Not everyone likes insects and we tend to have little awareness of them, save for those that drink nectar or blood. Some are delicately beautiful, some frighteningly hideous. More than a million species are known (25,000 in Britain) and perhaps five million more may exist unknown.

They first appeared more than 300 million years ago and their biomass vastly exceeds that of humans: about three quarters of all animals are insects, although the total population in Britain has been falling alarmingly.

They are astonishing masterpieces of miniaturised creation, their tiny, six-legged, three-part bodies capable of feats of survival, strength, flight, orientation, organisation, fecundity and quite possibly sentience that are hard to appreciate, let alone understand.

Most insects hatch from eggs into larvae of often unappealing kinds and so they may remain for years, periodically moulting into larger exoskeletons called cuticles. They emerge, transformed, from their final moult into wondrously intricate creatures, usually four-winged and compound-eyed, able, according to type, to fly, dig, swim, build, hunt, navigate or fight and desperately keen to mate and create successors.

Insects have no internal bones, lungs or active blood circulation, relying on passive oxygen transfer through hair-lined openings and various tubes within their haemolymph-filled bodies. Some make sounds. Their brains are partly in their heads — processing brilliant vision, antennae input and eating — and partly in decentralised ganglia elsewhere, which means that a beheaded insect may survive for a day or two until it starves.

More than half are vegetarian, most are potential food for other animals and many eat each other. Insects cannot grow bigger than they do because of their inability to absorb more oxygen. Millions of years ago, there was more oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere — 35% compared with 21% now — which enabled them to be larger. The shedding and regrowth of their carapaces also renders them periodically unstructured and helpless.

Their tiny size and light framework means they are proportionately much stronger than large animals, most of whose strength is needed to carry their substantial bodies. The biological physics of this, the square-cube law — a cross-section of insect muscle is relatively large compared with the mass it supports — is well understood by experts.

Insect wings, wafer-thin membranes of tissue powered by muscles working at the edge of biological possibility, beat in some cases at 1,000 times a second, faster than nervous systems can operate.

‘It is quite impossible to overlook the importance of insects,’ emphasises George McGavin, former curator at Oxford’s Museum of Natural History, one of Britain’s leading entomologists and an infectiously enthusiastic guide to the subject, who warns without hyperbole that ‘they are essential for the welfare of our planet’ to keep the ecosystem functioning.

He also observes that research indicates they probably feel pain, although not quite as fish, birds or mammals do. As the examples that follow demonstrate, we might consider ourselves much more accomplished than insects, but this could be a misconception. What is clear, however, is that, although we need insects, they do not need us.

'Only 2in long and lighter than a silk handkerchief'

After hatching, dragonflies spend up to five years underwater as carnivorous larvae, moulting a dozen times and eating prey such as tadpoles. Eventually, they climb a reed, unzip their larval skin and, perhaps with a frisson of joy, open two pairs of folded wings and transform into elegant, swift, airborne hunters with 360-degree vision, capable of reaching speeds of 40mph, hovering, moving sideways, backwards or vertically.

They occasionally catch hummingbirds in the US. Males often mate when flying in tandem with a captured female; if they land, he will fastidiously endeavour to empty her of any sperm she may already have acquired before supplying his own.

Dragonflies have quite astonishing range: globe skimmers (rare in Britain) are only 2in long, lighter than a silk handkerchief and can fly 3,700 miles at altitudes of up to 18,000ft.

'Strength wise, it's the equivalent of a carthorse carrying a whale'

Beetles, in more than 350,000 varieties — 4,000 in Britain alone — constitute 40% of all insects. The sturdy dung beetle, invaluable for tidying up the planet, can manoeuvre 1,000 times its own weight, the equivalent of a carthorse carrying a whale.

Their front wings form hard protective shields (elytra) for the back ones, which fold neatly below, enabling what Sir David Attenborough calls ‘rough tasks’, including digging into earth or wood. Elytra also enclose and retain enough air for some beetles to scuba dive. The metallic-green tiger beetle runs so fast that it outpaces its vision, having to pause to check where its prey is.

Stag beetles, Britain’s largest, are specialised for wrestling rivals with huge mandible ‘horns’. Fireflies and glow worms (both beetles) are bioluminescent to attract mates, the former producing flashing signals when aloft, the latter, flightless, a steady Earth-bound glow.

'A human athlete matching this could leap across Park Lane'

Grasshoppers can long-jump 20 times their own length — a human athlete matching this could leap across Park Lane. They possess powerful leg muscles and weigh very little, which helps, but also have an ability to wind part of their legs into tension, like a crossbow, which they release to supercharge their remarkable spring. (Fleas, without wings, have some elastic tissue that similarly assists their tremendous jumps: 40 times their body length).

Grasshoppers make sound by stridulation, rubbing their forewings against their hind legs. This insect violin-playing produces different chirping ‘songs’ according to species. It is, if you like that sort of thing, a kind of music, akin to the beguiling summer background of the cicada, a creature that spends up to 17 years as underground larva before emerging in synchronised profusion with millions of others to overwhelm the awaiting hungry birds.

Cicadas possess tymbals — vibrating membranes, natural tambourines — in their abdomens (some moths have these, too). Grasshoppers’ ears are in their abdomens, whereas crickets, their relatives, have theirs set conveniently on their forelegs.

'They can make bridges, rafts, acid and clones of themselves'

Ants are the world’s leading carnivores and constitute 20% of total land-animal biomass. They are essential to the ecosystem and Britain has more than 50 species, although not the fiercest.

Darwin called their brains ‘marvellous atoms of matter’. They possess an endogenous pedometer to record distance and a sort of internal sextant, to take mental bearings of the sun as they move about. Remembering these, they adjust for directional changes made when travelling and can march directly back to their nests. They rarely get lost.

It is difficult to comprehend how such minute mass-produced brains can achieve this— ours certainly can’t. There is prolific evidence about what ants actually do, but less certainty about how these activities are governed. Explanations such as collective intelligence, pheromone secretion, smell, neuron stimulus, genes, imitation or evolution raise as many questions as they answer.

Some ants keep slaves, some garden. Some farm aphids and enjoy drinking the honeydew secreted from their backsides. They can make bridges, rafts, acid and, in some cases, clones of themselves, as well as being able to carry many times their own bodyweight.

'They may recognise a human face and can learn by watching'

After roving in search of nectar to drink, later to be regurgitated as honey, bees inform their fellows where to find a discovered nectar source by ‘waggle dancing’ with varying degrees of pattern or intensity inside the hive. This exercise apparently tells the next patrol where to go.

How do they know how to dance or, indeed, how to interpret such dancing, should they encounter it? Bees have been observed using improvised tools, as chimpanzees do, they may recognise a human face, can learn by watching and probably feel pain —especially when attacked by wasps, from which they evolved.

'May travel 100 miles in its three-week lifetime'

With their nocturnal relatives moths, butterflies are renowned for the colours, patterns and textures of their captivating, seemingly fragile, minutely scaled wings. (The scales are flattened hairs.) However, they can be remarkably energetic. The humble cabbage white, weighing only 0.05oz and with a wingspan of 1½in, may travel 100 miles in its three-week lifetime.

More impressive are painted ladies, weighing less than a gram, millions of which fly at 1,500ft and 30mph to England from North Africa and back, surviving wind, rain and storm, guided by the sun. Richard Fox of Butterfly Conservation calls them ‘sophisticated travellers with a brain the size of a pinhead’.

Moth caterpillars, meanwhile, wrap themselves in silk. This, although ‘little more than insect spittle,’ notes Dr McGavin, is a wondrous substance, both in strength and texture, first exploited in neolithic China. Strands of silk, extraordinarily thin, are as strong as steel of similar gauge, smooth and elastic, too. Ballgowns and fine underwear are gifts from the chrysalis. Britain’s only indigenous silk moth is the emperor. Tiger moths can thwart bats’ hunting radar.

'They construct huge mounds, some resembling Gaudí’s cathedrals'

In Australia and elsewhere, termite communities of hundreds of thousands, focused on a distended queen (who may live to 40, kept productive by a tiny, energetic consort), construct huge mounds, some resembling Gaudí’s cathedrals, others large gravestones. These may be 20ft high, with much deeper basements, and are air-conditioned with chimneys, vaults, passages and nurseries. How this is achieved, in the dark, by minute, deaf workers, remains unknown.

'May live without their heads for several days'

The unpopular cockroach can tolerate extremes of temperature and may live without food for several weeks, air for 45 minutes or their heads for several days. They have high radiation resistance and would probably survive atomic war.

'Champions of fecundity'

Fruit flies are champions of fecundity, producing up to 26 generations in a year, and are invaluable for medical research because 70% of our genes have fruit-fly equivalents.

Aphids, meanwhile, reproduce parthenogenetically (no sex required), some-times supplying overwhelming quantities of themselves — only to be consumed by ladybird beetles, which will eat their own offspring when they finish the aphids.

This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

There are two key moments in the year when wood pigeons can be enjoyed to their best advantage. In the breeding season, our largest and heaviest pigeon performs an impressive aerial display. The bird’s flight is strong and direct, but on these occasions an individual surges forward high above the trees, then rises dramatically with more exaggerated beats, so that the upper wings often come together above the back in a loud, feathery clap. This achieved, it then sails down in an open-winged glide to repeat the manoeuvre, sometimes over and over.

The second moment is as much a signifier of season, although it comes earlier, at a point of transition from winter to spring. It is when the ivy berries finally ripen into thick black clusters amid the evergreen foliage. Wood pigeons love these life-saving fruits, which appear at a time of food scarcity sometimes called ‘the hungry gap’. If the ivy crop is good, the birds return to feast on them for days. They get so engrossed that they can lose any wariness and to reach particularly lustrous bunches they will clamber almost upside down, with white-barred wings outspread for balance.

In these contorted postures, the pigeon’s colours are vivid against the neutral background: the vinous breast, the deep almost bluish slate of the back and the iridescent lozenge at its neck, shining green.

Wood pigeons may be embedded in our sense of the British countryside, yet they join the Unloved Birds’ Club for much the same reason that consigns nine other species to the list. Quite simply, it is a matter of success. Wood pigeons have flourished in the 21st century, with their numbers hugely increasing from some three million pairs to an estimated 5.2 million today. There is barely a 10km census square in these islands, even in the treeless north of Scotland, where the birds don’t now breed.

They are almost entirely vegetarian and seldom aggressive. On the contrary, they routinely fall victim themselves and are a food source for predators, particularly sparrowhawks, goshawks and peregrines. They can even be taken by carrion crows.

Wood pigeon success isn’t founded on belligerence, but on adaptability. A wood-dwelling species, it will — if necessary — lay its eggs on open ground. Wood pigeons capitalise where natural foods are abundant. On moorlands, for instance, they feast on bilberries, then on the orange fruits of rowan trees. They survive equally in inner cities, where they regularly attend bird tables.

The bird’s capacious crop allows it to clean up in double quick time and, for these reasons, it can be an unwelcome — and expensive — garden visitor. Yet wood pigeons are seen at their deepest disadvantage, at least in the eyes of farmers and arable growers of all kinds, when their numbers are at a maximum after the breeding season.

In peak periods, there may be as many as 15 million wood pigeons in Britain, which equates to something like 8,000 tons of roving, flexible, hungry birds in search of grain, fruit or agricultural greens. They can be a scourge on allotments, raiding brassicas and beans even in peoples’ gardens. Farmers can suffer significant losses to their crops, ranging from oil-seed rape and peas to fruits of almost any kind. The bird can be shot on licence and the national bag is estimated at 3.6 million, many of which are eaten.

The wood pigeon may have an undisputed place in the Unloved Birds’ Club, but that it also feeds us is surely a mitigating factor. Pigeon breasts produce dark, rather livery meat that many judge delicious. They are widely sold and are occasionally prized on restaurant menus. This source of food is now unique among our gamebirds in one specific sense: the wood pigeon population flourishes without the slightest planned assistance from us.

There is one last element that might influence our final judgement on the species. Wood pigeons have a lovely, soft, crooning seven-note song, which continues as a drowsy chorus late into August and long after all other birds have ceased to sound. It is, therefore, a creature that appeals to our senses of hearing, taste, and sight — perhaps we can learn to forgive them a few pilfered greens.

This feature originally appeared in the July 22, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In the past few years, 110 UK councils have declared ‘a Nature emergency’. If those worthy declarations could be backed by one meaningful change, then rethinking our relationship with insects would probably deliver the single biggest uplift in our environment.

Insects represent at least a quarter of all wild species in these islands. Almost all of the flowering plants in Britain — in fact, most of the 340,000 species known worldwide —are dependent upon insects to complete their reproduction. This has been true for 100 million years and it means the very greenness of the planet is a byproduct of insects.

The fertilising services of these creatures are also of huge economic value for humankind. It is calculated that insect pollination accounts for every third forkful of food we put in our mouths, from apricots to courgettes and the coffee in our cups to the apple in our pie. In total, that specific function has an estimated value of $400 billion a year worldwide.

We should note, however, that this is probably as nothing compared with insects’ additional roles as the recyclers of nutrients and of biodegradable refuse. We need pollinating insects and not only the much-loved, if over-emphasised, honey-bee.

Pollination is performed by an enormous variety of insect types, including moths and beetles. Chocolate is produced courtesy of flies and we owe our tomatoes to bumblebees. All of that vital, life-giving work is free of charge, too.

Insects are so much more than their utilitarian ‘assets’, however. Butterflies, such as the blue morpho, are among the most dazzlingly beautiful creatures that have ever existed. Their diversity is breathtaking. There is a stick insect in China that can grow to the length of an adult’s arm and yet fairy bees are so small that five could line up end to end on a finger nail.

Named insects represent half of all documented life forms and their numbers are mind boggling. For every human, there may be as many as 2.5 million ants. By biomass alone, ants can represent four times more than all the mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians in an area of rainforest.

No one has been more eloquent about our indebtedness to insects than the late American entomologist E. O. Wilson. His best corrective to our sense of hubris is his observation that: ‘If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.’

More succinct, however, was his summary of their centrality to life on Earth. Insects are, he wrote, ‘the little things that run the world’.

This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

I recall vividly sitting once with the acclaimed plein-air artist Kurt Jackson in his adopted Cornwall. As he worked, he kept looking intently back at the sunless Atlantic horizon. ‘Grey,’ he suddenly burst forth, ‘it’s such a beautiful colour!’ I can already hear readers asking: grey? For those who need convincing of its extraordinary aesthetic impacts, I recommend the sight of herring gulls flying over snow-covered fields.

The birds seem to gather the light in their underwings — ‘like candles in the night’ was how Henry David Thoreau described the effect. Yet the grey on their upper wings acquires an almost ethereal quality and it glistens and sparkles more intensely than the snow itself. Our ancestors knew this aspect, because when they named the herring gull they made it Larus argentatus, which means ‘ornamented with silver’.

In some ways, the beauty of herring gulls is at its most impressive when the birds gather in flocks above the city refuse dump. Back and forth goes the enormous bulldozer blade, driving the great multi-coloured tides of rubbish, and over everything the silver-winged gulls hover and rise and fall, feasting on our abundant waste. The birds thus reclaim our excess as a thing of natural beauty. Ironically, it is these adaptations made by a seabird to a world dominated by our species that has brought it into disrepute.

A good example is the herring gull’s change of nesting habits. It once bred almost exclusively on coastal cliffs, but in the early part of the 20th century it made a double shift from seashore to inland localities and from rock-face to rooftop.

The pioneers of the new habits began in towns such as Dover in Kent and quickly adopted a suite of settings amid factory tops, churches, chimneystacks, aircraft hangars and hotels, but also domestic houses. The behaviour then passed from town to town and long since travelled inland to major cities, including London.

One of the problems arising is that herring gulls make noisy neighbours. The birds are famous for an extraordinary vocalisation called the ‘long call’ when an adult begins with head facing downwards. The sound is one part hysterical wail, one part manic laughter, but, as it reaches the emotional climax and maximum volume, the bird throws its head high over its back. It is magnificent to see and to hear, albeit not perhaps at 4am.

Add to this the copious guano from the adults and chicks, then the stale food and huge stick-and-seaweed nest choking your gutter with debris, and it’s understandable why rooftop herring gulls are not always welcome. The birds can then literally add injuries to insult, because people passing below are viewed as possible threats to their offspring. Like all good parents, the adult gulls will defend their genes, sometimes swooping on the humans unawares.

Rooftop nesting by gulls has been a cause célèbre for some cities such as Gloucester, where the colony is more than 2,000 pairs, although the number comprises mainly lesser black-backed gulls. Alas, the choice of nest site is only one in a string of complaints. Gulls have been accused of killing small dogs, of brazenly walking into seaside shops and helping themselves to snacks, of routinely scattering the contents of rubbish bins across the streets and — heartlessly — snatching ice cream from the hands of small children.

MPs have made speeches in the House of Commons, warning of ‘gull wars on our high streets’. In Berwick-on-Tweed, vigilantes were reported to have taken matters into their own hands and shot gulls. Reminding people that herring gulls make grey beautiful may not cut it as a counter argument.

However, what about the fact they are now red-listed in Britain, having suffered massive declines? Despite wide perception that the birds have prospered by coming into our towns and cities, the switch in lifestyle is starting to look like necessity. Gulls are essentially sea-going birds.

Yet the 1960s coastal population has fallen from 286,000 pairs to 130,000 today. It has probably remained constant for several decades, although this apparent stability disguises the extent to which the species is now dependent upon roof nesting. We may yet have to learn to live with the herring gulls among us.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on July 15, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The raven has so many superlatives attached to its name that the bird is almost a creature apart. It is the largest member of the crow family worldwide. It is also among the heaviest songbirds on Earth. Of avian species in our hemisphere, it is the most widespread — from the icebound lands well within the Arctic Circle to 1,400ft below sea level at the Dead Sea.

Perhaps more than anything else, it is a bird more steeped in human story than most. With the chicken, dove and eagle, the raven is an archetype for our imaginations: to the indigenous peoples of America and Asia it was a kind of trickster god woven into their creation stories of the Sun, the Moon and of humanity itself. For all this exalted status between our ears, real-life ravens out in the British wilds have an altogether less certain place.

In the 19th century, the birds were reviled and persecuted until they had been exterminated in all but the mountains and upland moors of western Britain. No longer. From these old redoubts, the corvid with the pickaxe bill and deeply resonant ‘cronking’ call began a revival this century. Ravens have spread to lowland counties and a 2016 census suggested a national figure of 10,000 pairs, more than double the population in the 1990s and almost certainly now an underestimate.

The species had long survived on the rugged coastlines of Cornwall and Devon, but it made a steady advance through Sussex and Kent and into East Anglia. In all those areas, you can once more see them perform their extraordinary breeding displays, when an airborne bird rolls over momentarily on to its back to fly upside down.

Unthinkable in the 20th century is the appearance of ravens in London. When people mention ravens in the capital, we can no longer be sure that they mean the ceremonial bird that has long been on display at the Tower.

As I’ve claimed the bird as the ultimate source of story in Britain, I cannot omit a wonderful raven tale from Derbyshire. The species was extinguished in the 1850s and remained absent until the 1980s. Yet, when the birds returned to nest in the Peak District, they chose as their first site an old limestone crag that had always been known as Ravencliffe Cave.

Ravens had thus closed the circle and, more than 130 years after they had been lost, returned to a place named in their honour. With the raven’s remarkable recovery, how-ever, have come less welcome stories.

The bird has an intimate association with death and the old Welsh name cigfran means ‘butcher crow’. It denotes an ancient taste for carrion, although it is worth highlighting that ravens are omnivores. ‘From a worm to a whale’ is a famous summary of their diet. On occasions, this catholicity is known to include young lambs and even adult ewes and newborn calves.

Licences have been issued periodically to control ravens where the problem is intense, notably in Wales in 2015 and in Orkney the following year. The latter campaign, spread across several seasons, led to 124 ravens being killed. In 2025, nine different landowners on the islands sought to cull a further 30 birds. However, not all such planned operations gain approval.

A similar licence sought in Perthshire, partly to protect ground-nesting waders, including curlews and lapwings, from the perceived risks of ravens, was challenged and turned down.

The problem is that ravens aren’t a clear-cut threat to livestock. Studies in western Scotland, examining the impact of crows and ravens upon sheep, revealed that three-quarters of lamb carcasses taken by the birds were already dead or so weak at birth they were unlikely to survive. Even in an age of the species’ heavy persecution, Lt-Col Ryves, in his Bird Life in Cornwall (1948) suggested he had witnessed ravens feeding peacefully among sheep for decades and never seen a single attack.

What we do know is that issues can arise. Ravens can be problematic. The risks have increased with the recent resurrection in raven fortunes. Yet the bad old days of knee-jerk prejudice and systematic extermination will never return again.

This feature originally appeared in the July 8, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

If the Unloved Birds’ Club has an apex predator in its midst, then it is surely this giant of a beast. The white-tailed eagle is our largest raptor and among the biggest of all British birds. Everything about it is impressive: the huge talons, the deep hook-tipped beak, the loud, almost goose-like hacking call, but, above all, the square-ended 8ft wingspan.

Equally noteworthy in a separate sphere is its glorious flexibility as a predator. It will catch and devour animals ranging in size from lemmings or small chicks to large wildfowl. It will rob other raptors of their kills. It will — we should note — tackle the seven biggest species on the unloved bird-list, including herring and great black-backed gull, cormorant and greylag goose. For this predation alone we should perhaps learn to love it.

Yet, white-tailed eagles are not too regal to enjoy carrion, from whales and reindeer to strandline fish. Ironically, it is those clean-up operations of dead animals that have caused the species more trouble than any other part of its lifestyle. The birds were once found from the English South Coast to the outer Scottish isles, but were driven inexorably to the margins of Britain by an unofficial coalition of shepherds, landowners and keepers. The issue propelling that long history of persecution was an old charge against the eagle as a killer of livestock.

By 1918, the last ever individual was eliminated and eagles were absent as breeding birds until a reintroduction campaign was initiated on the inner Hebridean island of Rum in 1975. The organisers could never perhaps have imagined how successful their eagle project would become. Today, the breeding total is put at about 150 pairs, most of them concentrated in the Western Isles, with strongholds on Lewis, Skye and Mull, but a new initiative launched on the Isle of Wight in 2019 has restored the species to the South Coast.

These patient works may have brought back a magnificent eagle, but they have also resurrected the accusations against them as killers of sheep. Several members of Parliament have called for an eagle cull. A bird released on the Isle of Wight was poisoned by rodenticides at a Dorset site in 2019 and last summer saw a highly publicised charge by a Hebridean farmer that eagles may have taken five foals from his herd of Shetland ponies.

Few would deny that a predator so flexible in matters of diet will readily take a free meal. It is when its status as a consumer of dead animals crosses a line to make it a killer of live, healthy stock that the problems arise. However, let’s first consider the case of the mysteriously disappearing Shetland foals.

Environmentalists argued that it is nigh-on impossible for an eagle to perform such a feat: the ponies weigh two to five times as much as the bird. No matter how broad those barn-door wings, an eagle could never fly off with prey weighing up to 37lb.

Searches around nests of the nearest breeding eagles corroborated this first-principle physics: no pony remains were ever found. Yet the story garnered widespread media coverage founded purely on supposition. Like almost all of the Unloved Birds’ Club controversies, it is not a bird problem: it is a human problem. Entrenched positions on both sides make it so difficult to achieve any kind of compromise.

Let’s try a little thought experiment. A solution could be found if eagles were allowed to reach their full carrying capacity in the British Isles. Then, if a ‘rogue’ bird were proven to take livestock (such as lambs and piglets), we could act, if necessary, even eliminating that individual. The eagle population would be secure and the farmer could sleep at night.

Environmentalists would probably be horrified by such proposals, but no more than their opponents by a vision of eagle numbers climbing to their full breeding extent in Britain. At present, we should note that our 150 pairs represent only a fraction more than 1% of the European total. Thus both parties continue arguing, entrenched and siloed, with no agreement in sight. Given the slow, steady rise in eagle numbers in Britain, the disagreements over them will continue. Perhaps all we can say is, watch this space.

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

A male common pheasant in full breeding regalia is arguably one of the most colourful sights in all of British birdlife. When two cocks spar in spring, facing up to one another in prolonged tail-twisting jousts, they are nothing less than spectacular. It’s not only their weird, fleshy crimson goggles, imperial purple ear-horns and emerald gourgets, but their exquisite repeat rows of elliptical black tips to all the orange-cinnamon breast feathers and the longitudinal black-and-buff margins to their neck and shoulder plumes.

Male pheasants appear exotic and, in some senses, they are out of place amid the subdued tones of our woodlands. Both parts of the bird’s scientific name, Phasianus colchicus, refer to its true origins, which stretched right across Asia from China to the Caucasus. Yet Europeans acquired their first captive stock at the western edge of the bird’s range, in an area on the eastern shores of the Black Sea with the ancient name of Colchis.

Medieval aristocrats were entranced by the bird’s Asiatic beauty, although few could have anticipated the pheasant’s gradual triumph over the sporting imagination, to the point where it had a central place in shaping the very lands of Europe. The bird was repeatedly introduced and acquired self-sustaining populations from Norway to Bulgaria. It was also taken around the world to North America, Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii. In this country, records of pheasants may go back to Roman times, but certainly date from the Norman period.

Now, it is indubitably the gamebird of choice. Its exalted place has been much enlarged since the late 20th century, partly because of the parallel population declines of our other native sporting birds — red and black grouse and grey partridge. For all the pheasant’s long heritage in these islands, it remains a non-native species, classiied by officialdom on Category C, together with other aliens, such as parakeets and mandarin ducks.

There is also a kind of unofficial sniffiness among birdwatchers. Twitchers almost scrupulously ignore pheasant behaviour and the birds barely feature as a subject for study. Those attitudes were humorously captured by one wag, who once saw a pheasant being washed briefly into the sea as it stood on a rocky Scottish shoreline. ‘This is probably the only known case,’ he wrote, ‘of a pheasant doing something interesting.’

In some ways, he could not have been more wrong. Like the duelling cock birds evoked in my opening scenario, there are now two opposed pheasant camps jousting with one another. At issue is the birds’ present-day abundance. Hand-reared poults, bred in pens, fed from grain hoppers and released in the summer in time for the start of the shooting season in the autumn have become the largest single species’ contribution to our entire avian biomass.

Even placing a figure on the numbers now being liberated has itself become part of the heated pheasant debate. Estimates range between 25 and 60 million, depending on the claimant’s position, however, an authority accepted by most sides has proposed that in 2019, 47 million were released.

Pheasants are largely vegetarian, yet switch to a mixed diet in spring and summer. The exact proportion of animal matter may fluctuate, but not the charge that large numbers of released pheasants are having major local effects on invertebrate populations.

A study in Belgium looking at the impact of pheasant releases upon reptiles — slow worms, lizards and snakes — has been taken as proof that they are having disproportionate and adverse effects on overall biodiversity. The pro-pheasant lobby is reluctant to go so far and prefers to stress the positives in terms of employment and economic stimulus to our rural places.

Another side issue is the grisly matter of road-kill. A minimum estimate for mortality on our roads is 2.8 million pheasants. One consequence is the food bounty that the squashed carcasses provide for foxes. Opponents of pheasants argue that it is the shooting community — ironically, those least sympathetic to old Reynard — that is providing the biggest boost to fox numbers. These animals are then driving fox predation of other beleaguered ground-nesting birds, such as curlews and lapwings.

Soar point: Phasianus colchicus is a sporting bird that continues to polarise opinionErnie Janes/naturepl.com Aristocrats were entranced by the bird’s Asiatic beauty

This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

As England begins its World Cup campaign tonight, aiming to end 60 years of hurt, I am once again wondering what makes a great football team? It’s an interesting question. You naturally need players and individuals bursting with talent, but more than that it’s necessary to work together on the pitch, with resilience, trust and coordination. Easier said than done, especially for this England team in recent years.

One place that England could look to for inspiration might be wildlife itself, which takes great pride in, well, resilience, coordination and trust. What then could football learn from nature? It seemed like a good question and one that our friends at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) were more than happy to answer. They identified six lessons from the world’s most iconic species that Thomas Tuchel and The Lads could use to bring it home. Here’s hoping they’re reading this.

The high press: African Wild dogs

No team can succeed by sitting back and letting the other team just play, so a high press is important. African Wild dogs, although sadly endangered, are the benchmark for an intense press. Reaching speeds of 44mph, they work as a pack, chasing prey together, with each dog taking its turn at the front to keep the pressure on.

Defensive shape: Emperor penguins

A good attack will win you games, but a great defence will win you championships, so the saying goes. Staying organised and in a coherent shape is the essence of a strong back four, although for emperor penguins, that might resemble a ‘back thousand’. When temperatures in the Antarctic drop, they form a close huddle, conserving heat and shielding themselves from the wind. Each penguin takes a turn on the outside of the huddle, before rotating back inside.

Coordination: Chimpanzee

Teamwork isn’t just moving together as one, but also communicating clearly and effectively, anticipating things and telling your teammates what’s going to happen before it happens. In the wild, chimpanzees are some of the most intelligent animals around, signalling to other members of their group and using vocal calls during hunts to help catch prey.

Set pieces: Humpback whales

Arsenal basically used them to win this year’s Premier League, so we’ll just have to accept that the set piece is as important to winning football games as it has ever been, even if it rendered the whole sport basically unwatchable. In the wild, fine proponents of the set piece could be humpback whales, which work together to herd fish with spirals of bubbles before surging upward to feed. Known as ‘bubble-net feeding’, the technique shows what a well-drilled move can achieve. I also reckon a humpback whale could make a pretty handy goalkeeper.

Patient build up: Marine turtles

You can’t attack all the time in football, and with temperatures in the USA, Mexico and Canada forecasted to be 30º or higher, conserving energy is key. Step forward our marine turtles, who cross entire oceans through steady, purposeful movement. They are capable of high speed when necessary, but their movement is typically defined by endurance and efficiency.

The exception: Cheetahs

Every team needs a star. Who will it be for England: Bukayo Saka, Harry Kane, Morgan Rogers, Jude Bellingham or someone else? Sometimes, to win the big games, you need individual moments of brilliance. The cheetah is a solo hunter, the fastest land animal, and its unique agility and speed that gives it success.

Kemi Badenoch said it was ‘a silly thing to do’, Nigel Farage termed it ‘crackers’ and the RSPCA demanded incredulously to know where the ‘pigeons, rats and gulls’ were, but at least one person was pleased about our new banknotes featuring illustrations of native British wildlife. When asked about Winston Churchill’s face potentially being replaced by a badger, his granddaughter Emma Soames proclaimed ‘lucky badger!’ Well said.

Cash may no longer be king, but who or what appears on the front of our notes has been a topic of hot contention among the British public recently. The change will mark a shakeup from the illustrations of famous faces, such as William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, that have been on our £5, £10, £20 and £50 notes since 1970. The one human to remain will be Charles III — maybe cash really is king, after all.

At Country Life, we think this no bad thing. What better to celebrate than our native wildlife, which adds so much value to our countryside, beaches and even cities. The public have until July 3 to make up their minds so, without further ado, here are the Country Life team’s bids for the creatures they want creeping onto our cash.

Bottlenose dolphin

My friends had posters of boy bands on their walls; I had posters of dolphins. Specifically, the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) — which is one of the largest dolphin species, growing up to four metres long. I remember thinking that a dolphin — an animal we, or at least I, typically associate with far-flung places and warm waters — couldn't possibly inhabit the UK because it was oh so exotic. In fact, they thrive in places such as the Moray Firth in Scotland, Cardigan Bay inWales, and off the coasts of Cornwall and Yorkshire.

In adulthood, I've had the privilege of seeing and even diving with bottlenose dolphins and other dolphin species. Like dogs and horses, they possess magical, therapeutic abilities. Sadly, I've never seen one in the UK — despite years of trying. The biggest threats they face in our waters are entanglement in fishing gear, chemical pollution and heavy boat traffic, but surely the beaming smiles they bring to the faces of everyone who come across them makes them worthy of all the good PR they can get.

— Rosie Paterson, Digital Content Director & Travel Editor

Brown hare

Nothing, simply nothing compares to the brown hare (Lepus europaeus). Associated with the moon, springtime and witchcraft — how else could our ancestors explain its magical qualities? — the hare is the big dude of small mammals. It doesn’t need to hide from predators, it’s too cool for that, but blitzes them with a burst of speed that nothing else can match while throwing in moves that Houdini could only dream of. Blessed with runway looks and more mythology than Merlin, the hare is freedom. It’s the true spirit of the land.

— Mark Hedges, Editor in Chief

European hedgehog

What’s more British than a European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus)? Spiky and standoffish on the outside, but completely charming once you get past its prickly exterior. Not only are they cute (a good enough reason on its own to appear on our money, in my opinion) but they also handily gobble up a whole load of gardeners’ pests, such as beetles, caterpillars and slugs, to boot. Sadly, the European Hedgehog is now Red Listed in Great Britain, meaning it's at risk of local extinction. So, let's not only get this brilliant creature on our banknotes, but back in our gardens too. My personal choice of model for our future cash would be my favourite hedgehog of all time, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.

— Lotte Brundle, Digital Writer

Grey seal

Long before I knew there were seal species native to Britain, or understood quite how important grey seals (Halichoerus grypus) are to our marine ecosystems, I simply thought they were the most adorable creatures I'd ever laid eyes on. So much so, in fact, that I once pinched a small seal toy from the Natural History Museum on a Year 1 school trip — a letter of apology swiftly followed, of course, but nothing was going to come between me and that seal. Britain is home to around 40% of the world's grey seals, making us internationally important custodians of the species. Highly intelligent and curious, they have been observed learning from one another and displaying distinct personalities. I'd support a return to cash if it meant being greeted by those whiskered faces every time I opened my purse.

— Florence Allen, Social Media Editor

Atlantic puffin

It was on the Isle of Lunga that the first puffin shot past my ear, with a beak full of sand eels, its wings fizzing like a badly hit golf ball. There were thousands of them, marching in and out of their nests, staring out to sea, flying back and forth endlessly. They are so small, yet so richly coloured and expressive, you could be forgiven for thinking you could sit down and chat to one.

I had wanted to see a puffin for years. The flora and fauna of the UK is rich and varied, but you could not call it colourful — apart from Fratercula arctica. These essential and fearless seabirds are as close as we get to exotic, and for want of a better word, they are absolutely adorable. They are, as all good things tend to be these days, at risk, as their habitats and food sources strain under the pressure of a changing climate and overfishing. What better way to remind ourselves of their plight and their brilliance than by putting them on the very thing that is likely leading to their doom: money.

— James Fisher, Digital Commissioning Editor

Barn owl

Barn owls (Tyto alba) are the supermodels of the strigine world. Their long legs, white undersides and beige plumage — unchanging throughout the year — mean they are the envy of other owls; and, indeed, of birds more generally. They swoop and glide with a heart-shaped face that could melt even the coldest of souls while being one of the only nocturnal creatures shortlisted for our bank notes. Since nightlife accounts for £112 billion of the economy (more than sport), I think we ought to show some respect. The barn owl can be the disc jockey's representative on polymer.

— Will Hosie, Lifestyle Editor

Basking shark

Hedgehogs? Baby seals? Please, we're not selling schmaltzy postcards here: this is an opportunity to do something different with our banknotes. Something surprising. Something, well, cool. And as everyone knows, sharks are nothing if not cool.

They're also — rather surprisingly — British. The waters off our island are home to dozens of different types of shark, all of which have incredible tales to tell, from the mako shark, which can swim at 45mph, to the Greenland shark, which can live to be 400 years old. So, rather than taking the obvious Beatrix Potter-inspired route of fluffy and cute, let's go with a creature that is less-celebrated, but just as wonderful.

The basking shark (cetorhinus maximus) is the second largest fish in the ocean, a plankton-eating gentle giant, and a British success story: the marine-protected area created for them off Orkney has helped stabilise a creature that had been hunted almost to extinction.

— Toby Keel, Digital Director

Buff-tailed bumblebee

The lazy, baritone buzz of a bumblebee is the merry little voice of an English summer garden. The buff-tailed variety (Bombus terrestris) is a commendable early riser — among the very first bumblebees to emerge from hibernation (sometimes as early as February). He’s an unassuming, portly little gentleman, going about his important business of being a super pollinator without fuss (buff-tails are famously docile and mild-mannered). He’s also the UK’s largest bumblebee. Most importantly, he’s a cheerful little fellow, exceptionally tough in cold weather, and highly adaptable, happy to nest in a variety of unusual locations, from rodent burrows to compost heaps. As William Blake noted, ‘the busy bee has no time for sorrow’.

— Agnes Stamp, Associate Features Editor

The pine marten, red fox, common kingfisher, Eurasian curlew, great spotted woodpecker, white-tailed eagle, Atlantic salmon, common frog, emperor dragonfly and marsh fritillary butterfly are also contenders. To have your say on which native animal should appear on our banknotes cast your vote here before 11.59pm on July 3, 2026.

Some may be shocked even to find starlings among the Unloved Birds’ Club, given their striking appearance: they are among our most beautiful garden birds. The dark plumage is copiously speckled with hundreds of white or gingery arrowhead spots, set off by a deep iridescent gloss that means the whole bird shines purple or emerald depending on the sunlight.

More recently, starlings have come to be recognised for a beauty that surpasses even these surface aesthetics. When flocks come to roost at dusk, they create protean shapes across the evening sky, murmurations that are championed as one of the great events in all of Britain’s natural world. What, exactly, can the species have done to earn our displeasure?

Ironically, it is those night-time gatherings that are the source for a less positive attitude. If starling roosts persist for weeks, they can leave large quantities of guano, sometimes toxic enough to kill the roost trees and underlying vegetation. These products once gave rise to a set of old dialect names for starlings, including ‘shitlegs’, ‘stinker’ and ‘scootie’ (Scots dialect for bird poo).

If eight million birds roost above your city home each night, as they did in Rome earlier this century, what they leave on your cars and pavements and gardens can make the matter feel personal. It was for exactly these reasons that, until recently, many British city councils broadcast the alarm calls of peregrines or other raptors to deter starling roosts. Flocks of the birds once gathered nightly in London and were enjoyed by commuters for bringing a sense of something wild and beautiful to the heart of the metropolis. On one occasion, however, the unthinkable happened, when so many birds landed together on the hands of Big Ben’s tower that this quintessence of all things British slowed temporarily, causing the clock to lose 4½ minutes.

Another aspect of starlings can arouse offence. They are essentially grassland inhabitants, which moved into urban or suburban settings when their numbers expanded with the intensification of agriculture in the 19th century. The birds adapted beautifully to town life, nesting in our roof eaves and finding food in the streets or on rubbish dumps, but also increasingly on garden bird tables.

Starlings in feeding mode are intense and their dagger-like bill can create a charge of aggression. I recall my parents’ distaste for the birds as they mobbed the fat balls. They were simply too successful, accused of out-competing all the others. Even worse are the occasions that they raid the feeding trays full of grain and cow-cake for stalled herds in the farmyard. A farmer friend complains bitterly of the cost of this form of starling larceny.

If anything could redeem the bird, it’s the remarkable voice. The song is an intense, free-form medley, full of jumbled whistling, wheezy, clucking and popping sounds. Into this starling stream of consciousness come perfect mimetic fragments of owl, buzzard and curlew calls. The range of these vocal borrowings is astonishing and includes horses, goats, cats, dogs, foxes, frogs, even captive gibbons. Most impressive is its ability to reproduce anthropic sounds, including the human voice; a Roman emperor apparently had a pet bird that could recite Greek and Latin.

The full spectrum of its borrowings from urban life makes the starling one of the great modernist composers. Items recorded include the alarms from reversing buses, the electronic bloop of car locks, the beeps at pedestrian crossings and phone ringtones of all kinds, not to mention workmen’s wolf whistles.

Through all this mimicry there are clear signs of their authors’ mischievousness, as well as their deep intelligence, but one starling motif that I heard of recently should surely bring a smile to the lips even of their worst critics. It was the reproduced music of children all laughing as they played together on a trampoline.

This feature originally appeared in the June 10, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Since humans began farming, birds have proved the gravest threat to crops of all kinds, both during sowing and at harvest time. ‘In autumn they cause great damage in the vineyard,’ noted the 14th-century German scholar Konrad von Megenberg; the subjects of his complaint were starlings.

Throughout the ages, solutions of varying effectiveness have been proposed. The Roman poet Virgil bemoaned the damage done by geese and recommended bird snaring even on festive days; late-13th-century Italian writer Pietro de’ Crescenzi advised protecting ripening grapes through the use of a tower-like contraption in the centre of the space with cords to connect it to all parts of the vineyard, manned by a young boy pulling the strings.

The most lasting and culturally significant method of crop protection is, of course, the scarecrow: a clothed, sometimes hatted, straw-filled guy on a wooden framework, intended to resemble the farmer or a farmworker to frighten away any birds. A relic of our pre-industrial past, it has long since been practically replaced by more efficient and effective methods; yet, in cultural terms, it endures.

From Austria to Brazil, Egypt to Japan, this rickety guardian of the field has been quirkily ubiquitous. Scarecrows are mentioned by the Andalusian writer Abu’l-Khayr in the 11th-century Book of Agriculture and, in Measure for Measure, Shakespeare writes: ‘We must not make a scarecrow of the law,/Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,/And let it keep one shape, till custom make it/Their perch and not their terror.’ Here, the scarecrow serves as a metaphor, a readily comprehensible image: the device reveals not only that scarecrows were widespread by this date, but that they were also not hugely effective.

The precursor to the scarecrow was a boy, who would hurtle about a field flailing his arms and shouting ‘shoy hoy’ in an attempt to scare away the birds (this may have informed the archaic alternative name ‘shewel’). The 16th-century English poet and farmer Thomas Tusser went a step further, suggesting stone throwing or arrow shooting, too, and advised readers: ‘No sooner a sowing, but out by and by,/With mother or boy that Alarum can cry:/And let them be armed with sling or with bowe,/To skare away piggen, the rooke and the crowe.’ Although some sources suggest the Ancient Egyptians set up scarecrows in the fertile farmland along the banks of the Nile, in Britain, it is thought that the scarecrow came about as a result of the Black Death: with labour in short supply, farmers could no longer spare someone dedicated to scaring away birds and so turned to distinctive, sometimes eerie dummies.

In succeeding centuries, the scarecrow became commonplace across rural England and was exported far beyond. Region by region, his name varied as much as the individual figures’ appearance: in Somerset he was called ‘mommet’, in Devon ‘murmet’, in Yorkshire and Lancashire he was a ‘mammet’ and in Berkshire a ‘hodmedod’. There were, of course, scarecrows on the grain-growing prairies of the USA: who could forget the one with the head ‘full of stuffin’ who capered along the Yellow Brick Road with Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz? By the time the film was released in 1939, however, scarecrows’ days were soon to be numbered: an increasingly mechanised agricultural sector after the Second World War had far less use for them.

Yet, that wasn’t the end of the story. In 1935, The Children’s Hour on BBC radio introduced young listeners to cantankerous scarecrow Worzel Gummidge. He proved so popular that he would go on to appear in children’s books by Barbara Euphan Todd and several television series from 1953. A later one would star Doctor Who’s Jon Pertwee (in 1980, he sang a pop hit in character) and contributed to suggestions of scarecrows’ unsettling, otherworldly qualities. The series was shot in an almost psychedelic light, with Worzel himself sporting an alarming array of heads, including a mangelwurzel, turnip and a swede. Worzel and his wife, Aunt Sally, with her feverishly rouged cheeks, enjoyed success across the globe, giving rise to Worzel Gummidge Down Under, filmed in New Zealand.

Scarecrows have taken on different characters worldwide. Ting mong in Cambodia, armed with wooden rifles and spears and clad in old helmets, are in fact effigies meant to protect households from spirits that might bring illness into the home; they gained popularity during the Covid pandemic. Those of Poland are no less intimidating: the term for scarecrow, strach na wróble, carries the alternative meaning of ‘bogeyman’.

In parts of Japan, the scarecrow has long been cast in a more spiritual role, revered as a sacred guardian of the field and honoured accordingly with small gifts. Indeed, in the Shinto religion, Kuebiko, a god of wisdom and agriculture, is depicted as a scarecrow. Today, in the near-deserted village of Nagoro on the island of Shikoku, artist Tsukimi Ayano — called the ‘Scarecrow Mother’ — has populated the once bustling streets with 200 kakashi. Japan is rapidly urbanising, with one of the largest ageing populations in the world: as young people move away to cities and elderly residents die, thousands of villages are left to crumble ignominiously, leaving nothing but empty houses and derelict infrastructure. Thanks to Ayano, in Nagoro the scarecrow has become more than a bundle of rags crudely arranged to resemble a person: it stands now as a symbol of the difficulties faced by rural communities.

Perhaps things haven’t changed so much after all, and these haunting figures are once again spiritual guardians of the landscape and their communities.

This feature originally appeared in the June 3, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

To celebrate World Ocean Day on June 8, and inspired by a delightfully silly TikTok trend, I've been considering an important question: which marine animals look most like man's best friend?

I strongly recommend taking all comparisons with a pinch of sea salt.

Seal = Staffordshire bull terrier

There's something undeniably Staffie-esque about a seal. The big soulful eyes. The smooth, silky appearance. The compact, muscular build. Even the expression is similar — a mixture of optimism and the vague hope that somebody nearby might have snacks.

Great white shark = English bull terrier

With their smooth egg-shaped heads, tiny triangular eyes and prominent noses, the resemblance to a great white shark is surprisingly strong. The crucial difference, of course, is that one is a famously affectionate clown of the dog world and the other is a three-tonne apex predator.

I'd happily come face-to-face with an English bull terrier every day of the week. A great white shark, rather less so.

Swordfish = borzoi

The longest snoots in their respective worlds.

The borzoi's famously elongated head has become the subject of countless internet memes, but the breed was originally developed by Russian aristocrats to hunt wolves. The swordfish, meanwhile, can reach speeds of more than 95km/h thanks in part to its streamlined shape.

Dolphin = Labrador retriever

Both seem permanently delighted to see you. Both are intelligent, sociable and eager to interact with the world around them. Labradors consistently rank among Britain's most popular dogs and dolphins are one of the few marine animals known to play simply for fun.

I think they'd make great friends.

Walrus = French bulldog

A comparison based largely on what experts might describe as 'squishy faces'.

The walrus's magnificent wrinkles, impressive whiskers and permanently unimpressed expression feel remarkably French bulldog-like. Both also have a tendency to look simultaneously grumpy and charming.

Elephant seal = bloodhound

It's all about the nose.

The male elephant seal's inflatable proboscis can reach nearly 2m in length and produces the extraordinary roaring noises used to impress rivals. The bloodhound's nose is equally impressive in its own way, possessing around 300 million scent receptors — among the highest of any dog breed.

Pufferfish = Pomeranian

Small? Yes.

Round? Also yes.

Capable of dramatically increasing in size when feeling threatened? Absolutely.

The pufferfish inflates with water; the Pomeranian simply inflates with confidence. Both somehow manage to occupy far more space than their physical dimensions would suggest.

Beluga whale = Samoyed

The resemblance between a beluga whale and a Samoyed isn't so much about appearance as it is about vibe. Both are bright white, endlessly friendly-looking and appear to spend their lives smiling. Belugas are often described as the most expressive of all whales, thanks to their flexible facial features, while Samoyeds are famous for the trademark 'Sammy smile' that gives them their perpetually cheerful appearance.

Manatee = basset hound

With their substantial frames, gentle nature and wonderfully unhurried approach to life, manatees and basset hounds feel remarkably alike. Both have a certain soft-edged charm, complete with droopy expressions, ample rolls (always a compliment) and a tendency to look as though they've just woken from an exceptionally good nap with neither appearing to be in any particular rush to get anywhere.

Dumbo octopus = Boston terrier

Both have enormous expressive eyes, compact bodies and an uncanny ability to look like animated characters brought to life. The dumbo octopus, named after the elephant-like fins protruding from either side of its head, may be one of the cutest creatures in the ocean. The Boston terrier is certainly one of the cutest dogs.

Whether you're a dog person, an ocean enthusiast or simply someone who enjoys comparing animals that have no business being compared, here's to celebrating the remarkable creatures that make both our oceans and our lives infinitely more interesting.

Mention the words ‘street pigeon’ and most would probably summon images of those lovely chest-pouting citizens found in every urban park, with their metallic green-and-purple neck patches, strutting the pavements and adding a touch of the natural world to the busiest metropolis. There is, however, a second, less-loved version of the same animal. It is the unwelcome interloper that breeds under bridges, inside derelict factories or on the girders above public structures — bus and train stations are favourites— and which hangs around litter bins for ketchup-soaked tidbits.

Many of those pigeons have dull grey plumages that seem the very essence of urban grime. Everywhere they gather to breed or roost is further splattered, sometimes heaped, with copious quantities of white, stone-corroding, acidic guano. Even worse, the bird occasionally decides to leave its calling card directly upon us. The cost to councils for deterrent measures against feral pigeons — the endless rows of vicious metal spikes along window ledges and sometimes the deployment of captive hawks by specialist handlers — is probably the largest public expense devoted to thwarting any avian pest in Britain.

Yet, however much we might dislike the birds, infamously described as ‘winged rats’, there is a moral bind we must consider before judging them. If feral pigeons have become a nuisance, then we made them so. The species is so ingrained in our notion of urban life that we easily overlook its extraordinary cultural history and its anomalous ecology.

It is, in one sense, an entirely wild bird. Its ancestors originated with a coastal or cliff-dwelling species that we now refer to by a separate name, the rock dove. However, this and the feral pigeon are genetically one and the same creature, Columba livia. What separates the two is a prolonged history of interference by us. Pure rock doves still exist, keeping to themselves on remote coastal cliffs. Yet, in places such as Fife, there are examples of what are locally called ‘doo cots’: stone structures that were erected to lure rock doves into our control. The practice is thousands of years old and is still pursued in the Middle East. The birds transferred their nests into the dovecote and the owners had access to a triple harvest: the eggs, the young sweet-fleshed squabs and the guano, which was once a valuable fertiliser. It is rich in nitrates and was used for making gunpowder.

There is double irony in that practice, because we long ago recruited the species as a symbol of peace, then pressed it into service to wage our wars. The wild feral pigeons you find in every town are descendants of those formerly domesticated birds. There are yet further sources from when we adopted the Belgian sport of racing pigeons in the 19th century. These extraordinary navigators are famous for finding their way to pigeon lofts from hundreds of miles away. Sometimes, however, they can get lost and those strays are recruits for the urban ‘pest’ population. Homing pigeons were used by medieval Arabs as a key means of state communication across thousands of miles. Pigeon post sounds archaic and inefficient, but it continued into the era of radar navigation.

Occasionally, the exploits of these birds have been passed to posterity. Ponder, for example, a female bird called White Vision. She ditched into the Atlantic off the Hebrides on the night of October 11, 1943, when the crew of a flying boat crashed. Their coordinates were scribbled onto a message, then wrapped around White Vision’s leg. She flew against a force six head-wind until she reached her loft. The handlers found her message, resumed the search and saved 11 crew who had spent 18 hours in the water. For her bravery, White Vision received the equivalent of the Victoria Cross, the Dickin Medal.

Next time you’re in the park being pestered by a pigeon that wants to share your sandwich, reflect that it might be a descendant of the heroic White Vision. What you do know is that the bird at your feet is there because humans once wanted to make use of its ancestors.

This feature originally appeared in the June 3, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The sounds of birds are everywhere at present.

Wherever you go — in a city park, in woods, in fields and on open moorland or simply when you’re lying awake as the light breaks in the morning, trying not to think about everything that is wrong with the world — the birds are singing.

This choral polyphony is at its richest and loudest — and most expansive — at dawn. The dawn chorus has no geographical boundaries in the northern hemisphere, except the oceans. This song wraps right around the terrestrial world; taking a single rough latitudinal line, it unfolds in sequence in Russia — on Sakhalin Island, in Novosibirsk and Moscow — then Minsk (Belarus), Hamburg (Germany) and on to Manchester in the UK as the sun rises. Billions of birds are tuning in, uniting our planet in their music.

