The Encircling Wild

By Nicola | Published: February 27, 2013

How many books did you read, or have read to you, as a child that featured lions or elephants? How many have you read to your own kids or grandkids? I would guess that for most children growing up with English as their first, or even second language, ‘lu’ is for Lion and ‘e’ is for elephant. From what I’ve seen of children’s books from other countries even when they don’t feature in the alphabet, lions and elephants loom large in the imaginative landscape of the under tens in most parts of the world. And they stay there, lumbering and lurking in our psyche, appearing in our dreams, the symbol of all manner of subconscious tides and seasons;  they are the embodiment of ‘The Wild’, always there beyond the circle of the campfire of our civilized lives, enclosing and defining our little world, just as night defines day.

But what if that’s the only place where lions and elephants were? If they no longer existed outside a zoo or the pages of a picture book? Think about that. Really think about it. If there are no more wild lions and wild elephants, then nature no longer encircles us, there is no longer a Big Wild, only little patches of wild that fit in between all the things that we humans do. That’s what we are in danger of. When I began my career in zoology 30 years ago there were 200,000 lions in Africa. Now there are 15,000. And the numbers of Asian elephants across the whole of their range -India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Borneo? Just 50,000, twenty thousand fewer than the human population of Barnsley.

 For me, the knowledge that there are places where human stuff just runs out and there is only nature, huge uncontrollable swathes of it, with animals in, is incredibly important, fundamental actually. And I’m pretty sure that if you dug around in any human mind you’d find something similar – the need for nature to be the biggest thing there is, and for that to be manifest in the continued existence of wild places and big wild animals.

Now I know there are lots of people who claim that Big Wild is a luxury. That for people in poorer countries – where most of the Big Wild is – having a reasonable chance that your kids won’t die at two from diarrhoea, is more important. Of course, when you are fighting for immediate survival, you don’t see or even feel the bigger picture – families dying of cholera in the back streets of industrial revolution Manchester didn’t think about fell walking, but when conditions were just a little better The Wild became important: as Ewan McColl wrote:

I’m a rambler, I’m a rambler from Manchester way

I get all my pleasures the hard moorland way

 I may be a wage slave on Monday

But I am a free man on Sunday

The truth is that it isn’t a simple choice between Big Wild and a decent standard of living, not just one or the other. It’s the choice that big business has often liked to present in order to get approval for huge schemes that destroy habitats and benefit a few people a very long way away. Attaining a decent standard of living can go hand in hand with keeping Big Wild and may even be dependent on it. On the big, planetary ecosystem scale that’s obviously true, as without the wild, natural functioning of oceans, forests and soils we wouldn’t have breathable air, drinkable water and edible food. But on the smaller species by species, habitat by habitat scale- on the elephant and lion scale  – it’s true too.

There are lots of very good practical arguments for maintaining viable wild populations of ‘charismatic megafauna’ (- as the big, mostly furry, creatures are called that management-speak style of conservation). One of the biggest as far as lions are concerned – in all parts of their remaining range – is income from tourism. Wildlife geeks like me would go to Africa for the bat eared foxes but the majority of tourists won’t use their passports or open their wallets for the smaller details of biodiversity. Big famous animals that belong to the Universal Set of creatures that turn up in picture books across the world, bring money to countries where it’s really needed, helping to give people a decent standard of living whilst keeping their encircling wilderness. A single male lion brings $500,000 worth of tourist money into its country in its lifetime, and Kenya’s 2000 lions bring 30 million dollars into the country every year.

The success of tourism as an engine of sustainable development depends on two things. First that the income from it reaches the right people, the locals who have to live with the ‘Charismatic Mega Fauna’ when the tourists go home. And second that the cost of living with the CMF isn’t too high. When the CMF your talking about are lions and elephants, finding a way to keep the costs down is tricky: lions are predators that can and do take humans as dinner and elephants can march through crops and houses as efficiently as an HGV.

 Sometimes this is just about changing the way people do things. The Niassa Carnivore Project in Mozambique found that lion attacks  could be prevented by asking people to follow a few simple rules, like never sleeping in the open  and always carrying a torch at night. They spread the word about this by using posters that even people who couldn’t read would understand.

Good strong fences really help too. Fences around villages and crops keep lions’ wild prey out, so that they have no reason to wander in after it and come face to face with a human. Putting domestic animals inside a barn or behind a fence at night stops valuable cattle, sheep and goats  – which can be a family’s lifeline – ending up as a lion’s dinner.

Knowing exactly where lions are can keep people and their animals from getting into danger. Putting satellite or radio tags on lions means they can be tracked over long distances, and if they get close to villages or grazing cattle, people can be warned. The Living With Lions project in Kenya employs local Maasai warriors – who once hunted lions – as Lion Guardians. Lion Guardians are trained to use tracking equipment and given mobiles phones to spread information about what lions are up to.

Helping people to live safely with lions means they are less likely to want to kill them and more likely to see that lions can be useful, keeping down the  numbers of crop munching animals like bush pigs, and bringing income from tourism.

Keeping CMF also means keeping the habitat that supports it and that in itself may directly benefit the humans that share the habitat. In the Garo Hills communities have resisted the temptation of short term benefits of cutting down forest and set up reserves to safeguard existing forests and planted trees to restore patches previously cleared. This way communities still get all that the forest provides for free: building materials, foods, medicines, clean water, a sense of identity and social coherence. And they keep their CMF   in this case a healthy population of elephants that can move between two vast areas of national park via the mosaic of forest reserves created and maintained by the Garo people.

With the means to create a decent standard of living for their families and communities, the people I communicated with and visited, whilst researching ‘The Lion Who Stole My Arm’ and ‘Elephant Road’ , the two books published on 13th March by Walker, choose to keep the their Big Wild. And the final part of this jigsaw is that they are helped to do it by conservation organisations whose funding comes from those of us with elephants and lions in our heads, trundling about in the big encircling wild of our subconcious.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

On Inspiration

By Nicola | Published: February 1, 2013


One of the questions that children always ask all authors is ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ I’m always tempted to say, ‘In aisle six at Tescos, just above the fair trade coffee.’ or something similarly daft. What  I actually do say is something like ‘From the natural world’, and then I cringe because it sounds as if I’m describing a kind of Lourdesian visionary experience. What I suppose I mean is that my motivation comes from the natural world, and obviously, if you’re writing a book about snakes, as I just have been, then your ideas come from, well… snakes. (No no I don’t mean snakes speak to me…even if they did I’d imagine snake speak is pretty limited in its scope ).

So the ‘Natural world’ answer isn’t really a truthful response to the question. What I’m answering is ‘why’ , when they are asking ‘where?’ and also to a certain extent ‘how?’

