I had a brief wander to the end of our lane at lunchtime to get a bit of respite from the computer screen. Usually such wanders are just down to the gate to the sheep fields to look at the view up the Brampton Valley. I didn’t stay long today as there was clearly rain on its way but I did come across these badger tracks in the mud.
Just a nice little moment in nature to take me out of work-mode and into the wild.
Next month it will be 15 years since I had a holiday that, with no exaggeration, changed the course of my life.
In 2009, I was in my eleventh year of my career and settled into a routine of working long hours and doing far too little with my time away from the office. I had long held an interest in nature but was doing absolutely nothing about it apart from some cycling in the local countryside and occasionally thumbing through the pages of BBC Wildlife Magazine. Essentially, an interest I had held since childhood was a barely burning ember of what could have been a passion.
However, a spark from the ember had been floating in the air for sometime, wafted by the pages of that magazine, in particular the pages showing adverts for wildlife holidays. Every once in a while I had noticed one of those adverts and had a cursory look at the linked website. On one such visit to those pages I came across a holiday that would eventually catch that spark and ignite it.
From being a child, I always felt a calling of the northern forests – probably after seeing pretty rubbish 1970s American TV movies about families surviving in the wilderness either after a shipwreck or heading out to escape the rat race. After very little Googling, I found the one I remember most, called ‘Sea Gypsies’. There were more including ‘The Wilderness Family’, with the father of the family seemingly always played by Robert Logan.
The holiday I had noticed was to just such forests, but those of central Sweden and the Bergslagen Forest in particular. It seemed a good trip on which to test whether liked such holidays; it was only a short distance from where some of my family live and, so I could see them while also having a few days in nature.
Having already arrived in Sweden a few days earlier, I was given a lift to the local airport at Västerås where I met the guide and the four other guests, before we headed out for the one hour drive to our venue for the first three of the next four nights. We were staying at the basic but very comfortable hostel-type accommodation of Grimsö Wildlife Research Station, which is part of the Swedish agricultural university. Here, amongst other things, they research the interaction of the country’s wildlife with farming.
That first evening, after we had settled in, we headed out in the minibus to search for European elk (älg in Sweden and Moose in American). The sun was dropping slowly, occasionally blinding us as we headed towards it amongst the roadside forest. It had rained not long before leaving Grimsö and the last of the springtime warmth from the early May sunshine was evaporating the lying water and steaming off the road’s surface with mist forming down at the bottom of the shallow valley meadows. We turned off the quiet main road and onto unmade dirt tracks, slowing down to a crawl as we rounded bends and came across each meadow amongst the thick pine forest. We drew a few blanks at first but eventually, standing at the edge of the trees, we saw two dark shapes emerge and there were two adult elk quietly grazing the long, damp grass. They after a little while sloped off into the forest but we were to come across more as we continued along the tracks, finding 17 in all over a couple of hours. In some ways these creatures were the stars of the trip, not just because they are the ‘kings of the forest’ but because we saw a lot of them. Quite often on such trips you get fleeting glimpses of an animal’s hind quarters as it disappears into dense undergrowth but in this case they were very easy to see feeding at dusk in numerous forest clearings.
Before returning to Grimsö, we stopped the minibus at the base of a walking track and hiked the short distance up to a rocky clearing high above the valleys. It was here that we would have our first attempt at trying to converse with the local wolf packs. With a bit of instruction, we cupped our hands around mouths and howled out chilly evening air over the hills and forest. After 10 or 20 seconds, we stopped to hear if we had a reply. Unfortunately, there no howls coming back and after another failed attempt, we headed back down to the waiting minibus. We were told that the wolves could have heard us much further away that we could have heard them, so I liked to think that they had indeed called back but just out of earshot.
The next morning, after being out late, we had a walk through the forest looking generally for wildlife and experiencing the Swedish wilderness. The evening before was the first time I had ever been in a wolf territory and it stirred something visceral inside me, a true sense of wildness and some trepidation. Even walking in daylight in a group of people, I felt the presence of wolves and a deep feeling of the wild and untamed. Walking across the uneven, moss and rock covered ground amongst the birch and pines, we found wolf prints, scat (droppings) and the very old remains of a wolf-killed elk with only fur remaining. That walk, rather than the attempt at howling the evening before, triggered a yearning to see wolves in the wild that has never left me and it has led to more trips in search of them in several more European countries.
