, geology, migrations. But what was new to me on this walk was his explanation of the detailed research into the raven roost, in which he clearly played a leading part (not that he would make such a claim for himself!)
On an expedition such as this, it's generally the whole field of understanding that appeals to me; it matches my romantic feelings about landscape and the turning seasons. I'm too lazy to stay long with meticulous detail.
So it's the echoing croak of the ravens coming in to the roost; the last of the light and the gleaming presence of Venus; the faint sighing in the pine trees from the lightest of breezes. That sort of thing, rather than careful investigations. The Naturalist too expresses a strong aesthetic sense, but it stands upon and feeds off a truly remarkable body of knowledge. It's the sort of knowledge that can lead to wisdom.
Notwithstanding my unscientific approach to the natural world, I did develop a new understanding of the importance of detailed, painstaking and very specific research. If I mention that an important part of The Naturalist's work was analysing the regurgitated pellets round the base of the raven's roosting trees, you'll perhaps see what I mean.
Apparently, by recording where individual ravens came from around the area, to roost in the Forest at night, and then analysing their pellets, it became evident that one function of the roost was the exchange of information about good feeding areas.
Our insights into the degree of communicative understanding and problem-solving of corvids in general and perhaps ravens in particular has grown rapidly in recent years. No wonder humans can train them to talk; they already do, to each other.
The Naturalist is right there amongst those who have worked to explore such remarkable and inspiring new understandings of the life-forms we share this planet with, and to communicate them exceptionally well, even to an unrigorous dreamer like me.
Here he is, on a different occasion, field glasses at the ready, explaining, informing, inspiring:
I hope I've explained just a little why, on this expedition with The Naturalist, I stood in the forest gloom looking at Venus, my back to a pre-Cambrian rock outcrop, raven's croaks echoing round us, and felt that brief but blessed sense of being at one with Everything, the Everything that mystics have sought to guide us towards.
Strange that although "the way that can be walked is not The Way," on this occasion the way through the cold dark woods to look at the regurgitations of ravens was, for a few moments (it's always only for a few moments) "the real Way."
Here's The Naturalist in action, on a walk he is leading.
Having captivated a large (for this sort of activity) audience with the release of moths from his previous night's moth-trap harvest- so beautiful, so varied- he is here showing us an apparently insignificant black lichen thing, which looks dried up, and as dead as a dried-up lichen on a limestone wall could be. I've noticed them before and thought they were remains, an ex-plant, lifeless.
He borrows someone's water-bottle, and pours a little of the contents over the black dusty thing. It almost at once turns green, and therefore, starts to photosynthesize again.
In motor engineering terms, that seems to me to be like a car with a flat battery and an empty tank taking in a pint of fuel and hitting 0-60 in about 1.5 seconds.
The Naturalist, with his customary light touch, says that we may quite soon find that sort of natural technology useful, as things heat up...
He takes us into a lovely little 12th century church, built of limestone blocks, and invites us to admire the flowers and plants in some recent stained glass windows, before he helps us get a truer sense of geological time. (i.e. time.) Geology as a time machine, a reversed telescope.
We feel the church is ancient, in terms of our history. The blocks of which it is built are (I think he said) about 350 milion years old, and in that period (Caboniferous) there were three separate eras during which the tiny shells and skeletons making up the limestone were laid down in their billions, and compressed into rock. The three eras were several millions of years apart. We're a blink, in that sort of scale.
"We've only been here a moment or two," he says. "Some might even say, too long." Again, all lightly done.
And I remembered an ecologist I used to know who said simply that for all the other life forms we share the planet with, the invention of agricultues was a disaster. He wasn't anti-farming, he meant something more fundamental - hunter-gatherers don't build up surpluses, power hierarchies and huge populations. For that, you need agriculture.
Standing by a rock pool close to the high-tide mark, The Naturalist contrasts a small brown seaweed (storm wrack? Oh dear, I've forgotten) with an equally insignificant green frondy sort of weed.
A fungus has co-evolved with the storm wrack, and they depend on each other. If the seaweed starts to grow too far out into the sea so it is wet for more than 6 hours/day, (one high tide) the fungus dies - and so does the wrack. But if there's not enough sea, the fungus would thrive so much it would overcome and kill its host. Dynamic balances are working in both organisms and through evolution - this partnership took millions of years to get to that position.
The Naturalist points down into the pool where the green weed sits, and says that it was from some such basis that green plants emerged from the sea and spread across the land.
He holds up the insignificant brown weed and invites us to consider an alternative history of the planet in which it's the brown non-synthesizing organism that triumphs on the land.
I guess everything, every single thing on the planet, would be different. No Bach, no Beatles, no - any of us.
The thing about The Naturalist is that he isn't a twitcher; he's as delighted by the house sparrows in the eaves of the church as he is by much rarer creatures. It's life in as many of its diverse forms as possible that he celebrates, as he brings the aesthetic and the scientific vision together, like the two lenses of a binocular, and helps us to identify not just with species, but with life itself around us. The energy that we are part of is what he celebrates. His vision makes meanings for our lives, and that's why I think it is a Way.
