The Red Notebook

Around this time of year, I like nothing better than to stand outside at dusk and admire the small local population of bats as they flitter around my head. It really is a wonderful and surprisingly moving experience.

When I say ‘small local population’, I really do mean small. I seldom see more than two or three bats at any one time—unlike my friend Stense, who counted over 60 bats leaving the roost in her attic recently. Stense also has ospreys nesting outside her window. I am consumed with jealousy.

Yesterday evening, I naively decided to try to photograph the local bats as they hunted for insects above my back garden. Well, naive is probably the wrong word as I knew that my efforts were doomed to failure; I was really just being ridiculously optimistic. So I set my camera’s ISO and aperture to maximum and fired away, capturing dozens of photos of empty skies and blurred trees. Bats are fast little buggers.

But I did manage to capture a few images of blurs remotely resembling bats:

A bat flittering above my back garden last night.

Yes, I know the photos are crap, but I rather like their ethereal, crepuscular nature—which pretty much sums up bats, as far as I’m concerned.

On the all-too-rare occasions that my frankly gorgeous friend Stense and I meet in person, we like nothing better than to go looking round second-hand bookshops. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to meet Stense this year, but she did phone me from a second-hand bookshop in Scotland a couple of weeks back:

“Have you got the book Goldsmith’s Animated Nature, volume two?” she asked.
“No, what’s it about?”
“It’s an old book about animals and stuff. It’s right up your street. Would you like it for a Christmas present?”
Stupid question.

And here it is:

Goldsmith’s Animated Nature, Vol. II

Good grief, I owe Stense big-style for this one. It’s a wonderful book, packed with semi-archaic descriptions of animals, which will provide me with many hours of amusement. The book’s full title is, rather magnificently:

A History of the Earth and Animated Nature

by Oliver Goldsmith

With an Introductory View of the Animal Kingdom by

Baron Cuvier;

Copious Notes of Discoveries in Natural History;

And a Life of the Author;

by Washington Irving

Vol. II

The author is the same Oliver Goldsmith who wrote The Vicar of Wakefield, She Stoops to Conquer and The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes. The book first appeared in eight volumes in 1774, and there were over 20 subsequent editions, some of which were magnificently illustrated (the illustrations appear to have been cut out of my copy by some print-selling vandal). The book became a popular source of information about the natural world.

Two items which immediately caught my eye: Goldsmith’s section on The Whale, and its Varieties appears in Part Fourth of the book—being the part about Fishes! And the section on the Dodo talks about the creature in the present tense—although a post script notes that the truly grotesque bird has now become extinct, and its former existence has been called into question by some writers.

Expect some snippets/extracts from Goldsmith’s Animated Nature in the next few months. In the meantime, thank you once again, Stense, for the wonderful present!

Stense in her natural environment