Country Mouse

Perils of going wild in the country

giles wood

I’ve now spent 30 years transforming an acre of grade one agricultural land into a snake-infested wilderness featuring rank weeds.

A visiting friend had the brilliant idea of setting up a motion-sensitive ‘trail’ camera within the acre, to see what wildlife I could observe by virtue of this spy technology.

Excitement mounted during the next fortnight as I waited for one of my daughters to come home and retrieve the images – a task way beyond this technophobe’s skill level.

The camera revealed a pageant of fauna, featuring the usual suspects. First came a brace of other men’s pheasants. Then what Mary perceived as a ‘plague’ of bunnies – a major feature of this year – a brown hare, a badger and that unwelcome alien invader from Woburn Abbey (introduced there by the 11th Duke of Bedford in 1894) the muntjac deer.

My attention span having been degraded by Netflix over recent months, my waning focus was restored by the sight of a female primate on her hind legs, breasts heaving, suggesting that she suckled her young. She was a mammal, to be sure, and in place of fur or feather she chose Gore-Tex.

A rambler had taken a wrong turn. By insinuating herself into this wildlife habitat, she called to mind a once fashionable, now dated book in my parents’ library by the zoologist Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (1967).

When humans are viewed in such proximity to other species in our national fauna, we are forced to wrestle with a problem that has exercised all the great minds, eg Shakespeare, Heraclitus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Silent Spring author Rachel Carson insisted that ‘man is a part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself’. In short, by tampering with nature through the use of pesticides and palm-oil plantations we are fouling our own nests.

We are living in the age of the Anthropocene, wherein mankind can be seen as just a geological force, whose calling card is a layer of plastic in the Earth’s crust. So how do we humans fit in – or not fit in – to nature?

Trespassers, paddle boarders, wild swimmers and even kayakers try on the ‘We are nature’ argument ad nauseam. Indeed, I vividly recall a wild-swimming experience of my own, undertaken a few summers ago with a friend. Cyril and I had entered a lake on the Benacre estate in Suffolk, where the temperature was some degrees warmer than the sea outside his house in Aldeburgh. Moreover, there were no stony pebbles to cross to gain access to the water.

Unlike characters in a DH Lawrence novel, neither were we naked nor did we wrestle – we were merely eco-signalling. Look at us – we love to be immersed in nature, even if it involves swimming with frogs, newts and possibly Weil’s disease contributed by rats.

Then, like the proverbial Turk emerging out of nowhere, materialised a wildlife ranger – fresh out of college and still wet behind the ears. He ordered us out of the lake. The poor fellow was no match for Cyril’s debating skills honed in the hallowed halls of the Eton Debating Society.

‘You are disturbing the natural environment of the lake,’ asserted the ranger.

‘But,’ countered Cyril, still in the water, ‘we are part of nature.’

‘Not to be confused with naturists,’ I added. After all, he could see only our top halves and I thought it important to clarify.

By saying so, I irritated Cyril, who had hoped for a good ding-dong on a philosophical question, but the ranger clearly decided not to engage with these awkward customers and slunk away to a safer space.

When Mary was a girl in Northern Ireland, a feature of her Sunday mornings was observing the congregation arriving at the Presbyterian church next door to her house. The townspeople arrived in their most respectable clothing with devout expressions on their faces. In those days, just being seen going to church was all it took to signal your virtue.

Those were simpler times. Today, Christian soldiers are almost defunct. The idea of man’s dominion over nature has given way to more fashionable proclamations of oneness with it. When it comes to the environment, however, we get it wrong more often than right.

Red kites, once persecuted, are now persecuting us, especially in Henley where they have reached Daphne du Maurier numbers. I am convinced as a citizen scientist that feeding birds is causing major distortions in the predator-prey balance of the British Isles, as well as causing a huge surge in rats. We would be better employed planting insect-attracting vegetation so that birds could help themselves.

Here in Anglesey, where I’m holidaying, we have a wren nesting and its young frequently fall out of the nest. Once I witnessed a fall in action and saw how well adapted the tiny speck of life was. With prehensile feet, it clasped onto the table edge that had broken its fall. I admonished myself for twice previously having acted like an avian helicopter parent by placing it back in its nest. Even as a committed rewilder, I couldn’t resist the feelgood factor of saving it.

Being an eco-saviour might always in hindsight end up looking more like ecomeddling. It occurs to me that man is no more suitable to assume the stewardship of the Earth than is a fox to be placed in charge of guarding a hen coop.