Leaps of Consciousness

A friend invited me to hear Jon Young’s Wild Roots evening talk at her farm near Bedford.

‘Jon studied with native American trackers and the San in Southern Africa. He co-founded the Wilderness Awareness School in the US in 1983, which connects children and their parents to reconnect with nature.’

Jon’s energy lit up the room. A slim man with brown, greyish hair, his eyes shone with passion.

‘A long time ago the lions ate a lot of us. When the San children (African Bushmen) heard a bird’s alarm call, they all turned towards it. Hyenas come at night looking for lone children. How did their parents teach them?’

‘All animals know where danger lies. ‘Birds know where snakes are. Kudu know where the lions are. The San took two or three days to kill a kudu but couldn’t defend it against a lion, so they needed to pay attention to where they were.

‘One warning call could mean a lion and death! The San learnt to keep a fire going at night. Kids were left by the fire. Our nervous system developed a nature connection to survive.’

‘When walking in a forest imagine how a cat and dog’s movements differ. A cat moves slowly, silently ‘with honey in its veins. It moved forwards a few steps, pauses, holds very still, scans the environment.’ A dog crashes through ‘abruptly, continuously, often looking at the ground … to smell its secrets.’

There are two zones: a zone of awareness and a zone of disturbance. Unwitting humans crash through the woods creating a bigger zone of disturbance than their awareness, so all wildlife scatters before they are aware of them. By treading lightly, their zone of disturbance is bigger than their zone of awareness so the animals do not flee and can be observed.’

Jon put his four decades of tracking, indigenous knowledge and his own experience into

‘What the Robin Knows’. Birds have many words and differentiate between predators. A study divided a wood into a grid with a person on a ‘sit spot’ at each cross. They noted everything they saw and heard. Every two minutes, they ruled a line under their notes and started again. At the end, the notes were combined and created a three dimensional map of the activity through time. The alarm calls could be traced to the sight of a hawk, and different birds responded in different ways: silence, carry-on singing, or feel of safety. This work revealed the tufted titmouse has 55 vocalisations that can identify:

‘Red-tailed hawk soaring.’

Perhaps Doctor Doolittle was not a fictional character after all.