No, it's more a case that I would like to believe all that stuff, and find those who do, the stories they tell and the quests and investigations they undertake interesting and vaguely appealing. There's a certain romantic instinct - a sort of longing for mystery and strangeness in the world - that seems to be part of the mindset, and I think that's a very basic human attribute. A very high proportion of us are drawn in one way or another to the mysterious and the strange, and we find our own personal ways of bringing those elements of the world into our lives. The search for unexpected wildlife fits the bill in a lot of respects.
And although I dismissed the plausibility of some of the most famous cryptozoological icons right at the start, there are several other cases that I tend to think of as 'semi-cryptozoological' that appeal much more strongly to both my heart and my head. For example, there's the possibility of big cats living wild in the UK, eating our sheep.
Or, and here we get to the thing that really captures my imagination, and even moves me, there's the thylacine. Could there be, somewhere in Tasmania, or even mainland Australia or New Guinea, a surviving population of the largest modern marsupial carnivore? Living in the wildest places it can find, skirting the fringes of human awareness and imagination? I would be utterly delighted if that one day proved to be true, not least because it's humanity's fault that the poor old Tasmanian Tiger disappeared in the first place.
I think part of the reason the thylacine has a hold on my imagination, and that of many other people, is that we have film of what may well have been the last individual of the species. Call me a big softy if you like (my excuse is that I'm a wildlife fan by instinct and by education) but I find this clip really quite moving. Was this animal, at the time it was filmed, the very last of its kind on the whole planet, thanks to us:
Probably. But not necessarily, if you climb aboard the cryptozoology wagon. There have been heaps of alleged thylacine sightings, and even some films, including one from this very year that's now drawing to a close.
Not exactly conclusive, huh? Unless you were after proof that there are mangy-looking dogs and foxes running around the Antipodes, in which case - well, make your own judgement.
But this, out of all the cryptozoological tales, is the one I want to be true. I reckon it'd be wonderful if in one of those clips we were looking at an animal that had survived, hidden, despite humanity's best efforts - both intentional and otherwise - to rid the world of it. If I was a multi-millionaire with time on my hands, I wouldn't be remotely tempted to embark on expeditions in search of the yeti or the sasquatch; but the thylacine ... yes, I could spare a fraction of my vast wealth to mount a quest in the wilds of Tasmania. Guess I'm just a romantic at heart.
(Though if I did find something out there, whether or not I'd tell anyone, I'm not sure. If anything deserves a bit of privacy, a bit of human-free peace and quiet, it's the thylacine.)
A minor technological wonder. The RSPB, Britain's biggest nature conservation charity, put satellite tracking tags on a couple of Osprey chicks at their nest in northern Scotland this summer. Ever since then, everyone and anyone has been able to follow their movements on a website. Now the longer I've been watching this, the more fascinated I've become. It's not just that I love ospreys (who, other than jealous fishermen, could not think they're kind of cool?). It's also amazement at what the technology makes possible, and how two wild birds can be 'brought to life' for thousands of observers by giving them names, putting a tag on them, and mapping their heroic migration on Google Earth.
One of the chicks set off on a doomed, misguided solo flight into the mid-Atlantic. He flew non-stop for days and for hundreds upon hundreds of miles, lost. Hundreds of blog-readers were watching his daily progress, willing him to turn around and head for land. It didn't work, unfortunately: the exact spot he ran out of energy and fell into the wilderness of the ocean is marked on the map.
His sister has done better, crossing Europe, the Mediterranean and the Sahara to find winter quarters close to a town called Louga in Senegal, West Africa. You have to zoom in on the map and switch to the satellite view to get the best out of it, but if you do so you can more or less see the individual trees in which she is roosting, by the banks of that African river. You can imagine her, drifting over that arid landscape, in clear blue skies, diving down onto fish entirely unlike those she was fed on in her nest in the Scottish Highlands.
