Tom Moorhouse - Elegy For a River: Whiskers, Claws and Conservations Last, Wild Hope

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First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Doubleday

Copyright Tom Moorhouse, 2021

The author and publishers would like to acknowledge the following lines from Monsters, Inc. () written by Andrew Stanton and Dan Gerson from a story by Peter Doctor with Jill Culton, Jeff Pidgeon and Ralph Eggleston for Pixar Animation Studios, released by Walt Disney Pictures in 2001.

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Design & landscape illustration by Irene Martinez Costa / TW
Plants / birds Shutterstock

ISBN: 978-1-473-57566-0

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In memory of Rob Strachan the original, and finest, Volemeister

You may say Im a dreamer, but Im not the only one.

JOHN LENNON,

Imagine

I SPENT YEARS TRYING TO AVOID THAT SO, WHAT DO YOU DO? conversation. It always turned a bit awkward.

I go out and study water voles in the wild, Id say, trying to conserve them.

Which usually prompted confusion. What, waterfalls?

No, Id smile. Water voles. Cute, endangered, rat-type animals.

Oh. A moments thought. Why?

I got that a lot. And there are few explanations that dont sound evangelical.

The other common response was, Oh, wow, thats great! It must be lovely being outside all day rather than stuck in an office. Id give anything to do that. Youre so lucky!

And I know I should have just agreed and moved on, but I could never manage it. Id settle for something like, Yeah, sure, but there are drawbacks. I mean, it does rain a lot.

And in return I got a look that said Im an ingrate.

But what I really wanted to say was, yes, of course youre right. Its wonderful. I get to spend all day with wildlife, doing what I always dreamed of. How amazing is that? But, look, it also means Ive dedicated my life to the service of Fieldwork. And Fieldwork is a goddess with a mean streak and a sense of humour. In lieu of blood sacrifices of which she receives plenty, thanks to her unparalleled potential for causing minor personal injury shell also happily accept a researcher, head bowed to clenched fists, muttering a prayer of Why am I doing this?

At some point in every fledgling ecologists career they discover the nature of the deal theyve struck by which time its far too late. In my case, Im only proud that it took her so long to nail me. But then Fieldwork has patience. And she starts gently. She lures you, first, with beauty and intrigue. She snagged me aged twenty, when I spent my summer as part of a team surveying river vegetation. This meant getting dressed up in a fetching yellow-and-black drysuit and wading down predetermined lengths of the river Swale, in the north-east of England. The upland sections were distant, bleak and beautiful. The river there was all peat-brown rapids, and rocks with clinging trails of river mosses and enclaves of liverworts. We needed guide books and microscopes to identify some of the tinier, more obscure plants. It was hard work. But then work also meant jumping into upland pools, eating lunch by waterfalls, finding the picked-clean remains of an otters dinner strewn across a flat boulder, or catching a cobalt flash as a kingfisher zipped by.

In the lowlands the river became deep, winding and serene. Here plants clustered in dense stands and were more easily identified. We ticked off species from a list on a clipboard as we went. And in the lower reaches we could float on our backs, buoyed by our inflatable chests. Borne through dark waters on a stately current, we gazed up at a towering canopy of trees. We drifted in peace. Right up until the rubber neck-seal on my drysuit ruptured, midstream. Air hissed out, and river poured in. My boots filled with water and I started to sink. Far from the bank and out of my depth, I did what anyone would: I panicked. I flailed, paddled, shouted, struggled, whimpered and scrambled my way to the shore. I crawled out, peeled off the drysuit and spent the remaining day in soaked-through clothes. Not fun, but one of those things. Good attempt, Fieldwork.

On the intrigue side, Fieldwork can be relied on to provide the spectacularly weird. Downstream from Richmond we once spotted a polystyrene takeaway tray on which somebody had placed for no adequately explicable reason some poo. They had adorned this with a small Union flag, fixed at a jaunty angle, and set the whole thing sailing off down the river. We watched it until it was gone from view. On a similar theme we discovered an encampment of total-immersion baptists on the river Wiske. The baptists spent their days in the river, dunking one another to wash away their sins. They were bemused when three drysuited researchers, laden with gear, clambered up the riverbank and lurched apologetically off through their camp. We were bemused by their choice of location. The Wiske is a short river with multiple sewage-treatment works. The water was nutritious. Really, it was just bursting with well-fertilized plants. Working there meant strict hygiene protocols, including rubber gloves, laboratory soap and cans of tapwater to wash with before eating or getting in the car all to minimize the chance of ingesting something disastrous. The baptists were nearly naked and fully submerged. If their aim was to get closer to God, they risked being a lot more successful than they had probably intended.

The winter after that project was spent sitting in a freezing bird hide, recording blue tits, great tits and coal tits as they chased one another off bird-feeders. (All while enterprising squirrels hung upside down from tree branches and chewed the feeders ropes, so they could ruin the experiment and get at the peanuts when the feeders hit the deck.) It was so cold that our electric heater cracked the window. Bitter, yes, repetitive, yes, annoying on the squirrel front, definitely. But still quite lovely. And a year later I participated, sleep-deprived and sunburnt, in dawn-to-dusk surveys of summer pollinator abundance. Thats what they call type-two fun, great in retrospect. And afterwards I spent months literally over my head in razor-sharp fenland vegetation, surveying plants at Wicken Fen. The problem with fenland grasses is they flatten to cover the ground ahead of you as you walk. Which is why I confidently strode on to something that turned out to be a six-foot-deep water-filled trench. My friend thought it was hilarious. I didnt. But it was just another soaking. The fenlands were beautiful, the weather was warm and I still loved Fieldwork. So when in June 1999 I was offered the opportunity for a doctoral study of water voles in Oxford, I barely even thought before saying yes. Id never caught a wild animal before, and was apprehensive about that. But I was confident I could cope. The voles would be a challenge, but I already had lots of field experience, right?