And that’s a lot more tricky. When I’m squeezing a book out slowly and painfully, like very old dried up toothpaste, I could probably name the little moments of blessed lubrication that allow the story to progress. The snake book was like that. I’d kind of lost count of the various drafts I’d done of the damn thing, all differing slightly from one another like a suite of closely related butterfly species. I returned the the text miserably, feeling a bit like Hugh Jackman looks in the opening shots of Les Mis. I knew what I wanted the book to do, which was to start from the list of things that people find scary about snakes, and to pop the fears and prejudices like so many balloons. I had a bagful of snake facts ready to use and some little tricks with rhyme and rhythm that worked for a page or two but kept running out of energy like cheap batteries. And then I had an idea. Not a big idea like gravity or quantum mechanics. This idea was a voice (nooo I told you, snakes do not speak to me) the voice of the youngest child in a family. The voice of the child who doesn’t fit in, who says the things no one approves of and gets into trouble. Well the tiniest bit of home psychology could tell you where that voice comes from – I’ve never fitted in anywhere. This voice was saying that it doesn’t like snakes, and in a family of snake enthusiasts that isn’t a popular opinion.

A tiny idea, an idea-lette really, but it solved my book, and after that it took just two days of fiddling about to make it work.

What’s much more difficult is to see what happens when a text just rushes out onto the page, so it feels like someone else wrote it. That doesn’t happen to me very often but it happened just before Christmas in the  picture book text I was writing for Mark Hearld. I had been cooking the ingredients – pigeon navigation and homing, racing pigeons, belonging and displacement – in my head for a year or more. And I’d heard the little voice of the narrator, and seen them wandering somewhere, lost alone and in a new an entirely unfamiliar place. What I don’t know is exactly when and how that lost place became the South Wales valleys in the 1920s and the child became the son of an Italian immigrant family.

What I do know now, is that when that happened, it was an extremely good and lucky thing, because the story really works and it strikes a chord with all the poeple I’ve read it to. Last week, at the fabulous Spatilaising Illustration conference the response was amazing. Two people told me afterwards how it connected with their own Italian Welsh family histories  and I realised I had just lifted the edge of something and there were many many more stories to be found underneath.

I suppose I don’t really know where those moments, those ideas, insights, voices come from, but I am beginning to learn how to make my brain more likely to come up with them when they are needed. I’m beginning to trust that if I just put the right stuff in, and then give myself some space and some licence, then the right stuff will come out with a greater or lesser amount of squeezing.  Mostly reading novels doesn’t put the right stuff in – poetry does (reading sean Borodales Bee Journal now and Philip Gross Deep Field…both AMAZING) and visual art does – and being with other people who write, paint, draw, make, do REALLY does. After last weeks conference, Spatialising Illustration in Swansea I felt nourished, as if my internal larder had just had a huge delivery from Fortnum and Mason.

Hearing Laura Carlin speak about her work, and seeing shots of her sketchbooks and ceramics was like a shaft of the very best and purest spring sunshine. All the best art comes from a true place I think, and Laura’s work comes from the truest soul. Her work is consistent with her nature and her life and her history, the clarity and simplicity of that straight line made me want to write like that. The images she creates are simply ravishing to the senses and the heart. They steal away your heart. You have no choice when looking at Laura’s work but to engage with it completely, and for a moment be taken right out of yourself and into to world.

There was lots of talk about the spaces between things “the potency of negative space.”.

Laura spoke about what you don’t show in illustration, what you leave out. There was some very precise technical talk about exactly what illustration does and how it does it. I was made to think  about what margins and gutters do to define images and about how eyes read pictures. I heard wonderful definitions of illustration  – ‘the space between art an entertainment’  and saw new things that it could do: Mitch Miller from Glasgow school of art using illustration to tell stories about whole community and to map its history and culture onto map-drawings, drawing-maps of the streets that have shaped it; Chris Aldhous’ drive to make illustration into an organ of ‘narrative persuasion’ in his creation of the exhibition ‘Ghosts Of Gone Birds’ which brings the spectre of extinction and how to avoid it to a new audience.

All of this was such a wonderful re stocking of my resources precisely because illustration is not what I do. I would love to be a visual artist but I’m not, but what illustration does is what I try to do with my writing, which is to pack information – fact, emotion, insight interpretation – into a single image or moment. Seeing how illustrators do this (Mitch’s street maps, Laura’s sketchbooks, Geoff Grandfield’s stunning book covers) shows me what is possible, spurs me on to try harder, do better.

And it simply makes me happy, fills me up with delight. Experiencing other peoples describing, explaining and interpreting gives me a window, for a moment, into who and what they are, a moment of connection, a spark of shared reality. It reminds me that describing, explaining and interpreting is what we humans are for, that life is for learning new things all the time and making sense of them…and that sense might be art or it might be science.

In the last book of his ‘Mortal Engines’ series, Philip Reeve describes his robot character, rusted, broken but still ‘alive’ waking after a long period of being ‘off’; waking to tell the story of all he’s seen in his long existence, and saying that that is his purpose, to be an engine for telling stories. In that moment the robot machine is clearly profoundly human, engaged in the life long weaving of ever changing, ever expanding narratives. Being reminded that that is the process in which my life is engaged makes me want to restock, renew and set up the space for ideas to come, even if where they come from and how they get here is still a bit of a mystery.

 

And as a little post script

Some favourite nuggets from the last ten days:

 

‘To make a drama a man needs on passion and four walls.‘  Alexander Dumas

 

‘Art is no good unless it is left alone o be itself’ Wila Catha

 

‘Art versus extinction. Raising an army for conservation.’ Chrsi Aldhous, Ghosts of Gone Birds 

 

‘The act of drawing drives the cognitive process’ Alan Walker

 

‘The place feeling in my mind is the feeling of not completely visualising a room in a novel’ Bella Kerr

 

 

‘I think, each bees six heels may be callipers for cell’s wall angles’ Sean Borodale , Bee Journal 

 

‘We can’t grasp the surface, so we call it deep’ Philp Gross, Deep Field

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Animals As Individuals

By Nicola | Published: January 22, 2013

One of the presents I got at Christmas was a Jonathan Franzen novel ‘Freedom’. It was the literary equivalent of a highly addictive drug and I couldn’t leave it alone. It’s a brick of a book, heavy enough to hold open a well sprung fire door, but I finished it in four bites. Apart from the deep, obsessive joy of such a totally immersive reading experience, there was something more in the book that has stuck with me, almost a month after finishing it.

One of the principal characters is deeply involved in conservation and there is a passage about migrant birds returning to their Summer habitats in North America, to find they’ve been concreted over, or degraded with human rubbish. It wasn’t just that it was beautifully written – Franzen writes like a dream (‘illuminates through the steady radiance of the author’s profound moral intelligence’ as the New York Times put it) – but it was the way that it presented these small tragedies. Without being in the least bit anthropomorphic, Franzen  implied the individuality of the birds’ lives, their self hood, each one as much the centre of its own universe, as each of our human consciousnesses stands at the centre of ours.

Humans tend to have two modes of thinking about animal lives: either as projections of our own experience – animals as little humans – or as statistical generalities, individual animals merely archetypes for a whole species. I’ve long found the first repulsive and have ranted about the moronic anthropomorphism in films and books. But as a scientifically trained zoologist, I’ve often subscribed to the second. But long term studies of animals in the wild, such as Jane Goodall’s work on chimps, Bernd Heirich’s work on ravens and my friends Hal Whitehead and Shane Gero’s work on Sperm whales, show animals as individuals, with more going on inside their heads that we might find comfortable.

