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| The 'setting' for our story |
On our first proper day of holiday we walked for a while in the relentless heat of the Dorset coastline until we found a bus to take us back to Weymouth beach. Then we returned in the early evening to the campsite and dined on pot noodles. After dinner we went for a walk, this time going left along the coast, the idea being to turn back in time for the sunset which we would watch and appreciate and get back just as the darkness descends.
On our way back, Rose spotted some movement in a hedge. It was a bird flapping its wings, a crow, and it seemed to be struggling. She wanted us to go and help it, or at least just go and check that it was alright, so we began to vault the fence into the field. Before we were even over the fence there was someone in the distance shouting at us, telling us we couldn't go through the field, that it was private property. We tried to shout back that there was a possibly a crow in trouble, but he said, 'let nature take its course.'
We got off the fence and continued walking back. Rose insulted the landowner rather fiercely, but out of his earshot. We thought maybe we'd be able to sneak in once he had gone but he stayed and watched us walk away. It seemed pretty heartless. 'Let nature take its course' is all very well but if a bird is suffering and you can stop it, then you should, surely?
We discussed it. We fumed at the selfishness, the heartlessness of man, the property greed, the disregard for animals. And we returned to the campsite. The field with the distressed crow in it happened to be pretty much adjacent to the field we were camping in, and its owner was sitting there surveying his land, making sure it was protected from intruders.
I decided we should just go over there and talk to him. Even though it seemed on the surface that this guy was a stubborn uptight landowner, shouted conversations across a field can only yield so much rushed personal information, like a car honking its horn always sounds rude even when it might just be softly informing someone that the traffic lights have gone green.
So we went over and this guy had his mate with him. They were sitting around a fire in their camp. They immediately recognised us and I asked them if they could just go and investigate the distressed crow, just, you know, if it's suffering, we should help it. Close up they were friendly, hippyish, young, long-haired. One of them half-reluctantly went to check out the distressed bird in the tree and we chatted to the other one, who told us about their comfortable lifestyle here in the field adjacent to the campsite. They grew their own food and sometimes shot pigeons to eat and once a seagull (its meat like shoe leather apparently) but not yet crow.
Turns out the crow wasn't in distress, it wasn't trapped and it had gone by the time the actually rather friendly landowner reached the tree. He said it was probably just raiding a magpie nest, which in hindsight makes sense, the flapping aggressive rather than panicked, the victim the attacker.
I don't have a photo of the crow, but here are some fetching six-spot Burnet moths we saw on our morning walk:
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