This is what I used to hear when I opened the front door early in the morning. That is, I heard a blackbird from across the street, and the first part of his song sounded just like, “I am a blackbird”, and I added the rest (and more, but that’s another story!)
At dusk, he’d be singing from a chimney pot a few houses away, and the last few notes would be scratchy and squeaky. It was almost like he lost concentration at the end.
He’d spend time in our silver birch, and use the birdbath regularly.
A few months ago, I realised I hadn’t heard him for a while. And I hadn’t seen a blackbird in my garden for some time either.
I really miss ‘my’ blackbird. I don’t know why they’re absent, but through Southampton Wildlife, a Facebook group, I learned about the Usutu virus. This article from the RHS gives advice on how to reduce the spread of this mosquito-borne disease, including minimising standing water and cleaning birdbaths regularly.
Though the birds seem to be missing from my area, they are still around in other parts of the city, so I take heart from this. I appreciate the birds I do still see and hear in my garden – starlings and sparrows, blue tits, goldfinches and greenfinches. The occasional wren, dunnock and sparrowhawk. And of course, the summertime swifts. But I really miss the blackbird. It’s hit me quite hard, because it’s brought home to me what it’s like to lose a species. Even sadder is that many people probably haven’t noticed they’ve gone, because they didn’t notice them in the first place. When I took a singing toy bird to a nature connection event, I was shocked that some people didn’t recognise the bird or his song. I thought I’d chosen a bird that would be known in the urban area we were in. But it wasn’t familiar to everyone.
My singing blackbird in my silver birch
Remember there was a poll to choose Britain’s national bird some years back?
The robin won, but a colleague at the time said to me that she thought it should have been a blackbird, for their song. I suppose robins are just so much more familiar to people, through Christmas cards if nothing else. According to this BBC report, the blackbird was in second place until children’s votes were counted.
The poll was a decade ago, in 2015. Back then, I have to admit that I hadn’t paid much attention to blackbirds myself. I hadn’t really noticed them, perhaps because they seemed so commonplace. Hearing a Tawny Owl from my flat in Portswood was exciting because it was unusual. So maybe Blackbirds becoming less common will give them an edge, and more people will pay attention to them. I hope so, because we need to notice them, to treasure them, before it’s too late.
If you want a wildlife-friendly, sustainable garden, making your own compost from green waste is an obvious thing to do. It’s something I’ve never done before because I’ve never had the space. But now, with both an allotment and Woolston Station Gardens, I’ve got the chance to compost – and I’m really enjoying learning and doing!
I’ve been making leafmould in bags for a few years. It’s really easy, even when you don’t have much space. I’m also encouraging more people to have a go, especially volunteers at gardening projects I’m involved with as Wilder Southampton officer with the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust. I found some clear instructions here, from the Shropshire Wildlife Trust.
Collecting leaves at the Tree Triangle.
When we started volunteering at the station garden, there were two pallet bins. Both had a lot of large woody plant stems in that weren’t going to break down any time soon. We removed them and added them to the habitat piles, then I covered what was left in one of the bins, to speed up the process of breaking the material down.
I’ve also been learning the basics of composting from a free beta test of a course by Garden Organic, which I was offered by Hampshire Community Rail Partnership because I’m a garden volunteer. Using your own compost means it’s full of woodlice, centipedes and other small creatures that are breaking it down, so this is a great way to improve the structure and biodiversity of your soil. We needed this , as the soil was pretty lifeless when we started at the garden in late spring. Gardeners often mulch with compost in autumn, but the Garden Organic tutor suggested that spring can be better, as earthworms are more active and therefore will incorporate the organic matter in to your soil. I’d initially thought our compost wasn’t ready yet, but realised it was ok to use it for mulching, so I added some to the hedge bed that was looking a waterlogged. Improving the structure should help it retain water that can help plants during dry periods.
Compost applied to the hedge bed.
We’ve got another bin to sort, and we also now have several plastic bins. Two of the three are full – with garden volunteers taking care to cut waste into smaller pieces, to speed up the process, as well as layering green and brown waste.
BIn yet to be sorted!Plastic bins already full
I’m very far from being an expert, but love a project! I’m hoping we’ll be self-sufficient with compost from now on, and will be able to offer mulch to other nearby projects such as Pollinating Peartree and Victoria Road Gardeners. Watch this space!
Volunteers Jill, Eamonn and Bridget with Charlene from Hampshire Community Rail.
