When I was young, I had an uncle who used to take me for long walks with his dog ‘Moss’ through the lush meadows of a west-country village. We would walk along the banks of a gently flowing river over hung with trees, where he would teach me to lie against the bowl of a tree that hung far out over the dark waters, to hang over the side and look underneath to see a mallard’s nest. The excitement of seeing a nest full of pale green eggs, or a mother incubating, sitting on the clutch was a wonder.
He taught me that to see those rare and wonderful sights in nature you had to be patient and quiet. He showed me the difference between rabbit, fox, and badger runs as they passed through hedges, and let me hold a slowworm gently, so I could feel its dry shiny silver skin.
Safe to say he inspired my love of nature, and my parents backed it up with Christmas and Birthday presents of nature books, magnifying glasses and an old pair of binoculars. They even went as far as buying me a pair of Clark’s ‘Tracker’ shoes, which had different animals paw prints moulded into the rubber soles, and a compass inside, in the heel of one shoe. I remember putting them on and going straight out to pad around in mud in the garden to see the prints, and then much to my father’s ire walking back into the kitchen and leaving paw prints everywhere.
At sixteen I worked as a volunteer at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in Slimbridge, and loved to watch the great flocks of swan and geese coming in to the flight ponds in winter. There were many pens with ducks from all over the world in them, usually because they were in a breeding programme to ensure their survival. They often had strange and exotic plumage and had names that conjured up far away places; the Magelanic Steamer Duck, the Cuban Whistling Duck and for me this sanctuary became a place of fascination and wonder.
Eventually adulthood encroached and earning a living with it. Work in the environmental sector was almost non-existent in those days and eventually I became a metalworker.
I never lost that passion for the outdoors and have always tried to keep an active interest in the environment. I have spent the last ten years as an engineer helping to restore and maintain a working waterwheel, and love walking up to the millpond before visitors arrive to watch the moorhens and heron that frequent the pond, or the kingfisher that comes to fish through holes in the ice in winter.
Nature has given me so much pleasure throughout my life and this blog is my way of giving something back, in the hope that people will be inspired to help save our rapidly vanishing environment and to make efforts in trying to prevent global warming.
The terrible things we have done to our environment in the name of progress, have largely been ‘swept under the carpet’, or seen as a necessary evil. The environmentalists and scientists who have tried to draw attention to this in the past, have often been seen as isolated voices, ‘a minority element’. The science surrounding our world’s problems is complex, sometimes confusing and often refuted by those who are set to lose much from acknowledging that there is a problem at all.
Talking to friends down the years about global environmental problems, and our part in creating them, they often seemed disinterested, seeing the situation as too large to do anything about or as a side issue to their everyday lives. So, if I couldn’t even reach those around me, I had a problem. I felt I had to try and reach them in other ways that were more understandable and appealed to the heart, and decided to create a series of artworks under the title ‘The Piercing Eye’ in the early 1990’s and more recently trying my hand at poetry.