BBC Wildlife

I won this trip to Norway as a result of being the BBC Wildlife Magazine Nature Writer of the Year in 2012. My original choice was to go mud-sliding in Costa Rica in order to find frogs, but because we have a son with Angelman Syndrome, we decided that this was too far to get back from if there was an emergency at home. Earthwatch offered me a few alternatives and my wife leaped at the idea of Norway as it is only just round the corner from us; isn't it? Actually, it takes two days to get to the whale-watch location from here, but only one day to come back.

Now we have the extra care in place for my son, it looks like we have "All Systems Go" for next month.

The story below is a version of the one I sent to the magazine.

MILLER'S THUMB 

If you were to visit a public aquarium, you probably would not spend long in front of a tank of bullheads. They aren’t handsome, colourful or large, and they don’t do much. They might be hiding under a rock if there was one, or they might just sit there on the bottom of a bare tank looking grumpy.  The truth is, you don’t find bullheads in captivity and I can see why.  Neither do you normally come across them in the wild; you have to actively seek them out. 

Before life got serious with girls, I hunted bullheads, loaches, crayfish and sticklebacks in any stream shallow enough to paddle in.  You could catch these pugnacious tiddlers with your bare hands in less than a foot of water.  If you worked upstream and gently turned over the rocks ahead of you, a bullhead would often dash out and then vanish under a nearby rock, or he might just stay still and rely on his camouflage for protection; if he did, he’d be yours. 

In the hand a bullhead is all head and belly like a big, wet tadpole,  but in a jam-jar at eye-level he’s a river monster.  An angry male looks like an heraldic dragon, painted black with all his details picked out in gold. I have watched such a fish in a jar for hours, waiting for him to calm down and revert to his normal blotchy sand and brown camouflage, but he didn’t. I reckoned he would stay mad at me as long as he was in the jar, or he would die, so I created a series of pools in the shallows and stocked them with black males and stripy females and watched them. They still didn’t change colour.  It seems that the males stay angry-black in spring, even though at other times they can change tint to match their surroundings.

A recent visit to Stotfold water-mill set me off on a trail of re-discovery.  Dust-laden sunbeams slanted across the room. and behind the commentary of the guide I could hear the heartbeat of cogs and the turning of the great mill-wheel below. 

“The miller knows when the sack is full when it reaches his thumbs, which he keeps tucked into the sack. Of course the longer the miller’s thumb; the less flour there is in each sack. Some millers had prodigiously long thumbs.”

I just heard the words “Miller’s thumb, miller’s thumb” over the bubbling water under the machinery and I wanted to paddle in that spring-time, spring-fed mill-stream and search for the little fish of my childhood called miller’s thumb, which I call bullhead and my American wife calls sculpin. 

Three weeks later I bumped into a lady who had lived in Stotfold since childhood. She remembered going to the mill for chicken feed and reaching high above her head to pull a long rope that rang a bell in order to catch the miller’s attention, three stories up.  And she remembered catching bullheads with her friends in the River Ivel just below the mill. 

On my local patch today, there is a flood relief channel called the Black Traps. Old friends remember learning to swim there when there was nothing but fields and cricket-bat willows lining the river.  Now the skyline is dominated by a Superstore, a new housing estate and a power station, but it still has an attraction for me and for a new generation of tiddler fishers. Below the weir the stream looks just like a classic mill-stream with a gravel bed showing between lines of waving weeds and emerging patches of water cress. There are no large stones to turn over so we fish our tiddler-nets upstream along the edges of weed-banks and we catch sticklebacks, minnows, loaches and bullheads that we observe in jam jars before releasing back to the wild. 

I’m standing barefoot in six inches of cold bubbling water that flows over loose yellow-brown gravel but all I can see in the stream is the rippled reflection of willows and sky.  For a child, this shining hour of undirected discovery in the twinkling, sunlit world of the stream will never be forgotten. For an old man, it’s about chasing half-memories out from under stones, hoping to see them re-played in the sunlight of an April morning. 

Catching tiddlers is like fishing through your memory.  Reflections distract you and the thing you are looking for dashes away from you or slips through your fingers, but you catch the unexpected and that’s always better than catching what you seek.