Journal Lake District
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People ask me, fairly often, whether there is such a thing as a bad day for wildlife in the Lake District. The honest answer is no. Every season has its own register. Every weather condition opens something and closes something else. The question is not whether you will see wildlife — you will — but what you will see and whether you know enough to understand what you are looking at.
I have been watching the wildlife of this landscape for a long time. What follows is what a wildlife day with me actually looks like.
Not always — there are wildlife days that are perfectly good from nine o'clock — but the mornings that stay with you most often start before the light is fully up. The early morning light in autumn, coming off the frost and catching the beck below the woodland, with the dipper on his rock and the buzzard already up on a thermal above the far fell — this is the Lake District that most visitors never see because they are eating breakfast.
If you specifically want red squirrels, we start early and we go to the places where I know the squirrels are active. The squirrel is not a difficult animal to see if you are in the right woodland at the right time. The difficulty is usually not the animal — it is being in the right place.
A bespoke wildlife day is not a fixed route. We have a starting plan, based on the season and your interests, and then we respond to what the landscape is doing. If there is a peregrine on the crag above the road, we stop and watch the peregrine. If a red kite appears above the valley, we pull over. If the osprey is fishing on Bassenthwaite, we take the time.
This responsiveness is the thing a small group allows that a larger one cannot. Seven people in a minibus can stop quietly, observe, discuss and move on without turning the experience into a production. A group of sixteen cannot do this.
I explain what you are seeing in enough detail to change how you see it. The buzzard soaring above the valley is not just a buzzard — it is a bird whose presence here is the result of fifty years of legal protection rebuilding a population that was almost exterminated. The red squirrel at the feeder is not just a red squirrel — it is a survivor of a long-running ecological displacement, the result of deliberate conservation that has kept this species in the Lakes when it has been lost from most of England.
The ecology, the conservation history, the specific behaviour of each species — this is what transforms a list of sightings into an understanding of a living landscape.
People who come on wildlife tours most often say that they look at the landscape differently afterwards. Not in a dramatic or revelatory way — in the way that happens when you start to understand how something works. The fell is not just the fell. The beck is not just the beck. The birds and mammals are doing specific things, for specific reasons, in specific places, and when you understand why, the landscape becomes inexhaustible.
That is what I am trying to give people on a wildlife day.
Tim leads most of our wildlife and natural history tours. Contact us to discuss a bespoke wildlife day.