Wildlife Writing, byElizabeth Kay

 

Martial eagle

I’ve written about travel writing here before, and there’s a bit of a crossover as most of the wildlife that has excited me has been abroad. It’s the spectacular stuff that grabs the attention, and it’s incidents rather than the stamp-collecting of many trips which are the most interesting. I’ve recently got back from South Africa, but these days due to arthritis I have had to limit what I can do. I went with Titan, a sister company to Saga, and it includes a pick-up and a drop-off to your door and an all-inclusive package at a single centre base, with two safaris a day. Ground floor accommodation, no stressful walks, and special assistance at airports. Very tame compared with what I’ve done before. The holiday was primarily aimed at seeing the Big Five which I’ve seen many times before. It’s nearly always the Big Four, of course, as leopards are notoriously elusive. But this time I was interested in the birds, and clocked up 42 new species, which you can do painlessly from a Toyota safari vehicle. My real triumph was capturing a bird flying overhead, which turned out to be a Martial Eagle.
This was the first time it had been recorded in Qwabi for a while, and was greeted with delight by the guides who didn’t initially believe it until they saw my photo. A lot of the time was spent lurking at the roadside hoping for elephants, and it took three days to find any. I first went to sub-Saharan Africa in 1993, when wildlife could stretch to the horizon and elephants were everywhere. How times have changed.

          There have been many notable wildlife writers. I grew up reading Gerald Durrell and Jim Corbett, and finding a new angle is the most important thing. This could be focussing on an unusual animal, habitat, behaviour, anything. One of the most unusual and interesting books I have read is Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, by Olivia Judson, which is informative, surprising, and sometimes very funny. David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest books are fascinating as they depict a world long-gone, when collecting animals for zoos wasn’t linked to conservation. The huge database now available to zoologists for love matches for endangered animals wasn’t possible, nor deemed necessary. Occasional extinctions were remarked on, particularly ones recent enough for there to be photographic evidence of the species concerned such as the quagga and the Tasmanian tiger (not a tiger at all). Jim Corbett is an interesting case – originally involved in trophy hunting, common in India when tigers were numerous.

He was so knowledgeable that he turned to hunting man-eaters, and his stories are terrifying whilst accurately depicting the lives of the hill people and their problems. In the end he turned to conservation, and became an important voice in the sub-continent.

Trophy hunting is still widespread. In South Africa we were staying in the Qwabi Game reserve, which unusually is dedicated to conservation. Unusually, as it is bordered on all sides by hunting reserves, which monitor which animals they have for you to shoot, and import a few more if stocks are running low. Sickening. But there are occasional good news stories. After heavy rains earlier this year there were some floods, and a Nile crocodile escaped and found a new home in a lake on the Qwabi reserve. Lots of fish for him to eat, and no more hunters. He has been called Bubbles,

Bubbles

and can be seen sunning himself on the bank in splendid isolation. I don’t think he has any intention of returning to his previous home, even though the mating possibilities are now zero. Qwabi collar all their rhinos and big cats, and a small group of rangers do a rhino count, on foot. This is quite dangerous, but they make sure they account for every single rhino every day. This has been so successful that instead of de-horning the rhinos to deter poachers they are letting the horns grow again, and a few of them are getting the sharp points back again. Rhino horns are simply matted hair, so regrowth isn’t a problem. Why on earth the horns are believed to cure everything from impotence to gout, rheumatism and cancer is beyond me.

But back to the less exciting stuff, which can be in your back garden. There was a wonderful book called Bird Cottage. This is an abridged Amazon description: Len Howard was forty years old when she decided to leave her London life, retire to the English countryside and devote the rest of her days to her one true passion: birds. Moving to a small cottage in Sussex, she wrote about the tits, robins, sparrows and other birds that lived nearby, flew freely in and out of her windows, and would even perch on her shoulder as she typed.

I have a number of feral pigeons which are identifiable, and there are three to whom I allow special concessions. Pinky and Perky are devoted couple who have a relationship which has survived at least a couple of years. I have to feed them at the bottom of the garden, behind a large conifer, so that the rest of the gang don’t take advantage. I simply call “Come on then,” and they follow me down the garden, always on foot. I banned them from the patio after Pinky snuck into the conservatory on day, discovered an open container of peanuts and stuffed himself, watched by an admiring audience on the widow ledge outside. The other special customer is called Can-I-Land-On-Your Head, which is self-explanatory. When he did this the first time I held out my arm, and he obligingly hopped down onto it. He got a few peanuts as a reward, and now all I have to do is hold out my arm and he flies down from next-door’s roof straight to my wrist. He only ever landed on my head once again, which was his way of saying Welcome Back on my return from South Africa.

You don’t have to target the exotic or rare with wildlife writing, going round your garden or local park with a hand lens can reveal a wealth of invertebrates. I was a winner in one photography competition with my picture of a wasp spider!

Argiope bruennichi