On Friday, in a field near St. Endellion in Cornwall, I found myself mic’d up for a conversation with Margherita Taylor of the BBC’s rural magazine programme Countryfile.  Shortly afterwards the poet Chrissie Gittins and a dozen children arrived for a nature-and-naturewords safari.  Chrissie read from Adder, Bluebell, Lobster, her collection of 40 children’s poems, each celebrating a lost nature word that had been deleted from the Oxford Junior Dictionary.  Then children from St. Kew, St. Minver, Nanstallon, Padstow and Blisland primary schools wrote a poem together, based on their real, direct experiences of nature.

As I was heading to the North Cornwall Book Festival and Countryfile, in Foyles Bookshop in London Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris were launching their own sumptuous treatment of the same subject – The Lost Words.  In this review by author Katharine Norbury, it is described as “a book of spells rather than poems, exquisitely illustrated by Morris [in which] Macfarlane gently, firmly and meticulously restores the missing words.”  It is almost three years since the writer Mark Cocker and I launched the #naturewords campaign, and it feels like a small October Revolution.

​In a recent article, Macfarlane summarises some striking research in which a Cambridge-based team made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a common species of British wildlife. They also made a set of 100 cards showing a “common species” of Pokémon character. Children aged eight and over were substantially better, the researchers found, at identifying Pokémon “species” than “organisms such as oak trees or badgers”: around 80% accuracy for Pokémon, but less than 50% for real species.  

The research showed that young children have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures -real or imaginary - but are presently more inspired by “synthetic subjects” than by living creatures. In a break from the usual dispassion of the scientist, they ponder on the fact that “we love what we know … What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never seen a wren”?

Blogging here In August I responded – positively – to Guardian columnist George Monbiot’s call for poets to weave their word-magic to find a new vocabulary for conservation and the environment, we conservationists having been part of the problem with our alienating technocratic language.  Gittins, Macfarlane and Morris are deploying their artistry in an even more fundamental way, to restore #naturewords to the mouths, and the mind’s eyes, of children.

Jackie Morris’s paintings for The Lost Words will be on display at Compton Verney, Warwickshire from 21 Oct to 17 Dec (except Mondays) 11am – 5pm

Countryfile’s edition from Cornwall will be broadcast on 22 October, BBC1 at 18:15

The Lost Words was published by Hamish Hamilton on 5 October.
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Adder, Bluebell, Lobster is published by Otter-Barry Books

​In his short introduction to Okeanos, Chris Watson told a packed house, assembled in the cavern-like underground Gallery Ambika P3, at the University of Westminster, that the seas and oceans are the most sound-rich environment on the planet.  Six years of recording and assembling these sounds led to Okeanos, an eight-channel composition of songs, signals and vibrations  from the smallest crustaceans to the loudest and largest animals ever to have existed.

Watson may be best known as the recorder of wildlife sounds made famous in the Attenborough programmes or Tweet of the Day, but he first came to public attention in the seventies as a musician, part of the trio Cabaret Voltaire.

Okeanos is in essence an hour of underwater recordings made using hydrophones hung ten to twenty metres below the surface, at various places around the globe.  To rely entirely on natural sound to sustain a long piece is a compositional challenge.  Watson succeeds partly by exploiting the narrative logic of a journey from pole to pole, but mainly by careful recompilation of sound, from the large-scale and structural to the minute and detailed, to create a musical logic too.
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Beginning at eighty degrees south, and above the surface, we hear a colony of Adelie penguins.  We follow them into the sea, and into a sound-world of singing Weddell seals and vast movements of water.  These undersea waves and swells have a sound unlike those at the surface or on the shore.  Having nothing to resound against but other bodies of water, they create a deeply menacing pulse.  Against this the singing seals and myriad small sounds provide an orchestra of microscopic detail.

