naturalists-from-england

"[S]ome learned writers...have compared a Scorpion to an Epigram...because as the sting of the Scorpion lyeth in the tayle, so the force and vertue of an Epigram is in the conclusion."

"... "wild service" ... is an ethos ... giving back to nature — but also, obviously, it's the name of . ... it's, after all, the tree of generosity and hospitality that used to be grown on the grounds of s, because beer was . So when you see a pub called "The Chequers", it's named for this wonderful ..."

"We speak of as if rock were the epitome of durability. It isn’t. Where rock meets water, it is water that wins in time, every time, and there are few places in England where this is more obviously true than the . Hollowness is ubiquitous here; a landscape riddled with caves and pots and channels. You can even watch them forming in many rivers and becks, where below most drops, you can find circular dishings in the rock, some shallow, some deep, some containing pebbles conscripted to the river’s work; swirling and scouring, day and night. ... It’s not necessarily the speed, volume or power of a river that wins, but its relentlessness. It needs no breath, no sleep, no pause to stretch or shake. And in time, without fuss or ceremony, it will take heat from flesh, life from limb, tree from bank, rock from channel, mountain from continent. It will hollow the land. And it demands total respect."

"Water reveals how small our lives are in time as well as space. Less than 0.025% of the water on our planet exists in all the world’s rivers, lakes, marshes and biological s combined. A river is water’s chance to flicker and dance under the sun before it returns to the deep, dark ocean, is frozen in or stored away underground, sometimes for hundreds of millennia. Flowing water moves mountains, it hollows and builds land. It provides the medium in which the chemistry of life recycles and reorganises energy and matter."

"19TH JULY SACRED GROVES Ancient Rome The Roman term ' (plural luci) referes to a class of woodland with special religious significance. Luci took the form of sacred groves or clearings, often featuring special trees and springs. They were places of celebration, communion and ritual offering. Well-documented examples include in (now in ) and (now the city of ). The was celebrated within such groves on 19th and 20th July."

"... by the third millennium the ns had developed a type which is shown in art of that period. Egyptian monuments of at least one thousand years earlier show dogs very like the modern and others like the ."

"Some animals lend themselves to use in idioms—the goose is a good example of this. As long ago as 1547 a simpleton was being referred to as a goose; presumably a domestic goose, for a wild goose is anything but a fool."

"When Attenborough joined the , in 1952, what were then called “animal programs” were presented by the superintendent of the London Zoo, a Mr. George Cansdale. Once a week, Mr. Cansdale would bring a selection of more or less compliant creatures to the BBC studio. He “put them on a table covered with a doormat,” Attenborough remembers in the preface to his new book, Adventures of a Young Naturalist, “where they sat blinking in the intense lights.”"

"My training was basically as an ecologist—for is largely applied ecology—and, since serving in Ghana for 14 years in the 1930s and 1940s. I have been back 14 times to East, South and West Africa. Even when I started work, it was already clear that the arid land such as the could not be safely occupied other than by s, who with their flocks and herds of grazers and browsers can use small patches of mixed vegetation scattered over a wide area, seldom causing anything more than limited short-term degradation, for the nomads had worked out a '."

"England is said to be one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. It has lost most of its big wild animals. A thousand years ago in my village, which was quite a big place even then, s used to build their dams on my river. Perhaps a thousand years before that the villagers might have heard a wolf howl from a distant down of a rumour of bears in the forests that extended that extended for after mile. Even a hundred years ago, there would have been far more wild flowers, particularly at the edge of the cornfields, colourful blooms whose names attest to their former familiarity: , , ."

"I can't say I have ever had much of a passion for proper . In fact, on about the only occasion I ever did any, I disliked the experience very much. I was about 23, and, wearying of ever finding a full-time job in , I got myself enrolled as a temporary member of staff at a northern university where I spent about four months on a cold, treeless fell, counting s. It was very boring and drove me to the bottle."

