Even at 3am in high summer, it is not dark and, in the stillness out over the saltings, I can see gulls flying. They drift inland in threes and fours and the tide runs in beneath them. When daylight seeps into the sky at 4am, I find myself standing among thousands of empty crab shells. Somewhere down on the sea bed, out beyond the estuary, the ragged-clawed creatures have shed their exoskeletons to grow. Their old shells are ghosts among the spartina grass.

Cley next the Sea in north Norfolk, at the mouth of the River Glaven — named for the village of Glandford, once Gleamford, or ‘merry ford’ in Old English — looks to the North Sea. If you rain a straight line north from Cley, there would be nothing but ocean. That line would run clean between Svalbard and Greenland. Two thousand miles further, it hits the pack ice of the North Pole.

Between the 13th and 15th centuries, Cley was one of the busiest ports in Europe. The Glaven estuary ran deep then and could accommodate large merchant ships; Cley thrived on sending East Anglian wool to Europe. Now, the river is a narrow winding channel and its medieval might is difficult to imagine. From 1522, the estuary was drained to create grazing for cattle, a process that gradually led to the river silting up; it would be unrecognisable now to the merchants and Cley pirates who made their fortunes here.

Morning, as early birds catch worms

Shortly after 6am, three figures are sitting on upturned buckets on the sweeping shingle beach. As I draw closer, I see they are fishing. Each has a couple of rods set up with lines running into the waves. Roy, who tells me he has lived next to the sea all his life, has already caught three bass: ‘I’ve always liked fishing, it’s the air and looking to sea.’ He reels in his line, attaches a new worm onto the hook and casts again. The fishing has changed, he says: ‘We used to get codling all the time, but never bass. Now we do get bass, you see, and flounders if we’re lucky, perhaps a sole.’

Two shelduck fly past, low over the water. Now that Roy is getting older and his back starting to go, he relies on his brother to dig bait. ‘Where does he do that?’ I ask. Roy laughs. ‘You can’t be asking people where they dig their bait. We keep that a secret. It’s dug somewhere out on the mud.’ He nods in the direction of Blakeney and goes back to fishing.

Some 600 years ago, Blakeney and Cley were the same estuary with different channels, but whereas Cley was drained, Blakeney, to the west, has largely endured.

At 10.30am, four little children stand shrieking on the harbour wall there. They hold orange crabbing lines and croissants from the nearby bakery. One boy drops his croissant into the water and a herring gull swoops for it from a pile mooring.

Down on the mud, where water meets land, Trevor, a man in shorts and Wellington boots, is tending to his boat. He has a tub of white paint and is standing back to assess his work. Rosie, his little wooden dingy, ‘got a crack in it. I just put some white on there you see, after a bit of wood skin varnish, and then I’ll properly see to it this winter’. He usually only sails out to Blakeney Point. ‘I used to go to see the seals, but they’ve moved further on now.’ The seals, Trevor explains, were ‘on that gravel spit’ — he points to the horizon with his paint brush — ‘but then there was a big storm in the winter and it cut right through’. The whole estuary has changed and is always changing: ‘Up at the churchyard, there’s a wall that looks down over the Glaven and you can see big metal rings where the boats used to tie up. It’s nowhere near the sea now.’

Further out on the mud, an egret probes for crabs and, some 40 yards away, Will, a bait digger, is working away with his fork. The sand comes up black where he turns it over. He identifies the worm casts: ‘That tells you where the lugworms are.’ It isn’t a game of chance — he works the sand methodically, looking fixedly at the mud. When the worm comes up, he catches it between forefinger and thumb before it can disappear. Nodding into the distance in no particular direction, he points out that his work isn’t simply a means to an end: ‘When you’re out there digging, it’s just you.’

Midday, in the heat of the sun

At 1pm, I have lunch with David Diggens, who formerly ran the Norfolk Rivers Trust. We sit by a rusted house boat to eat crab and drink local wine. A wildfowler, fisherman and river conservationist, he knows the estuary as well as anybody: ‘The only reliable thing in life is constant change, and that is exactly what’s happening at Blakeney all the time.’

There is no wind and the temperature is approaching 30ºC. Small children in bad moods trudge by and passing dogs pant in the heat. ‘In terms of nature, the biggest changes here are the terns declining and the seals arriving,’ David observes. ‘The bass are now coming earlier and in greater numbers because of the change in sea temperature.’ The first grey seal pup birth was seen at Blakeney in 1988 and the population has been expanding ever since.

One of the great challenges, he explains, is the influx of tourists in the summer. Blakeney village runs largely on septic tanks — more people means more sewage. According to Bernard Bishop, wildlife warden at Cley for 40 years and still living in the house where he was born, there was once a famous mussel fishery here, but there are no edible mussels now.

After lunch, we walk out onto the mud and David picks samphire, which is just coming into season. He is an optimist and hopeful for wildlife in Norfolk. All it takes is for more people to care, but quite how you persuade them of the importance of biodiversity in all its forms is tricky, we agree. He hands me a small bunch of what is also known as St Peter’s herb, Peter being the patron saint of fishermen. ‘Only ever take as much samphire as you plan to eat that night for supper,’ he advises, a sentiment that goes for many things in life.

Late afternoon, in the cool of the church

The large wooden door of the Church of St Margaret’s, Cley, is open at 4pm, so I slip in and wander up the red pamment aisle. All around on the walls, but grown faint down the centuries, are medieval carvings of boats. It is thought they were etched by sailors as offerings before they set out on potentially dangerous voyages.

I sit in the back pew for a while listening to the wood pigeons cooing among the roof timbers — probably ships’ timbers originally — and then for an hour or so I sleep. When I wake, it is 5pm and I head out into the graveyard. The heat has passed and I wander among the headstones. There are local names, some I recognise, and at least three or four inscribed memorials for men lost at sea. Probably many more exist, but rain and time have eaten away at the stones.

I clamber sleepily over the back wall of the churchyard. The drop on the other side is lower than I anticipated and, when I pick myself up, I find I’m looking down over the Glaven, where the surrounding meadows are full of freshly cut hay. In spite of feeling that I’ve explored every inch of the church wall, I still can’t find Trevor’s ‘big metal rings where boats used to tie up’.

Eventide, as the long day closes

In the George & Dragon on the High Street in Cley, I order a pint, and then I order another, studying the black-and-white photographs of Cley past that hang on the pub walls. One, which must have been taken from a small plane in the early 20th century, shows the vast mud flats then in front of the village. In another, older still, there is a shooting party in a small boat, heading out from the famous Cley Windmill. It is 1886, the river is wide and the ladies are wearing hats.

At the bar, a semi-inebriated argument about how to pronounce Cley is taking place. ‘It is “clay”,’ says one of the old boys. ‘The tourists are right. You ought to say it like clay. That’s how they used to say it.’ Everyone laughs and I have no idea if he’s serious or otherwise (nowadays, it’s generally ‘cly’, to rhyme with ‘rye’).

By 10pm, it is getting dark and the town seems deserted when I wander down to the windmill. Bernard told me that the sails on the fantail used to clang in the breeze, keeping the whole village awake at night; now, they are chained up and there is silence. The Glaven, which runs beneath the windmill so slowly that you can hardly discern it is flowing at all, is little more than a trickle; it is possible almost to jump across it to the mud where the Randall family still cuts reed for local thatchers.

A warm wind rises and I listen to see if I can hear a bittern boom. The sky to the west is electric pink and a barn owl passes, hunting low in the half light.

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

For those fond of wearing cut-off denim shorts with Wellington boots, the end of June in England means one of two things. Either you are heading to Glastonbury with 140,000 other revellers, or you are on your way to Groundswell, the regenerative farming festival in Hertfordshire, now dubbed — with only mild irony — the Glasto of farming.

This year is a fallow summer for Glastonbury. Groundswell, meanwhile, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. From a modest gathering of 450 farmers discussing no-till agriculture in a shed, Groundswell has grown to a world-famous convening of the agri-ecologically curious. Among last year’s 10,500 visitors were government officials, corporate sustainability teams and The Prince of Wales, all treated to artisanal food pop ups, wellbeing workshops and live music alongside discussions on hedgerow management and soil health. Its wide ranging appeal means a number of Glastonbury attendees can also be found dancing here, not least Andy Cato, co-founder of farm-to-plate food business Wildfarmed and one half of Groove Armada, who DJs at both festivals, sometimes just 24 hours apart.

Slickly produced and Instagram ready, this blurring of genres shows how far the farming festival has travelled from its country-show roots. But when tickets are snapped up by punters and corporations who wouldn’t know a plough share from a power harrow, does this risk driving away the very people they are supposed to be for?

The agricultural show is one of Britain’s oldest social happenings, proliferating in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a mechanism for disseminating new farming techniques, science and practice. Its foundational assumption was that the farmer was the focus. While 39% of visitors to the Royal Welsh Show have no connection with agriculture, no one is in any doubt whose world they were in, and who the show is for.

That world has contracted. When the first Royal Show took place in 1839, agriculture was the largest single employer in Britain. By the time it held its last outing in 2009 after 170 years, with breaks only for war and foot-and-mouth, visitors, which once included Elizabeth II and the Prime Minister, had dropped from a quarter of a million to 120,000. It closed not because farming had lost its audience, but because the farming community had become too small to make the economics workable.

In choosing to launch the inaugural ‘Great British Farm Fest’ on the same site in Warwickshire’s Stoneleigh Park this May, Jeremy Clarkson was making a point. Farming is back, but this time — as their website declared — it is ‘rock and roll farming’. Some 52,000 spectators came over three days. Whereas visitors to The Royal Show applauded rosette-winning farmers for specimen cattle and champion sheep, leading some to call it ‘the FA Cup for livestock’, Farm Fest offered tractors pulling apart a car, lookalike competitions for TV farm-star Kaleb Cooper and an orchestra playing music on vegetables drilled and chiselled into edible penny whistles.

But perhaps this is exactly the point: if a bridge needs building between an urban population disconnected from the land and those who grow their food, watching a white-coated judge praise the defined rump of a British Blue is unlikely to do it. Celebrity chefs cooking demonstrations and the chance to feed goats sticking their heads through a wooden windmill might.

What is not in doubt is that farming could use all the PR it can get. Average farm income across all types fell by almost 50% in in 2023/4. Cereal farms were hit hardest, with a 73% drop. There have been six Secretary of States at DEFRA in as many years. In the last year alone, the Government abolished the Sustainable Farming Incentive payment scheme without warning, reintroduced it with a cap, and announced inheritance tax changes so inflammatory that scenes of tractors blocking Parliament Square in protest have become commonplace. The boom in farming festivals in this context feels less entertainment and more a call to arms. The message for moral support appears to be getting through where pleas for financial support have failed. One in 10 people in the UK now visit a farming show each year. In 2023, record attendances were driven largely by non-farmers. But while aerial displays and Shetland Pony Races may be crowd pleasers, can these modern kinds of farming festivals keep sufficient space for their original purpose?

‘We have always said Groundswell is for farmers, by farmers’ says Alex Cherry, event director and son of co-founder Paul. Even so, fewer than half of last years’ Groundswell attendees were farm owners. This year the festival is offering a discounted farmer ticket in recognition of the sector’s financial challenges and Cherry is clear the programming is always conceived ‘thinking about the farmer in the room — we don’t want it to be dumbed down’. Sessions have, however, been diversified, ranging across fibre and flower growing, and policy and supply chain discussions to one of the most popular panels last year: the challenge of maintaining a marriage while running a family farm.

Cherry’s theory as to why the festival appeals to audiences outside agriculture has less to do with boujee burger offerings, and more about the underlying themes. Most of his London friendship group once thought him mad to return to the land. ‘Now they ring me up wanting to get out of the city, to get their hands dirty’ Cherry says. ‘This way of farming offers meaning in a world that can feel disconnected and dystopian.’ In both its aesthetic and its ethos, it is easy to see how Groundswell appeals to a disillusioned millennial hot-desker from Hackney.

How does Cherry respond to those who feel the proliferation of urbanites and corporates has changed the festivals’ character? ‘I now don’t worry about it’ Cherry says. ‘We do very little sponsorship — we have six festival partners, some of whom pay nothing. Our funding relies on ticket sales and exhibitors’ revenue. We are totally independent’. He is aware of the warning offered by the music festival world, where the majority of the 600 festivals taking place each year are now owned by a handful of mega-companies: ‘As soon as a festival comes into ownership run by someone in the events industry, it loses its soul.'

An example of one farming festival which has done exactly this is the Oxford Real Farming Conference. Begun as a fringe protest of 50 people in conscious opposition to the Oxford Farming Conference — the established, industry-aligned annual gathering held in the same town on the same dates — it has grown to a global gathering of nearly 5,000 with a range of ecologically minded discussions interspersed by music, book readings, film screenings, speed dating and morning meditation sessions.

However, despite government and business making sharp pivots towards sustainable farming in the last few years, it will not share its platform with the organisations it was set up to oppose. Some find this obstinacy reassuring. Others find it limiting. But the festivals’ identity and purpose remains clear, to both those who attend and those who don’t.

This sharing of a collective cause is the magic ingredient that seems to keep farmers at the centre of a festival, maintaining the balance between education and entertainment. Rachel Hall of Gutchpool Farm in Dorset, who attended the first Groundswell, says she comes back each year because ‘there are always interesting people to find and listen to’. This crosses not just ages but nationalities. This year Hall is attending a Groundswell reunion with fellow nominees for a Top 50 Farmer in Europe Award, representing 26 countries.

Cato has become an unlikely barometer of where the farming and music festival worlds intersect. He is clear about the difference between a festival for farmers and one about farming. The first is essentially a work event; the second a social one. Even so, the view from the Groundswell DJ booth is, says Cato, ‘pretty wild — farmers definitely know how to party’. As someone who has played to audiences of tens of thousands, he’s in the position to judge. But there is, thinks Cato, something special about his Groundswell set which comes down to a shared purpose: everyone has spent the day discussing how to better steward land and knows what is at stake. Dancing together seems to seal this mission: it is, says Cato, ‘a lovely moment of unity’.

In Groundswell’s wake, others are now swimming. From Cumbria to Jersey, there are now more regenerative farming festivals than months in the year. Most are squarely aimed at farmers. Others, such as ARK Summit on Steve Winwood’s Gloucestershire farm, are also stepping into the middle ground with policy debates alongside breathwork sessions, a pilgrimage walk and lunch cooked over open fire by Bushcamp Wilderness Cooking.

Philip Larkin, watching the Bellingham Show in 1973, saw in its annual gathering as something more than livestock and produce competitions: a whole community briefly visible to itself, before dispersing back into the countryside it had come from. This summer may bring more curious Glastonbury revellers than ever to Groundswell’s fields. As long as the farmers in the tent still feel the purpose is to learn and share as well as celebrate and showcase, farming festivals will continue to thrive in their modern interpretation of the agricultural show.

If they do, their farmer fan base will continue to agree with the final line of Larkin’s Show Saturday. ‘Let it always be there’.

What we think of when we picture luxury travel has changed over the years. Now it’s less private jets and piña coladas and more yoga retreats and home-made kombucha. We are, it seems, looking for meaningful experiences that enrich our lives instead of flashy status-symbols. As usual, throughout this process, people have been reminded that nature is priceless — particularly when it comes to the British countryside.

Although scrambling through the hedgerow in search of rosehips may not instantly scream ‘five star getaway’, foraging courses are now on the docket for many a luxury hotel guest in the UK.

At Bovey Castle, set amongst Dartmoor National Park in Devon, navelwort and nettle beer are on the menu just as much as caviar and Champagne are. It is just one of the Pride of Britain (PoB) Hotels — a curated collection of British hotels is annually reviewed — that are putting on foraging days.

‘A lot of people come to the hotel and they'll look at the view, but they won't actually explore the grounds. When you go out into these grounds today, you'll think: “Why are people not exploring this?” It's heaven down there, it's fantastic,’ says Thomas Radford, who is leading our foraging walk.

On the allure of foraging he adds: ‘I think people like to be guided and feel safe and, as opposed to just another boring drudge around the woods, it is something that brings it to life.’ In this country foraging is legal, as long as it’s not done on private land (for this you must have specific permission).

If we look back 300 years, knowledge about the plants you could and couldn’t eat was absolutely essential to survival. Some women possessed such a startling botanical arsenal that they were accused of witchcraft — something which many of them paid for with their lives. Sadly, with the rise of farming, when we started domesticating crops, and more recently supermarkets, this communal knowledge has since been mostly lost, with the exception of a few individuals.

As he leads us on a two hour walk around the grounds of Bovey Castle, a Grade II-listed early 20th-century mansion, Thomas points out the various plants we can gather and tells us about some of their uses. Elderflower is in season at the moment, and can be used to make cordial, flavoured gin or even elderflower wine. ‘But best use plastic bottles, as it does have a propensity to explode,’ Thomas says, detailing a particularly gory incident when a friend of his used glass bottles which, when one exploded, took his eye out.

Wild garlic is another useful ingredient in the foragers pantry, as is pink purslane, mint, navelwort, Jack-by-the-hedge and cleavers (otherwise known, amusingly, as ‘sticky willy’ — they make a brilliant diuretic that tastes of cucumber when left to soak in water overnight, apparently). Nettles, as long as they are pulled out with a glove to avoid stinging, make excellent nettle soup or beer.

The main thing that puts people off foraging, says Thomas, are ‘lookalikes’. Mushrooms are a prime example. We all, I’m sure, love the idea of cheffing up some self-foraged chanterelles on toast for supper as much as the next person, but many of us remember all too well reading a news story detailing someone’s death after accidentally eating a poisonous mushroom.

When it comes to lookalikes, Thomas never tastes the risk. As he puts it: ‘If you're going to die for something, don’t let it be salad.’ In Dartmoor, hemlock is the most common dangerous plant and can easily be confused with the totally benign cow parsley. Well known as the poison that killed Socrates, the innocuously-delicate white flowers of the plant bloom in clusters by bodies of water. If ingested, the alkaloids in the plant slowly poison the nerve-muscle junctions and cause the failure of the breathing muscles. Thomas aptly, but awfully, describes this as ‘a meat coffin that lasts hours’. We see plenty of it on our walk and I make sure to keep a healthy distance.

Despite the less than appetising description above, the trip did stoke my appetite for foraging. As long as you steer clear of those deadly lookalikes, it’s a healthy and interesting way to reconnect with nature and snaffle up some free grub while you’re at it. Plus the two-hour walk made sure I was ravenous for anything (but hemlock) once we were back in the hotel restaurant.

Booking for The Wild Larder: A Foraging Walk & Lunch with Thomas Radford is open now. Upcoming sessions at PoB Hotels include Thurlestone Hotel, Devon, on June 26 and Calcot & Spa, the Cotswolds, on June 30.

As the old joke goes, how do you know if someone’s into cold-water swimming? Answer: they’ll tell you. These days, more and more of these people move among us. ‘Oh I simply can’t start my day without a dip,’ they cry, before listing multiple ailments that have mysteriously been improved by their new habit of flinging themselves into the nearest river or pond like a Labrador.

One dubious website extolling cold-water swimming’s virtues lists as many as 50 benefits. These include, but are not limited to: it boosts the immune system, increases one’s metabolism, promotes better sleep, helps the libido (how, exactly?), improves balance and memory, apparently, ‘because the anti-inflammatory effect… is beneficial in those experiencing dementia or other memory deficits.’ None of these are medically proven, I’d like to add.

I remain unconvinced by cold-water swimming. Even the phrase is silly. Performative. What’s wrong with simply ‘swimming’? It’s not as if you’re going to be ‘hot water’ swimming in your local river, is it? The kind of swimming I like is on a hot day, with a cool (ish) swimming pool nearby, along with a sunbed and a plentiful supply of dry towels. I’m not that interested in slipping into a body of water that’s murky, potentially hiding creatures, and which may make you ill.

‘It’s lovely once you’re in!’ comes the smug cry from someone who stripped off and waded straight in. Meanwhile, you stand there shivering on the bank, extremely unwilling to peel off your coat and even less willing to stick a body part, any body part, into the brown water that will — supposedly — leave you feeling so perky.

The last time I managed it was in Guernsey, where cold-water swimming is very popular. Little wonder, they have sensationally pretty beaches and coves which are, on the face of it, much more inviting than, say, a grubby canal.

