Being a born and bred southern man from South Otago, crying is not something that I do much (or was encouraged to do).
There are some things that make the eyes prickle, though. Movies can certainly do it. Aragorn telling the hobbits “My friends, you bow to no one” in The Return of the King is certainly is up there. The last “That’ll do pig” from Farmer Hoggett in Babe has always gotten me. The final soaring ending of The Last of the Mohicans as Hawkeye and Cora gaze out over the forest clad hills brings the shiny eyes. The speech from young Paikea about her grandfather in Whale Rider was emotional enough in 2002, now that I am a koro myself with a granddaughter, I can only imagine it would be even more devastating.
In reading books I am a lot more immune to tears. There are, however, a few passages in The Lord of the Rings that will make the eyes water. One of them is in my most favourite section in the trilogy.
Tucked in towards the end of The Two Towers is the chapter Journey to the Crossroads. The last section, just over a page long, tells how Frodo, Sam and Gollum finally arrive at the crossroads. They have been sneaking through the gloom of Ithilien for the whole day, in an absolute unnatural quiet, broken occasionally by distant thunder or drums. They are scared and dejected. They arrive at the crossroads where, once they pass them, they will be committed to walking past Minas Morgul and into Mordor.
An old statue and surrounding walls have been vandalised by orcs at some point and all is in disrepair. Everything is sombre and Frodo is filled with dread.
At that moment the sun drops below the ash-cloud cover and shines a light on the scene, picking out the fallen head of the statue and the pretty flowers encircling it like a crown.
“They cannot conquer for ever!” said Frodo. And then suddenly the brief glimpse was gone. The Sun dipped and vanished, and as if at the shuttering of a lamp, black night fell.”
Cue the lump in the throat. It’s the hope that gets you.
There is another reason why I like this chapter so much. The hobbits are travelling through Ithilien, a beautifully lightly wooded region next to the Mountains of Shadow. Mostly the malign influence of Sauron has been kept to a minimum. There are always signs that Orcs have been up to mischief and that the local environment is beginning to suffer from Orc impacts. As the trio move closer to Minas Morgul, a source of orcs, pollution of the local rivers, and general environmental callousness, we start to see greater impacts on nature.
And then the sun shines for that brief moment and the Hobbits see that there are still beautiful plants growing and flowering, even in these areas of high impacts. Nature can persist in the face of ongoing Orcanisation.
Over the last few years, much of my research has involved looking at the impacts of anthropogenic (human) impacts. These impacts are often through urbanisation – building suburbs everywhere -and on local species in the environment. Research has ranged from how blackbird behaviour changes from the town to the country, to how kea and black-fronted terns respond to farming-use changes in the environment.
While we have a focus on impacts on birds in New Zealand, bats are a group that are often looked at in other parts of the world. Bats move around the landscape and will almost always come into contact with anthropogenic impacts in their travels. Bats are often a good indicator species for any local problems caused by humans.
Much of the work on bats has been done in Europe and often around major cities, typically in low altitude flat areas. Lincoln University Master of International Nature Conservation student Quinn O’Halloran had the opportunity of collecting data on bats in the South Tyrol landscape of the northern Italian Alps. Quinn joined a long term data collection project in the EURAC Institute for Alpine Research.
After a summer spent surveying for bats (using bat detectors that can record their calls) Quinn was given access to six years of data from 320 sites, focussing on 32 urban settlement sites and spent her thesis time analysing this information. Quinn wanted to find out how bats responded to urbanisation of these alpine valleys where the human population has grown over a large area in the last few decades.
Quinn was interested in how variables impacted the activity and diversity of bats in these areas. She looked at the influence of factors like the amount of hard surfaces and woodlands, distance to woody patches and rivers, access to old buildings and so on.
In a paper published in Global Ecology and Conservation with her Lincoln supervisors Adrian Paterson and Jon Sullivan and European advisors Chiara Paniccia and Tanja Straka, Quinn showed that the alpine landscape seemed to change things.
Typically, urbanisation has a big impact on bat diversity and numbers. There are a few bats that do well with human changes but most don’t and so there is a clear signal that cities are not great for bats.
In the South Tyrol this was not the case. Quinn found that bat diversity and activity was much higher than expected, even with bats that typically don’t do as well in urbanised environments in other parts of Europe. It seemed that there was enough access to woody patches, water and green areas in these alpine environments for the bats to be less impacted than in other places.
It is likely because of the three dimensional landscape of the alpine environment. The South Tyrol has a landscape of deep glacial-cut valleys (flatfish bottoms and steep sides). People live and build in the valley bottoms but they don’t make it far up the sides (even to farm) as they are very steep.
For a flying bat this is not such a problem and so they have access to somewhat wild areas not too far way up the valley walls. This access is enough to counter some of the urban impacts that are problems for bats living in cities on open plains where there are few wild areas. Quinn was able to show that bats and human changes in the environment respond in different ways depending on the landscape.
So, much like Frodo and Sam at the crossroads, there is always hope. Urbanisation can seem like an overwhelming problem for our native diversity, and it often is. But we also need to remember that not everywhere is the same and that species are often more resilient than we think (or at least better at finding and using resources in the local environment than we expect).
Nature is robust, and, sure, it will accept help where we give it. But nature is not just a victim, it can also help itself as well. And that’s a hopeful message.
Now, if that doesn’t bring a tear to your eye then I don’t know what will.
When Adrian isn’t choking back the tears he is a lecturer at Lincoln University.
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