IN the spring, when I was a child, the increasing brightness of the cold days of February and March meant that soon the horses would be unhitched from the ploughs and set to pulling the harrows on the land to be seeded with oats. The peewit nests in March and April, but in those days the progress of agriculture was such that not every field was harrowed and rolled before the sea pie and plover brought off her young. The chicks of ground birds, which the oyster-catcher can hardly be called since its proper place is the shore, were able to save themselves, for, like the young of the waterhen, nature has equipped them for the emergency. They can run almost from the time their down is dry, just as the waterhen’s chicks are able to swim when the water rises to flood their nest.

We regularly had the eggs of the peewit for breakfast. Sometimes the curlew’s eggs were taken and the nest of the waterhen was milked of one or two. Country folk had as much appreciation of a delicacy as any gourmet. On Sundays, while their masters went off to church in their gigs, with harness shining and brass all burnished, the ploughman, and most farm boys, wandered the brown fields searching for the nests of the peewit. In the first week of April there was something wrong if an hour or two of wandering didn’t produce at least two or three dozen eggs. Not every collector’s gathering went to the kitchen, of course. Some wrapped the eggs in fragments of newspaper and packed them in a stout box to send them off to London where they were sold at extortionate prices to people who had never seen the bird, or breathed the cold spring air on a ploughed field in April.

Egg-collectors of other sorts there were, but most harvested the peewit’s eggs knowing that in any case the harrows would rip through every nest before the field was ready for rolling. They could tell the fresh egg from the one that was incubated without going to the ditch to see whether it floated or not. The texture of the shell was different; the shine was identification enough, but the feel confirmed it all. It was inevitable that these egg-gatherers should meet now and then and that their rivalry result in sabotage on occasions. Many of them carried their eggs in their caps, which they wore on their heads, and the less agile ploughboy often found himself with shell and yolk trickling through his hair after he had been jostled and ordered to find some new place to search. When the partridges began to haunt the banks and the grass rose to give shelter to the corncrake, all this activity ceased. No one robbed the partridge. Few could find the ’crake’s nest and to trample the hay was something no farmer would permit, even if he thought nothing of birds. Looking back and considering the rarity of the ’crake at the present time, I am inclined to think that although it was common – I have heard five or six birds calling from adjoining fields in one evening – it was already doomed when I was a boy. A hundred years before it must have been common almost everywhere. My grandmother had been known to complain that the sound of the ’crake was tiresome and she, good solid countrywoman that she was, didn’t suffer from nerves.

We lived in a part of the country to which the latest inventions permeated slowly. Farming methods were old-fashioned by standards elsewhere. There were still as many tilting reapers in the corn as there were binders and although most farmers had hay reapers it was not unknown for two or three mowers to be given a five-acre field of ryegrass to cut. Bog hay was always scythed. The ’crakes had time to incubate and lead their young away while the mowers swung and lurched their way into the long grass. Even the hay reaper would bog down and choke its knives in some fields. The corncrakes stalked through the forest of fine grass without great alarm. They brought off their broods and led them to safety and they came again, summer after summer, until the reaping machines were improved and men who could mow with scythes went to their long rest.

My grandfather had been the only man in his part of the world who fully understood the mechanism of the corn binder. The binder had been in use elsewhere, but in our undulating, stony ground with its protruding rocks people had been reluctant to change. When the new-fangled machines broke down someone with an understanding of the parts of a twine-knotter had to be on hand; someone who could straighten a shaft or see why the sheaves bundled up and were not ejected. As soon as the knowledge of these things became general a revolution began to take place both in the cornfield and the hayfield. The merits of one sort of harvesting machine against those of another were critically judged. The blacksmiths and farmers were keen to take the heartbreak out of harvest. They were also banishing the ’crakes from the meadow. Not everywhere did the new green or red painted monsters appear at once. Not every farmer had the capital to invest. Here and there a smallholder, a crofter, worked his stony ground with ancient tools and out-of-date methods because he hadn’t a penny with which to bless himself.

The corncrake still called from the fringe of the arable country, from little, hidden-away paddocks where the rising hay was dotted with yellow-flowered weeds and seeding thistles. In such places a man would still wade into his meagre crop of hay with a scythe in his hands and a sharpening stone in his hip pocket. The sound of the stone on the blade while the sun rode the summer sky kept the ’crakes silent, but at evening they called again. Only in such places did they survive. In a decade people who had been unconscious of the sounds of summer pricked up their ears and said: ‘Do you know, I hear a corncrake.’ Once the corncrake had been as much a part of the summer’s day as the buzzing of the bee in the clover, the purring of turtle doves among the trees at the wood’s edge. When I was quite small the magic in finding a peewit’s nest was something I can’t even yet describe. There is surely nothing more beautiful than the sight of four pointed, delicately coloured, marled and blotched eggs that blend so well with their surroundings that if you look away for an instant you must look carefully a second time to spot them from any appreciable distance. The peewits would run and then sail into the air crying, the whole business being designed to mislead a watcher. The partridge and the corncrake relied more on furtive, unobtrusive movement to make their get-away. The nests of both could be hard to find until the exact area could be marked with certainty. I began to search for the nests of both birds when I was barely big enough to be allowed to wander abroad in the fields alone. Having seen a pan basket taken to gather peewit eggs I took a great basket to bring back the eggs of the partridges and corncrakes I might find!

There was no chance that I might come home with a basket of corncrake’s eggs, of course. The corncrake nested in the long grass on the shoulder of a hill leading down to the stream, or away out in a feathery patch of ryegrass, an island in the bog field of round rushes, and to find the nest required skill I hadn’t yet developed. The art of finding the nest of a bird is something that is cultivated in childhood when the eyesight is keen and every sense alert, but ground birds, too, have their own ways of misleading the searcher, and the corncrake, like the water rail, is a master of tactics, of moving and making a short, misleading flight and subtly leading its enemy astray. The corncrake, I have sometimes thought, has the power of the expert ventriloquist. The partridge is less secretive, but it, too, knows the way to lure a searcher on and trails a wing, stands on a knoll and makes a short flight until it judges it may safely make a longer one.

I had discovered, however, that a certain track up the side of a hill had a great attraction for the nesting partridges. Along one stretch of drystone wall and gorse and blackberry hedge three or four birds might be seen at different times on a spring day and, sooner or later, there would be those little runs and rushes that mating birds make and it was plain that they were nesting in the cover of the gorse and bramble. How many eggs does a partridge lay? It depends, but at least a dozen may be found, and often many more. I carried the basket and came back with more than forty eggs. I was very happy to think that there would be a fine feast as a result of my egg-gathering, but how bitter was my disillusionment! What horror was shown when I came into the steading, and back I was marched to replace the eggs in the nests I had robbed! Never, never again was I to think of such a thing. It was a crime. It was wicked. I was to think on the fact that already I had probably caused four partridges to desert their nests. Everyone loved the little birds. They were game, but they were loved and I would see them taking a dust bath on the turnip field or running through the rows when the potatoes were lifted or leading their broods across the paddock to pick insects under the beehives. Not only was I forbidden to take their eggs, I was forbidden to go near the hedge in which they nested. It was hard to understand why the partridge was sacred and the plover plundered of her eggs.

It is no use pretending that I didn’t look for the nest of both the partridge...