Look and learn
A life devoted to nature has prompted Nick Baker to share his passion in print
For as long as I can remember I have been mesmerised by plants and animals, and not just the living, breathing ones. Everything about them, feeding signs and other evidence they leave behind, even their dead bodies can tell us so much about them. But although I have been an amateur naturalist all my life, to this day I continue to learn how and where to look at the living world. That is really what my new book is about – using my experiences and the tricks of the trade that I have amassed over the years to gain more insight into the world we live in.
My interest started as soon as I could crawl and pretty soon I was putting my mother through situations no mother can be prepared for: giant silk moths in the wardrobe, tarantulas under the bed and the countless dead animals I would find while out and about and bring home to dismantle at leisure – behaviour my family found particularly disturbing. But to me there was very little difference between wishing to see and understand the internal workings of an animal and my brother pulling a lawn-mower engine to pieces for the same reason.
Through those dark, misunderstood times, a wonderful book called The Amateur Naturalist by Gerald and Lee Durrell became my friend, inspiring me to look, investigate and satisfy my natural curiosity. That book was a major influence on my becoming a naturalist, and it was very much the inspiration behind this one. I am deeply grateful to Lee Durrell for providing such a generous foreword to The Complete Naturalist.
Things haven’t changed much since those early days, despite the fact that I am now a responsible adult with my own house – my home is still stuffed full of natural curios, both living animals and the inevitable collections of debris, skulls, bones and feathers. To