Yet there are some anomalies we should tease out. We call it the ‘dawn chorus’, but it does not truly begin as the sun appears. Many species, notably skylarks, grasshopper, sedge and reed warblers, as well as cuckoos, will sing through the night. Others, including robin, blackbird and song thrush, tune in long before sunrise. They begin at this hour partly because song is a double-edged business: it announces, but also betrays the songster’s location — by singing in semi-light, a bird lowers the risks of predation.

Then there is the matter of it being a ‘chorus’. This suggests that the birds pre-plan their contributions. However, the idea may contain more substance than we imagine. The great American sound recordist and ecologist Bernie Krause proposed that, over millennia, each vocalising organism has learnt to share the communal sonic space by adjusting the pitch and timbre of their solo performance to this wider ‘songosphere’. Each, therefore, occupies a slightly separate sound niche deliberately, so as not to interfere with others.

The notion of a ‘chorus’ as a harmonious enterprise also cuts across a central purpose of birdsong. In singing, the individual — usually a male — is proclaiming both its breeding territory and its status as a potential mate. It is a kind of turf war, but expressed through music. One wonders, at this time of international conflict, whether our own species couldn’t learn a thing or two from birds.

The dawn chorus is just about passing its peak, so it is the perfect moment to tune in ourselves (try the Merlin app), before it fades. It isn’t really necessary to know one bird from another — the soft fruity notes of blackbirds from the bell-like tinkling of song thrushes.

It is enough to realise that in hearing it, one is encountering one of the most beautiful fixtures in all Nature and the greatest musical performance on Earth

At a time when public confidence in artificial intelligence (AI) seems lower than usual, a group of scientists at the University of Cambridge has found at least one good use for the stuff.

Using an AI tool known as Tessera, which maps out the country using images taken from space, the team has managed to identify specific sites that might offer habitat for hedgehogs. Tessera captures the landscape in such minute detail that it can glean an individual hedgerow, later using AI to flesh out areas obscured by cloud cover. Chosen places could allow hedgehog populations to thrive.

Experts also believe that the technology might help them identify barriers to hedgehogs finding food and mates. Indeed, in today’s heavily fragmented environment, males of the species too rarely enjoy successful breeding. This is due to roaming ranges (obstacles include housing, new roads and tidy gardens).

To further improve the accuracy of their monitoring, researchers will also attach tiny GPS trackers to some of the creatures to record their movements. Tech does have its uses…

This feature first appeared in the May 27, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

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In some ways, there are two kinds of cormorants. There’s the real bird, the coastal fish-eating species that, at any range, looks black. See them well, however, and you appreciate how the adults have a beautiful oil-on-water iridescence, which shines variously green, blue, bronze brown and purple, depending on the light. Cormorants possess large webbed feet, thick sinuous necks, long hook-tipped beaks and short wings for a goose-sized bird. This all makes it appear heavy in flight, ungainly as it walks and awkward as it gets airborne.

Then there is the cormorant that dwells between our ears. This imagined version is also a dark beast, with a huge appetite for fish and an almost wilful disdain for fishermen, fishing clubs and for lakes or waterways that are expensively stocked with captive-bred fish. Milton anticipated this ill-will when he made the bird an image of Satan in Paradise Lost: ‘On the Tree of Life/… Sat like a cormorant; yet not true life/Thereby regained but sat devising death.’

Unfortunately for fishing folk, cormorants have undergone a range change in the past few decades, with breeding numbers increasing to about 9,000 pairs. The wintering total is put at 65,000 birds, many on inland waterways. That switch by what is usually considered a coastal bird to freshwater places has been triggered by the spread in the UK of Continental cormorants. The subspecies, technically known as Phalacrocorax carbo sinensis, is better adapted to lakes and reservoirs and it is largely birds of this race that have triggered controversy.

Some of the claims against cormorants are rooted in fact. Numbers have grown across Europe and cormorants are supreme catchers of fish. If you see one swimming underwater, it’s astonishing how the bird loses its air-filled feathery bulk and becomes a lithe, almost snake-like organism that can twist and writhe after prey. The species has been recorded to take more than 90 different fish types, from tiny sand-eels to conger eels that are 2½ft long. This prowess is not appreciated by some human competitors, who speak of a ‘black plague’ or ‘black death’ ruining angling.

Cormorants have been illegally shot and poisoned, some with paracetamol crushed inside dead fish. Wilder claims are that each bird takes 6lb of fish daily — six times the average consumption and more than twice the bird’s own weight. Equally questionable is the notion that cormorants injure, but cannot swallow, large fish or that they eat large numbers of small fish and disproportionately deplete the population. What is not in doubt is the background ecology that brings about cormorant conflict.

Anglers want to boost the numbers of their potential prey by introducing captive-reared fish. That artificial increase serves as a magnet for all kinds of fish-eating birds. Some of them, herons and goosanders, as well as cormorants, are inevitably unpopular and clubs seek Government licences to legally kill them. A previous limit to the cull of cormorants was set at 3,000 birds, but fishing clubs have sought to increase the number of legal licences issued for control. That goal received recent support from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, which recommended wider culls to reduce Europe’s total cormorant numbers. All of these moves butt up against protections both in UK law and EU legislation. So far, there is little hope of reconciliation.

One thing that might put the conflict in context is the long tradition of blaming other animals for declines in fish numbers. In Cornwall during the 1920s, thousands of shags were shot. Off the Northumberland coasts, it was young grey seals that were culled. In the 1970s, on a Carmarthenshire estuary, oyster-catchers were blamed for destroying the local shellfish industry. About 10,000 birds were duly shot, only for the cockle numbers to collapse shortly afterwards. Blaming birds for damaging fisheries in a world where four-fifths of all main catch species are judged to be harvested to or beyond sustainable limits is perhaps starting to sound like a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

This feature first appeared in Country Life's print edition on May 13, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

As the Season gets under way this month, Britain’s intelligentsia will descend upon the Hay Festival. I’ve always loved that a glorified book fair on the Welsh borders can morph into our very own Venice Biennale: a who’s who of Life & Arts where Dua Lipa might clink glasses with the Pope. It all began in 1988 with the winnings from a game of Poker; a year later, the festival was welcoming Arthur Miller as a headline act.

Hay has helped to shape the cultural discourse ever since, a cursory glance at its keynote speakers in the intervening decades akin to looking through a time capsule. The gradual addition of certain names and roles within Hay’s governing body reveals the varying concerns of the age: inequality, free speech and artificial intelligence. To Hay’s credit, these concerns tend to stick. No doubt the most recurring, however, is the climate.

This year is no different, although the focus will shift from the more usual suspects (birds, weather and renewable energy) to something more conspicuously bland: plankton. As ever, Hay is on the money. What for years have been mumblings about the ripple-effect of aquatic plants, on everything from global warming to biodiversity, are finally getting their dues. Leading the charge is Vincent Doumeizel, a senior adviser on oceans to the UN Global Compact, whose talk at Hay on May 23 has already sold out. His new book, The Power of Plankton (The Book Social, £19.99), identifies this as the source of all life.

Plankton makes up 90% of the biomass in our oceans. Its myriad subspecies live in suspension, perpetually drifting, unable to work against the current. This impotence is misleading: plankton defines the temperature of the planet, absorbing roughly half our global emissions and converting carbon through photosynthesis. It helps to form clouds — which, in turn, reflect the sunlight — and, where oxygen production is concerned, it outperforms rainforests by as much as 400%.

The trouble is we know little about how it actually works, its species’ microscopic size and geographical spread working against researchers. What we do know tends to raise only more questions: why are there so many subspecies and why does this not beget more competition? Why do some resemble algae, but others look closer to shrimp? A mystery we have solved is this: plankton’s role as a sequester of carbon is effective only when it sinks. The key subspecies here are grouped under the name of diatoms, the number of which is falling in open-ocean regions. That of surface plankton, by contrast, is rising.

Other regions, ruled by different currents, tell yet another story. Perhaps theirs is more positive; although, without further research, conclusions will remain uncertain. ‘If we understand plankton,’ Mr Doumeizel said two weeks ago on the Futureproof podcast, ‘then we begin to understand the biology of our oceans.’ Learning — and funding —starts with conversation. Let us hope this one doesn’t crash too soon after takeoff.

This feature originally appeared in the May 13, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

'There are moments in farming when change feels like a bold decision and others when it feels more like survival. What felt like a leap into regenerative farming has turned out to be more of a signpost,’ says Charles Mann. He is one of several regenerative farmers in the Cotswolds, who combine a passion for restoring the pastoral landscape of centuries ago with an understanding of the challenges growing crops on the brash the area is famous for, a determination to build soil resilience and the intuition of how to balance food production with Nature recovery.

Oxleaze Farm on the Oxfordshire/Gloucestershire border, which he inherited from his father in 1978, was rooted in the conventional practices of the day. ‘Sprays, fertilisers and the pursuit of ever-higher yields were not only the norm, they were the measure of success. It worked, until it didn’t. Perhaps it was a growing awareness of the countryside beyond the balance sheet or a sense that something was missing,’ he reflects. ‘Diversification had already begun, converting old buildings into office lets. Renewable-energy projects followed, enabling those living and working on the farm to enjoy green energy. We planted woodland and hedges to encourage wildlife and paid closer attention to the land itself, rather than merely what we could extract from it.’

In 2004, a poor harvest coupled with dismal prices forced a reckoning. It became clear that the old model — high input, high output — was not as resilient as it seemed, so Charles took what felt like a radical decision and converted to organic farming. ‘We embraced the stewardship and environmental schemes available, not only for the financial support, but because they aligned with our growing belief that farming should work with Nature, not against it.’

Driven by a passion for regenerative farming that came from a realisation that the food system is unsustainable, Jonty Brunyee studied environmental management before undertaking a Nuffield Farming Scholarship and travelling the world looking for solutions — ‘that’s when regenerative farming hit me right between the eyes’. Jonty never thought he would run his own farm, being a fourth son of four, so taking on the tenancy of the National Trust’s Gloucestershire Conygree Farm in 2004 was significant: ‘My aim has been to show that a small regenerative farm can be great for wildlife, carbon neutral, profitable and can feed people,’ he asserts. ‘We have done this by stacking regenerative enterprises that work together and benefit the wider system. It was let as a “part-time farm” (providing enough income for only half a person). Now, four of us work here and run events for our community and fellow farmers. The farm is alive.’

It might be a niche ambition for some, but ‘getting people excited about soil and how to make it healthy is a lifetime goal of mine,’ confesses Annie Landless, manager of Ampney Brook Farm, a regenerative organic farm in Gloucestershire selling beef, pork, venison and vegetables. ‘That and creating a profitable farming business that regenerates soil, is full of life, allows livestock to express their natural behaviours, grows nutrient-dense crops and produces healthy food at scale.’

Her childhood was spent on the family farm rearing orphan lambs, riding ponies and selling organic beef at farmers’ markets with her parents. After becoming unwell with what she thought were food intolerances, she became curious about the source of what she was eating. Moving to London to work for a click-and-collect farmers’ market connecting farms with local customers, she met ‘inspirational people leading the way with what is now called regenerative farming, sharing ideas on improving soil health, biodiversity and selling fresh produce directly to the public. I was hooked’.

Phil Gordon-Jones experienced a similar awakening. Born in Miami, Florida, he fell in love with the countryside when his parents bought a house on a farm in Wiltshire and ended up helping in the grain store, riding in the combine and relief milking. When studying at Cirencester’s Royal Agricultural College, ‘we used to laugh at the few-and-far-between organic farmers with their low yields and thistles growing in their cow pastures,’ he remembers.

However, 12 years as head stockman at Daylesford Organic ‘was an eye-opener, learning about organic farming and growing pastures without the use of artificial fertilisers. It gave me a new view of farming with nature for the future, basing decisions on how it will affect the land’. He now manages Fir Farm, Gloucestershire, a Pasture-Fed Livestock Association (PFLA), organic and regenerative mixed farming business and he is a member of the Cotswold Regenerative Agriculture Accelerator Programme, an initiative for like-minded farmers and advisers wanting to expand their understanding of regenerative and agroecological practices.

‘At Fir Farm, we put Nature and soil at the forefront of every decision we make,’ Phil says. ‘We have ecologists who study bird, plant and bug life and advise how we can make things better. For example, last year, we brought our ornithologist in before cutting the silage; he found skylark nests and we cut around them. I’m sure the neighbours thought I was mad, but the skylarks sat on their nests until the fledglings were ready to fly.’

It is a philosophy that Sam Phillips already subscribes to at Macaroni Farm, a 2,000-acre mixed cereal and beef farm in Gloucestershire that his father converted to organic in 1999. ‘My great-grandfather would shoot 125 brace of grey partridge on a day without putting down reared game because of good farming practice and game management,’ he says. ‘With intensive agriculture and the loss of habitat, artificial inputs and monoculture, grey-partridge numbers plummeted, so we’ve been doing our bit to restore them. Corn bunting, skylark, linnet, yellowhammer and lapwing populations have increased considerably, too, due to our efforts. We even have a resident hen harrier, never seen before on the farm.’ Such successes contributed to him winning the Gold Purdey Award in 2025 in recognition of wildlife and game conservation.

Mark Tufnell has driven similar change at Calmsden, near Cirencester, which his great- grandfather bought and he has farmed since his father died in 1995. ‘Field margins of wildflowers, beetle banks, cover strips, conservation headlands, nesting margins and hedges cut on a two- or three-year rotation provide habitat for farmland birds,’ Mark points out. ‘We’ve seen growing numbers of skylarks, yellowhammers, corn buntings and grey partridges since the programme began. Each year, we do an ecological survey and the 10-year results show an increase in birds, pollinators and rare arable plants, proving Nature recovery can run alongside food production.’

What is evident from each of the farmers is the desire not only to reinstate, but also to elevate. ‘We talk about sustainable farming being the way forward, yet the definition of sustainable is “to maintain at a certain rate or level”,’ says Phil. ‘I don’t want to maintain what we’re doing, I want to improve our soils, increase wildlife populations and rejuvenate the microbiome under our feet.’ Jonty concurs: ‘Simply sustaining is not enough — we must rebuild, improve and enhance if we are going to save the planet and nourish our communities. It begins with soil and biodiversity, then nutrients and water and, ultimately, our landscapes and people. We must farm with Nature, not against it.’

There are five key principles to regenerative farming: minimising soil disturbance, keeping soil covered, maintaining living roots, maximising plant diversity and integrating livestock to stimulate natural nutrient cycles. Annie elaborates: ‘We don’t worry too much about weeds, as they are indicators of what is happening in the soil. We want to see a diverse range of plants with a diverse range of roots feeding a diverse range of soil micro-organisms. In winter, we graze cows outside [negating the need for straw, antibiotics and machinery]; the seeds in the hay residue and manure from the cattle feed a host of insects, birds and soil organisms. In the summer, cows graze through fields of grass, herbs and legumes full of bees, dragonflies and butterflies. We grow heritage and genetically diverse population wheats that grow tall, develop strong root systems and have broad leaves to shade out competition. Our soil and fields are alive and resilient.’

Setting out to plough your own furrow in the regenerative-farming landscape can be a daunting prospect and, as Jonty has discovered, ‘requires a different way of seeing and measuring outcomes. Because we are always learning as it’s so complex, imposter syndrome is real and it can feel isolating and a bit “woo woo” at times’. Charles is relieved that farming friends — who initially greeted his decision with raised eyebrows — have become more accepting: ‘What once looked like an eccentric departure is now part of a broader movement, so conversations that might once have been avoided are now revisited with genuine interest,’ he muses.

However, the sceptics remain. ‘It’s tough being a young woman in a male-dominated environment and doing things differently to “how it’s always been done”,’ Annie says. ‘Setting up multiple new enterprises on the farm means plenty of hurdles and holding your nerve when the neighbours are looking over the hedge.’

There are wider pressures, too. With the recent Land Use Framework, farmers are being pushed to grow more food on less land and won’t be funded through public finance to set aside non-productive land for biodiversity restoration. ‘The majority of the land I farm is of low productivity, so not best suited for high-output agriculture,’ admits a concerned Sam. ‘We’re good at raising high-quality livestock and meat through our mineral-rich pastures and that’s the direction I want to head in over the next 30 years. However, as of January 1, 2027, we might have to plough everything up and try to grow food on land we know we can’t make money out of.’ The thin, stony Cotswold brash that is susceptible to the effects of climate change has been hit hard by recent droughts, as Mark laments: ‘Yields from the past two harvests have been notably poor, so the aim is to secure premiums for the arable crops. Recently, we’ve introduced cover crops to enhance soil fertility and prevent any erosion and nutrient run-off. We’re also using sheep to graze the crops off, before planting spring barley and soil organic matter continues to improve. Ultimately, the two main aims are to provide food for human consumption and improve biodiversity. Both need to occur alongside running a profitable enterprise.’

Optimistically, however, for Sam ‘farmers are the solution’: ‘We can produce food, restore nature, address flood mitigation, capture carbon… but we need the right mechanism to allow us to do so,’ he asserts. ‘We need a cross-party, 20-year food, farming and Nature-recovery strategy; then we can plan accordingly, create a system that suits the land and do something that gives stability for decades. At the moment, farmers don’t know where they’re going to be next year. We simply have to continue to operate best practice and engage with and educate the public as much as possible. I’d put nutrition on every syllabus. If you educate people young, that will have a knock-on effect in terms of supporting farmers, who are producing food that’s got great nutritional value. Everyone needs a farmer three times a day: breakfast, lunch, dinner.’

The wider public is already reaping the rewards of the innovative seeds these farmers have sown, from Annie selling veg and meat boxes through the Ampney Brook website so local customers can order and collect from the farm or nearby collection points to Jonty developing networking projects, such as Emergent Generation and RegenDeep, and Mark hosting the Gloucestershire Root Fruit and Grain Society for its annual farm walk and tillage event.

As for those ensconced in it: ‘Our children have grown up with the farm, not only as a backdrop, but as a constant presence — a playground, a place of work and, gradually, a shared responsibility,’ Charles states. ‘They’ve lived through its organic transition and now bring their own ideas, whether that’s new approaches to land management, fresh inspiration for diversification or a different way of communicating what we do.

‘Farming today is less about maximising output at all costs and more about balancing productivity and stewardship, business and beauty, tradition and change. My father might have raised an eyebrow at some of the directions we’ve taken, but I like to think he would have recognised the underlying aim. It’s comforting to realise that what once felt like long-term decisions are merely part of a longer story.’

This isn’t simply an ongoing narrative, however. By taking bold steps, yet treading carefully to forge their own paths, these farmers have created a guidebook out of which others can take a leaf — a regeneratively grown one, at that.

Have you experienced climate change first hand, I ask Bertie Gregory — the 32-year-old Emmy and BAFTA-award-winning wildlife cameraman. ‘Yes, 100%. You can’t get away from it. Every shoot I go on, the seasons are out of whack, the animals are out of whack. Every scientist and guide you talk to says: “It used to be more predictable.”’

Bertie — the name behind the headline-making shot of a polar bear leaping into a pod of beluga whales in the BBC’s 2019 Seven Worlds, One Planet —is quick to admit that he has benefited hugely from the natural world, but also keen to point out that he’s genuinely passionate about it. The companies he works for — including the BBC and National Geographic — offset the carbon footprint of their productions and he is personally funding the planting of a forest in Dorset. ‘These stories need to get told. If they aren’t told, people aren’t going to know about them.’

Apart from climate change, the cameraman and sometime presenter is working to get the trophy hunting of wolves banned in British Columbia. ‘It’s all well and good if we care about wolves saying “we need to stop climate change”, but if there are no wolves left when we’ve solved that problem [climate change] in 100 years or so, that’s going to be a real shame.’

Bertie has been taking pictures since the age of 12 — initially using a compact camera, surreptitiously stolen from his father, to photograph his fish tank and the wildlife around his home. ‘A lot of my friends thought I was a complete freak,’ he recalls without irony, but ‘being able to show them places they had walked past every day without realising what was there and seeing them genuinely excited — it gave me a real buzz.’

One zoology degree and 2 1⁄2 years assisting National Geographic photographer Steve Winter later (Bertie left his own graduation early for the job), he’s upgraded the compact camera for a half-a-million-pound gyro-stabilised system — which he used to film Sir David Attenborough walking across a beach in Iceland for the opening sequence of Seven Worlds, from a helicopter.

He calls the experience of working with Sir David ‘spine tingling, simply because he’s such a pro and so lovely in real life. You know the cliché line people say “never meet your hero”? Those people haven’t met David Attenborough’.

The cameraman also specialises in drone photography and works underwater, where ‘you still have to be very close to your subject, so you tend to have very intimate, adrenaline-fuelled encounters’, and, since our interview, has transitioned to a camera-facing role

Some might say too close for comfort.

On a shoot with Steller sea lions, off the west coast of Canada, one playful animal repeatedly pulled the scuba regulator out of Bertie's mouth. In the Canadian sub-Arctic, he was lucky enough to film a harp seal pup (below) taking its first dip — something they do only 10 to 14 days after birth.

‘It was the situation we were hoping for, but we never thought we’d get it. It was a dream idea. I got my dry suit on and the camera and underwater housing, slipped into the water and waited. I spent 1 1⁄2 hours with the mother and pup. In that period, the pup went from being this flappy little mess that kept trying to sit on my head to something that looked like a proper seal.’

A good thing, too, given that harp-seal mothers abandon pups immediately after weaning (at a maximum of two weeks, it’s the second-shortest weaning period of any mammal) to hunt and fend for themselves.

Has he ever felt in danger when working? ‘Ninety-nine times out of 100, it’s humans that have caused the dangerous situation. The media would have you believe the natural world is a really dangerous place and wild animals are out to kill you, which is rubbish. We don’t put ourselves in situations where animals might be defensive or aggressive towards us because that would be irresponsible.’

What about filming those hard-to-watch moments? ‘If humans are responsible for the bad thing you’re seeing, it’s a difficult challenge.’ He elaborates: ‘If you film it and don’t help, you could argue that, although that animal is going to suffer, filming it and getting people’s eyes on it all around the world might mean avoiding many more of that species meeting the same fate.’

He has, however, come to the conclusion that, if mankind is behind the problem, he will ultimately intervene.

Bertie’s work has taken him all over the world, including his current favourite — South Georgia in the South Atlantic Ocean. It took a week, on a 50 foot sailboat in rough seas, to reach the island, which has one of the highest concentrations of wildlife on the planet.

He’s normally on location for months at a time and spends only five to six weeks of the year back in the UK. Anyone hoping to follow in his footsteps, he says, should visit the temperate rainforest-covered mountains and coastline of Vancouver Island, off Canada’s Pacific Coast — think killer, grey and humpback whales, bears and wolves. ‘By going there, you are helping to put a value on these animals, so they are worth far more alive than dead. And that goes for many places.’

There was no back-up plan, he discloses, and it’s only now that he realises how lucky and rare it is to find something you’re so fanatical about at such a young age. ‘It’s hard work, but it doesn’t really feel like work.’

This feature originally appeared in a 2020 issue of Country Life. It has been updated for clarity.

‘Secrets Of The Bees’ and ‘Cheetahs Up Close’, among other show hosted by Bertie Gregory, are available to view on Disney Plus.

One of the most delightful programmes on recent television has been Sam & Ade Go Birding (Channel 5), in which Samuel West, who plays the prickly Siegfried Farnon in All Creatures Great and Small, takes a friend, fellow actor Ade Edmondson, birdwatching.

It turns out that Samuel, an RSPB ambassador, is an obsessive birder who records sightings in minute detail daily, goes off on tangents and knows a lot of fascinating facts. Ade, the perfect foil, cheerfully admits to knowing little about avian life and declares contentment at communing with a robin.

They view awesome clouds of pink-footed geese swirling over the marshes of Holkham, north Norfolk, at first light, chase a rare warbler in west Cornwall and listen for bitterns amid the reedy Somerset Levels.

Friendship, wine, cooking, grief, jokes, companionable silence and open-mouthed wonder are involved. It’s gentle: the two actors resist declaiming or the temptation to bounce around like noisy Tiggers.

Reviewing the latest bird books in this week's issue, naturalist and writer Mark Cocker, who begins a new series this week on less popular members of the avian world, reflects why birds, the ‘all-flying, all-singing dinosaur descendants’, capture hearts and are loved disproportionately over other species.

Sir David Attenborough, who appears on our Frontispiece this week in honour of his 100th birthday (May 8), has been responsible for not only fostering this with the most mesmerising birdy footage — chubby puffins, cadaverous vultures, featherweight hummingbirds — but for enlightening us about an extraordinary spread of species.

Like Samuel, Sir David had thespian relations, a cultured upbringing, an early fascination with natural history — in his case collecting newts — and grasped the bigger environmental picture and Man’s irresponsibility at a young age.

His background in general programme-making shows in the musical cadences of his speech and clear diction; there is a perpetual hint of humour, the avoidance of excitable shouting and, crucially, knowing when to stay off camera.

The watcher is irresistibly drawn in, whether Sir David is musing on copulating geckos, chimps pulling funny faces, a pack of killer whales about to massacre a porpoise or the speed with which foxglove petals open.

The camera work is, of course, outstanding, but the brilliance — the USP — is in the subtle combination of wonder and reality, however soothingly delivered.

He doesn’t hold back on the fact that Nature in all its splendour is ‘red in tooth and claw’, that life in the animal kingdom is a brutal survival of the fittest. Creatures predate each other and don’t always know when to stop. Their lifestyles can be as hard to watch as they are spectacular.

Thank you, Sir David, for bringing this blend of exhilaration and education into our sitting rooms, and Happy Birthday.

This feature originally appeared in the May 6, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

A study appeared in The Lancet Public Health last month — an occurrence that rarely elicits national attention — that found our pollen season is now nearly two weeks longer than it was in the 1990s. The timing was propitious: bunged-up noses and itchy eyes are as common in spring as an item on Nicky Haslam’s annual tea towel and a nasal overtone now supersedes any conversation in which one takes part, or on which one eavesdrops. Perhaps our adenoidal Prime Minister thinks it’s all a case of imitation and flattery, although tomorrow’s elections will show the reality is anything but. Sorry, Sir Keir: it is just hay fever.

