Lee Raye is an author, academic and wildlife expert who spent years researching their encyclopaedic book The Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife. But what is about slow-worms that brings joy and how do they embrace their non-binary identity in academia?

Hi, I'm Dhruti Shah and this is my podcast Have You Thought About. I'm a writer who loves to find out about what passions people are pursuing, especially if they're managing to blend together all their skills and unusual ways. In each edition, I'm going to chat with someone I find particularly interesting and someone who has managed to fit things together in their life or profession that you might not think of as an obvious match. Now, you're about to hear me chatting with Lee Ray, an author, wildlife lover, and academic.

Hi Lee, thank you so much for coming on my podcast. Now. First, you have this amazing book called The Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife, and it would be remiss for me to not start off with it. It catalogues the state of nature in Britain and Ireland between 1519 and 1772. It's a pretty hefty tome. But how on earth did you think to come up with let alone embark on a project like this?

Thanks so much for inviting me to be on your podcast. The Atlas of Early Modern Wildlife came about because I wanted to write about wildlife in the past, but I knew that I didn't want to just write a story of wildlife where I sort of go through by date, what was happening, I wanted to write something which would actually be useful for people who study wildlife in the present, particularly for conservation conversations. So we often talk about restoring nature and conservation. So I wanted to write something which would give an idea of a specific period and a set of information and data about how we could restore nature to the point where it's been in the past.

But what made you think this is something that I really have to create into a book?

That's a good question. So I knew that when, a few years ago, I was translating a natural history book from Scotland, from the 17th century. And I thought it was fantastic. Lots of different secondary sources, were referring back to this one 17th century Scottish, Latin natural history. So I worked a lot on talking about that book and translating it. What I found with the book was that there were actually a lot of books in that same genre. So it wasn't just that one. There were lots of books from the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries, and I realised if I put them all together, I might be able to come up with a real state of nature from the time period, which I didn't think had been done before.

You have maps, you have like these beautiful visuals - like how did that all come about?

I feel like with just text, you don't get the whole story. So the maps are really good, because they show where the animals live and what they're doing in different areas. The pictures are good as well, because they show how much people actually knew about the actual animals. And they give you a sense of the complete picture which people had of these animals, you know, you've got wolves looking ferocious, and rabbits being eaten, and that sort of thing. So it's not just about cold clinical descriptions of the animals.

And for people perhaps who aren't aware of how the book publishing world works, it must have been a bit of a journey to actually create it.

But I yes, I spent years researching, reading, I read over over 200 books from the time period and put them all together, bringing in all the data. And what I came up with the basis of this book. And then once once I had the maps, I had to sort of interpret them and do some data, statistical analysis, and you're out interesting facts and figures. And also, I did a bit of a lit review. So I've got lots and lots of sources in the back. So I think it was about four years that it took me to write and then I shopped around for publishers.

Well, it was a long, long task. So it's, I suppose it's a bit different for fiction and nonfiction. With fiction books, you sort of come up with a concept, this is what I've heard, I've never written fiction before. But I've heard you come up with a concept and you find someone who's interested in that concept, and then you talk it through with them. Whereas with nonfiction, you sort of write it and then you go to a publisher and say, Do you think this is good? And they say, No.

With that shopping around process, was that easy? Did you have acceptance straightaway?

I was really lucky. I'm quite active on social media with my research. And I was determined to be sort of sharing it all the way through. So over those years, when I was researching, I was sharing maps here and there. My maps changed a lot, actually. But I had had these maps. And because I've been sharing them for so long, I had quite a big network of people interested, including a couple of publishers. And so when it came to time to look for a publisher, a couple of people were interested straightaway. So I suppose it's an advantage of sharing your work all the way through even though you end up with with less novel stuff at the end.

But having gone through that process, and all that research and see all the imagery, the text, the mapping, what are some of the more unusual things that you discovered that say a reader wants to go out and get your book has to look forward to.

Some of my my top findings is it? Well, there's lots of stuff that surprised me all the way through. So I quite often start with the rabbits because just I thought this was going to be a really easy species to do - just a rabbit you know that they're everywhere nowadays. But what I found was that in the past, some historians and especially English, economic and agricultural historians have described these rabbits as being found throughout England, all over the place and naturalised wild from the 14th century after they were introduced in the second half of the medieval period. But Scottish and Welsh historians weren't really agreeing, they were saying, rabbits are just found around the coastlines.

