The amateur naturalist - is it a dying breed?

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THE AMATEUR NATURALIST - IS IT A DYING BREED? PETER MARREN This is a gloomy and pompous title, I agree, but slightly better than the alternative: 'The Naturalist - is it an endangered species?' Thanks to endless repetition and misuse by pressure groups, the phrase 'endangered species' fills the heart of every thinking naturalist not with concern but nausea. At least 'Dying breed' has a touch more dignity, don't you think?

My title implies that there are grounds for fearing that the amateur naturalist is becoming a rare bird - a touch ironic, perhaps, when it becomes the subject of an address delivered to a large audience of enthusiastic naturalists on a cold day in late October. But let's try to see the Situation from the viewpoint of a visiting population scientist from Mars. Having cast it's beady three eyes over us, it would note that we are a bit top-heavy in the age class. Or, as someone remarked at a party held at the Offices of The Countryman a few weeks earlier, 'this isn't exactly a Playboy party, is it?' One has the same feeling with the BSBI (Botanical Society of the British Isles for any reader under 30). Recruitment to this population does not balance the mortality rate, nowhere near. The swollen obituary papers of Watsonia read like a Who's Who of British field botanists. But where are the Young Tßrks - or perhaps the Young Turk's Cap Lilies, in this context - the great botanists of tomorrow?. How many natural history all-rounders are still being made? While it was never particularly hip to be a field naturalist, my generation, which grew up in the sixties, did manage to produce a lot of boys and girls who knew their flowers and birds. But what of today? Each of us can only draw a few straws from our own experience. I know that most of the correspondents from Scotland on Flora Britannica were elderly. I remember that when I visited the camp of protesters at Newbury, I found a prevailing sense of reverence for nature, but no one seemed to know the call of a nuthatch, or understand the historical nature of banks, ditches and coppice stools around them. And I have lived in a large village in the country for over three years, and have never yet met any naturalist (and I think I can spot 'em) on my regulär round, except for a few birdwatchers. Each year I take parties about the fields and woods in quest of flowers and toadstools, and while there are sometimes one or two who know more than I do, the majority can't seem to distinguish between a Cat's-Ear and a Cat's-Tail. Yet they often travel miles to be there, and are invariably politely attentive to what one has to say.

All this begs the question how we define a naturalist. I detect a generational divide here. We oldies or aspirant oldies know exactly what it means. Many of us were lucky enough in our distant youth to have known a Theodore character - you know, someone resembling the kindly doctor in Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals. Durrell's mentor wore formal clothes on field expeditions, was well equipped with paraphernalia, and was often to be found lying prostrate among the grass stalks with his head in the ditch. He spoke very precisely, and had a dry quiet wit that delighted in the absurd. He was also the only character in the book to understand young Gerry Durrell. Like all naturalists who have ever been born, part of Theodore's mind had never grown old, and so he retained a child's natural sense of awe and wonder. Today's younger generation are too self-absorbed to make good naturalists. A young

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person's definition might be anyone who cares about nature. But anybody can care - it costs you no effort, and conforms to social expectations. It doesn't mean you're necessarily very interested.

When you read the classics by people like Gilbert White or Richard Jefferies you are given the impression that they enjoyed quite impressive amounts of leisure time and that the stresses and strains of life were not so great then.

White, you feel, didn't do much work apart from an occasional sermon. His exterior life was as flat as a map. They will never make a film about him, unless it is one of those quiet ones like The Piano or Propsero 's Books which are really (slightly) animated paintings. All the activity was inferior: he was a natural observer and contemplative; outside he was more or less motionless, but inside his head the neurons were whirring away merrily. You feel you might as well throw away Gilbert White's legs and arms and reproductive bits: his vital parts were a pair of eyes, a responsive brain and a hand to write it all down.

Apparently he ate well, and drank quite a lot, and while that is of no interest to us, it is a reminder that English naturalists have traditionally been enthusiastic trenchermen. Some of the Victorian natural history journals devote almost as much space to the feast as to the bag. Personally, I haven't much time for abstemious naturalists, there's something vital missing, it seems to me - the fun element - teetotallers lack robustness or irony - or am I wrong?

It may well be that it is no longer possible to produce English Whites and Darwins because the way of life that made them possible has gone. Even Darwin needed his mentors, and a good private income, and a nice big house with a bank of orchids nearby. I believe that naturalists are born with the right instincts, irrespective of what happens later. I have been interested in flowers and insects as long as I can remember - I can never recall learning their names; they just came with the job. like speech. But I would have had it crushed out of me if I hadn't enjoyed a boyhood when it was possible to roam about the countryside had the right kind of encouragement by school teachers and parents. We caught newts and water boatmen with nets, we shot things with air guns and stuck pins in butterflies to our heart's content. We weren't supposed to collect bird's eggs, but plenty of boys did, for a week or two, before getting bored and doing something eise. And we climbed trees, and built bonfires and burrowed through haystacks. It gave us a literally 'hands-on' experience of nature study. Looking back on it, we were Pantheists, really. I still enjoy a feeling close to ecstasy jumping into streams, or scrambling up mountainsides - like sampling a strawberry from the Garden of Eden. And although one doesn't say so, I'd still love to be majicked into miniature size, and swim among the pond weeds and clamber among the reeds. Today children are encouraged to reverence nature, but in a different way, and wrapped up in a general goofiness about the Environment with a capital E and Gaia and endangered orang-utans. But they aren't encouraged to experience it much.

