MUSIC PICTURES WILDLIFE HOME OddsNsods I watch wildlife. I can’t help myself. A bird on the ground, an insect on a leaf, a deer in a field. If I’m  looking at all, I’m looking for these sorts of things. Even in cities you can see plants growing in the  cracks in pavements. Squirrels and foxes abound. It seems like we are destined to share our lives  with wildlife even if it’s just the spider sitting on a web in that hard to get at corner, or flies circling  your latest culinary creation. It’s all around us all the time, and just as well too. Wildlife is our life  support system. Plants provide oxygen and food for us and animals. Animals provide food for us  and fertiliser for the ground. Even when we farm intensively with added chemicals the underlying  structure relies on wildlife to exist, worms, soil bacteria and so forth. We live in an interconnected  whole and we ignore the wildlife around us at out peril. My interest started with birds but the first wild creature that I  really watched was a squirrel. I had bunked off school on my  own for the first time ever. To while away the rush hour, when I  was likely to bump into people I knew, I went to the local woods  and just sat quietly for an hour. I discovered that if you are really  quiet and don’t move, most wildlife won’t even notice you are  there. Since then I’ve always been interested in wildlife and the  environment but only in a passive sort of way until about 20  years ago. I started to actually try and identify the birds I was  seeing. It was pathetic, I’d had this wildlife thing in the back of  my brain for all that time but still the only birds I could reliably  identify were sparrow, blackbird and robin. Well, I’m better than that now but still no expert. I also  know a few plants and a spattering of dragonflies, butterflies and the like. What I do know is that if  you are prepared to watch there is all sorts of fascinating stuff going on all round you right now  even as you are reading this. One of the reasons for studying birds was that I wanted to try and take pictures of them. This was a  cunning ploy on my part because I was a crap photographer and trying to take photos of something  as hard as birds - well, it was a good excuse for taking crap photos. If I was going to get any sort of  picture worth having though, I was going to have to study the little critters to try and learn their  behaviour. Then, I might stand a chance of predicting what they were going to do next and hence  know where to point my camera. Well 20 odd years on and I’m still no good at photography, but I’m   better. Likewise identifying birds. I now know the songs of several species, which species are here  in the winter, or summer, or both and I can recognise 100 or so without reference to a field guide.  Not good by birder standards but It will do for the time being. Terry Jeffries 2010 YOU ARE HERE YOU ARE HERE