Where did birds first learn to sing?

The crisis inflicted by Covid-19 has been a source of anguish for everyone; yet we frequently hear how people are rediscovering solace in nature, especially in their gardens or in the surging renewal of life in the spring. According to Tim Burt and Des Thompson, the editors of a collection of essays about the importance of field research, this fulfilment reveals something much more profound than a distraction from lockdown.They argue that a response to the natural world is hardwired in the human psyche. Out of that fundamental reflex has evolved not just our prowess as hunters, then agriculturalists, but the entire edifice of science, whose assembled vision of the physical universe was described by C.P. Snow as ‘the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man’.

Curious About Nature provides a glorious overview of how those scientific accomplishments were achieved. Here, in précis, is the whole history of fieldwork, from pioneering ancients such as Aristotle, Pliny and Ptolemy, via champions of the Enlightenment — Carl Linnaeus and Alexander von Humboldt — to such giants of modern environmentalism as Rachel Carson and Jane Goodall.

The central point is that the story of field science is as unending and ever-expanding as a vast, accreting coral reef. The editors have taken the broadest possible approach to the definition of research. Here are deep-sea expeditions to the mid-Atlantic Ridge, with expensive, hi-tech equipment to trawl 3km down and return with a staggering 61,000 fish specimens. But here also is the unknown artist who, 40,000 years ago, produced a magnificent series of cave paintings in Kimberley, Australia — images significant not only for supplying scientifically accurate data on a long-extinct species of marsupial lion, Thylacoleo carnifex, but also for offering insight into who consigned the poor creature to its fate. The wider point is that fieldwork is open to us all, including amateurs, whose ranks, incidentally, numbered both Humboldt and Charles Darwin.