Beautiful both to see and hear, the turtle dove is a jewel of the summer months
I MUST confess to being in a state of vigorous competition with a manic birdwatcher at the moment-our 10year-old grandson, Henry. I'm very pleased that he's wildlife-crazy, but it does put all my books in danger, particularly my favourite—which has also become his Birdsong: 150 British and Irish Birds and Their Amazing Sounds. It's a fantastic book, although, sadly, I believe it's already out of print. It seems that half my life is now spent preventing Henry from taking the book home with him. The other half is spent listening to wonderful recordings of both the turtle dove and the cuckoo's calls.
This summer, it's my ambition to show Henry turtle doves and to let him hear for himself the wonderful purring call of the summer bird, which I have not heard on my Cambridgeshire farm for far too many years. Then, the last badly built nest was quickly predated, I suspect by one of those dark marauding birds that Wild Justice wants to protect. What a bizarre world we live in.
There's only one word to describe the decline of the turtle dove (Streptopelia turtur) and that's tragic. According to the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), between 1967 and 2018 (only 51 years), numbers of turtle doves declined by 98%. In 2020, it was estimated that the breeding population was a mere 3,600 pairs. Yet Anthony Cheffings, a good Kenyan friend of mine who has just been to Chad, found hundreds of thousands of wintering turtle doves there. Saying there were 'too many to count', he's assuming that they were birds from Eastern Europe and Russia.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der April 27, 2022-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der April 27, 2022-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