They see a lot of nature on the telly, but most people with children do not spend much time in real countryside. On their weekend excursions they are likely to end up in some ghastly picnic place or 'visitor centre'. On holidays, the interested ones may take up one of about ten pages of wildlife tours advertised in BBC Wildlife, and the rest will end up on the beach somewhere hot. The point is that for many people, experience of nature is now packaged and

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passive. They don't need to know anything, or to work out something for themselves, or exert themselves very much. I am doubtful whether natural history can ever be a really gregarious subject, though it can be a social pursuit.

Individuais are freer, and see more, and act differently from crowds, and if you are ever in a crowd you'll need facilities: viewing platforms, Souvenir shops, car parks and lots of toilets. This isn't natural history. l ' m sorry, but it isn't.

I think many people became good naturalists for being unable, or unwilling, to travel much. Until the railway age, travel was usually fairly arduous, and expensive. Naturalists were obliged to be parochial, and this gave them an observant eye for detail as well as for the changes of season and land-use. It encouraged the use of journals and diaries, which could in time be worked up into a Flora or those long lists of species and localities found in every journal.

The secret of the Natural History of Seiborne - the father of all subsequent natural histories - is that it takes the form of correspondence with fellow naturalists far away, so that you can follow Gilbert's reasoning as though the letter was written to you. It is this intimacy which is so inspiring - 7 could do that' - in a way another approach would not be. The best county floras, like Donald Grose's Wiltshire, or Francis Simpson's Suffolk, or David Allen's Isle of Man, have the same spirit - of an Englishman's personal record of his home ground, in which Observation and sensibility merge with accurate recording and attention to detail. The 'teamwork' floras do not have the same character; they may be first rate handbooks, or atlases, or ecological surveys, but they rarely succeed so well as literature - the human perception is missing.

Most of us no longer have a home ground that is so rieh in wild life. On the other hand we can travel freely and cheaply, at some risk to our lives. This has brought about a fundamental change in our personal relationships with nature.

Another kind of change has been the loss of amateurism itself. To be an Amateur Naturalist did not imply that you were one whit less dedicated or knowledgeable than the notional Professional naturalist. Before about 1940, most Professional Naturalists were commercial suppliers or dealers. Insofar as university lecturers or schoolmasters ever went into the field, they did so in the same spirit as amateur naturalists. When it came to field craft, you couldn't hold a cigarette paper between, say, Julian Huxley (lecturer) and Max Nicholson (onetime journalist), or W. H. Pearsall (lecturer) and J. E. Lousley (banker).

They were all amateur naturalists, and proud to be so. Often they brought different perspectives to bear on the same subject, neither one necessarily superior to the other - for example compare F. W. Frohawk's and Captain Purefoy's dedicated unravelling of butterfly lives, with E. B. Ford's and Bernard Kettlewell's long-term studies of their genetics. The great renaissance of English natural history lay in this combining of the talents, the Observation and field knowledge of the dedicated amateur, allied to the broad horizons and scientific acumen of the relative few in academia and institutions. This renaissance lasted about a generation, between 1945 and 1970, about the same span of time as Shakespeare's plays. The Golden Age, the most wonderful time of all to be an English naturalist, was equally brief, between about 1690 and 1715, when every walk in the country (itself at an Arcadian apogee) might bring forth a new species of butterfly, and every fossil or tuft of moss was a small miracle.

These summits of natural history were the result of bursts of intellectual

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energy, released from the discovery of ecology, behaviour and genetics during the Renaissance, or from the unveiling of the divine laws of nature during the Golden Age. Each age had its heroes, people who left a particularly deep imprint on their time. Post-war natural history would surely not have been the same without (inter alia) Peter Scott, James Fisher, Max Nicholson or Kenneth Mellanby, who presided over its final great flowering at Monkswood in the late 60s. The genius of 'the new natural history' was founded on the work of the amateur - it played to our traditional strengths. It was based not so much on higher scientific theory as on the study of living wild plants and animals in their natural habitats. That British scientists could propound theories of universal truth about nature was possible because we had the best recorded and best understood native flora and fauna (and geology) in the world. Or, to put it another way, Darwin did what he did because in his youth he had collected beetles, and spent a lot of time in sunshine and rain tramping about the English countryside, looking and thinking.

