Beauty to make you cry

As lockdown continues, there is plenty of delight to be found outside and much birdsong to be savoured

And so it goes on and my hair gets longer every day and. Meanwhile, I find solace in the beauty of High Park, in the company of two spaniels, in telephone contact with friends and family and in the inestimable comfort that comes every evening from two glasses of fino sherry and half a bottle of red wine.

“Too much”, I can hear some of you saying, disapprovingly. “Essential,” say I, scarcely believing that I am proving capable of such exemplary restraint.

I told you last month that my daily exercise consists of walking my boundaries with Sir Tripod and Zac (Our duty to hope, 22 April). More often than not I still do this, except that the dogs no longer come with me because I am keen to avoid unnecessary disturbance of ground-nesting birds.

My dogs are given a run before and after my circuit and sometimes I take a shorter walk before spending half an hour training them. Or rather training Zac, for the truth is that Sir Tripod is more or less a free spirit these days and spends his time doing more or less what he likes. He is an impressive retriever, so fine as a peg dog, but he is too independent for any other sort of work.

Zac is different. He is maturing into a dependable gundog. I did not shoot over him last season, but I worked him on stand-and-walk days when it was my turn to walk. Next season, if there is one, I look forward to rough shooting days in his company. Sir Tripod will still be joining me on my peg.

Birds’ nests

I walk my boundaries and run the dogs, and make sure that Zac does what he is told. But, occasionally, instead of all this, I set off through the bluebells in the big wood. At the same time I find my way back to my far distant childhood when, as a sevenand eight-year-old, I spent whole days roaming the fields and woods, exploring bushes and banks and hedgerows in search of birds’ nests.

Now, in these strange times, I spend rather less than an hour at it — no longer wearing that T-shirt (top right), by the way — and I am

and the hoarse cawing of a crow fail to fill me with delight; the mewing of buzzards is not exactly music to my ears, but the songs of many birds are very beautiful indeed.

I think the three of them that I love best, in no order of preference, are those of the willow warbler, the curlew and the blackbird. I also love the twittering laughter of swallows, and it worries me that, at the end of the first week in May, I have heard so little of it and seen so few of the birds that make it.

However I choose to spend my daily visit to High Park, I am everywhere surrounded by the peerless beauty of spring, of the young leaf and the blossom on cherry and crab, by the yellow glory of the gorse, by flowers scattered through wood and field and by all that sweet symphony of birdsong.

Often it moves me very deeply and I am going to tell you something that may perhaps seem out of place in a magazine devoted to the manly sport of shooting, a magazine doubtless read by whole battalions of lanternjawed alpha males.

For what will they think when I tell them this; that the other morning found me standing beneath a still leafless ash tree listening to what

I felt certain was a garden warbler; and how, after a while, I spotted the bird and saw at once that it was a blackcap; how the song was so beautiful, how the bird singing it was so delicate and lovely; how both singer and song were surrounded on all sides by such wonderful and complementary beauty that I sat straight down on the bank and burst into tears?

I think I was weeping for the incomparable beauty all about me, weeping at the same time for the

“I admire the exquisite craftsmanship of the nests, the loveliness of the eggs and of the birds that may be sitting on them”

uncertainty, the frustration and the deep sadness of our present times. They were tears of gratitude, they were tears of sorrow, and I felt much better for letting them flow.

Mother nature

My lockdown visits to High Park have taught me all over again something that I have really known all along: that what made me a fisher and shooter in the first place was my love of nature.

The love that sent a seven-yearold boy scouring the countryside in search of birds’ nests is that same love that sends the 70-year-old man he has turned into off to his rivers — when allowed — or out under the sky with his spaniel and his gun in search of fascination, fulfilment and food for both body and soul.

And, like many, he can’t wait to be doing it all again.