Nature Unleashed
As humanity was put on pause, wild flora and fauna flourished, showing that our absence only makes the natural world blossom
ILOST the spring and the summer this year. I don’t mention it with any sense of grievance as, in the greater scheme of things, it was a small price to pay. Being unable to visit my preferred theatres of nature, however, made me suddenly and vividly aware of what a very good spring and summer nature would be having. By the end of this year we will have learned just how much nature thrives when our species is denied access to it.
The naturalist, writer and all-round wilderness man, Mike Tomkies, once wrote that if humankind disappeared from the Earth, every other species would be better off. It was a striking declaration.
We are nowhere near there, at least not yet – although he also pointed out that throughout history, the fate of dominant species has always been extinction – a worrying thought.
But this year provides us with the opportunity to get a sense of what it might feel like for whatever remains behind when we are gone. It has been a sobering few months for a Scottish nature writer.
The simple fact of the absence of human beings in wild places at the height of lockdown, and all across Europe at that, has been a windfall for nature on the grand scale. Just imagine – all across Europe it had spring all to itself. It is a good moment to take stock.
As it happens, I have just re-read a favourite nature book, a landmark of the wonderfully diverse and accomplished nature writing literature of America.
The Outermost House by Henry Beston was written almost 100 years ago. Its subtitle is A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. He spent that year living alone in a one-roomed shack he built himself. The end of the book, a very short chapter of four-and-a-half pages, is as fine a piece of nature writing as you will ever encounter.
Once his year on the dunes of Cape Cod was over he was asked many times “what understanding of nature one shapes from so strange a year” – as he put it in the book.
“I would answer that one’s first appreciation is a sense that creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great and active today as they have ever been, and that tomorrow’s morning will be as heroic as any of the world. Creation is here and now…”
I read that, stopped in my tracks, and put the book down. Sometimes it takes a single revelatory utterance, even one 100 years old, to encapsulate a moment in life and fix it in place.
I had been wondering earlier that day how the golden eagles were faring on a certain mountainside of Balquhidder, a territory where I had watched the resident birds and the occasional interlopers for
more than 40 years, and I was feeling rather feeling sorry for myself that I wouldn’t get to find out until much later in the year. This spring and summer I couldn’t go, couldn’t watch them, couldn’t write down what I saw, couldn’t add to my store of knowledge.
But, of course, the fact is that not only was the inconvenience minimal in my own life, it was of no significance whatsoever to the eagles or to nature.
The eagles would go on being eagles, the burn that falls from the watershed at the head of their glen and flows beneath the eyrie would still flow. Creation is here and now. Beston’s point was that it never stops.
When I raised my eyes from the book they came to rest on four pictures on the wall.
One is a triptych, three small paintings of a sun, moon and stars in a single frame, the work of my late friend George Garson, mosaicist, stained glass artist, and senior lecturer at Glasgow School of Art.
One is a wooded landscape of the Tay near Dunkeld by my mother, who was a passionately enthusiastic amateur, and one a large painting by Galloway artist John Threlfall of a mountain burn tumbling through bare rocks.
The final picture is a photograph by Laurie Campbell whose pictures enhance this column every month, a beautiful study of an Arctic tern on its nest.
All four artists are or were friends – George and my mother are no longer with us, but John and Laurie are alive and well and at the height of their powers, interpreting nature with great distinction.
All four were people who, one way or another, had a sound grasp on the fundamentals of nature, and responded daily to its daily creations.
“And that”, I told myself, “is your job.”
I have written about the eagles before. I will doubtless do it again. But all I can ever write down is the moments in their lives I happen to witness, then the writer puts the moments together and interprets them for the benefit of himself and his readers.
The eagles don’t care that I do that. It is worth remembering in the midst of my preoccupation with one book after another, that in the eagle glen as in everywhere else where I go to work, every morning after my visits the eagles will still be going about their everyday lives, creation will continue, and these mornings will also be as heroic as any in the world, as Beston put it.
But Beston was not finished. His next sentence was this: “So near is man to the creative pageant, so much a part is he of the endless and incredible experiment, that any glimpse he may have will be but the revelation of a moment, a solitary note heard in a symphony thundering through debatable existences of time.”
His point is that it may be that the solitary notes matter to us, but it is the symphony that matters much, much more, and it is the symphony that we tamper with in the way we live our lives, the symphony we render discordant and disharmonic.
The fact that I, and many other people, have been inconvenienced is to nature’s great advantage, because we are not there standing and staring, making noise, injuring or destroying habitat, and by our presence, wittingly or unwittingly disturbing nature.
“We staring” are not there standing and