Downland Days with the cowboy naturalist in the year 1899

The final year of the 19th Century would be remembered for its heatwave in southern England. William Henry Hudson chose that year to focus his acute naturalist’s senses on Sussex. He described summer 1899 as ‘exceptionally hot,’ as he recalled the many hours he spent on the wide open spaces of the Downs, happy to be away from the murky streets of his inner London home.

From the summit of these hills on a clear day he could see as far as the Isle of Wight. He reminisced about his first impressions of those chalk cliffs when first arriving in England on a bright, early May morning in 1874, when he stepped off a ship at Southampton after a month at sea. He was 32 years old and had come from South America to the land of his ancestors, to seek his fortune as an ornithologist.

While Hudson was exploring the South Downs, Queen Victoria was mostly ensconced at Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. In 1899 she added her voice to the Society for the Protection of Birds’ plumage campaign, banning the military from the wearing of plumes. It was a timely intervention in the last years of her reign, as the plumage industry had never been so vast.

While Hudson did this fieldwork, his colleagues were busy in the capital. In early July 1899, Bird Society (as he called it) leader Etta Lemon was giving an address at the International Congress of Women in Westminster. ‘What an impoverished nature and earth future generations will inherit from us!” she declared passionately from the lectern. ‘God’s footstool, yes: but with all the shining golden threads picked out of its embroidery…’

At the same time Hudson was writing in his notebook about the embroidery of the Downs… ‘The air, especially in the evening of a hot spring day, is full of a fresh herby smell, to which many minute aromatic plants contribute… The turf is composed of small grasses and clovers mixed with a great variety of creeping herbs, some exceedingly small. In a space of one square foot of ground, a dozen or twenty or more species may be counted, and on turning up a piece of turf the innumerable fibrous interwoven roots have the appearance of cocoa-nut matting. It is indeed this thick layer of interlaced fibres that gives the turf its springiness, and makes it so delightful to walk upon. It is fragrant, too.’

He had a term for the very small animal life of this carpet ecosystem, woven over centuries of organic pastoralism like a Persian rug… the fairy fauna. He would lie among clouds of blue butterflies and watch to see where they went in the evening, finding them roosting on the grasses. On one June day he went into a kind of reverie. ‘I experienced the blissful sensation and feeling in its fullness. Then a day came that was a revelation. I all at once had a deeper sense and more intimate knowledge of what summer really is to all the children of life; for it chanced that on that effulgent day even the human animal, usually regarded as outside of nature, was there to participate in the heavenly bounty. That I felt the happiness myself was not quite enough, unhuman, or uncivilised, as I generally am, and wish to be. High up the larks were raining down their brightest , finest music…’

Hudson was by now nearly 60, and although often sickly, he could be inexhaustible in his ramblings among wild nature. He described on one occasion walking for 12 hours from 8 o’clock in the morning to Beachy Head, and back across the Seven Sisters. ‘Owing to so much up and down I think my sixteen mile walk was as good as twenty miles. On the way I saw wheatears – males in their beautiful summer dress, and I was sorry not to be able to spend an hour watching them in the hope of hearing their song notes. About their music there is a question, and it seems that no living ornithologist knows the song.’

Hudson was drawn to these hills in part to trace the former haunts of James Hurdis, a poet whose verse he had known in his youth, when the hungry young reader and nature enthusiast had found fragments of nature poetry on the bookshelves at home, and in second-hand stores on his occasional journeys into the rapidly expanding city Buenos Aires. Hurdis was by now fallen out of fashion and favour, but precious to Hudson nonetheless.

Hurdis knew a time when wheatears were so abundant on the Downs that there was a thriving industry around capturing them, for the dinner tables of those who could afford the delicacy. Thanks in large part to the local lobbying efforts of Hudson and the Bird Society, the East Sussex bird protection order had recently become law. Trappers were no longer permitted to catch wheatears before September. ‘Efforts will, I trust, be made by residents on the south coast, who are anxious to preserve our wild bird life, to enforce the law, he declared. ‘And I hope to be there to help them.’

When he first walked in the Downs Hudson had no notion of writing a book about them, assuming such work was already well covered. But he kept notes of his observations of Sussex in his field naturalist’s journal, till one day the notion of compiling it struck his mind. ‘It will be, I imagine, a small unimportant book,’ he later wrote, ‘not entertaining enough for those who read for pleasure only, nor sufficiently scientific and crammed with facts for readers who thirst after knowledge.’