Instant Genius - Exploring the diversity of England’s distinctive habitats

Episode Date: October 6, 2024

For a relatively small country, England is home to an astonishing variety of habitats. From the low-lying grasses, gorse and heather that make up the heathland to the many rivers that make their way across our countryside and cities, each landscape has its own individual characteristics and charms. In this episode, we catch up with farmer and best-selling nature writer John Lewis-Stempel to talk about his new book England: A Major Natural History in 12 Habitats. He takes us on a tour of some of the country’s unique habitats, speaks about the flora and fauna we can enjoy there and tells us how the best way to interact with nature is to get your hands dirty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and expert talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor, BBC Science Focus. For a relatively small country, England is home to an astonishing variety of habitats. From the low-lying grasses, gorse and heather, to make up the heathland,

to the many rivers that make their way across our countryside and cities. Each landscape has its own individual characteristics and charms. In this episode, we catch up with farmer and best-selling nature writer John Lewis Stemple to talk about his new book, England, a major natural history in 12 habitats. He takes us on a tour of some of the country's unique habitats,

speaks about the flora and fauna we can enjoy there, and tells us how the best way to interpret write to nature is to get our hands dirty. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us. It's my pleasure, Jason. So today we're talking about your book, England, a major natural history in 12 habitats. Very interesting, very like lovely looking book, as all I must say. Well, I always hope that the beauty of the cover reflects the beauty of the writing inside. But what it certainly does do, I think that a lovely cover is actually acknowledged in some ways the beauty. of the English landscape, or probably more accurately, landscapes.

I mean, you know, England for a small country, what is it, 56,000 square miles, has an extraordinary variety of habitats, you know, from the Lake District, down to the broads, you know, moors, heath, of those kind of, you know, iconic meadows and bound up with hedges. So a tremendous variety of landscape. Those landscapes, I think, informed England's sense of itself. It does have a sort of, you know, recognition of beauty and countryside, something actually, in fact, worth fighting for. I mean, it's extraordinary, if you think, you know, soldiers in the First World War went off to fight for King and indeed countryside, so passionate was their commitment to countryside.

Edward Thomas, you know, the poet being the kind of case in point, you know, he was asked, why are you volunteering to fight? Because he didn't need to, but he was in his 30s. It picked up a handful of English earth and said, you know, literally for this. You know, what I've tried to do is recognise those habitats and celebrate them. And indeed, probably even sometimes exult them because I think we, you know, could be reminded of why they're important to us, but actually really more. Why are they important to nature itself and what we should be doing about them? Yeah, so as we said, the book's called A Major Natural History in Twelve Habitats. So how did you go about selecting the habitats?

Well, actually, that was all my selected for me. I've spent most of my life as a farmer in the west of England, a farmer very much committed to producing nature as well as food. I rarely, for years and years, actually kind of wandered outside my own personal habitat, which was the hill country of the west of England, the border of Wales. But there was a day when I was sitting in passport control on a rare holiday, at Dover, and I flick through this kind of odd wasteland pages in the back of the old passport. And there are all these kind of actual pages of English, well, British English habitats.

And I thought, well, actually, I kind of like to know them. My sticke as a nature writer has really always been trying to provide the view from the inside, someone who's immersed in something sort of looking at rather than just a sort of, you know, passive, casual observer looking in. So I looked at most of those habitats. And so basically, the habitats, my book, pretty much elected themselves from the back of the old passport, you know what are the people who considered our iconic habitats. So the book took me five years to write, but in a sense, it's sort of drawn on about, you know, sort of, you know, 40 years of experience. Because as I say, I never really wanted to be a tourist in any of the places. I really kind of wanted to get to

know them and to know indeed, you know, kind of individual birds and animals within those landscapes. So that, you know, and a kind of, well, unity with the places. Yeah, so let's have a look at a few of these habitats then. So let's start with heaths. It's such a lovely sounding word, isn't it? It's satisfying to say heaths. But what does it actually mean? Well, heathland is extraordinary, really, because it's one of those, and indeed most

the habitats in the book are something that's actually been created by Heaths. humans. I mean, like Heathland looks wild. You know, it's kind of knee-high, kind of shrubbery of heather, predominantly, but other kind of bushy shrubs, and it's swarthy, and it looks immense, and you get wide open vistas because it's kind of largely treeless, but it's not wild, really. It's actually a cultivated habitat. It's actually created essentially by, in the beginning, by Neolithic farmers, and then Bronze Age farmers, who arrived in England, saw all the trees in the wildwoods and actually started to raise those trees. Probably before the advent of farming, Heathland and Britain was probably restricted to kind of a few wind-blown acres of Cornwall.

