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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
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
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Country diary: The sizzling sound of ants en masse
You can hear when the wood ants wake up from hibernation. Heaps of soil, loose sticks and pine needles that lay inert all winter start seething with a continual, multidirectional flow of insects, whose footfalls make an incessant sizzling sound. Exmoor's woodlands are ideal for southern wood ants (Formica rufa), the largest of the four British wood ant species. The sandy, sunny path at Webber's Post above Horner is lined with nests, the biggest of which is a sprawling dun mound a metre high and nearly six metres across, with a network of hidden underground tunnels and chambers beneath. It's possible that the whole stretch is really one linked colony divided into various nodes, each occupied by hundreds of thousands of workers and several queens. Many of the nests are built against the trunks of fallen Scots pine trees – wood ants use an anti-microbial mixture of conifer resin and formic acid to kill harmful bacteria and fungal spores. On hot, dry days, active heaps emit a vinegary smell reminiscent of old chip wrappings. Much is made of these ants' supposed aggression – and yes, they will defend themselves if threatened. Come too close and they will sit up on their hind legs, cock their abdomens forward and jet repeated, stinging streams of acid from their venom glands. But behave with respect, and they will ignore you, intent on their own purposes of gathering food and nest materials. They are beautiful to watch, their red thoraxes slightly translucent like beads of scuffed amber, glowing against the banded black silk of their huge abdomens. Broad, apple-pip heads, with large, slightly bulging eyes, taper down to long, segmented antennae and massive mandibles for biting, hooking and lifting. Each ant can move up to a hundred times its own weight. These colonies are busy raising males and new queens from eggs laid a few weeks ago. On warm, still mornings towards the end of this month, they will emerge with glittering wings and take to the air to mate. The males will die soon afterwards, but successful mated queens can live for a decade or more. 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
22-04-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Country diary: Sunset, midges and then the bats arrive
We've sneaked back to the office after hours. My partner has been working late here recently and has promised me that if I sit by the window as the sun sets, I'll see something special. Our office rental is on the top floor of an old Midlands shoe factory. From our window, we can see half a dozen other Victorian relics, some derelict, with buddleia growing through the broken glass. They squat over a maze of cramped terraces: warm red bricks, slate roofs, drooping washing lines and ornate chimney pots. My high-up view slowly fills with golden rectangles as people switch on their lights. A bright, almost full moon begins to rise. Midges buzz and bounce against the window, drawn to the glow and, ah – could that be a clue? It is almost dark and then … there … there again! Two tiny bats, common pipistrelle, most likely, our smallest and most common species. Darting silhouettes, iconic in shape. They're so fast I have to relax into my peripheral vision to try to follow their erratic flight above the car park. Every time I think they're going one way, off they dart somewhere else, shearing up and away from walls and windows just in time. I think of all the midges disappearing into their bellies – they each weigh barely more than a 20p coin yet can pack away 3,000 insects a night. Who knew I had such neighbours? I can never get over the supreme pleasure of urban wildlife. Of course, it would be easy to see bats in the countryside, but in urban sprawl, it's easier to miss things. You have to really pay attention, to look up from the humdrum grind of daily life. It feels like we've passed some secret test to be here, witnessing. We watch them until it's too dark to see, then creep home, listening out for echolocation clicks, but I'm far too middle-aged to hear them. I fall asleep, still seeing those dark shapes zipping back and forth. My whole neighbourhood feels bigger, wilder, and I do, a little, too. Josie's new book, Letters From Wonderland, is out on 5 June 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
