The
clatter and crash of wheels and cogs turning ceased as soon as I saw the open
view across the morning stubbles. There was nothing wrong with the X-Trail. The
noise was in my head, the turmoil of yet another poor nights sleep. Before I'd
left, the digital weather station in the kitchen told me that (at just 6.30am)
it was 17C and the humidity was a staggering 90%. A legacy of last nights
rainfall .. and the reason for my insomnia. Stepping out now onto the cropped
barley fields, the moisture hung as a spectral, golden mist. The ghost of dawn
battling against the ascending orb of the sun. There would be only one winner
in this skirmish today and, looking at my panting lurcher, I knew we needed to
take our patrol at a gentle pace. This is a glorious time of day to be out with
a gun, or a rod, or a dog. The cusp between night and day sees a flurry of
activity as the wild creatures change shift. Old Charlie stole back to his den,
padding alongside the hedgerow, to do whatever foxes do during the heat of a summers
day. The barn owl made her last sweep around the meadow margins at the same
time as the sparrow-hawk lifted off to start his hunting, one birds suppertime
vole being the others breakfast. Brimstones danced around the purple
loosestrife already, the butterfly worlds earliest risers using that huge
proboscis to drink from the deep flowers. Far out on the stubble the rooks were
feeding on and around the huge, cylindrical bales. The harvest mites are
plentiful but the birds have to work for their meal .. chasing the little
chiggers here and there. Over near the pine coverts, a doe is browsing with her
faun following closely. She has an air of ambiguity around her, even though she
has sensed my presence. Perhaps she knows my feeble little rifle poses no threat?
Or perhaps she knows it's nowhere near November 1st yet?
So we set
off, my hound and I, to cross the shorn field and stalk the sixteen acre wood
for grey squirrels. It should be simple, shouldn't it? To cross a stubble
field? Not for Mr Barnett, who stops to examine everything of interest. The
tortoiseshell butterfly caterpillars munching on weeds. Their striped and hairy bodies warn the passing jay or rook that their flavour could be perilous. The
badgers prints in the loamy soil, showing where Brock has hoovered up those
huge black slugs and done the farmer a service last night. The mysterious jelly
fungus on the fallen branch beneath the lone maple that stands in the field. It
needs photographing, to enable identification, so out comes the camera. The
lurcher glances at me with that air of frustration. We're meant to be hunting,
boss! Eventually we reach the wood and
the dog slips in along the track and lies on his belly on cool, damp grass. I
understand his relief. I'm already melting but rather than undo another button
on my shirt, I do an extra one up. We're now in tick territory and in this
weather they will be abundant, clinging to the ferns and briar leaves, waiting
for a mammalian host. We move quietly through the forest, helped by a sumptuous
damp layer of leaf mulch drenched by last nights deluge. There are only the
windfall twigs to avoid and the dog cracks one before I do. My chance to return
the icy stare and he glances back over his shoulder with a doleful apology.
Back to the work in hand and the lurcher finds the enemy first, his radar dish
ears zoning in on the scrabble of tiny paws. His nose points to a trunk some
thirty yards off and I see the flick of a bottle brush tail snake around the
slender bole until just its tip remains. Then even that withdraws. That 'look'
again, from the hound. I had obviously been neglectful in my duty. When the
grey appears on a branch, squatting, my rifle is slung back over my shoulder
and I'm wiping sweat from my spectacles with a lens cloth. The panting lurcher
is looking at me as though I'm 'gone out'. I feel like handing him the rifle
and saying "Go on! You feckin' shoot it!" We move on. As we near the
end of the path, about to emerge into the fields again, the dog stops ..
bristling. I stop and scan the woods edge, then spot it. It's laid up, neck
craned, watching me. I reach for the camera but that simple movement puts the
young red stag to flight. A handsome sapling and one I'm sure I'll meet again.
Dylan crawls under the bottom rail of the steel gate and I drop my rifle,
safety catch on, against the gatepost. The game-bag is lowered gently to the
other side and I clamber quietly over. As I recover the the rifle and shoulder
the bag I note that the dog is transfixed on something, right paw dangling in a
mark. I kneel alongside him, away from the gate now, and there is a rabbit just
twenty yards away .. frozen. It's seen the dog and now, me. I raise the gun,
sight up through the scope and all I see is a fugue, a blur. I pull my eye away
to check the lens (which is clear) but that's enough movement to make the coney
bolt. Dylan starts to lunge but I call him off quickly. "Nooo!" I'm
still puzzled and, checking the safety is on, turn the gun around to look at
the front lens of the scope. I nearly drop the gun. Sitting, legs akimbo across
the 40mm lens, is a nursery web spider, which must have dropped into the lens
as I crossed the gate. I flicked the little beastie out with a straw husk and
sat back against the gate for a while. The lurcher came to lie alongside me in
the shade. Jeez .. that rabbit was blessed. Saved by a spider, of all
things. But that's how Mother Nature
rolls, doesn't she? I didn't shoot a damn thing this morning, but it didn't
matter. Why? Because I will remember, to my dying day, the rabbit that was
saved by a spider.
Driving to work early this morning I witnessed a sight I have never seen before, despite my decade and a half working and living in the Norfolk Broads. In the distance the flock of large birds beat across the horizon from right to left and I assumed it was skein of geese. My road took me straight towards them and as I approached the bridge over the narrows at Filby Broad, they passed right over me just thirty feet above the X-Trail. I tried to count them, staggered by the number. It was a flock of cormorants, at least eighty strong, heading north towards the large open Broads of Hickling and Barton, no doubt. While used to seeing six to a dozen in the air together .. or gathered on bare lightning-struck trees along the rivers, I have never seen this amount at one time. I understand that a gathering of cormorants is called a colony or flight. Though I would venture another name. A trawl of cormorants. For the collective threat to the fish stocks on Norfolks waterways of this number of birds is considerable, though I doubt catastrophic.
The problem for Phalacrocorax Carbo, a problem which it will never know or understand, is that (like the badger) its continued success as a species also nurtures a growing campaign of antipathy from the genus which can both protect it .. or subdue it. The view from homo sapiens, as always, is subjective. If you love wildlife that hunts efficiently, you'll love cormorants. It doesn't mean though, that you wouldn't control them if asked to. Let me qualify 'subjective'. If those eighty birds I saw this morning landed around the perimeter of Hickling Broad and spread themselves out to fish economically, no-one would give a hoot. Yet if just a quarter of that 'trawl' landed around a shallow, half-acre private fishery where fee paying anglers have struggled to sustain a sporting stock .. there will be calls for culls. Understandably. For this bird can dive to 10 metres and eat 2lb of fish stock a day. Now, let's take 'subjective' a little further? If you are the avian equivalent of a mink (and while soaring across the waterways of Norfolk) you see the choice between sitting on a dead branch, waiting for a passing perch .. or splashing down in an enclosed lake brimming with trout .. what would you do? From my perspective, the bird is just doing what it has evolved to do and equally the angler has just as much right to intervene as the gamekeeper does to stop the fox stealing his poults. Or the arable farmer requesting a cull on wood pigeons. It shouldn't need special licensing. The law should be simple. If the bird has chosen to feed from privately stocked water, it should forfeit its protection.
From cormorants to badgers, where a similar situation exists. The current media attention surrounding potential badger culling due to the spread of bovine TB is mainly vested in the public perception that Brock the Badger is the ursine, father-like figure portrayed in those old fifties style books and cartoons. Like the cormorant mentioned earlier, which used to be slaughtered indiscriminately by our fore-fathers, modern wildlife legislation has drawn a cloak of protection around the badger which will only ever end in disaster. Before I make my case, let me state something clearly. I love to see badgers, as I love to see all British wildlife. Four years ago I was invited to undertake grey squirrel control with my air rifles on a wonderful 1000 acre old-money estate close to my home in Norfolk. Much of my Wildanglia blog is reported from there and the wildlife I have been able to photograph there has been pure privilege. In that first autumn, exploring the estate, I counted four badger setts. One was the largest I (personally) had ever seen. Last weekend, on a deliberate survey of the estate undertaken due to the amount of badger droppings I've encountered recently, I recorded fifteen distinctively different colonies. That largest sett has doubled in size. There are even small setts under the Hall, in the garden escarpment. The estate farms two cattle herds, yet there isn't a move among the estate staff to remove the incumbent badgers. So why are the badgers annoying me? Because they are trashing the surrounding landscape with their delving and foraging.
The estate rides are littered with badger scat .. unusual for a creature that tidies up after itself like a domestic cat (digging a scoop). Hare and rabbit runs have become wide paths. The low under-carriage of meles meles swiftly erodes the vegetation. Their paw prints are abundant around the muddy pools. Most of all though, it is their bullish hooliganism that I resent. The total disregard for habitat. They push over the pheasant feeders, uproot spring bulbs and bulldoze the newly planted saplings to get at the roots and sprigs. Old Brock (and his progeny) can vacuum a partridge nest in seconds. They will dig out a rabbit stop in minutes, devouring the kits .. though perhaps that's a bonus? They are clean animals, for sure. Someone asked me, only today, if I can scent badgers. I can't .. unlike the rank musk of fox which I can smell a hundred yards off. The badger is so meticulous in its domestic housekeeping that I have often recovered the bones and skulls of its dead dragged from the sett along with the old nesting materials. My concern on this estate is for the Old Hall itself. The tunnelling around here lends me to believe that I will motor up the drive one day to find that the whole structure has sunk into the surrounding escarpment.
Like those cormorants, common sense says that there should be recourse, within the law, to balance an over-population of any species if the intention is honest. After all .. that's what Mother Nature does to us.
The
clatter and crash of wheels and cogs turning ceased as soon as I saw the open
view across the morning stubbles. There was nothing wrong with the X-Trail. The
noise was in my head, the turmoil of yet another poor nights sleep. Before I'd
left, the digital weather station in the kitchen told me that (at just 6.30am)
it was 17C and the humidity was a staggering 90%. A legacy of last nights
rainfall .. and the reason for my insomnia. Stepping out now onto the cropped
barley fields, the moisture hung as a spectral, golden mist. The ghost of dawn
battling against the ascending orb of the sun. There would be only one winner
in this skirmish today and, looking at my panting lurcher, I knew we needed to
take our patrol at a gentle pace. This is a glorious time of day to be out with
a gun, or a rod, or a dog. The cusp between night and day sees a flurry of
activity as the wild creatures change shift. Old Charlie stole back to his den,
padding alongside the hedgerow, to do whatever foxes do during the heat of a summers
day. The barn owl made her last sweep around the meadow margins at the same
time as the sparrow-hawk lifted off to start his hunting, one birds suppertime
vole being the others breakfast. Brimstones danced around the purple
loosestrife already, the butterfly worlds earliest risers using that huge
proboscis to drink from the deep flowers. Far out on the stubble the rooks were
feeding on and around the huge, cylindrical bales. The harvest mites are
plentiful but the birds have to work for their meal .. chasing the little
chiggers here and there. Over near the pine coverts, a doe is browsing with her
faun following closely. She has an air of ambiguity around her, even though she
has sensed my presence. Perhaps she knows my feeble little rifle poses no threat?
Or perhaps she knows it's nowhere near November 1st yet? 
So we set
off, my hound and I, to cross the shorn field and stalk the sixteen acre wood
for grey squirrels. It should be simple, shouldn't it? To cross a stubble
field? Not for Mr Barnett, who stops to examine everything of interest. The
tortoiseshell butterfly caterpillars munching on weeds. Their striped and hairy bodies warn the passing jay or rook that their flavour could be perilous. The
badgers prints in the loamy soil, showing where Brock has hoovered up those
huge black slugs and done the farmer a service last night. The mysterious jelly
fungus on the fallen branch beneath the lone maple that stands in the field. It
needs photographing, to enable identification, so out comes the camera. The
lurcher glances at me with that air of frustration. We're meant to be hunting,
boss! Eventually we reach the wood and
the dog slips in along the track and lies on his belly on cool, damp grass. I
understand his relief. I'm already melting but rather than undo another button
on my shirt, I do an extra one up. We're now in tick territory and in this
weather they will be abundant, clinging to the ferns and briar leaves, waiting
for a mammalian host. We move quietly through the forest, helped by a sumptuous
damp layer of leaf mulch drenched by last nights deluge. There are only the
windfall twigs to avoid and the dog cracks one before I do. My chance to return
the icy stare and he glances back over his shoulder with a doleful apology.
Back to the work in hand and the lurcher finds the enemy first, his radar dish
ears zoning in on the scrabble of tiny paws. His nose points to a trunk some
thirty yards off and I see the flick of a bottle brush tail snake around the
slender bole until just its tip remains. Then even that withdraws. That 'look'
again, from the hound. I had obviously been neglectful in my duty. When the
grey appears on a branch, squatting, my rifle is slung back over my shoulder
and I'm wiping sweat from my spectacles with a lens cloth. The panting lurcher
is looking at me as though I'm 'gone out'. I feel like handing him the rifle
and saying "Go on! You feckin' shoot it!" We move on. As we near the
end of the path, about to emerge into the fields again, the dog stops ..
bristling. I stop and scan the woods edge, then spot it. It's laid up, neck
craned, watching me. I reach for the camera but that simple movement puts the
young red stag to flight. A handsome sapling and one I'm sure I'll meet again.
Dylan crawls under the bottom rail of the steel gate and I drop my rifle,
safety catch on, against the gatepost. The game-bag is lowered gently to the
other side and I clamber quietly over. As I recover the the rifle and shoulder
the bag I note that the dog is transfixed on something, right paw dangling in a
mark. I kneel alongside him, away from the gate now, and there is a rabbit just
twenty yards away .. frozen. It's seen the dog and now, me. I raise the gun,
sight up through the scope and all I see is a fugue, a blur. I pull my eye away
to check the lens (which is clear) but that's enough movement to make the coney
bolt. Dylan starts to lunge but I call him off quickly. "Nooo!" I'm
still puzzled and, checking the safety is on, turn the gun around to look at
the front lens of the scope. I nearly drop the gun. Sitting, legs akimbo across
the 40mm lens, is a nursery web spider, which must have dropped into the lens
as I crossed the gate. I flicked the little beastie out with a straw husk and
sat back against the gate for a while. The lurcher came to lie alongside me in
the shade. Jeez .. that rabbit was blessed. Saved by a spider, of all
things. But that's how Mother Nature
rolls, doesn't she? I didn't shoot a damn thing this morning, but it didn't
matter. Why? Because I will remember, to my dying day, the rabbit that was
saved by a spider.
