It has been a year of extremes for nature. Under the first lockdown in spring, wildlife was suddenly left to its own devices. There were wild goats in the streets of Llandudno, peacocks in Bangor, sheep cavorting on playground roundabouts in Raglan in Monmouthshire. With verges left unmown by councils, roadsides erupted with wildflowers. There was respite for the estimated 100,000 hedgehogs, 50,000 deer, 50,000 badgers and 100,000 foxes that end up as roadkill every year. With no boats, jetskis, people or dogs, a friend living on the cliffs above Seaford Head Nature Reserve, in East Sussex – a popular walking destination and normally home to just five occasional curlews – showed me from her balcony on Zoom a flock of 36 curlews, hundreds of oystercatchers, ducks, merlins and peregrines. Everyone seemed to notice the birdsong. Without planes competing overhead, the dawn chorus of songbirds at Knepp, our 1,400-hectares (3,500-acres) rewilding project in West Sussex, was cacophonous and, after dusk, nightingales and woodlarks took centre stage. In May, in the crowns of our oak trees, white storks hatched their chicks for the first time in Britain since 1416.
https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.amp.../2020/dec/28/lockdown-nature-expense-wildlife
https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.amp.../2020/dec/28/lockdown-nature-expense-wildlife