Anyway, in raising the trees, actually kind of creating this new habitat, what the New Atlantic Farmers actually did, of course, was actually change, you know, all the kind of ecology of those areas, what fauna and flora actually lived there. Heathland used to be extremely extensive in Southern England because it loves kind of dry gravels and soils subject to periodic drought. And it was very extensive, which is actually indicated on all those kind of Heath names that we still have. So there's, you know, Heathfield. There's Bromley, which is actually from Broom. There's Farnham, which is from Fern. There's kind of Anglo-Saxon recordings in place names of how extensive that Keith used to be.

I mean, for instance, these days, we refer to Surrey as leafy Surrey, but probably go back 200 years, and it would have been best described as Heathie, Surrey, because probably 20% of Surrey in the 1800s was actually heathland. It's a habitat that's become incredibly restricted. Well, it's become restricted, because it was regarded as the agricultural revolution went on, as in fact being kind of wasteland, you know, suddenly it should be brought under the plough. So, you know, it's been pushed back and pushed back.

We've lost something like 80% of heathland since 1800s. I mean, it's actually rarer than rainforests, and England alone has 20% of the world's heathland. And it's a kind of marvelous place for nature and for kind of humans. you know, that's why Thomas Hardy, in his novels, especially which are in the native, were so admiring of Heathland and so enamored by it, because you have these kind of, you know, this swardi vista to use his kind of phrase. And all sorts of kind of magical things happen, and it's, in a sense, oddly un-English, because there aren't many trees, and in summer it can be incredibly sort of spicy and exotic.

and yeah, it's just, you know, after agriculture revolution, became very, very devalued. So it's largely restricted to, in any kind of immersive extent for what to go to really go there and they kind of appreciate it. It's largely restricted to Dorset these days. So, for instance, so Surrey, as I said, used to have like 20% of, sorry, used to be Heathland today, only 3%. But when those Neolithic farmers created Heathland,

because it was something that they browsed, with their cattle and their sheep, they also cut the heath, you know, a source of fuel. And when those kind of old-fashioned farming processes stopped, which very largely located within kind of peasant and small farmers' kind of farming practices, when those stopped, you know, if the heathland wasn't actually built over or brought under the plough, Eastland spontaneously, as it were, erupted into treeland again, because basically the inclination of the English landscape is that unless it's maintained, it will revert to the kind of wildwood it was before the arrival of farming. So what kind of wildlife can we expect to

encounter in a heath? That's a very good one because of course creating this new habitat, created an ecology and particular fauna and flora. Heathland, for those persons who get slightly nervous about snakes, it's fantastic for snakes, because it's essentially dry. That's what it is. It's dry. It's kind of free draining, which is exactly the sort of habitat that reptiles like for their winter quarters. So if you go to somewhere, which is the kind of featured area in my book,

the Isle of Poveck and Dorset, which is actually Thomas Hardest, Eggton, Heath. If you go there, it's one of those places, those rare places, where you can find all six of our native reptiles. And I think over the years that I've been there, for instance, in sort of spring and summer, rarely have I missed a close encounter with an adder. You know, the place actually sometimes almost fizzes with snakes, which is, you know, just extraordinary, really. The bird life is, in a sense, it's extraordinary, but in Heathland terms, it's ordinary. So there's a Dartford Warbler, a marvellous sort of songster with the bright pink chest. And Heathland, in a sense, as I say, it's become restricted and threatened. It can also be a success story because at one point in 1960s, it's a number of Dartford Warblers in England, which used to about six pairs.

