Country Diary: Tetbury

The ongoing BBC2 evening programme Springwatch sings a delightfully upbeat song on the status of wildlife in the UK, which is, I suppose, quite easy if you base consideration on an organic farm in Devon and a lightly populated Hebridean island at the southern and warmer end of the chain. I applaud the program. Sadly, other experience of wildlife in the UK could suggest a story of continuous fallback in the face of the activities of the human population.

Having observed a new colonial nesting site of sand martins in a low sandy cliff within a walk of the Breton fastness, I asked if anyone could match this sighting in the UK. A deafening silence was the answer. Readers certainly proved their observation of the natural world last summer when I asked a matching question about lizards. Reports flooded in, so I have to conclude that sand martins visiting these isles for the summer breeding season are not doing as well as their cousins who stop at the French coast.

This was not a surprise, since most of the birds coming from Africa for our summer season seem not to do so well as they did in former years. Yes, the swifts and swallows swoop and screech over the garden, but I have failed in my efforts to encourage house martins to accept a nesting ledge on this house, and the one regular nesting site I knew, high under the eaves on the back of our daughter's house in north Oxford, seems to have been abandoned. An ill-timed house painting last summer disturbed the nesting birds at the worst time, with young in the nest, and they have not returned. They may still do so, but benign neglect is all they can hope for there. The wilful destruction of a house martins' nest on a seaside cottage in southern Cornwall, which I witnessed several summers ago, remains in my mind as a most disgraceful human act against the natural world.