I’m being reminded of this now as I’m researching a non fiction picture book about lions and reading about the differences in behaviour between the male lions in a pride. The individual as archetype predicts that a lion should behave like a calculator – always totting up the genes to be passed to the next generation. But individuals don’t see the big picture, the picture created in retrospect by the outcome of natural selection; they mess up. So instead of maintaining the boundaries of his territory, one lion slipped over the border to mate with two females with no pride affiliations. Good strategy at the time – more cubs for sure- but actually jeopardized the survival of his other cubs with pride females as an un maintained territorial boundary leaves young cubs open to infanticide by other males.

I’m acutely aware that when I write a book about a single species – as I often have – what I present is the archetype. If I write about an individual whose behaviour is at the tail of the normal distribution curve am I giving my readers the wrong information? But if I don’t am I giving them an impression of an ‘average’, which isn’t going to engage their hearts and minds?

What I felt, when I read Franzen’s understated, but poignant, description of a tiny migrant bird, returning to find its home destroyed, was a desire to find a new way of writing about animal lives. Not anthropomorphic, but with the ability to convey the importance, the emotional weight of each life and to connect that to our human experience of our own lives. What I want is to make human beings feel a connection with the natural world, and all that’s in it, as sharply and even as painfully as they feel events in their own lives. I suspect my only route to this goal is through fiction, through taking the extreme tail ends of normal distributions of behaviour and awareness, and extrapolating, to bring two characters – one human and one not – into a relationship that cuts every reader straight through the heart.

I’ve started this process in the books I wrote last year, in Whale Boy, and Elephant Road, Manatee Baby and Walking the Bear but I want to hit harder, have a bigger punch. How am I going to do this, exactly? I don’t know. I suspect finding out is  going to take the rest of my life.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

De-Mob Happy and Communities First

By Nicola | Published: December 20, 2012

I am in shock. I have finished my writing marathon. All year I’ve had a timetable pinned to the wall beside my desk with weeks blocked out for each book and deadlines marked with ominous dark rings. All year I’ve been holding off the panic that threatened to take over whenever I thought about exactly how many books I was supposed to write.

And now it’s done. The book that I’d been hatching for months finally had its moment last week, and my subconscious had spent so much time cooking it, that it kind of popped out without the usual ghastly stages of labour that picture books normally take -a lot of gas and air, screaming, cursing, forceps and stitches.

It’s slightly risky to say ‘I’ve done it’ because the last one…a picture book set in Wales in the 1920s and mostly about pigeons (really, it’s better than it sounds) hasn’t yet had the editorial seal of approval, but I’ve tried it out on a few people and it seems to work: so far 80% hit rate of tears by the last page.

Anyway, until I’m told its rubbish and I have to write it again, I can be de mob happy for a while, and do remedial activities like hoover my study floor, an clear away the drifts of notes and notebooks that are on every flat surface in here. Yesterday I wondered why I felt so odd and realised that I had actually relaxed for the first time in months.

But the best thing about this finish line – which isn’t a finish line anyway cos I have another book to do by the end of January – is that my imagination held up under pressure, and I don’t think the quality of the writing has suffered for being part of a brisk production line. That’s a hugely reassuring discovery to have made about myself. The other best thing is that most of what I’ve written this year has been fiction – fiction rooted in fact, but characters and storylines invented to convey facts and truths. Whatever anyone else thinks, I really like the stories I’ve written this year, and I’m so fond of the characters in them: the little boy in my pigeon story, and his relationship with the retired miner, Mr Evans, who contains a little of my own Grandpa and my own father; the girl in my manatee story, who is still paddling about in the flooded forest on the edge of the Amazon in my head; the quiet, steady boy in my elephant story and his naughty younger brother, the dreamy boy from my dancing bear story who loves his bears but wants to be a musician and Michael, my dear brave Whale-Boy; all of them are alive in my head and heart now and as much a part of me as my own real memories.

Another good thing about being temporarily deadline free is that I can do other things. Yesterday I spent an  afternoon at the Communities First centre just around the corner from where I live in Abergavenny, signing books and talking to the lovely kids and families that use it, and the dedicated staff  and volunteers that run it.

Now if people have heard of Abergavenny it’s usually because of its huge food festival, or because of the wonderful hill walks to be had in the mountains that surround the town. But there’s another side to this little town which has nothing to do with gourmet dinners and glorious landscapes. There is a huge dollop of poverty and deprivation here. There are many families struggling with the destructive effects of generations of unemployment and alienation from education. There are parents trying to be the best parents they can in very difficult circumstances or  even without having had  a role model of what that looks like. Communities First, which is largely run by volunteers with a few utterly saintly paid staff, provides all manner of help and support to these families.  It gives advice on things like housing, money management; it gives training in basic computer skills (pretty soon no one will be able to claim their benefits without being able to use a computer); it runs an after school club to help kids with their homework – vital where mum and dad may not be fluent readers and writers; and its just started up a fantastic book club with the support of the local school and library to encourage year six kids to read. Yesterday, with the help of the local Rotary Club, it was providing children with a toy and a book from Santa’s sack; I’ve seldom seen children so delighted with their gifts or so friendly and well behaved.

Seven thousand people every year are helped, advised, supported, counseled, consoled, educated and cared for by the Center. In human terms, in terms of the common decency by which civilized societies should assess themselves, this work is crucial, helping a marginalised section of the population to feel a bit more included and giving children a chance to break the chain of under achievement. In economic terms it’s a brilliant way to make a small amount of money go a very long way, and prevent much more intractable and expensive problems manifesting themselves in the future. If its funding was trebled then I’d be willing to bet that the cost of crime fighting, health care for chronic ailments associated with poor diet and self neglect, vandalism, drugs, unemployment etc etc etc would drop like a stone round here. Eventually the success of the Center would be such that it would do itself out of a job.

But guess what I’m going to tell you next? The Center is set to close by the end of March next year. The Welsh Assembly has cut its funding. The staff are fighting a valiant rear guard action to keep the office open a few days a week, staffed by one part time worker and a few volunteers, so that the families that they help won’t be utterly abandoned. But with a reduced staff and limited opening times much of the work that the Center does will be left undone. Seven thousand people will be left to muddle through as best they can, trying largely unsuccessfully to undo the tangled knot that long term poverty and alienation has tied them in. In the short term it will balance somebody’s books, but in the long term the costs will escalate like the interest on a pay day loan. The decision to cut the Center’s funding is poor government, that will lead to greatly increased costs in the future and a further accumulation of human misery in a little town that should, and could, be a joyful place for everyone to live. It’s pretty clear that  the Welsh Assembly has put communities last in Abergavenny.

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Big Ears and Fluffy Tail: So Prove it’s Not A Penguin

By Nicola | Published: December 17, 2012

I’ve been writing a lot of fiction this year and while I’m writing it I don’t read it much, as it might travel down my arm and into my fingers as I type. So it’s been a non fiction year (mostly – apart from the two TOTALLY AMAZING Hilary Mantels about Cromwell, deep, deep reading joy). One of the best non fictions of the year has been ‘The Emperor of All Maladies, A Biography Of Cancer’,  by Siddhartha Mukhajee. It contains many beautifully told stories from the front line of medicine and medical research, but the most interesting for me was the story of the establishment of a causal link between lung cancer and smoking.