"The oak has long been a symbol of strength and, with the growth of the Royal Navy, also patriotic pride. It once fought our naval battles and carried our cargoes, framed our houses and spanned the roofs of cathedrals and barns, fed our pigs, tanned our leather and nourished our earliest industries."

"An average produces about five s of debris per per year. The get through this mountain of raw by sheer numbers. Fungi make up about 10% of the weight of living matter () in a wood. They are the weightiest component of all, bar the trees. You would require a convoy of dump trucks to remove the fungi of just a small copse. Yet all we see of them are their scattered in autumn."

"Butterflies attract attention and cash because they are popular and attractive, and because there are rightly seen as symbols of wildlife in decline."

"s of hunting camps built about 9,500 years ago indicate that by that time Britain had become densely wooded. At , in the is , bones and antlers from a variety of s were uncovered, including and in abundance, wild boar, (a prehistoric wild ox), , wolf, , , fox and hedgehog."

"... being rare often means your genetic resources are limited, and that makes you vulnerable to change. Small populations are also liable to be picked off by chance events, like a shrub growing up in front of you, or that new borehole for a new housing estate dug a few metres away. Conservation has recently come to the aid of many threatened plants, drawing many a little further back from the brink, but perhaps at some cost to their inherent wildness ... But the wise conservationist will aim at preventing flowers from reaching that state of extreme vulnerability in the first place."

"There is, in fact, thirteen times more land north of the than there is to the south of it. This alone must obviously have a profound influence on —the vast ocean area being almost exclusively represented so far as plant life is concerned, by and ; so far few s, such as the Grass-wracks (), inhabiting salt water."

"The s are stated to have burnt their human sacrifices in cages; and, though we cannot with equal confidence vouch for the antiquity of that other more harmless use of the Willow, the making of s to be wielded at , or on any other English greensward, even if we forget altogether its many uses in manufactures, we can find many points of interest in the Willows group. It may as well, however, be mentioned here that the wood, especially that of the , is made into paper pulp, besides affording the best charcoal for artists' crayons; whilst, not to mention the undoubted value of the bark for purposes, it is now well known in the medical world as the source of ."

"Wood does not occur in any plants of a lower grade than ferns; and in the higher plants in which it does occur it is chiefly, but not exclusively, in the stem. The main physiological function of wood is the as it grows erect and branches. Submerged s, buoyed up, as they are, by the water, do not form wood in their stems, nor, as a rule, do s, nor, at first, the succulent, flexible shoots of longer-lived plants. In , and in allied plants, the wood, though dense, consists largely of scattered longitudinal strands and often of cells of no great vertical length. Though there are also generally woody layers just below the surface of the stem, giving it considerable strength as a whole, the structure renders s useless as . For all practical purposes, therefore, wood is produced only by the highest sub-kingdom of the plant world, the seed-bearing or flowering plants, the or Phanerogámia of botanists."

"During the last few weeks , , and myself have been exploring an ossiferous at Shandon, near , under a grant from the . Bones of , , bear, wolf, horse, and hare, were found in the débris of a here in 1859, and are now in the . We have worked through a considerable quantity of and , in which and in a thin underlying deposit of cave-earth we have found numerous bones of the above-mentioned animals, indicating at least two individuals of mammoth, eighteen of reindeer, and five of horse, for which latter this is as yet the sole recorded locality in Ireland. The bones of bear show extreme age and signs of disease, and we have found the cast antler of a reindeer. Some of the bones have been gnawed, probably by wolves, and many have been broken by the falling-in of the roof of the cave. Though we have broken into a large chamber, we are as yet unable to form a clear conception of the original form of the cavern. A full account of the cave previous to the present exploration was given by in the ' for June, 1870."

"Our old-established {[w|Botanical garden|Botanical Gardens}} have long carefully collected those species that have been used in medicine. The , founded by the in 1632, was the first. In 1690 the were placed by under the charge of the botanist (1642-1706), who sent collectors abroad; and about the same date presents the , afterwards rendered famous by the encyclopedic works of (1691-1771), to the . In 1760 the was established by the , under the advice of (1713-1792). who was an enthusiastic botanist ..."