And yet a mere toe in the water felt enough for frostbite. ‘Come on, it’s gorgeous!’ friends shouted from the sea where they were, naturally, already bobbing about like seals. I managed almost a minute in the water and then scurried out again. Sure, I felt a vague warm glow once I’d pulled my clothes back on again, but I can get the same sort of wellbeing from a glass of wine in the bath.

If you find yourself staying with friends who insist on this tiresome practice, you could either claim you’ve forgotten your swimmers (although in my experience those who are keen on this pastime are gung-ho sorts who won’t brook this kind of excuse). You could feign a heart condition, or a recent chest infection. Or, if you don’t want to feel a stick-in-the-mud, you could join in — but very briefly.

‘Is there a dryrobe I could borrow?’ you can ask, to make it sound as if you know what you’re talking about when it comes to the clobber.

Arrive at said location and strip off quickly, as if to denote enthusiasm. The quicker you get in, the quicker you can get out again. Try not to take half an hour to get in. That only prolongs the torture. Jump, if you can. A short sharp shock to the nether regions, but at least then you’re submerged. Splash around a bit, exclaim how lovely is it, make sure everyone sees you, and then you can claim cramp and hop out again. Bravo. Now go and have a hot shower.

Almost every year, the largest crowd in Britain can reliably be found at Glastonbury. Some 210,000 revellers cram into a site spanning 1,100 acres and let loose to the sound of music until the cows come home. Not this year. Worthy Farm, which hosts the festival, is taking a backseat. The cows are home and need no summoning.

It seems fitting, therefore, that some of the largest crowds of 2026 should gather around a tribute to farm life. The Royal Welsh Show in Powys expects to welcome up to 65,000 people a day (July 20–23) and the Royal Bath & West, which took place in Somerset on the last week of May, registered just under half of Glastonbury’s total capacity in only three days.

County shows are frequented by seven million people each year. There are as many as 156 across the country, and they have been held, in one form or another, since the 18th century. Beginning as informal gatherings for local folk eager to trade savoir-faire across craft and farming, they later morphed into a premial and educational showcase of country living, held on permanent showgrounds since the 1960s. Perhaps surprisingly, they are growing more popular. What by urbanite maxims could have spelt their eventual decline has, instead, proven a boon. Championing the very traditions held in contempt by vegans and agrofuturists has allowed the county show to appeal, ironically, to city dwellers — many of them young parents with small children, who now make up the shows’ primary attendees.

Those seeking a connection to the land that feeds them are beginning to realise what has long been obvious to the farmer: that agriculture is a conduit to culture itself. Sheep shearing, livestock parades and Shetland pony racing all offer a glimpse into our agrarian heritage. ‘The young ones,’ wrote Philip Larkin in 1973’s Show Saturday, ‘thunder their ponies in competition/Twice round the ring.’ Businesses are catching on. The Newt in Somerset is hosting its very own Summer Farm Show, on July 4–5. ‘The farm is intrinsic to who we are,’ says Charles Freeman, head of sales. The show is included in membership and members can bring up to six guests on day tickets, at £35 each. ‘We are transforming the paddock,’ Charles explains, ‘into a space for demonstrations of traditional farming methods, welly wanging, and a dog and duck show.’

Besides its educational purposes, it is also somewhere for people to let their hair down. Michael Eavis, founder of Glastonbury, now sponsors the Bath & West’s Pilton Tent: a music marquee which show director Rupert Uloth tells me was full to the brim on both Friday and Saturday nights.

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

It’s a sight that gladdens the heart at this time of year: hand-painted signs dotted around the country declaring that the local village fete is shortly to take place.

‘The village fete!’ you may think warmly. ‘How lovely!’ You imagine the sun shining, a tombola, perhaps a coconut shy, children laughing and, perhaps, even a rude vegetable competition. It’s a quaint and comforting image of England. There will be tea and cake and warm Pimms; there will be jars of homemade preserves and giant marrows. There will be lots and lots of dogs.

Fetes aren’t supposed to be grand. The more homespun the better. In parts of the Cotswolds now, you may come across very grand fetes indeed. No sticky jars of dubious chutney in Burford, thank you very much. But the lack of sophistication is part of the charm. When so much is so carefully manicured for social media, these days, here is an event where the less perfection the better. The bunting is tangled and faded; the PA system crackles and then gives up; the tombola prizes include several tins of peaches in syrup that went out of date during the war. The first one.

On the day itself, it will rain, but spirits will not be dampened. Locals will determinedly erect gazebos in the drizzle and remark every few minutes that it’s set to brighten up after lunch. Reader: it will not brighten up after lunch.

No matter. The show will go on. Competitive events will vary from village to village. Some will feature a tug of war. Wellie wanging, Splat the Rat, ferret racing, ‘Guess the marrow weight?’, ‘Guess the number of sweets in a jar’, and sponge throwing may also feature. These will be taken immensely seriously, and with an astonishing level of competitiveness when one considers that the prize is probably one of those sticky jars of chutney. Last year, I went to a fete in Sussex where there was a ‘naturally misshapen vegetable’ competition and first prize was awarded to a suggestive carrot. ‘Very amusing!’ the judges had scribbled on their judging card. Second prize went to an enormous squash that had warped like a French horn. ‘What a whopper!’ said that judging card. Magnificent.

There will probably be a dog competition, too. Again, categories will vary from village to village. Waggiest tail is likely; best six legs is now disapproved of by some in these body positive days, but you can still find it in certain villages — those which remain blissfully unaware that judging the lady vicar’s legs could be a cancelling offence.

You’ll probably be able to get a slightly charred sausage if you’re peckish, or an ice cream, or buy something that looks vaguely as if it might have been sat on from the cake stall.

At one juncture of the afternoon (the rain still coming down), someone will announce on the crackly tannoy that a lost child is safely in the first aid tent. Or a lost dog. But nobody will panic very much because nothing could possibly go wrong at a fete.

Splendid, wasn’t it? Same time again, next year.

The image of the fly-fisherman waiting to tempt a trout is among the most British clichés one can find. Robin — let’s call him Robin — wears waders, wellies and a cap, with a flannel shirt he hides under a gilet when the temperature drops below 15°C. When Gen Z discovered Guinness seven years ago and found they could cosplay as their grandfathers, they took a leaf out of Robin’s wardrobe and donned a Barbour to the pub. They did not, however, take up fly-fishing; though this may be changing.

For £85 per annum, budding fishermen have been quietly joining City Flickers since the group was founded in 2020. The project grants access to subsidised angling around the world, as well as introductory classes and parties for the hook-minded. Membership now stands at 350. ‘It’s been a steady trickle,’ says co-founder Lucy Mantle, ‘although Britain’s move from rod fishing licences to a paperless system in 2023 certainly lent a hand.’ The main draw for young people is proximity to Nature. ‘Unlike here, where it’s often seen as an inaccessible hobby due to the cost of fishing permits,’ Lucy says, ‘the sport has no such connotations in Australia or the US, where young people take it up because it connects them to the natural world.’

Since social media tends to dissolve these cultural boundaries, young fishermen in Britain are now more likely to resemble Brad Pitt’s Paul Maclean than our very own Robin. ‘It’s seen as cool,’ one tells me. Ned Varley, a jurisprudence student hoping to become a sports solicitor, is one of the young bucks whose love of fly-fishing nearly saw him go down the riverine path. ‘It’s quite a different thing to go fly-fishing for pleasure than it is to make it your life’s work,’ he cautions. Ned first fell in love with the sport in Yorkshire, with his grandfather as a mentor. ‘People have this false impression of fishing as a sedentary activity,’ he says, ‘when in fact it’s a long, scenic walk with the hope of catching some fish along the way.’

After attending Sweetwater Guide School in Montana, US, Ned did a stint as an assistant at Kau Tapen, one of the luxury lodges on the Rio Grande in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. ‘I accidentally spooked some of the fish when I was going out to familiarise myself with the 80-odd fishing sites I had to know off by heart,’ he laughs. As with most Gen Z-related news, not all people are thrilled. ‘The last thing I want is a young man intruding on my time in the river,’ says one of the Robins.

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

Flowers from the Farm, the UK trade body that represents more than 1,000 small-scale cut flower and foliage growers, has been awarded dedicated Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes — the economic identifiers that allow a sector to be formally recognised in the eyes of government, funders and policymakers.

The move comes just in time for British Flowers Week (June 15–21) and is particularly pertinent during the UN International Year of the Woman Farmer, as eight out of 10 members of Flowers from the Farm are women.

The award was secured following pressure on the Treasury for recognition for a sector worth £33.6 million a year by Sarah Dyke MP, Liberal Democrat Rural Affairs Spokesperson, who commented: ‘Securing dedicated SIC codes means that [flower growers’] contributions can finally be measured, supported and championed. These are businesses that not only create jobs and drive local growth, but also enhance biodiversity and support more sustainable land use.’

Flowers from the Farm recently exhibited at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Georgie Newbery, the chair of Flowers from the Farm, said: 'Getting this SIC code means that not only can we prove how much flower growers are putting into the British economy but that we're in a position to be acknowledged and encouraged by government, because we finally exist.

'The most important thing is that we can now look at the biodiversity net gain protocol, which will give us protection. The SIC code also allows us to lobby for more, and if we can lobby for more, then it will be much, much clearer for consumers that the flowers that they are buying are British-grown.'

In theory, this will result in fresher, longer-lasting flowers for consumers, making eco-friendly choices more viable and a greater variety of flowers available. Because of this, services like LORE, by The Real Flower Company, a new monthly subscription that deals in cut flowers, will benefit massively from these changes.

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

What are the ingredients of a thriving market town? A decent butcher and deli, a pub or two and bonus marks for a bookshop — but the real jackpot is surely a good independent wine merchant. As supermarkets deploy convenience and discounts to great effect and ever-expanding Majestic combines scale with specialism, it’s easy to be lulled into regarding your local wine shop as an anachronism reserved for claret-related emergencies. Yet the reality is more likely to be a champion of artisan producers, a free-thinking guide through classic regions or more off-piste terrain and a dynamic business that is deeply woven into its community ecosystem.

‘The important word is independent,’ declares Philip Amps, the fourth generation of his family to run Amps Wine Merchants in the Northamptonshire town of Oundle. ‘What you get with independents is a little bit of panache, that stardust, because they work with small growers who are perhaps only producing 3,000–4,000 bottles.’

It’s a scale that lends itself to originality, rarity and passion projects from families that prefer to spend their time among the vines rather than completing supermarket compliance forms. Unlike the store manager of a large chain, notes Philip, ‘our specialism is that we only sell wines we like’. In fact, the company’s unofficial motto is: ‘If you don’t like it, bring it back because we’ll drink it!’ It’s a manifesto echoed by Tom Ashworth, CEO of Yapp Brothers, which was founded after a long lunch in 1969 when his stepfather, Robin Yapp, enthusiastically ordered a pallet of wine to his garage in Mere, Wiltshire.

Now based a few miles down the road in Sparkford, Somerset, and directly representing about 100 producers, Yapp remains true to its original ethos, which doubtless still includes the odd good lunch. ‘What we’re about is best-in-class wines from family producers,’ explains Tom, noting that in many cases this relationship is now on its third generation of vigneron. Such precious continuity cultivates an affectionate thread between producer, retailer and customer that is a world away from the price-driven loyalty on which larger corporations rely.

Although UK cities boast their fair share of excellent independent wine shops, more rural locations tend to engender a slightly different mindset. ‘Our producers are small farmers from communities not unlike the one we trade in,’ remarks Gareth Groves, managing director of Stone, Vine & Sun in Hampshire’s fly-fishing Mecca of Stockbridge. That resonance is amplified by his freedom to offer ‘a range that meets local rather than national tastes’. As many independents do, Stone, Vine & Sun has embraced online sales and serves customers across the UK, but relishes an opportunity to deliver more personal service in the shop. This is also the perfect environment in which to show off local heroes, such as Exton Park Vineyard, Black Chalk, Northbrook Vineyard and — just over the Wiltshire border — Domaine Hugo.

Then there are all the events, which not only represent such an important element of a country wine merchant’s business model, but also embed it within the wider community. Weddings are only the start, suggests James Tanner, managing director of Tanners, whose forebears founded this Shropshire-based wine merchant in 1872. Today, in addition to its original Shrewsbury flagship, the firm has five shops dotted either side of the border along the Welsh Marches. He flags Tanners as a regular supplier of ‘hunt balls and point-to-point bars, where you need someone who can manage delivery into the middle of fields’. Venturing back through the post-party quagmire to collect empty bottles is all part of the service.

Back on firmer ground are the regular talks and tastings, as well as more intimate tutored events with visiting producers, all hosted at Tanners’ historic headquarters, where the cellars also provide a handy customer storage service. In addition to advising clients on how best to fill their own cellar, augmented by popular en primeur offers (in which a wine is bought before it has been bottled) and a ‘Wine In Time’ two-monthly or quarterly mixed-case subscription service, Tanners will also buy back mature bottles from country houses in need of a declutter. ‘They’re often a really good source of old Bordeaux,’ reports James, who recently reclaimed a collection of 1970 Port, safe in the knowledge that these bottles had been gently maturing in the same place since his father originally delivered them.

If Tanners epitomises the traditional wine merchant, The Somerset Wine Company shows a different side to the independent scene. When Camilla Wood set up her Castle Cary business in 2014, she ‘saw a gap in the market for a younger style, a more vibrant wine shop’. In particular, Camilla felt well placed to engage with fellow female wine lovers. ‘Women have a lot of interest in wine, great noses and great palates, but they tend to hide behind their — dare I say it — more pompous wine-buying husband,’ she smiles. ‘We say: “Come in, have a chat, share the troubles of the day, get some really good advice.”’ Although her team all have wine qualifications, this expertise comes packaged with the ability to be ‘great people connectors’.

The wine itself is a perfect tool to make that connection. ‘Wine is a very joyful product; it can be life-enhancing. I just love that alchemy.’ Beyond its own Castle Cary neighbourhood, The Somerset Wine Company taps into the significant footfall offered by nearby Teals Farm Shop, which has established itself as a superior stop-off on the A303 artery to the West Country. ‘The raison d’être of Teals is organic and sustainable, so we reflect that with our wine curation there,’ explains Camilla. She has also forged connections with other local businesses, including Paul Nicholls Racing, whose team and owners require a healthy supply of Champagne magnums.

One challenge that independent wine merchants share is the perception that they should be kept for special occasions. These smaller players may lack the economies of scale and loss leader tactics that allow supermarkets to offer their cheapest deals; nonetheless, you don’t have to shop far north of a tenner with an independent specialist to find similar, indeed often superior value. Walk into any wine shop and the manager will be able to rattle off the cumulative effect of duty, VAT, packaging and logistics costs on every bottle before you factor in the quality of the liquid itself. It is a shame, however, that the additional post-Brexit administrative burden tends to fall disproportionately on smaller importers, not least because they focus on all those interesting wines that tend to be produced in modest quantities.

More happily, it’s testament to the sourcing skills of a company such as Amps that it still manages to offer about 20 wines priced at less than £10. If you can nudge your spend up towards £15, however, you’ll hit today’s real independent sweet spot, enthuses Amps' Philip: ‘That’s when you get really interesting wine that is exciting and worth drinking.’ Over at Yapp, Tom agrees. ‘I think you should be able to find really drinkable wine at under £15 a bottle,’ he observes, drawing a parallel with shopping at a butcher. ‘If you want sustainable, good-quality meat, you will pay £15 for a good chicken.’ Extend this same notion of value to the contents of your glass and there’s yet another good reason to push open the door of your friendly local wine merchant.

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

Director Alfred Hitchcock instinctively grasped the nation’s attitude towards our most unloved avian families when he made crows and gulls his two killers-in-chief in his horror classic The Birds. Our stock image of the marauding seagull might be less traumatic, but it’s still a rather heartless act — the carefree child on the promenade, relishing their ice cream until a grey-winged raider swoops down to snatch it.

Ironically, the one gull rarely guilty of that crime is, in some ways, the least loved of all: the great black-backed gull. It’s a formidable and — if its critics will permit — even magnificent seabird. Dark slate above and surf-white below, it is larger in size than all our raptors, except the two eagles. The chest is deep and muscular, whereas the huge bill has a heavy hooked tip. Yet sheer size renders great black-backs too ungainly for most ice-cream-stealing manoeuvres.

More important still is the fact that the species suffered centuries of persecution and, in the Victorian period, this was so intense that it drove the bird to the edge of extinction. Slow recovery ensued, however that long history of human antagonism has left great black-backed gulls instinctively wary. You can almost never get close to one.

Even when we willingly feed birds at the seaside, this species seldom joins the squabbling throng. Offal from trawlers and the rich pickings at rubbish dumps are among its stock feeding opportunities; nonetheless, the gull is less dependent upon human foods and retains a strong preference for coastal places. On many sea cliffs, it can be a major predator.

My most visceral experience of this came once on a Scottish beach. Rabbits were scampering to feed across the lawn-like turf by the shore, when suddenly there was a commotion of black-and-white wings. The gull then proceeded to manoeuvre a near full-grown rabbit into position and, with several convulsive gulps, shovel the entire animal down its maw.

Elsewhere, young auks and shearwaters can become key sources of food for the gulls’ own chicks. On the Welsh island of Skokholm, off the Pembrokeshire coast, a mere 20 adult great black-backs were recorded as having taken 1,400 shearwaters in a single season.

We often colour these scenarios with a simplistic moral overlay — predator bad, victim good — even if this misunderstands the wider processes underpinning these environments. Birds such as shearwaters and puffins can be remarkably long lived and, if every chick survived to join the adult breeding population, their overall numbers would increase exponentially.

Great black-backs are natural constituents in many coastal settings. Yet there are places where there is no tolerance for this predatory behaviour. On the same island where I watched my bird catching rabbits, I was told by local crofters how the gulls were dangerous for their sheep. Not only did they accuse them of taking lambs, but also of blinding and killing full-grown ewes.

The issues are further entangled because the species has suffered a prolonged UK decline. Our breeding total is only 15,000 pairs, although this country is a destination for wider European populations in winter, when numbers swell to 77,000. Even so, the bird lives in a world of multiple jeopardy: at risk from collisions with offshore wind turbines, from various kinds of pollution, including seaborne plastics, from diseases such as avian flu and from entanglement in trawler nets.

I will close with a final anecdote that, if it incites no love for the world’s largest gull, might evoke grudging respect. I was once on a Scottish shoreline where a sperm whale had been washed up the previous winter. The carcass had lain there for months and, although it had broken into two enormous bone-girded reefs, it had lost none of its bulk. There was no sense of decay except for a strong smell in the air. The body yielded nothing to my full weight nor the impress of my boot.

Days later, I chanced upon the whale and there were two great black-backed gulls, patiently working the flesh, shifting their angles of approach, pausing occasionally to swallow fids of stone-like tissue. I finally realised: not only what a bird this is, but, also, what an extraordinary digestive tract.

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

If we had to pick a mascot for the Unloved Birds’ Club, we might look no further than this magnificently maligned creature, the carrion crow (Corvus corone). As if designed to evoke negative responses, they are black in plumage, coarse of voice and distasteful in name. Worse still, they’re thriving as never before. They need no human affection to achieve a significant population increase.

In the 1970s, there were an estimated one million pairs in Britain, but that was when hooded crows in northern Scotland and Ireland were deemed a race of their English counterparts. Hoodies may be a more attractive two-tone version of their cousin, with an almost pinkish caste to the grey underparts and back, but they occupy a near-identical ecological niche. Now, carrion and hooded crows are considered separate species; however, if we recombine their totals, they add up to 2,770,000 birds. Given those harsh, gravelly calls, we find it hard to appreciate that this 18in, 20oz creature is classified with songbirds. Many prefer to think of it as a kind of raptor, with reason — crows predate species as big as pigeons. They can snatch starlings or blue tits in mid-air.

In summer, they visit our gardens to pick off the wide-eyed young of blackbirds and thrushes, fresh from the nest. All this is central to their reputation, but the depth of opposition to crows could be summarised with a single observation made by the great naturalist David Bannerman. He described once finding a dump of about 200 egg shells, all sourced and devoured by crows, all originally taken from grouse nests and all on moors guarded by gamekeepers.

