A Risca Boy’s Birds by Jeremy Hughes I joined the RSPB’s Young Ornithologists’ Club, and dog-eared its magazine articles about this habitat and that habitat and the wonders of its reserves.

Descriptions of the repeated capture of wild-population animals and their subsequent illness and death caused by Maxwell's negligence and unpreparedness ran abundant. And yet he still promoted getting animals because they were cute or pretty. Just get another dog, dude. You've had the opportunity to meet many of Gavin Maxwell's friends and acquaintances; which of them do you feel gave you greatest insight into him? His writing is lyrical, on the nature-ish side. Here is his reason for writing Ring of Bright Water, taken from his foreward, written in October of 1959: Ah man, how to rate this book? I'd give the writing 5 stars easily, it's brilliant. But the protagonist? Yeesh, what a creep. This is basically Lolita but with Otters. I watched the movie Ring of Bright Water several years ago and was absolutely taken by the story. I am what one may call an extreme animal lover and am drawn to such accounts. Due to my upbringing, I'm also fascinated by individuals who choose to live outside of the hub of society. In Ring of Bright Water, Maxwell recounts the early years at "Camusfearna", an isolated house in a remote part of Scotland and his subsequent adventures and misadventures raising three otters.

The subsequent two books break down the façade a little and I think it's a shame that most people just read the first and accept it at face value. It does get a little depressing and self pitying though. It's also only really in the final book that he starts accepting some personal responsibility for events. Up until that point almost everything that goes wrong is due to someone else. I wanted to read this after having a go at Miriam Darlington’s Otter Country, which in many ways revolved around this book and the landscape described by Gavin Maxwell. He got much closer to the animals than Darlington, so perhaps it’s not surprising that his account is more interesting and vital. Otters were, not quite pets, but definitely companions for him, in a way that Darlington had no opportunity to understand.

A reviewer in the Sunday Herald described the book as having "inspired a generation of naturalists" and referred to it as a "classic account of man and wildlife". The review calls Ring of Bright Water "one of the most popular wildlife books ever written", as over two million copies had been sold worldwide by 1999. [8] Legacy [ edit ] What does stand out, though, much as it did in Maxwell’s memoir of childhood, The House of Elrig, is his attitude toward animals. What is clear now, but I don’t think was to the child me, is that Maxwell is focused on individuals. He loves Mijbil and Edal deeply and fully. But he’s not really concerned with animals more broadly – or, if he is, only in a somewhat selfish way. The very way he acquires the otters is fraught with risk – for them. Even he admits, in the end, that his very pursuit of exotic pets supports and instigates a cruel, brutal trade that causes many of them to die. It’s a fact that stands out to my adult view from the beginning. As a child, I was no wiser than he, and was simply mesmerized by the otters. Now, some of it is horrible.An artistic temperament... Douglas Botting, Gavin Maxwell’s biographer, opines that Maxwell was bipolar. But Maxwell also drank a lot – which might explain those expansive evenings. I’m not sure Maxwell was an alcoholic, but drink was in his life (as it was in many more people’s lives in those less puritanical, post-war years). Hangovers make you crotchety, drink makes you contradictory. Also, by the time (and probably before) the house at Sandaig burnt down and he moved to the island, Maxwell was dying. Though he didn’t know it, the cancer that was to kill him was already eating away at him. When you’re facing an early death (Maxwell was only 55 when he went, in September 1969) or you’re in a lot of pain, there’s a lot of anger to deal with. And status and fame put pressures on people, and he was an outsider, in a world that was very tightly-wrapped.

Perhaps when I'm dead I can do just that, in the great pub in the sky. (Though on reflection, I’d be inclined to stay to listen to whatever he might have to say by way of a response to my gesture. However, it’ll be eternally sunny up there, so I’ll be lying about catching up on my reading, endlessly, on the rabbit-cropped sward in the beer garden.) Maxwell's great friend Raef Payne observed that Maxwell would have liked you. What do you think he meant by that?Ring of Bright Water is more lyrical in its descriptions than I recall. In fact, there’s quite a lot of the book that’s simply describing the setting – the isolated house of Camusfearna and the nature around it. The otter I remember, Mijbil, doesn’t even enter the book until fairly late. And his successor, Edal enters in, though I’d thought she was only in the sequel. Maxwell takes such a delight in the landscape and the antics of the creatures within it, both the wild ones and those he tamed or half-tamed, that it’s impossible not to enjoy this, for me. He wasn’t ashamed of his love for the animals, and sometimes that just shines through so clearly.

In the post-Savile era, an air of unease hangs over aspects of Maxwell’s life; while in Sandaig he hired two adolescent assistants – Terry Nutkins (who went on to become a well-known TV naturalist) and Jimmy Watt – to help look after the otters. Both under-age, they moved into his home and he became Nutkins’ legal guardian. It was a set-up discomfiting to modern sensibilities, though no allegations have ever been made against Maxwell and those who knew him best believe his desire to be around young boys was merely a product of his stunted emotional development. There is a degree of public ambivalence towards Maxwell’s “conservation” work too. Looked at from a 21st century perspective, his attitude towards animals is distinctly dubious. As a member of the landed gentry, he learned to hunt at an early age; one of his many failed ventures was a fishery for basking sharks; and, far from encouraging the otters to live wild, he anthropomorphised them, giving them their own rooms and feeding them eels shipped in from London. This was one of my favorite books as a middle-grader - thereafter when my parents asked what I wanted for my birthday, it was always the same: an otter. (Nope. That never happened.) The book describes how Maxwell brought to England a smooth-coated otter, from the Marshes of Iraq (before Saddam Hussein drained them)

Now, X years later, I finally read the book that was the basis for the movie – and the two follow-ups that contributed to it, as well. And, X years later, I once again say “I enjoyed it. BUT, I didn't love it.” The book – books, as it is an abridgement of all 3 books in the “otter trilogy” – is focused on Mr. Maxwell's life and how the otters changed it, rather than on the otters themselves, although there certainly are enough anecdotes and stories of the otters themselves – yes, multiple, as Mij was only the first to come to live with Maxwell. Anyone who expects otherwise should be prepared. “Abridgement” is a dirty word to me – in this case, the editor states that they cut out everything in the 3 books that involved Maxwell but not the otters. While I certainly read the book for the otters more than an autobiography of Maxwell, I expect that some of the items trimmed would have lent additional clarity to some of the points that Maxwell was attempting to make about life while describing his interaction with the otters. Maxwell knew the significance of wildlife, observed and described the connections between migration and plant energy abundance, ecosystem stability and the role that single predators could play in the functioning of food chains comprising billions of animals. This was all described in a narrative of natural history written before popular concepts of biodiversity What is the definition of biodiversity? When we ask, what is the definition of biodiversity? It depends on what we want to do with it. The term is widely and commonly misused, leading to significant misinterpretation of the importance of how animals function on Earth and why they matter a great deal, to human survival. Here I will try to, rewilding or indeed, the majority of the science that underpins conservationist today.