There is a certain dominant mode in writing about natural systems that we can characterise as elegiac, broadly speaking being about loss. We (and here I’m invoking the Royal We of the First World ) inhabit what are grossly degraded habitats or biomes. Spend anytime in relatively undegraded ecosystems and you are perhaps ruined for life when it comes to appreciating what we are left with. Hence the elegiac mode. A lament for the ghost flocks, ghost herds, ghost predators and ghost raptors and perhaps most pernicious tragedy of all the ghost of all of our primate awe at the suchness, the thusness, the tathata of the Other. We live with the trace, the echo.

Now that’s a subject really worth an elegy; ‘if thou beest that; But O how fall’n! how chang’d’.