The first female nature warden
as she the loneliest woman in England? The national press thought so in 1924. Miss E.L. Turner was also the very first female nature reserve warden
(known as watcher then) but nobody could understand why she wanted to isolate herself on a lonely Norfolk island and protect birds. Men did that job. The problem for the Norfolk Naturalists’ Trust was that it couldn’t find any men and time was running out to protect the largest colony of terns in England for the coming season.
Each year egg collectors scoured the colony of 2,000 paired birds for the trade in these beautiful looking shells and ‘stupid yokels stamped on eggs and young for the sheer pleasure of destroying them’ as Miss Turner recorded later in her book ‘Bird Watching on Scolt Head’. That sounds a bit hard but is accurate as I recall in my boyhood when some violent village kids smashed anything that others thought beautiful.
Fleet Street descended on the intrepid lady in her cold and draughty hut in the sandhills but did not stay many minutes. Some were asked to carry drift-wood for the fire, the only form of heating on the bleak and Arctic nights of spring when the ‘lazy wind goes through instead of round you’. One irate London journalist arriving with half a dozen others claimed she was not lonely at all. ‘I didn’t say I was, ’she retorted; ‘you invented that fable’.
Her book published in 1928 by Country Life with its magnificent black and white plate-camera illustrations is all but unobtainable today. It gives a daily account of the lives of all four species of British breeding terns and pulls no punches as to the apparent stupidity of these gorgeous aerial angels with their pure white plumage that come all the way from the Antarctic every year to breed here. Force feeding chicks, killing neighbour’s young, laying eggs where the spring tides washed them away, and the ‘nervous electric storms’ now called ‘the dreads’ when suddenly the complete colony has a nervous breakdown were all written up in splendid scientific prose by this Agatha Christie of the marshes.
One day she had an uncanny encounter with the terns after she had found one dead and took it back to the hut and laid it outside on the sand. ‘All at once I became aware of stealthy movements. They were silent, but shadows of the hovering birds were all around me. I looked up, seeing some 20 common terns looking down at the dead bird. They were rapidly joined by 200 more. Each group in turn hovered over the dead bird then swooped down till they almost touched the corpse, rose again and joined those which had already viewed the dead bird. Then they all faced me and in perfect silence remained poised above my head. The whole episode did not last five minutes but it was most impressive. The silence seemed uncanny. There was a menace in their dark eyes. They seemed to be accusing me, their guardian, of the murder of their comrade. I felt so guilty. They dispersed then and ignored me. The incident was closed’.
Today the protection of tern colonies – equally men and women of course – is down to a fine art due in part to the enthusiasm and fame of one not-at-all-lonely woman on her desert island. She was one of the first gender-benders in the rules of employment engagement with which we are familiar today.