We launched Woolston Station Garden Club in May 2025 to revive the station gardens. Long-term volunteer Bridget was the only remaining gardener still available when Charlene Arrondeau, Hampshire Community Rail Officer, contacted me in my Wilder Southampton role with Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust. My work schedule was full, so I decided to take this on as a volunteer. It’s my local station, virtually opposite two of my Pollinating Peartree patches, and I’d already met Bridget through my role with Friends of Peartree Green.
What happened next? And how are the gardens helping wildlife and people? Read on to find out!
Volunteers at the end of the first session.
To kick-start the garden, we rallied a group of local people and enlisted the help of the Good Gym. Ziggy and Alan from Bitterne Station gardeners also came along. There was already a range of pollinator plants, some of them wildflowers, including cornflowers, ox-eye daisies, poppies and purple toadflax. We worked around them, pulling up tall grass stems by hand and carefully cutting back some of the bramble. Some of us started sorting out the compost areas, while Eamonn took charge of connecting the water butts. We achieved a lot in one hour – and had a lot of laughs in the process.
How are we helping wildlife with this garden? Well, by working around plants, we’ve been able to avoid too much disturbance to the creatures living there. This included a robin making a nest in ivy on the old signal box building, so we didn’t go into that area at all. Leaving plants in place meant bees could continue feeding. Gradually moving garden waste from the dilapidated pallet bin to the new one gave woodlice and other invertebrates time to move. We’ve also built a stick pile close by to provide a habitat for these little creatures, which in turn provides a place for birds to look for food. And we’ve added drinking/bathing areas for birds, mammals and insects.
There are two garden areas at the station. The first one was made by Bridget for her late husband Hugh, who worked in the ticket office. I remember him from when I used to catch the train to work, and I’d noticed the garden on the left as you walk to the platforms. Bridget has now been able to start maintaining this again.
Bridget reclaiming the path through the garden she created when her husband Hugh worked in the ticket office.
Due to the prolonged dry weather, we haven’t added many plants yet – just a few from our own gardens and some sunflowers donated by my neighbour. We bought a few herbs with funding provided by Hampshire Community Rail Partnership, and I’ve added seep tubes to the lavender and sunflower bed. These are 2-litre plastic bottles with the bottom cut off. Put them in upside down and fill with water, and you have a system that keeps the plants watered for longer, with the water going to the roots. This makes better use of it than surface watering, when it evaporates more quickly. Naturally, the bottles are ones I’ve found when litter picking!
Lavender with seep tube in place
There’s plenty more to be done at the garden, so if you’re local, why not join us? It’s a chance to meet new people, learn new skills and be part of a community – that’s why we’ve called it Woolston Station Garden Club. You don’t need any experience or tools. To find out when we meet, check our Facebook page, look out for posters, or contact me through this blog. Thanks for reading!
One of my stories is that I’m not comfortable near rivers, sometimes even afraid. There have been moments of panic, such as the time I went for a walk at Chessel Bay when the River Itchen was choppy, and I basically ran back along the path to get out. Living on the east, I regularly have to cross the river to go to other parts of the city. Of the five crossings I can use, Northam Bridge would be my last choice. The one time I cycled over it, I felt unsafe. The railings felt too low, the water too close.
The Itchen from Woodmill cafe
These were my thoughts as I sat by the river yesterday. It was the last day of a week off, and I’d left my bike at RideRide near Cobden Bridge for a service. I had at least two hours to fill, so I’d decided on a walk through Riverside Park and onto Monks Brook, where I wanted to check the Purple Toothwort I’d first seen on a guided walk almost a month earlier. The plant wasn’t at its best then, so I thought I’d go back. It looked good, but my photo of Marsh Marigold came out better!
Marsh Marigold beside Monks Brook
Monks Brook itself isn’t scary, but walking the path alone makes me nervous because it’s hemmed in on both sides. Earlier this week, I’d been talking about this to Rae, a researcher who’s looking at ideas of belonging in green places. To feel safe, I usually choose places where I have a clear view and options to change my route if I feel concerned. This was part of the issue at Chessel Bay, where it’s a no-through route.
So why did I choose to walk here today? Well, partly it was convenience, but it was also an opportunity to become more familiar with these areas and the species that live there. It was a chance to explore.
