As we all hunker down at home, well most of us at least, it's interesting to see how nature is responding. We might be in lock down, but this time of year nature certainly isn't!
There's a certain cruel irony with us being stuck at home and in the house this time of year, but the eerie peace and quiet enables us to see and hear things we wouldn't normally see and hear.
Just yesterday I raised the kitchen blind first thing in the morning to see a mallard duck and ducklings passing under the kitchen window. In the 29 years of living here I've never seen that before. Melanie managed to nip outside and snatch a quick photo, below. Good camouflage!
As they were heading towards the A47 at the bottom of our garden I went round to see if I could catch them coming out, to no avail. I hope they've survived, especially given the lack of ponds nearby and the resident fox population. Whether we should try and intervene in these situations is an unknown, to me at least, although I did go armed with a bag for the duck and cardboard tray for the ducklings, just in case..
On our nightly walks we've also seen bats on Bushby main street, toads mating in the gutter, as well as hedgehogs scurrying about and owls. We've even managed a stroll across the A47, not something you can say normally!
During the day the ring necked parakeets, normally in the wood between Thurnby and Stoughton have decided that Thurnby village can now be explored, as well as the lesser-spotted woodpeckers and the odd red kite and buzzard, all enjoying the lack of boy-racers with their noisy exhausts.
As we look forward to the lock down coming to an end, there are some things I will definitely miss, which makes you wonder how we can preserve the good bits of the lock down whilst enjoying the return of previous freedoms. No easy answer to that one but sure to be exercising a few minds - a challenge for us all.
We had to cancel our planned event of planting of the wildflower margin outside the Thurnby Scout & Guide HQ, but nature doesn't wait. So we've had to press on, on our own, with nightly sessions of turf removal (completed), seed sowing (completed) and now transplanting of wildflowers from our garden (mainly forget-me-nots and foxgloves, which self seed all over the place) and watering. Let's hope this experiment is successful and spawns more planting elsewhere in the village. It certainly had widespread support when we did the door-door survey of local residents it was claimed would be affected. I'm looking forward to nature moving in here too.
Bruce Wakley
