#82: Merlin

The Merlin app

Poets often write about birdsong – Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush and Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale spring to mind. Both these poets knew how to identify the birds they heard. Hardy also sees his:

    An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

    Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

The nightingale is never seen in Keats’s poem, and indeed an obliteration of the senses is strangely part of what the poet desires to attain through the‘viewless wings of poetry’. He imagines the bird singing after his death:

    Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain –

To thy high requiem become a sod.

These are solemn interpretations to put on creatures marking their territory or trying to attract a mate. Birds also make shorter ‘calls’ to sound an alarm, identify other birds, connect with the flock or, in fledglings, beg for food.

The Merlin app

I’ve often wished I could identify birds through their song – I could tell chaffinches, and more characteristic callers like wood pigeons, the hoopoe or owl, but not much more. Now the Merlin app, devised by Cornell University, has changed this. Holding up your phone for a few seconds brings a picture of each bird singing. The bird’s name is highlighted as they sing to help you link the song and the bird (if there is more than one listed). I caught a lovely glimpse of a golden oriole flying from tree to tree in Spain after being alerted to its call, learnt the background tinfoil crinkle-song of serins and of course the everyday chatter of sparrows. The app also allows you to compare birdsong with a recorded sample to check its suggestions.

The more virtual, the more real?

But does this mean that, using the app, your ability to identify birds independently diminishes? I’ve found exactly the opposite – once given guidance, you listen hard and learn to identify them yourself.

This improvement in my ability is an example of one of sociologist Steve Woolgar’s ‘five rules of virtuality’ – ‘the more virtual, the more real ‘. In other words, virtual engagement increases actual engagement (although Woolgar was writing before AI). The example Woolgar gave was of televised football leading to more, not fewer, people attending football matches. Identifying the birds via the app means identifying them more in real life. If you haven’t already, try it.

#81: Raising Hare

 

Raising Hare is Chloe Dalton’s account of finding a leveret on a path near her house in the country, taking it home (after initially leaving it alone for four hours to let it move away or be reclaimed by its mother) and rearing it.

This is, initially, against advice. A conservationist tells her he has never heard of anyone successfully raising a leveret. A friend advises her to give it to someone who knows about animals. But, says Dalton, ‘… I felt an inner stubbornness stirring. I will work it out.’

What do hares eat?

Dalton knows little about raising hares and soon finds out most advice is about cooking and eating them, not feeding them. She eventually finds out what to feed the leveret in Cowper’s poem ‘Epitaph on a Hare’, written after the death of one of his three pet hares:

His diet was of wheaten bread,
And milk, and oats, and straw,
Thistles, or lettuces instead,
With sand to scour his maw.

On twigs of hawthorn he regaled,

On pippins’ russet peel;

And, when his juicy salads failed,

Sliced carrot pleased him well.

This hare refuses carrot and lettuce, but oats prove a long-term favourite, along with clover and grass from the garden:

It adored clover and would bury itself in the deepest patches, until only the tips of its ears could be seen, foraging freely for the plants that it had spurned when I cut them, preferring to crop them fresh from the ground.… Grass it would eat from the tip of the blade down to the stem, flowers the reverse. It would snap dandelions off at the root and gradually draw the stem into its mouth until the vivid yellow petals hovered at its muzzle, whereupon it would neatly sever the flower head and let it fall by its paws.

Such close observation and description of the hare’s appearance and habits was for me the main strength of the book. Here, for example, is the arrival of the hare’s winter pelt:

At year’s end, its coat was russet-coloured, almost flame-like in the sunset light. Its face bore prominent white markings: a beautiful pale circle around each eye, with an additional patch of white above and below it, presumably intended to break up the dark shape of the face when seen against the snow. Just as when it was small, its rear legs and lower haunches were once again a pale milky-coffee hue. At dusk, these streaks and patches of white would remain visible while the rest of its body disappeared in the fading light.

Dalton’s familiarity with the hare is shown by linking its winter coat to the pelt of its youth, and her sensitivity to its surroundings and habits by describing how the pelt appears in the light and against the snow.

Citizen research?

I can’t help feeling such description may be of use to scientists, and indeed Dalton once or twice finds the hare’s behaviour at odds with what she’s read in scientific papers; for example Dalton reads that hares are absentee parents, but when leverets arrive (showing the hare to be female), she is an attentive mother:

The hare remained close by throughout the day, ensuring that the leverets stayed undercover while keeping an eye out for predators. On several occasions I watched her lunge fearlessly at crows that came too close, wielding her front legs like a battering ram and successfully chasing them off her territory, despite their larger size and formidable beaks.

