The stork cometh

A visiting stork causes great excitement, but no babies, and a cold spring holds the farm back

- Jamie Blackett

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.