Follow the Kids on a Nature Walk
Introducing the next generation to wildlife - plus a moth
Splendid name …
Last week I learned by chance of a plant with the common name of LITTLE WEASELSNOUT (Lagotis glauca ssp. lanceolata). Isn’t that a glorious name? The specimen that drew my attention had been observed in some pretty tough habitat in Alaska but the species grows in a number of upland areas with lots of moisture at similar latitudes. Weaselsnout grows alongside other tall plants such as grasses and has a bright blue/purple flower spike. When the spike is in seed, it is a yellowy brown color, giving the plant the look of a weasel's snout poking up from the grass. The internet will find you several photographs. As common names for species go, this wins the prize.
Sparking …
If the world is to achieve any of the necessary environmental remedies then there will have to be a generation of keen and enthusiastic and above all knowledgeable youngsters willing and able to take up the fight as my generations begins to fall by the wayside. On the famous “Give me the child before he is seven and …” principle it’s key to seize their attention when they are young, gently exposing them to the natural world and ensure that they find it as magical as we do. Before they commit to careers and a future lifestyle divorced from nature. Having adults around who will help nurture the spark and to answer their questions with facts, is important.
A recent article in the Globe and Mail started thus:
I don’t particularly want to stop and look at the snail. But it’s caught your attention, and I can’t possibly distract you now that you’ve noticed how it expands and contracts its slimy little body in a futile attempt to escape the looming shadow of your giant foot. I’d rather keep moving, maybe stop if we find something vaguely more interesting, like a horse, or even a tractor. But we stay, watching the snail, poking the snail, talking about the snail in the limited terms your vocabulary will allow, but which actually is sufficient, given the topic.
I have noticed during decades of wildlifing that while adults might look at you askance while you stare through binoculars at a distant speck on a pond or in a tree, or get down on your knees to peer at a plant, kids are just as likely to come up and ask you … “What are you looking at, mister?” It’s happened time and again. The child’s adults then hover, perhaps wondering the same but not wanting to ask. Kids are like dogs - they open conversational opportunities. So you show them the bird you were looking at - most easily done if you have a spotting scope but that’s not essential. Ask the parents if they would like to look too and you have potential recruits to the game. Sometimes the specific bird I have been looking at was not unduly colourful and most people would perhaps shrug and wonder what’s so special about yet another brown sparrow … BUT, close by is a male Mallard duck and so you put the scope on that instead, zoom in, focus and invite child and adults to look. One of the world’s most common ducks is suddenly a blaze of sparkling colour. “Wow! Who knew? Gosh!” … it never fails. Offer a few words about a good field guide, maybe point them towards the website of a local nature club and who knows - the next generation of birders just perhaps has had the spark ignited. Here, if you don’t mind, I’d like to offer a short, personal story by way of a brief exemplar … just to show that the trigger, the spark, needs only to be brief just so long as it makes a big impression. I hope the tale is of interest - it has been seriously edited for length. If any any of you are young enough to have young kids of your own, then you will know what to do 😉 Read on:
Some readers who have followed my posts on a now defunct website may have seen an earlier, and longer, version of this tale from a few years ago. I won’t be at all offended if you skip parts, though I hope you might find something interesting along the way. There’s a nice moth waiting for you at the other end of the post.
On Not Dipping a Dipper - To begin at the beginning
“His music is that of the streams refined and spiritualized”.
I have lived for twenty-five years just ten minutes walk away from the banks of the 1200km long St-Lawrence River. One of the world’s “mighty” rivers which is already some two miles wide as it passes Montreal on its way to the Atlantic. This tale is about a river at the other end of the scale of riverine magnitude. One that I have known since I was maybe five years old. It’s also about my “first” life bird.
The River Barle is only 39 km long – that’s a mere 24 miles in English distances. Just about a good day’s jog for a fit person. It twists and turns a lot and is rarely much wider than the average suburban road. The whole river, and the Barle Valley it defines, have both been designated as biological Sites of Special Scientific Interest. It is a bit more than 15 years since I last saw it and that was on a visit to my very aged (she lived to 103) favourite Aunt who lived right beside the river. There wasn’t much opportunity for wandering along the riverside and watching birds on that occasion.
The Barle rises 1400ft up on Exmoor in south-west England and ends some 1100ft lower when it joins the Little Exe River at the “Black Pool”. The Black Pool was a common destination for a walk when staying with relatives as a child and was said to be bottomless which, of course, it was not but hence its name. Just a gentle confluence of two rather insignificant rivers.
Apart from its natural beauty, often running through ancient woodland, the Barle is famous for its salmon and trout fishing. We used to visit it along the stretch from Dulverton to Brushford when the fishing rights were owned by the Carnarvon Arms Hotel. Long ago the hotel closed and was converted to luxurious country apartments but back then it was filled with tweedy guests down for the fishing. In 2018 the fishing rights came up for sale at a price of around £250,000 … no mean sum as the purchaser didn’t actually get any land for his money, just the rights to cast a fly.
