Home is where the heart is

My love of wildlife started when, as a very small person, I began exploring the damp, crumbly places that I found under the stones and hedgerow of our modest Southampton home. As I grew, my home range extended to the bomb site at the bottom of the road. There I found a common lizard that scuttled around a big pile of rubble and a fabulous butterfly bush that attracted scores of peacocks, small tortoiseshells and the occasional comma.

I still find the best wildlife close to my home here in Gloucestershire. My patch now includes organic allotments that have given me two wildlife “wows” in the last month – two creatures at very different ends of the visibility scale but each having their own magic.

The allotments that my wife Margaret and I run are managed of the perma-culture raised-bed system. This includes the use of carpet to cover paths and uncultivated spots. Each year in spring we look forward to our first sighting of the slow worms that have emerged from their winter hibernation. Last Sunday we found two adults, one of them probably the mother of two exquisite babies that lay curled nearby. Even the Royal jeweller could not create such beauty as their tiny bronze bodies with jet black undersides.

At the other end of the show-off scale was the red kite that drifted along the scarp inspecting the allotments in the clear hope of some tasty snack! The kite is a spectacular bird, graceful in the air and mildly patterned in reds and subtle gold. It has not yet re-established itself as a breeding bird in the county but it cannot be long before it does.

Slow worm (c) Colin Varndell, Red kite (c) Wildstock