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On Nature

Hiding From Animals

The Island Mere Hide at the Minsmere nature preserve on the Suffolk coast of England.Credit...Giles Price for The New York Times

I’m walking beside a hedge of tangled dog roses in a nature preserve in eastern England, toward a hide, a building whose purpose is to make me disappear. This one is a rustic box with bench seats and narrow slits in the wall. Half-hidden by branches, it looks like a small, weather-beaten wooden shed. I’ve made myself disappear in hides for as long as I can remember; structures like this are found in nature preserves all over the world, and they seem as natural here as trees and open water. Even so, a familiar, nervous apprehension flares up as I reach for the door, so I pause for a few seconds before opening it and walk inside, where the air is hot and dark and smells of dust and wood preservative.

Alone, I sit on a bench and lower a wooden window blind to make a bright rectangle in the darkness; as my eyes adjust, I can see through it to a shallow lagoon under cumulus clouds. I scan the scene with binoculars, ticking off species — three shoveler ducks, two little egrets, a common tern — but my mind is elsewhere, puzzling over that odd sense of apprehension, trying to work out what causes it.

Perhaps it is partly the knowledge that wildlife hides are not innocent of history. They evolved from photographic blinds, which in turn were based on structures designed to put people closer to animals in order to kill them: duck blinds, deer stands, tree platforms for shooting big cats. Hunters have shaped modern nature appreciation in myriad unacknowledged ways, even down to the tactics used to bring animals into view. As hunters bait deer and decoy ducks, so preserve managers create shallow feeding pools that concentrate wading birds near hides, or set up feeding stations for wary nocturnal mammals. In the Highlands of Scotland, one celebrated hide gives visitors a 95 percent chance of seeing rare pine martens — lithe, tree-climbing predators — munching on piles of peanuts.

What you see from hides is supposed to be true reality: animals behaving perfectly naturally because they do not know they are being observed. But turning yourself into a pair of eyes in a darkened box distances you from the all-encompassing landscape around the hide, reinforcing a divide between human and natural worlds, encouraging us to think that animals and plants should be looked at, not interacted with. Sometimes the window in front of me resembles nothing so much as a television screen.

To witness wild animals behaving naturally, you don’t need to be invisible. As scientists studying meerkats and chimps have shown, with time you can habituate them to your presence. But hiding is a habit that is hard to break. There is a dubious satisfaction in the subterfuge of watching things that cannot see you, and it’s deeply embedded in our culture. When wild animals unexpectedly appear close by and seem unbothered by our presence, we can feel as flustered and unsure about how to behave as teenagers at a dance.

Two years ago, I was walking with my friend Christina through a park in a small English town when characters I’ve only ever seen in bird hides began to appear: camouflage-clad photographers with 300-millimeter lenses and expressions of urgent concentration. We looked to where the cameras were pointed, and were astonished. Three meters away, two of Britain’s most elusive mammals were swimming in the shallow river running through the park. Otters! They didn’t seem to see us; they certainly didn’t care.

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The Canopy Hide at the Minsmere nature preserve.Credit...Giles Price for The New York Times

Their wet flanks gleamed like tar as they rolled in the water. They broke the surface to crunch fish in their sharp white teeth, showering droplets from their stiff whiskers, then slipped back beneath the surface to swim down the river, the photographers chasing them like paparazzi and intermittently running backward because the lenses they’d brought were the wrong ones for such close views. It was thrilling. We followed the otters downstream and stopped by a woman with a toddler and a baby in a stroller, who were watching them, too. She told me she loved these otters. They were part of her town. Part of her local community. They’d eaten all the expensive carp from the fishpond in the big house, she said, amused. Then she tilted her head at the photographers. ‘‘Aren’t they weird?’’ she asked. Outside the hide, they looked faintly ridiculous, so accustomed to their binoculars, camouflage and high-zoom lenses that they felt compelled to use them even when they were unnecessary.

Hides are places designed for watching wildlife, but they are equally rewarding places to watch people who watch wildlife and to study their strange social behavior. One reason I hesitated before entering the little hide is that I was worried there would be other people in it: Walking into a crowded hide is rather like arriving late at a live theatrical performance and trying to find your seat. There are unspoken rules in hides. As in a theater or a library, you are required to be silent, or to speak in a low murmur. Some rules are to prevent animals’ detecting your presence — a general prohibition on telephone calls, slamming the door, extending hands out the window. But others are more curious, stemming from a particular problem: Your job in a hide is to pretend you are not there, and when there is more than one person in the hide, the sense of disembodiment that the trick relies on is threatened. Regular visitors to hides often solve this conundrum spatially. When she started visiting hides for the first time, my friend Christina wondered why people chose to sit at the far edges, leaving the seats with the best view unoccupied. ‘‘I thought it was self-sacrificing English etiquette,’’ she said, ‘‘before I realized that people sat at the far sides of the hide because they wanted to be as far from everyone else as possible.’’

In the hide, there is a constant monitoring of others’ expertise as the inhabitants listen to one another’s muttered conversations about the things outside — and it can be agonizing when they get things wrong. I remember the chill in the air one spring day in Suffolk after a man confidently told his companion that what he was watching was a water vole. Everyone else in the hide knew this lumbering creature with a long tail was a large brown rat. No one said anything. One man coughed. Another snorted. The tension was unbearable. With true British reserve, no one was comfortable correcting his mistake and lessening him in the eyes of his friend. A few people couldn’t bear the atmosphere and left the hide. It is always a relief when you open a hide door and find you are alone.

The uses of hides are as various as their inhabitants. You can sit with a camera hoping for the perfect shot of a passing marsh hawk or owl. You can sit with a proficient naturalist and hear whispered identification tips, or use it as a place to sit down midway through a long walk. Most people sit and scan the view with binoculars for a few minutes before deciding there is nothing of sufficient interest or rarity to keep them there. But there is another kind of hide-watching that I am increasingly learning to love. It is when you embrace the possibility that you will see little or nothing of interest. You literally wait and see. Sitting in the dark for an hour or two and looking at the world through a hole in a wall requires a meditative patience. You have given yourself time to watch clouds drift from one side of the sky to the other and cast moving shadows across 90 minutes of open water. A sleeping snipe, its long bill tucked into pale-tipped scapular feathers and its body pressed against rushes striped with patterns of light and shade, wakes, raises its wings and stretches. A heron as motionless as a marble statue for minutes on end makes a cobra-strike to catch a fish. The longer you sit there, the more you become abstracted from this place, and yet fixed to it. The sudden appearance of a deer at the lake’s shore, or a flight of ducks tipping and whiffling down to splash on sunlit water, becomes treasure, through the simple fact of the passing of time.

Helen Macdonald teaches at the University of Cambridge. Her most recent book, ‘‘H Is for Hawk,’’ won the 2014 Samuel Johnson prize and was the 2014 Costa Book of the Year.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Hiding From Animals. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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