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Episodes
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In today's increasingly urbanised and digital society, young people are more disconnected from nature and the countryside than ever before. But in the absence of any kind of national plan to re-engage them with wildlife and ecosystems, how can parents and caregivers encourage kids to take an interest in the natural world, and what are the pitfalls to watch out for?
George Browne and Marcus Janssen discuss how they have shared their love of fieldsports with their children, and how this has fostered a love of nature in them. They swap theories about the right approaches - especially with very young kids - as well as their respective successes and the times when things have not gone according to plan.LinksSubscribe to Scribehound
Marcus Janssen - The Joy and the Drama... but Mostly the Drama
Richard Negus - Crafting a Future: the Need for Rural Apprenticeships
Roger Morgan-Grenville - Less Serengeti, more Sheffield: combating nature illiteracy
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What does a country boy and angler do on holiday when heās left his rods at home and is reading a book by Hunter S.Thompson? The answer is to reflect on really unimportant things in life, like why are cricket and fishing actually the same.
Shit itās hot. Itās 35 degrees out there, the sand burns the skin off the bottom of my feet, and I could do with a large rum in a glass full of ice.
I want to write about stuff I like - and I want to do it in the style of Hunter S. Thompson. Iāll fail to do that well, but Iām going to try anyway.
OK, so this is self indulgent, but Iāve decided I donāt care.
At last Iāve got time to disengage my brain and quieten the voices. I need to think about things that really don't matter while I lie on a Portuguese beach, roasting my feet as they poke out from under a sunshade into the glare of a cloudless sky.
Thereās the noise of waves breaking, the chatter of other holidaymakers gibbering at each other. The weirdness of a large Portuguese man, who for some strange reason is dressed as a shipās captain, cap at a jaunty angle, dinging a tiny bell and then loudly trying to sell people doughnuts for six Euros from his cooler.
Each wave first gathers up, then releases the troubles of our world as it crashes.
āWhat shall we talk about?ā my wife, who is bronzing nicely, says from the next lounger along.
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Sharing some of my personal experiences and stories from the moors of ground nesting birds, their parenting skills and what I have learnt along the way!
One of the Scribehound team once told me that one has 3 seconds to capture to someone's attention on social media otherwise they move on. A rather sad but true indictment of our society today. The irony is not lost on me when comparing the hours I spend with moorland birds.
My favourite and best technique is to try and spend time with them with the car switched off, allowing them to settle down and resume their normal behaviour as a pair of birds or a young family. I can sometimes spend an hour or more with a particular species and this is when the best photographs are often achieved which may or may not grab someone's attention in those few seconds.
Whether that or those images grab anyone's attention or not, for me a benefit of time on the fell with these birds is getting to observe and learn about each species particular behaviour and that of their young.
As someone who spends a lot of their time with birds, I certainly have my favourites and have witnessed lots of behaviours in different species. For example, the oystercatcher is by far one of the best parents on the moor, whereas the lapwing is probably one of the worst! These are some of my personal experiences when out on the moors with some of our incredible UK wildlife.
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With demands on the public purse being extremely high, should politicians be doing more to fund and facilitate bottom-up land management solutions such as Farmer Clusters which are proven to deliver more bang for the conservation buck?
My solitary four-hour drive home from Oxford to Aberystwyth marked the end of a week engaged in conversation about future land management in the UK. This started at the Royal Welsh Show and ended at the Game Fair at Blenheim Palace. In a reflective mood, I recalled a time, not long ago, when both these major countryside shows were untroubled by todayās undercurrent of anxiety about imposed policy change which is bound to have a profound impact on the livelihoods, culture, and heritage within our rural communities. As I left the dual carriageway at Abergavenny heading for the narrower winding roads of Mid Wales, it struck me that our rural communities are also facing some hard miles ahead.
The most striking element of both shows was the impressive practitioner knowledge and expertise held by the farmers, keepers, and land managers within our rural communities. Sadly, this valuable resource, built on an intimate understanding of the land they manage, is frequently overlooked in a world of top-down policy making. Whilst it can be argued that Brexit brought considerable economic risks to UK agricultural, few would disagree that it also offered us a chance to reset funding models specifically tailored to farming in the UK, rather than the āone size fits allā excessively bureaucratic approach of the EUās Common Agricultural Policy.
