I just had one of those magical experiences, that makes you forget that you live in the middle of a big city. For some years I have occasionally heard the sounds of what I thought to be a woodpecker - a resonant drumming sound in short bursts. Living in Brixton, though, I pretty much dismissed it, thinking it must have originated from some other source.
Today it's a warm sunny day, and so I decided to take a short walk to get a bit of air, and try to shake off a slight lingering hangover. As soon as I stepped into the park, I heard that familiar drumming sound. It seemed to be coming from a nearby tree, so I wandered over to investigate. Sure enough, high up on the dead branch of a sycamore tree, was a beautiful woodpecker, not the green kind you see on the side of a can of cider, but one with a red rump, a creamy white breast, and black and white stripes on its head and upper body. A quick search on the web indicates that it's a Great Spotted Woodpecker.
With its large powerful beak it was digging out grubs from the dead branch, in short percussive bursts. I don't know if it noticed me watching it, but within a minute or two it flew away to a lower branch on an adjacent tree. But in 10 minutes or so, when I was on the other side of the park, I heard it again and walked back to watch it's further endeavours.
I have always been fascinated by the boundary between tame and wild. I sometimes wonder what the city would look like in 10 years if it were abandoned. How far would wild crazy nature have encroached upon our seemingly corralled and controlled environment. Perhaps if we look closely, even now, we might see that what we think is a man made, man-centred world, is just a thin veneer on top of the untamed and untenable vast nature.
It gives me a strange kind of joy to find indications of nature's processes going on even in this big city. For a while I took pictures of stalactites and stalagmites forming on great concrete structures such as the London's South Bank Centre, underpasses, and council estates. Along with them I observed small fenced-off areas that had turned into rampant jungles, moss colonies on top of greenhouse roofs, the heave for of paving slabs from the inexorable pushing of tree roots, and the gradual disintegration of my clothing due to the moths that lay their eggs in my clothing drawer.
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My grandma used moth balls in Sri Lanka as moths are quite a common menace to fabrics - wild life abounds due to the climate and we can't really shut them out without suffocating in a finite supply of oxygen. . . ; I would get some mothballs for you but then you'd smell like my grandma haha.
About wild-life encroaching in on urban life, it reminds me of the scenes from IAmLegend where you can see the grass growing in the cracks of New York city sidewalks and herds of antelopes etc. Turns out it's plausible to some extent.
On the bus home the other day, the driver had to swerve to avoid a clumsy fox in his path. I saw it stagger off across the zebra crossing (foxes are very aware of the green cross code). Cunning foxes and field mice are about the only new wild life we see around here and this area is considered greenish, how on earth did you see a woodpecker. . . . and what ever happened to the common garden frog?
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