When my father died, he left a hundred notebooks and a pair of binoculars. A keen birdwatcher — you might say obsessive — his notebooks meticulously record every birdwatching trip he ever made. Each entry follows the same pattern: site description with sketch; map co-ordinates; date and weather; species seen (relevant gender icon applied); flock sizes estimated and rarities noted. His life’s work, these notebooks are a statistical record of the last wildernesses of northern England from 1951 to 2012 — the world viewed through my father’s binoculars.
Though drawn just as deeply into the natural world, I don’t do things in the same way. I lack his encyclopaedic avian knowledge; I don’t keep lists. Never making special trips to see vagrant rarities, I don’t even carry binoculars. My compulsion is to be immersed within a landscape, not to detail its contents. But last week I found myself following in his footsteps.
Word got round that a crane had taken up residence by a ruined abbey. Extinct in Britain since the 17th century, cranes are recolonising the country in one of the most exciting recoveries in British ornithology. I was soon pedalling through the back lanes, gripped in the kind of excitement my father must have often known as he drove our green Mini Clubman to view a new sighting.
When I arrived, a band of twitchers were happily ensconced behind a stone wall. Cranes are the UK’s tallest, most striking birds and the array of optical instruments (binoculars, monoculars, telescopes, telephoto lenses) were taking in every detail of the flamboyant ruffle of tail feathers, long slender neck and red crown.
Standing there squinting at the crane, which from this distance looked to the naked eye like a grazing sheep, one of the group whispered to me: “Want to borrow a pair of bins?”
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Words for water
One of my father’s notebooks is different from the rest. Rather than site visits, it’s a list with detailed descriptions of what he called, Our Words for Water. He found 67 of them in the English language and in the field. Cycling back from the crane, I decided to see how many I could find.
“Beck” was easy, I passed over a number of these hurrying “streams”. Up on the moor, I also crossed a couple of upland “sikes” — young “watercourses” that often dry in the summer but can become raging “torrents” after a “downpour”. Down in a dale, I cycled beside a “stell”, a local term for a sluggish, lowland “brook” where fish used to be corralled. Then, taking a diversion, I visited a “spring”, or as my father’s notebook also referred to such local sources, a “keld” — a Norse-English word meaning cold.
Kneeling down to drink from the water bubbling up from the moss, the cold did indeed sear my tongue and I remembered the notebook entry: “Limestone aquifer-fed, even in the hottest summer, the kelds of the Yorkshire hills will register between 3-7C.”
For a whole minute I knelt by this icy twist of singing spring water. In that time it discharged about four pints of water, making it what my father called a “keld of the seventh magnitude” — he used a geological classification method to measure water issue.
Roots in the past
The natural world is a great gift for the wellbeing of us all. It feeds the human need for both science and poetry; in fact, it unites them, bridging a chasm that has fractured our culture for too long. My father found a life’s study in nature, and I do too. And though we were very different, I know that he would have been just as fascinated by the old tree growing on the hill above the spring.
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As I walked up to it, I saw that the towering, twisting field maple was part of a remnant of ancient woodland, somehow preserved when the hillside was planted with commercial conifers. If he’d been here, my father would have methodically investigated this arboreal monument for indications of age in the hollow girth, decay holes and fungi, pointing out the multiple trunks rising from a single base, which are a sign of past pollarding.
Thanks to his influence, I saw that too, but what I was looking at, or rather imagining, were the conversations of the last people to pollard this maple to feed their cattle, what they talked about as they carried the foliage to their herd and whether they too felt the ice as they knelt to drink from the bubbling keld.
Jonathan Tulloch’s latest book is Glimpses of Eden: Field Notes from the Edge of Eternity