Just after the second world war when cigarette smoking had become a universal habit in Europe and America medical authorities noticed a lung cancer epidemic. You might have thought that the co-incidence of those two facts might have lead governments to encourage a little restraint in the smoking of cigarettes, but no, it took nearly two decades of research before any action was taken to discourage people from sucking carcinogens into their lungs.

Study after study showed that lung cancer followed smoking like a carriage after a horse and still the tobacco producers denied the link, blaming everything in ‘modern life’ but smoking for the precipitous and catastrophic rise in lung disease. The huge vested interest and advertising might of the tobacco industry was brought to bear in an entirely ruthless and cynical way to undermine the integrity of the scientists and the science that threatened their profits. The actions and claims of the tobacco industry would have been ludicrously funny if they hadn’t been costing millions of people their lives.

As I read the chapters covering this fight, I was struck again and again by the fact that you could replace the words ‘lung cancer’ with the words ‘climate change’, and the word ‘smoking’ with ‘carbon emissions’, and you’d be telling the story of climate scientists and climate skeptics. On one side scientists – cautious, circumspect, self questioning and on the other organisations with a huge amount of money to lose if the scientists are right.

I remembered this parallel again last week listening to a scientist in the employ of a large pesticide company, being interviewed on the Today programme. Did he think there was any truth in the research that linked the decline in bee populations with the long lived insecticide produced by his employers? Just guess what he said. You could hear the che-ching of the cash register behind his words, the whoosh of the wind blowing through the place where his soul was before he sold it.

And I remembered it again this morning with the fisheries minister giving reasons why we should start fishing cod in the North Sea again even before populations have made the most basic of recoveries. Back in the 70’s Newfy fishermen were behaving in a similar way – arguing for their right to fish, and blaming seals, whales and presumably the tooth fairy for falling catches. Never of course their massive nets, boats and fish locating sonar. And in case you don’t know, there isn’t a cod fishery Newfoundland any more because there aren’t any cod.

If it wasn’t so tragic it would be funny.

So, there will now be a delay, while science does the research that draws a big, black, indelible line to join up all the dots. Anybody with half a braincell and couple of functioning neurons can see the shape the dots make before any line is drawn but the people who stand to lose money from that obvious shape have to have it drawn out for them, and with all of us standing there and pointing to it, before anything changes. Meanwhile bees disappear and we don’t have anything to pollinate our crops, climate tips into boil-in-the-bag ghastliness and the tobacco industry moves its advertising to a new region whose populations don’t yet know that Malborough man died of lung cancer.

Like I said in my blog last week: if it looks like a threat, smells like a threat, pretty likely it is a threat. You can wait and see if you want to, making your comic denials and the Universe may cut you a little slack.  But most likely the threat whose existence you denied will squish you flat. You’re dead. That simple.

One campaigner I interviewed for my book about climate change said

“You wouldn’t get on a plane if it had a ten percent chance of crashing”

So why are we keeping systems of energy production, transport and agriculture that have a 99% chance of leaving us with a planet that doesn’t support human life? Like, DURR.

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Make Your Christmas Gift Count

By Nicola | Published: December 7, 2012

 

I’ve just been writing the post script to Whale Boy, giving a bit of factual back ground about sperm whales – possibly the weirdest animals on the planet, which is of course why I love ‘em. So yesterday I reread parts of my mate Hal Whitehead’s great book ‘ Sperm Whales, Social Evolution In the Ocean’. The book is now hedgehogged with little yellow postits marking my favourite bits, but here is a favourite-favourite, a description of what a sperm whale looks like to a squid that’s about to be swallowed…

‘During its final moments, if in daylight and not too deep, a doomed cephalopod might see the sperm whale advancing formidably on a broad front from the gloom of the ocean. Coming directly toward it is the long, narrow but powerful, lower jaw, outlined in white, which will soon open to display two rows of large conical teeth and the white lining of the folds of the mouth and tongue. Above the jaw is the mass of the spermatceti organ, expanding from the narrrow jaw to the ‘high and mighty God like dignity inherent in the brow” (Melville 1851 ). The front of the spermaceti organ is often scarred from encounters with past prey, or with other whales, or other hazards in the ocean . Protruding on either side of the head are the eyes and behind them the rest of the body fades into the murk of the ocean. Such is the vision of this devastating predator as seen by its prey.’

Revisiting the facts about sperm whale anatomy and behaviour, outlined with such clarity, was a delight, and hugely cheering. Rather less so was my reading on the last few years doings with the IWC. The IWC – International Whaling Commission – is the organisation that over sees whaling, or tries to. That’s all I’m going to say about it – for readers who know, you don’t need to be reminded of the Machiavellian shenanegins that go on inside it. And for readers who don’t, rejoice in your blameless ignorance. All you need to understand in this context is that member countries – whaling nations and nations which can’t even bless themselves with a coastline – get to vote. And in 1986 they voted to end whaling, a moratorium that could only be over turned by a 75 % majority. I remember how happy I was. We’d won I thought. Whales were safe. Well, I was in my twenties and young for my age.

Japan, Norway and Iceland of course, keen whalers as they are, were having none of it. Since 1986 they have found a series of excuses for killing 30,000 whales. Its totally unecconomic. They can’t sell the meat and not many people apart from Jeremy Clarkeson want to eat it anymore. Some of it is so rich in heavy metals that they must have to wear protective clothing to put it in the freezer. But they live in hope that by keeping their whaling fleets alive they will be prepared for the day when the moratorium is over turned and they can go back to slaughtering whales on a truly industrial scale, until there are none left for anyone to argue about.

Dream on you may say, you still need a three quarters majority. Well the whaling nations have been busy bribing all manner of impoverished countries with international aid and other state level Ferrero Rochers and now the vote is split 50 50. It is not impossible that they could get their way. The ensuing ‘fishery’ will not be well managed or sustainable, it’ll be an unseemly and bloody rush to grab the last tins of soup from the shelves.

And the whales will be gone.

Just think about that for a minute. What would you say to your grandchild who picks up a yellowing copy of a picture book about whales? Or finds a clip on the internet? How would it feel to know that they were nowhere, not up there somewhere in the Arctic, or down with the penguins. That no matter how hard you looked, you’d never find one.

Perhaps you’ve never seen a whale perhaps you never will. But if you never could. That’s different.

Somehow if defeating the moronic old harpoon-wielding loonies were the only thing we had to do to make sure there are still whales in the ocean for our great grandchildren, it wouldn’t be so bad. The whalers’ll all be dead in a few years anyway, especially if they eat their own products.  But the list of threats is ghastly – entanglement in the increasing miles of fishnets, collisions with ships, hearing damage from military and geological sonic surveys, and the more intangible specters of climate change and pollution. Because we know so little about the ecology of the seas, and of whales, some of these threats are unquantifiable, and the standard policy of government and business in this situation is to ask that we wait for more data. This is like standing on the train tracks until you can see the colour of the train driver’s eyes; here’s Hal again:

‘To save the sperm whale and other oceanic life, we must conserve on a grand scale, and we must do this in the absence of conclusive scientific data on what levels of threats are dangerous’

 

This goes for all habitats and all creatures. All the lovely things I’ve seen this extraordinary year – the orang utans I saw in Borneo, the manatees and river dolphins in Peru, the elephants and gibbons in India.  We do need to go on gathering that conclusive data, but we need to act. If something smells a bit like a threat, looks a bit a like a threat, then it probably is a threat, so best to do something and not wait until we have its inside leg measurement.

