Dear Readers, when I was in Somerset last weekend, I decided to go for a walk along the hedgerow in Broadway, a village close to Ilminster. I have always been intrigued by these country paths – they hold such a mixture of plants and animals, and there is a kind of peace about them, a sense of their posterity. In this lane, for example, the level of the field is a good six feet above the level of the path, giving some idea of how it has been worn away over the years. The plant community at the base of the hedge is a splendid mixture of cow parsley and bluebell, bush vetch and stitchwort, cuckoo pint and nettle.

Cuckoo pint

Bush vetch

Greater Stitchwort

Bluebells, greater stitchwort and dandelions

Rough Chervil. Or Cow Parsley. I should have checked the leaves….

A symphony in green

The hedge is hawthorn on one side, hornbeam on the other. It is tangled with honeysuckle and guelder rose. A tree has been allowed to grow at some points – this was largely as a reference point, for the days when people ploughed by horse. One of the trees is full of mistletoe.

Mistletoe in one of the trees that have been allowed to grow in the hedge.

A tree that’s been allowed to grow in the hedgerow – maybe a ploughing mark?

As I got to the bottom of the lane, the path passes a small cottage. This, my aunt Hilary tells me, is where the village cobbler used to live. The road was named ‘Paul’s Lane’ after him.

I climb a dozen steps to look into the field beside the hedgerow. Here I see some creatures that I’m fairly sure don’t live in my half-mile territory back in East Finchley.

When I was a child, I visited Wanstead Park with my little brother and parents. While we were walking through the wood, there was a rustling in the undergrowth. I stooped down to see a rabbit looking back at me. And right there and then I fell in love, not just with rabbits but with a world that has such creatures in it. It never occurred to me that a humble city child would be able to see such an animal, in the wild. Blessings on my parents’ heads for taking me out into the few unspoilt places that were available in East London.

I still feel a little excited at the sight of a rabbit, even now.

Just next to the field is the stream. There is a corner of unspoilt meadow there, too small to grow anything on. It was a riot of forget-me-nots and cow parsley and wild garlic.

The stream is a temperamental creature. At this time of year, she trickles along, bothering nobody. In a wet winter, the lower concrete part of the road is covered, and you have to use the upper bridge. Sometimes, even that is perilously close to being swamped.

I looked up and down the stream in the hope of seeing a kingfisher. It seemed like a perfect place for them, but today it was not to be. Maybe another day.

Now, the path enters the wood. Already, through the trees, I could see the distinctive nests of the rookery.

It was raining now. I tramped on, wiping the raindrops from my camera, though not altogether successfully as you’ll see from the film. The sound of the rooks was loud in the still air, and there was a constant traffic of birds flying in and out. One bird stole a stick from an unoccupied nest, and headed off to his or her own. I wondered how long the rookery had been in place? In John Lister-Kaye’s recent book ‘Gods of the Morning’ (which I recommend), he tells of how the rookery on his land has been in constant use since at least the 1860’s. It will be here until some developer decides that the land is ripe for a crop of new houses, though the risk of flooding is maybe what has protected this little patch of ancient woodland so far.

I walk past the rookery, remembering my very first visit to Broadway fifteen years ago. I walked along this path with my husband-to-be and was amazed by the smell of green garlic. It was a warm day, and the scent seemed to rise like mist from the plants on either side. I had truly never noticed Wild Garlic (or Ransons as they are sometimes known), but I could not avoid their presence here. Today, they are in full flower. I wish they would invent a way of putting smells on the internet, so that I could share it with you. And what a boon it would be to recipe websites! But I digress. For now, we’ll just have to look.

A Somerset footpath. Look at all that wild garlic!

Wild Garlic

The rain is coming harder now, so I head for home. It’s interesting the things that you notice when you reverse your direction. The first hawthorn flowers are bursting from bud in the hedgerow, and the ferns are unfurling.

The darling buds of May

The unfurling of fern

As the rain patters on the hood of my raincoat, I find myself looking forward to a cup of tea, and an hour’s knitting. And, as I walk into the garden, I see one last rabbit, amongst the forget-me-nots. What a great way to end my expedition.

Dear Readers, since I took this walk in the lanes of Somerset, we have had a General Election. I believe that the party now in power is the most antithetical to the natural world that we have ever had . But this is no time to despair, for there is too much at stake. We will need to be vigilant, and vocal, and brave in defence of our communities, both human and non-human. We will need to work together, to learn from one another, and to listen. I do not know what our particular challenges will be, but I do know that we will need to be ready. Our rookeries, our rivers, our hedgerows, our ancient woodlands, our city greenspaces and our little patches of wild flowers, our badgers, our foxes, our rare spiders and our dragonflies will not protect themselves.

Every city that I visit seems to have a presiding spirit, a bird that is omnipresent but often goes unnoticed. In Prague, it was the Jackdaws, who filled the air with their chinking cries and aerial acrobatics. In London, it’s the feral pigeons. But in Berlin, it’s the Hooded Crows.

These are a bird that I associate with the wilds of Scotland rather than the centre of a bustling conurbation, but in Berlin any dropped currywurst will attract a little party of corvids, hopping over and inspecting the food with their heads on one side, and then picking out the meat, while the sparrows chip away at the bread.