Carrion crows are major nest predators and are killed or trapped in the interests of gamebirds, although keepers freely acknowledge that the aim is to eliminate the crows’ depredations only during the breeding season. Managers of nature reserves tell a parallel story, particularly where they want to protect ground-nesting lapwings and curlews. I recall vividly a warden explaining how he used Larsen traps to catch crows on an East Anglian reserve and, sometimes, newly arrived birds filled the vacated breeding territory within hours of the capture of its previous holder. Given the number of hands raised against the beast, you might wonder if there’s anything to say in favour of carrion crows.

Actually, we could begin with that name. We might project upon the bird’s macabre associations with old flesh, but its real ecology is far more modest, even helpful, to us. Carrion crows are essentially dependent upon grassland invertebrates and, nine times out of 10, you see them doing what they love most: foraging in pasture for subsoil organisms, many of which are harmful for farmers. Carrion crows do take small songbirds and eggs. We respond with visceral horror when a crow eats our baby blackbirds, but those emotions don’t take account of the whole picture.

For a breeding thrush or blue tit to sustain its overall population, it needs to raise only one offspring to breed successfully like itself. Yet it may hatch dozens of chicks in its lifetime. Their breeding ecology has an inbuilt redundancy. Thrushes and tits are also predators, albeit bathed in admiration. Who of us cares passionately about worms taken by thrushes or the moth caterpillars devoured by blue tits? We make partial judgments to crows’ detriment.

One reason some dislike corvids is that they show a understanding of our antagonism. A crow’s ability to tell if a person is carrying a walking stick or a gun is proverbial. Britain’s great scholar of avian intelligence, Prof Nicola Clayton, has proved corvids possess intelligence comparable to that of primates. It is the bird’s supreme gift for adaptation that inspired Poet Laureate Ted Hughes to his most brilliant poetry collection. Crow was published in 1970, at the height of the Cold War, partly as the poet’s hope-filled response to the possibilities of nuclear holocaust. Hughes could have found no deeper, richer, more potent symbol for the idea of life’s imperishable genius than his central poetic motif — the much unloved, many talented, quick-witted crow.

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

The main source of vanilla globally, the world’s smallest waterlily and several species of magnolia could disappear, together with their evolutionary history, say scientists who have carried out the first worldwide study of extinction risk, linked to the tree of life, among flowering plants. They also estimate that, if current rates of loss continue, more than one-fifth (21.2%) of the evolutionary history of flowering plants worldwide will be lost.

During this global assessment, scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and international collaborators identified 9,945 Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered (EDGE) species, which is about 3% of all known flowering plant species.

These included the increasingly rare thick-stemmed Vanilla planifolia, an orchid that grows in the tropical forests of Mexico and Central and northern South America; the diminutive Nymphaea thermarum, also known as miniature Rwandan water lily, that has fallen victim to over-exploitation; Medusagyne oppositifolia, the jellyfish tree, which grows on the island of Mahé in the Seychelles; and the flowering plant Magnolia sinica, which is native to the south-east Yunnan Province in China.

Hondurodendron urceolatum, a dioecious tree found across a single mountain range in the Parque Nacional El Cusuco in Honduras, topped the EDGE list. The scientists ranked all 335,497 flowering plant species using molecular data, the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List and computer modelling, in what is the largest conservation prioritisation study ever carried out.

With some species more evolutionarily distinctive than others because they have fewer close relatives on the tree of life — such as Ginkgo biloba, the maidenhair tree, which is the only known descendant of an ancient lineage dating back more than 300 million years — researchers had needed a clearer roadmap to protect those at-risk plants.

The impressive-looking Amorphophallus titanum is also a species identified by the EDGE assessments due to its risk of extinction.

‘By applying the EDGE approach to flowering plants, we are better able to protect our planet’s rich, bustling ecosystems that have taken billions of years to develop,’ explains the study’s co-lead Dr Rikki Gumbs, a researcher at the Institute of Zoology at ZSL, which is celebrating its 200th anniversary.

Kew’s new exhibition of EDGE species, including the critically endangered blue amaryllis or empress of Brazil (Worsleya procera) and the Albany pitcher plant (Cephalotus follicularis) from Western Australia, opens on May 20.

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

Murals featuring classical figures and seasonal allegories by Elizabeth Arkwright adorn the ceilings, doors and wall panels of Grade II-listed Parndon Hall, Essex, and yet, despite their historical significance and the fact that they are rare large-scale survivors from the period by a female artist, the building housing them has been allowed to fall into a state of disrepair.

The hall, situated within the Princess Alexandra Hospital campus in Harlow, is on the Victorian Society’s new Top Ten Endangered Buildings list, prompting the charity’s president Griff Rhys Jones to comment: ‘Grrr. Come on Harlow! This is a worthy building. To stick it to one side and let it rot is such a waste of a valuable resource… This could be an asset instead of derelict — and it should be.’

The hall was built in 1867 for Loftus Arkwright, great-grandson of the industrial pioneer Sir Richard Arkwright and husband of Elizabeth, who is believed to have honed her artistic skills through Sir Edwin Landseer. For a while, the hall was a distinctive family home, before it was used as a school and offices, then a training centre, library and skills facility for the nearby hospital, which saved it from demolition. It is now empty and there are no plans for its future.

The fate of Elizabeth’s bewitching paintings has been equally precarious — certain ones having been concealed beneath whitewash and paint over time; some are still covered over. The other nine Victorian and Edwardian buildings on the society’s list (with two out of the total Grade II*-listed and eight Grade II-listed) are London’s Hackney Borough Disinfecting Station (1901); the Tees Transporter Bridge, in Stockton-on-Tees, Co Durham (1911); New Market Buildings, Bridgnorth, Shropshire (1855–59); the Former Strand Railway Station and Railway Men’s Club, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria (1863); Oakes School in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire (1885); St Michael’s RC Cemetery Chapel, Sheffield (1898); Derby School of Art (1876, with additions in 1899); the former Library and Mechanics Institute, Devonport, Devon (1843–44); and Faenol (Vaynol) Mausoleum, in Pentir, Gwynedd, North Wales.

The architecturally significant Henry Kennedy-designed mausoleum, which has a bell tower and a hammerbeam roof, is one the rarest funerary buildings of its type in Wales. It was built in the late 1870s with French Gothic elements for the wealthy Assheton-Smith family, owners of the 36,000-acre Faenol estate, who made their fortune from slate. Still showing evidence of its glorious past, vandals and graffiti ‘artists’ have, however, damaged its walls and stained glass and left it in a vulnerable state, prompting Griff to state: ‘The tangle of ownership needs to be cut aside by a latter-day perfect gentle knight, so this sleeping beauty, this unique monument, can come back to life.’

The Victorian Society is hoping that these new Endangered Buildings listings, as with many buildings on its past lists, will be saved from their cycles of neglect through a combination of public pressure, partnership and investment. ‘They are each part of the character and quality and history that made Britain and can continue to make Britain,’ adds Griff.

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

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,’ forewarned the economist The Revd Thomas Malthus in 1798. His observation did not go down well with either the Communist thinker Karl Marx or with captains of industry. However, we are still here on Earth, albeit struggling for sustainability in a far busier world.

As arguments rage today about the despoliation of the British countryside by development in the name of economic survival, so the 19th-century figures Wordsworth and Ruskin fumed about the spread of mining (now defunct and provider of tourist attractions) and the first railway lines (now deemed ‘heritage’ and treasured). At the time, these brought much-needed employment and connectivity, yet created what opinion-makers perceived as jarring interruptions to uncluttered landscapes.

Formal opposition to unsuitable development came during the middle and end of the Victorian era (with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the National Trust) and then in the depressed aftermaths of the First and Second World Wars. By 1936, a Times leader suggested that the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), by now 10 years old, should be credited with the notion that ‘the beauty of rural England has a commercial value’. This wasn’t a new idea — the 18th-century travel writer William Gilpin realised Britain’s huge tourism potential — but it had been submerged in an atmosphere of postwar deprivation. Many of the CPRE’s initial concerns remain 100 years on, depressingly unsolved or worse: litter, badly constructed housing, industrial ugliness, hideous signage, pollution, contaminated water.

The historian W. G. Hoskins wrote in his seminal The Making of the English Landscape (1954) that ‘since the year 1914… every single change in the English landscape has either uglified it or destroyed its meaning’. Hoskins is quoted in the CPRE’s centenary publication, Future Rural, by Dame Fiona Reynolds, a former leader of the conservation charity and author of The Fight for Beauty. She suggests that the countryside, which needs far more understanding representation and flexible policy making from Westminster, is at a precarious crossroads: it can either become submerged by ‘characterless suburbanisation’ with ‘a few wildlife-rich islands’ or it could be a biodiversity-rich, farmed landscape populated by vibrant communities. The nation has become ‘countryside blind’ amid a governmental desire to build at all cost.

In the same book, Sir Michael Morpurgo, founder of Farms for City Children 50 years ago, contends that the word ‘protection’ implies ‘siege mentality’ when what is needed is ‘for town and country to understand one another better’. This is not to say that campaigners should ever give up on preserving beauty, but that it reflects the dilemma of tempering creditable and uplifting ambition with pragmatism and 21st-century knowledge.

This article first appeared in the April 22 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Foraging is in our DNA and, although it may have become hidden from many of us, it is always ready to emerge if we allow it. ‘When the tide is out, the table is set’ is a saying originating from the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest coast of Alaska and Canada, but it applies equally to most coastal regions where the sea is clean. Of all the habitats in which a forager might look for food, the coast is by far the most rewarding in both diversity of edible species and nutritional density.

Many of the vegetables we have cultivated for consumption still grow freely there: wild cabbage (Brassica oleracea), for example, was domesticated by 2000BC and has since been selectively bred into a host of staples, including broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale and Brussels sprouts. It still grows coastally.

Of course, the coast isn’t uniform: it’s a patchwork of ecosystems. The plant communities of maritime woods and hedgerows enjoy the warming effect of the sea, which makes for a longer and frost-free growing season and, occasionally, sandy, free-draining soils, together with an abundance of mineral-rich fresh water running off the land and less predation by insects and herbivores. For these reasons, the earliest, biggest, juiciest and sweetest fruits tend to swell near our coasts — sloes ripen earlier and tend to grow more prolifically, often plump and dark enough to harvest as early as August — as well as some delightful aromatic plants, the stems and leaves of which grow fatter than those of their inland kin.

Perhaps the most versatile of these is alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum), all of which is edible, with a strong, bitter, aromatic flavour. Leaves, young shoots and thin stems have a more pungent, celery-like taste; used sparingly, they add an interesting flavour to salads, especially tempered with an oily dressing. In Turkey, young shoots and leaves are cooked and eaten with yogurt. They can also be finely shredded and used like an extra aromatic parsley in soups and sauces or to add a twist to pesto or salsa verde. Alexanders seeds are an excellent spice, reminiscent of black cumin; try adding them to bread dough or keep some pre-ground in a pinch pot by the cooker. Be sure not to confuse alexanders with poisonous hemlock, which they resemble: a key difference is that the flowers are yellow, rather than white.

There is nothing within the regular reach of tides that is dependable enough for terrestrial plants to cling to, but above the strand-line — the highest extent of the waves — larger sediments begin to stabilise. On these, thousands of tons of seaweed are deposited each year to rot down and leach a fecund cocktail of nutrients. Even in the driest summers, this fertile strip gets a steady supply of fresh water seeping from the land, making the foreshore prime real estate for well-adapted plants. I still gasp with surprise each spring at sea-kale plants larger than sheep growing from what looks like nothing but windswept pebbles.

Look out for scurvy grass on the strandline of shingle and rocky shores: it was so named because it was harvested by sailors, then dried or salted down to help stave off the disease on long voyages. It is a member of the brassica family, with a pungent, mustardy flavour. In spring, the flowers have a relatively mild taste and are good as a garnish or scattered through salads. In summer, all but the sheerest, most austere coastal rock faces become implausibly festooned with colourful blossoms hanging from every crack and ledge, bending with the wind, like a dancing, vertical garden.

It goes without saying that these can be dangerous places for foragers with their eye on a prize; fatal accidents were common enough in Shakespeare’s day for him to describe the harvesting of rock samphire (Crithmum maritimum) as a ‘dreadful trade’ in King Lear. Wild thyme (Thymus), which thrives in craggy outcrops near the sea, is magical when its scent drifts in summer and its small pink flowers turn rocks into aromatic cushions. No wonder it has long been regarded as a favourite flower of fairies; bees love it, too. Snip the creeping stems or pinch out the flowers, leaving plenty on each plant. Try pushing sprigs under the skin of a chicken with butter before roasting or tucking them into the belly cavity of fish before baking. It is a delightful addition to mushroom dishes, a natural partner for most fruits and is particularly happy alongside lemon. To preserve it, infuse it into oil, alcohol, honey or vinegar or add it to herb butter, which can be frozen.

Seaweed has had a bit of an image problem around the North Atlantic; even its name dismisses it as a nuisance. Foraging is a wonderful, rewarding way of entering into a wider appreciation of it, as well as topping up your levels of vitamins A, C, B12 and calcium: seaweeds are the most highly mineralised vegetables on Earth. Harvest only living, healthy specimens that are still attached to rocks in clean water and, using a sharp knife or scissors, cut only up to the top one-third of each plant. Many varieties may be used as seasoning, dehydrated and ground into flakes or powder, then added to recipes or sprinkled like salt (chips benefit especially from this treatment).

The crisp texture of sea lettuce, sea spaghetti, mermaid’s tresses, wrack, dabberlocks and kelp makes them ideal for pickling. Laver (Porphyra), the Welsh delicacy that, under its Japanese name, nori, is wrapped around rice, is the wild food with the largest gulf between how it looks (melted bin bags) and how it tastes (rich, satisfying umami).

How to forage legally and responsibly? I differentiate between these because, if you stick only to the law, it’s still possible to be an irresponsible and inconsiderate forager. Laws vary widely, but, in most parts of the world, if you are legally allowed to be somewhere, you will be within your legal rights to gather the ‘four Fs’ — fruit, flowers, foliage and fungi — provided they are not being grown deliberately. If you intend to uproot anything you should seek the landowner’s permission.

Try to recognise the uniqueness of each species and how it contributes to its wider ecosystem, then harvest (or not) in a way that is sensitive and appropriate to its location. For example, sea buckthorn growing in one location may be considered a troublesome non-native species that you are encouraged to pick, whereas in another it may be important for stabilising sand dunes or as a food source for over-wintering birds.

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

Just below Uffington Castle on an Oxfordshire stretch of the Ridgeway, a 360ft-long white horse gallops across the landscape. Its striking shape defies its age, for the Uffington White Horse has been recently dated using OSL (Optically Stimulated Luminescence) to the late Bronze or Iron Age, making it the oldest chalk hill figure in the country.

In Cerne Abbas, Dorset, the well-endowed naked giant dates from the late Saxon period — the only other human figure in the country is the more modest, Tudor-era Long Man of Wilmington in East Sussex, who surveys the South Downs clutching long poles like a modern-day Nordic walker. They are three of the most celebrated of more than 50 mythical figures and symbols tattooed on to our landscape. Many more have been neglected and some have disappeared altogether, but the ones that survive are synonymous with mystery and folklore.

White horses, long recognised as symbols of power and freedom, make up the vast majority of hill figures or ‘geoglyphs’. Of an estimated total of 16, eight can be found on the chalky downs of Wiltshire, where the undulating landscape provides the perfect canvas. Many were created from the 1780s to the 1860s, when carved white horses became a landscaping craze and landowners competed to ‘out-white-horse’ each other in size and shape.

One such image was the Cherhill White Horse, created by Dr Christopher Alsop, who assembled a group of men to form a 220ft-long figure as he stood in the valley below bellowing instructions through a megaphone. The horse’s eye, slightly more than 4ft across, was originally filled with upturned glass bottles, giving it a distinct twinkle, and the landmark was said to be eagerly anticipated by passengers on the long carriage journey from Bath to London. Today, it is still clearly visible from the A4.

Passengers on the train from London Paddington to the West Country can enjoy fine views of the largest and oldest of all the Wiltshire horses. The Westbury White Horse was believed to have been originally cut in the late 17th century to commemorate a Viking defeat at the Battle of Ethandun in 878AD and it is the only horse pictured standing still. The current horse, 180ft tall and 170ft wide, was cut in 1778 and covered in white cement in the 1950s. Blazing white and tucked into the folds of the hill, it is forever tethered to Eric Ravilious’s 1939 painting of the same name.

Further south, outside Weymouth, the Osmington White Horse depicts George III in the saddle and, in the north, the Kilburn White Horse in the North York Moors, created in 1857, is the largest stallion of all: 318ft long and 220ft high. Dating the older chalk figures is made more difficult due to the lack of relevant artefacts. The origins of the 180ft giant that looms over Cerne Abbas eluded archaeologists for centuries. In the absence of scientific facts, speculations about the club wielding figure flourished. Was he the demi-god Hercules? An ancient fertility symbol? Or a lampoon of Oliver Cromwell?

However, in 2021, in a process that measures how much time has elapsed since soil has been buried, together with an examination of snail shells, the giant was revealed as being late Saxon. ‘I was genuinely surprised,’ admits Dr Martin Papworth, leading archaeologist at the Cerne Abbas dig, ‘and the arguments continue. I like to think of him as the abbey’s founding saint, his outstretched arm guiding pilgrims from Sherborne. The public love him — it’s his rudeness. Every news story turns into a media event.’

In addition to horses and giants, a bewildering array of beasts stalk our uplands, including an enormous lion — dug into the Dunstable Downs in Bedfordshire in 1933, to advertise the location of Whipsnade Zoo — and the gargantuan Bulford Kiwi, strangely out of place on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire and cut in 1919 by homesick New Zealand troops. More mementos of military life can be found on Fovant Down — also in Wiltshire — where soldiers returning from France during the First World War cut regimental badges into the grass in remembrance of fallen colleagues.

Other hill figures are less easily explained, such as the Whiteleaf Cross in the Chilterns. The origins of the figure, which consists of a large white cross on a triangular base, are unknown; among the theories are a Saxon celebration of a victory over the Danes, a phallic symbol later Christianised and a 17th-century alternative to a village cross. Stranger still is the Watlington White Mark, a triangular obelisk in Oxfordshire, cut by a local landowner to give an optical illusion of a church spire.

With its pointed muzzle, flowing tail and abstract shape, the Uffington White Horse is quite unlike other geoglyphs. Best viewed from above, it was once thought to commemorate King Alfred’s victory over the Danes, but it has now been placed between 800BC and 600BC. ‘We still don’t know for certain its original purpose,’ says National Trust archaeologist Adrian Cox. ‘It could have been a way of marking territory or as a tribal symbol.’ Its remarkable survival is thanks to the dedication of generations of local communities who have looked after it with organised ‘scourings’, which took place roughly every seven years. In the 17th century, these cleaning events became part of a rowdy festival known as the Pastime and included cheese rolling, horse-racing and a pipe-smoking competition for women. Today, the conservation efforts are more restrained and organised by the National Trust.

Despite scientific advances, chalk figures remain mysterious and continue to attract folklore and ritual. At Cerne Abbas, couples make pilgrimages to the site to ensure they are blessed with children. Morris men dance at the Long Man of Wilmington and the Westbury horse is only one in a herd of white stallions believed to leave their hills at midnight to drink water.

Artists and writers have been similarly attracted to chalk hill figures. Eric Ravilious created his painting of White Horse Hill — 1939’s The Vale of the White Horse — as part of a series of chalk-figure works, Frank Dobson’s 1931 poster of the Cerne Abbas giant included a passing cloud to mask the giant’s priapic glory and Paul Nash painted the Whiteleaf Cross. Many figures are used as business logos, appearing on everything from plumbers’ vans to beer labels. (In 2016, the Cerne Abbas Brewery had temporarily to conceal the giant’s integrity with a fig leaf when it was for sale in a Parliament bar.)

Over the centuries, some hill carvings have survived better than others. Among those lost are the Red Horse of Tysoe in Warwickshire, the chalk giants of Devon’s Plymouth Hoe and the first Pewsey White Horse in Wiltshire. All the country’s figures were covered up during the Second World War to stop them being used by the Luftwaffe for navigation and several have undergone adaptations from pranksters — not least a face mask for the Long Man of Wilmington during the covid pandemic, a giant Homer Simpson painted next to the Cerne Abbas giant and a temporary jockey for the Uffington White Horse for Cheltenham week.

