That’s why, when it came to spring time and the dusk and dawn choruses started to heighten, I was keen to do live sessions at both ends of the day from this place. Through the sessions, I was also keen to try and relate in poetry and reactions to the sights and sounds, there and then, that unfolded around me. I did both and these are available to listen to and watch if you missed them via our Facebook site - dusk chorus and dawn chorus.
As ever, it was the outtakes that didn’t happen at the actual time of recording that were the best and I couldn’t share! For instance, just as the dawn chorus finished, a peregrine squawking loudly attacked a very loud croaking heron just overhead, or when a goldfinch came to stand about four feet away from the microphone to blast out a song of, ‘this is my territory, what are you doing here?’
As for many, my garden is also my exercise area and I’d say my spiritual space too, where I feel I connect with the bigger picture of life and the cosmos. One way I try to plug into the underlying patterns of all natural universal processes around me is through the ancient Chinese art of tai chi. I’ve learnt it over 25 years and it’s based on close observation of nature’s rhythms and how animals move, and how we need to create a sense of balance and harmony for everything, including us, to thrive. The slow-moving circular patterns of the movements help me relax, strengthen and also tune into the natural scenes around me.
After I finish, I usually sit and contemplate or even meditate, keeping a sense of mindfulness to stay in the moment and enjoy just being alive amongst nature’s wonder. It helps especially when other aspects of life crowd in on us, as often happens in homeworking and in what have been and are tense times.
Also. in these moments, I think I gain important insights. For example, recently, I started to really appreciate just how the macro picture of nature fits with all the micro things we see around us in one joined up way. For instance, I’ve never been a detail person. Always it is the bigger picture and players that appeal to me. Even when it comes to wildlife watching, unlike my entomologist and botanical, bryophyte focussed friends and colleagues, it is the birds and mammals, those charismatic ‘macro-fauna’, that excite me. Though the bigger, more obvious insects, such as dragonflies and butterflies do get my attention.
But I am a general naturalist too. I’m interested in how all of life fits together and is mutually ecologically supportive. I know in any ecosystem or food web everything big depends on everything little, and, when these smaller life forms are obvious all about me, even I sit up and take notes.
Take this morning, just sitting in our seaside, cliff top, garden, immersed in what is a vigorous blooming of cottage garden perennials and wild flower and shrubs. When I might otherwise be raking the skies for peregrines or looking to sea at gannets and dolphins, I am here transfixed by a black bead of a tiny diving beetle, rising to the top of our new pond we have put in. Then, on the rougher grassy edge of the garden, what appears to be a little jumping party of bush crickets, moving from grass blade to grass blade in a miniature replay of a scene from the film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I even put on my reading glasses to get a better look at the detail and am surprised by the yellow beady stalked eyes of the grass hoppers looking back at me. It’s all a bit of a revelation.
From then on it feels like an unstoppable flow of early June micro-biology. As late afternoon turns into early evening, a cloud of small smoky moths floats up like a chorus from the lawn, what I ID after as a suite of ‘grass veneers’ bumbling there in the bright sun, and others I vaguely recognise also come to view, that others have named for me, like the candy yellow coloured brimstone moth and the silver Y. I might even buy a moth trap I muse and start to learn to identify them properly. Other things come in, but I am useless at identifying insets, but I can tell the difference, just about, between hoverflies and solitary bees and real bees of various sorts, including different sorts of bumble bee.
I’ve tried to learn these at least, but they are still quite difficult and so I default to my own descriptive silly terminology, and note in turn and even together, big white bum bumble bee, red bum bee, black and red, small stripy, large stripy, and the like. In a way, none of the naming is important I guess, just the fact that there is both diversity and apparent abundance in all that I am seeing. These are ecosystem builders and connectors, the things that formulate part of the natural processes that drive life, like pollination.
As I was staring into the myriad of stunning flowers and plants and then focussing down to observe the little lives of insects, I felt something else beyond these intriguing lives. The more I focussed on the micro the more I sensed a connection, a sequencing of patterns within and around it all, a sort of background network, to which it all belonged and which it was invisibly linked to. It was as if I was suddenly party to the perception of the multiple layers of life, and the realisation that all these small things were component parts of a vastness of life. Something that spins out from the microscopic, to the micro to the macro, within which we and everything exists.
Years ago, I had this same feeling examining and researching birds’ nests and nesting habits. This was for birds such as the stonechat and snow bunting, which make nests that have tinctures of all the elements that make up their whole ecosystems, in them, a kind of composite magic of the place they inhabit woven into their little nests. All of this came back to me as I watched the flowers and insects all about me, then glanced up and outwards taking in the massive views of sea, sky and land.
So that is it then. I am now very interested in the detail, because it actually represents, is in fact the whole component, of the so-called bigger picture. It’s like an infinite mosaic, or a whole galaxy of stars. Not one part of the bigger whole can exist without all of the tiny and massive all working together in unison. All are indeed one and the same thing, the detail is the very stuff of the universe. The old cliché that everything has its own universe, is actually a fundamental truth, and to quote a bigger cliché, the devil is not in the detail, the meaning of how life works, is.