What handsome birds they are, these Hooded Crows. I followed the one in the picture for a short while as he turned over leaves, inspected a litter bin, called a few times and headed off into the trees. He was intensely alert, always with an eye open for an opportunity. There is no doubt in my mind about their intense intelligence, their adaptability or their resilience. Through the whole of the twentieth century they have looked on at the follies of human beings, at their destructiveness and cruelty. The crows were here when a handful of Jewish people struggled to survive undetected in the woods around Nazi Berlin during the Second World War. They scavenged alongside the starving women of the city after it had been reduced to rubble. They hopped over the Berlin Wall to feed on both sides. And today, they are living the high life in the newly tolerant, tourist-friendly Berlin of trendy suburbs and vegetarian restaurants.

But at night, if you look up as you walk along Unter den Linden, you will see the crows flying home. A few crows flying along a side street will meet up with crows coming from another direction, until there are great squadrons of them, lit from underneath by the streetlights. How good that the only things that now overfly this city are birds, rather than warplanes and missiles.

Berlin is something of an urban wildlife hotspot. The parks and lakes and woodland harbour woodpeckers and red squirrels, dragonflies and deer. In the suburban town of Kopenick, you may stumble over a wild boar sow feeding her piglets on the pavement, and there are an estimated 500 families of raccoons in Berlin, descended from 20 who were released when an Allied bomb destroyed the fur farm where they were incarcerated. You do not have to go far to feel that you are no longer in an urban environment, and whilst Berliners seem to feel at home in their city, the hearts of many citizens are in the wilder country that surrounds it. At the first sign of good weather many people head for the ‘beaches’ around the lakes, or out for a hike.

On our last day in Berlin, we went for a walk to the district of Prenzlauer Berg, in the east of the city. This was a working-class district that was also favoured by artists and writers, and was next to the Berlin wall. Nowadays, it is a very desirable location, but these apartments have no gardens, just a courtyard to hang the washing in, and a few windowboxes. So, here on the street,  the Berliners have created a painted garden of sunflowers and daisies, roses and violets. As I walk along these streets, under the shade of the London Plane trees, hearing the sparrows chirruping around the cafes, I am happy that this tumultuous, troubled, troubling city is having a period of peace.

The second of an occasional series in which Bugwoman investigates the urban wildlife of other cities.

A Green Wall Lizard – not something I ever see in London!

This week, I have been on holiday in the Austrian Alps, and decided to visit Innsbruck, the unofficial capital of the Tyrol. I found this lizard at the Alpenzoo, which is in the mountains just above the city, and which specializes in Alpine fauna. As usual, I was much more interested in the animals who had occupied the zoo of their own free will than those who were behind bars, and so I spent a lot of time watching the lizards sunbathing and arguing about who owned which rock.

A Common Wall Lizard – I’ve caught this one as it ran away from another lizard, it has its little feet in mid leap…

When I wasn’t searching the walls for lizards, I was watching the sparrows who had set up house in the zoo. They had made their nests under the eaves of the newly-built aquarium building:

A comfy sparrow’s nest

They used the pond for drinking water:

The main outdoor pond of the aquarium provides plenty of drinking and bathing water

Furthermore, the Aquarium was right next to the cafe, so the sparrows were soon all around us, checking out the Sachertorte…

However, the sparrows weren’t just after crumbs. They were also hawking for insects just like flycatchers, and were extremely acrobatic, flinging themselves into the air to catch mosquitoes and flies. I have often noticed that, when there are babies in the nest, sparrows cease to be purely gramnivorous (grain-eating) and start to seek out more protein-rich foods. In London Zoo,for example, I’ve seen them stripping the meat from the bones in the vulture cage, .

If there were no croissant-crumbling visitors or flying insects, the sparrows could always ‘borrow’ the food from the other animals:

The sparrows ‘borrowing’ food from the pigs

But although I enjoyed watching the sparrows and the lizards, and although the Alpenzoo is a very well-run zoo, I still find it hard to spend time with animals in captivity. Here, for example, are a pair of ravens in the ‘Ravenry’ at the zoo:

Captive Ravens

I had seen wild ravens in one of the valleys only the previous day, and watched them fly and tumble over the pine trees, making their distinctive cronking call to one another. They are the very spirit of remote places, and their incarceration in the midst of their wild brethren seemed cruel and unnecessary. After all, if you wanted to see a wild raven you didn’t have to travel far. At one point, a raven landed in the trees a hundred metres away, and started to call.

The captive ravens started to call back:

Am I alone in wondering about the role of zoos? I accept that some do pioneering work in conservation (I’m thinking of the Gerald Durrell zoo in Jersey in particular), and some become sanctuaries for animals when their native habitat is destroyed. But I think zoos often overstate their education and conservation roles, and simply become ‘Cabinets of Curiosity’, places where people can gawk and point and pull faces at animals without learning a single thing that will change their attitude to that creature in the wild.

I speak as someone who has always loved being close to animals, being able to see them, hear them,  smell them. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve wanted this to be on more equal terms – I find the thrill of seeing a bird on my birdtable, or a fox in my back garden, much more soul-satisfying than the same creature in a cage, where it has no choice but to interact. I feel that encounters with animals are a privilege, not a right, and that before we take away a creature’s freedom we should be very, very sure that we are doing it in the interests of that animal, not just to increase our visitor figures and our profit.