My Natural History

My Natural History Read Free Page A

Book: My Natural History Read Free
Author: Simon Barnes
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vulnerable conquistador: a glorious oxymoron. I believed that there were just a few lone birds sadly and patiently working the endless seas on their enormous wings: unicorns with feathers, birds that told us humans of better times, long-lost times when there were more beautiful things than we could ever imagine.
    I had other teachers too. Gerald Durrell ripped away the solemnity of the birdy text books, and their traditionally awful prose, and never thought for a second that jokescompromised love, still less reverence. I read all his books, many of them many times. Television brought untold wonders right into the sitting room in Streatham. Peter Scott presented a programme called Look which seemed to be broadcast for me alone. Everything he said, everything he showed me had an added vividness because I knew the story of Scott and the nene, the Hawaiian goose brought back from extinction by the Wildfowl Trust. Imagine doing such a thing – and imagine I did. Savour the words: the rarest goose in the world. It is found – and I loved that slip into the passive voice, that technique beloved of serious bird books, something that seemed to imply a strange and portentous mystery, as it indeed did – only in Hawaii. By 1952, the wild population was down to 30. Then Scott took a hand and started a captive breeding programme at the headquarters of his Wildfowl Trust in Slimbridge, Gloucestershire. This led to a successful re-release programme : and there are now about 500 wild nenes honking their stuff – their name is an onomatopoeia – about Hawaii.
    When I left Sunnyhill, I got a prize. So did almost everybody except Peter Miller, so far as I remember. I got, for we were allowed to choose, Zoo Quest for a Dragon , by, of course, David Attenborough. I have it on my shelves still, so I can remind myself that in 1962, it was presented to me for Attainment and Good Work In English. (Attainment meant getting a place in a Good School.) Thebook contains Attenborough’s signature, because my father knew him from his work at the BBC. I read the book and enjoyed it: but it was the pride of possession that was the main thing. It was Attenborough’s television performances that overwhelmed me. It was not just the fabulous places and the fabulous beasts: it was the fact that he really cared. You could see him caring. You could see him not faking it. He cared like I cared. Here was a grown-up who thought it really mattered that an animal should live rather than die. It was as if Attenborough gave me permission to care. Attenborough told me that my anguish and my joy in the wild world had a real value: that love of the wild was not something you grew out of.
    There was one series in particular. It was the series of 1961, Zoo Quest to Madagascar . The details are vague in my memory, but I remember the awful, the beautiful anxiety as Attenborough hunted for a lemur that had never before been filmed. It was a revelation of the terrible fragility of the wild world: the first time that such an idea had struck me. Not that the programme dealt with the threat of extinction, for Attenborough was never one for scare stories, never one for going off half-cock. It was some years later that the accumulating weight of evidence made him the most forceful and vivid campaigner for the endangered wild on the entire planet. But for me at least, there was a strange presentiment of this future orthodoxy in the story of the indri, in this tale of a great man, the bestpossible substitute for me, travelling round a wild and remote place in an apparently hopeless quest for a strange and lovely creature that nobody had heard of and nobody could find.
    Years later, years and years later, I met Attenborough when we were both doing some work for the conservation charity, the World Land Trust. I was taking drinks, as good conservationists do when business is over, in the glorious double-decker library of the Linnean Society in Piccadilly, and as extraordinary

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