The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (25 page)

However, the tideway was only half the story. The salmon were returning to spawn. But where? There were no suitable sites left in the main river. After an intense decade of trials, the best potential spawning ground was identified in the upper reaches of a chalk stream tributary of the Thames in Berkshire, the Kennet; attention focused on the gravelly bottoms of an isolated stretch of the Kennet known as the Wilderness Water, where stocking with fry – baby salmon – was begun. Yet from the Wilderness to Tower Bridge was seventy-five miles of river, and this second long passage, above London, proved much harder for the fish to negotiate, each way, than had the seventy-five miles of once polluted estuary, between London and the sea. As soon as stocking began on the spawning grounds, rather than in the tidal river, the number of returning salmon dropped dramatically. Not the least of their problems was that between Teddington Lock and the Wilderness Water were no fewer than thirty-seven weirs. Even though some fish might jump some weirs, from the point of view of the salmon’s supporters, choosing the Wilderness meant that every one of those weirs would have to have a fish pass installed. And so, over a period of fifteen years starting in 1986, this was done at a cost of several million pounds, the money mostly being found by the Thames Salmon Trust, the charity set up specifically to raise it. This seems to me an astonishing and very largely unsung achievement, which climaxed with the opening of the last fish pass to be built on the Kennet, on the weir at Greenham Mill, Newbury, in October 2001.

Even though the experimental restocking of Thames salmon had been continuing for more than twenty years, it was not until this moment that a proper self-sustaining salmon run once again became a real possibility. And yet it has not emerged. No fish, as far as is known, have to this day – thirteen years on, at the time of writing – swum all the way down to the sea after being stocked as fry in the Wilderness Water, and then swum
all the way back up and bred in their ‘home’ stream, which was the whole point of the exercise – bar one. A single salmon is known at least to have made the journey each way. It has a name, or, rather, a number. It was found in the salmon trap at Sunbury weir on 14 July 2003 by Darryl Clifton-Dey, the Environment Agency scientist who was running the Thames salmon scheme, a cock fish weighing twelve-and-a-half pounds; it was estimated to have spent two years at sea, and was recognised as a ‘millennium baby’ – one of ten thousand tiny fry stocked in the Wilderness on 9 June 2000. Darryl and his colleagues put a small radio tag on it bearing the number 00476, and released it; and the following November, on the 28th, they picked up its signal in the pool below the weir at Hamstead Marshall – weir number 37, the gateway to the Wilderness Water – thus proving, to their great delight, that the arduous spawning journey for Thames salmon is indeed possible. Even if it hasn’t happened.

But 00476 and the proof of his odyssey – had he gone to Greenland? – were not enough. For another eight seasons the Environment Agency persevered with stocking salmon fry in the Wilderness, but no breeding was observed and only the odd fish returned to the lower Thames each summer; and at length, after the stocking of 2011, the Thames Salmon Rehabilitation Scheme was brought to a close. It had lasted thirty-two years.

Having followed it fairly closely for more than two decades, I have thought a great deal about its failure, about the reasons for it, and about the lessons to be learned.

There is no doubt that over the years of the scheme, circumstances moved against the fish and fresh problems arose, two in particular. One was that the increasing amount of abstraction from the river by water companies to supply their customers in hotter years was making the flow often insufficient to tempt salmon upstream from the estuary, something which may worsen further with climate change; the other, more immediately serious,
was that in London itself, Joseph Bazalgette’s ageing sewer system was increasingly discharging raw sewage into the river when heavy rainstorms filled the pipes completely, which led to rapid deoxygenation and mass fish kills. This latter phenomenon has become known as ‘London’s dirty secret’, and in September 2014 the British government authorised a solution for it, the building of a new £4 billion ‘supersewer’ to intercept all the rainfall discharges, which is due to be completed in 2023. Will that help salmon back to the Thames? Perhaps.

