Country diary: There's fox blood on the track

Inkpen, North Wessex Downs: Even though there are no pheasants to protect this year, it appears the old response of predator control remainsThere have been such heavy dewfalls these last mornings, I could scoop a glass to drink. It's a phrase I hear around this time every year. But this autumn the woods and fields are strangely quiet. There is no swish and crack of beaters' flags, no trill, no whoops or hollers. No encouragement of dogs, with a "git in, git on" through the low, thorny coverts of brambles, to run the pheasants to a flushing point, where they take to the air above the guns. The estate we live on is not having a shoot this year, or next, and the gamekeeper has been let go, leaving his tied cottage behind.After a century of the shoot, there is a palpable holding of breath across the landscape. Not a relaxing, yet, but the days are at least not bookended by the throaty crowing of thousands upon thousands of released pheasants, reverberating off the hills. The boom of military guns on Salisbury Plain 20 miles away is not preceded by a chorus of birds "cocking up" as the soundwaves reach them seconds before us. Continue reading...