Most mornings I walk along this road to the gym, and in spring and early summer I smile and say hello to swifts that wheel among the rooftops. I don’t know which roofs they nest in specifically, but if I were to hazard a guess it would be those with old roofs and wooden fascias, where slipped tiles and bowed wood make the perfect entrance holes to a small space to raise young. I wince at the home ‘improvements’ that take place among this colony, at the scaffolding that goes up, at the plastic fascias and shiny new roof tiles that, ultimately, make swifts homeless. Swifts are extremely faithful to nest sites and return to them every year. That’s why it’s so devastating when the holes are filled in, either intentionally or otherwise. The swifts are so determined to reach their nest that they will continue trying to access it, until they are exhausted and die. Sometimes they can be encouraged to nest nearby with the help of some quickly erected nest boxes and a loudspeaker playing swift calls, but only if the community rallies around to support them. It takes a community to raise swifts; it will take a nation to save them.
Sometimes, if I’m feeling brave enough, I get in touch with those who have scaffolding up and I tell them about the swifts nesting in their neighbourhood. Scaffolding provides the perfect opportunity for helping these birds; it removes the effort of erecting a nest box. You just need to pop the kettle on for a cup of tea, open a packet of biscuits and present them to your builder, along with a swift box and instructions of where you want it. ‘Oh be a love and pop this box up while you’re there. Thanks ever so. Jaffa cake?’ Job done. Even if you’re doing the work yourself, you’re already up there, you already have the tools. Just whack a swift box up, under the eaves and especially under the tip of your gable, please.
In autumn, as I walked to the gym, I passed a house with an old roof and new scaffolding. Over the next few weeks I watched as the entire roof came off, as guttering was replaced, as the render was filled, sanded and repainted. I have no idea who lives there but I decided to write them a letter and post it through their door. ‘Please, will you put a swift box up?’
I explained that swifts migrate here from the Congo Basin each spring, that they are on the wing for most of their lives, that the young do ‘press-ups’ in the nest to prepare them for a lifetime of flying. That swifts are here for only two months of the year, that they make no mess at all, that they are suffering staggering declines but that you, dear people with scaffolding, live in an area where there’s a reasonable colony and that you can help them by erecting a swift box, which may or may not replace a nest that you are destroying by having your roof done. I definitely didn’t use the word ‘destroying’, I was trying to get them on side. I was nice and gentle and said lovely things about these wondrous birds, and enclosed a leaflet about swift conservation so they could read more on this subject that they would obviously be newly interested in.
Each day, afterwards, as I walked past the house, I noted the lack of swift boxes. As the builders made finishing touches to the house and the scaffolding came down, I realised my letter hadn’t worked, that they had read it and not acted, that they had not erected a swift box. There will have been a hundred reasons why they didn’t want one, but ultimately they didn’t put one up because they didn’t care enough, and I took that very personally. I know it seems silly but I did.
This year I see my first swift in the first week of May, as I do most years. It’s one of a pair, casually flying above houses in the next road, where I’m sure they are nesting, but I have found no evidence of them entering buildings. I stand with my head in the sky and gawp at them, while passers-by rush to school and work, oblivious to the wonder above them. As I walk to the gym I look out for swifts trying to access their nests in the house that has a new roof, and am pleased to see nothing at all. Lucky for them, but countless other swifts this year will be returning to nest sites to find them gone, just when they need all the help they can get to slow down or even reverse their declines. If we won’t share our homes with them, where will they raise their young? They have to live somewhere.
It’s raining, my god it’s raining. Tap-tap-tapping on the roofs and windows and streaming into the water butt in a great noisy spout. I open the back door and stand in it, feel it. I crouch beneath the overhanging shed roof and watch it splash into the pond, hydrate the garden. Rain. Actual rain. Every single living thing in this garden is heaving great sighs of relief.
The sound of rain filling the water butt is joyous. It pours off the roof of the house in streams and rivers. I connect the hose to its tap and turn it on when the water level approaches the top so I don’t miss a drop. I direct water into the pond, which needs filling up, and around the trees and tiny hedge that desperately need a drink. I have to watch the water butt closely so it doesn’t empty completely into the pond and leave me with nothing when the rain stops, but also that it doesn’t overflow into the drain and be lost forever. There should be an outlet at the top so water can escape into the garden only once the butt’s full, but that would involve having hoses all over the patio.
I leave buckets and saucepans on the lawn, moving them around so they don’t deny the grass a drink. In the front I place a bucket beneath the bit of guttering that isn’t fixed properly and leaks and I should probably fix it but why would you deny yourself free water? Why would you mend something that will then direct rain into the road? I watch that, too, and empty it into the rain shadow of next door’s hedge. I spend most of the day checking and emptying buckets and pans, making sure the water butt isn’t emptying or spilling over, that there’s no snail or snail poo clogging up the diverter, so that everything – all of it – lands in my water butt. I don’t get much work done. I get very wet.