Farming in the UK is unusually diverse due to our varied geography. With delivery of rural policy being ceded to the devolved governments of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the opportunity exists for further refining of agri-funding models on a regional basis to accommodate these differences. This is a good thing, but are there even better ways of getting more bang for the conservation buck?
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As a fishing agent, I'm often asked what the difference is between a ghillie and a fishing guide. While the two roles are similar, there are important differences.
When out fishing it is often common to have a ghillie or a guide available to aid you in your adventure. The differences between the terms āghillieā and a āguideā can sometimes cause confusion, and even become a bone of contention. It is a question I get asked a lot, so at the risk of putting my head above the parapet I am going to attempt to define each role as I believe they are very different. The terms "fishing ghillie" and "fishing guide" are often used interchangeably, but they denote different roles depending on the geographical and cultural context.
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Rewilding is swiftly becoming a religion - a belief system with little evidence to support its claims - but is this a sane way to manage our landscapes?
Re-wilding is a very clever idea. It is very difficult to be against re-wilding. It would be a bit like being against nostalgia. It has a vague warmth about it. It has no downside because whatever happens, it will be what nature intended.
It has another trick. It is whatever you want it to be. Anything from the local council stopping cutting the kerbside grass, through bison in pens, to planting vast forests on land that has been naturally treeless for millennia can be called re-wilding. There is a definition, but it is rambling, vague and that dreadful thing, 'a journey', and no one is really interested enough to check, so it's Liberty Hall.
In old-fashioned conservation, you try to conserve a habitat, a species, an ecosystem, or a natural or cultural landscape. To do this you did things. It required continuous, regular or occasional action, and that needed management and the continuing commitment of resources. It also had the further handicap that because you had an objective your success in attaining that objective could be assessed and sometimes people might see that you had failed.
Happily with re-wilding all that failure nonsense is completely avoided. If the curlew go because the heather is waist deep, the redshank chicks are all predated, or the peat is dried out by invading birch and leaks CO2 like a tap, it is not your fault. You bear no responsibility. It is what nature intended.
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How Olympic history should never forget it's rural roots, integrity, or the source of so many of our medallists
24 years ago, I experienced a wonderful example of good manners - and all about a sporting event taking place the other side of the world.
As Chairman of the Campaign for Shooting, I had been approached by Ian Coley, the Alex Ferguson of the British Olympic Clay Team, for sponsorship to rent the team an Australian base where they could quietly prepare for the Sydney Olympics, without any outside brouhaha.
The young star of the team was Richard Faulds, who, to our great delight, went on to clinch gold. I had been watching on TV, very pleased at our investment of a few (very few) thousand pounds. Before Desmond Lynam (or whoever - that was probably a wee bit early in the morning for Desās carefully manicured coiffure) announced the medal ceremony, my mobile rang. Bloody hell, I thought, I hope theyāre not going to take long else Iāll miss the national anthem. Turns out it was Richard ringing to thank me. Wow! Now that sort of thoughtfulness was extraordinary then and maybe even rarer now. I do hope not.
Anyhow, moving forward 24 years to another Brit, Nathan Hales, winning Trap gold and I am tempted to reflect on the connections between the British countryside (and, frankly country sports of all sorts) and Olympic success.
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It is time that the building industry embraced change. Good for the planet and good for their profits. And good for government building targets.
Currently we are building about 150,000 houses a year. The new Government plan to raise that to 300,000 houses a year to help house the 3 million odd immigrants let into the country over the last few years by the previous government. Not to mention of course all the future ones they are planning to let in.
Incidentally that equates, at an average housing density of ten an acre, to 30,000 acres of mostly agricultural land going under tarmac and concrete every year. So, if Labour did meet its house building targets some 150,000 acres of land will be built on over the next five years. An area slightly larger than the New Forest National Park which is 140,000 acres.
It is though easy to ātalk the talkā but can the government āwalk the walk.ā
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Wood pigeons are rightly regarded as a top-tier sporting bird, but what with wasps, nettles, the need for truckloads of clobber and the quarry's uncooperative nature, decoying them can be a pain in the proverbial
Anybody will tell you that there is no better sport to be had than decoying pigeons. In fact, everybody will tell you that there is no better sport to be had than decoying pigeons. I've said it myself. And I'll stand by it: there is no better sport to be had than decoying pigeons.
