Lunchtime wonderings
I’m out on the merse carrying out a butterfly transect.
It requires a long, long walk out on the saltmarsh, counting every butterfly I see. Often there are only about seven in total so it makes for a boring morning a lot of the time. It’s going well, I’ve seen red admiral, green-veined white and meadow brown, so I decide to stop for lunch.
I sit down next to this bit of old deadwood: a massive, old tree. It makes the perfect back rest. I take my bag off and pull my sandwich out of my rucksack. My mind begins to wander as I chew and I start to think about how strange it is that we take this sort of thing for granted. There are bits of deadwood strewn all over the merse, huge trees that have somehow arrived here as if dropped out of the sky by the hand of God.
Photograph of the dead tree with moss growing on it
But how did they get here?
And in pondering this, first I realised that nature is simply way better and way stronger than we are. The ocean tide carried this enormous tree in, from who knows where.
I watch the spiders, ants and beetles crawling over the gnarled skin. And the other amazing thing, as I’m sitting here eating my lunch, relaxing in the warm August sun, is how without the tide, the entire miniature ecosystem that exists within this dead tree wouldn’t be here.
I polish off my lunch and pack everything away in my bag and stand to carry on with the survey… but then I spot some old feathers. They are clumped together and as I follow the clumps, I realise they have been plucked from a juvenile goldfinch. It seems a bird of prey has caught this little bird and used the deadwood as its dinner plate. I shared a lunch spot with a raptor (probably a hobby or sparrowhawk)… which I have to say is pretty cool. And certainly made this potentially dull morning much more interesting.
Photograph of juvenile goldfinch feathers by dead wood
Words and pictures by Jake Goodwin