Wild Park lies on the other side of town and is Brighton’s largest nature reserve. It’s connected to the South Downs National Park and has woodland and chalk flower meadows, a dew pond (or at least the remains of one) and ‘sweeping views across the city’. It’s also home to an Iron-Age hillfort, which sounds much grander than it looks, and of course lots of golf courses. We three (Emma, Tosca and me) take a trip there for the first time. We park up in a valley, surrounded by football pitches and other playing fields, get our bearings and then start to climb, up into the woods. It’s a perfect day: blue sky, big fluffy clouds, a fair bit of wind but not too much, and the odd rain shower that beats against the tree leaves while we remain dry beneath. I like these woods. I feel a magic that I haven’t felt in a woodland for a long time. Is it because it’s raining and I’m no longer used to it? Is it the fresh green of the leaves against old wood? Moss hangs from tree branches like curtains and sunlight paddles through the canopy, hitting the ground like disco lights on a dance floor. Our noses fill with the scent of fresh earth and new life. Oh, rain!
We come out of the woods and on to the brow of the hill, to wildflower meadows and skylarks, and indeed a sweeping view across the city. ‘Look at Brighton!’ we say. The first of the year’s meadow brown butterflies bounce among the grasses while six-spot burnet moth cocoons hang like teardrops from grass stems. Tosca sniffs everything. I stop and look at everything. Emma wonders what she has done to deserve being saddled with such slow-moving creatures.
The area is horseshoe-shaped and we walk around the top, an escarpment if you like, before descending back through the trees on the other side. It’s a funny spot, so wild and yet so urban. I could imagine boxing hares here but there are rows of houses all along the outskirts, the sound of police sirens beneath us. Boxing hares might be a stretch, although they do have a corridor here from the Downs. But what else could there be, if I came on my own and spent time here sitting and watching, without my girls to keep me moving? I make a note to do just that.
Afterwards, we walk on the big playing field at the bottom. Tosca and Emma practise their litter-picking routine and I watch them for a bit before finding myself at a big clump of nettles, Emma’s commands of ‘Hold!’ and ‘Drop!’ fading as my attention turns to other things. Almost immediately I find what I came looking for: the telltale signs of butterfly caterpillars – folded over and chewed leaves, mounds of square frass (droppings) and then, following the trail, caterpillars. There are two patches of up to a hundred wriggling together, all knitted under the shelter of silk and leaf. I think they’re small tortoiseshells, which have declined by 75 per cent in the last 50 years. I realise this is my first caterpillar clump of 2022 and the first, I think, in a couple of years. I used to see two or three clumps on nettles every year and then this dwindled to one, and then nothing. But here, on this average spring day in late May, in Brighton, I have found them again.
It’s funny, because I saw just one small tortoiseshell butterfly last year. It was feeding from a buddleia on the side of the road down by the port, the most unromantic of places to see a now-rare-in-these-parts butterfly. But then, on a sunny day just two months ago, in March, I saw four flying about in a local park. Four! Would they have hibernated together? Or was someone raising (and then overwintering?) them locally? Did they fly here from France? I see someone else mention it on Twitter. ‘We’re seeing loads of small tortoiseshells!’ we say to any lepidopterist that will listen, and they would like the Tweet or respond with a thumbs-up and I supposed they couldn’t really do anything with the information because it wasn’t information, was it? It was two people saying they had seen more small tortoiseshell butterflies in the last couple of weeks than in the last few years, and that that, in itself, isn’t evidence of anything.
But here I am now, standing in front of nettles in another park in Brighton, my girls collecting litter in the background, and there are caterpillars. I walk along and find evidence of other clumps, some of which I think may have been mown, as the trail of frass and folded leaves disappears in the same spot as evidence of recent tidying.
‘What are you doing?’ says Emma.
‘I’m just taking a few,’ I say.
She rolls her eyes. It’s quite a thing, taking caterpillars, because I don’t want to interfere, no one wants to meddle. I want to leave them in their own habitat. I want them to be able to feed and explore naturally, and then disperse and spend a couple of days as fat caterpillars sitting on leaves, before disappearing to pupate and then emerging 10 days later as gorgeous adult butterflies. But there’s too much at stake. There are wasps and birds – natural predators, of course – and there are mowers and strimmers, anxious parents complaining to the council about nettles harming their children. Then there’s bad weather – too hot and dry and the nettles will shrivel and die; too wet and the caterpillars will be washed off the leaves (no chance of that happening this year). And when you have declines of 75 per cent over a 50-year period and you know you can take them home and improve their chances of survival, why wouldn’t you? I’m just so sick of never seeing any butterflies.
I take some from one of the two batches, not too many. I snap off the nettle stem with my hand and pop it in a doggy bag. Back home I set up my ‘farm’ (a mesh cage for kids that usually comes with painted lady caterpillars and some pelleted food so you can raise your own pet butterflies). I pop them all in the cage together, with the nettle stem I brought them home with, and watch them eat for a bit. And then I leave them to it. That’s it, they’re captive but not for long. I go into the garden and gawp at baby frogs in the long grass.
Later, I pop to the park to collect nettles for my caterpillars to feed on. There, astonishingly, I find more caterpillars. Older than the ones I collected this morning, they have been developing here unnoticed for a couple of weeks. I don’t take them, they’re nearly ready to pupate. But it’s a gamble – the council hasn’t been to cut everything back for a while so they must be due soon. But I take my chances. I can hear the strimmers from my house anyway.
The neighbourhood Facebook group has been busy with reports of the drone and the bad man. People have gone down to speak to him and been scared away, others have had muck from his warehouse gutters thrown at them. I observe most of this without comment, adding the odd sentence of despair when they mention how upset the gulls are. We are all upset. We are all really upset.
I’m out to lunch with Dad and his wife Ceals – a celebration of their recent civil partnership, it’s only taken them 35 years. Hilariously, Ellie and I weren’t invited to the ceremony; they got hitched in the registry office with just two friends as witnesses, had their photos taken with roadworks in the background. ‘It’s just for financial reasons,’ they laugh, ‘just a bit of security as we get older.’ But it’s still nice to celebrate. They had a boozy lunch with their witnesses and now they’re here in Brighton, being taken out for a slap-up meal by me, before they head home again tomorrow. I show them how much I care by getting both the iron and the hair brush out.
‘You look vaguely presentable,’ says Dad.
‘I do ’n all,’ I say.
We have a drink before the meal and, while Dad and Ceals busy themselves with ordering, I check Facebook. In the group someone has posted a video of men on the roof of the warehouse. ‘They’re wearing gloves,’ she says, ‘and they’re loading material into white bags.’ I freeze but my heart races. Nests? Eggs? Small chicks? I feel sick. If flying a drone isn’t a crime then this absolutely is. I read the comments: people are furiously saying they’ll get in touch with the contacts they have been dealing with, that a police community support officer (PCSO) is heading down tomorrow. That this is the action we knew was coming and has finally, frustratingly happened and can now no longer be ignored by police.
We have a nice meal and I try not to be distracted. I cry only a little. On the bus on the way back I ask Dad and Ceals if they fancy taking a walk to the warehouse and they say yes OK and we walk round and the gates are closed but I can see three white bags in a skip at the back of the yard. At home I email the police again and tell them that all the evidence they need – evidence of crime – is in three bags in a skip at the address I have now given them twice. I have visions of tiny chicks suffocating in plastic, of the miracle of a police officer opening them to find life hanging in the balance and of rushing these tiny birds to a rescue centre where someone will help them live. Of the men being arrested and fined. Of lesser black-backed gulls being safe to continue nesting here. Of these streets being a fraction wilder. In the morning I check the Facebook group to see if the PCSO has paid a visit, if the bags have been confiscated as evidence, if anything has happened at all.
But there’s nothing. The police don’t come. The bags remain in the skip with whatever’s in them rotting into oblivion. The Facebook group goes quiet, as does the drone, and I realise I have to let it go, I have to move on before it consumes me completely.
Sometimes I get lost in thoughts of other animals rising up. About them finally speaking out against habitat theft and violence towards them. Online there’s video footage of orangutans attacking logging machines in Borneo, tales of killer whales destroying the propellers of fishing boats. Are they angry? The orangutans are, certainly. And why wouldn’t they be? In our thirst for cheap palm oil we have destroyed so much of their forest home. Whale experts seem to think the killer whales are just having fun. But what if they aren’t? What if they’re attacking propellers to seek retribution for overfishing, which is threatening their lives? And, surely, if you have the capacity for fun, you also have the capacity for pain and anger? Surely they can see what we’re doing to the sea?
One day, if climate change doesn’t kill us all, a new world order will be created, where people go to university to study the languages of other species. As well as French, German and Spanish, people will study Whale, Gorilla, Pangolin. Why not? I can already speak a bit of Dog, I can play-bow with the best of them. I know when Tosca needs a wee and when she’s stressed. I know when she wants to play and when she wants me to put her on her lead (I had always assumed dogs don’t like being tethered but Tosca appears to feel safe, she always asks for the lead when faced with large dogs or groups of dogs, presumably so we can walk past them together).
