I always wanted to do a book review of Ring of Bright Water because it was the work that inspired much of my life’s wonderment of animals. I carried the memories of the Maxwell’s descriptions of Scotland’s west coast when I escaped as a youth to the wilds of Shetland, the Outer Hebrides and as far as the Faroes, ending up for weeks aboard small ships on the rollicking storm-ridden Atlantic, counting whales and seabirds. My first otters were glimpsed foraging among the wracks of seaweed on the west coast as I would walk along the jagged windswept coastline near Scalloway, communing with wild ponies while marauding Hooded Crows and fighter jet Fulmars flew overhead.
‘I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and as yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it.’
― Gavin Maxwell, 1960. Ring of Bright Water.
The first time I read Ring of Bright Water must have been the 1980s. I can’t have been more than an early teenager, as evidenced by the faint impression of algebra indented in the book’s front cover, which I must have leant on during homework. It’s in tatters now, the glue of the binding falling away like dandruff from the spine.
Now, as it did then, it fills me with a sense of freedom and the deepest empathy for the wildlife, a yearning for nature. But the intervening thirty five years have also given me a new way to interpret Maxwell’s acutely discerning opus.
Among Maxwell’s colourful and prosaic descriptions of the life he built in the remote wilderness of Camusfeàrna, he ventures to describe the burgeoning of spring and the bounteous arrival of wildlife to his bay. Among these renditions, he stumbles across several statements so concise in their merits and familiarity to the subject of this blog (and my intended book Animal ImpactWhat is Animal Impact? Without wildlife, Earth would not be habitable for humans, because it's animals that stabilise ecosystems. It’s a fundamental law of nature that animals (and humans) exist because we are the most likely lifeforms to minimise environmental chaos. Animal impact, therefore, is a measure of how much all wildlife is collectively responsible for creating a habitable Earth. The More) as to make me almost laugh out loud. I will come back to these momentarily.
But first, I have on some occasions mentioned that to understand the role of nature and the rigours of ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More has taken me several years of unlearning. I’ve had to delve back into the wilderness, reconnect with nature and take a fresh look at the intensity by which animal life functions, to begin to make any sense of it. Moments of epiphany that have led me to explain why animals matter and are essential to a habitable life on Earth, are hidden in plain sight among Maxwell’s own words.
On the arrival of spring, he describes the appearance and orchestration of wild geese, Whooping Swans and Eider Duck, of the Sand Martins, Wheatears and Swallows from Africa, the terns from Antarctica and the cliff-nesting Black Guillemots, Herring and Common Gulls. This abundant and regular migration is only obvious to someone who has spent more than a few seasons frozen in winter solitude but it is more than mere coincidence that this happens at the onset of spring, when plant life bursts forth. For if it wasn’t for the abundance of wildlife, the vegetation would overwhelm the ecosystem’s fine balance and throw everything into disarray.
Maxwell wasn’t to know this, yet his curiosity and observation of nature was enough for him to spot the dissonance that occurs between an ancient, unyielding Atlantic coastline and the profligate activity of spring plants. He sums this up by saying:
‘To me there is always something a little stifling in this enveloping green stain, this redundant, almost Victorian drapery over bones that need no blanketing, and were it not for the astringent presence of the sea I should find all that verdure as enervating as an Oxford water-meadow in the depths of summer. Perhaps ‘depraved’ is the right word after all’.
In my opinion, this single statement is one of the most remarkable in the entire book. To know and realise that there is something awry with the way plants function(Of an ecosystem). A subset of ecosystem processes and structures, where the ecosystem does something that provides an ecosystem service of value to people. More in ecosystems reveals more to me about Maxwell’s genius than almost anyone I have ever read. And it sets, for me, a context for his love of wildlife – including his companion otters – and everything that unfolds in his book from thereon.
Migration is one of the most important things animals do to stabilise ecosystems. Plants can’t move. They can’t moderate their own waste energy but animals travel vast distances – and in vast numbers – to do this for all of us. It’s never been the number of species going extinct that should worry us most of all, but the disappearance of sheer numbers of animals, transferring, amplifying and concentrating nutrientsEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More around the planet: the insects missing from the car radiator after a long drive at night or, as Maxwell describes, the migration of eel fry or ‘elvers’ from the Sargassum Sea* to the Scottish west coast.
