Over the Farmer's Gate (13 page)

MORE TIME spent on a tractor of late means more time to observe what is going on around you, and this time of observation has led me to the conclusion that it isn’t necessarily that wonderful being a pheasant.

Cocks and hens lead very different lives at this time of year. The hen pheasants have secreted themselves away in hedgerows sitting on eggs. Measuring their success at this, in terms of the numbers of young pheasants that they will actually rear, would suggest that this is a complete waste of time and contributes very little, apart from so many ready meals for carrion crows and the like.

Once or twice a day your hen pheasant will make her way off her nest to look for some sustenance and is promptly sexually assaulted by every cock pheasant within about 50 yards. How they actually survive this period amazes me, but survive they mostly do.

The cock pheasants, for their part, are showing signs of wear and tear. They patrol what they think of as their own territory, but are under constant attack from their neighbours. Most of them are now limping as a result of all the fighting and their beautiful spring plumage is starting to lose its sheen. They spend
three months of the winter being shot at and the next four months fighting. It’s true that they spend quite a lot of that four months trying to make love, but it never seems to lead to any meaningful relationships. I think if I were a cock pheasant I would be smoking about 40 a day by now.

On the shoot next door, the keeper has taken to rearing a particularly dark strain of pheasant, darker even than the ones I call melanistic. A small colony of these has made its way on to our shoot, probably about two miles. The birds keep themselves very much to themselves and seem to live their lives to a higher moral standard than I see elsewhere in the pheasant world.

THE ‘NEW’ world of environmental benefits in farming is starting to make an impact. Several hundred yards of new hedgerow has been planted on this estate during the winter and it is pleasing to see how much of it has established itself successfully.

Farmers and landowners are paid to put in these new hedges, just as a generation or so ago they were paid to remove them, further evidence, if it were needed, of what a mad world we live in. As for me, I see all this going on and shrug my shoulders at it. I’ve never taken a hedge out in more than 40 years of farming. I’m quite proud of that, seems I was right all along.

TURKEYS, it was always said, are compulsively suicidal. If, for example, a young turkey in a rearing shed should die, another turkey would come and lie down next to it. Then another would do the same, and another and another, so that in no time at all there would be a whole heap of turkeys.

Unfortunately, the ones at the bottom of the pile would be suffocated by those on the top, so it would be possible to progress
from one dead turkey to lots and lots of dead turkeys in no time at all.

There is something of the death-wish about all livestock. We had a cow that had a difficult calving recently that left her a bit wobbly on her back legs. We put her out in what we call the stack yard where she could lie under cover should she wish and where there were several patches of fresh grass to nibble. Most importantly she was off the concrete and on natural ground where she could find her feet at all times and recover. I was working up there all afternoon and twice she made her way 30 yards or so to the water trough, ate some of the silage we had put out for her and then, each time, returned to a cosy spot in the corner under the hedge to lie down. Because of the work we were doing, there were no gates to keep her in but given her condition and her obvious contentment with where she was, I was not particularly concerned.

During the night she became more adventurous and she wandered further afield. She declined the opportunity to go into our garden, by two different gateways, as she did the gardens of our two immediate neighbours. She rejected the chance to go into my son’s garden through the small wicket gate, but decided instead to try to enter his garden over his cattle grid where she spent most of the night with her legs firmly stuck between the bars.

Fortunately, we have the kit on farms these days to lift cows out of situations like this without too much trouble. Her back legs, which were a problem after the calving, are fine now, but one of her front legs is now badly swollen.

We’ve only ever had a cow stuck in a grid once before. That was on a Sunday afternoon and the incident occurred on some land we were renting about a mile away. A passer-by came on the cow in the grid and telephoned 999. You might have spotted
by now that we live in a very rural area populated by very rural people, most of whom have a very good idea of what goes on and how things all ‘work’.

The local volunteer firemen ‘scrambled’ to the call. They knew immediately where the field was, and whose cattle were in the field. They also knew which pub my son was in so they drove there first of all, blue lights and sirens busy, collected my son, took him in the fire engine to help them extricate the cow, which they soon did, and then, at a more leisurely pace, returned him to the pub and his pint.

YOU MUST have 40 to 50 hares up on your top ground,’ the keeper told me during one of our Saturday morning chats. He calls them ‘my hares’ because he knows I love to see them about.

I knew there were a lot of hares about, but had no idea there were that many. He has a much better idea than me, because he’s been lamping for foxes lately and the hares sit still there in the spotlight for him to count.

If there are that many, and he’s rarely wrong, I take great pride in it.

I’ve often been told that hares are a good barometer of the wellbeing of the countryside, so using that criteria, all’s looking quite well. And they’re not just any old hares; they all look fat and well.

I often come across four or five playing together, oblivious to the approaching Land Rover, so full of themselves that they will often look you right in the eye before they slope off. A neighbouring tenant has a different view on hares and phones the landlord’s agent on a regular basis complaining about hare numbers. It takes all sorts!

Quite what damage they do to mature arable crops I don’t
know, they are more likely to be grazing the short grasses on the field margins. But ‘my’ hares could be getting too numerous for their own good.

I drove around the stock and the fields on Saturday morning. It is one of my favourite jobs and it suited my plans the next day, the Sunday morning, to go around before breakfast. It had rained hard in the night and as soon as I went off the hard road onto the track and the field margins I could see the tracks of a four-wheel drive vehicle that had travelled there since I had the previous evening. I was able to follow its marks all around my land and it was quite a tour. I’m good at reading the signs, I even found where they’d got stuck and had to have another go. (I’m probably an Apache Indian reincarnated as an impoverished dairy farmer.)

I was concerned about who had been about. The keeper usually travels about on his quad bike and has a four-wheel drive vehicle as well, but a quick call on the mobile soon determined that it wasn’t him.

The hares didn’t behave as if someone has been ‘having a go’, you can soon tell, but someone could have been checking to see how many were about. A few years ago a gang used to go up on the top, hare coursing, perhaps they’d been back to have another look. At the moment the keeper shoots about three or four a year strictly for the landlord who will talk eloquently about the delights of jugged hare.

I’M NEVER quite sure of the right word; the word I’m looking for is litigious. I’m trying to find a word that best described the society we find ourselves in. It describes what some people call ambulance chasers, the people who appear on adverts on our television with: ‘Have you had an accident at work?’

Of course I have, who hasn’t, it’s a part of life. When my son
broke his ankle ice-skating last winter there were two ‘suits’ there getting him to sign disclaimers before the ambulance arrived, and who can blame them? This blame culture has manifested itself in a new way, one that will affect the countryside.

Apparently there are vigilant council employees out there, scrutinising roadside trees. The story goes like this; your council employee spots a tree with a couple of dead branches, it could be a large dead branch which could be dangerous and in need of removal, or it could be a tiny bit of dead branch, about a foot or so long.

A letter is sent to the owner of the tree, questioning the safety of the whole tree and giving the owner 28 days to do something about it, putting the responsibility for any future accidents firmly onto the owner.

The owner of the tree usually takes advice from a tree expert along the lines of ‘Is this tree safe for ever?’ Well no-one in his right mind is going to say ‘yes’ to that. Around here there are 26 healthy oak trees marked up for felling with red crosses on them. There is an established paper trail of passing the buck that ultimately ends with the tree being cut down. If a farmer were to fell 20 trees somewhere it would probably lead to an outcry. But for Health and Safety, it’s apparently OK. No-one wants to see anyone injured by a falling tree, or bough, especially me, but this is all a bit over the top. Where’s the commonsense, where’s the balance?