The evening was spent focusing on beavers with a canoe trip on a quiet and slow-moving river. We were picked up by another guide and made our way to a nearby river bank where we unloaded three large Canadian-style canoes and launched them into the river. At dusk we moved off and paddled calming up stream, hearing the slowly quietening birdlife and the rippling of the water against the side of the canoes. Our patience was tested with a long wait and we had seen no sign of the animals by the time we turned back to our launch site. However, almost as we were about to give up hope, we came across a dark lump floating around in the water. A brief glimpse ended with a loud slap of its tail and it dived beneath the water and permanently out of our sight. We returned to minibus with only that short sighting of the beaver and with a little disappointment we headed back to Grimsö for the night. Little did I know that years later, in a lake only a few miles away, I would regularly see both adult and young beavers during annual stays at a family summerhouse in the forest.
The second full day started with some free time and I took a walk around the area close by the research station. Our guide had heard there was a very special nest that we could possibly go to see and we headed out to find it. After more walking over the uneven forest ground, we came across a tall tree stump with a shattered top. At the very top, at first hard to see, was a nesting great grey owl, sitting very still on a clutch of eggs. It seemed almost oblivious to our presence apart from an occasional glimpse in our direction but we soon reversed away so not to disturb this amazing bird from its nest.
Later that evening we again headed out into the forest in search of wolves in hope of hearing them howl. We had our evening meal out in the open as we sat around a warming campfire, which kept the cooling effects of the damp spring air at bay. As we sat around the first, the tour guide’s small dog walked to the edge of the huddled group and growled out towards the darkness. A shiver shot down my spine; ‘could there be a wolf out there watching us?’ I thought to myself, a sense of both fear and excitement coursing through me. A spotlight was shone out into the surrounding woods, going from point to point, pausing and moving on, trying to pick up movement or the shining retinas of staring eyes but there was nothing looking back at us.
Afterwards, we had another couple of attempts, at different locations, to howl out into the forest in hope that wolves in the darkness would howl back in return. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be and we headed back to the research station with perhaps the biggest hope of the trip dashed for a final time.
The last full day started with a long drive north. We may our way to a small lakeside homestead and then out into the surrounding forest. Eventually we arrived at a wooden shelter at the edge of a clearing. Set up with desk chairs, bunk beds and a toilet, we settled in for a long night as we waited for brown bears to appear. We had seen their paw prints on route to the hide but that was the closest we got to them. As it became too dark to see beyond the small viewing slots, we all headed to our bunks and in the morning the view was still empty apart from a cawing raven or two. The ravens called out a range of different sounds, varying significantly over the course of our stay in the hide. We were told that they have distinct calls when a bear is nearby and each time they made a different noise there was a little jump in expectation but each time the hope ebbed away again. We reluctantly and sadly made our way back to the homestead for a very good breakfast, but only after very gingerly opening the door to the hide, just in case the bears were waiting for us behind it.
With another long and uneventful drive back south away from the unseen bears, that was it, my first wildlife trip was over. The only notable moment on the journey was when we were driving along a particularly long and straight road and we saw a car heading towards on the wrong side of the road (for Sweden). It only moved back to the correct side at the last moment and we had slowed down to avoid it. Very kindly, I was dropped off at the home of my Swedish family and said goodbye to the rest of the group as they went onwards to the airport for the flight home.
What had I learned from the trip? Well, it showed me that wildlife holidays can be deeply immersive experiences, spending time in nature with people who know so much about it or, like me, want to learn and share it with others. I also found that you can’t guarantee seeing the wildlife but just being in the places they inhabit can be almost as good, even if you don’t see the species you really want to. I’ve come to value finding the breath of nature in the places I visit, the true experience isn’t always seeing a particular animal but being in locations that have so much wealth in their ecosystems that we simply don’t have in the UK. Overall, that trip really did reignite my love of nature and I returned enthused and energised to actually do something with that passion I had found.
