The beauty of plankton

By Oliver Morton

Like his murderous employee James Bond, the spymaster M is a creature of arbitrary prejudice. But while Bond is mundane and joyless in his racism and snobbery, M’s targets are enjoyably unexpected. Near the beginning of Ian Fleming’s sixth Bond book, “Dr No”, the spy takes silent delight in his boss’s ranting about the Audubon Society: “People start preserving something—churches, old houses, decaying pictures, birds—and there’s always a hullabaloo of some sort. The trouble is these sort of people get really worked up about their damned birds…”

M’s tirade against the Audubon Society was in part a piece of self-mockery. Fleming was a keen birdwatcher; he borrowed the name James Bond from the author of “Birds of the West Indies”, which sat by his writing desk in Jamaica. My sympathy for it, though, is genuine. My dislike of birdwatching probably dates back to the childhood trauma of being taken on “trips to the seaside” which were in fact spent sitting in hides, and a lack of any facility for the pastime makes it easier for me to be outraged at the fact that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds occupies such a large place in the British public’s affections. But I would also claim at least a hint of an intellectual justification. Birdwatching seems to embody a belief that nature is best appreciated through the observation—and cataloguing—of its component parts in all their variously plumed and differently warbling specificity.