"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."