Ernest in the wild: a Greenlandic kaffemik

To celebrate eight years of publishing Ernest, we ask contributors to share their memories of journeys undertaken for the journal, from seeking ancient burial mounds in the North York Moors to floating with jellyfish in the Salish Sea. Here, deputy editor Abigail Whyte reflects on being invited into the home of Qaqortoq’s oldest resident when she visited Greenland for issue four

Photos by Daniel Alford

In 2015, I travelled to southern Greenland, a place I never dreamt I would visit. I realised I was in a country on the cusp of change, with its retreating glaciers revealing tracts of land ripe for agriculture, and an Inuit population adjusting to a future where traditional hunting no longer plays a core role.

One Greenlandic tradition that continues to thrive is kaffemik, where friends, loved ones and strangers gather indoors during the long winter, usually to mark a celebration: a birthday, a baby’s first tooth, a boy’s first caught fish. In Qaqortoq, I was invited to kaffemik by Sophia, the town’s oldest resident, who laid out crowberry cake, angelica flavoured bread and her finest china on crisp, white table linen. As she poured me cup after cup of milky coffee, she explained the kaffemik conventions: that guests come and go throughout the day, that it’s considered impolite to stay too long, and how dried fish, reindeer and muskox are often served alongside the coffee and cake.

Sophia spoke with hope for the future – how the Greenlandic Inuit strive to remain true to their heritage while weathering the inevitable changes still to come. I often think back to that kaffemik, and feel proud that I was able to tell Sophia’s story and highlight the seismic changes being felt by a community on the frontline of climate change.

You can read more of these stories in the Collector’s Edition of issue one, available to order now.

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Ernest in the wild: Mashpi Cloud Forest, Ecuador

To celebrate eight years of publishing Ernest, we ask contributors to share their memories of journeys undertaken for the journal, from breaking bread at a Greenlandic kaffemik to floating with jellyfish in the Salish Sea. Here, editor Jo Tinsley reflects on the vibrance, interconnectedness and fragility of an Ecuadorian rainforest she visited for issue six

Photos by Graeme Owsianski

I peer down from the open-air cable car and watch transfixed as an iridescent, cobalt blue butterfly the size of a dinner plate flies languidly below, its alternate blue upper wings and brown underside making it look as though it’s appearing and disappearing.

In the canopy below, clouds condense on humungous leaves and trickle down through the foliage to nourish a host of peculiar plants. There are ‘walking palms’ with stilt-like roots, which some say allow the plant to move in search of light, twisting lianas that form vine bridges for arboreal animals, and strangler figs that lower roots to the ground while surreptitiously smothering their host. Once on the forest floor, we turn leaves to discover translucent glass frogs. A tiny hummingbird flies up to my binoculars and pauses mid-air, blurry in the frame. I’ve never been somewhere so rich with life.

Travelling and writing for Ernest has allowed me to explore many remarkable landscapes, but one stays with me above all others. Mashpi Rainforest Biodiversity Reserve – a 1,300-hectare (3,200-acre) private reserve and conservation project, three hours northwest of Quito, Ecuador – brims with life. More than any other place I’ve visited, I was struck by the interconnectedness of it all.

How one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet results from the mingling of marine currents many miles away – the cold, nutrient-rich Humboldt sweeping northward along the Peruvian coast meeting the warm El Niño and causing moist air from the Pacific to become trapped on the steep slopes of the western Andes. How half of the world’s plant species coexist here, each species nourishing, supporting or spongeing off another. And, in turn, how unique – and fragile – places like the cloud forest are, and how important is it to share their stories.

You can read more of these stories in the Collector’s Edition of issue one, available to order now.

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Ernest in the Wild: the North York Moors

To celebrate eight years of publishing Ernest, we ask contributors to share their memories of journeys undertaken for the journal, from breaking bread at a Greenlandic kaffemik to floating with jellyfish in the Salish Sea. Here, writer Joly Braime reminisces on seeking moody landscapes in the misty North York Moors with photographer Daniel Alford for issue six.

Images by Daniel Alford

“This is like the barrow-wights scene out of The Lord of the Rings,” said Daniel with delight as we picked our way through Bronze Age burial mounds rising dimly out of the thick hill fog.

My first job for Ernest was a piece called ‘Yorkshire’s Last Vikings’ in December 2016. Art director Tina wanted to base the artwork around moody shots of the North York Moors, so landscape photographer (and Ernie regular) Daniel Alford gamely boarded a six-hour train from Cardiff with instructions to look for a bespectacled man and a small black poodle on the platform at Scarborough.