The chatter on the topic these past few weeks, however, suggests the tide of ignorance may finally be turning. Tackling the cause of hay fever has often ranked low on our list of priorities, the condition deemed either too unsexy or too indulgent to warrant much attention. For decades, the professional recommendation has been simply to take an antihistamine and grow up; meanwhile, town planners and landscape architects have been busy finding ways to mitigate the damage caused by allergenic trees. The first step, to the uninitiated, is to quit planting male trees over their female counterparts, which trap pollen from the air. Moving into summer, the key is to keep grasses short (a trade-off for rewilders who favour wildflower meadows) and finally, come autumn, one has to target the weeds.

Trees remain our primary concern. Historically, town planners have preferred to plant male trees because these are tidier and easier to maintain, producing no seeds, fruits or pods the way female trees do. These at least appear to be less of a nuisance to citizens. Yet hay fever continues to get worse: an estimated 13 million to 18 million people suffer from the condition in Britain (roughly a quarter of the population), with a 2021 poll of 7,000 people finding that 37% had developed symptoms for the first time within the previous five years. In the worst-case scenario, victims can suffer from angioedema, chronic sinusitis and asthma. With that, the quest to change what and how we plant has become galvanised.

How, then, should we weave more female trees into our landscape? Going further still: what more do we stand to gain from them? London’s green-minded mayor has previously hinted at planting an urban jungle along a soon-to-be-pedestrianised section of Oxford Street, one of many environmental projects in a city where several boroughs are expected to vote Green. This is fertile ground for new female trees, the fruit of which might also support more avian life — and, in certain cases, yield crops for local citizens. It’s a win on all counts. Now, the real work begins.

This feature originally appeared in the May 6, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In the opening chapter of John Buchan’s Sick Heart River (1941), the main character Sir Edward Leithen is described as feeling tired of life. A friend tries to engage his interest and asks if he has heard the curlew that year as he ‘usually make[s] a pilgrimage somewhere to hear them’. We are told that, for northerners, curlews, not cuckoos, are regarded as the ‘heralds of spring’.

This brief reference to curlews is poignant. Leithen, who turns out to be terminally ill, is a recurring hero of the Buchan adventure stories, a lawyer and amateur ornithologist, considered among all Buchan’s action men to be the one to most closely resemble his creator in his solitariness and love of nature and wildernesses. The book’s tone is unusually reflective for the master of ‘shockers’ and the manuscript was finished shortly before Buchan’s death in 1940. He would have understood the curlew’s duality of meaning in folklore and literature — a creature that, for some, had life-affirming attributes and yet, for others, stirred gloom and foreboding.

Robert Burns was among those for whom the curlew (Numenius arquata), Britain’s largest wader, was a source of joy. In a letter of 1789, musing on human sensitivity to passing incidents in Nature, the Scottish poet confided that: ‘I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the Curlew in a Summer’s noon, or the wild, mixing cadence of a troop of grey plover in an autumnal-morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of Devotion or Poesy.’

Burns would have heard these long-billed, immensely shy, easily disturbed birds during explorations of the heathery upland moors. Curlews demonstrate immense faithfulness to their breeding grounds by returning to the same sites — primarily moors and farmland edges in northern and western Britain — year after year to pair off and breed (nests are laid in scrapes on the ground), rearing their young throughout the lengthening days of spring and early summer. It is at these times when, gliding and wheeling overhead, their bubbling trills and plaintive cries of cour-lee! cour-lee! have a vibrant, uplifting quality. ‘A moor without a curlew is like a night without a moon, and he who has not eyes for the one and ear for the other is to me a body without a soul,’ an observer told the Northumbrian naturalist George Bolam, who repeated it in his immense study Birds of Northumberland and The Eastern Borders (1912).

Yet the most evocative description of the spectacle of calling curlews was supplied by a Londoner, Henry Williamson in Tarka The Otter (1927). Williamson’s observations for the book were undertaken on Exmoor, between the Torridge and Taw rivers. ‘The birds fly up from solitary places, above their beloved and little ones,’ he explained. ‘And float the wind in a sweet uprising music. Slowly on spread and hollow wings they sink, and their cries are trilling and cadent, until they touch earth and lift their wings above their heads, and poising, loose the last notes from their throats, like gold bubbles rising into sky again.’

Yorkshireman Ted Hughes was another curlew admirer. He read Tarka The Otter as an 11-year-old boy and later asserted that it ‘gave shape and words to my world, as no book has ever done since’. It is fitting that he later settled in Devon, near the River Taw. A hunter in his Dalesman youth, Tarka helped Hughes develop a broader sensitivity towards Nature and the curlew featured in several poems. To Hughes, the bird had ‘a wobbling water-call’ and was a ‘wet-footed god of the horizons’ (Curlews in April, 1979). However, in an earlier poem The Horses (1957), out before dawn in ‘evil air’ and ‘frost-making still-ness’, Hughes found ‘the curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence’, tapping into the idea of it as a representative of eerie desolation.

In autumn and winter, curlews gather in flocks in coastal fields, on rocky ledges or muddy estuary edges and in those bleak, isolated landscapes their cries may assume a ghostly quality. W. B. Yeats spent part of his youth roaming the remoter parts of the Irish coast around Sligo, developing a sensitivity to bird sounds. In He Reproves The Curlew (1899), from one of his earliest collections The Wind Among The Reeds, the mournful sound of a curlew served only to amplify his suffering from romantic rejection: ‘O curlew, cry no more in the air,/Or only to the water in the West;/Because your crying brings to my mind/passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair/That was shaken out over my breast:/There is enough evil in the crying of the wind.’

William Yarrell was the first British naturalist to compile a list reporting on the status of our avian species, but his History of British Birds, published between 1837 and 1843, judiciously mixed fact and anecdote for a wider readership. He noted that in Scotland the curlew was called a ‘whaap’ or ‘whaup’. This, according to Jamieson’s Scottish Dictionary, was a name for a goblin ‘supposed to go about under the eaves of houses after nightfall, with a long beak’. There is a further hint of the diabolical in a scene in Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Black Dwarf (1816), in which Hobbie Elliott, a superstitious Borders farmer, rambles the haunted Meikle-Stane-Moor, fearful of ‘o’worricours [goblins] and lang-nebitt things about the land’. He says he once heard a fairy whistling in the moss ‘as like a whaup as ae thing could be like another’.

Sinister or not, curlews are in the proud position of being one of the few species mentioned in one of the earliest known poems in domestic literature. The Seafarer was an elegy whose meaning fascinated J. R. R. Tolkien. Found in The Exeter Book, an anthology of Old English poems thought to have been compiled in the 11th century, it is now accepted to represent the thoughts of a man who has experienced the dangers and deprivations of seafaring life, yet feels a yearning to return to it. In pondering past oceanic discomforts, in contrast to the comforts of life on land, he recalls the loneliness that gnawed at his heart when all he had for company, apart from the roaring of the seas was, variously, ‘the song of the swan, the cry of the gannet and the voice of the curlew instead of the laughter of men’. Curiously, elsewhere in the poem, the cuckoo, usually seen as a bird of the summer, also features as a bird of lament, likely to bring sorrow to those who hear its call.

Sadly, curlew numbers have been declining for decades, although vulnerability has simply heightened their appeal. Mary Colwell’s book Curlew Moon (2018) was inspired by the legend of St Beuno, a 7th-century Welsh preacher whose book of sermons was blown away when his boat was caught in a storm off the Isle of Anglesey, only for the book to be retrieved for him by a helpful curlew. The author describes her 500-mile ‘pilgrimage’ from western Ireland to England’s east coast, exploring the wonder of curlews, the watching of them being ‘an inner experience, at the level of the soul, where the ordinary and the everyday become extraordinary’. A fit and functioning Leithen would have appreciated the sentiment.

This article first appeared in the April 29, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Sometimes, when a clear night sky cloaks moist ground, a magic spell is cast. As the sun rises and the dark curtain lifts, a landscape glistening with glassy droplets is revealed. ‘Every thorn-point and every bramble-spear has its trembling ornament: till the wind gets a little brisker, and then all is shaken off, and all the shining jewellery passes away into a common spring morning,’ wrote John Clare in Dewdrops, one of the many works that convey the poet’s fascination with this ephemeral phenomenon.

I share Clare’s enthusiasm. On warm days, I like to get outside early enough that the dew is still damp beneath my feet. Barefoot is best, padding around the garden until my toes begin to tingle; then back inside, the story of my feet’s miniature adventure written in a slippery trail across the kitchen floor.

Dew has mesmerised humankind for millennia. The ancient Greeks attributed the natural spectacle to the dawn goddess Eos, personifying her tears as Ersa, who poured water upon the land. Later, in ancient Rome, Pliny pondered whether dew was ‘the sweat of the heavens, or the saliva that comes from the stars, or the sap that exudes from the air when it is cleansed’. The idea that dew was astral water, trickling down to Earth via the luminous rays of the moon, stuck longest — well into the 17th century, in fact, as evidenced by engravings in the 1677 ‘wordless book’, the Mutus Liber, detailing how this nocturnal distillation might be alchemised to create powerful elixirs and dissolve gold.

Such notions of dew as Heaven-sent were also nurtured by literature. In Andrew Marvell’s metaphysical poem On a Drop of Dew, written in the 1660s, the dew, ‘shed from the bosom of the morn’ and now languishing on Earth, yearns to be reunited with the firmament. It ‘shines with a mournful light,/Like its own tear,/Because so long divided from the sphere,’ he writes. ‘Till the warm sun pity its pain,/And to the skies exhale it back again.’ By contrast, dew is the fuel for adventure in Cyrano de Bergerac’s A Voyage to the Moon (1657) and is used by the intrepid protagonist to take flight, propelling him back to dew’s imagined origin in the sky. ‘I planted my self in the middle of a great many Glasses full of Dew, tied fast about me,’ he narrates. ‘Upon which the Sun so violently darted his Rays, that the Heat, which attracted them… carried me up so high, that at length I found myself above the middle Region of the Air.’

Even scientists have been bewitched by the beauty of dew. ‘When from the bright blue vault of heaven, the sparkling constellations shower their mild light over the earth, the flowers of the garden and the leaves of the forest become moist with a fluid of the most translucid nature,’ wrote Robert Hunt, an expert in the physics and chemistry of light, in 1854’s The Poetry of Science. However, by then, our understanding of the world was changing. ‘Science has removed the veil of mystery with which superstition had invested the formation of dew,’ Hunt continued, attributing the phenomenon instead to ‘a condensation of vapour’ acting according to ‘a fixed law of radiation’ — about which more later.

I prefer the Celtic belief that dew is the footprints of fairies who have been making merry in the night. ‘And I serve the Fairy Queen/To dew her orbs upon the green,’ declares a fairy in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘I must go seek some dewdrops here, and hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.’ It’s dew’s delicate touch that surely suggested the work of fairies. ‘The fall of dew is the softest way in which water comes into the world; without the slightest sound, much smoother than rain or than natural fountain,’ notes the German philosopher and chemist Jens Soentgen in his 2012 Essay on Dew. In rural Germany, we learn, dew was once thought to enhance growth as a result of the astral life force within it. ‘It was the practice to add a little dew when churning butter to increase the yield,’ he writes. ‘On the other hand, if one were to steal the dew from a farmer’s field, his cows would give less milk.’

Whereas some were adding dew to their food, others — mostly women — were applying it to their faces, believing it a potent beauty tonic that could induce a youthful bloom, reduce rosacea and fade unwanted freckles. May was the optimum time to collect it. ‘They would go forth betimes in the morning, and before sun-rising, into a green field,’ the physician Gerard Boate recalled in 1652’s The Natural History of Ireland. ‘And there either with their hands strike off the dew from the tops of the herbs into a dish, or else throwing clean linnen cloaths upon the ground, take off the dew from the herbs into them and afterwards wring it out into dishes.’

The grassy heights of Edinburgh’s Arthur’s Seat were once a focal point for the most fervent dew-gatherers, who thronged in their thousands. Today, May Day still sees a handful of walkers ascend its summit to wet their faces. Over the years, various health-giving properties have also been ascribed to dew. People dabbed it on their eyes to relieve soreness, ingested it to rebalance emotional energy, and, according to 1593’s A Short Treatise of the Small Pockes, used it to treat ‘rednes of the face and hands after the pockes are gone’. Others, Oliver Cromwell among them, slipped off their stockings to walk on it in the hope of curing gout.

Harvesting dew from a dawn landscape may require patience, but capturing the visual effect on canvas is a feat of genius. Millais feared that such a scene ‘might be unpaintable’, but persevered nevertheless. The result was the atmospheric Dew-Drenched Furze (1889–90), a triumph of humid undergrowth bathed in gossamer light, achieved by virtue of generously applied paint and delicate dry brushing. A century earlier, Constable had achieved the ‘unpaintable’ optical effect seemingly by accident. ‘Look at these landscapes by an Englishman; the ground appears to be covered with dew,’ a visitor to the Paris Salon of 1824 was overheard saying of The Hay Wain — an astonishing achievement for a painting originally titled 'Landscape: Noon'. By contrast, Turner’s Dewy Morning of about 1810, a view of Petworth House in West Sussex from across the lake, was intentionally dewy, although there’s not a single droplet to be seen. Instead, the dew is suggested by the misty veil over the verdant landscape.

It’s perhaps dew’s transience that makes it such a rare and precious subject in paint. ‘But soon shall fly those diamond drops,/The red round sun advances higher,’ announces Clare in his poem Summer Morning. ‘Now let me tread the meadow paths/While glittering dew the ground illumes,’ he entreats. ‘As, sprinkled o’er the withering swaths,/Their moisture shrinks in sweet perfumes.’ I’d like to think that Clare did this shoeless, as I do. What better excuse than dew’s brevity for splashing it on our faces and feet?

On Brownsea Island near Poole, Dorset, a ripple of amber flashes through the canopy. Although the charismatic red squirrel’s bright orange coat is unmistakable, sightings are unusual: once widespread throughout the country, Sciurus vulgaris is now extremely rare. Safe and secure on its island stronghold, Brownsea’s population is thriving — but, elsewhere, numbers have been devastated: today there are only about 287,000 in the UK, compared with 2.7 million of Sciurus carolinensis, its ubiquitous grey cousin.

Our relationship with red squirrels burrows deep into the past. Their constant scurrying up and down trees has led them to be framed in folklore as messengers between the physical and spiritual world. In Scandinavian mythology, the Norse god Ratatoskr was a playful squirrel that carried messages and insults along the Tree of Life between the wise eagle at the top and the serpent within its roots; in medieval times, they were often kept as pets, especially in monasteries where their quiet watchfulness aligned well with the contemplative life. Sometimes depicted in illuminated manuscripts, the squirrels are seen nestling in robes and perched on desks and fed by hand.

Although it is this closeness that is now believed to have caused the transmission of leprosy between humans and squirrels, and vice versa, squirrels were still popular companions in 1527, when Hans Holbein the Younger painted a portrait of Anne Lovell with a gleaming-eyed squirrel on her lap. Many centuries later, in 1903, Beatrix Potter published The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, inspired by the creatures around Derwentwater in the Lake District. Nutkin, the mischievous protagonist, who loses his tail after an encounter with the owl, has provided us with a lasting image of cheeky defiance.

Red squirrels first arrived in Britain at the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago and, until the late 1800s, they could be seen bustling around broadleaf woodlands. Their sudden disappearance was due partly to the loss of suitable forests, but mostly to the introduction of grey squirrels as exotic additions to country estates.

The first recorded release took place at Henbury Park in Cheshire in 1876, with subsequent introductions at Woburn Park in Bedfordshire and Richmond Park and Regent’s Park in London. The landowners assumed the animals would keep within their parks. However, the grey squirrels had plans of their own and soon started to move into the surrounding countryside, spreading at a rate of a mile a year. Their impact on the native red squirrels was disastrous.

Larger and more robust, they were able to eat a wider range of foods (greys can digest green acorns; reds must wait for them to ripen) and, worst of all, they carried a disease, squirrel pox, to which the greys are immune, but which is often deadly to the reds. Finally, as red squirrels were put under increasing pressure, they bred less often, further reducing the size of the population until they were forced to retreat to more remote coniferous locations.

Despite all of this, the red squirrel is staging a cautious comeback. In Cumbria in 2025, there was a record number of sightings, up 24% on the previous year, and, in Scotland, red squirrels have expanded their range across the Highlands by 25%, thanks in part to the work of the rewilding charity Trees for Life.

Most exciting of all is the discovery of a rare colony of red squirrels living in a Sitka spruce plantation in the Yorkshire Dales, which is protected on all sides from the greys. The animals were first identified a year ago by Julie Bailey, project officer from the UK Squirrel Accord, using thermal imaging and, since then, conservationists have been working to protect the colony. ‘I’m very encouraged by their persistence and breeding success,’ reports Julie. ‘We’re finding squirrels in all directions from the plantation and within seven miles of the border with West Yorkshire.’

In Scotland, the reintroduction of pine martens, which like to predate the meatier and slower-moving grey, is also giving red squirrels an opportunity to recover. In one scheme, dens have been installed along the A9 corridor in the hope of attracting pine martens, which can act as bouncers to halt the march of the greys.

Elsewhere, island populations of red squirrels continue to increase. On the Isle of Wight, which is believed to contain the remnants of the original British red squirrel population, there are an estimated 3,000. Brownsea Island has 250, Anglesey has between 700 and 800 and Mersea Island in Essex supports between 50 and 100 animals, which make up the only wild red squirrel colony in the South-East.

The best time to spot the red squirrel’s tufty ears and signature question-mark tail is in the morning or late afternoon in the spring or autumn, when falling seed fragments and rustling overhead can indicate the mammals’ proximity. Evidence may also be found on the tops of tree stumps, where shredded pine cones can be studied to see whether a squirrel is left- or right-handed — pine seeds are a favourite food, but they will also eat hazelnuts, ripe acorns and fungi, which are hung out to dry in a fungal larder.

Fur colour varies from vivid ginger to dark brown. Occasionally, you might spot a black squirrel: a melanistic form of the grey species, which escaped from a private zoo in the 1900s. As a native species, the red squirrel has an important role to play in woodland ecology. Hoarding, burying and forgetting, they help disperse seeds and mycorrhizal fungi and their presence helps mitigate damage caused by the bark-stripping greys. ‘Red squirrels are builders of woods,’ notes Julie. ‘They are resilient and, given the right habitat, I believe they can bounce back.’

Britain’s inaugural Save Our Reds Day takes place on May 15

This feature originally appeared in the April 22, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

There is awesomeness in scale. The Earth is a big place, with lots of people, places, animals and things on it, but our experience of it can only ever be described as small. Even though you know there are 8 billion other people, and 7.7 million species of animals, those numbers have no real meaning because they are so vast. All I know about 8 billion people is that they must make quite a lot of mess, and on this fragile planet, that can feel overwhelming.

This is apparently known as eco-anxiety. It hits me when I try my best to clean up a yoghurt pot for recycling, or have to dispose of a plastic film lid. Multiply my waste times 8 billion, and that’s quite a lot of plastic film lids. It can all feel a bit pointless; swimming against an inevitable tide of carelessness. I am doing my best, but is my best good enough? Will it make an impact?

There is some comfort in knowing that I am not the only person who feels this way. If I can despair over recycling in Bermondsey, what must those who work on the front lines of conservation feel when face-to-face with rising temperatures, oceans of plastic, wildlife persecution, disappearing forests and habitat destruction? As Victor Glover, pilot of Artemis II, correctly pointed out, ‘we live on a fragile planet in the vacuum and the void of space’. The Earth might be big, but that does not mean it is indestructible.

While it might be easy to despair, that does not mean it is necessary. ‘Our purpose on the planet as humans is to find joy, to find the joy in lifting each other up by creating solutions together instead of destroying,’ Glover added. ‘When you see it from out here, it doesn’t change it. It just absolutely reaffirms that. It’s almost like seeing living proof of it.’

Those who spend their lives in nature are thankfully more positive than me. Despite being privy to the destruction and loss of what once was, many have found hope in a wild encounter. This Earth Day, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has asked staff, researchers and partners to share these experiences in nature — stories of luck, awe and renewed purpose — to remind us that no matter how helpless we feel, how anxious we might be, it is worth making the effort. The WWF has been kind enough to highlight these stories, which we’ve shared below, to remind us that while the Earth might be a big place, it's the little things that make it feel like home, and a home worth fighting for.

My first wild sighting of a snow leopard was in Shey Phoksundo National Park (SPNP) in western Nepal. The animal walked calmly along the mountain slope that rose steeply upward of our camp, that evening, traversing between us and our horses and yaks grazing in the slope. All eyes — humans and animals — were on the snow leopard as it walked gracefully up to the nearby ridge, positioned itself to mark its territory, and finally disappeared into the mountains.

This event epitomized our vision for me: snow leopards and people living in harmony. Yet this romanticism was short-lived. A few days later, during this trip, I saw the challenges that lay before us. I observed resilience and exceptional patience of local communities losing livestock, but also frustrations and anger reaching breaking point. I sensed their desperation and the reality of retaliatory killings of snow leopards, in absence of support during their times of need…

Our world is interconnected, and our futures are closely linked. The fates of flagships such as snow leopards are an indicator to the fate of people — our friends and families. The optimist in me knows the future can be bright for people and snow leopards, but the realist in me knows we need greater awareness of what we stand to lose if we don’t take action together.

Sheren Shrestha, Lead – Snow Leopard Program, WWF

My first time seeing an elephant I was a little scared. But the longer I’ve worked with them, the more confidence I’ve gained, and now I can move closer because I understand them. I’ve developed a liking and a love for them. The Maasai even call me the elephant man!

Professor Noah Sitati, Wildlife Species Expert, WWF Tanzania.

It took me 20 years to lay eyes on a wild tiger. In my career, I’ve spent weeks deep in tiger territory without ever spotting any stripes, but I broke that spell in early 2020 when a young male emerged from the tall grass to quench its thirst. It was a dream come true for me, a moment that filled me with renewed enthusiasm, awe, and a deep sense of luck.

Kanchan Thapa, Conservation Biologist, Tigers, WWF-Nepal

I was very excited, the first time I saw them; a rhino is not an easy animal to see! I’m always happy every time I see them, just looking at their size, and their horn. But it’s so easy to feel sad for them. Sometimes the horn can be removed to deter poachers, but without a horn it’s just not a rhino anymore.

Professor Noah Sitati, Wildlife Species Expert, WWF-Tanzania.

The first time I saw penguins I did not realise what I was looking at. I was on a dinghy boat, moving across the Baie du Marin in Possession Island, the main island of Crozet archipelago in the French subantarctic territory. I was about to overwinter as a young scientist for 16 months on this island.

As the dinghy was sailing towards the beach I came to realize that the whitish-greyish pebbles that were in front of me were in fact thousands and thousands of penguins in the distance. I had never seen such a concentration of wild animals. I was watching in awe as the noise and smell superimposed on the scenery! This was so intense…. My overwintering time with penguins was determinant in guiding my career; I left the island knowing what I would do in the future: continue to investigate penguins at sea to help establishing conservation approaches, especially Marine Protected Areas.

Yan Ropert-Coudert, Director of Research CNRS – Marine Predators team.

It's said that it wasn’t his merry tune alone that helped the Pied Piper of legend to lead the rats out of Hamelin. Hidden in his pockets were the roots of the valerian plant, its musky odour irresistible to the bothersome rodents that dutifully followed its scent through the town. Uproot the common valerian (Valeriana officinalis) and you can experience for yourself that curious ‘socky’ smell: tantalising to rats, perhaps, but to humans, reminiscent of unwashed feet or over-ripe cheese.

Above ground, however, this herbaceous, serrated-leaved perennial is charming, its pretty clusters of pink trumpet-shaped flowers, which appear in June, dispersing a sweet vanilla-like aroma, rather like the honeysuckle to which it is related. The plant’s scent is particularly appreciated by felines, who may roll in its vivid green foliage and chew on the root, much as they would with catmint. Whereas the moisture-loving common valerian is happiest in a ditch or damp meadow, the naturalised red valerian (Valeriana rubra) has reached us from warmer climes and seeks out somewhere drier, insinuating itself through a rocky crag or huddling in crowds on a chalky cliff top.

As the curtain closes on summer, both form snowflake-like parachutes that float their seeds to pastures new. Valerian might have attracted the Piper’s rats, but, in our gardens, it does a good job at repelling unwelcome visitors, such as red flour beetles, booklice and even mosquitoes. ‘Like many strongly scented plants, it can help deter certain small pests, which is Nature’s way of creating balance,’ notes wildlife garden designer and author Joel Ashton, founder of Wild Your Garden.

As important, however, are the creatures it invites in. ‘It’s one of those plants that quietly supports the balance of a garden: the clusters of small flowers draw in bees, hoverflies and butterflies in huge numbers and it provides a valuable nectar source throughout the summer,’ he explains. ‘It’s a classic example of how a single species can add beauty and help the wider ecosystem at the same time.’

Our ancestors knew that valerian was special and wove various legends around it. The ancient Greeks believed it could ward off evil and hung bunches of it in their windows and, according to Teutonic mythology, the earth goddess, Hertha, who rode a stag, used a riding crop made of valerian to spur on her antlered steed. Elsewhere, the plant (also known as amantilla) was thought to pacify, rather than rouse. Maud Grieve’s A Modern Herbal (1931) references a medieval recipe that suggests valerian could be a great asset to public decorum: ‘Men who begin to fight and when you wish to stop them,’ it reads, ‘give to them the juice of Amantilla id est Valeriana and peace will be made immediately.’

It’s this same calming property that sees valerian briefly mentioned in Gustave Flaubert’s landmark novel Madame Bovary (1857). When the bored, restless Emma ‘grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the heart’, it is ‘valerian and camphor baths’ that her husband, Charles, a country doctor, prescribes.

On screen, however, valerian is positively soporific. In the 1974 adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, it is the addition of valerian, as a sleep aid, to Edward Ratchett’s drink that helps mask the stronger sedative used to render him unconscious. More recently, the BBC television series Merlin (2008–12) showed the sorceress Morgana using valerian to subdue Arthur in order to poison him with henbane. All this drama and intrigue risks vilifying a plant whose name, derived from the Latin ‘to be healthy’, quite rightly hints at its virtue.