The lessons, for me, are about our limits. We grow used to wildlife conservation success stories, of endangered species miraculously brought back: in Britain we have the sea eagle, the lady’s slipper orchid, the large blue butterfly . . . further afield we see the American bison, the Arabian oryx, or what about the Mauritius kestrel, there were only
four
of those left at one stage and now there are hundreds of them . . . we know we are wrecking nature across the globe, but those of us concerned with conservation have generally tended to feel that if conservationists direct their efforts at saving a specific species, with a fair wind and enough funding, they can usually succeed. Well, not always. The principal lesson of the Thames salmon story, for me, is that we can sometimes damage the natural world too severely for it to be repaired.

Yet more than the lessons, more than the reasons for the failure, what I take away from it is the sadness. It was a dream, perhaps with a hint of the Romantic about it, but an eminently practical one – assuredly it was an inspiring one – and to watch it die is a heavy weight on the heart; although, maybe it is just the project that has died, and not the dream. Certainly, crossing the footbridge over Teddington Lock, pushing my bike, I still see him in my mind’s eye, the silver shadow below bulling his way upstream towards the tumbling water of the weir; and then I also realise something more about the beauty of the earth, as he leaps, that it is found not just in colour, not just in form, but in life itself.

7
Wonder

Since the beginning of this book I have barely referred to butterflies, but sixty years ago they did indeed fly into my soul; and they have never flown out. For a long time, I did not know how to categorise what happened to me in Sunny Bank, at the age of seven, since experiences which mark you for life, as a child, generally arrive as dire or at least, disturbing ones, be they physical or psychological; yet this experience, although it came in a time of turmoil, was not in itself distressing, although it was most assuredly powerful – and that I have always understood, as it has exercised a form of dominion over me ever since. It was as if it had implanted something permanent into my nervous system: a receptiveness to butterflies which was almost a whole new instinct. A lepi-empathy, if you like. It has been a peculiar part of me, a quirk of personality like a limp or a lisp, like a quick temper or a meanness with money, and it will last until I die. I say again, this did not mean I became a butterfly obsessive – I was not Fowles’ Frederick Clegg and there were long periods when I gave no thought to Lepidoptera, turning my adolescent enthusiasm to birds, as I have described – but it did mean that there has always been present in me the
possibility of an intense response to butterflies, especially when the encounters were unexpected.

All down the years.

For example, it happened in April 1968, when I was twenty and a student at the University of Toulouse, and was spending the Easter holidays hitching around Italy to look on the monuments of the Renaissance, and I had been to Florence and seen what everybody sees, but most particularly the young Lorenzo de’ Medici, who was one of my heroes, portrayed on horseback in the Gozzoli fresco of the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem – there was still a tide mark across the painting from the calamitous flood of the Arno eighteen months before – and I had marvelled at the Piero della Francesca
Resurrection
in the little civic museum in Sansepolcro, and I had admired Federigo da Montefeltro’s palace looming over Urbino, and a French couple in an Alfa Romeo – funny the details you recall – had driven me down from the hills and then on to Rimini, where I slept on the beach. I had run out of money. With the last of it I had bought two loaves and half a dozen eggs, which I had hardboiled in the youth hostel in Arezzo; and the next morning, which was a Saturday, I remember, I made my way to the Rimini entrance to the autostrada and took stock. I had three eggs left and a loaf, no cash, and about seven hundred and fifty miles to hitch, back to Toulouse, but I reckoned I could do it easily enough, over the Alps from Turin down to Marseille where the widow of a friend of my father’s lived, and she might bale me out, and anyway it had been worth it, God yes . . . I had stayed in the castle in Lerici from where Shelley set out and was drowned, and I had squeezed into Savonarola’s cell, and I had discovered the portraits of Bronzino which excited me more than anything else and then I saw the swallowtail.

It was on a roundabout, a traffic island – one which had not been landscaped with lawn or flower borders but was simply in-filled with autostrada construction rubble and thus was full
of weeds or wild flowers, however you want to describe them – and it was catching the bright spring sunlight of the Marches. I forgot about the Renaissance. I forgot about hitch-hiking logistics. I was electrified. Here was something from the far corner of my imagination, one of those early dream-species from
The Observer’s Book of Butterflies
which I had continued willy-nilly to dream about and which in Britain, then, was the rarest butterfly, as it was confined to one small area of the country, the Norfolk Broads. It was also the biggest butterfly species, but even more than that, it was . . . I find it hard to get away from the word
glamorous
. It was the most glamorous British butterfly, and I had never set eyes upon it until this moment in north-eastern Italy.