That holiday changed so much. Within 18 months, I’d been on three further wildlife holidays with the same tour company, to the Scottish islands of Islay and Jura that autumn, to Iceland in the following late winter and to Spain, to look for wolves again, the following autumn. The Sweden trip also put the idea of wildlife volunteering into my head and I started to look for local opportunities close to home, although I didn’t do anything about it immediately. However, the idea was firmly planted and it was to become a central part of my life away from work.
In 2011, two years after that first trip, I had no more wildlife holidays planned and work was particularly busy and not very happy. Despite those trips, I hadn’t made any further changes to my life to grow that interest in nature. However, not being happy at work and frustration with my home life led to the biggest decision of my life to that date; to take a year off.
Over that year, I spent many weekdays and Sundays volunteering locally, nine weeks residential volunteering for the RSPB at three sites across Scotland and Wales, I went on wildlife holidays to Speyside, Norfolk, Mull and Iceland (again) and had 11 weeks in Sweden over course of four visits. This intense period focusing on watching and photographing wildlife, and volunteering, transformed my life after I returned to work, ensuring I was infinitely happier in both my work life and home life.
When I returned to work, I continued to volunteer both locally and more widely; with a local group in Cheshire, with an osprey project in North Wales and on RSPB Ramsey Island, with the latter culminating in a three-month stay in 2019. I also continued to take wildlife holidays including, up to now, another trip to Spain to find wolves (which I did), and others to the Falkland Islands, Finland (successfully finding bears), Botswana (twice), Poland and Zambia plus various self-guided trips in England, to the Inner and Outer Hebrides, and Orkney.
That trip to Sweden, eventually, via a very winding route, led me to take that second trip to Botswana, to the Kalahari, was where I met my wife, Sarah. So, finally deciding to actually do something about my wildlife interest, rather than occasionally imaging that I should, has changed my life way beyond anything my imagination could have come up with when I was thumbing those pages of the wildlife magazine and glancing at the wildlife holiday adverts.
I’ve been doing bird surveys for about twelve years now. I think spending an hour or two every so often totally immersed in bird songs and calls has sharpened my hearing. I now seem to pick up the sounds when I’m not even trying and often they burst into my consciousness unexpectedly. I’m currently on the train to work and as we stopped at one station and the doors opened, a fleeting song of a blackcap came in to the carriage from the undergrowth behind the platform. It brought a little joy into my commute and stirred me from my doomscrolling on my phone.
It’s been quite a few weeks since we last went for a country walk. We had to do a few household tasks yesterday, probably made a little less unwelcome by the weather being pretty unpleasant, particularly in the morning. However, waking this morning on what looked like a beautiful spring day, we headed out for a walk around part of Rutland Water.
Since we moved to Northamptonshire three years ago, Rutland is now less than an hour away. We have been to the wildlife trust nature reserve a couple of times over that time but today we decided to do a five mile circuit around the village of Hambleton and the peninsula on which it sits. The whole walk was under a mix of bright sunshine and fluffy spring clouds. The strength of the sun can now be really felt, being towards the end of March, but as soon as cloud covered it over, even fleetingly, there was still a chill in the air, especially out in the brisk wind.
There were signs of spring all along the walk: in the fields, along the hedgerows, in the woods and along the shoreline. There are new lambs in the fields, hawthorns are now coming out into leaf and the blackthorn into blossom, and there are migrant birds starting to appear and sing.
I would like to pay a little more attention to the wild flowers this spring and there were plenty on the walk. There were delicate primroses in amongst the trees and celandines on the grass verges in addition to the blossom in the hedgerows. There must also be a great display of bluebells in some of the shoreside woodlands as there were big swathes of them bursting up through the leaf litter.
After what was a stunning five-mile walk we headed to the nature reserve. Firstly to look at a possible new purchase; it’s about time I bought a proper wildlife watching telescope and I just wanted another look at one before I take the plunge (possibly). The last visit of the day was to Manton Bay to see the newly arrived ospreys. The established pair have settled in and are already mating regularly, so it might not be long until the first eggs are laid.