So if you want to buy a Christmas present that actually does something to make the world better, log on to Whale and Dolphin Conservation or (better still AND) the World Land Trust and find out how to give them some money and put some ticks on your Christmas list.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The White Hare

By Nicola | Published: November 19, 2012

I wanted to write a story to tell the young people I was working with at the weekend. As it happened the telling didn’t go that well – my fault really, I didn’t ramp up the energy enough or set out my story telling stall clearly. Anyway, here is the story in written form. It has a hare at its heart as one of the many things I miss about living in East Anglia – I grew up in Suffolk – is the hares; hares, and brent geese flying over the salt marsh at Cley and the light reflecting on the river where it cuts between the boats and fishing huts of Southwold and Warbleswick.

The White Hare

In the days before computers, before cars, before electricity or water in taps, or food in supermarkets or even before proper roads, people lived by what they could make from the land and the sea around them. Humans were closer to nature, at the mercy of cold and wind, frost and snow and drought, just as other animals were. Back then humans and animals were just fellow living beings, under the sky. Perhaps that’s why it seemed possible back then for humans to change into animals, and animals into humans.

The story I’m going to tell you happened at that time and it’s about a young girl called Ostra, who lived in the village we call Sherringham now. Back then it was just a cluster of huts – or what would look like huts to you and me; shelters made of wood, and stones, mud and animal skins. People ate what they could get from the sea and from the woods above the cliff tops. There were a few fields of crops perhaps, maybe even some skinny little sheep, a few ponies, but that’s all. There weren’t rabbits then either, just long lean hares, running on the heathery heaths and the cliff tops where trees wouldn’t grow on account of the wind.

Ostra was the eldest of five children. There had been more but a lot of kids died before they could walk back then, so Ostra’s brothers and sisters were already tough survivors. Their Mum was dead and their Dad spent all day trying to get them enough fish and crabs to eat, out in his boat, so Ostra did pretty much everything else. Cooking, sweeping, making clothes, wiping snotty noses, scolding, nagging, cuddling. And one other job too which was making her father’s crab pots. No plastic back then of course, just osiers – willow, long stems, bendy and springy.

Using osiers is a Winter job. In Spring and Summer willow stems lose their bendyness and become snappy and brittle. So on Winter evenings, after it was dark and her Dad was back from the sea, Ostra walked up the cliff to the marshy osier bed on the edge of the woods, to cut the willow stems and weave them. She worked by the light of the moon or a little rush lantern. In the cold, in the wind, in the rain. She liked the work, because it was peaceful and solitary and gave her time to be quiet. The rhythm of bending and binding the stems to make the big open, shape of the crab pot pleased her. Sometimes she sang quietly to herself, but more often she sat quietly listening  to the sounds of the Winter night…the screaming vixen, the owls hooting, the wolves howling…. and to the big silence of the stars….

And listening is how she came to hear animals speaking to her.

One November night, as she sat in the cold and cold with her strong hands bending the whippy willow stems, a robin came and landed on the ground at her feet. Its feathers were so fluffed out against the freezing night that it looked like a little ball stood on two skinny legs like wires,

“You got any food missis?” the robin asked.

“Only a crust.” Ostra replied before she had time to think that she was holding a conversation with a bird. Whether it had really spoken or she was just to tired to think straight didn’t matter. It as pretty clear that on a cold night like this is was only right to share whatever you had with other living creatures. She broke the crust to crumbs and scattered them on the ground for the little bird

“Fanks missis, “said the bird, through the crumbs, because no one teaches robins not to speak with their mouths full. It flew away saying

“You wont be sorry!”

Ostra returned to her pot making and told herself she must be hearing things.

But a week or two later it happened again. She sat bending the stems under the stars like always on a Winter night, and a wren landed on the ground in front of her

“I’m sooo cold missis!” it said in its tiny little voice

“Well come here and I’ll warm you!’ Ostra replied, as usual thinking of how she could help before she thought about anything else. She opened her hands and the bird came and sat between them while Ostra breathed warmth onto it.

“Thanks missis!” said the bird as it flew off, “you wont be sorry.”

Ostra shook her head, convinced she’d fallen asleep over her work – which was pretty likely as with all she had to do, she was always tired.

Back home she was too busy carrying wood, making fires, cleaning fish, fetching water, picking lice out of hair, sewing skins, and scolding, nagging and cuddling to even remember she thought she’d heard a bird say words.

But every few nights through the Winter, as she made her pots some little bird or mouse, some small, small helpless thing of the forest would come and ask for her help. And it was always the same, before she even thought, she gave whatever help was asked for. And the response too, was always the same

“Thanks missis, you won’t be sorry!”

So Ostra had to accept that she could hold a conversation with  small creatures, even though that ability seemed to make no difference whatever to the harshness of her life.

She was still fetching carrying cooking cleaning scolding nagging and cuddling and generally worrying over far too many other people, including her father, who was so tired when he got in from his boat, that all he could do was snore.

And so it went on.

But somebody else had noticed what a kind, reliable, hardworking girl Ostra was. Num the hunter, whose special skill was killing things  – stabbing, or strangling or trapping or poisoning. And then he ate what he killed or wore its skin, or traded its body for something else he wanted. He’d seen Ostra working and working away in those winter nights, her strong hands bending the willow, and he wanted all that hard work and strength and kindness for himself.

So come Spring time when other jobs replaced pot making, Num came looking for Ostra. One morning when she was up at dawn collecting young nettle heads for soup, he jumped out of a bush and greeted her.

Now I should say here that Num was very, very good looking. He would have made Jude Law look like a minger and Daniel Craig like a wimp, and Ostra was pretty pleased when he said

“Ostra, I’d like to make you my wife!”

She was all set to blush and say “Oh all right then!”

But a little robin landed on her shoulder and whispered into her ear

“He’s cruel and wicked. Tell him no.”

That’s when Ostra noticed string of robins, freshly killed and hanging from his belt by their tiny wiry little legs and dripping blood from their delicate little beaks in red jewels onto his leather trousers.

So she did what the bird asked,

“No, “she said, “ I can’t marry you while my littlest brother has a cough.”

The huntsman tried to put a good face on it, but he was handsome and he wasn’t used to women turning him down. He stomped off into the forest using words that Ostra had never heard anyone say before!

Two weeks later, Ostra’s little brother took a turn for the worse, and died.

The huntsman came and found her as she laid wild flowers on the little boy’s grave

“Ostra, “ he said, “I’d like to make you my wife.”

Ostra was so upset about her little brother that the thought of being held in the huntsman’s big strong arms made her want to say ‘YES!” but before she could get the word out, a little wren landed on her shoulder and said,

“He’s wicked and cruel, tell him no!”

That’s when Ostra noticed that the huntsman wore a necklace of a hundred baby birds, small and naked as peas, hanging around his neck like pink beads.

So she did what the bird asked

“No” she said, “I can’t marry until my sisters are old enough to keep house.”

Once again the huntsman stomped off into the woods, furious.

