Friday 7 August 2015

Green Woodpeckers And Wild Rabbits

I've never been a city boy. I grew up first in a small town called Snodland surrounded by lakes and, at the time, disused quarries that were teeming with life. I then moved to the village of Sellindge, living away from the main road near a large but secluded pond full of spawning toads and an imposing sentinel-like heron. I spent my teenage years in the larger town of Folkestone where the closest to wildlife one got was some seagulls and ducks, followed by a spell in Greenwich and then Folkestone again.

Nothing prepared me for the last year though. My love of nature from my early days had never left me but I'd been starved of contact with anything more than some urban foxes (gorgeous and beguiling though they were!). The fauna I've encountered in the first few months of living in Eastry rival all the British wildlife I'd seen before put together. We've a rabbit warren on one side of our drive. Pheasants, hares and very rarely seen partridges live in the large orchards behind our house. I've seen little egrets, ring-necked parakeets, a swarm of bees, flocks of house martins swooping low over the fields (and into the rafters of our home when escaping our cat and dog's eager eyes!) and last summer there was a common lizard burrow just across the road from the end of our lane (plus a toad that lived in our shed!). I'm in paradise.  

But there is a new love in my life... the green woodpecker. They spend almost all their time just out of eye sight in the orchards, but their unmistakable laugh echoes through the apple trees constantly. Occasionally one or two will alight upon the apple tree's support poles or our fence and their gorgeous green colours shine like some tropical bird. And, very rarely, I'll look down on the grass by our driveway and see one, two, sometimes three of them foraging through the ant hills (of which there seems no limit here!). They are extremely welcome and delightful birds which I've never had the pleasure to see before let alone be neighbours with.

When our new cat, a Maine Coon called Jeff, killed one and left its carcass on our patio I felt real pain unlike that when he kills a rat or a rabbit.

One day we will need to leave this place. But my heart will never leave this land of natural beauty.