“Devon wildlife is extraordinary. Comparable with anything the world outside can offer”. This was what Andrew Cooper set out to show us with his photographs. In fact what captivated me was not the photos, however stunning they were, but his sense of the drama of wildlife; the drama of our ‘ordinary’ wildlife: the animals, birds, insects and plants that inhabit the huge variety of habitats that we have in Devon. Wildlife that is extraordinary not just for colour, shape and size, but for behaviour, the way species interact, their way of life.
We saw the tiny sand crocus that blooms in April at Dawlish Warren and nowhere else in the UK; the peregrine falcons that are recolonising the same ledges that they used for breeding before their population was decimated; the migrant birds that somehow find their way each year to our estuaries and coast; the Brent geese and the avocets that winter in their thousands on the Exe, the guillemots that breed on wafer thin ledges at Berry Head. We take them for granted and forget the wonder of them.
Other snapshots of our wildlife: otters making a comeback, the dramatic colour of the kingfisher, the profusion of bluebells and garlic in our woodlands, and the dormouse sleeping the winter away curled up in its nest. The unique Lundy cabbage, the owls that we hear regularly but seldom see, the buzzards that we hardly bother to look at as they soar overhead, forgetting that they compare to a stealth bomber in their accuracy and speed when they are hunting. It’s difficult to stop, but I shall have to finish with a sunset as research has shown that sunsets, either real or filmed, make us feel good. Apparently we appreciate things better after a good sunset, I should have started with one!
Finally Andrew spoke of how, 13 years ago, he and his wife ‘put their money where their mouth is’ and started farming at Church Farm, managing the farm for wildlife. Farming for the good of grasshoppers and hence for the cirl buntings that feed on them. Farming for biodiversity in hedgerows, for, as we know, Devon is the hedgerow capital of Britain…
Penny Avant