there are now 3,000 because, you know, there has been some habitat restoration with Heathlands, that's kind of crucially important to remember. We get very doomy and gloomy about the state of nature. I mean, rightly so. Yeah, in England, Britain, but we also have to remember

there are success stories. But, I mean, you said, you know, and then it's a wood warbler. And then, you know, I'm a bit of a kind of birdy sort of person. So, you know, much of my life has been, you know, around just sort of watching birds, observing birds, providing habitat for birds. And one of the things I actually love about the heathland,

because it's kind of a wide open space. Yes, there are some judicious trees, but it's largely kind of tree. So you have a kind of sense of an auditorium, and it's fantastic on Heathland to watch night jars do their kind of mating ritual when they fly around, flapping their wings, so their wings actually clash at the back and make this, you know, flapping noise. And on the heathland, at Arne in Dorset, I mean, they're actually, you know, such a prodigious number of night jars doing incredible sounds that they make, which is a kind of cheering, purring sound. People in the old days used to call them sort of scissorrinders, because it's actually almost mechanical rather than bird life. But you can, in this kind of wide,

open auditorium of the heath, which is magical smells, which is sort of populi. Then you get this sound of night jars actually encircling one. And one of the things I wanted to do in the book was just to remind us of the extraordinary experiences that, you know, humans can have in nature. You know, nature is important to itself and we need to remember that we are aware, increasingly aware, I think, these days, of how nature is restorative of our own health. But, you know, obviously you have to remember the greatest duty is to restore nature itself. that said, you know, it is worth having and knowing experiences that humans can have in nature and habitats like Heathland, because then they will value that habitat more and do more to reserve it. Yeah, absolutely. So let's move on to rivers then. So in the book, you concentrate on the river Y.

So obviously, it's a source of freshwater, rivers attract all manner of wildlife. But the first thing you'll think of when you think of rivers is fish. And the why is known for its salmon. Yes, I was brought up on the banks of the why, and I would probably self-identify as a wise side boy. I mean, the terrible tragedy, of course, with the why, which is, you know, arguably England's preeminent salmon river is the dreadful state that the why has become. And with that the decline of salmon, an extraordinary creature in salmon. You know, we saw, sort of largely think of it as something, you know, sort of on the plate or in a tin. But, I mean, you know, it's life story, you know, it's kind of born in the case of the river wild, some,

you know, upper stream tributary and it, you know, eventually kind of grows. And it transforms from its very small fry-like state into, it actually changes colour as it goes downstream, you know, out to the sea. It actually becomes silver because it's kind of, you know, first birth colorings were great camouflage in gravel, but not so great in the sea. So it actually changes and becomes a silver color. So when it reaches the sea, it's not so easy to pick off by predators. Then it spends years in the sea sort of getting fatter and fatter by eating more and more fish. Then returns to the birthplace. It was led on by its nose because it can remember the sense of the place that was born, which is an extraordinary thing, isn't it? So it fights its way up

river to spawn and then, you know, most salmon in that kind of final act, the spawning actually die. So it's a whole kind of series of kind of metamorphoses. I mean, you know, salmon are extraordinary thing. Incredibly, in fact, you know, they are almost living fossils. I mean, you know, they're from a bunch of sort of fish family. They've been going around for, you know, swimming in our waters for 100 million years. In the book, these days, I mean, you know, the state of the the river Y and other major rivers is more often than not parlous due to pollution. And, you know, what's causing the pollution? And I, you know, I do something a bit, I think, probably slightly novel in the book by kind of tracing back through centuries, if not millennia,

what's kind of gone wrong? Because the point I wanted to make was actually, if you start looking at fish numbers in rivers before the Roman, arrived, okay? Basically, you could probably walk across stretches in the while on the backs of fishes. Because, you know, various things that humans have done, mills, industry, etc., etc. Absolutely. I mean, to give a rough figure, probably between the beginning of the Roman era in Britain in the 1600s, our rivers lost something like 80% of their fish. The reason that's important to state is that these days we talk about fish plenty, i.e. the marker from when it was good to what it is now as being in the sort of 1960s and 70s. My point being, by that time, really, we'd already lost

huge number of the fish in our rivers. So yeah, our rivers are really, you know, in the parlous state, you know, let's point fingers. There's the pollution from farming, and why in particular, it's a Phosphate runoff from intensive poultry units. I'm a farmer myself. So I'm going to, as it were, also point out that, you know, there's a lot of sewage from humans. And indeed, almost every human activity on the river will affect its ecology. I thought my particular bug bear is that it's actually right to point the finger

at intensive poultry units because it's phosphate runoff that's, you know, primary contributor to river pollution. But I would also say, you know, that there are other branches of farming, such as cereal and potato farming, where the phosphate runoff is considerable too. So, you know, if we're going to save the rivers, the odd thing is, I think we probably have to heal the land. We actually have to stop the runoff of the phosphates.