​The icy Antarctic waters merge into the Indian Ocean and coral reefs with thousands of tiny sounds from crustaceans and molluscs.  Across to the Caribbean and the virtuoso singing of humpback whales, before crossing to the Atlantic coast of western Scotland.  Here grey seal females provide a touching harem chorus.  Orcas off Norway’s Lofoten Islands join in with songs that sound like they were created digitally, unlike any that could be created for an airborne acoustic.  It is the sound-carrying qualities of sea water that are part of the attraction for Watson.  In the final leg of the journey, the sounds of bearded seals off Svalbard, were recorded up to twenty kilometres from their source, but are as clear and haunting as if they were with us in the gallery.
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If being a composer is all about choosing, matching and compiling sonic elements, then Chris Watson is a composer.  Arguably he has a greater orchestral scale and diversity at his disposal than any other composer, as well as an unrivalled knowledge of both the technicalities of obtaining these rare sounds and their zoological importance.  This attention to context is the key to making a work that is both beautiful and authentic, not to mention a revelation. 

The extraordinary mimcry of Australia’s lyrebird has inspired artist Zoë Palmer to create an extraordinary opera, or, as she describes it, an interactive musical adventure made especially for 0-2½ year-olds.  Musical Rumpus:  Lyrebird has toured venues in the East End of London, culminating on 4 and 5 December in the final performances at Rich Mix, Bethnal Green Road, as part of the Spitalfields Festival.

I asked Zoë why she chose the lyrebird to provide very young children with their first music theatre experience. Like many of us, Zoë first discovered the lyrebird through David Attenborough’s Life of Birds.  “Ever since I saw that clip on YouTube I knew I wanted to work the lyrebird into one of my shows.  I was inspired by the incredible mimicry, this bird that could imitate anything from other species to camera shutters.

“It was also very moving, because this particular bird was imitating chainsaws, too, creating a record of the destruction of its own habitat.”

So how did this become the inspiration for Musical Rumpus?  “I’ve been specialising in early years music, but I’ve also recently completed a Masters in Human Ecology, and I realised the lyrebird is some kind of metaphor for creative development.
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“It’s an abstract piece, but it is based around the idea of the bird doing what children do, borrowing material and creating their own language.  Eventually it comes together in a developing language of words and song.”

She also sees a deeper, primeval connection.  “Before words and music were natural sounds, which blossomed into beautiful loops and patterns and sang the world into being.”

The 50-minute work casts the children as a “roving chorus”, gathering sounds from three different environments: home, city and forest, and creating their own song.  Parents are invited to engage, too.  Some, Zoë says, are a bit frightened, uncomfortable with letting go and simply being, but most get wrapped up in a shared experience with their babies.

Neck of the Woods, for Turner-prizewinning artist Douglas Gordon is a retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood story.  It brings together an impressive group of talents: Gordon, the pianist Hélène Grimaud, actor Charlotte Rampling and the Mexican-born writer and film-maker Veronica Gonzalez Peña.

Gordon has worked with the piano before:  in The End of Civilisation, he set a piano on fire in the Cumbrian hills and filmed it burning.  Grimaud is a world-renowned pianist and only slightly less well-known as a wolf conservationist, having established a wolf conservation centre in New York State.   And Gordon is also fascinated by wolves, hence this Manchester International Festival commission.    

Gonzalez Peña’s script is, ostensibly, a version of the Red Riding Hood story: playing to a cultural fear of wolves and of evil -  not the depiction Grimaud would champion in her other life.  For many cultures the wolf is a positive, even heroic figure: contrast the reverence given by the American Indians with the loathing and fear imported from Europe by later Americans.  

Neck of the Woods, which opened last night at HOME in Manchester, is at one level a struggle between artistic licence and Grimaud’s conservation agenda:  how to make a balanced portrayal of a species in trouble when so much great art has been built around wolf myth and metaphor?

Hélène Grimaud personifies that struggle, while the other artists had no such dilemma.  A piece about the ecology of a keystone species that evokes powerful and contradictory feelings would be a tremendous creative challenge for someone, but Neck of the Woods turns out not to be that piece.

For Gordon and González Peña, it is firmly rooted in the tradition of myth-making, which, on balance, has not served the wolf well.   Rather than use art to illuminate and challenge perceptions, it seemed to me to take the easier route – to build on what centuries of ignorance have offered us many times before.  There is an ulterior agenda, for sure.  Gordon has stated that he wanted to show that “men are worse than wolves” thereby once again using wolves to set a benchmark for measuring others’ badness.

