Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Country Diary
Early summer is when the many benefits of habitat improvement are at their most glorious — and this year has been particularly bountiful
May is a time of scrutiny. The vegetable patch is visited twice daily and examined with rapt attention for any sign of the miracle that is germination.
Nest boxes, put up in January, claimed by tits and robins in March, clutches laid in April, are now avidly studied for a glimpse of their fledglings. The skies are scanned for returning swifts and swallows, ears cocked for the cuckoo’s call or nightingale’s evening serenade. This latter comforting, May ritual is particularly poignant in our currently unusually insular world. The nightingale and the cuckoo returning from far-flung parts is a reminder that nature has no regard for travel bans.
I was called by Adam Steed, the awardwinning Suffolk gamekeeper, last week. He bore glad tidings, having also been busy in the observations of May. As usual, the subject of his monitorings were his beloved grey partridges. He had spied a pair nesting in the lee of a hedge that I laid for him in January.
The partridges were using a protective cross-hatch of thorny regrowth, which a laid hedge provides, as the backdrop for their nest bowl of dried grasses, where the hen lays up to 20 eggs. No other wild bird lays such a prodigious clutch, largely because no other wild bird has so many predators, nor weather-related dangers for their young to survive. Adam’s revelation led me to check on other laid hedges that had the attention of my billhook last winter.
Over at Flea Barn, I had laid a hedge on the windward side of the main cover to help make the 20-year-old woodland a snugger couch for game. To my delight, as I revelled in the citrus-green regrowth of field maple and hawthorn appearing along the laid pleachers, a cock pheasant squared up to me. Rolling his shoulders and thrusting out his chest, he stood like a street fighter. The brave soul crowed out a challenge; he was reluctant to back down. Parenthood makes lions of men, and pheasants, it seems.
I looked in the hedge bottom and would have missed his crouching dowdy spouse were it not for her boot-button eyes staring back. I backed off, the pheasant cock strutted in a manner that reeked of pride. Later, I spoke with Ed Nesling, who owns and farms Flea Barn. He couldn’t remember a time when a pheasant had nested in the cover edge there. Another win for an ancient craft used in modern conservation.
My final hedge for perusal was all the way over in Saffron Walden. I had laid a line of ancient hazel stools. The surrounding woodland had been planted at the design of Capability Brown. I had no reason to disbelieve that this old hedge was also a part of the great landscaper’s scheme. It was a significant job, but one that looked good when I finished it in mid-february.
The leaf growth was verdant. More pleasing was the wildflowers that had erupted into raucous colour in the ditch bottom, exposed for the first time in years, having been blotted
“A laid hedge is not natural, but it is of nature. It is man’s way of helping to improve, create and manage a balance”
into dormancy by the hedge’s straggling shadow. Bluebells and pink campion shone. The flower spikes of southern orchids were about to erupt. Cow parsley frothed like surf over cowslips and oxlips now on the wane.
Balance
This reminded me why I do this job and what the very meaning of conservation is. A laid hedge is not natural, but it is of nature. It is man’s way of helping to improve things, to create and manage a balance. Those who believe that man should walk away and rewild the countryside would see my actions as too interventionist. They would demand that I leave the hedge untouched. More’s the pity, because that grey partridge would have had no safe couch, nor the pheasant. The wildflowers would have had nowhere to shine.
Conservation is a man-made concept. In our farmed landscape, the conservationist ensures that every available piece of habitat is maximised for wildlife and dovetails with agriculture. The hedges I laid last winter are bearing fruit already. In the future, they will be better still. Life is a long song.
Richard Negus is a professional hedge layer and writer. He lives in Suffolk, is a keen wildfowler and a dedicated conservationist with a passion for grey partridges.