Ian McMIllan: Why it's time for me to become Captain Taxonomy

These days when you go into your local bookshop there’s always a table packed with books about nature. There are books about rambling through the hills or strolling through the dales. There are books about quests for rare butterflies and attempts to climb mountains so high you can almost step onto the moon from them.

There are books about rediscovering places you once knew and books about finding places you’ve never been before.

I guess a lot of this writing has come about because of the current and very pressing climate emergency and a lot of it happens because in these complex post-lockdown times we have a nostalgia for a time when the world was simple and we could go bird-spotting with our grandad.

I like these books and they’re often well-written but what I have noticed is that without exception all these nature writers are very good at the names of things.

They know the name of that tree and the name of that bird. At one glance they can tell you what kind of mushroom that is and where you might find it and they can tell you the name of the mushroom next to it that, it turns out, is a completely different mushroom even though it looks more or less the same.

The difference between me and these writers is that I have absolutely no idea what the names of most trees or birds or plants are and, between you and me, I don’t give a hoot.

And I can’t identify the owl the hoot that I don’t give is coming from.

Sometimes in the morning my wife will glance at the bird table and say ‘Oh look, there’s a Great Tit’ and I’ll look at something beautiful flapping around a half coconut and I’ll the appreciate the wings and the head and the beak and the colour and the movement and somehow I’ll not feel diminishedby the fact that I don’t know its name, in the same way that I can appreciate a sunset without knowing orunderstanding the complex sciencebehind it.

But as I leaf through these nature books in the bookshop I start to think, as I often do, that I’m missing out on something.

Taxonomy, that’s what I’m missing out on.

I love the word ‘taxonomy’; I love the sound of it and the shape of it and themeaning of it. It means ‘the branch of science concerned with classification,especially oforganisms’and maybeI’m missingout on something just byliking the word without actuallypractising any taxonomy. In other words, will knowing the names of these things help me to appreciate them more?

I have to point out that I’m not a complete duffer in this area, mind you. I know what a robin looks like. I know what an oak tree is. So I can identify a robin in an oak tree but frankly that’s about as far as I go.

So maybe it’s time, as a kind of autumn resolution, to learn the names of things, to become a kind of CaptainTaxonomy, to relish the fact that that tree is a birch rather than ‘that tall one’ and that that bird is a jay rather than ‘that noisy bright one.’

This new-found articulacy willmake me a better reader and a better writer too, and that has to be a good thing.

I’ll become like the Natural World equivalent of those trainspotters I seeon Doncaster station, who know the names and numbers of every engineand every carriage. And that’s a GreatTit flying by!