"Macdonald is making it her mission to communicate as exactly as possible what s and a host of other species are, in the hope that her words are not obituaries."

"' ... tells the story of how one woman deals with grief by training a . This isn't as strange as it sounds: Macdonald, who became obsessed with as a child, has flown many falcons over the years, and it's who has died so suddenly, a man she associates strongly with her passion (a press photographer, he and his daughter were good companions, sharing a certain beadiness and the ability to be vastly patient). But in another way it's perverse. Goshawks are by reputation the ruffians of , being bloodthirsty, temperamental and supposedly difficult to tame."

"It’s true, you can go nuts when you suddenly lose someone you love, you fall off the world. I saw in the goshawk — this ferocious, intense, bloodthirsty, murderous creature — what I felt: rage-filled and angry, living in the present with no thought for the future. My mistake was identifying too much with the bird and forgetting how to be a human."

"Having described the breed known as the Carrier, and the varieties allied to it, we have now to consider the different kinds of s, or those that are remarkable for their powers of flight and their attachment to the home in which they have been reared and first flown. There are numerous varieties that exhibit this peculiarity, such as the Dragon, the ordinary flying , and the Skinnum, or mongrel race, between these two breeds. Among the pure breeds that can be flown good distances may be mentioned that called the . But the varieties in which this homing faculty is developed to the highest degree are unquestionably the different races of Belgian birds, which are termed in England by the general name of Antwerps, and in Belgium are known as , s, Demi Bees, &c."

"Falcons are the fastest animals that have ever lived. They excite us, seem superior to other birds and exude a dangerous, edgy, natural sublimity. All of this means nothing to falcons, of course; these are our own concepts. Though real, living animals, falcons can't be seen except through what anthropologist described as your Kulturbrille, the invisible lens your own culture gives you through which you see the world."

"People say, Why didn’t you get a dog? I guess the big question is, Why didn’t you find a human? In a way, I tried. I fell in love with a friend of mine, a very nice man. I think I freaked him out, deeply, because I was broken. He ran away. So maybe there was a feeling that the hawk was safe. But is very strange in that it’s very much about letting things go. These birds are flown free; once you’ve got them tame and trained, you let them go every day! And hope they come back to you. When they do, that reestablishes the sense that things can return."

"As the slipped towards spring and cases of began to blossom horribly across the map of Europe, I was in Costa Rica on a wildlife-watching tour. For two weeks I shared a minibus with a group of retired British folk whose main aim was to see as many birds as possible: we met every evening to tick off the species we’d seen that day from a ready-printed list. We saw s, s, s, s, hawks, a whole cavalcade of tiny , s that snapped and buzzed through the air like animated electrons. ... ... I realised that this trip was disquieting me because we weren’t learning anything much about the birds we saw: we were identifying them, ticking them off a list, and moving on, caught up in a hungry and expectant apperception of the world in which the lived reality of the creatures that flew and sang around us seemed almost entirely obscured by the triumphant, costly light of seeing them."

"s are various creatures and we’ve recruited them to symbolise many things. s are a placeholder for social anxieties: reviled as invading thugs in the , their crime seems little more than failing to treat humans and human spaces with due respect. Other seabirds, like s and s, fall into the anthropomorphised category of cute little guys, mable avian '. And oceanic specialists like s and s spend so much of their lives at sea, visiting their nesting burrows in darkness, they seem barely part of our world at all: the Other rendered in feathers. But in my lifetime, seabirds have symbolised one thing above all: . News photographs of s thickly coated in horrified me when I was young; their gluey silhouettes are still seared into my brain."

"The }} constitute by far the larger proportion of the inhabitants of the ; they vary considerably in number at different periods of the year, in consequent of their being short lived, and breeding being arrested during the depth of winter. In spring they become exceedingly numerous; so that, in May or June, a good colony will give off a swarm of more than 20,000 bees, and retain a sufficiency of workers to rear the brood and feed the young grubs that remain behind. This number may appear incredible; as as 300 bees weigh only one , and a good swarm often weighs above five s, the statement admits an easy proof."