We actually have to develop a healthy, I would want, organic or at least nature-friendly farming in all the river catchment areas because, you know, good, healthy soil won't be leaking phosphates from whatever branch of agriculture, you know, you care to contemplate. But, you know, good, healthy soil is actually really good trapping rain. I mean, a good healthy soil is going to trap something like 100 millimeters of rain per day and stop the runoff, which, you know, natural England, I believe quite rightly, the runoff from soil and agriculture, as being the primary culprit in river pollution,

on the Y at least. So also the Y is home to Otters. So personally, I've never seen an otter in the world in England. So how common are they? Well, yes, that's the other thing. That's the other thing about the book, you know. We live in a time of kind of contributions because, as I say, it's really easy to be gloomy about the state of things.

But otters are actually a success story over the last 50 years, because I know, I think it's right, I think I'm right in saying, that otters now exist in all of England's counties. Certainly there has been a comeback, despite absolutely everything, Otters have had a comeback. I mean, you know, obviously, you know, reduction of otter hunting, for instance, has helped. And, you know, there have been phases when the state of our rivers has improved, along with the fish stocks. It is an extraordinary thing to meet an otter in real life. Nothing quite prepared me for the first time which actually happened to me.

we farmed on a branch of the riverwai in the hills and I was taking a dog for a walk along the stream well brook going on river I should say that bordered our land and I was standing there looking at the water of the dog and an otter came barreling down the stream and we were by a kind of slow pool it was essentially a mountain river where we were but there was a calm pool so the otter came barreling down to the kind of white water went into the pool and did it. all these amazing kind of acrobatics, which kind of reminded me why the Anglo-Saxons used to refer to the otter as being a snake-like creature, because the contortions the otter could do were extraordinary in the water.

And then he got out of the water to preen itself on the shingle, and it was only about, I don't know, a few feet away from the dog and I, who must be slightly hidden from its view because we had the trees behind us. So it proceeded to do its kind of toilet. And I was so close, I can see the water dripping up its wish. Then it finally sort of smelt or sores. I had the dog to Lee and I think probably the dog was giving off a kind of aura of wanting to intervene in an attack the otter, which is probably what finally alerted the otter.

But I was most amused that when the otter decided to make a hasty retreat, I must say did the hasty retreat with some plon, it wasn't a kind of frightened exit. It went a lot with dignity, whereas much dignity as much dignity, animal that was so gymnastic in the water could do on land, but it looks a bit like a kind of toffee, coloured dapsund, sort of glumphant along. But, yeah, I mean, you know, it's extraordinary sometimes, you know, to nature like that. But the only ways you meet nature like that, is I always say to everybody, is go outside and stay there. Because if you go outside and stay there, eventually, you know, things like that happen. There's a moment when you start to wonder, what's the right next step?

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for more information. So let's move from the river to the coast then. You chose Portreuth in Cornwall. So why is that so important to you? I was introduced to Portruth as a teenager, and I went down with a kind of group of friends, and it was a very sort of teenage time of parties on the beach and those sorts of things.

Anyway, one day we decided that two friends, I was two friends of myself, that we'd go to sea at night in a small fibreglass boat and do some fishing. We had probably taken too much Smyr-Mov vodka with us. Anyway, so we kind of end up on the kind of tar-black sea outside, you know, some five, six hundred, eight hundred metres outside, four-three. And it was an extraordinary experience because ganets,

I mean, gannets are actually really big birds close up. I mean, they're actually goose size. And they were kind of diving into the water. And then we realized that all these fish were shodding around us. So every time we dipped in our fishing wards, with our spinners. We were hooking these fish. I'd been told as we sort of settled from the shore that they were cornish sardines. Anyway, we talked to loads of them. We caught a good deal, enough certainly for a decent barbecue. And then I realized that in the water were these kind

of huge black, arced backs of extremely large creatures, i.e. sharks or whales or something. So we sped for the coast at very high speed, rowing like no one's ever rode before, to be honest. So we arrive on shore with our booty of Cornish sardines, at which which point someone told me the cornish sardines are actually pilchards,

which is kind of an interesting thing because we can get very prejudice about certain types of food and pilchers used to be something as far as I was concerned that came in tomato in a tin, but caught wild and fresh, yeah, a very different, very different kind of experience. But you know, there's this thing, isn't there? You know, how does one get close to nature?