If you leave aside shooting driven grouse, obviously. Your grouse ā going downwind at a zillion miles an hour - across acres of glorious purple heather is a thing of rare excitement, right enough, but it also costs a zillion ducats a day to ambush it from a butt, so when we are declaiming about the best sport to be had, we tend ā out of a perfectly reasonable urge to recognise that not everyone may be able to shoot driven grouse for several weeks each season ā to temper our excitement and point instead towards shooting pigeons over decoys.
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I got bored of waiting and got lucky with hope and practical activism
Donāt laugh, but I once nearly went into mainstream politics.
Never mind when and for whom, but let me reassure you that the dream was a short one. I came to the early conclusion that there was a limited amount that a thin-skinned Etonian of no settled world view and the attention span of a mayfly had to offer people fighting real battles in their everyday lives, let alone deal with volcanically unpredictable leaders elsewhere in the world.
Besides, there was always that comment in one of my earliest army reports in the back of my mind: āI fear that this man will go through life pushing doors marked āpullā. Precisely. As I said, donāt laugh.
I lost interest in politics and instead rediscovered the natural world. I spent the next two decades coming to understand that other than climate change, most of the environmental challenges that beset us are much easier, quicker, cheaper and less controversial to fix than we imagine.
When I walked through Britain in the spring of 2022, I saw evidence of this over and over again- re-wetted peat on Kinder Scout, a re-meandered tributary of the Tweed above Peebles, a regenerating āancientā forest in Glen Affric- and I have been seeing it ever since.
Over the last year and a half, I have walked another 2000 miles or so round the coast, and seen it again in the offshore no-take zones, the eagles on Mull, the transformation of Holkham in Norfolk and many other things besides. Nature is resilient. So long as you havenāt killed it off, as we did with the Great Auk, you can probably bring it back.
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Finding a copy of Trout & Salmon from 1994 shows that weāre still talking about the same environmental, and geopolitical, issues three decades on.
A wormy startāLook what Iāve found Papa!ā I held up an oozing earthworm, my hands blackened by Hebridrean peat. The year was 1994, I was five years old, and we were on a family holiday to the Isle of Lewis. My enthusiasm for a day spent trout fishing was waning. Weād seen and caught nothing and I couldnāt really get this casting lark. My father took the worm from me, squished it onto the hook of our Teal, Blue & Silver fly, glanced around to make sure his friend and host hadnāt seen him, and said, ātry this.ā
I lobbed it into the black waters of the burn. The next moment a trout was writhing on the other end, and with all the awkwardness of a child whoād never done this before, I lifted the poor thing onto the bank. It probably weighed a quarter of a pound. Thirty years on I can still recall my uncontainable excitement. My first fish, and the moment that ignited a lifelong interest in angling.
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Creating a wildflower meadow will put you in touch with nature and feed the soul. Here's how any old fool can do it...
At the bottom of my garden thereās a long wooden fence that, in my mindās eye, performs a vaguely-similar function to the Berlin Wall of the late 1970s.
On one side, you find a small paddock grazed by half a dozen Jacob sheep. They belong to my parents, who live next door, and this particular area is the German Democratic Republic of our situation: itās a world of order and conformity, where grass is the only plant tolerated, and any rogue wildflower that happens to pop up gets immediately chomped to pieces by our ruminant Stasi.
On the opposite side of the fence is a quarter of an acre of what used to also be part of this paddock, adjacent to the patio. Last summer, Mrs Adams and I asked a local garden designer, Kylie (hat-tip here), how we might make our outdoor space more presentable. She suggested fencing out the sheep from this parcel of land in an effort to create a āwildflower meadow.ā And here we are.
In my increasingly-laboured Cold War simile, this little corner of my Welsh homestead is now the equivalent of Western Europe: a place where freedom, liberty and occasional decadence has become the order of the day.
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A day out with the Eastern Counties Mink Hunt is never dull nor dry. I ventured out with this wonderful group of eccentrics to recapture my lost youth and pass on the mink hunting baton to my son
I learned many life lessons on river banks in my early teens. I gleaned the art of stealth and concealment when watching wild trout and chub take naps, the only indication their piscine hearts still pumped was an occasional wave of a pectoral fin as they lay in their riffle beds.