As luck would have it, my other article for issue six of Ernest had involved brewing 40 pints of 7.5% Burton ale, so we cracked open a bottle or two that evening as we sat by the fire at my cottage poring over OS maps, my dog snoozing disloyally in Daniel’s lap.

Our dawn shoot at Danby Beacon was wispy and atmospheric, but we spent the rest of the day in a proper pea-souper of a moorland fog. We inched my old Volvo blindly along single-track roads then ditched it in a lay-by and struck out on foot to seek out abandoned buildings, ancient burial sites and exposed ridges where we hoped we might catch the mist swirling in the dales below.

Daniel was the first of several remarkable photographers, illustrators and designers who’ve brought my words to life. There’s such pleasure in watching talented people pick up your ideas and run with them, and the article that lands on my doormat is always more than the sum of its parts.

You can read more of these stories in the Collector’s Edition of issue one, available to order now.

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Concentrates of place

Inspired by a near-death trauma in her 30s, writer Tanya Shadrick has been curating tangible reminders of people and places that are important to her, which she archives in old tobacco and sweet tins

Photos by Tanya Shadrick

Tanya, tell us about your Concentrates of Place.

It’s a practice I began on the 10th anniversary of my near-death from an arterial hemorrhage. I pledged myself to a rest-of-life creative response to that experience, and all the work I’ve made since (as a hospice scribe, a self-proclaimed ‘writer of the outside’ and now as an author) has this purpose: to find and share multi-sensory ways by which we can celebrate our most vivid and intimate moments of being.

What do they mean to you?

They mean the world to me, literally. In what I call my first life – before the hemorrhage – I was a very nervous and self-limiting person, rarely leaving the country or even my adopted hometown on the Sussex Downs. Now, my writing life connects me to people and places far beyond my old comfort zone, and so each tin is a heady reminder of that expansion. And they are just delicious things to open up for the colours, textures and smells they hold: heather, moss, sand, slate…

Do you give any away as gifts?

Yes, only as personal gifts, not commissions. During lockdown it was lovely to walk to nearby Rodmell by the River Ouse – the last stomping ground of Virginia Woolf – and fill a tin with pieces of chalk and flint for a visual artist making an illustrated journey of Woolf’s regular walk to her sister Vanessa Bell’s home at Charleston Farmhouse. As an afterthought, I added a bit of loose bark from the tree that reaches over Woolf’s writing shed.

We’re so used to taking a quick snap on our phones to capture a moment or place – what do you feel is lacking in this?

Spending long periods bed-bound because of the lasting damage from the hemorrhage left me with a passion for bringing all my senses to how I enjoy and record experience. My Concentrates allow me to touch over and over again a walnut shell from a tree in Switzerland or put my fingers into sand from my childhood beach, and share those textures with others. I’ve got photos too, but the tins mean more to me. I use a smartphone of course, but mainly to make one-minute sound recordings – another practice that tries to move beyond our modern over-reliance on the eye.

Do you have a favourite Concentrate?

My mentor is the sculptor David Nash, whose work returns after each exhibition to the Welsh chapel that has been his home and studio for the last 50 years. A chance event brought him and I into orbit, just as I began my second life as a writer, and I now get to stay among his huge carved pieces most summers, which is such a deep pleasure and privilege. And so the tin filled with slate and heather from there is a particular treasure.

Have you always been a collector?

In my memoir The Cure For Sleep, I describe how early childhood loss created in me a tendency to “prize routine and everyday objects more than people. As if by loving a person in pieces, through pieces, to pieces, I could suspend time, stop sorrow.” After the near-death, I began to find a public form for this lifelong instinct to curate, celebrate and commemorate. Something that began with a private hurt has now become a way I share healing perspectives with others.

Add your own Concentrates of Place to the online archive using the hashtag #ConcentratesOfPlace on Twitter or Instagram. Tanya’s memoir The Cure For Sleep is out now, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Just look up

Deputy editor Abigail Whyte speaks to birder David Lindo, whose childhood memories of discovering the natural world among the dumped shopping trollies in his local river have inspired a passion for urban wildlife that he wants to instil in all city kids

Illustrations by Miranda Harris

Ten years ago, David Lindo wrote his first book The Urban Birder, described by naturalist Stephen Moss as something that should be read by anyone who has ever lived in, travelled through or visited a city for it carries a vital message: “If we don’t notice the wild creatures on our doorstep, how are we going to look after those further afield?”. With a new photographic book out this year, David Lindo spoke to me via Zoom from his home in Extremadura, Spain, to reflect on his career as the Urban Birder, the power of storytelling in conservation, and the importance of cherishing what’s on your doorstep.

