Wild Words
I am sitting at the back of our house, the kids are inside, and all is quiet – except it is not.
Turning slowly towards a light scurrying noise along the surface of the gravel path, I catch sight of a water vole, hugging close to the stone before disappearing into the long grass up the bank. In the space of our silence other lives can be seen and heard.
A stag strolling through a friend’s garden prompted him to ask if the stag was there because there were no cars and people on the road, or if it had always walked there and all that had changed was that he was there to see it.
While some towns and cities may have seen more remarkable changes in lockdown, wildlife venturing into the silent streets, in Lochaber the change in behaviour is largely our own. Lockdown has created space in our lives, but it is by no means empty.
Another day, standing on a raised pallet path to the east of the house, I become aware of a fat hedgehog, poised, watching me, watching it. A few nights later, as we turn the kitchen lights out for the evening, the hedgehog trails across the shorter grass in front of the house, heading towards the bird table in the blue dusk. The creature’s search for the fragments of food dropped by the birds could be seen in the twitching of the uncut grass above it. It is the first time we have seen a hedgehog by the house in the 10 years that we have lived here.
The same bird table has been filled sporadically over those years, but these days I watch to see which birds prefer what feed; filling it has become part of my daily routine. Sunflower hearts draw charms of goldfinch, the blackbirds will perform acrobatics to get to the fatballs, and two mamma woodpeckers fly in for those fatballs from east and west so often that I cannot keep up with their demand. The slope beyond the bird table is thick with grass and flowers, but not so thick that I do not see the soft movement of a roe buck passing through, his short antlers bobbing and pausing above the seed-heads. Butterflies that were previously only seen as orange-brown flutters, fluttering away from our slightest movement, are now pearl-bordered fritillaries, red admirals, peacocks, and heaths. The tiny dark holes leading into tumbled stone walls and moss-covered trees, once a mystery, are revealed as wrens’ nests.
Lochaber Times recently reported the efforts of Upper Achintore Regeneration Group to gift window boxes and bird feeders to residents without gardens. The blue tits, the chaffinches, the sparrows that will come are all there, busy in their lives. The birds will be unaware of the boon coming to them – they will not be waiting – but by creating space for them in our lives, whatever shape it is, we can see them a little more clearly.