On Sunday, poet Simon Armitage will be on BBC1's Countryfile, talking about the Stanza Stones, which the Ilkley Literature Festival commissioned as part of the London 2012 celebrations and which form a 47 mile trail from Armitage’s home town, Marsden, to Ilkley – home of the Festival.

Unlike the vast, rugged landscapes of upland Britain, which have inspired artists for centuries, wetlands may seem to have gone relatively unnoticed by poets, painters and composers.  Certainly, they have fallen victim to neglect and destruction since Roman times.  World Wetlands Day is held every year to raise awareness of their importance for wildlife, well-being and human survival. NATURAL LIGHT will mark World Wetlands Day on 2 February with musings and music.

The last week of the month sees the launch of a new festival celebrating our cultural links with nature.  In the programme are a number of high-profile artists and authors including writers Patrick Barkham and Mark Cocker, illustrator Sheila Tilmouth and audio-visual artist Kathy Hinde, whose work with the RSPB we featured here in September.  Patrick Barkham will team up with the National Trust's Matthew Oates to present the Festival Lecture exploring Spirit of Place.  NATURAL LIGHT editor Laurence Rose of the RSPB presents a lunchtime concert of nature-inspired music while RSPB colleague Matt Howard is among the poets presenting readings.  The Hawk and Owl Trust, Norfolk Castle Museum and Art Gallery and  Norfolk Wildlife Trust are contributing talks on subjects as diverse as birds of prey, landscape and nature painting and the future of nature itself.  Click on the Festival logo for more details.

Check our What's On page for more inspiring nature-themed events, or get in touch to add your event to the calendar.

My writing room looks out on a garden, and then across fields, to a rising Yorkshire hillside streaked with the remnants of a snowscape that has all but vanished overnight.  I am vaguely getting my eye in for the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch tomorrow, which has just been plugged by Radio 3.  At least 600,000 families are expected to join in, if recent years are anything to go by.

This annual celebration of the commonplace is one time when we reconnect with wildlife en masse. It is a positive that we can take out of the background trend of declining contact with nature; a note of hope that marks the end of a fortnight in which many of us have been reflecting on that sad and dangerous trend.

Positive News, the world’s first positive newspaper, can be relied upon to find inspiration in the loss of nature words from children’s vocabularies. Lucy Purdy, a London-based freelance journalist specialising in environmental and ethical issues, writes that “despite this, a new breed of writers and publications are using language, and new perspectives, to reinvigorate our relationship with the natural world.”

Lucy has written twice this week in response to our #naturewords campaign.  In New Internationalist Magazine, she surveys the current crop of nature-word champions like Dominick Tyler and Robert Macfarlane.  She concludes “At a time when systems and values crumble before us, using language to help craft a new story could be crucial. Words which stimulate and enrich. Our humiliated, hopeful humanness laid bare to the page.”

Dominick Tyler has himself been blogging about the Oxford Junior Dictionary.  Tyler’s  Landreader Project has been collecting words for landscape features, like jackstraw, zawn, clitter and logan, swash, cowbelly, hum and corrie, spinney, karst and tor.  Lucy Purdy describes it as a stirring synthesis of people and place. Already, more than 2,000 terms and words have been gathered, and in March Tyler will publish a book based on the project, titled Uncommon Ground.

In his latest blog, Tyler reflects on the list of words omitted from the OJD, which he considers as “a kind of prose-poetry supplement to be administered like a multivitamin as a defense against lexical malnutrition. Perhaps we can intone it to our children and, even better, seek out each of those things it names and show them.” 

Melissa Harrison writing in today’s Times explains why she put her name to a letter signed by 28 leading authors and thinkers: “to delist these words is to make the very things they represent begin to disappear because the process of putting words to things is how we begin a relationship with them.”

In Italy, English teacher and mother of twin girls Nadia Stevenson read about #naturewords with alarm, and wrote to author Rob Macfarlane, one of the twenty-eight who wrote to the Oxford University Press last week.  “I've been pondering all day as to what can be done. Although I'm just one small voice in the huge scheme of things, I have an immense love and esteem for the natural world of which we are part, as well as great hope for my daughters' futures.”