By glamour I suppose I mean something like beauty with built-in excitement. Clichés beckon. Movie stars. But there was undoubtedly something in this insect’s appearance, in its banana-yellow slingback wings slickly transected by bold jet-black stripes, which set it apart. Its was not a calming colour scheme. It was flashy, it carried a hint of risk, even of danger, and today, with innocence long gone, I might say there is even something almost tarty about it, as if the pair of black needletails to the hindwings were stiletto heels. I was mesmerised entirely. I watched it intently for perhaps three or four minutes, until it finally flew off and I waved it goodbye, excitement slowly subsiding, and planted my Union Jack-decorated rucksack at my feet and got out my thumb. That night, as I climbed into my sleeping bag under a pine tree on the outskirts of a small town near Alessandria called Tortona, about seventy miles short of Turin, my left lung collapsed and the events which followed changed my life, but when I think back to that day, the swallowtail is what I remember first.

I could tell you something similar from nearly a decade later, from May 1977 when I was in Rondônia in the Brazilian Amazon as a reporter for the
Daily Mirror
– the pre-Robert Maxwell
Daily Mirror
which had tried to become the
Guardian
for ordinary working people and which I loved and believed in – and for a
Mirror
series called ‘The Last Frontiers’ I was writing about the settlers swarming over the rainforest like ants on the carcass of an elephant, in the first great wave of Amazonian deforestation. They were grim young men from the south in straw hats, everywhere slashing and burning the trees so that the landscape of flaming and smoking stumps looked like the aftermath of an armoured battle. I was focusing on the fact that they were encroaching on the territories of Indian tribes, some of which had only just been discovered or contacted, and which FUNAI, Brazil’s national Indian foundation, was trying with difficulty to protect. I was engrossed by it all, this rising human tide, this vast irresistible surge of destruction which a decade later was to obsess the world but which then was only just beginning, and at the same time I was engrossed by the thoughts of a woman thousands of miles away in America, a woman who was forty-three while I was twenty-nine, a woman who, although I had been in love before, had presented me with my first experience of passion, and everywhere I went I saw her heart-stopping face and her fire-red hair, in Rio, then in São Paolo, then in Brasilia, and then in Porto Velho as we reached the Amazon, and then in the tiny frontier towns and settlements as we got deeper into the jungle until eventually we found ourselves, four of us – myself, the photographer, the interpreter, and the guide – at a log cabin at the end of the farthest path from the farthest track you could possibly go down. The cabin had been put up several months earlier by a settler and it was in the territory of the Suruis, an Indian tribe which had only been contacted three years before, in 1974, and it was illegal, as it was built in the Surui reservation which FUNAI had demarcated, the demarcation post being clearly visible back down the narrow path through the rainforest along which we had hiked after leaving the Land Rover. We talked to him, the settler – his children had a Surui arrow, we noticed – and he was staying,
he wasn’t going anywhere, and a rifle was hung behind the door, and he cheerfully took us across a fallen-tree bridge over a small river to show us the fruits of his labours, a patch of virgin jungle half the size of a football pitch which he had cleared himself and planted with bananas, and I realised that this was the sharp frontal point, at that moment, of the human invasion of the Amazon. (And even there, I saw her face.) Beyond, beyond the packed impenetrable trees, was the Surui village, ten miles away, maybe fifteen, nobody really knew because the only way you could reach it was to fly to the small airstrip FUNAI had built, but they weren’t going to take us so how could we get there – that was the problem. This was a great story but it was only half a story; we had to go and see the Suruis themselves – that was what I was pondering as we left the banana clearing and scrambled back over the fallen-tree bridge and said goodbye to the settler in his cabin and headed back down the track to the vehicle as quickly as we could because the rain was coming and that would make the track impassable, how could we get to the village, that was the question, and the morpho flew out of the forest.