She also finds she feeds her young more often than asserted in various studies.

Other things one learns in the book is how hares run and leap; that they build ‘forms’, shallow grass-filled grooves in the earth, rather than burrowing underground like rabbits; and they strongly dislike changes in their environment, as when Dalton disposes of an old sofa, then has to reinstate it after the hare is unsettled.

The sofa question leads gently onto Dalton asking herself whether she should enclose the garden, which would deprive other gambolling hares of their playground, then to a wider comment on all the human barriers to animal roaming, and information that many hares may cover 9-12 miles of ground per night to feed. Gentle seguing from personal observation, to questioning, to factual information is another strength of the writing.

Helping hares

There is also a plea for a closed season on hunting hares (amazingly, there is none at the moment), and information that they are often killed by farm machinery, since leverets defend themselves by hunkering down and staying still rather than running to escape, which makes them particularly vulnerable. A chapter called ‘Blood in the Harvest’ recommends using drones to detect the animals so often harmed through agriculture:

If it is possible to create robots and drones to reap our fields for us, could we not use technology to detect the presence of leverets, and fauns, and nesting birds, and could reasonable efforts not be made to relocate them, rather than simply leaving them to be crushed beneath our machines?

Raising Hare is (thankfully) mostly free from any ‘journey’ of personal development on the part of the author, although she does describe how being with the hare made her question her often frenetic life as a foreign policy specialist. The book’s core is her experience and observation of the hare, and any wider exploration is based on and grows out of this close observation and description. The hare’s pace of behaviour permeates the writing; the book takes its time on description, is not overly concerned to form a narrative and trusts the reader to try to enter into the hare’s texture of life.

Raising Hare is published by Canongate.

#80: Wilding at Knepp

Wilding is Isabella Tree’s account of how she and her husband Charlie Burrell gave their 3,500-acre arable and dairy farm back to nature. They started in 2001, initially since they could not make traditional farming pay, but discovered there was government funding for conservation. The subsequent transformation of the land has made Knepp one of the most important spaces for wildlife in Britain.

The book mixes delightful observation of the ever-changing activity of animals, plants, soil and insects, with information about the various species, as well as detailing the couple’s efforts wrestling with various bureaucracies to convince government of the importance of the project.

Purple emperors

Knepp is the site of the largest breeding population of purple emperor butterflies, for example, which, explains Tree, was always thought to prefer woods, because woodland was the only habitat humans had left to it. On the evidence of its behaviour at Knepp, it prefers the sallow, a type of willow – itself given space at Knepp by patches of earth thrown up by the rootling of pigs which were introduced in lieu of the wild boar which would have been present in the true wild. The video below shows a purple emperor emerging.

The ‘magic of rewilding’, she says, shows us how little we sometimes know about species:

… We forget that our landscape is so changed, so desperately impoverished, we may be recording a species not in its preferred habitat at all, but at the very limit of its range. Naturalists believe the purple emperor was a woodland butterfly only because – with no significant areas of sallow left – that is where it has clung on.… And we can dwell on the delightful thought that, in times past, purple emperors would have been a feature of the English summer, present in huge numbers in every sallow-strewn county.

If they had set out to create a perfect habitat for purple emperors, says Tree, they would never have achieved the same numbers as flit among the trees now.

The episode shows the interconnectedness of plant and animal species – it is plainly difficult for Tree to describe one species without showing how others interact with it, as the pigs do here in preparing the ground for sallow, which nurtures the purple emperors.

‘Lettuce from hell’

The couple had to learn to leave nature to its own devices – to work with it, not against it. One of the most striking episodes for me was a spectacular outbreak of creeping thistle (also known as ‘cursed’ or ‘lettuce from hell’ thistle) in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Tree describes how the dusky pink flowered plant heads covered acres of the park. She says:

It was the biggest challenge yet to our rewilding ethos. We looked out on the day of the Triffids and knew what our neighbours would be saying and the threat the thistles could pose to our Countryside Stewardship Scheme funding with their unashamed invasion of the Repton Park. Less than a decade earlier, under the old regime, we would have been out with the toppers and weedkiller for all we were worth. It took all the courage we could muster to hold our nerve and do nothing.

