![](https://www.karunavirus.org/pics/story/2021/4945/871x497.jpg)
“If there is an Elysium, or an afterlife, I would like to think it’s the middle of the New Forest during lockdown,” says James Aldred, a wildlife cameraman and Emmy award-winning documentary-maker. “It was stunningly beautiful.” Aldred was blessed with the opportunity to continue his filming of New Forest in England while the rest of the world went on lockdown during the pandemic. What he discovered was beyond words. Sounds of planes and cars that once polluted the air were gone. Within that silence, birdsongs filled the air, goshawks silently swooped through trees, boar badgers roamed paved roads, and muntjac deer reclaimed their generations-old game trails. Aldred would spend 15 hours a day filming the rich diversities that came to life from his Douglas fir 15 meters above the ground. “It was magical,” he says. “I can’t imagine ever getting to experience anything like that again. It was like going back in time 1,000 years.”
More: