Finding the Wild Side of Life

 

 My first four days of taking part in the Wildlife Trusts 30 Days Wild has been an experience of two halves. Today we took one of the dogs down the river, spotting an oystercatcher and his veering trail of footprints left in the wet sand. Yesterday I met with one of my tutors for my Wild Writing MA, followed up by a wild lunch sat on Broomheath over looking the River Deben. We were surrounded by dried rabbit droppings, though only spotted one darting behind a hedge, and ferns only just beginning to unfurl their fiddleheads, apparently having been relatively recently (for a planet that has been largely unchanged for over 100 million years) mowed down. The eradication had afforded us a better view of the river and the villages and fields on the hills beyond, but I would have much preferred the forest of ferns. Any time I wander through a sea of their geometric leaves I feel transported back to the Cretaceous Era, awaiting the stampede of long extinct beasts, apparently no match for those curling green leaves.

On the first two days it was only the weather that was wild. What with gales of wind and the rain threatening all day I failed to get out and instead spent most of my days snuggled in a winter jumper, a splatter of rain incapacitating me from escaping from my elaborate burrow. On day 1 I tried imprinting leaves on paper, with little success. On day 2 late in the evening I decided to switch on some wildlife webcams. The first few I tried were, unsurprisingly, completely black, obviously set up in a place miraculously far away from the unrelenting lights so many of us have become used to. Eventually I caught some creatures awake. A family of peregrines nested on Aylesbury county hall. I couldn’t work out how many there were or how old any of the members were. I could clearly see at least three. One, I thought to be male, spent a long time preening with another curled up next to him. I assumed this second to be a female as she looked about twice the size. I flicked back later and another had risen up from the huddle and took up the preening routine. It was an oddly cosy and domestic image for animals so perfectly designed for murder. They appeared fluffy with their fledgling feathers and snuggled next to each other for warmth.

Barn Owls were next. I watched one where a bundle of chicks nestled close to the lens. They screeched incessantly for food and their mother. I turned on another and was immediately met with the face of a barn owl mother turned 180 degrees. She shuffled and twitched on her spot for a long time but eventually moved to reveal another clutch of chicks. Before leaving for her night time hunt she stretched and turned back and forth. There were times when she looked terrifyingly human. At one point, her face turned and catching the light in a particular way, it looked like she was wearing a Venetian mask, an eerie pale and pointed visage. Then she moved closer to the entrance of the box and spread her wings, looking like some sort of odd caricature of a human, a clown fooling about before the beginning of a show or a stout man limbering up for the day.

While the last two days I’ve been in amongst my nearby nature and relaxed under the dappled light that escapes from a canopy of leaves, it was during the first two days, trapped by the mild grievance of nature’s unpredictable weather, that I was reminded how close we really are to the wild. The wild isn’t something foreign and distant that you must escape from the confines of an urban environment to discover. It can be domestic and sometimes it bears a human face. You shouldn’t have to step out of your comfort zone to experience the wild, just lift your head and open your ears to incorporate it into your life.

Starlings & Vision

While the tremulous dark clouds of stress and worry, built from the ridiculously insignificant and the absurdly unrealistic, sometimes seem to overwhelm my every thought it can often take merely a glance outside the bring some clarity. A great source of comfort for me recently has been the simple satisfaction of watching the various birds in our garden. That burst of the wild world that is open to all.

 

 Starlings have been a particular favourite recently. A small flock of them seems to have taken to alighting on the lawn almost every day. The grass had been left to its own devices for a long while and with alternating episodes of heavy sun and bursts of rain has turned into what must seem like a jungle for those birds standing only a few inches tall. Perhaps I can hear the murmur of their chirps or can sense the mass of the flock as it falls to the ground in near harmony, but every day something will call me to the window and there I’ll see one or two bobbing among the blades. Suddenly I’ll spot another and another, little beaked heads catching my eye wherever I look, barely giving me a moment to count them all. There’ll be at least 15 of them out there, darting between the tallest patches of grass. They’re everywhere, but before I know it they’ll all of a sudden, as one, fly up and away. Then a magpie, seeming enormous by comparison, might take their place.

I think those little creatures are perfectly symbolic of the beauty hidden in Britain’s wildlife. It’s not in-your-face or overwhelmingly majestic, like an eagle, an elephant or a blue whale or any other of the many awe inspiring animals that roam the other corners of our earth. It’s that type of beauty that takes some time to appreciate or, sometimes, even just to notice. It has subtleties and unique characteristics that once you’ve seen you can’t turn away from, they stay firmly with you.

 Just like my starlings. To look at them absent-mindedly it is just a brown birds with some unremarkable specks across it’s wings. But one day you’ll see it clearly. Perhaps you’ll catch it standing perfectly in a bright beam of sunlight or simply see a photograph that magically captures the hidden, spectacular nature of the birds. Never again will you be able to miss those purple, green and blue shimmers that cover every feather, like a gem shining out of the cracks of a stone.

Not only do it’s subtle shades make the bird a unique beauty, every individual different depending on the angle or intensity of light with which you see it, it also gives us a glimpse into another world of sight. We cannot even imagine how the birds see the world, they master a spectrum of colour beyond the tri-recpetors of the human eye. Ultra-violet light brings another dimension to a world that we see as dull by comparison; many birds’ feathers will reveal another shade of colour and some avian predators might be able to see into the past with the trails of their prey shining in ultra-violet brilliance.

 Their world of light might be outside of our cognition but, even if their full beauty might be hidden to our eyes, they can bring simple flashes of relief and colour into our lives.

All of the photos displayed here are the work of the lovely Michelle Terri who kindly gave me permission to use them as it was her photos that made me realise the wonderful colours that cover the starling feathers. Please check out the rest of her work here: https://www.facebook.com/michelleterriphotography?fref=ts She is very talented and takes very beautiful and original photos of wildlife (in the UK and beyond). I think she has a particular eye for bringing out the beauty of many aspects of the natural world that people take for granted.