How to be Wild by Barnes Simon

How to be Wild by Barnes Simon

Author:Barnes, Simon [Simon Barnes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780720715
Publisher: Short Books
Published: 2012-11-03T00:00:00+00:00


77 There is a lovely little scrap of woodland to one side of the Suffolk Show ground, and as we passed, I heard the sudden racket of nightingale. Most people walked on unregarding: perhaps noticing it as a pleasant background din, perhaps just letting it all flow by as part of the essential ambience of the annual splendours of the Suffolk Show. There was a blackcap, too (definitely not a garden warbler), singing rich and fruity.

Then I noticed overhead a hawk: biggish, burly, round-winged: making a fast, shallow, gliding descent into the wood: sparrowhawk, female – females are bigger than the males – on what looked to me like a killing run. I had the quiet satisfaction of seeing something that nobody else did, and hearing something that most people would not have identified.

For this was a spot of Unofficial Nature: and that’s just as important – perhaps a great deal more important – than Official Nature. Official Nature is to be found at the big sites, where the star species gather and strut their stuff: places like Minsmere bird reserve, with its avocets, its bitterns and its marsh harriers. These places are of vast and unquestioned importance: everybody knows that a place like Minsmere is a Good Thing.

But Unofficial Nature is perhaps an even better thing. Unofficial Nature is the sort of thing you find and see everywhere, if you are wild enough to keep your eyes and your ears open: the blackbird on the lawn, the flock of crows over the fields, the tight formation of Canada geese glimpsed from the train window. And I always love those extrusions of the wild world into civilisation: for example, the birds I have seen when covering sporting events around the world: crested oropendola in Trinidad, lesser kestrel at the Stadium of Light in Portugal, common tern at Middlesbrough, shikra at the Wankhede in Bombay.

Unofficial Nature is to be found in every garden, in every untidy corner of the countryside, in every copse. It is something that needs to be treasured. And there is a change taking place: slowly, these places are being cherished that little bit more. Joni might be able to explain why.



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