I still managed to hobble about a bit, and take advantage to some small extent of the access provided by a residential stay over a day trip, but I need to come back again.

The trip is worth a page on the website, so I shall update this with a link when it is ready.

I returned in the afternoon when the light was from a better direction, and watched both parents coming and going every five to six minutes with food. They seemed to be doing very well.

Today, I came across this photograph in my collection, and looked up the full poem, and wondered who Lt. Hunter was. Presumably a young man – did he die of illness? Or was it by violence? I thought of his family back home, and pondered on how traditions change over time. No respectful journey back home, accompanied by comrades, for the body of Lieutenant Hunter. No hearse and flowers, no mention by name in Parliament, no grave which could be tended by grieving relatives.

His grave was one of the oldest in the cemetery. Nearby was Major T. Westbrook, M.C., who had died twenty years later, and there was a Mr Cook, Agriculturist, who died in 1930. The only grave which was older than his was that of Mr G.E. Ferguson, a Fante from the south of what would have been the Gold Coast colony. He had spent some years surveying the country, and signing treaties with local chiefs on behalf of the British, and was killed in 1897 in Wa by a slave trader called Baburi. The cemetery was named after him.

So what of Lieutenant Hunter? He died and was buried alongside Mr Ferguson in 1902, which was the year that the British established control over the Northern Territories, after finally defeating the Ashantis. There were no roads to Wa at the time, and just five years previously, the British had stopped the selling of slaves at the Kintampo market, nearly 300 km to the south. The world was very different then, and it seems that the death of a British soldier somewhere on an obscure border of the British Empire was not a newsworthy event.

After looking around the dusty cemetery, I walked over to see what the men were working at nearby. They were making concrete blocks for the construction of what appeared to be a stand for a football ground.

Life goes on around the “small corner of a foreign field”. Lieutenant Hunter’s grave, with its Christian cross and reminder of Ghana’s colonial past, remains intact, treated with respect in this overwhelmingly Muslim town, if judged by its tidiness and lack of graffiti.

And I continue to wonder – Who was he? How did he die?

]]> http://seencaught.co.uk/CWBlog/?feed=rss2&p=495 0 http://seencaught.co.uk/CWBlog/?p=487 http://seencaught.co.uk/CWBlog/?p=487#comments Tue, 01 May 2012 20:18:45 +0000 Pat http://seencaught.co.uk/CWBlog/?p=487 Continue reading →]]> It was a gift from Christmas, and the box containing the bulb lived on the kitchen windowsill for a long time until I spotted the stalk trying to escape through the gap beside the lid. I took it out of the box, gave it water, and put it in the conservatory. When the flowers begain to emerge from the top of the stalk, I photographed it.

Two days later, I photographed it again.

Three days later, it was in full bloom, sensuous and full of life. The sepals were the only exception to the vibrant show, turning brown as they gave up their life-given moisture. They had completed their job of protecting the flower buds until they were ready to meet the world.

Ten days later, the flowers had completed their task and hung down in richly textured gowns, the sexual organs still visible, but dry and inoperable. Day by day, the ovaries swelled with new life, seeming almost to glow in their pregnancy.

He never did. However, in the middle of watching the buzzards, I heard a familiar call – “peep peep” – and looked up to see an oystercatcher fly overhead. I immediately thought of the Hilbre islands in the Dee estuary, where I had photographed innumerable oystercatchers on many visits. The walk across the sands, the huge sky and expanse of shining water, the encroaching sea surrounding my little temporary island, and the arrival of the birds to unknowingly share my small kingdom for the space of a high tide, all unaware of my presence in my dome hide. Every visit different, with a feathered cast that changed with the seasons, with sky, sea and sand changing its appearance with the light.

The presence of the oystercatcher in the middle of Cheshire meant its absence from the Dee estuary with the onset of the breeding season, but it’s haunting call reminded me of how much I love the place. That evening, I looked up my photographic database, and was amazed to find that it was five years since I last spent a tide on one of the Hilbre islands. Far too long. I looked up the tide tables, and found that it was a spring tide the next day – I took it for an omen, and went to Hilbre this morning, spending the high tide on Little Eye.

There were no waders around – they had all cleared off to the moors to breed, but there were a crowd of cormorants in breeding plumage. The males were magnificent! I don’t think that I have seen them at close quarters like this before.