*the Sargassum Sea features in another of my blog posts. Perhaps the disappearance of vast abundance of eels there has also contributed to the ‘depraved’ abundance of seaweed that’s now threatening to deoxygenate the ecosystem.
Among the greatest migrations on Earth, eel populations have collapsed to less than 20% since the 1960s. Along with loss of seabirds, these declines have led to a 96% reduction in the transfer(of nutrients) the thing that sets animals apart from plants, is that they can move. Some of the biggest migrations on Earth every day, are the movement of insects like caterpillars, from the stem of a plant to a leaf and back, before turning into butterflies and transferring the energy elsewhere. Large-scale migration of grazing animals and migratory songbirds moves More of nutrients around the world [1]. Consider the amount of fertiliser these migrations represent, relocated from the Caribbean to the shores of the United Kingdom and beyond? The quantity of movement and biomassThe weight of living organisms. Biomass can be measured in relation to the amount of carbon, the dry weight (with all moisture removed) or living weight. In general it can be used to describe the volume of energy that is contained inside systems, as the size of animals relates to their metabolism and therefore, how much energy they contain and More of animals cannot be imagined by any human, least of all one that lives in today’s world, deprived of the experience that Maxwell observed in the 1950s:
‘Early in May comes the recurrent miracle of the elvers’ migration from the sea. There is something deeply awe-inspiring about the sight of any living creatures in incomputable numbers; it stirs, perhaps, some atavistic chord whose note belongs more properly to the distant days when we were a true part of the animal ecology’
The only other wildlife spectacle of such abundance that Maxwell could ever recall seeing, also happened at Camusfeàrna, when shoals of Herring fry as thick as ‘silver treacle’ were forced into the bay by predatory Mackerel. Looking further afield, Maxwell writes that he noticed porpoises preying on the Herring and then in the distance, a single a Killer Whale:
‘… his single terrible form controlling by its mere presence the billions of lives between himself and the shore’.
Maxwell knew the significance of wildlife, observed and described the connections between migration and plant energy abundance, ecosystem stability and the role that single predators could play in the functioning of food chains comprising billions of animals. This was all described in a narrative of natural history written before popular concepts of biodiversityWhat is the definition of biodiversity? When we ask, what is the definition of biodiversity? It depends on what we want to do with it. The term is widely and commonly misused, leading to significant misinterpretation of the importance of how animals function on Earth and why they matter a great deal, to human survival. Here I will try to More, rewilding or indeed, the majority of the science that underpins conservationist today.
This is what still gives me some hope, the realisation that despite the staggering complexity of ecosystem life, any ordinary person can by just looking at nature, form similar and quite accurate views about how nature works. Built within us all is the sense to empathise and understand nature because our intuition is a survival mechanism. Deep down, we all know what we need to do. We need animals to rebuild a habitable planet and as Maxwell puts it, we have since ‘suffered in [our] separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world’.
It seems to me, that the path to any enlightened view of our dependence on wildlife can be achieved by one’s immersion in it and that simplifying all the complications and confusions of everyday modern life is necessary before that can happen. The challenge for most these days is finding a time and place to escape and somewhere there is still a reasonable abundance of wildlife left, to lift us from our self-imposed urban weariness.
Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water remains one of the most enthralling and surprising books I’ve ever read and I am sure, if I was to read it again in another twenty years or so, I would find yet more significance in his words. It’s a timeless and wonderful testament to the beauty and power of nature.
The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy is published by Penguin Random House.
- Published: 26 April 2001
- ISBN: 9780141927206
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 464
- Doughty, Christopher & Roman, Joe & Faurby, Søren & Wolf, Adam & Haque, Alifa & Bakker, Elisabeth & Malhi, Yadvinder & Dunning, John & Svenning, Jens-Christian. (2015). Global nutrientA substance that contains the raw materials for life. At a chemical level, these are contained inside compounds that are absorbed into the body and essential energy-containing molecules are extracted, so that energy can be transformed into other chemical processes that use the energy for living. More transport in a world of giants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 113. 10.1073/pnas.1502549112.
