I often bemoan the fact that despite being fantastic in pretty much every other way and a place I am proud to call my other home, Cornwall is lacking in ‘proper’ woods. As a woodlander in spirit, raised crashing through bracken, climbing trees and dined upon by ticks in the great ancient woodlands around Romsey and in the New Forest, the offering here is more limited. The coastal, blustery nature of this peninsular county makes it difficult for any tree higher than a Shetland pony’s shoulder to grow, and any spots of woodland that may have managed to survive this and the chop-chop attitude of Neolithic farmers are battered and have a distinct ‘will that do?’ quality to them. The wild and rugged setting may suit Ross Poldark getting his shirt off and smouldering out to sea, but it’s bloody irritating if you’re an oak tree.
  
The exception to this rule can be found in the river valleys, and a quick scan of a satellite map will reveal these perusing across the agricultural green quilt like moss-green blood vessels towards the sea. These woodlands were pointless to deforest and cultivate given the steep-sidedness of the slopes, and the shelter from the cold and wind creates warm and humid microclimates, leading to temperate rainforests distinct enough to be classed as ‘Atlantic Oakwoods’. As their name suggests, these climes are exploding with life and colour in comparison to the relatively barren pastoral fields around them, and yet they frequently remain conspicuous and unassuming on the outside. It’s a bit like stumbling upon a psychedelic music festival in the middle of greyest, bleakest Birmingham*.

One such wood is my own ‘secret’ location. I initially found it some three years ago while staying in a B&B nearby, and later returned there after moving to Cornwall for university. Accessed from a standard Cornish country lane narrow as a tractor, the wood isn’t public access and I suspect I’m probably trespassing, but that just makes it even better. I’ve never stumbled across another soul while out here; this is the closest I feel to entering a world devoid of civilisation in this Western corner of the country. Continue reading →

Copyright RSPB

I’ve witnessed the slow coming of Spring 21 times now, yet the passage of time, of which a large part of it seems to have been spent in a perpetual waiting-room gloom of winter, makes it seem as fresh as if it were the first. I’ll probably keep writing about it each year too, and you can add ‘groan at Pete’s unoriginality’ to seasonal staples like Christmas, Eurovision and a new series of Game of Thrones. But as it is in my view the most wonderful and obvious illustration of the shapeshifting face of nature, it’s a tradition I’m happy to keep up, as each year seems to bring a new perspective to it.

No sooner have I crossed the terrifying B-road of death and gone through the gate into College Reservoir nature reserve, that I am welcomed by the twittering of songbirds, like the sudden wall of chatter one encounters the moment they enter a pub. A curious robin peered and bobbed around me methodically from branch to branch, perhaps in expectation of a mealworm or two to be launched from my pocket. To it’s left, more delicate ‘seeps’ and flashes of black, white and rusty pink could only mean the presence of long-tailed tits.

Fixing my binoculars on one of the pair proved difficult – the birds seem to resemble feathery ping-pong balls not only in shape, but also locomotion. Once they stayed still for long enough however, I could see how dashing the increasingly brighter sunlight of Spring cast them, and on a less poetic note, inspect they’re legs to see if they were ringed – many of the songbirds in this area have been mist-netted and subsequently adorned by academics at my university. While this was not the case, I noticed tiny pieces of lichen in their beaks. To my delight, I watched as each bird in turn flew into the crux of a gorse bush, where bit by bit a very comfortable looking nest was being constructed.

At this point it was similar in size and shape to half of a large orange, made out of particularly fuzzy mosses and lined attractively with the lichens being gathered. As one tit returned with new material, it was locked and stitched in with the precise care of someone brushing out the folds in a newly laid bed-sheet, and it would then turn around and vigorously shift up the moss with its backside. Eventually this nest will form a neat, rounded dome to form what is perhaps one of the most charming of all bird nests. Although I could not see any myself, long-tailed tits are famous for lining their homes with spider webs, the strong and sticky silk providing ideal natural foundations.

