Posted: Thursday 2 December 2010
Looking at Nature
When I lived in Clackmannanshire I was always intrigued by the motto which lies under the official crest of the county council, which is: 'Look aboot ye'. This seems like a very good general instruction for everyone trying to plot their path through life's many challenges and opportunities. It's also quite a good thing to do in the current snowy weather and a reminder that we often don't take enough time to look about and notice things.
On my recent trip to India I was determined to see as much of the wildlife as I could, because so much of it would be new and different to me. Although there was not really time for serious natural history, everywhere you go in the world it is easy to see birds at least, and even from the window of my room in Nitte there was much to see. The girls were excited at seeing a troupe of monkeys which came and played underneath their window - annoyingly I missed that for some reason. But that is the reality of looking at wild animals and birds, you have to be very alert and watchful, because often you only get a partial and tantalisingly brief view. We are very spoiled by TV wildlife documentaries which are able to show long, meaningful shots of rare animals and even aspects of their behaviour which are almost impossible to see without the use of technology plus a great deal of patience.
There is also another factor in real life nature-watching - what if you don't know what you are looking at? Before I set off on the trip I had bought a pictorial guide to the birds of southern India, which wasn't brilliantly clear, but at least had distribution maps which meant that I could rule out quite a number of possibilities on the basis that they were not found in the Nitte area. There's a well known joke in birdwatching that if someone who doesn't know much about birds tells someone who is an expert that they have 'seen this incredible bird in my garden ...bizarre, weird colours and shape.. ' then it is always a Jay. When I reached India, nearly every single bird I saw was a new species, and I was reminded just how difficult it is when you catch a glimpse of a bird to note enough features to be sure of being able to identify it later from a book. Imagine how the naturalists on the Beagle or Challenger expeditions in the 19th Century felt when they were put ashore on an unexplored coast and had absolutely nothing to fall back on but their knowledge of western European species. They solved much of this problem by simply shooting the birds they saw, preparing the skins and examining them later during the lengthy sea passages. That must have meant that their sampling method was rather skewed by what it was possible to shoot, and what species were less timid in the vicinity of gunfire.
Serious 'birders' are able to identify a species by its call alone, which makes it easier to count shy and retiring ones, but again, the early naturalists exploring new lands didn't have that luxury. Peacocks are wild in the Nitte area and I heard one calling most mornings at dawn, but never actually saw it, and so I feel reluctant to include it in my 'life list'. Nevertheless, when I exclude it, plus birds that I wasn't able to be sure about, plus ones that may have been one of two closely related species, I am still left with about a dozen new to me, which isn't bad for a ten day trip. Some of these look very like the British equivalents and are just the Indian close relative of our crows, egrets and cormorants, but others are very different. You won't see anything remotely like a greater racket-tailed drongo in the UK.
I learned recently that the Clackmannanshire motto apparently comes from the legend that when Robert the Bruce was hunting in the area, he lost one of his gauntlets When a lazy servant came to say it couldn't be found, Bruce was supposed to have commanded: 'Look aboot ye!'.
I think that rather takes the gloss off it a bit.