So two days ago Nadia set up a Facebook page Save Nature Words from Extinction.  On the page she writes:  “While we may choose to what extent technology is or isn't part of our lives, we cannot escape the fact that we ARE part of the natural world, it isn't an optional extra.” 

On Monday top authors, poets and naturalists were among 28 prominent people who wrote to Oxford University Press calling for some of the fifty nature words lost from their Junior Dictionary to be reinstated. The issue first arose in 2007, was not corrected with the 2012 edition, and is now a growing concern as we look for cultural leaders to help resolve a seemingly unstoppable problem - the rapid decline in children's formative experiences of nature.  The letter sets out the problem here, and now we have a response from the OUP.

In Margaret Atwood's home country Canada, coverage included articles in Huffington Post Canada and the CBCNews website.  

Alistair Fraser from Kootenay Lake, Canada, writes a nature blog Exploring Kootenay Lake.  In a thoughtful piece he writes “It seems to me that the Oxford Junior Dictionary is being blamed for recognizing a deeper problem: the decline in the relevance of the natural world to today’s children. Is this a problem of Oxford’s making? Hardly. Does Oxford make a convenient scapegoat? It would seem so.”

Fraser’s blog is beautifully illustrated with his own pictures of some of the wildlife removed from the dictionary, including otters, a (great blue) heron, a (belted) kingfisher and a beaver.  He concludes: “The solution (if indeed there is one) does not lie with shooting the messenger (Oxford University Press); it involves dealing with the problem: the increasing irrelevance of the natural world for urbanites and their children.”

Alistair Fraser emailed me to alert me to his blog and I have replied:  “To some extent I accept the charge of shooting the messenger and completely agree that the problem lies more deeply in society.

“However, making any kind of inroad into such a seemingly unstoppable process requires strong signals from those who have a leading role in cultural life.  The Oxford Dictionary brand occupies such a position throughout the English speaking world.  The OUP's edits, as you say in your blog, have all the appearance of being systematically anti-nature and pro-technology.  Whilst I am sure there was no overt agenda in this, it makes them part of the problem.  Correcting their error would be an even stronger signal in favour of natural childhood, and this is what we are calling on them to do.”

And finally, BBC Newsbeat asks "Are celebrities really more important than conkers?"  Given that 28 celebrities have just supported NATURAL LIGHT's campaign to save the conker, I'll take the fifth on that one.

Robert Macfarlane's forthcoming book Landmarks develops the theme.  Robert says "it was one of two chief motives for the book's existence - the other being the 'peat glossary' I was handed on the Isle of Lewis...a beautifully precise and evocative word-list of more than 120 Gaelic terms for aspects of the moor."  

Landmarks, published on March 6th, is a celebration of the language of landscape. “It opens with my dismay at the OJD deletions which I see as a symptom of the natural and the outdoor being displaced by the virtual and the indoor” he says.  “I’m worried that the basic literacy of nature is falling away. A should be for Acorn, not Attachment.”

Award-winning author and ecologist Mark Cocker agrees, and sees a threat to nature as well. "Without language we will eventually lose the land itself" he fears.

The Blue Rock Thrush of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux inhabits crevices of the cliffs overhanging the Mediterranean near Banyuls in the Roussillon. Messiaen paints a vivid picture of waves crashing below and swifts screaming above before the blue rock thrush is heard.  Its song is vaguely pentatonic but with a riot of ornamentation and flourish, leading pianist and Messiaen scholar Peter Hill to describe it as “a Balinese gamelan gone mad.” Later, a fast and brilliant section introduces the song of the Thekla lark.  Serene, beautiful chords link the main "bird" sections.  Despite the uncompromising complexity and dissonance in much of his music, these moments of calm are nonetheless classic Messiaen.

Messiaen’s introduction speaks of the bird’s song blending with the sound of the waves.  The pedal marking creates some extraordinary resonances with the accompanying bass chords. Throughout the piece these bass sonorities represent the echo given off by rock faces overlooking the blue sea.   

