A Job for All Seasons

by Phyllida Barstow

  Luckily the storms were only a temporary blip and temperatures soon recovered, but it showed how careful one had to be in timing the once-yearly shearing in order to avoid any possibility of frost.

  Alpacas have a life-expectation of around twenty years, much the same as a horse or cow, but although neither Meshak nor little grey Abed-Nego lived to be more than ten, in his seventeenth year Shadrach looks like a bony old man but he eats well and still enjoys life. His once-lustrous fleece has coarsened with age and is fit only for stuffing cushions nowadays, but over the years he has produced enough high-quality fibre to clothe the whole family several times over, not to mention blankets, rugs, cot-covers or anything else I had a mind to knit or crochet. Never was there such user-friendly yarn as alpaca. Devoid as it is of greasy lanolin, and beautifully clean without the chore of washing, it glides along knitting needles and leaves your hands with no sticky residue. Putting on a 2-ply alpaca sweater is like walking into a super-heated room – all warmth without weight – while 3-ply garments are, frankly, too hot to be worn indoors except in the most bitter weather.

  Yet despite his long experience of shearing, Shadrach still struggles and ‘urgles’ like a two-year-old while undergoing the annual ritual and when, out of the blue, he suddenly throws a temper tantrum directed at his current companion, the fluffy, apricot-coloured Chimborazo, his blood-curdling screams and curses are still enough to put the frighteners on anyone within earshot.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Frontier Tribes

  Forgive the ant that steals a speck of grain

  Like you, he lives with pleasure,

  Like you, he dies with pain

  Hindu proverb

  FURRED OR FEATHERED, with two legs or four, with gossamer wings, or far too many feet, or just a single foot attached to a stomach, ‘the frontier tribes’ are what I call all the unofficial, unauthorised, uninvited residents of our smallholding. One can’t say that they don’t belong here since they were certainly in residence before we arrived. Like indigenous people whom ruthless invaders have dispossessed and pushed to the land’s unproductive margins, they probably look on us as the interlopers rather than the other way round, and feel justified in mounting continual raids on our crops and livestock.

  In response we wage long-running campaigns against them which we cannot realistically hope to win, for though we have access to powerful weapons, they are many, while we are few. They are single-minded while we can devote only a small proportion of our time to repelling their attacks and, most tellingly of all, they are active in the hours of darkness while we are asleep.

  No one can deny that slugs, snails, and cabbage-white caterpillars, rabbits, mice, rats, magpies, grey squirrels, moles, crows, pheasants, foxes, badgers, deer, and all other raiders of crops and human provender have a perfect right to life, food and shelter, and I would be the last to grudge them a place on the strength if only they would limit the size of their families.

  Some hope. Sharing, abstinence and compromise never enter the calculations of frontier tribes. With them it’s kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, and in each of them the urge to procreate and fill the world with its own particular species is every bit as strong as the desire for food and shelter. If we did not keep up the struggle to whittle them down to acceptable numbers they would soon overrun the place entirely.

  Any kind of farming disturbs the balance of Nature to some degree, and we are able to call the shots only because humans are at the top of the food chain. Everything we do upsets its regular working. Every time we intervene to protect a vulnerable species or one that is useful to us, whether animal or vegetable, we disrupt the plans of another in the intricately layered pattern. Ecologically speaking, we really should not consider whether any particular creature inconveniences us, but what effect our persecution of it will have on the other links in the chain.

  Without wanting to sound too high-flown, I feel that all creation has an equal right to life, and animals cannot be blamed for following the nature they have been allotted – at least I do until the juicy, self-satisfied clucking of a magpie raiding small birds’ nests in the garden sends such liberal principles flying out of the window.

  There is something particularly sickening about seeing these strikingly handsome, bold, accomplished killers systematically working a hedgerow, terrorising chaffinches, bluetits, sparrows and blackbirds, who squawk and flutter in vain as their nestlings are dragged out and dismembered. Like Vikings stripping a settlement, back come the raiders again and again until the nest is empty, when they move on to the next. Unless one intervenes to disturb them, a whole generation of small birds can be lost.