After checking the stream below for otter spraint (none today) and a quick scan of College Lake (couple of grey herons, groups of teal, coot and canada goose), I made my way back through the woods towards Argal Reservoir. Both College and Argal are man-made lakes built to fulfil a functional purpose in water supply, and standing on top of the dam wall that gives you the best panoramic view of the latter gives you a humbling sense of the engineering ingenuity that has created this, water tumbling over a 50 foot drop from the sluices beneath your feet.

Despite the dam initially appearing like another triumph of utilitarianism, the reservoir has created ideal habitat for waterbirds. Scanning the horizon with my binoculars, what appear to be model viking longboats from a distance reveal themselves to be great crested grebes, their swooning necks and handsomely feather-crowned heads occasionally disappearing below the water line on foraging dives for weeds. At this time of year pairs will be courting with their famous, synchronised dance. I kept my eyes fixed on the birds, but of the four in view, none seemed interested in ‘setting a date’. Continue reading →

On this Sunday afternoon, staring out the window of Beerwolf Books as I procrastinate off doing uni work, odd thoughts drift in an out. For some reason, one of those is life after death.

I’ve never really been overly concerned with the concept since I was very young – ironically, it was perhaps when Auntie Barbara, one of my earliest mentors in introducing me to the wonders of wildlife, died when I was 12 years old that I was happy to accept death was death, and it was what someone achieved in a life that mattered. I don’t believe in any sort of afterlife, and equally I don’t believe in nothing. I just accept we don’t know, and it’s best to worry about the here and now, like whether we could see pine martens translocated into English woodlands by the end of the year and whether to drink tea or coffee depending on the time of the day.

But our mind is a door any thought can walk into, and so life after death did today. To which I was reminded of one of the most fascinating passages I’ve read on the idea, in one of my favourite books about my favourite conservationist. The excerpt I was pleased to discover is copied word for word on wikiquote, which to spare you the search I will post here. It relates to the experience of the author of Gerald Durrell’s biography, Douglas Blotting, who while researching the book several years after Durrell’s death in 1995 witnessed something very curious indeed. Make of it what you will.

“I returned to Corfu, staying with friends at the small coastal village of Kaminaki, not far from Kalami, while I researched the life and times, haunts and homes of the young Gerald and his family on the island. The season of the festival of the fireflies – that fantastic insect spectacle so vividly described in My Family and Other Animals – was long over. What happened at Kaminaki one stifling moonless night was therefore doubly odd.
I had been dining at the taverna on the beach with my friends, and stayed on after they left, engaged in a desultory conversation with strangers. By the time I started for home it was pitch-black, and I could not find the gap at the head of the beach that led to the ancient paved track to the house. As I wandered up and down, uncertain where to go, a tiny winking light, a curious, incessant, electric neon flash, suddenly appeared at chest height about three feet in front of me. I took a step towards it, and it backed away by the same distance, then hovered, winking steadily.
It was a firefly, I knew. But it was odd that it was around so late in the year, and so alone; and odder still that it should appear to be relating, or at least reacting, to a human being in this uncharacteristic way. I moved towards it again, and again it backed away by the same distance. And so we proceeded, the firefly always at chest height and three feet in front of me. I realised I had been led through the gap in the beach that I could not find, and that we were at the foot of the ancient track. Guided by the firefly I walked slowly up the invisible path, step by step in the total darkness.
Halfway up, the firefly stopped and hovered, winking vigorously, until I was almost abreast of it. Then it made a sharp turn of ninety degrees to the left and proceeded up another, shorter but steeper path, with me trustingly trudging behind. It stopped again, and I realised I was at the garden gate of the house where I was staying. The firefly went over the gate, and I followed it across the unlit patio. The kitchen door was somewhere there in the dark, and the firefly flickered unerringly towards it. As I reached for the doorknob the firefly fluttered up and settled on the back of my hand, winking the while. I was home.
Was this normal? I asked myself. Were fireflies known to behave in this way towards people? I lifted my hand up to my face and peered closely at the wildly signalling minuscule organism. As I did so, I heard the voice of one of my friends, who, sitting silently in the dark, had witnessed everything: “Good … God!” I blew gently on the firefly, and it rose, turned once in a flickering circle, flew off into the tops of the overhanging olive trees and vanished into the night.
“You realise what that was, don’t you?” my friend said. He was a distinguished political journalist, and an eminently sane and sensible man. “Gerald Durrell keeping an eye on you, lending a hand, helping you home. No question about it. I think I’d better have another Metaxa after that!”
Every Corfiot Greek I told the story to nodded dryly and said matter-of-factly, without a hint of surprise, “Gerald Durrell.”
Gerald always believed that if he survived in a life after death it would be in some form of animal reincarnation. He had hoped it would be something fun – a soaring eagle, or a leaping dolphin – but perhaps a firefly would do at a pinch.
Make of this visitation what you will, there is no doubt that Gerald Durrell’s spirit does live on in one way or another – in his books, in his zoo, in his ongoing mission, in the natural world he has left behind.”