And two weeks later Ostra’s little sisters were down on the beach in the sunshine collecting driftwood for the fire. One second they were there, and the next they were gone! Ostra and her brothers and father and all the villagers searched and searched but the girls had vanished into thin air.

Ostra was grief stricken. There was less work to do now with three fewer children to care for,  but she cried over the fewer mouths to feed, and fewer little bodies to clothe and fuss over and care for.

But the work and the caring had to go on, so one Summer night she walked up the hill and onto the clifftop to gather sweet majoram and bedstraw to put on the floor of the hut to keep it smelling nice (and to keep the fleas under control). The huntsman came and found her yet again. His handsome face was tanned and his strong arms were bare and bronzed, his big blue eyes were the colour of the sea. Ostra felt her knees going quite wobbly.

“Ostra, now will you be my wife?”

How Ostra longed to say yes!

But a tiny harvest mouse, gold as the sunshine, ran out of the grass and up onto Ostra’s shoulder,  and squeaked into her ear.

“He’s wicked and cruel, tell him no!”

That’s when Ostra noticed that the handsome waist coat that covered (but only just)  Num’s broad chest was made of hundreds and hundreds of harvest mouse skins.

“No I can’t, “ she told Num the huntsman, “my brothers and my father need me to cook for them.”

This time Num didn’t even try to conceal his fury. He kicked trees, he snapped branches and he stomped away with a very unattractive expression on his face.

And two weeks later on the stillest, hottest, bluest day of all the Summer, Ostra’s father took his two young sons to sea, to teach them how to set a crab pot. Ostra watched anxiously from the shore, and she saw the boat sink, quite suddenly as if it had sprung a leak and filled with water.

Even before the sea had given back the bodies with the incoming tide, the huntsman came to find Ostra as she sat on the clifftop weeping.

“Ostra, “ he said, “you have no family and no protection. Now surely you must take me as your husband.”

Ostra looked at him, and she saw that he wasn’t handsome at all. That he had a nasty hard mouth, and his eyes were like those of a dead fish, and that his muscley body was rather stringy and ungenerous looking. So, when a beautiful brown hare popped his head out of the undergrowth and started to say

“He’s wi…”

Ostra interrupted

“I know, I know !” she told the hare, “but I’ve got no more excuses!”

“Then, “ said the hare, “RUN!”

So Ostra leapt to her feet and to Num’s astonishment she ran. She followed the  hare along the cliff top, past the osier bed, through the woods and out the other side. The hare and Ostra ran and ran, out at last onto the big heathery heath under the sky.

And that’s where Num the huntsman caught her. His long legs stretched out and his long arm reached and caught her by the wrist, squeezing cruel and wicked.

“I poisoned your little brother and still you refused me!” said Num, “I strangled your sisters and buried them under the sand, and still you refused me. I holed your father’s boat and watched him drown with your brothers, and still you refused me. Do you think I’ll hesitate to break your neck if you refuse me again?”

Ostra didn’t know what to say. She was full of fear and fury. But she didn’t need to say a word because a cloud was gathering over the huntsman’s head, and a moving carpet under his feet. A cloud and carpet of tiny helpless creatures, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of little beaks and little claws and little teeth.

They covered the huntsman, pecking and tearing and biting.

“Ostra, Ostra!” called the Hare, “ You can leave that all behind you now. Come with me” he said, “you won’t be sorry.”

And Ostra ran after the hare, faster and faster. Running out the tiredness, and grief and anger and fear. Running into the beautiful Summer night, under the silence of the stars, until all she could feel was the air in her lungs and the sweet springy turf, beneath her four, white furry feet.

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Perils Of The Default Setting

By Nicola | Published: November 14, 2012

 

There is a point in the middle of a book where I always feel very alone. I’m too far from either the end or the beginning to hear any voices of encouragement. I’m in the middle of a featureless plain with no real clue about where to go, not certain if I’ve come the right way anyway. There  is no one to help, I got myself here, I’ve got to get myself home again.

It was especially bad yesterday because I was writing about a little boy in my bear bookwho has just made a hasty decision out of sheer brewing fury, and then has to live with the consequences. For the first time in his life he is alone, without the support and direction of his extended family, with no one telling him what to do. And at first it terrifies him. Then he realises that this is really where he wants to be, that in this alone place is where he belongs.

I think that’s the process many writers go through…mid book, mid career, mid week, mid day…we feel our alone-ness because to be a writer you have to be alone (mostly…but I’ll come to that) and there are moments when it’s bleak and terrifying. But then we take a breath and remember that this is where we are comfortable, that for whatever reason – personality, history, luck – bad or good, alone is our default setting, and that without time alone, a lot of time alone, we are not truly ourselves.

There are people who write as a communal activity. I have two friends who do it very very successfully. That  fascinates me. I ask them about it and get only frivolous answers ‘he does the verbs I do the nouns’ or some such silliness. I think they fob off enquiry because they’ve found the  way they work together actually defies any kind of description or definition. Just as, when you are at the point of causing words to electrify the link between your mind and the page, that moment is beyond conscious description or definition. How does that moment, that process happen when it’s two minds and not one? I’ve always assumed that I don’t know but I guess it’s partly what I do when I work with a group of children – we write something together, they think, I facilitate and together we make something that neither side could have done alone.

It’s something that makes me more happy than almost anything else,and I often wish I could replicate it in my proper published working life and  have a regular writing relationship with just one other person, work ‘a deux’. I’d like to think so, but there are two things that would get in my way. One is a kind of terminal shyness: its like trying to actually speak the many words of Italian I know, impossible (just ask my Italian publisher!).  I revert to my six year old self out of sheer self conciousness…and my six year old self was very solitary indeed. There is something else too. And this is a pretty shabby admission. It’s about possession. If I wrote with someone else, how would I know what was mine? It’s fine to say to a class of eight year olds, yep that’s all yours, but could I let go enough to work with a grown up and still maintain my self belief? You can imagine the rather unattractive process I have to go through with picture books and editors can’t you? On bad days completely negating my own contribution and thinking of them as only the work of the illustrators. In one of my picture books, I wont tell you which, there is a line, a rather good one and I can’t remember if it was my idea or my editor’s, and it grates on me like a spade on concrete.

Somebody (very nice)  very sweetly asked me this year if I lived in a little stone cottage in the middle of no-where. I’d like to. I reeeeellly would.  But it would mean giving way to my default setting of alone, so totally that I’d be filling a supermarket trolly with gin, dogfood and pipe tobacco in no time. I’d be burnt as a witch.

It’s a good thing then that work, and not living in the middle of nowhere, pull me away from my desk. Last week working with kids in schools in Pembrokeshire and being restored by conversations with my friend Jackie Morris. This coming weekend to Norfolk for a project with musicians and composers and a group of young people from North London. I will have to write with other people, sing with other people and generally share, smile and not be alone. And of course I’ll LOVE it.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Surreal shrimps and pangolin pie

By Nicola | Published: October 30, 2012

Save habitat and you save species. It’s pretty simple really, and its the basic message of the World Land Trust and why I have supported them with my PLR’s for years. There are however, little wrinkles and knots in the smooth skin of that argument that sometimes make the job of ‘saving habitat’ more complicated and difficult than it already is, and others that get in the way of that direct link between habitat and species.

