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The Guardian
20-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Country diary: A fly is never just a fly
Examine any part of the horizon from our garden and you find the air freckled with slow-dreaming swarms of black dots. I'd hazard a guess that all of them are Bibio marci, a fly named because it's said to emerge on the feast of Saint Mark – 25 April. All spider webs inspected thus far have contained their remains, but a larger revelation came from some cattle troughs 10 miles from here. The surface film was full of drowned insects. The fly of St Mark is so often a corpse that you could easily imagine that its species' raison d'être was to exit life as casually as possible. Those many victims, however, hint only at the creature's astonishing abundance. For the ensuing weeks it will be probably the most numerous macro-organism in our countryside. It is not just omnipresent in its own black-flecked shape. It's also there in transmuted form in our first swarm of swifts. It occurred to me that the swifts' entire return to temperate Europe may be timed to coincide with this fly's emergence. The starling chicks I hear wheezing in our eaves are presumably fuelling their infant squall with the blood and body of St Mark. Everything that eats flesh, you imagine, is present at the same life-enhancing feast: swifts, hobbies, gulls, starlings, bats, wasps. St Mark's flies speak of the unitary condition of nature. They need soil and vegetation in which to grow, but sky in which to breed. They are made of earth but, in turn, they are consumed and converted into heaven-dwelling birds. Life in Britain is one continuous holy cloth, or perhaps – given that we are among the most nature-depleted countries – holey cloth. Yet our government, surely among the most deliberately anti-nature since the second world war with its new planning regulations, has just inverted this understanding of the living world. It has reduced the outdoor realm to a between-the-ears process, where it has been chopped into little parcels and all parts have been made equal. So a 500-year-old yew or oak can be judged the same, or compensated for, with 500 plastic-wrapped saplings. It has reduced life to the idea of a machine to meet a numerical sense of national wellbeing, invariably expressed as 'economic growth'. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Country diary: I can hear the badgers, I can smell the badgers – but where are they?
I've been waiting for a good time to go badger watching at an old, old sett I've known for 20 years. I'm hoping for a first sight of this year's cubs, which begin to emerge around now. An evening after rain is best, before the nettles get too high. In damp ground, the worms might be up and badgers love to forage those, but we haven't had significant rain in weeks. Tonight will have to do. I settle against the broad, rough trunk of a favourite oak. The evening is perfectly still, the sun has gone down in a deepening blue sky. The flattened state of the bluebells indicates that the cubs have been out and playing. Housework has also taken place, as two piles of bedding lie airing between the sett entrances, waiting to be taken in. They are mostly composed of wild garlic leaves that double up as fly repellent. The sett has a clean, in-use smell: the cool cathedral scent of scraped chalk earth, the green bacon whiff of claw-shredded elder bark, a warm muskiness. I am relieved to see the sett still active, though badgers do well here. The birdsong falls away until there is just a mistle thrush and an up-late cuckoo. Pheasants roost noisily in a chorus of stuttered coughing, then all is quiet but for tawny owls. Soon enough the noises begin: a bumping underfoot, a subterranean knocking-about. Muffled whickering, nasal growls. It is almost too dark to see. My night-adjusted vision is making tree branches imprint on the sky like blinked lightning, and the pale patches of lichen on tree trunks seem to detach themselves and float. An image of a badger's striped face seems to appear – but turns out to be the twin flowering stems of yellow archangel. From down below, more bumps and bickers. Without the promise of worms to feed on, I don't think the cubs are allowed out to play. Finally, a sow badger emerges, shakes off a bloom of chalk dust and trots off into the darkness as if she's escaped, with one shoe on, from the debris of a party. • Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
The Guardian
06-05-2025
- The Guardian
Country diary: I inhaled a whiff of wolf urine – it was the true essence of wilderness
This place, which straddles two eastern European countries, has a reputation as the continent's last primeval forest – a glimpse of a world before it was smothered in ourselves and the homolith. To arrive at night is to tunnel through trees for mile after mile without end. And this, you realise, represents a fraction of the whole. Because beyond the border the Belorussian section of Białowieża is larger still. Overall, it extends to 149,000 hectares, but there is a further buffer forest of 131,000 hectares. To imagine this whole: take all of the RSPB's reserves in Britain, place them contiguously, then lay them end to end with all the 46 Wildlife Trusts' reserves and cover it largely in trees. They would still be less in area than Białowieża. You'd still only have an impression of it in a generic sense, of seeing it in the dark, so to speak. It is during the day that you can separate the trees from the wood, when