Sparrow Street

Day for this, day for that. Social media is jammed with ‘world days’ for just about everything now, but World Sparrow Day on March 20th caught my eye – a bit like the real bird, busy and confident in our urban shadow as if it were a small feathered fox.

Tree sparrow2

This is a tree sparrow, a rarity in England these days but abundant in the Philippines. The unevenness of nature is one of its marvels – some species paint the skies with a million silhouettes while others are known only to the most inquisitive scientists. That is not random; it reflects variation in whatever food and habitat is required, and in how wild things rise and fall on humans rhythms. This little bird, this sweet chirp in the warm grass, is perched firmly on human civilisation. Our crops feed it, our buildings house it, and our boats give it safe passage. In fact, it may have travelled to the Philippines with the Spanish fleet.

But tree sparrows tell us something else. So confident, so confiding, they unwittingly star in one of the bleakest parables of unintended consequences that we as a species have yet managed to write. Mao declared a brutally effective war on sparrows in 1950s China as part of the Four Pests campaign. It was to protect crops, of course, but without considering that sparrows actually eat crop-destroying insects. The destruction of sparrows contributed to a famine which killed up to 55 million people.

It is one lesson that should be told in every school and parliament in the world: think, from all angles, before doing.

Tree sparrow

But sparrows are birds of the present, and squabble and flutter as if yesterday is in the past. They still link us to nature, building a noisy, unruled life alongside commence and cluttered streets. Like foxes, they are the flag-bearers of a much broader collection of mostly shy wildlife that threads its way past us. When not watching sparrows in the Philippines, I was wondering how to find those others. I set up my my trailcam on the off chance it would catch something unusual, and it happens, it did.

The large dark birds in the first part of this video are barred rail, a common but extremely reclusive species of open landscapes and farmland. The toads are probably Philippine toads Ingerophrynus philippinicus, and I’m not even going to hazard a guess at the bat. I might have got more species except that the trailcam was knocked over by a magnitude 6 earthquake three days into its adventure. Here is the water cooler reacting to the 5.9 magnitude aftershock.

Perhaps that is the final lesson from sparrows. They lean on us, and that is not particularly safe; but we in turn stand on an unstable planet, and no dustings of urban glory will ever quite hide our need to remember that.

Tree Metropolis

So, Philippines.

Yes, I was in Mindanao earlier this month, my third visit to this land of numbers: 7,641 islands, about 109 million people, and trees – who can say how many trees? A hot, wet land under a sun on hyperspeed: it rises in a rush, soars scorchingly high into the sky, and collapses into a sunset twelve hours after dawn, when absurdly the air feels even stiffer. This is the kind of wild artistry that grows rainforests, and left to its own devices, the Philippines would be smothered by them, feathered out by mangrove swamps on the coast and tropical pinewoods in the mountains.

The reality, of course, is that most of the lowland rainforest has been cleared; the tall, straight trunks make for good timber, and the endangered lapnisan or agarwood has the unwelcome honour of being the world’s most expensive tree due to its wood being poached to produce oud perfume. But even where the primary forest has gone, the secondary growth is thick, and supports a fair variety of trilling, busy wild things.

Red-keeled flowerpecker

Red keeled flowerpecker

Philippine brown shrike

Shrike

No tree is a solitary life. Even in the rawest habitats – salt deserts, say, or the arable deserts of modern agriculture – a tree is a lifebuoy seized by lichens, birds and invertebrates. In the tropics, they are grabbed by other plants too; orchids and ferns perch on their limbs and frame, in a manner of living known as epiphytic. Sometimes it is difficult to know where the tree ends and its army of piggy-backing guests begins.

Big tree

Trees produce food as well as support, but not freely. These young glossy starlings will deposit the seeds in their droppings, spreading the tree’s offspring far further than it could achieve through mere gravity.

glossy starling chicks

Humans also gather from trees. In the Philippines, plums and apples are imported exotics in the malls, but mangoes, bananas and passion fruits can be picked by hand. Cacao trees, the birthplace of chocolate, sport their pods.

