Jane Goodall was one of my heroes! What a woman. She’s in her nineties now and still going. There is always hope.
I was just walking up my hill yesterday and a small flock of birds flew over and wheeled above me. I stood and watched, transfixed. Nothing moves me like nature. I couldn’t make out what they were but it was stirring. I found myself thinking.
Five hundred years ago that flock might have been a hundred times bigger. Wild life proliferated. Everywhere was a mass of nature, big and small. It seemed infinite. Catching a thousand larks to pickle their tongues as a delicacy was not even considered wrong. Larks were so numerous you could never exhaust the population. I read with horror how in Greece they filled barrels with living tortoises and used them as ballast in ships because they were so numerous it was easier than gathering rocks.
Mankind’s inherent cruelty and inability to understand suffering in animals has always horrified me.
It’s taken hundreds of years but what we have now is the remnants of what once was wonderful. What once was everyday is now rare; what once was numerous is now solitary.
When the Normans invaded King Harold marched his army from one end of the country to the other down forest trails. The whole country was a forest. There were wolves, bears, beavers and so much wildlife they would catch and eat what they wanted. I read tales of herring shoals so dense that you could walk across them.
As a child I roamed the meadows. They were alive with chirping insects. Every flower adorned with bright beetles, bugs and hover flies, bees and butterflies. Hawk moths on the willows, stickle-backs in the streams. We collected frogs, newts, slowworms, voles, lizards and snakes.
Now those fields are silent, the streams empty of darting fish.
We live in the remnants and think that is normal.
I have to believe there is hope. There is always hope.