I discovered if I shut up and stayed still, wildlife swiftly forgets your presence. Dippers would dip, kingfishers fish and otters would gambol, either dealing death to other river dwellers or playing energetic solo sports with stones, shells and twigs.
In those aquatic margins I also picked up a taste for botany, becoming well versed in the old country names for the wildflowers that delight in the lush edges. Iād challenge myself to mutter the names of tree species, plucking at the leaves of the branches that bowed to wetly kiss the bubbling surface of the running water below.
Much of this sodden education was in truth a by-product of the primary reason for my being on the water, that purpose being my pursuit of mink. During my senior school years, mink hunting was for me what fox hunting was to John Jorrocks, what football was to John Motson, what shagging and drinking was to Ollie Reed.
I loved it, it dogged my every waking moment and crept its way into my dreams, I wrote about it, painted its image, noted notable hunts and praiseworthy hounds. I took water temperatures and measured wind direction. I turned this humble form of venery, a form of hunting that the snootier foxhunters of the time derided as little better than rat catching, into an amalgam of science, high art and ecological survey.
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The latest plan to help Scotland get back in touch with its true wild self is to reintroduce lynx, a big cat and apex predator, to control deer numbers. But can Scotland follow Switzerland's lead? Or is this all just land reform by stealth?
Tales of the riverbank with a difference - the story of the beaver, the big cat and the eagle.
Sounds like the kind of story that would be written by Kenneth Grahame, with illustrations to match by Ernest H.Shepherd. To add to the romance of it, Iāve just been chatting online to a Scottish farmer who is about to start putting out carrots to feed the beaver on his land. All is furry and very lovely.
The flip side is perhaps less rosy. Official reports from NatureScot reveal that a total of 63 nuisance beavers were killed under licence in 2022. Thatās down from the 87 killed in 2021. One sympathises with the beaver, who must have thought life was on the up when he and a few relatives were introduced to the Knapdale Forest in 2009. Itās all in the name of re-wilding Scotland.
Let me explain what this is all about. It seems this process is happening against a rather confusing backdrop.
First came the white-tailed sea eagle - now regarded as Britainās largest and most magnificent bird of prey. That happened in 1975 - and today there are estimated to be 152 mating pairs of them in the skies. Doubtless those positively invested regularly āhigh fiveā.
Then the beaver. Extinct in Scotland 400 years ago, they were re-introduced to help manage wetlands and provide what many describe as a āgolden opportunity for tourismā. From a handful of these tree-munching, dam building engineers first released into the wild, itās estimated there were a thousand of them by 2021 - and there will be 10,000 by 2030. That is a lot of beaver - and theyāll need an awful lot of carrots. (Official figures from https://www.nature.scot/plants-animals-and-fungi/mammals/land-mammals/eurasian-beaver)
But there are clues that all is not well in beaver worldā¦..
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A few months ago, I wrote a column on Scribehound called Ancient Hunting Stories: The Origins of Human Culture?. In it I explored the idea that aside from opposable thumbs, the thing that really sets humanity apart from other animals is our love of stories.
Stories follow (or subvert) patterns, and our brains are essentially pattern recognition engines, so we see narratives everywhere we look. Whatās more, we are suckers for a good story, and we instinctively find an argument made through the medium of storytelling more compelling than one that is laid out in a carefully constructed essay.
To explore this theme a little further, at the Game Fair I spoke with two Scribehounders, watercolourist, woodcock enthusiast and Chairman of the GWCT in Wales, Owen Williams, and Roger Morgan-Grenville, author of several books on conservation and a champion for a wide variety of endangered bird species.LinksSubscribe to ScribehoundAncient Hunting Stories: The Origins of Human Culture? - by George Browne
From Doom to Dreams: The Five Types of Nature Writing - by Roger Morgan-Grenville
Roger's latest book: The Return of the Grey Partridge
Owen's art: Portfolio
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Working summer jobs on farms did me a world of good. Could a programme to put 18 year olds to work on farms make the country a better place and help to fix our food systems?
Iām sorry to bring up the election again - it has been a fortnight so Iām sure youāve been happily getting on with your life not thinking about politics, but something that was in the headlines in the early stages of the campaign has been gnawing away at me over the last few weeks.
