Charles Foster: 'My freaky zoological method acting was fun'

The Baillie Gifford longlisted author explains how he tried to reconnect with the natural world to write Being a Beast and why we should all conduct our own 'epistemological fieldwork'

I grew up in suburban Sheffield. Everywhere in Sheffield is an edge place. Everywhere everywhere's an edge place, in fact, but in some places you can forget that for a while. That's not an option in Sheffield. The streetlights ended at the top of our road. Wilderness crouched in the dark beyond and it would slink into my bedroom at night. As an edge person, perhaps I was bound to try to look over, or even ooze through, the porous boundary between our species and others. Certainly I was bound to write about the wilderness that creeps in and sleeps with and in everyone, and without which we die, and which will one day kill and eat us.

One day, there was a blackbird in our garden. It looked at me, and I looked at it. It plainly knew something about the garden that I didn't know. That enraged and tantalised me. I wanted to know what it knew; I wanted to know what it saw when it looked at our privet hedges. I wanted to see our garden properly, and thought that the bird could help me to do it.