According to Cotswolds-based medical herbalist, Anne McIntyre, there’s much to appreciate in valerian’s gentle work. ‘Valerian is highly valued as a sedative and tonic for the nervous system and is often found in over-the-counter remedies to promote good sleep and ease anxiety, nervous tension, agitation, nervous headaches and exhaustion,’ she reveals. ‘The calming effects of valerian affect muscles and help relieve tension and pain,’ she continues, and ‘several compounds in the root increase levels of GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), which is known as the anti-anxiety neurotransmitter’.

Animals can also benefit — some riders administer it to calm jumpy equines and it is perhaps testimony to its efficacy that valerian is banned for official events. In the aftermath of the First World War, the herb formed part of the treatment of the numerous ‘cases of mental breakdown’, as documented in the book Medical Services Diseases of the War (1923). ‘In the cases marked by tremors special measures were needed,’ notes the book, and ‘a mixture containing valerian was administered night and morning.’

Classical civilisation held valerian in high regard, with the esteemed physicians Hippocrates, Dioscorides and Galen all prescribing it for insomnia. In medieval times, valerian — also known as ‘setwall’ or ‘all-heal’ — was enlisted to tackle disease. According to the document Good Councell against the Plague (1592), valerian root was ‘a special preservative against the plague, being chewed in the mouth’. It was also used to treat the plague’s disfiguring sores. Gather ‘two handfuls of Valerian, three rootes of Danwoorte, and a handfull of Smallidge’, it recommends, and ‘seeth [simmer] them in sheepes suet and water, with a fewe crums of bread: and applye it hotte to the sore’.

In the same year, the Italian nobleman and botanist Fabio Colonna reported in his illustrated book Phytobasanos that a course of powdered valerian root had healed his own epilepsy. ‘They that will have their heale,/Must put Setwall in their keale [kale]’ goes an old saying quoted by the English herbalist John Gerard to convey the widespread use of valerian as a cure-all.

In his seminal book The Herball, published in 1597, he compiles its many medical uses: the dried root helps cure cramps, convulsions, ulcers and bruises, he writes, and ‘provoketh urine’ when a patient is retentive. Not only urine, either: ‘Some hold opinion’, he adds, that mixed with wine, it ‘do purge upward and downward.’

This feature originally appeared in the April 15 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

What does the herring have to do with Shakespeare and the Cold War? More than you might think — the humble Atlantic, Pacific and Baltic herring (Clupea harengus, C. pallasii and C. harengus membras respectively) has made an impressive contribution to literary, social and even political history. Perhaps this isn’t surprising given how many of them there are: somewhere in the region of one trillion fish dwell in the Earth’s waters and their spawning grounds are visible from space.

Certain fish emit noises when hauled up from the water; well into the 20th century, fishermen believed herring were ‘speaking’ a word that sounded similar to ‘cheese’. The high-pitched sound comes from air in the herrings’ swim bladder being released through their anuses (the pulses of 1.7 to 22 kHz, lasting between 0.6 and 7.6 seconds, were named a Fast Repetitive Tick, or FRT, when they were discovered in 2003).

The purpose of these emissions is thought to be nocturnal conversation with the rest of the shoal, but, during the Cold War, Swedish biologists were called in by the country’s navy to investigate what appeared to be a more sinister form of communication. From the 1980s onwards, recordings in Swedish waters had been picking up the sonic presence of what appeared to be small Soviet submarines. Depth charges and mines were unleashed in response, although the craft somehow always escaped. The biologists found that the enigmatic pings were in fact not coming from submarines — there was an indisputable correlation between them and the presence of vast shoals of flatulent herring.

Outright skirmishing may have been averted on this occasion, but a Battle of the Herrings did take place in 1429. It was fought during the Hundred Years’ War near the eastern French town of Rouvray and centred around a convoy carrying salted herrings to English troops besieging Orléans. Ensuring the supply of food for the Lenten period was critical, so, when it was attacked by French and Scottish forces, English defence of the wagons turned a minor engagement into a lasting historical lesson. The endeavour was led by Sir John Fastolf, said to have been the inspiration for Falstaff, and himself hailing from part of Norfolk known for herring fishing.

Shakespeare scattered herrings throughout his plays: in Henry VI, Part I the fictional Falstaff declares that ‘if manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I a shotten herring’ — shotten here referring to a fish that has spawned and is past its best. In Twelfth Night, the fish pop up twice: Sir Toby Belch wishes a plague on the ‘pickle-herring’ in which he has overindulged, and Feste the fool quips that ‘fools are as like husbands as pilchards are to herrings; the husbands the bigger’.

Herring is eaten in countless guises, from Yarmouth bloaters (cold-smoked without being gutted, lending them an intense, gamey flavour) to kippers, which were once so beloved that there was a national outcry when they were taken off train breakfast menus in the 1960s. None, however, is as amusing as the famously foul-smelling Swedish canned incarnation, surströmming.

Pronounced ‘soor-strem-ming’, it is made with herring from the Gulf of Bothnia, which are salted then canned after fermentation begins, so fermentation continues inside the can. The hydrogen sulphide, propionic and butyric acids produced can be so powerful that the can often begins to bulge ominously. Opening one is a feat in itself and countless viral videos are testament to its profound pungency — and clear comic effect. The smell is invariably compared to rotten eggs and reactions range from watering eyes to retching, but those brave enough to persevere talk of surprisingly complex flavours and waves of umami. Naturally many Swedes look on with bemusement as, for them, it’s less a test of culinary courage and more a beloved tradition, albeit one often lubricated by aquavit.

What of its contribution to linguistics? In Rigby’s Encyclopaedia of the Herring: Adventures with the King of Fishes, author Graeme Rigby touches on phrases such as ‘done up like a kipper’, a nod to the splitting of a mackerel to leave it vulnerable and exposed. The most famous coinage, however, is the red herring. A red herring would have been salted and cold-smoked for weeks, a process that turns the silvery fish reddish-brown and ensures a pungent aroma. Due to herrings’ affordability and shelf life of up to a year they quickly became a popular staple in Britain and beyond.

One questionable theory behind the phrase was that escaped prisoners used red herrings to cover their tracks and confuse the bloodhounds tailing them, throwing them off the scent. However, it was journalist and politician William Cobbett, writing in the Weekly Political Register in 1807, who most famously defined it. He recounted a tale that, as a boy, he had used a red herring to distract hounds chasing a hare. His story was a deliberate political metaphor, a way of shaming journalists misled by a 19th-century equivalent of fake news. The story they ran — that Napoleon had suffered a defeat by the Russians — was, in fact, a ruse to deflect attention from domestic matters. Two centuries on, red herrings remain an effective public-relations tactic.

This feature originally appeared in the April 8, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

'Oscar! Oscar!’ The ‘bison queen’, Ruth Wakeling, is calling her newest charge. All legs, Oscar emerges from his trailer. He is an orphan; Ruth is his surrogate mother, tasked with bottle-feeding him four times a day. He sucks at the bottle of Lamlac, his little eyes popping out of his head. ‘After two days, I couldn’t go in [the pen] on my own,’ Ruth says. ‘He’s very strong.’

Ruth and her husband, George, have kept American bison at Bouverie Lodge Farm, near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, since 2000. Today, they care for about 50 of the beasts. For years, they had red deer alongside them and now sell their meat: fresh, frozen and as hot and cold food at Through the Gate, their on-farm café — almost the last survivors of an industry that has long been beleaguered by bureaucracy.

Following the death of Edward Smith-Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby, in 1851, a sale catalogue of the ‘menagerie and aviary’ from Knowsley Hall in Lancashire was produced. In it — alongside six cashmere goats, two golden eagles and a beaver — was an American bison. A century later, Colin Ellis (from 1999, the 6th Baron Seaford) was at prep school, watching the bison in Walt Disney’s The Vanishing Prairie. ‘I felt that I must have some one day,’ he remembers. ‘When I went to agricultural college, I bet the people I shared a house with that, by the time I was 40, I would have a breeding herd. I won the bet.’

It was in 1986 that the first American bison came to Lord Seaford’s Wiltshire farm. Within a few years, having rounded up calves from UK safari parks, he looked abroad for fresh blood and began acquiring them from Dr Ken Throlson’s North Dakota ranch in the USA, via the Belgian bison enthusiast Jean-François d’Hoffschmidt. ‘When they came over to Belgium, I would pop over there with a trailer and get the calves,’ he explains. ‘We did that a couple of times and it grew from there.’

One of the bison fans Lord Seaford collected along the way was former Leicester Tigers lock Arthur Hazlerigg — from 2002, the 3rd Baron Hazlerigg, who lived at Noseley Hall in Leicestershire. As his son William, 4th Baron Hazlerigg, remembers: ‘One of Dad’s friends ran Chester Zoo and, one year, they had a glut of bison calves and asked Dad if he would like some. He said: “Why not?” We ended up with a herd of about 36.’ The late Lord Hazlerigg ‘used to treat them like pets — he had a big walking stick and if they got a bit rambunctious, he would bop them on the nose and quickly walk away’. One day, the Fernie hunt, coming through the estate, found itself in the bison field — much to the bemusement of both hounds and bison. It wasn’t unlike the late baron suddenly to decide to keep bison — an arrangement that ended when foot and mouth arrived in 2001. ‘He was a bon viveur,’ notes Lord Hazlerigg, ‘and always up for a laugh.’

Lord Seaford, now retired, established the British Bison Association in 1993 and, by the early 2000s, it had about 20 members. Today, there is scarcely a handful, red tape having pushed many farmers out — particularly as regards bovine TB testing. Bison do not like to be handled, and can die from the stress of human contact. ‘It’s crackers,’ laments Ruth. ‘We have one killed a month and if there was TB it would show up at the abattoir — they don’t go off the farm unless they’re dead.’

If it seems extraordinary that, of the tiny number of British bison farmers, two of them should be hereditary peers — themselves an endangered species — it is more extraordinary still that there is a third. Robert Wynn, 8th Baron Newborough, has run the Rhug estate in North Wales since 1998 and struck upon the idea of introducing bison to his farm in 2007 in Sussex. ‘I walked around the corner and there was a herd of bison. I thought: “Wow, I want some of these,”’ he recalls. The first seven bison at Rhug came from Ireland. ‘Everyone was gobsmacked — we put them in a field by the main road and the traffic started slowing down to see them and then turned into our farm shop.’ Inspired, Lord Newborough bought a few more and soon Rhug ‘became known as the place with the bison’.

Now, the 12,500-acre estate has — in addition to its Drive Thru café, farm shop, sheep, chicken and venison businesses — 35 bison and runs a dedicated bison walk. ‘We love showing them to people,’ Lord Newborough enthuses. ‘When we have bison on the butcher’s counter in the farm shop, it’s a sell out. They are very important to us — I wouldn’t want to be without them.’

At Rhug, bison are a central part of the visitor experience. Near Canterbury, at the Wilder Blean project — a partnership between Kent Wildlife Trust and the Wildwood Trust — the public can observe European bison in a rather different environment. A herd of nine now roams West Blean and Thornden Woods as part of a wilding initiative that hopes to restore natural woodland processes — the Rare Breeds Survival Trust would point out that native British cattle breeds, such as the longhorn, can achieve similar results.

Their impact, says bison ranger Heidi Aguirregoicoa, is evident. ‘They roll around and create big dust baths — they’ve done it in the ex-plantation conifer areas that aren’t the most biodiverse. They get rid of all the bracken and the bramble and make these nice open areas. It’s lovely to see.’ Heidi respects her subjects, which she describes as ‘very emotional and smart’, and can be found sitting for long periods watching them, waiting for ‘a specific dung sample — it’s very relaxed’.

All of those involved with bison, past and present, whom I speak to, adore their beasts. They are, according to Lord Seaford, ‘lovely creatures, very polite’. The Wakelings have had fun with their bison — as well as ‘a lot of tears,’ adds Ruth, ‘but we will always have bison’. At Hill Farm Packington, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, Janice and Andrew Sumnall have kept bison since 2006 when, intending to buy some red deer, they visited Lord Seaford. Seeing his bison, ‘lo and behold, I took a fancy,’ confesses Andrew. At their peak, they had about 40, but now, winding down — ‘it’s a young man’s job, bison’ — they have five, which they love as much as ever. ‘When Andrew is on the ride-on mower, they walk up and down on the other side of the fence and watch him,’ says Janice.

Still, bison are not for the faint-hearted. As well as stress from handling, bison are affected by malignant catarrhal fever, which is carried by sheep. Accordingly, they cannot be grazed near sheep — a challenge for Lord Newborough, as ‘there are more sheep in Wales than people’. They can also be dangerous and are much more athletic than they look, being capable of travelling at 35 miles an hour. Lord Seaford once sold some bison to a ‘fellow in Scotland’ to keep in his deer park, advising him to put mesh on the gate. A month later he received a call to say that the bison had got out: ‘He hadn’t put mesh on the gate and they’d put their horns through and lifted the gate off its hinges — they’re not idiots.’

When the Sumnalls lost their stock bull three years ago, they buried his ashes close to the fence adjoining the bison field. ‘That night, the bison were standing in a group and, one by one, they came up to the fence where he was buried, stood for a few seconds and then walked into the field shelter,’ remembers Janice. ‘It was as if they were paying their respects.

The foxes on the roof of Google’s building in King's Cross are staring down the barrel of a gun. It’s only metaphorical for now — but, soon enough, it may not be. The vulpines made their way up the Thomas Heatherwick edifice last spring, using lifts, staircases and good old-fashioned gumption; ultimately to reign over a patch of land that overlooks Meta and Central Saint Martins and raise litter upon litter of cubs in the tech giant’s roof garden. Some 250 trees were planted there in 2024 to reaffirm its commitment to the environment (as they say). Foxes, enterprising to the last, decided to take this rewilding initiative into their own paws.

Now, Google wants its roof back: and the squatters will have to be culled, unless the Silicon Valley behemoth can humanely relocate them to the Cotswolds. This probably won’t help: urban foxes are unlikely to survive a move to the country, experts believe, unless they manage to find an environment that is not so different from that in which they grew up (Soho Farmhouse, perhaps?). The news comes hot on the heels of a proposed ban on trail hunting, which has reopened a time-old debate over human-vulpine relations. The actor Ryan Gosling recently emerged as the animal’s latest champion after he told Radio 1 last month that we Britons are not ‘celebrating’ our foxes enough. ‘They were hunted,’ he gushed, ‘and now, they have free reign of the city!’ Well, quite.

Against him are those who believe Reynard is pure vermin. As they are not legally classified as pests, authorities have no incentive to control their sprawl, prompting some to take more drastic measures. Bruce Lindsay-Smith, whom The Times once called ‘Britain’s pre-eminent fox killer’, has been exterminating skulks in London’s back gardens for years (his open firearm certificate means he can do so legally) and there are strong suspicions that the Tottenham foxes made famous by Sir David Attenborough in his 2026 documentary, Wild London, were poisoned by residents after they were found dead near the allotment they called home as recently as March.

Perhaps relocating those at Google HQ is the humane solution, after all. Although might I suggest a move to another city, instead? The blueprint was set a month ago when a fox boarded a cargo ship at Southampton, headed west, and is now living happily in the Bronx Zoo in New York City. It’s either that or Bruce. I know which of the two I’d rather pick.

This feature originally appeared in the April 8, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

As well as running The River Café, chef Ruthie Rogers hosts Ruthie's Table 4, a podcast where A-list celebrities discuss food. During one popular episode, Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker offered up a confession: she daydreams about smuggling a particular item back to America when she visits Britain: Burford Brown eggs. ‘They have these orange yolks that I just… oh, my God!' she enthused. She isn't alone: speaking to Kathy Burke on the comedian's podcast, The Traitors presenter Claudia Winkleman revealed that a Burford Brown omelette with mild cheddar would be her last supper.

With their thick, hard, glossy brown shells (which help them to stay fresh for longer) and rich flavour, Burford Brown eggs are beloved of home cooks and chefs, as well as Hollywood stars. Their cachet is such that they are even named on the menus at Claridge's.

The hens which lay them are no less special. My own Burford Browns, which live with me near the Cotswold market town from which they take their name, plod about issuing commanding clucks until they hear the metal feed bin opening, at which point they rush towards it in a flurry of jet black. Generally placid and sociable, each hen has a large, rosy comb and a variable neckerchief of strikingly burnished orange feathers, known as hackles. This is a robust breed suited to gardens made up of tough-stemmed roses and gooseberry bushes or, preferably, farmyards. My dad, upon receiving a pair as a present from me, returned them within the month, declaring that it was as if I had released two rotavators into the garden.

Burford Browns will lay like clockwork from spring into autumn. They can produce up to 240 brown eggs in their first year and, given a good life, can lay for many years to come. When eggs of this hue were first seen, some people believed that they had actually been painted because their colour, with scrubbing, can be removed from the shell.

The hue is unique to specific breeds of hen: the internal shell gland deposits the natural brown pigments, known as porphyrins, at the specific Burford Brown concentration onto the eggshell just before laying. In the wake of bird flu, which has seen poultry shows devoid of live birds to judge, egg showing is increasingly on the rise: a clutch has to be freshly laid, be identical in size and be of its correct breed colour. Unsurprisingly, competition when it comes to the showing of dark-brown eggs has always been especially high.

The Burford Browns' original home was Manor Farm on Westhall Hill, near Burford's main street in Oxfordshire. Back in the 1900s, Mabel Pearman began breeding hens there and noticed that they laid darker than average brown eggs. Their exact genetic make-up remains a closely guarded secret, but their heritage likely includes other traditional breeds known for laying brown eggs, such as Dutch Welsummers and French Marans. Years later, in 1980, Pearman's grandson, Philip Lee-Woolf, would begin to rear the birds himself, remembering the delicious eggs of his childhood. He spent years perfecting his flocks to ensure hardy and uniform genetic traits before taking his eggs, packaged in colourful, characterful boxes, to market under the brand name Clarence Court.

‘The industry was stuck in a rut and dominated by a handful of large packers intent on making profits at the expense of poultry welfare and, in many cases, the producer farmers, too,' he recalls. ‘Quality and individuality didn't seem to matter, and chickens themselves even less. It was all about uniformity, numbers and price — small, medium or large eggs of pale shells and a watery texture, in a drab, grey-pulp box.'

Department stores such as Fortnum & Mason placed orders and then supermarkets. Yet with success came the realities of hard commercialism, as they demanded more and more product, necessitating a larger business model. Philip and his wife, Janet, decided to part with Clarence Court in 2004, knowing that their ethos of having relaxed and properly free-range hens had left an impression on the egg industry and, crucially, consumers.

Philip remains the only person rearing genuine Burford Brown hens for domestic sales; if you have your heart set on owning some, you have to be on his Legbars of Broadway waiting list for his seasonal debutante pullets. If you do get to the top of it, you'll be in good company: the birds reside in coops at esteemed gardens from Gresgarth Hall, Lancashire, to Rockcliffe, Gloucestershire. Jeremy Clarkson's Diddly Squat Farm in Oxfordshire is also home to a flock.

The late Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire adored her Burford Browns, which she kept at Chatsworth, Derbyshire, and, later, at the Old Vicarage in nearby Edensor. Speaking in 2010 to Jenni Murray on the BBC's Woman's Hour, she proclaimed their eggs as ‘the most delicious… I have ever had'.

They were too good not to share: she arranged for them to be taken up the road to her beloved farm shop and piled into a bowl like a mound of delicate Ferrero Rocher, with empty egg boxes that tempted customers to fill them. Unsurprisingly, they sold out.

The Tithe Barn at Thyme, Lechlade, Gloucestershire, is hosting an exhibition of hen paintings by Arthur Parkinson until May 12.

If you have ever despaired trying to locate the ladybird that has appeared on every cover of Country Life since 2019, relish in the fact that you aren’t trying to pinpoint Stethorus pusillus, the dot ladybird. About one millimetre in length, it resembles an excitable chia seed, revealing pale yellow legs to those with visual acuity. It is but one of 46 astonishingly diverse species of Coccinellidae in the UK, a beetle group fronted by an iconic lead: Coccinella septempunctata, the seven-spot ladybird, dressed in its 1980’s Yves Saint Laurent polka dot best.

‘Determined, cheerful, committed, hardworking,’ Professor Helen Roy of the University of Exeter and the UK Centre of Ecology and Hydrology says of the ladybird. ‘Some of them can be a bit bumbly, but in a lovely way.’ The co-author of the Field Guide to the Ladybirds of Great Britain and Ireland, Roy has studied the charming minibeasts since her PhD in 1994 — a lifelong interest that began at age six in the summer of 1976, when the ladybird population surged to such numbers that red tides would form along the English coastline.

Across cultures, ladybirds have a remarkable hold on us. They are instantly cheering figures and spring incarnate, perhaps because they are some of the first insects we see when they emerge in March from their overwintering sites among leaf litter, bark crevices and twig piles. They embody renewal and are widely considered messengers of good fortune, thought to stem from their role as a voracious pest control. One seven-spot ladybird alone can eat up to 5,000 aphids during its year-long lifespan.

Not many figures can move seamlessly between the worlds of sustainable gardening, children’s books and the pinnacle of luxury, but the ladybird’s benevolent symbolism and jolly attire opens every door. At Van Cleef & Arpels, the ladybird has been a cherished, gentle-natured house guest since the 1930s when it first appeared as a charm. Whether animated in rubies or enamel, it has fluttered between clips, necklaces and secret watches, distilled this season into a pure carnelian and onyx form outlined with rose gold for the Lucky Spring collection.

‘[Ladybirds] elicit tender emotions, and that is also what Van Cleef & Arpels strives for with its creations,’ the house notes, adding how ladybird beetles are able to tap into a sense of wonder rooted in our childhood memories. A between-the-finger ring featuring a coccinellid alongside a mother of pearl plum blossom evokes the feeling of a ladybird daintily landing on your finger. Some use this precious moment to make a wish, while in parts of Europe it is custom to count until it flies away, as this is meant to signify the years until you marry.

‘There’s us really enjoying them, crawling up our finger. But for that ladybird, it’s a commitment to that moment when it’s got to fly. Once they begin to go through the process of preparing themselves for flight, they find it very hard to stop. Even if things change — maybe the wind suddenly gets up, or it starts to rain — that ladybird is still programmed to go off into flight,’ Roy explains.

The ladybird hides its gossamer wings below its coloured, hard forewings (elytra). It is a strong flier that can cover reasonable distances to seek food sources, but you also see it hitching rides on our modes of transportation.

The UK’s largest ladybird, the chunky, 8-10 millimetre eyed ladybird (Anatis ocellata), is especially impressive in flight. With its black spots encircled by yellow rings, it wouldn’t look out of place as a Robert Kime textile. And while air currents certainly play a supporting role, some ladybirds have been tracked at 1,100 metres above ground at speeds of more than 60 kilometres per hour.

This Easter, they have also found their way onto Birley Bakery’s artisanal chocolate temptations. The pièce de résistance is a 1.9 kilogram milk, dark and white chocolate egg, wrapped in hyper-realistic cabbage leaves and adorned with rotund ladybirds (left). Ladybirds have also been observed in other high fashion habitats this season, moonlighting as a sequinned Anya Hindmarch mini cocktail bucket bag and a beaded Loewe keyring charm.

At Dior, a two-spot ladybird crawls along a single strand of pearls in the Diorette jewellery collection (below). Here, artistic director Victoire de Castellane has taken inspiration from Monsieur Christian Dior’s garden near Milly-la-Forêt, using the ladybird to lend a playful air to the Girls in Pearls classic among enamelled daisies, pink petals and diamond-encrusted bees.

As for the seven-spot ladybird, Coccinella septempunctata (‘scarlet seven spots’), it takes its name from Our Lady’s Bird, linked to the Virgin Mary’s red cloak and her seven joys and sorrows. There are no immaculate conceptions here, however: as David Profumo has noted of the ladybird in Country Life: ‘It is wildly promiscuous. The two-spot female can mate 20 times a year and, with copulation lasting up to nine hours, its love life is practically tantric.’ (In continental Europe, a sexually-transmitted mite, Coccipolipus hippodamiae, takes advantage of the ladybird’s amorous pursuits and can cause sterility.)

Right now, as hungry adult ladybirds have just woken up, you might see them feeding on pollen for a quick energy hit before their quest for romance. Hawthorn is a favourite, and they are grateful for a mosaic of plants and fruit trees, and dandelions left in lawns. Once they’ve reproduced, they die, and the new generation materialises. Bright yellow eggs hatch after a few days to a week, revealing larvae that go through four stages (instars) to become a pupa from which the adult ladybird emerges. The warmer the weather, the faster ladybirds develop.

Each shedding stage reveals increasingly extra-terrestrial tiny battle tank incarnations. There are the pine ladybird larvae’s punk spikes, the 22-spot ladybird’s yellow and black plates of armour, and — one of Roy’s highlights — the speckled, fluffy larva that transforms into Britain’s spottiest ladybird, the 24-spot ladybird. ‘It looks like a miniature hamster. It’s just absolutely exquisite.’

Cryptolaemus montrouzieri, the mealybug ladybird, is another one with an outlandish teenage phase, best described as a waxy alien coral from an underwater fantasy world. At Chatsworth in Derbyshire, it is a valued team member in the fight against (as the name suggests) mealybugs across the estate’s 105 garden acres, where a holistic approach is favoured over chemical pesticides. Many environmentally-considerate gardeners strategically recruit native ladybird larvae to combat aphids. During its two to four week larval development, one larva can eat up to 500 aphids.

But, Roy notes, the seven-spot adult ladybird’s slightly bumbling personality sometimes comes out when it’s time for supper. ‘They have an interesting approach to finding the aphids. If they’re very hungry, they’re much more committed. When they start to get satiated, they bumble about a bit and will just wander past an aphid.’ One of her favourite ladybirds is the spectacular orange ladybird, which has up to 14 cream spots and feeds on tree mildew with mouth parts adapted to scraping fungus off the leaves.

‘Because it’s feeding on fungi, which is not so nutritionally good as an aphid, it has a slower development time. So it’s often a ladybird we see around a lot later into the autumn, giving me that moment of ladybird indulgence when many of the other ladybirds have started to go to sleep.’