Sometimes, technology can be fodder for our imaginations and for our sense of wonder. This is one of those occasions, for me at least.
... breaking blog silence, briefly, for this update.
... writing!Fall of Thanes is making its way through the publication process (still seems to be on course for a summer 2009 release date - early summer, at that), so my attention turns elsewhere: to short stories, specifically. One of 2008's nicer surprises was being invited to contribute stories to a couple of upcoming anthologies. Nice, but a bit scary. Writing short stories is hard.
...reading!
Books: Infoquake by David Louis Edelman. First sf book I've read that's essentially a corporate boardroom thriller. Only about halfway through it, but so far it's interesting and feels at least somewhat original, which is (almost) always a good thing.
World War Z by Max Brooks. Subtitle is an 'Oral History of the Zombie War'. Seriously clever idea: the story of the zombie apocalypse, told as if it's non-fiction through transcripts of interviews with those who witnessed and survived the struggle.
Comics: Or graphic novels, I suppose, since I only ever read this stuff in collected trade paperback format nowadays.
Umbrella Academyis an sfnal superhero romp, with robots, apocalyptic music, time travel, sentient chimps and a hero whose head has been grafted onto the body of a space gorilla. Very well written (despite the fact its author is considerably better known as a musician), and with great art. It feels full of excitement at the freedom offered by the medium, and is positively wanton in its flinging about of crazy ideas and striking images.
Scalped is quite a contrast. A crime story set in a modern day Native American community, it's stuffed with brutal violence, spectacularly bad language, sex, drugs, local and cultural politics and messed up relationships. Very definitely not for kids (or easily offended adults). The characters, setting and tone are interesting enough to make me want to read more.
One thing about both these comics that appeals to me is that they keep their plot and character cards quite close to their chest. They both very deliberately create the sense that they have a hinterland, as yet unrevealed, of plot and history and setting, and there is an implied promise that we will be digging deeper, peeling back layers, in future volumes. I like that.
... listening!
To tales of financial armaggedon on the NPR Planet Money podcast. An accessible, often illuminating and occasionally even amusing, guide to the ongoing implosion of the world's financial system. It's like watching/listening to a slow motion car crash in which an endless succession of security vans laden with our money plough into one another and explode, incinerating their contents. Boom! There goes another billion. Smash! Yes, that's your pension turning to ash ...
... in awe of the ruthlessness and efficiency of Nature!
A sparrowhawk killed a pigeon in the back garden not so long ago, and spent close to an hour sitting on the grass right outside the window methodically dismantling its victim. The pigeon was plucked and devoured with awesome precision, and its remains were then carried off, leaving just a near-perfect circle of feathers, a few strands of gut and a bizareely neat and tidy little pile of corn, presumable decanted from its crop. The corn was soon gone, eaten by other birds - pigeons, as likely as not - picking it out from amongst the remains of their late colleague. That's recycling for you. No room for sentiment out there in Red-in-Tooth-and-Claw World.
A ritual of sorts has been enacted: the all but annual trip to the Isle of May (2007 version was recorded here). Good news for me, since it's one of my favourite places. Less predictable in its consequences for readers of this blog, as it leads inexorably and inevitably to ... my photos! Hooray.
That's the Isle in question, and very pretty it is too, but here's the real reason I actually take the hour long boat trip required to reach it:
The birds, obviously. But there's no denying the place itself is so extremely pleasant it might be worth even if there was nothing with wings within ten miles of it:
The last of the bird pictures, by the way, is an Arctic tern. These are heroes of the bird world, going from the Antarctic to the Arctic and back again every year (and no, Scotland is not quite in the Arctic - for all that it feels like it occasionally. I guess our Arctic terns are ever so slightly less motivated than most of their brethren). Watching them, if you take a moment to reflect that not so very long ago these very birds were surfing the breezes of the Antarctic Ocean, perhaps even dodging Antipodean icebergs, it blows your mind just a little. I think they're fantastic.
