Diary of a Young Naturalist

by Dara McAnulty

Dara McAnulty

Some people believe that roots grow from bricks and mortar, but ours spread like mycelium networks, connected to a well of life lived together, so that wherever we go we stay rooted.

Not only is our family bound together by blood, we are all autistic, all except Dad

living either inside my head or amongst the creeping, crawling, fluttering, wild things. They all make sense to me, people just don’t.

I couldn’t invite the rest of the world in, with its hustle and bustle, its noise, its confusion.

The loss of that song in autumn and winter was traumatic, but reading taught me that the blackbird would come back.

Dara, my name, means ‘oak’ in Irish,

my worst characteristic: impatience!

Big Dog Forest,

sitka

Dandelions and their allies in the daisy (or Asteraceae) family are often the first pollinating plants to flower in spring,

As nature is pushed to the fringes of our built-up world, it’s the small pockets of wild resistance that can help.

Sometimes, ideas and words feel trapped in my chest – even if they are heard and read, will anything change?

whooper swans – the only true wild swans.

Rathlin Island.

I love new places and hate new places all at once.

When I’m ambushed by the anxiety army, when it comes stomping back, I’ll be ready to fight, armed with the wild cries of Rathlin Island.

We flush out snipe and woodcock as we walk,

six miles long and one mile wide

pyramidal bugle,

A restful night’s sleep is not something I’m familiar with. I find it hard to process and phase out so much of our overwhelming world.

The colours on Rathlin are mostly natural and muted in this early spring light, tones that are tolerable to me. Bright colours cause a kind of pain, a physical assault of the senses.

Noise can be unb...

Natural sounds are easier to process, and that’s all w...

My thoughts flit in and out of time as

There’s a seal with a strange red protrusion in its body: a wound made by plastic, healed over but with whatever the object is still lodged in place. The sight fills me with a solar flare of anger. How can we treat wildlife like this?

even here, in such a wild place, nowhere escapes human intervention. There is loss everywhere. Loss of habitat, loss of species and ways of life.

There is no giggling, no pointing out beyond the waves. Subdued silence. In Irish this feeling is called uaigneas. It is a deep, deep feeling, a condition of being lonely.

The classrooms at school are claustrophobic. Through the stale air I’m bombarded with fidgets, sighs, shifts, rustles as loud as rumbles. The rooms are bright, so bright that the reds and yellows pierce my retinas. Fluorescents drowning natural light. I can’t see outside. I feel boxed in, a wild thing caged.

Thank goodness for the school ‘safe space’ – it’s a room reserved for kids on the spectrum, or others with needs for a quiet space. Some people think I’m isolated in there, but no. I’m safe. My brain can expand and spill out the burdens.

My brain becomes engulfed by colour and noise and remembering to be organised. Ticking things off brain-lists. Always trying to hold in the nervous anxiety. To keep myself together.

making eye contact with an empty wall far away is an important tool for me when I talk in public.

Music always makes me feel better,

I muse on how much we humans depend on each other for survival, and how wild species are at our mercy for survival.

Dandelions remind me of the way I close myself off from so much of the world, either because it’s too painful to see or feel, or because when I am open to people the ridicule comes. The bullying. The foul-mouthed insults directed at the intense joy I feel, directed at my excitement, at my passion. For years I kept it to myself, but now these words are leaking into the world.

I lift my face to the rain and let cloud particles fall on my tongue.

Edward Thomas, who fitted a lifetime of poetry into two years before being killed in the Trenches of the First World War, captures it perfectly:

Their song that lacks all words, all melody. All sweetness almost, was dearer to me Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words. This was the best of May – the small brown birds. Wisely reiterating endlessly What no man learnt in or out of school.

Enniskillen

The wood anemone grows a mere six-foot spread every one hundred years.

Róisín, her name, means ‘little rose’ in Irish.

conkers.

cashel

folklore and stories are so often inspired by the strange and the beautiful in the natural world, and all these stories bring nature, deeply, into our imagination.

a need for seasonal ‘firsts’ is strong in me. The first of everything is very special.

You know when you forget a place and remember it all at once?

A bluebell wood takes much longer than our time on earth to get to this carpet of bloom. It is precious and ancient and magical. And it arrives like clockwork, if left alone, casting a charm on so many open hearts. Here since the Ice Age, the bluebell takes five whole years to grow, from seed to bulb. A labour of slow and perfect growth.

I do love these stories. They enrich my life as a young naturalist. Science, yes, always science. But we need these lost connections, they feed our imagination, bring wild characters to life, and remind us that we’re not separate from nature but part of it.

In flight, amazingly, they can reach 55 mph by manically flapping four hundred times a minute.

I need to find the ability to move through the day, without grumpiness and self-entitlement. Find the joy in the unknown. Because maybe all of life is unknown and we are grappling in the dark, and at least I have the comforts that so many have not. I have family. I have warmth. I have so much love. It will be okay.