My Natural History Read Free

read the old one to bits.
    I was always poor at arithmetic; my natural ineptitude combined with the teaching of Mrs Holland was a fatal combination. It was decided at home that I must “learn my tables”; that is to say, to get the multiplication tables by heart. My father wrote them out for me in his speculative italic hand, and I duly learned them. I still know them: if you ever want to know what nine eights are, you have only to ask. It was a triumph of corruption: I pulled off this feat because I had been bribed. I was entitled to choose any book in the world, other than, I suppose, a Gutenberg bible. I acquired something far more precious: A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe by Roger Tory Peterson, Guy Mountfort and PAD Hollom: a trio of teachers that made me forget Mrs Watson and all her works.
    I read this to shreds also. It had far more birds than The Observer’s Book : nearly three times as many. S Vere Benson described 243; Roger Tory Peterson and his pals told me about a mind-spinning 500-plus, and then went on to talk about more than 100 accidentals. So many birds! Birds and birds and birds: I had not thought life had created so many. I knew about buzzard, of course, “easily recognised by its mewing cry”; and S Vere had mentioned rough-legged buzzard in a throwaway paragraph. But now I could learn about honey buzzard and long-legged buzzard as well, andpore over many pictures of every species: so many buzzards ! So many different kinds of legs! And how could anyone tell these buzzards from Bonelli’s eagle and booted eagle and short-toed eagle? How could you see an eagle’s toes? I knew about golden eagle: but now I had to wonder: was imperial eagle still better? I mused on the question night after night, turning the pages. I thought I was learning about birds: in truth, I was, for the first time, beginning an understanding of a subject that in those days didn’t even have a name. Despite that, it had me enthralled then, as it has enthralled me all my life. I was learning the greatest lesson of my life, and it was not arithmetic and not the recorder. The name of the subject is biodiversity.
    Those accidentals, they were the most marvellous thing of all. Time and again, I would turn to the terse paragraph that described wandering albatross Diomedea exulans : “Largest ocean bird (11 ft wing-span). Mainly white, black wing-tips…” Imagine that. Imagine seeing one. And imagine I did: my imagination was haunted by birds, and particularly the wandering albatross. In the Field Guide , all the birds described fully and illustrated had been “ officially recorded” in Europe at least 20 times. An accidental was, I learned, a bird that had made even fewer appearances . In other words, it was very, very rare: so rare it hardly existed. So rare it was almost a myth. It was a bird that nobody would ever see, a bird of the imagination. Naturally, I looked for the wandering albatross all thetime: off the shore at Southsea and Paignton, but without any expectation at all of seeing one. I just looked out and imagined: and look! There it was! Coming in past the pier, or perhaps cruising over from Torquay, a nonchalant master of the winds and the waves, banking with airy grace on its giant wings, and I alone was there to understand. But I don’t think it was the glory of seeing one that really mattered to me. It was the glory of being one. I too was an albatross, I too was an Accidental, I too was a rare being, I too was to be treasured in my wandering isolation.
    Rare, rare. The more precious because rare: the more precious because so few. I hadn’t grasped the point that albatrosses are rarely seen in Britain and Europe because their heartland is the Southern Ocean; that their only reason for coming so far north is, indeed, accidental. The poor things only come here when they get lost. But I preferred the idea of a mighty bird of devastating fragility: a magnificent warlord in need of protection: a