Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
I'm capturing the last of the sunshine of the day.
We've had a lovely sunny day today and I'm squinting as I look towards the sun and I can see it's very soon going to dip beneath the hill and that will lead us into the very quick then onset of nighttime.
But I wanted to pause by my favorite hawthorn tree which recently I've read,
Hawthorn trees,
Particularly these isolated hawthorn trees,
And this is one on Dartmoor,
There's quite a few just dotted around,
Isolated trees,
Gnarled and quite stunted.
This one's still got some red berries clinging on.
I've just recently learned that these are supposedly the haunt of little people or fairies or in Dartmoor terminology probably pixies because pixies are traditionally the little folk that are associated with Dartmoor.
So these have over the years been attributed with magical qualities,
The hawthorn trees,
That's where I am right now.
And I'm wanting to reflect today on efficiency and for me the drawbacks of efficiency and I've come across this or I've come to see this because of watching the birds on my bird feeder.
I got a bird feeder a few weeks ago.
It took a while for the birds to find it and now I have real joy sitting in my office looking out the window watching the birds bob up and down.
This bird feeder and this particular bird feeder that I look at has got mealworm in it and I've seen robins and I've seen little coltits and blue tits and great tits and the occasional starling land on it.
And one of the things I saw is that some of the birds as they landed on it and they pulled out the mealworm,
It looked like they're being really extravagant actually,
They'd pull out one worm and they'd sort of toss it away onto the ground and then they'd pull out another one and then they'd eat that and then pull out another fragment and toss that onto the ground.
And as I was watching I thought well that's not a very efficient way to eat and then the starling landed on it and that's quite a scruffy bird with a rather chaotic manner of eating.
It was pulling mealworms out here and there and they were going everywhere.
And and then what I saw is that the blackbirds which can't land on this as a bird feeder,
They're just not built for that,
They were able to bob along underneath the bird feeder picking up all these little bits that the other birds had sort of thrown away.
And this morning I even saw a thrush bobbing around.
And then there are some birds which I don't really want to encourage onto the bird feeder because they are the birds that frighten all the small birds away,
The magpies and the crows.
And when they had a go at sort of,
They couldn't land on it but they would dive bombing it to try and get the the worms to fall out onto the ground and that became quite an extravagant waste of mealworms.
So I've moved the bird feeder so they can't do that.
And I'm telling you this because I've been quite fascinated in first of all thinking that these little birds that were landing on the bird feeder and sort of tossing bits of mealworm here and there,
Thinking that they're a little bit inefficient.
And then realising that the way they fed meant that other birds were also able to eat the birds that weren't able to actually land on the feeder itself.
And I got just thinking about this whole thing of efficiency.
There's a real sense sometimes that efficiency is all that is important.
But the thing with efficiency is that there is something wonderful about inefficiency,
As these birds have just illustrated,
In so much as their inefficient feeding means that they benefit so many other birds.
And from my office I can also see delivery drivers turn up and the postman turn up and I realise that the postman who turns up and he jogs around the different houses putting the letters through the letterbox.
He's doing it as fast as he can and delivery drivers are whizzing in and out as fast as they can,
Being efficient.
And I just thought wouldn't it be great if maybe they were inefficient in so much as they stopped to have a chat with people.
They made it their business to check people were okay.
What if in this drive for efficiency,
And we're getting quicker and faster with so many things,
We miss out on those connections that make such a difference.
And it just got me to question this idea that efficiency is the be-all and end-all.
Maybe it's not the be-all and end-all.
Maybe there's something quite delightfully gorgeous and delicious about inefficiency,
Where many more people will benefit from a slower,
More connected way of life.
