- One of the nice things about the diaries is that
it's enthusiastic, it's personal.
There are one or two places where he throws in a little bit
of poetry, or totally silly things, you know,
saw a newt, saw the newt again today
it was in exactly the same place it was yesterday.
And there were things like that,
which just sort of bring them to light.
(plucky strings, airy music)
(birds chirping)
- [Ceri] Charles Elton was one of the
early pioneers for recognising
the value of progression of animal life and to the
communities within ecosystems.
- [Caroline] When Wytham Wood was donated to the
University in 1942,
he set it up over a period of about 30 years,
as a world-class research centre.
People came from all over the world to collaborate with him
and to explore Wytham Wood.
Elton was very much a man of his time
in that he was a very quiet, shy, man.
He hated having his photograph taken, for example -
that's why so few survive, and I attended his lectures,
very boring lecturer he was,
but his books were extremely interesting and he was happiest
with other scientists and out in the Woods.
- [Keith] He kept a diary throughout his life,
and it certainly continued after he'd retired.
- So there's a period of about five or six years in the mid
seventies where he took up the gauntlet again and went round
all the old logs and made notes.
At that point, Elton would have been
well into his mid seventies, possibly later.
And his wife accompanied him in some of those later trips.
- And there's many, many occasions
in which he and his son would go out at four
in the morning before the boy went to school and they would
make long trips out to Wytham to listen to birds and observe
them before school or work began in the mornings.
I grew up at a time when, if girls were allowed
to study physics and chemistry and
biology, like the boys did,
this was regarded as a very, very great honour.
And we felt we owed society a debt to continue working
for as long as we possibly could.
And an email came round asking for volunteers to transcribe
Elton's field notes, so I thought, well,
I can do that, why not?
- In terms of the notes for Wytham,
there are about 400 different entries,
spread over about 20 odd years.
There are bird records, butterfly records,
fungal records, plant records,
and then it's interesting because, on the one hand,
most people think of him as a zoologist
but he was concerned to look at the interactions between
different species and to try and look at the whole system.
- It's really important that we transcribe Elton's notes
and diaries. Primarily because it makes
it available to the masses.
People can access it online and then
use it for their research information.
- One of the things that we were able
to do was that there's a rare plant, a yellow Bird's-nest,
which hadn't been seen since 1958 in the Woods.
By chance, when I was reading through, I said, oh
Elton saw it at Brogden's Belt,
which is quite a narrowly defined piece of the woodland.
So we were able to go there at the right time of year,
and hey presto, there was the plant,
it's been sitting there for the last 30 years.
Just nobody looked at the right time of year to find it.
So it was rather nice, sort of, rediscovery as it were.
And Charles Elton was such an important player in the
discussions that were going on at that time.
His diaries filled in this missing link
in our study of the history of the woods.