How does one, you know, just... I hate the kind of idea we keep saying everything between humans and nature. It's broken. You know, everything is broken apparently these days. I think our connection with nature is certainly stretched. It's thin. It needs to be repaired. And the oddity for me is, I think one in the ways in which we can repair our connection with nature

is actually by in a sense participating ourselves in the food chain, because you will never be so close to nature as when you're picking it, plucking it, fishing it, entering into the food chain yourself, because then you really value it, you can touch it and you feel it, and you can see the way everything is actually interlinked. I think that's kind of quite important. So, you know, my nature books always have recipes,

which is not an affectation. it's a way of just trying to get people to connect to nature and make kind of practical way. You pick it, you pluck it, you eat it, and then you're actually in that kind of system yourself. Yeah, so I think a lot of wildlife enthusiasts visiting the coast will likely go rock pooling. So how do we go about that?

And what should we be keeping our eyes open for? Well, yes, I mean, actually, if you ever want to get a kind of child interested in nature, I think rock pooling is a very good start because I'm completely convinced that in the rock pools and the rock pools of England, if you, you know, dabble about with a net or even just with your hand, you're going to find creatures so strange that utreys, anything we're ever going to find in deep space. I mean, I always love the fact that the starfish, which looks so, you know, gorgeous, isn't it?

You know, a starfish just looking lovely, don't they? But then you realize, okay, that's very odd because they can lose an arm and then we grow it because in fact their arms are an extension of their head. And frankly, their eating habits are really, really recent. So what they do is they're actually hunters. So their favorite food is a muscle. They catch a muscle, prized open with their arms tentacles. And then to eat the muscle, the starfish extrudes its stomach through its mouth

to inject, you know, essentially a kind of chemical or dissolving solution. To dissolve the muscle. So then the starfish can suck it down. out, you know, the muscle, so it becomes kind of suctionable soup. I mean, some of the creatures when finds are the coast, you just think really, is that actually possible? But also, I mean, you know, cuttlefish. I mean, I'm just got a mind of obsession with cuttlefish. We most often encounter them as those kind of white sort of, you know, float bodies and one finds discarded by the sea, which is actually the cuttlefish is boronciate. I mean, it's a sort of, you know, it's a squid-like thing,

which is actually a snail-like thing, which is a slug-like thing, a cuttlefish. But then, you know, Cattlefish have one of the largest brains of any invertebrate and actually have essentially better episodic memories than humans, because their episodic memory does not diminish. So is that not interesting? I mean, is that not part of our problem with nature that we call ourselves homo sapiens sapiens, doubly wise humans? I mean, maybe a little kind of humility in the face of nature would not go awry if we were trying to repair our nature. because actually it is pretty staggering to find a creature in the kind of same family as slugs and snails has a better episodic memory than we do. So I don't know.

I mean, sometimes I just think, you know, if we look at nature and learn about nature, we can actually learn a little humility and maybe take ourselves off the kind of pedestal on which we put ourselves. Yeah, so let's look at coastal birds then. So I think that most people's minds will turn to the gods that Nick your chip. when you're on the seaside. But what else is out there? Well, actually, those girls... I'm going to go back to those goals.

Because actually, one of the things that I always think is, you know, as humans, we become a bit kind of obsessed, and we were kind of like charismatic mammals, like wolves and beavers. Do we not sometimes overlook the most wonderful things that are just actually under our noses? Because, I mean, basically, we tend to regard seagulls as a bit of a pest, because, as you say, I mean, they're forever nicking our chips. But, I mean, you know, sea goals like other goals and similar seabirds who like to wander a bit. I mean, it's fascinating.

The reason that they actually have dark backs, it's because a dark back on the goal actually helps reduce drag so they can fly easier and longer. which I think is actually kind of quite an interesting thing. It's something extraordinary that the colouring of a girl's back enables it due to kind of thermodynamics, aerodynamics, and enables it to fly further just because of its colouration. And I think that's kind of important that we recognise in very ordinary creatures. There are wonderful things just under our nose. I mean, I'm always saying to people, you know, the wood pigeon is basically when the communist bird you're ever going to find.

