Tower and Town, March 2023 (view the full edition)Nature NotesEver since the pandemic struck I seem to have built up a nice little pile of Natural History books, and last Christmas the pile got bigger. March weather is usually wet, windy and cold so perhaps this will be the month for catching up with them all. The most recent addition is a reprinted gem, The Peregrine, J. A. Baker's classic of nature writing first published in 1967. It had impressed me when I first read it, as much for the dedicated and obsessive observation involved as the brilliance of his writing. It's always an exciting and unexpected thrill to see a Peregrine in Wiltshire-over the Ridgeway locally, or in the skies above Wilton Water. Baker brings to life the drama of such encounters on the flat fenlands of eastern England. From the first year of the pandemic came The Consolation of Nature, a diary three writers kept during the spring of 2020. One of them, who lives in Ramsbury, recorded natural delights that I have also enjoyed along his local territory: dingy skipper and Duke of Burgundy butterflies, celandine and wood anemone, cuckoo and grasshopper warbler. I found it reassuring sharing his enthusiasm for and knowledge of these iconic species. There was a period many years ago, when, inspired by Vesey-Fitzgerald's Town Fox, Country Fox, I ventured out in the small hours looking for foxes and badgers, with little success it must be admitted! I was recently given a copy of Nightwalking, four journeys into Britain after dark. The author describes nocturnal encounters with snuffling badgers, playful fox cubs, skittering bats and hares boxing in the moonlight. It seems that you need to be a dedicated loner to get the best out of the natural world. In The Last Wilderness author Neil Ansell sets out to explore the Rough Bounds of the northwest Highlands over the course of a year in five solitary walks, relying on tracks and trails rather than roads, of which there are hardly any. His reward is a series of special encounters with nature in a challenging but largely unspoilt terrain. Birds in a Cage tells the remarkable story of four men, all keen birdwatchers, who shared incarceration in a P.O.W. camp in Warburg, Germany in 1941. Despite the humiliation, monotony and deprivation they suffered their methodical observations and detailed records of the local birds (including nesting wrynecks and redstarts) kept up their spirits, and they went on to become founding fathers of the conservation movement in Britain, one to start the Fair Isle Bird Observatory, another to chair the R.S.P.B. A remarkable and moving read. Robin Nelson |