Country diary
Apr. 1st, 2008 09:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustHaving failed to get out for a walk on Sunday - for no good reason, but lack of planning and just not coping with the shift to Summer Time - we went out yesterday, and walked from Bishop Middleham to Hardwick Country Park, with a detour to Sedgefield for lunch.
We were nearing Sedgefield - we had climbed out of the valley up to the farm, skirted the quad biking course and turned on to the lane - when we saw two men with serious binoculars standing by the edge of a field. So we asked them if they'd spotted something interesting, and the one with the binoculars said that he was just watching the skylarks. Would he have told us if he'd spotted a rarity? I don't know.
But we paused and chatted, about the lovely bright morning, and his companion said that he'd started keep a list of how many birds he saw around the farm buildings. There were sixty or seventy species, and he was surprised at how many and varied they were. There was only one species whose rarity surprised him, and that was the house sparrow. (Yes, said the ornithologist, their numbers had declined dramatically). They used to be so numerous, they covered the ground like a brown feathered swarm; they'd eat the top couple of inches of grain out of the big grain bins. Of course, that was when the farm was farmed; now they didn't grow wheat, just the quad biking and - he waved vaguely at the field before us - the nature thing. But DEFRA made them cover over the grain bins for hygiene reasons, and now he saw hardly any house sparrows - tree sparrows, yes, and thrushes and rooks and magpies, but not house sparrows.
I said that magpies were often blamed for killing off the other birds. When he was a boy, he said, the gamekeepers from the estates used to keep the numbers down. Now he'd got his sons (I think) to shoot them, to keep the numbers down to about three pairs. They were bonny birds, but had to be controlled, and the estates no longer managed the land. The gamekeeper used to have a hut, just back at the corner of the lane - a black hut, and they called it "Black Hut Corner", and he'd never seen inside the hut, though it was there, kept locked, all the time he was growing up.
We were nearing Sedgefield - we had climbed out of the valley up to the farm, skirted the quad biking course and turned on to the lane - when we saw two men with serious binoculars standing by the edge of a field. So we asked them if they'd spotted something interesting, and the one with the binoculars said that he was just watching the skylarks. Would he have told us if he'd spotted a rarity? I don't know.
But we paused and chatted, about the lovely bright morning, and his companion said that he'd started keep a list of how many birds he saw around the farm buildings. There were sixty or seventy species, and he was surprised at how many and varied they were. There was only one species whose rarity surprised him, and that was the house sparrow. (Yes, said the ornithologist, their numbers had declined dramatically). They used to be so numerous, they covered the ground like a brown feathered swarm; they'd eat the top couple of inches of grain out of the big grain bins. Of course, that was when the farm was farmed; now they didn't grow wheat, just the quad biking and - he waved vaguely at the field before us - the nature thing. But DEFRA made them cover over the grain bins for hygiene reasons, and now he saw hardly any house sparrows - tree sparrows, yes, and thrushes and rooks and magpies, but not house sparrows.
I said that magpies were often blamed for killing off the other birds. When he was a boy, he said, the gamekeepers from the estates used to keep the numbers down. Now he'd got his sons (I think) to shoot them, to keep the numbers down to about three pairs. They were bonny birds, but had to be controlled, and the estates no longer managed the land. The gamekeeper used to have a hut, just back at the corner of the lane - a black hut, and they called it "Black Hut Corner", and he'd never seen inside the hut, though it was there, kept locked, all the time he was growing up.
