Amazing Journeys

While we immerse ourselves in summer holidays and day trips, Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s NICK ACHESON wonders at the often unseen yet miraculous journeys and adventures our wildlife undertakes around us

 

AUGUST is a month of journeys and adventures. For us bipeds this may mean bundling dogs and children into the car and driving to the Norfolk coast, to visit grandparents or spend a joyous week paddling through muddy creeks and poking at rockpools.

It might mean sailing on the Norfolk Broads, running along the unforgiving shingle of Blakeney Point, or pitching a tent above a salt marsh wild with the redshank’s fluting and the sharp smell of wormwood.

A significant downside to being a modern human is spending our lives in our own skulls; not noticing – in our zeal to be and do what we want to be and do – the numberless journeys and adventures afoot in the non-human world all around, at every turn. Each, in its way, is a startling miracle, each humbling to us humans; if we would only stop and look.

As you sail on the Broads in August, you are beset by wildlife. The year’s second wave of dragonflies is at its peak now: brown and southern hawkers at eye level, migrant hawkers around the tops of trees, and common darters basking on broken reedstems near the water’s edge. To our busy human eyes and minds these enamelled animals are background; not players in the story.