Stop, look and listen

I am officially fed up with pheasants.

I very nearly hit my second of the week tonight when he decided to step out in front of me, totally oblivious to the fact I was driving a ton of rusty metal and he was but a few pounds covered in puffed up look-at-me-girls feathers. He was very nearly a mangled, bloody and broken mess of gold, russet and green.

Admittedly, I had been momentarily distracted by the sight of my first spring lambs silhouetted in the twilight at the top of a hill. I braked - hard - closed my eyes and when I opened them he was gone. Off, no doubt, to seek a lady friend to impress with tales of his escape from the big blue monster with the blinding eyes.

The cock pheasant that stepped out in front of me in the Monday dawn wasn't so lucky. His body was tossed into the air, its trajectory momentarily interrupted by hitting my windscreen with a sickening thud. Instinctively, I closed my eyes again, convinced the glass was about to shatter. I cannot understand how hit-and-run drivers can claim they were not aware they had hit someone when crashing into a pheasant makes such a racket.

I hate running over pheasants but at this time of year, the lust-blinded boys pay little heed to cars. I think it's such a shame after they have survived the winter, the fox and the gun that they have such an ignoble end. If pheasants spent more time flying and less time strutting, I'm sure there would be far fewer fatalties.

A murder of crows

The shrieking was high-pitched and heart-rending. It was the noise of something not long for this world. Two crows – looking for all the world like Antonio Banderas’ black cloaked gang in Interview with the Vampire – had flipped a baby rabbit on its back to expose its soft belly. I went to investigate; the crows let go, their victim scuttled into the undergrowth. Deprived of their dinner, they eyed me angrily from the telegraph wires.

I had seen crows mob a cat before but had never seen them catch a live mammal. From an anthropomorphic point of view, crows appear cruel. I don’t think they are: I consider them to be very clever. Indeed, the appliance of science has proven them to be far from bird-brained.

Three types haunt the horses’ fields: the carrion crows I saw attacking the rabbit, rooks and jackdaws that scatter the horse muck as they look for worms. They have chosen their homes wisely close to the shops. Their cousins who build cities in trees near busy routes also display admirable foresight by choosing locations with a ready supply of roadkill.

Yet proportionately very few crows end up squashed on the roads themselves. It amazes me how they judge when to move away from the traffic; they are rarely wrong. One made a mistake last summer, a young rook playing chicken with a gang of his mates. Leaving it a fraction too late, he crashed into my car as he rose into the air and became trapped in the bumper. I stopped to free him. His heart was pounding but there was not a mark on him. I let him go in the long grass. He lay quiet, his wings outstretched, his still body looking like a blue-black cross.

Roadkill

Tis (almost) the season of slammed brakes, swerves and sweaty palms. I’ve already seen two dead badgers on the roads this week, innumerable squashed rabbits and now that the shooting season is over, the cock pheasants are starting to sniff the pheromones on the air and dandify themselves as they prepare to go looking for love.

No one taught them the Green Cross Code at school. Strutting around, their pea-sized brains overcome with lust, they don’t care if there’s a car coming – if there’s a likely lass on the other side of the road, they morph into a bloke in a club when the slow music comes on.

I have a friend who taught himself not to swerve to avoid rabbits. But I hate killing anything. My first roadkill was a duck on the A47 in Norfolk. I was doing 60mph; there was nothing I could do. I felt sick and for about five miles afterwards, my heart thumped like it does when I’m battling another bidder on eBay in the final few minutes of an auction.

But I’m not as sick as people who stop, pick up the poor unfortunate and take it home for tea. There’s a whole list of roadkill recipe books if you look on Amazon. Arthur Boyt calls himself a conservationist, but I bet his fans don’t swerve, slam on their brakes or suffer from sweating palms if they see a bunny walking the verge like a tightrope.

I don’t understand people who name animals, build up a relationship with them, then eat them, either. People like Hugh Fernley- Whittingstall, whose mantra seems to be ‘if it moves, eat it’, or Gordon Ramsey, who killed and cooked his piggies Trinny and Susannah.

My ethics have always been odd. I’m not a vegetarian: I am happy to gut a fish or remove the breasts from a still warm (shot) pheasant. But I don’t do venison, veal, or foie gras; rabbit has been off the menu since I read Watership Down as a child, and I suffer terrible pangs of conscience if I eat lamb, even though it tastes divine. Kill It, Cook It, Eat It? I don’t think so.