You may recall that one of Rishiās flagship proposals was to reintroduce national service for teenagers. It was widely panned as a somewhat desperate idea, and prompted a well-publicised tweet from the de facto spokesman for the Countryside, Jeremy Clarkson, suggesting that it would be a better option to get kids out working on farms.
As is often the case with Jezzaās outpourings, the response was somewhat mixed, with some ridiculing the idea, and others highlighting the difficulty in finding agricultural workers in a post-Brexit landscape. While Rishiās plan will now never come to fruition, I think Clarkson might be onto something.
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Some love it; some hate it; but is the āback gunā a symptom of a wider problem in game shooting?
I have a confession: walking gun is one of my favourite places to be on a game shoot. I say that even as a member of the gun trade who, when asked to āgo with the beatersā invariably ends up with a performance review committee of customers past and present scrutinising one's every miss. It is at times like these that the ability to turn electric ear defenders off and mute the inevitable abuse is a godsend.
Yet still walking gun remains an opportunity to remember the early days of my game shooting. My father would be asked by some kindly host to 'bring along the boy if heās free, he can walk all day'.
But it's not just the memories of my youth. Walking gun heightens the awareness of your surroundings. You are not relying simply on a steady stream of pheasants driven from one covert to the next. You must listen as well and think. All of it is bound up in the anticipation of one of two clever cock birds knowing the danger and making a bid for safety curling back over the wood.
This is particularly the case in January when their seasoned wits are put to full use until they run out of running room and break out the side or come back over the beaters. These are the birds I treasure and as a young man bringing one crashing through the canopy to the acclaim of the beaters (before I started taking their money and filling in their licences) was a special triumph.
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Before I continue I'd like to just confirm I couldn't smell any patchouli (or BO) and there were no hairy armpits on show (to my knowledge). Back to this in a moment.
The first was a screening of Isabella Tree's Wilding. A documentary shot at the Knepp Estate in Horsham, West Sussex. The second, I was on a panel at a local agricultural college hosted by Royal Agricultural Society of England and Innovation for Agriculture, the title was Farm of the Future.
Next we went to a screening of Roots So Deep. An American 'documentary series all about inventive farmers and maverick scientists building a path to solving climate change with hooves, heart and soil.' And finally, the crescendo, Groundswell Festival aka farming Glastonbury. A two day festival in Hertfordshire, a stone's throw from London.
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This July marks my ten-year anniversary working in the media and rather self-indulgently, I have been reflecting on the very exciting, albeit chaotic journey my life has taken and where it all began, at the BBC.
Iām aware that the BBC often gets a bad rep in farming circles, receiving criticism for not showing enough interest in rural issues or sensationalising headlines around agricultureās impact on the environment.
I have at times been on the side criticising my former employees and have even sat down with the Head of BBC Scotland News, sharing my concerns about past documentaries which I felt unfairly represented agriculture.
However, I am unbelievably grateful to the BBC for putting me on the path I am on today, and I know without doubt, that my time spent as a researcher and producer during my four years at BBC Scotland, has contributed hugely to why I am pursuing my Nuffield Farming Scholarship today and the good I intend to deliver with it.
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One of my favourite sayings is, āLive as if you will die tomorrow; farm as if you will live forever.ā And I have tried to follow that policy as far as my finances have allowed.
There is always a temptation to think short-term and scrimp, or take a shortcut. To avoid thinning a young plantation or re-establishing a grass ley, or carry out building repairs with cheap materials that wonāt last, or use manky bits of wavy pipe without much gravel for drainage jobs rather than twin-wall pipes with gravel to the top of the trench. But something always tells me that my grandchildren will be grateful one day, if I do the right thing and look after the soil and the trees and the infrastructure of the estate, even though I donāt yet have any, grandchildren that is, not trees.
It is the idea referenced by the great farming scribe of the last century, AG Street (who would certainly have been a Scribehounder had it been around then) in the title of one of his books: āThe Endless Furrowā. Although ploughing has rather gone out of fashion, so we donāt talk so much about furrows these days. And, if you read the book, it turns out not to be as endless as all that.
The thought that my son, who is getting married next year and is coming into the farming partnership with me, will carry on my work here and that of those who have gone before us, is a big part of what gets me out of bed in the morning. But...
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