A lovely place indeed, but what about the bird? This bird.
My birding life-list started with a chance encounter of a small brown bird on the Barle in August of 1957, or thereabouts. The other end of my life, anyway. This wonderful bird, purely by chance became number one on a birding life list that even today is, to be honest, not nearly as lengthy as I might like – there have always always been so many flowers or insects to distract me from the serious work of birding.
I was probably a horrible child. This is to be expected as, frankly, decades of observation of the species tell me that the default setting on children is to be at least a bit horrible and I see no reason to assume I was anything different in this respect. I grew up in a smoky, northern industrial city and spent 50 weeks of each year eagerly looking forward to the annual family holiday when we would visit my grandparents and the aunts in a small village on the southern edge of Exmoor in England’s west country. The village is Brushford and it really is small. We went there every summer , usually in August. Across the field in front of the house, was a river. No televisions or internet connections back then, but I always enjoyed looking at wildlife and had made this interest well known in the family – as a consequence, during that 1957 holiday I was given a three volume paperback field guide to British birds to keep me quiet.
Field guides were a rare thing back then and were not the colourful books we have today. Undoubtedly, this set of paperback books by James Fisher was far too advanced for even the brightest eight year old but I thought they were wonderful. Still do for that matter. I long ago lost the originals but with the aid of the internet and a second hand book dealer I have replaced them in my collection. The illustrations are black and white drawings, but of excellent quality, the text is informative and each bird description is accompanied by a feature I have never seen bettered. This was a circular chart representing the twelve months of the year with areas marked off to indicate spring, arrival, mating, nesting, fledging of young, autumn migration and so on thus enabling the reader to know exactly what to expect and when. Brilliant books for a nerdy kid and I studied them intensely.
But reading only goes so far when you are full of energy, so inevitably came the moment when I informed by father that I wanted to go bird watching. My father was always keen to do things with me, but he was a chemical engineer and such people are generally deficient in knowledge of matters biological. Hence, although he agreed to take me “bird watching” the fact of the matter is that we neither of us knew what this actually involved other than, presumably, watching birds. We did everything wrong from today’s perspective – I recollect we set out in the middle of a hot August afternoon when few birds would be likely to be about and we had no binoculars, though I did take a notebook … being the sort of kid that took a notebook everywhere just in case, as you do.
A narrow lane ran from almost opposite the house , across some fields to a bridge over the River Barle where we could get down to the fields by the river and follow well worn footpaths. The Barle at this stretch joins in a mile or two with the River Exe at the (supposedly) bottomless ‘Black Pool’ and contained, as it still does, some famous salmon fishing opportunities that were jealously guarded by rich guys in tweed jackets. I think I remember that after much tramping along the footpaths we saw some ducks which I imagine were Mallards and we enjoyed Swallows overhead taking insects on the wing but I don’t think there was much else around. I wouldn’t expect there to have been but we were certainly not skilled observers so may well have missed several opportunities. We got tired, it was hot, my father was undoubtedly bored but I couldn’t help feeling there was probably more to this game than we had discovered and so we decided to stop in the shade of a riverside tree to see what came by before heading home for tea and cakes (isn’t this all terribly reminiscent of the Famous Five and Enid Blyton?).
The Barle at this stretch runs rapidly over a stony and pebble filled bottom and is rarely more than a couple of feet deep, with rapid rills and occasional small pools that held brown trout. There were numerous larger stones sticking above the gin-clear water and, on top of one of these, was a small brown bird bobbing up and down on its little legs. I can see myself thinking “well, it’s a bird but a pretty boring one and I have no idea of its name” when it suddenly hopped into the water and started walking about on the bottom of the river where I could clearly see it, trailing bubbles as it went. Up it popped onto its stone again and then back into the water. Out and back, out and back until it surfaced with a caddis fly larva in its beak and ate it with relish.
Utterly entrancing. Birds are supposed to fly, but this one walks under water. Sheer, unalloyed magic and if not quite the only thing I remember from those far distant days, certainly the most vivid and the most important.
Back home, a cup of tea, some cake and out came Mr Fisher’s field guide. The bird’s identity was nailed – we had been watching a White-throated, or European Dipper (Cinclus cinclus) doing what Dippers do, dipping.
A short digression is in order here. Dipping is what birders say they have done if they have failed to see an expected bird. So to ‘dip a Dipper’ is to not see a Dipper where you expected or hoped to see one. Well, I had Not-dipped a Dipper and was a happy and contented child. A while back, I happened upon a short video of a Dipper (on YouTube, of course) that was filmed within a mile or so of the place where I saw “my” Dipper and was once again, fascinated by this little brown bird. It is quite a good thing to know that despite all that has happened to the world, these birds are still able to make a living along that stretch of water. One day I might go back and see for myself though at my age I had better do it soon.
