June 2 Gary has been back with his tractor. He’s mowed the paths that run around our eight acres of Norfolk marsh. Done a great job. It makes an extraordinary difference to the place. The idea is that the marsh runs wild, so that marsh harriers can hunt over and deer can lie up in… [Read More]
Wild June and the sweet cheat gone
June 1 It was the start of 30 Days Wild and Eddie and I were sitting on the common in the late afternoon. A sudden cry, tremendously loud and just behind us: cuckoo! And then he was flying over us, across us and away, wings shearing the air like an especially sharp pair of scissors. … [Read More]
Miles and miles of bloody elephants
Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 9 Our guests had gone ahead of us, all save one; Jane did the last leg with us. She, Chris and I were the last ones to fly out of North Luangwa National Park: heading by light aircraft down to the South Park where we would all spend the last… [Read More]
Meditating on the one-breath elephant
Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 8 Here are two subjects to avoid when you are in conversation with me. The first is human exceptionalism, and the second is haiku. That’s if you have any ambition of making this a dialogue. Once either subject comes up, I am likely to go spiralling off into a monologue:… [Read More]
Lee-opard
Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 7 You travel hours and days to get here. You spend two weeks walking, sitting, driving, thinking, looking, listening. And sometimes the thing you came here for – the experience you had been seeking for months, for years, all your life – lasts for perhaps three seconds. Or less. When… [Read More]
There is a time for reverence, you know…
Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 6 Throughout human history there have been increasingly frenzied attempts to find things that separate human and non-human animals for all time. Tool use? No. Tool-making, then? No, not that, either. Culture? Sorry, no, that doesn’t work. So what about religion? But some of the more intense studies of apes… [Read More]
The roaring and the silence
Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 5, Part 2 At the end of the walk we sat on the banks of the Mwaleshi River in North Luangwa national Park. The idea was sundowners, but the sun was already as down as it was going to get; we had been delayed by kudu, three fine males with… [Read More]
What’s the collective noun for carmine bee-eaters?
Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 5, part 1 I heard a leopard in the night: the roar that sounds like a saw. It’s a good sound to hear: you congratulate yourself on picking it out, and you go back to sleep easily, because it doesn’t have that menacing quality of a pride-chorus of lions. You… [Read More]
In search of slightly mislaid time
Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 4, part 2 It’s about this stage of the trip that our guests start to realise that one of the finest things this kind of safari offers was not mentioned in the brochure. It couldn’t be. It’s not only impossible to describe, it’s different for every single person. Time. Time… [Read More]
Wild dogs? Funny, I thought, funny…
Sacred Combe Safari IV Day 4 Many years ago, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, in the course of their 60s television programme Not Only… But Also, used to put on their cloth caps and morph into Dud and Pete. Funny, I thought, funny… so they always said, anyway, and on one of these occasions they… [Read More]