Esther Woolfson focuses on conservation at a local scale and finds a mood of oncoming loss
There's a slow sea change taking place in how we view nature. Gradually, people are beginning to realise that cherishing the exotic and the rare is not necessarily the most helpful kind of conservation. Often, what we really need to do is learn to appreciate the local, the common and the unfavoured.
The same tendency is becoming apparent in nature writing too, that unlikely boom industry of the new millennium. From Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts's Edgelands to Kathleen Jamie's Findings, from Jean Sprackland's Strands to the grandfather of them all, Richard Mabey's The Common Ground, writers are increasingly shifting their attention from virgin wilderness to the urbanised and polluted world we ordinarily inhabit, and to the kinds of species that live cheek by jowl with humans, so seemingly ubiquitous that most of us regard them as pests, assuming we bother to see them at all.
An example would be the magpie, that egg-stealing bandit of urban mythology. Back in 2008, Esther Woolfson published Corvus, a delightful ode to the maligned crow family, many of which she'd adopted over the years. She possessed a naturalist's loving attention to detail, combined with a likable fondness for demolishing superstitions. An ideal candidate, then, for a larger take on urban wildness, and why it's so important for our wellbeing, not to mention our continued survival.
In Field Notes, Woolfson turns her beady eye to the muddled and fascinating ecology of her hometown of Aberdeen. Her diary begins on a day of uncommon snowfall, the harbinger of a period in which the entire city shivers to a standstill. Finding a wounded pigeon flailing in the lane, she takes it home to nurse. The weather is off-kilter, and the bird "seemed to symbolise the fragility that suddenly I felt was there, at the heart of everything".
Over the course of a year, her sense that something has gone awry intensifies. It's too wet; the winter's untimely and summer barely lasts a week. Is this androgenic climate change, Woolfson wonders, and her growing anxiety infuses the book with a kind of hyper-attentive urgency, a desire to record exactly "the lives and time and place" among which she finds herself.
The Aberdeen she unearths is a beguiling city. Woolfson borrows a key to investigate an otherwise inaccessible strip of wilderness between two rows of houses, where a Victorian botanist once led his students on summer expeditions. Behind a chain-link fence, she discovers the largest quarry in Europe, out of which much of the granite for Aberdeen's houses derived. Abandoned in 1970, it filled with water to form a vast lake. "More than part of the city unseen, it seemed like the city's secret; a strange irony considering that it's where most of the city came from."
Though her hidden city extends back through time, it's the living inhabitants that capture the larger part of Woolfson's attention and enthusiasm. There's nothing mystical about her enthusiasm for spiders, worms, shrews and foxes, but rather a kind of bustling curiosity about their strange and purposeful lives. Some slugs, she reports gleefully, mate by way of what is known even in scientific papers as a "love dart", a small blade of chitin or cartilage that may have provided the Greeks with the inspiration for Eros's arrow. Rats, meanwhile, have been proved to refuse to take food if by doing so they cause pain to other rats, a sign suggestive that they, like us, experience empathy.
Little in the world of conservation is simple, and this is particularly true of the vexed subject of invasion biology. After spotting a red squirrel crossing a road at a traffic light, Woolfson begins to ponder the odd and often tortuous logic by which so-called native species are regarded as inherently superior to "invaders". One list of the world's worst invasive species includes foxes, rabbits, mice and pigeons. Even Himalayan balsam, that aggressive coloniser of riverbanks, seems potentially less lethal than was once imagined. "To which moment might we wish to retreat, pull up our drawbridge, erase from memory what we ourselves, or the processes of nature and time, have wrought?" she asks, pointing out, too, the uncomfortable rhetoric of nationalism and violence that often accompanies the debate.
Though Woolfson maintains a spirited sense of inquiry, the overwhelming mood here is of oncoming loss, and bafflement as to how we've managed to make such a poor fist of stewarding our inherited Eden. Writing on the subject of sparrows, those once abundant, now critically endangered residents of our cities, she writes movingly: "If we lose sparrows, everything will change. Our lives will change, even if we don't at the time fully appreciate how… As with every loss, our lives will be thinner, lesser; the future not only of the physical but our mental world will be diminished, the world of our history and legend where the life of all cultures resonates with all we've seen and all we've lived with, plant and animal, stone and cloud."
She's right. It can only be hoped that books like this play a part in making us both notice and value the lovely creatures we stand to lose, before the wild portions of our cities have been entirely swept and tidied and paved out of existence.
Olivia Laing's To the River is published by Canongate (£7.99)
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