To New York-based artist John Derian, ladybirds — or ladybugs, as they are known in America, despite in fact being, as he points out, beetles — are a source of delight. For ladybird enthusiasts, his sought-after decoupage pieces feel like curiosities from the chicest entomology cabinet. Antique ladybird motifs detailing the beetle’s little antennae and articulated legs adorn domed paperweights (right), trays and matchboxes, as well as his tableware for ceramic artisans Astier de Villatte. ‘There’s something beautiful about their shade of red and their charming polka dots,’ says Derian. ‘I remember when I would see them as a child, they felt so approachable since I knew they were “friendly” bugs.’

While we adore their bright wardrobes, ladybirds are in fact dressed this way to repel unwanted attention. Their aposematic colouration warns hungry predators such as swifts and swallows of their foul taste, and if attacked, their leg joints will exude reflex blood; a sticky, toxic alkaloid substance. They can fall prey to spider webs or parasitoids, but their main enemy is perhaps the invasive harlequin ladybird, Harmonia axyridis. First recorded in the UK in 2004, it poses a biodiversity threat as it can out-compete the British natives for food.

Contributing your ladybird sightings to the UK Ladybird Survey, which Roy heads up alongside Dr Peter Brown at Anglia Ruskin University, is an excellent way to help researchers understand the current ladybird population. ‘Many thousands of people submit their sightings and we also get to hear their stories,’ says Roy. ‘I love to hear what excites other people about their connection with ladybirds.’

Do you remember walking through fields as a child and rabbits darting out from under your feet? There used to be dozens: little Flopsies, Mopsies and Cotton-Tails and, of course, the odd Peter, who would go rogue and end up in the farmer’s garden only to re-emerge with a carrot, happy as Larry. You’d be lucky to see even one of them today. As we celebrate the arrival of spring, the rabbits that had previously danced around us in a pastoral conga line are nowhere to be found. Wild populations have fallen by 67%, estimates suggest, and upwards of 80% in regions such as Scotland and the East Midlands. Myxomatosis, a disease that causes swelling and skin lesions, was first to ravage the bunnies. Now, a second variant of Rabbit Haemorrhagic Disease Virus (RHDV2) is devastating them.

Campaigners made some noise around this during covid, as city dwellers turned to the country in droves and realised it was not quite the Beatrix Potter picture book they’d imagined. The momentum to help the rabbits has dwindled, but as we near breaking point, those in the know have begun to sound the alarm. Adam Hunt, a Somerset-based landscape designer who drew acclaim for his wild garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2022, says a world with fewer rabbits is inevitable — but that we can help stymie the decline.

Planting more brambles to help ward off predators and prevent the rabbit's numbers from depleting further would be a start, says Mr Hunt, who believes RHDV2 is going to force 'a change in behaviour' as it favours animals who burrow less. Diana Bell, Emeritus Professor of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of East Anglia, is not so sure. 'RHDV2 has spread to multiple continents and has also leapt onto hares, which are more solitary and live above ground,' she says. 'We really need to target the disease itself.'

We have every incentive to help our floppy-eared friends. Rabbits are Nature’s ecosystem engineers, a keystone species on which many other animals rely. Not only are they a food source (to foxes, badgers, buzzards and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall) but, being selective grazers, they also keep more vigorous grasses in check, allowing wildflowers to grow. This, in turn, lends life to more insects.

Their burrows help to germinate seeds and create what ecologists call mini-mosaics: patches of land where invertebrates and lizards are permitted to thrive. RHDV2's decimation of rabbits and all they represent is a decimation of Britain's wildlife at large. Vaccines are already widely used on their domestic cousins: we now need a national programme to help those in the wild. If Europe can do it for fox rabies, we can do it for rabbits, too.

This feature originally appeared in the March 25, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The evening of May 26, 1941, was probably a normal one for Oscar until the first torpedo hit. Bismarck, pride of the German navy, had been discovered by the Swordfish of HMS Ark Royal and, this time, she would not escape.

What Oscar would have made of torpedoes, or battleships, or the concept of war is unknown, but explosions and flooding were not conducive to his favourite activities, which were napping and catching mice, because he was a cat.

By the evening of May 27, Bismarck was at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, some 300 miles west of Brest, France, and Oscar had sensibly switched sides. He was now aboard the British destroyer HMS Cossack, having been rescued from a floating plank of wood, but, alas, the peaceful existence that he craved would not last long, as, on October 24, the front section of the ship was blown off by a torpedo.

Rescued again, and now nicknamed ‘Unsinkable Sam’, Oscar was transferred to HMS Ark Royal, which was then torpedoed on November 14 and sunk off the coast of Gibraltar. With three of his nine lives now used, it was decided that Oscar was probably best suited to a life on land away from torpedoes and he died peacefully in Belfast in 1955. Cats continued to serve on a variety of ships in the Navy until 1975, when they were banned as a result of hygiene regulations — an early casualty of the woke mob.

Professional cats are perhaps best known for their work at sea, yet Felis catus has been (and, indeed, remains) a working animal in many different fields. Consider, if you will, Tibs the Great, the ‘number one cat’ who ‘reigned at Post Office Headquarters’ from 1950–64. Such was his proficiency at catching rats that he swelled to an almighty 23lb in size and was said to have never ventured from the basement where he lived, ‘where no rat has been seen since Tibs sorted them out early in his career’.

It was noted in his obituary that he once caught a pigeon, which was released unhurt, although shaken. For his work, Tibs collected a weekly salary of 2s 6d.

Other working cats of history include the sublime Tiddles of Paddington Station, who kept a watchful eye on the women’s loos and was so beloved by visitors that overfeeding allowed him to reach a weight of 32lb and first place in 1982’s London Fat Cat Championships.

In 1995, for the first and only time in its history, The Stage carried a front-page obituary for Beerbohm, a 20-year-old tabby who trod the boards at the Gielgud Theatre, W1. Although technically employed to keep the theatre vermin free, he was a sucker for the limelight and would often wander across the stage during performances, as well as spending time in actors’ dressing rooms.

It is rare for a cat to be affiliated with a political party. Such is their disdain for everyone and everything that a career in the civil service, where such traits are often celebrated, seems more suitable. The nation’s favourite working cat (and arguably favourite feline in general) is surely Larry, Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office at No 10 Downing Street.

A true icon of meritocracy, he was born as a stray sometime in about January 2007, before being taken into care by Battersea Dogs & Cats Home. From there, he was adopted by the Downing Street staff and has served under David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer. In hindsight, it is fair to wonder if a life on the streets may have been better.

Although Larry has consistently polled above the aforementioned Prime Ministers in terms of popularity, he was not without a rival. In 2016, a black-and-white tuxedo cat named Palmerston moved into the Foreign Office, an all-too obvious assault on Larry’s domain that could not stand. The two cats were said to have fought on numerous occasions, with one particular scrap on August 1, 2016, leaving Palmerston with several scratches and a cut ear as a result of the mêlée in which Larry lost his collar.

Palmerston retired from the Foreign Office in 2020 and enjoyed five years in the British countryside, before moving to Bermuda to take up a role as ‘feline relations consultant’ to the new governor, Andrew Murdoch, in 2025. Palmerston sadly died on February 12, with articles appearing in both The Times of London and New York.

The latest cat to be making waves in Westminster — the bright young thing — is Attlee, the four-year-old Maine Coon belonging to The Speaker (see box).

What makes the cat so suited to the working world? They can scarcely be relied on to catch mice and rats. ‘It has proved impossible to organise any scheme for payment by results or output bonus,’ David Gammans, assistant postmaster general, told the House of Commons in 1953, when queried as to why Tibs the Great and the other working cats of the Post Office had not received a pay rise since 1873. ‘These servants of the State are, however, frequently unreliable, capricious in their duties and liable to prolonged absenteeism.’ We’ve all had colleagues like that.

Perhaps it is because the cat doesn’t take life too seriously that we adore them in the workplace. The cat does not consider the email. It does not have KPIs or Smart Goals. A cat has never been subject to an unexpected phone call or an overrunning meeting. The cat could not care less if it has accidentally muted itself on Zoom. As far as the cat is concerned, there is no schedule. They are timely reminders that perhaps we should not always take everything too seriously.

A cat is never overwhelmed by its surroundings. In the grandest places, among the grandest people, the cat does what it wants. I often think of an image of Mrs May and Donald Trump standing together outside No 10, Downing Street. Two leaders of the world’s most powerful nations, responsible for more than 5,000 combined nuclear warheads, and, to their right, Larry, asleep on a windowsill without a care in the world.

Yet perhaps the most important characteristic of the cat is that its affection and respect must be earned. In a world of instant gratification, they are a reminder that the best things in life are worth working for and that is the most important work there is.

Cats with top-class jobs

Name: Attlee
Profession: Diplomat
Employer: The Civil Service
Line manager: The Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle

It’s a Wednesday in early February and a particularly stressful day in the House of Commons. Prime Minister’s Questions is over-running as questions fly about the appointment of Lord Mandelson as HM Ambassador to the US. MPs huddle down corridors and there is a smell of blood in the air over the leadership of the Prime Minister. The halls of power echo with whispers.

None of this matters to Attlee, the four-year-old brown tabby Maine Coon, because he (and his owner, Sir Lindsay Hoyle) are above such petty grievances as party politics. ‘Attlee is here to give peace and calm and that’s what he brings, wherever he goes,’ Sir Lindsay attests. ‘He has the ability to change the mood of the moment.’

Attlee suits living in a palace. He’s a big cat, as Maine Coons tend to be, but he moves smoothly around the Crimson Drawing Room in Speaker’s House, eyeing up a soft cushion on which to sit. More than once, he has been found asleep in the State Bedroom, an honour traditionally reserved for the monarch on the night before their coronation at Westminster Abbey. ‘He’s inquisitive, he loves to get around, he likes jumping and climbing,’ notes Sir Lindsay.

At home in Chorley, Lancashire, where Sir Lindsay is the MP, he will climb the kitchen units and can be found on top of an oak tree in the garden. ‘Nothing stands in his way. Edmund Hillary may have had Everest, but Attlee’s got the kitchen tops.’ Attlee’s fame means he is in danger of leaving Sir Lindsay in his shadow. He has more than 54,000 followers on Instagram (@attlee_the_cat) and you can buy a plushy version of him in the Houses of Parliament gift shop, as well as tea towels, fridge magnets and a water bottle. You may also meet him on a Speaker’s House guided tour.

However, Sir Lindsay reassures me that Attlee doesn’t let fame get to his head. ‘He’s an integral part of the team at Speaker’s House. He turns up for team meetings, he’s there with them. When they go through trauma, he’s there for the trauma, when they want someone at front of house, he’s there. That’s his job, he has a role here.’

Perhaps what Attlee enjoys most about his job is meeting foreign dignitaries. ‘We’re a nation of animal lovers, but Attlee has worldwide fame,’ Sir Lindsay adds proudly. ‘Ambassadors come in here and it’s “can we meet Attlee”.’ Such is Attlee’s presence, you could be forgiven for forgetting that Sir Lindsay’s role is keeping a lid on the affairs of one of the world’s oldest democracies.

‘I’m in awe of him. He’s very special. I’m just in the shadows of what Attlee does'

Name: Haven
Profession: Religious service and contemplation/vermin control
Employer: Chemin Neuf Community at the Sclerder Abbey, Cornwall
Line manager: Sister Amandine Cote

It was on the sixth day that God created all land animals, including the cat, arguably his most divine work. Outside of Christianity, cats have long been worshipped as deities (presumably at their own request), most famously in Ancient Egypt, where the gods Bastet (protection, pleasure, good health), Sekhmet (war) and Mafdet (judgement, justice and execution) assisted the sun god Ra in his day-to-day duties.

Down in Cornwall, Haven is a Christian cat, who graced the sisters of the Chemin Neuf Community with her presence in the autumn of 2024, on a divine mission to help control the number of rodents in the garden.

‘Haven was very wild at the start,’ explains Sister Amandine Cote. ‘We set up her bed, water bowl, food and other bits in an outside laundry of the abbey to help her get used to the place, but she would often escape and hide.’ Haven joined the community with the help of the charity Cats Protection, which produces the Homes Beyond Houses booklet to assist rehoming cats in ‘unusual settings’. These settings can include houseboats, farms, schools and, in Haven’s case, a convent.

Haven is relatively new to life in Cornwall and she likes to keep her distance. ‘I only joined the community recently and Haven took a while to warm to me,’ admits Sister Amandine. ‘Last week, after half an hour of watching her eat, she finally asked me for a cuddle and I heard her miaow for the first time.’

For the slow, thoughtful pace of life in this religious part of Cornwall, a cat was infinitely more suitable than a dog. ‘They have a more independent nature,’ points out Sister Amandine. ‘Haven isn’t bothered about someone watching over her. She seems happy going about her business around the garden. She likes to visit the chickens and runner ducks and has become a bit of a roommate for them.’

Her favourite napping spot? ‘The greenhouse,’ Sister Amandine confirms. Glorious.

Name: Ozymandias
Profession: Education
Employer: Oxford University
Line manager: Dinah Rose KC, president of Magdalen College

It should be no surprise that a cat can be found stalking the halls of the oldest university in the English-speaking world. What might be a surprise, however, is that such a cat would be a ‘ball of exploding grey fluff, like something you’d expect to find in the back of a tumble dryer’.

Ozymandias belongs to the president of Magdalen College, Dinah Rose KC, who found ‘Ozzy’ living with his brothers and mother in Northampton. ‘We were captivated,’ she recalls. ‘We named him Ozymandias, because there was an incongruous mismatch between his extreme fluffiness and his innate sense of self-importance. He still thinks he is the King of Kings.’

Ozzy takes his work at Magdalen very seriously, helping to shape the minds of the next generation at one of Britain’s most elite universities. He regularly attends college committee meetings and end of term Collections, where Mrs Rose hears reports of students’ progress, as well as a range of social events in the President’s Lodgings. His role involves putting people at ease and providing a distraction from important college business.

‘He came to the ceremony of admission of new Fellows, where he caused a mass outbreak of giggling by weaving through the legs of the assembled Fellows,’ Mrs Rose reveals. He’s also ‘a surprisingly good mouser’, but Mrs Rose says she has had little luck in convincing the bursar to pay him for his work. ‘Ozzy is currently learning to play the piano,’ she adds, ‘but it will be some time before he is ready to give a recital.’

A confident and friendly cat, it was hoped that Ozzy would be easier to look after than Scrumpy, Mrs Rose’s late spaniel. How wrong she was. ‘He requires a great deal of attention, and tends to jump on us at 5am, demanding breakfast,’ she notes. ‘He has also found an inexplicable way to get out at night even when the catflap is locked and has been found by the College Porters fraternising with a fox in St John’s Quad before dawn.’

However, Mrs Rose adds, ‘we are happy with this situation, because we are completely besotted with him, as is everyone else who meets him’.

Calling all pub quizzers: which was the first national park in the UK to be designated? The answer is the Peak District, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, as do the Lake District, Snowdonia and Dartmoor, which all followed swiftly in 1951.

There are now 15 — the latest being (here’s another quiz question) the South Downs, created on March 31, 2010 — the eventual fulfilment of an idea that was born as far back as 1929 by the newly formed Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE). Its founder, Sir Patrick Abercrombie, a celebrated town planner, had written a manifesto suggesting that ‘a bold and wide policy should be pursued towards the creation of a series of national parks for the preservation of “wild country” with universal appeal for civilised man’. Ironically, the areas we now call national parks and revere for their vivid, individual landscapes, were once considered undesirable places to live for their remoteness and the fact that there few ways of making a living on rough, infertile ground.

Indeed, some found the wildness frightening; it took a certain robustness of attitude to cope. The writer Daniel Defoe, who published the first account of his travels across Britain in 1724, found the ‘wonders’ of the Peak District — its caverns, caves and springs — ‘underwhelming’ and described it as ‘the most desolate wild and abandoned country in all England’. About a century later, however, attitudes towards beauty and public access had changed and the poet William Wordsworth suggested that the Lake District was ‘a sort of national property to which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy’. The dichotomy is that, unlike the vast, genuinely wild, uninhabited expanses of US parks, ours are living, working places and the more accessible they are to civilisation the less money visitors spend in them.

Some residents believe that enterprise will automatically be stifled and planning thwarted; the CLA once said that people there shouldn’t be ‘condemned to selling tea and scones’. Last year, the proposal for a new national park in Galloway and Ayrshire was scrapped, with unhappy locals citing rising house prices and overcrowding among other typical potential problems; the recent row over wild camping on Dartmoor has highlighted how much clearing up landowners quietly do. Overall, however, national parks have to be ‘a good thing’: their myriad and definitive charms, from Dartmoor’s tors to the marsh harriers swooping over the watery Broads and the pony-grazed glades of the New Forest, lend character to this nation, boost the tourism economy and necessitate protection from crass development. They are, as intended by the campaigners of a century ago, still a source of national pride and joy.

This feature originally appeared in the March 25, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Geese are like Marmite — they are either adored or despised. Many people have a story of how they got chased by or had an unfortunate encounter with one at some point in their life,’ declares Samantha Wood, who falls firmly into the former category, raising geese on her Dorset smallholding. Admittedly, the goose’s popularity as the choice of bird to keep has waned over the decades in favour of other poultry, but there are plenty of folk who still find them an enriching addition to their lives.

Goose husbandry can be traced at least as far back as 3000BC and, through the ages, the birds have remained popular, as they need little, but yield a lot. Dr Chris Ashton, author of Keeping Geese: Breeds and Management, explains: ‘Geese required little apart from the grazing of common land, yet provided many useful products: feather and top-quality down were saved, the quills were used for pens and the flights for fletching arrows and the birds could be used as the Michaelmas or Christmas goose.’

It isn’t only their meat that is still prized today, either. With a bigger yolk-to-white ratio, the eggs are excellent for dipping bread into, something that Samantha has been partial to from a young age, as geese have been kept on her farm since her great-grandparents’ time. She keeps a selection of breeds: Lucy, ‘a very stately lady of matured years’, is an Embden — the classic white goose of nursery tales — whereas Jo-Jo and Jaylo are Brecon Buff. Orphaned Canadian ganders Shelby and Gerald complete the gaggle, when they’re not trying to escape. ‘Once, they performed a breakout and tried to follow passengers onto a local bus. Thankfully, a local lady intercepted them and returned them before their adventure got out of hand.’

Some may be familiar with the ancient Roman legend in which geese sounded the alarm during an attack from the Gauls on the Capitol, which woke the Romans and enabled them to defend the citadel. Although unlikely to be subjected to a Gallic uprising in Abbotsbury, Samantha is familiar with the efficacy of geese as a warning system: ‘There is no need for a doorbell in my house. When a stranger approaches, the geese honk, setting off a chain reaction with the dogs barking, which triggers the parrot to shout: “What’s going on?” The three females have also been nicknamed the feathered police force of the village — a job they take most seriously. They stand on the roadside waiting for an unsuspecting driver to come by, giving the impression that they are about to cross. Once the person has completely slowed down, they’ll nonchalantly turn around and head back to where they came from.’

Emily Caldecott has witnessed similar behaviour in her geese on her Leicestershire farm. ‘Some of them made a nest on the roadside so they would slow the traffic as they paraded up and down. We’ve had people drive up and tell us the geese were attacking their car.’ Such behaviour is usually for good reason, as Emily explains: ‘It’s only during the laying season that their temperament changes; they all become very protective of their area and the males become very protective of their ladies — so much so that they’ve bitten a passing horse, as well as our dog. It gave the dog quite a shock and she hasn’t gone that close again, but usually you can walk through them and they are generally good-natured; there isn’t the risk of them running up behind you like a cockerel will.’

It seems to be more nature than nurture in Tom Godber-Ford Moore’s Toulouse Dewlaps, he concedes. ‘Brothers and sisters can be quite the opposite ends of the friendly scale, which at least makes it easier when selecting which birds to keep for breeding and which will end up on the menu.’ This is the second year that Tom has kept geese at Pennard Hill Farm in Somerset, a family-run farm and wedding venue with accommodation. ‘We have them primarily for meat to supply our farm-to-table feasts. The breed is often used for showing and less so for meat due to their slow-growing nature. However, as we are adding value by putting them on a plate, we are able to make it work and prefer keeping the heritage breeds going. We love having them around; they are terrific characters.’

Apart from in the breeding season, behaviour can be managed by the way one interacts with them, Tom advises. ‘The less time you spend with them and the less confidence you have with them, the more aggressive they may be. They are wily creatures and soon sense fear, so will take advantage. If buying from new, it’s crucial that you get on the right foot with them and be confident, in charge and caring for them all at once. They will soon come to see you as a friend and the young become playful if you spend time with them.’ However, caution should still be exercised. Mrs Ashton notes that: ‘Suspicious parents raise aggressive geese; tame parents or hand-reared goslings tend to stay tame. Geese get a bad press because they are intelligent, are tuned into flocks and family groups and, therefore, their humans are important to them. Don’t expect them to cope with young children who have no idea about their own body language and behaviour.’

This doesn’t mean that children can’t be involved in the husbandry and, indeed, Emily’s four girls were very hands-on. ‘I remember the excitement the first year we had geese when we found the first egg. At that time, the children were all under seven and egg hunting was a constant occupation. We’d see the crows circling when the geese were sitting, so my eldest would give us strict instructions to hunt for eggs as soon as she returned from school. The girls sold them at the bottom of the drive as pocket money, so it was an important sport.’ Keen to be involved, even the family dog played a role. ‘My husband trained the spaniel to retrieve the eggs,’ reveals Emily. ‘Her enthusiasm to get every last one went as far as swimming down to the bottom of the pond to retrieve very old eggs — although we didn’t sell those!’

When it comes to input, geese are relatively low maintenance. Tom asserts: ‘Apart from shutting them in overnight (some people believe they are a fox deterrent, but a fox will make short work of even the most aggressive gander), they are not time-consuming at all. Provided they have enough space, food and water, they need very little if they have access to green pasture, which they will prefer over all else.’

For anyone still wavering over whether these waterfowl are wonderful or wicked, Samantha enthuses: ‘Our stately individuals bring colour, charm and oodles of character to the yard and village in only a way that a flock of geese can. No two days are the same around them. If ever the day came when we didn’t have geese, the heart and soul of the place would vanish.’ Such words serve as a fitting final toast to the Marmite birds.

This feature originally appeared in the March 18, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Spring in England does not announce itself loudly. It arrives by degrees: a softening of the light over ploughed fields, the tentative green haze on hedgerows, the first blackbird stitching song into the morning air. Emerging from winter’s dormancy, we look for signs that endings are not final. We wait for snowdrops, primroses and daffodils before releasing a tightly held breath — and rejoicing, as our monochrome world flushes with colour once more.

Yet, like all ephemeral things, spring’s balm is bitter-sweet. We know that blossom falls almost as soon as it blooms and this fragile urgency draws poets time and again to the delightfully arduous task of bottling its scent. It is during this season of serene alteration that Christina Rossetti’s ‘frost-locked’ gates of redemption and liberation creak open and invite us in. The calendar may reset itself in January, but our inner clocks are slower to comply. The nights are long, the days are dim, our energy yet to return. Hope does not sprout from a marked date, but from the sensory proof that the world is waking up. January may invite intention, but spring is where we find motion and, echoing Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s observation on the turn of the year, this season bids us all to ‘ring out the old, ring in the new’.

Spring is often invoked as a metaphor for personal transformation and with good reason. It holds a subtle paradox: the birth of what is revealed and the death of what is concealed. What has been gestating unseen now enters form and, in doing so, invites us to do the same — to draw on our concealed potential and emerge in bud. Sap rises, seeds split open, light lengthens. Spring gives hope to hearts long winter bound and we feel it in our own quiet loosening.

For centuries, artists have turned to spring as a state of mind, not merely an annual happening to be analysed, and poets have long tried to capture such inner expansion on the page. The unveiling of blossom along a lane, a lamb unsteady on new legs, rain that smells of sweet soil rather than metallic cold — such details resist grand explanation. They ask for attention, for language that listens as much as it describes.

Thomas Nashe, inspired by birdsong, uses onomatopoeia in Spring, the sweet spring to carry the melodic twittering that would have flooded the English countryside half a millennium ago, ‘Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!’ In Craving For Spring, D. H. Lawrence longed for the season’s vibrant energy and the ‘conflagration’ of green: ‘I wish it were spring in the world./Let it be spring!’ The renewal of spring rouses the mind as much as it does the earth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, watching vernal life awaken, pondered his own inertia in Work without Hope, in stark contrast, as ‘the sole unbusy thing’.

To discern a bird by its song or a snowdrop by the hour it opens is the work of a mind that has stopped wandering. Both poetry and springtime reward stillness. Both ask us to slow our stride through the day and notice what is quietly changing. Gerard Manley Hopkins devised the much-debated terms ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’ in his journals to describe how one might commune with Nature. Inscape is the unique inner pattern of a thing, its soul-signature, and to perceive it requires instress, a deep, loving attention that presses inward until the thing’s inner life is felt. ‘Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—/when weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush’, he wrote in Spring. Once we begin to observe in this way, even the lowliest plants blaze with meaning.

Rossetti’s Golden Glories reveres the humblest flowers of the countryside. Buttercups become ‘golden cups,’ daisies possess a ‘golden eye’ and the gorse transforms the common land into a ‘golden sea’, signifying that spring-time alchemises the ordinary into something precious. Gillian Allnutt, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize for the third time in 2025, masterfully marries rural landscapes and spiritual attentiveness in her verse: ‘I stand/as ash by winter bound/as crow stoned/as heron sudden/land/by absence astounded/by presence astounded.’

For English hearts, true belonging lies not in exotic hothouses, but in our wild fields, lanes and footpaths. In a letter to his friend James Rice in 1820, John Keats wrote: ‘I have seen foreign flowers… but I do not care a straw for them. The simple flowers of our Spring are what I need to see again.’

