How many of us, on a warm autumn day, have shaken some seeds from the dry, ripe pod of a favourite garden plant or scooped out seeds from a much-loved tomato to sow the following season? In so doing, we become part of a continuum that began about 12,000 years ago, when our Neolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors gave up foraging for wild plants and settled to farm.

In collecting the seeds of wild plants that grew well for them to sow the following season, these accidental plant breeders kickstarted a journey that all the crops we grow and eat have taken — evolving from wild parent to cultivated offspring. This process of selection naturally focused on plants that flourished in the collector’s soil and climates, a system that continued unchanged until early in the 18th century, when a new generation of enthusiastic amateur breeders and entrepreneurial plantsmen and women started to take an interest.

Echoing our farmer forebears, their method for developing and improving flower, fruit and vegetable crops was through careful observation and the selection of perceived changes that were occurring naturally. The result was the development of a huge range of new varieties.

It wasn’t until 1837 that seeds were produced commercially, when Suttons Seeds and Carter’s Trusted Seeds started growing flowers and vegetables with the specific purpose of collecting their seeds, which were sold through catalogues published the same year. This marked the start, in this country, of commercial phenotype breeding; that is, the deliberate crossing of different varieties based on their morphology (observable characteristics) by the transfer of pollen from a male flower to a female, thus creating something entirely new.

Gardeners and estate owners could now buy packets of countless different varieties of favourite garden crops by mail order. Not surprisingly, breeding new cultivars became an obsession with the Victorians and seed producers sprang up across the country. Catalogues were often richly illustrated and their arrival through the letterbox was eagerly anticipated. Many home gardeners continued to save their seed and were instructed in doing so with ‘saving one’s own’ advice in gardening books.

Everything changed again with Gregor Mendel’s discovery of the laws of heredity towards the end of the 19th century. As a result, plant breeding became a science and, early in the 20th century, moved from the farm and garden into the laboratory. Genetics, a word invented by the biologist William Bateson in 1905 to describe the laws of inheritance has, since the Second World War, revolutionised our approach to plant breeding.

This often involves another traditional breeding technique known as mutagenesis — the forced mutation of a plant using chemicals and radiation to select for specific traits. This has enabled highly inbred types with the development of F1 hybrid cultivars. Most recent advances are in selective molecular plant breeding of genetically modified and engineered (GMO) crops, initially rice, wheat, maize and soya, with increasing numbers of fruits and vegetables being added to the list of GMOs every year.

Traditional open-pollinated varieties are very different from genetically narrow and homogenous modern hybrid cultivars. They are highly heterogenous with complex genomes and they are adaptive, meaning their traits can flex with changing biotic and abiotic stresses. Their seeds carry within their genomes the memories of their wild relatives: as growing conditions change, so underused genes ‘wake up’ and play their part in ensuring the survival of the whole organism.

Why did the tradition of home seed saving go out of fashion? It is thanks mostly to a misguided perception that home-saved seed is not as good and the belief that a greater choice, particularly of modern hybrid cultivars, promises greater yields and better disease resistance. However, with about 80% of all the seeds we buy now imported, mainly from the EU, but also from America, North Africa and the Far East, it is becoming ever more important to increase the amount of homegrown seed and so ensure we have the greatest diversity of well-adapted edible and ornamental plants in our gardens.

In the past 50 years, the vast majority of small, family-run businesses selling open-pollinated seed have either been bought out or gone bust, leaving only a handful of companies supplying most of the seed we buy mail order or from local garden centres. (Three of the biggest, Suttons, Dobies and Thompson & Morgan, are all owned by BVG Group, a multi-channel retailer.) There are still several independent seed companies with long and distinguished reputations; Kings Seeds, Marshalls, Mr Fothergill’s, Unwins and Chiltern Seeds to name but a few.

Most encouraging, however, is the emergence since the start of this century of a new generation of small-scale seed suppliers and breeders. Two of the oldest are Tamar Seeds in Cornwall and Real Seeds in Pembrokeshire. The smaller companies that champion cultivating open-pollinated varieties also provide guidance on how to save their seeds. Garden Organic’s Heritage Seed Library, which holds the national collection of more than 800 heritage and heirloom vegetables, actively encourages its members to save seeds of the varieties they share out every year. Not only does this make economic sense, but, by saving our own seeds, we become part of the solution to restoring genetic diversity, resilience and adaptability in our gardens. By selecting seeds, year after year, from the best flowers and crops we harvest, we are acting as evolutionary plant breeders, exactly like our Neolithic forebears.

Adam Alexander’s latest book ‘The Accidental Seed Heroes’ (Chelsea Green, £20) is out now. Look out for his seed-buying guide in a January issue of Country Life.

This article first appeared in the September 2, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

'It happened to be my daughter’s 17th birthday when I collected the first alpacas I rehomed,’ food writer and recipe creator Anna Stanford recalls. ‘She had friends over and it was hard to keep them calm (the friends, not the alpacas) when the four balls of fluff arrived.’ However, Stanford had underestimated how stubborn the new arrivals could be and they refused to get out of the horsebox. ‘We tried everything. Eventually, as I was straddling one, she suddenly took off with me on her back — my first rodeo experience!’

Traditionally kept as herd animals in South America and prized for their wool and hardiness, alpacas (Lama pacos) only came to the UK in any number about 30 years ago — perhaps with as much reluctance — but have grown in popularity to near 60,000. There are two types: huacaya and suri. The former is identifiable by its crimped, teddy-bear-like fleece and is more prevalent; the latter has long, silky dreadlocks. The blanket (the fibre that extends from the base of the neck to the tail and along the flanks) is highly prized for being soft, lightweight and warm; the finer and more consistent the fibre, the more valuable it is.

It transpired that the Stanfords were destined to find those particular alpacas. ‘They were introduced to us as Mia, Matty, Nora and Grunt. Mia is my daughter’s name, my nephew is called Matty and Nora was the name of my husband’s grandmother. I saw it as a sign,’ Stanford says. ‘Luckily, we don’t have a Grunt in the family, but that name suited him. He was such a character with big buck teeth and a fantastic quiff.’

For Olympian Dame Kelly Holmes, who acquired her six ‘boys’ when they were six months old — ‘I needed a field to be kept mowed and they are brilliant at that’ — she named them based on their fleece colour: Liquorice (black), Polo (white), Truffle (mid brown), Crème Caramel (two-tone brown and white), Toffee and Fudge (light brown).

Seventeen years later, and sadly without Fudge and Crème Caramel, it is evident how besotted Dame Kelly is with the animals, although the same can’t always be said for them: ‘Liquorice acts like Polo’s shadow and is very protective, so he tries to bite you or spit when you get close to Polo. He is a little sod! He still has all of his teeth, whereas the others have lost theirs, so he chases people and bites them, including the vets.’

Northamptonshire-dwelling Polly Westley wasn’t afforded the same opportunity when it came to naming. ‘I had originally planned to give our alpacas Spanish names as a nod to their Peruvian heritage, but when they arrived they already responded to the ones they had been given: Disco Inferno (thankfully shortened to Disco), Abbandando (after Genco Abbandando from The Godfather) and Liberace. Ironically, Abbandando is the gentlest, Liberace isn’t remotely flamboyant and Disco is a drama queen. He is the most handsome and he knows it — the moment he spots a camera, he turns and poses.’

Names were similarly established with Molly Raven’s current alpacas, as they were inherited from the Revd Richard Coles’s late husband, David, who lived within spitting distance in another nook of Northamptonshire. ‘David knocked on my door and asked if I knew where the alpaca lady lived (I had my three old ones at the time),’ remembers Raven. ‘He told me he had been given three, but that the church was selling the field next to their vicarage so asked if I could have them for a few weeks. He named them Anneka (after Anneka Rice), Belinda (a priest he knew) and Margo (I think after Margot Leadbetter). Sadly, David died months later, but he regularly came to see the alpacas and was great fun.’

Having previously owned sheep — ‘suicidal escape artists’ — Raven was drawn to alpacas after seeing them in Peru. ‘I found a lady who kept some and arranged to go when my husband was away. However, he got suspicious and asked to come, hoping to put a halt to more animals. Fortunately, he really liked them and so he bought me three for my birthday nine years ago.’ From having a herd of nine at its largest, she is back to three again. ‘We lost three old ones and sold three young as they were males and alpacas don’t really live in mixed herds, plus the unneutered males can be a bit feisty. Females also come into season when a male is present so it makes it hard work if they are being kept for fun.’

This isn’t the case for Tess Homewood and her husband, Mark, at Bonnington Farm in Kent, who have a serious venture going. After buying three alpacas in 2020, they now have 43. ‘We primarily breed huacaya, but also run British Alpaca Society-affiliated training courses, host farm experiences and take alpacas to weddings,’ Homewood reports. At her own wedding, ‘our cake featured a felted bride and groom created using fibre from our own alpacas and every table was named after one. With a loose theme of “creatives”, there are names such as Picasso, Björk, Marlon and Brontë among the herd’. Each cria (newborn) is given the same initial as its dam, making it easy to follow lines from one generation to the next.

‘Alpacas’ breeding behaviour is amusing,’ Homewood says. ‘When introduced to a male, a female leaves absolutely no doubt about whether she is receptive. If she isn’t, or is already pregnant, she will spit at him.’ Although tales of vets and neighbours being spat at suggest that this behaviour isn’t directed at male alpacas exclusively, the reputation for regular expectorating appears unwarranted.

A more noticeable indicator of their mood is their humming, as they use different tones to express everything from curiosity and contentment to uncertainty or irritation — and taking the time to observe and understand them is vital, as Dame Kelly discovered. ‘You don’t always know when they are ill, so it is important to observe changes in their character and demeanour,’ she advises. ‘I realised that Crème Caramel had an extremely bad neck and it was causing him to start choking on his food.’ Sadly, she had to have him put down, but her awareness of the issue reduced any suffering.

One thing alpacas certainly don’t seem to enjoy is a manicure. ‘For me, the most challenging part of the husbandry is toenail trimming,’ Westley admits. ‘They wriggle around and even sit on their feet to avoid it. They are strong animals, so it can be a bit of a task.’ Whether they are halter-trained or not doesn’t seem to make much difference. Whereas Dame Kelly holds her hands up — ‘You can tame them to a point that they can use a halter, but I never had time for that when I first got them’ — Raven washed hers of trying to make one alpaca biddable. ‘We attempted to take her to a pet service in the church we live next to,’ she recalls. ‘However, she didn’t want to leave the herd and was prancing everywhere, so we had to take her back. We took a stuffed turtle on a lead instead.’

The annual shearing is an equally challenging task, with the consensus suggesting it is not for the faint-hearted. ‘I will turn my hand to most things, but would not attempt to shear an alpaca,’ Stanford confesses. However, the results are worth it. ‘Their fleece is wonderful,’ Raven remarks. ‘I have about 20 bags of fleece in my loft waiting to be made into something lovely… perhaps next year.’

With such luxurious coverings, it is unsurprising that alpacas enjoy any opportunity to get wet. ‘The first summer we had Matty, I found her trying to get her entire body into her water bucket,’ Stanford remembers, ‘so I bought a padding pool, which they bathe in when it’s hot.’ Westley’s receive similar treatment: ‘We put the sprinkler out so they can cool off. Abbandando dances around it bucking in delight as the water splashes his legs and belly.’ Other bathroom habits are, fortunately, more controlled. ‘Alpacas may be elegant, but they produce an impressive amount of poo,’ Homewood laughs. ‘Thankfully, they are remarkably tidy and use communal poo piles, which makes the daily task considerably easier than it might otherwise be.’

‘If you are looking for a low-maintenance animal to enjoy then they are great, but they aren’t “no maintenance”,’ Westley concludes. ‘They require daily care, which is a commitment (although personally I enjoy the discipline of going out every morning and evening). If you are looking for a fun, affectionate pet, they also might not be the right choice, but if you want a peaceful animal to share your space with, they are perfect. I keep them for the sheer joy they bring. At dusk each evening they start “pronking” — a joyful, bouncing dance. It is such a treat to watch them frolic with obvious happiness.’

