I once met an artist on a wildlife trip to Africa. She had deliberately forgotten her binoculars. It was an experiment in seeing. I asked if I might inspect her sketchbook: it looked like the caves of Lascaux. She had become a prehistoric artist. “It wasn’t what I expected at all,” she said.
I often forget binoculars on my dog walks. Partly this is because if I forget them, I am far more likely to find something worth looking at. But also, there is something pleasingly atavistic about looking at wildlife through the naked eye.
All at once, I am a prehistoric artist myself, admittedly without the cave, the pigment or the talent. I am the seafarer, writing an Anglo-Saxon poem echoing with the sound of birds. I am Gilbert White, the great proto-ecologist, walking his local patch at Selborne, or Charles Darwin inspecting the Galapagos finches. None of these had Leica 10x42s.
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There is a feeling of distance, because you can’t bring the birds closer, but a greater feeling of intimacy of the mind: if you want to see, you have to be good at looking. Your view depends almost entirely on your knowledge of the birds and the place you are in.
A barn owl, quartering the fields at dusk, the dog lost in her world of smells, the owl lost in his world of sounds, locating field voles by ear on silenced wings. I picked it from a quarter-mile off: the privilege of knowledge. As it vanished behind a distant hedge, I noticed a white speck in a tree 300 yards away in the opposite direction: it was as if the owl had doubled back in a single instant of time. Must be a plastic bag.
But no, bad birdwatching, it was a second barn owl, taking to the air: a pair, hunting together, filling the world with optimism and chicks. I read the distant, profoundly familiar shape, thinking that if I had moved to Suffolk only for the barn owls it would be one of the great decisions of my life.
Without binoculars, you cannot take a bird out of the landscape. You are both involved in the same place, the same drama. If you want to see them better, you stand quite still, and maybe they will come closer.
The shifting shapes of the white aerofoil surface; the wings briefly raised like an angel, a deadly one, as it dropped silently into the grass and stayed there. Even from a quarter-mile away, I knew that meant dinner.
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Everything that lives is holy, said Blake. But did he mean green slime? Well: it is an irrefragable fact that everything that lives matters, that everything that lives is interesting, that everything that lives will have a group of glorious nutters trying to learn more about it, and that everything that lives is in danger.
All of which means that I now know about the nine best spots for seaweed in this country, and the six best spots for freshwater algae. This country has many rare species, unusual algal habitats supporting rich communities of life. A report on their extraordinary diversity has been produced by Plantlife, the British Phycological Society (there had to be one) and the Natural History Museum.
The group ranges from single-celled stuff to seaweeds yards long; there are 34,000 recognised species and maybe 350,000 left to describe. It’s where life in the water starts, and of course, there is a great raft of dangers and threats. You can’t learn about life without learning about vulnerability.