Did you know it’s World Pangolin day today? Do you even know what a pangolin is? Did you even know it was a Saturday?

If the latter applies to you, I’ll let you off as a cause lost to the world, but the second question is all to frequently answered with an awkward shake of the head. You can start by looking at the photo above: that chap there is just one of eight species of pangolin (four in Africa, four in Asia), remarkable, characterful mammals that look the result of a night of passion between a podgy anteater and an amorous pinecone, bearer of a long dextrous tounge for investigating ant nests and an evolutionary body plan that hasn’t really changed in the last 60 million years or so. Lewis Carroll couldn’t have dreamed it up himself.

If something that fantastic still remains mostly unknown to the world, today’s day of awareness raising makes a lot of sense; but there’s more to it than that. Pangolins are being abducted from their forest homes in Asia at a rate which is difficult to monitor yet sickingly staggering when you consider the seizures that have been made by authorities; a single smuggled cargo of pangolins can carry up to six tonnes of the animals, and those are just the ones that are caught. They are being decimated in the hundreds of thousands, and all to fuel the same market of rich, South-East Asian consumers notorious as the root of more publicised illegal wildlife trades in elephant ivory and rhino horn. Although the pangolin is subject to paper protection in the countries where it is consumed, go to any market or classy restaurant in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and you will find pangolin meat, scales, even foetus soup, on the menu with waiters all to enthusiastic to serve it to you.

The fact so few seem to be aware of this is in my view as disgusting as the trade itself, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to rectify in as much capacity as possible for the last few years. I covered the issue two years ago on the Independent largely as I was trying to reach a much larger and ‘unconverted’ audience as possible than one can achieve with a personal wordpress. But this World Pangolin Day, I’m happy to announce a very exciting project to keep track of over the next two years.

Having gathered a team of seven fellow students from the University of Exeter Cornwall Campus & Falmouth University, this Spring we will be launching ‘Ferae Vietnam’ – an eight week expedition to take place over the Summer of 2016, where our aim will be to survey and study populations of elusive mammals within the Ferae clade (pangolins and carnivores) in conjunction with NGO Save Vietnam’s Wildlife, and at the same time we will be filming a documentary on our research and the terrible plight faced by the pangolin – the aim is then for the film to be marketed as widely as possible to both Western audiences, and those in South-East Asia who may otherwise consume them.

It’s early days, and we will be launching the website and an introductory film within the next month or so. But it’s the start of an exciting journey where I hope to make some kind of difference to the future of these wonderful mammals.

