The last alcoholic drink I ever had on an aeroplane was on a Friday afternoon in early March 2014, travelling with a colleague to a trade show in Chicago. Don’t get any ideas: this was Economy. Unaccountably, about 100 miles south of Greenland, the steward took a shine to my colleague and gave him custody of a full 75 cl bottle of Drambuie, and the rest is history. Painful history. Somewhere over Northern Quebec Province, my westbound body met my eastbound hangover with a severity that both astonished me and eventually caused me to have to duck out of a dinner I’d been much looking forward to a few hours later. I hadn’t drunk a lot, but what I had drunk was unwisely consumed seven miles above my planet, where my brain’s ability to deal with the effects was borderline non-existent.

I had fallen for that oldest of human idiocies, the one that says, if you can have it, or do it, then you should.

I could run through a long list of other personal examples, and so could you unless, that is, you are some sort of latter day saint. But I won’t. Instead, as this is a blog whose vague editorial purpose is, among other things, to quietly imagine a world whose climate and ecosystems might allow comfortable life a few hundred years from now, I’ll limit myself to a couple of wider examples of the cognitive dissonance this leads to, or stems from.

1. Availability. We all know that strawberries are not harvested in the UK in December, but we still sometimes yearn for them. The supermarkets understand this, and therefore supply them. We see them on the shelves and therefore buy them, quietly burying any uncomfortable concerns with the old ‘better not let them go to waste’ or the ‘well, they were there anyway’ argument. The supermarkets find this profitable and so bring in more, and more often, and on it goes.

2. Time. Anyone who lives in or near my village will have spent from dawn to dusk for the last four days of last week listening to the drone of endless private helicopters ferrying people from London to the Festival of Speed at Goodwood. It is a fair assumption that these are carrying people who have both money and a high valuation on their personal time, the combination of which outweighs any slight pang of guilt that might derive from the 40 times higher emissions this entails against if they had travelled by car. They are in a post-traffic jam phase of their lives. ‘I can, therefore I will’.

3. Self-importance. You will have your own views about the annual jamboree at Davos but, whatever these are, it may strike you as odd that the use of private jets to ferry in the great and the good of the world has gone up threefold since 2023 to around 700 return trips, at a time when the climate worries are making themselves felt as never before. It’s also a delicious but annoying irony that no less than 317 private jets ferried delegates in to the COP30 in Brazil, delivering around 1,600 tons of extra CO2 into an atmosphere that they would then spend a week trying to cleanse of , er, CO2. ‘My organisation/country/whatever can’t afford to have me sitting in an airport lounge with ordinary travellers. I can, therefore I will’.

Here’s where it gets tricky, not least because all these things are extreme examples of quite nuanced issues. After all, I enjoy fruit out of season, fly occasionally and had nine years of frequent helicopter trips when I was a soldier in the 1980s; and I freely acknowledge that the Festival of Speed has brought jobs, attention and interest to this part of West Sussex. The accusations of piety and of being a killjoy are never far away, and maybe rightly so. I received more abuse from an article I wrote last year that questioned whether people really needed a 3-ton Range Rover to do the school run in, say, Wimbledon (where the biggest obstacles were little speed bumps) than for anything else I have ever written. (Well, nearly anything, if you disregard the various death threats I received from supporters of Suella Braverman on Remembrance Day 3 years ago). ‘Champagne Socialist’, ‘hypocrite’, Scrooge’ and ‘pious leftie’ etc.

So I’m more of an observer than a campaigner, simply looking out through the frosted windows of my own imperfect life. And the distorted view that unfolds, curiously, is one of optimism that this world is probably much easier to fix than we ever give it credit for, especially the health of the ecosystem.

It just needs more of us to say ‘no’ a little more often.

As my initial contribution, I have undertaken never again to have a bottle of Drambuie in the house. I hope it helps.

Once gone, they won’t come back to the box. In fact, once gone, they probably won’t return to any sort of fixed ground for at least a year, maybe more They are supreme aviators, and every moment of their childhood and teenage months will be spent aloft: feeding, socialising and even sleeping there. Once airborne, their parents wash their hands of all responsibility for them and in all likelihood will never meet them again. The extraordinary 10,000 mile journey ahead of those chicks to Zimbabwe, Congo or Mozambique, will be entirely instinctive, led south by an inbuilt ‘clock and compass’ that we have only recently started to understand. If you were searching for an animal at the opposite end of parental dependence to humanity, who rely on their parents for around 20% of their lives, you could do worse than start with the Swift.

If they survive- (and it is a general rule of thumb that around half all birds will perish in their first winter)- they will be back, screaming and scything through the Sussex skies sometime next May. Who knows? In May 2029, they may well come back to the village to breed. Given a fair wind, those two birds could easily be here when I am 76, in ten years time. They are remarkably long-lived birds.

All this is speculation; they have to survive the next few days first, not least by avoiding the attention of a Hobby who seems to have taken up residence in the area recently. Equally, to have played a small part in providing a suitable nesting site for them, and to have spent ten years creating an insect factory out of our garden, turns out to be the most important thing that either of us can do with our summer. There are now 51 Swift boxes in our village, a number that will go up to 100 this winter. Prime ministers may come and go, for all I care: we will have our Swift City.

And that’s the point. There is so much to burden our minds and souls with right now, mainly driven by the vanities and unpleasantness of a small number of mainly middle aged men, that it could be easy to lose heart, even if you are in the privileged position of not having to worry where your next meal is coming from, or whether your apartment block will be targeted by a maniac with a missile in Moscow.

The most impressive conversation that I have had in a decade of writing about and campaigning for nature was with a lady in her 70s, who was walking with me one day in the Peak District during my 1,000 mile walk through Britain in the spring of 2022.

‘When I retired,’ she said, ‘I spent my lump sum on buying up 13 acres of degraded peat bog. I decided that the most important thing I could do with the rest of my life was make it gradually better. Dam it and re-wet it; plant sphagnum plugs; create a habitat for waders and invertebrates.’

After another few hundred yards, she added: ‘And that’s what I do. Every weekend. Sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend or two. And, do you know, after two years we got some Snipe back, and then some Redshank. This spring, we have had our first Curlew, and I cannot begin to describe the joy that gives me.

’The ultimate good news story

She doesn’t have to. I know. I know from my Swifts. We sometimes think that nature restoration takes hundreds of people, millions of pounds and decades of time. But it really needn’t. If all any of us think is ‘what can I do?’ rather than ‘what can’t I do?’, the sky is the limit.

Call it positivism. Call it hope. Call it what you like, so long as you know it for what it is when it comes knocking.

The one word of my summer is ‘Swift’.

‘There are seven reasons,’ says Corporal Kelly to the 24 or so shaven headed recruits gathered there, ‘why things are seen.’ He has an attractive west Irish accent that suggests, ridiculously, to most of us that he is somehow on our side. He is, as it happens, but it will be weeks before we understand why. Anyway, we listen intently, not because we are polite, but because not to do so invites trouble. These are very early days in uniform, the Queen’s shilling still new minted in our metaphorical pockets, and we do what we are told.

He suggests that we write them down, as we will be tested later. This is the British army, and we will get tested on everything, including ironing our underpants and holding our cutlery in the approved manner.

‘Shape, shine, shadow, sound, silhouette, spacing and movement.’

He pauses momentarily.

‘Now look out at the shingle, and tell me when you see my colleague.’

We never do until Corporal West stood up, but the point is made.

We now know why things are seen.

Nearly 50 years later, one of the many reasons I originally signed up to be a wildlife guide at Knepp was to try to become a better naturalist which, among other things, includes being a better observer.

Corporal Kelly is sadly now in the great Guardroom in the sky and much missed, but his various lessons live on vividly in this his one-time student, never more so than when I try to help my guests see more, and see it quicker, by parroting those seven reasons on many of the safaris I lead. My near total immersion in nature for the last decade has persuaded me that nothing has changed in those intervening decades, and that it is a useful skill to pass on.

High on its nest, we see a white stork. ‘Shape, shine and a bit of silhouette’ they say.

Across Pond Field, we see 16 Exmoor ponies in the shade of an isolated oak.

‘Shadow,’ they say.

Across a path through the scrub, a silent nightingale flits and then flits back.

‘Movement’.

A Turtle Dove turrs its summer song from the branches of a dead tree.

‘Sound,’ someone suggests, before we see its tiny profile through a thin screen of leaves.

A young red stag stares at us out of its muddy hole in the new beaver lagg.

‘Silhouette’. And so on.

Five minutes later, we hit the jackpot. We are watching Ringlet and Small Skipper butterflies when a pair of Goshawks knife their way through the plantation to the right of the ride we are walking, just 30 metres from us. We are already looking in their direction which is good, because, if we hadn’t been, we would surely have missed those assassin flights. I tell them that they are almost certainly hunting Grey Squirrels.

‘Movement,’ someone says.

They are right, of course, and you could add shape if you wanted, but I explain that what we have just seen is far more significant than mere lessons.

In my experience, it is vanishingly rare to see Goshawks hunting in pairs, and we are doubly, maybe trebly blessed to do so on this hot morning.

But I still find myself articulating my silent gratitude to Pete Kelly- (he eventually became Pete to me, and I Roger to him)- for explaining to me why it is we see things.

Into such a patch on mine, some time ago, drifted a long, striped brown feather.

That day, I was walking my dogs through a local wood when I noticed it lying on the ground. Maybe eight inches long and with the bold stripes that evolution has delivered on raptors to allow them, in turn, to deliver unseen death to the prey they are hunting.

Thinking it was from a buzzard, a bird that is almost comically widespread these days, I took it home to check. it wasn’t. It turned out to be a tail feather from a goshawk, a raptor whose ferocity and efficiency in the hunt probably creates the nearest thing we have on these islands to a killing machine.

I was intrigued and excited. I had seen a male knocking around the area in the spring, but never up in these thick woods, and never close by.

The following day, I found the plumage of a woodpigeon close to where I had found the goshawk feather, and visualised for a split second in my mind the silent flashing of the hawk above the understory of the beechwood, and the shock of death about which the pigeon would have probably known precisely nothing before it had happened.

The next day, I went up there on my own again, and just sat for a while on the steep bank from which I could see the wood slope away to my north, until the tops of the trees in the distance were actually below me. The effect of my being able to see both below and above the canopy at the same time was at once a privileged opportunity to see the evening life of the wood unfolding, and the best chance I had of spotting the goshawk.

A couple of days later, when I went up there with my wife, and whilst we were involved in a long and companionable conversation with a neighbour, I saw a flash of brown under the canopy, long enough to know it was the right size, but too short to positively identify it as the bird I keenly wanted to be. Probably a buzzard, I thought. Can’t make it a hawk. Not yet, at least.

Then , when the weekend came round

, I saw him. About two hundred yards from where I had found the feather, he was flying quickly, noiselessly, almost casually, through the wood, but there was plenty of time to see what bird watchers call ‘the diagnostics’: the squared off tail, the white flashes of the wingbeats, the dark head and the unfeasible size. Maybe I watched it for five seconds, maybe a couple more, but almost as soon as I saw him, he had gone about his work in the concealed morning busyness of an ancient wood.

And sometimes, that is all you need. I never saw a single goshawk here as a child, or indeed until I was over sixty. Back in those far off days, the accumulations of DDT up the food chain softened their egg shells (those that the egg collectors hadn’t already removed) beyond use, and the rest of them would be shot by gamekeepers. Not any more. DDT is banned, egg collectors go to prison, and my friend Charlie, who keeps up on the Downs, knows that what the goshawk says about the health of his patch of ground is worth the odd grey partridge that goes missing, and he welcomes them.

E.O Wilson also said this: ‘if history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.’

That goshawk was truth.

It’s strange that I have been privileged to have been raised in a peaceful and free country, but that I have still seen a surprising amount of violence.

As a soldier in Northern Ireland and on the Chinese border of Hong Kong, sometimes this was a bit beyond what my sheltered life had prepared me for. Other times, such as when I was first on the scene of a motorbike crash, or times I witnessed a Saturday night bar descending into frenzied chaos, have been more sudden and more surprising.

But fundamentally, I have been lucky, as I hope that you have. I am a child of a peaceful interlude in history.

Maybe it has made me soft.

Recently, I was driving to where I work as a wildlife guide, when a tiny shape came out of the hedge on the right hand side of the road I was driving down and made its way in a slow motion parabola towards my windscreen. My eyes are no better or worse than they should be, but I knew for sure, even whilst travelling at 80 foot per second, that this was a goldcrest, Britain’s smallest bird. Regulus regulus is so small that you could hold it in your closed palm without inconveniencing it, so light that a 20 pence piece would weigh more than it on the scales. The goldcrest is a miracle of reduced scale, a bold testament to the sheer survivability of nature.

The bird duly hit the windscreen, in a tiny but audible head-on blow that cannot but have ended its short life. How can it be that I clearly saw the gold patch on its tiny head, and at that speed. I watched it happen in slow motion, as if the film had been slowed deliberately so that I could take in every detail. I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw, in more detail than you would think possible in a car going at speed, the light green shade of its tiny body spinning off into the road below and spinning onto the tarmac, and away into the kerb. Immediately, I went into a half-recognisable state of grief. Not all-consuming, obviously, but just the outer edge of the dull ache of regret.

There are maybe 600,000 goldcrests in the UK and it is not even on the amber list of concern, let alone the red. Compared to many birds, they are doing well, skulking away as they do, in the thick hedges and edges of suburban gardens and fields.

And yet, the death of that tiny bird, and my part in that death, stayed with me all day, and on into this morning. I relived that moment many times, wondered idly how it could have been different if I hadn’t stopped for a newspaper on my way through Petworth, or if I had finished the cup of tea I was drinking before I left home. I don’t blame myself, and yet I suppose I tacitly acknowledge that the way I live, the way my own species lives, is bad news for that little bird and most of its avian colleagues. And I’m not so stupid that I don’t remember that a sparrowhawk might have got it if I hadn’t, or a cat. It’s just that I was the agent of its death, and that somehow this mattered.

Part of me can laugh at the heightened sensibilities that a decade of writing about nature has equipped me with. The other part hopes that maybe this late-life vulnerability may be of some use.

None of this amounts to anything, other than to explain in a cack-handed way why it is that I ended up doing what I am doing now, leading the life I live. Other goldcrests will come. Indeed, their numbers are on the rise. And yet, every little life matters. It’s annoying. Twenty years ago I might even have mocked people like me.

These days, I just search for the words to try to explain it.

Subscribe now