But in May 2009 there was a ‘bonanza’ of painted lady butterflies migrating from Africa. They descended on the thistles:

That summer, spiky black caterpillars swarmed over the thistles, spinning silken webs like tents, which soon filled with frass and inedible leaf spines. The whole area took on the appearance of a chaotic army encampment. By autumn, after the caterpillars had wolfed down the leaves, pupated and flown, our creeping thistle fields were in tatters, their stalks draped in dirty silk, the pink flower-heads nodding on skeleton stems – easy pickings for the ponies.

The thistles did not return, perhaps because the caterpillars’ devastation had admitted a virus or other pest. ‘Now,’ says Tree ‘when people stand shaking their heads in our fields of ragwort or – latterly – acres of the pioneer fleabane, we smile benignly and shrug off their concerns. Not even plagues of injurious weeds last for ever.’

Tree and Burrell also found that the thistles’ prickly cover had protected other butterflies, moths, lizards and insects: ‘gravid females with dark stripes scuttled between the thistle stems along tracks made by field mice, hunting for insects in preparation for the birth of their wriggling young.’ Anthills appeared, protected from animals’ hooves by the thistles. ‘Charlie watched for hours as, mandible by mandible, the worker ants cut down thistle and grass stalks to add structure to the new mounds. By the time the thistles died back in autumn the anthills had gained height and stabilised, capped by a coating of living moss and grass like the rind of a cheese.’

So they were able to observe nature’s natural boom and bust, ‘thanks to sitting on our hands and keeping the diphosphate under lock and key’.

Horses at twilight on the estate

Wrestling with bureaucracies

She comments that management of nature to keep it static in order to benefit a particular species may miss the larger picture, only available when nature is allowed to take its dynamic course. Indeed, this was a long-term frustration for the couple in trying to get funding. English Nature, she says, wanted ‘computer modelling, targets, safeguards, setting parameters for the number of animals and vegetation cover, and lots and lots of further research’. But targets and parameters made no sense: ‘the only way to test the impact of freeroaming grazing animals in a landscape was to put them into action…The idea of constructing a computer model to identify the outcomes of self-willed land seemed like trying to predict the lifetime achievements of an unborn child.’

Throughout the book a bewildering plethora of organisations, departments and schemes pops up – Natural England, English Nature, the Countryside Stewardship Scheme, the Environment Agency, Rewilding Britain. It is clear that rewilding needs subsidies. But then farming itself is heavily subsidised, as are other estate parks. One wonders about the rewilding potential of other grand estates. Knole Park in Kent, for example, is maintained carefully for its deer populations. What would it look like under a scheme like this?

Help from others

It is clear from the book how much the couple depended on others’ expertise and influence to advise on developments and assess and argue for Knepp’s importance in Britain, Europe and worldwide. Naturalists and academics gave the project credibility and boosted morale. Tree singles out naturalist Ted Green, who visited them early on to advise on tree care and pointed out how a tree’s life-support system includes a vast underground network of fungal filaments which may even span entire continents. Another early inspiration was Frans Vera, who had started a pioneering rewilding project in the Netherlands which had attracted, among other creatures, white tailed eagles.

Beavers

One of the most moving passages is when Tree describes seeing beavers released into the wild in Scotland:

Two of the beavers slid down river and disappeared within seconds but the largest, a pregnant female, after a lap of honour, emerged onto the sand-spit in front of us to preen. The size of a portly spaniel, she sat up, whiskers diagnosing the air and, balanced by the flat scaly tail on the ground behind her, began to comb through her long, slick fur with a back claw. Perhaps the dream of having beavers at Knepp was not so far away.… Our concrete dams and Lego block slipways would be things of the past, the floodplains punctuated with woody debris blockages not of our own making, our clumsy, artificial scrapes a staircase of pools, Spring Wood a resurgence of coppice. And with this watery refinement a whole habitat would spring to life, an aqueous kingdom such as Knepp has not seen since the early Middle Ages, a place of vegetative complexity where even water voles would have a sporting chance to outwit the mink. 

Knepp does indeed now have beavers, introduced in 2020, two years after the book was published. Not only that, but stork chicks hatched that year for the first time, and 45 hatched in 2025. Some of these will be transferred to an open aviary in Dagenham this year.

Words such as ‘ecosystem’, ‘sustainable’, ‘diversity’ are so common these days as to be unremarkable, but Wilding shows how delightful, unpredictable and essential they are in practice. Rewilding is spreading, partly thanks to Knepp and Tree’s optimistic, joyful, skilful writing.

Knepp offers safaris, tours and workshops as well as accommodation and events. There are also public footpaths through the estate.

The kitchen garden