White’s discussion of the birds guided us to view the world through a different lens; no longer just the human lens, in which Selborne was a village 50 miles south-west of England’s capital city, with a baker and a lawyer and a church, but through a ­swallows-and-­martins lens, in which it was a set of nameless eaves and trees in which to build nests and hatch children and one stop in a year that had perhaps begun and would end again in a quiet lagoon in Madagascar.

The martins and swallows were but one example of the many life-forms co-­existing so unobtrusively alongside humans, and for which familiar objects and places had entirely different meanings (the sign advertising the village inn was a convenient resting place for a martin; one swallow had made a nest in a gentleman’s hat). White’s book, which rooted the observation of animals in a specific human context (the village of Selborne; the life of the curate) almost naturally encourages us to shuttle between the human and animal perspective; to consider for a moment how everything might seem to a swallow, to look at Selborne through the eyes of an ant – and hence to appreciate the narrowness of our previous view of reality.

When we are feeling out of sync with our era or society, there may be relief in coming upon reminders of the diversity of life on the planet, in holding in mind that alongside the main business of our species there are also swallows that build nests and quietly set off over the English Channel for Madagascar.
It’s often remarked that learning anything at school tends to kill the subject, be it literature or biology. Less explored is the reason for this. It may have to do with curiosity’s relationship to authority. In order to remain personally engaged with a subject, we have to feel, however naively and narcissistically, that we could at some level make a contribution to it. The best teachers give their pupils a sense that they too could, after mastering the basics, become pioneers. But because this hasn’t generally been true for the teachers themselves, they often imply the contrary message and so quash ambition.

If a love of science and the natural world is to take firm and wide roots, we should remember the underlying lesson of Gilbert White: that ignorance and a certain clumsiness are the necessary building blocks on which mature research and insights develop.