Fear as a fact of life

TO run a garden as part-allotment, part wildlife sanctuary, is to negotiate constantly on the borders of alarm. Fully half the acre, now, is thicketed with trees and brambles: a whole suite of unmown glades in which nettles and nature rule okay. Its residents treat me as intruder, shrieking and scattering whenever I come by, which is not quite the Franciscan idyll I had in mind.

The birds hate the motor mower, but the clothes-line is in The Hollow, beside the stream, and a path has to be kept open. A. nesting chaffinch was in hysterics, bouncing backwards and forwards from branch to branch like a pingpong ball. Her constant chink-chink... chink-chink, cut through the mower's noise with a steely edge.

Just now, being so hopeful about the goldfinches and siskins attracted in to feed at the peanuts, I am trying harder than ever to become the Invisible Man, sidling past the hedge to the toolshed with lowered gaze and ponderous, bovine gait. Sometimes it works, but more often the finches are off in a flash and a twitter of alarm. It's a reflex, I tell myself, they don't mind doing it again and again.

There's no doubt birds are born ready kitted-out with fear: they don't have to learn it. Scientists have used a cut-out silhouette, flying it over newly-hatched goslings and ducklings. Moved across one was the silhouette resembles a hawk with a long tail moved the other, it's a goose with its neck stretched out. You will know which terrifies the nestlings.

Small birds have a special alarm call for hawks. It can be curiously difficult to locate quite ventriloquial enough, sometimes, to fool a human observer that another bird is present.

It's not in a bird's own interest, seeing a hawk, to make any noise at all. But some risk is worth it genetically, if it prevents the loss of a whole family. The ventriloquial call may have evolved through natural selection, and it now serves, in any situation, as a way of confusing a predator for a precious second or two.

Birds' fear of people is not necessarily innate, or you would not be able to walk right up to an albatross on its nest in Antarctica to take its picture - or even in the Arctic, lift a guillemot off its eggs. Where whole populations of birds have not met people, they show no fear.

That "tameness" can depend on a species long experience seems to be confirmed by the robin. The native robins of Ireland and Britain are trustful and garden-dwelling and will even wander into houses. Most robins on the Continent (where they are hunted and eaten) hide away in forests. The difference in behaviour shows up when European robins visit Britain in winter: they lie low in ditches and keep away from houses.

The regular shooting of small birds in France, Italy and Malta, or trapping on migration through Africa, seems to be enough to keep a learned nervousness of people alive even in songbird populations which have known very little persecution on their own breeding grounds. Birds of many different "cultures", native and immigrant, come together in Ireland's roaming winter flocks of finches, pipits, thrushes and larks.

We seem to be able to watch the exercise of fear and "avoidance behaviour" in birds without getting too concerned about it. The repetitive panic and flight of the finches at our peanuts is, we assume a reflex, acted upon and then forgotten.

Fear in mammals is regarded quite differently by people. Those who arouse or inflict it are cruel,, and fox hunting and hare coursing are condemned because neither animal volunteered to be chased, sometimes to the death.

But do they in fact, suffer equally. Two British biologists have been arguing a different less anthropomorphic, view. Chris Barnard, professor of animal behaviour at Nottingham University, and, Jane Hurst, a behavioural. ecologist there, suggest in the paper "Welfare By Design: The Natural Selection Of Welfare Criteria", that animals may not suffer when running away from predators - it depends what natural selection has adapted them to do.. The feeling, of fear may make them run, just as, hunger makes them eat, but they are good at running and may not mind doing it.

Thus rabbit may feel quite at home in the chase while the fox, adapted, as a predator, may suffer from being forced to perform outside its evolutionary design criteria if the tables are turned. Neither, presumably, feels very good about being caught and torn apart by dogs.

Last week, a two-year scientific study commissioned by the National Trust in Britain reported that the red deer of Exmoor and the New Forest do, in fact, suffer "extreme stress" while being hunted with hounds, and that the sport is cruel. But stag hunts and bare coursing enthusiasts may still want to use the Barnard research (carried out with laboratory mice and rats) to back the belief that some animals are "made" to be hunted.

It's an opinion with a long tradition. "As I look upon a hare," wrote Arthur Stringer, the famous naturalist-huntsman of Lough Neagh, in 1714, "so I am satisfied that nature hath taught her the most innocent way of self-preservation . . . first, her swift running; secondly, her doubling; thirdly her squatting... The hare is naturally a very fearful creature, and yet for gentlemen's sport and recreation, the most noble little creature that draws breath."

Walking the strand the other morning, I met a hare on the seaward slope of the dunes. She squatted on the bare sand and we regarded each other, quite still, for some minutes, until the lift of my eyebrow sanctioned her ambling retreat into the marram.

I was reminded of the pleasure it was, camped in the north Greenland wilderness, when the fluffy white Arctic hares wandered by to munch on yellow poppies round the tents. All that summer, I never saw one running (though they do, in their winter herds). So far as the hares were concerned, we were the only three people in the world.