Different Food

A series of programmes that I love to watch is back this week and continues over the next two weeks also – Springwatch.  I find it so interesting and informative.  This week they have commented often about the bad weather we have had so far this year and the particularly late spring and the effects this has had on the wildlife.  The various creatures have been reverting to inventive and strange ways to compensate for the rough times. 

There is a coastal region in Dorset - Kimmeridge Bay.  It is part of the Jurassic Coast and forms a key habitat for wildlife, the bay itself being a Marine Nature Reserve.  This year people have commented that apart from the usual seabirds that can be seen there, they have noticed garden birds such as robins, chiff-chaffs and wrens.  When marine scientists investigated further they realised it was because along the shoreline there was a microclimate underneath the line of rotting seaweed.  Here there was an enormous amount of small insects, sand-hoppers and maggots.  Further inland the weather has been so wet and cold that there have been very few insects for the birds and so they have travelled further out from their usual nesting places in order to seek food and feed their young.

 

On the Nature Reserve in Wales where the Springwatch team is located for the three weeks, there is a camera showing the nest of a pair of buzzards with their chick.  Again because of the bad weather, much of their usual food has not been available and so they have improvised and have been eating more frogs, moles and even an eel.  These creatures don’t normally appear so near to the surface of the soil but the unusual wet weather has meant that they have been more visible above the sodden bogs and so in the absence of their usual food store, the buzzards have been eating something different.

 

In both cases, the birds were willing to leave their traditional ways and try something new.  As people we often shy away from that with the attitude that ‘we’ve always done it this way’, ‘it’s not what we’re used to’, ‘this is our way, our life and we wouldn’t dream of going anywhere else’, ‘it doesn’t work the same.’  That shoreline of rotting seaweed must seem like an eyesore to some and there are those who would like to clear it (and the smell that goes with it).  But to those birds it is a lifeline.  For them it is not a waste place. It is a different place –yes – but a place of sustenance and full of life that they hadn’t been aware of before.  Some look at me (and others like me who have left traditional organised church) and in a similar way suggest that where I am, there is no spiritual food to be had.  To them it is unfamiliar, different or seems to be a waste place. But for me and many others it is a place of great sustenance.  The church without walls has an abundance of life.  It might not be for everyone but I for one am enjoying and thriving on the different way of being and doing things.