The best wine since incarceration

The woodpecker jinked across the lawn like an especially cunning partridge. Its goal was a skilfully constructed bird table with wire surrounds, to provide safe feeding for finches, tits, woodpeckers and other small birds, while denying access to corvids, grey squirrels and raptors. A sparrow hawk regularly sweeps across the garden. The ‘sparrow’ element is misleading. This is an avian pocket-battleship, with not a molecule wasted in the pursuit of lethality. Sparrows? I have seen it feasting on a pigeon.

It is a pity that real-life nature offers so little scope for sentimentality. Magpies are handsome creatures, but if you want songbirds, you will need a Larsen trap to control numbers. Cats seem at least as worthy of sentiment as dogs or children. But the domestic moggy is birdsong’s great enemy. Tom Kitten may have grown up fearing rats. The same was unlikely to apply to birds. Although Kenneth Grahame and Beatrix Potter are enchanting reading for littlies, a lot of grown-ups take it all literally. The Wind in the Willows lulls many a simpleton in the direction of the League Against Cruel Sports, or even hunt saboteuring. Mr Badger — ‘I’ll larn them’ — is John Bull in black and white stripes, but actual badgers spread diseases, cause accidents by undermining paths and fields, and are far more destructive than the weasels who persecuted Toad. They need culling. So do rabbits. ‘Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter — jolly tasty they were too.’ That is a much better fate than myxomatosis.

We were discussing all this in Dorset, celebrating the end of lockdown. Often redolent of scrumpy and blue vinny, Dorset place names are an enchantment. They range from the respectable — Beaminster, Kimmeridge, Lulworth — to the comical — Gussage St Michael — to belly–laugh vulgarity: Shaggs and the various settlements in the Piddle Valley.