Birds, Beasts And Flowers

I hardly came across any mammals on the Chemin except for the domestic kind, but wild flowers, birds and insects were abundant. Although many of the species I saw were familiar to me from the UK, there seemed to be a much greater diversity and distribution here in south-west France.

Birds of prey included buzzard, kite, kestrel, sparrow hawk and possibly an eagle. And the call of the cuckoo was the musical backdrop to the whole fortnight. Some more unusual birds I spotted were redstarts and shrikes — redstarts are only locally common in Britain, and shrikes very rare indeed. (Shrikes are also known as 'butcher birds' because of their habit of catching insects and small vertebrates, then impaling their bodies on thorns.)

Shrike.

The 'chirping' of crickets could be heard most days. This loud, rasping wall of sound is produced by the males when they rub one wing against the other to attract the females, a behaviour which is called 'stridulation'. I'm pretty certain they were crickets, and even saw one basking on a wall near Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole. However, checking the natural history websites, it seems crickets tend to 'stridulate' at night rather than in the daytime. What's going on here?

Cricket.

Buttercup, dandelion, ragged-robin, cuckoo flower, wild daffodil, white narcissus, bugle, spurge, tormentil, wood anemone, cowslip, wild strawberry, dog rose, stitchwort, campion, scabious, poppy, St John's wort, speedwell, yellow archangel, lungwort, vetch, clover, marsh marigold, violet, wild pansy, herb robert, oxeye daisy, peony, butterbur, honesty, selfheal, comfrey, broom, bird's-foot-trefoil, scarlet pimpernel, cow parsley...

... were just some of the flowers I found growing along the path. Lungwort (pulmonaria) is unbelievably common, whereas in England this tends to be mainly a garden flower. (Lungwort is so called because its spotted leaves were thought to resemble diseased lungs, and it was therefore used to treat pulmonary infections in the days of sympathetic magic. You can find a post I wrote on sympathetic magic here.) I also saw several different types of orchid, including the rare bee orchid, and later identified with delight herb Paris and pasque flower — both firsts for me.

Lungwort.

Pasque flower.

Herb Paris.

Bee orchid.

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)

From Hag To Bag

Last Saturday I took another walk in the Lincolnshire Wolds. I followed farmers' tracks and field paths from the village of Hagworthingham (known locally as 'Hag') to the village of Bag Enderby, then returned a different way. The weather was warm, and the sky mainly overcast. By the middle of the afternoon it became almost sultry, with a temperature more like that of a summer's day. Meandering slowly along the route, I passed some garish yellow acres of oilseed rape...

... and this five barred, wooden gate leading into a grass field...



... then saw this riven tree...

...close by the River Lymm, which Alfred Lord Tennyson immortalized in his poem The Brook: I come from haunts of coot and hern,/I make a sudden sally,/And sparkle out among the fern,/To bicker down a valley...

On the hedgebanks, at woodland edges, and in other shady spots, I found stitchwort, red campion (see pic below), lesser celandine, and tangles of herb robert, a flower which demonstrates perfectly the ancient 'doctrine of signatures' - herbalists once recommended herb robert as a treatment for blood disorders as its stem and leaves turn blood-red in the autumn.

(The 'doctrine of signatures' was formulated by early physicians, herbalists and mystics. They believed God had marked the objects of His creation with a sign or 'signature' - perhaps relating to their form or colour - which gave a clue to their purpose; for instance, the walnut, since the shell resembled the shape of a human head and the nut had the texture of a human brain, was supposed to be good for head ailments. Another example of sympathetic magic?)

In the sunnier, less sheltered grassland areas, the year's first daisies had opened, and there were drifts of lilac-coloured cuckoo flowers, a flower which evokes the fields of my childhood: some of my cousins were farmers, and their meadows were full of cuckoo flowers and cowslips, poppies and field scabious - this was long before the days when most farmland became fertilizered and pesticided and monocultured.

The cuckoo flower (aka mikmaid or lady's smock) is a fascinating and nostalgic flower for me. It recalls the long spring and summer days of boyhood - when I used to roam freely and carelessly about the countryside. It's name too has an interesting derivation. Sure, it blooms during the months when the cuckoo sings; but, more intriguingly, the plant is covered in foam in late spring, and it was once believed this substance was cuckoo saliva. Really it has nothing to do with cuckoos, but is produced by the nymphs of the froghopper bug.

The blackthorn blossom had already faded and tumbled, but the hawthorn (or may) bush was just on the cusp of unpacking its tight flower buds. Indeed the odd one was already in bloom. May blossom looks wonderful - but many think it has an unpleasant, sickly smell, an odour of death. I've written before about may blossom, and its connection with Proust, here.