The drawings evolve over time, with every cleaning and re-chalking, and so do our interpretations of them. At Uffington, where it all began, secrets remain. ‘The horse is a symbol of continuity and enchantment,’ wrote the archaeologist David Miles in his 2019 book The Land of the White Horse, ‘a place where the different pasts remain present… the horse remains a wonder, a myth for modern times.’

This article first appeared in the April 8 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Great bustards, the birds whose male specimens are among the world’s heaviest living flying animals, have been found breeding in a new location. For the first time, Cranborne Chase Landscape Trust announced, chicks had been found in their National Landscape last May.

Two chicks were found in a field of sainfoin after a farmer told the Great Bustard Group (GBG) that he would shortly begin mowing a crop and the eggs were rescued under licence by volunteers and hand-reared.

The GBG have been releasing chicks on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire since 2004, including these latest two bustards. David Waters, who set up the GBG in 1997, says the birds have been breeding very close by for a long time, so the announcement from Cranborne Chase is not massive news for them. ‘The bird's range is slowly expanding and their population is slowly increasing, but the real story is that the Great Bustard is the only bird in the UK which is globally endangered [...] I always put that into context by reminding people that giant pandas and snow leopards aren’t.’

David, a former policeman, continues: ‘Our UK population is slowly expanding in numbers and range, which is great. We are chuffed to bits that they are breeding in Cranbourne Chase — but, for us, it’s not the strategic breakthrough that other news outlets have said that it is.’

The bustard was hunted to extinction in the 19th century, but Russian chicks were secretly reintroduced to Wiltshire in 1998. It has been the emblem of Wiltshire Council since it was established in 2009 and the UK’s population of the bird is exclusively located in the county.

With their slightly aristocratic look and purposeful stride, the species take many aback. At just over 3ft tall, weighing up to 40lbs and with an 8ft wing span, the male bustard in particular is a striking sight. It is thought the bird was first attracted to England's open grassland and cultivated fields in the middle of the 15th century.

Pliny the Elder named it, and despite sounding similar to the name one gives a child born out of wedlock, bustard actually means ‘slow bird’. Ironically, bustards are quite fast, as well as being enormous. Apparently, they are also delicious, a factor which led to their near extinction in the first place, along with a Victorian penchant for collecting unusual eggs. The last bird in Wiltshire is reported to have been killed in 1873, before their reintroduction.

Tom Hilder was born to a life in the country. Born in rural Scotland but raised in Hampshire, he went through school always thinking – and being told — that he needed to find a life, and a career, out in the countryside, working with his hands.

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A chance meeting with a lecturer at Sparsholt College changed his life for good, and put him on a pathway to become (deep breath) the 'Senior Nature-Based Solutions Officer — Practical Delivery' at the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust. It's comfortably the longest job title of anyone who's yet joined James Fisher on the Country Life Podcast, but the aim is clear: to make the world around us a better, greener place.

Tom talks to James about his life, how he ended up working in the field (literally), and the challenges he's faced — from Exmoor ponies and landowners suspicious of his tender years to the 'charismatic adders' found on Hook Common, in north Hampshire.

You can find out more about the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust here, and to nominate someone for the 2026 edition of the award Tom won, visit the Schoffel Countryside Awards website.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Tom Hilder

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Here's a look at some of what you'll find inside.

The legacy

Emma Hughes celebrates the genius of Ian Fleming, the brains behind James Bond, the world’s most famous secret agent

Zinging in the rain

Telltale aromas of the seasons are Nature’s signposts for our senses. It won’t be long before spring is in the air, hopes Laura Parker

Winging it

A barn owl’s soundless flight at dusk must rank as one of the British countryside’s signature sights, suggests Mark Cocker

Offaly good

Tom Parker Bowles makes the case for nose-to-tail eating as he savours the fantastic flavours of dishes from faggots to marrow bones and everything in between

Interiors

Amelia Thorpe picks out those little luxuries that can transform a bathroom into a relaxing haven

A budding genius

Business is blooming for Trevor White, who grows 600 varieties of roses at his Norfolk nursery. Charles Quest-Ritson reports

Beverly Joubert’s favourite painting

The conservationist and film-maker chooses an influential study of brawling big cats

Country-house treasure

John Goodall unearths a chilling reminder of England’s Civil War at Doddington Hall in Lincolnshire

A world of dreams

Aoife Caitríona Lau visits Schloss Charlottenhof at Brandenburg, a neo-Classical masterpiece built for the Kings of Prussia

Five, six, pick up sticks

John Lewis-Stempel adopts the mindset of Stone Age man as he wanders the woods gathering fuel for the winter fire

Scale model

David Profumo profiles the parasite-ridden ocean sunfish, a jellyfish-eating oddity partial to a spot of surface bathing

A study in scarlet

It is 100 years since London got its first all-red telephone box. Deborah Nicholls-Lee dials up a British design classic

Luxury

Charming jewellery and revitalising treatments with Amie Elizabeth White, plus a few of food writer Diana Henry’s favourite things

Arts & antiques

The legend and lore of Japan’s samurai warriors is charted by a major new British Museum exhibition, reveals Carla Passino

Humble, grumble, toil and scumble

An artist’s labour is never done, concludes Michael Hall when he investigates the depictions of people at work down the ages

The tragedy then the triumph

Henrietta Bredin reveals how Verdi overcame crippling grief to write his most acclaimed operas

Woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown

Michael Billington welcomes the revival of plays penned by Alan Ayckbourn and Tom Stoppard

And much more.

The wonderful tawny probably supplies our default image of all British owls. It is our most abundant and widespread species, with only the mountainous Scottish Highlands and the largely treeless Hebrides beyond the bird’s limits. Yet we must also acknowledge tawny owls are in decline; their re-designation as an amber-listed species due to a 10% contraction in range. Britain has become a rather impoverished place for this family of owls; one factor might be the overlooked matter of light pollution. Another concern for several species is secondary poisoning from rodenticides.

With a current British total of 50,000 pairs, the tawny is still the one owl that many of us are likely to have seen — perhaps as a silhouette perched momentarily on a rooftop or a broad-winged, brown shape floating silently through the trees. Tawny owls come readily into towns and villages and will breed in many suburban woodland patches, leaving them to hunt across domestic gardens after dark.

As well as being our largest owl, it is also probably the most versatile in matters of diet. Rodents are a staple, but so, too, are songbirds snatched as they sleep. A large starling roost in Lancashire last century contained a million birds and supplied a life of relative leisure for the local tawny population. Yet they can tackle a range of other prey, including young hares, rabbits, squirrels, weasels, as well as more eclectic fare — fish, frogs, newts, even woodpeckers.

Titbits as large as adult rats are swallowed whole. A main source of information on the birds’ diet are the pellets of undigested fur, feathers and bones that owls regurgitate daily at roost sites. Each species of owl produces a pellet that is instantly recognisable — black, smooth and almost shiny in the case of the barn owl, but broad and grey coloured for tawny owls.

Pellets are a good indicator that an owl pair is resident in an area, but clearest of all is the tawny owl’s extraordinary vocalisation. The male produces the inimitable sound from late autumn onwards and it can be heard in midwinter. It has given rise to a mnemonic that, at one time, every child would have committed to memory: tuwhit-tuwhoo. However, this transliteration is a conflation of two sounds made separately by male and female birds and its precise structure warrants a little teasing out.

All tawny owls have a sharp disyllabic warning or contact call—keewick (or, if you prefer, tuwhit)—that they deliver at regular intervals, as they move in tandem through their territories. The male also then produces a separate song. This is itself in two parts: the first is a clear, low, drawn-out hooting hoo-ooo; then followed by a silence of several seconds, after which he delivers a more sustained, rising and tremulous oo-ooo-o-o-o. The complication arises partly because the pause left by the male is often punctuated by a call from his mate.

It is fitting that one of the most celebrated avian sounds was first diagnosed on the page by the Bard. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare wrote: ‘Then nightly sings the staring owl: Tu-whoo;/Tu-whit, Tu-who—A merry note.’ In these two lines, we have perfectly evoked the two-part male song, intersected by his mate’s sharper call. The only part with which I dare disagree is the idea that it is in any way ‘merry’. It is certainly beautiful and unforgettable, but it is also solemn and, if the background conditions are just so — perhaps a touch of ice and moonlight and stars pricking the blackness overhead — utterly mysterious.

The novelist H. E. Bates once suggested that a nightingale’s song consisted of exquisite phrases wrapped around silences and it was the shape and eloquence of the latter that made this nocturnal performance so affecting. In precisely the same way, it is the pause in the male tawny’s notes — and his apparent recognition that an absence of sound is as moving as song itself — that turns a duet by these owls on a dark winter’s night into one of the greatest musical performances in all of British Nature.

It sounds like a Monty Python gag: late last year, a technology company in the US announced that it was planning to ‘de-extinct’ the dodo.

After raising $120 million in funding, Texas-based firm Colossal Biosciences aims to inject chickens with cells from the Nicobar pigeon, the dodo’s closest living relative, before using gene editing and selective breeding to re-create the originals. ‘Our goal is to make enough dodos with enough genetic diversity engineered into them that we can put them back into the wild where they can truly thrive,’ CEO Ben Lamm told journalists. ‘We’re not looking to make two dodos, we’re looking to make thousands.’ I think we can take it as read that he hasn’t seen Jurassic Park.

Picture a dodo: what probably comes to mind is Lewis Carroll’s in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, refereeing the nonsensical Caucus race with the geniality of a hopeless country parson. Or, if you’re of a more recent vintage, Bertie and Beatrice in Dick King-Smith’s tear-jerker Dodos are Forever. The portly, flightless bird has become both a totem of extinction and an exemplar of Darwinian ruthlessness: writing in National Geographic, palaeontologist Riley Black described it as having accumulated ‘the air of a bird that stood still with a blank stare as the scythe of extinction lopped off its head’. In fact, the truth is more complicated — and salutary.

The year is 1598 and a Dutch East India Company fleet under the command of Admiral Jacob Cornelis van Neck stops off in what we now know as Mauritius. After weighing anchor in sight of a lushly wooded volcanic island, a fact-finding party goes ashore. When the sailors return, they bring news of flocks of comical avians standing 3ft tall, with stumpy vestigial wings and oversized beaks. Heyndrick Dircksz Jolinck, one of the fact-finders, wrote the first known description of the birds, which he claimed had been ‘named penguins by the Portuguese’ (who had arrived in Mauritius in the early 1500s).

The first Englishman to commit the name ‘dodo’ to paper is thought to have been Thomas Herbert in A relation of some yeares trauaile begunne anno 1626. As is almost everything to do with the bird, the etymology is a bit of a mystery: it could be from the Dutch dodoor, meaning lazy, the Portuguese doudo, for fool, or even an onomatopoeic rendering of its call (later described as being ‘like a gosling’ by the French explorer François Cauche).

Reports started filtering back to Europe of fruit-eating, ground-nesting, clumsy creatures that couldn’t fly, together with sketches made by sailors and even a dozen or so living dodos. The birds couldn’t easily be classified and from the start they were the subject of wild conjecture. The gizzard stones found in their crops were held up as evidence that they consumed burning coals or metal: writing in 1657, the philosopher Samuel Clarke claimed that the dodo’s stomach was ‘so hot, that shee digests stones, or Iron’.

Meanwhile artists set about depicting dodos, the most famous being Roelant Savery, whose The Dodo and Other Birds of about 1630 is now in London’s Natural History Museum. He and his followers were working largely from hearsay and imagination: most had never seen a dodo either living or dead and none of the birds that left Mauritius alive were well preserved in their entirety after death. To this day, almost all dodo skeletons in museum collections are composites of bones from different individual birds.

Early, rather fanciful depictions of rotund dodos became gospel: centuries later, they would inform not only Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for Lewis Carroll, but attempts to reconstruct skeletons and the instantly recognisable replicas made by the famous London taxidermist Rowland Ward for various British institutions from plaster and goose feathers. Like the Horniman Museum’s blimpish walrus, overstuffed by well-meaning Victorians, Dürer’s armoured rhinoceros and the rectangular cows of 19th-century British art, the dodo as we know it today is a construct — not so much discovered as created by people who actually had very little to go on.

Jumping back to the 17th century, expeditions to Mauritius continued apace and the dodo waddled unknowingly into a perfect storm. It had evolved in isolation, so was entirely unafraid of humans. Flightless and slow, it couldn’t readily escape even if it wanted to — which it didn’t, if tales of dodos being caught easily by hand and herded onto ships are anything to go by. Visitors destroyed its habitat and the ships’ rats that travelled with them ate its eggs. The birds themselves became provisions, eaten fresh or salted and stuffed into barrels for the next leg of a voyage. In his chapter on the dodo in The Vortex: An Environmental History of the Modern World, historian Frank Uekötter writes that ‘the dodo’s French name, oiseau de nausée, suggests that the bird’s greasy meat left even gastronomically challenged sailors nauseous’.

A handful of dodos escaped this grisly fate, only to be dispatched around the world as gifts. At least two were sent to India and a solitary bird journeyed to Japan in August 1647, arriving in the port of Hakata a month later: according to the diary of Dutch seaman Willem Verstegen analysed by Julian Hume of the Natural History Museum, it was taken ashore, together with a deer, and given to a nobleman.

For many years, the last dodo was thought to have been sighted in 1662 by a Dutch sailor. More recent research has unearthed records of a dodo being killed for the governor of Mauritius in 1673, as well as notes made by his successor of living dodos up until 1688. Extinction was still a concept foreign to science in the late 17th century; it would be more than 100 years before French naturalist George Cuvier proved it was a reality.

After it became clear that the dodo really was gone for good, Victorian ornithologists began trying to uncover the truth of what had been lost: in his famous monograph on the bird, Hugh Edwin Strickland wrote that although dodos were ‘almost contemporaries of our great-grandfathers’, they had become akin to ‘the Griffin and the Phoenix of mythological antiquity’. ‘We possess only the rude descriptions of unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments, which have survived the neglect of two hundred years,’ he lamented. The dodo certainly had a long-standing PR problem: Carl Linnaeus had been so convinced of its hopelessness that, in 1766, he had proposed naming it Didus ineptus (the more sober Raphus cucullatus stuck).

A dodo skull from Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum was dissected at the request of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1847 in front of an audience that included Prince Albert. The scientists reached the conclusion that the dodo was ‘a very aberrant member of the family Columbidae’ — in other words, as Prof Uekötter puts it, ‘a pigeon, albeit a really strange one’.

Modern analysis of dodo remains has confirmed their hypothesis, as well as prompting a reassessment of its intellect: far from being so stupid and hapless that it was inevitably doomed, its brain was average sized and it had impressive olfactory capacity, which enabled it to sniff out food on the ground. Microscopic analysis of dodo tissue has enabled scientists to fill in other blanks, revealing that the birds bred in August and moulted between March and late July.

Running in parallel to all of this scrutiny have been a series of spurious dodo sightings: in February 1886, the journal Science debunked English newspaper reports that a dodo had been found in Samoa, explaining that the bird in question was ‘not the dodo at all but the dodo-pigeon, Didunculus strigirostris, a living specimen of which was last year presented to the national museum… this specimen was, at latest account, thriving in the zoological garden at Philadelphia’. At the time of writing, there is a video on YouTube claiming to prove the dodo never died out that makes the evidence for the Loch Ness Monster look plausible by comparison.

There is still so much that remains uncertain about the dodo, from the way it looked when it moved to how it evolved in the first place. Perhaps this is why it is such an object of fascination for Silicon Valley types: it resists the mastery of Nature that has always been their ultimate goal. As Colossal Biosciences’s genetic engineers will no doubt discover, to engage with the dodo is to be continually reminded exactly how little we humans know and how badly wrong we keep getting it—which is precisely as it should be.

January

Encouraged by Cornwall, Norfolk makes a bid for independence. Furriners (visitors and second-home owners) unable to engage in mardle (idle chit-chat) in Norfolk dialect will have to pay kewter (cash) to stay.

February

There’s romance in the birdwatching world with a new dating app, MateForLife, that alerts birders to a potential love interest observing a pair of courting grebes nearby. Loud booing overwhelms the opening Six Nations rugby match; the waddling robots that have replaced human referees are hopelessly behind the action, letting through all manner of fouls.

March

The Oscars ceremony descends into chaos after some joker swaps the contents of the envelopes, with the result that the winning make-up artist takes Best Director. At Crufts, the Royal Kennel Club announces a new dog breed, the torgi, a cute corgi-Jack Russell cross with sticking-up ears that simultaneously rounds up sheep and sees off foxes.

April

A 200-1 outsider, Water Wings, wins a rain-soaked Grand National in which runners are forced to swim a flooded Becher’s Brook.

May

The May Bank Holiday is renamed Sir David Attenborough Day. The centenarian reports on human behaviour at the local elections: ‘Here are two of the species Canvasser desperides, displaying their rosettes. They’re in competition for the same neighbourhood…’

June

Enterprising Somerset locals fill the Glastonbury vacuum with a pop-up festival featuring a Wurzels tribute band singing: ‘I can’t afford a brand-new combine harvester.’

July

Henley is cancelled due to low water; instead, the crews play spin the boater and lacrosse with oars on the dry riverbed until an invading plague of scorpions stops play.

August

It’s the silly season, so animal-rights activists plot to steal Stubbs’s Whistlejacket from the National Gallery because the poor horse has been standing on his hind legs since 1762. It all goes wrong when they get stuck in the swing doors.

September

The Lindisfarne Festival is disrupted by locals claiming reparations from Scandinavian countries for the Viking invasion of 793. Order is only restored when it’s pointed out that those who perished were celibate monks who were unlikely to have had offspring.

October

The Booker Prize is halted after the chair of judges, Dame Mary Beard, complains that nothing has been written in Latin.

November

Parliament comes to a standstill when thieves steal the House of Commons mace, without which the House cannot pass laws, including the emergency one allowing the Serjeant at Arms to carry a silver-plated shovel instead.

December

The year 2026 really is endless; thieves steal the hands of Big Ben. Happy New Year!

This feature originally appeared in the December 31, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

CHANGE happens. Species come and go. Survival is the exception. It is a safe bet that 99.9% of all plants and animals that ever existed are now extinct. Extinctions arise from many causes: meteorites, volcanic activity, climate change, disease and, for the past 50,000 years, from interactions with Homo sapiens. Biologists call this last one the ‘progress trap’: we get better and better at killing things—mammoths, say—until they disappear altogether and we lose a food source.

However, there is a difference between extinction and extirpation (where they have died out in one area, but survive elsewhere). Animals that have disappeared from the planet include aurochs, tarpans and mammoths and many apex predators, such as cave lions and sabertoothed cats. Three of Britain’s apex-predator casualties—the brown bear (which disappeared in Roman times), lynx (about AD700) and grey wolf (about 1700)— exist elsewhere. Almost unbelievably, Britain is now the largest country in the world without any large carnivores. The badger is now our biggest predator, followed by the fox.

An apex predator is a flesh-eating animal that sits at the top of the food chain and has no natural predators, apart, perhaps, from its rivals. It acts as a top-down control on the prey animals below, affecting their numbers and their behaviours, and, in turn, is reliant on the health of those populations. These days, unthreatened by anything above them, this group is generally thriving.

Why does all this matter? Aren’t we better off not sharing the landscape with animals that would kill us, our pets and our livestock? Perhaps, but more likely not. Ecosystems are circular in Nature, so there will always be consequences if a central part of that system is removed. One example is the eradication of sea otters on the US Pacific coast: it turned out that the otters were the control agent for the destructive local sea urchin that then set about denuding the coast of all remaining life including, inevitably, itself. Conversely, the reintroduction of timber wolves into America’s Yellowstone National Park, in 1995–96, led to the deer reverting to their natural state of ‘nervous browsing’ and allowed for the robust growth of willow along waterways. This, in turn, brought back the beaver.

The principles remain the same in Britain, despite this country being far more populated. One reason for the 62% loss of ground-nesting birds over the past 50 years has been the increased numbers of generalist predators, especially foxes and corvids, whereas a main driver of the 285% rise in the destructive muntjac deer across southern England since 1995 is the lack of an apex predator; short of stalkers and traffic, the muntjac has nothing to fear. Overall deer numbers in the UK are probably about two million now, at least twice what’s sustainable.

