Hare today

It rained today which is probably good news from the hunting point of view – there’s unlikely to be any.

There was in the week though. The guy who managed a quick hunt before donning his tuxedo to attend a wedding was back again. And he did actually phone the night before, for which I was effusively grateful.

He told me that he’d be coming onto our land between 9.00 and 9.30 am. I planned to let the dogs out at 8.15 so I’d have plenty of time to get them in again.

I hadn’t let them out, therefore, by 7.15 am, which was when he turned up. He’s another one like the surveyors who can’t tell the time.

He also told us he’d be hunting wild boar, which would have meant he was quickly through and off our land.

Instead, he stuck around for 2 hours, sending his dogs through the woods and stomping all over the field.

I guess he was after hares, and I would also guess that he killed one because I heard 2 shots, one of which was followed by a scream. Hares scream when they’re caught.

Hound of the Baskervilles - a hunting dog in the orchard

I managed to get a photo of one of his dogs as it made a last pass through the orchard. Having rounded them up, he drove away.

No man is an island

Our place is definitely not an island, let alone the castle that Englishmen try to turn their home into. It sometimes feels as if our privacy and tranquillity are under siege.

Today I’d just brought Kepler in from doing his early morning ablutions when all the dogs started baying and jumping up at the bedroom windowsill, nearly tearing the curtains.

Outside was a hunter making his leisurely way up the hillside in the company of 3 dogs. He wasn’t wearing an orange reflective jacket so I knew he wasn’t part of the official ‘squadra’ which, in any case, would have alerted us (I hope).

I shot out in my dressing gown and called to him from the drive.

The upshot of our shouted conversation was that he claimed to live locally and be after wild boar. He said he knew the huntsman who normally phones us, and that he would get our phone number off him and phone us in future.

His parting shot (no pun intended) was that since our land is not a ‘Reserve’ - by which is meant somewhere that hares, for example, are reared for sport - he has every right to hunt across it.

I phoned the normal hunt spokesman who just kept repeating that they always phone us. He wasn’t sure if he knew this guy. The one he thought it might be was going to a wedding today …

I phoned our neighbour who knew that pet dogs could be killed by hunts crossing the land, and also knew that nothing could be done about it.

I can understand that a boar hunt would be a complete farce if it had to circumvent this and that protected piece of land, but I should like us to be accorded the courtesy of a warning so that we have the opportunity to protect ourselves.

The trail bikers who came up the drive this afternoon warrant less consideration, as far as I’m concerned.

I would have expected the overgrown continuation of the track to be a deterrent in itself, but Clive says that in his heyday he would have taken a bike right up the hill, over the tussocky grass.

Hillside where trail bikers might have made sport

It follows, therefore, that  these bikers could in theory have spent all afternoon criss-crossing the field, mangling juniper bushes and orchid bulbs, endangering the dogs and driving us mad with the noise.

Which is why the West tribe as a unit, Kepler included, sent them packing.

Hunting dog

The other day we were warned about a boar hunt crossing our land and nothing happened. Today we had no warning but a hunting dog came right up to the house.

The hunting dog

It must have been lost, or at least a maverick member of the pack.

It may well have caught the scent of wild boar because they’ve been in exactly the places it was sniffing.

Whatever the justification, our dogs had quite a lot to say about it.

Kepler was the first to spot the intruder, and gave tongue in his dulcet tones, followed by a deafening volley from the other 2.

I can’t quite make out if they want to join in, or are voicing their objection.

Anyway, I managed to photograph our visitor inches away through the patio door.

Boar hunt

Just as we were getting up today, we had a call on the cellphone. It was from a hunt organiser, giving us half an hour’s notice before a boar hunt came onto our land.

This personal warning came about as a result of my going into the Comunita Montana to explain that we couldn’t see the notices posted at the beginning of the road unless we went out.

The idea is to give us a chance to get the dogs in. And keep them in.

Today we heard some rumpus but saw neither hide nor hair of the hunting dogs themselves.

When they do come, they’re unmistakeable because they reconnoitre right up to the walls of the house, sending our dogs into a frenzy of territorialism. Plus they wear bells round their necks.

The photo is of a similar occasion on our land another year.

A boar-hunting 'posse'

The whole event can be quite exciting: watching for the lead dog, seeing the others come into view, then the huntsmen…

I’ve no problem with the controlled culling of wild boar although I wouldn’t want to witness the kill. Boars have no natural predators here and could quickly become a major pest.

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.