A bird’s eye view

On a frosty December morning, John Lewis-stempel grapples with his farming administration and tries not to be distracted by the buzzards, tits, finches and siskins he can see out of the study window

A busy bird table distracts John Lewisstempel from farm paperwork

Sometimes, I think the bird table is the greatest aid to avian conservation ever

LAST night, the sky was black velvet spread with diamonds, so frost this morning was a given. Sure enough, when I went out at about 7am, the sheep field was a white sheet polka-dotted with green circles where the ewes had slept. My horse galloped to its food, its hooves making a hollow drum of the paddock. I thought this sounded like a magnificent cavalry charge, but I’m prone to romance.

Or I am until I begin the secretarial work that’s half the substance of modern farming. Now, at 10am, I’m in the study, where the inside of the window displays frost-etchings of ferns, such as you would imagine negative photographs of the Jurassic swamp. I turn on the laptop, but only after I turn on the two-bar electric fire.

In the bad old days, filing livestock movements took five minutes, a paper form filled in, the triplicate posted to Herefordshire animal-health office on Blackfriars Street. With the wonder of computers and rural broadband, the same process takes an hour. I can’t get on the Animal Reporting and Movement Service website because the internet is too slow, then the page with the form freezes, so I have to reload; there’s a problem with ‘submission’. Re-start the application.

By now, the study is full of fug; it’s a damp room anyway, but the frost on the windows is melting. Condensation runs down the panes like the ‘legs’ of wine in glass. Or tears.

I’m startled from my petty complaints by a tapping at the bottom corner of the window. A smudged blue tit, balled against the cold, is pecking at some crack in the putty. The pick-pick-pick goes on for minutes. She must realise that the fracture won’t yield, but such is her hunger and her determination she continues. She hopes.

I wonder why she’s not at the bird table on the lawn, swipe a pane of the glass with the sleeve of my jacket and then I understand her choice. Perched, gangly and ungainly on the pitched wooden roof of the table, is a juvenile buzzard.

I can see, as if watching a silent film, protesting birds in the dwarf fruit trees, these bare and ruined by winter, and made bleaker still by the encircling stone-cold wall. Sparrows gang in the damson; finches in the pear; tits in the cherry. A blackbird flies low, from tree to tree, demented in outrage; her wings send up spumes of frost crystals across the lawn.

For a bird of prey, the buzzard is peculiarly dependent on a diet of earthworms (indeed, it’s evolved its innards for maximum nutritional benefit from Lumbricus terrestris), but the frost has locked up the earth, sealed the meat safe. Life is hard for the birds of winter.

By turns tragic and comic, the buzzard tries to lean over to secure the rinds of bacon and flaps manically to maintain its balance. A clown. The audience hoots. Unable to secure pickings from the bird table, it flaps off on tetchy wings, but I know it’s heading in the right direction; there’s carrion on the lane, a cock pheasant killed by a car.

My car. My children complain I’m a slow driver. Even I was too fast for a poor gormless pheasant hand-reared, loitering and bewildered in crowds of its kin on the corner when the afternoon sun was low and in my eyes. Mad, isn’t it? I like pheasant on the plate, but I still tried to brake, to avoid killing that bird. In parenthesis: the law does not allow one to profit from one’s own roadkill, so I didn’t put the bird in the boot.

The little birds flock back to the bird table now the big, bad buzzard has gone and what do I see? A siskin. I’m certain of the identification, the black cap and double wing-bars are distinctive, but check anyway with my Hamlyn Guide to Birds of Britain and Europe. I’ve had the same copy since I was a boy, alongside my two other bird bibles, the AA Book of British Birds, and the Rev C. A. Johns’s British Birds in their Haunts (the 1938 edition, given to me by my mother).

Sometimes, I think that the bird table is the greatest aid to avian conservation ever invented and I suspect it’s a British invention. As early as 1910, Punch declared feeding birds a ‘national obsession’ in these isles.

The bird table isn’t only for the town garden; such is the efficiency of modern industrial agriculture that few weed or crop seeds, or insects, are left over to feed farmland birds. I once did an experiment in which a square

foot of a £25 B&Q bird table, plus a pheasant hopper filled with a few handfuls of seeds and mealworm per day, supported more arable birds, in numbers and type, than 50 conventional acres.

Now, I’m hot, if only under the collar. The screen on the HP Stream informs me ‘no internet try: checking the network cables, modem and router, reconnecting to wi-fi, running Windows network diagnostics’.

I throw open the window. Glass can be as much of a prison as iron bars. The sounds of the countryside in winter surge in on the glittering cold air. A properly feral pheasant, born to a skulking hen in the copse, beats his proud wings in our stubble patch; further off, crows honk like a flock of London taxis.

In the spindle tree next to the house, a robin sings its wistful seasonal song. Of all the birds of winter, the redbreast is the one true chorister. The song of the robin belongs to winter. As surely as does the sound of squealing car brakes on country lanes when the afternoon sun is low and blinding.

Twice crowned victor of the Wainwright Prize for nature writing, for ‘Where Poppies Blow’ (2017) and ‘Meadowland’ (2015), John Lewis-stempel was the 2016 British Society of Magazine Editors Columnist of the Year