And what my research found was that both actually seem to have been correct. So I found rabbits around Wales and Scotland, especially I found around the coastlines. In the mainland England, especially in the south, and in the north of the country. There were rabbits all over the place inland as well. So it's this strange dichotomy between the the two areas. And there's little surprises like that all the way through, when I came to do the Wheatear, which is a little songbird, which you normally now find on islands, and maybe in really upland areas that nests in old walls and rocks. I found lots of descriptions of wheatears nesting in rabbit warrens, and there are lots of descriptions of these Wheatears in lowland England, which really surprised me. But it's just because that's the area where the rabbit warrens have been created. And they weren't found these wheatears weren't recorded in London, other areas, just because there weren't weren't many rabbits there. So it seems that there was this partnership between the animals as well as between humans and animals going on.

There's even fish in there. This is the thing there's nothing that you haven't included, it seems. Is that fair to say?

No, actually, I suppose that's not not entirely fair. I included all the species, which were the most most commonly talked about. So I have lots of fish. And they were talked about because they were delicious. And I have lots of birds, which people hunted. And some of the larger raptors, which they were just interested in as potential pests, lots of mammals, but hardly any invertebrates. So they talk about the pearl mussel because they could get pearls from them. And they talk about things like oysters, which they would eat. But I don't have many records at all of things like butterflies or beetles, which of course just weren't of much interest to them, not as much utilitarian value. So these people just didn't record them, which means I can't really make maps of them.

From what you've learned, and the procedures that you underwent in order to do this mapping to to uncover the research the archives, what can we who are here present, learn in terms of how we're record keeping when it comes to the creatures that are around us right now? Is there anything?

Oh we do record so much better. Nowadays, if you look at a really well known species, there'll be millions of records of it because we go out and record the songbirds in our gardens and ducks and geese around wild areas. So often, there are some really interesting contrasts. So nowadays, the best recorded areas of Britain and Ireland are lowland England, especially southeast England, around London, just where the naturalists who live there go out into the countryside each weekend and scour the countryside looking for all sorts of animals. But in the early modern period, better record of them that were actually the little islands around the Highlands of Scotland. So Orkney and Shetland Islands and the Hebrides, were better recorded because people thought that these were really interesting avenues of exploration, and places where where it was, it was appropriate to go and create inventories and map the natural resources of the area. So there is an interesting contrast, which maybe tells us a bit about where people think the nature exists. But I don't know what we can do about that really?

Well this is 'have you thought about', so maybe some of the audience can have a think about what we can do. Now, the thing is, your love of wildlife isn't purely academic, or even in this book, now. You ran a slow worm project for six years. So can you share a little bit more about that, but first, for those who don't know, what is a slow worm?

A slow worm is the most beautiful creature in God's creation. They are brown, sometimes silver, sometimes reddish. They are long animals. They look like snakes, but they're actually legless lizards, they have eyelids and their tongues are not forked all the way down. They're just notched at the tip. They sometimes have blue spots when they get old, especially the males, and they like to clump together under old bits of tin and things like that to warm up in the in the warmer weather during sort of spring, summer and early autumn. So I ran a project at my previous employer at Cardiff University. I just realised there was slow worms on the site one day and I said, Can we start looking after this site in a way which helps slow worms, can I start coming to the site every week and checking on them? And they said, Yes, so I started checking on them each week and recording the numbers. And they're lovely, lovely little creatures.

I'm amazed I never would have considered slow worms to be so wonderful, but now I feel like I need to go and find out a lot more. The passion now, wildlife we love that - but you're non binary, and you embraced the identity more publicly a few years ago. So can you share, if you like to what your experience is like? And is there anything that you can offer? For perhaps someone who's listening who's in the process of figuring out their own identity

I came out publicly about five years ago, it's been quite nice. I think everyone's been pretty positive about it in, professionally, at least, I think anyone who has a problem with it seems to have just not talked to me about it, which is fine was great. It doesn't seem like it's affected me very much in life. I've got new jobs and things since coming out. So I think in if you're happen to be teaching, it doesn't seem to affect things too much. Or maybe I'm just missing all the effects that it has, because they're all behind closed doors. I think I'm better at, better at teaching and more positive and more enthusiastic since since embracing my more authentic self. So look forward to it. It sounds like if you are someone who's questioning, maybe you are at the beginning of being more happy, so positive vibes all the way.

In that element of the of the questioning it did you have people to speak to did you like, how did you figure it out? Because it is at a later age. It's not like when you're a teenager or even as a child in this respect. So again, in terms of what you're comfortable with sharing what helped you with that journey of self exploration, I guess,

This is a tricky one. I think I grew up under UK law, a system where we are identities just weren't talked about in schools. And there had been a bit of a regression actually. So when I was growing up, gay was a slur used on the playground. And that's, that's gay people would say, I suppose that the teachers were kind of powerless to prevent that, because they weren't allowed to talk about being queer or other people in the past that had been gay. So all of a sudden, there was this step back. And because I grew up under that I didn't really have any heroes or anyone to think about.

