How to be a Naturalist

AWE Season One Episode Two: Respecting the past and those who came before.

I could be glib, here, and just include a single sentence:

To be a naturalist, you need to examine nature—from near and far, past and present—and study it, recording what your senses tell you about individual species and their relationships, how they fit in with our wider, wilder world.

That’s more-or-less it, but that would make for a short and relatively boring post. Instead, I want to talk about my own journey to being a naturalist, and follow this with thoughts on how you can begin to find your own path. A path you are probably further along than you might realise.

Detail of Father Time, from the Dunbar tomb, St. Fergus, Wick, Scotland

A Little (Naturalist) History

I cannot recall a time I was not interested in nature. On one of the many bookshelves in the family home there is a field guide to butterflies. The inscription is from me or, more correctly, the gift was from me, the book itself was given to my dad in the late 1970s, when I was a very, very small thing (just a month old, if my memory of this book serves me) and, as such, unable to write or read. According to the inscription, and here I paraphrase, the small-baby-version of Alex enjoyed looking at butterflies with his—our—daddy. (If my mum is reading this and it is incorrect, do hit comment below and let me—and us—know!)

Even back then, long before I have memories, I was apparently looking at nature, but the crucial part of the above paragraph is really the fact my parents were both already interested in the natural world. To come from such a background, to have access to their experience and knowledge, and their library, meant I had a healthy head start on my own naturalist’s journey.

Fast-forward a few years and young, now-reading, Alex could be found either reading David Bellamy, David Attenborough, Gerald Durrell, or watching them on 1980s UK TV. I would look through field guides in the same way my schoolmates would flick through the Beano (note for non-UK readers, this is a very long-running and famous kids’ comic). I would think of what I had seen, and dream of what I wished to experience.

I wanted to live somewhere I knew there were wild wolves (✓), I wanted to find a scorpion carrying her babies (✓), and watch a peregrine stoop (✓), I wanted to see brown bears in their natural, wild habitat (X), see the migration of the monarch butterflies (X), or witness a vast herd of wildebeest crossing a river (X). These are just a few—there are many, many others.

Some of the field guides, especially those centred on birdlife, would tell me a species was rare, limited in its range, or a passing migrant, but I would see them often in Orkney, where I was raised from the age of 8 to 18. Looking back, I remember wishing for trees, wanting to see foxes, badgers, or deer. It is a strange thing, to consider how the species I could see, such as the hen harrier, merlin, short-eared owl, seals, orca, or Orkney vole were always wonderful, but never enough.

Even now, years later and many, many miles travelled, I still think of what I have not seen, of those as-yet-unticked boxes. And, one thing I have learned in those decades, is that boxes ticked are also never enough.

I live where there are wolves, I have heard them howl in other places, I have seen their tracks, found their kill, but I have never seen them in the wild. I want to do that. I want to track them and I want to photograph them.

I have seen a scorpion carrying her babies, seen more than one species of scorpion, for that matter, but I have never shone a UV light on them in a dark place. I want to do that.

To begin studying nature is to open Pandora’s box. One thing will lead to another, which in turn shall reveal an entirely different box within, all neatly packaged and ready to be untied. Having a list is one thing, but it is a list which shall be added to eternally: you will NEVER reach the end.

Isn’t that just so wonderful?

Begin to add in the different and varied uses we humans once discovered and used to enable us to thrive, and the amount of knowledge you can accumulate becomes truly extraordinary, yet you will forever be the student. Know how to light a fire with a bow drill? How many different wood combinations have you tried? What about using various types of natural cordage? How many medicinal plants do you know? How many uses from just one plant? Can you make arrowheads with different materials: bone, antler, stone? What does that cloud mean for the weather tomorrow?

So much to learn and, by doing so, so many opportunities to grow and broaden your view of our world.

Yet it all starts at home.

The Amateur Naturalist

(Which has always amused me, as to be a professional naturalist is somewhat difficult: if you pursue this as a career, you nearly always morph into a biologist, a zoologist, botanist, palaeontologist, ecologist, lepidopterist, coleopterist, or specialist of some of sort, chosen from a long list.)

I have already mentioned Gerald Durrell. The Amateur Naturalist, the book to accompany the TV series of the same name, written by and featuring Gerald and Lee Durrell, is one of those books (and see here for a superb newsletter on this subject: The Books That Made Us), a book which was instrumental in my upbringing, something intrinsic to who I am, deeply engrained in my very psyche. Without it, in short, I would be someone else.