“I grew up in London. I had a park just down the road from me – it had a river running through it, which was basically a canal with shopping trollies and scooters chucked in. The water had a film of oil on it. It was pretty crap. On the opposite bank was undeveloped land full of rubble and weeds. That was my countryside. I used to scramble across and make camps, and I saw my first skylarks there. As a kid I thought it was an area that would never change, but it had been earmarked to be built into a massive estate. When that happened, it was my first lesson in habitat destruction. The flock of tree sparrows I’d taken for granted every winter were suddenly gone.

I’m campaigning to make London and other cities less grey, and more green and blue. Of course we need housing, but why not build estates that incorporate a lake and woodland, so that kids grow up learning to love that space and not have the compulsion to dump their crap in it?

As the Urban Birder, my message is global. There’s a whole world out there to encourage and inspire to get into birding. I want to popularise and modernise it – to make birding interesting, sexy and accessible, like Jamie Oliver did for cooking. I also want to popularise the idea that the environment, nature, the planet – it all starts on your doorstep. When you’re sitting outside having a coffee, just look up and you’ll see something – something that has a backstory that spans the planet, not just the high street.

I think there is a problem with how nature is ‘sold’ in the first place. It’s sold as something that’s in the countryside. Eighteen per cent of the British population live in rural areas, whereas 82 per cent live in cities – this needs to be more catered for in nature programmes. Audiences need to be shown more urban wildlife so they can see that cities aren’t ring-fenced from the countryside, and that wildlife isn’t just something you see in a nature reserve. That myth of nature being ‘out there’ is something I’ve been trying to dispel for my whole career.

All respect to David Attenborough. He is the don and his programmes are amazing, but every time a new series comes out, the bar is raised even higher. It’s full of spectacle and action sequences. There’s no lesson from that. And the audience thinks, ‘That’s over there, that’s nothing to do with me. My life’s here.’ I think more can be done to show people the relevance of what’s on their doorstep; how the flowerpot on their window ledge in their council estate flat is connected to the rainforest or the Congo or the Antarctic.

I’ve noticed a resistance among ethnic minorities to admit to being interested in nature. I remember taking two school groups out to show them the grounds of the BBC in Bristol. The first group was from a suburban posh school; mainly white pupils. They came along and – bam – were really into it, searching for buds and other things. The other school, an inner city one with predominantly Asian and black pupils, when they turned up it was a very different atmosphere. They were reticent, quite stand-offish, but I could tell they wanted to be involved so I really worked at it. Eventually they came round. I find that reticence interesting – I think it’s down to the fact that they feel it’s not their world because of what they see around them. All they see is white people getting involved in the countryside. No one black or Asian is doing it, or very few, if any. That’s what the issue is, and that needs to be changed. I hope that by doing what I do, I’m inspiring other ethnically diverse people to think ‘I can do that too’.

I’ve only ever received racism from a birder once. There have been other subtle incidences though, for instance, I used to go out with a white woman who was a birder. We noticed that when we went out birding together, other birders would come up to us (usually white men with beards and bellies) and they’d just be about to ask that perennial question, ‘Is there anything about?’. But they’d look at her and think ‘She’s a woman, she’s not going to know’ and then they’d look at me and think ‘He’s a black guy, he’s not going to know either,’ and then they’d walk off. We’d find it quite funny.

If we can influence lots of people in urban areas and help them realise there’s something worth protecting, then we’d have more people that can help. I’d call that the conservation army – they may not necessarily be birders or anything like that, but they’d have a sympathy, an empathy, so if an issue comes up they’d be quick to put their hands in their pockets or sign a petition because they understand it’s important. And that understanding starts from a local level, when they realise their local park needs to have wild areas, or they think, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t astroturf my lawn – maybe I need to have wild areas so my kids can see butterflies.

My favourite habitat for birding is wetlands. Anywhere where there’s a source of water, that’s where you'll find lots of birds because that’s where they need to bathe, feed and drink.

I love using storytelling to engage people with birding. For instance, for a robin, I explain how it’s a woodland dweller that only started appearing in large gardens on the edges of cities at the end of the Industrial Revolution. As pollution eased, they ventured into urban gardens, which coincided with us becoming a nation of gardeners. The robins realised that by waiting around while we dig with our pitchforks, we’d be exposing invertebrates for them. In their eyes, we’re huge pigs or deer rotavating the soil. Basically, they’ve adapted their instincts and previous behaviour to a modern scenario. It’s those sorts of things that transform birding into a story, that make the layperson think ‘wow’ and look at birds differently. That’s the power of storytelling.”

David Lindo’s new photographic book Birds On My Mind is out now, £19.95; theurbanbirderworld.com

This interview features in our latest edition, issue 11, available to buy through our store page.