The walk through Riverside Park from the cycle workshop to Woodmill Coffee Kitchen would take about 20 minutes at my normal pace, but I wanted to slow down and go where curiosity took me. One place was to the water’s edge to look at this board, which I’d spotted from the main path.
Defaced interpretation board
I’d never been to this spot before. The board tells us that badgers use this riverbank, something I hadn’t realised. (I’m not sure what caused the black marks, but someone’s spray painted ‘I 💜 nature’ in purple over it).
Another reason for visiting was to see the latest mural by Joanna Rose Tidey. This is at Woodmill, and was commissioned by Southampton National Park City to celebrate the importance of the River Itchen to the Atlantic Salmon.
Part of the mural at Woodmill
Mainly though, I wanted to just spend some time doing nothing in particular. Of course I got a bit hung up trying to identify trees, and yes, I sat at the cafe overlooking the river hoping to see a seal or an otter. But I also gave myself time to reflect, inspired by this book, a gift from my partner. It comes from Natural Academy and covers aspects of nature connection and well-being that I’m familiar with but don’t often allow myself time for. There’s much in the book to inspire me, but feeling comfortable by the river, letting my mind wander, felt like a really good start. I’m beginning to change my story.
Twenty-five starlings, two bluetits, a wood pigeon, a magpie, two or three greenfinches …. I can more or less predict how many birds of each species I’ll see when I take part in the Big Garden Birdwatch this weekend. What I’m less sure of is what they’ll be doing. And that, for me, is the really fun part.
2024 was the year I started keeping notes on more than just numbers. And, as is often the case, it all started with Starlings.
First, in spring, I noticed one on a nearby chimney pot, making particular wing movements and calling. It – he, I now realise, would then disappear into a crevice before coming out and repeating the routine. I looked this up and discovered he was advertising his nest site to females.
Male Starling advertising his nest
Whether he was successful, I don’t know. But not long afterwards, I sww another Starling in our silver birch, pulling at the papery bark. At first, I thought he was foraging for insects. But a few days later, I saw the same behaviour. I made the time to watch for a while, and was rewarded. He pulled off a strip of bark and flew away with it – but not towards the chimney nest, where the other Starling was again shouting about his nest site. Was Starling number 2 using the bark for nest material? It seems possible, as they are known to use flowers.
Starling taking silver birch bark
2024 was also the year I started using the Merlin app, which identifies birds from their calls. It’s really handy when you can’t see the bird, which is the case when our silver birch is in full leaf. One day in late September, there was a call I hadn’t heard before. Despite circling the tree, peering up at it from all angles, I could see nothing. Enter Merlin, who told me it was a Chiffchaff. I should note here that it wasn’t the song I could hear, which is easily recognisable, and which I know well from walks on Peartree Green nearby. Funny though, isn’t it, how ‘seeing is believing’? Most of us are so used to confirming things by sight that there’s a niggling doubt. Ridiculous really in the case of a Chiffchaff, which is a classic LBJ – little brown job, difficult to distinguish from other, similar species. So, for me at least, seeing wouldn’t help much!
Our silver birch in full leaf.
Two days later, I heard another mystery call. This time, Merlin said Dunnock. Now, I wondered whether Chiffchaff had been right. To me, a single note, even repeated, is hard to distinguish from another single note. Could Merlin get it wrong? Maybe, but let’s face it, the app is more likely to be right than I am. I have since seen Dunnocks in the garden, in winter, and I’ve learned to recognise the song. And, excitingly, I’ve seen a Chiffchaff – I think, first in December, then again, earlier this month, January, and I watched the bird take a sunflower seed before flitting back into the climber on my fence. This is where the birding community is so helpful. I couldn’t get a photo, but posted my observations on a Facebook group, Southampton Wildlife, and the experts came back with yes, likely to be a Chiffchaff. Fortunately, one of those experts lives just a few houses away from me and confirmed they’d got Chiffchaffs visiting their garden, though they hadn’t seen them take seeds from a feeder.
Noticing how birds feed has helped me to identify them when I can’t see them clearly. This is part of what birders mean when they talk about the ‘jizz’ – the behaviour of the bird, as well as its call, where it is, and its appearance. Over the years, I’ve seen that Goldfinches seem more likely to use the perches on the seed feeder, whereas Greenfinches often favour standing on the tray, rummaging through what’s there. Both finches get quite territorial about the food, chasing each other off. The Blue Tits keep out of it, nipping in while the finches are preoccupied! They grab a seed and take it to a branch to eat it.
