Dancing with Bees by Brigit Strawbridge Howard

Author:Brigit Strawbridge Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

CHAPTER 11

Seeking the Great Yellow Bumblebee, Part 1

I do so enjoy watching nature documentaries. Like millions of other viewers, I am awestruck by the exotic and diverse wildlife brought to the screen, as well as the dramatic landscapes they are filmed in. But for all the brilliance and splendour of the world’s rainforests, deserts, and oceans, I still find myself drawn more to the wildlife and wild places of Britain and Ireland than those of faraway places. There is so much I don’t know about life in the moors, mountains, fens, forests, rivers, lakes, and shores of these islands we call home, that I barely know where to begin.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could see more, hear more, and understand more about the wildlife on our own back doorsteps? Imagine how much richer our lives would be if we made time to lie on the ground and watch life in the undergrowth; to walk through ancient woodlands, meadows, marshes, and heathlands; to immerse ourselves in these different landscapes, absorb their energies, and encounter, in the truest sense of the word, other living, non-human beings that live there.

I will never grow bored of the plants and animals living on my own local patch in Dorset, many of which I have still to meet and get to know. I manage my time these days as carefully as I can, to make sure I am free to spend more than just the occasional sunny afternoon watching birds and insects in our garden. And I spend far more time than I probably should looking through the macro lens of my camera at the lichens and mosses growing on Shaftesbury’s greenstone walls, and the wild flowers that grow along the tracks and lanes, as I walk between our house and our allotment.

Sometimes, during the months of March and April, Rob and I head out before breakfast in search of boxing hares. We have a few favourite fields where we have seen as many as eleven hares in less than an hour, but I still dream of the day we finally get to see them ‘boxing’. Which I know we will, when it is meant to be. And we get up considerably earlier in the month of May to try to catch the dawn chorus at Garston Wood, an RSPB nature reserve just across the border in Wiltshire, near the village of Sixpenny Handley. I say ‘try’ because we get far too easily distracted by the hares, barn owls, and other wildlife we see along the way, thus frequently arrive late and miss the best of the birdsong. In fact, we sometimes miss it altogether.

All these encounters, and more, I have delighted in, but recently I have felt a yearning to visit other, more far-flung parts of Britain and Ireland that I know are home to treasures I can only dream of seeing near our home in North Dorset. I have, for instance, never seen a mountain hare, a pine martin, or a long-eared owl.

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