Where have the buzzards gone?

I’m not a birdwatcher. Most of them look and sound much the same to me I have to confess but I was taken this summer by the display of a pair of buzzards which suddenly appeared in the church woods adjacent to our land and which seemed to view our 20 acres as their territory.

The sheer speed with which they hurtled to earth would be enough to terrify even the most hardened pleasure rider and it was a good spectator sport sitting in a chair watching them swoop and climb over the ‘Magic Valley’ as Damaris calls it.

We found them one day sitting in the walnut tree which is not 10 metres from the house – they rarely come that close to humans.

I haven’t seen them now in a couple of weeks which was about when the hunting season began. I daresay some geriatric Rambo clad in his camouflage and armed with a double-barrelled rifle thought that they would look good in his pot. It is easy to imagine them in the ‘Rootin’, tootin’, shootin” shop (Hunting and Fishing) showing off their prizes to other likeminded individuals. Of course, the bounty bag closes abruptly as soon as any ordinary member of the public passes – it wouldn’t do for them to know.

I have to be the last person anyone would call a ‘greenie’ but these people just haven’t caught on. To them, if there are no more buzzards, they will just shoot something else and go on and on until there is nothing but they cannot conceive of that day so they just carry on.

Maybe I’m wrong and the buzzards have just taken a holiday somewhere but I have a horrible feeling that they both ended up with a nasty case of lead-poisoning.