The margins of our village lanes are thick with yellow leaves. It looks autumnal, but they’ve changed colour and fallen due to heat stress. The fields are tinder-dry; crop fires have sprung up here and there, some sparked by chaff from combine harvesters hitting power lines, some thought to have been started by the sun glancing off glass bottles left as litter. In my garden the sparrows are no longer busy and voluble but sit out each day’s heat in the privet, tiny beaks agape.
East Anglia gets little rain; the region includes some of the driest places in the UK. Even so, aerial images comparing now with last July are shocking — only the larger forests and the damper creases of the watercourses still appearing green. When I went to our local river for a cooling paddle, the water didn’t even reach my knees.
I drove to the coast. Suffolk’s seasides can be busy, but the long dog-friendly beach south of the fishing hamlet of Sizewell is largely overlooked by tourists and is a great place to swim. Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, had just given the proposed new nuclear power station the go-ahead, and, bobbing in the waves, I gazed at the existing site’s faraway blocks and sphere and tried to come to terms with what’s likely to happen to this lovely stretch of coast — not to mention the Minsmere nature reserve and all the sleepy villages, nightingale-filled woods and family farms that the long building process will irrevocably change.
The pioneering environmental scientist James Lovelock, who died this week, believed that nuclear power was the only green solution. “[Nuclear’s] worldwide use as our main source of energy would pose an insignificant threat compared with the dangers of intolerable and lethal heatwaves and sea levels rising to drown every coastal city of the world,” he wrote in 2004. Even so, my grief for the countryside here is acute. I wish there were other options than Sizewell on the table. You might say that’s nimbyism, but without people willing to protect their home patches even more of our precious landscapes, habitats and creatures will disappear — and that’s not just a loss to locals, it’s a loss to all of us.
Merlin’s magic
A few years ago, when the first birdsong identification apps were created, I tried a couple and found them wanting. They were unable to cope with concurrent songs, recognise alarm calls or distinguish mimicry, so everything I recorded was apparently either a blackbird or an extreme rarity. I estimated that when tested in normal conditions — for example, with wind, traffic or more than one bird singing — they were correct about half the time. If you’re new to birds that’s not a help but a hindrance, as beginners are less likely to know the information they’ve been given is wrong.
But the tech has improved, and The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin app is so good I struggle to believe it’s free. Using crowd-sourced data from the vast eBird network, its algorithm identifies birds by photo, sound or a short checklist, all of which use your exact location and time of year to correlate with species’ reported frequency. It’s not perfect: distant birds can’t always be identified by sound or image, a non-typical blackcap’s phrase flummoxed it, and while it tentatively (and correctly) suggested a nuthatch, it incorrectly flagged it as a rarity. But the best thing about it is that it’s constantly learning. Used with caution it’s an extremely useful tool.
I found plenty of uses for Merlin when I visited the volcanic Garrotxa region of Catalonia. The old priest’s house I stayed in was a few yards from a stone church on whose walls lizards skittered, and the air danced with butterflies. Hoopoes, left, stalked the lawn and hooted their name from the woods, and golden orioles flew between trees, their low warbles unmistakeable, even to a Brit like me. But there were others I needed help with, and here the app came into its own. The mustard-streaked bird I kept seeing wasn’t a yellowhammer but a serin, its scratchy song unfamiliar; and while a zitting cisticola might sound like something you’d want ointment for, it turned out to be well-named, saying “zit, zit, zit” from deep in a wheatfield, like a squeaky bicycle wheel.
March of time
Hilly regions make good holiday destinations: challenging geography means less development, while local cultures often persist for longer than in more accessible spots. East Anglia, of course, is anything but mountainous, but for a while its marshy fens did slow the march of big roads, railways and industry to what some are now trying, unforgivably, to dub “the energy coast”. But those days are gone, and we must move forward. What we value enough to take with us on our journey remains to be seen.