the wealth of detail and experience is so great it's almost overwhelming; such as the black woodpecker drinking sap at the tree base and flying off with its forest‑piercing kreee-kreee call; the male bison locking horns, their breath thickened around them as musty clouds in the sub-zero morning air; the sight of a pine marten caught in a shaft as an arc of glistening fur against the forest shadow. I couldn't capture Białowieża as just one image, but maybe I can render the magic of the place as a smell. While we were inside the national park's pristine core, our obligatory guide noticed a raised post, and pointed out that such sites are used by wolves for scent-marking. There are five packs in the Polish side. With leaves he mopped up the moisture and held it for us to experience. Wolf piss possesses the most powerful natural odour I think I've ever encountered, and I only wish I could include a scratch-and-sniff with this column to convey it. Weirdly, however, noxious as it was, once the withdrawal instinct was done, an equally compelling reaction ensued: to sample it again. It was the stench of wolves, but it was the perfume of European wilderness, (largely) unmediated by our species. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
The Guardian
05-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
A good year for apple blossom
The alarm call of a blackbird makes me look up in time to see a magpie hurtle into the branches of the apple tree in our garden, hotly pursued by two adult blackbirds in no mood to compromise. They shriek and display their displeasure until, after a minute or so, it gives up and flaps away over the hedge towards the fields. The blackbirds have many scores to settle with the much larger predator, most recently the attack on their nest where a magpie made off with at least one egg – which I found empty shortly afterwards on the path, eaten rather than hatched. In the collision with the tree, the magpie causes a flurry of falling blossom, a pale starburst of petals against the darker foliage, but most of the recently emerged flowers are still firmly rooted to the boughs. It is a good year for blossom – very welcome after last spring when Storm Kathleen ripped the flowers away before pollination had taken place, leaving us with our poorest apple crop for many years. I look with fresh eyes at the apple tree. Now grown to three times my height, it bears little resemblance to the bare-rooted stem I brought home about 30 years ago. I'd found it languishing in a high street store that has long since vanished, and bought it on a whim for a penny under two pounds. Planted to fill a gap at the edge of the garden, it largely had to fend for itself – except when an early storm knocked it out of kilter and I propped it to avoid collapse. It leans outwards to this day, but has grown into a fine, strong tree and is usually a good cropper. Bumblebees, mostly common carders yellow with pollen, fossick around the blossoms in the warmth of the sun, and hopefully this will translate into a good harvest for both eating and cider making. Later, in the twilight with a gentle breeze beginning to stir the leaves, the flowers shed a drizzle of petals – while the male blackbird, having recovered its composure, delivers an evening song from a high branch. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
The Guardian
03-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Country diary: Lambing season is in full swing
Lambing each spring is a time when I find myself going round and round in circles. At least three times a day I do a lap of the farm, checking on the yows and lambs, making notes about which have lambed and how many lambs they have had. I'm also troubleshooting; looking out for lambs that are cold, hungry or inactive, and for yows on the verge of lambing. Just a flick of the tail or turn of the head can give it away. It's also time to notice things: hawthorn beginning to blossom, bluebells looking like they might flower soon, two noisy oystercatchers, a buzzard circling overhead. It's an active world and I'm not just an observer, I'm part of the whole landscape and ecosystem. This year I'm lambing 178 yows, and so far 79 have lambed. Nearly halfway there. We normally scan them, but aren't this year as we planned not to give any additional feed to those expecting twins. That's because the twins were a little big last year, and we are moving to an entirely grass-fed regenerative system. So far they are lambing at about 125%, so one in four is having twins. I've had to intervene in two out of the 79 births. One lamb has died, two yows have rejected their lambs, and one was convinced to mother its own by bringing them into the shed and putting them in a small pen together. The whole process from first birth to last takes about 25 days. This week a farming friend died suddenly at the age of 59. I haven't given myself time to think about this until today, and suddenly, overcome, I sit on the hillside and lie down in the grass. I see tiny violets around me and the view of the valley below. As well as being connected to nature, we farmers are connected to each other. I think about those who lambed here before me, and those who will hopefully come after. A peregrine soars overhead, and as I watch it I'm reminded of my friend singing his favourite hymn, How Great Thou Art: 'When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur, and hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze'. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount
