WHAT DID WORDSWORTH KNOW ABOUT NATURE?

What Did Wordsworth Know About Nature? - By Ronnie Bennett-Bray

 "Ronnie Bray and his wife Gay live 10 miles away from the nearest grocery store, 23 miles from the local hospital, 110 miles from medical and surgical specialists and 260 miles from the airport. But why care about that when Whitetail deer are daily visitors to their garden?" --Editor Peter Hincliffe - www.openwriting.com

 This is an interesting time for this ancient pair of nature watchers. Many Whitetail deer visit our garden every day. Some of them are recognisable as regular visitors, others are new friends, but all are welcome to come and eat the food we provide for them each day.

 At the midpoint of Montana Springtime, the deer still keep their dusky livery. It makes them difficult to see, especially in the two hours before dawn and the two hours after dusk when they roam abroad in search of grazing, criss-crossing the highway as they change from the valley side to the mountain side of Bull Lake Road, then back again, visiting their grazing places.

 The Bull Lake Valley highway is a narrow high speed road where locals keep to the seventy mile an hour limit, when they are not doodling along at an inexplicable fifty. Visitors from the nearby Idaho Panhandle perseverentially maintain fifty-nine miles an hour, heavy lorries exceed their sixty-five mile an hour limit by at least ten miles an hour, and some visitors with more horsepower than brains come close to aeronautical speed, although the road is signed for "deer crossing" for twenty of its thirty four miles.

 It is not a busy road, for even in the tourist season it never becomes so crowded that care and vigilance are not possible. Nevertheless, there is a terrible loss of deer, young and old, to the genus "motorem fordium." Local churches include in their services, the Deer’s Prayer, "Domine, defende nos contra hos motorem fordium!"

 Sometimes, when we are driving into town, we come across huge patches of blood on the roadway, and follow blood stained tyre trails some distance down the road, and we know that one of our friends has met an untimely end. It is especially sad when one of the groups that visit our home rolls up with a member short.

 We see deer families and groups every day, several times a day, when they come to feed on the corn we supply to them and on the greening growth on our meadow.

 They are far from tame. The nearest I can get to them is twelve feet, but they are learning to trust that Frankie and I will not harm them, and even though they sometimes nervously skip away a few yards, they no longer put up their white tails in their distinctive danger signal for which they are named.

 In the two years we have lived here, there have been few days when deer do not visit us at all. On those occasions, we feel like singing, "No deer. What can the matter be?" But, happily, such days are few and far between.

 The other evening, Gay counted eleven deer at one time feeding in the pasture. They had been up to the house where they stand gazing through our front window, impelling me with their beautiful bright eyes to go out and dispense their favourite meal of cracked maize.

 The days are warming, although the threat of snowfall is not yet past, and some of the deer show signs of moulting. Soon, their dusky grey-brown coats will be shed and their beautiful red coats will mark the beginning of summer.

 Gay came across a group of deer with two little spotted Bambis as they took their time crossing the moonlit road as she drove home, two nights ago. Visiting does do not look swollen bellied, but perhaps they are having smaller babies than usual this year. We shall see in four to six weeks when the fauns are dropped.

We enjoy visits from our deer, not only because they are beautiful, but also because they remind us that we share this amazing planet with a wonderful variety of animalkind, whose needs are not less important than ours, and for whom humankind has a divine stewardship to nurture and protect.

Yesterday, the deer had company as a little family of five wild turkeys trotted, later expanded to nine friendly turkeys word must have gotten round – do you remember the "Turkey Trot"? - through our north pasture. The two males displayed their gorgeous fantails, and drooped their spread wings to the ground, but failed to interest the three hen birds who had found a repast beneath a clump of trees, and were more intent on getting fat than in making babies.

I had sympathy for the resplendent would-be-beaux who did their very best, as men habitually do, but were eventually forced by disinterest to abandon their efforts to repopulate the earth and do nothing more important than join the ladies for dinner.

 The Robins are back in droves, hopping and pecking at moving things on the meadow floor. Our almost-resident pair of Stellar’s jays feast noisily on the remnants of the deer corn, initiating Frankie’s chase mechanism, as do the cute little pine squirrels, and chickadees, nuthatches, and redwing blackbirds who come to our front grass, it’s no lawn, for the wild birdseed we strew.

 When night temperatures rise above forty degrees Fahrenheit, many colourful tribes of hummingbird will come back to the Northwest to feed their summers from our bright red feeder, and the cost of sugar will rise as we boil it with water to make their nectar. For now, we can only wait until they return, and enjoy anticipating their visits. On the down side, nectar also attracts wasps, but a nearby jam jar filled with sugar water keeps most of them away from the feeder.

 Thus, we pass our days waiting for summer in the spring sunshine, satisfying our senses by drinking in the sights and sounds that nature unfolds, as early summer birds return, bears begin to wake, and deer begin to multiply.

 We are ten miles from the nearest grocery shop, twenty-three miles from the local hospital, a hundred and ten miles from medical and surgical specialists, and two hundred and sixty miles from the airport.

 But it is not what we are far from, but what we are close to that enchants, delights, and keeps us happy in our wilderness plot at the edge of the forest between the mountains of the last best place on earth.

 William Wordsworth was wrong when he wrote of London, "Earth hath not anything to show more fair.''

 But, then, what did he know about nature?

 Copyright ? 2004 - Ronnie Bennett-Bray - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED