Читать книгу Bill Oddie’s How to Watch Wildlife - Stephen Moss - Страница 21

As do all people of a ‘certain age’, I delight in recounting how, when I were a lad, I suffered for my pleasures. Not least in pursuit of wild geese. As soon as I had passed my driving test, my Dad allowed me to take his car to go birdwatching. His nervousness about my dodgy driving was presumably preferable to the chore of chauffeuring me to various bleak reservoirs around Birmingham.

Slimbridge then was not as it is today. Go to the headquarters of the WWT now and you will be delighted by one of the most lavish and ‘modern’ wildlife centres, reserves, establishments – it’s all those things and more – in the world. Back in the late 1950s, it was all a bit more basic. There were a few ‘captive’ birds in pens, principally for scientific study and reintroduction schemes. Nowadays, it is an incredibly complete ‘collection’, and the science is world renowned.

One aspect hasn’t changed, though: now, as then, several thousand wild geese – mainly white-fronts from Siberia – winter along the Severn. In fact, there were even more when I was a teenager. They invariably fed way out on the ‘Dumbles’, the water meadows alongside the river. The wild geese were what I wanted to see. More specifically, I was close to being consumed by an ambition to ‘tick off’ a lesser white-fronted goose, a very rare bird but one that had inspired Peter Scott to found the Wildfowl Trust when he spotted a ‘lesser’ at Slimbridge back in the 1940s.

Frankly, my chances of emulating Peter Scott weren’t good. Not just because lesser white-fronts were so rare, or because it would have been very difficult to pick one out among the thousands of common white-fronts, but mainly because in those days it was almost impossible to get a decent view of the geese! There were only one or two rather rickety wooden hides, and even from them the geese were miles away. If it was a misty, drizzly day (which it almost always was), they were totally invisible.