A child's thrill with nature, fighting poisoned river banks and an Osprey visit

A child's thrill at nature sows the seeds of conservation in Bill Clark's heart. Increasingly aware of the damage of modern land management practices he fights against the spraying of river banks to clear weeds. Best of all, an Osprey regularly visits his farm!

Photo by Jean Beaufort

Extract s from chapter 6 from Route and Branch by Bill Clark, former Warden at Wandlesbury

...Caroline was interested in every flower before she could toddle, and by the time she was four, wanted to know everything about anything! She had also reawakened Julie’s enthusiasm for retrieving again. If any soft toys were lost around the garden, she only had to rummage under Julie in her bed, to triumphantly find her treasure: the pair were almost inseparable. They would run to meet me as I walked back over the fields for meals, Caroline pointing to some, ‘new’ flower and I would name it, and answer her questions on various matters. Little did I guess that it would be my life that would be most changed by, and gain the most benefit out of, her early years.

I soon discovered that a small child’s capacity to assimilate knowledge should never be underestimated, and that I had to be careful with my delivery – One mistake was when I was loading manure from a heap in the corner of a nearby field, then driving back and forth, with the spreader flinging it in a wide ark behind me. Caroline met me at midday and asked, ‘Why?’ I explained how all of the countryside relied on the death and decay of what had gone before – nothing was wasted: we baled up all the straw to use for winter bedding for the animals, we fed the animals, and when they went to the toilet, this soaked into the straw too, and by the end of the winter we had a deep solid layer. This we cleared out, and put in a heap with any other stuff we had available – the septic tanks that collected the waste from our houses got pumped there, wood shavings mixed with droppings from the turkey houses, even any dead pigs or turkeys got buried there. And I finished with, ‘And now it has all rotted, it makes good food for all the crops that we plant,’ pointing out the difference between some fat-hen plants we were walking past and two or three extremely large ones, growing on the heap. She was very impressed.

Then one Sunday morning a week or two later, I was preparing our greenhouse to plant tomatoes – a task made all the more pleasant by the help of a small person with her own tools. I had already sterilised the soil, by cooking it, the weekend before – which had involved quite a bit of discussion – and was barrowing it into place. Next I cut open a bale of peat-moss – something that I would never use today – that had been soaking, and with Caroline enthusiastically joining in, started mixing it into the soil. ‘What is this Daddy?’ ‘Peat, Caroline.’ She leapt up with a scream, and burst into tears. I quickly examined her hands expecting to see blood as Wendy rushed out of the house, ‘What on earth has happened?’ Caroline pointed down to the heap, ‘It’s P P P Pete,’ she sobbed, ‘I didn’t know he was dead!’ – Peter the pugnacious pig-man, was quite overcome at her concern...

...Then in September I was to see another side of people’s enthusiasm for wildlife. I was ploughing a field by a large gravel pit lake, using our latest Select-O-Matic Ford tractor with a built on cab – although it was the envy of the other men on the farm, I disliked the cab, for I would much rather have the wind in my hair and an unobscured vision. At about 11.00 am, I was swinging over the one way plough as I reversed round at the cliff edge of the lake, some six metres above the water, when into the view of my open rear screen, a large bird swooped down over the lake. As I turned, it remained in the centre as if framed, dropping its feet, to effortlessly lift a two or three kilo carp out of the water. By the time I had pulled back into the furrow to return across the field, it was visible through my front screen, coasting across, to perch on a dead branch at the top of an oak tree behind our house.

Wendy could hardly contain her excitement when I arrived for my midday meal. I was lucky to see any food! She had my binoculars in her hand as I opened the door, and a bird identification book on the table. ‘There’s an Osprey sitting in the tree at the bottom of the garden,’ she gasped, ‘and looking through these binoculars from the lounge, you feel you could almost touch it.’ And indeed there was certainly no need for any visual aid – as we sat watching it from just inside our open door whilst we ate...

you can listen to the ull reading of this chapter in the podcast here:
https://archive.org/download/a-childs-view-poisoned-banks-osprey-visit/Ch6c-A%20childs-view-poisoned-banks-ospreyvisit.mp3