A starling discovery

Feature image credit: stephendl via flickr

Photo Credit: Duncan Brown (Cradlehall) via flickr

Some time ago, I was sitting in my living room with some of my family, enjoying the usual comfort of relaxing on the sofa. In one of the pauses between conversation, I glanced out the window in a sort of daydream when something caught my eye. My attention had been diverted by a bird sitting on my next door neighbour’s brick wall that surrounded our front garden. It was a beautiful bird with a speckled coat and feathers that revealed a multitude of colours when they caught the sunlight. I called over my brother-in-law, a fellow nature lover (or so we claimed), and asked him if knew what the bird was. After some failed guessing work, we turned to the RSPB’s online bird identifier and tried to remember the features of the little creature that had now flown off. Around half an hour later, using the process of elimination, one finally seemed to match. A starling. I raved about it to my parents, “I saw a starling outside earlier!” I started to see more. I told various others, “I saw some starlings the other day, they’re lovely!” until I repeated the same sentiment to my best friend. “Starlings?” “Yeah!” “Yeah I see them all the time, they’re quite common. Haven’t you seen them before?” Maybe I truly hadn’t (at least not on its own where I could distinguish it from its flock), or maybe leading up until that very moment, I had been seeing but not really looking. And to think I’d had the audacity to call myself a nature lover.

Having gained some friends in the conservation sector who are real lovers of the natural world, and I know this because I have had to endure a walk back from a campsite in the Purbecks with them while they stopped to identify every wildflower along the way and every bird swooping past, my interest and appreciation for British wildlife has developed over time. But it wasn’t until I started reading Hugh Warwick’s ‘The Beauty in the Beast’ (recommended by one of my conservation friends in fact) that I really started to think beyond myself and about the rest of the UK population.

We claim to be a nation of animal lovers, but given a list of British wildlife, how many could you tick off having seen?

This is somewhat hypocritical of me, and despite making a slight effort by volunteering at a couple of nature reserves and trying to take advantage of the countryside that surrounds where I live by getting out on a walk every now and then, that list would remain largely unticked.

I visited the gorgeous country of Costa Rica last summer, and was lucky to see lots of wonderful wildlife. From American crocodiles, to scarlet macaws and to those I hadn’t even heard of; the coati, the resplendant quetzal to name just a couple, we were spoilt in the two weeks that we spent there, albeit witness to just a small percentage of what resides there. I even found myself buying a wildlife guide and circling the animals we saw as I went along, hanging onto every word that our tour guide told us about them.

What added to the spectacle was that I was seeing all of these animals in the wild; in their natural habitats, as opposed to behind some metal wire or a glass panel. It was funnily enough this very idea that made me pine for the wildlife at home. I may have seen squirrel monkeys leaping through the trees, but I’ve never seen a badger emerge from its sett. I may have seen the three-toed sloth, but not the otter, or the adder, or the dolphin, or many of the other wonderful species we have here in the UK, and really, that saddened me.

It seems we feel that we need to venture beyond our little island to have a wild experience and see something special, when really there’s amazing wildlife that we haven’t even seen in the country in which we reside. In November 2015, The Wildlife Trusts published results from a survey that revealed that 71 percent of British children have never seen a lizard in the wild in the UK, more than half have never seen a flock of starlings and four in ten have never seen a hedgehog. When discussing these issues with a friend who teaches forest school, he told me that he asks the children what they might see in the forest, only for them to answer with “lion”, “giraffe” and “tiger”.

37 percent of British children in a survey by the Wildlife Trusts have never seen a hedgehog (image: dniwe_morskoe via flickr)

Of course it’s not only the children (who else would be providing them with these experiences otherwise aside from perhaps schools), but the figures give you some idea of how disconnected we have become with our own surroundings. It is most likely because of this that, at least I don’t feel, many of the wider British public have really connected with issues to do with our own wildlife, such as those surrounding fox-hunting and badger-culling, yet we care so deeply about a lion killed for sport 7,000 miles away.

Now don’t get me wrong, every living thing is extremely important to this world’s ecosystem, and we do need to care for and defend them, especially when half of the world’s wildlife has disappeared over the last 40 years, but as the saying goes, it starts at home. At least this seems to apply to every other argument made by some British citizens that I see on the comments of various articles- whether it’s foreign aid money, “but what about the people suffering here?” or perhaps manufacturing, “why does nothing seem to be made in Britain anymore?”, but yet have we kicked up the same fuss about British wildlife?

This is important because this is where it starts. By connecting with our wildlife and our local spaces, we care about what happens to them, and we can begin to develop a deeper understanding of why each and every one is so important.

I used to live in Bournemouth, and currently work in London just up the road from St James’s Park, and in both of these places I have seen residents and tourists alike marvel over the grey squirrel. Ironically, this is probably a very bad example as they are not actually native to Britain (although a great one for testing your knowledge of British wildlife- did you know that they hail from over the pond in North America and in fact pushed out our native red squirrel?) but still, it’s a simple illustration of the kind of connection that we need to encourage. In London at least, it’s probably one of the most exciting things you’ll see wildlife wise aside from a wood pigeon, or maybe a rat. But a walk around St James’s Park in November, and amongst the squirrels and the seagulls, I saw a heron and a pelican, and for me that was magical. Even in ‘The Beauty in the Beast’, Hugh meets the advocate of the bat in Brixton, and she speaks of not having to venture further than the outside of the local pub to spot bats flying around.

When you allow yourself these experiences, it really does open your eyes and fill you with apprecation for what’s around you. I even found pleasure in seeing three pheasants fly off one after another when on a post-Christmas walk in a field within a mile from my front door- but that’s the beauty of it- it’s the small things that make a big difference, and better yet, it’s closer than we think.

So spend your weekend frolocking in the forest, taking a walk along the river bank or even spending some time in your garden- and pay attention to what’s around you because even if it’s the common starling, it’s one to tick off your list.

Here’s a few resources to help you get you started:

RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch (30-31 January)

National Trust nature reserves

RSPB nature reserves

Big butterfly count (15 July-7 August)

Where to see wildlife in urban areas