A 'Peaceful' but not 'Silent' Spring

Now that we are almost at the summer solstice I can hardly believe that this spring, the 'lockdown spring' has slipped past so quickly, and here, where we are so fortunate to have the Dentelles in our backyard, it has been a remarkable spring.  Throughout lockdown there was almost nobody apart from us hiking the mountains, and the peace and quiet was palpable.  It was not silence as such however, but the lack of man-made noise, no distant sounds of traffic, not sounds of machinery, no aeroplanes and no human voices.  It was as if for those few months people and machines were banished from the world and in their place we heard the calls of birds that we never heard before and we saw animals, birds and reptiles that we never noticed before, it was their world once again.

This seems to have been a very prolific spring too.  The wild flowers have been more numerous and bigger than we have ever seen before.  I'm hoping that's because the spring weather has been particularly kind and not because the flowers are picked or trampled in 'normal' years.

Still it makes one think about the impact we have on nature, there can't be much of this planet untouched by Homo sapiens, and every year there are about 75 million more of us, which is more than the population of the UK.