There is a sense of privilege in a rarity. But there is another and perhaps deeper privilege that comes from an encounter with the seldom-seen: with creatures that are common enough but rarely in sight. A glimpse of a roe deer, say, or a stoat, a water rail for once out in the open. The invisible made visible before us.
I had such a moment this week. I was in search of far more glamorous things, and had splendid views of hobby, a serious contender for the title of world’s most dashing falcon. But there was something equally special, in a quite different way, about a very undashing beast that I almost stepped on.
It writhed at my feet, gleaming like a piece of living metal. It was unable to get much purchase on the dusty path, so its retreat was clumsy and obvious. At last it managed to find a bit of traction and slithered with more confidence into the dark and secret places that it much prefers.
Slowworm. One of the many British creatures that fascinated me as a child. It was there in every textbook and field guide.They all said that it was common, but I never saw one. I think it was from experiences like that I made an unthinking child’s assumption that there was some kind of mythology involved, as if these creatures were common in a parallel reality from which I was forever barred.
I felt like Alice, who was tall enough to reach the key that opened the door to the beautiful garden, but far too big to go through. I never quite believed in the objective reality of such things as roe deer and stoats and slowworms: perhaps it’s been my life’s work to make these mythological creatures part of my world.
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The more you look, the better you get at looking. And the more often you go out, the more likely you are to bump into unexpected things. So eventually, inevitably, I bumped into the odd slowworm. I am now prepared to concede that they inhabit the same world that I do. But still I see them only occasionally. There is always that odd tang of privilege.
It was really quite a big slowworm: a foot is normal, this one was at least half as big again, probably female. And not a snake, of course. I got so cross when my books explained primly that a slowworm is in fact “a legless lizard”: well, I used to mutter to myself, what better description of a snake?
But slowworms have eyelids and blink like lizards; they have visible ear openings, unlike snakes; they shed their skin in patches rather than all in one go, as a snake must; and there are important differences in the pattern of the scales. Two quite different groups of reptiles have independently reached the same conclusion: that leglessness is the best adaptation for the way they live. Convergent evolution, it’s called.
There would be more slowworms in towns were it not for cats, and there would be more of them in the countryside, were it not for pheasants. But they carry on, in their legless, wriggling way, great lurkers under stones and logs, but like all reptiles, fond of a good energy-yielding bask in the sun. Which was why this large and elegant female was disporting herself in this unseemly way, affording me a moment of quiet privilege: a sense of how remarkable it is to share our living spaces with such singular beings.