I wonder what Darwin would think about nature conservation. Since the preservation of wild life and their homes is so obviously a moral duty, and, in the long run, in our own selfish interests, it seems perverse to suggest it could be anything but a force for the good - one of the clearer, cleaner spots in our muddy age. But we are fallen angels, and even with the best intentions, we are apt to make a horrible mess of things. I leave aside the labyrinth of overregulation and the mountains of paper that conservation has built. The least benign result of conservation has been to turn natural history from a pastime into a profession. The generation which should be producing the best field naturalists is confining them to Offices - often, it might be added, squalid Offices - where they spend their days raising funds, or administering the regulations. It is a common, everyday complaint among them that they no longer have any time for nature study. I know of reserve Wardens who teil me that they rarely visit their reserves, and almost never knock in a fence post, or count ducks. Again, one can only draw a few straws taken from personal experience.

I was lucky during my locust years as a bureaucrat, that I did manage to get out a bit, though these escapes were frowned upon, and feit like playing truant. But those who take their careers more seriously have to exhibit skills that are nothing to do with nature study. The agencies are now manned, and increasingly womanned, by tougher types in suits, who speak the right jargon, and impress people at meetings, where they spend most of their working lives. The charities are not so inhibited by agency narks and auditors, but they tend to Channel their energy into campaigns which lie entirely within the human sphere. All of them tend to turn like weathervanes with the latest swings in political and bureaucratic fashion, and if income is your sole object, I suppose you have to.

But there is a spiritual deadness at the heart of the modern conservation industry. It is becoming increasingly separate from its roots in natural history, and even from its original aims, and bureaucratic methods are designed to perpetuate the industry as much as anything. The industry is suspicious of practically everyone who still works in the country, it considers as a matter of no importance whether you can teil a sloe bush from a cherry plum tree, and issues yards of irritating self-serving propaganda with the declared intention of

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'educating' the public. There are few heroes in contemporary British nature conservation (as there are in, say, Brazil or Indonesia) - it is, on the whole, faceless. There are no works of art or literature, nothing that sings of the free, imaginative spirit. Its monuments are management plans, management handbooks, management courses and files. Long words, small minds. The conservation industry will rejoice when the whole country is enmeshed in regulation which only 'Consultants' can unravel, when country life is virtually criminalised, and when the set target has been achieved for some priority dung beetle that they wouldn't recognise if they stepped on it. As I say, it is not the aims of nature conservation that I deplore. It is the dead hand that works the runaway machine. Nature conservation at its purest and best lies among the volunteers, with their chainsaws and bonfires, doing what they do for the love of it. They at least, seem rural in spirit, like Brueghel's peasants who illustrate this article. The lobbyists and bureaucrats, who now outnumber the naturalists, and maybe even the peasants, seem to me to be rooted in urban notions of planning and centralist control. They are right to try to preserve wildlife, but their solutions are often repulsive, not least because their assumptions about management and control seem to deny the very idea of wilderness.

There, for what they are worth, are some possible reasons why the amateur naturalist is a dying breed. They are, like mechanical toys and self-discipline and butterfly nets, out of tune with the times. Of course, it may be that naturalists are not so much dying out as evolving, just as in every bird there are the distant genes of a dinosaur. Traditional natural history no doubt always rested on some form of privilege: idle country vicars, quack doctors, eccentric lawyers, and, above all, anyone with a private income and a country estate. Today we have in their place retired people, twitchers, a few escapees from the conservation world, and a galaxy of whacky alternative lifers who provide most of the social energy, if not much of the science. In the end: perhaps what matters is not who you are, or what you know, but whether the flame burns inside. Natural history is not only a matter for study but a form of grace. It brings fulfilment, exalts our senses, transforms a trudge down muddy paths into a journey of discovery. It can bring colour to monochrome lives, and light to darkened souls. This is what we have ignored while we have endeavoured to save habitats.

Is the naturalist a dying breed? No. There are lots of us, and we are doing wonderful work putting dots on maps, and making beautiful films for the telly.

Has the naturalist changed? Yes, I think so. There are a few Gloucester Old Spots left, but most of us have been cross-bred and turned into more functional, less colourful pigs. Does that matter? Yes, or perhaps no. It depends.

I illustrated my talk mainly with slides of paintings by Peter Brueghel the Eider (active c. 1550-1569). They are not only among the first great landscape paintings, but they are also about pleasures and follies which seem perpetual and permanent. Plates 5-8 Peter Marren, Newtown Lodge, Newtown Road, Ramsbury, Marlborough, "Wiltshire FN8 2QD

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Plate 5: The Lord of Cockaigne might be subtitled Four naturalists after a day in the field. The first natural history societies were based firmly on a hearty communal breakfast and a jovial communal dinner. The 'For the Record" conference provided a hot lunch. but forgot that the real social impetus lies in the eyening dinner. A point to ponder perhaps. I was obliged to dine alone. but ate as much as 1 could.

Plate 6: The Fall of llie RebeI Andels reminds us of the moral Polarisation that nature conservation has brought. Nature is all good. and so, by extension, are all conservationsists. By implication. every one eise deserves a damn good beating. Inside many lobbyists lurks a tiny despot.

Plate 7: The Blind leading the Blind is an old Dutch proverb. illustrating the perils of aimless wandering. Conservation agencies have Vision Statements, but how well do they really see?

Plate 8: The Tower of Babel was a tall building designed to reach heaven. God knocked it down, and, as a punishment for presumption, invented jargon.