It is hazardous to stand in my garden. Thwack. Thud. Every five minutes, the tree above slings a conker to the ground as if by catapult.
Some open their spiny cases on impact. Others can be gently crushed to reveal their gleaming treasure: cool to touch, encased in cream memory foam, and decorated with whorls that resemble a chestnut map of the world.
Conkers are not an endangered species but they are disappearing from children’s vocabulary – controversially excised from the Oxford Junior Dictionary a few seasons ago. It’s an old chestnut that children no longer play conkers, but this autumn’s bumper crop has two new champions: the writer Robert Macfarlane and the artist Jackie Morris.
Their gorgeous new book, The Lost Words, celebrates 20 natural things, from adders to wrens, that have been culled from the dictionary. Macfarlane writes acrostic poems, which he hopes are spells to be read aloud, to conjure up each thing.
When Macfarlane and others first objected to the dictionary’s cull of the likes of kingfisher and newt, lexicographers gave a teacherly retort that it isn’t a dictionary’s job to be didactic (true) and these words are no longer common currency, among children, curriculums or literature (false).
My young children may not rap knuckles with their 25-ers (each conker’s number of victories was always an implausible boast in my primary school), but they relish the thrill of discovering what’s inside each case: sometimes unexpectedly small, sometimes twins, always shining. Like most beautiful pleasures, this is ephemeral: each conker quickly dulls, and collections are discarded.
Perhaps if lexicographers are clunked on the head by a falling conker they will realise that many simple wonders they’ve decided are no longer part of busy urban lives – magpies, otters – are actually thriving, even in cities, and are more numerous than they have been for decades.
I hope The Lost Words restores some of these natural treasures back where they belong: in our dictionaries, as well as hearts and minds.
Deathtrap for badgers
It’s impossible to escape another culled creature in this autumn’s news. Looking less handsome than usual is a bloodied, dead badger filmed in a cage-trap for the government’s beefed-up badger cull.
The footage suggests guidelines have been breached because badgers that have been trapped and shot should be promptly removed to a hazardous waste site. Natural England, the government agency responsible for licensing the cull, must investigate. Sadly, the cull’s industrialisation – to kill 33,500 badgers this autumn – means that monitoring is woeful. More badgers will be inhumanely killed than ever before.
Hail the OAP (old-age puffin)
For all the premature deaths we cause – I learn in Stephen Moss’s new biography of a robin that one in four robins is killed by a cat – some wild animals defy all averages. A fortysomething puffin has been found on the Shiant Isles, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, that was ringed as an adult in 1979. There’s a buzzard that has lived for 30 years in Snowdonia, a 21-year-old peregrine falcon in Cumbria, and a 23-year-old tawny owl in Aberdeenshire. Avians of an advanced age, I salute you, and give thanks to the British Trust for Ornithology’s bird-ringers who provide such inspirational glimpses of tenacity and survival.
• Patrick Barkham is a natural history writer for the Guardian
