30 wonderful days

30 wonderful days

Lapwing and chicks by Dave Steel

Mosslands birding legend Dave Steel comes to the end of his epic 30 Days Wild. It has been a wonderful experience and will interest many people in the wildlife we are protecting on the moss. I wonder where Dave will be now this has all ended? On the moss?

The wander comes to an end. The wild with our care will go on. As for me? Well tomorrow is another day in and with the wild. It gives so much of itself in simply surviving and this survival creates such fascinating encounters. It comes from the tenacity of the wild to take on all we humans throw at it. It needs our attention, we need it to survive. It feeds us and I hope it gets our continued support, if only because it is simply beautiful.

This reflective day in the wild was short on my time as a busy Sunday took over my wandering but it was long on my thoughts on where are they now. Those 30 days. No, not the passage of time, I am well aware of that factor in my life!

My thoughts were of those barn owls, they have four young which the BTO birds ringers ringed a couple of weeks ago. Or maybe, the curlew, once more today proved that its young are surviving as it went into alarm mode as I walked round a breezy reserve.

The young lapwing I saw a few weeks ago being sheltered by their parents’ wing on a cold rain-swept early June day are still growing well. The wild facing off the weather.

The five meadow pipit young packed tightly in their nest are now finding their way through a wild world which often looks upon these as prey. The yellow wagtail continues to substitute for the lack of sun on grey days and is equally enhanced by the flush of a bright sunlit day.

The young robin and starling that wandered my garden, by now, will be independent and free to face the next 365 days out there in the wild. And hopefully they will return next year with their own young.

Butterflies have now found the sun and this year we have an influx of painted ladies, which are long-distance migrants whilst the dragonflies are now patrolling the water filled ditches in their one summer of flight.

Barley, wheat, potato, coriander and wasabi are all ripening, whilst, in nooks and crannies and track-sides, wild flowers having escaped being tidied away are supporting a whole host of bees, hoverflies and other such insects, which are vital to our survival in their pollinating of our food crops.

Yes, here we have had a month’s window into the life of the wild as it jogged alongside our busy lives keeping our world ticking over under the June sky It will continue to do so - we hope.
 

30 Days Wild