So Hélène Grimaud’s personal mission to right all the misperceptions about wolves, and their consequences for the species, has had to take second place. 

The best bit is at the very beginning.  Starting in complete darkness, we hear a recording of a man chopping down a tree.  The darkness forces us to listen intently to the man’s breathing and the cut of his axe.  Over what seemed like several minutes, his efforts grow more desperate, his chopping more irregular, and he seems on the point of giving up when the trunk starts to splinter, and it falls, leaves and branches creating a crashing crescendo, to finish with a subsonic thud that I felt in my chest.  Ninety minutes later this was how the piece ended, also in darkness.

In between, Rampling tells her story, blended with that of Little Red Riding Hood.  Waking from a nightmare about wolves, she takes us through the narrative a few sentences at a time.  She and Grimaud alternate a dozen or more times.  This is two one-woman shows, chopped up and performed in turn.  We hear Rachmaninov and some dark minor-key chords.  A few more lines of narrative and then, as interludes between fragments of text, mini-medleys of Bach-with-Schumann, Rachmaninov-with-Beethoven, Ravel, Chopin. 

Now and again the disembodied and chilling voice of Gordon hints at the real story.  Rampling has complete command of the pace of the narrative, and of her coldly traumatised persona.  Grimaud is, as always, in command of her material, and occasionally dazzles.  The Sacred Sounds Women’s Choir is effective in the dark, behind a black gauze curtain, with wordless vocalisations, and dimly-lit hand gestures in imitation of the wind-blown trees that haunt Rampling’s nightmares (and in which live wolves).

It is, in the end, a story about men (one man) and an evil worse than any wolf.  This is signalled often and early enough for there to be no shocking reveal.  The music is there to pace the narrative, to slow down what is always going to come.  The lighting and the occasional snow, and odd bits of ambient sound from Eno add a bit, but not much, to what is basically a showcase for two talented women and a story; just about the sum of its parts.

Neck of the Woods runs at HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, First Street, Manchester, as part of the Manchester international festival, until18 July.

Over the last year NATURAL LIGHT has featured Australian birds and the music they have inspired several times.  Glorious birdsong, the threat that it faces, the loss, “and the soulless noise that we’re left with when they’re all gone” are the inspiration for Australian composer Brett Dean’s Pastoral Symphony, which will be paired with Beethoven’s own homage to the countryside at the BBC Proms on 2 August.  

Dean is following in the footsteps of Tate and Sculthorpe, as well as living composers such as John Rodgers and David Lumsdaine, who are among several Australians who appear to have created a modern tradition of celebrating birdsong in their works.  With the dynamic young Aurora Orchestra, who specialise in playing from memory, expect a powerful sense of direct communication with the audience.  

A few days later it is the turn of the best-known musico-ornithologists, Olivier Messiaen.  Little over a year after Peter Hill premiered a newly discovered Messiaen bird-piece, La Fauvette Passerinette, Chris Dingle, Professor at Birmingham Conservatoire, repeats the feat with a new piece for orchestra.   Messiaen’s Un oiseau des arbres de Vie (oiseau Tui) - A bird from the tree of Life (Tui bird) - will receive its world premiere on 7 August.  It is an orchestral tour de force featuring a single species, the Tui of New Zealand.  Tui are known for their noisy, unusual call, that varies for each individual, combining bell-like notes with clicks, cackles, creaks and groans. Ravel’s Oiseaux Tristes – Sad Birds – is also on the programme.  Ravel is said to have been inspired by the “elegant melancholy Arabesque” of a blackbird singing in Fontainebleau forest.

Later this month Chris Dingle will describe how he brought the piece to life in a guest blog for NATURAL LIGHT.  He will also be speaking at a pre-concert event at the Royal College of Music, which will be broadcast on Radio 3 during the interval.  

The following evening two works remind us of spring.  Mahler’s bitterly beautiful Ninth Symphony is also full of birdsong and, in Alban Berg’s view, “expresses an extraordinary love of the earth, for Nature”. The National Youth Orchestra’s annual concert opens with the world premiere of Tansy Davies’s Re-greening, a celebration of spring written specially as a complement to Mahler’s Symphony.