Homewood agrees: ‘They are inquisitive, gentle and endlessly entertaining, bringing a sense of peace wherever they are. Watching the herd together on a summer evening is one of life’s simplest pleasures.'

This article first appeared in the October 14, 2026, issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Maybe the old veteran shouldn’t have told the 11-year-old Tom Butler: ‘Oy! You shouldn’t be going out there!’ It only provoked him. It led him, ultimately, down the rocky path to the Cribbar.

When a wave the size of a dinosaur rears up out of the water and starts furiously charging towards you, most sensible people evacuate and head for higher ground. Then again, there are some — an elite few wave warriors — who can’t resist the opportunity to shove their heads into the jaws of the beast. Serious surfers like Butler, a Newquay native, wax down their boards and paddle out to meet the challenge. ‘If you’re born here and grow up here,’ he says, ‘the Cribbar is the big one.’

There is one thing that you might care to thank climate change for: the Cribbar is becoming a more frequent visitor to our shores. The ‘Cribbar’, from the Cornish ‘kribow’ meaning ‘reef’, is not so much a part of the landscape, more the occasional, colossal end product of a perfect storm of topography, far-off hurricanes and the jet stream. On calmer, settled days, with children playing on the beach, big waves can seem like a memory, a ghost, possibly a hoax. But then, in the right season, they come roaring back to life, regularly reincarnated. And now, with glaciers in retreat and temperatures rising, the big-wave season is getting longer and more spectacular than ever.

As someone whose biggest wave was, at most 10 feet (and a fair chunk of that surfed upside down), I can’t help but take my hat off to Tom Butler — and feel a degree of justified awe. When I started out, some time in the last millennium, the Cribbar was more myth than monster. The massive wave that breaks off Towan Head (beyond the Headland Hotel) on a submerged pinnacle of rock was once thought to be unsurfable: too huge, too wild, too out of control. According to legend, it was first tamed way back in the 1960s by a crew of migratory Australian lifeguards. But it wasn’t until the early noughties that it landed in the history books. The Cribbar is our Waimea Bay, the closest UK approximation to Hawaii’s classic big-wave arena. Admittedly, a lot colder and greyer with fewer palm trees, but comparable in scale and intensity: a solid 20-feet wave, on its day, with reportedly 30-40-feet faces. It is strictly for battle-hardened surfers used to putting themselves in the way of harm.

Butler is definitely that. He started surfing smaller waves around the age of three. He was tall for his age and as he got bigger, the waves did too. He became British surfing champion. Then, at the age of 16, the day came when he was finally ready to step up and take on the Cribbar. The paddle out on big days is from Little Fistral, hugging the headland that runs out to the Cribbar and using the rip next to the rocks to drag you out. Or if it’s too big for that, you go off the back of the old lifeboat slip behind the building in the car park.

It’s hard to line up the wave because the peak jumps around a lot. Then there is the classic conundrum of how to catch the wave and not get caught by it: too far out and you won’t have a shot; too close and you run the risk of a bunch of extremely heavy slabs of water landing right on your head, sweeping you onto the nearby rocks. But if grace descends and you are fortunate enough to find yourself in just the right position and you paddle like a maniac and leap to your feet and find yourself astride a huge spitting monster of spray and turbulence, riding on a dopamine high, then it feels as if you just won the lottery. Which is what keeps you coming back for more.

After overcoming the Cribbar (and finishing his GCSEs), Butler caught the attention of Quiksilver who became his sponsor and dispatched him on a mission, partly inspired by the film Endless Summer (1966), to Australia, Indonesia, and Hawaii. He went on to carve out a career as a professional big-wave rider. An adept of tow-in (in which you rely on a jetski to slingshot you onto the peak), he has taken on the most ginormous waves on the planet — freaks of nature such as Mullaghmore Head on the west coast of Ireland and Nazaré in Portugal, which has claims to attaining the magical, mysterious height of 100 feet.

But some years ago Butler turned down an invite to the Nazaré Challenge, ‘sick of the politics and the demand to monetise.’ He married, had a son called Ziggy, and now devotes much of his time to Coastal Crusaders, a community interest company which is enabling disabled people, young and old, to go to the beach and get in the water. ‘It gives the wheelchair world access to something extreme,’ he says. ‘Just not at the Cribbar.’

Now 37 and ‘cruising up to middle age’, Butler fondly recalls Cribbar swells of yesteryear. ‘Storm Hercules (2014), that was a big one. But the Covid year — 2020 — it was a spring tide: I’ve never surfed it as big as that.’ However, Butler is far from calling it a day. Big waves are a realm in which age and experience and wisdom count for as much as youthful ambition. ‘The worst thing,’ he says, ‘is to go out there all guns blazing. It’s a head game. I’m not reckless. But, still, you have to be willing to go for it. It’s not a sport where you can just dip your toe in.’

In his lifetime, Butler has seen the wave supercharged by climate change. It used to peter out in February: ‘This year we were still surfing it at 15 feet in April.’ He expects it to make a return appearance some time in September, whipped up by hurricanes in the Caribbean. Like dedicated birdwatchers, you have to be patient for a sighting. To be ready. Butler is lining up his big wave boards in preparation. ‘More people are going out there now,’ he says, ‘but I wouldn’t encourage beginners.’ It’s more frequent, but it’s also more volatile. Having fallen in love with the Cribbar as a child, he describes his attraction to the wave as being like ‘a bad relationship: you commit so much, invest all this time — and then… it smacks you in the face.’

Up close a big wave can look like a mean, ugly, foam-maned leviathan that really wants to take you down with it: from the safety of the shore, it’s like seeing a precarious but majestic mountain, arching up to the sky only to collapse and die and pump out its life-force on the beach — and then be reborn.

Always head to an RNLI Lifeguarded Beach and stay between the black and white chequered flags. Never go out alone; always surf with a friend or let someone on shore know where you are and when you plan to return.

Ever since the covid-era sourdough boom, good bread has become hot property: according to a dataset from early 2025, there has been a year-on-year increase in sourdough sales of 56% and the UK saw a 237% rise in new bakeries opening between 2019 and 2022. A superlative loaf, however, depends on quality flour — and that requires great grains from which to mill it.

Unfortunately, over the past 70 years, Britain’s flour supply has become uniform and disconnected from the land on which it is grown. Many commodity flours are processed from monocultures developed around the 1960s Green Revolution, when industrial grain production took off with gusto. Although high yield, they tend to be uniformly short in stature and susceptible to climatic changes and diseases, requiring noxious chemicals to flourish. They’re also heavily processed, roller-milled into little more than starch — hence the pappy stodge that passes for much mainstream bread.

Now, a steady revolution has taken hold across Britain. A newer generation of artisans is bucking the system, looking back to our provenance-driven grain histories and embracing small-scale modern varieties in thrall to their forebears. There are a few different kinds. Ancient grains are erstwhile and hardy crops that have existed, unchanged, for sometimes thousands of years: think einkorn, emmer, spelt and khorasan.

Heritage grains, meanwhile, are historic British crops that were naturally cross-pollinated and re-sown over many years, eventually becoming genetically defined varieties, such as Red Lammas, April Bearded and Rouge d’Ecosse. Many were preserved for posterity in seed banks in the 20th century, later salvaged and regrown.

Both are usually tall (to outgrow weeds), resilient to bad weather, pests and diseases and grown without chemicals, often with biodiversity-boosting regenerative principles in mind, such as employing low-or no-tilling planting to preserve soil health and fungal networks or leaving borders around crop fields to encourage wildlife.

Population crops, meanwhile, are a sort of modern version of heritage crops, developed in the late 20th century by places such as Cambridgeshire’s Plant Breeding Institute and Suffolk’s Wakelyns, which aimed to record, preserve and promote our agricultural heritage through native crops and ecologically sympathetic farming. They have cross-bred myriad heritage varieties together to create evolving, diverse styles: Miller’s Choice, Oak Farm, Wakelyns YQ, Maris Wigeon and so on.

In addition to the nutritional and ecological benefits, these grains taste fantastic compared with their dowdy commercial cousins, especially when gently stoneground to retain their precious wholegrains — as these British bakers and millers are well aware.

Barony Mill, Birsay, Orkney

Windswept Orkney has many historic USPs — not least its ancient stone circles and burial chambers — and two more diminutive, but no less significant ones. Enter Barony Mill, the only place on the globe that grinds bere barley, a botanical cousin of wheat. Located on the western mainland, the mill dates back to 1873. It was going to seed (so to speak), but, in the 1990s, the local Birsay Heritage Trust set to its renovation, returning bere-milling to the cultural landscape.

Bere is a long-standing crop in this part of the world. ‘A close relation was found in one of the Neolithic digs,’ explains trust treasurer Tony Morley. It’s also a staple of the Orcadian diet: ‘Beremeal bannocks are something that everybody here knows.’

Bere is a hardy crop and grows quickly. ‘It’s called 90-day barley, because the period from sowing to harvest is three months, from May to August. You have to get it out as early as you can because the weather will take it — or the geese will.’

As well as fine- and medium-grain bere flour, Barony sells whole bere ‘berries’ and the three-storey stone mill operates exactly as it did in the 1800s, powered by the waters of Boardhouse Loch. ‘The water wheel drives everything from the millstones to the hoists, to the sieves to the fanners,’ Morley explains. ‘Even shovelling the grain off the kiln drying floor is done with water power.’ It’s a heritage exemplar for the ages.

Pinch, Kelsale, Suffolk

Just off the north Suffolk coast near Aldeburgh, Pinch is the tiny fiefdom of Alice Norman, a Ballymaloe-trained chef long in thrall to sensitively sourced ingredients. During the pandemic, she returned to her native Suffolk and started a meal-kit enterprise, setting up in a former jam room at Maple Farm. Here, piqued by the farm’s wooden Austrian mill, used to grind various specialist grains, she began ‘feeling more passionate about flour and where it comes from’.

After crafting cones from spelt (for the ice creams she’d sell her kit customers), she began baking crullers — a fried doughnut — and then the crisp-bottomed Roman-style pizza for which Pinch is famed. Maris Wigeon is a farm staple and well suited to pizza dough, but Norman will use whatever’s thriving, all milled into semolina, a wheatgerm-flecked plain flour and bran, ‘which goes into the chicken food’.

Next in the running is a coarser, ‘proper’ wholemeal. The flavour, Norman explains, is slightly nutty, ‘like the smell of a health-food shop. We tried it in our pizza; it was actually a bit too much flavour. We need to introduce it gradually, so people’s palates can get used to it’.

Soon, she hopes to have a single wheat variety aligned to each product she’s crafting. ‘It sounds cheesy, but it’s bringing people back to the roots of where an ingredient comes from and the idea that this year’s bag of flour will be different to the next,’ she says. ‘It’s a reminder to be mindful about what this ingredient is.’

Shipton Mill, Long Newnton, Gloucestershire

Back in the early 1980s, John Lister and some friends were ambling in the Cotswold wilds when he came across a ruined, Domesday-era watermill. Inspired by the principles of William Morris and the Arts-and-Crafts Movement — which sought to reinstate craft skills in the face of rank mechanisation — they set about returning the site to glory. ‘It was an amazing opportunity to get stuck into the making of something wholesome,’ he recalls.

Shipton, which has been granted a Royal Warrant by The King, is now one of the country’s preeminent mills. At first, it ground plenty of Maris Wigeon (and still does; the 100% Maris flour ‘suits our organic production methods, as well as offering opportunities for thatching straw’).

Soon, it was experimenting with emmer, einkorn and spelt; even working with Italian mountain farmers on saragolla, propagated in the country’s south for centuries. Lister is also fascinated by teff, an East African grain familiar to Ethiopian and Somalian communities, but something of a curiosity to Western bakers.

Given Shipton’s size, it’s inevitable the mill has segued into some more refined flours, but the founding principles remain (not least in the heritage flour supplied to bakery behemoth Gail’s). The ecological appeal of specialist wheats over commodities is simple, Lister says. ‘These softer wheats have bigger root systems and they harvest more nutrients. You get resilience because you’re not planting a single variety in a field that has to be sprayed to keep all the weeds off, so the biodiversity is greater. It’s a completely different approach to producing grain.’