  Magpies are clever, persistent, and extremely wary. They are under no illusions about the danger humans represent for them, and they have tried and tested ways to deal with it. When, incandescent with rage, I dash outdoors to stop the massacre of nestlings, they flip their wings and soar away to perch on a branch a hundred yards, sneering, ‘Can’t catch me.’

  I know, and they know, that they have time on their side. I have other things to do, and can’t stand guard over songbirds’ nests for long. High on the branch, the magpie presents a tempting shot, but at the merest glint on a barrel or even the stealthiest opening of an upstairs window they will double the distance between us, while still keeping watch on the vulnerable nests. The glitter of a few old CDs dangling on strings might deter them temporarily, but the ever-moving, shimmering discs might also frighten away the parent birds bringing food for the chicks.

  So what can we do? In my childhood, poison was the answer, though it now makes me shudder to think how many other creatures may have suffered horrible deaths after crunching up blown eggshells filled with yellow phosphorus paste, which we left out to tempt crows and magpies. Rodine, as that poison was called, is now illegal – and a good thing too – and instead we turn to the Larsen trap in an effort to keep magpies to a minimum.

  This ingenious device consists of a wire-mesh cage about four foot square, divided into two unequal compartments. The larger has a top-entry door covered with a piece of roofing felt to keep off rain, a solid perch, and containers for water and food. This is where the decoy bird is caged. The smaller compartment also has a top entry flap, but this is springloaded and wedged open with a collapsible perch.

  The male magpie has a strong territorial instinct and dislikes intruders on his patch, particularly in the run-up to the breeding season, so in order to lure him into the trap, you first need a live decoy, or call bird. Intensely suspicious of shiny metal or, indeed, any new equipment, he may have to be tempted for a week or more with small baits strewn casually around the general area of the Larsen before you begin placing them first on, then inside the compartment with the booby-trapped perch.

  Down Mags flutters eventually, walking back and forth on top of the cage while eyeing the bait from either side. He tries to reach it through the mesh, then hops back to the ground to pace along the side of the cage, looking for a weak place. No go. It will have to be from above. Once again he perches on the lid, ducking into the open top, but the bait is still out of reach.

  At that point – particularly if the would-be trapper is watching – instinct will very likely warn him that the whole thing is a put-up job. It may be a tiny movement inside the house that alerts him, or the semi-psychic way in which animals seem to sense the impact of a human eye. Whatever the cause, Mags decides that the tasty morsel is not worth the risk, and away he zooms to his favourite branch to think things over.

  When this happens, there is a strong temptation to go and inspect the Larsen, perhaps to replace the bait with something even more enticing, but it must be resisted. The less Mags associates the trap with human activity, the better. In fact the best strategy is probably to stop watching the trap, get into the car, and go shopping for a few hours: more than likely in your absence Mags will make another attempt on the bait and, by landing on the collapsible perch, release the springloaded door and find himself trapped.<
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  The next step is to transfer him into the more spacious next-door compartment without inadvertently letting him go. This is definitely a time to wear leather gloves. There will probably be a good deal of squawking and flapping, accompanied by some shrewd stabs with a very sharp beak, but once he is settled with water and corn he will accept the situation and hop around inspecting his new des res, while you reset the split perch and door and withdraw to a concealed vantage point a fair distance away.

  Presently another magpie will come to see what has prompted his rival to spend so long at the Larsen, and most likely the caged bird will react by hopping on and off the perch and chattering angrily at the newcomer. This is just what the doctor ordered. I have seen four magpies caught in quick succession as, one after another, they challenged the decoy and ventured on to the booby-trap. Conventional wisdom decrees that you should then knock the first decoy on the head and replace him with the latest catch, because the last thing you want is a placid, semi-tame bird who does not try to drive off intruders. Some magpies, like some old lags, prefer a sheltered cage with food and drink provided to the uncertainties of life outside.

  The best live decoy we ever had was presented to us by a judge, for whom this one bird had enticed seventeen of his mates to their doom. Judas, as we called him, was by then thoroughly accustomed to humans coming to replenish his supplies of food and water, and showed no tendency to pine. Indeed, he would greet his carer with the typical soft chuckling that so infuriates me when it signifies a raid on other birds’ nests, and I suppose it is a magpie’s way of showing pleasure. We grew quite fond of him, and he certainly earned his keep. So powerful was his attraction for other magpies that he soon notched up another nine victims in our paddock, and when at the end of the breeding season his strike-rate declined, we faced a dilemma. Glossy and plump after weeks of corn and cat-food, he looked a picture of corvid perfection. He had done everything we asked of him – and more. Surely, suggested my husband, he had earned a reprieve?

  But if we set him free to repopulate the area with his progeny, all his work – and ours – would have been in vain. Reluctantly I pronounced sentence but, rather than disposing of the corpse in the muck-heap as usual, acting on a tip from a friend we wrapped him in newspaper, popped him in a plastic bag, and put him in the deep freeze.

  Time and again that winter, as my hand quested for some fish or chops in the frosted depths, it emerged with a slim parcel which, on investigation, turned out to be Judas, and time and again I contemplated throwing the gruesome relic away. Come the following spring, however, when courting couples of magpies once again began to terrorise the garden birds, we carefully defrosted the corpse, and propped him with twigs inside the Larsen trap. Battered and dishevelled he may have been after his nine months below zero, but amazingly Judas retained his old magic. Within two hours, his corpse had attracted a strapping new magpie and then, with the decoy succession re-established, we could at last allow Judas to rest in peace.

  If magpies are the most rapacious of the avian frontier tribes, in terms of wanton destruction, woodpigeons run them close. The vegetable garden is a very important part of any smallholding, and although ours measures no more than an eighth of an acre, it provides far more food than all the ground dedicated to livestock, and inevitably attracts the envious attention of every non-human resident, official and unofficial.

  The horses and sheep eye up the flourishing greenstuff surrounded by neatly-mown paths every time they pass that way, hoping that someone has left the gate open. Partial as they are to root vegetables, the sheep wouldn’t mind a nibble of the parsnips, turnips and carrots, either, and the chickens long to scratch up the seedbeds. For this reason we keep it strongly fenced, with rabbit-wire dug in below ground level, and ordinary wire-netting to a height of seven foot. Nevertheless, with a wood above and a spinney below, it is still vulnerable to attack from the air.

  It may be delightful to hear the gentle croo-crooing of woodpigeons: ‘Where’s your shoooes, Betty? Your blue shoooes, Betty?’ emanating from their hidden roosts among the leaves of nearby lime trees as one digs and sows and picks and weeds the vegetables, but the moment the coast is clear they seize their chance to launch daring raids on fruit-bushes, brassica, legumes and even well-netted strawberries before retreating, butter-wouldn’t-melt, to their shady perches.

  The woodpigeon, Columba palumbus, is a very different character from his relation the carrier pigeon, or rock dove, Columba livia. Not for Woody the heroics of Cher Ami, who carried a dispatch above the enemy lines in the First World War, and was awarded the Dickin Medal – the animals’ VC – for delivering its tattered remains despite his wounds; or GI Joe, his doughty successor in World War II, who brought news that British troops were occupying an Italian town which the Allies were just about to bomb. Nor does he feel any urge to carry messages between New Zealand and the Great Barrier Reef, which the aptly-named Velocity, star of the Pigeon Post, traversed at the astonishing average speed of 125km per hour.

  Far from it. While Columba livia is a sleek athlete who watches his waistline and performs amazing feats of endurance over great distances (and is fully protected by law), our friend Woody prefers to hang around at home, raising up to four broods in a single season, and eating like there’s no tomorrow. It is hardly surprising that he tastes so good, since he feasts on a wide range of crops, picking out the most succulent and best of each. He is an early riser, and first light will reveal him snacking away on young cabbages or peas; just a nibble here, a peck there, and away he goes before the irate gardener is even dressed, let alone armed. Like deer, he spoils more than he eats, ignoring tough outer leaves, pecking right into the heart of brassica, or nipping off seedling legumes so that they wither and die.