"The structure and habits of the family or group of pigeons are so peculiar and so strikingly distinct from those of any other birds, that they demand special attention. The pigeons were formerly classed by the majority of naturalists along with the , the true poultry, and by others with the or -like birds; but more accurate observation has rendered evident the fact that they form a perfectly distinct family, distinguished from all other birds by the singular manner in which their young are nourished. Unlike the true gallinaceae—which are hatched in a very perfect state and able to follow the parent hen within a few hours after birth—the young pigeons are born in a most immature and helpless condition, and are fed with a curdy secretion, produced in the crops of the parents, the "soft food" of the pigeon-fancier. This is expressly produces at the period of hatching, for the support of the callow young."

"and possess one great recommendation as sitters, in the soft and abundant supply of downy feathers that so specially distinguish these varieties; for under no other hens do the eggs appear to maintain a higher or more constant temperature."

"This treatise, small as it is, could hardly be regarded as complete, without directions for the manufacture of , a drink so much in fashion, that had some made yearly for her own especial benefit. , an old and quaint bee author, who printed his work entitled "," with a phonetic alphabet of his own invention, gives the exact recipe for making mead, as used by "our renowned Queen Elizabeth of happy memory;" but the taste of our race has become more refined and we should now fail to appreciate the mead brewed with and sweet-briar leaves as relished by the virgin queen ..."

"We are pretty much in the right now, we just expect it to take place in 24 hours. Actually, it just takes place in a slightly longer timeframe. It is going to be grim. We are going to have to adapt."

"s nest in obscure places, in dark and cramped spaces: hollows beneath roof tiles, behind the intakes for ventilation shafts, in the towers of churches. To reach them, they fly straight at the entrance holes and enter seemingly at full tilt. Their nests are made of things snatched from the air: strands of dried grass pulled aloft by s; molted pigeon-breast feathers; flower petals, leaves, scraps of paper, even butterflies. During World War II, swifts in Denmark and Italy grabbed , reflective scraps of tinfoil dropped from aircraft to confuse enemy radar, flashing and twirling as it fell. They mate on the wing. And while young martins and s return to their nests after their first flights, young swifts do not. As soon as they tip themselves free of the nest hole, they start flying, and they will not stop flying for two or three years, bathing in rain, feeding on airborne insects, winnowing fast and low to scoop fat mouthfuls of water from lakes and rivers."

"The first, and by no means the least important, consideration of every prospective poultry keeper is the situation and construction of the poultry houses and yards. It is trued that poultry may be kept almost anywhere; good specimens of s have been reared in an attic, and many very fine ones have never known there was any world beyond a small back yard in the street of a county town. These, however, are extreme cases; and success under such disadvantageous conditions can only be achieved by constant attention, extreme cleanliness, and great judgment in supplying artificially those requirements of the birds which the place of confinement does not afford. The best of all s on which to establish a poultry yard is , or sand resting on or a substratum of gravel. If the soil is clayey, or from other causes of wet, the whole should be well drained. This is essential to success, as a wet soil is more inductive than any other circumstance of cramp, , and other diseases."

"The , that common small hawk, may also be known and instantly distinguished from the — which is more of a woodland bird — by it manner of hovering in the air. The sparrow-hawk glides along, dashes round bushes, sweeps over a hedge and disappears; but the kestrel mounts to a fair height, quivers its wings, spreads its tail like a fan and hangs poised in mid-arie for what seems to the watcher a considerable time. It is watching for s in the herbage below."

"... has no place beneath the trees nor where the fresh winds blow. Hunt and be hunted is the rule of wild life."

", to say a person "carries the horn" signifies that he hunts the pack. It is often said of a that he "carries the horn," meaning that he acts as , or contrawise that he "does not carry the horn" which means he employs a huntsman to hunt hounds for him."

"It is because they kill the tiresome mice that people should not shoot, or trap, or allow the eggs to be taken, of hawks and owls. Owls, and the in particular, live almost entirely on mice and young rats, and when we kill a (the barn owl is the white owl which files about so silently over the fields) we are allowing hundreds of mice to live and thrive and eat our things."

