My Natural History Read Free Page B

coincidence would have it, I found myself by the table with the drink on it, clutching a bottle. I turned to find Attenborough with an empty glass beside me, so I filled it. As a result I was able to ask a question that had been troubling me for years: “What was the lemur? The one you tried so hard to find and thought you never would?”
    I had wondered if my description and my memory were too vague. But not a bit of it. There was only one possibility: “Indri!” And a flood of reminiscence and anecdote , wonderfully told over a diminishing glassful: Attenborough is as great a performer for one as he is for millions. It was, and still is, a question of caring about the subject. It was, and always is, a question of love. Attenborough was, and for that matter, still is, my favourite teacher.
    Indri! The biggest surviving lemur, weighing up to 29 pounds, a teddy-faced jumper with a taste for music: thegreat singer of the Malagasy forests. Lemurs are primates, like us: one of the earliest forms in which our group took shape. They were out-competed on mainland Africa by monkeys and apes (like ourselves) but they somehow got to Madagascar after it had separated from the African mainland and set about a great adaptive radiation. Presumably the pioneers got there by rafting, by getting lifts across the strait – accidental lifts – on tumbled and floating vegetation. There the lemurs ceased to be losers and became winners: virtuosi of evolution, creating more and more new species to fill one niche after the next: from extinct giants to tiny little things like the pygmy mouse lemur, from lemurs that live much as monkeys do, to the aye-aye that sneaks about in the dark and thinks it’s a woodpecker. (It has a middle finger three times the length of the others and pokes it into holes in tree trunks for larvae .) The name lemur is from the Latin; lemures are spirits of the night. Perhaps it is the haunting song of the indri that prompted this name. It is a sound I have never heard in person, and it is as strange a din as nature has come up with. The indri is something of a tree-bound whale.
    And I revelled in Attenborough’s search for the indri: the elusive, the near-lost, the all-but-unfindable beast, the myth of the Malagasy forests. But he found it: wonder of wonders, he found it, and there he was, in black-and-white images caught on a clockwork camera, brought to our sitting room, brought even to the postal district of SW16.Surely, I thought, it is a wild world out there, a world in which wonderful things exist, but one in which they can’t take anything for granted.
    All was not as it should be in this world. I knew that after the search for the indri. I knew then that it was not possible to love the wild world without knowing pain. Though Attenborough found his indri, I knew that it might just as easily have come out the other way: almost, I could see him on television apologising for the fact that he had been unable to find an indri, that there weren’t enough indris to find. And this would not have been an admission of a failure of the human ability to find things: it would have been an admission of a failure of the human ability to keep things. To look after things. I knew that if I chose to continue loving wildlife, I would be choosing a way in which sadness was unavoidable. And I embraced it willingly.

3. Beadlet anemone
Actinia equina
    I t troubled me that I didn’t love the sea. Such loving was required behaviour. It was essential that I loved Cornwall with a deep and special passion, and that meant loving the sea. Cornwall was the land of our holidays: family all together, father not at the BBC, mother not writing or lecturing, school forgotten. It was the land of treats and everything could only ever be marvellous. To believe anything else would be an unthinkable crime; worse, a kind of blasphemy. But I swam poorly, and the Cornish seas, even in August, sucked the warmth and, it seemed, the life from my body.