Driving to Taroona on a misty autumnal night recently I was struck by a sense of déjà vu, a journey that was coming full circle.
As a cub reporter a half century previously I cut my journalist teeth on the type of community meeting I was about to attend.
Many men of my age speak of a misspent youth frequenting snooker parlours; I spent mine covering community gatherings like garden clubs with my reporter’s notebook. During summer weekends it was garden shows along with the usual mid-week assignments at the local magistrate’s and coroner’s courts
A tawny owl hooted outside the village hall at my last 1960s garden club reporting commitment for my first paper, a country weekly in Britain, and it would have been appropriate if a boobook owl had called at my latest, the May meeting of the Taroona Gardening Club but alas this déjà vu du experience was lacking this poetic detail.
The format for such meetings, though, remained the same as I membered it. The eager gathering of green thumbs – as I would have described gardeners in my teenage reporting years – was read a list of upcoming gardening events for their diaries, then sold raffle tickets to raise club funds before the meeting was formally opened with a quiz question, members invited to name a plant that was being described.
And then an introduction for the speaker, “the bird man” of the Mercury, which happened to be me.
I had been invited to give a talk on gardening for birds, explaining how we can all do our bit for birdlife in the suburbs, and “make a difference” as the saying goes.
It was only afterwards, on the drive home, that a frightening statistic about not just birds but wildlife in general hit me. I had just read that in the span of my career in journalism, 50 percent of the world’s wildlife had vanished from the map, not just in volumes of individual animals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish but whole species at an ever-increasing rate.
I couldn’t recall how many bird species had been lost in this time – beyond a grebe found in Madagascar whose demise I had written about in these very columns – but during the half century I had had personal experience of the decline of mammal species. I had once been a foreign correspondent reporting Africa’s wars in the 1970s and 1980s, and I discovered a starling decline in species of big game when I returned to the continent for a holiday nearly 40 years on.
But in 2016, in the suburbs of what I once knew as Salisbury (now Harare, the capital of the new nation of Zimbabwe born in 1979), I spent many a happy hour with my binoculars trained on flowerbeds in parks and gardens, revisiting the sunbirds and other exotic species I had spotted all those years ago when, at times, I should have been out reporting on war.
Gardens still rule, and in the suburban environment we can still do our bit for wildlife.