Bats are divided into microbats and megabats, but it gets confusing as you get large microbats which are bigger than some of the smaller megabats. Greater horseshoes, which can live until they are thirty and are one of suprisingly few species of bats that actually hang upside down, are an unusually large microbat. People often expect and want categories to be clearly defined in nature, as if when weasels were invented they were all brought out on a large tray marked ‘Weasels’, which was very separate from another tray, which contained all the planet’s original stoats. But that’s not always the case. As the ecologist John Walters explained to me in an orchard just outside the village of Stoke Gabriel, the line between butterflies and moths, for example, is not a line at all, as it does not exist. Some moths are surprisingly cool with flitting about in the daytime; some butterflies are a bit reclusive and nocturnal. Some moths have a Laura Ashley beauty to their markings that they don’t get nearly enough credit for. Some butterflies – such as the numerous marble whites in the orchard with us – are a bit mothlike in their wing decor. You get the feeling Donald Trump could learn a lot about the complexities of genetic identity by spending a day in a never-fertilised, insect-heavy field such as this, but of course, as a massive closedbrain fuckshined pissface, he wouldn’t. He’d be too busy nuking it and turning it into a golf course.
I could have got flat on my stomach in the orchard, as I did in my parents’ garden in Nottinghamshire so often on summer days when I was six or seven, and watched the activity in that tiny never-fertilised jungle for hours, the communities-within-communities playing out their lives between the reeds of grass. I could then have gone home and identified everything I’d seen, but I’d still not have known a fraction of what there is to know. There are apps on phones for that kind of thing nowadays but they’re not always a guarantee of help. My friend Jenny, who had joined me in the orchard, had been walking along a path near Totnes a few weeks previously and stopped to let a furry orange caterpillar cross. A crowd of walkers soon gathered around the caterpillar, fascinated as to what kind it could be, since it looked quite exotic. Nobody knew the answer. An authoritative man in the crowd told everyone not to worry as he had just the thing, then photographed the caterpillar and fed the information into the appropriate part of his high-grade smartphone. There was a dramatic pause as the crowd waited anxiously for the voice on the phone to reveal the identity of the insect. ‘Orange caterpillar,’ said the phone, finally.
One of the most visually impressive finds when Jenny and I were with John in the orchard was a large emperor moth caterpillar, a beautiful plump specimen with a punk-rock back of soft yellow studs. After pupation John will sometimes release a female emperor moth on Dartmoor, up on one of the high points above Postbridge. ‘Within seconds I’ll see about a hundred randy male emperor moths flying over the ridge, having caught its scent on the wind,’ he told me. Since the previous autumn I had been following John on a few of his talks and expeditions, trying to soak up some of his vast entomological knowledge and sometimes carrying his butterfly net for him. At home John has a glass bee house, where his bees sometimes sleep on their backs. In March, at a talk in Dartington Village Hall attended by Hayley and me, he showed his audience photos to prove this, as well as his stunning watercolour illustrations of insects, snakes and birds, all of which he composes live, outside, in front of his subjects. ‘I can’t do it any other way; I’d have no way of capturing the movement,’ he told me. John also took the first ever photo of the extremely rare horrid ground-weaver spider and will tell you a great story about a fellow naturalist who once escaped unharmed after having an adder up his trouser leg on Dartmoor and reacted to the experience with Buddhist equanimity.
I remember that outside the village hall that night, as Hayley and I set off in the direction of home, there was a full moon, and Jupiter was clearly visible next to it. The planet burned so bright I began to worry if perhaps they had trouble up there with a fire. There was a pregnant feel to the air, as if spring was behind an invisible wall, scratching to be let out, and not far behind it was summer, yawning and rubbing its big eyes. But that summer, as a lot of people in this area knew, could signal an ominous change for the local ecosystem. A couple of hundred yards behind Dartington Village Hall is one of the most fertile small valleys for rare wildlife in the area, a refuge for dormice and another horseshoe colony. Beside it is the social housing of the Brimhay development, occupied by over-sixties and built by the same 1930s architecture firm which constructed many of the utopian buildings of the nearby Dartington Hall estate. These are slightly draughty structures, tired and in need of an update, but they were designed with community vision and kindness, and placed in a sociable green space, abutting the wild and precious valley. For many of their residents – such as Liz, a nature lover I met who’d not long recovered from a broken spine – the proximity of the valley has a huge bearing on quality of life. The council, however, had decided to