From that perspective, I was helped a bit on social media, actually, the early days of social media, Facebook, back in the day used to call everyone, they invented this pronoun themself. Singular themself, not themselves, but themselves. Well, they claim they invented it to talk about people. But back in the day on Facebook, it would say, What are you doing, and you're supposed to talk about yourself in the third person, sort of be today, Lee is pleased with themselves, for example. And if it didn't know your, your pronoun, it would just guess they, and it would use themselves. I quite liked that. I knew I liked that. I've always described it in the, in the terminology, the language, which I had, when I was doing my A levels, I learned that there were people who had a low gender focus, so I called myself that for several years. But then I sort of learned more as I came out, and and as, as I, as I removed myself from school where there was no education going on, if you like,

I'm not aware of that term. What's the term?

This was a term probably made up for a levels psychology back in the day, and it was low gender focus, they said some, some individuals have a low gender focus, and they don't feel very masculine or very feminine. And it was probably a way around talking about queer identities. Never heard it used to before or since. So it's probably not a real term, but it was it was one that I seized on the time.

Well, if it helps with identity embracing, then let's take it. But as you get older, or as you engage further with all aspects of your identity, and what you're comfortable with, were there any elements which were a bit harder in terms of having those conversations where you just were like, no, actually, I'm here? This is what I do. And just let's get on with, it's part of who I am, like, were there bits where you had to sort of think twice about, you know, do you fill in a box on a form? Do you do this? Do you do that? Like, how have you managed to keep going, I guess?

gives you a tick box for are you male or female? And you think, why does that matter for my teeth? That you just, you get through it, you don't fill it in or you you cross through it. There's the new movement in Japan is x gender, where people just cross through both boxes, male and female, and I quite like that. It's a good approach to filling in those boxes. And people ask you silly questions, and you just deal with them. But yeah, it's quite helps now that there's more online meetings and more conversations by email than than they used to be 10 years ago, I suppose before COVID. My employer has an option where I can put a them in brackets on my emails after my name. And when you go into meetings, you can you can choose to add your pronouns there and that sort of thing. And that sort of helps with remind teaching people to gender you correctly, which can stop dysphoria.

And because this is all about having that interdisciplinary approach with your own academic studies and the wildlife has there been any sort of intertwining as it were, with that element of the non binary and the creatures perhaps that you've been researching?

Some sometimes some of the narratives toward about creatures annoying, so we're coming into frogspawn season now, and there's always a narrative around frog sport. I don't know, you might have to cut this if this is too naughty for your podcast. But people will talk about frogs raping each other and frogs being addicted to sex. And sometimes frogs die in their amplexus and their mating, if they get too carried away, and then they drown. And people see them as sort of these very amorous creatures. But the trouble is that frogs don't actually have sexual organs like humans. They don't have penises and vaginas. They don't. They're not actually mating when they when they're cuddled together. They're laying eggs and Amplexus is an egg laying situation. Narratives like that sometimes annoying me about animals when I find I have to sort of switch off and say, Nope. If I go into why it annoys me, I'll come across like, I've got an axe to grind, which I probably do.

But it's interesting that you say that because I was watching Planet Earth the other other day, and they were focusing on on the frogs. And I was like, oh, no, the frogs. I've never felt so much for frogs before. Now I'm like, Oh, the frogs? I'm not sure. I'm not sure about the frogs anymore. I'm so confused. I'm having a confused moment with frogs right now. But do we have to be very careful in the way that perhaps we anthropomorphize the animals? Like, what should we do as someone who's clearly researched the language around various wildlife, domestic animal animals? What would be a good way forward from everything that you've immersed yourself in do you think?

Oh it's really difficult, because people might claim that they are looking at animals objectively, and that they are just observing. But whenever we observe an animal, we always bring in our own stuff, my favourite mating strategy animals, probably newts, where one minute will lay down a pocket of semen and do a little dance and waft some pheromones, and the other newts might go pick it up, if they're convinced, or they might just leave it there. And I think that's a lovely, lovely way to mate. But that is me, reading in my own prejudices, about sex and about mating and about animals into the animal world. And people coming out in 100 years or 500 years will have their own their own ideas of ways that we should look at the world. So I don't think we can ever escape our biases and our prejudices completely. Maybe if we're just exposed to lots of different ways of seeing the natural world and lots of different stories, it can make our our views a little bit fuller. And maybe that's the best we can hope for.

That's amazing. That's definitely made me think very, very differently about the way I approach the animal world. And, and also language generally. So thank you very much. And talking of language, now you are an academic one, why did you choose to pursue a field like this? Which also, isn't that very well paid? As far as I'm aware? And two, what keeps you there?