Arguably, spring in the Northern Hemisphere unspools its magic similarly across the celestial equator; but not according to Robert Browning, who, when visiting northern Italy in 1845 and preparing to marry his beloved Elizabeth Barrett, expressed a deep longing for his motherland. The bloom of primavera could not quiet his homesickness and the expatriate composed Home-Thoughts, from Abroad: ‘Oh, to be in England/Now that April’s there…/And after April, when May follows,/And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!’ The ache for English orchards and hedgerows is more than nostalgia. It is rooted — like a perennial bulb — in a landscape that generations of poets have studied as scripture.

In I watched a blackbird, Thomas Hardy records a moment of observation: ‘I watched a blackbird on a budding sycamore/One Easter Day, when sap was stirring twigs to the core.’ John Clare, our ‘quintessential Romantic poet’ according to the Dictionary of National Biography, wrote with an intimacy and precision born of daily contact with the land. His poetry captures rural rhythms, creatures and the countryside in all its moods. Describing a vixen with her cubs, Clare writes: ‘Among the taller wood with ivy hung/The old fox plays and dances round her young…’

Over the years, despite its gentlest intentions, spring has not always arrived during peacetime. Written after the First World War, Humbert Wolfe’s A Thrush in the Trenches recalls a moment of beauty amid brutality. For an instant, the throstle song stills the soldiers, softening the din of war and suspending the ‘horror, hate and Hell’ that surround them — unexpected, luminous and transcending the battlefield, as if belonging to a world untouched by war: ‘Suddenly he sang across the trenches,/vivid in the fleeting hush/ as a star-shell through the smashed black branches,/a more than English thrush.’

Mechanisation changed farming and the 1950s saw the dawn of hedge grubbing. Hedges were removed to make tractors’ lives easier and, with the loss of these vital wildlife corridors, songbird populations plummeted. Spring, of course, kept coming. Ted Hughes wrote of ‘soft excitements’, daffodils, bees and A March Calf. Spring was no longer a pastoral ideal, it was something to be protected.

In March 2024, our Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, published Blossomise, a collection that celebrates the rapturous return of spring blossom through a chorus of voices. His poems lead us through blossom-festooned cities and fields alike and reflect on the fragile beauty of the climate that sustains them: ‘The woods beyond were sparse and spare,/the branches empty-handed, bare,/no glint of blossom anywhere./apple, cherry, blackthorn, pear.’

In recent years, spring has appeared unreliable. Migrants arrive early or late, blossoms may open before pollinators arrive, frosts destroy early fruit — and, whether we attribute this to climate change or a protracted cycle of Nature, this new instability has brought renewed engagement on our part. Blossoms are recorded, we listen for birds, protect hedges and list veteran trees — we have woken up and now we are keen to participate, dialling in, more sensitively than ever, to our instress.

English poets, from medieval writers to contemporary voices, have used spring to express survival after hardship, to transform grief to gladness and to expose the fragile, threatened wonder of the natural world. Each year, we are reminded that the discipline and restriction of the darker months make rebirth possible. It is this anticipation that has ignited our collective imagination for generations and restored hope in our darkest hours.

As in the cosmos and the human heart, abundance requires prior contraction. Renewal, whether in the fields or within ourselves, is not naïve optimism; it is hard-earned. To walk in the English countryside in spring is to step inside a verse that has been unfurling for more than 1,000 years. Spring does not offer mere spectacle, but reassurance. Poetry, in turn, offers us a way to hold it long after the petals fall.

This feature originally appeared in the March 18, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Kicking up the dew on the fields as the sun warms the early morning mist is the first of many signs that spring is on its way. Blackthorn is flowering and even urban roundabouts are lit up with yellow gorse. Yet nothing quite stirs the heart as the sight of the first magnolias covered with so many soft pink flowers that their bare branches are almost hidden.

We tend to think of spring in terms of warmth and sun, but it is the constant lengthening of the days that really makes the difference. The wrens and robins are in no doubt, appearing after months of absence to dart joyfully along flowerbeds before dashing back into the safety of a dark hedge as the garden gate opens.

Feel down for the warming of the soil and watch for the accompanying spurt in weed growth, according to the gardener’s adage. When fresh hummocks of hairy bittercress pop up seemingly overnight in the vegetable beds and innocent-looking rosettes of dandelions appear as if out of nowhere, the time has come to get out into the garden again. Whatever we have in mind this year — be it digging a new rose bed or making a no-dig vegetable plot, planting an orchard or experimenting with a gravel garden —there will be some sort of work required.

Gardens need gardeners and, as anyone who has tried to find help looking after theirs will surely know, it is not easy to find experienced gardeners. To find someone to come to mow the grass or cut the meadow is one thing, but someone who understands how to prune and tie in a climbing rose or who can avoid slicing off the glistening carmine shoots of an emerging peony when hoeing weeds is quite another. People with real knowledge are as rare as hen’s teeth, which is why anyone with a good gardener will never offer to share them.

Horticultural expertise has to be gleaned on the job: you cannot learn to prune a clematis or wisteria without a pair of secateurs in hand. We still mourn the closure of the many local parks departments that once offered hands-on training, but all is not lost. This month saw the launch of Hortistry, a scheme championed by some of the finest gardeners in the country. It will provide free masterclasses with horticultural experts to professional gardeners who want to brush up on their skills.

There are also scholarships supported by places such as Sissinghurst in Kent and Great Dixter in East Sussex, among many others, as well as the WRAG scheme run by Working for Gardeners. This offers people who want to retrain as gardeners paid, part-time practical training in a garden where they can work and learn from the owner or resident head gardener. This is such a clever idea — a match made in Heaven or, rather, in the garden.

This feature originally appeared in the March 18, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

If you are ever confronted by a toad, you soon see why there is little chance of confusing it with its froggy cousin.

I realised this after discovering a glorious, warty specimen settled on damp concrete in the garage one autumn. It was not only its copper-coloured eyes, squat boxer face and bumpy, waterproof skin — allowing it to survive away from water for longer — but its size that impressed. Wild toads can live for more than a decade; this creature may have been as old as my son.

After some deliberation (and Googling) I moved my toad to a pile of logs and fallen leaves near the pond. It was silent as I transported it, in gloved hands to protect its skin from mine, which meant it must have been a female: only male toads squeak when picked up.

Sadly, a report recently found that the chance to perform a toad relocation may become rarer than ever. Led by Dr Silviu Petrovan of the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the charity Froglife last October, it used one of the biggest data-sets ever gathered for amphibian population trends; between 1986 and 2021, a dedicated team of volunteers counted migrating toads during the spring breeding season. The findings were sobering: over the past 40 years, the UK population has declined by nearly half. The common toad (Bufu bufo), now reassessed as ‘near threatened’ in England and Scotland, may soon need a new name.

One of two species native to Britain, the common toad has a place in our culture not enjoyed by the natterjack, whose home on sandy coasts and modest population has meant few of us will ever encounter one. The common toad, however, has had a near-ubiquitous presence in Britain since the last Ice Age: a study of frog and toad bones at Repton in Derbyshire found evidence of local populations as far back as the 8th century. The excavation concluded there was a toad boom in the 14th century, which might explain why the creature begins then to creep from folklore into literature.

From magic and medicine to myth, toads have been linked always to the suspicious and powerful: a toad is the first ingredient Shakespeare’s witches drop into their cauldron in Macbeth, the 15th-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson makes his toad treacherous and Milton’s Paradise Lost has Satan himself choosing to inhabit one for his disguise.

As with all folklore, there is confusion: what is bad is also powerful and power is something people try to harness. Across medieval Europe, women were advised that a toad effigy clamped between the knees during childbirth could ease labour pains. Meanwhile, toads were thought to carry a jewel in their heads that changed colour to warn of poison and protect against evil — or, as Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It, the toad was ‘ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head’.

These ‘toad-stones’, mentioned since the Middle Ages, became especially popular between the 14th and 17th centuries. They were, in fact, often fossilised fish teeth, but that did not stop people believing the proper way to extract one was to sit a toad on a red cloth until it belched the stone up, to be caught and set into a ring or amulet for luck.

Modern literature has given the poor old toad a gentler reputation. In his superb 1946 essay Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, George Orwell describes the creature after hibernation as having ‘a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent’. The essay credits the toad — not the cuckoo — as the herald of spring. His description of toad copulation brings to mind a particularly lively urban Saturday night, with the creature entering ‘a phase of intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms round something and if you offer him a stick, or even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad. Frequently one comes upon shapeless masses of 10 or 20 toads rolling over and over, one clinging to another without distinction of sex’.

My own re-homed toad did not hop into her new refuge, but crawled, stretching her limbs across the leaves like an aged yogi. The glands in her bumpy skin contain toxins that deter predators, meaning that, unlike the frog, she can stroll away from trouble rather than leap. I never saw her again, nor any sign of the alien-like double-rowed strings of eggs she might have left clinging in the pond. Around St Valentine’s Day, amorous toads leave hibernation and begin their migration to ancestral breeding ponds, sometimes many hundreds of feet away. Most return to the very pond of their birth, using chemical signals and magnetic orientation to find their way — regardless of whether a new A-road now crosses their route. The long, jelly-like strings of eggs hatch within days. It takes two or three months for a tadpole to become an inch-long toadlet, which must then brave cars and predators as it leaves the water to find new ground for feeding and hibernation.

Toads return to the same ponds, which means when those ponds are drained or built over it breaks a link that is both ancient and ecological. Although a toad’s skin may look tough enough for a witch’s cauldron, it is porous. Agricultural pesticides seep through it, poisoning the animal, at the same time as killing off its food sources, such as spiders, beetles, worms and slugs. The creatures that prey on pesticide-poisoned toads are also affected, hedgehogs and otters among them, which often skin the toad inside out to avoid its toxic glands. Climate change, too, plays its part. Last year saw the driest spring in more than a century, disrupting hibernation and the availability of a toad’s choice of food, and milder winters cause toads to wake too soon, losing body condition and producing fewer eggs.

Why should we care about the much-maligned toad, apart from the fact that a world with one hiding in your garage is richer than a world without? The answer lies in the natural cycle. As with birds and insects, the decline of once-common species sends ripples along the food chain. As Froglife’s report notes: ‘It is not extinction, but the population decline of abundant species that will have the most serious ecological consequences. Abundant species tether food webs, account for much of the interaction diversity in a given community, and carry out ecosystem services’.

There is some good news. Froglife reports that, although toad populations crashed by 68% per cent between 1985 and 2013, efforts in the past eight years have brought ‘regional recoveries’, reducing the total decline to under half. Much of this is thanks to the Toad Patrols — volunteers who literally carry toads across roads by the bucketful. In 2025, 275 active patrols helped almost 135,000 toads complete their lust-driven journey to reproduce.

Community-led action can sound worthy, but futile. In fact, there is precedent in the revival of another creature once commonly squashed on tarmac: the hedgehog. As rural populations continue to fall, urban hedgehogs are making a comeback. The excellently named HogWatch project has seen dramatic rises in hedgehog populations in Highgate Wood, north London, in only eight years, thanks solely to citizen action. In October 2024, the National Hedgehog Conservation Strategy—launched by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species and the British Hedgehog Preservation Society — became the world’s first of its kind, providing a frame-work for NGOs, government, landowners and communities. The Hedgehog Street campaign has already recruited more than 100,000 ‘hedgehog champions’.

Are toads the new hedgehogs? Let’s hope so. It would be a shameful thing to have created a landscape that in only 40 years manages to kill off a creature that has survived 400 million, through the extinction of the dinosaurs to the Industrial Revolution.

In the meantime, anyone with a garden can help. Despite not being able to build amphibian tunnels for commuting juveniles, Jenny Tse-Leon, head of conservation and Impact at Froglife, says that ‘the restoration and creation of more and better-connected ponds and habitats such as woodlands and grasslands are essential to their survival’. No matter the size of your garden, a small pond, log pile, stones or even an upturned flowerpot can become a summer refuge and a winter hibernaculum.

One day, perhaps, the sight of a toad making its slow, dignified way through the garden may become as common as it once was — and our children, too, might move one from a garage to a bed of leaves and see for themselves why these characterful creatures have long been woven into the fabric of British culture.

What does footballer-turned-actor Vinnie Jones have in common with the late Elizabeth II? A deep affection for rural Britain, certainly, but also a love embodied by one item in particular: the walking stick. How fitting then, that Vinnie should choose a beautifully crafted stick as a present for his friend and recent Country Life guest editor Sir David Beckham, who highlighted the ‘solace’ they have both found in the countryside.

A well-made stick is an object of beauty, a symbol of connection to the land from which it was plucked and, over many patient hours, refined. That symbolism becomes weightier still when it takes the form of the crozier, or shepherd’s crook, long carried by bishops on ceremonial occasions to represent pastoral care for a perpetually wayward flock. Cathedrals excepted, a wooden stick feels out of place in town or, at least, a striking style statement. In the countryside, however, there’s no finer companion to tackle uneven ground, beat down nettles, shoo errant livestock or simply rest on in contemplation.

Of course, anyone can fashion themselves a functional, instant stick from the nearest tree, but that’s very different from the piece of craftsmanship that will draw admiring comments when out and give pleasure even as it rests in the stand at home. What is it, therefore, that makes a good stick? And how can you acquire one?

There’s no organisation better to ask than The British Stickmakers Guild, the 800-strong membership of which is testament to the quiet passion this craft inspires. In fact, membership secretary Ian Smith reports a record recruitment year, with more than 100 new members paying their modest £18 subscription in 2025. He also emphasises the eclectic mix of ‘accountants, forensic scientists, judges, gamekeepers and farmers’ who find themselves united by this shared interest. ‘We’ll get someone who’s been on holiday in Scotland and found a few antlers that they want to make into a stick,’ remarks Ian. ‘Or a farmer whose favourite tup has died and he wants to keep its horns.’

A local shop may sell wooden sticks that pass muster for as little as £25, yet Ian gently distinguishes these ‘very rudimentary’ wares from the prize-winning examples that are his focus. ‘You’re talking £300 to £400 a stick at country-show competition level,’ he suggests. If that sounds expensive for a piece of wood, then consider the man hours alone that are involved in its enhancement. According to Ian, ‘40 to 50 hours on a stick wouldn’t go out of the way on the quality you want for a competition’. Set your heart on an intricately carved piece of ram’s horn, a woodcock head complete with painstakingly stained plumage detail or perhaps a likeness of your beloved spaniel and even that timeframe begins to look rather conservative.

Then, of course, there’s the minimum 12-month drying period required before the sander or jigsaw comes out. If the summer show season is when finished products go on proud display, the winter months, as sap falls and bare trees can more easily be assessed, are the time to cut wood and so begin this long process.

This is the period when stickmakers can be identified by the intent way in which they walk the landscape. A hedgerow that has been cut and laid rather than mutilated by tractor flail may provide rich pickings, as can coppiced woodland. Down by the stream, trees growing at an angle out of a bank may be carefully dug to preserve the root as a sturdy handle. There’s a special thrill to spotting a shank with the perfect length, taper and natural ‘V’ split required for a thumbstick.

Opt for a jointed rather than single-piece stick and a whole host of handle options unfurls. Yew and walnut offer a natural look with handsome grain; antlers are stylish yet hard-wearing and relatively easy to come by; ram or buffalo horn require skill to obtain and fashion, but can be particularly eye-catching.

The choice of wood or design often comes down to a mix of aesthetic, pragmatic and even regional preferences. ‘Blackthorn is popular, especially with the Irish lads,’ notes Ian. This wood’s sturdiness and rich hue is regarded by many as a perfect combination of form and function, the appearance of regularly spaced knots down the shank only adding to its character. These physical properties have long made blackthorn a favoured material for the Irish ‘shillelagh’, whose historic use as a weapon carries loaded symbolism in the national psyche. Adding still further to blackthorn’s popular mystique is this plant’s ancient Celtic association with witchcraft and — depending on which end of it you find yourself — either protection or misfortune.

Head to Scotland and the stylistic preference takes on an altogether more pastoral, ornate tone. This is where to seek out the ‘cromach’, a shepherd’s crook or tighter curled leg cleek, often crafted in horn with its functional heritage transcended by a decorative thistle and scroll design. That’s not to suggest embellishment is absent south of the border: simply admire the finely carved detail of the late Norman Tulip’s sticks, displayed at Alnwick Castle, Northumberland. In Wales, the cattle drover’s hooked Cardigan or Llandovery stick is a useful option for those who prefer a hip-height walking accessory.

As for other favoured wood choices, Ian recommends ‘ash if you can get a straight piece or holly is very strong’. He recently branched out into less traditional territory with a lightweight bamboo shank complete with resin head. By far the most popular shank choice, however, is hazel, prized for its straight shoots, ease of seasoning, strength, widespread availability and — especially when the plant grows in stressful conditions — scope for a beautiful silvery colour. ‘I have to sneak off into the woods by Windermere,’ Ian reveals. ‘In Knaresborough, where I live, the ground is too good so the trees are brown or grey, although they do grow very straight.’

Although every master stickmaker will have their own specialisms and preferences, all too often they are craftsmen first and salesmen second. A few respected names have embraced Instagram as a shop window, but otherwise would-be customers must rely either on word of mouth or strategic stalking inside a country-show tent.

Perhaps this retail reticence and often long commission waiting lists explains why a growing number of stick coveters choose to make their own. After all, you never know when you’ll need that tricky last-minute gift for a retired footballer or a member of the Royal Family.

It was April 27, 1974, and I was looking south from the village of Freckleton over a wide expanse of the Lancashire coastline near the Ribble estuary. I can see in my written record for the day — a notebook marked No 2 now in a shelf of 100 — that I’d listed all the birds present on this beautiful spring morning. The area is still home to the thousands of waders that I’d logged, but pride of place went to a species underlined, encircled and accompanied by a triumphant tick! I was ecstatic. It was a snow-white heron, a little egret and, at the time of my Freckleton visit, there had been only 100 ever in the history of British ornithology. Who could possibly have imagined how this exalted rarity would become so commonplace today we almost take it for granted?

From the Severn to the Wash, it is a default bird of our estuaries, yet in winter any southerly bias disintegrates, with little egrets present from southern Ireland to the River Tyne, from Kent to the Outer Hebrides. They are now routine on the Ribble and at any one moment there are at least 12,000 in Britain.

The little egret is one of the best illustrations of huge changes that have occurred in our bird populations. Alas, the direction of travel for much of our avifauna has been downwards. Since my 1974 egret sighting, the losses are put at 73 million birds. There is no scope for complacency, but it shouldn’t stop us marvelling at some extraordinary gains. The obvious questions inspired by the egret’s rise are why has it happened and what has changed?

The likeliest explanation involves two interlocking elements. The first goes to the heart of modern relations with nature and led to the social movements creating the RSPB here and the Audubon Society in America. It concerned the slaughter of millions, possibly billions, of herons and other waterbirds for their elaborate lacy breeding plumes. These were used in a century-long fashion for feathers in women’s hats, which, by the time of the First World War, had driven birds such as the little egret almost to the wall. The British eventually legislated against the trade, a move aided, ironically, by the arrival of motorcars, which favoured close-fitting cloche-style headgear. The lacy feathers now stayed on the backs of Europe’s breeding herons and, year by year, their numbers rebounded.

A key moment in this story came at the end of the 20th century. In 1990, there were 36 little egrets on the southern-English coast. By 2000, it was 1,018 and 68 pairs had bred, mainly in Dorset. Few places better illustrate the wider pattern of waterbird recovery than Holkham National Nature Reserve in Norfolk, where I was once a warden. In 2010, we were awestruck that, after centuries of breeding absence, six pairs of spoonbills — members of the wider heron family — had nested. Those numbers steadily rose to more than 40 pairs, which have now fledged 748 young, but they were also joined by 15 pairs of cattle egrets, 12 great egrets and 25 pairs of little egrets. The last species has so expanded — a recent survey indicated 2,500 breeding pairs — that we can speculate whether little egrets will become the commonest member of its family in this country. Yet it is equally important to recognise that both our native species, the grey heron and Eurasian bittern, have done well over the same period. When I went to Freckleton in 1974, there were 7,000 pairs of grey herons in Britain. Today, it is 11,000, whereas bitterns hit a new record total of 227 pairs in 2019. The figures bring into focus the second factor in all these developments. Quite simply, we care more.

At a societal level, there is less persecution of birds and more effective legal protection. This has benefited little egrets and grey herons alike, but now in its wake come previously unimagined species that may well become fixtures very soon. They include wetland-dwelling little bitterns, purple herons and glossy ibises. The first of the trio began breeding in 2009, purple herons in 2010 and, last September saw an arrival of 600 glossy ibises right across Britain.

If they become permanent ‘citizens’ they will join one of the largest of all Britain’s wild animals: the common crane, whose own fortunes mirror the same developments. After an absence of 450 years, common cranes returned to breed. In half a century, they have reached 40 pairs from the Norfolk Broads to the Somerset Levels. However, that increase progresses in the same stately manner in which a long-legged crane stalks across the marsh.

As I mentioned, Holkham exemplifies the process, albeit not merely because of an expanding heronry. In winter, those same marshlands play host to birds visiting Britain from Iceland and Greenland. They are pink-footed geese.

In Adventures Among Birds (1913), W. H. Hudson described his Holkham encounter with ‘pinkfeet’ as ‘the most magni-icent spectacle in wild-bird life I have ever witnessed in England’. He guessed his sighting entailed 4,000 birds. This year, the wardens are rather disappointed they have ‘only 42,000’; in 2006, there were more than double that figure. The Norfolk geese have a curious link to the Ribble estuary, because the latter is part of the other core area where pinkfeet winter. Overall, our islands hold 500,000, a fivefold increase since my 1974 Freckleton visit.

A wonderful consequence of this dual concentration is that arrowhead formations cross the skies of middle England as the geese fly back and forth between the areas. Like many towns or cities, my home in Buxton, Derbyshire, shares in the daily drama of their English ‘commute’. Pinkfeet are powerful proof of heightened British wildlife protections, but there is a further factor in their success. Rather strangely, it concerns our national sweet tooth. Sugarbeet production rose massively in the 20th century and, although the green tops of the crops are of little interest to farmers, the geese have come to rely on them. The particular food supply may be inadvertent, but today millions of us delight in spending a small fortune on seed mixes for our garden visitors.

This intentional shift in our behaviour has had major consequences for birdlife. The biggest winners are goldfinches and, in many homes, they even have an allocated dispenser all to themselves. Their seed of choice is called nyjer, imported from Asia, which has helped to drive a near sevenfold increase to two million pairs today.

Another species cashing in on the garden bird-table is the great spotted woodpecker. These glorious pied creatures have also acquired a parallel taste for peanuts and such supplementary winter supplies have boosted their survival, and driven a 378% rise to 130,000 pairs. Sometimes, bird increases are so slow that we barely even register that any change has happened. The nuthatch exemplifies this creeping process. It is the chunky little songbird with a high whistling call and the gift for clambering up and headfirst down tree trunks.

Nuthatches have spread right across Britain into southern Scotland in a manner as undramatic as it is largely unexplained. Climate change could be a factor. The new largesse in our gardens may benefit them. Ultimately, however, the ways in which birds fluctuate in number or distribution is never a linear progression. If I could go back to meet my 14-year-old self at Freckleton I would offer one tip. Nature is never simple, never static, but take in as much as you can, both the commonplace and the rare. Because it is all equally filled with wonder.

This feature originally appeared in the March 4, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Many people might think that 22,000 miles above Earth is the best place for a solar power station and, indeed, a spokesperson for Space Solar in Oxfordshire, the company that is hoping to achieve exactly that by 2040, with the first panels going up in 2028, describes it as a ‘no-regrets move’.

The idea is that it would be illuminated by the sun almost all of the time and would lead to far lower energy bills than nuclear power; it only needs investment — much, much more of it — and, as for all forms of energy, it has its detractors, too. We are in a Pandora’s Box, genie-out-of-the-bottle situation: the continually increasing knowledge about renewable energy in its many forms cannot be ignored — and it would be irresponsible to do so — yet the relentless rate of its progress threatens to trash the landscape as fast as others are trying to save it.

Ofgem has released figures that indicate that Britain has nowhere near the capacity (of electricity and water) to power the AI revolution that the Government desires. The physical manifestations of renewable energy are increasing exponentially in size and scope in front of our eyes. Wind turbines, which some people consider things of beauty — and, indeed, they can be mesmerising, great white sculptures gently revolving on the far horizon — are becoming bigger and bigger, leading to local angst and protest at the relentless noise and the desecration of views.

Solar panels, which even their makers could not describe as attractive, are growing like Topsy; those proposed at Lime Down in Wiltshire will bestride the fields at a height of 14ft 7in. The process of the construction and installation of these metallic beasts is a strain on rural infrastructure, miserable for locals and hardly environmentally friendly. Then there is the overlooked potential of brownfield sites and rooftops and the difficulty of an ecologically sustainable disposal at the end of the panels’ useful life.

According to the umbrella group Stop Oversized Solar, which covers some 20 protest groups from Yorkshire to Devon, the average size of a ‘Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project’ is 2,000 acres; one, in Nottinghamshire, would be 7,000, another would stretch for 17 miles of Norfolk countryside. The total loss of farmland by 2035 is estimated at 375,000 acres.

This all comes amid increased pressure on food security, not to mention the clamour to protect shrinking biodiversity rates, alongside the Government’s determination to force through planning permissions. Urgency is required, of course, but not panic, compromise instead of complete ruination, hard facts over emotion and ambition. There needs to be a calmer, more honest assessment of the merits of development and a less divisive left-right politicisation of the different types of power. The countryside should not be viewed as an empty canvas on which to achieve everyone’s aims.

Birds do it, bees do it and fleas, educated or otherwise, most certainly do it.

‘It’, in this case, is what biologists term ‘symbiosis’, meaning a close, long-term necessary interaction with another different species. The word hasn’t strayed far from its root, the Ancient Greek symbios (living together with another) and bios (life). Symbiosis can be lovely, it can be nasty, it can be indifferent, but it made the natural world in which we live. A squillion years ago, primitive plant forms trying to get a grip on the earth of Earth got a rooting leg down with the aid of anchoring fungi. To this day, the vast majority of plants and trees — more than 90% — still rely on the thin threads of underground mycorrhizal fungi to live and to breathe, even to send chemical messages to other arborea, the ‘Wood Wide Web’. Symbiosis: it’s a long-term affair.

