It’s a Time of Hush…

Way back in the day, a day in 1966, a chap called Geoff Stephens recorded the album Winchester Cathedral with a group of session musicians, The New Vaudeville Band. On that album was a song Stephens penned with Les Reed, which was covered a year later by Herman’s Hermits and ten years after that by The Carpenters.

It is the first couple of lines that swirl in and out of my mind as around the globe we close our borders, our doors and retreat to the inner sanctum of our families, where possible, and certainly to our thoughts. “There’s a kind of hush, All over the world tonight”.

As I listen to the quiet, my mind wanders and wonders at the fact that in a relatively short period of time, a time when we noisy, intrusive humans have been forced to take a back seat due to COVID-19, the animal world is reasserting itself.

A Malabar civet, critically endangered and not seen since 1990, has been spotted (forgive the pun) sauntering the streets of Kozhikode in the State of Kerala. (I was terribly impressed he was using the pedestrian walkway.) Dolphins cavorting and swans gliding in Italian waterways may not be wholly uncommon but residents have reported seeing more of them in the clearer canals. Manatees are meandering around in the chi-chi waters lapping the docks of the rich and infamous in Miami now that boat engines have been stilled. A puma has broken curfew in the centre of Santiago, Chile. Wild boar, arguably the least attractive of animals, have been seen in Barcelona, perhaps grunting for the right to self-determination, and ducks have waddled near the Comédie Française. And why shouldn’t they? Have not Parisians always flaunted their feathers? 

And for a little levity. Kashmiri goats have descended from Great Orme, the limestone headland on the north coast of Wales that lours over Llandudno, and have been feasting on leafy delicacies dotting the township’s squares. If you are wondering why there is a herd of goats from the sub-continent roaming a Welsh hillside, it is due to those tandem human traits of envy and avarice. Learning of a herd of goats imported from Kashmir to France in the 1800s, our hero Squire Christopher Tower of Brentwood, Essex wanted a piece of a possibly lucrative wool industry. The two goats he bought soon required a nursery, and so the herd was born. Their wool was turned into the finest cashmere shawl which won the favour of King George IV, who then also wanted goats. Jump forward a few decades and we come to the illustrious Major General Sir Savage Mostyn. He too coveted goats and, so the story goes, was given a couple by Queen Victoria from the royal herd at Windsor. He freed them in the grounds of his ancestral home, Gloddaeth Hall, near Llandudno. Whilst some obviously strayed, ever since a Kashmiri goat has been given the rank of lance-corporal and has served as the Mascot for the 3rd Battalion of the Royal Welsh Infantry, the Major General’s regiment. How’s that for a shaggy goat story?

But perhaps the most amazing story of animals reclaiming their lands came after the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Humans left, and suffered horribly. The animals stayed, and suffered horribly, according to an article recently published in ThoughtCo, by Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D. called “What We Know About the Chernobyl Animal Mutations” 

What scientists have found through collecting samples of dung and soil and watching animals through camera traps is that, with time, plants and animals have rebounded and reclaimed much of the region. They are of course still radioactive and often have smaller brains, but are breeding though producing fewer young, some of which are deformed. It is the mammals who appear to have adapted best – wolves, badgers, moose, elk, lynx and Przewalski’s horses to name a few. Birds and invertebrates have not faired so well.

The article makes for fascinating reading, but one of Dr Helmenstine’s most chilling sentences was, “Ironically, the damaging effects of radiation inside the zone may be less than the threat posed by humans outside of it.”

Her comments beg the question, when our present restrictions are lifted, will we humans return to our destructive ways? Drive the animals back to the brink of endangered species or worse, extinction. Thankfully, unlike Chernobyl, it appears we will not be contaminated by this current crisis for years. Hopefully will we not recontaminate each other in a rush to demand our spaces back and our reclamation will be gradual. But human mammals are already massing – some never even stopped. China is opening up and we are seeing photos of people gathering in the rush to normalcy, albeit wearing masks.

So perhaps we should listen very carefully, not get too close now, and we might see it isn’t a dream. 

It will be interesting to see if we have learnt anything from this time of hush.