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twenty years before. It was a cool, still morning, the first day of
autumn, a year after my dispiriting foray into the Desert. On the other
side of the fence the birch and ash still held their paling leaves. The
hawthorns and rowans were already bare. Far below us, in the rem-
nant stand of mossy oaks that grew beside the stream in the sheep
pastures, jays screeched like football rattles.
Ritchie Tassell is the person to whom I have most often turned
when trying to feel my way through this story. He has a voracious
appetite for reading, and made some of the key discoveries in the lit-
erature that feature in this topic. More importantly, he has an
engagement with the natural world so intense that at times it seems
almost supernatural. Walking through a wood he will suddenly stop
and whisper 'sparrowhawk'. You look for the bird in vain. He tells
you to wait. A couple of minutes later a sparrowhawk flies across the
path. He had not seen the bird, nor had he heard it; but he had heard
what the other birds were saying: they have different alarm calls for
different kinds of threat.
He was brought up in a village in Northamptonshire - its burr still
lingers - the county whose wildlife and human life were celebrated by
the poet John Clare, who died a century before Ritchie was born. His
grandfather often took him out into the fields and woods, teaching
him about birds. 'He showed me how to summon owls out of the
trees. It's been a party trick of mine since I was about eight.'
His grandfather studied at Kettering grammar school at the same
time as the author H. E. Bates; they both came from humble shoe-
making families.
'My grandad and my father avidly read his topics, which often
recalled his childhood in the Northamptonshire countryside. Listen-
ing to them talk, I began to realize the great losses my grandad's
generation had witnessed in their own lifetime.'
Ritchie is obsessed with birds and for that reason, he says, he can
seldom watch a television drama. 'There's this hideous habit in which
British films are overdubbed with American bird tracks. They're
obsessive about the setting, the period costumes, the hair, the vehicles,
the horses, but they always get the birdsong wrong. I've got to the
point where I have to leave the room. I cannot stand it: it's a measure
of how disengaged we are. We could probably as a nation lose all our
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