Landrace, Bath, Somerset

It was when working at Neal’s Yard Dairy that Andrew Lowkes developed the foodie ethos that would shape Landrace, the Bath bakery and restaurant he founded in 2019: ‘The better the farming, the greater potential to make something delicious at the other end.’ Back then, he’d been spending time with various growers and millers involved in the UK Grain Lab — a decentralised body championing interesting wheats. The quickfire nature of wheat cultivation and breadmaking appealed to his ‘impatient’ personality, he laughs. When the Bath site came up, he took the plunge.

At first, Lowkes was more concerned with locating stoneground flours than esoteric strains, but a burgeoning relationship with Ceredigion’s 16th-century Felin Ganol watermill inspired him to start grinding his own. After sourcing some fresh stones from a company in deepest Vermont, USA, and installing them at Somerset’s Westcombe Dairy, Landrace began milling: at first, self-grown wheats — Red Lammas and Orange Devon Blue Rough Chaff among them — before the bakery’s ascent necessitated purchasing grain again.

This year, the mill has been processing wheat from various growers, but Corston Fields Farm near Bath (for a red spring wheat called Mariagertoba) and Somerset’s agroecological don Fred Price (for rye and other heritage varieties) are go-tos. Despite being combined in the bakery’s mixing bowls, they’re milled and bagged as single varieties.

‘Our motto,’ he says, ‘is “Identity preserves stone milling”.’ As well as cornetti — an Italian-style croissant that ‘gives us hell! It’s really hard to make laminated croissants with British stoneground wheat’ — Landrace’s country sourdough remains a signature. It’s all in the retained wheatgerm, Lowkes notes. ‘It’s the grain’s little passport — it declares to your gut that it’s worth digesting.’

This feature originally appeared in the September 23, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

There are a few moments in the year that stand out above all the others. The first snowdrop flowering, swallows arriving from Africa in April, hearing the cuckoo, mayflies hatching in May and the roses and summer solstice in June, but for epic scale, drama and operatic glory nothing matches the wild geese arriving now.

There are about one million migrants, almost half of which are pink-footed from Iceland and Greenland, plus barnacle, brent, greylag, white-fronted, bean and others.

Geese fly in V-shaped skeins, which has been proven to be aerodynamically efficient, but that is only the beginning of the spectacle. The numbers can be enormous from hundreds to super skeins of several thousand birds forming vast avian chains across the sky and these are big birds weighing about 5lb with wingspans of 5ft–6ft.

However, it is the noise that sets them apart and makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Their ink-ink or ank-ank calls are used to keep the flock together, coordinate movement in the formation and communication between parents and young birds to keep the family group intact.

Together, it is a chorus of such beauty that it has been compared to a group of foxhounds in full cry: they are the hounds of heaven.

If there is a more completely engrossing British bird than the common redstart, then I would struggle to name it.

One indisputable aspect of this charisma is physical beauty. Not only is the male colourful, there is also a jeweller’s precision placement to the parts. The back is smooth slate grey, the breast is glistening terracotta, whereas the face is notable for a crisp jet-black triangle outlined with a white brow.

Perhaps most remarkable is that, as he sings, he reveals a mouth lined with citrous yellow. Yet the defining feature is possessed by both sexes. They have glorious ferruginous tails and, even now, I vividly recall seeing my first redstart more than 50 years ago. She was a female and suddenly burst from hawthorn bushes close to my Derbyshire home as an entirely unknown fire-tailed bird. The first thought in that 12-year-old’s muddled head was for a nightingale. After all, I was armed only with The Observer’s Book of Birds, in which half the ancient plates were in black and white.

Slowly, it became clear that nightingales were never seen in my county. Disappoint-ment, however, was obliterated by the vision of this bird itself. She was not only beautiful in colour, but also in shape: slender and elegant. As she moved, her hind parts vibrated so that the red tail shivered — no wonder the bird was once called a ‘fireflirt’. Even the word redstart refers to this same detail and is rooted in the Old English word steort, meaning ‘tail’.

Redstarts are migrants, moving between Africa and those parts of Europe and Asia lying between the July isotherms of 10ºc – 24ºc. About 130,000 pairs breed in these islands, mainly in upland northern and western districts, and usually in broadleaved woods or in parkland-type country that comprises solitary mature trees — ash trees in Derbyshire — with mixed scrub and open rocky ground.

They can achieve very high breeding densities, with parts of western Scotland holding 50 pairs to a square kilometre. What places a limit on their presence is the availability of suitable nest-holes. These can be cavities in trees, but I have found redstarts nesting in crevices in exposed limestone scree or under rocks by the side of a footpath. To complete the impression of some overarching beauty, even the redstart’s eggs are exceptional. For the first time ever, I saw a clutch this year. Almost perfectly oval, they were an unmarked sky-blue with a soft lustre like unglazed china. Lying in a circular feather bed, they had the finished quality of six lapis jewels.

If there was an aspect to the bird that appeared to let it down, it was the redstart song. The author W. H. Hudson set the trend on a long pattern of denigration when he suggested that the sound was ‘interesting both on account of its exceptional inferiority… It is impossible to listen for any length of time… without feeling, almost with irritation, that its strain is only the prelude of a song — a promise never performed’.

It is true that the song is short. Each passage is only two to three seconds long, but what the redstart appears to lack in content it makes up through persistence. Each sound unit is followed by a six- to seven-second interval when it delivers the next short phrase. The pattern can continue for hours. As a male plays no part in nest construction or incubation, he can deliver thousands of separate songs every day and sings for hours on end. What Hudson never appreciated is that each individual unit is packed with the mimicry of other birds.

Those gifts had been recognised for decades. In the 1840s, ornithologist William Yarrell noted that redstarts included the sounds of sparrows and chaffinches in their songs. However, it was poet John Buxton who, when incarcerated as a German prisoner-of-war in Bavaria, wrote more fully about these gifts. In his monograph The Redstart (1950), the Oxford scholar recorded 14 other birds copied by redstarts, including wryneck, night-ingale and golden oriole.

My own introduction to this ability in redstart arose during lockdown. I happened to hear one singing and incorporating snatches of nuthatch and redpoll sounds into its repertoire. That slowly unlocked a full-scale research project that has led me to astonishing personal discoveries. To date, I have recorded 70 species being copied by Derbyshire redstarts. As you would expect, the list includes birds that are their neighbours at breeding sites — curlews, great spotted woodpeckers, house martins and swallows, meadow pipits, pied wagtails, willow warblers, whitethroats and coal tits.

The song also features many species that can only be met on migration in Spain or further south in North Africa. The redstarts then bring to Derbyshire note-perfect renderings of little ringed plover, common sandpiper, European nightjar, little and scops owls and Sardinian warbler. Pride of place perhaps goes to the bird at Bonsall Moor, near the town of Cromford, that imitated a common bulbul, a species you could not find within 1,000 miles of Bonsall. That redstart had to have heard it somewhere in Africa and there it was — re-creating for me the soundscape of another continent.

I should add that none of this extraordinary vocal ability was new to European naturalists. They have long investigated the subject and these researches culminated in 2020, when a Spanish father-and-son team, Godfried and Pedro Schreur, working with friends, made a recording of a male red-start singing in Badajoz province. It was imitating the calls and sounds of 51 other birds in 60 minutes of song. There are so many aspects of the phenomenon that almost demand further investigation. Why do they do it and how long do they go on adding to their repertoire?

One reflection, however, stands out for me. Mimesis is a name we give to the reproduction of the world in some symbolic form. We often think of this skill at copying as both the bed-rock of art and a talent that is uniquely defining of our species. However, isn’t this precisely what a redstart is doing, conjuring moments and encounters from its long odyssey to and from Africa and rendering it in sound form? It is mimesis of the most sophisticated kind.

If we travel back in our imaginations to the caves of southern France where these mimetic gifts first emerged in our species, what we find are cave walls covered in beautiful representations of animals — bisons, horses, deers, mammoths — that shared the world of our Palaeolithic forebears. What those ‘artists’ copied in their paintings was a living community of neighbours. Should we not consider the possibility that redstarts have been practising exactly the same gifts — art, if you will — in the way that we do still? It may be a matter of manipulating the avian organ of sound, the syrinx, rather than our hands with their opposable thumbs. Yet the neural capabilities to conjure experiences that are not present and to revive them in symbolic format are identical.

There is a wonderful moment in Buxton’s The Redstart where he writes: ‘One of the chief joys of watching them in prison was that they inhabited another world than I… They lived only in the moment without foresight and with memory only of things of immediate practical concern to them.’ The sounds and sights of his redstarts were clearly a deep reassurance to the poet and prisoner-of-war, but I wonder whether the birds were really as different as he imagined?

This article first appeared in the September 16 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Even angels may fear to tread across bogs. Humans certainly do. You know when you have reached a bog: the sinking feeling as your booted feet disappear into the dark mire, the view before you possessing nothing above shin-height except apocalyptic aloneness, endless coarse-heathery hummocks and pools that are the upcast unseeing eyes of Earth.

In bogs, whimbrels delve carefree and adders brazenly sport the forked lightning down their backs cast from the spells of witches. Most north European nations have reposed their national psychic fears onto woodland (Little Red Riding Hood being the case in point), but, for the British, the peat bog of lowland heath or highland moor became the repository of dread.

Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon epic composed between the 8th and 10th centuries, was an early cultural iteration of the national psyche of bog-fear: the carousers in King Hrothgar’s mead hall are attacked and devoured by a monster, angered by their merry making: ‘Grendel this monster grim was called,/march-riever mighty in moorland living.’ This creature is exactly the sort you would find dwelling beneath a tarry mere of bog-land.

In the acidic peat of the bog, all manner of folk fears became deposited; over the Pennines, the ghosts of a lost Roman legion march eternally and everywhere in the mist-writhed boggy places at night, the will-o’-the-wisp awaits, an apparition of blue light that lures, devil-spritely, the travellers of bog-land to their death.

The bog will take more than your knees — its pools will swallow down your body and that of your horse, too. Hark the warning issued to Sir Henry Baskerville on his arrival from Canada to take up his West Country inheritance in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles: ‘As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor.’ Dartmoor, that is, with its bogs.

A bog may be scientifically explained. A bog is acid peat fed wholly from the sky and forms in wet places, with which Atlantic-faced Britain abounds (fen, in chemical contrast, is alkaline peatland, watered from underground). There are two principal types of bog in Britain, this reducibility to numeration suitable, as bogs are simple mechanisms.

Our bog cover is threefold. First, the blanket bog of high-rainfall, high areas is our most common bog. Then we have the raised bog, a dome of peat in a low basin. A variant of the blanket bog is the quaking bog, where a mat of moss, perhaps a yard thick, floats on the surface of the bog. Cors y Llyn near Builth Wells in Powys will serve as the paradigmatic quaking bog, should you be tempted to visit.

The crucial ingredients of bog are binary, too: moss and rain, which together make peat. You know peat. It’s the stuff from the garden centre you formerly, before recent environmental legislation, thrust your hands into lovingly to pot-up plants, which was as sensually rich on skin and nose as Romeo y Julieta cigars.

Of course, like so much in Nature, the peat-making process is a deceptive miracle, if at sub-snail pace. Peat forms, on average, at 0.039in per annum. Rainwater gathers in a pool, where few plants like the acidic conditions, but the sphagnum-sort mosses thrive and, as they die, they fall into the bog-pool, to become compressed as peat.

You can play the bog-numbers game endlessly. The British have deplored bogs as brown, featureless wasteland, if not an actual waste of space. Hence the pejorative ‘bog-standard’ and ‘bogged down’. Peat has been cut unceremoniously as fuel and compost, the bogs drained victoriously for farming. This fitted the Anglo-Saxon mind, agriculturalist and suspicious of the mirey places where not only Grendel lived, but so did the recidivist remnants of the Celts and Britons, with their guard corps of midges and mosquitoes.