But in its way, it's a little miracle because a wood pigeon can actually produce when it's feeding it's young something akin to mammalian milk, which is actually kind of, you know, an interesting thing, an extraordinary thing. And it's just under our nose, you know, do we really need to go on safari? well, you know, to Africa, to see wonderful things. I mean, when the point of my books was to find the wonderful things under our nose, you know, I wanted in a sense, really, to be a traveller in small things, to find all those wonderful things, the small things, the common things under our noses are actually doing and actually are. So let's move on to parks then.

So what makes a particular area of greenery a park? Well, parks are actually a completely manufactured experience. Probably the park was introduced into England, would have been introduced into England by the Romans, who came with a set of ideas about what a park is, which is essentially a fenced area in which deer, or possibly some other animals for the hunt, are raised. A park really began,

life as a kind of, you know, living larder, a ranch for meat to feed people. But it was always kind of, there was always in the park idea, this kind of creatis impaled, is the word, you know, for the fencing, this separate world, this kind of, you know, fenced wonderland, what it was. It was always intended to be kind of fenced wonderland, separate from the world beyond it. and what actually happened in England is the park under the Normans, what did Normans ever do for us? They really gave us parkland because they arrived, they took over England in 1066 and all that, and the idea of a park, this fenced area. I mean, the park being between, you know, sort of 200 acres and the kind of a thousand acres,

and in which deer were sort of allowed to roam semi-wild, but also semi-domesticated. In fact, they'd be fed in winter. But what was allowed to happen was that deer, who had become a kind of pest in our century, they were, of course, back in that day, not only wonderful to eat, I eat venison, which is what the normans really wanted, first and foremost, but deer also are, ecosystem engineers. So what the deer did was prevent reforestation. They prevented large amounts of treeland sprouting up which created the lawns by the lawns, large grassy expanses in the park. So with the deer what happened in parkland was you had

these wide open grassy spaces with some protected trees, usually oak, to create the classic kind of parkland look. I mean, you know, you go somewhere like Richmond Park or any of the other parks that still exist. And it is a remarkable site parkland where it's sweeping grassy areas, and then these selected copses or perhaps even singular, single trees to create a particular kind of wonderland, almost wonderland experience, a kind of enchanting experience, a kind of Shangri-La, in fact, very creating, very manufactured experience in English Park. What the Normans actually did for us in creating Parkland, by the way, was actually enabled oaks to really thrive in this sense. Because the oaks in parkland

tended to be sort of sparse, singular or in small clumps, they were allowed to grow to their great maturity and majesty. Whereas oaks in wildwood forest become very cramped by their competitors, in parkland they are allowed to absolutely thrive. So as a result of the Normans and their parkland, England essentially has more mature vintage oaks than anywhere else in the world. Fascinating. So as a sort of final question, what's your advice? to someone listening who wants to get out and enjoy the English countryside, you know, what should they do? Anyone who wants to get out of the English countryside should actually, as I say, I'm always a really firm believer in foraging, even if it's almost in the kind of token level.

Go somewhere, pick a berry, learn about something there that's edible that you can eat. And then it's actually in the moment of, say, you know, when my, oddly, for a country boy, One of my favourite places in Britain is actually the Thames estuary. So here's why. I think it's rather marvellous as a human, sometimes to be alone with nature. And it is strange, but one of these places in Britain, in our crowded Britain, particularly in crowded England, where one can have a few moments alone with nature, is actually on the Thames estuary between my favourite places.

Ilst Tilbury and kind of Thurrock. And you can walk along in the estuary there and yes, you've got a very concrete graffiti spraying seawall and there's often lots of litter, but you're almost guaranteed to be alone with Avicet, for instance, sometimes, and all the creatures that swim in the estuary such as seawls. And yeah, I went along there recently and, you know, picked a berry of sea buckthorn. It's got incredibly tart taste. But the thing is, when you actually do that thing of actually touching something, that's the thing you see.

You can actually touch it. And in that moment of touching something, just even for a token moment of foraging, you actually key yourself into nature. Humans are very, very, very dependence on eyesight. When we talk about nature, it's always so much but observation, yeah. I want you to develop the other senses, yeah? I want to actually remind people, that actually touching something is actually important, just touching it.

And then, you know, it's a transformative experience. You're no longer outside nature in that moment you touch it. You're actually inside nature. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Farmer and Nature writer John Lewis Stemble. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his new book, England, a major natural history in 12 habitats. If you liked what you just heard,

then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or check us out on your app store of choice. You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music

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