Music and great nature broadcasting are two of the BBC’s biggest reasons to exist, and the Proms is the natural place to bring the two together, in a concert of music from the series Life Story, composed by Murray Gold.  Sir David Attenborough and members of the production team present footage from the series in a Sunday afternoon family concert on 30 August.

And finally, a late night Prom on 10 September is in collaboration with six of the BBC national radio stations and BBC Music.  The Radio 4 show Wireless Nights is brought to the concert hall, pairing music and spoken word inspired by the night. Jarvis Cocker presents an evening he describes as ‘a nocturnal investigation of the human condition’, with Maxime Tortelier conducting the BBC Philharmonic. The blurb says that badgers, stars, elves and lambs may or may not be involved.

You can read NATURAL LIGHT's feature series on the 2014 Proms here, and keep up with the nature featured in this year's festival in a forthcoming series of articles and reviews.

The East Neuk Festival (27 June – 5 July) has been going since 2004 and has always revelled in its location:  the beautiful Fife coast and its many harbour villages. Its weekend festival-within-a-festival Littoral is a celebration of our profound connections with nature, landscape and seascape. 

Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain has become a beacon of place-writing for two generations of writers.  On 27 June Poet Tom Pow leads a discussion on this extraordinary work.  Later in the day Pow returns for a conversation with Helen Macdonald, winner of this year’s prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, who will discuss her book H is for Hawk.


After talks from wildlife photographer Laurie Campbell and conservationist Sir John Lister Kaye a closing panel discussion led by writer James Robertson will ask: what is the relationship between a place and its observer?

The following day Lister-Kaye and writer Mark Cocker explore Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water and its impact on nature writers more than half a century after it was first published.  

Neck of the Woods is written by New York-based novelist and playwright Veronica Gonzalez Peña.  NATURAL LIGHT will review the opening night, July 10 and Neck of the Woods is on seven dates until 18 July.


For ticket details of all events click on the festival links or visit our What’s On page.

For 27 years Hay Festival has brought together writers from around the world to debate and share stories in the staggering beauty of the English and Welsh Borders. Hay celebrates great writing from poets and scientists, lyricists and comedians, novelists and environmentalists.  As usual, wildlife and environmental groups are closely associated this year.

Hay Fever is the young people’s festival within a festival, and welcomes nature enthusiasts Nicola Davies from the Really Wild Show, Piers Torday, Tom Moorhouse, Katie Scott and Virginia McKenna.  RSPB garden safaris and workshops are on every day, although many have sold out. Click the link for the full programme.

Hay on Earth is a programme for sustainability, and includes a day-long forum on Thursday 21 May exploring global sustainability issues.

Several other literary stars who have supported the campaign are taking part in the Hay programme including Nicola Davies, Melissa Harrison (At Hawthorn Time, 25 May), Tony Juniper, Helen MacDonald, Michael Morpurgo and children’s illustrator Jackie Morris.  Jackie’s beautiful book Queen of the Sky, about a peregrine and a girl who live on the west Wales coast, is featured on 31st.

On 24 May Canadian explorer John Hemming celebrates the Amazonian feats of three famous naturalist-explorers of 150 years ago:  Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates and Richard Spruce.  Closer to home, Britain’s shoreline is explored by Patrick Barkham (Coastlines, 28 May) in association with National Trust Wales.

Tough issues are tackled over two days on 28 and 29 May.  On the Thursday the Chief Veterinary Officer for Wales, Christianne Glossop, debates one of the most contentious issues in the countryside today:  badgers and bovine TB.  Later that day Bill Oddie will hopefully lighten the mood, although Bill is himself an outspoken champion of the badger’s cause, so who knows? The following day, economist Dieter Helm will argue that the environment is an economic asset and should be treated as such, and Tony Juniper (What Nature Does for Britain) will develop the idea of “natural capital.”  Prepare for some serious humour when Marcus Brigstocke tackles climate change later on 29th, before Jules Pretty addresses extinctions – in nature, and among human traditions and languages.

Click here for the full Hay programme, or visit our What’s On page for just the green bits.