The hosts of raiding Vikings did little to promote the cause of the bog, as they were said to brew the habitat’s aromatic shrub bog myrtle for a pre-battle potion on which they went ‘berserk’ in battle against the Angles and the Saxons. None of it, the cutting and the draining, was intrinsically evil-intended, but it was always one vision of Britain, ordered and attended, against another that was wild and free.

Although Britain’s bogs have reduced and degraded, their story is not requiem, but resistance. Even in This Year of Our Lord 2026, 9% of Britain’s land surface is bog, with peat the single biggest store of our carbon, locking down the equivalent of 20 years of all the nation’s CO2 emissions. Another number: 70% of our drinking water comes from upland areas dominated by the spongy, boggy peatlands.

Bogs, however, quench more than human physical thirst. They are still avoided by the pars maior and, if you want to escape from the madding metropolitan crowd, the bog is the go-to, a place where you can drink solitude. Come to know the bog’s secrets, too, for they hold rare magic. Under their mottled flatness, they entice water with mystic mechanics; under each bog is a watery mass, a suspended subterranean lake. Regard again, the surface of the bog: it is a haunting thing of minimalist metaphysical beauty, silent and serene, except for birds crying.

Boglands have few animals, but birds proliferate, for wetness is avian fastness. It is a place where curlews (Numenius) probe mire with their decurved bills and golden plover (Pluvialis apricaria) tumble down the big sky that is suspended above the bog and which is its rightful partner.

Insects, too, are in adoration of bogland; the large marsh grasshopper (Stethophyma grossum) — Britain’s largest grasshopper, with the female of the species reaching 1½in— is a habitué. The rare fen raft spider (Dolomedes plantarius), lurks there too, dangling its hairy legs in the water to detect vibrations from potential prey, then rushing out over the surface to seize the victim, walking on water to kill. For variation, the raft spider can hunt underwater in a form of arachnid scuba-diving, by trapping air bubbles to its body.

Bogs belie their apparent boring blankness with dramas small, yet potent. Members of the dragonfly clan patrol the mirror-still pools scattered through the hummocks and use them as kill-zones. They are also places of preservation; the Old Time people called dragonflies ‘flying jewels’ and they would have pointed to the Highland’s azure hawker (Aeshna caerulea) as evidence, as it is lapis lazuli given gauzy wings. The flora of bogland, however, is its true private and preserved esotericism.

Sphagnum moss, miraculously able to hold more than 20 times its own weight in water, lives, dies and pickles itself in acid. The plants of the bog have names seemingly conserved from misty antiquity. Bog asphodel, golden-headed, is a lily once gathered by Lancashire maidens as hair-dye. In and near water, bladderwort, butterwort and bogbean grow. The first two eat insects trapped on greasy leaves.

A bog has reason to take you soakingly by the ankles, as you must then gaze down into its fantastic Lilliputian sparkling and strange plants. In among the many mosses lurks the tentacled sundew, with leaf-borne drops of mucilage (‘dew’) shining like elven diamonds, all the better to entice the bog’s midges and flies. The plant then slowly curls shut on the unlucky insects, fly-trap original, and consumes them carnivorously. There is nothing bog-standard about a bog.

This feature originally appeared in the September 16, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

When the fruits of autumn beckon, with them will come those pestilential little flies. Across every continent and every island where fructification is celebrated, they will take to the air in search of sustenance and reproduction, an abiding nuisance wherever the pomaceous perfume of decaying orchard mesocarp ascends, sugary cooking odours arise and picnic goodies and wine glasses attract.

Diminutive they may be, but they bear a big name, Drosophila melanogaster, a classification vested on them in 1830 by German entomologist Johann Meigen. It means ‘black-bellied dew-lover’, a strange description for flimsy brownish insects with big red eyes and a taste for fermenting fruit. However, what they lack in stature they make up for in numbers, and here’s an extraordinary thing — as we wave them away, we should also celebrate the little blighters, for this creature is entomology’s greatest gift to scientific research.

Learned papers concerning fruit flies run into thousands, many confirming previous work, and six Nobel Prizes have been awarded for medical and physiological findings based on this humble pest. Investigations were first triggered in 1901 after California-based entomologist Charles W. Woodworth bred fruit flies in captivity, noted variations over generations and suggested that the species could be used as a model organism for research into the genetic results of inbreeding.

This notion was taken up by a Columbia University team led by Thomas Hunt Morgan, whose studies into sex-linked inherited traits (such as the insects’ eye colour) resulted in the monumental conclusion that the units of heredity were genes strung on chromosomes inside cell nuclei. Not surprisingly, Morgan was duly awarded one of those coveted prizes. Today, as ever, it demands a leap across the credulity gap to attribute this seminal discovery to the constitution of a flimsy fly barely one-eighth of an inch long.

The mass of research that followed included putting fruit flies into a US space ship in 1946, when they became the first living creatures to be subjected to a rocket trip. Another batch was retrieved safely from a second launch the following year. However, the greatest significance of the huge body of study into fruit fly genetics has been the conclusion that 60% of their genes coincide with those of humans and that 75% of human genes linked to disease find an equivalent function in the insects.

This is increasingly important, for the humble fruit fly has accordingly become the genetic laboratory model for research into neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntingdon’s diseases. It has also been pivotal in an extensive range of other vital studies, from immunity and addiction to stress, cancer, diabetes, dementia and the mechanism of ageing. A further element in this insect’s contribution to research is the presence of a ‘fat body’, a component that stores nutrients and is the equivalent of the liver and body adipocere in mammals, including us.

It regulates the circadian cycle, the natural 24-hour biological oscillation whereby nights and days are managed to maximise physical condition. Where will this creature’s contribution to our knowledge of the human condition eventually lead? It is estimated that 50 million fruit flies are reared annually in more than 3,500 laboratories in 72 countries and their study involves some 10,000 scientists.

They are also the basic subject of most biological and genetic university courses. It is clear that this tiny nuisance has more to tell us about ourselves.

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

In the spring of 2026, BBC News carried warnings of quicksand at Cocklawburn Beach near Berwick-upon-Tweed. Coastguard alerts about quicksand in the Aln Estuary and at Boulmer Haven in Northumberland followed shortly afterwards. Although none of these locations is within 50 miles of my home, the news still sent a shiver down my spine.

As a child, I was terrorised by the thought of sinking in quicksand. I envisioned myself being pulled down into the glutinous depths by unseen hands until the only sign of my presence was a few bubbles and perhaps a school cap floating on the stodgy surface.

My fear came not from personal experience (to this day, I have never encountered quicksand), but from reading Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ adventures (George and her dog Timmy seemed to spend part of every story sinking up to their necks in mud), watching television (a particularly traumatic quicksand scene filled the closing credits of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons) and the silver screen (in ‘Tarzan’ films, the only thing more likely to happen to the naïve European hunter than sinking up to his chin in gloop was awakening to find a giant spider crawling up his arm).

I am not alone in my anxiety. Social media reveals that my phobia about quicksand is shared by hundreds of thousands of people. Most of them, like me, were born in the 1960s or in the decade that followed. This was an era when quicksand loomed so large in the lives of children that Parker Brothers — the company behind Monopoly and Risk — brought out a board game devoted to its perils.

Baby boomers may have lived through a golden age of quicksand, but history suggests that it isn’t only our generation that has been scared witless by the thought of being sucked down by something that — at least in its screen appearances — looks similar to a semolina pudding. Quicksand has been the stuff of nightmares for thousands of years. It features on the Bayeux Tapestry — future English King Harold Godwinson is depicted rescuing two soldiers from quicksand near Mont-Saint-Michel in northern France — and in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, in which it serves as an allegory for losing moral grounding. By the 1720s, slurping sands that swallowed heroes and heroines alike had become such a cliché of overwrought epic verse that Alexander Pope lampooned bad poets who thickened their descriptions ‘here and there with Quicksand’.

How to escape a sticky situation

• Stay calm — thrashing around will only make you sink faster

• Lighten your load and cast aside your rucksacks, backpacks and so on

• Lean back. Distributing your weight over the greatest possible area will help you float

• Wiggle slowly. Circular motions with your legs will allow water to gradually seep downwards and break the suction

• Roll or slither. Once your legs are nearer the surface slowly and gently roll or army crawl to safety

Undeterred by Pope’s sneering, quicksand continued to make its malevolent, squelchy presence felt in literature. Sir Walter Scott, who lived not so far from Berwick-upon-Tweed, was fond of ‘quivering sand’. In Redgauntlet, the protagonist Darsie Latimer gets trapped in some on the Solway Firth and narrowly escapes drowning as the tide races in. Meanwhile, the unfortunate Edgar Ravenswood in The Bride of Lammermoor rides into quicksand; all that’s left is the feather from his hat. This is more than survives of poor Rosanna Spearman in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. The Yorkshire maid is both repelled and fascinated by the ‘Shivering Sand’ that lines the coast, fantasising that it holds the bodies of hundreds of souls. Eventually, she voluntarily joins them.

In R. D. Blackmore’s classic of star-crossed Exmoor lovers, Lorna Doone, the villainous Carver Doone disappears into the sands of the Wizard’s Slough and in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Dr Watson watches in horror as a Dartmoor pony sinks into the Grimpen Mire. That there is no quicksand on Dartmoor was no matter in numerous screen versions of both novels — and the treacherous Devonian mires are indeed as sticky as reheated porridge.

If novelists and poets love quicksand, their passion for it is nothing compared to that of film-makers. Quicksand made its big screen debut in the 1909 Gaumont melodrama Saved from the Quicksands. Since then, it has swallowed up people and animals in Hollywood films as diverse as The Swiss Family Robinson, Lawrence of Arabia, Blazing Saddles and The Princess Bride.

In real life, quicksand is altogether less ubiquitous than in fiction. The quicksand of Dartmoor is a novelist’s fantasy, although that on the Solway Firth is not. It is also an ever-present danger at the extensive sandflats of Cumbria and Lancashire’s Morecambe Bay (where a Royal Guide has helped people navigate around it since the reign of King John) and along the notoriously dangerous Broomway in Essex. In recent years, quicksand has been reported near Whitby in North Yorkshire, Rhyl in North Wales, Walcott and Mundesley in north Norfolk and along the Channel coast at Lancing, West Sussex, and Barton on Sea, Hampshire.

No sooner has it arrived than it is gone again, because quicksand is a capricious phenomenon — which is one of the things that makes it dangerous. Formed of water-saturated sand, silt and clay, quicksand loses its structural strength when agitated. It is firm ground that turns liquid when something — or somebody — steps on it. This singular nature means that the more you struggle, the quicker you go down.

However, the gritty sludge is by no means as directly lethal as the fictional version. Physics dictates that an object only sinks until it has displaced its own weight. Quick-sand is roughly twice as dense as the human body, so most people will only go down up to their waist. Yet, it’s not all good news. The suction of quicksand is so powerful that attempting to pull your leg rapidly from it would require the strength needed to lift a family car. Quicksand won’t swallow you whole, but it can hold you in its powerful grip until hypothermia, exhaustion or dehydration sets in.

There’s also — as Sir Walter Scott’s hero Darsie Latimer discovers — the danger of a rising tide. It was this combination of sludgy suction and the incoming sea that resulted in the tragic deaths of 23 cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004. The shivering sands may not suck people down into the muddy depths as they do in stories and films, but they haunt our nightmares for a reason.

This feature originally appeared in the September 2, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Glorious leaf colours are one of the joys of autumn. They fill our landscapes and gardens with red, orange and yellow — colours unknown in summer. Yes, the process is actually a by-product of the leaves dying, but it also serves a definite evolutionary purpose and brightens our way from summer sunshine to winter gloom. Autumn colour is a time to celebrate.

Why and how do trees and shrubs do it? The ‘why’ question is easy to answer. Trees started to evolve about 390 million years ago. All were evergreen and operated in warm, sunny climates. The emergence of deciduous plants about 135 million years ago was a logical development. They learnt to shed their leaves so that they could survive in cold areas with long, dark winters.