IMG_0217_DxO_DxO

And this is rambutan, brightening up its parent tree.

For all of the trees, the sun feeds them, and the moon sets behind them.

And the next day brings the pattern again.

Moonset

Smiles in the Rock

What stories the rocks would tell. But they do not speak, so we must ask geology to infer. Like the rest of the Pennines, the Yorkshire Dales are raw rock that has been hollowed from the inside out by water’s skilful fingers.You could say that the real landscape is down there – in a stooping fantasy of stalagmites and flowstone, with underground waterfalls tinkling by. The mountains and their drama are merely a rooftop over that world.

But they, too, host rocks worth knowing. Here rests a traveller, a wanderer from a bygone age. Samson’s Toe is a glacial erratic ripped from its bed and dumped near Catrigg Force, resting under lichen’s patient greening.

Other rocks stay put, but form staircases for Atlantic salmon.

Salmon Stainforth Force Nov 22

And others merely smile, if you look at them kindly. This one high in the fells wears brachiopod fossils – marine creatures with shells, seen edge-on here as if you were looking at an oyster held flat.

Then there are the pavements. Where limestone has been swept by glaciers and whittled by rain, it forms a most eccentric floor. Limestone pavement is a form of karst that, in its moment, sports an astonishing bloom of wildflowers. In winter they are stark and other-worldly, and difficult to navigate without breaking an ankle.

But the grandest rocks of all keep utterly silent. To wander beneath Malham Cove and stare up into its giant grey face is to read water’s diary. This has been England’s greatest waterfall, with dimensions similar to the American Falls at Niagara – albeit it is now a ghost, a curved bite-mark where grey-green meltwater from the Pleistocene icesheets ate the mountainside into a monstrous curve. The small modern stream falls underground through the limestone and roars out of a cave at the extinct waterfall’s foot.

I have visited both Niagara and Victoria Falls, and Malham Cove is about as close as I will get, I suppose, to seeing what their faces must look like behind the roar. The sheer scale of it is hard to capture on camera, but it is even more difficult to comprehend that the stories of rocks are still being slowly, so slowly written. Who knows what the next chapter will be?

Ghost Hills

Did they know that they would become this?

Thompson Common skies 29 Jul 21

Breckland, after the ice sheets.

The most formidable glacial advance in the entire Pleistocene is named ‘Anglian’. The East Anglian peninsula was swallowed by it – this meadow once looked like Greenland. As the climate warmed, standing blocks of ‘dead’ ice were left behind, eventually to be topped with soil and grass like surviving examples in polar regions. The Inuit word pingo is used to describe such hillocks with a heart of ice. They would have stood tall over the flat Breckland landscape, but they pressed into the soil like a knee.

But they melted, in time. Now, their legacy is ponds. The ghosts of lost hills, water-filled depressions carved by ancient glacial games.

Pingo pond 29 Jul 21

Breckland is rich in pingo ponds, also known as kettle ponds. It is also very rich in dragonflies, rare beetles, great crested newts and other species that appreciate wet habitats. Northern clade pool frogs, the UK’s rarest amphibian, made its last stand in the pingo ponds, and has recently been reintroduced.

Away from the water, other species exploit the meadows. Six spot burnet moths are hard to overlook.

Six spot burnet

I heard many birds calling, but didn’t get any good photos of them today. Here’s a couple from another Breckland visit a couple of weeks back: goldfinch…

Goldfinch Jul 21

And a juvenile blue tit.

Blue tit Jul 21

Two very common British species, but the Brecks can do far better; it has stone curlew, turtle dove and many other specialities. In total, nearly 13,000 different species of wild things have been identified, and many have comfortably rubbed shoulders with farming for millennia. Poppies on the edge of an arable field are a reminder of that.

Poppies Thompson Common 29 Jul 21

And all of it, from the soil to the sky, is a reminder of the ice.