"There are many ferocious predators in the , such as that carnivorous monster the and the bloodthirsty , with its equally predatory grub."

"Another small bird that has to find shelter these winter nights is the , or 'Jenny Wren' as we call it in the countryside, and it likes snug quarters, a really good place being often patronised by several birds. A hayrick is a popular dormitory."

"Though the whole trend of modern scientific thought is to lay stress on the fact that animals differ from us in degree rather than in kind, yet the moment we go out into the open the widespread fear, the overwhelming horror, that most undomesticated creatures display at the approach of a human being, the panic with which nearly all flee, show what an awful and fearsome thing he is to them. Man is an object of horror, the dealer of death and destruction, with which they have nothing whatsoever in common. The wild animals that one moment were feeding happily in company with horses and cattle, the rabbits nibbling the grass, the starlings perching on the beasts' backs, or hopping in and out between their legs, have fled for their lives at the mere sound of a human footfall."

"The are undoubtedly direct descendants of the " forest bulls " of Norman times, but we have no evidence to prove, and a good deal to disprove, that these were the aboriginal wild cattle. The animals which roamed about the country in the Middle Ages, and which evidently were wild and fierce enough, were not the original indigenous species, the that was common during the , but merely " gone wild " or feral beasts that had escaped from domestication. Far from being of pure primigenius descent, they were certainly related to the tiny Bos longifrons, otherwise the Celtic shorthorn. This was the domestic breed of the Neolithic and early Celtic peoples. The existing , and are its descendants. It was the only domestic ox known in these islands up to the time of the Romans, but afterwards became mixed with larger breeds of the Urus type that were brought over by the Romans, Saxons, Danes, Normans, etc."

"The Greater Spotted, like all the woodpeckers, lays pure white eggs, with the faintest flush of pink from the yolk showing through the thin shell. The colourlessness of tis eggs is a characteristic that the woodpecker shares in common with most other birds that nest in holes and dark places. Colour in eggs is usually associated with exposed nesting sites, and apparently serves to camouflage the dainty morsels from the hungry gaze of the many creatures that are always ready to raid a nest. In a dark hole colour is useless, and it is a significant fact that the eggs of the majority of birds that nest in holes are white."

"Glorious with the hues of the , a living gem of colour that seems strangely out of place beside our quiet English rivers and babbling streams, the kingfisher is well and aptly names, for it is indeed clad in royal robes, a very king of birds and a prince of fishers. There is no bird on the to compare with it for brilliance of colouring, but of its hues bird-books give us little idea."

"Of ancient stringed instruments there are, we may roughly say, two broad types; in one the strings are stretched across a sound-box and lie parallel to it—this we may call the ‘’ type, though including, for our present purpose, the various forms of and ; in the other the strings are attached to the upper board of the sound-box and rise vertically from it—this is the ‘harp’ type."

"That the was the predecessor and counterpart of the of the present day is a matter of common knowledge, but, when we come to unravel the origin of the name, we are landed at once into the region of wild conjecture. Some writers have wisely passed the subject over in silence; others have propounded solutions more plausible than probable."

"Sir (Ur Excavations, vol. , 1934) records that in the grave of the (c. 2700 ) he notices close to the coffin a quantity of small "" of thin cope sheeting, laid over wooden cores; with them there were plentiful traces of wood and also of some substance which looked like leather or skin; he suggests that they formed the remains of a drum."

"When completely dry the plant should be mounted on stiff white paper. The size depends on the purpose of the collection; paper 17 in. by 10 in. will be found useful and workable, and can be obtained from most printers. It is a bad system to fasten the specimens on with glue or gum, as it renders it impossible to shift the mount, and finer parts of the flowers are destroyed. The writer has found that very thin strips of parchment, cut with wider ends, laid across the stoutest parts of the plant and fastened to the paper with strong cement, form a most easy and effectual way of mounting with the least possible unsightliness."