If we left home early in the half light, before breakfast, the white owl would still be ghosting alongside the hedgerows on silent wings to take a last late vole to the shadow of the barn.   And  there in the garden of the big house, behind the wall, a fairy woodpecker, red head and ladder back would be fidgeting his way up the tall trees.  

Alas, the house has been demolished;  the barns pulled down, the birds gone, even the chinking of Corn Buntings in the fields.  The spectral owl still hunts in the wildernesses,  but the fairy woodpecker is a figment, an image torn from a book, a trace in the memory.     

Fifty three more springs have passed.  And then on Thursday,  lying in sharvasana  (the corpse posture) under the tall beeches on the Tumps,  I heard a soft regular tapping, more like a snore or the purr of a contented cat, and a high pitched call repeated three times.   I opened my eyes and caught a flutter as a tiny bird, no bigger than a sparrow but more fragile, moved to another dead limb and rattled a different pitch.  I focussed; the same white stripes, the red cap, the cheek patches and I believed in miracles.

The Lesser Spotted Woodpecker has declined by more than 90% in the last fifty years in the UK and cross Europe.  There are now fewer than  2000 pairs left in Britain.  At least two pairs are present amid the deer and open woodland in Chatsworth Park. The British Trust for Ornithology identifies the possible reasons for its decline as competition with and predation by Great Spotted Woodpeckers, and reductions in small-diameter dead wood suitable for foraging, while the species’ large home ranges suggest that landscape-scale changes in woodland (loss of mature broadleaved woodland, losses of non-woodland trees such as elms, and woodland fragmentation) may also be important (Fuller et al. 2005).

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To some extent, the erosion is predictable.  Computer models can factor in tides, currents, geology, bathymetry, and they provide an rough idea, but what actually happens often depends on politics and local interests.  As, my brother Simon, who is an artist interested in environmental issues, told me, ‘The situation is very different on the impoverished Holderness and Lincolnshire Coastline compared with the more affluent Suffolk Coast where there are major amenities like a nuclear power station, a world famous nature reserve and big coastal communities of Lowestoft, Southwold, Aldeburgh and Felixstowe.’  Down there, the coast is being protected by blocks of Norwegian granite and sand dredged up just off shore, but such measures are short term solutions.  Over the longer term, usch measures are counterproductive.  The granite blocks can sink and the tides find their way round the back of them while dredging offshore sandbanks can remove the first bulwark against erosion. 

‘What the land means varies from place to place’, Simon explained. ‘Such meanings are political  and local and their cumulative effect cannot be easily factored in.  Decisions on whether to allow arable or to allow the river to break through to the sea (as at Aldeburgh) are often made by local councils without reference to the bigger picture.  So what you can have is some local amenities protected, a golf club here, a ferry terminal there at the expense of desolation at bigger areas up and down the coast.’    

As an artist without the restrictions of commerce and local politics, Simon is free to use his imagination to create what might happen in the future.  He is not confined by the physical constructs of the computer modellers, he can bring in concepts of politics and meaning to gain a more realistic understanding of what might happen.  It’s a chaotic system but like the weather, not entirely unpredictable.

Not for the first time, have I seen comparisons between what Simon is doing and what I am interested in.  We think about things the same way.  Most illness is more influenced by the meaning of what happens to an individual; diet, infection, gender, contamination may be able to be factored in but are only part of the story.  For both coast and the disease host, you need to get up front and personal.

The image, Sand patterns, Isle of Eigg, by Dudley Williams  was the winner of the classic view, adult class, in this years Landscape Photographer off the Year competition.

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According to legend, the Empress was sitting under a mulberry tree when a white egg-shaped cocoon fell into her tea and she observed a thread uncoiling from it. She picked up the end and started to wind it round her finger.  It didn’t break and just kept on coming and coming.   

Eventually, having leant how to dye, weave and fashion clothes from this precious thread,  the Chinese traded it to the rest of the world via the Silk Road, an overland trade route though the legendary Samarkand and the deserts Central Asia to the emporia of Europe.  The Venetian, Marco Polo followed the same route in the opposite direction to bring back knowledge of China to the west.

 The Silkworm (Bombyx mori) is the caterpillar of a pallid moth native to Northern China.  Over the centuries, it has been inbred to the point where it can no longer survive in the wild. It has a fat body and small wings and cannot eat or fly.  It just reproduces and dies within five days, just enough time for  the female to lay, on the underside of a  mulberry leaf,  200 to 500 lemon-yellow eggs that eventually turn black and hatch into tiny caterpillars.  The emerging silkworms are fussy eaters, dining only on mulberry leaves ( Morus alba)  for 4 to 6 weeks until they are nearly 3 inches long, having moulted several times.  When the silkworm has had its full of mulberry leaf, it spins a cocoon from a single strand of silk made of protein secreted from two salivary glands in the caterpillar’s head. This process takes 3 or more days.  The silk covers a hard brown-shelled pupa, from which the adult moth emerges.

