Time for wildlife

City life clearly suits many, the majority of humankind perhaps, but our needs are different. Cities do have trees, and in Rotterdam we saw and admired some magnificent specimens, great thick trunks of considerable age beside a road or canal; oaks, willows and even ancient olives which seemed to be grown as status symbols outside the residents' front doors.

Cities also have their share of wild fauna. 

This small selection - mallard, stork and parakeet - seem to have become quite acquainted to the constant traffic noise, passing trains, even the odd helicopter and our duck friend was keen to show her attentive drakes that she could cadge food from campers better than most.

What can be missing from cities is the unmanaged, the unkempt, in short, the wild. Which sort of explains how we ended up in the Biesbosch just south of Rotterdam. Our tour guide having departed, after entertaining us for the evening whilst we fed her in our mobile home, we concluded that without her company our temporary city life should probably come to an end, the thrill quotient having naturally exhausted itself. We decided that Martin should transport us elsewhere.

We are still under the same high pressure system that brought us cloudless skies on our passage through England but the warm sunny days mean cold nights and we are glad to be able to snuggle up inside when the evening chill starts to bite. Fortunately this doesn't matter as we are completely self contained in our campervan and can live completely off grid for several days, longer perhaps should the need arise. All we need is a quiet place to park, some wilderness (this comes in different flavours) and the assurance that we will not be disturbed once we are tucked in for the night.

First impressions of the Biesbosch are not what I was expecting at all, my only reference being the British concept of a national park, rolling hills (often eaten bare of vegetation by grazing sheep) with dense wooded valleys through which flowed rushing streams and boulder strewn rivers. Now we all know that Holland is a flat country, which rules out the hills and valleys, but what really sets this country apart is how it was formed in the first place.

The land around our home in Scotland was formed by ice, earlier still by volcanoes, and the shapes and marks left behind by these natural events are visible everywhere today. One thing we learnt from our Rotterdam visit was that this part of Holland has almost no pre-history, a term generally used to describe pre-Roman or pre-recorded history. This is because the space it now occupies was largely beneath the sea, land emerging only between periodic inundations. In more recent times the land was gradually 'reclaimed' by the efforts of people who would eventually override the efforts of the sea to drown them and this process persists today as it will into the future. Holland, therefore, is entirely man made. It is a managed environment and will always be, through necessity.

Many years ago we travelled to Holland in our own boat, entering the country through a lock. In Britain, entering a sea lock will always take you to a higher body of water, a canal or a lake but in Holland the reverse is true, the sea lock will take you lower, to the level of the country's inland waterways.

Which brings us to the Biesbosch, a vast triangle of shallow water and land, much of it farm land, with pockets of naturalness in the form of trees, mostly willow, where beavers live alongside geese and other wild animals in a place created by human kind and now managed, at least partly, for their benefit. Wilderness here has its own unique flavour.