January 2025
“Asia is home to about 4.5 billion people. More than the rest of the world put together.” This is a quote from the 7-part documentary series narrated by Sir David Attenborough. This remarkable series should still be available to watch on BBC iPlayer. I do strongly advise this. A striking aspect of the constituent films is learning how wild animals have integrated with the people of this huge continent. Among many other animals, we see sequences of sika deer traversing a zebra crossing over a busy road with people able to touch them as they walk, just as if the deer were also human. There is no fear or hostility between them. Sika deer are close relatives of our own fallow deer. Another sequence includes 2-metre-long monitor lizards squabbling over food in an Asian public park in the middle of a city, where there are also flying red squirrels gliding between the skyscrapers. Tigers were coming into a city to feed at night, but not on humans. Elephants are demanding food tolls on busy Sri Lankan roads which they block until paid with a cob of sweet corn or loaf of bread, which is willingly given by the drivers. Humans and animals living in modern harmony.
Some of the footage is filmed by camera traps. These are night vision cameras triggered by movement. I set one up in our Uckfield suburban garden. I was delighted to record red foxes and Eurasian badgers, foraging for food and enjoying themselves in the darkness. I also see common frogs, a grass snake and many invertebrates. I feed birds with sunflower hearts. Delightfully, the garden hosts breeding blue and great tits, wrens, robins, blackbirds, house sparrows, collared doves and wood pigeons. Also, greenfinches, nuthatches, great-spotted woodpeckers, coal tits, long-tailed tits, starlings, jackdaws, goldcrests, song thrushes, chiffchaffs, treecreepers, bullfinches, carrion crows and sparrowhawks all visit and looking splendid. We recently ‘house-sat’ for our son at Rushlake Green and were delighted to see fallow deer walking through the wood, visible from bed early one morning. We are integrating with nature. We just need to be observant and friendly to animals around us and not see them as enemies but potential friends. As our human population grows, it is currently at c. 8.2 billion, the only way to preserve the natural world is to learn how to integrate with it. To me, there is no such thing as vermin; from Latin ‘vermis’, meaning worms, it is a biased derogatory term that some have chosen to use for animals they dislike and persecute, as pests, often un-necessarily.
As we come to understand ecology (home-study) we realise that a balanced ecosystem will control excessive numbers of most organisms that bother us. Good animal husbandry and home management will usually prevent inter-species conflict. An attitude of kindness to nature will lead to extraordinary discoveries within the natural world around us, both at home and the ones presented so well by Sir David Attenborough and others on our televisions.