This did remind me of one of my old usual spring haunts, at the Glaslyn Wildlife osprey nest protection site near Porthmadog in North Wales. I volunteered there for a number of years, spending quite a few nights but also many days in the old caravan amongst the wet meadows and drystone walk, just a couple of hundred metres from the nest. It was a joyful experience being surrounded by wildlife and helping to protect this beautiful but rare species. I saw this morning that the lucky volunteers no longer have to sit in an old caravan but have a new hide, perched up on stilts to avoid the water from the too often flooding river. The ospreys at the Glaslyn have yet to return this spring but I’ll be keeping an eye out on the webcams over the coming days.
I’ll finish this post with a few images of the lovely spring walk today…
I’m very fortunate to live in a quiet village and even more lucky to have views of the countryside from my home office window (at least when the leaves aren’t on the trees). Working from home yesterday gave me quite a few wildlife sightings without even leaving the house.
Sitting at my desk I saw a small flock of winter-visiting redwings in the paddock opposite as well as the muntjac I now fairly regularly see. There was also a calling green woodpecker in the trees beyond.
In the late afternoon there was a winter visitor to our bird table, a brambling. I very rarely see one of these striking finches but we’ve had one or two visit, staying for a couple of weeks or so, both this winter and last.
As night began to fall, I saw my first bats off the year, racing around the house and trees behind us, where we so often do. Due to there size, they were undoubtedly pipistrelles but I didn’t have my detector out to be able to tell whether they were common or soprano.
A last welcome sight of the day, just before it was time to go to bed, was our first hedgehog of the year. They’ve actually been coming quite regularly to eat in our feeding box over the course of the winter, only missing in the properly cold periods. We’ve caught them on our trailcam a few times but this was the first sight with my own eyes.
The day would have been even better if I’d heard a little owl when I went to stand by my open office window as I went to be but I can’t have everything, I suppose. Last year I didn’t hear them as often as the previous two springs we’ve lived here, so I’m hoping for a bit of a return this year.
I’m working at home again today, so hopefully a bit more wildlife watching from the house.
A Saturday and a Sunday morning spent working and putting together flat-pack furniture wasn’t the most inspiring way to end the week. However, after finishing the same set of bookshelves for the second time, we headed out to one of our closest nature reserves at Pitsford Water reservoir.
While putting my tools away at home, I had felt some early March warmth from the sun peeping out between the clouds. As we left the car and walked down to the water, the cloud dispersed and the sun’s strength was a bit of a surprise after such wet and grey weather recently. The warmth could be felt on our dark clothes being heated by the rays and the hide we went into felt like someone had left some (non-existent) radiators on. With no wind to speak of, and the cloud clearing further, this was a first real taste spring weather, despite the temperature still being some way below 10 degrees celsius.
We decided to head for Pitsford to see what might me a last sight of the wintering wildfowl before many of them head off to breed further north in the UK and a long way beyond. Given the relatively mild (if damp) first part of the year, it wasn’t a surprise to see that wildfowl numbers had already dropped significantly from their mid-winter highs. Pitsford is a winter home to thousands of birds with large numbers of widgeon, teal, mallard and tufted duck as well as a range of other waterbirds.
One of my favourite winter visitors to the reservoir is the splendidly feathered goldeneye – well, at least the male is, with the female being much more drab. They have already started displaying and pairing up, with the males in their finery performing a slightly odd manoeuvre, stretching their necks out and throwing their heads back, with a cartoon-like duck call. A (not very good) video of them doing this is below.
While the weekend is already sadly drawing to a close, our short walk did give me a little pick-me-up before settling in for Sunday dinner (maybe after a run in the last of the sunshine).
I had to scrape ice off the car windscreen as I left for work this morning. Despite having a mild winter, mornings of late have been chilly.
The 15-minute drive to the station, once the light has started to return, is lovely. I drive cross-country to a village station on the line between Northampton and Rugby. The route is all rural with an occasional village and passes through nicely rolling countryside. On a frosty morning like today, the valleys can be cloaked in mist giving some stunning views as I pass through them.