The brent geese which spend the winter in the Dee Estuary were still there, but they seemed quite flighty and I expect thery were soon to leave for their breeding grounds in Greenland.

After a while, it was obvious that their flightiness had another source, as it was shared with the cormorants. The origin of their fears came into view near the shore.

The kite surfer surfed right out to the point and back again. Whether he was within his rights or not, he caused great disturbance to the birds on Little Eye. The geese expended a lot of energy flying around when they should have been preparing for their migration to the Artic circle.

It has been a beautiful day, cold but sunny. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again – the Hilbre islands are a magical place. The magic comes from the bird life and the wonderful light caught between sand and sky, and perhaps a little bit of it comes from inside my head.

Probably this was an example of post-partum mating, meaning mating after the female had given birth to cubs, so I am looking forward now to seeing them above ground in a few weeks time.

These are the holes mentioned in “The Death of a Tree” post, so the badgers living here are the successors of the orphaned cubs of forty years ago. Good to know that the clan are doing well.

We used to call it the Cubs Sett. The family that used it forty years ago were in the habit of crossing a road which divided their wood, and one day, I found that the male badger had paid the price. He lay at the side of the road, where his path passed under the barbed wire and out onto the tarmac.

That night, I went to watch the sett to see what other badgers were there, and was rewarded by a long session with the mother and three young cubs. They came up from a hole at the base of a large tree and spent a long time socialising on the earth mound, grooming themselves and each other, playing follow-my-leader, biting mother’s tail – all the usual enthusiasms of young badgers.

A few days later, I was returning to the sett to check on the family, but when I came to the point where the badger path crossed the road, I came across another badger corpse – the mother badger had also fallen victim to the traffic.

I carried on to the sett and climbed the tree above the main hole, sitting on a lower branch so that my scent would not betray me. I was concerned in case the cubs had not yet weaned, and I was wondering whether I would have to catch the cubs and bottle-feed them. However, they came up and after some perfunctory play, went off into the meadow and seemed to be hunting fairly well, as far as I could see.

Over the next few weeks, I spent a lot of time with the orphaned cubs who quickly got used to my scent and accepted my presence without fear. I sat beside the hole, rarely having to wait more than ten minutes before they emerged, and had a close-up view of their play and mock fights.

When they went off to begin their night’s hunting, I followed behind. As they snuffled in the grass, they let me put my torch a few inches from their nose to see what they were doing. Some nights during that summer forty years ago, I followed the growing badgers into the small hours, watching them explore the fields and woodland, developing their expertise in catching earthworms and other small prey.

As autumn approached, the young badgers began to become more wary of me and gradually their behaviour changed to what would be expected of wild animals. Over the years since then, I have watched them and their descendents emerge at dusk to go about their nightly business.

This afternoon, I visited their neighbourhood. There was fresh soil in the mounds outside the favourite holes used by the clan, which are forty yards along the bank from where the orphaned cubs lived. The tree that protected the entrance to their home has died, and is slowly falling to earth.

It felt strange to see the tree in its slow motion fall, and to think of the generations of badgers which have lived beneath it. And also to think of the people for whom the tree would have seemed a permanent fixture in the landscape. How many others have watched the badgers playing under its branches? Where did the badgers live when the tree was a sapling? Awareness grows of the churn of life, of change in the shape of the earth and its living things, of death as part of life.

When I looked at the results from the first session (just 24 hours), I was surprised to see that I had over 60 video clips – I was expecting to just be able to count the badgers going off hunting, and then returning. However, a lot of the clips were daytime, and here’s a typical one :

Apart from the farm cat and a group of pigeons, all of the daytime clips were of a squirrel, sometimes a pair, foraging in this area and burying acorns. That night, out come the badgers :

The badgers – 4 or 5 of them in the sett – spent a lot of time in this area, seeming mostly to be just snuffling amongst the leaves. They did not dig up any acorns – there were plenty lying around on the surface – but certainly seemed curious about the activities of the squirrels. On the other hand, they showed no response at all to the scent of the farm cat who passed along the badger path at a time when there were no badgers in sight.

Lovely piece of kit, this camera trap. Adds another dimension to badger-watching!