Not Quite With Nature
Worried I wasn't as connected to nature as I thought, I followed a birder into the British countryside to find out.
‘What was that?’ I ask, spinning around, binoculars at the ready, expecting to spot whatever creature made that shrill cry.
‘That’s a tree,’ says Neil Bucknell, a lifelong birder who has spent most of his sixty-nine years honing the craft.
He nods toward the wind, which has set a pair of willow branches rubbing together. ‘That’s the problem when you’ve got weather like this.’
We continue along the muddy path. Our Wellingtons sink to mid-calf as we search for birds brave enough to face the winter storm.
‘That noise you hear is a redwing. And that’s a magpie,’ says Neil, reeling off identifications like a human Merlin app. ‘You’ll probably recognise magpies — I think that’s one both we and you get.’
‘Actually, we don’t have them,’ I say with certainty.
I later learn — via Google — that Magpies do inhabit my home country of Canada.
Whoops.
A recent University of Derby study found that Britain — where my father was born and where I’m currently based — and Canada — where I’ve lived most of my life — rank among the least nature-connected nations in the world.
How could this be?
I’d seen enough David Attenborough documentaries to know the UK isn’t exactly short on wildlife. The same goes for Canada, particularly British Columbia, where I’m from, with its towering pines and orcas peppering the coast.
Also, in both countries, I know plenty of people who spend time outdoors, whether running trails, cycling up mountains, or paddling in kayaks.
But instead of dismissing the findings outright, I decided to see just how connected to nature I am.
‘Sounds like a bunch of something,’ I say, trying to take the birdspotting burden off Neil.
I ask what the secret to recognising them is. He says it’s all about matching the bird to the sound — but our lesson is interrupted by a barbed-wire fence across our path.
We climb over it gingerly and carry on.
Eventually, we come across a redwing — by ‘we’ I mean Neil — perched high in a tree.
Like an eager student trying to impress a sommelier at a wine tasting workshop, I offer: ‘It’s almost like a chestnut brown,’ surprised by how little red there is in a bird named after the colour.
Perhaps in an attempt to build my confidence, Neil points to a group of birds settled in an open field.
‘You’ll probably recognise these boys,’ he says.
‘Canada geese!’ I cry, relieved to see a reminder of home — and to finally get something right.
Neil explains that Canada geese are an introduced species, so these are likely UK-born.
I’m thankful for the clarification. I was about to ask if this might be the very same flock I’d seen flying in a V formation back home, some 5,000 miles away.
Watching Neil move so effortlessly through the landscape, I couldn’t help wondering how our relationship with nature in this county has changed — and when we first began to appreciate it.
A little online digging seemed in order.
In 1889, Lancaster-born Emily Williamson was appalled by the slaughter of birds to feed a fashionable trend: feathers adorning hats, clothes, and accessories.
In response, she gathered a group of women to discuss how to stop the plumage trade and had them sign a pledge to ‘wear no feathers.’
That small meeting grew into what is now the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, while the pledge became the Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Act, which banned the trade in exotic feathers.
Attitudes were also shifting elsewhere.
A decade after Williamson’s campaign began, British ornithologist Edmund Selous — who was then in the habit of shooting birds for study — had his own epiphany.
While observing what he first took to be a piece of tree bark, he realised it was a nightjar, perfectly camouflaged.
Astonished, he wrote in his journal:
‘Let anyone who has an eye and a brain (but especially the latter), lay down the gun and take up the glasses for a week, a day, even for an hour, if he is lucky, and he will never wish to change back again.’
‘So where would most of the birds be hanging out?’ I ask as the landscape grows eerily quiet.
Neil explains that most birds hunker down in vegetation when it’s cold and windy to avoid heat loss, though those in open country — like geese and ducks — don’t have that luxury.
‘I see them on really cold days,’ I reply. ‘They always look so miserable just hanging out on the water.’
Even so, if you lined up a row of mallards, I doubt I could tell the content from the unhappy.
‘I can hear another kingfisher,’ Neil says, picking out a faint, high-pitched call nearly lost beneath the rush of the river and the rain beginning to fall.
‘Really? You can hear it through the water?’ I ask.
‘Well, I might be nearly seventy,’ he says, laughing. ‘But I’ve still got my hearing.’
If my birdwatching debacle was any indication, the gap between me and the natural world was only growing.
At a loss, I turned to Miles Richardson, the University of Derby professor behind the nature connectedness study, to see where I was going wrong.
‘Being “in” nature can be passive,’ he says. ‘Nature as a backdrop while doing other things.’
Nature connectedness, on the other hand, is a measurable psychological relationship with the natural world.
‘So it’s possible to be connected to nature when you’re not in nature,’ he adds.
The good news? Getting started, Richardson says, is easy:
‘Simply taking a moment each day to note the good things in nature.’
‘We don’t want you being swept away,’ says Neil, guiding me along a stretch of towpath not yet swallowed by the rain-swollen river.
As we head back, the darkening sky drawing our day to a close, I take comfort in knowing that if I were to tumble into the Thames, he could relay my location to rescuers, distinguishing my distant hollers from the Canada geese squawking in the field beyond.