Labels, Labels Everywhere

It’s the British way of protecting places, and it’s confusing. Huge areas of the country are green on the map but the designations vary in value for wildlife. To complicate things further, they frequently overlap – but given there’s currently talk of increasing the protected areas, here’s a guide.

Area of Outstanding National Beauty (AONB)

Focus: landscapes. Ownership: usually private.

AONBs are an acknowledgement that a landscape is special: rich in history and character. I live on the border of the Surrey Hills, one of the oldest AONBs; they quietly protect much of the countryside, from the Yorkshire Wolds to the North Norfolk Coast.

AONBs offer protection against development and save our rural heritage, so are invaluable, but there is no duty on landowners to do anything for wildlife. While some AONB land supports many rare species, other areas are intensively farmed or used for pheasant shooting. I would like to see AONB status come with a basic duty of care for the environment.

Cotswolds AONB

National Park

Focus: landscapes. Ownership: usually private.

Very different to the North American meaning; English national parks are basically AONBs with their own planning authority and notably more access for outdoor recreation. They sprawl across the uplands and occasionally elsewhere, conserving some of our most spectacular landscapes.

Yorkshire Dales National Park

Yorkshire Dales

Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI)

Focus: biodiversity or geology. Ownership: usually private.

These are the ones that really matter for wildlife. They cover 7% of England and range from abandoned railway tunnels to vast moorlands and estuaries. All of them come with lists of ‘notified features’: the special wildlife, geology or habitats which triggered the notification. Depending on the SSSI, this can be anything from nightingales to red squirrels or chalk cliffs.

They are bewilderingly varied, like the wildlife and geology they protect, but this is one of the strangest (and smallest) of all: Orielton Stable Block and Cellars SSSI in Pembrokeshire. Yes, we have a SSSI that is indoors. It was designated to protected lesser horseshoe bats!

Babylon Hill SSSI (Dorset) – notified for Jurassic geology

Babylon Hill

Thursley, Hankley & Frensham Commons SSSI (Surrey) – heathland habitat and species

Heather in bloom 18 Jul 2018

National Nature Reserve (NNR)

Focus: biodiversity or geology. Ownership: public, or public-private partnership

Our ‘real’ national parks, NNRs are the high point of British nature conservation. They are often underpinned by SSSI status and almost always provide public access and good scientific research opportunities.

Hickling Broad NNR, Norfolk

Hickling Broad

Special Area of Conservation / Special Protection Area

Focus: landscape-scale conservation. Ownership: various

SACs and SPAs are often called European sites, but actually derive from the Bern Convention. Together with Ramsar sites, SACs and SPAs are designed to protect habitats and species of international importance. Nobody can undertake a project in one of these sites without first proving that it will have no likely significant effect on the environment. For good measure, all British examples are also SSSIs.

Woolmer Forest SAC / Wealden Heaths Phase II SPA

Woolmer1 6 Sept 2018

Scheduled Ancient Monument (SAM)

Focus: historic landmarks. Ownership: various

Finally, there is the human factor. People have been living and working in Britain for many millennia, and every generation has left thought-provoking traces in its wake. A SAM is to human work what SSSIs are to wildlife.

Belas Knap SAM – a 5,000 year old Neolithic longbarrow.

Belas Knap1

The Maverick

We may call it a moment of genius. It takes an object – a rock, a stick, a tool – and applies it to purpose never before imagined. We admire crows that use traffic to crack open nuts, elephants that swat flies with branches, and badgers that convert trailcams into toys.

Okay, maybe the last one is less brilliance than simple mischief. Be that as it may, Trailcam2 is gone. The strap has been chewed through by badger cubs and the camera dragged underground!

Lost camera

And there it will stay, at least until the badgers shove it outwards during their regular sett cleaning forays. I hope I do see it again eventually because I’m sure the footage that it has obtained during its captivity is spellbinding. Otherwise, an archaeologist in a few centuries’ time will ponder the meaning of a small rectangular camera deep inside a Surrey hill.

But even when the path has been trodden before, nature has the feeling of a pioneer. A toadlet venturing from its breeding pond into the wood cannot guess how many generations have preceded it.

