If you go down in the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise.
If you go down in the woods today, you’d better go in disguise,
For every bear that ever there was will gather there for certain
Because today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic.
Well I wasn’t really expecting teddy bears nor a picnic, but the relative absence of life never ceases to surprise. No rustling in the hedgerows and precious little bird song. I took a short walk primarily to test out my latest piece of kit, a camera harness (made by Sevenoak). My main camera is quite heavy, too heavy to sit on my belt, and I can’t stand having it swinging around my neck. I have a good camera bag for my back with side access, but it’s still a bit of a faff taking the camera out, especially if you’re in a hurry. The harness works well – the camera mounts on the front and once you get used to the release method (a simple twist and pull of the camera itself), it’s a good option. You can attach a side holster too if you want to carry two cameras. There’s not much I like more than an excuse to acquire a new camera accessory – my favourites are a hide clamp and gimbal head which have revolutionised the photographs I can take from a hide. I was hoping for fungi yesterday too but was disappointed.
Nevertheless, I do love a natural archway / tunnel.
What I couldn’t get out of my head was how narrow the footpath is (it’s single file only) relative to the wide open fields which surround it, although I have walked along it many times before. As Nick Hayes eloquently points out in his excellent The Book of Trespass, as soon as we accept and even are grateful for a right of way, we are also accepting that the vast majority of England’s land and waterways, in other words everywhere else, is closed to us, hoi polloi. We are turned into unwelcome intruders in our own countryside. The gates to the fields all have reasonably polite signs (as Hayes points out “Trespassers will be prosecuted” is just an outright lie, trespass is not a prosecutable offence), but are also all topped with barbed wire. That’s a thing we could do with uninventing.
Talking of woods, I recently came across Simona Kossak. There’s a really good article about her here:
The Extraordinary Life of Simona Kossak | Article | Culture.pl
The only biography of her is, as far as I can establish, only available in Polish, but having reached out to Janusz R. Kowalczyk, the author of the above, I have now contacted the publishers to ask if there is an English version or perhaps a pdf which Google might be able to translate. Simona Kossak was an ecologist and an activist, fighting to protect the forest which was her home. She spent more than thirty years in a simple hut in the Białowieża Forest with no electricity or running water. There’s a photograph of her sleeping on the floor beside her bed which is occupied by a fully-grown wild boar. She also shared her bed with a lynx. Another friend was a ‘terrorist’ crow, notorious for theft and attacks on people, especially cyclists.
Simona recalls her epiphanic moment in her own words: “One day, the pack of my deer, which I raised and fed with a bottle, and which I later followed across the woods for many years, manifested signs of fright, and did not want to go out onto the forest field to graze. And I started to approach the young forest, because this was the direction in which the deer started, their ears raised, and the hair standing up on their buttocks, apparently something very threatening had to be there in the young forest. I crossed about half of this open space, and I stopped, because I heard a choir of terrified barking behind me, so I turned around, and what did I see? […] Five of my deer stood up on their stiffly straightened legs, looking at me, and calling with this bark: don’t go there, don’t go there, there’s death over there! I must admit, I was dumbstruck, and then finally I did go. And what did I find? It turned out that there were fresh traces of a lynx that had crossed the young forest. I went in deeper, and I found lynx faeces; it was indeed warm, because I touched it. What did that mean? It meant that a carnivore had entered the farm, the deer noticed him, then ran and they were scared, and what did they see? They saw their mother going unto death, completely unaware, she had to be warned, and for me, I will honestly admit, this day was a breakthrough. I crossed the border that divides the human world from that of the animals. If there was a glass that divided us from humans, a wall impossible to knock down, then the animals would not care about me. We are deer, she is human, what do we care for her? If they did warn me […], it meant one thing and one thing only: you are a member of our pack, we don’t want you to get hurt. I honestly admit, I relived this event for many days, and in fact today, when I think about it, there is sense of warmth around my heart. It proves how one can befriend the world of wild animals.“
Scientists set up illegal kill traps (the kind with heavy metal jaws which require two people to open them) as part of an effort to study already small populations of wolves and lynx in the forest. Simona was having none of that. I do hope I get to read more about her.
And talking of wild animals, an article in The Guardian pulls no punches as it accounts for the collapse in the wild salmon population in England and Wales. There’s climate change, there’s agricultural run-off, but the poor state of our rivers does not just mean they are not safe for humans to swim in. This is unequivocally attributed to repeated sewage spills and criminality by the water industry (update: more than 1,100 criminal convictions since privatisation it has now been revealed). Butterfly numbers this year were the lowest since the big Butterfly Count began and Swallow numbers are down by a quarter. The government is proposing new legislation but for the most part it already exists. Enforcement is the problem and as with the farming industry there is so little of it that it doesn’t begin to scratch the surface.
My little walk had its pleasures. This entanglement evoked the dark, scary woods of Kenneth Grahame and Tolkien.
And there were other treats.
Apologies as ever for any all too likely misidentifications.
Nice to see that this Hollyhock has been left undisturbed.
Spindle tree flowers.
Ivy berries.
A single disused badger sett entrance.
Common Greenshield Lichen.
Purple Cyclamen.
A Silver Birch, doing its beautiful, almost wispy thing, even now the leaves have fallen.
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