Rekindling a sense of wow for nature

Anja Murray discusses beautiful new nature book

‘What I’m trying to do is rekindle this sense of wow!’ says Anja Murray about her newly published book.

Anyone who has listened to Anja’s long-running Nature File series on Lyric FM, will be familiar with how she casts her appreciative eye to the stars of the Irish countryside - hares, barn owls, otters and oaks. But the most humble of subjects – earthworms, midges or lichen are all deserving of a wow in Anja’s world. It’s nigh impossible joining that world when she marvels at how caterpillars can ‘sing’ squeezing body parts together to make a sound to attract ants to help ward off predators, or wood mice using twigs and stones to mark a path from their home to a rich food source.

Now Anja has revised, updated and collected many of those five minute Nature File episodes in Frog Routes, Polka-Dot Newts and Other Treasures of Irish Nature. Revisiting each piece was a labour of love for Anja, but it was also necessary in parts as there have been discoveries in the time since they were first broadcast.

“We thought Normans had brought them in,” she says of frogs, and notes that recent genetic analysis shows they were here before the Ice Age. “So we now know frogs are native - they were here even through the glaciation, there must have been some kind of a refuge where they survived.”

Anja explains how this appreciation for nature is, well natural due to ‘biophilia’. It’s the type of word designed to mute any sense of ‘wow’ for non-scientists, but the theory ‘biophilia’, coined by scientist EO Wilson suggests we are hard-wired to be curious about the natural world.

“We have a genetic basis to know wild plants and creatures, and to seek out connections with all of those lifeforms that are around us – to look, to explore, to know, to understand, to interpret, and that’s how we would have survived as a species: understanding our dependency and interaction with so many other organisms and the whole realm of life around us.”

Anja, like many others, has noticed a widening disconnect between people generally and our environment.

“Only in the past two or three generations have we become so separate from the natural world which we depend on. We tend to forget that we are so tightly linked in so many ways with the natural systems upon which we depend. We have become illiterate in reading nature around us, and the extent to which we become more literate with our natural environment will determine whether we thrive or not as a species and society.”

Given those high stakes is there a responsibility to focus on the threats to each of these animals and what we can do to fix it?

“I think a lot of the mistakes the conservation community have made in the past is to put the threats and bad news up front to grab people’s attention with all that’s wrong – how that species is declining and what the challenges are.

“You go through these things and there is such incredible lives and life strategies – there is so many things about these wild animals and wild plants that are really wondrous – so I want to put that up front, and elaborate them first, and then I do always include the conservation issues where they are relevant.”

Asked if there are any subjects she approached tentatively and were surprised by how much she got out of them?

“I would say always,” she replies with a laugh, after some deliberation she gives the example of Brent Geese, a subject she has “for donkey years” and thought she had a good grasp about them.

“Then you do a deep dive and do all the research and oh my God they are amazing. I always find out so, so much more.”

It’s a good example as she casually throws in that 90% of the world’s population of Brent Geese arrive in Ireland at this time of year from their homes in Arctic Canada.

“You know when they honk overhead, they make a distinctive noise as they are travelling? They are doing that quite intentionally to maintain social cohesion within their group – it’s a family group normally. It’s like a way of holding hands: ‘Hey are you there?’ ‘Yeah-yeah, I’m still here behind you’.

“I learn all these little details about whichever species or habitat type I’m doing a deep dive into. I’ve learned so much in doing the research.”

The radio show airs with a seasonal insight into whatever is busy in our hedgerows, sky, river or soil at that time. Accordingly the book is arranged by what to look out for that month. So in February you will read about how incredible badgers are and how multiple generations can use the same sett - with some documented to have been in use for more than a century.

In May oak tree flowers are on Anja’s mind. “These are things that are all around us, but we tend not to notice them. Did you know that there are oak tree flowers?”

And then in late October her attention turns to brown bears. Wait, brown bears?

“We used to have brown bears all over Ireland, living when people lived here; there was a couple of thousand years of overlap. So the first humans to arrive in Ireland would have lived among brown bears.

“I love to imagine how they would have lived and what the landscape would have been like at the time when they were alive, catching salmon out of the rivers, wandering through woodlands and standing in caves.”

The conversation flits to jays who visit an oak in our garden to gather acorns to see them through winter.

“The incredible thing is their spatial memory is better than ours, so they know exactly where they have cached all these different acorns and retrieve them over the course of the months.”

She recalls being told by a cognitive scientist that when jays are hiding their stash of acorns they are alert for other, non-related jays.

“If they see a different jay, who sees them cache their acorns or hazelnuts, they will pretend to cache them there and when they know they are not being watched, they’ll go back and retrieve them and remove them to a different site.”

Now that’s a story deserving of a wow! Such is the key to Anja’s story-telling and the subtle approach to conservation that underpins it.

“As we spend more time and mental energy understanding the natural world around us, that does change our perspective from this always human-centred perspective about our place in the world to actually thinking, we are one of many species and we are all interdependent, and there’s a lot of other animals whose lives are just as important as ours, running in parallel but we just don’t see this. And our attitudes are very different because of that.”