The weather remained mild and settled for most of the month with a visit from Storm Arwen in the last week, which devastated the North of England and Scotland but barely touched us here on The Lizard. The Autumn colours began to emerge but never completed the full fiery display. A few mornings of light frost down in the valley of the field but always by midday the sun was warming us and bathing the fields in bright light and long, long shadows. Red Admirals were still around and sunbathing on the leaves. Sunsets were numerous and particularly stunning, with burning reds, oranges and pinks colouring the evening skies.
The Juniper trees have grown well but no berries have ever appeared. The sweet chestnuts were also absent. Traveller’s Joy was in full view, still draping itself around the various hedgerow plants and bushes. The mushrooms were having a field day, apparently this month has seen a bumper crop everywhere, the warm and moist conditions being perfect for their growth. In the garden there were still the blooms of pink roses, scarlet salvias and orange calendulas. The blackberries were still ripening on the vine and showing signs of confusion in their growth pattern; new flowers were appearing with both closed buds and open petals on display.
A stoat was spotted on top of a hedge, looking like it was playing around and having fun – more likely it was doing the dancing to confuse its prey, one of their standard tricks. Several sightings of foxes; I encountered one, still as a statue, as it watched me plod up the hill getting ever nearer, we were eyeballing each other before it bounded off across the field. Fieldfares and redwings have arrived. Redwings can be seen and heard in the field in the evening and the fieldfares can be spotted lining the bare branches of the trees. The noisiest creatures have been the owls, from early evening to late at night, they have called out, screamed back, had a bit of a chat back and forth, a bit more screaming and so it went on, and on… I love to hear them, but I also like to sleep at night.
The most frequent and numerous visitors this month have been the pheasants. No surprise as November is part of the shooting season and many of the birds have escaped, either from the pens or in the process of a shoot. In amongst the common bird, we regularly catch sight of both the white and the black pheasants. It got me thinking about the history of the pheasant – a non native bird – and the world of breeding to shoot. The “shooting season is carefully regulated to allow populations to flourish, breed and move to different areas to feed and overwinter”, a description from ‘shooting uk’ that almost sounds caring; allowing populations to flourish, to feed etc but the sole purpose for this ‘carefully regulated’ system is to have 1000’s of birds to slaughter. According to Savill’s Shoot Benching Survey in 2018, (and yes this blog has been taking me into some strange places), only 48% of birds make it to the table. That’s a lot of birds killed for fun and in the light of the increasing use of food banks, this all begins to look quite obscene.
Pheasants have been in written documents since the days of King Harold. From the Norman times laws have been enacted to protect pheasants, in order for them to be shot by specific people, (the rich and the clergy), in a particular season. However, the birds were shot for food and on the menu of many medieval banquets. But by the 1600’s, ‘show hunts’ had become popular on the continent as a demonstration of wealth and power and were the inspiration behind the ‘battue’ in Britain, that’s the driving of game by the beaters, towards the shooters. By the 1840’s the demand for these shoots had increased, partly due to faster firing guns and by the encouragement of this ‘sport’ from the Prince Consort. (Thanks mate). Birds were then imported from Japan, China and Afghanistan and were shot in their thousands. Today in the UK alone, 47 million pheasants, (plus 10 million red-legged partridge) are released into the countryside to be shot. (RSPB)
Aside from this annual slaughter, other mammals pay the price of this form of caged hunting. “1.7 million wild and domestic animals are caught in gamekeepers’ snares in Britain every year” and “250,000 of the animals caught in snares – classified as ‘other’ by the government – include cats and dogs, as well as otters and deer” There’s more; did you know that three quarters of the cost of obtaining a gun licence is paid for by the taxpayer? In 2016, that amounted to £19 million. To summarise; we are giving handouts to rich people who pay a lot of money to kill a load of ‘wild’ birds. (All information courtesy of Huffington Post/E. Goncalves).
In amongst this melting pot of weirdness, check out the legal status of the pheasant. They are ‘livestock’ when they are bred and reared in captivity and therefore have an owner. Just before the shooting season, they are ‘released’ and then become ‘wild’ birds, which is very convenient as ‘wild’ birds can be shot in the open season. Being ‘wild’ means it has no owner and therefore nobody can be held accountable for any damage a pheasant has caused. This includes the ruin of vegetable plots, annihilating fields of cereal and causing road accidents, some of which have been fatal. You might be forgiven for thinking this is a ‘legal situation which was written specifically to protect the interests of the shooting industry’ (markavery.info). One final bit of the jigsaw will confirm that suspicion. At the end of each season, gamekeepers can round up any ‘wild’ pheasants who have survived the annual kill, bring them back into captivity, hey presto they are now ‘livestock’ again, for breeding purposes, only to be released later as ‘wild’. Mark Avery has named this situation ‘Schrodinger’s pheasant’, nicely summing up the ludicrous nature of these laws. (wildjustice.co.uk). Defra has just announced the great news that native wild birds can now be shot to defend non native gamebirds – for the rich to shoot. It beggars belief and that’s before you get started on the damage it does to the soil,the native plants and the vast quantity of shot left on the ground to be ingested by other animals, and the dumping of dead birds.
A poll in 2018 (YouGov) showed that 69% of UK citizens want to ban the shooting of birds for sport, at the same time the Welsh Government put an end to all shoots on public land. Discontent with this industry is growing but has always existed. In 1895 AJ Stuart-Wortley published this piece in his book ‘Shooting the Pheasant’.
“Away with the degenerate class of humanity which delights to nurture this exotic, unnecessary creature, and having done so, let loose all the predatory and bloodthirsty instincts of savage man and butcher it wholesale! Away with this dainty; let us have food, money and land for the people, and be rid of the idle vicious class who, living in their sybarite fashion on the rack-rented peasantry, consume ill gotten wealth in such debasing pursuits as fox hunting and pheasant shooting!”
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
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