Country diary: Humans are nature just as much as the falling tree

Monkton Wyld, Dorset, and Welburn, North Yorkshire: Some environmentalists wish us to shrink ourselves from the world and other species. This cannot be soOn the first morning of our holiday, we walked a winding route through woods to the sea. Returning a few hours later, the same path was blocked by the carcass of a huge ivy-swathed Scots pine. While we'd been lucky to miss the drama of its falling by a few hours or minutes, it had ripped limbs from neighbouring trees, crushed, smashed, uprooted other plants, and no doubt terrified every sentient creature in earshot. A moment of seismic disruption - but only destructive if you consider that moment in isolation. Wait a year or 10, and we might see that tree sustain as many lives and connections in death as it did in life. Our inclination is to look for conclusions, and seeing the bigger picture doesn't always come naturally. It takes practice to encounter a river and intuit an ocean, a spring or a rainshower.Three days before the tree fell, I'd unwittingly become involved in another, smaller drama, involving two carrion crows and a hunched form I first mistook for a rabbit, but which resolved into a crouching, defensive buzzard. As the dog and I loomed on their horizon, the trio took off, leaving slight flattenings of the grass. No carcass. The dog shoved her nose into the sward and inhaled deeply. I envied her additional sensory insight into whatever conflict had been unfolding. Continue reading...