Last week, on the first day of the government’s ban on farmers shooting pest birds, I walked across St James’s Park and came across a pigeon murdered by a crow. It was on its back, wings spread, with a nasty hole torn in its chest. It looked like a botch job by an amateur heart surgeon, or an allegory for the whole messy, sorry affair.
The ban — a sudden revoking of the old general licences to shoot — was announced right in the middle of the crop-sowing season by Natural England, a semi-autonomous offshoot of Defra. It consulted no one and gave baffled farmers just a few days’ notice, insisting that this was the only possible course of action after lobbying group Wild Justice claimed the licences were illegal.
Wild Justice was founded by the punky little TV presenter Chris Packham and now the countryside has risen up in revolt against him. The online air is thick with petitions and counter-petitions. There’s one demanding that the revoking be revoked; another insisting Packham’s sacked from the BBC for not being ‘impartial’. Someone’s been hanging dead crows on Packham’s garden gate — though whose side they’re actually on is anyone’s guess. And there’s now a trend for sending him photos of newborn lambs savaged by crows.
Well, we all know it happens. As James Delingpole points out in his article, nature is gruesome. Like him, I’ve seen a lamb with bleeding holes where its eyes once were and a crow standing thoughtfully on its head. In County Durham one spring I saw a pair of crows murdering a pigeon. One stood on the poor pigeon’s wings, pinning it to the ground while the other pecked a hole in its chest. That’s why I’m so sure I know how the park pigeon met its end.
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