Can you remember the first time you saw a deer? I can. The first proper time. I’d seen them briefly framed in the car’s headlights, but not properly.
Draped over the North Downs near where I grew up is King’s Wood. It was my deep, dark wood where the deer lived. It was here that I first saw them, properly – a movement through the trees and then framed on a ride, looking directly at me, a dark fallow deer, wing-nut ears, alert and poised to flee. Perhaps the wind was in the right direction, perhaps my father and I had kept still enough, but the deer didn’t take to its heels, instead she fed for a few minutes before melting into the trees on the other side of the ride.
I wasn’t very old, still in single figures, and I’d watched deer – real nature.
I’ve been back to King’s Wood many times since – in April the chestnut coppice floats on a sea of bluebells. When bluebells are mentioned, it is to King’s Wood that my memory wanders.
On another dusk visit, looking for deer, my father and I were sitting quietly by an open area softened by sprouting re-growth from coppiced chestnut stools. The bird song was quietening; a song thrush, a robin rounding off the day when the air was filled by an eerie purring. ‘Nightjar’ whispered my Dad. This was a prelude to watching the bird fly past on stiff wings before landing on a dead branch of a standard tree standing above the coppice.
Nightjar
It may have been on that evening, or another time, when a woodcock bundled overhead grunting its way round its territory, roding it’s called.
The last time I visited King’s Wood with my father we somehow missed the nightjars. Their distribution follows the coppice of the right age – and we just picked the wrong section of the forest. But as we were returning to the car we found glow worms by the side of the path.
Jack is old enough now to stay up late enough for an evening adventure to the forest, so this May I hope to introduce him to nightjars and woodcocks. Just one story, three generations, one wood. It is that connection with woodlands that underpins the outpouring of concern and opposition that has galvanised the debate about the future of England’s forests.
I found King’s Wood on this map (move the navigator thing over Kent – it’s one of the red blobs between Ashford and Canterbury) and a red blob signifies ‘small commercial’; ripe for sale? Not special enough? More questions than answers.
The wind of public opposition is bending the branches of the Government’s proposals. The consultation is now underway and we scrutinising it closely – you can read more here and on our Conservation Directors blog.
What’s your woodland story?
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