  When it comes to fruit, he is equally selective. Not for him the acid tang of gooseberries, but black, white and redcurrant bushes draw him like a magnet, and he will stuff his crop with raspberries until his neck looks deformed. In the same way cherries – just before they are fully ripe – are a particular favourite, and a peck into a plum will ensure that wasps can hollow out the rest, to make it unfit for humans. I have never seen a pigeon attacking our mulberries, which is strange, but perhaps he finds them too tart for his taste. Ripening figs, on the other hand, suffer the same fate as plums: a couple of stabbing pecks into their rich, juicy middles, and the remains left to the wasps.

  Protecting our favourite fruits of the earth against woodpigeons demands much effort and ingenuity. There is no way we can net every tree or cover the whole vegetable garden, so it is more a question of devising spot protection for particularly vulnerable plants and crops. The trouble is, Woody is a shrewd bird. He grows wise to each deterrent in turn, and works out how to circumvent it.

  Fine black cotton strung between hazel pea-sticks is effective for a time, because a pigeon dislikes colliding with the near-invisible barrier as he glides in to land. The drawback from the gardener’s point of view is that long streamers of sagging cotton looped across the seed-bed make hoeing and weeding difficult, and close inspection impossible. Thus you may soon find that the crop so carefully protected from pigeons has been eaten by slugs instead.

  Again, the flashing discs of old CDs have a mildly deterrent effect, though they add nothing to the beauty of the garden; and a gas-gun set to go off at irregular intervals will disperse avian raiders in a satisfactory hurry – until they realise that its bark is worse than its bite. An old-fashioned scarecrow, realistically dressed in gardening clothes and leaning on a fork, may keep birds at bay for a few days until some bold spirit decides that he makes a handy perch.

  It is the old story: for crop protection, as for so many other rural chores, the farmers and smallholders of yesteryear had the best answer – while Third Worlders struggling to make a living from the land still do. Instead of sending small children to school at break of day, they are supplied with a bite for lunch, a stick and possibly a dog, and expected to spend the hours between dawn and sunset
guarding the family’s livestock and crops from anyone or anything minded to destroy them. How much healthier, more useful and character-building than sitting all day in a classroom! In our country, alas, there’s no way now of turning the clock back, but as I survey the ruins of a row of peas, onions plucked from the soil, or a plum-tree despoiled of its fruit, I can’t help regretting the March of Progress.

  In my eyes, foxes resemble the Afghan tribes who caused such uneasiness to our ancestors on the Raj’s North-West Frontier: feared, admired, but never, never to be trusted. They are highly skilled killers, bold, resourceful, and patient in pursuit of their prey, and they have powers of endurance even beyond those of a pack of hounds. I have seen a hard-pressed fox, confronted by a river, whip round and snake through his pursuers and the horsemen behind, to get clean away before the hounds could lift their heads and turn. I would almost swear that Charlie (as he is familiarly known) actually ran over the hounds’ backs, but so swift was the manoeuvre that I may have imagined this.

  Despite non-retractable claws, he can jump and climb nearly as well as a cat, tiptoe along rafters or roof-ridges to take roosting birds, and squeeze through the smallest aperture of a hen-house. Any weak spot in a poultry-keeper’s defences will be found and ruthlessly exploited, with his trademark calling-card of a neat dropping with a cheeky twist at the point, deposited nearby to make sure you know he has passed that way.

  Or you may be lucky enough to see him hunting field-mice, poised in balletic alertness, sharp nose pointed groundward, ears keenly pricked, ready to pounce when he detects the least movement in the grass. A vertical spring, a sharp prod of that needle nose into the ground, and then a rapid snap-snap of his lean jaws before he bolts it down.