Non-Fiction November Week Three: Be the Expert - Nature Writing

This week we are invited either to share three or more books on a single topic that we have read and can recommend (be the expert), put the call out for good nonfiction on a specific topic that we've been dying to read (ask the expert), or create our own list of books on a topic that we’d like to read (become the expert). 

I don’t think I am exactly an expert in anything, but if I find a subject that interests me I do tend to read several books on it. I thought about focusing on food writing, but I’d already used at least one of my books (Writing at the Kitchen Table, Artemis Cooper’s biography of Elizabeth David) in Week One, so I’ve decided instead to go with nature writing.

I enjoy this genre provided it’s not too twee and silly; I think there’s more than enough ‘How I left my job as a venture capitalist, moved to some enormous property in the Cotswolds/Cornwall/Highland Scotland (priced the locals out of the property market but I'm sure they love me really), and Found Myself In Nature’ nonsense out there. But good nature writing, often by people who’ve spent years honing their craft, can be wonderful. Here are some examples:

Field Notes from a Hidden City by Esther Woolfson

(This is from a review I wrote earlier this year)

'Esther Woolfson lives in the west end of Aberdeen, just a few streets from the house in which I spent ten years of my life - but unlike me at that time, Woolfson is acutely aware of the natural world all around her, and her book Field Notes from a Hidden City, opened my eyes to so much that I had been missing. She investigates and enjoys everything from spiders' webs to birds, bats, foxes and even slugs.  She walks along the beach, she protests against Donald Trump's plans to dig up an area of huge scientific interest and great beauty to build a golf resort. Most of all she watches, and she sees, the wildlife that has adapted to the built structures of the city. Her writing is outstanding, and I can't recommend this beautifully produced book highly enough.'

Woolfson has also written Corvus, about the three rescue birds (a rook, a crow and a magpie) that live in her family home. I have a copy, but haven’t had time to read it yet – friends who have say they like it even more than Field Notes.

Nature’s Architect by Jim Crumley

I first heard Jim Crumley speak years ago, at a book launch at Blackwell's in Edinburgh. I was enthralled; Crumley’s writing is as vivid and beautiful and unfussy a prose as you'll ever find anywhere, not just in a book about nature, and I’ve since read more of his work. Nature's Architect, though, was my first and remains my favourite.

Crumley lives in Stirling and most of his books are about the nature and wildlife of Scotland. He does not go in for dramatic photography, and he is not an author who brings his personal life into his books; instead he pays regular visits to little known places in the remote countryside, and there he sits and waits – indeed he attributes his sightings of many animals to his particular expertise in sitting still:

That ten-minute audience ..revealed a perfectly painted portrait of the archetypal beaver, shorn of all tree-shadows and aloof from the workaday toil of its clan. In my mind it has established itself in a kind of hierarchy of individual animals whose paths I have crossed, like the pale golden eagle I wrote about in... The Eagle's Way, like a mute swan on a Highland loch that fell asleep in my shadow, like a Mull otter that tried to engage me in a game of hide and seek, like a badger boar that peed on my wellies while I was wearing them..

Nature’s Architect is about beavers – how they were ruthlessly eradicated from Scotland, and how they are now being re-introduced, both officially and rather less so. Crumley firmly believes that if beavers were allowed to get on with what they like doing – ie managing waterways – most of the country’s flooding problems would be solved. Of course this isn’t the view of many other ‘stakeholders’ – especially some farmers – and there are projects that seek to get everyone round the table, to reach a compromise and reintroduce beavers in a more measured way. Which approach you favour will depend on your own views about wildlife. Crumley’s is based on the famous tenet:

Let nature manage nature.

In Nature’s Architect Crumley also talks about architecture – he’s particularly interested in Frank Gehry and the Fondation Louis Vuitton building in the Bois de Bologne – and jazz. He seen connections with beavers in both. Beavers are masters of design; they ‘riff’ of their surroundings. We often don’t understand why they have spent so long gnawing a tree in a particular way, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a reason;

 It (a sculpted tree stump) is frankly beautifully done, but what on earth is the point? Aesthetics, or just one more example of the beaver's chaotic and inconsistent approach to logic?

This is a great read, and I can also recommend Crumley’s quartet of books about the seasons, which began with The Nature of Autumn.

 

Ghost Trees: Nature and People in a London Parish by Bob Gilbert

Bob Gilbert and his family moved from North to East London when his wife took up her first post as an Anglican priest at All Saints’ Church, Poplar. Gilbert, already an urban nature writer, decided to emulate Gilbert White (of A Natural History of Selborne fame) and study the nature and wildlife of a small area intimately;

My district, I decided, would be the new parish.

His investigations over the course of the next year extend far beyond the teeming wildlife of the inner city;

It became clear to me that many of the questions I found myself asking were also about past influences on the landscape. I became increasingly involved in a form of ghost hunting, seeking out the resonances of what once had been.

The book is a truly fascinating study of the natural and social history of an area that has seen successive waves of immigration and a huge variety of industries.

Gilbert uncovers amazing stories, such as the one connecting the humble conker to the shortage of acetone needed for the production of cordite in World War One, a Jewish chemistry lecturer at Manchester University, local schoolchildren, an East End gin distillery, the Balfour Declaration and the first president of the modern state of Israel. He quotes authors as disparate as Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath and the Brothers Grimm. His writing is erudite but extremely easy to read, and he’s often very funny.

My full review of Ghost Trees is here.

Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty

Time for one more book - one that I haven't yet read, though I heard the author read extracts on Radio 4 and was instantly hooked.

Last year Dara McAnulty's Diary of A Young Naturalist won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, which is a marvellous achievement for any debut writer, but Dara is just 17. He is also autistic and finds some aspects of life challenging, but nature is his solace, and he writes beautifully about it, and about his close and loving family, with whom he lives in Northern Ireland.

McAnulty has now won several more prizes, including the prestigious RSPB Medal for Conservation (the prevention of raptor persecution is one of his special interests.) Famous naturalists from Robert MacFarlane to Chris Packham have heaped praise on his work, and he writes regularly for (among other publications) the Irish Times.

I'm very much looking forward to reading this book.

Next week: Stranger than Fiction with Christopher at Plucked from the Stacks.