Wild Air
James Macdonald Lockhart
Meetings With Moths
Katty Baird
Both 4th Estate, £18.99
REVIEWS BY SUSAN FLOCKHART
To the casual observer, nature-watchers can seem a rather timid species. There they go, flitting across meadows with their butterfly nets or skulking silently among the rushes with binoculars trained on some lesser feathered creature.
But that image is misplaced, if the intrepid twitchers and lepidopterists who emerge from the pages of two new books are anything to go by. In Wild Air, James Macdonald Lockhart records audacious birdwatching safaris through bog and moor, while in Meetings With Moths, Katty Baird describes scrambling up cliffs and crawling through subterranean caverns in search of rare caterpillars or hibernating moths.
Nor, it seems, is this bravura anything new. Baird depicts her moth-hunting forebears as a gutsy bunch, scaling Victorian lamp-posts before dawn in the hope exotic varieties had been caught in the gaslight. As for Macdonald Lockhart, his mentor is the early 20th-century Scottish naturalist and wildlife author Seton Gordon, whose search for black throated divers once saw him navigating a Highland loch in a half-deflated canvas boat – only to lose his paddle and have to be pulled ashore by his pet dog.
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Gordon was Macdonald Lockhart’s great-grandfather, and the picture he paints of his ancestor is of a colourful eccentric, tramping around the Cairngorms in a tatty kilt in search of dotterel, ptarmigan or golden eagles. When his hearing began to fail, he got his young daughter (Macdonald Lockhart’s grandmother) to scurry ahead of him through the glens, listening for birdsong and singing back to him the calls of oystercatcher or greenshank which he then attempted to replay on his bagpipes.
Gordon described the greenshank’s call as the “the most beautiful and certainly the wildest of all the bird songs of Britain”, but doubted whether it could be conveyed in writing. In Wild Air, his great-grandson sets out to “at least attempt to put into words the experience of listening to” the sounds made by eight iconic species, including the raven (caricatured here as “the xylophone of the trees”) and nightingale (whose melodious sequence of trills includes “knocks, rattles, Sputnik-beeps and … pulsing, electric laser blasts”).
Few of these birds hang around urban gardens and Macdonald Lockhart’s quest takes him to the remotest parts of the UK, including the Small Isles. Having travelled to Rum “to listen to the midnight song of the Manx shearwater”, he spends several nights camping out on a hill known to 11th-century Norse settlers of the Hebrides as “the mountain of the trolls”, because of the otherworldly din the birds make in summer as they complete their long transatlantic return from their winter quarters, thumping down on the hillside as – astonishingly – each locates its own nesting burrow in pitch darkness.
Our ancestors, it seems, were always affected by the sounds made by birds, as reflected in onomatopoetic folk names such as cuckoo, chiffchaff, peewit or – loveliest of all – gobhar athar (air goat), Gaelic for the snipe, which is said to resemble a bleating goat as it quivers above the machair. And birds are also deeply affected by the environment they inhabit. Many species have localised “accents”; skylarks, apparently, are “great imitators” of curlews and lapwings, which have now disappeared from places they once frequented so that “all that remains of these birds is the trace of their voices in the skylark’s song”.
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During the 19th-century craze for caged songbirds, when larks were often blinded because it supposedly made them sing better, some were kept in solitary confinement lest their voices be corrupted by other birds’. It wasn’t the only cruelty. Egg collecting, although outlawed in 1954, is thought to have contributed to the decline of many species and today, museum cases filled with blown speckled shells can seem repellent.
Displays of pinned butterflies may attract similar censure but as Katty Baird points out, the number of moths taken by lepidopterists such as Alice Blanche Balfour (1850-1936) – whose carefully curated collection is stored by the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh – is proportionately tiny, and Baird credits her predecessor as contributing hugely to our understanding of the natural world and the ways in which human activity is impacting on wildlife habitats.
Baird does not pin moths herself and when she sets out to "trap" the creatures around her East Lothian home, she lures them with light sources or pheromones before releasing them back into their natural habitat once they've been observed.
For anyone who thinks moths are just those little beige critters that eat your clothes, this book is a revelation. There are night moths and day moths, moths with beautifully coloured wings and some with no wings at all. There are moths that camouflage themselves against tree bark or sooty chimneys and others that masquerade as bird droppings or staring eyes in order to repel predators. Some have lovely names such as Merveille du Jour and True Lover’s Knot.
Then there are the caterpillars, with their ingenious survival tactics. The Arctic Woolly Bear takes around seven years to mature. For the single month when the sun shines, it eats, grows and then, protected by its own internal anti-freeze, cocoons itself away for 11 comatose months. “When the caterpillar emerges from its final winter freeze it has a race against time to pupate, emerge as an adult moth, quickly find a mate and lay eggs before the ice returns.”
Baird is a captivating guide to the surprising world of this astonishingly diverse creature – and indeed, that of the people who pursue them. She herself was an unusual child, stashing binoculars into her satchel and getting off the school bus several stops early so she could birdwatch her way home. Now a professional ecologist with a doctorate in zoology, she emerges as a quirky presence in her local neighbourhood, who embarrasses her children by arriving at the school gates covered in mossy, twiggy, moth-hunting detritus.
Her self-awareness as a slightly geeky naturalist is part of the book’s charm. For while insects are at the heart of Meetings With Moths, Baird reveals enough of her personality and social hinterland to create a compelling narrative. We learn less about the author of Wild Air and the man at the human end of James Macdonald Lockhart’s long telescope remains an enigmatic presence. What drives the acclaimed author of Raptor to haunt wild, lonely places in search of avian song?
Ancestral legacy aside, that's unclear. What we do gain from Wild Air – as from Meetings With Moths – is fascinating insight into the lives of the twittering, fluttering creatures that share our world.
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