However, that does not explain why the dying leaves take on such brilliant colours. Everyone knows that leaves are green because they contain chlorophyll — a photosynthesiser that uses the sun to create the foods, mainly sugars, that plants require to live and grow — but other colours are present in foliage that are overpowered by chlorophyll’s green. Autumn’s hues come from useful flavonols and carotenes — respectively yellow and orange — and, later in the season, from red anthocyanins, which are a by-product of change. These compounds, and their colours, occur all through the vegetable kingdom, not only leaves: raspberries contain anthocyanins; yellow raspberries are dominated by a carotene called lutein.

Chlorophyll does not live forever. Scientists tell us that the individual chloroplasts break down and are constantly replaced throughout the summer. However, as autumn approaches, rather less green chlorophyll is recycled, so the underlying colour of the leaves is revealed. Some leaves turn pure yellow and others mainly red, with endless variations in between. The exact mixture of these compound chemicals varies between individual plants, as well as between species — hence the degree of yellow or red colouring in the dying leaves. An important part of the process is called abscission: the tree or shrub starts to lay down a layer of cork where the leaves are attached to the branches and, eventually, the leaves fall off.

Frost accelerates the process. The best autumn colour comes from hot, sunny days and cold, cloudless nights — what we call an Indian summer. If autumn is mild and wet, the process slows down and enough chlorophyll survives to mix with the reds so that the leaves appear brown. Most of us had a hot and sunny summer. Provided we have cold nights, autumn colour this year will be all the better for it. That said, the leaves of our red maples Acer rubrum and scarlet oaks Quercus coccinea will never match the splendour of those in New England and Canada because our summers — even this one — are cooler than theirs and our autumns usually damper.

You can see the carotenes in such trees as poplars, ginkgos and birches, each of which turns to a distinct and uniform shade of brilliant yellow or gold, but without even the merest hint of the reds that come from anthocyanins. Not all trees and shrubs make anthocyanins. Unlike the ever-useful carotenes — which help with photosynthesis — anthocyanins are not present in the leaf throughout the growing season, but a sign that the sugars are breaking down in the presence of bright sunlight. Japanese maples, liquidambars and rowans are some of the best — the most dependable — trees for good leaf colour in our climate.

Anthocyanins have another significant purpose: when the leaves fall to the ground they inhibit the development of rival plants. The technical term is allelopathy. Walnut trees and sycamore are good examples, but so are the tree of heaven Ailanthus altis-sima and the Canadian sugar maple Acer saccharum: they keep their competitiveness by killing off their rivals.

How long does autumn colour last? It varies between species. The tupelo Nyssa sylvatica may hold its brilliant scarlet colour for a week or 10 days, but the sweetgum Liquidambar styraciflua retains its autumn leaves for up to six weeks. The process is gradual and individual leaves die by stages, so a tree will have leaves of many changing hues as autumn progresses.

Hot, dry weather can also bring on a change of leaf colour. If you saw birch trees turning yellow in August, it’s because they are surface-rooting and suffered more than most trees from the heat and drought of summer. Their survival strategy is to shut down prematurely.

Japanese maples and cherries are among the first to show their autumn colour. Normally we have to wait a couple of weeks before our native trees start to turn. The beechwoods of the Chilterns and the oakwoods of Sherwood and Savernake are at their best in early November. The brown tinge to their leaves comes from tannins left inside when the chlorophyll fades away; they overwhelm the carotenes.

Elm trees are among the last to turn colour and drop their leaves. Young beeches and hornbeams hold onto their dead leaves until spring. Marcescence is the scientific word for this phenomenon and there are many reasons for it — but that is another story.

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

There was, in my mind, only one kind of gardener. They feature in this magazine; cultivating, planting and maintaining various acres of this green and pleasant land. Always on land. But then I met Titouan Bernicot.

Titouan gardens in a wetsuit off the coast of French Polynesia. He doesn’t grow tomatoes, tulips or trees, but organisms that predate the dinosaurs by 250 million years. His crop is coral.

Titouan’s horticultural career did begin on dry land: ‘I had my tomatoes, a little lettuce and stuff,’ he says. But, aged 16, when he was surfing over a bleached and dying reef, he discovered the crop that will likely consume the rest of his life.

Coral reefs are the ocean's great overachievers — they cover less than 1% of the ocean floor, yet shelter a quarter of all marine life and provide food security and livelihoods for more than one billion people. They also act as natural breakwaters, underpin tourism economies and, rather importantly, help to produce a about half of the oxygen on Earth. Coral polyps host microscopic algae called zooxanthellae. These algae convert CO₂ into energy and release oxygen as a byproduct.

Humanity has a nasty habit of ruining the most useful parts of the natural world and reefs are no exception. Live-coral cover has roughly halved since the 1950s and we are currently experiencing the aftermath of the worst mass-bleaching event on record: between January 2023 and March 2025, heat stress hit 84% of reefs across 82 countries. Rising ocean temperatures is the primary driver, compounded by pollution, coastal development, overfishing and coral-eating starfish outbreaks. The economic case for acting now is stark. Unchecked coral loss could cost $500 billion a year by 2100, against a fraction of that to protect ocean health today. There is a simpler, more urgent case too: our own survival. ‘No reef, no ocean, no air,’ concludes Titouan.

The environmentalist was still a teenager when he founded Coral Gardeners, which restores the ‘rainforests of the sea’ by growing coral in underwater nurseries — mostly on suspended rope structures — before transplanting mature fragments back onto degraded reefs. Rather than rushing the polyps into deeper water, the organisation deliberately lets them mature for up to two years in the nursery, prioritising resilience, species diversity and connectivity so the restored reef can function as a genuine ecosystem. ‘Nature loves diversity — a resilient reef has a lot of different coral species, not just one,’ says Titouan.

Since 2017, the company has planted 221,212 corals across 103 species and restored 25,100 square metres of reef — 20 Olympic swimming pools' worth — across 12 active sites in French Polynesia, Fiji and Thailand. And the team’s patience pays off: despite 2024's catastrophic bleaching event, their corals have maintained an average survival rate above 80%. The team combines hands-on gardening with in-house scientific research (CG Labs), AI-powered monitoring tools and partnerships with brands and institutions to fund the work and raise public awareness of reef decline. ‘We know restoration alone can't save reefs at the rate we're losing them,’ he says, ‘which is why we focus also on storytelling and building a movement, since real change starts when people understand how much we depend on the ocean.’

I visited Coral Gardeners' headquarters on Mo'orea a few years ago. It is not a subtle island. Nature does not so much exist as loom large in high definition. It is an earthly paradise, its soaring volcanic peaks iced head to toe in spongy vegetation. On moodier days, clouds snag in the steep crevices and raindrops the size of marbles plip-plop off palm fronds and pool inside hibiscus plants. The air becomes so thick with moisture you swear you can feel and hold it in your mouth. The people I met described how ocean water runs in Polynesians’ veins and that it’s not uncommon for older fishermen to ask for a shark’s permission before taking fish from their feeding grounds. It is, in other words, precisely the sort of place that produces people like Titouan.

There is, tucked away on page 44 of Coral Gardeners' latest report, a single sentence that ought to have made rather more noise than it has. In June, at the United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice, the President of French Polynesia announced that his government would formally recognise ‘coral gardener’ as an official profession. On the face of it, it is a bureaucratic footnote. In practice, it is rather extraordinary: an environmental NGO, founded by someone not yet 30, has effectively willed a new career into existence by government decree.

Buried a few pages later is something else. On the atoll of Ahe, Titouan’s team repurposed the ropes of a defunct pearl farm — his family's trade — to grow coral instead, with growth rates nearly 20 times the original volume in under a year. Meanwhile, in Italy, the same methodology developed for tropical acropora (a genus of small polyp stony coral) is now tentatively being trialled on cold-water Mediterranean gorgonians (colonial soft corals).

You'd assume a coral-restoration project in French Polynesia and the great houses of Italian fashion and Swiss watchmaking would have little to say to each other. You'd be wrong. In nine years, more than 500 companies have come knocking, wanting to attach their name to Coral Gardeners. Titouan turns most of them away.

His filtering process is, to put it politely, unsentimental. He wants evidence of homework done before a single penny changes hands; partners who have ‘properly started even before our discussion to build a CSR (corporate social responsibility strategy) with some tangible goals’ — and, crucially, ‘not just giving us some financial support for us to do the thing.’

There are two big names who cleared the bar. Rolex and Prada Group. The watchmaker — who Titouan speaks of with something close to reverence, calling them ‘our North Star’ — has backed Coral Gardeners, via its Perpetual Planet Initiative, since near its inception. Earlier thsi month, the President of French Polynesia visited Coral Gardeners' headquarters earlier this month and joined the team underwater to inspect the nurseries. The moment was caught on camera by CNN for Call to Earth, the cable news networks's multi-platform editorial series that exposes some of the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. It launched in 2021 in partnership with Rolex.

Prada, in partnership with UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, is helping to fund Titouan’s projects in the Mediterranean. He singles out the luxury fashion house's Re-Nylon collection, spun from recycled fishing nets. ‘Introducing nylon into [high] fashion is bold,’ he says, ‘but using recycled fishing net nylon’ — and sustaining it for years, as one of the label's bestsellers — is ‘brilliant.’

It would be easy to mistake all this for greedy ambition. However, Titouan doesn’t even consider himself a custodian of the reef, much less so its keeper. ‘The reef has given me everything in my life,’ he says, ‘so I want to give back… nature is not something we own, but something we live in harmony with.’ The billion-dollar question is whether it’s a philosophy that scales to planetary emergency. Titouan might be our and the ocean’s only hope, and the closest thing gardening has to a creed.

A month ago, preparing this magazine’s London Life pages for August, I wrote that the city is at its most verdant in summer. Our trees usually reach their apogee this season. How wrong I was.

The prolongation of the heatwave, despite last week's intermittent rain, means the trees are now experiencing so much stress that they have started shedding their leaves. Autumn has come early.

Perhaps none has suffered more than the apple tree. Orchards across the country started losing their fruit in July when the trees were forced to redirect wilting water reserves to their roots in order to survive. It is forecast to be one of the worst apple harvests in history — a nightmare for cider-makers. ‘The effect won’t be seen until 2027,’ says Nick Showering, whose family has been making cider in Somerset for 180 years, ‘when this year’s yield translates to sales.’

Last year produced one of the richest yields on record. Although not as voluminous as in previous years, 2025 benefited from last summer’s then record-breaking sunshine and produced an unusually, delightfully sweet mixture. Apples of exceptional potency translated to top-notch drinks. The fine cider on sale this summer has been phenomenal.

Too much heat, however, can be fatal. Until last week, it hadn't rained properly in the West Country — cradle of British cider-making — since late June. Producers are expected to make a heavy loss in 2027. Suggestions, from some, to diversify a specialist industry are as oxymoronic as they seem inconceivable.

Importing apples, meanwhile, offers little in the way of compensation. ‘Producers in Europe are most likely experiencing similar issues,’ Nick explains. ‘It would constitute an additional cost to import and potentially dilute [our] product’s quality.’ A fine cider, akin to the one made by his family, prides itself on using local ingredients. For more mass-market brands, a few things could still be done. ‘Instead of importing apples,’ Nick says, ‘they might look to import apple concentrate’: that is, transporting a higher density of product across borders at a lower cost.

As is the case for other, equally water-reliant industries, creating infrastructure to capture the winter rain is paramount to preserve our orchards’ future. Britain has not built a new reservoir since 1992: the result of red tape and resistance from residents near suggested sites. This is neither fair nor right. Cider is one of our greatest and proudest creations — an industry with huge potential as changing tastes lean in favour of lighter booze and national produce.

Supporting our makers goes beyond merely buying their products: it demands a proper strategy. Even our most robust trees need deep watering in times of drought.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It is remarkable to reflect on the cultural stories that attach to our only native breeding goose, the greylag. In classical times, it was a bird sacred to Aphrodite (or Venus). For millennia, it served as an erotic symbol and a faint vestige of this is apparent in the nursery rhyme Goosey Goosey Gander, wherein a male bird is up to mischief in my lady’s chamber.

You could also argue that greylag geese changed the course of Western history. A flock of the goddess Juno’s sacred wildfowl was kept on the Capitoline Hill in Rome and it famously gave the alarm that thwarted the attacking Gauls in 390BC. Less well known is the fact that the species was first domesticated by ancient Egyptians, from whom the practice slowly spread worldwide.

Alas, none of these reflections has much impact on modern British attitudes to greylags. They are possibly the least loved of our native birds and I must declare my own bias: I cherish the music generated by our avifauna, but not the calls of this species. It may have saved ancient Rome, yet there is a nails-on-blackboard quality to that braying cacophony of a greylag goose flock in full chorus.

It was once a rare sound in Britain. Greylags had been resident across the country until they were largely exterminated by the mid 19th century, primarily by wetland drainage. The only indigenous breeding population survived in northern and westernmost parts of Scotland, although these islands have always been a location for wintering flocks coming largely from Iceland. All this was turned around in the 20th century, when greylags were reintroduced, especially in East Anglia, Kent, southern Scotland and the Lake District.

Wildfowlers seeking to re-establish a valued sporting bird were party to those efforts and they, in turn, were aided by the widespread construction of new reservoirs or the development of gravel pits. A bird that weighs 7lb has few natural predators and, as the Gauls learnt to their cost, it is a hyper-vigilant creature. Greylags soon started to nest successfully at the suite of new wetlands and the sight of fluffy yellow-green goslings pootling in the wake of their parents became commonplace. However, what lay behind that cute tableau was already rather alarming.

Introduced greylag numbers were thought to be increasing at 10% a year: small wonder, perhaps, that the bird was an ancient fertility symbol. By the 1990s, there was a nominally two-part population, with reintroduced feral birds reaching 14,000 pairs and the older native Scottish stock at about 4,000. This century, any sense of separation between the two vanished as the species completed an expansion calculated at 700%. The combined greylag total is 47,000 pairs and only south-west England, south-west Wales and north-eastern Scotland now lie outside its breeding range.

It is mainly in the north that the agricultural impact of grazing geese is contested. Crofters claim that they damage crops and have a disproportionately large impact on their often low-input, low-yield agricultural methods. As recently as spring 2026, the Scottish minister for agriculture announced £1 million would be spent to mitigate damage. Another archipelago adversely affected is Orkney, where there are said to be 24,000 resident birds, topped up in winter by large flocks of migrants.

Farmers complain of their depredations, with one lamenting that his 100 scarecrows were barely deterring them. Another concern — not only in Orkney — is the vast quantity of droppings they deposit. These have been linked to the spread of campylobacter, a contagious pathogen that causes the death of calves or young cattle, but can also infect humans.

One ‘solution’ pursued in Orkney has been ‘hunting holidays’, where excess birds are taken for sport. This has become a source of further discord for those who insist Orkney should be a refuge for birds.

The only point we can conclude about these disputes is a constant refrain about all the species in the Unloved Birds’ Club: an issue presumed to arise in human-bird relations is quickly lost beneath the loud greylag-goose-like clamour between ourselves.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It was the summer of a new Labour Prime Minister (James Callaghan), the birth of punk rock and the film Carry on England; Terry Pratchett released his first novel, appropriately titled The Dark Side of the Sun, and Agatha Christie’s last (Sleeping Murder) was published a few months after her death.

In sport, Sue Barker won the French Open; the West Indies, spearheaded by the incomparable Viv Richards, won the Test Match series, which came as a shock to English spectators; the swimmer David Wilkie won gold at the Montreal Olympics. Extraordinarily, a British band (Brotherhood of Man) triumphed in the Eurovision Song Contest. The Ford Fiesta was launched, creating 3,000 new jobs in Dagenham, Essex. Big Ben’s clock broke down. There was a plague of ladybirds.

The famous heatwave (temperatures peaked at 35.9˚C in Cheltenham, Gloucester-shire) and drought of exactly 50 years ago saw not only hosepipe bans, but queues at standpipes and the unfortunate residents of South Wales had their water supply cut off every night. The problem was compounded by the fact that the drought was preceded by a winter of lower than average rainfall and reservoir levels were dangerously down.

Despite the fact it was widely considered to be a one off, Callaghan appointed a drought minister, Denis Howell, and, hey presto, it began to rain a few days later, over the August bank holiday. However, the population was 20% smaller then and there were no water-sapping data centres. There were fewer arguments about land management, but also fewer wildfires. It was, wrote Herefordshire farmer and author Evelyn Cox, ‘a shared experience unlike any other in Britain since the Blitz’. What has the country learned since?

Not enough, it seems, despite more sophisticated weather forecasting and greater awareness of a changing climate. As we reported last month, there have been no new reservoirs built for 34 years and those in the pipeline are years off completion. Some water companies remain complacent and have done lamentably little to stem leakage. Fish are gasping (the Environment Agency carried out 38 fish rescues on two West Midlands rivers alone) and many city dwellers are blissfully unaware that food shortages could loom as cattle run short of grass and crops wither.

However, as Defra made clear last week, at least the drought is galvanising action: greater investment in infrastructure by water companies, research into desalination and less red tape for farmers and landowners, not to mention a bit of common sense on the part of the public. It even prompted the Prime Minister to send the an emergency alert linked to the wildfires.

Even Natural England is beginning to consider fuel management to combat wildfires. We’re all in it together, just as we were half a century ago.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It's a sunny June afternoon in the Cheshire village of Willaston and something strange is afoot. Or, rather, underfoot. The community primary school’s playing field is a hotbed of activity. Children and adults traipse the grassy expanse — painted with three-metre-square plots and bounded by cake tables and craft stalls — all carting strange equipment, from garden forks and foam cudgels to ukuleles and power drills. These are tools for a peculiar, soil-flecked competition, for which Willaston is ground zero. Welcome to the World Worm Charming Championships.

Worm charming is the act of vibrating a patch of soil, causing earthworms to squirm up through the turf to be collected. In 1881’s bestselling The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, pre-eminent worm hype-man Charles Darwin hypothesised that the worms believe that ‘they are pursued by a mole’.

In the US, it’s known as ‘worm grunting’ and most associated with the Florida Panhandle, where it’s long been employed to source fishing bait. There, its practitioners bow a short wooden stake (called a ‘stob’) with a ‘rooping iron’, sending low-frequency drones into the earth to flush out the slippery invertebrates.

Cheshire’s version is less mercenary: a jolly bash in which no worms are harmed. It was founded in 1980 for the school summer fête by then-deputy headmaster John Bailey, who drew 100 three-yard-square plots on the playing field with an old tennis-court marker.

The inaugural winner was farmer’s son Tom Shufflebottom, who enticed a cracking 511 worms — an auspicious start. Bailey soon ceded control to Gordon Farr — a former headmaster, now long-time organiser and founder of the International Federation of Charming Worms and Allied Pastimes (or IFCWAP) — and village policeman Mike Forster.

A few years later, the pair got wind of a rival contest in Blackawton, Devon, also calling itself the World Championship. The Willaston boys took them to task. ‘We realised we had to take on the responsibility of the worm-charming fraternity,’ says Forster. They founded IFCWAP (of which they’re the only members) and set out their official rules of worm charming, one of which is a ban on using liquid to soak the soil — a technique still permitted at the Devon event, now known as the International Festival of Wormcharming. Its organisers declined to comment.

Little has changed in the years since, save for a shift from imperial to metric measurements (‘to bring us in line with Europe,’ confirms Farr). It’s now a competition of such prestige that Guinness ratified a world record here in 2009 — 10-year-old Sophie Smith coaxing up 567 worms — and it has gained international traction, the rules translated into multiple languages (Fijian, Korean and Icelandic among them) in case any foreign delegations fancy a pop. Russian, Farr adds, was tricky, as the language lacks a word for ‘charm’.

As well as the liquids ban, IFCWAP maintains a staunch ‘no digging’ rule. ‘It doesn’t matter how old the competitor is, it’s a red card,’ sighs Forster. He also raises the pervasive issue of ‘premature worm grasping… when people go for the worm too soon and he either goes back in or you get a tug of war.’ (The RSPCA, it should be noted, has commended the event’s high worm welfare.)

Almost anything else is fair game and, inevitably, Farr and Forster have seen some bizarre things — not least the participation of a horse named Flicker, trained to hoof the earth. ‘He had to have a corner plot,’ remembers Farr, ‘because any excrement had to fall outside the charming area.’

They’ve had to stamp down on some flagrant cheating, too. ‘One year, a guy arrived on a bike,’ says Forster. ‘During the charming, he was doing a rain dance, unclipped his bicycle trouser clips and worms began cascading down! That was banned straight away. Shocking.’

Back to the field. At 2pm, a bell rings and a 30-minute charming window commences. A cacophony of psychedelic earth-thumping rises and, soon, gleeful squealing as the worms begin to emanate from the grass. Many participants are using garden forks — stuck in the ground and their tines or handles bashed to judder the soil beneath in a method known around here as ‘twanging’.

Some of the gathered masses are more creative. As veteran Matt Sefton rhythmically smacks his fork prongs with two sticks in the classic style, his son William, 13, blasts a rousing and mellifluous rendition of the Indiana Jones theme at the grass with a trumpet. Erik Satie’s lilting piano vignette Gymnopédie No 3 is also on the sheet, but, Sefton explains, it lacks the tumult to startle the worms into action. ‘We wanted maximum aggression.’

Three plots away, university student Millie Searing is also on a twanging bent, albeit aided by some doofing drum ’n’ bass from a portable speaker. Nearby, a slight man with an overhanging mop of hair prostrates himself on the ground, surrounded by wind-up bath toys. A few feet across, a woman lays down a small wooden board and elegantly tap dances atop.

Finally, I locate Forster’s son, Tom, and his grandsons, Ted and Sam. The centrepiece of their square is a wooden box, raised on four legs with a disembodied, Monty Python-style mannequin’s foot protruding beneath, the stamping motion of which is controlled with a pulley.

The bell rings; the contest is over. Was it a vintage year? ‘I’m not sure we’ve a winning number, but it’s a lot — more than 100,’ notes Tom, sweat-flecked and visibly pooped. How did the Python foot fare? ‘Oh, it broke, but we got two worms with it,’ Ted, 13, adds stoically.

After all the charming brouhaha, the counting table is more hushed. A whiteboard of plots is being filled in as cups of soil and worms are tipped onto plates and carefully picked at, the worms then gently popped into a nearby trench for safekeeping until the birds have gone to bed, thus avoiding any massacres. There are many zeros, but the majority of the almost-complete board is in double digits.

One strip — in the south-western part of the field — is all that’s left. ‘It was a wet corner,’ someone in the crowd says; this is where they’re expecting the big numbers. Some fevered muttering implies it could be tight — there’s even talk of a five-minute ‘worm-off’, if it’s too close to call.

When all but three squares are filled, it’s time for the big reveal. The prospect of a tie is ill-founded: Archie, 10, and Sienna, 11, have prevailed with a nifty 164 worms, much to their friends’ euphoria. Their technique? ‘We just banged the grass!’ they say in unison, grasping a gleaming trophy. They’re not giving any more away; understandable reticence in victory, their secrets preserved for next summer’s title defence.

As proceedings wrap up, Forster mulls over worm-charming’s evergreen appeal. Community spirit aside, it’s the raw spectacle that he finds astounding, year on year. ‘There’s a few minutes where everything has to wake up. Then it’s almost magical — as if they’re coming out of a sponge.’ As well as Blackawton, the UK has a third contest.

Founded in 2021 by Georgia Gendall, the Falmouth Worm Charming Championships operates with a comparable ‘Charm, don’t harm!’ credo, but is an even more outré undertaking than Willaston’s, with elaborate fancy dress folded into the mix. As an artist whose work ‘celebrates, challenges and disrupts interspecies dependencies’, Gendall’s take on the calling is more holistic than the joyfully irreverent philosophy espoused in Willaston.

