And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead Pheasants

I gazed out of my kitchen window distracted from washing-up by the death-throes of a pheasant hen. It made no sound. Lying on the earth near a pile of rotting aspen shoots, it arched its neck right back until its head disappeared behind a wing, its claws jerking and scrabbling for a while then pausing as it lay still but for a shallow pulse in its breast. There was no obvious wound that might have caused its demise. It could have contracted a disease of the gut which apparently they are susceptible to, or maybe it was simply starving since their feeding stations have now been removed to the other side of the valley, where the shooting will begin in October.

Another bird, a cock, approached the twitching hen and began pecking at its back. I banged on the window and it stopped and peered at me. I banged again and it ran off up the slope, only to return a minute later to continue its torment. A third knock had little effect, but by now the poor hen seemed to have died. The male pheasant enjoyed eating its feathers, plucking them out one by one and gulping them down. Another hen wandered close but contented itself with pecking at a shrub, perhaps aware that the cock would chase it off if it tried to join in, or maybe it didn't share its taste in cannibalism. Rather than having to witness the slow consumption and decomposition of the corpse over the next few days, I put on my gloves and carried it over to the track entrance where I tend to leave the bodies for collection, one or two a day being the current mortality rate.

Apart from dead pheasant clearing, my other tasks at the moment include Christmas tree clearing (the ones I felled last week, from which I've been hacking the branches off with a billhook), couch-grass clearing whose dense white root networks occupy areas where I want to create raised beds for veg growing, and tree stump clearing. These stumps, perhaps forty or so of varying diameters, are the remains of trees felled to make way for the electric lines, installed eight years ago right through the centre of my land. Like the couch-grass the stumps and their roots are just where I want to be growing vegetables. Having dug up six of the small ones armed only with a spade, a fork and a pickaxe, it was clear that I would be here until my dying days digging the other  ones out.  There's a time and a place for fossil-fuel power and in the absence of a willing chain-gang, I've decided now is the time and place.

I was tipped off by the pheasant keeper that the son of the lady at the petrol station down the road has a digger, so I enquired there and got his number. He was willing to do it but was booked up for the next couple of weeks, so suggested I try a chap who lives at Groes-Llwyd (Grey Cross in English), a house just up the road from me. There I went and met Greg*, a builder in his thirties who was friendly enough considering he knew some stranger had been living in a caravan down below the road for a few months. He came the next evening to have a look and I showed him round. The land used to be part of Groes-Llwyd Farm, stretching up the hill above the road, and his house was the old farmhouse. The previous owners had sold off most of the land; when Greg and his partner bought the house two years ago it came with just two acres, which they keep a horse on.  He offered me a few tonnes of free horse manure which I gladly accepted!

So we agreed that he'll bring his five-and-a-half tonne digger (the small one) on Thursday evening to have a crack at it. It's going to make a bit of a mess but I can't wait to be rid of these stumps. Step by step progress is being made.



April 2013



Now



*Not his actual name.