Urban adventures

Running along the Wensum this morning, I was suddenly aware of how busy the place is.

Squirrels running along the ground with that strange half-leap, half-ooze movement, like slinkies. Swans looking unconcerned, bright bills tucked under their wings, one black eye malicious and alert.

A rabbit hiding by the brick wall of the Great Hospital. Blackbirds chasing each other, dark torpedoes over the top of a hedge. A robin perching on a twig, head on one side as he assesses me.

This let's remember is the centre of Norwich. yet there is wilderness everywhere. I came out of the King's Head late one evening - well, the early hours of the next day - and there in the passage outside, among the fag ends, was a fox, staring at me as if I had no right to be there. It was his time. And then he trotted off down Magdalen Road.

I'm not much of a twitcher. I don't have the Observer Book of Birds. I can tell a hawk from a harnser (that's the Norfolk original of the hawk and handsaw joke in Hamlet, which Will Kemp understood but Brummy Will Shakespeare completely failed to get) whichever direction the wind's in, but that's about it. And even so, I'm rather enjoying the avian accompaniment to my daily run.

Mind you, although the anglers on the Wensum tell me that they've taken some good big pike this year, I have to say I've never yet seen one...

The dawn chorus

Sunday is 'International Dawn Chorus day', apparently. Lots of guided trips into the woods to hear the birds, at ungodly hours such as 4.45 am.

Now the nightingale and the skylark are the gold standard of song according to all the books. But I beg to differ.

The skylark actually sounds to me - a true city girl - like a dial-up modem. (You remember, before we all had broadband.)  Just with the skylark you never get the satisfying silence at the end that means it's connected.

So can I disagree with Keats and Shelley - and propose the blackbird and the thrush as the champion songbirds?

There is nothing as delightful as a blackbird's song. Its full-throated, slightly hollow, fluty tones ; its extension, in free forms, imaginative melodies tumbling over each other; the way it echoes in the stillness of the evening. There's something melancholy about it; not gloomy, nor depressing, but just gently sad, a true evening song bearing with it the same slight sadness as the smell of the wet earth after a rainshower.

Of course we don't always get that. Today I'm listening to a cuckoo. Two notes, two notes, two notes, just repeating them over and over. Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo. It seems to keep going for ever. Does it never get bored?

Other days I can hear the woodpecker in the coppice, drumming away with its beak on the wood of a dead tree. I've never seen him, though I've seen the nuthatches who come out to be fed in winter, and heard their cry, sharp and repetitive like a sopranino version of a pneumatic drill.

Or the woodpigeons murmuring away. They always look plump, their purplish plumage shining - a very different bird from the urban mongrels most of us know.

So whether you can bothered to go on an official guided walk on Sunday, or just stay at home - it's worth waking up early. While the traffic hasn't started, the kids next door aren't squealing, and the TV's still switched off, you can hear the birds instead.

Resource:International Dawn Chorus Day web site

Put a cork in it

The cork oak dominates the countryside in Extramadura. Huge, twisted old trees stamp their character on the landscape.

This isn't a forest like the marching pines of the Lake District. It's open grassland scattered with huge trees. Fine hunting for the eagles and rare Iberian lynx, two of the species which depend on this open landscape.

Sometimes you'll pass a dark pond half hidden behind a hedge. Even if you can't see it you can hear the frogs - not one at a time, but huge colonies of them keeping up a continuous sonorous croak.

This apparently wild landscape, though, depends on human intervention. The cork oaks are stripped of their bark periodically for cork, and that's what sustains the agriculture of the region.

Unfortunately wine producers are increasing their use of plastic stoppers. Not only are these non-biodegradable - whereas cork, of course, degrades naturally in a few years; without demand for cork, farmers will have to turn to other crops, and most are looking at eucalyptus - an ecological disaster.

Besides, the cork oak plantations need to be managed sustainably. Currently, planting of young trees is way below what's required to ensure the future health of this unique landscape.

Intrigued? Concerned? Want to do something about it? Realcork tells you more.