by Simon Barnes
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I. If you want to draw a line between humans and our fellow apes.
II. Cogito ergo sum and all that.
Nautilus but nice
Skip this chapter. I really should be doing the same myself: after all, I’ve got a book to finish. I should be hurrying along to other molluscs, instead of lingering with the cephalopods. But I find it impossible to continue without spending a moment with the nautilus. I’m not really sure why: it’s not as if I’ve ever seen one. But for some reason they have a deep and elusive meaning for me.
These creatures have always had something magical about them, at least for me. And it’s complicated. There’s a distant memory of watching David Attenborough explaining the nautilus shell, which is used as a bailer by some island people around Papua New Guinea. I have half-remembered visions of seeing pictures of these strange things in the sea: coiled shells from which a wreath of tentacles tentatively emerges. Then there is the name: the Nautilus was Captain Nemo’s impossible submarine in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; that was a book to dream on all right. But I think more than anything else it’s the fact that these curious creatures bring me back to illustrations I saw in my boyhood: illustrations of the world beneath the seas of the Devonian era. Lost worlds and extinct animals had an eerie fascination for me, as they do for most children; most adults, too, I suspect.
The nautilus group is ancient enough, 500 million years or so. But what matters more to me is that they look a great deal like ammonites. Ammonites are perhaps the definitive, the archetypal fossil: a beautifully coiled, ridged spiral that makes an almost abstract pattern of life. There is one on my desk; the tentacles are there at the shell’s mouth in blurred outline. It’s not a great fossil, as collectors rate them, but it’s on my desk and that gives it meaning. In truth, ammonites are more closely related to present-day squids and octopuses than they are to the nautilus. But they look like ammonites, and they look as if they have just swum out of the pages of The Golden Treasury of Natural History,I by Bertha Morris Parker, a book full of wonders that my grandparents gave me for Christmas when I was, I think, nine, a book that shaped my understanding of the world.
The magic of the nautilus lies in this similarity to the perfect fossil. It reminds me of those artists’ reconstructions of ancient seas: trilobites crawling about on the ocean floor, and above them, fleets of ammonites, tentacled garlands protruding from the elegant spirals of their shells, improbably propelling themselves about the oceans of the lost world.
The nautilus species that survive today are from a very ancient line, and there are very few species left: just half a dozen. The chambered nautilus is the best known: the creature advances through its shell throughout its life, vacating an old chamber and building a new one, and as it does so, creating a work of beauty and mystery as well as an ad-hoc bailer. It can have as many as 90 tentacles in two circles on its head, and can measure up to 27 cm, 11 inches, in diameter. It can close its shell with a leathery hood formed from two tentacles, and it swims by jet propulsion, like an octopus. It can adjust buoyancy by adding and subtracting water from its shell. Unlike octopuses, nautiluses have no claims to higher intelligence, though they have been shown to possess rudimentary long- and short-term memory: perhaps the seeds of intelligence are there, but were simply unnecessary for the shell-dwelling lifestyle.
The notion of a “living fossil” is a confusing one. It implies that the creature so-named should be extinct, and is some kind of failure. It is the very opposite, in fact: an example of a design that is so effective it has functioned pretty well unchanged across millions of years, escaping major extinction events as it did so. The nautilus gives us a vision of ancientness, for these creatures have survived since the late Cambrian period, products of the great Cambrian explosion that changed life on this planet forever. Time past and time present are both perhaps there in the shell of the nautilus. And the ammonite on my desk looked very similar as it cruised and tentacled its way through the ancient oceans. “It looks nice on your desk,” my older boy said. “Makes you look like a real naturalist.”
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I. Look on this book as my attempt at a grown-up (fairly grown-up, anyway) version of The Golden Treasury.
Bell-beat of their wings
I am writing these words in my usual workplace, which is a hut that looks over a fragment of Norfolk marsh. You’ll understand, then, that it’s wonderfully filled with potential distractions. There is no momentary break that can’t be extended by a long stare at the uncompromising landscape before me. Often, I am released from my computer screen by the sound of whiffling. They were at it as I walked towards the hut to start work this morning: four whifflers in a hard, straining line low in the sky.
Mute swans don’t get a great press from bird-writers. They – perhaps I should say we – prefer their more glamorous and much wilder relations, the whooper and the Bewick’s swans. These are birds that fly in from the Arctic to spend the winter in Britain: birds with no history of taming, birds that were never farmed to make up a medieval banquet, birds that never queued up for a child’s bag of crusts. But there is an epic quality about a mute swan that’s best appreciated when not looking down at them from the edge of a duck-pond. Mute swans are better when you look up.
