Wood anemone I write to share the wildlife experience and the fun of finding things. I hope you’ll feel as if you are there. My part is to be a listener, eager to learn what matters to you. It’s a dialogue because we all share the countryside, the discovery and the sense of wonder. So, listener and guide, that’s my role whether I’m writing a book or a blog.
I live in Cumbria and I like an in-depth experience so that’s usually the location for my nature writing. Scout Scar is my local patch, I know it intimately because I can observe the day by day unfurling of spring. Yesterday, I found the first mountain everlasting, a rarity on limestone. And a burst of yellow on the escarpment edge that is horse-shoe vetch and bird’s-foot-trefoil. The season for the flowering of the cliff-face is upon us.
Bird's-foot trefoil
Horse-shoe vetch
I used to live in north-west Bristol, overlooking Henbury Golf Course and Blaise Estate. I learned not only the wildlife, but how to enjoy the woods whilst keeping clear of the golf balls which don’t always go where the player intends. I loved the season of wood anemones and bluebells. My neighbour Ruth’s family were from Czechoslovakia and had travelled everywhere on skiis in winter, and had picked fungi in the woods. So sometimes I went on fungus forays with visiting mycologists.
There were mature oaks and senescent trees with green woodpecker, great-spotted woodpecker, nuthatch and tree creeper. In spring, as the fresh oak leaves burst there would sometimes come a plague of black flies with long dangling legs. There were spindle trees whose fruit are a delight- to look at only because they’re poisonous. One autumn I collected a Halloween posy of spindle berries and bright and startling fruit you find in a late October hedgerow. I saw goldcrests so frequently I learnt to tell them at the slightest movement in the trees. One year, I came upon a family of sparrow hawk being giving flying lessons by the adult and their cries filled the wood. On a winter’s night the tawny owls sounded close, never closer than the year I had chicken pox and could not sleep. I got up and thought it was kids larking about. Surprising who is out and about at two in the morning. But this was so very close. Was I more ill than I knew, was I delirious? I went out onto the balcony to look down into the road for these fooling kids. And the tawny called right in my ear. I turned to see eyes staring at me inches away on the edge of the flat roof. It felt hallucinatory.
This was Westbury-on-Trym and down in the depths of the woods ran a stream that is the River Trym. There was a glade where I could find kingfisher. Emerge from the woods and there was an old house with a terraced garden, a beautiful secluded place. In the pasture below grew rosy garlic which I now grow in my garden.
There were mature oaks and senescent trees with green woodpecker, great-spotted woodpecker, nuthatch and tree creeper. In spring, as the fresh oak leaves burst there would sometimes come a plague of black flies with long dangling legs. There were spindle trees whose fruit are a delight- to look at only because they’re poisonous. One autumn I collected a Halloween posy of spindle berries and bright and startling fruit you find in a late October hedgerow. I saw goldcrests so frequently I learnt to tell them at the slightest movement in the trees. One year, I came upon a family of sparrow hawk being giving flying lessons by the adult and their cries filled the wood. On a winter’s night the tawny owls sounded close, never closer than the year I had chicken pox and could not sleep. I got up and thought it was kids larking about. Surprising who is out and about at two in the morning. But this was so very close. Was I more ill than I knew, was I delirious? I went out onto the balcony to look down into the road for these fooling kids. And the tawny called right in my ear. I turned to see eyes staring at me inches away on the edge of the flat roof. It felt hallucinatory.
This was Westbury-on-Trym and down in the depths of the woods ran a stream that is the River Trym. There was a glade where I could find kingfisher. Emerge from the woods and there was an old house with a terraced garden, a beautiful secluded place. In the pasture below grew rosy garlic which I now grow in my garden.
The Great Storm of 1987 hit the woods of the south-west with ferocity. I was Head of an English department in Bristol and I remember a wide-eyed kid telling me that a sheet of corrugated iron had just chased him across the playground. I was in the library and panels of ceiling started to shift and fall in. Late in the afternoon I sat in my lounge hearing the large windows strain and bow under the force of the wind. A large tree crashed onto our garages. Out in Blaise Woods there’s a steep slope of beech trees and several were brought down. In the aftermath, we had a memorable day’s birding at Brean Down, seeing storms all around us in the Bristol Channel and walking in sunlight to find fire crest in the bushes. Swathes of woodland were destroyed in the south-west of England.
I belonged to Bristol Ornithological Club and since the BBC Natural History Unit is in the city I met dedicated and knowledgeable naturalists. I learnt lots on field-trips and club holidays. Sharing is what it’s all about, with a competitive edge. On Islay, over tots of the local whisky, we compiled lists of all we’d seen that day. Someone had seen a dozen grey plover. Someone else claimed a flock of a thousand. I learned to listen.
When I came to Cumbria I had to find things for myself. In the end, that’s far more rewarding. Unless you know birdsong it’s not going to happen. Redstart, for instance. I used to think redstart a rarity on Scout Scar. Now I can identify the bird on the first notes of its song, so I can map them out and they’re doing well. It’s taken me some time to confirm the call of lesser redpoll because I hear them in flight but they’re hard to see. I refer to Tweet of the Day to confirm what I hear. But birdsong is far more intricate than most people realise. The raven has something like thirty different calls, and it’s not alone. And birds don’t always give their song entire, just a fragment.
If you’re a keen gardener perhaps that is your bird watching and wild flower patch. Surprising what you can discover very close to home. What I hope to share here is the notion of a local patch and the reward of looking into it. Where is yours and what does it mean to you?
I belonged to Bristol Ornithological Club and since the BBC Natural History Unit is in the city I met dedicated and knowledgeable naturalists. I learnt lots on field-trips and club holidays. Sharing is what it’s all about, with a competitive edge. On Islay, over tots of the local whisky, we compiled lists of all we’d seen that day. Someone had seen a dozen grey plover. Someone else claimed a flock of a thousand. I learned to listen.
When I came to Cumbria I had to find things for myself. In the end, that’s far more rewarding. Unless you know birdsong it’s not going to happen. Redstart, for instance. I used to think redstart a rarity on Scout Scar. Now I can identify the bird on the first notes of its song, so I can map them out and they’re doing well. It’s taken me some time to confirm the call of lesser redpoll because I hear them in flight but they’re hard to see. I refer to Tweet of the Day to confirm what I hear. But birdsong is far more intricate than most people realise. The raven has something like thirty different calls, and it’s not alone. And birds don’t always give their song entire, just a fragment.
If you’re a keen gardener perhaps that is your bird watching and wild flower patch. Surprising what you can discover very close to home. What I hope to share here is the notion of a local patch and the reward of looking into it. Where is yours and what does it mean to you?
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