Growing up in Woodingdean, Brighton, i spent many hours as a child exploring the swathe of countryside between Brighton and the River Ouse flood plain. I spent the hours climbing trees in green stained jeans and remember lifting discarded boards to watch the little furry creatures scatter along narrow pathways. I would always lift any log I came across and gawk with skin crawling fascination at the beetles and centipedes scuttling furiously out of the light and into crevices. One spring afternoon wandering along the Telscombe Tye, I remember seeing a brief but excitable view of a long sausage shaped furry creature with a rather striking black tip to its tail. It was darting in and out of the tall grass at the side of the bridleway. My friend asked me what it was and i said it was a polecat, only because I had remembered a man known as ‘Old Rusty’ describing them to me once. It transpires that Old Rusty did not know his mustelids either. Regularly, while walking home from the South Downs across stubble fields just after the sun had disappeared below the horizon, we would flush flocks of strange looking birds with big black bat shaped wings. They would take flight emitting a piercing piping call and then disappear just over the crest of the stubble field.

Thinking back, i do not actually remember recognising any great variety between the majority of the animals and plants I encountered. Most birds were small and brown, all grass was green and the trees were just big. The individuals of the different invertebrates i saw under the logs and stones all looked very similar. The only distinguishing feature was their colour, number of legs or size. I did not know the specific name of any of the animals or plants, they were completely overlooked, beetles were beetles, trees were trees and flowers were just flowers. I now know that the green stuff that used to stain my jeans was a species of Trebouxia, an algae growing on Sycamore, the furry things under the boards were field voles, one of the species of beetle was the grove ground beetle, the centipede was Lithobius forficatus, the polecat was actually a stoat and the strange flocks of birds with bat shaped wings were lapwing.

It was only when volunteering at the monkey sanctuary in Looe and the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in Slimbridge that I became aware and was very impressed, that people actually knew the names of the different plants and birds. I was hooked and suddenly the natural world seemed to spring to life in front of my eyes and became inordinately more fascinating. It is now impossible for me to walk along a bridleway, country lane or even the streets of a suburb, without spotting something of interest and spending a few seconds wondering what on earth it is and how it fits in with the local ecology.