‘Worm charming creates a kind of shared attention on something usually overlooked: earthworms, which are essential to healthy soil and ecosystems — celebrating the hidden labour of the natural world,’ she explains. ‘[It’s about] participating in a slightly absurd, very human ritual that reconnects you to your body, to other people and to the ground beneath your feet.’ What could be more charming than that?

The article originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

I am guessing that any reader, who, like me, spends much of their spare time out amid nature, has come up short on one specific set of observations: the moments that a bird of prey captures its food. Even observing a kestrel as it drops onto a vole after hovering over the field is rare.

In 50 years of looking, I have never once glimpsed a sparrowhawk take a bird. I’ve regularly seen the moments immediately afterwards, when the deed is done and the hawk, with wings spread and cowling some poor casualty, has its claws embedded in vital parts. However, the precise second of first contact is unknown to me.

Readers who have witnessed it will probably have done so when they chanced to be seated by a window as a sparrowhawk visited their bird feeders. It brings the visceral moment to the breakfast table and it can be both shocking event and raw spectacle all at once. What such garden assassinations also bring to the fore is the entire hunting ecology of this raptor.

Sparrowhawks are relatively small birds of prey, lighter in weight than a merlin; the male sparrowhawk is lesser in size and wingspan even than a kestrel. What they lack in dimensions, however, they more than make up for in speed and the element of surprise.

Sparrowhawks are originally from wooded habitats, where they can swerve and jink unseen among the trees, often low to the ground when you glimpse them as little more than a grey blur fizzing past. They are now brilliantly adapted to suburban environments. I suspect they use hedges, fences and even our own buildings to blindside possible prey.

I recall vividly a friend describing how a sparrowhawk once flew in like a bullet, ran up the garage roof and then peered over its apex for any possible victim on the other side. These urban innovations in sparrowhawk behaviour have possibly been in play over the past 50 years.

It was in the 1970s that the species began a steady recovery in Britain from the dark days of DDT and other agrochemicals that had proved poisonous to several bird-eating raptors. At that time, there were about 17,500 pairs, but there are an estimated 31,000 today, with an inexplicable shallow decline in recent years. Some have observed the rise in the species and linked it to declines in a number of our songbirds, presuming a causal connection between them. For these reasons, they dislike the sparrowhawk and advocate for its control.

There are several simultaneous shifts in bird populations that counter any sweeping condemnation of the sparrowhawk. One concerns our blue and great tits, which, like the raptor, are woodland birds. In fact, the breeding cycles of all three are closely integrated, because at the very moment our woods are full of young, naïve tit fledglings, the sparrowhawk is feeding them to its own brood.

Yet, as the hawk population has increased, so, too, have both great tit and blue tit numbers (by 76% and 23% respectively), although the latter has experienced a shallow decline since 2008. What offers support for the idea that sparrowhawks may be influencing some of the birds visiting our gardens arises from long-term population studies conducted by the British Trust for Ornithology.

The organisation’s research suggests that there is a negative consequence of the raptor’s presence upon three routine attendees at bird feeders: the starling, house sparrow and blue tit. The first two are so reduced that they are now red-listed species. What the evidence seems to show is that gardens where sparrowhawks are present have smaller numbers of those three songbirds.

It may be direct predation, but it could equally be that those species are now coming less frequently to such places. It doesn’t as yet show any link at the wider level of national populations.

What is indisputable, however, is that both sparrow and starling declines have multiple antecedents, even if the intensification of our agriculture is the single most important underlying factor in a complex picture. What seems equally incontrovertible is a partial inversion in our expectations, whereby the open country is an impoverished place for wildlife, whereas our towns and cities operate as refuges alike for blue tits and sparrowhawks.

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Last week, Athena revisited Portchester Castle, Hampshire, on the edge of Portsmouth Harbour. The site is still physically defined by the walls and towers of a Roman shore fort constructed in the late third century AD. It is the most complete survival of its kind anywhere in Europe.

Over time, the vast enclosure created by the Roman fortifications has been turned to many different purposes. The castle aside, the walls have served as protection for an Anglo-Saxon burgh in 904, a short-lived Augustinian monastery in the 12th century, as well as a large prisoner-of-war camp during the Napoleonic Wars, to name a few.

Some of these functions have left a clear physical mark. The monastic church, for example, survives in parish use and the position of the long-demolished claustral buildings is represented by a line of latrine chutes cut through the Roman wall.

Others have disappeared without obvious trace. During this summer of heat and drought, however, more of the history of the site is on show than usual. Climb to the top of the castle keep and there is not only a spectacular view of the harbour, Gosport and Portsmouth, but some additional archaeology in the form of crop marks visible in the usually featureless surrounding expanse of lawn.

Differences in the depth and character of the soil mean that in this extreme weather the grass has grown or burnt away to different degrees, revealing invisible foundations and trenches beneath the surface. Suddenly, the ordinary visitor can enjoy a sharpened understanding of the bewildering complexity of the site's history.

But this isn't the first time this has happened. At Longleat, in 2022, warm weather revealed some similar long-lost secrets.

Similar revelations are apparent all over the country. At Chatsworth, Derbyshire, for example, the ghostly outlines of the Great Parterre have appeared beneath the south front of the house. This was only one compartment of the vast formal garden laid out for the 1st Duke of Devonshire in 1699, which was largely swept away two generations later. The volutes and patterns of the beds have been seen on hot summers before, but they are not on show most years and they make apparent the staggering scale of this lost garden.

The prolonged spell of hot, dry weather has also revealed the hidden outline of Blenheim Palace’s historic 300-year-old parterre, offering a rare glimpse of the formal garden that once graced the grounds.

In Wales, meanwhile, which has received only 5% of its average July rainfall, an exceptional quantity and diversity of historic sites has been revealed. Among those identified by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales are a prehistoric long barrow at Welshpool, Powys, and training trenches dug during the First World War on what is now a golf course at Deganwy, Conwy. There have been some new discoveries as well, including a previously unknown Iron Age or Romano-British farmstead enclosed by a double ditch near Llandysul, south Ceredigion.

If, for the future, we are going to have to live with more summers such as this, one positive thing is that we may discover much more about our own history and the palimpsest of our landscape.

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Cumulus; cirrus; stratus; nimbostratus; altocumulus… there is a rolling, tongue-pleasing poetry in the scientific labels for cloud types, although their ancient folk-naming has its descriptive merit. Cirrus uncinus, in old language, is ‘mare’s-tail cloud’ and altocumulus is the ‘mackerel sky’ of neatly arranged small clouds, fish-scale like.

Clouds, those ever-passing ethereal entities above our heads, receive their own dedicated branch of meteorology, which is nephology (from the Greek nephos, meaning ‘cloud’). Rightly so — the airy formations are a scientifically reducible phenomenon. A cloud forms when invisible water vapour turns into visible water drops.

There are three basic sorts, beginning with cumulus or heap cloud, which is lumpy, bumpy and brilliant white when lit by the sun. Cumulus cloud evolves constantly. The top may rise and freeze into tiny ice crystals and conjure its forbidding offspring, cumulonimbus, the thunder cloud containing its 50,000 tons of water, destined to fall from the skies as heavy rain — or hail.

Elsewhere, other times: air masses rise slowly and cool gently to form the second basic type of cloud — the low-dwelling stratus, or sheet cloud, memorably described by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as: ‘When o’er the silent bosom of the sea/The cold mist hangs like a stretch’d canopy.’ Light rain may well descend from the thicker parts of stratus and, in winter, the cloud can descend from the heavens to Earth as fog. Then comes the last of the prime trio: the wispy cirrus cloud family is a high flyer, at about three to eight miles overhead. From these three families come the various cloud sub-taxonomies and combinations.

Due to its temperate climate, Britain tends to avoid exotic and extreme clouds, although not entirely, which is luck, bad or good depending. Nacreous or ‘rainbow clouds’, usually habituees of polar regions, illuminated our northern skies with their mother-of-pearl iridescence in the winter of 2023. They journey the stratosphere as nacreous clouds, three times higher than the cruising of jet planes, and only form when the air temperature is -78˚C.

Noctilucent clouds venture higher still to become the highest clouds of all, skirting the very edge of space to shine in the summer months with vaporous electric blue, a dissipating sky-jolt from some Frankenstein laboratory. Noctilucent iterations were rarely recorded in these isles before 1885, but are increasingly noted by cloud-spotters. Some suggest the augmentation in the number of entrancing noctilucent clouds is due to anthropogenic climate change. Every cloud has, as it were, a silvery-blue lining.

Clouds, whether tall nimbostratus towering up into the sky or the delicate hazy, lazy milk-water cirrostratus, move. They are Nature’s shield from the sun and Nature’s water dispersion system, this usually from the ocean to drier regions, although capriciously so. As Percy Bysshe Shelley expressed it some 200 years ago in The Cloud, we hope for gentle cumulus clouds to ‘bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,/From the seas and the streams’ for the garden, rather than a thunder-faced cumulonimbus to rain on a parade or the Macmillan tea party at the vicarage. Cumulonimbus is the dark prince of clouds, frequently spreading its top out to resemble a blacksmith’s anvil, from which rain hammers down.

Sometimes, however, such as in a sizzling 1976-style summer, we want black rain-bearing nimbostratus clouds. Humans have forever tried to inspire precipitation in parched places, whether with the Navajo rain dances, Mapuche rain-sticks or by the oddest means of all, a ‘cloudbuster’. This, designed by Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897– 1957), sought to produce rain by manipulating the ‘orgone’ energy in the atmosphere via copper tubes aimed at the sky. There is, alas, no proof it ever worked.

Clouds are their own advance information system, their shape and sailing height signals to their likely behaviour. We read clouds for the weather they carry pregnant in their ectoplasmic bodies and for the weather front they portend. There is truth in folk weather lore because it was founded by sky-gazing eyes across the ages: ‘Mackerel sky, mackerel sky — never long wet, never long dry’ runs the venerable adage, accurately so and passed down generations of country people like a small precious gem.

Our fate is not written in the stars, but in the clouds. Over the millennia we have, accordingly, ascribed them mythical and theological purpose. The epithets of the Greek deity Zeus are ‘Gatherer of Clouds’ and ‘Storm-God’, as he is able to wield the weather to influence human affairs. The Christian God, meanwhile, guided the Israelites through the daylight desert with a ‘pillar of cloud’ (Exodus 13:21) and His son is destined to return ‘in clouds with great power and glory’ (Mark 13:26).

To explain our brain-state, we have sought the state of the clouds for an applicable metaphor: ‘under a cloud’ suggests suspicion of guilt, ‘cloudy thinking’ is brain-fog and ‘on cloud nine’ is euphoria. Wordsworth went full anthropomorphic — and he is not the only one — in his famous verse line ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, superimposing his own solitariness on the travelling body of vapour in the sky above him in the 19th-century Lake District. He had a point: unmoored by earthly cares, a cloud ‘That floats on high o’er vales and hills’ is patently also an emblem of freedom.

There is liberation in cloud-watching. The Ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes, who knew a thing or two about clouds, hence his play The Clouds, considered them ‘the patron goddesses of the layabout’. This is hardly a slur, as idling allows us to cloud-gaze. Go out, go out and regard the clouds; they come, menacing fast, in fleets of masted galleons. They approach, stately, in a passeggiata of ice-castles in the air or they erupt in turbulent brew-smoke from a moorland witch’s cauldron. They arrive, too, as breathy kisses, their only apparent purpose to point to the perfect blue of the sky with their cute white exhalation. Yet sometimes the cloud slides in, surreptitious, and puts a lid over the known world, suppressing, depressing. Clouds? Always shape-shifting in their form and mood.

Clouds are physical process and phenomena, yet they make us look beyond humdrum ratiocination. They are physics, they are metaphysics and the link between. Examine the paintings of John Constable, who made 100 studies of clouds between 1821 and 1822 alone. In his most famous work, The Hay Wain (1821), the clouds frame and still the scene, necessarily. Clouds make our British landscape whole. Their unlikely absence causes the unlikely exclamation: ‘There’s not a cloud in the sky!’

There is liberation in cloud-watching. The Ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes, who knew a thing or two about clouds, hence his play The Clouds, considered them ‘the patron goddesses of the layabout’. This is hardly a slur, as idling allows us to cloud-gaze. Go out, go out and regard the clouds; they come, menacing fast, in fleets of masted galleons. They approach, stately, in a passeggiata of ice-castles in the air or they erupt in turbulent brew-smoke from a moorland witch’s cauldron. They arrive, too, as breathy kisses, their only apparent purpose to point to the perfect blue of the sky with their cute white exhalation. Yet sometimes the cloud slides in, surreptitious, and puts a lid over the known world, suppressing, depressing. Clouds? Always shape-shifting in their form and mood.

Clouds are physical process and phenomena, yet they make us look beyond humdrum ratiocination. They are physics, they are metaphysics and the link between. Examine the paintings of John Constable, who made 100 studies of clouds between 1821 and 1822 alone. In his most famous work, The Hay Wain (1821), the clouds frame and still the scene, necessarily. Clouds make our British landscape whole. Their unlikely absence causes the unlikely exclamation: ‘There’s not a cloud in the sky!’

If Constable was a cloud apostle, there was one greater. The understanding of clouds as science-art antimony had its crucial evangelist in Goethe, 19th-century Europe’s intellectual superstar, who wrote: ‘To find yourself in the infinite,/You must distinguish and then combine;/Therefore my winged song thanks/The man who distinguished cloud from cloud.’

The man who ‘distinguished cloud from cloud’ was young British Quaker and amateur meteorologist Luke Howard, author of the 1803 pamphlet Essay on the Modifications of Clouds. The pidgin Latin Howard used for his pioneering cloud categorisations received both snobby academic disdain and populist ire (was plain, brown-smock English not good enough?). However, Goethe came to Howard’s defence and the matter was settled by the sheer immovable weight of Goethe’s cultural standing. Goethe even referred to Howard as ‘Master’. Howard’s Latinised terms henceforth became the names by which we call the cloud types.

Smitten with Howard’s ‘modifications’, Goethe even adapted them into short musical poems in a collection titled Howard’s Ehrengedächtnis (In Honour of Howard). Ever the synthesis of Romantic and Rational, Goethe had recognised a kindred spirit: the classification system is equal parts practical and poetic. Read again the cloud types with which we began. Cumulus; cirrus; stratus; nimbostratus; altocumulus… all Howard’s creation. They are precise scientific categories, yet they might be heroes and heroines wandering the Roman legend of The Aeneid.

Like the clouds themselves, Howard’s naming of clouds has both utility and beauty

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

If we judged magpies purely on looks, they would surely rank among the most visually arresting birds in Britain. It is not only the boldness of their black-and-white design. It is the subtle touches, such as the uppermost wing feathers (technically called tertials), which flash a brilliant azure or turquoise depending on the light.

When magpies fly, they reveal that lovely long, shimmering tail, as well as delicate dark tips to nine white outer-wing feathers. Alas for the species, the voice is similarly arresting, albeit for the wrong reasons. The machine-gun rattle is distinctive, yet supremely unmusical. It is invariably described as chattering and one nice detail is that the sound gave the bird its Italian name — gazza — which, in turn, was believed by some to be the source for our word gazette, the gossipy broadsheet for the chattering classes.

It is not only that grating racket that leads some to dislike magpies, but the same issue that condemns many of the others in our Unloved Birds’ Club: their robust prosperity in modern suburban Britain.

Magpies have had a great half century and more than doubled their numbers since the 1960s, with the national total put at 610,000 pairs. It should be said that the increases followed centuries of persecution and it is from an old suppressed place that the species has rebounded.

The recovery was also underway from the early 20th century. However, that increase has closely mirrored declines in many of our most wonderful song-birds: house martins, willow and marsh tits, nightingales, mistle and song thrushes, to name only a few. The tendency is to make this link causative — to assume that thrushes have gone because magpies have flourished.

It is indubitably the case that magpies are nest predators, taking the eggs and young of other songbirds. It is equally true that seeing magpies rip apart a nest and carry away helpless chicks is a visceral, often upsetting experience. Yet the powerful impact of the encounter doesn’t equate to a principle of ecology. No matter how offensive it might be, it is not proof that magpies are the key reason for declines in other species.

Firstly, we have to admit that the magpie doesn’t come to us with a clean moral sheet. Centuries of superstitions cast the bird as a villain or as an omen of ill fortune. The ‘one for sorrow’ rhyme once known to every school-child is only the tip of a folkloric iceberg.

Another common notion is that magpies are habitual thieves. These ancient ideas freight the species with negative associations and place it in the frame as a scapegoat. However, the main allowance we have to make for magpies derives not from an admission of our past superstitions, but from our acceptance of the facts. There have been several studies demonstrating how songbirds flourish in precisely the places where magpies have themselves done well.

One of those studies was completed at the GWCT’s research and demonstration farm at Loddington, Leicestershire. It looked at the effects of three predatory species and concluded that ‘there is no convincing evidence of an impact of these corvids on songbird breeding abundance. The evidence indicates that songbird populations are resilient to predation’.

In short, songbirds have many young, including several broods in a season and, although many might be lost, including some to magpies, the overall total is sustained. If such evidence doesn’t exonerate magpies in totality, it does indisputably illustrate a central principle that is so often a casualty in these bird disputes. Working out the ecology of British Nature, where thousands of species are interconnected, is enormously difficult. Following a single linear path through it and finding simple, sometimes simplistic, answers to enormously complex questions might be tempting. However, it is not the same as the truth.

When all this is said, it doesn’t mean those who dislike the corvid with the jaunty swagger and the rattling voice will find a way to love it. Equally, those who cherish magpies for their beauty and resilience won’t condemn the bird for eating thrushes occasionally. This, after all, is life. It is we, ultimately, who have to learn to live with one another, just as, in Nature, magpies live alongside garden thrushes.

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

Has anyone else noticed mozzies coming out earlier in the afternoon? In defiance of conventional wisdom (mosquitoes, it is said, come out either at dawn or dusk to avoid wilting in the heat), the pesky things are proving hardier than ever.

Those in my garden enjoy a feeding frenzy every time I choose to work from home and eat alfresco. Perhaps these ones are a mutant species engineered by City bosses to return us to the office all week. Then again, perhaps not.

Our summer, as well as being hot, has been unusually humid. The moisture in the air is catnip to the mosquito and the heat itself appears to have upset traditional patterns — drawing the insects out in the late morning and early afternoon as the temperature now peaks at about 6pm.

Last month was the driest July for England and Wales since records began 190 years ago, according to the Met Office. It was the second warmest July for the UK as a whole and also the sunniest on record.

So who else, apart from the mozzies, has been a heatwave winner this summer, and who have the biggest losers been? We, at Country Life, break it down for you.

The winners

Octopus

The hot weather, although detrimental to much marine life, has been encouraging greater numbers of warm-water creatures, including the octopus.

Our eight-armed friend has also begun to migrate because of this. More and more octopuses are being found near Welsh, English and Scottish shores.

This is a nuisance to some of our swimmers; and, to fishermen, a concern. However, to chefs and calamari lovers in the UK this is a huge win — as well as for the creature itself, which is multiplying in droves.

Butterflies

Warm temperatures and sunny days speed up the life cycles of these beautiful animals and encourage them to fly out in high numbers to feed and mate.

Professor Richard Fox, head of science at the UK charity Butterfly Conversation told the BBC last month that we could be in for a 'bumper summer of butterflies'.

'They are cold-blooded creatures and rely on the warm from the sun,' he added. 'On these hot, dry days, they can get on with their lives, particularly finding a mate and the females laying eggs to create the new generation of butterflies later in the year.'

If only the warm weather had made mating as seamless for human beings. Alas, single friends have bemoaned that sweating buckets on the London underground is a sure fire way to put off the opposite sex.

English winemakers

In Haywards Heath at Bee Tree Vineyard last month, wine was flowing. Sugrue South Downs is just one of the British vineyards massively profiting as the sun continues to shine.

Dr Alistair Nesbitt, director at vine management service Vinescapes, told Metro last month: 'We have seen a really rapid rise in temperatures during the growing season over the last 30 years.

‘Regions that were previously unsuitable are now suitable. That has really enabled these vineyards and varieties to expand and grow.’

With weather here becoming the same as Champagne's in its glory days, the only way is up for English vineyards. With wine now being made as far as Scotland, it really seems that the sky's the limit — as long as the weather doesn't get much hotter than it is now this really could be English wine's Belle Époque.

Tomatoes

It is my first year of growing any vegetables at all, and despite my experienced neighbour's many warnings about the perils of growing tomatoes from seed (the word 'heartbreak', I believe, was uttered) they have turned out amazingly.

In southern France, where UK supermarkets important many of our tomatoes from, the industry is reporting a 50% decline in production due to the heat, according to Simon Conway, the chair of the British Tomato Growers Association and the Cucumber and Peppers Association. However, the amount of sunshine over here has lead to 'brilliant yields' for British growers.

My garden for one has provided a bountiful haul that keeps on giving, made sweeter by the warm weather. British tomatoes, I have concluded, are a heatwave winner. Growing more locally can only be a good thing for this country.

Lidos

Normally the paddling-ground of the wetsuit-clad or incredibly brave, the warmer weather has been excellent news for our country's lidos. My local Brockwell Lido, which in February is an unfathomably cold icy pit, has become in recently months a literal South London hotspot. Long may it remain in vogue (although their recent decision to charge £5 to rent a deck chair due to its increased attendee numbers is a bit of a step too far, in my opinion).

The tide of popularity even saw a group of 20 MPs and the Fabian Society call for water companies to fund the reopening of the country’s lost lidos last month. I'm sure that this would be a pleasant relief to all.

The losers

Hedgehogs

It's a sad time for poor little hedgehogs, who don't have enough water to make sufficient milk for their hoglets —so are pushing them out of their nests before they're old enough to survive.

Yvonne Cox, the co-founder of Hedgehog Rescue in Yate near Bristol, told the BBC last month that the animals have been 'coming in thick and fast'. You can help by leaving shallow dishes of water out in your garden with stones in (for them to perch on).

Farmers

If watching the new series of Clarkson's Farm has taught me anything it is that it has been a tricky time for farmers as of late. And this has only been worsened by the heatwaves. The CLA's president Gavin Lane said: 'Farmers are telling us this is the worst harvest in years. A sodden winter followed by drought has left wheat at half its usual height and some crops not worth harvesting.

'This is the third drought in five years. What was once extraordinary is becoming part of farming in Britain, and government must start planning for it. We know that proper government investment in resilient farming systems, from reservoirs to wildfire prevention, could help farmers cope with these new extremes.'

Bees

Data from the Bumblebee Conservation Trust's national monitoring scheme shows that British bumblebees could suffer sharp falls in their numbers as heatwaves become more frequent.

UK species have fat, furry bodies that have historically helped them survive in our cooler climate. Dr Richard Comont, the Trust's science manager, told the BBC that once air temperatures reach around 28ºC to 32ºC, UK bumblebees can begin to struggle. 'They actually cook themselves from the inside out,' he said. You can help by creating a more flower-rich habitat in your own garden as well as adding a pond and more shade.

Rivers

Rivers and streams have been another heatwave victim, with rising temperatures putting them in danger. People have been asked not to canoe on the River Wye because the water is so hot that salmon and trout have moved into the shallow, oxygenated water in order to survive. If a canoe appears they will move to deeper water and die. So it's bad news for not only rivers, but the marine life that live in them too.

A version of this feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

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.

Ed. update: No, it's not Sir David Beckham, another of our previous cover stars — it's the Atlantic puffin, barn owl, buff-tailed bumblebee and European hedgehog, which have been announced as the new faces of our banknotes.

A European honeybee was our annual Sustainability issue front cover star, in June 2019, so we have long been fans of the wider species. However, not everyone on the Country Life team was pro puffin, owl, bee and hedgehog. Here is who they wanted to see crowned — and why.

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.