IT has been a dispiriting nesting season so far. I had high hopes for the lapwings after last year’s success, but they have been struggling to breed. We were seeing them regularly a couple of weeks ago, but had yet to identify any nests, which we would then have fenced off against grazing cattle and foraging badgers. Sadly, the lapwing parents were spending so much time in the air mobbing the crows that I fear they have decided to cut their losses and try elsewhere. We are doing what we can to control the crows with Larsen traps, but there seem to be a lot of them this year. Perhaps that is because bird flu cut such a swathe through the buzzards and red kites that the corvids have fewer enemies themselves.
Then, on April 17, to great excitement, a white stork—other storks are available— appeared in our fields. I tweeted a video of the bird gracefully stalking, or even storking, about, snacking on frogs near a large puddle in the middle of the field, where the water accumulates in a wet time. The twitchers duly descended on us the next morning and the bird obliged them by staying around so that it could have its photograph taken before flying off up the Nith Estuary like a large white-and-black hang-glider.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der May 17, 2023-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der May 17, 2023-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.
