Recommended · Nature
The Return of the Oystercatcher
The oystercatcher has been doing something quietly remarkable along Britain's coastlines. A new book about it turns out to be about considerably more than birds.
The oystercatcher is not a modest bird. It is black and white in the way a tuxedo is black and white — deliberately, emphatically, as if making a point — with a bill the colour of a traffic cone and a cry that carries, on a clear morning, from one end of a beach to the other and into the dreams of anyone trying to lie in nearby. It has strong opinions about territory, about the proximity of dogs, and about human beings who walk too close to the shoreline between April and July. It is also, in the past three decades, quietly recovering. Numbers that fell through the second half of the twentieth century — casualties of overharvesting of the shellfish beds on which the bird depends, of coastal development and agricultural intensification pushing inland breeders off farmland margins — have been edging back. Not everywhere, not evenly, but perceptibly. The oystercatcher is returning, in the way that conservation progress tends to happen: gradually, then noticeably, then all at once if you happen to be standing on the right stretch of coast at the right state of the tide.
The book under review — whose precise title and author are noted with a caveat in the footer below — takes this return as its organising subject and transforms it into something considerably more ambitious than a single-species natural history. This is a book about place and time as much as ornithology: about the specific textures of British coast, the long and not always honourable relationship between the people who live beside the sea and the creatures who share it with them, and the tentative, qualified sense of repair that conservation success tends to produce in those who have been paying close attention to decline for long enough to remember what abundance looked like.
There is a particular quality of attention that a long-watched coastline demands — not the tourist's wide-eyed survey, but the local's slow accumulation of small changes, absences, and unexpected returns.
British nature writing has been in an unusually productive period for the past twenty years. Since Robert Macfarlane reinvigorated the genre with The Wild Places in 2007, a succession of writers — Patrick Barkham, Tim Dee, Amy Liptrot, Melissa Harrison, Helen Macdonald — have found ways to use close observation of non-human life as a means of saying things about human experience that would resist more direct statement. The best of these books work because they are genuinely rigorous about their subject (the birds or the insects or the weather are not merely metaphors; they are themselves, in all their biological particularity) while also being generous enough in their range of reference to become, almost inadvertently, books about grief, or memory, or the peculiar difficulty of living in a country that has been largely stripped of its wildlife and is only slowly beginning to notice.
This book operates in that tradition, and operates in it well. The oystercatcher is an almost ideal subject for this kind of treatment. It is conspicuous enough — that bill, that call — to have accumulated a long record in human observation, appearing in place names, in the notebooks of Victorian naturalists, in the field guides of the mid-century when bird watching was becoming a mass British leisure activity. It is also coastal enough to serve as an index of the health of a specific, pressured habitat: the intertidal zone, which is simultaneously among the most productive and the most threatened ecosystems in Britain, squeezed between rising seas and the development pressures of a population that has, for obvious reasons, always wanted to live beside the water.
The author's method is the slow walk, the repeated visit, the patient accumulation of detail over seasons and years. There are descriptions of particular estuaries and particular headlands that achieve that quality of particularity that distinguishes good nature writing from pastoral vagueness: you feel the specific shingle underfoot, smell the specific mud, hear the specific pitch of the alarm call that indicates you have wandered too close to a nest scrape in the marram grass. The prose is exact without being cold, and carries the understated emotional weight that comes from long acquaintance with a place and genuine investment in what happens there.
Around this close observation, the book assembles a set of wider arguments about the state of Britain's coastline. The story of oystercatcher decline is also a story about the industrialisation of the shellfish industry, about the political history of coastal access rights, about the slow degradation of the intertidal zone that went largely undocumented because most people were not looking closely enough to notice it happening. The recovery, when it comes, is partial and precarious: dependent on the continuation of conservation measures that are themselves dependent on political will and funding that cannot be assumed. This is not a triumphalist book. The return of the oystercatcher is real, but it is also a reminder of how much has not returned, and of how recently the departure happened.
What makes the book worth recommending — beyond its intrinsic pleasures as a piece of nature writing, which are considerable — is its refusal of false comfort. The oystercatcher is back on some beaches. The work is not finished. Both of these things are true, and the book holds them in the same frame without resolving the tension between them, which is exactly the right place to end up. The cry of the returning bird is not a triumph. It is, in the author's accounting, more like a question: whether the recovery is real, whether it will continue, and whether we will pay sufficient attention to know the difference.