Letters from Luke - Part 2: What's Going On?

Luke is our current conservation intern. Though from this latest blog, he seems to have missed a calling in philosophy as he asks "What's going on?"

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In the visitor centre, today’s fifth cup of tea firmly in hand, I’m looking through the glass to the wide vistas beyond. It feels like the glass is a window to another world; a wild one with many hardships - trials of nature that we might fleetingly meet during a poorly prepared camping trip, but trials that are frequently forgotten in the pervasive comfort of modern life. With the freezing wind clearly audible and the water looking quite frightening, I can’t help but feel I’ve got it good in here.

A voyeur to this hardship, I’m really enjoying looking at the birds, but I would struggle to tell you why. On a superficial level, I’m not sure I find them particularly attractive, and I’m not really moved by the “cuteness” of a hatchling. When I really analyse it, I think I just deeply admire their innate tenacity to face up to the challenges of the environment. I am also fascinated by the adaptations they have developed to help them fight the good fight, even when some of these appear to be ethically questionable if viewed from a highly subjective human perspective. For example, there’s a justice-seeking part of me that thinks the cuckoo’s breeding strategy is a dirty trick, but the rational part of me knows it to be an absolutely amazing quirk of evolution (I’m not sure I like you, cuckoo, but god damn it I respect you).

Anyway, although our understanding of “life beyond the glass” is often framed in a way that makes it palatable to even the most sensitive of souls, the objective Attenboroughs of the world will tell you that, fuzzy though some of them might be, all of these animals are locked in a bitter battle to survive. I know that the sugar-coated perception might be crucial for engaging certain sectors of society at a time when appreciation of the outdoors is more critical than ever, but I sometimes feel like the popular presentation of nature in the media is doing a slight disservice to how exciting the natural world really is. Truthfully, the daily struggle to survive is adrenaline-pumping, action movie sort of stuff. It’s less Peter Rabbit, more thunder and lightning. Every second counts, and everything is at stake with all the participants playing to win. A black-tailed godwit can’t have a lie-in; if a Frampton specimen doesn’t spend every minute of feeding time consuming every calorie it can get its bill on, it might not survive its exhausting migration to Iceland in the spring. In short, nothing is done frivolously because every action must have a purpose, and the ultimate purpose is to survive.

Black-tailed godwit, not having a lie-in (Photo by Neil Smith)

That said, much of what I have learned since arriving here has impressed on me the worryingly low odds of making it through. At the risk of sounding macabre, dying of old age is a luxury for a non-human. Many of the birds you’ve seen today are up against it, and they are the lucky ones – by virtue of the very fact that they are indeed alive and present for you to observe, we can infer that they are the individuals with the right combination of good genes and good luck to experience the unlikely lottery win of existing.  

These past few weeks I have been helping to monitor lapwing nests. Because lapwings are ground nesters, their eggs are vulnerable to predation and the survival rate is shockingly low. At sites like Frampton Marsh, the breeding programme will be deemed successful if 30% of all eggs hatch and the chicks live to fledge. That considered, you won’t be surprised to learn that several of the nests have already been deserted, with disturbance by predators being cited as the most common cause. Lapwing lovers who would hold this against the predators are misplacing their anger - they should instead be angry at the circumstances that have necessitated the existence of breeding programmes.

Wary of suddenly sounding sentimental in an otherwise bleakish post, I will tentatively suggest that, despite the blow of losing a brood, the lapwings’ refusal to call it a day and then continue to visibly display the biological necessity of “trying again” is inspiring.  With the breeding season ongoing, they will repeatedly pursue that most primitive need to procreate, and it’s just this sort of persistence to overcome the staggering odds that I find admirable. Maybe that’s part of the reason that so many of us love birds; perhaps we feel some sort of affinity with them, can see our own struggles to survive mirrored in their most public displays of bravely fighting the constant threat of death.

All in all, these recent experiences have highlighted the unforgiving nature of, well, nature. Yikes - that last sentence presents a philosophical dilemna. Nature can’t really be called unforgiving, because nature is all, and in its totality can’t be compared to something else that is forgiving (or indeed given any adjectives) because there is nothing else that we know of. In other words (and following the philosophical argument that even our most modern existence can be considered natural by virtue of the simple fact that it has occurred in this world) what do we know except nature? It’s not anything, it just is.

This has got a bit too deep. Maybe it’s all a question of semantics. Really what I’m trying to say is this; maybe I don’t need to feel any unease about drinking tea indoors whilst getting a perverse pleasure from watching birds struggle to survive because me sitting in this building might be as natural as the sand martin in its hole, and everything that goes on out there does so because it must, in accordance with forces that have been in play since time immemorial.

Anything to justify this sixth cup of tea. Milk, no sugar please.