When I get to the station, standing on the platform there are views across the fields to the far off Borough Hill, near Daventry. The scene at the station this morning was quite spectacular with a colourful sunrise above the frosty and misty fields. On mornings like this, despite the cold clawing at my nose and fingers, there’s something joyous about being out and about at this time of day.
We’re lucky to live on a quiet country lane in a village. The fields at the end of the lane do call us on a sunny lunchtime when working from home and we wander down to take a look at the view.
Despite the impression of a lovely warm day in the picture below (taken a few minutes ago) it’s actually quite chilly and blustery today. However, the bright sun does have a sense of the coming spring about it…as did the plump ewes in the fields…
With this 570th post, I’ve reached ten years of blogging on this site. It is somewhat surprising that I’ve kept it going so long; I only set up my blog to ‘give it a go’ a see if some longer-form writing would give me an outlet for my thoughts beyond the usual social media.
The blog started 18 months after I retuned to work following a 12-month career break. So much of that year was spent in nature with a mixture of volunteering, wildlife trips and photography, that it helped me find a new enthusiasm for the world around me and gave me a much more positive and constructive life overall. Before the break I had very little to say beyond my work life and I would never have blogged about that; I’ve always tried to keep work and home separate and leave thinking about work to weekdays. Continuing to spend my time away from work in nature in a number of different ways led me to consider blogging. I had done some (pretty rubbish) creative writing as a mindfulness practice and it seemed to work in moving my thoughts away from work. Doing things more interesting and constructive with my free time also gave me more inspiration to write and it just seemed to be an obvious extension to my practical conservation volunteering and photography, adding another dimension and enabling me to dive more deeply into my interests.
I can’t say this is the most keenly read or most visited blog and certainly not the best written or most thought-provoking. However, it does have a small band of followers and it does have individual posts which continue to be read years after they’ve been written. It seems that my posts on Scottish Islands and my trip to the Falkland Islands (also nearly 10 years ago) continue to get the most visits. Perhaps a bit of Googling while planning a holiday is the main source of my visitors.
The most visited posts at the time of writing have always been those about my volunteering at the Glaslyn ospreys in north Wales, where for a number of years I did nest protection shifts each spring. From the statistics page for my site it’s very easy to see when I stopped doing those shifts as my visitor numbers have never been the same since.
The subject which I have most prolifically written about is probably Ramsey Island. Since 2012, I’ve spent one, two or three weeks a year there as a residential volunteer for the RSPB, which all culminated in a three month stay in 2019. When I’ve written so much about the place, it’s hard to think of new things to say but I’m sure I’ll be inspired some more by my next visit.
I also can’t say that it hasn’t been a struggle at times to keep it going and to generate the enthusiasm to do so. Certainly over the past two or three years my rate of posting has dropped markedly. I have a generally strong underlying angst over the state of nature, the country and the world as a whole. I find so many things so concerning and hugely negative. I often find it exhausting when thinking beyond my own little world and at times writing about nature, when I feel so depressed about it, is almost the last thing I want to do. However, perhaps my blog should again be a place for positivity in the face of all the negativity around us.
At this ten-year mark in my blogging, I have considered whether it’s time to stop. It would end the false pressure and guilt I put on myself for not posting but it would seem such a waste of all the effort I’ve put in over the last decade. I also feel I still have so much to say, possibly, in fact, more than I used to. Almost by chance, my work has started to encroach on areas I blog about, with rural transport and wider countryside and coastal issues being a key area of my weekday focus. I don’t want my private time and work to mix too much but my personal thoughts on some of the crossover subjects could form the basis for future posts.
So, at this 10-year point, I don’t intend to leave the blog behind but, instead, find some new energy and, hopefully, new ideas, to reinvigorate my site and continue posting for a good while yet.
I’ll finish my post with a video. It was shot on my phone at Snettisham on the Norfolk coast of The Wash a couple of weeks ago. My wife and I had a weekend away, staying in a lovely pub nearby. One evening we went to the shoreline at the RSPB reserve to watch the dusk flight of birds as the tide came in. The result was a natural spectacular with thousands upon thousands of geese and waders putting on a show at a scale seen in few other places in the UK. It was a truly inspiring sight and one that re-energised my love of nature.
Daft Mumblings 