The blue rock thrush is a bird that can appear anything from powder blue to black depending on the light, and Messiaen undoubtedly saw in this the many moods of the sea, including terrifying waves and rough cliffs. The many depictions of birdsong are often quite sharply set against four “mood” sections which are announced in the score in characteristically vivid ways: ‘the resonance of rock faces', 'luminous, iridescent, blue halo' and so on. These exquisitely harmonious episodes, according to the composer, complement the satin texture and purple-blue, slate and blue-black shades of the blue rock thrush's plumage.  In this most joyous and visual of the Catalogue pieces, Messiaen connects birdsong, landscape and his own sensory perception in a complex but eminently shareable real-world experience.

"Drumming" is the peculiar sound that snipe make when they display in diving flights across their marshland territories.  Hearing my first drumming snipe, when I was about thirteen, is one of the clearest of the many abiding memories of my early days as a birdwatcher.  So much so, that when I was asked to speak at Earth Music, a series of concerts broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 in 2011, I chose to read from a collection of essays, one of which featured this formative experience.  Below is an extract, but first, hear for yourself what this drumming sounds like.

Sky (extracts)

“The air was very pure and the sky was a faded blue with shining white clouds arranged like flights of angels. Towards evening, when the sun began to set the clear turquoise of the sky was beyond all imagined beauty.”  Diary of Dr. Katherine Heanley, Sept. 27th 1914, Manea

In my father’s land the only landmark is the sky.  If there were but one sign to pilot by, it would be a small shape, a ship-shaped silhouette, cut from an edge of sky where it meets the horizon.  This Ship of the Fens, or The Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Ely, has been the south pole of a hemisphere of cloud, water and soot-black soil these past fifty generations.

Here it is the sky that governs the mood of the ground beneath, and calibrates your sense of scale.  You might stand under a bright cumulus-laden sky, and it feels as though you are watching yourself from a great distance, standing at the horizon, The Ship of the Fens at your shoulder.  Under a slate sky, in a spotlight, ringed by the flat horizon, you are at the anonymous centre of all things.

Into this sky I watched a strange bird rise, only to plummet back into the field with a sound like a balsa-wood plane. 

Out of this sky, into this same field, a German plane fell one day.  It was May 1941.  My father heard about it as he was riding home from school, and by the time he’d pedalled to Welney anything removable had been taken by the local boys.  Almost thirty years later, all traces were long gone; but across a dull, smeared sky this strange balsa-bird arc’d over us both.  We had gone into the field to find lapwing nests; not, as my father would have done at my age, to harvest eggs, but just to look.

Neither my father nor I knew straight away what this bird was.  I had never seen such a disproportionate beak before, and the sound it made was the strangest I had encountered in all nature.  The Observer’s Book suggested woodcock, or maybe snipe, but S. Vere Benson’s descriptions of the calls seemed to rule them both out.  In the evening, in my room at The Crown at Outwell, I leafed diligently through the little book.  The various sandpipers and shanks didn’t look quite right, and no sound ascribed to them came close to that flat airborne bleat. I checked the snipe again, more thoroughly. This bleating, it turned out, was no cry from within, but a play of wind on tail-feather, a reed-instrument that rose from the reeds to deliver its vibrations across far meadows and wide open sky.


                                                           ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On a winter visit, the quiet would drop like a mallard as the sky itself fell drear, the better to reveal lonely lights in distant houses I barely noticed before.  Wigeon, siffling and back-biting only minutes earlier would repose themselves; flights of lapwing chose their spot and settled.  In the osiers below the bank blackbirds clucked and then didn’t.  For a while, a brief fermata, nothing stirred.  Then the nocturne, a delicate chorus of small sounds would start to sound from across vast acres.  First might be a gentle, nasal skirl from the midst of a small flock of lapwing.  From afar, a drake wigeon might siffle or his mate yap. A distant dog, or door-jamb, or other commonplace unnoticed in the light of day, would lend its voice and shorten the span of any silence.

In spring, walking back to Manea under a brighter darkness I would hear none of the wigeon of winter; the lapwings’ squealings would as often as not come from above, in a night-flight illuminated by faint pearl-shimmer on damp grass.  And higher still, and farther off, a dive-bombing snipe on a night raid would leave its tail-flaps open, and bleat like a child playing front-gunner, to land unseen while its feather-cry hangs in the clean air.