Paul Lawston's Wild Space

Even having lived next to it for nearly nine years, this month I think I’ve really come to know and to appreciate the park. Only being allowed one daily exercise walk has made the time spent in there a little island of sanity in a world gone mad. And the park keeps giving back in terms of wildlife. April is the time of year when the trees start coming to life, the flowers begin to grow and a lot of the wildlife that’s been dormant since the previous summer begins to reappear. Slowly but surely the trees are coming into leaf. In early April they’re still sparsely covered in fresh, yellow-green shoots but by the end of the month most of these will be fully unfurled and drinking up the sunlight. Probably my favourite are the oaks, with their delicate flowers hanging down pendulously amongst the sprays of leaves. This is the tree that I have the most to do with because I volunteer for the park as an Oak Processionary Moth surveyor; I’ll talk more about that in a future entry because ...

So last month’s diary was a weird one because of all the heavy rain and storms making it hard to get out and about in the park. I was looking forward to March because it marks the beginning of Spring and those first days of brightness and warmth. Well for the first week it wasn’t too bad, and I ended up taking a trip down to Frensham Common in the sunshine to look for a Great Grey Shrike. I found it, with quite a bit of help from the birders who already knew where to look, but as we were looking at the bird there was a slight hint of worry running through the group. Should we be standing so close to each other? Fast forward to now and the answer is no, we shouldn’t. The novel Coronavirus has disrupted every part of daily life, up to and including the time we are able to spend outside, and now the time I spend in the park is incredibly precious. I can’t really complain too much – the lockdown rules are there to protect the most vulnerable in society and stop the health service fro...