Well, that's good questions. Probably. Probably a singular determination and focus, really, it's the answer to both. So when I was doing my undergraduate degree, I did my undergraduate degree in Celtic studies. And I really enjoyed it. And I especially enjoyed I did a few essays on animals. So I did memorably birds in Gaelic poetry, and I really enjoyed seeing all the ways that things like cuckoos and cockerels, and other birds have been seen through the lens of this other society that I was looking at. And I really enjoyed that. And I, when I went on to doing a master's degree and doing a PhD, I knew that I didn't want to focus on human history, I wanted to look more at animals in, in the past and in literature and in history.

And that's what I did, but I can't say that it's been really very well renumerated. So, for me, I'm, there's this almost there used to be two, two pathways for academics. There's the teaching pathway and the research pathway. And from that perspective, I've been on the teaching pathway now I'm, I'm an associate lecturer, so I get paid to teach people and I almost do research mostly in my spare time, although occasionally I get grants and funding to do things, especially to visit archives and that sort of thing. And I get a very, very tiny amount of royalties from from books or they're not from articles. So that's, that's sort of the path that I've taken.

But for people starting it now it's it's very difficult because university degrees are so much more expensive than they used to be. University departments are closing all over the place, especially the current government's war on woke ism means that there's been less and less interest and more and more pressure to close departments which aren't seen as adding economic value to people's lives. And that's a that's a shame. And it's going to make it harder to, to research things, which I think are actually quite useful, like the situation of animals in the past, so that we can restore them properly and understand where we are in terms of them and what their current status actually is.

But yet, it's difficult and that the state of the of academia is is quite dreadful right now, there's a such a huge proportion of people who end up doing PhDs who develop difficulties with mental health as well, that it's perhaps not a choice that you recommend to anyone, unless they were really determined to do it for their own personal reasons and not expecting very much reward from studying at all.

But taking out that element of that reward for studying as it were, and that sort of element of the renumeration, which is important, because if you don't have people researching, you don't have people having it, it's time to have the resources to help us create policies to decode policies, etc. Yeah, is it something for people who who are privileged, like what can we do to make it a lot more inclusive?

It's a real shame because it always used to be this way as well, that university was something for middle middle class, upper middle class kids to do, and to almost follow in their parents footsteps that academia was a was almost something which you inherited from academic parents or grandparents, and especially with the humanities, that seems to be something which is happening more and more, but there was a period when it wasn't like that in the UK. So when I went to university, my university fees were £1850 a year, I was lucky. In the second half of my of my childhood, my parents could afford to support me more. But when I was born - until I was 12 years old, I lived in a council house. And when I think of other people who lived on the council estate with me, the kids I used to play with, it'd be very hard for any of them to justify going to university today. So it seems like there is going to come a time when academics in this country go back to being mostly from a certain social class. And they're interested in tackling problems, which mostly are of interest to to poor people. And they're interested in studying poor people. And their interest in criticising rich people might be less, especially given the fact that with humanities, the most socially acceptable form of humanities to study is probably studying the great, the great monarchs and the great prime ministers and doing little hero worshipping pieces about them. It seems that academia is just going to be more simplistic and, and less good, but you've got me on my high horse now to take.

The point is to make people think differently. And if you've been in this field, and you're the expert, you know, so I'm glad that you're on your high horse. And I like the fact you've managed to bring another animal in. Always back to the animals, it's always back to the allegories. In fact, it feels like everything that you're doing is very interdisciplinary does intertwine with every single other element, it feels like you're clearly quite passionate about where you are right now in life. And what I'd love to find out is, where do you want to head? What would be the ideal if money wasn't an issue?

That's a good question. So I've recently published my book, obviously, and that's taken me years. And the the point of that was to get an overview of the state of nature in the 16th to 18th centuries. And I thought at the beginning that it was going to be a categorical overview that it was going to involve all the sources I could possibly find. But of course, since publishing the book, I found more sources. I continue to find new sources.

So I'd love to continue doing what I'm doing, to continue tracing animals and plants in the past and finding how their status has changed over time, and how humans have interacted with them, and how they've interacted with each other. So I don't really know I think, I continued what's going on, but it is a labour of love, almost because it's almost like a hobby, something that I'm not paid for that I do. And I financially suffer for, I suppose, because I could, I could probably get another job instead. But it's very rewarding in its own right.

The wonderful Lee Ray who bridges their love of wildlife in an academic setting, and much more. Do you have an interdisciplinary life because I would love to hear from you and perhaps we can chat on this podcast that goes with my newsletter, which is also called Have You Thought About and can be found via www.dhrutishah.com. But please join me next time for a fascinating conversation with another guest who likes to mix up lots of things in their life. Do listen to past episodes and rate and review the podcast if you've enjoyed it. Thank you to Rian Shah for the music.