In Northern Laos they let the caterpillars grow, feed them on fresh mulberry leaves until they form cocoons and pupate. Some of pupae are allowed to hatch into a silk moths and produce a new crop of silkworms, but the rest are first steamed to kill the pupae (which  would break the silk if they emerged as moths).  Next the cocoon is dunked in hot water, (rather than tea), to dissolve the sticky coating that binds the silk.  Then they wind the half mile strand of silk that makes up each cocoon on a small wheel, spin the threads from several cocoons together,  dye them and weave them on a small loom to make the cloth.  The Loatians do all of this in the space under their houses on stilts, the silkworms protected from predators in small mesh cages. 

I wonder if the cocoon altered the taste of the Empresses tea.

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A magnificent butterfly, I thought,  so eye-catching in its dress uniform of red and black with white flashes, but it’s forewings were long, black and lacy and used for propulsion; only the hind wings were designed for display, like banners or the logo on tail of an airliner with its fuselage  painted the brightest red.   No butterfly this, but a magnificent lacewing, some two inches from wingtip to wingtip.   It flew in figures of eight but always returned to dip its abdomen in the same patch of wet sand and deposit a few more eggs.    

They call them inch worms, but they don’t slither along like most worms, they grab with their mouth parts then bring their nether regions up, folding their body like a paper clip before stretching forward again.  Not that they move very much; they lie in wait in the damp shade under leaves  for months and then drop off and attack themselves to any large mammal (like us), who comes past and brushes against the vegetation.  They are so sticky, wipe them off with your hand and, like burrs, they stick to your fingers.  But most of the time, you don’t know they’re there unless you knock  them and they burst in a pool of blood.  Leeches secrete an anaesthetic and an anticoagulant.  They inch their way into your clothing and secretly latch on to a tender area of naked skin and only detach when they are full and distended, whereupon they seek moisture and shade for their long digestion.

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The butterflies lay their eggs on the leaves of the Wild Thyme.  When they hatch the caterpillars burrows into the buds and eat the developing seeds.  If there is more than one one caterpillar in a bud, it will be devoured.  The surviving larva then falls to the ground,  hides in a crevice in the earth and is discovered by an ant, which is driven into a frenzy, climbing all over it, licking its skin and sipping the sweet secretions from glands at the end of the caterpillars body.  The larva tolerates the ants attentions for up to four hours before curving its body and making it rigid so that it resembles the larva on the ant.  The ant, thinking that’s what it is, then carries it to its nest and deposits it with the other larvae, which the caterpillar proceeds to devour, biting through the soft skin and sucking out the body fluids. The ants might realize that there is an invader in their nest at this time, but the caterpillar produces a pheromone that is identical to the ants and so remains undetected until its skin becomes too tough to be attacked.  The caterpillar feasts in the nest for a year, by which time it has grown to 100 times its original size.  The workers treat it as a queen, fussing over it and licking its skin.  It even emits noises like those of a queen ant.  It then turns into a chrysalis and late the following spring, amid a flurry of queen like noises and frienzied activity from the attendant ants, it emerges as a butterfly and escapes the nest, where it expands its wings and takes off on its mating flight. 

What an amazing life story, but it still didn’t explain why the Large Blue became extinct.  To answer this, Thomas’s painstaking research discovered two crucial facts.  There are several species of red ant on heathland, but only one of them, Mermica sabuleti,  plays host to the caterpillars of the Large Blue.  This is because the Large Blue larva produces a pheromone that mimics that emitted by sabuleti ants, but not any other species.  The second is that the sabuleti are exquisitely sensitive to temperature and humidity and can only survive when the turf has been cropped by sheep and rabbits and thereby exposed to the sun. When early conservationists tried to protect the butterflies habitat by fencing it in and preventing grazing, they inadvertently broke a crucial link in the butterfly’s life cycle.

But here’s another twist to this tale.  Enter the villain, the devilishly attractive black and scarlet ichneumon wasp.  Different species of wasp parisitise each species of blue butterfly and here’s how they do it.  They seem to know, perhaps by some chemical signal, perhaps by the behaviour of the ants, which ants’ nest contains the larva of the butterfly.  The wasp then invades that nest in search of its prize.  Of course the ants detect the invasion and come out to attack, but the wasp sprays them with a pheromone that causes them to turn on each other instead.  Picking her way through the melee, she finds the larva, injects it with her ovipositor. The caterpillar continues to feed and grow and turn into a chrysalis, but when the skin of the pupa splits, it’s not a beautiful blue butterfly that emerges, but a shiny black ichneumon wasp.