‘Fssh, fssh, fsssh… fssh, fssh, fssh… fssh, fssh, fssh…’ if you’re a bit confused, which you are, that’s the sound of one of the most amusing and quite simply nicest wildlife moments of last year. A badger was shuffling backwards with a huge heap of dead leaves between it’s back legs and forepaws in a characteristic manoeuvre, resembling a cross between a dog trying to relieve itself of worms and a drunk doing the rowing dance to ‘Oops upside your head’. Once it had descended into its sett to dump this load of fresh bedding, it was back outside to repeat the process continually for at least another hour and a half, providing a constant source of entertainment on this evening’s sett watch in the New Forest. (Which reminds me that I need to send over last season’s data to the badger group by the end of the month – sort that out later)

2014 was yet another year in a trajectory of increasing annual awesomeness that I hope doesn’t stop anytime soon. Another year which has been more eye-opening, full of adventure, new people, knowledge and progression than the last. This has been the case (bar a couple of real dud moments) personally and emotionally, but as this a wildlife blog rather than one on lifestyle, love and instagrammed pictures of meals, it’s what I’ve gained from my natural life’s calling that provided the real fruit of what to write home about.

If there was one thing you notice as a conservationist, it’s that as each year builds up on your understanding of the issues we face as they become more far more prevalent. As a result, you can either become more depressed, or more invigorated to fight harder for it. For most it’s generally a mix of the two, though thankfully with a leaning more towards the latter. These are feelings more thoroughly explored in this post from September, and my new role within the committee for youth conservation movement ‘A Focus on Nature’ certainly put a great emphasis on this throughout the year, all boiling up to our rather splendid gathering of over a hundred young people speaking up for nature in Cambridge on the 9^th September.

This year however, there was a particular defining moment that summed up exactly what nature could achieve if we just stepped up a bit more for it. It wasn’t a conference, or a discussion, but four weeks of my life carrying out wildlife research in the Tanarva Mare region of Transylvania.

Here was a landscape barely changed since the days it was being battled over by Saxons and Turks – beyond the quaint valley-bottom villages with their playbox farmyard-homesteads, rolling wildflower meadows bloomed with a pyschadelic blossom of innumerable creatively-named flowers and orchids. Wasp spiders wove their webs between these, and every footstep was an arthropod firework of bush crickets and grasshoppers. Rasping calls of red-backed shrike pierced the heat haze of a burning summer afternoon, replaced by the crek of the corncrake come the cool descent of evening. At this time, all kinds of creatures would come a stirring from the slumber from the shadows of the woods above – including the great brown bear, a creature faded into fairytale for us but very much a regular suspect in these foothills.

The key word to sum up the wildlife of this region was ‘plenty’ – but what made this place stand out from other parts of the world I’ve been to, equally bounteous in nature, was how it could well have been Britain not so long ago. Plants and animals we know well and take for granted from our countryside lived plentifully alongside those we now regard as rare or threatened (such as the swallowtail, sand lizard, pine marten and woodlark) to those we’ve completely wiped out back here – stand up bears and boar. Yet this was no civilisation-less wilderness: it was somewhere people were living and working in close commune to nature, be it grazing their family cattle upon the meadows or cutting oak and hornbeam for the homestead in the hill-top woodlands.

My time in Romania showed me what I wanted nature in the UK to be. We don’t have to take this literally and go back to medieval methods of ploughing fields with horse and cart, but if we just take a little less and work out a better balance between wildlife and what we use the land for, we could have fields full of birds, invertebrates and wildflowers again – one day, maybe even woodlands in our uplands, with some of the missing great beasts reinstated, may even make a comeback. My point being that anyone seriously trying to defend the natural history of Britain should at least visit the Tanarva Mare or somewhere similar, for then they will see the physical form of their argument. It’s certainly set me up for 2015 and beyond. Who knows where conservation will take me, or what I’ll have seen by this time next year, but at least I have a vision of what we could aspire to – something I think our wildlife would certainly thank us for if they could.

With the exception of that housekeeping badger. All it wants this year is a clean bed.