Country diary: Like wrecked prizes, the body parts of pheasants litter the landscape | Nicola Chester

North Wessex Downs, Hampshire: Predators are increasingly drawn by the shooting-season escapees. But, miserably, other ground-nesting birds and their eggs are being taken, tooAway from where arable fields have enriched the down to coarse grasses, meadow anthills are floriferous pillows, pimpling the smoothness. On them, strange, wrecked prizes are arranged: eggshells; the light, keeled sternum of a pheasant; a stripped, raw?red bone; a jewel-bright French partridge's head, topping the beads of its neck vertebrae like an umbrella handle, or a brooch, pretty and gruesome.As far as the eye can see, shooting estate borders shooting estate. Skylarks, linnets, yellowhammers and whitethroats sing, but by far the most numerous birds are pheasants, followed by corvids; and this year's gamebirds haven't yet been released for winter's shooting. Continue reading...