What are we to do? Reintroductions are feasible, as witnessed by the white-tailed eagle (in 1975), the red kite (1989) and the beaver (2009). The dilemma regarding apex predators is, practically, a simple one, even if it is otherwise fiendishly complex. We can’t reintroduce what has already become extinct; there are few ecosystem benefits in bringing back the brown bear and it is unthinkable that a government would have the courage to bring back the grey wolf. It comes down to the question of whether we are ready to welcome back the lynx.

The Eurasian lynx is a woodland animal, about 3ft long and weighing three stone, with a preference for abundant understorey plants to enable it to ambush prey, especially roe deer, and hide from humans. Highly secretive and almost impossible to find, they have enormous territories of 100sq km or more. The ecosystem services they offer include reducing problem populations, providing food for scavengers and supporting natural regeneration of forestry. (Remarkably, the reintroduction of the lynx in Sweden has led to long-term growth in ground-nesting bird numbers.) Lynx would never attack a human, but there is no question that they can kill sheep. It is there that the problem lies.

Causes of livestock deaths from wild predation is an inexact science, often depending on who is dispensing it, but research suggests it is small (ranging from zero to 0.03%), with the possible exception of Norway (at 0.7%), not least because lynx territories are so huge.

In Sweden, lynx killed an average of 145 sheep per year in 2012–16, representing about 0.03% of the national flock of 580,000; in Switzerland, the Czech Republic and France these figures were 0.01%, 0.02% and 0.02%, respectively—although their farming patterns are different from Britain. Each dead sheep is someone’s living and the experience is traumatic for the farmer concerned. The issue may be alleviated, by the use of ‘guardian animals’ (llamas and dogs) and other deterrents, such as scare tape and flashing lights. Compensation schemes need to be fair and consistent.

This is an emotionally charged debate, but the long-term choice comes down to what kind of country we want to live in. Business as usual where human exceptionalism will trump the needs of Nature? Or a new settlement where we learn once again to live alongside what has always been here? There are currently no plans for an official reintroduction of lynx, but perhaps it could be a modest contribution to a suite of problems. A formal trial could be a good place to start.

The missing lynx

• Lynx became extinct in the British Isles about 1,300 years ago, probably due to deforestation reducing their habitat and the availability of prey

• Preferring wooded areas, they are nocturnal, secretive and solitary, preying on the smaller deer species, but also rabbits, squirrels, foxes, livestock and pets

• With 50,000 lynx in the world, they are considered a species of least concern by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)

• Some 15 reintroductions have been attempted in Europe; none is yet independently viable. Only one established population is increasing, in the Jura mountains on the French-Swiss border. A viable population is considered to need no fewer than 250 individuals, requiring an area at least the size of the Scottish Highlands

*Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust

The cultural stories attached to the turtle dove are so complicated, so varied, that you could well imagine them framing one of those riddles you find inside a Christmas cracker. ‘Which bird, named after a marine reptile, has a song considered the very essence of summer, but has somehow become a symbol for our Yuletide celebrations?’

We’ll come to those stories shortly, but one turtle dove fact on which most agree is its status as the most beautiful of our five native pigeons. The bird’s breast is a soft vinous pink and the belly linen white, but the most arresting features are the finely barred black-and-white neck patch, the bright rufous-orange mantle and wings liberally spotted with black. Vivid colours are only part of the aesthetic appeal, because turtle doves are also exquisitely shaped — elfin-sized with a sweetly rounded head and long attenuated wings and tail that come to a perfect point at the rear.

Equally unequivocal is the bird’s status as our most calamitously declined species. As recently as the 1970s there were an estimated 125,000 pairs in Britain. Then came a rapid reduction in range and numbers, until the species diminished to only a patchy presence in southern and eastern England, where the final few thousands are still slowly dwindling. The key factors in this collapse are thought to be habitat loss and agricultural intensification — particularly the disappearance of seed-bearing ‘weeds’ in arable areas — but also the wearisome tradition of hunting turtle doves throughout the Mediterranean.

Those practices may be centuries old, yet they now bear down on the bird at a time of crisis. Mercifully in 2021, there was an EU-wide moratorium on the legal shooting of turtle doves, which almost immediately demonstrated the birds’ powers of recuperation — they increased by 400,000 pairs — together with the baleful consequences of the shooting in the first place. Despite the proven value of staying the hunter’s hand, the EU Commission backtracked this year and sanctioned the resumption of legal hunting, albeit with a quota.

Nightingale and spotted flycatcher may closely match the turtle dove’s overall 99% losses in Britain, but not its wider story as a red-listed species threatened with extinction from north-west China to Iberia. This may make it a suitable mascot for our age of environmental anxiety, although that couldn’t be further from the original notions we once assembled around this creature for thousands of years.

Turtle doves are unique in being the only family member to perform a long-distance migration out of Africa. Their sudden and, at one time, inexplicable reappearance was a dramatic indicator to people of seasonal change. ‘Yea, the stork in the heaven know-eth her appointed times, and the turtle and the crane and the swallow,’ announces the narrator in the Book of Jeremiah in the Old Testament. However, the dove’s spring arrival also signified something equally elemental in our affairs: that here was a renewed moment for courtship and for love.

Turtle doves were almost tailormade for these associations because they seem especially bonded as pairs, males and females sharing equally the tasks of incubation and feeding of their young. I can well remember the birds in my childhood — you almost always saw them in pairs or you would hear a male singing to his mate — and it is with the song that we touch on something at the heart of the bird’s special status.

With most celebrated birdsongs — that of nightingale or song thrush, for instance — the sounds arrest our attention. We stop to listen and they captivate us. Yet, with turtle doves, there is little of that conscious process, because it is a soft, almost background purring noise. Singing turtle doves don’t announce their presence, they insinuate themselves into our unconscious minds, laying down a mood within us like a layer of gentle colour. I want to say beige, but that suggests something bland, when it is both soothing and temperate, yet enormously vital. I liken it to the colour of ripening wheat made audible. Those who know the sound name it as the very essence of summer.

The thrill of it plainly moved our ancestors and they incorporated this gentle music into the turtle dove’s status as a symbol of romantic love and marital fidelity. In The Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer wrote of ‘the wedded turtle with her heart true’. As in so much of life, Shakespeare perhaps put it best when he wrote in Troilus and Cressida:

'As true as steel; as plantage to the moon

As sun to day, as turtle to her mate'

Even in the US, where no turtle dove has ever graced the summer fields, the associations live on. A very striking example is in Buddy Holly’s hit That’ll Be The Day, where he turned the bird into a verb (‘give me all your lovin’ and your turtle-dovin’). It is, of course, the species’ own song that gave rise to its rather strange name. There are no links whatsoever with a hard-shelled reptile; ‘turtle’ is an anglicised version of the French word for the species — tourterelle, which is itself a transliterated echo of the sound.

Now, we can finally turn to the third part of our Christmas cracker riddle. How on earth did this quintessence of summer find itself entangled in our solstice celebrations? The answer is the beloved carol, which may well have originated in northern England in the 18th century, but also seems to have strong French connections and which we all know as The Twelve Days of Christmas. Among the bizarre miscellany of items presented by ‘my true love’ to his beloved, there is one that stands out as deeply appropriate. On Boxing Day, he gives her a pair of turtle doves.

From this single reference, those birds have spread their symbolic wings until they too have become a synonym for the season. On the morning of the 25th, I suggest you scan your chimneypiece of cards or the wrapping-paper designs beneath the tree to see if you can spot a turtle dove nestled among all the other customary iconography. Yet, if Christmas is a moment for family affection, then perhaps we should agree: what better motif could you wish for than this beautiful, soft-voiced, endearing dove?

However, if Christmas is also the time for our wishes to come true, then mine would be to restore the real dove to its rightful place in our countryside and for this to unfold Europe-wide.

Disappearing doves

There are now many English projects to give desperately needed help to turtle doves. The best of these focus on creating the right habitats for the birds, which require us to rethink one of the most badly named and misunderstood land forms — ‘scrub’. Turtle doves love ‘edge’ places where tall shrubs mingle with more open ground. The whole supplies both the nesting places the birds prefer and the weedy plants, such as fumitory and bird’s-foot trefoil, that form their seed diet.

One of the most important of these initiatives is in the North York Moors National Park and called the North Yorkshire Turtle Dove Project. It occurs across a 100,000-hectare (247,105-acre) swathe of country between Scarborough and Thirsk and centres on the last population of the species at the very northern edge of its range. Against the odds, the area has somehow managed to hold onto 50–100 turtle doves. Run by volunteers and dependent on small-scale grants, the project focuses on some of the habitat details that turtle doves need. As well as planting the requisite seed-bearing plants, the group’s members have dug about 10 ponds. Turtle doves feed their young a liquified seed mix known as ‘crop-milk’ and for this they need ready access to water. This habitat creation has benefited the turtle doves, but also a spectrum of other beleaguered animals, including woodcock, crossbills, frogs, toads and dragonflies.

Ecologist Richard Baines, spokesman and lead volunteer for the group, says that: ‘We know from historical records that this was always a great place for this species. Our efforts have kept an outlying colony stable in the past decades, but there are very few other successfully breeding turtle doves within 100 miles of us. If we’re going to keep this fabulous creature in these islands, then we need more work like ours, but we need it everywhere, and especially in southern Europe. The turtle dove is a symbol of good partnership and it’s telling us all that we need to play our part.’

This feature originally appeared in the December 3, 2025 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Why do we not know — or care — more about the eel? It seems to have an image problem. Even one of its great admirers lists its attributes as being ‘snoutiness, a thick coat of viscous slime and convulsive writhing’. Fishing journalist Tom Fort in his Book of Eels goes on to note its (false) reputation as a scavenger of decomposed flesh, its unnerving capacity to squirm even after decapitation and the myth that its blood is toxic. This serpentine creature of the night lurks in muddy river bottoms, but has also been witnessed on land, wriggling across damp ground. It would seem the European eel (Anguilla anguilla) has a long way to go to win hearts.

Yet try this: ‘Her belly is a dulled pearl… her patience/Global and furthered with love/By the bending stars as if she/Were earth’s sole initiate.’ That’s Ted Hughes capturing the mystery of a creature that, during its life cycle, floats with the currents, surges with the tides at full moon and makes its way at least 4,000 miles across the ocean to breed. Learning the beautiful names given to each of those phases — willow leaf, glass and silver — may help endear it to us. As may knowing that even in an age when we have plundered deep space, we do not fully understand the life of the lubricious eel.

There has been conjecture about eels for centuries. Aristotle believed they emerged spontaneously from mud. Millennia passed before anyone could connect the eel with its larval stage. Men of science in the late 19th century thought it emerged from deep holes in the sea bed. Eels continued to frustrate investigators, including the young Sigmund Freud, who dissected thousands in an effort to find the male sex organs of this hermaphroditic creature. It was not until the 1920s that a theory about their breeding grounds by Danish biologist Johannes Schmidt held fast.

All European eels emerge as fertilised eggs from the weed-strewn, windless Sargasso Sea in the north Atlantic. From here they catch the current and, after a journey that may take up to three years, they arrive in Europe’s estuaries as glass eels or elvers, less than 5in long. They are found in all of Britain’s estuaries. About 10 million reach the Thames each year, but by far the highest number — about 100 million — are funnelled into the Bristol Channel and many surf the rising tide of the Severn Bore. Their natural pattern is to move up rivers or into marshes and lakes, where they grow into adolescent yellow eels. The process of maturity can take up to 15 years in British waters and it is only when they are about five years old that their sex is decided. ‘We don’t know why, but when there are lots of eels more become male, when fewer, they choose to be female,’ clarifies Andrew Kerr, chairman of the Sustainable Eel Group.

Then, at some unknown signal, the adult eels will divine that the time is right to leave. Now silver, they make their way back downriver and set off for the Sargasso, this time via the Azores in the mid Atlantic, at night diving to depths lower than a nuclear submarine. They don’t eat on the journey, instead absorbing their non-essential organs. By the time they arrive, a large female will be carrying about three million eggs, needing several males to fertilise them. After mating (which has never been witnessed), the eels sink to the bottom of the sea to die.

Our relationship with the eel goes back to the beginning of our own history, when this highly nutritious fish was hunted with a spear or caught in various forms of trap. The Luttrell Psalter of the 1330s has an illustration of a wicker eel trap, a bottle-shaped woven-willow device that was used right up to when Peter Carter, the last eel fisherman in Ely, Cambridgeshire, who came from a 500-year-old family line of eel trappers, finally hung up his trap a decade ago.

The fyke net, a long cylinder with diminishing sizes of internal cones, is the estuarial method still used by Steve Matthews, the only licenced eel fisherman in Poole Harbour, Dorset. Steve, 69, also descends from generations of fishermen and has been catching eels for 52 years. ‘I started with salmon on the river at 14, but I found eels more interesting,’ he tells me as he heads out on his boat to catch the tide, having begun his day at 4am.

Eels can only be hand fished in this country. Matthews cannot pass on his licence and does not know anyone who would take up his way of life. He sells his catch to Bradley’s in Middlesex, one of the largest jellied-eel distributors, where owner Frank Bradley, 82, is keen to emphasise their nutritional value: ‘Science says there is more goodness in an eel than salmon,’ he points out, after his lunch of jellied eels eaten in the traditional way, on dry bread with vinegar.

Eels were once both so abundant and prized that they were a form of currency. The priests of the eponymous Ely bartered them for stone to build their cathedral, but also accepted them as rent, as did many monasteries, eels being a permissible Lenten meal. The Domesday Book of 1086 lists many instances of ‘eel-rents’: the villagers of Harmston in Lincolnshire owed their overlord Hugh of Chester 75,000 eels a year.

Inevitably, this profusion is now a faded folk memory. The European eel is a red-listed (critically endangered) species and its numbers are thought to have dropped by as much as 90% in the past five decades. Reasons for its decline are, as is much about eels, both complex and not fully understood, with theories ranging from parasites and pollution to changing ocean currents. Humans have not made life easy for them by draining marshes and putting up barriers, such as weirs and hydroelectric dams. The Environment Agency has regulatory powers for securing eel passes — channels to help them through such obstacles — and has been trialling new designs. Last year, it counted more than 50,000 eels using a pass between the River Ehen and Ennerdale Water in Cumbria.

Eels are slippery customers to monitor, with the best way being to record the numbers of glass eels arriving. It is at this stage that they have been in most danger of being illegally caught in large numbers and sent to Asia, where they are a prized delicacy. In a lucrative black market, tied up with organised crime, one 66lb suitcase can smuggle up to €100,000 (about £87,000) worth of glass eels. Baby eels are one of the world’s most trafficked creatures, but, since EU eel regulations dating from 2007, enforcement, coupled with severe sentencing, has had an effect. The Sustainable Eel Group, founded by Kerr in 2010, is committed to tackling trafficking, unblocking the passage of eels and to programmes to move elvers upstream. Initiatives for the latter are more common in Europe than here. ‘The UK Government has not invested in restocking,’ laments Kerr. ‘One pity is we have lost our relationship with the eel in this country.’

‘Elver Dave’ Smith has been catching glass eels on the Severn for 50 years, going out at night between February and April. He believes numbers have improved hugely in the past six or so years. Fried elvers were once a local staple food and elvering a common way of supplementing incomes. In time, the market turned to exports for restocking European lakes, but a combination of Brexit and a final ban this year on supply to Russia has closed off outlets. He will apply for his licence to go out next year —‘it’s in my blood’ — and would happily fish to restock UK waters. Smith is featured in The Elvermen, an atmospheric short film directed by Isla Badenoch, who wanted to capture a vanishing world and the deeply mysterious eel/human relationship.

An eel evangelist taking practical action is Vanessa Becker-Hughes. Her Somerset Eel Recovery Project has taken more than 60 tanks of baby eels to local schools to introduce children to their magic and weaves traditional straw ropes for eel passes. Fired up with memories of fishing for eels with her grandfather and catching 200 a night to store in the bath before they were sold around the village, Becker-Hughes has got some local fisherman on side. Everything to do with the eel is complicated, but fascinating, she says: ‘They are an example of how we have lost our way. The eel should be as powerful a conservation symbol as bees or butterflies.’

This feature originally appeared in the November 19, 2025 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The Country Life quiz runs daily every afternoon, with new editions published at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up with all our previous quizzes here.

The Country Life quiz runs daily every afternoon, with new editions published at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up with all our previous quizzes here.

We have all seen it. You are driving over the moor in dead winter, the snow descending unceasing; but, by the wayside, there is an Exmoor pony, or a Welsh, grazing unconcernedly. Or, you open the bedroom curtains on a January morning, the garden mummified in mortal white frost, and a tiny, fragile wren is, somehow, hopping perkily about the acacias.

How do they survive the depths of winter, the animals and the birds? Winter in Britain is variable, yes, often mild and wet, but then it soars in all its cold majesty. In English, the seasons are not capitalised, but Winter must be. Winter, with the majuscule initial, Winter with its ice and its snow. Winter when the pond freezes over with a pale ice lid, the snow builds unremittingly to the hedge top and the earth of the wheat field is cast in iron, unyielding to the beak of the rook. We humans flip up the car heating, turn around the dial of the house thermostat, shove an extra dog on the bed. Yet, the natural things outside, really, how do they survive?

They have their stratagems, the wild things. Most obviously, flee! Hence the pre-hibernal migration of our avian summer visitors, the swallow, the warbler, the cuckoo and all, southing to warmer climes, the avian Club Med, even beyond. Our resident birds are also cognisant of the evasion manoeuvre, the flight before the white storm, with the curlew gliding down on its long wings from high moor to low coast, a continental difference in climate — the seashore rarely freezes.

Smaller birds, the passerines, the finches and the larks, may join travelling bands to stay in front of the talons of the wind, constantly alighting, pecking for food. Winter, after all, has two killing claws: the cold and the lack of food, both of them requiring dressing in initial capitals like Winter itself. These are Hypothermia and its handmaiden Famine.

If you can’t run, you can hide. Burrow, shelter. The badger (Meles meles) goes down, deep down, some 12ft under the earth into its sett, where the air temperature will be within the range of 6˚C to 19˚C, whatever Winter is doing above ground. As the Inuit know, snow itself is a surprisingly excellent insulator and the ptarmigan grouse (Lagopus) is a possessor of the same secret. The bird duly scratches itself a snow cave, a little igloo, in which to rest safe. Queen wasps chew their way into the hollow stem of hogweed, where they may share Winter quarters with other insects, such as earwigs. Winter doth strange bedfellows make.

Reptiles and amphibians will bury themselves under stones, under leaf litter, under a log pile, where they will enter a period of low metabolic function, reducing body temperature and heart rate to conserve energy. They will be intermittently active. The scientists term this half-asleep state ‘brumation’. Some adult male common frogs (Rana temporaria) will spend Winter down in the detritus in the bottom of the pond — a risky strategy, as smaller ponds can freeze over, causing an oxygen shortage and the frog perishes, suffocating unnoticed under the ice sheet.

Hibernation, simply sleeping the Winter away to avoid the hard, hungry times is the option of only three British mammals: the bat family, the hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus) and the hazel dormouse (Muscardinus avellanarius). Hibernate is derived from Latin hibernationem, ‘the action of passing the winter’, but dry words fail to convey the mystery of the suspended animation by which the tiny dormouse can sleep soundly for more than half a year by reducing its metabolism by 90% or the hedgehog drop its heartbeat from 190 per minute to 20 during its long lethargy. Bats chill out so much during hibernation that they may be kept in a fridge, although a more usual winter roost is the church steeple, cottage attic or hollow tree. During hibernation, they take only five breaths per minute.

The prerequisite for hibernation is gorging beforehand, turning the body into a larder, so it can live off the fat. Hedgehogs pig out in autumn, fattening up by half a pound. The dormouse doubles down on food, doubling its weight. As the dormouse is, the British mammals that hibernate to avoid the hard, hungry times are insect-eaters, or part-insect eaters; in Winter, the huzz and buzz of the insects is all but gone, replaced by the sound of silence.

Fattening up on autumn’s fruits and food to survive compassionless Winter is a familiar for many, not only the true hibernators. Badgers do it for their ‘torpors’, their short semi-hibernal snoozes. The grey seal puts on fat as insulation to see the grim, grey season at sea through, yet remains as flippery active as ever. The blubber of the grey seal in Winter can be more than 4in thick. Moles and shrews, meanwhile, get through the lean times by getting lean. They shrink themselves, with Moley reducing body size by up to 11%. Sorex araneus, the common shrew, can decrease its skull by 20%. The diminutive creature’s organs are likewise contracted. The less the body, the less the energy required.

Insulation is the key trick of numerous stick-it-outs. The fox grows denser fur to trap air against its skin. Getting hairy is also the method of the ponies of the high country, such as the aforementioned Exmoor and Welsh. (The old breeds of pony have redoubtable innards, too, able to thrive on iron rations, such as bramble, much as deer do.) ‘Rugging up’ is not restricted to the wild and the feral. Utterly domestic lap dogs do it, leaving you with much hoovering when they shed this surplus fur in spring. The primitive breeds of sheep, such as Herd-wicks and Hebrideans, possess two coats, a protective, coarse outer jacket and a cosy inner. The blizzards of Winter roll off their backs, as the fine underwool keeps them snug. There are stories of Herdwicks being buried in snowdrifts for a fortnight yet surviving.

All our birds will fluff up their feathers to trap a layer of insulating air; a birdy duvet coat. The downy feathers of the eider duck (Somateria mollissima), an especially efficacious insulation, has been used for more than 1,000 years for bedding, hence ‘eiderdown’ as synonym for quilt. In cold weather, birds can often be seen tucking their heads and bills into the warmer layer of air under their back feathers. Breathing in this warmer air maintains their body temperature more efficiently. Also, birds of feather huddling together helps keep them warm in inclemency. Usually, wrens are highly territorial birds, but will roost communally should the mercury of the thermometer drop dangerously. The overnight record for the most wrens roosting together is 61, found in a single nestbox in Norfolk in 1969. Some wildfowl, meanwhile, have a trick up their legs, a counter-current heat-exchange system whereby warm arterial blood and cold venous blood pass each other closely in legs and feet. The result is that the birds’ feet and the external cold are near equivalent in temperature. Paradoxically, this reduces the risk of frostbite. It is why the tootsies of the mallards and pintails resting on the frozen surface of the lake do not fall off.

If Winter brings death, death itself is a survival strategy. The insects are masters of this, with the colonies of the social wasps, hornets included, dying off in autumn as food supplies diminish. The only survivors are the queens. All for one and all for one is their motto. Yet, the species lives on in the shape of the one and only queen. In contrast to this ultra-Darwinism, hive bees stay active, sustained by calorific honey. Clustering around the queen bee, they maintain her ambient temperature at about 35˚C, the workers constantly rotating to share the duty and give all a chance against the creeping-in cold.

Insects have existed for 480 million years, seen the Ice Ages come and go. They know the fantastic ways to endure Winter. There is metamorphosis, with the fleshy butterfly caterpillar making a hard-shelled chrysalis in which to mature safely, and there is producing glycerol to prevent water in the body turning to ice crystals. Brimstone, small tortoiseshell and peacock butterflies all wing it through winter as adults on Nature’s own antifreeze. The Atlantic wolffish (Anarhichas lupus) similarly employs ‘antifreeze glycoproteins’ to allow it to swim in frigid depths of the North Atlantic where few other fishy creatures dare go.

Spare a thought for the common black slug (Arion ater) when you look out on the garden this winter to see white death has come. The mollusc boasts no magical fluid, no super-insulation and no great reserve of fat. Its preference in Winter is for dark shelter, a crack in the ground, a crevice under rock. Sometimes, however, when Winter arrives, Arion ater is caught out in the open. Yet it will survive being literally half-frozen to death at -1˚C for two days, then come back to life. The slug slugs it out with Winter.

This feature originally appeared in the November 12, 2025 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

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When Shakespeare rhapsodised about these isles as ‘a blessed plot’, he could have had our happy lack of dangerous animals in mind. We have only one poisonous snake, the adder (Vipera berus) — Northern Ireland is free even of this serpent — and the surrounding silver sea is devoid of the sort of sharks that bite you in two. Having found bears unbearable, we removed them from the scene. The packs of wolves were similarly sent packing.

Yes, savage and life-threatening animals are luckily found ‘abroad’… or perhaps not. Out there in the non-wilds of Britain exist potentially lethal creatures. Some, such as domestic dogs, could be said to be hiding in plain view; in 2023–24, there were 16 deaths in England and Wales due to canine attacks (the wolf’s revenge, perhaps).

Other could-be killers lurk, hidden or camouflaged. The lesser weever fish (Echiichthys vipera), which has needle-sharp, venomous spines, secretes itself in the shallow, sandy beach waters so pleasant to paddle about in; the yellow-tailed scorpion (Tetratrichobothrius flavicaudis) lives in the dark cracks of walls of buildings. A scorpion? In Britain? Yes: a poisonous scorpion. The stingy-appendaged thing is an invasive species, an accidental import. One can introduce trouble into Eden. Then there are the mislabelled. Horseflies (Tabanidae) do not restrict themselves to biting equids and, although they rarely cause human death directly, they do spread diseases such as rabbit fever. Despite the ‘rabbit’ in the name of the disease, and the ‘horse’ in the nomenclature of the insect vector, tularemia is a life-threatening illness for humans.

The British countryside, pace Shakespeare, is overwhelmingly a safe space. Enjoy it, but respect Nature and give some species a wide berth — such as this dangerous dozen.

Sting in the tail

A confirmed resident in England and Wales, the Asian hornet’s (Vespa velutina) greatest threat is to the honeybee population — it kills up to 50 honeybees a day to feed its nest’s carnivorous young. The insect’s stinger is a whopping ¼in long, a positive insectoid syringe, and for anyone allergic to venom from the Vespidae family (which includes wasps and bees) an attack could be fatal. They also happen to be notoriously bad tempered, waspish even, when interrupted doing their housework. There have been numerous fatalities across the Channel from Asian hornet stings, too — including that of a Normandy gardener, Laurent Duval, last year.

A freak from the deep

Named, aptly, after a type of old warship, the Portuguese man o’war (Physalia physalis) is a convincingly menacing marine creature, really quite the Jules Verne. The animal’s poisonous tentacles can reach 100ft in length and oft the beast comes not singly, but in armadas 1,000 strong. The sting causes rashes, fever and, rarely, death. Although resembling a jellyfish, the animal is in fact a siphonophore: a colony of specialised clones with various forms and functions, from feeding to reproduction, all working together as one. The oddity of the thing makes it that tad more unnerving. The global warming of our surrounding sea is making Blighty an increasingly attractive destination for Physalia physalis.

The (potential) widow-maker

False widow spiders (Steatoda grossa) may not be as life threatening as true black widow spiders, but their fangs can still give a nasty — and venomous — nip. A non-native species, which arrived in fruit crates from the Canary Islands in the 1880s, the eight-legged creepy-crawly has a distinctive bulbous abdomen that sometimes possesses a skull-like pattern, appositely. Although no lethal bites have been recorded in the UK, in 2012 a woman nearly lost her hand after too close an encounter with the arachnid.

A pain in the foot

Sea urchins (Echinus) live in the coastal shallows, where they feast on whatever floats towards them. Related to sea cucumbers and starfish, their intriguing remains, globes of delicate shell, are often washed up and sold in souvenir shops. When alive, however, their long spines are rather effective at puncturing human feet. Should such an eventuality occur, it is worth hopping along to A&E. The sting is, in rare cases, deadly — but it is always painful and some pain-killing may be required.

Hiss off, or else

It would be an exaggeration to say that the adder’s (Vipera berus) hiss is worse than its bite, but our only venomous snake is a shy, retiring thing and only bares its fangs when disturbed — such as you mistakenly treading on it. About 50 to 100 people are bitten annually. Since records began in 1876, there have been only 14 reported deaths from adder bites in the UK and no adder-related demises since 1975. Biting incidents occur chiefly in early spring, when the snake wakes from its winter torpor and is, to be frank, a bit slow on the uptake, or in summer, when it likes to snoozily sunbathe. We must give credit where it is due, however, as no other reptile has brought a British kingdom to ruins. Warned in a dream to avoid confrontation with usurper Mordred’s army, King Arthur tried negotiation. During the talks, according to the Stanzaic Morte Arthur of about 1350: ‘An adder glode forth upon the ground;/He stang a knight, that men might sen/That he was seke and full unsound./Out he brayed with sworde bright;/To kill the adder had he thought…’

Arthur’s party, seeing a sword flash in sunshine, mistakenly believed themselves attacked. Thus ended the life of King Arthur and 100,000 knights in a legendary bloodbath, due to the bite of a single adder and the confusion its slaying caused. Hedgehogs, incidentally, have a degree of natural resistance to snake venom, which handily allows them to hunt adders — making Mrs Tiggy-Winkle a bit of a femme fatale herself.

Killer cows

For a decade or more, Bos taurus has been in the dock because of its methane ‘emissions’ (or, in Anglo-Saxon, its farts), which warm the atmosphere, inducing climate change. As every country person knows, charging cows with responsibility for the End Times was always daft and science is increasingly letting Ermintrude off the gallows. It’s the how, not the cow. Cattle on old-fashioned outdoor grazing are doing more climate good than harm.

Now the rub. Cows in fields really can be B-movie horror stuff. According to the Health and Safety Executive, between 2017 and 2022 cattle killed 32 people in England alone. An average Holstein Friesian, an entirely average cow, weighs 1,700lb, so when it charges and tramples, it becomes a bovine armoured car. Cows are extremely protective of their herd. Accordingly, cows will charge and trample any person perceived as a threat: notably farmers, veterinary workers and members of the public walking through their pasture. Remember this: Daisy, despite her apparent docility, really, really does not like dogs. You may think that Fido is a darling pooch, as he accompanies you on your wander through a cowfield, but the cows see ‘wolf’, and activate their pre-domesticated state of auroch, entering herd-protective mode. Anyone taking a dog into the midst of cows is asking for an express ticket from the gene pool. A cow’s top speed is an udderly fantastic 25mph. That’s faster than Usain Bolt. Are you?

Oh, deer

When speaking of dangerous animals, Bambi’s mummy and daddy probably do not come leaping to mind. After all, she is a doe-eyed beauty; he is a majestic mountain-top Landseer figure in antlered headgear. They are also dense flesh and bone. Thus, by simple physics they make a considerable obstacle when encountered by a travelling car on a prosaic road. A fallow deer (Dama dama) buck weighs in at 176lb. Although cows kill more people one-on-one, some 200 deer and car collisions occur each day, leading to 20 annual deaths. Alas, none of Britain’s six deer species seemingly attended The Tufty Club. Peak danger periods are May, when young males leave the herd, and the autumn rutting season, when deer are on the move and, frankly, their minds are on things removed from how to traverse tarmac and avoid a moving mass of metal. Top Country Life tip: deer are social animals, so the first deer crossing the road in the car headlights is likely to be followed by more.

A critter to get ticked off about

Ticks (Ixodida) are tiny parasitic arachnids that, Dracula-style, attach to warm-blooded animals and suck out haemoglobin until full. The list of the tick’s victims includes us humans. Ticks are deadly, as they spread tick-borne encephalitis and Lyme disease. The latter can cause, inter alia, cardiac attack and partial paralysis (about 1,000–2,000 people are diagnosed with Lyme disease each year in the UK). Ticks can also disseminate other diseases, including Q fever. A tick’s modus operandi is to lurk on long grass or low vegetation, meaning knee-height for humans. Conclusion: in affected areas, put the trews on when walking.

The tail end

Common stingrays (Dasyatis pastinaca), which are ubiquitous around our coastlines and especially in England, can reach 5ft across and weigh 80lb. Which, should one happen to meet the fishy thing when swimming in the briny, may frighten a person to death. Less fancifully, the stingray is called such for the good reason that it has a barbed and venomous tail that, when whipped around defensively, can pierce human skin. The Australian celebrity conservationist Steve Irwin was fatally pierced in the chest by a stingray in 2006.

A plague on all our houses

Historically, the real contender for most dangerous organism ever extant in these isles is Yersinia pestis. That is: the cause of the Black Death. Between 1348 and 1350, the plague killed an estimated one-third to half of Britain’s population, roughly 2–3 million people. There were subsequent pandemics caused by the bacterium, transmitted principally via fleas and rats, most notably the Great Plague of 1665–66. Thankfully, plague is currently absent from Britain, although active abroad, and sometimes in unsuspected locations. In July of this year, there was a plague death in Arizona, US. Advanced civilisation is not always the bastion one hopes — a small, if harsh, lesson from Nature.

Hair-raising stuff

Few caterpillars in Britain pose a problem to humans, but the oak processionary moth caterpillar (Thaumetopoea processionea) is the exception to the rule. When touched, the caterpillar’s toxic hairs may cause vomiting, rashes, breathing difficulties and other allergic reactions. The larvae can release the hairs intentionally as a defence mechanism. The oak processionary is a non-native pest, accidentally introduced from southern Europe in 2005. As the creature’s moniker indicates, it lives in oaks and moves about in creepy, nose-to-tail processions.

Tiddles, the furr-ocious mass murderer of urbia

Let’s not be human-centric in evaluating Britain’s most dangerous creatures. If one were a bird or small mammal, you’d probably cite the domestic cat as the national killer sans pareil. Research suggests that Felis domesticus, of which there are at least 9.5 million specimens in the country, kills up to 270 million wild animals annually, a quarter of them our beloved tweety feathery things — which is cat-a-strophic.

This feature originally appeared in the November 5 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

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What am I? You will need to spell the name perfectly to score a point.

The name was Bond, James Bond. Bond was an American ornithologist whose name was borrowed by Ian Fleming, a twitcher himself, for his spy hero 007. The original Bond possesses another fame, being author of Birds of the West Indies. First published in 1936, this was, and is, the definitive guide to birds of the Caribbean. Yet even Bond’s knowledge and the artistry of the illustrators, struggles to pin to the page the beauty and variety of the birds that inhabit the tropical waters, islands and continental land masses framing the Caribbean Sea.

The Caribbean is a birder’s paradise, not merely for its birdy bounty, but for the singularity of its avifauna. Of the 700 or so species in the Caribbean, 185 are endemic and found nowhere else in the world. Of these endemic birds, 110 Caribbean birds are specific to one island and one island only. Ridgway’s hawk (Buteo ridgwayi) can only be found in Hispaniola and the Guadeloupe woodpecker (Melanerpes herminieri) is absolutely Guadeloupian. A place of azure seas and emerald rainforest, the Caribbean seemingly naturally produces birds of colourful exoticism, such as the red-legged honeycreeper (Cyanerpes cyaneus), whose brilliant pins are even outdone by its electric-blue plumage.

Yet the Caribbean has its subtleties, too. The grey Grenada dove (Leptotila wellsi) is almost weepingly fragile, the call of the St Vincent wren (Troglodytes musicus) is a lilting lyricality. One of the most famous songs of the Caribbean is Yellow Bird, about a yellow warbler (Setophaga petechia) in a banana tree. The bird is an emblem of love. Who could not love the birds of the Caribbean?

Magnificent frigatebird (Fregata magnificens)

See a magnificent frigatebird overhead and you can be forgiven for thinking you have wandered into Jurassic Park. With its dark angularities and deeply forked tail, it’s a dead ringer for a pterodactyl. The seabird also has prehistoric eating etiquette, piratically stealing food from other birds in midair — its old moniker of ‘man-o-war bird’ refers to this harassing habit. Full marks for the youthful pickpocketing practice: juvenile frigatebirds place sticks in their beaks and chase each other. When one drops a stick, its play pal dives below to retrieve it.

The male of the species has a bright red pouch under the throat, which it inflates like a balloon to attract a mate. Whether this puffed-up self-importance is genuinely alluring may be a moot point. The female Fregata magnificens looks nothing like the male, having a white breast and belly, as if embarrassed to be related, although neither sex will win the ‘Early Bird Prize’ as frigatebirds don’t generally take to the air until afternoon, when the thermals are a-rising.

West Indian whistling-duck (Dendrocygna arborea)

Why is it called a whistling duck? Because it whistles. Obviously. Rather than a ducky quack, Dendrocygna arborea emits a shrill haunting s-h-i-r-i-r-i-a, hence its onomatopoeic Spanish name, suirirí. Despite being almost goose-sized, the duck can be hard to spot: it’s brown, hides by day and feeds at night. The ‘woodinesses’ of its scientific name point to its other secretive manners, which are to perch and nest in trees, especially within inaccessible swamps and mangroves. It is also unfortunately rare, although there is hope of population stabilisation due to conservation efforts.

Imperial Amazon (Amazona imperialis)

Who’s a pretty boy (and girl) then? The Imperial Amazon is a striking purple and green parrot and a proper national treasure, being Dominica’s national bird, portrayed on flag and coat of arms. Restricted in the wild to the wet montane rainforest of Morne Diablotin, the Imperial, known locally as the sisserou, may grow very long in the beak, reaching 70-plus years in captivity, often along-side its lifelong partner.

The largest parrot in the Amazon genus, the Imperial’s wingspan is a shadow-casting 76cm. Tragically, the bird’s numbers are in inverse proportion to its physical size. There may be fewer than 60 surviving adults. Tree-felling hurricanes are a major threat to its existence. A single hurricane, Maria in 2017, left only 12 sisserou alive.

Brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis)

Absolutely beige and widespread throughout the region, the brown pelican is avian wallpaper. Well, until its ginormous form (wingspan 2.2m) cranks up into the air, gains altitude, reaches 18m and then plunges headfirst into the sea in search of fishy things. The charitable might call the action a ‘dive’, the realist would say it was the birdy form of a belly flop. Elegant it ain’t. However, a clever adaptation protects the brown pelican from serious impact injury: it has airbags on its breast. Despite the body-banging, brown pelicans are not bird-brained: they learn that entering the water at steep angles of 60–90 degrees reduces aiming errors caused by the distortion of light refracting through water.

Even their gular pouch, located under the beak, plays a role. As a celebrated limerick jests, ‘a remarkable bird is a pelican/Its beak can hold more than its belly can…’ True enough. The pouch, as the bird enters the water, expands immediately to be both fishing net and parachute, the latter slowing the bird down. That pouch can hold two gallons of water/fish.

Unsurprisingly, pelicans have changed little over 30 million years. After all, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Bananaquit (Coereba flaveola)

This is a sweet little bird, or perhaps a little bird keen on sweets. The hyperactive songbird drinks nectar by piercing flower bases with its sharp, decurved bill. Emboldened individuals — which seem to be the majority of the species — will purloin sugar from human tables.

Local names are as colourful as the warbler-sized bird: its Dutch name is suikerdiefje or ‘sugar thief’. One of the veritably characteristic birds of the Caribbean, the bananaquit is oddly and largely absent from the largest island, Cuba.

Bee hummingbird (Mellisuga helenae)

Wish to see the world’s tiniest bird? Then you’ll need to jump on a jet plane to Cuba. The bee hummingbird, which is found only on said Caribbean island, is an exquisite minikin, even among the perfect jewelled miniatures that are hummingbirds.

Placed against a ruler it measures only 5cm. Put on scales, it registers a barely perceptible 2g. Bee hummingbirds are frequently mistaken for, wait for it… bees. The female’s eggs are the size of a hazelnut.

A supremely alive little thing, all vital force and electricity. In quotidian flight, the tiny fairy wings beat 80 times a second. During courtship flight, the wings whirr at 200 times a second — which would be a sight to see, if only human eyes were capable of registering it.

Trinidad piping guan (Aburria pipile)

Let’s talk turkey, or at least the turkey-looking Trinidad piping guan, whose eponymous whistling call echoing around the lush rainforest is always a reminder that Caribbean birds are to be heard and not simply seen. For communication, this rare arboreal member of the family Cracidae (which includes the chachalaca, guan and curassow) also ‘drums’, clapping its wings as it glides between trees.

Courtship rituals are extravagant, with the male crest-raising, vocalising and shaking its tail feathers. The pattern of white markings on the wings is unique to each individual bird. Historically, hunting contributed to the precipitous decline of the pawi, as the bird is known locally, as the 60cm target was a sitting turkey. Hopefully, pawi-focused ecotourism tours now make the bird more valuable alive than dead.

The Northern crested caracara (Caracara plancus)

This bird looks like a vulture, but it’s actually a falcon. A falcon, that is, which prefers to scavenge (very vulturely) on foot and will eat fruit. The bird’s confusing ways are matched by its mismatched appearance: the vulture face, the leggy legs made for walking and the air of nobility when in the air despite its terra firma opportunistic habits (some cultures ascribe the caracara the title ‘eagle’).

The caracara is the only falcon known to collect its own nesting materials, the rest of the zoological order sequestering existing premises. ‘Caracara’ probably derives from the rattling noise when agitated.

The species breeds in the Dutch Caribbean, with populations in Curaçao rebounding over the past 30 years after almost disappearing. Good. Nature needs its Caribbean eccentricities.

Scaly-naped pigeon (Patagioenas squamosa)

By preference, this bird is a denizen of the rainforest, where it performs an invaluable role in the ecosystem by dispersal of fruit and tree seeds.

In many islands, it is notably wary, possibly an evolution due to hunting pressures and if glimpsed it will be in the tree top peering down suspiciously. The pigeon’s calls, together with a very dovey coo-coo, even seem to include the line ‘who’re you?’ A successful approach allows a slow reveal of its beauty, the bird transforming from slate grey into iridescent mauve; the eponymous scaly nape is a particular mirage, due to the arrangement of the feathers rather than presence of flesh (‘squamosa’, by the way, means scaly). There are islands, however, where the pigeon deigns to mix with humans, even in the urban environment. The Grenadines are among them.

The Jamaican Tody (Todus todus)

Endemic to Jamaica, this cute, if hallucinogenic, puffball sails under the apposite nickname of ‘rasta bird’. Its brilliant red, green and yellow mirror-match the Rastafarian flag. Another local cognomen, ‘Jesus bird’, derives from the legend that during Christ’s crucifixion a drop of blood fell onto the bird as it gazed up at the cross.

Curiously, for a perching bird, it digs a burrow to nest in and may generously share its underground accommodation with lizards and mice. Its toiletry is also noteworthy, the bird suddenly midair diving into water for a quick bath.

Generally, it is a quiet bird, except in the breeding season when it positively beeps and rattles. A dedicated insectivore — regard the thin tweezer bill — it is an esteemed pest-control operative in the coffee farms of the Blue Mountains.

This feature originally appeared in the October 22, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The Country Life quiz runs daily every afternoon, with new editions published at 4pm.

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What do Genghis Khan, scientists at the National Accelerator Laboratory, Illinois, US, and a small boy on the South Downs have in common? Lithe, inquisitive, quicksilver ferrets. That boy, James McConville, grew up to found the West Sussex Warreners, a thriving group of ferreters: ‘It’s three animals working together as a team, ferret, dog, human, to do a job. It’s magical.’

Ferrets have done that job for thousands of years, for the ruler of the Mongolian hordes on the warren-riddled steppes, in Egyptian ships and on the dusty hills of the Peloponnese (Greek references date to 450BC). Pliny the Elder writes of ferreting and the Romans may have brought the animals to British soil with their rabbits. Ferrets and ferreting were mentioned in court rolls in 1223 and as part of the Royal Household in 1281. Ladies are depicted ferreting in the Queen Mary Psalter of about 1340 and the 15th-century Sherborne Missal, a manuscript scribed by the monk John Whas and illuminated by one John Siferwas, has an exquisite image of longdogs chasing a hare, with mustelids ready to pounce. Such scenes were aristocratic: in 1390, a law decreed that ferrets could only be kept by those earning more than 40s a year, a substantial sum intended to put them beyond the reach of poachers. Elizabeth I herself is believed to have had ferrets; the ‘Ermine Portrait’ may show her with a ‘fitch’, an old word for the animal, rather than a stoat in ermine.

The exact origins of Mustela putorius furo cannot be pinpointed. Linnaeus gave credence to Ancient Greek historian Strabo and cited Africa, as does a Russian engraving of 1909 that names them Afrikanski horek, but they are accepted as domesticated polecats, Mustela putorius. The furo of the name comes from the Latin for thief, furonem, but the sneaky reputation, evoked in The Wind in the Willows, does these curious, diligent animals a disservice. The collective noun, a busyness, is far more apt. As James McKay, founder of the National Ferret School, says: ‘You’re ferreting things out right now, aren’t you?’

For all their uses, ferrets are fun — indeed, with falcons and fishing nets, they were banned in the 1443 Statutes of King’s College, Cambridge, for being too much of a distraction for scholars. They certainly brought amusement to Kirtlington Park in Oxfordshire, where Fidget, Panda and Pebble made Lucy Holland’s daughter Matilda laugh.

‘When she had friends over, they all shot straight upstairs to the bedroom,’ remembers Holland. ‘The bedroom was over the kitchen and I would hear screams: “He’s coming up the curtains!” ’ The ferrets were known to join the girls in the bath and would go under the rug as ‘carpet snakes’. ‘They were like clockwork toys, you’d wind them up and set them off as if they were on speed, then they’d sleep.’

Sculptor and ferret lover Nicola Hicks concurs: ‘They’re the cleverest, sweetest, most extraordinarily humorous animals you’ll ever meet. We had a rundown house in south London and they’d get under the floorboards. You’d be watching television and one would pop up and literally laugh at you.’ In the bath, ‘I’d put my hand under their belly and they’d float like a flying squirrel’.

Holland went ferreting with a local farmer as a child, but only tried it with her pets once: ‘We set up a bank by the stables with nets, but then I realised I only had a hammer and spade to kill the rabbits. Thankfully, all the rabbits were babies and escaped, or it might have been a bit traumatic for little blonde girls.’ Going out with the right equipment — a lurcher — meant Evie McCabe, now 25, was hooked from the age of three, selling rabbits she caught with her father in Chipping Norton market in Oxfordshire. She now has four jills, Dizzy, Rascal, Radish and Fig, and, until recently, a hoblet called Clyde. ‘They are funny little characters, super inquisitive, they wander around and cause havoc,’ she reveals. ‘They’ll use a mousetrap as a seesaw and they love stealing my cup of tea.’

Her ferrets live in a ferret court: ‘For my 21st birthday, my dad made me one, with tunnels, swings, hammocks, everything.’ Secure accommodation is vital: ‘They can squash their ribcage down to go through the tiniest hole,’ McCabe explains. Hicks concurs: hers would get out and into the neighbour’s house, then a building site. ‘They’d run along the top of walls and these large builders would be squealing thinking they were huge rats.’

Another who can attest to the slippery nature of ferrets is Florence Allen, Country Life's Social Media Editor. 'My cousin had two ferrets and she went through a phase of taking them everywhere with her,' she recalls. 'She decided to bring them down to London from Alnwick, Northumberland, but they got loose in the British Museum and she got a pretty stern slap on the wrist. It took the better part of the day to find them. She was told to never come back.'

Ferreting draws upon the ferret’s natural inclination to go down a hole, but not only after rabbits. At the Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, US, ferrets would run through the planes to wire them in the Second World War and, when Lt-Col Randy Blaisdell moved to US Space Command, he took his ferret Misty with him to do a similar job. At the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, when experiments failed due to magnetic debris in the four-mile vacuum tube, Yorkshire engineer Robert Sheldon proposed using a ferret to pull a duster through and Felicia duly set to work with great success. No challenge is too much for them, as Hicks notes: ‘The place a ferret can’t get to is the one it’s obsessed with and watching them work out how to get there is magical.’

McKay has also drawn upon ferrets’ versatility, vital now the rabbit population has fallen dramatically in parts of the UK, probably due to the RHDV2 virus. He runs Acting Animals and his ferrets appeared in 2023’s Firebrand, with Jude Law as Henry VIII. ‘They need work, physically and mentally,’ he notes. ‘They want to find out what’s at the other end of a tunnel and we use that desire.’ McKay and his ferrets have found the location of a drain blockage and laid broadband cables, akin to the job performed by ferrets Beckham, Posh and Baby under the stage for the Millennium Concert in Greenwich Park, London.

McKay’s experience with a lack of rabbits in Derbyshire is echoed by McCabe in Oxfordshire and, in West Sussex, McConville is waiting to see if a relocation he did, from a farm with many rabbits to a farm with none, has worked: ‘We would always get double figures in the past, now we’re lucky to get five or six.’ He took his ferrets to school at Seaford College, running a Grand National Ferret Race, and to university in Bournemouth. ‘One escaped from his cage and was found in Boots on the high street.’
With the West Sussex Warreners, he does shows in summer and takes people ferreting in winter. ‘I want to get children involved and teach them the traditional methods of hunting,’ McConville says. He loves the winter days: ‘Going out with frost on the ground, it’s all quiet, then you hear the thump, thump of a rabbit underground. You put the ferret in and the rabbit bolts to the lurcher. There’s no gun, no disturbance, it’s very exciting.’

McKay feels the same: ‘You see wildlife so close. I know I will be quiet, not make a mess, not harm anything except the rabbit and, an hour later, all will be back to normal.’ Among many wildlife sightings, he remembers one that was unexpected: ‘The net literally went up in the air. I thought rabbits had learnt to fly, but it was a little owl. It bit me as I freed it!’

Ferrets, contrary to popular opinion, seldom bite if well handled. McKay’s first encounter was as a little boy with a gamekeeper. ‘Dad was talking to him and I put my hand into the box of ferrets and took one out. Dad was furious! The keeper, a man of few words, opened the ferret’s mouth and put my finger in. Dad was apoplectic, but the keeper said “a good ferret never bites”.’ A ferret is not used to kill rabbits, but to bolt them to a lurcher or hawk, although if hungry they may kill underground and tuck in, at which point a tracking collar can help find where to dig.

In one ancient game, biting is understandable. Ferret legging involves securing the bottom of a competitor’s trousers and placing the ferret inside, the winner being the one who lasts longest before, presumably, ripping their trousers off and running away screaming. The record, set in 1981 by Yorkshire miner Reg Mellor, is five hours, 26 minutes. It’s unlikely that time was challenged at Aysgarth School, North Yorkshire, where head of maths Tim Bullas, affectionately known as Lord Bullas, founded a ferret club 18 years ago (now sadly closed). One wet Saturday, denied their usual walk, the boys tried ferret legging. ‘Health and safety would never permit it today,’ he admits, ‘but there was lots of laughter and squeals.’

At Milton Abbey in Dorset, ferret-club alumnus Ed Pope, founder of Watatunga Wildlife Reserve in Norfolk, recalls another habit lost to the past: ‘We would sneak out at night and poach fish from the lake to feed our ferrets. The keeper turned a blind eye!’

One year, when one of Lord Bullas’s jills produced a large litter, he presented each Form 5B leaver with their own ferret. ‘The boys were delighted, the parents perhaps less so.’ Hicks, who would bury her nose in her ferrets’ fur in defiance of those who say they smell, would have been delighted: ‘Look in a ferret’s eyes and you’ll never forget it.’ Busy, amusing and eager to work, a ferret is a companion for the ages.

This article first appeared in the October 29, 2025 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here

The Country Life quiz runs daily every afternoon, with new editions published at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up with all our previous quizzes here.

The Country Life quiz runs daily every afternoon, with new editions published at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up with all our previous quizzes here.

The Country Life quiz runs daily every afternoon, with new editions published at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up with all our previous quizzes here.

Growing up in the cityscape of Huddersfield, Amanda Owen was inspired by tales of farming life, from the adventures of James Herriot to the classic Hill Shepherd by John Forder, painting a picture of fell farming that became all she wanted to do.

The bad days, though, can be bleak, and when 'you're life's work is disappearing before your eyes' there are days when 'you wish you'd never started farming at all,' James tells the Country Life Podcast this week.

It's an utterly fascinating look at the life of a farmer in modern Britain — full of joy and wonder, the beauty of nature and the satisfaction of working organically, with the land, yet also realistic, honest and at times heart-wrenching.

Fast forward to the 2020s and Amanda has become one of the best-known farmers in the country, starting with her Instagram account — where she has over half a million followers as @yorkshireshepherdess — and progressing on to television documentaries and more.

While doing all this she has somehow found the time (and energy) to have nine children, keep the farm thriving, write a children's book about farming life, and appear on the Country Life Podcast with James Fisher.

Amanda talks to James about her life, her inspiration, her philosophy and what she'd change if she ruled the countryside for a day — and also tells the tale of her new book, Christmas Tales from the Farm, which is out now (Penguin, RRP £14.99).

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Amanda Owen

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

The trouble with the transition to clean energy, clean air and a greener future is that it starts here in the UK, where we have dirty energy, filthy air and losses of biodiversity. Yet there is a feeling of safety in what we know and that safety brings assumptions. We assume that it can go on like it is without much trouble, whereas change is always a challenge. We ask, will it work? What will it cost? By contrast, we rarely ask of the world we know, does it work and what will it cost to go on in the same way?

It costs to move to clean electricity and clean air, but it will cost a lot more if we stay with oil, gas and dirty air. That, however, is not how we think. Instinctively, we prefer what we know and distrust what seems new.

There are always plenty of interested parties to encourage that distrust: oil companies that attack electric vehicles by promoting newspaper articles that encourage anxiety about range and battery life; gas businesses that cast doubt on the efficacy of renewables in order to keep us dependent on their expensive imports from questionable overseas regimes; and food companies who oppose any action to encourage more healthy diets and less fast food.

Clean energy is challenging these companies and their profits as much as the railways challenged the canals and toll roads 200 years ago. Then, it was landowners and barge-masters who demonised steam and said railways were unsafe and costly — and they did cost a lot. Yet, looking back, we can see just how much more it would have cost if we had stuck with canals and toll roads and eschewed railways until they were thrust upon us by necessity. Instead, we embraced them and drove them across Continental Europe, Africa and South America.

It was upon that acceptance of change that our prosperity was built. We did it by using and adapting the institutions we had. It was through evolution, not revolution that we created the industrial world. Its effects were revolutionary, but its establishment was enabled by our settled constitution. That is what we have to do again if we are to flourish in a new, more sustainable world.

Yet, too many are determined to hang onto what we have. That inhibits co-operative change and makes those who see the dangers of clinging on increasingly impatient. It explains the Green Party’s recent choice of a new leader, Zack Polanski, who is often dubbed a Bolshevist. He really believes we can’t deal with climate change unless we have regime change. He has given up on evolution and advocates a full-throated, publicly owned economy, which echoes Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana: nationalisation, wealth taxes and central direction — all the mechanisms that restrict innovation and enterprise and denigrate success.

Sadly, the natural supporters of evolutionary change are giving ammunition to those who demand extreme solutions. The Tory Party that supported the Climate Change Act and six successive carbon budgets and established the need to strive for net zero has turned in on itself by protecting the status quo, questioning the need for change and undermining the opportunities for growth.

Yet growth, as Margaret Thatcher understood, only comes if we take up the challenge of change. In the year of her 100th birthday, denying the need for urgent transition is a betrayal. It is an expensive recipe to maintain dirty air, polluted seas and sterile land and gives succour to those who promote revolution. Only the free market, properly encouraged, can deliver clean energy, clean air and a green future.

This article first appeared in the October 1 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

The Country Life quiz runs daily every afternoon, with new editions published at 4pm.

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Capercaillie

Elusiveness: 100 (out of 100)

Speed: 40mph

Deliciousness: 70 (out of 100)

Population: 523 and declining

Location: Capercailllie live in Scottish pine forests, in places such as Strathspey, Easter Ross, and the Cairngorms — their pine forest habitat is now much depleted at some 180’000km².

Need to know: The capercaillie we have in Scotland today are descended from reintroduced birds brought to the UK from Sweden by Llewelyn Lloyd and Thomas Fowell Buxton in 1837. Fowell Buxton was a politically radical brewing magnate and anti-slavery campaigner. He asked his distant cousin, Lloyd (who was fishing in Sweden) to bring some capercaillie back with him to replace the original Scottish population, which had become extinct in around 1785.

The reintroduced population initially thrived, but is now struggling due to habitat loss, predation by pine martens, and collisions with deer fences.

The meat is said to be very strong and they come over the trees at an immense height. Old gamekeepers will tell you wistfully that capercaillie shooting (when numbers allowed) was a very fine sport.

Muntjac deer

Elusiveness: 25

Speed: 35mph

Deliciousness: 85

Population: 100,000 and rising fast

Location: Muntjac in Britain are abundant in East Anglia and the South East, particularly where there is arable farming. There is a growing number in Wales and into the north of England. They are a common site on stubble fields in autumn, but are also often seen in woodland.

Need to know: Reeve’s muntjac (the particular type of muntjac we have here), named after John Reeves, a naturalist employed by the British East India Company in the 19th century, were introduced accidentally by the 11th Duke of Bedfordshire. He put them in his park at Woburn Abbey and they escaped. His son then started releasing them throughout the country.

They bark when alarmed, hold their white tail up, and run away.

Muntjac are very harmful to hedges and woodland and if you look at woodland in an area full of them, you often see a very clear browse line about 18 inches high (the height of the muntjac).

Otter

Elusiveness: 75

Speed: 5.5mph (swimming)

Deliciousness: Reportedly 35 (fishy and strong, but very much protected here)

Population: 10,000 and rising

Location: Otters like lochs, lakes, craggy coastlines and even canals — they are a good indicator of clean water and they now inhabit every county in England. They have bounced back in the Highlands, are doing well in Cumbria, and are expanding their territory in Wales.

Need to know: By the 1970s, otters (made furry national treasures by the likes of Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water and Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter) had almost become extinct. One of the main factors in their decline was the use of pesticides (such as DDT which Jonie Mitchell famously sang about) — these pesticides travelled up the food chain, eventually causing reproductive issues in otter populations and death. However, the banning of DDT, as well as habitat restoration (such a restoring meanders in rivers), and the reintroduction of otters in places such East Anglia and Dorset, has changed their fortunes.

Otters are occasionally seen in relatively urban places like Bristol and Newcastle, on the Rivers Avon and the Tyne.

There is evidence of otters being eaten as far back as the Iron Age and they were hunted both for their fur and because anglers saw them as competition for trout and salmon.

Grey partridge

Elusiveness: 70

Speed: 30mph

Deliciousness: 88

Population: 43,000 breeding pairs

Location: Once ubiquitous, the grey partridge or ‘English partridge’ as it's often known, is a sparse presence in agricultural England, particularly on light, dry ground in Suffolk and Norfolk. It also does well in Sussex. Greys can still be found in good numbers on the edge of well managed grouse moors, such as in East Lothian and in Northumberland. In Wales, however, it is largely gone.

Need to know: The grey partridge is our true native partridge, as opposed to the red leg partridge, which is reared and released. Grey partridges make terrific parents — the cockbird will defend his brood fiercely and they have even been seen flying at foxes. You can differentiate them from red legs because they cheep on the wing.

The loss of habitat and pesticides (which reduces the abundance of food for greys) has reduced the population dramatically. However, people like the Duke of Norfolk are doing their very best to keep wild populations going.

Badger

Elusiveness: 30

Speed: 19mph

Deliciousness: 50 (in the Victorian period, ‘badger ham’ was sold)

Population: 500,000

Location: Badgers are now widespread throughout much of Britain, but are most common in the West Country and dairy country such as Gloucestershire. In recent decades, they have expanded their territory and can be found in parks and gardens, in relatively urban areas, as well as up into the Highlands. They are remarkably adaptable — they will happily dig a set in an old railway line or in deciduous woodland.

Need to know: In the Victorian period, due to badger baiting, snaring, and shooting, the badger population was much reduced. However, badgers became fully protected under the Badger Act of 1973 and have since increased dramatically in number.

They are prolific predators and will merrily eat the eggs and young of groundnesting birds.

Marsh harrier

Elusiveness: 65

Speed: 40mph

Deliciousness: N/a

Population: 550 breeding pairs

Location: The marsh harrier, as their name suggests, likes reedy, boggy country, and fen. They breed in the expansive reedbeds of East Anglia and are common too on the Somerset Levels. They are present across the Humber and up in Scotland around the Tay estuary.

Need to know: To ‘harry’ means to engage in attacks and harriers are notable for predating on rabbits, ducklings, voles, and frogs. Like the hen harriers, they were persecuted by gamekeepers because they were considered to be a threat to game.

When they are mating, the male birds will wheel, rise, and then tumble dramatically towards the ground. Occasionally the female with lock talons with the male. These displays have won them the epithet ‘the skydancer’.

They are migratory and spend and tend to leave Britain for Africa in October.

London fox

Elusiveness: 10

Speed: 45mph

Deliciousness: N/a

Population: 10,000

Location: Foxes in London live in gardens, on old railway embankments, on playing fields, and among derelict buildings. Sites for them to rest during the day are just as important as places for them to dig earths in — these resting places are often roofs.

Need to know: Foxes in London were first documented during the 1930s when urban sprawl was ramping up. It’s not so much that the fox came into the city as the city expanded its limits to meet the fox.