The pungent smell of wild garlic wafted towards me from garlic mustard plants (aka jack-by-the-hedge or hedge garlic) which grew along the hedgerow bottoms, and also from clumps of white-flowered ransoms in the woods and spinneys. Ransoms belongs to the lily family, and you can chop up the leaves and use them as a flavouring in cookery; garlic mustard is a cabbage, and has many culinary uses too - in sauces and in salads, and, of course, as the ingredient for garlic mustard!

To be continued...

Play

At times it seems as if the whole company of nature, ourselves included, is simply at play.

It's evident to me that animal 'play' happens out of sheer spontaneous joy, curiosity and invention - rather than purely to fulfil some narrow, evolutionary purpose. Look at puppies running after a ball. Lion cubs pouncing on their mothers' tails. Young polar bears play-fighting. Dolphins blowing bubbles, chasing them to the water's surface, then bursting them. Homo sapiens applying pigments such as ochre, manganese oxide and charcoal to cave walls and with them creating images of horses and bison, aurochs and reindeer.

Play is the opposite of Management by Objectives, the current creed which rigidly screens out spontaneity, imagination and surprise as parts of the creative process.

Spontaneity. Imagination. Surprise. All of which, at least for me, are essential to the human experience. And the animal one too?

So many of the transactions between different organisms seem almost incidental, wildly gratuitous.

What is the nature, the meaning of these 'gratuitous transactions'? To my mind they can't be completely understood simply by following worthy-but-dull, cause-and-effect scientific reasoning. Is 'sympathetic magic' coming into play?

(All quotations come from Richard Mabey's book Nature Cure. All opinions are mine alone.)

Sympathetic Magic: All Is Metaphor

Every tree is strange to me. JOHN CLARE (Written during his illness).

Some time ago I read Nature Cure, Richard Mabey's confessional book about his nervous breakdown. (I mentioned this book recently, and Beating The Bounds blogged about it here.) Mabey recounts how his recovery was made possible thanks to writing, the kindness of friends, and the love and dedication of one particular woman. With the help of these he was finally able to re-establish, as a human being and as a natural history writer, his connection with the natural world - in an East Anglian setting of fen and breckland, under huge skies, between long horizons, and in the company of multifarious wild plants and birds.

In chapter 4, The Naming Of Parts, Mabey writes: Certainly... a natural science confined to the naming of parts and simplistic models of cause and effect is neither adequate nor particularly helpful in describing a world in which memory, feeling, spontaneity and a growing and necessary sense of the wholeness of things are intertwined.

He amplifies this by introducing the ancient and primitive belief in 'sympathetic magic': Sympathetic magic is often simplified to the formula of 'like cures (or generates) like'; but it is really a more comprehensive (and seemingly almost universal) approach to the search for order and connectivity in nature. At its heart is the idea of analogy, the ecological, if 'un-scientific', belief that the different layers of life are not only connected, but in some way physical reflections - metaphors, if you like - of each other. Exterior likenesses are clues to inner processes and likely resonances. The shape and colour of plants reveal their powers. The mating dances of animals, if mimicked by humans, will make the animals more prolific - and maybe the dancers, too. The woodpecker thunders, and the heavens will thunder as well. (In the myth and folklore of many cultures woodpeckers are believed to foretell rain, influence the growth of crops, even predict the future.)

Mabey makes clear that Sympathetic magic isn't some primitive stage on the upward journey towards real science. It's a different way of understanding and, its followers hope, influencing the world. It begins with observations and experiences, but then, instead of attempting to explain these by reducing them to ever smaller and more discreet parts or 'atoms', looks at them more broadly until they seem to fit into the weave of the world.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as unscientific, New Age nonsense, but I think it deserves more serious consideration. I myself think it's an exciting, provoking, imaginative and wholly different way of looking at the world - one that I (and I suspect many of us) have likely been practising all the while without realizing it. The poetry of William Blake fits in very well with this holistic world view - as do the Gaia theories of James Lovelock (to quote a quite different sage from more modern times).

One example of this approach (which is beyond the purely taxonomic or test-by-theory methods - and more inclusive, as it brings together the personal and the human, observation and memory, both science and art) is the idea of 'play' in the animal world. Consider the acrobatic jackdaws I saw on my recent walk, swifts screaming in fast and joyful flight, kittens mock-fighting, humans messing about with paint or clay or words. I think you'll find that science alone hasn't yet come up with a convincing, watertight reason why animals indulge in these 'playtime' activities, 'games' which seem to serve no immediately 'useful' purpose, and which seem to arise from no other motives than pure pleasure and delight.

More of all this in a coming post... But in the meantime, can I ask: do you believe in sympathetic magic? Is it the stuff of mysticism, or is it really, objectively out there? I'd like to believe so.