On March 2nd, the funeral of Brian Bundock, who lived in Blean, will take place at Barham Crematorium. Michael Walter, in this month’s newsletter, writes about Brian’s contribution to the Blean Reserve:
The immense value of volunteers is sometimes under-rated. Because they may work less than an eight-hour day and very few beaver away for their chosen charity five days a week, there can be a tendency to belittle their efforts, but thirty years of working with a wonderful band of volunteers at Blean Woods certainly taught me some humility, turning up, as they did, in all weathers, without pay, their only reward being the knowledge of a job well done and a contribution made to local wildlife conservation. This was brought home to me recently with the death of Brian Bundock, whom I met soon after I moved to Canterbury to become the first warden of Blean Woods (or Church Wood, Blean, as it was then known). Most of my volunteers helped with habitat management, usually involving a bonfire, but Brian was an extra pair of eyes and ears for me, noting many aspects of wildlife that I might otherwise have missed. He had an amazing ability to recall the dates on which he had had sightings of birds and butterflies, and bumping into Brian in the wood was a bit like encountering a computer downloading reams of information, all without recourse to notes. However, knowing that I was but a feeble mortal, he would periodically present me with little cards with key names, dates and numbers written on them. These cards were about half the size of a postcard, and invariably orange. I have no idea where they came from, but he seemed to have a lifetime’s supply.
In those days Brian was still working, but he always found time to help out on the evening and dawn walks that I organised every spring for the public. His cottage was ideally placed, right on the edge of the reserve, and he used to make me quite envious with tales of some of the wildlife that he had come across in his garden. The public walks started from the car park, which he could reach by taking a short cut through the wood, and on occasion he could regale the visitors with tales of having nearly tripped over a home-going badger as he made his way along the path to the dawn walk in the dark.
Brian belonged very definitely to the old school of birdwatching. He didn’t have any truck with computers, or even those new-fangled typewriters, and was never linked in to the phone or internet bush telegraph that would have told him of the whereabouts of rare birds, and, to be honest, I think he was probably a bit disdainful about that type of birdwatching. An illustration of his approach was that in all the years that I knew him he retained the same old battered pair of porro prism binoculars, which might have seen service on a battleship in the second world war, long after all other birdwatchers had switched to the more expensive, but better roof prism models. I do, however, well remember the day when, with a mixture of pride and embarrassment, he drew out of his pocket a mobile phone! Whether he ever used it, I have no idea, but he probably thought it was sensible to have one with him on his long, solitary walks through the wood.
He loved Blean Woods and could, on occasion, become very animated, such as the time that he exploded into a group of volunteers, gasping “Did you see the hen harrier that’s just flown over?” We were both saddened by the near extinction of the brimstone butterfly in the woods in the 1990s, and when it started to show signs of recovery we began vying with each other to be the one who had seen more brimstones that day: Brian usually won.
Brian didn’t really change with the times, and I don’t think he was any the worse for that. He did, however, remain true to his abiding interest in wildlife and the countryside, and that is how I shall always remember him.