Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
A warm summer night has a special music. The thing to listen for is the
singing water-weed. You almost have to hold your breath to hear it.... It's a
queer experience; a sort of fairy music rises from the water. If your ear is not
attuned, you might compare it with the 'muzz' in sound broadcasting before
VHF came along; but it's really rather like a faint jifflin of cymbals, or the
hiss of rain on water. Only one sort of weed performs in this way; the hornwort.
(Ellis 1957a)
Ellis, making analogy with a then popular musical movement, suggested that as the
leaves scratch together they 'skiffle…. Very much the same sounds are made by
musical water-bugs in our marsh ditches' (Ellis 1957a; see also Ellis 1952: 197, 206,
on 'Reed-mace music' and 'When waterweeds sing'). The message is that to connect
with the animal and the vegetable most effectively you need to get off the beaten
tripper track, into Ellis's Wheatfen or the NNT reserves, or into the dark of a Broads
night, where you can exercise this way of being human, with eyes and ears open,
with neither disturbance nor ridicule from those who might find nosing in a swamp
bizarre.
Ellis, with his specialist knowledge of insects and fungi as well as mammals and
birds, invited the listener into a total ecology. Birds remained the most prominent
wildlife in new naturalist public discourse, however, helped along by the increasing
use of radio to bring distant nature into the home. Radio acts as an introductory
space for the possible naturalist, nurturing weather ears in the living room, and the
Broads became part of educational radio's common ground, the subject of
travelogues, schools programmes, talks, adventure stories and outside broadcasts,
such as that from Hickling Broad in May 1947. Central to this radio nature was the
transmission of a convincing aural ecology, produced through mimicry and
recording; such fields have been ignored as yet in discussion of sonic geographies. If
John Betjeman in his 1937 poem 'Slough' had mocked the inhabitants of a new
commercial England who 'do not know/The bird song from the radio' (Betjeman
1975:22-23), new naturalists inverted Betjeman's caustic commentary by getting
people to listen to bird song from the radio, transmitting calls into the home.
Imitation was the province of Percy Edwards, who worked for the BBC on nature
and country programmes from soon after the war, and remained a celebrity until his
death in 1996. In 1948 Edwards could impersonate 153 birds. Edwards's public
persona shuttled between that of expert and variety turn, but he and others took
care to present his bird calls as the work of a field naturalist. Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald
prefaced Edwards's 1948 Call Me At Dawn by stressing that this was more than just
entertainment:
[T]hough there are thousands of people who regard Percy Edwards, quite
rightly, as a 'star,' there may be many who do not regard him as a naturalist.
Let me say straight away that Percy Edwards is a naturalist—and a very good
one.
(Edwards 1948:9)
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