Some mysteries remain though, which keeps it interesting. I’ve twice found blood on a feeder, but am not sure what happened. Both times, there was no blood anywhere else, and no signs of predation around the feeder. These feeders are mainly used by pigeons. Let me know in the comments if you’ve seen this too.
It seemed like it was all happening in our garden last year. Here are a few of the highlights.
Probably the most exciting event was seeing a leaf cutter bee using the bee hotel. I was, quite honestly, beside myself with excitement. This happened 3 weeks after I’d moved the bee hotel from one side of the fence post to another – crucially, the south-facing side. I saw a bee make several trips across the garden to cut discs from the rose leaves, before taking them to the tubes. Watching this was fascinating. Despite careful observation, I couldn’t tell how many bees were using the hotel, but who cares?! Just wonderful.
Rose leaves showing semi circular holesBee hotel in use
A close second was the proliferation of self-heal, one of my favourite flowers but one that hasn’t done well in the garden before. A plant with panache, don’t you think?
Then there was the bagworm. I’d seen the case of one a week or so before it featured on Springwatch, but had no idea what I was looking at. Once I knew, I went looking for more, and found one at the moment it was emerging!
Bagworm under sedum leaf.
Another thing I saw on Springwatch was a wolf spider carrying her babies on her back. Then hey presto! One scuttled out from the gap in our paving slabs. I have to admit that the look of this makes me shudder for reasons I can’t explain, but it’s a garden wildlife experience I’m glad I had. My photo is blurred, so I’ve added another I found online.
Wolf spider with babies Stock photo
I was also in the right place at the right time to witness some mating activity, like these hoverflies and slugs – though it felt a little intrusive taking photos.
Not sure what was going on with these two brocade moth caterpillars. Maybe a stand-off over who had feeding rights on the purple toadflax?
Garden spiders have to eat too…
Also in summer, this chrysalis caught my eye. I hoped to see the butterfly emerge, but missed it. Maybe next year?
So much activity, and I haven’t even mentioned the birds – the return of Greenfinches after a few months’ absence, Great Tits seen taking wool for their nest, a Starling having a thorough wash after I’d hung the bird bath in a better position. More on birds in my next post, but to end this one, it’s over to one of my favourite critters, the woodlouse. They shed their exoskeleton as they grow, and, for me, finding one is like finding treasure.
Me next to the Itchen Ferry Memorial Garden after the tidy up.
Near where I live, there used to be a village called Itchen Ferry. Most of it was destroyed during World War 2, as it was close to the Supermarine factory where Spitfires were built, and now there’s a memorial with a garden. The memorial plaque states that, in 1985, pupils from class 3B at Ludlow Middle School learned about the area, and wanted there to be a memorial. You can read the full text here.
As R.G. King points out in his book Itchen Ferry Village, a 16th century map shows a few houses at a place then called ‘Itchyng’. My aim with this post isn’t to write about the history, though – the book just mentioned is available in the library, and Marie Keats has written an excellent post on the subject, which includes some fascinating photos. My angle is the natural habitat and the space for nature provided by the garden. As I wrote in my blog post from 2021, I’ve done occasional litter picks here with the Woolston Wombles, and regular ones with my partner. I hadn’t paid too much attention to the garden, other than adding a Pollinating Peartree sign. I was told it was looked after by Southampton Amateur Rowing Club, who are based at there, so when I noticed it looked in need of a little attention, I contacted them to organise a shore litter pick and garden tidy up. Below, you can see ‘before and after’ photos.
The rowing club do regular litter picks, and John Bailey of the club organised the memorial and raised funds for the garden. But he isn’t sure when it was established – if anyone reading this knows when it was, or has photos, I’d love to hear from you! Ongoing garden maintenance isn’t something the club has taken on. Despite this, around 15 club members were already well underway when I arrived with other volunteers on the day, and had cleared a lot of the scrub that was spilling over the sleeper walls. I was lucky to have my partner Tricia with me, who’s a professional gardener. She was able to guide others about what was growing, how to prune and what to leave. Here she is with Robin, who’d come prepared with tools and long arms, and was a great help at cutting back clematis and pulling out rubbish from the back of the garden, including two footballs, a crowbar and a kit bag.
Below: before and after on one corner, looking towards the Itchen Bridge. You can see some of the dry stems of couch grass, which is well established and may make it hard to establish new plants, though Tricia did put in a few from our garden.