The Large Blue was reintroduced into Dartmoor in 1983 and has since spread to heathland throughout the country, but is still not common.  The question is should scientists reintroduce the wasp that parisitises it.  David Attenborough thinks we should preserve these natural systems in all of their complex diversity. I wonder if we should let well alone, but let new complex relationships develop.

My zoology teacher, Dr Ernest Neal, famous for his doctorate on delayed implantation in the Badger, Meles meles,  once wrote a slim volume on the ecology of the Somerset woods.  It was he who introduced me to notions of biodiversity and the specificity of ecological niches.  The long suffering Ernest tramped his troop of recalcitrant youths through damp coppices, along scratchy hedgerows, across sodden and once, in a fit of pique, marooned us on the summit of Steep Holm in the middle of the Bristol Channel dive-bombed by angry Black Headed Gulls. 

But ecology has developed since Ernest.  Species are no longer regarded as simple organisms, but more as a system of interactions between many organisms dominated by a single species.  Think of the complex ecosystem of an ancient oak tree: the warblers and tits that feed in the canopy, the owls that nest in the cavities left by fallen branches, the woodpeckers that peck away the softer bark to get at the burrowing beetles underneath, the complex fungal mycelia that provide the fungi that supply the root hairs, the ants that crawl up and down the trunk, the ivy, the moss and lichen on the trunk.  And think of the complex relationships between us and the animals we keep for food or for pets, the plants we eat or provide shelter, the insects that live on our bodies or in our houses, the complex ecosystem of bacteria that live in our colons that salvage much of the plant food that we eat.  Symbiosis determines the lives of every species on the planet and drives evolution.  We are not alone.   

I listened to the Large Blue tale as a podcast from David Attenborough’s recent series of Life Stories on Radio 4.  Attenborough is such a wonderful story teller. I hope we are able to preserve the enthusiasm for nature that he so uniquely embodies.      

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I was running along the narrow track that threaded its way along the grassy slope.  The deer were feeding far below me.  The rain the previous night had made the mud slick and my feet slipped at every pace.  I was concentrating on the way ahead when a faint hissing from high above me made me stop and look up. 

There high in the tree, a bird, no bigger than a sparrow, seemed to dangle.  Its wings were spread and its tail was fanned and it rotated horizontally as if it were snagged on a fishing line. 

I removed my binoculars from the back of my waistband, where I had tucked them, and identified the bird as a Great Tit.  As I watched, it seemed to swing first one way then the other in the breeze.  ‘It must be dead’, I thought.

But No!  Every so often it would flutter its wings ineffectually.  My next thought was, ‘It’s caught on something and can’t get free.’  But that wasn’t true either. As I watched, it hopped onto another twig and repeated the performance, wings and tail spread, turning on an imaginary breeze. 

It continued the exhibition until it got close to the stump of a branch, where its dance elicited a chorus of plaintive whistles from what must have been its nest,  but instead of hopping up to join its chicks, it remained there ‘as if’ dangling, quite resistant to their entreaties .     

So what was going on?  The bird clearly wasn’t damaged.  It was some kind of display, but for whom and for what purpose.  Surely not for me;  I was thirty feed below and no threat. Was there a sparrowhawk around?  I scanned the adjacent trees with my binoculars and could not see anything.

My guess is this was a decoy display.  The bird was pretending to be injured in order to distract any would be predator away from chicks.  But if that was the case, why did it keep hopping towards the nest?

Decoy displays are not unusual in ground nesting birds.  On the high moors, I have been led down the path by a female grouse, dropping a wing to feign injury only to take off with a cackle when I was far enough away from her chicks to be safe.  Curlews do something similar. They fly around in a state of high anxiety if you get too close to their chicks before alighting a few feet away and running off in the opposite direction.  Lapwings do much the same, they fly off and alight at a safe distance uttering a hoarse pee-wit repeatedly to warn their chick to hunker down in the grass, where they instantly resemble a sheep dropping.  Experience has taught me to stay still and scan the ground nearby, the intensity of the performance is directly proportional to the proximity of the chicks. 

But today, I witnessed a different display of avian protection.  While other geese were busy tending their chicks in the farmyard, one large solitary white goose had adopted a young mare as its sole charge.  As I approached, it became very agitated, started hissing and then holding its neck out low to the ground, launched itself at me, a hissing missile, intent of grievous bodily harm.  But this was more wuss than goose.  A few yards from me it drew up and became all nonchalant, prodded the ground with its bill for a bit and then ran back to the oblivious mare, honking loudly with wings outstretched. 

‘There, see what I’ve done.  I’ve chased him off. He won’t bother you now.’

The mare looked up.

‘Oh thanks!’

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