Of birds and bees
IF I had the craft of Merlin, I would give every child the gift of my childhood,’ said the naturalist Gerald Durrell. His Greek-island education might have been rackety, but he found purpose in lying on his stomach contentedly observing the intricate life of insects (Masterpiece, page 56). Soon, the engrossing subject of natural history that directed the course of his life may be taught to GCSE level, to the generation in whose hands the future of the environment lies. For how can they be expected to recover biodiversity if they don’t know what the word means, how it works, what can be realistically achieved and what are the consequences of their intervention?
There is, however, a simple joy in knowing this stuff—the identification of wildflowers, trees and birds and the knowledge of quirky habits, from puffins living in burrows to beautiful butterflies being drawn to cowpats —which overrides the dramatic statistics. How do you tell a stoat from a weasel? (By the tail). Which bird’s call sounds like ‘a little bit of bread and no cheese’? (Yellowhammer). When are a stag’s antlers ‘in velvet’? (When they’re re-growing).
These and other fascinating manifestations of the natural world—the laziness of cuckoos, the geographical instincts of swallows, the hierarchy of bees, the engineering abilities of beavers—will form lessons where the less sophisticated country child can steal a march and their deprived urban cousin have their imagination fired. The child that doesn’t like school very much might become more enthusiastic. The pandemic has served to reiterate the solace to be found in the natural world, from the persistent spider that, legend has it, inspired Robert the Bruce to keep fighting to the uplifting birdsong that French composer Messiaen incorporated into his Quartet of 1941, written in a prisoner-of-war camp.
The wheels of Government departments grind slowly, not helped by Covid; it is anticipated that the subject, the brainchild of, among others, the journalist Mary Colwell, will reach the classroom in September 2024. Then, the education of teachers will be as important as that of their pupils and some will need a dose of realism.
They must understand that just as a lion will naturally pull down a gazelle on a BBC wildlife programme, so a fox will bite the heads off newborn lambs, that a spectacular raptor will break a hare’s heart when seizing her leveret or that cow effluent is an important ecosystem. This brilliant new exam will only do its job if teachers can resist politics and remember from their English lessons who wrote that Nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’ (Tennyson).