Toadlet2 Jun 20

It is the first of its journeys, after all. Not like the rain, which is evaporated and precipitated over and over again.

As for the badgers, they write their stories in rocks as well as on trailcams. Scratch marks on chalk tell of their travels.

Badger scratches on chalk 14 Jun 20

Here’s a still that I got from Trailcam2 last week.

Badger 9 Jun

It was a good camera, and it will be missed – and replaced, of course.

But the badgers will still play whether they are watched or not.

Walls, Walls, Walls

…and only plants know how to climb them.

These are the bones of Pickering Castle, a watchman of the north for centuries. Today it rests on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors National Park, flanked by a market town also made mostly from stone.

It’s almost symbiotic, the connection between humanity and rock. It shelters and guards us, while we craft it into new purposes. But it does not always need our hands to build walls. There are other, much older edifices, and those watch the North Sea.

The cliffs at Whitby are of Jurassic age, and dinosaurs and crocodiles sleep within them.

Even without fossils, their patterns catch the eye.

An invitation to walk onwards, to learn more lessons of the walls.

Dagger in the Clouds

Matterhorn: king of mountains, definition of mountains, the raw heart of a mountain after ice and erosion have stripped everything superfluous. Standing high, monstrous pyramid of unbreakable gneiss.

Switzerland: home of mountains. I’ve been needing to come back here for a long time. Even the train from Geneva painted alpine through the windows, pure white ridges and their epaulettes of clouds, cut in pieces by high towers of bare rock. At their feet are lakes as blue as gentians, and meadows that remind the rest of Europe that modern agriculture does not have to mean environmental death.

And so, into the Mattertal valley, on a cog railway that clings to the narrowest of ledges between mountain shoulders and a canyon that plunges to a milky glacial river, criss-crossed by stone bridges that make you giddy even while seated on the train. But, for certain, there is only one mountain, and rounding the last curve of track it greets you, a dagger pointing above the station to the stars.

The Matterhorn is irresistible to humanity. Flanked by higher peaks, yes, but none so perfect, none so tyrannical. It is easy to imagine the terror of early travellers across the 11,000 foot Theodul pass, shadowed to the west by this highest of triangles. Early mountain people speculated that the summit held a city of the dead – unreachable, and mystical.

But not everyone was convinced that it was beyond mortal man. It was my own country that supplied some of those who first scrambled up there – in a time before crampons, GPS or headlamps. Edward Whymper survived that day in 1865; four of his party did not. The rope that broke on their descent now lies in a glass case in Zermatt. It is hardly thicker than a human finger.

Today, most people who climb the Matterhorn do so under the watchful eye of highly experienced Alpine guides. The mountain ignores them, shouldering its glaciers and dazzling the valley just as it has since humans learned to count time.

As Luna rises over the forests of Monte Rosa’s flanks, it is time to reflect with a map and ponder tomorrow’s hiking trails.

Not going too close to the king of mountains. But its presence adds a royal intensity to the path.

There is only one mountain, and this is its realm.

Roots of the Mountain

Huge areas of England are hollow. Hard to believe, looking across mountains capped with snow and heather, lined with dry walls and wandered by idling sheep. But there is so much more beneath.

York Dales3 Mar 19

Britain is, for its size, the most geologically diverse area in the world. We have collapsed volcanoes, cliffs that crumble amongst dinosaur bones, and chalky hills that support an incredible diversity of flowers. Beneath it all, a new and exotic landscape awaits.

Blue John Cave1 Mar 19

The Pennines are England’s backbone, running from Derbyshire up to the Tyne Gap. But like real bones, they are not solid. Water has scarred them, carved them, painted them with ghosts of lost rivers on the ceilings of caves.

Creswell River in the roof2

Derbyshire has a sparkle about the edges. It is almost the only place in the world where Blue John – a type of fluorite – occurs. Some is still mined and turned into jewellery, but other specimens are left in the rock for visitors to ponder.

Blue John2 Mar 19