‘Boar’-ing adventure in the forest was a wild delight
MY old pal, John Hart, the only guy I was ever happy to call my Boss, is the Head of an International School in Budapest and the invitation to visit was too good to resist, not least because John and his wife Emma live on the edge of the forest in the Nyek area on the outskirts of the city.
Their dusty and idyllic tree-lined road is called Madar Utca, Hungarian for ‘bird,’ which leads, with a marvellous touch of serendipity, to Kondor Utca, a forest road named after a bird of prey.
Some readers may remember John as the Head of Denton school, Egerton Park, before he moved to Glossopdale in Glossop, which is where I teamed up with him in 2005 as the school’s Behaviour and Inclusion adviser.
So 15 years on and I step into the forest 50 metres from John’s house to be greeted by the laughing call of a green woodpecker, followed by a grey-headed and, I’m fairly sure, a Syrian woodpecker as well.
A familiar shape from my years at Woodhead caught my eye towards the top of a tree and, with one eye open on the setting sun, the long eared owl certainly made me smile.
As I went for my camera he reluctantly dropped into the tangled maze of a forest and vanished from sight. John’s wife Emma, had told me that as she went to get in her car the week before and in the middle of the day an adult and very male wild boar stood it’s ground 20 feet from her.
So, with a wild boar as my main target, Joanie Lucy and I had three days to do a recce and report back to readers, because I knew after crossing the Danube as darkness fell with the stunning parliament buildings lit up and Freedom Bridge glittering like the ultimate Christmas bracelet, that our short stay would not be enough.
The place is stunning and I reckon a week for the city itself would do you. We managed a cruise on the Danube, a visit to the House of Terror, a memorial museum to the locals who were tortured and executed in the building and, of course, we had to check out the local food and drink, the highlight being the street-food festival where I sampled lamb and potatoes for breakfast, washed down with an Hungarian beer.
There were maybe one hundred stalls and not one made the concession of any English on the menu.
I like that, a kind of frisson when you point out your fancy, although I did come unstuck once in a Tuscan mountain village, when I thought I’d ordered pheasant but was served thrush kebabs.
Not good, head, beak, legs and everything. I ate the peppers which separated the three birds.
With a few hours to spare on the Sunday morning I wandered off into the forest by myself, next stop Slovakia, with wild boar on my mind.
I love that feeling of expectation, the sound of autumn leaves crackling underfoot, the rat-a-tat-tat of an unnamed woodpecker, then silence, and then what?
Well, you just never know what will turn up, fly past or startle you next and you invariably see something other than what you set out for, in this case I heard the call of nutcracker, a spotted member of the crow family and spotted a nightjar taking a nap, as they do, confident with its camouflage.
Got ya pal. Sometimes in a forest, and this saves on the steps, your best bet is to find a comfy spot to sit down, preferably leaning on a tree trunk and wait.
After 10 minutes I was sure I heard the gruff grunting of a wild boar some distance off, so I stayed put, but maybe it was wishful thinking and I was hearing things.
At this stage I was completely out of sight of any human, telegraph pole or vehicle and if you spun me around, it would only have been the sun which told me which way was back to John’s.
Half-an-hour in, with the thought of another meal by the Danube kicking in, the magic happened.
Bold as brass one wild boar, ‘why thank you’ I thought, it’s beer o’clock.
The beast lifted his ample snout and scooted back into the anonymity of the trees, where his dusky dappled hue and straggly furry bits rendered him as cryptic as cryptic could be.
It’s his safe place.
Don’t forget to send your wildlife stories, photos and questions to sean.wood@ talk21.com