WHEN the tide is in, I try to spend a few minutes each day birdwatching. In winter, most times, I am rewarded with sightings of a dozen curlews, plus oystercatchers, ringed plover, snipe and, if I am lucky, a flock of 48 lapwings. It gives me great satisfaction because it confirms we are farming in an environmentally sensitive way—the soil would not be healthy enough to support the invertebrates on which the waders are feeding if we weren’t. However, before the Springwatch team descends on us, lamenting the state of modern agriculture, I should make it clear that we have not ‘rewilded’; in fact, as far as the apparatchiks in the Scottish Government are concerned, we have ‘de-wilded’.
That field was in one of its environmental schemes for 20 years and grew nothing but rushes. It occasionally held a fox, but sightings of feathered wildlife were rare. Disillusioned with the derisory payments for not farming it properly and the hassle—the final straw was being made to keep a diary-like a primary-school child—I invested in a 650-cow dairy and went full-tilt into intensive agriculture. Hey presto, our bird numbers went, well, sky-high.
'The biggest obstacle to biodiversity is the predator imbalance, and there needs to be greater honesty'
Esta historia es de la edición February 09, 2022 de Country Life UK.
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Esta historia es de la edición February 09, 2022 de 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.