The Hedgehog and the Tiger

My son is three and a big fan of animals. We read a lot of animal books… He’s seen lots of animals on the farm and in the zoo. But others, well, let’s say we haven’t bumped into them yet.

 

The Hedgehog and the Tiger

 

Flipping through children’s books, each

Bucolic page fairy-tale picturesque:

Rare as hen’s teeth to see a hen in

The same frame as a cow or pig;

More common to see the cage. A

Cow in a sunlit meadow would

Count its blessings if it could ken

Cattle mass confined in feeding pens.

 

Yet, becoming just as false are

Pictures of our wildlife: brilliant

Butterflies and ladybirds, snails

Spiralling, to lions and giraffes,

Explaining to our children, the

Tiger and elephant, zebra and gnu,

Knowing at least they’ll watch the

Lion King, and visit the zoo, where

These species might cling to existence

In spite of our infantile delight in

Destroying our environment. But

 

What of furry foxes, squirrels,

Badgers and newts, other cute

Denizens of our hedgerows and

Fields? How do we describe these?

Who’s seen a hedgehog in a decade,

Or ever encountered an otter

Of an evening? May as well have an

Irish mole on the page, a polecat, or

Mink, for all the meeting and greeting

Our kids will have with these as

They disappear from all around us,

Unseen and unobserved, unremarked

And impossible to explain when asked.

 

Not an Irish mole, but even in Spain, it’s hard to actually see one of these children’s book favourites. This my second ever, a victim of the road like so many hedgehogs. The first one I saw was alive – I rescued it from a dog!

 

I wrote this poem a few weeks ago. I was reminded of it the other day when my wife read an headline about Barcelona Zoo, which is going to change after the city council decided it would have to end reproduction of animals not endangered nor capable of being released into the wild. The number of species will dwindle as individuals die or are moved out. Considering the above, perhaps some wild animals that we citizens never bump into any more would be useful for the folks of Barcelona to become familiar with. Perhaps soon enough those once familiar small mammals will be endangered themselves…

A Poems about Farms and Wildlife

 

They don’t have to be mutually exclusive…. an orchard with flowers underfoot.

 

But sometimes farmers feel that they have to plough every patch their tractors fit into, for fear those flowers take energy away from the apples and nuts.

 

Thoughts on seeing a recently-cleaned water pond on Saint Patrick’s Day

 

On a Sunday, the seventeenth, I went for a walk in the countryside about the village.

I walked along the hedges, trimmed now in March before the birds came come along and put a fly in a farmer’s plans.

I paused over an old walled water pond, for the vegetable plot, to perhaps look upon a frog, or salamander.

It was scrubbed clean. The concrete pale below the clear water reflecting the crystal blue.

Not a boatman stroked across the surface, ne’er a leaf lay upon the bottom to hide a frog or newt.

For what would a farmer do with silt? A streamlined machine these fields, these springs,

And cleanliness is next to godliness, of course. The wild world was sterilised of sprits in favour of clean sheets.

The dragons were already gone before Saint Patrick stepped upon a snake.

A day will come when none of us will see one, no matter where we seek.

 

Of course, the day seems to be coming faster than we feared, with the new  UN report about to come out today, Monday, declaring that a million species are about to go extinct if we don’t turn this shit, sorry ship, around toot sweet, as they say.

Which is terribly hard to tell your kids when they ask at the age of eight.

I didn’t take a photo of the empty pond, but I did help this lad across the road a few days later after some long-awaited rain.