Snow and more snow. It's a hard and hungry time to be wild unless you're hibernating. If I didn't have four cats I'd be scattering food in the garden for birds and mice. In the meantime, since it's too bleak to go out and watch the wildlife, I'll share a poem I wrote before xmas while recovering from a cold. Hope it strikes a chord...

Wildlife spectaculars

Not the bloody wildebeest migration
Again!
We know the crocodiles lie in wait:
We've seen the bone crushing
Splash of jaws.

Or is it the salmon-hungry
Grizzly bears
Wading through Alaskan torrents?
Butter-fingered paws mauling, gory fish
Flailing with futile energy.

Lemurs I love:
Sinuous sifaka dancing
Sideways;
Miniscule mouse lemurs,
Impossible primates:
Tiny hands, big, searching eyes.

But it's always the ring-tails,
Strutting their stripey charisma.
You'd think Madagascar
Had a plague of them.

Most of all I mind
The meerkats.
I've watched them leave their burrows at sunrise
To bask in the Kalahari desert.
Please don't give them names
Like Zaphod
And cast them in a furry soap opera.

Those clever capuchins in Brazil
Have got themselves a good agent.
Three times at least this year
They've been seen on TV,
Since their tool-using, nut-cracking antics
Were discovered.

Last week I watched a wood mouse
Watching us
From a bank of bronzy beech leaves.
Sleek, twitching, alert,
Apple-pip eyes, nimble hands and ears tracking our voices.
We had disturbed it and it looked at us,
Perplexed.

Nature Sleeps

I'd love to be in Madagascar now, instead of frosty southern England where nature seems to be fast asleep, or hibernating with the bats until spring comes...But maybe the winter sleep is what makes the sunny months so precious: the brief flight of bumblebees, painted ladies, dragonflies hovering over the water. I'll try to use this pause to learn the calls of British birds, so I can pick them out in the woods when breeding season arrives.