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A Visit With Painter and Naturalist Scott in Cambridgeshire

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British artist Dafila Scott shares her Kalahari pastel, “Eland pause to look at the observer.” (Anne W. Semmes photo)

By Anne W. Semmes
Sentinel Correspondent

Perhaps it was that children’s book I collected that I gave Dafila Scott years ago about her grandfather, Captain Robert Falcon Scott of the Antarctic, that provided the welcome mat to visit her in her home outside Cambridge in the centuries-old village of Reach on my recent trip to England.

I had met Dafila at a swan conference in Cambridge when I had my own Mute Swans on the Byram River. Dafila as zoologist was a swan specialist, and, surprisingly, without a copy of the charming book, Like English Gentlemen,  that tells the story of her grandfather’s fateful expedition to the South Pole where he died along with four others. The book’s author, J.M. Barrie, of Peter Pan fame, had addressed the book to his godson Peter Scott, Dafila’s father, aged two at his father’s death.

Dafila, who has now become an accomplished painter, has been twice to Antarctica, first in her gap year with her parents when they visited the site of Scott’s expedition, and more recently she spent a month there as “artist in residence” aboard the HMS Scott, the Royal Navy’s Ice Patrol Vessel, as sponsored by the Friends of the Scott Polar Research Institute, in Cambridge.

Those who have traveled to Antarctic may have seen her covers and colorful portraits of wildlife in Bradt’s Antarctica – A guide of the Wildlife. But, now she’s enjoying a more abstract embrace of art, and I was looking forward to learning more about this new chapter in her life.

Arriving at her door, a gaggle of geese greeted me – and great guardians of one’s manse they are, Dafila assured me. Dafila looked just as I remembered her, but this time with Lyme Disease! Yes, an American export, and on the rise in the UK. “We have three kind of deer here,” she told, and, yes, she is recovering. “A diet of herbal microbials is part of the treatment.”

Artist Dafila Scott shows her love of color in this Antarctica painting, “Wandering albatross and iceberg, Southern Ocean.” (Anne W. Semmes photo)

Her centuries-old house was full of art, hers and her father’s. She shares the art gene with her father Sir Peter Scott, who drew and painted his way through life as wildfowl artist (who also fell in love with fish), and her grandmother Kathleen, the sculptor wife of Captain Scott.

Sir Peter’s painting, “Blue Goose” was prominent in her living room. It had hung over the fireplace in her father’s studio near a giant window looking out over hundreds of swans and other wildfowl in Slimbridge, near Bristol, that became the first of now nine wildfowl wetland reserves in the UK, aka the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT).

On a shelf stood the original pen and ink drawing her father did of a panda known the world over as the symbol of the World Wildlife Fund, of which her father was co-founder.

After a warming bowl of soup, grainy bread, and fresh fruit in her kitchen, Dafila walked me out back for some feeding-the-geese time, where I saw her fruit-bearing trees. Then it was into her studio to talk art.

“When I was quite young,” she spoke of those days at Slimbridge, “the birds came quite close to the house, literally a meter away, particularly the wild swans, the Bewick’s Swans. They’d come in the winter, and I got to know them quite well.” She was witnessing her father’s discovery that each Bewick’s Swan could be identified by the varied color fragmentations of their beaks. He was drawing those differences and she fell into identifying and drawing them too. “I really enjoyed recognizing them, and drawing their faces,” she said. She found her father “quite a hard task master,” so she had to “get the shape right.”

Then college at Cambridge came along where she studied zoology and did her doctoral dissertation on those Bewick’s Swans. Then marriage to Tim Clutton-Brock, ecologist, evolutionary biologist and Cambridge professor, and while raising two young children, the drawing commenced.

“I drew illustrations for my husband, [of deer and meerkats!] and for my colleagues’ books [of cheetahs and Manx Shearwaters]. The Shearwater is a small seabird that lives a long time. They breed in burrows in the ground. They’re lovely birds. They make the most eerie and bloodcurdling call.”

It was that art teacher in Devon who put Dafila on her present painting path. “I’m enormously grateful to Robin Child who has taught me a lot about art, particularly about painters since Cezanne. I paint a mixture. I still love watching animals and I still enjoy drawing them. But I also do some abstract landscapes as well.”

Artist-naturalist Dafila Scott gives a treat to her geese in her Cambrideshire backyard. (Anne W. Semmes photo)

Did Sir Peter’s interest in capturing the light and the movement of the birds embed itself in her approach to art?  “Yes,” she said. “He brought us up to be very aware of the light.” But artist Dafila was keen on color. “I’ve done quite a lot of paintings in the Kalahari. The red dunes are stunningly beautiful. The desert sand is so reflective. The light is overwhelming – it’s spectacular.”

In Antarctica she found, “The light is amazing, the elements are amazing, the power of the wind when it blows the sea, when it blows the snow is extraordinary. You’re really aware that man is a bit of an intruder there.” She hopes to take her family there some day.

The morning of the day I met with Dafila, I visited the nearby Welney WWT reserve. I wanted a feel of that looking from a window as its observatory allows, across a wetland of birds. In my former home on Riversville Road, I had such a window overlooking my swans. At Welney, what I saw fly in was a flock of Graylag Geese, mixed in with Canada Geese, and in the distance a few Whooper Swans. The Bewick’s would arrive from the Russian Arctic in October.

It was at Welney that Dafila did her doctoral study of Bewick’s, and she would be instrumental in their protection on their breeding grounds in Russia. A 1991 expedition to the Russki Zavorot Peninsula she made with a WWT colleague brought international attention to the importance of that area for Bewick’s Swans and other migratory water birds, which led to its becoming a nature reserve.

Other than this, Dafila does not see herself as contributing “a great deal” for conservation. But, she does serve as vice-president of the WWT and has long played a part in the Trust. And, she has most certainly lived out that wish of her grandfather for her father. In his last letter from the Antarctic to his wife, Kathleen, he directed, “Make him interested in natural history.”

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