This article first appeared in Birdwatching Magazine in January 2025
I saw my first Lion in the wild with its legs sprawled either side of a low bough, lolling in the rising sun amid the long grass of a National Park, behind the tree, in close view were the skyscrapers and shanties of Nairobi.
My first US Great White Egret walked by six feet away to pick at a half-eaten hamburger in a litter bin at my hotel in Orlando, Florida. The next day I saw my first Muskrat at Orlando’s home of effluent, alongside Yellow-rumped Warbler in the surrounding trees, and Common Yellowthroat flitting among the reeds.
My first Pitta was pecking between grass and litter on a road verge on the edge of a village in India. My first White Stork was finding sustenance among the discarded food waste on a Portuguese dump.
I once twitched a Spotted Crake in a muddy puddle, under a motorway bridge in the Medway towns where it was half hidden by detritus including a dumped shopping trolley.
I have lost count of the lifers I’ve had at the sewage ponds of the world… African Swamp Hen in Cape Town’s poo ponds, Painted Snipe in Goa, Wilson’s Snipe in Broome, Western Australia, the list goes on.
Last night, I stepped from my car, in a car park in the centre of the most visited city in the UK, walking five steps to a footpath. As I looked across the fast, shallow river, a continual stream of hundreds of students walked past behind me, chattering at 90 decibels in a variety of languages. Six pm on a summer evening. There on the far side among overhanging vegetation, was a mass of sticks, stretching feet along the bank. After a few minutes the homeowner swam into view. My life-tick European Beaver.
Obviously, as a leading exponent of isolation and melancholy away from the madding crowd, I’m not one to advocate birding anywhere near people, let alone crowds of horribly young, fit and convivial happies. But I will admit to elation on seeing the beast ignoring everything humanity has and just getting on with its life as a mostly crepuscular city slicker.
However, as you can see, many of my memorable wildlife moments have been in places normally only inhabited by Wombles. Birds and beasts make use of much of what us ‘other folks leave behind’. Sadly, that is not the norm, much of what we produce, enjoy and dump does horrible harm to innocent nature.
Nevertheless, there is a good lesson down among the dirt and discards of us over-abundant apes. Nature has spent eons overcoming adversity and triumphing in distress. Evolution is all about throwing random mutation out in order to ensure that there are always plants, animals and the rest to fit unoccupied niches, and the least favourable conditions. Bacteria survive boiling geysers and chemical hell. Sea has life on its deepest beds, and so forth.
It’s no wonder that some species manage to thrive despite our despoliation. Whilst we can, and do, rejoice in their stoic survival, we could also see another lesson in this fable. There are two eco-models where wildlife gets up close and personal with us. One is this scenario of last resort… if we take the best for ourselves there are only scraps for other taxa, and they have to hazard proximity. The alternative is where we become so unselfish and benevolent that nature has no reason to fear us. I’ve sat among the birds, like St Francis, in places where they eat from your hand because they have no experience of the harm we can do.
