May

Despite the lack of rain, the garden has put on growth. Not quite lush but green, full-looking after a winter and early spring of being subdued and locked away. Growth is slower than it would have been if it was wetter but I’ll take it. I’ll take any growth, any green over grey, any new flowers. There are fresh green leaves, unfurling fern fronds, the first blooms of white comfrey, guelder rose, rowan and honesty. Next door’s wisteria is coming into flower, too. ‘Hello!’ I say, ‘hello, hello, hello!’

The sparrows and starlings have had their first brood. I can tell because there’s an urgency with which they come to the garden – they have hungry mouths to feed. They descend all at once in a big mixed flock and then ransack the garden before rushing off again. They’ll visit bird feeders as adults but will always need natural food for their young, and so my garden, with its meadow and its native plants and its pond and its gardener, is perfect for them. They hop around the outer edge of the pond where I’ve left a buffer of wildflower meadow for insects to take shelter, they climb into the teenaged ivy and peck at tiny grubs behind the leaves. The sparrows home in on leaf tips and stems for aphids, while starlings charge around, taking snails and larger prey with determined hops. I stand at the kitchen window and watch them, laughing at how busy and serious they are, compared to the rest of the year, when they are idiots.

One of the house sparrows is still being an idiot. He’s decided to start a nest in one of my swift boxes. He’s obviously got one elsewhere, with chicks in it, but instead of finding food for them, like the rest of his clan, he’s trying to persuade them to move house. He sits in his swift hole and cheeps at them while they forage for food and they, understandably, ignore him. I’ll give him a 10 for effort, for persistently trying to persuade them that my garden is the place to be, when clearly there’s some resistance.

He’s very welcome to the swift box, as the swifts have ignored it for three years. I’ve been watching him bring nesting material in, collecting grasses and sticks and other bits and pieces to build his (probably quite bad) nest. I’ve watched him fly in and out, to and from various posts like the shed and the hawthorn, the top of the roof, sticking his head out and cheeping like the lord of the manor. I wonder how many other half-built nests have been made in the other nest boxes on the house – the other three swift boxes and the three sparrow boxes, one of which, once, was used by great tits. If the sparrows moved in and nested in a loose colony as they are prone to do, then they could use all four of the swift boxes and all three of the sparrows’. Then there’s the hole in the gable at the top of the house – eight nests. This rogue, idiot male, who’s calling to his clan while they busy themselves with mouths to feed, is trying to sell them eight new homes they can move into, now, with a fully stocked garden of invertebrates on the doorstep. He’s a pioneer, not an idiot. He’s a leader. He has vision! They’re still ignoring him. But he may have success, one day. Imagine living among a clan of eight house-sparrow families. Surrounded by cheeping idiots – I would be so happy.

The first swift of the year is marked with exclamation marks and stars, with hugging strangers in the street, with giant, beaming grins. I count down the days to it, starting in mid-April, and trip over myself for nearly three weeks, walking around with my head in the sky. I’ll meet you in the pub and make you sit outside so I can watch for the telltale effortless flap of swift wings, so I might hear the hint of a scream.

‘Swift!’ I will say, to anyone and everyone. ‘Swiiiiiiiiiiiiiiifffffftttttttttt!’ I’m really, genuinely very sorry if you’re midway through talking about your divorce.

I love swifts with all my heart, with every ounce of my being. I have three swift boxes that were retro-fitted into the cavity walls of my house at the back, and a big white one at the front in case they need a bigger welcome sign. For three years I played swift calls from my bathroom window, which is said to lure them to potential new nest sites, but then a neighbour told me they were driving her mad so I had to stop. Still, swifts might find me eventually. I live in hope that, one day, my house will be full of swifts (I haven’t told my neighbour this).

Like many summer migrants, swifts fly here from the Congo Basin each spring, breed and then fly back again. And, like many other summer migrants, they’re declining at a terrifying rate – thought to be around 60 per cent in the last 20 years, but likely much, much more since the turn of the last century. They nest in holes in roofs in tall buildings and houses, which makes them vulnerable to home ‘improvements’ like insulation, new soffits or fascias, a new roof or loft conversion. These can easily be compensated for by people putting swift boxes on their homes, by councils and building developers making swift bricks compulsory, but there are no plans to do such a thing, despite petitions and pleas from nature lovers. Then there’s the decline of insects, which is harder to reverse on small scales. Swifts catch insects high up in the sky and collect them in a ball in their throat, called a bolus, which they take back to their nests to feed their young. With fewer insects there’s less to go around and it looks like fewer swifts are nesting successfully. Again, we can all contribute to them doing better by growing more plants that insects feed and breed on, by reducing hard surfaces and plastic, on which very little can live. Of course, most people don’t bother, and so swifts continue to decline.

That swifts are declining makes them even more special, but it makes the pleasure-pain of seeing them all the more intense. There are fewer of them this year. There are fewer of them this year.

Apart from those few short weeks in which they’re laying eggs and raising young, swifts are completely airborne – they eat, sleep and mate on the wing. They’re so good at being in the sky that they’re terrible at being on land, their wings too long and their legs too short to take off again. If they become ‘grounded’ they need a kind human to pick them up and help them back to the sky, often by climbing a ladder or going to the first floor of a building and holding them out on a palm-stretched hand until they’re ready to take off again. Never throw a swift into the sky but wait, calmly, for it to launch itself.

Unlike cuckoos, which I also love, and nightingales and swallows and many other summer migrants that return to our shores from Africa each spring, swifts do not make for a romantic first sighting. Living in the city, if I want to see cuckoos and nightingales I have to travel to more rural landscapes. I will hear a cuckoo while tramping through cobweb-strewn pastures, hear nightingales while sitting beneath an 800-year-old oak tree. Last year, I saw my first swift flying over a bin lorry on the New Church Road. I’m not knocking it, the first swift sighting of the year remains a highlight; it’s just that, sometimes, on bin day I’m reminded of them, which is a very odd thing indeed.

The bin lorry swifts are part of a colony that lives on the other side of the main road, about a five-minute walk from my house. There’s a small group of swift lovers living among them, who celebrate them and have erected nest boxes. But most people don’t know or care who lives in their roof spaces and would probably prefer that they didn’t.

Most mornings I walk along this road to the gym, and in spring and early summer I smile and say hello to swifts that wheel among the rooftops. I don’t know which roofs they nest in specifically, but if I were to hazard a guess it would be those with old roofs and wooden fascias, where slipped tiles and bowed wood make the perfect entrance holes to a small space to raise young. I wince at the home ‘improvements’ that take place among this colony, at the scaffolding that goes up, at the plastic fascias and shiny new roof tiles that, ultimately, make swifts homeless. Swifts are extremely faithful to nest sites and return to them every year. That’s why it’s so devastating when the holes are filled in, either intentionally or otherwise. The swifts are so determined to reach their nest that they will continue trying to access it, until they are exhausted and die. Sometimes they can be encouraged to nest nearby with the help of some quickly erected nest boxes and a loudspeaker playing swift calls, but only if the community rallies around to support them. It takes a community to raise swifts; it will take a nation to save them.

Sometimes, if I’m feeling brave enough, I get in touch with those who have scaffolding up and I tell them about the swifts nesting in their neighbourhood. Scaffolding provides the perfect opportunity for helping these birds; it removes the effort of erecting a nest box. You just need to pop the kettle on for a cup of tea, open a packet of biscuits and present them to your builder, along with a swift box and instructions of where you want it. ‘Oh be a love and pop this box up while you’re there. Thanks ever so. Jaffa cake?’ Job done. Even if you’re doing the work yourself, you’re already up there, you already have the tools. Just whack a swift box up, under the eaves and especially under the tip of your gable, please.

In autumn, as I walked to the gym, I passed a house with an old roof and new scaffolding. Over the next few weeks I watched as the entire roof came off, as guttering was replaced, as the render was filled, sanded and repainted. I have no idea who lives there but I decided to write them a letter and post it through their door. ‘Please, will you put a swift box up?’

I explained that swifts migrate here from the Congo Basin each spring, that they are on the wing for most of their lives, that the young do ‘press-ups’ in the nest to prepare them for a lifetime of flying. That swifts are here for only two months of the year, that they make no mess at all, that they are suffering staggering declines but that you, dear people with scaffolding, live in an area where there’s a reasonable colony and that you can help them by erecting a swift box, which may or may not replace a nest that you are destroying by having your roof done. I definitely didn’t use the word ‘destroying’, I was trying to get them on side. I was nice and gentle and said lovely things about these wondrous birds, and enclosed a leaflet about swift conservation so they could read more on this subject that they would obviously be newly interested in.

Each day, afterwards, as I walked past the house, I noted the lack of swift boxes. As the builders made finishing touches to the house and the scaffolding came down, I realised my letter hadn’t worked, that they had read it and not acted, that they had not erected a swift box. There will have been a hundred reasons why they didn’t want one, but ultimately they didn’t put one up because they didn’t care enough, and I took that very personally. I know it seems silly but I did.

This year I see my first swift in the first week of May, as I do most years. It’s one of a pair, casually flying above houses in the next road, where I’m sure they are nesting, but I have found no evidence of them entering buildings. I stand with my head in the sky and gawp at them, while passers-by rush to school and work, oblivious to the wonder above them. As I walk to the gym I look out for swifts trying to access their nests in the house that has a new roof, and am pleased to see nothing at all. Lucky for them, but countless other swifts this year will be returning to nest sites to find them gone, just when they need all the help they can get to slow down or even reverse their declines. If we won’t share our homes with them, where will they raise their young? They have to live somewhere.

It’s raining, my god it’s raining. Tap-tap-tapping on the roofs and windows and streaming into the water butt in a great noisy spout. I open the back door and stand in it, feel it. I crouch beneath the overhanging shed roof and watch it splash into the pond, hydrate the garden. Rain. Actual rain. Every single living thing in this garden is heaving great sighs of relief.

The sound of rain filling the water butt is joyous. It pours off the roof of the house in streams and rivers. I connect the hose to its tap and turn it on when the water level approaches the top so I don’t miss a drop. I direct water into the pond, which needs filling up, and around the trees and tiny hedge that desperately need a drink. I have to watch the water butt closely so it doesn’t empty completely into the pond and leave me with nothing when the rain stops, but also that it doesn’t overflow into the drain and be lost forever. There should be an outlet at the top so water can escape into the garden only once the butt’s full, but that would involve having hoses all over the patio.

I leave buckets and saucepans on the lawn, moving them around so they don’t deny the grass a drink. In the front I place a bucket beneath the bit of guttering that isn’t fixed properly and leaks and I should probably fix it but why would you deny yourself free water? Why would you mend something that will then direct rain into the road? I watch that, too, and empty it into the rain shadow of next door’s hedge. I spend most of the day checking and emptying buckets and pans, making sure the water butt isn’t emptying or spilling over, that there’s no snail or snail poo clogging up the diverter, so that everything – all of it – lands in my water butt. I don’t get much work done. I get very wet.

Wild Park lies on the other side of town and is Brighton’s largest nature reserve. It’s connected to the South Downs National Park and has woodland and chalk flower meadows, a dew pond (or at least the remains of one) and ‘sweeping views across the city’. It’s also home to an Iron-Age hillfort, which sounds much grander than it looks, and of course lots of golf courses. We three (Emma, Tosca and me) take a trip there for the first time. We park up in a valley, surrounded by football pitches and other playing fields, get our bearings and then start to climb, up into the woods. It’s a perfect day: blue sky, big fluffy clouds, a fair bit of wind but not too much, and the odd rain shower that beats against the tree leaves while we remain dry beneath. I like these woods. I feel a magic that I haven’t felt in a woodland for a long time. Is it because it’s raining and I’m no longer used to it? Is it the fresh green of the leaves against old wood? Moss hangs from tree branches like curtains and sunlight paddles through the canopy, hitting the ground like disco lights on a dance floor. Our noses fill with the scent of fresh earth and new life. Oh, rain!

We come out of the woods and on to the brow of the hill, to wildflower meadows and skylarks, and indeed a sweeping view across the city. ‘Look at Brighton!’ we say. The first of the year’s meadow brown butterflies bounce among the grasses while six-spot burnet moth cocoons hang like teardrops from grass stems. Tosca sniffs everything. I stop and look at everything. Emma wonders what she has done to deserve being saddled with such slow-moving creatures.

The area is horseshoe-shaped and we walk around the top, an escarpment if you like, before descending back through the trees on the other side. It’s a funny spot, so wild and yet so urban. I could imagine boxing hares here but there are rows of houses all along the outskirts, the sound of police sirens beneath us. Boxing hares might be a stretch, although they do have a corridor here from the Downs. But what else could there be, if I came on my own and spent time here sitting and watching, without my girls to keep me moving? I make a note to do just that.

Afterwards, we walk on the big playing field at the bottom. Tosca and Emma practise their litter-picking routine and I watch them for a bit before finding myself at a big clump of nettles, Emma’s commands of ‘Hold!’ and ‘Drop!’ fading as my attention turns to other things. Almost immediately I find what I came looking for: the telltale signs of butterfly caterpillars – folded over and chewed leaves, mounds of square frass (droppings) and then, following the trail, caterpillars. There are two patches of up to a hundred wriggling together, all knitted under the shelter of silk and leaf. I think they’re small tortoiseshells, which have declined by 75 per cent in the last 50 years. I realise this is my first caterpillar clump of 2022 and the first, I think, in a couple of years. I used to see two or three clumps on nettles every year and then this dwindled to one, and then nothing. But here, on this average spring day in late May, in Brighton, I have found them again.

It’s funny, because I saw just one small tortoiseshell butterfly last year. It was feeding from a buddleia on the side of the road down by the port, the most unromantic of places to see a now-rare-in-these-parts butterfly. But then, on a sunny day just two months ago, in March, I saw four flying about in a local park. Four! Would they have hibernated together? Or was someone raising (and then overwintering?) them locally? Did they fly here from France? I see someone else mention it on Twitter. ‘We’re seeing loads of small tortoiseshells!’ we say to any lepidopterist that will listen, and they would like the Tweet or respond with a thumbs-up and I supposed they couldn’t really do anything with the information because it wasn’t information, was it? It was two people saying they had seen more small tortoiseshell butterflies in the last couple of weeks than in the last few years, and that that, in itself, isn’t evidence of anything.

But here I am now, standing in front of nettles in another park in Brighton, my girls collecting litter in the background, and there are caterpillars. I walk along and find evidence of other clumps, some of which I think may have been mown, as the trail of frass and folded leaves disappears in the same spot as evidence of recent tidying.

‘What are you doing?’ says Emma.

‘I’m just taking a few,’ I say.

She rolls her eyes. It’s quite a thing, taking caterpillars, because I don’t want to interfere, no one wants to meddle. I want to leave them in their own habitat. I want them to be able to feed and explore naturally, and then disperse and spend a couple of days as fat caterpillars sitting on leaves, before disappearing to pupate and then emerging 10 days later as gorgeous adult butterflies. But there’s too much at stake. There are wasps and birds – natural predators, of course – and there are mowers and strimmers, anxious parents complaining to the council about nettles harming their children. Then there’s bad weather – too hot and dry and the nettles will shrivel and die; too wet and the caterpillars will be washed off the leaves (no chance of that happening this year). And when you have declines of 75 per cent over a 50-year period and you know you can take them home and improve their chances of survival, why wouldn’t you? I’m just so sick of never seeing any butterflies.

I take some from one of the two batches, not too many. I snap off the nettle stem with my hand and pop it in a doggy bag. Back home I set up my ‘farm’ (a mesh cage for kids that usually comes with painted lady caterpillars and some pelleted food so you can raise your own pet butterflies). I pop them all in the cage together, with the nettle stem I brought them home with, and watch them eat for a bit. And then I leave them to it. That’s it, they’re captive but not for long. I go into the garden and gawp at baby frogs in the long grass.

Later, I pop to the park to collect nettles for my caterpillars to feed on. There, astonishingly, I find more caterpillars. Older than the ones I collected this morning, they have been developing here unnoticed for a couple of weeks. I don’t take them, they’re nearly ready to pupate. But it’s a gamble – the council hasn’t been to cut everything back for a while so they must be due soon. But I take my chances. I can hear the strimmers from my house anyway.

The neighbourhood Facebook group has been busy with reports of the drone and the bad man. People have gone down to speak to him and been scared away, others have had muck from his warehouse gutters thrown at them. I observe most of this without comment, adding the odd sentence of despair when they mention how upset the gulls are. We are all upset. We are all really upset.

I’m out to lunch with Dad and his wife Ceals – a celebration of their recent civil partnership, it’s only taken them 35 years. Hilariously, Ellie and I weren’t invited to the ceremony; they got hitched in the registry office with just two friends as witnesses, had their photos taken with roadworks in the background. ‘It’s just for financial reasons,’ they laugh, ‘just a bit of security as we get older.’ But it’s still nice to celebrate. They had a boozy lunch with their witnesses and now they’re here in Brighton, being taken out for a slap-up meal by me, before they head home again tomorrow. I show them how much I care by getting both the iron and the hair brush out.

‘You look vaguely presentable,’ says Dad.

‘I do ’n all,’ I say.

We have a drink before the meal and, while Dad and Ceals busy themselves with ordering, I check Facebook. In the group someone has posted a video of men on the roof of the warehouse. ‘They’re wearing gloves,’ she says, ‘and they’re loading material into white bags.’ I freeze but my heart races. Nests? Eggs? Small chicks? I feel sick. If flying a drone isn’t a crime then this absolutely is. I read the comments: people are furiously saying they’ll get in touch with the contacts they have been dealing with, that a police community support officer (PCSO) is heading down tomorrow. That this is the action we knew was coming and has finally, frustratingly happened and can now no longer be ignored by police.

We have a nice meal and I try not to be distracted. I cry only a little. On the bus on the way back I ask Dad and Ceals if they fancy taking a walk to the warehouse and they say yes OK and we walk round and the gates are closed but I can see three white bags in a skip at the back of the yard. At home I email the police again and tell them that all the evidence they need – evidence of crime – is in three bags in a skip at the address I have now given them twice. I have visions of tiny chicks suffocating in plastic, of the miracle of a police officer opening them to find life hanging in the balance and of rushing these tiny birds to a rescue centre where someone will help them live. Of the men being arrested and fined. Of lesser black-backed gulls being safe to continue nesting here. Of these streets being a fraction wilder. In the morning I check the Facebook group to see if the PCSO has paid a visit, if the bags have been confiscated as evidence, if anything has happened at all.

But there’s nothing. The police don’t come. The bags remain in the skip with whatever’s in them rotting into oblivion. The Facebook group goes quiet, as does the drone, and I realise I have to let it go, I have to move on before it consumes me completely.

Sometimes I get lost in thoughts of other animals rising up. About them finally speaking out against habitat theft and violence towards them. Online there’s video footage of orangutans attacking logging machines in Borneo, tales of killer whales destroying the propellers of fishing boats. Are they angry? The orangutans are, certainly. And why wouldn’t they be? In our thirst for cheap palm oil we have destroyed so much of their forest home. Whale experts seem to think the killer whales are just having fun. But what if they aren’t? What if they’re attacking propellers to seek retribution for overfishing, which is threatening their lives? And, surely, if you have the capacity for fun, you also have the capacity for pain and anger? Surely they can see what we’re doing to the sea?

One day, if climate change doesn’t kill us all, a new world order will be created, where people go to university to study the languages of other species. As well as French, German and Spanish, people will study Whale, Gorilla, Pangolin. Why not? I can already speak a bit of Dog, I can play-bow with the best of them. I know when Tosca needs a wee and when she’s stressed. I know when she wants to play and when she wants me to put her on her lead (I had always assumed dogs don’t like being tethered but Tosca appears to feel safe, she always asks for the lead when faced with large dogs or groups of dogs, presumably so we can walk past them together).

I want to know what the whales and dolphins say, I want to know how the sharks and seals feel. How are the octopus doing, how are the dragonflies? ‘It’s a bit warm, isn’t it?’ they might say. ‘Could you stop choking us with plastic?’ The migrant birds that fly here each spring from Africa, what could they tell us? How could they teach us to live better? What does the robin know? I fantasise about turning on the news at night and not just hearing of human stories but those of other animals, too. Tales of the first cuckoo arriving from Africa, of the annual sad goodbye to the swifts and the swallows. On national news, on local news, on any news.

And the gulls, the poor gulls, whole streets of whom are being distracted from nest building and egg laying by one man and his ridiculous drone. What would they say about the way they are being treated? What could I say to them? If I could connect with them I would tell them to stay away from the man with the drone, to nest, instead, with me. ‘You’ll be so safe here,’ I would say, and I would also show them where else they had allies beneath the slate roofs they call home. If their antics were on the news, beyond the usual tales of ‘Gull Steals Chips’ / ‘Gull Scares Child’ / ‘Gull Walks into Shop and Helps Itself to Pasty’, how could our attitudes change, just from being more aware of their needs as our neighbours, of the challenges they face?

Years ago, in my early twenties, I travelled to Australia and signed up to camp in the bush on a saltwater crocodile expedition, just outside Darwin in the Northern Territory. My guide was a man who had been a successful banker but had burned out and had quit his old life to take clueless backpackers into the wilderness to teach them about crocodiles and northern Aboriginal cultures. There was a group of us, all young and silly, all signed up for an ‘adventure in the bush’ without really knowing what it was. I was there with Kat, a student doctor I had met in a nightclub in Sydney’s Darling Harbour, who randomly agreed to explore Western Australia with me in a camper van that, inevitably, was always breaking down. For three nights we slept out in the open, in outdoor sleeping bags known as swags, and ate food made on a camping stove. I don’t remember the food or much of the company, the small things. I remember Kat’s shoulders as we swam in crocodile-free pools beneath waterfalls, of being terrified of sleeping outside and of waking in the night to see wild boars searching for scraps among us, of the Dutch lads singing a Dutch drinking song. Mostly I remember the views and the nature, trekking up to an escarpment and watching the sun set over the wetlands, cave paintings made by long-dead people who had once shared the views that were now in front of my eyes some 20,000 years later. Mostly I remember the words of the man who had quit his old life.

He told us that Aboriginal Australians had a special way of interacting with the natural world, that they were fully a part of it. He told me they would sit, for hours, and watch other animals. That, in their observations, they learned to mimic other species; they read their body language and knew their habits. Consequently, they knew when it was safe to swim with crocodiles, because they knew if the crocs had eaten. They knew exactly how much fish to take from the river and when to take it, to protect populations so there would always be fish to eat. He told me they had extraordinary powers of sight and navigation, and could travel over huge areas of land without what we westerners would ever deem a ‘proper map’. I was 21 years old and fascinated. From that point I watched as many films featuring Aboriginal Australians as possible, I visited Aboriginal museums and bought Aboriginal art (I also bought a didgeridoo, c’mon, I was 21). I felt a kinship with these people who, in my mind, had a higher understanding of the workings of life, and, inevitably, I was devastated to see what European settlement had done to them.

Weeks later, I ate curry with an English man in Vietnam, and I told him about my trip. He laughed and said Aboriginal civilisation wasn’t to be taken seriously as they hadn’t built any tall buildings. It’s been more than 20 years but I still think about that trip, the amazing things I learned, and of the ridiculous English man who considered tall buildings – read ego – a true mark of civilisation. If only the ego wasn’t the dominant force of civilisation today, what would we know? I doubt we would be hurtling towards 3ºC of average global warming by the end of the century.

To connect, or reconnect with the natural world would be a thing of enormous beauty, for us and other species. To view other animals as equals, to understand and respect their needs in this world we have taken over, would be nothing short of a gift. A gift of reading the body language of another animal and understanding its thoughts and needs, its next move.

The dog jumps up for a cuddle and I say ‘kisses’ and she gently licks my nose. I wonder if we will ever have such kinship with wild animals, not that we need to love and hug them or teach them to give us kisses, but that we can understand each other a bit more. As wildlife gardeners we already understand the needs of others more than most. We can anticipate food and water shortages and supplement accordingly. We can create habitats that we know will be used. But if they could speak to us and if we would listen – if they could actually get through to us – what would they say?

The park behind my house is a scruffy, neglected space with a large playing field full of craters made by dogs, a children’s play area, a scout hut and masses of overgrown borders. A small copse runs through the middle, where poplar trees rub shoulders with guerilla-planted cordylines and a rogue Scots pine. There are smatterings of garden escapees, helped along by those whose gardens back on to the park, along with oddities such as gnomes and a ceramic hedgehog. On the other side is more lawn, along with huge overgrown rose beds, an area of long grass and brambles, and a nettle patch. It’s used by a huge community of people, including teenagers and adults without gardens, who use the space for sunbathing and socialising, people with children and/or dogs, people who feed the birds and people who don’t like others feeding the birds. There are fetes, children’s events, dog parties and weeding and litter-picking sessions. There are late-night gatherings and little ‘balloon’ dens with discarded nitrous oxide canisters scattered among the trees. There are hedgehogs and birds, butterflies and other wildlife, who are often overlooked.

It used to be better looked after but cuts to council budgets mean it now has just a few big trims a year, with no detail given to the weedy rose beds or the crater-pocked playing field. This means brambles and nettles have free rein, which is good for the hedgehogs and butterflies but risky as we never know when the council will come and cut them back. Plus, they are the source of many complaints. It’s hard managing a space that is used by so many people for so many things. But we get along.

Today I’m here for the nettles, which I need to harvest daily for the caterpillars I am raising in the kitchen. I have an old supermarket shopping bag and a pair of scissors. I turn the corner and see two men in high-vis jackets, one on a ride-on mower and the other hacking into brambles with a strimmer. Of course, after weeks of nothing, today everything will be cut back, tidied up and taken away. I curse, silently. I should have taken those caterpillars.

‘Hiya.’

The man with the strimmer stops his work, and I try not to look at the debris in his wake. I ask if he will be cutting back the nettles where the caterpillars are, and he says yes.

‘When?’ I ask.

‘Within the hour,’ he replies.

I tell him about the caterpillars.

‘Show me,’ he says.

I take him to the nettles and he tries to tell me they’re the larvae of the brown tail moth, a native species with very fine hairs that can cause skin irritation and breathing difficulties in some people. I say no, these are small tortoiseshells, they have declined by 75 per cent in the last 50 years and, besides, brown tails don’t deserve to die because some people, who are unlikely to ever go near nettles, are allergic to them. He sighs and says he will have a word with his colleague on the lawnmower but, really, there’s nothing they can do.

I get it, I really do. The grass needs mowing and the paths need to be kept clear. And with fewer resources these jobs are done less frequently but more harshly. And the council is trying – when they mow the grass they leave longer patches so clover can flower to feed the bees. But no one ever thinks about the caterpillars.

To think I was beating myself up for taking caterpillars from nettles just two days previously. To think I had considered taking these ones and decided not to. The small tortoiseshell, a once-common and easily recognisable species, has seen populations collapse since the 1970s, and boy do we know it. If I had a penny for every ‘Where have the butterflies gone?’ question I’d had at talks, I would be very rich. Yet here we are, in one of the UK’s 27,000 public parks, killing them. And it’s not just this park, is it? It will be all of them.

Can we not dedicate areas to other species who use the park as well? Can we not manage habitats so the wildlife uses the bits intended for them and avoids those that aren’t? The first brood of small tortoiseshell butterflies lays eggs in early summer, and the offspring of this spring batch mate and lay eggs of the second brood from mid- to late summer. The egg-laying females seek out fresh, young nettles to lay their eggs on. So if they’re cut and regrow they become even more attractive to butterflies. A nettle patch, therefore, which is cut in midsummer by the council, is a death-trap, an ecological dead end. I wish we could do better for our wildlife. I wish we could tell the species that make all of this unwelcome ‘growth’ their home, that there are better places to lay their eggs. ‘Look,’ I could say to them, ‘Not there, it’s too near the path, but this nettle patch is for you! And when you’re done I will cut the nettles back and they will regrow and be perfect for your babies. Welcome!’

I start picking caterpillars off the plants and dropping them into my supermarket bag, as the man on the lawnmower gets into position. He has spoken with his colleague, he seems friendly. I resist the urge to talk to him, too, but I’m grateful for the space he’s giving me to save these butterflies.

Caterpillars go through growth stages, known as instars, and with each instar the caterpillar grows before shedding its skin. The small tortoiseshell goes through five such stages. Because they hang out together, in groups of up to 100, the shed skins are very obvious – indeed, sometimes the first signs of caterpillars on nettles are not the caterpillars themselves but the ghosts of earlier instars. When I raise them in my little mesh tent I always know when they’re about to shed a skin; they stop eating and move around less. I like to imagine them all crying out in Caterpillar: ‘My tummy hurts! I don’t feel well.’ And then, suddenly, they are bigger, differently patterned and HUNGRY. ‘Hello, new beans,’ I say to them. ‘Feeling better?’

Annoyingly, after spending most of their time huddled together, eating en masse and making collective decisions to move from one nettle tip to the next, when they reach their fifth instar they disperse, where they appear to sunbathe on nettle leaves for a few days before climbing to a suitable spot and pupating into a chrysalis. I suppose this is an evolutionary tactic – a predator would have a hard job finding them all, dispersed as they are along a huge bank of luscious leafy leaves. How do I know this? Because here I am, picking through nettles to save 100 caterpillars that are not, conveniently, in the same spot.

I walk along, methodically plucking caterpillars off leaves and dropping them into my bag. I count them as I go. The first 27 are easy to find. But there are more, I know there are. I go back to where I started, crouch down, look under leaves. I find another five, then six, seven. The man on the lawnmower busies himself with a little patch of grass by the roses. A final sweep and I have 41. That’s 41 caterpillars that would otherwise have had the chop. I collect a rogue red admiral and a few mother of pearl moth caterpillars as I go, then cut nettles into the bag to sustain them all. My hands tingle with a thousand stings. I pocket the scissors, wave thanks to the man on the lawnmower and take my leave. I’ll return later to assess the damage.

At home I arrange nettles in the little mesh tent, and watch Sunday’s caterpillars climb on to them and start eating. I release the red admiral and mother of pearl larvae on to the nettles in the garden – my small patch will be enough for them. I recount my quarry, and am pleased that I still have 41, there were no escapees on the way home. I gently tip these into the same mesh tent and watch as they, too, climb on to the nettles, newly incarcerated but safe. I apologise to them and try to explain that they’ll be free again soon. I leave them to get on with the rest of their day and make a note to buy another, bigger, mesh tent.

Later, I return to the park to see how much has been stripped back. I’m pleased to see the nettles have had the lightest of trims – possibly because I kicked up such a fuss. I walk along and find a garden tiger caterpillar wondering where its home has gone and I scoop it up to take back to the garden. The rest of the park has been scalped, one whole nettle patch has been razed completely. There will be lush new growth in a couple of weeks. Just in time for the next generation of egg-laying butterflies to meet a grisly end at the hands of more men with strimmers and mowers.

I wish caterpillars were viewed more favourably. I wish they were prioritised, like bees and butterflies, that gardeners and park-maintenance folk were as happy to see little grubs eating their leaves as they are a pollinator visiting a flower. We are trained, the world over, to see caterpillars as pests, to pick them off when we see them, to spray and squish them. We need to change our mindset, to recognise the importance of them, both in their own right and as food for so many other species further up the food chain. These tiny eating machines that grow fat and transform, like magic, into a beautiful butterfly. These fat, moist grubs that fill the bellies of baby birds, of frogs and toads, of hedgehogs. One baby blue tit needs to eat 100 caterpillars a day for the first three weeks of its life – who are we to deny them a meal?

Caterpillars represent hope, abundance, promise, new life, while butterflies are a celebration of life itself. Can you not see that, when a butterfly flies over your garden fence? Do you not yell ‘Butterfly!’ when you spot your first of the year? Every time a caterpillar is removed from a plant, a bit of love, hope and magic is taken from the world. This not only denies food for wildlife but also joy for people. Who are we to take that away? To kill love, hope and magic, when surely there’s never been a greater need for more?

Slow worm, Anguis fragilis

The slow worm is not a snake but a lizard without legs. A lizard that has eyelids and can blink. Males are a dull brown and females are golden, often with go-faster stripes down the sides. They bask to warm up in the morning, beneath the shelter of logs or other items (some people lay down slates or corrugated iron for them to rest beneath). They eat slugs and other small invertebrates but, if you’re a gardener, the most important thing you need to know about slow worms is that they eat slugs. They eat slugs!

They are common across the British Isles except for the Scottish islands and the whole of Ireland. I rarely see them in the garden but when I do, they are resting beneath the old roof slate I have laid down for them at the back of the border. They also like the habitat pile and the log pile beneath the bench. They venture out, in late spring, to look for a mate. I have found slow worms trying to cross the road, slinking across the lawn, heading out of the garden down the twitten. Mating looks uncomfortable but who are we to know? The male clasps on to the female’s neck and holds fast while they roll around together, for up to 10 hours. In common with two other lizard species, the common lizard and sand lizard, slow worms incubate their eggs internally, which then hatch out while still inside their mother so she appears to ‘give birth’ to her young. She seeks out warm places to bring her young into the world, such as the top of plastic compost bins and the toasty centre of open compost heaps.

To garden for slow worms is to open up the space for them, ensure they can come and go as they please. Compost your kitchen and garden waste, either in plastic bins or open heaps (or both!) and avoid turning it until early autumn. To see if they’re living among you, the best way to find them is to lay down a piece of slate or corrugated iron over long grass or straw; they won’t be able to resist.

Slow worms are often found, and tormented, by cats. Ensure, then, that they have plenty of hiding places to escape to, that the log pile, compost heap and piece of slate are distributed evenly around the garden. If they can nip to safety quickly they have more chances of survival. The cats will have to play with something else.