Anyway. I thought I had seen the bird walking on the river bottom, but I now know that I had not as the laws of specific gravity and relative density apply to these birds as they do to anything else. In fact Dippers ‘fly’ under the water using their wing muscles and only occasionally gripping pebbles with their feet in order to remain submerged. Effective, anyway. To confound things even further, the bird’s name comes from its bobbing or dipping activity when standing on the riverbank, not from the dips it takes in the water.
From such small things does a career and a lifetime interest grow. “What do you want for Christmas?” “Animal books”. “What do you want for your birthday?” “Animal books”. “Where shall we go for the day?” “The countryside, up on the moors”. So here I am, over sixty years later, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology with a few other letters after my name, past-President of Canada’s oldest bird-focussed conservation charity (Bird Protection Quebec) and with enough spare time to put this down in a computer file knowing that few are likely to read it … but it pleases me to remember.
Just think if all children could occasionally be taken birding (or bugging, or botanising) and helped to see and become involved with what is around them. I am sure that few children who find their own “Dipper” early enough, anything that makes them go “Wow!”, when their minds are open to new experiences, can fail to care about such matters for the rest of their lives. What’s more, there is a better chance that they may be prepared to advocate for, and protect, wild creatures and the places they live, throughout their lives. I think the trick is to play it low-key. Avoid didactic lectures and allow the kids to approach you with questions about what catches their fancy. Have simple answers ready, and don’t be boring.
Working with the Underlings - while you are here.
There are five species of Dipper in the world. The one that I saw in the England being the White-throated Dipper, also known as the European Dipper. ( Cinclus cinclus.) The specimen in my photograph below was encountered in some seriously heavy rain on the west coast of Scotland - heavy as only Scottish rain can be.
There are Dippers on this continent too, albeit not the same species though they look similar. The famous John Muir wrote of the American Dipper that: “His music is that of the streams refined and spiritualized. The deep booming notes of the falls are in it, the trills of rapids, the gurgling of margin eddies, the low whispering of level reaches, and the sweet tinkle of separate drops oozing from the end of mosses and falling into tranquil pools.” That description would fit the European Dipper and its habitat equally well.
The first detailed description I could find of the White-throated Dipper, dates back to c.1183. Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis), a twelfth-century cleric, historian and traveller was an observer of wildlife alongside his more routine duties. He described the dipper accurately, but had a tendency to believe anything he was told and decided they were an aberrant variety of the common kingfisher.
The Dipper is no ordinary bird. Norway has made it their national bird. The Dipper, who spends most of its time on the ground near waterfalls, was thought in the past to be in close contact with the underlings, the fey folk living underground. These underlings were said to be hostile towards heavy-footed humans who tread on their homes. They thought that the Dipper could work with the underlings and so take revenge on anyone who disturbed their nest or young ones. Hence the Dipper was a bird who should be left alone and avoided at all cost.
Recently, in the Garden
A few days ago we had a band of cold rain and snow coming through. All melted within a day, but at the time it was pleasant to spend some time with a gang of American Robins making a meal from Winterberry fruits growing near the house. A friend in England even asked for a copy of this photograph to make Christmas cards out of … that was a nice compliment.
Winterberry (Ilex verticillata) is a deciduous, prickle-free species of holly that, as its name suggests, ripens its fruits late in the year and then carries them over into the winter. It is native to this continent and although supposedly adapted to wetland and shade it seems to grow pretty well anywhere.
Then last Wednesday the ice on a bird bath had frozen overnight but was not very thick. These birds decided this were just the ideal conditions for taking a winter plunge in … despite there being a heated water bath no more than 15 feet away. Two Dark-eyed Juncos and an American Goldfinch.
Flying around in the house late last night was this large, brown moth. Now removed to a more suitable place to pass the winter. After consideration, I think it is perhaps a Brown Satyr Moth (Ufeus satyricus) or something similar. I would rather like it to be a Cynical Quaker (Orthodes cynica) because that’s me, but the wing markings don’t look quite right. Apparently most such moths are reported round about this time of the year … quite possibly because this is when they are visibly seeking a spot to overwinter and do the crashing around the bedroom thing.
This is for you plant people. I was idly scrolling though the Mastodon website recently (Mastodon being a polite and user-friendly alternative to X) when I learned of a friendly challenge under the name of “Wild Flower Hour” … this was originally a UK project and the #wildflowerhour was set up with the express purpose of flooding the internet with wild flowers every Sunday from 8 to 9pm.
https://bsbi.org/wildflower-hour.
It bears similarity with a number of birders’ challenges and could be somewhat repurposed into listing how many wild flowers/other plants you can identify in an hour and then posting the list on Mastodon to encourage others. Knowing that this is hard in the colder months, a member of the herd has proposed a “Winter Ten” sub-challenge.