Lapland: a Natural History

Where the waxing breeds

The boreal coniferous forest which wraps around the northern crown of our planet from Fennoscandia to the Pacific (and then across the whole of North America) comprises the largest single habitat on earth, and covers 13 million square kilometres. The European fraction of this huge taiga belt, along with a range of more open landscapes of peat bog, lake, fen, marsh and montane tundra, all fall within the geographical region that is known as Lapland, named after its indigenous inhabitants the Saami or Lapps. In winter it is a harsh, inhospitable and largely frozen blank, but in summer the weeks of perpetual sunlight give rise to an extraordinary efflorescence of natural life. While few people visit the region, here in Britain we can gain a tiny inkling of Lapland's character -- and also of its fathomless silences and the exhilarating purity of its atmosphere -- among our own blanket bogs in Sutherland and Caithness, whose popular name, "the Flow Country", was originally coined by the author of this book.

Before he died last spring, Derek Ratcliffe was one of the pioneer students of Britain's upland habitats. But in the 1980s, during his final years as Chief Scientist for the Nature Conservancy Council, he was forced to endure the worst environmental excesses of the Thatcher Government. These included the financially worthless and ecologically criminal scheme to afforest the Flow Country with blanket stands of exotic conifer, arguably the worst act of government vandalism in the last half-century. On his retirement, partly out of disillusionment at this mistreatment of our own northern landscapes, Ratcliffe assumed an annual pilgrimage to the larger, wilder spaces of Lapland. Together with his wife Jeannette, he maintained the routine for fourteen summers, the result of which is this beautiful and inspiring book.

As Ratcliffe makes clear in an opening chapter on early exploration, Lapland has long exercised fascination for European naturalists. As early as 1732, Carl Linnaeus spent four months travelling through the region and, after risking treacherous snowfields, rock fall, musket-toting Lapps and constant privation, he returned with the first significant botanical information. His journey inspired a succession of other enthusiasts but the place was very slow to yield its secrets. A bird like the waxwing, for instance, one of its most charismatic inhabitants, did not have its nest, eggs and breeding regime described until the 1850s. Even now the nesting behaviour of another regional specialist, the bar-tailed godwit, is largely unknown.

Ratcliffe's own studies in Lapland are full of comparable lacunae. Since all of his trips were in summer, he had little insight into the extraordinary survival strategies employed by its tiny selection of resident birds during the long months of deep snow. The scope of the book also reflects the personal bias in his interests. There is, for instance, very little on the forty-one mammal species occurring in the region and almost nothing on other phyla such as insects, fish and Lapland's handful of amphibians and reptiles.

Ratcliffe devoted most of his time to the study of birds and plants, and his observations of their distribution or behaviour form the core of the book, arranged in five central chapters, each on one of Lapland's primary habitats - forest, forest peatland, lake and river, coast and tundra. Even within this narrower field it is abundantly evident that what aroused his deepest passions was the quest for breeding waders. The region holds twenty-eight species and is of global importance for the birds, which crowd in their millions onto European shorelines after their brief and hectic season in the Arctic.

No doubt Ratcliffe's wader forays were inspired as much by the legendary challenge in tracking such secretive birds to their broods, as the sense of scientific mystery that surrounds their nest behaviour. One of the most elusive of all is the spotted redshank, which Ratcliffe singles out as the "spirit of the Lapland taiga". As one reads of the unshakeable faith and patience necessary to locate these nests in an infinity of featureless terrain, one cannot help sensing the wider symbolism inherent in the search. And at the heart of the quest is the gemlike rarity and beauty of the eggs. It is no coincidence that 10 per cent of the book's 230 beautiful photographs document the nests of these globe trotting species.

For all of its apparent scale and intimidating character, Ratcliffe suggests that Lapland is not invulnerable to human activity. In the Russian sector there are two gargantuan metal-smelting plants that are the fourth and fifth largest sources of sulphur pollutants in Europe, and which between them yield 700,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide and 50,000 tonnes of heavy metals. Less likely-sounding but possibly more pervasive in its impact is the potential damage inflicted by Lapland's oldest form of trans-humance -- the herding of reindeer. Ratcliffe records the apparent declines among the region's grouse and the recent failure of its most famous natural phenomenon -- its cyclical plagues of lemmings. Both of these populations, as well as many other aspects of Lapland ecology, may be suffering disruption from the recent rise in numbers of reindeer, which have increased in Norwegian Lapland alone from 50,000 (in 1950) to 180,000 (1999). Ratcliffe suggests that these over-sized herds may now be doing serious harm to the rich lichen flora that carpets much of the landscape and is a mainstay of the whole ecosystem.

Despite these potential threats, Ratcliffe still thought of Lapland as one of the best candidates to be Europe's last great wilderness. It is deeply revealing of the area's magical allure that, despite a recent medical diagnosis of his severe angina, Derek and Jeannette Ratcliffe were on their way "home" to Lapland when he suffered his fatal heart attack.

Mark Cocker is the co-author of Birds Britannica, published earlier this year.

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