IT’S SPRING!( BUT ONLYAS SEEN ON TV)

It’s the season that swells the heart of MAX HASTINGS – so why would so many rather watch nature programmes than step outside their own front doors . . .

NO Nation in the world loves nature like the British. We sup on it and gorge on it, from Springwatch to Countryfile, Blue Planet to Life In The Undergrowth, Coast to naturewatch.

We savour every vole scuffling through the bushes, each bee sipping at the lavender, all the hares dancing in the meadow.

Moreover, we enjoy all these wondrous sights without needing to don wellies or scratch a bare arm on a bramble bush, because they scroll past on an HD screen in the living room.

We visit ‘farm shops’ in city centres, pay a few pence extra for organic produce in the supermarket, and wax lyrical about the daffodils in the local park.

Yet for all our professions of enthusiasm for the countryside and its wildlife, with each passing season we become lazier about engaging with them in real life. Even when the sun bursts forth, as it did so gloriously at the weekend, and promises to do again in the coming days, we are just as likely to slump in front of our televisions as we are to head for open spaces.

Tv wildlife programmes breed ‘virtual’ countryfolk, suffering from what scientists have dubbed nature Deficit Disorder.

More than a million people subscribe to the rSPB, many more to the national Trust, the Campaign to Protect rural England — of which I was once proud to be president — and suchlike. Yet it is dismaying how few country visitors walk rather than drive, use their eyes rather than watch a DvD, can identify a bird’s egg when they see it, or have read such great country writers of Britain’s past as Cobbett, W.H. Hudson or John Clare.

A significant divider between town and country is the loss of opportunities for children to do holiday jobs on farms, such as enabled my generation to learn a lot.

I ploughed decently; could harrow a field and shift bales at harvest. In the early Fifties, when even small farms still employed several workers, I will not pretend that a middle-class interloper such as me was always welcome, or softly treated.

I have never forgotten a day when, as a seven-year- old, I sobbed my heart out atop a rick because a tough countryman found a rat’s nest and stuffed its squeaking, wriggling contents down my shirt.

As I grew older, however, I learned about ferreting rabbits, skinning a lamb, handmilking until my hands ached, shooting rabbits at night in the lights of a Land rover; peerless fun for an early teenager.

TODAY, almost all the above is off the menu. no responsible farmer, never mind health and safety, could allow a boy to drive a modern tractor: farm workers have perforce become high-tech specialists.

Animals have vanished from many farms, likewise swathes of grass downland that were once glories of such counties as west Berkshire and Wiltshire.

The Prince of Wales extols the merits of returning land to a grazing regime, and how marvellous that would be! But he would struggle to earn a living out of grassland. I doubt that many rustic Tv presenters know much about that, either. A limitation of most programmes is that they reflect a sentimental vision, exemplified by Countryfile’s indulgent items on vegans and animal rights.

My father, Macdonald Hastings, made country films for the BBC in the Fifties and Sixties which went too far the other way, waving the flag for farmers, pesticides and intensive livestock production in a fashion that even he came to regret in old age. Yet Father understood fundamentals about rural life which are alien to many of today’s twee presenters.

‘The principal activities of the countryside,’ he would say with relish, ‘are sex and death.’ This, if you think about it, must be true.

In nature, creatures kill each other from dusk to dawn and beyond. One of the first enchanting sights that I see on morning marches with the dogs is a barn owl, completing his nocturnal deck-level sweep of the fields, in search of small mammals.

In the countryside today, it can be difficult to persuade a sentimental public that some species must be managed — culled — especially such predators as mink and foxes. Because seals look so cuddly, it is painful to admit that there are far too many of them off the coasts of Britain for the available fish food stocks.

It is an unattractive feature of many modern eco-warriors and animal rights campaigners that while they cherish a passion for wildlife, they also tend to have a down on people.

Lowest on their pecking order are landowners, focus of the animus of such writers as Mark Cocker, author of an angry book titled Our Place: Can We Save Britain’s Wildlife Before It is Too Late? The subtext of such works is that wildlife would fare better without all the horrible toffs, farmers and even gardeners who get in its way. ‘We are the problem,’ writes Cocker.

This is correct, of course, in a narrow sense: nature prospered mightily in past centuries, when there were fewer hulking, intrusive, polluting human beings.

But most of us acknowledge that mankind has rights, too, and that to accommodate an ever-growing population, there must be compromises between nature and the demands of housing, farming, road-building, vehicles.

While some landowners and farmers diminish the land by harsh stewardship, many more are committed to preserving the natural balance, and spend far more of their own money on doing so than any self-proclaimed eco-warrior.

Even Mark Cocker acknowledges the value to wildlife of conservation headlands, strips of wilderness around fields, pioneered by the Game And Wildlife Conservation Trust a generation ago, and now happily common among farmers.

I share one of the obsessions in Cocker’s doom-laden book — against the planting of conifers which makes economic sense only because of crazy tax breaks, while perpetrating fearsome environmental damage.

He also performs a service, by highlighting some of the most grievous declines in species numbers — of moths, nightingales, cuckoos, swallows.

But Cocker overstates the malign influence of human persecution. The major force is habitat decline, reinforced by insect loss driven by agricultural pesticides, though he would say that comes to the same thing.

For all that, I am amazed by how much wonderful wildness Britain still offers, if only more virtual countryfolk went out to find it.

Every year, I spend several weeks roaming and fishing in Caithness and Sutherland, meeting scarcely a home-grown tourist, though a good many European ones.

English families, it seems, and especially their children, insist on theme parks, water slides and McDonald’s, of which thank goodness there are none up there. In Sutherland, stunning beaches are almost empty, because to reach them requires steep descents on foot — and return climbs to the road such as few passing drivers care to make.

Many and many a day, my wife and I walk the pristine sands alone with our dogs. We are grateful, but also sad about what others are missing.

Where I part from many modern eco-warriors, including Prince Charles, is that they yearn for a return to a rustic past in which indeed there were more butterflies, but also grinding rural poverty. Tuberculosis as well as incest flourished in thatched cottages.

I cannot follow the conservationists who cry ‘backwards to the future’, to preserve our wildlife. The interests of mankind must come first, and to pretend otherwise is naive. Yet the campaigners are right that there is more we can do to defend our wild heritage.

We ArE belatedly recognising plastic and detergents for the plagues that they are, infecting our ecosystem.

We should be able to exploit Brexit to abandon the crazy system of EU farm subsidies which give most money to the biggest producers, and instead focus cash on promoting environmental sensitivity, and supporting the most deprived rural areas.

ABOVE all, we must cherish untilled wildernesses as the most precious of all wildlife habitats. In schools, we can again teach children to play with conkers — banned by heads ‘ for safety reasons’. We can walk more, drive a little less; stop subsidising conifer planting; watch fewer Tv wildlife programmes, and see real wildlife more.

Partly owing to sensationalist coverage of some rural mishaps — walkers tossed by bulls, children abducted, lovers falling into quarries and suchlike — the countryside has come to be viewed as a place of fear, of the unknown.

In truth, it remains the most glorious playground in Britain.

We must teach a new generation to embrace it as my generation was fortunate enough to do; and strive to secure the future of its wildlife for the next.

So when the sun comes out this week, resist the urge to turn on your television, and go and experience the natural wonders of these islands — before it’s too late.