Nature, being Nature, exhibits symbiosis in more ways than you can shake a Power-point remote controller at. Our little grey cells conveniently reduce it to three main sorts. We’ll commence with mutualism, whereby both species benefit, either thriving together so that both win or when the one could not survive without the other. The most well-known example of mutualistic symbiosis is the relationship of the aforementioned bees with the flower and vice versa. In return for receiving sweet nectar, bees help to pollinate the plants that may have otherwise not been able to reproduce. This happens because pollen sticks to the bees’ legs when they feed; there are even bees with special adaptations, pollen ‘baskets’, on their spindly limbs to help the harvesting from, say, the wildflower-spreckled verge on the local country lane. Our human version of mutualism is incorporated in the apothegm ‘scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’; more elevatedly, there is the Latin expression quid pro quo.

We humans rather like mutualism. If it is transactional, something for something, it also suggests societal co-operation and cohesion. Bonding as a means of survival. According to a quote often attributed to Charles Darwin: ‘In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.’ You drive your car safely in the expectation that others do likewise.

Out in the British countryside, the examples of mutualism are as multifarious as they are marvellous. Take, for starters, a hypothetical good old meadow with ant hills strewn like grassy scatter cushions. Say this flowery mead lies alongside our bee-friendly lane noted above. Down in the very base of the yellow meadow ants’ tump, in a cellar, the mob of Lasius flavus keep a herd of aphids to be ‘milked’ (licked, in fact) for the sugar, or honeydew, they produce. A colony of yellow meadow ants can easily harvest 22lb–33lb of sugar from its aphids over a summer. In return, the aphids receive protection from predators and valeting that cleanses them of parasites. Think insect dairy-farming.

In that same meadow, there may be blue butterflies, dilettantish, flitty-floating about and likewise in a symbiotic relationship with ants, what is technically ‘myrmecophily’. The caterpillars of Adonis blue (Polyommatus bellargus), an icon of chalk grassland, exude the honeydew that ants are so delirious for — to the extent that the ants carry the caterpillars into their underground nest, where, safe, the latter pupate over winter.

In the meadow there are also starlings (Sturnidae) on the backs of sheep, picking off annoying bugs. The bird gets grub, Shaun the Sheep gets relieved of an itch, an avian-ovine symbiosis acknowledged in the old folk name for starlings, ‘sheepstares’.

Magpies (Pica pica) perform grooming duties on farm beasts, too, before flying back to roost in the alders lining the brook. The alder trees (Alnus glutinosa) fix nitrogen in the soil through a symbiotic relationship with Frankia bacteria in their root nodules, thus enriching the ground. The peas and other legumes — our future food — in the surrounding crop fields do the same nourishment of the earth, but with other bacteria. On the bark of the alder are grey clumps of lichen, which, despite appearances, are not one organism, but symbiotic relationships between fungi and algae (or, sometimes, cyanobacteria). The fungus provides the stable protective architecture, whereas the algae photosynthesis produces the life-giving energy. Together, they are greater than the sum of their parts, harmony in action. In the oak wood beyond the pea field, chanterelle mushrooms (Cantharellus cibarius) are draped like a small orange robe about the base of an oak, filling the woodland air with their apricot perfume. Mycorrhizal fungi are not random; chanterelle form a mutualistic relationship with the roots of particular host trees, primarily oak, beech, birch, pine and spruce in the UK. They are a gourmand’s delight.

Number two type symbiosis is commensalism, where one species benefits when the other does not, but the latter is not harmed in the process and is indifferent to it. It’s the graceful, brilliant-white cattle egrets (Bubulcus), an increasingly common bird in the UK, getting a free meal of insects stirred up by bovine hooves and its water fleas, Daphnia, feeding on the algae and micro-organisms stirred by grazing aquatic snails in the pond in the meadow corner. Our virtual field is also conveniently beside the seaside. Commensalism is barnacles getting a free ride on the cruising whales to nutrient-rich waters.

As the Devil has all the best tunes, so parasitic symbiosis, number three, has all the best stories in symbiosis — and all the grimmest reapers. Fleas on the shepherd’s sheepdog, ticks on the deer that live in the wood beyond the crop field, the 30in Anoplocephala magna tapeworm in the gut of the child’s pony trotting along the lane. In parasitism, derived from the Latin for ‘one who eats at the table of another’, the parasitic organism lives off a host at the host’s expense, even unto its death. The mistletoe festooning the apple tree in the orchard behind the meadow has developed special roots that penetrate the tree’s bark and tap into its water and nutrient sources.

Down in the rock pools, it’s a parasite’s delight. The isopod Anilocra physodes, a woodlouse-like thing, clamps on to some luckless fish, notably wrasse, and sucks the lifeblood out of them. Then there is its cousin the isopod Ceratothoa steindachneri, known as the tongue-biter, which attaches to the tongue of weaver fish until the tongue shrivels and falls off. Don’t forget, either, the truly macabre crab hacker barnacle (Sacculina carcini), which attaches to the underside of the shore crab, invades its body with probing fleshy rootlets, then chemically castrates it. An infected male even develops a wider, feminine abdomen, together with motherly characteristics. The hacked crab guards the parasite’s eggs, attached to its underside, as if they were its own. Welcome to the Rocky Pool Horror Show.

Symbiosis. It makes the natural world go around. We can’t live without it, but sometimes we’d rather not know the details.

For the last two weeks, people around the globe have been glued to their televisions, marvelling at the speed, power and gravity-defying skills of the world's finest Winter Olympics athletes. However, out in the wild, another set of fierce competitors have been perfecting their icy-weather performances for a lot longer then four years. For millennia in fact.

There is the hare that can spring across snowdrifts as fast as any downhill racer, and penguins, whose slide-and-glide technique would surely earn them a place on any top-placing bobsleigh team. These wild animals are our unsung athletes and their survival depends on podium-worth performances every single day.

Here are some of our favourite photographs of them in action:

Emperor penguins release bubbles of air, trapped underneath their plumage, just before they jump out of the water and onto the sea ice. This helps them to pick up speed and get the momentum they need.

An adult mountain hare running at full speed in the Cairngorms National Park, Scotland. We think Norwegian cross-country skier Johannes Høsflot Klæbo, whose sprint finish last week sparked a thousand memes, should watch out.

Photographer Sascha Fonesca captured this image during a three-year camera trap project high up in the mountains of Ladakh in the Indian Himalayas. Snow leopards face an extremely difficult struggle for survival, living as elusive, solitary predators in one of the most harsh and unforgiving environments on Earth.

The true champions of any cross-country course, they can travel an incredible 25 miles in a single night.

A group of emperor penguins sliding over the ice in Antarctica. Luge athletes in the making — every single one of them.

A gentoo penguin jumps out of the sea — and seemingly straight into the photographer's lap. It's giving Eddie the Eagle.

A house sparrow bounces across the snow-covered ground in Derbyshire. It's probably not quite enough to qualify for the Big Air final, but give it another four years.

An Arctic fox skates across icy ground — Ilia Malinin take notes.

When hunting, the fox employs its signature move, the 'mousing leap', a high, swooping jump followed by a nose-first plunge through the snow in order to catch it's prey hiding beneath.

A snowy owl in Alberta Canada swoops low over its territory. Their loud screeching can be heard up to 10 kilometres away.

Reindeer undertake epic treks across the tundra, through blizzards and across frozen rivers, all while trying to avoid predators and find food. They can travel up to 3,000 miles in a single year — the longest known distance of any land-based mammal, dwarfing any Olympic course. 

Their wide, crescent-shaped hooves act like snowshoes to help them move across different terrains, while also aiding them in digging for food. 

When RMS Titanic sank in 1912, 40 cases of exotic feathers ordered by New York milliners were lost, their value greater than their weight in gold. A decade later, George Bernard Shaw described chilly, tweed-clad Everest climbers as ‘resembling a Connemara picnic surprised by a snowstorm’ — but one, George Finch, wore a suit lined with eider down, and stated that ‘every-one felt the cold except myself’. He had discovered what penguins already knew: a dense layer of down provides the finest known insulation, enabling the birds’ survival both in Antarctic storms and deep underwater. Feathers have many remarkable qualities and they entrance the human eye.

Birds, their 11,000 species greatly outnumbering mammals, evolved over aeons from feathered dinosaurs, via the winged Archaeopteryx, developing plumage incomparably more versatile than fur or hair. Feathers consist of keratin — like hair and nails — but of a reptilian type. The shafts, hollow at the bottom, solid further up, grow from follicles in the skin and from them branch tightly contiguous filaments or ‘barbs’, which form the vanes of the feather. Each barb has scores of tiny hooks (barbules), which mesh into each other like Velcro to form a smooth surface, restorable if disturbed by combing with the bird’s bill.

Feathers are of three main types. Flight feathers are comparatively long, strong and flexible, with narrowed front vanes. Connected by ligaments and tendons to wing bones activated by powerful muscles in the chest, they form aerofoils that enable flight; similar tail feathers assist steering. Contour feathers, closely overlapping and subject to muscular control (they can be puffed out) provide protection, shape and colour. Beneath them, down feathers are hookless, soft and fluffy, retaining internal — or resisting external — heat. Some birds also possess bristles or filoplumes, perhaps with sensory function. A swan may have 25,000 feathers, wrens about 2,000 (small bodies need proportionately more to keep warm). A bird’s feathers typically weigh twice as much as its skeleton.

Birds generate lift and thrust by beating their wings. On downstrokes the outer (primary) flight feathers are closed, on upstrokes held apart. Getting aloft is assisted by running or swooping. Teal can take off almost vertically, but swifts, with their almost vestigial legs and long narrow wings for rapid, prolonged flight — sometimes 100,000 miles a year — avoid taking off from the ground as they struggle to generate the required lift from a flat surface.

On landing, birds steeply adjust the angle of their wings and open the flight feathers. Unlike conventional aircraft, they generally need no landing run. Hein van Grouw, senior bird curator at the Natural History Museum in Tring, Hertfordshire (which holds the world’s largest bird-specimen collection), believes ‘birds never unintentionally stall’. Biologist and writer Thor Hanson understandably calls feathers ‘the evolution of a natural miracle’.

One miraculous feature is the ability in many cases — notably ducks, dippers and especially penguins — to keep their owners dry. The overlapping of the cover feathers, naturally hydrophobic anyway, is so tight and perfect that water cannot penetrate to the underlying down, which, if wet, would cease to insulate (although downy ducklings somehow swim without disaster). Owls, observes Hein, have ‘soft, quiet feathers, vulnerable to rain’. Oddly, some seabirds, notably the frigate (with inflatable red chest), lack water resistance, so has to fish by skimming only its beak into the waves.

Plumage is kept in condition by regular preening, involving for most birds the distribution of an ‘oil’ from a gland under the tail. Doves, Amazon parrots and the dangerous cassowary, which have no preen gland, possess instead a type of feather (powder down) that fragments into a dust with conditioning qualities. Partridge chicks, mobile on hatching, grow flight feathers astonishingly fast: egg to air in 14 days. A young albatross needs eight months before decades flying above the restless ocean. Before they fledge, grebes feed nutritious masticated feathers to their young.

Although they are extremely robust, feathers do nevertheless wear out and are vulnerable to lice, but replace themselves by moulting: shedding old stems for replacements grown from the same follicle. When moulting, some birds cannot fly. Mallards are ‘sitting ducks’ for about a month.

Flight is, for most birds (although perhaps 60 species are incapable), their supreme miraculous ability, from bird-table robin to the almost unbelievable bi-polar migrations of Arctic terns. The feathers of bar-headed geese provide lift and warmth sufficient to cross the Himalayas twice a year. Different wing shapes facilitate the soaring of condors, frigatebirds sleeping in flight, falcons’ 200mph stoops and hummingbirds hovering. The tiny wing feathers of the spangled coquette, which oscillate at 80 beats per second, uniquely enable backward flight, so exhausting as to require restorative ‘torpors’, a short, low-temperature nap. Penguins’ feather ‘wings’ are hard fins.

Many birds enjoy splendid camouflage, such as the sombre russets of the woodcock or the white of winter ptarmigan, finely portrayed in Archibald Thorburn’s paintings. Yet plumage, especially in the gloom of tropical jungle, is often vividly flamboyant for dimorphic sexual display, exemplified by the peacock. Bright hues — birds’ colour vision is superior to ours — result from natural melanin or from light refraction on feather structures. Ostentatious plumage attracts females. Lengthy tails (the superb lyrebird) and strange dances (riflebirds) are effective, too. So admired are spectacular feathers that they have been taken for human embellishment. The iridescent emerald quetzal, which trails its long green tail out of nest holes to mimic ferns, was appropriated for Aztec headdresses. Roman helmets bore ostrich crests; the Chinese liked kingfishers and golden pheasants; Marie Antoinette favoured poufs: towering compositions of hair, plumage and avian parts. The Cheyenne revered eagles.

In the 19th and early 20th century, fashionable women in Europe and North America became passionate about millinery containing feathers, even complete birds; coveting egrets, ostrich, scarlet ibis, grebes and hummingbirds (some weighing less than an ounce). Ornithologist Frank Chapman noted 40 species worn in New York in 1886, and many millions of birds were killed for fashion. Birds of paradise, naturalist A. W. Wallace’s ‘masterpieces of nature’, suffered dreadfully. Carolina parakeets were hunted to extinction.

This slaughter provoked protest and reform. Societies were founded, protective legislation passed and, after 1914, tastes changed, although the Charleston was danced in feathered headbands and New Guinea tribes-men continued shooting paradise birds into the 1950s. Ostrich feathers from South African farms still entice at the Moulin Rouge. There is contemporary British enthusiasm for plumed hats and fascinators, created from legitimate, sustainable sources. Leading couture milliner Jess Collett reports that 30% of her hats include plumage, especially for Ascot. ‘Feathers are fun,’ she says. ‘They provide delightful movement and are satisfying to work with.’ Ordinary feathers can be made to look exotic; Valentino, Gautier and Givenchy have all employed plumage.

England’s only remaining plumassier (feather supplier) is Jaffé et Fils, a family firm in Axminster, Devon. Gilly Jaffé explains, with the vim of one resisting Chinese competition and ‘determined to keep my craft alive’, how ‘splendidly feathers can be coloured and formed… they last indefinitely, provided moths do not get at them’. She meets military, fashion, film and theatrical demand.

Feathers have also had vital practical uses. Military success for centuries was based upon millions of arrows, before archery was replaced by slower firing, less effective, muskets. The 5,000 longbowmen at Agincourt shot about 100 arrows each, mostly fletched with goose feathers. Between the 5th and 19th centuries, almost all writing was done with quill pens, usually from the primary flight feathers of geese or crows. Stems were cured in warm ash, vanes removed and nibs cut with a penknife. (Pens are named after the Latin penna, for feather.) Metal nibs appeared in 1822, but Dickens always used a quill.

Artists have also painted with pin feathers: Letitia Kerr was a Victorian miniaturist with exceptional delicacy of touch. Today, Clare Brownlow paints feathers with feathers, creating wildlife pictures in Northumberland with fine-pointed pheasant quills and acrylic ink. She describes a ‘very methodical and messy technique’ in which, paradoxically, ‘precision is key’. Her subjects, whether grouse in flight or vivid macaw, display lively animation and sharp accuracy.

Fly-fishermen tie their hooks with feathers, and may, if prosperous, sleep beneath an eiderdown quilt, a warm, expensive luxury made from down collected from the vacated Icelandic nests of eider duck, sociable birds with a friendly ooh ooh call, like happy people in a communal bath. Explorers need down clothing. Maids once wielded ostrich-feather dusters, their mistresses feather fans, and 19th-century golf balls had feather cores.

Avian flight prompted the study of feathers by Leonardo da Vinci, the Wright brothers and modern aero-engineers, for feather wings are more efficiently adjustable than wooden or metal ones. Replicating the attributes of feathers is difficult, although Daedalus, designer of the Cretan labyrinth, legendarily attempted it when imprisoned with his son Icarus. He created wings of feathers and beeswax with which to escape, warning Icarus not to fly too close to the sun. The boy did, however, and fell to his death, as depicted by the artist Gowy in 1637.

‘Human’ wings in art often signify grace, freedom, proximity to God: think of Caravaggio’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1597) and Bouguereau’s Song of the Angels (1881). Feathered holiness slays evil in Reni’s The Archangel Michael Defeating Satan (1635). Chunky classical cherubs sport little wings and Abbott Thayer (1849–1921) specialised in feathered female angels.

Sadly, unlike birds, humans lack the necessary pectoral muscles to fly without ethereal assistance. Mankind cannot know the bliss of feathered flight.

This feature originally appeared in the February 18, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The long-eared owl breeds from Kent to northern Scotland; it is our most widespread bird, yet the one that the fewest of us have knowingly seen (or even heard). A key factor in this challenge is the owl’s status as the most exclusively nocturnal of all our night birds: it cherishes darkness more than other owls, but also favours the heavy shadow of dense tree cover. Its song is a low, flat, monotonous hoot, but even this diagnostic sound is seldom heard until long after dark.

If seen well, a long-eared owl is unmistakable, with its warm, rusty-brown upperparts cross-hatched with dark streaks and a distinctive upright, slender posture. It also has a further habit, when alarmed, of ‘sucking’ in its plumage until the body looks like nothing more than a stick. A real giveaway to its identity is its two buff-fringed head plumes that resemble ‘ears’, but actually have no link to the owl’s hearing. Best of all are the huge eyes, their piercing orange hue apparent as the bird glares disdainfully down on any human intruder.

There are only about 1,800 pairs in Britain and one reason for their irregular distribution may be the competition with the more widespread and abundant tawny owl. The latter is considerably bigger than the long-eared owl, weighing almost twice as much, and will on occasions predate its smaller relative. The potential for competition between the two possibly explains the situation in Ireland, where tawny owls are absent. Long-eared owls, meanwhile, are more numerous there and on one-third of the land area they inhabit in the UK.

The long-eared owl likes dense tree cover in which to nest, although it does not build structures of its own — preferring to take over abandoned platforms made by crows or squirrels. It will also leave trees to hunt over adjacent pasture and rough moorland.

There is a strong population in the Pennines and one of the best ways to encounter them is to wait for dusk in late June. By then, their young are almost fledged and in early evening begin a barrage of reedy calls akin to the sound produced by blowing on a stem of grass placed between two thumbs. It is remarkably far-carrying and has an insistent, pleading quality. In response, the adults begin hunting, where their exquisite aerial abilities are in full play. They have longer wings than barn owls and the action is languid, elegant, soundless. During one 30-minute spell, I saw two parents catch five voles in succession and then return to the pine-plantation nest-site, where the begging sounds of the young were briefly quelled.

Long-eared owls might be challenging to observe, but there is a time when they are easier to find. During October and November, large numbers vacate more northerly latitudes in Continental Europe, some crossing the North Sea to Britain. These immigrant owls can be seen hunting by day over the Wash in Norfolk and Lincolnshire and over marshes along the east coast in Yorkshire, Suffolk and Essex. Another feature of the wintering birds is that they sometimes gather in communal roosts, occasionally in double figures.

It is wonderful to peer into a dense hawthorn bush and find several owls, all hunched and asleep, eyes clamped against the intruding day-light. Yet imagine seeing 350 long-eared owls together like this. Those numbers are common-place in the Serbian town of Kikinda, famous as the long-eared owl capital of the world. During my visit, there were 27 birds arrayed across a single bare tree outside the town’s bank; next to a nearby school, there were another 30.

The purpose of these roosts is something of a mystery, although many such winter congregations are thought to serve as information centres, allowing birds that have not fed successfully to follow more replete neighbours out to profitable hunting areas. By dawn, all the owls had returned to the trees in the centre of town to sleep. One insight into the life of small rodents in this part of northern Serbia came when we stood beneath the owls and made squeaking noises like those of a mouse. As if a switch had been flicked, scores of staring orange eyes flared open all at once.

This feature originally appeared in the February 11, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Care to guess how many umbrellas I’ve lost in 2026? A lot. Enough by now that I could have treated myself to a night at The Connaught if I hadn’t bought a new one each time. Anyway, it has been rather wet, and people have been up in arms about it, as if torrential rain is anathema to being British or something along those lines.

It rained three times more than it normally does in January. Southern England was the hardest hit, enduring its sixth wettest January on record. Yet we still went about our business as we usually do — and, given the resilience this seems to have inspired, I reckon we’ll continue to do so. We’ve known for years that wetter winters are becoming the norm, regardless of how these might arise (mostly storms) — so we may as well embrace them. Don the trenchcoat, the wellies and revel in the romance of it all. Just maybe don’t go swimming.

The rain also leaves room for pragmatism. Wet weather, though temporarily tough on farmers, is good for our soil, assuming it is healthy and has been carefully restored after last year’s harvest so as to accommodate more rain. This both prevents flooding and creates better conditions for crops to thrive: good news for Worthy Farm, which is taking a sorely needed holiday from Glastonbury in 2026, precisely so that it can regenerate its soil. Don’t cry—at least the cows are happy.

Another thing we ought to do to make the most of the downpour is build more reservoirs. Wetter winters tend to beget drier summers, which increase the risk of water shortages. It seems almost comical that Britain should ever experience such a thing, although it did last summer when a record dry spring and a succession of heatwaves laid the stage for a drought. The subsequent hosepipe ban lasted until November.

The trouble with building a reservoir from conception to completion is it would take several more years than an electoral term. Our most recent reservoir opened in 1992; since then, infrastructure projects of the sort have not been high on any government’s list of priorities. As ever, our planning rules prove the biggest obstacle to progress. To make the most of wetter winters, we ought to begin relaxing them.

This feature originally appeared in the February 11, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

If only you'd put your phone down for a minute, just one minute, and gaze into the side of this jaguar, or the beating wings of this hummingbird, or some loved-up swans, you'd realise that there are hearts everywhere for those with eyes to see.

Coral reefs, tide marshes, large cats, butterflies, flowers and lakes. All throughout nature, the hearts and 'sort-of-heart-shaped-if-you-squint-your-eyes-a-bit' things exist and enthrall.

Our friends at the WWF have shared some fabulous examples with us, which we will now share with you. Next time you are out in the park, or flying over the Great Barrier Reef, a reminder to take a good look around you. You can fall in love with nature quite easily, as it turns out...

We invariably think of owls as creatures linked to woods and darkness, but the short-eared owl bucks both trends in preferring open landscapes and by being active in daylight. In summer, when they are breeding, the birds favour high moors or rough farmland, often in northern England or Scotland, as well as the offshore islands and especially the Outer Hebrides.

Then, in winter, when they descend in altitude or migrate south to English coastal areas, short-eared owls add salt-flats, dunes and grazing marsh to their range of treeless habitats.

Hunting birds will perch momentarily on isolated bushes, but I have never once seen the species in a wood or even merely flying through mature trees. Their preference for day-time is almost equally diagnostic, although best of all its features is when the bird stares straight at you. Its eyes are piercing yellow and, occasionally, you can spot the vestigial ear tufts, which stand proud of the enormously rounded head.

It may not be the largest by weight of our five British species — tawnies are heavier — but the short-eared owl has the greatest span and the chequered ash-brown wings are noticeably broad. In consequence, the flight is airy, light and immensely fluid. Watching a short-eared owl hunt is never less than a joy. It patrols just over the ground and deploys a deep, steady action, in which the two parts of each full beat are of unequal length. The upstroke is whippy and near instantaneous, but the downstroke seems slower, as if the wings must work harder through all that disturbed air.

This rhythmic progress is ultimately at the service of the owl’s spotlight search for rodents, and there are always floating pauses or moments when the wings tilt down to either side. It is the blend of precision and grace throughout that makes the bird so beautiful to watch. Best of all is the moment that the owl strikes, collapsing to earth, the enormous wings folding down upon it like old clothing.

Prey taken during these patrols includes insects and birds as large as redshanks, but newts, frogs and bats are among an occasional miscellany. Yet the vast majority of the short-eared owl’s diet comprises small mammals, and particularly voles. This dependence on the latter has been well illustrated at moments in British history when vole populations have reached ‘plague’ levels. They were recorded as long ago as the 17th century, but a striking event occurred in southern Scotland in 1891–93. Farms were said to have been infested with millions of scuttling, squealing rodents, as the short-eared owl numbers built up in Dumfriesshire alone to 500 pairs. The exceptional nature of these owl numbers come into focus, when you realise that the present British total is only 620–2,200 pairs. This has coincided with a near halving of the short-eared owl’s British range in the past 40 years.

A predator whose own numbers fluctuate with the fortunes of a single dominant prey might be assumed to be vulnerable, but short-eared owls have a massive hemispheric range that wraps right across Eurasia and North America and even through the lower half of South America.

It has, improbably, managed to cross the 300 miles of roiling ocean between Argentina and the Falklands. I recall vividly seeing the species on a South Atlantic coastal cliff — half a world away from any of the British places that I so associated with short-eared owls. Yet it wasn’t the strangeness of the bird’s presence that struck me. It was how at home it appeared in the heath-like vegetation of the Falklands’ diddle-dee; no less a true resident than it is on the moors of the English Pennines.

The ability to cross large areas of open sea allows the short-eared owl to make annual journeys from mainland Europe to Britain. These appearances on our east coast are triggered by the same conditions that bring other autumnal arrivals, such as woodcock and winter thrushes. The coincidence led to an old country name for the shorty — the ‘woodcock owl’.

Quainter still was a belief, which some serious ornithologists once entertained, that those midgets of the bird world, goldcrests, somehow managed to snuggle into the owls’ thick plumage and hitch a ride to Britain.

The might and majesty of nature photography is fully on display in the shortlist for this year's Niveen People's Choice Award — part of the Natural History Museum's Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition for 2026.

The judges picked 100 photographs from more than 60,000 entries to be shown in an exhibition. The photographs below made the shortlist and now it's your turn to decide which is the winner. Will it be a Polar bear family resting after an arduous trek in Canada that takes the crown, or a cellar spider complete with a horde of eggs, photographed in a house in Southampton, of all places?

It is up to you to decide. The entries, shown below, are some of the best wildlife photographs of recent times — each capturing a small glimpse of a different part of our natural world today.

Voting closes at 2pm on March 18. You can visit the Natural History Museum's website to cast your vote.