Birdie Par Two

You do get to see the world with a shotgun. Britain anyway. Last week I was not far from home, but in an empty Chiltern valley that I had never visited before. An hour's drive from central London, but as remote as a Northumberland fellside. Except for those big birds going into Heathrow. Rather you than me, I thought, looking up to the distant droning cigar tube, standing on a little cutout on a steep chalk hillside, looking across grass meadows to ancient beechwoods on the other flank of the valley.

Here, of course, you have to be careful of those other big birds as well. Also circling above, but in silence, wheeling around high above you, just catching the corner of your eye so that you flick the gun halfway up, then relax it again. Massive outstretched wings and that characteristic forked tail.

The red kite. A floating wheeling soaring object of great beauty, brought back here by an American billionaire after they became extinct in these hills. They obviously have an affinity with rolling high chalk downlands and beech woods, they are everywhere now. In the last ten years red kites here have multiplied from the rare to the commonplace. They, allegedly, do not interfere with the pheasants, though with those hooked bills and the sheer numbers of them, I would think it must take great forbearance on their part not to nick a pheasant chick or twenty in the spring.

And it does take a little forbearance not to swing the gun around that enticing circle. Just joking, RSPB members.

My host, a man of these parts, told me that one of his syndicate guns, a local farmer, (a proper one, a lot more rare than red kites now that the Chilterns are an easy commute to Marylebone) had a corner of the eye problem, swung a little too quickly, and the trigger finger connected with the deadly accuracy that only a farmer's can.

After a little discussion and without drawing too much attention (they thought) the kite went into the back of the farmers Shogun under a pile of sacks. "Take it home and bury it" was the host's clear instruction. Fortunately for lovers of justice, at least one of the beaters was an upright citizen and bird lover. Next morning the constabulary arrived at the farm gate and our farmer confessed.

He might have been best advised to hire a PR firm before his time in the dock at Aylesbury magistrates court. The sorry saga was frankly related to the glaring and appalled magistrates.

"And Mr Smith, what did you do with the bird once you had removed it from the scene?" one enquired.

"Took it home"

"And then?"

"Skinned it, cut the breasts off, and pan roast them, madam"

Once order had been restored in the court, the questioning was resumed:

"Ate it, my god, Mr Smith, ate it; what was it like?"

"Somewhere between a golden eagle and a buzzard, madam"

He is using a solicitor for the appeal hearing.