I am really supposed to be starting my bears book today – I can hold it off for a little while, but not long enough to come up with an elegant set of links to string these examples together so they’re gonna be pretty free standing…

 Fish and Forests

You wouldn’t expect fishermen to be an enemy of forest conservation, but when the riparian forests of Kinabtangan in Sabah, Borneo (where I was the other week) were given legal protection, it was fisherman who were to be found in the forest felling trees illegally to make into their traditional cylindrical fish traps. When the forest extended over most of Sabah, a few trees made into fish traps didn’t matter, but when all that’s left was a ribbon on the river banks, every tree began to matter. Nobody wanted to make the fisherman into criminals, or wanted them to give up their livelihood, but a solution had to be found.  Dr Isabelle Lackman, co director of the wonderful conservation organisation HUTAN told me the story of how fishermen found a new material to make fish traps: worn out lino. Word spread up and down the river, helped by HUTAN community workers, that you didn’t have to go to the trouble of chopping down trees any more – just use the old lino off the kitchen floor. Soon all fishermen were using these traps, and we saw them in action, in one case catching a Giant Surreal Prawn, the size of a whole packet of fish fingers and with long bright blue front claws.

 

Seeds of BIG Trees

Pretty much all the forest I saw in Kinabatangan was secondary rain forest, forest that had been logged in the past and left to regenerate. Secondary rainforest, contrary to conservation received wisdom of thirty years ago, is actually pretty good for wildlife, especially orang utans ( there are lots of fruiting lianas in secondary forest so loads of food for them). But it’s very different from primary rain forest – the sort of forest you get where trees have been left to do their own thing for hundreds if not thousands of years. When you walk into secondary forest it’s a chaos of climbers and smaller vegetation; primary rainforest is like a cathedral, with the closed canopy shutting out light so there’s not much at all below the tree tops. That matters for a very good practical reason – secondary forest with its tangle of combustable material is much more susceptible to the destructive power of forest fires. Primary forest is more robust.

Primary forest is also simply more awesomely amazing, especially in Borneo where the combination of heat, soil, rainfall and tree species has created the tallest primary forest in the world. I didn’t get to visit any primary forest in Borneo, (although I heard about it from my father who travelled in Sarawak in the late 40s) but on my last night in Sabah I had a glimpse of it in a restaurant in Kota Kinabalu. I sat next to Glen Reynolds the director of the Royal Society’s South East Asian Rainforest Programme, at the Danum Valley (recently visited by Wills and Kate). The canopy height of the Danum Valley forest is 70 m and the tallest trees, the emergents, that pop out above the canopy to lord it over the forest, top 89m. OK just figures right? Well a British oak tree is about 25 meters tall and the very tallest tree in the UK is a Norway maple at 36 meters. The top of the average roof is about 10m. So picture a forest, seven times the height of your rooftop, and then put another two houses on top of that to give you the tallest trees in Danum.

Gottit now?

That’s quite something isn’t it (I’m going back there to SEE it the VERY VERY first chance I get).

I asked Glen if secondary forest, given time, would just turn into Primary, and that’s when I heard about the wrinkle. The biggest trees species belong to a group of trees called Dipterocarps (I leant about these as a student and they filled my heart with longing to see them, like wanting to see dragons or unicorns). They are the trees that the loggers took first, so there are few left in secondary forest. Which means, if you want to remake 70m canopy you have to replant ‘em. And here comes the major wrinkle: dipterocarp seed doesn’t keep. What’s more, dipterocarps don’t start to make seed until they are very, very grown up indeed…you could pass your whole career as a botanist and still not live long enough to see it. AND when they do start making seeds they are erratic…some years tons, some years sweet FA.

The wonderous Glen (who is almost a deity in Sabah..quite rightly) is trying to work out solutions that will make it possible to repopulate secondary forest with dipterocarps.  But this is slow, slow work and it may take many generations of Glens to see Borneo’s remaining secondary forests growing the kinds of trees that would make Galadriel feel at home.

Pangolin Pie and how to Stop it

Tottering back to my hotel on the night I’d heard the Dipterocarp story from Glen I was told another, very uspetting tale. Before I went to Borneo I wrote a blog piece entitled An Inordinate Fondness For Pangolins. Which is what have had ever since I saw an B and W picture (Armand and Michaela Dennis Stylie)  when I was five. I’m slightly obsessed with animals that stretch the basic mammalian body plan to extremes…sperm whales, horse shoe bats, and pangolins. Imagine an elongated pine cone, with leaf shaped scales, given four legs and cute little face and you have a pangolin. There are a handful of species and they tootle about in tropical forests, ripping open ant and termite nests and slurping up the contents. A more entirely inoffensive, marvelously bizarre and completely beguilingly charming animal you couldn’t dream up on any kind of hallucinogenic drugs.

I imagined that the world’s ignorance of pangolins was probably a pretty good protection for them. They existed below the parapet of wildlife awareness, just quietly getting on with their lives. Whilst fluffier more anthropomorphic type species caught the limelight, the flak and the conservation money, pangolins could quitely benefit as their forest homes were preserved because they held more glamourous and well known species.

But a horrible spotlight has fallen on pangolins. Somebody somewhere has decided that their meat, their blood and their scales (which are made of the same stuff has human fingernails- just bite your nails people!) or any bit of them really will cure all manner of ills in humans. As I write pangolins are being stripped out of Malaysia’s forests and shipped off around China and S.E Asia. 400 kilos of scales were seized earlier this year, just imagine how many dead pangolins that means. So, no matter how much forest we manage to save, pangolins will be picked out of it like berries.

This is moronic beyond description, and it’s happening because hardly anyone – probably not even the people eating the meat to cure their hair loss/ colliwobbles/lumbabo etc etc – know what a pangolin IS. So the public’s ignorance about pangolins is no longer their blissful protection.

I’d like to do something about this. I think the children of the UK, and of Malaysia would find pangolins as magical and lovable as I did as a kid. I think if they knew what pangolins looked like it would be enough to trigger a mass of children writing to the Malaysian government would make them take action?  I don’t want to live in a world without pangolins and I’m certain nobody under 10 does either. Logon on to Project Pangolin if you’d like to help

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Teddy Bears Picnic?

By Nicola | Published: October 17, 2012



 

There’s something about bears: their rounded furry shape, their forward facing eyes, their ability to stand up just like we do, seems to switch on the ‘cute-appreciation-gene’. And that’s just the adults, when it comes to cubs, almost anyone can turn to goo. We put them  in myths and stories and further imbue them with human personality traits and the kind of super powers we ourselves would like to have.

 

This is all very bad news for bears: they get into trouble because we cosy up to them and then feel betrayed when instead of behaving like good natured human buffoons in afluffy coat, they behave like…bears, and take a bite out of us; we take home a cute wittle cubby and in a few months we have a predator the size of a sofa in the house; we force them to play a human part in our world, that utterly divorces them from their lives as wild animals or we simply plunder their bodies for the superpowers that only exist in our own imaginations.

Over the last couple of years, whilst researching various books I’ve come across examples of all of these. From foolish tourists trying to cuddle wild grizzly cubs to Asian black bears being kept in cages with open fistulas, so their bile can be harvested for ‘medicine’.