The rowers worked hard to clear the grass from the three tree pits, then Laura and son Toby planted crocus bulbs – some provided by the club, some from Pollinating Peartree.
As I write this in early December, there’s some Borage in bloom and a Rock Rose in bud. Come spring, thanks to everyone who helped, pollinators should be able to find food more easily, especially when those crocuses come out!
L: Borage; R: Rock Rose.Tricia, Jill, Robin, Toby and Laura. Nick and Lisa missed the photo, but also helped the rowing club members bag up all that rubbish!
Places like Badger Green seem to be overlooked when people talk of ‘access to nature’ or ‘green spaces’. I’m not sure why this is. Has someone decided a ‘green space’ should be a minimum size, or that it must be designated a ‘park’? Southampton City Council’s website has a category called ‘parks and open spaces‘. ‘Open spaces’ covers greenways and nature reserves, and while some (most?) parks have plenty of ‘nature’, I can think of some that are much less green than Badger Green. But you won’t find Badger Green on this list, or even on a map (yet). It’s a name I’ve invented, inspired by the badger that Joanna Rose Tidey painted on the telecomms box. Places need names for people to connect to them, don’t they? Since I named it, I’ve visited it more often, and am paying more attention to what’s there. It’s become another of my local walks, and that’s largely because of the trees.
Badger Green is made up of a wide verge of grass and trees that wrap around part of the boundary of the Merryoak Estate, separating back gardens from the road. The Green runs along Merryoak Road from Cypress Avenue to Spring Road, and then along Spring Road as far as Blackthorn Road.
There are around 30 mature trees: beech, oak and lime. These presumably date from the time of the original Merry Oak estate, when there was only the manor house (and the name was still two words). An ordnance survey map of 1841 – 1952 shows a large number of trees in this stretch of land. This lime is one of my favourites.
Inevitably some trees have fallen or been felled over the years, but several of the beech stumps – elephant’s feet – are like mini nature reserves as their core has decayed and other organisms have moved in. This one below seems the most established, as well as being the biggest. It took me 12 steps to walk around its perimeter, about 7 metres. There’s holly and ivy, moss and fungi on the outside, plus grasses and a sapling growing in the middle – and that’s just what I could see from a two-minute observation in the rain.
The two beech logs provide seating for drinkers, but wouldn’t it be great if they took their empties with them? The area does attract a lot of litter, as there’s a takeaway and a Tesco Express across the road, and a bus stop (with a bin next to it, mind you). So, I fill a bag or two on each visit.
The same log was host to a special fungus in the autumn, the Coral Tooth. It was so striking that I first noticed it as I cycled past.
It’s exciting to have found this ‘new’ place only five minutes’ walk from home. On my most recent walk, I noticed this hazel for the first time, and I’m sure there is much more to be discovered as the seasons change.
On a Sunday morning at the end of July, I arrived home to see scaffolding going up on a house down the road. This is a house where I’d seen swifts nesting, so I was really concerned. I had to wait half an hour for the scaffolders to finish, which gave me time to think about what to do. Even though I had no idea who lived there, I decided to knock on the door anyway, braced for a negative response. Fortunately, the owner was happy to talk to me and interested in wildlife. They hadn’t known swifts nested there, but reassured me they would make sure the birds could still get in. I hadn’t seen any swifts around the area for a few days, so I felt reasonably confident they’d already left to return to Africa.
I contacted Hampshire Swifts to ask for advice, and had a chat with Catharine Gale, who sent me some leaflets. I went back to the house with the one about swift-friendly renovations, and again received a warm welcome. I resolved to start knocking on more doors, though it is a gamble. A part of me wonders if it might better not to tell someone, in case they’re not happy and block up the holes.
Leaflets from Hampshire Swifts
Early in August, scaffolding went up on another house, almost opposite the first one, and also a known nesting site (though I couldn’t confirm nesting this year). Before I’d had a chance to call round,work began on the roof. It’s now complete, and from what I can see, the soffit boards on the front of the house haven’t been touched.
It’s been almost a month since the swifts left, but I still miss them. I’ve been thinking about them a lot, planning how to raise awareness of them in the local area. Through social media, I’ve connected with a few other swift followers and found out about other possible nest sites. Swiftmapper shows some of these, but I need to encourage more people to use it and get them all on there. This will help me to plan some swift walks for next year. I hope to do some during Swift Awareness week, which usually takes place in the first week of July.
