Keeping it scruffy

Cutting back on mowing and adopting a ‘rough around the edges’ approach would be a major boost for wildlife

- MIKE SWAN

Over the next month or so, I shall be helping to lead a couple of GWCT to shoot walks each week. These are wonderful evening outings with great people who love shooting and the countryside.

Our generous hosts will normally have gone to some trouble to organize things as they expose themselves and their ground to the critical gaze of a gang of GWCT members and their guests.

One of the things that almost invariably happens is a last-minute tidy-up of the venue. If this involves recycling some scrap that should have gone ages ago, all well and good, but too often it goes too far, also resulting in heavy-handed use of the strimmer to clear away ‘unsightly’ weeds and rough grass.

Sadly, this can easily expose the carefully hidden nest of a pheasant, partridge, or duck and, even if the bird does not desert because of the disturbance, its chance of successfully hatching before some predator or other spots is very low.

Natural seasons

Our native wildlife is beautifully adapted to take advantage of the annual cycle of weather and growth that our position on the globe dictates. Grey partridges, for example, generally choose nest sites in dead grass and start to lay around the beginning of May, when new spring growth will rapidly help to hide a nest. This results in a peak of hatching around the longest day when the world has warmed up and the countryside is full of soft, squishy insect larvae for chicks to feed on.