They are the world’s second-heaviest flying bird. The all-comers’ record is held by the kori bustard, a chunky bastard of a bird that I have come across often enough in Africa. To see two or three take to the air is like watching the evacuation of Saigon.I But mute swans are not far behind them and as birds go, they are almost as homely as robins. You can hear the power, hear the effort needed: no mute swan pretends that flying is an easy matter. The sound of the air being hammeredII through the stout, almost unbreakable quills fills your ears as you stand beneath: whuff-whuff-whuff, beat by effortful beat, neck extended like the arm of a novice skater desperate for the safety of the rinkside. See them land on a lake: they come in at a shallow angle, lower the enormous black webbed undercarriage and ski along the surface of the water till they have decelerated enough to sit down. See them take off: they must run along the surface, flapping madly, leaving a great runway trail of double puddles, looking horribly unserene and undignified, until they have enough speed to take whifflingly to the air. If they are forced to crash-land in a confined space like a suburban back garden, they can’t take off; many a bemused householder has called in the RSPCA to help the bird find its wings again. Flying is a big deal for a mute swan: but it’s no luxury, no mere bonus, nor is it something they only do at moments of desperation, like a pheasant. Flying is at the heart of their existence.
That is true of practically all waterbirds; I use the term here to cover ducks, geese and swans.III They can swim, yes, and that’s great, but their existence is made possible and defined by their ability to fly. Water, even before food, means safety. On water, a bird is safe from any land predator. But it needs to fly there and fly off again.IV Some ducksV are particularly adroit at this: watch the near-vertical take-off of a group of mallards. The collective noun “a spring of teal” expresses their ability to swap water for sky in an instant. Waterbirds seldom restrict themselves to one patch of water: they need to commute from one to another, in the course of the day, or of a year, for the various different demands of their strenuous lives: feeding, roosting, breeding, wintering. In winter, open water in Britain is full of waterbirds, many of them visitors who have escaped from the icier regions where water becomes too inhospitably solid for them. Just a short distance from my hut is a patch of open water where I can see 500 wintering wigeons, ducks that graze on the land when hungry but rest up in the middle of the black waters of the lake, occasionally whistling to each other in far-carrying sibilants. In the summer the waters are relatively open: in winter, it’s as crowded in places as the rush-hour Tube.
These waterbirds are defined by the structure of their bills and tongues, which work together like a suction pump, allowing water to be taken in at the tip and expel
led at the sides, with chunks of food saved in filter plates called lamellae. But many waterbirds have evolved to take food from outside the water: geese and some ducks graze onshore. One of the great sights in British birding is the dawn flight of pink-footed geese in the Norfolk winter, flying in from the shallows of the Wash to graze on sugar-beet fields during the day: hundreds and hundreds of them in great straggling calligraphed Vs. Some ducks have adapted the basic model and become fish-eaters: the sawbills have serrated bills as their name suggests and they are adept divers and graspers. In this country we have the scruffy red-breasted merganser and the elegant goosander, and occasional winter visits from the impossibly dapper smew.
The feathers of ducks, of all waterbirds, are famously, even proverbially, watertight and waterproof. Beneath the shiny top layer of feathers lies a layer of superb insulating down. Water would destroy it, but water never reaches it, so effective is the waterproofing: and this explains why ducks can sit all night on water that would kill you and me within an hour or two. The top feathers are oiled regularly with a substance secreted from the preen gland. Feather maintenance is vital for all flying birds, for without immaculately looked-after feathers the mechanisms of flight break down. A waterbird needs to fuss and preen even more than most, because it must keep the water out or die, just as it must fly or die.
The point of waterbirds is not that they can swim, but that they can swim as well as fly. Like most birds they have their being in mobility, and their ability to relocate, and to escape from dangers that come from weather and from predators. Feathers give the birds flight, and flight gives them areas of the world that few other large creatures can exploit. Flight has opened world after world to birds: and water is just one of them.
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I. A kori bustard weighs in at 41 lb, 19 kg, a mute swan at 39 lb, 18 kg. In bronze medal position is the Andean condor at 33 lb, 15 kg.
II. All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
WB Yeats, “Swans at Coole”
III. I prefer the term waterbird to waterfowl: waterfowling is a shooting term. To be technical, what I’m writing about here is the order Anseriformes.
IV. But there are three species of flightless steamer ducks; they are all noted for their aggressive behaviour and their fearless attitude to potential predators.
V. The ducks in Finnegans Wake, being educated French ducks, say: “Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoi”, perhaps in bewilderment at the book they find themselves quacking in, perhaps in bewilderment at the unending forms of life. The seagulls, however, say: “Three quarks for Muster Mark”, thereby giving a name to the elementary particle.
She sells seashells
I was still wondering what the hell had possessed me to come. Sunnyhill Junior School in Streatham was bad enough in term-time: what was I doing with the school in the holidays? Why had I decided that I wanted to go on School Journey? I must have been trying to fit in, never a good reason to do anything. After a long train ride, most of which I spent mooning out of the window, we checked into a lodging house. We dumped our bags and were allowed out. We were at Paignton, in Devon, right on the seafront. And as we hit the beach, two simultaneous waves of delight hit the male part of the party. Did I whoop too? Certainly I can remember the unbelieving joy at this instant discovery. The beach was full of round flat stones that were idea for skimming!
Not that I gave a toss. It was everyone else who got excited about the stones. I would never for an instant deny the keenness of the pleasure to be gained from skimming stones across the sea, but it pales into nothing when compared with the joys of the wild world. And Paignton beach was covered with shells.
Shells! That stroke of genius from the molluscs, that hard and lovely thing that endures for hundreds, even for thousands of years after the soft creature itself has died. With my hands scooped together I could pick up dozens of them, generations of them. Tower shells and top shells and periwinkles and whelks and mussels and oysters and razor shells: a wild museum, almost imploring me to fill my pockets and my suitcase with these gritty, lovely trophies: part of the living world I could pick up and revel in and do so without hurting, still less killing, a single creature. Shells touched my heart with a rare sharpness. I could gaze on them and touch them and wonder at them and look them up in books and – glorious, glorious thing – name them. What made all that even richer was the fact that I could actually own them. I could take them into my home: make them a part of the museum I had established in my bedroom on tottering brick-supported shelves, the letters of their magical names written in maladroit letters. There are shells in Ulysses: “And now his strongroom for the gold. Stephen’s embarrassed hand moved over the shells heaped in the cold stone mortar: whelks and money, cowries and leopard shells: and this, whorled as an emir’s turban, and this, the scallop of Saint James.I An old pilgrim’s hoard, dead treasure, hollow shells.”
There’s always been a mystery about seashells for humans: a sense of value and meaning as Joyce implies. Cowry shells were used as currency in Africa for centuries; they were also used for money in North America. Cowries have been traded as jewellery and as charms, and they have been used for divination. Shells have always mattered to humans, but to a shell-wearing mollusc a shell is life, the universe and everything: the meaning of existence is shell. The shell supports, encloses and protects the soft life within. It is a calcareous exoskeleton, but unlike the skeletons of us vertebrates, shells contain no cells or DNA. Every shell is a small miracle: an inanimate object produced by an animate being. The hard shell of calcium carbonate is not an exclusively molluscan invention: corals, crabs, barnacles (which are not molluscs),II seas urchins, lampshells and bryozoans also go in for shells. Molluscs have done it more times and more thoroughly than any other group: molluscs are the most diverse animal in the oceans, and make up 600 families in all. Most are tiny, but naturally, we will look at some of the whoppers as well. There are shell-wearing molluscs in fresh water, as every aquarium-keeper knows, and plenty on land, as everyone who has ever sat in a garden knows.
The shell is, as it were, willed into being. To be more scientific, it is secreted by specialised tissue called the mantle, something every mollusc, shell-wearing or not, possesses. The secretion contains a protein called conchiolin. Every shell, whether or not it contains a living animal, looks like an entirely finished thing, but it grows throughout the life of its creator, a process that begins with the addition of a fresh band of conchiolin along the existing edges of the shell. Internal layers can also be added to make the shell thicker. There are about 100,000 known species of shell-wearing molluscs; there is some dispute as to whether or not these should be classified separately from shell-less molluscs.
We humans have an intimacy with shelled molluscs: a special relationship. Shells have been used as money, as Joyce writes in the fragment quoted above. A few years ago, archaeologists in Morocco discovered shells that had been perforated, presumably as human adornments. The perforations themselves were 80,000 years old. Were they worn by males or females? Did they wear them to demonstrate their status? Or to make themselves more beautiful? No doubt the answer is the same as it is for the jewellery in our shops now: both. “Stephen’s hand, free again, went back to the hollow shells. Symbols too of beauty and of power. A lump in my pocket. Symbols soiled by greed and misery.”
* * *
I. A scallop shell was traditionally carried by pilgrims to the shrine of Santiago – St James – in Spain.
II. Darwin had a special relationship with barnacles, which we’ll examine later.
22:1
We set off from Stonehaven, a tough-looking harbour on the east coast of Scotland, just south of Aberdeen. The sea fret had come down like the curtain at Covent Garden: you could see maybe 20 or 30 yards. So we went out in an open boat looking for dolphins. Not that we’d be able to spot any, but the
re was always the possibility that the dolphins would spot us and cruise over to check us out, dolphins being full of interest in what is going on. They didn’t, but it was an unforgettable trip. For much of it we were out of sight of land. For much of it, we were out of sight of practically everything. It was as if we were in the middle of a small bowl of light, and the rest of the world was a soft thing of pearl and silver – and into this bowl and out again flew bird after bird. Now it is a thing that always fascinates me about the sea: as soon as you are even a short distance offshore, you get a completely different set of birds. As soon as you let go of the land, you find the birds that have done the same thing, but on a career basis. And so, in and out of our bowl of light, there cruised first gannets, the spear-billed fishers who plunge from impossible heights into the sea, with sharp-pointed wings 6 foot, damn near 2 m, in span. Wheeling and turning with wings that seem far too long for their bodies, the shearwaters. Every now and then the Dracula silhouette of skua. And then, whirring into sight and out again, with wings that look far too small to support such a chunky little bird, the auks: guillemot, black guillemot, razorbill, puffin: flying with all the grace of a bath-toy powered by a rubber band. These birds are at their best swimming beneath the sea after fish. But like ducks, geese and swans, seabirds are able to exploit the sea so effectively because they can fly.
