Williamson's Weekly Nature Notes

Norfolk and Devon have them too, but I'm here in Sussex now. Some years ago, I was sweating it out in Iraq and Afghanistan, and if you have not been to those places you would be surprised how much these sounds of home bubble through the grit and heat of the desert lands.

But there are country people who don't give a fig for the rook or the nightingale.

As for church bells, they would repeat A E Housman's lines from Bredon Hill: 'Oh, noisy bells, be dumb; I hear you, I will come' when the story-teller spoke of the tolling funeral bell.

There are those who find the nightingale a noisy nuisance, keeping them awake on moonlit nights, even though the poor bird has only six weeks of song at the very most.

There are those who hate the seashore with its sand in the sandwiches and lobster-red bodies.

As for rooks, people shoot them because they may do a little harm in winter to new-sown wheat and barley.

In the old days, May time was rook-shooting time, when the young birds were made into tasty meat pies for underfed cottagers.

Somehow, that seemed all right.

The rook was merely being harvested and recycled. But to place large cage traps on shoots to thin the flocks to 10 per cent of their possible number seems to me to be wrong.

The bodies are thrown away I have heard. Perhaps the small farmer despairing of a profit on his only known business cannot do with any competition.

But the big estates should do all they can to look after an icon of the English countryside.

You wouldn't let your parish church fall down. You wouldn't shoot a nightingale because its song kept you awake an hour or two during one full moon of the month.

You wouldn't burn your Betjeman books with their praise of the seaside hols now would you? Would you?

So let the rest of us enjoy the rooks in the treetops, the contented cawing that keeps us safe in a civilised world.

There are far worse things out there in the cauldron of the world, believe me.