 On April 3, 1949, my father, Dr Maurice
Burton, met the editor of The Daily Telegraph to discuss a
short weekly article on natural history. Four days later,
the first Nature Notes appeared on the back page of the
Saturday issue. On December 2, 1989, forty years and over
2,000 Saturdays later, my father, by then in his 92nd year,
reluctantly handed over the feature to me to follow in his
footsteps. It was my life-long ambition to succeed him and
use the column to express my own fascination with nature. I
had started young. When I was 12 years old, I had earned
a half-crown postal order for a letter to the
long-defunct Junior Daily Telegraph. With the demise
of Nature Notes in the
Daily Telegraph, I am continuing to publish my
fascination with nature on this website.
In 1949, nature study was still considered a rather eccentric subject for adults. It was not easy to admit to an interest in bird-watching, botany or bug-hunting. Even 20 years later, a friend saw me sitting on the bank of a stream and enquired what I was doing. Rather than admit to watching sticklebacks courting, I replied feebly that I was doing nothing. Nowadays I find that, more often than not, people will be interested to learn about the courtship of sticklebacks or that I have siskins feeding on my peanuts and newts breeding in my pond. They will tell me what they have seen in their gardens and probably ask me to explain their own observations. This is the basis of Nature Notes: a simple anecdote of natural history followed by its interpretation. It is not always easy. We are still ignorant of many details of the private lives of even common animals. But, as part of the new public interest in natural history that has developed over the last half century, there has been an upsurge in the scientific study of natural history. Ornithologists are now subjecting even the antics of birds in gardens to detailed scrutiny. This makes wildlife-watching so much more interesting. I enjoy watching a skylark as it ascends on winnowing wings, singing as it goes, until it is a speck in the sky. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley regarded the skylark as a symbol of freedom, and we earthbound mortals can certainly envy its freedom of the air, but it adds to my enjoyment to known that its blithe spirit is assisted by unusually well-developed flight-muscles. They confer on the skylark the ability to climb and hover, while pouring out the continuous song, and have the added value of enabling the skylark to escape birds-of-prey by out-climbing them. I read about this in a scientific journal and, for me, the dry objective account by the ornithologist is as exciting as the subjective rapture of the poet. And I can share it through a Nature Note (nowadays with a potentially World Wide readership!), so that the next time they walk through the fields and hear a skylark, they will benefit from knowing this little nugget of science that I dug out of academic obscurity. My involvement with Nature Notes did not finish with publication on Saturday (and now with hoisting on the Web). One of the delights was to receive letters prompted by my expositions and some readers became pen-friends. The topics raised might be ploughed back into another Note. They stimulate further investigation, either by enquiring among my scientific friends or by further observation. Scientific studies of our wildlife reveal fascinating details of the lives of animals but there is a drawback. After I had written about the antics of "Mad March Hares", my fellow Weekend columnist Robin Page complained that I was “demythologising" nature. The problem with science is that while giving a more accurate picture of the natural world, it can make it appear dull and prosaic. I do not think this was so when explaining the Madness of March Hares because the pleasure of watching the animals was not diminished in the least. For me, the attraction of science is that it reveals a world that is richer than I imagined. Before the scientists started their patient inquiries into the habits of common animals, the countryside was full of marvellous tales of magpies' weddings, badgers' funerals, rooks' parliaments, rats carrying eggs, hedgehogs milking cows and other wonders. I fancy that Robin Page's real complaint against scientists is that the fox is no longer the romantic, and mythical, Reynard. Understanding the behaviour of animals is a challenge. We cannot ask them why they do things. We can only infer from careful observations and check our hunches with systematic experiments. But a perennial problem for the student of behaviour is that animals are not automatons. They are individuals whose conduct is not always predictable. Readers enquire about strange behaviour that they have witnessed: a mole dustbathing, cats making friends with foxes, birds mourning dead mates. Even when I have discussed the matter with scientist friends, many of these letters are difficult to answer satisfactorily. With rare and unpredictable behaviour, this is well-nigh impossible. Great changes have taken place in the countryside since Nature Notes started. Countryside management has become more intensive. There has been loss of wildlife habitat as hedgerows, ponds and untilled corners have disappeared, woods have been felled, meadows ploughed up, and rivers and streams straightened. The chemical revolution has produced powerful weedkillers and insecticides that have affected wildlife directly. And perhaps worst of all, enormous areas have been swamped by urban development. The result is that we are finding that once abundant animals and plants have become scarce. Ironically, at the same time there has been a surge of interest in natural history and great efforts are now made to preserve both the countryside and its inhabitants. The latest news is that the RSPB is acquiring 700-hectares to recreate a fen. The aim of Nature Notes is to stimulate an interest in natural history. If people are not interested in animals and perhaps not even aware of them, the conservation message will fall on deaf ears.
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