I’ve written a short article for a local news magazine, hoping to catch the eye of a few more people – especially any that might be thinking of renovating their houses.
My plan is to use these swiftless months to learn more and do more. I’ve already added my records to both Swiftmapper and the Hampshire Swift Survey . Recently, I’ve also read a couple of inspiring books, one of them by the author of this blog, Sarah Gibson. These, and that scaffolding, have made me want to do more, before it’s too late.
As well as talking to my neighbours and others with nest sites, I’ll organise getting a swift caller installed in my nest box. This should increase the chances of it being used next year. It was installed in 2022 by Hampshire Swifts, but hasn’t been occupied yet – at least, as far as I know. This summer, I didn’t monitor it as much as I could have. Next year, I want to make more effort to check sites that have previously been used, as well as ones where I’ve seen banging this year. That’s when younger birds check out potential sites for future use.
But I won’t spend all my time thinking about swifts. There are starlings to be appreciated – and the possibility of winter murmurations!
Have you ever picked a flower from a White Deadnettle and sucked the nectar from it? As a child, I did – and I tried it again recently! That’s when I realised not everyone knows you can do this. It’s a countryside thing, as Richard Mabey noted in Flora Britannica. Or at least it was – I don’t know if today’s children do it, but it got me thinking about my own connection to nature, and where it came from.
Popes Lane, Leverington
I grew up in the countryside around the town of Wisbech (pronounced wizbeach), the Capital of the Fens, according to road signs welcoming you there. It’s in East Anglia, where Cambridgeshire meets Norfolk. The picture above shows the first place I lived, in the village of Leverington. You can see it’s quite rural, even now (the photo was taken in 2024, 60 years after I was born). On the left, behind the telegraph pole, there’s a ditch, or dyke, as they’re called in the Fens. This is where, when I was about 2 or 3, I cut my finger on a reed so badly that I still have the scar.
My mother grew up in a city, Liverpool. During their summer layoff from Littlewoods Football Pools, she and her friend cycled from Liverpool to a village outside Wisbech called Friday Bridge. There, they spent the summer at an agricultural camp, and this was where she met my father, a local. I think my mum loved the clean air and peace of country life, and was happy to escape the city.
With my sisters Anne (right) and Ruth (centre) outside Brooklands, Feb 2024
When I was 3, we moved to a neighbouring village, Gorefield, and lived in a pebble-dashed house called Brooklands, on a small road named The Barracks. It’s from here I can remember some of our pets – our rabbit, my sister Anne’s cat, Sweep Minou Minx, and our three guinea pigs. Just round the corner from our house was a den that all the local kids played in.
My best friend Michelle lived on a lane further along the High Road, and I recall fishing for tadpoles with jam jars in a dyke there. I also remember the tall, thin poplar trees along the lane. In our garden, we had a weeping willow tree. They were quite a common sight in the area.
L-R Ruth, Anne and me, with the weeping willow behind.
Another tree memory is of ‘seeing’ animal shapes among bare branches from my bedroom window, but I’m not sure which type of tree it was. This is something I still do, look for shapes in trees and clouds. But that’s more or less it for my memories of nature – pets, tadpoles and trees.
By the time I was 9, we’d moved to town, but on the southern edge, close to the horticultural college. I used to earn extra pocket money there, picking gooseberries, just as I’d strawberry-picked in the village when I was younger. At the end of our road, Westmead Avenue, was an orchard. I remember birdwatching there, with my Observers Book of Birds, but I don’t recall why I became interested in this. Maybe it was simply because the orchard was so close, so I went to explore what was a ‘safe’ place for me to go to alone. I probably started off collecting plums, then noticed the birds! We had a big garden with a pond, though it contained goldfish rather than newts and toads. We also had a pet tortoise. I didn’t pay much attention to the wild creatures in the garden – though I think I remember house martins nesting under the eaves of the house.
At some point I became interested in exotic animals, as I suppose many children do. My sisters went on a school trip to London Zoo, and brought me back a postcard of the Giant Panda Chi-chi. I must have watched Tarzan on TV, because I got a toy chimpanzee and named it Cheetah after the one in the programme. And here I am with my chimp mask on 😁
With my mum on a day trip.
