It’s just after dawn on a freezing cold April morning, and at the side of the track I’m standing on, the flailed edge of a grove of coppiced hazel has formed a deep, jumbled jackstraw layer of faded brown stems and splintered sticks. It’s a common sight in nature reserves at this time of year, yet from within it I am hearing a sound that seems utterly alien to the British countryside. It starts familiarly, like the high trilling of …
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I know how to make a sound: a groan, an “ooooh”. If I take a roomful of people and say one word, it always happens. Shall we try? Adders See? I spent last Saturday watching adders. These small-to-medium sized snakes are wrongly billed* as Britain’s only venomous snake, but are certainly the only one with a bite that can hurt humans. And “hurt” is the right word here. An adder bite can be painful – a bee sting is often …
Yesterday, I heard a cuckoo for the first time this Spring. Which was hardly surprising, because it was sat about fifteen feet away from me at the time. This was no captive bird, however: this was a truly wild bird, newly arrived from Africa. Colin, as he is known, is undoubtedly the UK’s most famous cuckoo. He has been arriving at the same site in Surrey for years. Estimates wary: some say he has been here for seven years, some …
If you’re trying to remember it, the headline is from the lyrics to the hymn “Amazing Grace”. As a hymn, it extolls the power of restoration. I have a growing discomfort with the nature conservation movement, who all too often equate “conservation” with “management”. Mankind has all but eradicated many species from this country, and it seems a little ironic that we always believe that nature can only ever recover with our help, even though it was often our ignorance …
On Friday this week my wife and I went on our usual lockdown walk, following a path along a local stream. It’s a path I must have walked hundreds, if not thousands, of times. It’s easy to become complacent about your local patch, to assume that you have seen all there is to see, to overlook the gradual change as environments age, trees grow taller, bushes grow thicker, and the ground beds down under layers of bramble and rotting leaves. …
Snow was forecast for today, so when a hungry cat woke me at 4 AM I did what any sensible person would do: I pushed him off and tried to go back to sleep. When he tried again at 5 AM, and resorted to his usual ploy of jumping up on to the bedside table and progressively knocking things one by one to the floor to get some attention, I did what any sensible person would do, gave up, went …
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