Running Wild

Weeks like these, I get my wildlife fix on the run.

Meeting my son off the bus fifteen minutes early, means quarter of an hour’s birdwatching on the hill inbetween. Or at school, helping students with their GCSE Speaking and Listening exams, I am delighted that some have chosen water vole conservation, plastic in the seas, or the subject of foxhunting to speak on. I watch the bare-faced cheek of rooks on the end-of-break bell, pulling litter out the bins for crisps and crusts.

On another trip to the bus stop, I fit in a run. It is a dun, damson and brown afternoon, rain-soaked and tractor flailed. But there are mauve and blue flashes of jays, white-bottomed as bullfinches in plum colours.

I run slowly, quietly, and discover I’m not the only one seeking the flat shelter of the valley bottom. Suddenly, I am running with hares, peeling off from potential boxing matches to join the chase for a few strides. Two muntjac deer are swept along, bumping shoulders, white flag tails up and waving, like the aerials on bumper cars. Roe deer jump the ditch ahead. Then, flowing through the wood and out into open pasture, the cream and brown gallop of a herd of fallow deer. They come loose from the wood as if a ribbon weft of them has been pulled through the warp of the upright wood; a fabric unravelling, a wood unspooling. They are the same colour as the trees and the earth, rain-darkened flanks running to pale bellies like cave paintings of themselves. There must be forty of them, just fifty metres away. I can hear the snick of the toes of their splayed, cloven hooves coming together, the rumble of a gallop slowing to a trot. They are not running from me and I wonder if they are running from what I might be running from?  It’s a profound, uncanny experience. They melt into the wood ahead and I discover that I’ve run for a full half hour.

Back in the car, I think how nature adapts to live and run alongside us quite well, if we let it.

I raised my voice this week in protest at the new trend of netting trees and whole hedgerows, to prevent birds nesting in them – and scupper plans for development, whether planning permission has been granted or not. And to a Tesco store in Norwich, netting off a trolley park that swallows had nested in in previous years, to prevent them returning there and making a mess of the trolley handles. Nature is a wraparound, intrinsic thing, woven through our daily lives and our shopping. Deer joining in with my Couch to 5K efforts, and swallows at the supermarket should be celebrated for the wonders and joys that they are.