Years later, I developed a real fascination with chimps. I’m not sure when, but I think it was sometime after I’d moved to Nottingham (when I was 22 – small town life wasn’t for me). I happened to see Dr Jane Goodall interviewed on breakfast TV, bought her book Through a Window, and was hooked. I guess this was around 1990, when it was published. I became quite obsessed. I read all her books, joined the Jane Goodall Institute, and for years I adopted chimps for my young nephews’ birthday presents (to encourage them to care about the natural world). When I moved to Southampton in 2002, I regularly visited the ape rescue centre Monkey World in Dorset and spent hours watching the chimps. Then in 2008, I achieved my ambition of spending time with chimps in the wild, in Uganda. I tracked a semi-habituated group that were being studied in Kibale National Forest, and spent the night there. Waking up in the forest to the sound of chimps calling to each other was thrilling. At the end of my trip, I spent a few days on Ngamba Island on Lake Victoria, a sanctuary for orphaned and rescued chimps. Having had the required vaccinations to make sure I didn’t pass on any diseases, I was able to do a forest walk with the younger, calmer members of the group. Giving one a piggy back was one of the highlights of my life.
In Kibale National Forest with Julia, the researcherMy accommodation in Kibale NFWith Dr Fred Nizeyimama on Ngamba Island
I also read a lot of studies about chimp language and behaviour, and, as a teaching fellow at the University of Southampton, for several years I delivered a ‘guest lecture’ on chimps to international pre-sessional students. These lectures were designed to give students a chance to experience general lectures before their Masters programmes. For me, it was an opportunity to share my enthusiasm, and perhaps change the way chimps were viewed by some students, most of whom were from countries with poor animal welfare standards, and in some cases, places where chimps were kept as pets.
My guest lecture, with a photo of chimps at Ngamba Island.
So how did I get from being obsessed with one species native to Africa to becoming interested in urban wildlife? These two seem a long way apart, but on reflection, they’re not really. As I learned more about chimps, and their close relatives bonobos, I shifted from focussing on how like humans they are, to how important they are in their own right. I also learned about the importance of habitat conservation and, through Jane Goodall’s example, about how to work with local people, to listen to their experiences, and find ways for them to share the land with chimps. When I moved to the Peartree area of Southampton in 2014, and discovered Peartree Green, I started to shift my focus to wildlife near me. It’s a special site, a local nature reserve with over 1400 species recorded so far, and it’s so close that I can walk there in three minutes and visit it daily. I started identifying the wild flowers there, realising how few I recognised. I was interested in the common ones, not just the rarities. There’s a local birder who counts all the pyramidal orchids each year, so one April I decided to count all the dandelions in bloom. There were 874.
Head and shoulders shadow with dandelions
I joined the Friends group because I wanted to help protect the reserve, and to do that, we needed to engage with people effectively. When school groups visited, I helped out, and found it so much fun that I started volunteering at forest school with the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust, now my employer.
Wilder Southampton is all about encouraging and enabling people to enhance areas for wildlife. As part of this, I’ve done a number of engagement activities, including some with local school children. At one session, I realised that some children – and some adults – couldn’t recognise a blackbird. There could be many reasons for this, among them the lack of an adult to inspire interest, the local environment, adult fears about safety, etc. I can’t remember an adult inspiring me when I was young, but my environment was rural, and safe. I grew up in the 60s and 70s in villages and then a small town, with nature around me that I could access in relative safety – there was much less traffic, for example. I can also remember playing in farmers’ fields of wheat or barley with my best friend, no-one else around. Back then, this wasn’t thought of as risky – and nor was sucking deadnettle flowers! Deadnettles don’t sting.
The school I visited is in an area with not many green places, and few trees – but, as David Lindo the Urban Birder has said, if you think there’s no nature in a city, look up! That’s true, but birds aren’t always the easiest wildlife to get to know – they’re too far away, or they move too quickly, or you can hear them but not see them. If you want to know what they are, you need someone to help you, or an app such as Merlin. Flowers though, are much easier. They don’t move, for one thing. That’s why I started with them on Peartree Green.
And as I continued with that session in Sholing and got chatting to three young people in particular, I discovered they knew quite a bit about flowers. They giggled as they said “it makes you wet the bed, doesn’t it?” of dandelion; they talked about holding a buttercup under their chin to test if they like butter; they’ve made daisy chains. All the things I knew about as a child. Maybe this knowledge has been passed on because the flowers are common, even in urban areas. I wish I’d asked how they knew these things. I will next time, and I’ll also find some white deadnettles – perhaps they’ll surprise me by telling me they drink them!
Dandelion Nature 