That sentiment is not, it has to be said, mutual. This year, the tern colony has taken a collective decision to locate itself right next to the landing stage. To reach the boat, therefore, you have to run the gauntlet of righteously agitated and protective parents. I am thus able to leave you with this world exclusive video. A brief (and I do mean brief, like 2 seconds brief, so pay attention) clip revealing, for the first time anywhere, the sound a fantasy author makes when the immensely well-travelled beak of an Arctic tern connects with his skull at high velocity:
So, today is Blog Action Day, meaning that in theory bloggers around the world are talking about environmental stuff. Here comes my token gesture in that direction: a bit of a ramble about writing, influences and wildlife.
Every writer's a stew of conscious and unconscious influences that shape what they write. They're like a host of semi-visible fingerprints that the author leaves all over the text, some of which only he or she can see, some of which he or she will probably be the last one to recognise. In its own small way, the natural environment is one of the very faint, smudged fingerprints I left on Winterbirth. My preoccupation with natural landscapes and wildlife just kind of crept into the book along the way. I imagine it's not something that most readers register, and nor should they since it's mostly just minor background details, although one or two have mentioned it in reviews or suchlike.
Behind all the in-focus stuff in Winterbirth to do with battles, conspiracies and general strife, there are buzzards circling above forests, bears snuffling around in the undergrowth, geese flying south for the winter. It's just the way my mind works: the sound and sight of vast flocks of geese overhead is as much a sign of impending winter to me as are the shortening days and the increasing prevalence of miserable weather (mind you, this year the weather actually improved once September got going, which tells you something about the damp squib that was summer). So you get geese flying down the Glas Valley as winter closes in, just as they're flying south over my house this month.
The natural world that features in Winterbirth and the rest of the trilogy isn't really drawn from the present day, though. It's based on a long lost Britain of hundreds or even thousands of years ago: it's a richer, wilder and more dangerous kind of Nature than what we've got now. There are still bears and wolves, both long gone in the real world; there are even - to judge by the names I gave the Kyrinin clans - wild boar, wild horses, and gigantic wild cattle, all of which were once British citizens but no longer. (Although to be strictly accurate there are wild boar lurking in some corners of the island again, much to the consternation of some observers.)
I can't really have the kind of wilderness experience that the Godless World would offer to a visitor here in the UK any more, but there's still plenty of stuff that gives me great pleasure and enriches my life, some of which has turned up on this blog. Since we're in Blog Action Day mode, it's worth remembering how fragile these things are. I posted some photos from the Isle of Maya few months ago - a place that possesses a kind of natural magic. But all the hundreds of thousands of seabirds that throng that island, and the rest of the Scottish coastline, are facing potential disasteras the food chain collapses under the influence of overfishing and warming seas. I also posted photos from the Isle of Mull, but unfortunately didn't have one of the golden eagle that we watched patiently quartering the slopes in search of prey. Every time that eagle swoops down on some carrion, it's running the risk of being poisoned. I posted a photo of a poplar hawk moth, a chance discovery in the Edinburgh grass. And ... you're probably detecting a pattern by now ... sure enough, Britain's moths are in trouble, too. Many of them seem to be spiralling towards rarity, or even extinction.
Sometimes I kind of regret that I can't share this island with the wolves and bears I populated the Godless World with, but there'd be no 'sometimes' about the regret I'd feel if we lost what we've managed to hang on to by way of wildlife. My life will be that tiny little bit poorer if one year there are no more puffins nesting on the Isle of May: it might sound silly, but it's true. And in this modern, crowded world, the only way we're going to hang on to it is if at least some of us are paying attention, and making an effort to keep it. All it takes to lose a species nowadays is indifference. So for that reason if for no other, seeing thousands of bloggers take the trouble to talk about environmental issues is kind of cool.
Go check out his 
That's the Isle in question, and very pretty it is too, but here's the real reason I actually take the hour long boat trip required to reach it:
