Forming sentences in my head as i ranger around on a very busy Sunday morning.
Twitch season has started.
Late on Friday and Saturday nights driving around the car parks and laybys of the moors hereabouts trying to deduce why unoccupied cars are where they are and whether there is anything to make you twitch.
An example would be a car with camouflage kit in the back alongside a wood where deer have been beheaded. Or a car parked across a gateway with the interior light on and in excess of fifty empty alcohol and medicine bottles inside. Or even the sensibly parked car in a main car park (which doesn’t permit overnight parking) but which has no sign of human use inside whatsoever.
Where are the users of these vehicles and are they a wildfire, livestock or wildlife risk ?
Out with the thermal imager. Up with the thermal drone. Noses sensitive to smoke. Eyes peeled for torchlight or flame.
Hope is not a plan.
Trust has to be given out. You can’t ranger this landscape from a standpoint of mistrust and from a perspective that every single person aims to do the landscape harm (albeit the % of those that do rises sharply after dusk).
I’m driving the ‘northern loop’ last night. I see headlights and humans at the back of a car park. Instinct tells me to drive by and have a look back with the thermal. The almost out BBQ was hidden by the headlights but clear as day through the scope. It’s a disposable sat on two stones on tarmac. I walk back.
Four lads. Finished cooking a meal after sunset in Ramadan. I explan that i have to ask them to extinguish the BBQ …. but given the circumstances i’ll let them finish their food (which they kindly offer to share with me). They promise me it’ll all be cleared up and removed. I trust them.
I return this morning to find the foodwaste and plastic across the moor. The BBQ in a bag in a nearby hedge. The coals on the grass.
I’m disappointed in myself. Those coals could have ignited the grass along the fenceline.
I repeat to myself …. Trust has to be given out. You can’t ranger this landscape from a standpoint of mistrust and from a perspective that every single person aims to do the landscape harm ….
but with more and more twitches every night and the increasing erosion of trust, maintaining a positive perspective gets harder and harder.