Very early on in the book (I can barely remember the TV show, it was on in the early 80s, I think, perhaps repeated a few years later too), the authors talk of the importance of looking at those naturalists who have gone before, who paved the way. There are the usual suspects, or usual if you read this subject: Pliny, Darwin, Linnaeus, Audubon, Mendel, Fabre, but there are also hints of the legion of amateur naturalists who had the time and education to accurately study and record the natural world as they saw it. Ironically, considering the fear of evolution in certain parts of the church, many of those most effective at this were members of the clergy.

I like to also think of all those who went before them too—the nameless and the forgotten. Perhaps an ancestor of yours in deep prehistory, learning how best to process a tree and turn it into a hunting weapon which fires projectiles further than we could throw them, or the prehistoric naturalist who discovered the healing wonders of yarrow (Achillea millefolium).

Each of these, whether Durrell, Victorian vicar, or Mesolithic hunter-fisher-gatherer, began in the same way we do—by observing those who went before, whether parents, tribe, or writers—and by looking at the nature close to them, their own home and backyard, using nothing but their own senses, memory, and intelligence.

Listen to the ancestors.

There may be folk remedies your Great-Grandmother might have passed to you, or you might have heard stories of hunger and the local wild foods people were forced to eat when times were lean. Perhaps you know a spot where you can find excellent local clay, handed down to you from a neighbour, or maybe you heard of a spring or well, once venerated and kept clear and clean, now overgrown and disappeared from the memories of most.

Listen to the ancestors and respect their knowledge.

More memento mori iconography at the Dunbar tomb. Our ancestors had a closer relationship with death and therefore, I’d argue, life, than our modern, sanitised ways allow.

It begins at home

Too often, there is a temptation to ignore the local and seemingly mundane, but who knows your own patch of the world better than you? Or, more pertinently, who could know your local patch better than you?

It all starts at home.

Even if you are globally feral, always moving around—or, perhaps, especially if you are always moving around—you should pause and look at what you can find in your own home, in your own garden, yard, or street. What is that beetle? That plant growing from the wall?

The thing—the big thing—is that we need to acknowledge all of nature. Every facet of it. Every microbe, every bacteria, every crust of lichen, or every elephant, California redwood, or blue whale. It is all part of the puzzle, all a part of a glorious whole, a system which has developed over billions of years. It is still developing.

Accept how small a part of this wonder we are, and the wonder embraces you.

Watch the view change. Wonder why. Today, it is sunny and fierce heat is already building. Last week, the cloud was so low it caressed the cheeks and made all bejewelled. Soon, I suspect, there will be a day of tremendous storms, hail crashing down, lightning dancing from the sky, thunder echoing from valley wall to valley wall.

All is in flux and we should accept that too.

If we accept that we will never see the whole picture, that it is too vast and too changeable, whilst still acknowledging how huge it is, we begin to realise we need to find a focus, a way to move forward, to begin, which does not leave us feeling overwhelmed. We need to step back before we can move forward, and narrow our field of view.

This is where the home patch comes in.

When we were small, our world grew in every increasing circles. I would suggest that, to begin with, any exploration of nature and, especially, nature in connection with how we could harmoniously use and utilise it, begins with a small circle.

How small depends on you.

Perhaps you cannot get out much, but have a garden. That’s enough.

Or you walk your dog for a couple of hours a day. That’s also enough.

Or you cannot leave your home at all, but you can see out of a window. That can also be enough.

Begin to look at all you see within those circles. Begin to question the why too—why does this tree grow here, but not further along my walk? Why does this wild flower sprout in my flower bed on the eastern edge of the garden, but not the west?

Being a naturalist—and especially a naturalist who is keen to learn ancestral skills—is all about those questions. And, as we have seen, the answers come through two different but entwined paths: direct observation, your own notes and thought, and indirect observation, reading the observations of others, whether through studying those field guides, or reading a journal or memoir.

The key is to combine these two in just the right amount. Like any recipe, if you have too much of one ingredient, it becomes unbalanced. Experiment a little, you don’t need to invest in anything beyond the only currency which matters: time. And, to spend that time on nature, is time spent very wisely indeed.

One final observation for this letter is this: as you start to closely examine the natural world (or continue to do so), note down how this makes you feel. Every time you see a butterfly, what does that do to you? Or when you take a slow walk in the woods, or along a beach? How do those scents and sounds affect you? Record how nature—and being a part of it—affects your mindset. Witness more sunsets, listen to the birds, and observe how these do something to you on a fascinating, primeval, deep level.

We are meant to observe nature. It is within our very DNA.

Next week, along with more photography, I will include some practical ideas of how we can all begin to make a journey towards being a better naturalist (and specifically, for the sake of this letter, a better modern hunter-fisher-gatherer-naturalist).