Letters to the Editor - February 2008

Formidable challenge ahead

Shaun Spiers writes eloquently about preserving and enhancing the beauty of the countryside (December). Who could disagree? Quoting from his article: ‘wildflowers, birds, insects and animals ...will have returned ...’ and farmland will still dominate the countryside’. Are these two statements compatible?

For many years (I am over eighty) I have walked, at times, in beautiful countryside passing sanitised fields and trimmed hedgerows (if they have not been dug up) and seen very little of the wildlife which was there once. In contrast, I have walked through some of what I suppose the writer means by ‘inhospitable prairie’ and ‘trodden on by hardly anyone. Inhospitable to whom? Birds, insects, animals? Or just man? Why may they be there? Because their territories have been ‘trodden on by hardly anyone’ and there is no sanitised farming.

Walking in Sussex and many visits to the Lakes, Pennines and Scotland’s Highlands and Islands have convinced me that more people means less wildlife. I have watched and been watched by much more wildlife on a hill in Glen Garry, well away from the beaten track, than I have seen on popular hills like Ben Nevis and Ben Lomond.

Wildlife does not see countryside as we do. I have walked in ‘empty countryside’, wasteland with buddleia crowded with butterflies, bramble used by birds particularly in spring. I have paused by a pool flanked partly by a rubbish tip as a kingfisher perched on a rusty trolley dived and caught a fish. He or she was not bothered by the unsightly tip.

The challenge is formidable: how to reconcile beautiful farmland public access with a mutable environment for wildlife.

Michael Barnard, Lewes, Sussex

Proven innocent

For the last thirty-six years the badger has been blamed for being the main cause of bovine TB breakdowns in cattle herds. But two events have by serendipity demonstrated that this is simply wrong. The idea that badgers are the main reservoir of TB has come about rather oddly because supposedly cattle were NOT the infectious source of TB for other cattle or badgers. But that idea has arisen precisely because annual cattle testing has been removing cases before they reach the active spreader stage, and also, so early that in two out of every three herds it was not possible to confirm TB (no visible TB lesions in lungs, and too few bacilli in tissue samples).

The 2001 Foot and Mouth disaster meant no cattle testing so was a unique one-off ‘experiment’ which allowed cattle to reach the infectious stage (with confirmed lesions) and hence new herds doubled and cases rose three- or four-fold. The current cattle TB crisis is hence via cattle spread. And incidentally, with a doubling in TB levels in badgers by spillover FROM cows. Badgers are victim not villain.

Finally, the June report on the seven-year Krebs badger culling trial found that out of 11,000 badgers culled, only 1,515 had TB, and nearly half the 51 proactive culls had fifteen or fewer TB badgers per 100 sq km. So they cannot remotely be seen as a major cause of anything. Alas, farmers and vets, and indeed also badger scientists, are still insisting badgers are the problem. A case of not seeing the wood for the trees, or being blinded by pseudo-science.

Martin Hancox, Stroud, Glos

Wonderful Mother Nature

The letter (December) in which Mr Harris says that foxgloves grew on felled woodland reminded me of something which has puzzled me for many years. In 1941 near our farm in Warwickshire an area of mature oak trees was felled. It was about three and a half acres, and on sloping ground. Teams of horses pulled the trees to a central point. Next spring every groove made by the logs was thick with red poppies and charlock, the flowers only growing on the land disturbed by the dragged logs. The oak trees must have been there for hundreds of years. As a young boy I was curious and asked everyone how the seeds had got there. The only answer I got was ‘they’ve always been there ...waiting’.

In 1958 I began farming in Shropshire and adjoining my land was a seventy-acre wood which had been felled in the First World War and was untouched since. The scrub was all cleared by hand, ready for replanting. The next year twenty acres was covered with wild strawberries which had not been there before. They were so thick that from several hundred yards away they appeared as a red glow as the fruit opened.

Do any readers know how long seeds can remain viable. Nature has always fascinated me and I find it wonderful what she can do – given half a chance.

Barry Jasper, Ludlow

My perfumed garden

I have a specimen of the Balsam Poplar, a close relative of the black poplar (December), in my garden. In spring when its buds are opening, they are coated with a sticky balsam which exudes a strong sweet scent. For perhaps two weeks my garden smells like a perfume factory. My neighbour remarks on it every year. The tree owes its existence to pure chance. I’m nearly ninety-two but have always been a horseman. Riding out on a fine spring morning half-a-century ago I was struck by a lovely scent and traced it to a nearby tree. I broke off a twig and planted it. Now I have a fine tree thirty to forty feet high.

Jim Randall, Chesham, Bucks

Editor’s note: Henry Harris, of Totnes, has drawn our attention to Arbor Day in the village of Aston on Clun, near Craven Arms in Shropshire. Each June villagers celebrate the wedding in 1786 of the local squire with a day of pageantry and fun and by dressing a black poplar tree in flags.

Encounter with odd bod

Elise Dickenson’s remarks on albinism (November) reminds me of a remarkable example of the contrary melanism that I encountered more than sixty years ago on the beach promenade at Ayr, Scotland. A woman was feeding the gulls and one of them was as black as a crow. Several people suggested it was a crow until it was pointed out that the crow’s beak and wing structure are totally different to those of the gulls, and this bird showed its physique was clearly that of the gulls. I returned to the prom for several days but did not again see this ‘odd bod’.

Graham Kirkpatrick, Tavistock, Devon

Wherefore art thou...partridge?

I’ve never read such analytical twaddle (December) regarding the ‘Partridge in a pear-tree’. The song is from the Elizabethan period and Franco Zefferelli’s superbly-produced film Romeo and Juliet opens with a scene showing Romeo, holding a sprig of juniper, going to meet Juliet. In those days it was custom to present your beloved with juniper.

That long-forgotten custom is clearly explained in the last line of the song ... ‘and a part of a juniper tree’. Incidentally, four colley birds should be calling birds.

Graham Walker, Leominster, Hereford

Vitamins at vital time of year

I was rather disappointed by the small number – twenty – of replies to my ‘Bread and Cheese’ survey, but one very interesting letter came from Gill Coles in south Wales, who says: “My husband can remember the men at work (a brickworks) putting in hawthorn buds and leaves with their bread and cheese when they were having lunch, probably in the 1950s and 60s.” Her husband adds that his grandfather, who worked in a granary, also did this, as did some farmworkers.

This backs up my own guess that ‘bread and cheese’ added vitamins to the early spring diet which must have been lacking in fresh greens. Some people just ate the buds; others the fully opened leaves. In south Wales they were sometimes known as ‘bread, cheese and beer’. A letter from Worcestershire mentioned that old people used to chew a new shoot of hawthorn to cure toothache. It’s difficult to draw conclusions but the main areas seemed to be south Wales and the Midlands.

As for my other query ... ‘Jacks’ was played in Somerset, Surrey, Yorkshire, Essex and Northamptonshire; ‘Dibs’ in Hampshire; ‘Five stones’ in Lancashire; and ‘Snobs’ in Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire.

Pat Jenkins, Alton, Hants

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