In rural areas, meat makes up 95% of the diet of the fox, whereas in the city, half their diet is found in rubbish bins.

Dr Thomas Fry, who researches urban foxes at Cambridge, has found that they tend to live in pairs in rural areas, but in London they will often live in much larger groups.

Red squirrel

Elusiveness: 70

Population: 160,000

Speed: 20mph

Deliciousness: N/a

Location: 75% of Britain’s red squirrels live in coniferous and broadleaf forests — they are found in places where there is a year-round food supply such as hazelnuts.

Need to know: Grey squirrels, which were introduced to beautify gardens, are larger than reds and are more aggressive. This forces reds to live in the few remaining places that there aren’t greys. Grey squirrels also often carry squirrel pox, to which they are immune. To reds, however, squirrel pox is lethal.

The pine marten, which is increasing in number, has been helpful in the fight for the reds because they prey on the lumbering greys — whereas the native red is too agile for them.

Brown hare

Elusiveness: 50

Speed: 45mph

Deliciousness: 75

Population: 600,000

Location: Brown hares love a mosaic habitat — where there are hedges, meadows, and arable fields, which provide food. They are abundant across East Anglia, but it is trickier to see them in dairy country.

Need to know: Brown hares, despite being a much loved part of British culture, were actually brought here by the Romans. They are most visible in spring when they box — this was thought, originally, to be two males fighting over a female, but we now know it’s actually a female fending off male advances.

Females can produce up to three broods of three leverets a year, meaning that in areas where food is abundant and foxes are controlled, the populations can be very large.

Lapwing

Elusiveness: 80

Speed: 28mph

Deliciousness: 65 (but not on menus for almost a century)

Population: 97,500 pairs

Location: Lapwings are present throughout the UK, but their numbers have declined by some 70% in the past 50 years. They nest in arable land or on short grassland with a low stocking densities of cattle and sheep.

Need to know: Known as peewits because of their ‘peewit peewit’ cry, lapwings were once abundant across agricultural Britain. Their eggs were much prized and appear in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited as plovers’ eggs. This practice has been illegal for decades because of declining numbers due to agricultural intensification, which has reduced the supply of food and has destroyed nesting habitat.

The Country Life quiz runs daily every afternoon, with new editions published at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up with all our previous quizzes here.

The Country Life quiz runs daily every afternoon, with new editions published at 4pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up with all our previous quizzes here.

There is a fly in the Government’s housing ointment — or, more accurately, a bat and a newt. Committed to constructing 1.5 million new homes in England, Labour figures, among them the Prime Minister and Chancellor, have railed that protections for wildlife are ‘blocks’ on building. Indeed, Rachel Reeves recently blamed the animal order Chiroptera for HS2’s failure to reach Leeds, declaring: ‘I’m afraid, as a country, we’ve cared more about the bats than we have about the commuter times for people in Leeds and West Yorkshire.’ She proceeded to add snails to the list of obstructionist fauna.

HS2 is a particular bugbear with the Government, which cites the rail line’s £100 million ‘bat tunnel’ in Buckinghamshire as an egregious, even batty, example of the hindrances caused by Nature laws. The Chancellor, of course, has a vested interest in Labour’s house-building programme, intended as it is to boost economic growth, which is currently sluggish.

In pursuit of this, the Government has introduced the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, now proceeding through the Lords. If passed as is, the Bill will override existing habitat protections, but propose that developers pay into a central, restitutionary Nature restoration fund — dormice, nightingales and water voles also have a tendency to live in inconvenient places.

As environmentalists and charities have remarked, offset schemes are rarely worth the official paper they are printed on and, besides, land is a finite resource. The habitat earmarked for potential eco-restoration, such as a brownfield site, is equally likely to be required for homes and roads.

Aficionados in #TeamBat #TeamNewt will be further alarmed by reports that the Treasury is contemplating adding more environmental rules to the bonfire, together with demoting protection for species rare in the UK, but common elsewhere in Europe, such as newts.

Are bats and newts really the problem, however? Research by charities, among them the RSPB and The Wildlife Trusts, has revealed that of 17,433 planning appeals in England last year, newts were relevant in only 0.8% of cases and bats in 2.48%. There is a certain naivety, too, in believing we can do without these creatures. Bats are ardently insectivorous, making them excellent pest controllers in agriculture; newts snack on insects that carry human and livestock diseases; both are biodiversity indicators.

House-building plans that affect these creatures are likely to affect myriad more in biodiversity hotspots, including riverine and woodland creatures, not to mention over-stretching our water resources. Such plans are poor human planning. We need houses, especially affordable ones in rural areas, but there is a danger of being as blind as a bat when it comes to sensible wildlife protection.

This article first appeared in the September 17 issue of Country Life. For more information about how to subscribe, click here

For most of the last 2,000 years, the white-tailed eagle — or sea eagle — was one of the most common birds of prey in Britain.

That all ended in horrendous fashion from the late 18th century onwards. Shooting, poisoning, egg collection, a mania for taxidermy and more combined to see this majestic creature — affectionately dubbed the 'flying barn door — hunted to extinction in Britain. The last bird is thought to have been killed in 1918.

Fast forward a century and they are now one of the great success stories of nature. Starting with four chicks brought to RAF Kinloss in June 1975, a 50-year effort led by the RSPB but supported by a string of other organisations has seen populations restored from the Highlands to West Sussex. The RSPB have celebrated this milestone with the making of a film, Return, which tells the full story, and we're delighted that two of the — conservationist Dave Sexton and musician Alice Boyd — joined the Country Life Podcast to talk to James Fisher about how it all came together.

It's a wonderful, inspiring story which shows just what can be done by committed experts, backed by long-term thinking, and is a must-watch for anyone with even a passing interest in wildlife and nature. As of August 29 it's now available to watch on the RSPB's YouTube channel.

You can find out more on the RSPB website — rspb.org.uk — about white-tailed eagles themselves, the making of the film and Alice's hauntingly beautiful music which captures the beauty and majesty of these great creatures.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher
Guests: Dave Sexton and Alice Boyd
Editor and producer: Toby Keel
Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Last month threw up a number of stories about dolphins and porpoises. At the start of the month, a motorboat was blamed for injuring a pod of the former off the coast of Cornwall, with footage on social media showing their dorsal fins sliced open or cut off. Two weeks later, a dolphin nicknamed Reggie allegedly tried to drown several people off the Dorset coast, with observers noticing that the lone male had a penchant for women in wetsuits.

Reggie was also spotted mocking a group near Lyme Regis, coming up from behind and miming them treading water. As his legend grew, so did the number of admirers: paddle-boarders seeking him out at sunset were criticised for ‘surrounding’ the wild animal.

Dolphins are funny old creatures: playful, agile and fiercely intelligent. Although fiction has always been kind to them, they have a tendency to snap and find a close relative in the ocean’s apex predator, the orca.

The Marine Management Organisation recently issued a statement urging swimmers to stay away from dolphins and ignore them if they cross their paths. If this feels like overreach, there may be reason to believe the beasts are angry with us.

Over in the Strait of Gibraltar, orca have been attacking yachts since 2020, with one theory claiming that they are exacting revenge after a vessel injured a member of the pod.

Reggie, like his Cornish cousins, has been the victim of a collision, incurring a noticeable gash to his body in July. His borderline aggression vis-à-vis certain swimmers could feasibly be some kind of retaliation.

These incidents have prompted avid discussion. Should there be stricter laws around what boats the average licence-holder can drive or more severe penalties for damage to wildlife? The footage of the Cornish pod was tragic, almost as if they’d been harpooned. Part of the upset, however, came down to responsibility: the danger posed by a propeller or driving a boat at high speed.

Dolphins cannot help but be curious about men at sea. On a fishing trip to St Mawes two summers ago, at least 20 of them followed our boat for close to an hour. They would leap into the air, nearly scraping the hull as we bounced up and down on the waves. Should we have stopped the engine and waited for them to swim away? Perhaps, although that would have been unnatural. To witness dolphins surfing the waves alongside a vessel is among the great moments of interspecies communion. It would be wrong to try and tame them, but should we really push them away when they come up to say hello?

The best defence against the rise of AI

In the lee of our very online times, designers are winding back the clock. The pull of hand-drawn furniture, that feels rough-and-ready, has seemingly never been stronger. Self-taught ceramicist Sophia Pelizzoli has produced plates, bowls and trays, with hand-painted fish, fruit and vegetables, and furniture designer Bloomsbury Revisited is doing something similar. Taking a leaf out of the Charleston House playbook, its new collection draws on the language of the English countryside, decorating lampshades with images of greyhounds and jockeys. Charleston, the East Sussex farmstead where the Bloomsbury Group met, sets something of a blueprint for the whimsical style espoused by designers today. Among the brightest stars of this new movement is the decorative artist Meg Boscawen, whose hand-painted walls, wardrobes and cabinets are a favourite among the fashion cognoscenti. Perhaps the best defence against the rise of AI is the human hand.

If you are a person who lives in the UK, and you like standing in, or nearby, rivers, there’s a good chance you will have heard of Farlows.

It is one of the great outdoors companies of the UK, a place for all fishermen and women to obsess over rods and reels while they tell themselves that they would catch way more fish if they could just buy a bit more gear.

We were joined on the podcast this week by Robin Philpott, group CEO of Farlows and Sportfish, to talk about the business, fishing and the state of our waterways, because while the newspapers have only been covering the pollution crisis for the past few years, the people on the rivers of this country have been sounding the alarm for a decade.

When you think about it, who better to keep an eye on our rivers than the people who spend their time standing on or nearby them? Falling catch numbers, murky water and low levels have been plaguing this most ancient sport for a long time, and if there’s one thing an angler has in spades, it is patience when it comes to making a fuss.

Robin was more than forthcoming about the work that Farlows and other fishing businesses are doing to raise the alarm and help protect our rivers, from investing in more sustainable business practices to creating Sportfish Rivers Month, a grassroots campaign that saw anglers spending the month of July cleaning and improving the health of our rivers. After all, if there’s no fish, there’s no fishing.
It was a fascinating chat with a business leader in a sector very close to Country Life’s (and this host’s) heart. We hope you’ll enjoy listening.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher
Guest: Robin Philpott
Editor and producer: Toby Keel
Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Yesterday, conservationists celebrated a fledgling eaglet with a name chosen by Sir David Attenborough. The bird is the first eaglet to fledge from the nest of a translocated golden eagle.

Sir David, who described the landmark moment as a ‘wonderful achievement’, chose the name Princeling, which means ‘young prince’ (the video below shows him being tagged). The regal-sounding baby bird was hatched by his somewhat less regal-sounding parents: Emma, a golden eagle translocated by the South of Scotland Golden Eagle Project in 2021, and Keith, a locally fledged bird from Galloway.

Golden eagles, often described as the ‘King of the Skies’, play a vital role as an apex predator, but in the past two centuries, numbers in the south of Scotland had slipped to perilously low levels. At one point, there were only three breeding pairs left.

In response, the Golden Eagle Project, in collaboration with The Southern Upland Partnership, Scottish Land and Estates, RSPB Scotland, NatureScot and Scottish Forestry began translocating the animals to help reinforce the dwindling population. Over the space of five years, chosen eaglets, with the future of their species’ survival on their wings, were transferred to custom-built aviaries in confidential locations and then released, first into the Moffat Hills and then further south.

The number of golden eagles soaring majestically through southern Scottish skies now totals 50 — the most in 300 years. Some have even ventured into northern England; well in advance of plans, overseen by environment secretary Steve Reed, to formally reintroduce them there too.

The gargantuan bird has in effect been extinct from England for 150 years owing to persecution from farmers and gamekeepers — some of whom are likely to oppose the findings of a study by Forestry England, due to be published in the coming months, that is expected to conclude that there is habitat and prey capacity to support a new population.

Golden eagles predominantly feast on smaller mammals and birds, but have been known to predate on lambs; in the USA, they’ve even been known to snatch small pet dogs.

Of all our raptors, common buzzards (Buteo buteo) are the most likely to provide us with the twin pleasures of sight and sound. In those peerless blue skies on sunny afternoons in late March, buzzards are invariably on the wing performing near-effortless spirals as they fire down salvoes of the softest, rising cat-like call. Mewing buzzards in display are one of the most affecting indicators of the British spring and now part of its very essence.

There are at least 64,000 pairs spread more evenly through these islands than any other raptor, but this wasn’t always the case. In the early 20th century, persecution had driven them to the western fringes and, even as late as the 1970s, the species was almost trapped to the west of a line between Southampton and Liverpool. Their strongholds were in the West Country, Wales and also in the Highlands of Scotland.

At that time, the bird was almost unknown in eastern England. This all changed at the end of the 20th century, when they started to expand in range and number and I well recall my first ever buzzard in Norfolk — it was 1994 and, within only eight years, I saw my first breeding birds. Today, in some wooded parts of East Anglia, it isn’t uncommon to find a dozen circling in unison. They particularly favour woodland or plantation forests of all kinds, but they have spread into arable farmland and even the rather treeless sheep country of northern England.

One secret to success is the bird’s flexibility in matters of prey and one of the most common sightings many of us have of it involves a rather comical scene. A rotund brown creature, with an almost chicken-like waddling gait, will be loping across some short-cropped field right at the roadside. Slowly, it dawns on you: it is a buzzard pulling up earthworms, which are a dietary mainstay in lean times.

That modest fare is in keeping with historical opinions of the buzzard and a rather lowly estimate of its hunting ethics. One 19th-century ornithologist suggested that it was a ‘dull, stupid, heavy… lazy, sleepy and cowardly fellow, who dozes away half his time on some old rotten stump’. Had this critic bothered to watch a little longer, he might have seen something more impressive: when a buzzard suddenly transforms from quiet sentinel to surging missile intent on some unsuspecting victim.

In Britain, it is often rabbits that are caught in this way. They are a key element in the diet and the raptor was badly affected by the myxomatosis outbreaks of the 1950s. Studies in mainland Europe suggest that small mammals may also be a major dietary component, but buzzards are able to take birds as large as grouse, pheasants, crows, jays, rooks and wood pigeons.

One memorable encounter I recall involved a mother and her full-grown young. They were circling over a steep, gorse-covered slope in the Peak District, which was densely riddled with the burrows of a large rabbit colony. Following their parents’ lead, the young birds tested their mettle, hurtling at speed, almost brushing the ground as they careered after scampering bunnies in playful sorties. It may have been hunting school for the youngsters, but it was risky stuff swooping through the armoury of gorse spikes. There was nothing ‘lazy’ or ‘cowardly’ on show here.

One of the more recent shifts in our experience is the way we have to look carefully at large birds of prey to confirm their identity. In many parts today, any raptor could be one of three or four species. Buzzards are the most abundant, but they are not always easy to separate and show an astonishing plumage variation, from almost completely fulvous-white birds right through to solidly black individuals.

The real giveaway is when a buzzard takes flight. There is invariably a silvery crescent through the middle of the underwing that flashes as the bird banks. Then, it planes away and you get the full breadth of the rounded span, together with a broad, rounded tail. Without a flap, it twists and rises until barely visible high in the ether. Finally comes the telltale moment: those inflected pieeeuu pieeeuu notes that lend a sense of wildness to every British scene.

Mark Cocker is a naturalist and multi-award-winning author of creative non-fiction. His latest book, ‘One Midsummer’s Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth’, is out in paperback (Vintage, £10.99)

A few years ago, I travelled to the northernmost reaches of Scotland and visited the Shetland Islands, where I hoped I might encounter a giant sea creature. Its dorsal fin alone, sticking up above the waves, would be taller than me. I longed to catch a glimpse of slick black and white skin and feel the thrill of being in the presence of a formidable, super-smart predator. Shetland gave me my best chance anywhere in the British Isles of seeing a wild orca. Around this isolated subarctic archipelago the sea is brain-achingly cold and rich in wildlife, including large populations of harbour seals and grey seals. That’s why the orcas come — to hunt these nourishingly blubbery marine mammals.

Two or three semi-residential orca pods regularly appear around Shetland. Collectively known as the Northern Isles Community, they sometimes roam south to the Orkney Islands and on towards the Scottish mainland, as well as to the Faroe Islands and Iceland. In Shetland, they’re frequently joined by several Icelandic pods that also come to hunt for seals. At any time there can be dozens of orcas prowling around the small cluster of islands that make up Shetland — and when they come within sight of land, there are always devoted orca fans following them, posting sightings on social media, rushing from bay to bay, beach to cliff top, scanning the sea and sharing photos of dorsal fins reaching above the waves. If you happen to be in the right part of Shetland at the right time, you could get lucky and see an orca swimming by.

Orcas, or killer whales, are the world’s largest dolphins. They grow to between 25ft and 30ft long and can weigh more than five tons, roughly the full body length (trunk included) and heft of an African bush elephant. Globally, orcas live more widely than any other mammals, from the icy waters of the Arctic and Antarctica, to tropical and temperate seas. They live in tight-knit pods often led by a female elder, the children and grandchildren often staying with her all through her long life and learning from her how to hunt.

Renowned for their intelligence, orcas work together to target different prey types; in Antarctica, they swish their tails together to wash seals off floating ice floes; in Patagonia, they deliberately beach themselves to hunt sea lions; off South Africa, orcas work together to hunt another of the ocean’s top predators, great white sharks. In southern Europe, in the sea off Gibraltar, an orca pod recently gained notoriety for interfering with sailboats, tearing off rudders and causing many vessels to sink. The boat-meddling orcas have never harmed any people on board and scientists are still puzzling over why they started doing this.

As well as Shetland, orcas also roam around the islands of the Hebrides, but those ones are much harder to spot. The West Coast Community is the last remaining resident pod of orcas in British waters and they are perilously rare and endangered. In 2016, tragedy struck when a female from this community, called Lulu, washed up dead on a beach on the Isle of Tiree. An autopsy revealed she had drowned after getting her tail tangled in fishing gear, something that shouldn’t normally happen to nimble orcas. Tests revealed her body contained immense concentrations of manmade toxins — more than almost any other animal that’s been tested — which probably hampered her brain function and immune system and may have made her more vulnerable to entanglement. The poisons are also the likely culprit for Lulu’s infertility. She was at least 20 years old and sexually mature when she died, yet she had never given birth to a calf. She left behind a dwindling group of orcas. Eight individuals have been identified in the West Coast Community, but, recently, only two have been spotted, both of them males.

Chemical pollution is a major threat to orcas all around the world. Toxic industrial chemicals leach into the ocean and don’t readily break down, but build up in food webs, getting passed on from prey to predators. Orcas can live for a century and through their long lives as apex predators they take on a huge toxic load that accumulates in their fatty blubber. One study predicted that polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, lingering in the ocean could lead to the collapse of half the world’s orca populations by the end of this century.

Although the production of some dangerous chemicals such as PCBs has been widely banned, others have taken their place and pose ever greater risks. Thousands of synthetic compounds, dubbed ‘forever chemicals’ because they take so long to break down, are highly toxic to humans and other animals, but efforts to control their production are alarmingly slow. As it becomes increasingly obvious how badly our world is becoming contaminated with forever chemicals, which have been detected in everything from Arctic sea ice to domestic drinking water supplies and the bodies of unborn human babies, the need for strict regulations becomes ever more urgent. Phasing out these dangerous substances is not only vital for human health, but it will help keep the ocean healthy for everything that lives there, from plankton to fish and the imperilled top predators, the orcas.

Knowing about the precarious future of orcas made it all the more frustrating when, during my time in Shetland, I was always in the wrong place to see them. On days when I visited the northerly islands of the archipelago, the orcas appeared in the south; when I headed east they showed up in the west. Then, with one day left, a pod led by a matriarch known as Vaila visited a beautiful beach where waves crash towards each other along a narrow arc of sand connecting to St Ninian’s Isle. In the cove on one side, three adult orcas arrived accompanied by a gaggle of young ones. The elder orcas demonstrated their hunting prowess, chasing and killing several seals, then tenderly passing chunks of food to the juveniles.

As all this was going on, a crowd gathered on the surrounding cliffs and looked down on the hunting scene, but I was not among them. I was at the other end of the archipelago, separated by several inter-island boat rides and with no hope of getting there in time to witness this wild drama unfold. Even so, it was reassuring to know that there are still giant predators doing what they need to do to survive and roaming the British seas.

This feature originally appeared in the July 30 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe