Not far from where I live, about halfway along the walk to school with the kids, there is a pond. No big deal there, I’m sure lots of you have ponds near your home, or even in your back garden. But this pond isn’t meant to be there. Rather, it should be what we would call when I was growing up, a green.

Where there should be grass, with a few trees growing in small groves, for at least six months of the year there is something you could sail your model boats on. In some countries, it would be a lake. Grass is pondweed, trees stand as islands, and council employees risk floating away never to be seen again should they dare to drive their mowers in. One local character has hammered in a wooden sign saying ‘Roosemere’ on the periphery.

Everyone seems to like Roosemere. It probably has something to with the ducks. They don’t live there full-time – the transient nature and the shallow depths of the body of water mean it does not provide a suitable permanent base – but they show up often enough for us to notice when they have increased or decreased in numbers, when there are more males than females, when the group dynamics have altered.

[Photo: Paul Turner]

My children like to guess of a morning or afternoon how many mallards will be swimming about when we walk past, and whether the moorhens will make an appearance (they are not always easy to spot in among the mud, trees and bushes at the edge of the water). It’s a little sad when there is nothing dabbling about.

I mentioned the pond on the Transforming Tomorrow podcast a long time ago, back in season one when we were speaking with Matt Healey about how people connect with nature. It came to mind as we discussed how we see nature in the everyday – be it on our walks to school, in our back gardens, or looking through our office windows. Trees, birds, insects and creepy crawlies are easy to ignore or dismiss when you see them all the time, but they are there and we can connect with nature through them.

In our most recent podcast, we spoke about nature connectivity in a different way. Duncan Pollard – a man who had the honour being our first guest back in the mists of time – has worked with the Pentland Centre and other organisations on nature corridors and connectivity for several years since his non-retirement (he seems to do more now than most of people do when they’re 30 years younger).

You may have heard them called wildlife corridors, green corridors, or many other things, but they all mean the same thing – a conduit to ease the movement of species. Duncan’s work analyses how certain industries and businesses can play a part in the construction and protection of these wildlife corridors.

Schemes can be on a grand scale – Duncan talked to us about Network Rail’s 20,000 miles of track, and the area on either side – or on a much smaller one – we discussed Jan’s garden, toads and hedgehogs, but it makes me think of the pond/very big puddle near home. The ducks who swim here, the crows and seagulls who hang around the edge of the water, the rabbits I occasionally observe on the fringes, all of them can use the pond as a stopover, a corridor, between larger, more long-term bases. It’s connectivity on a local scale.

As to whether businesses or authorities are doing much to deliberately create such corridors – I’m guessing no-one from my local council decided to put a layer of sealant beneath the grass to encourage more wildfowl – Duncan brings both positive and negative news.

Negative in the sense that regulation in the area is weak, and that most work on conservation in recent years has concentrated on creating protected areas rather than connecting them. Positive because there is a movement for change – led from South America, as it turns out – and the potential for collaboration between organisations is there to implement positive action.

Any partnerships will certainly be better for nature than those to be found in the Scottish Highlands in the 1800s. When we spoke with Jason Harrison we discovered how golden eagles were targeted by estates and hunted to extinction in some part of the country. All because landowners saw them as a threat to livestock or game on their lands.

Fortunately, numbers have increased again in recent decades thanks to sustained conservation and reintroduction efforts. There may not be as many eagles now as we might have seen 200 years ago, but the population is heading in the right direction. I would like to say such birds of prey are not being hunted or poisoned any more, but there are too many stories of hen harriers mysteriously disappearing or dropping dead in various parts of England to believe there are not still some people out there who care more for their annual pheasant or grouse numbers than they do for rare birds that belong in the countryside as much as we do, if not more so.

Hopefully, there will soon more estates like the United Utilities Bowland Estate, not far from Lancaster, where fledgling hen harrier numbers were at a 40-year high in 2025; golden eagles will continue to fly south; and programmes to reintroduce species such as beavers, white-tailed eagles, and even European bison can be a success. If more organisations and individuals can create nature corridors, then they can serve as stepping stones for wildlife to spread and prosper. Maybe in five years’ time, there will be a golden eagle soaring over Roosemere. I can only wait and see.

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