Luckily for the bears, there are at least a few humans with their heads on the right way. Last week in Sabah, Borneo I visited a wonderful bear rehabilitation centre, T he Borneo Sunbear Conservation Centre,run by people with the good kind of bear obsession: one that works for the bears. The centre caters for sun bears, rehabilitating bears taken from the wild as cute cubs to be household pets, which have then had the audacity to grow up. Bears are released into large areas of fenced off forest, where they can do some research into how to be bears….climbing, digging, turningover rocks. The staff offer the bears support in the form of regular food drops, until the bears’ own food finding skills are good enough to allow then to be returned to the wild.

This week I’ve been in India, in Bhopal the ancient lakeside city that became famous two decades ago for the worst environmental disaster in Indian history. I’m here to meetKalanders, a social grouping of semi nomadic people who have, for hundreds of years, struggled to survive on the margins of Indian society.

As landless poor their options were pretty limited but one way to make money was to train sloth bear cubs to perform; the now infamous dancing bears of India. Sloth bears were once very common in the Indian landscape, so it was easy to obtain young cubs, remove their potentially dangerous upper canines, put a rope through their noses and get them to jiggle about on their hind legs, shake hands, salute with their right paw and give little children rides. An extended family of Kalandars and their bear would travel around remote villages for seven or eight months of the year, giving impromptu shows.

In Britain we used to bait bears and badgers, fight cockerels – still do in secret little pockets. We hunt foxes and course hares, so we can’t afford to be too pious about the

Kalandars and their bears. Like all human- animal relationships there were good versions and bad versions. You can catch the bad versions on utube… A miserable manky bear,being yanked around by the nose and hit with a stick, by a yob who looks like he doesn’t much like human beings, let alone bears. But the good versions is what I’ve been hearing about this week.

The Kalandars of the little settlement Nyabasera Kotra Sultanabad, a shanty suburb of Bhopal (where the Kalanders were given the chance to buy land to live on by Indira Ghandi), were great trainers and keepers of dancing bears.They are not the sort of people to hang about in dirty laybys with a scruffy, badly fed animal, the condition of their little town shows you that at once: the houses maybe made of sticks and polythene with a few brick walls here and there; a family of ten may be living in a windowless house smaller than a six berth tent, but the streets are immaculately clean and everyone is smartly turned out and smiling. The sense of community is very strong.

 

“You will never train a bear by hitting hit, never.” says the expert bear trainer in the pressed checked shirt. “First the cub must live with your family like  another child. It will sit on your lap and be stroked and cuddled. Only when it is six or eight months old can you start to train it.”

There is of course no disguising the fact that putting a hole through a bear’s nose and pulling on the rope threaded through it, isn’t kind. The bear must do what the rope tells it, pain makes sure of that. But training was also by reward and even without their canines sloth bears are big, fierce animals, with massive heads, lethal claws and the strength of several brawny boxers in their front legs. Seeing fully grown sloth bears, retired ‘dancers’, in a wildlife park was enough to convince me that a bear that really didn’t want to cooperate, wouldn’t and could inflict some pretty serious injuries by way of rebellion. However unpleasant the rope through the nose may be, there is no doubt that the people I talked to this week really loved their bears. Shameen Ahmed, the Wildlife Trusts of Indiafield officer, who has been working with the Kalanders, tells me how sleek their bears were “They took great, great care of their bears. They always got the best food.”

It’s also clear that the Kalanders bear men were expert showmen and story tellers, who knew exactly how to work a crowd. The bear trainer’s eyes light up when he describes how he would tell stories about the bear’s life in the wild, about its individual ferocity or cleverness, about its power and agility.”The finale was always the bear rides, ” he tells me with a knowing smile, “people believe that their children will be protected from bad luck and illness if they ride on a bear.” What parent isn’t prepared to pay to keep its child in good fortune and good health?

When I visited one of the villages where the bear and its people used to perform, I can see immediately why bear dancing was so popular. It’s a subsistence  farming community, down a very rough road. People here work very hard to keep their kids fed and their animals alive over the dry season. Entertainment is thin on the ground and a visit by a troupe of flamboyant showmen, blowing their flutes, banging their drums and telling stories, with a big shaggy bear, must have been the highlight of their year.

All that is in the past now. Wildlife Trusts of India working with other conservation and animal welfare organisations have helped the Kalanders to step away from bear dancing.Families have been given financial support and guidance to help them find new ways of making a living, education for their kids, a place in the wider community whose margins they have occupied for too long. Now Nyabasera Kotra Sulatanbad is a town of small business people and entrepreneurs, with plans for their children’s futures. WTI has helped to buy taxis, poultry keeping equipment, handcarts…whatever is needed to get a family started with a new livelihood and shown the community how to use government small loans and grants to help their businesses and get the training they need. No one spends seven months trailing round the country side, with the consequent toll of family life, health and education. Fathers, Shameem tells me, are more involved with their children and take a greater responsibility for supporting their wives and families.

 

And the bears? Cubs can potentially be returned to the wild, if they haven’t yet had their  teeth removed. Asian Black bear cubs, taken for bear bile and seized from trade by the police or wildlife officials, have successfully been re-educated as bears. In a scheme called ‘Walking the Bear’ run by WTI, forest rangers take cubs out into the woods and show them how to be bears. Gradually the bears spend less time with the rangers and more on their own and one day, they just don’t come home. Rehabilitation of this kind, and the kind being done with the sun bears in Borneo, isn’t just about the well being of individual bears: bears have a great role to play the ecology of their habitats. Sun bears, for example are nicknamed ‘ the architects of the forest’ because the work of their claws and teeth in ripping insect infested, decaying wood from trees makes homes for other forest animals like hornbills. All bears are important tree planters, depositing tree seeds with a nice dollop of fertiliser, when they do what bears are famous for doing in all woods.

So every bear that makes the transition back to the wild, is a victory much bigger than the paw print of just one animal. Tragically for adult sloth bears there is no happy ending, no return to the life of balloo, picking paw paws and fancy ants. After so long with human beings, and without all their teeth, grown up sloth bears can’t be rehabilitated.They can at least live without a rope through their noses, and spend their days dozing in the sun, in peaceful retirement…more than their hard pressed former owners can hope for.

Thanks to the positive carrot not stick approach of WTI, in giving Kalanders the chance to change their livelihood, dancing bears, once common across India are now rare, existingin only a few of the remotest spots. This is a story of successful, small scale social engineering; a community raised from grinding poverty and deprivation. But it’s also a conservation story. India has a human population of more than a billion. Its wild places are ever more fragmented and dispersed. With so much pressure already on India’s slothbear populations, the constant drain of animals being taken from the wild for bear dancing was too much. It was also a reminder of an attitude to animals that, even though it could seem benign, was profoundly exploitative; an attitude that said that animals are there solely for humans, with no right to exist simply for themselves. But the Kalanders community Ivisited this week showed that attitude can change…in a village of 200 families there were once around twenty bears, supporting at least one family each, through their ‘dancing’, and now there are none. If a group of marginalised outsiders, deprived of education and on the poverty line, with a great deal to lose, can change their attitudes, and transform their lives  then surely we all can.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 2 Responses