I want to know what the whales and dolphins say, I want to know how the sharks and seals feel. How are the octopus doing, how are the dragonflies? ‘It’s a bit warm, isn’t it?’ they might say. ‘Could you stop choking us with plastic?’ The migrant birds that fly here each spring from Africa, what could they tell us? How could they teach us to live better? What does the robin know? I fantasise about turning on the news at night and not just hearing of human stories but those of other animals, too. Tales of the first cuckoo arriving from Africa, of the annual sad goodbye to the swifts and the swallows. On national news, on local news, on any news.
And the gulls, the poor gulls, whole streets of whom are being distracted from nest building and egg laying by one man and his ridiculous drone. What would they say about the way they are being treated? What could I say to them? If I could connect with them I would tell them to stay away from the man with the drone, to nest, instead, with me. ‘You’ll be so safe here,’ I would say, and I would also show them where else they had allies beneath the slate roofs they call home. If their antics were on the news, beyond the usual tales of ‘Gull Steals Chips’ / ‘Gull Scares Child’ / ‘Gull Walks into Shop and Helps Itself to Pasty’, how could our attitudes change, just from being more aware of their needs as our neighbours, of the challenges they face?
Years ago, in my early twenties, I travelled to Australia and signed up to camp in the bush on a saltwater crocodile expedition, just outside Darwin in the Northern Territory. My guide was a man who had been a successful banker but had burned out and had quit his old life to take clueless backpackers into the wilderness to teach them about crocodiles and northern Aboriginal cultures. There was a group of us, all young and silly, all signed up for an ‘adventure in the bush’ without really knowing what it was. I was there with Kat, a student doctor I had met in a nightclub in Sydney’s Darling Harbour, who randomly agreed to explore Western Australia with me in a camper van that, inevitably, was always breaking down. For three nights we slept out in the open, in outdoor sleeping bags known as swags, and ate food made on a camping stove. I don’t remember the food or much of the company, the small things. I remember Kat’s shoulders as we swam in crocodile-free pools beneath waterfalls, of being terrified of sleeping outside and of waking in the night to see wild boars searching for scraps among us, of the Dutch lads singing a Dutch drinking song. Mostly I remember the views and the nature, trekking up to an escarpment and watching the sun set over the wetlands, cave paintings made by long-dead people who had once shared the views that were now in front of my eyes some 20,000 years later. Mostly I remember the words of the man who had quit his old life.
He told us that Aboriginal Australians had a special way of interacting with the natural world, that they were fully a part of it. He told me they would sit, for hours, and watch other animals. That, in their observations, they learned to mimic other species; they read their body language and knew their habits. Consequently, they knew when it was safe to swim with crocodiles, because they knew if the crocs had eaten. They knew exactly how much fish to take from the river and when to take it, to protect populations so there would always be fish to eat. He told me they had extraordinary powers of sight and navigation, and could travel over huge areas of land without what we westerners would ever deem a ‘proper map’. I was 21 years old and fascinated. From that point I watched as many films featuring Aboriginal Australians as possible, I visited Aboriginal museums and bought Aboriginal art (I also bought a didgeridoo, c’mon, I was 21). I felt a kinship with these people who, in my mind, had a higher understanding of the workings of life, and, inevitably, I was devastated to see what European settlement had done to them.
Weeks later, I ate curry with an English man in Vietnam, and I told him about my trip. He laughed and said Aboriginal civilisation wasn’t to be taken seriously as they hadn’t built any tall buildings. It’s been more than 20 years but I still think about that trip, the amazing things I learned, and of the ridiculous English man who considered tall buildings – read ego – a true mark of civilisation. If only the ego wasn’t the dominant force of civilisation today, what would we know? I doubt we would be hurtling towards 3ºC of average global warming by the end of the century.
To connect, or reconnect with the natural world would be a thing of enormous beauty, for us and other species. To view other animals as equals, to understand and respect their needs in this world we have taken over, would be nothing short of a gift. A gift of reading the body language of another animal and understanding its thoughts and needs, its next move.
The dog jumps up for a cuddle and I say ‘kisses’ and she gently licks my nose. I wonder if we will ever have such kinship with wild animals, not that we need to love and hug them or teach them to give us kisses, but that we can understand each other a bit more. As wildlife gardeners we already understand the needs of others more than most. We can anticipate food and water shortages and supplement accordingly. We can create habitats that we know will be used. But if they could speak to us and if we would listen – if they could actually get through to us – what would they say?
