How a farmer friend saved a bird’s nest!

Readers might be interested in hearing this heartwarming story from my neck of the woods. A farmer friend, who knows I’m a keen birder and always passes on sightings from his land, came up to me in the village pub a few weeks ago, and related an amazing tale of the lengths he had gone to protect a Blackbird’s nest. The bird in question had built its nest next to the exhaust stack on a very expensive piece of kit, belonging to an agricultural contractor, which was stored in his barn. As the contractor had not used this particular tractor for a week or two, the nest had gone unnoticed, and by the time that the tractor was needed it contained four eggs. My farming friend could not bear for the nest to be lost so he literally ‘hatched’ an amazing plan with the local agricultural supplier. He arranged for a brand-new tractor of exactly the same model to be ‘lent’ for the period of the nest’s occupancy. With great good will from the local supplier the new tractor was substituted in his barn for the contractor’s machine, and the nest gently lifted to its new location, which of course was an exact match. The female Blackbird appeared not to notice and duly returned to her eggs. The same farmer by the way, along with many others locally, takes great care to mark and avoid, the nests of Curlew, Oystercatcher, Lapwing and Sky Lark when working on his arable fields. We don’t, of course, see eye to eye about everything, but such a duty of care is testament to his involvement with the environment in which he works.

Clive Griffiths, North Cumbria