How English!

Yesterday evening, and into the night, several RSPB staff scoured the Nene Washes for singing corncrakes (see blog of 24 May, Last night I went to Eldernell...).  It was worth their effort because one new bird was found and the total this year looks as though it might be somewhere between 16 and 20 (but these are not final or definitive figures).

The reintroduction project is going quite well, with numbers slowly rising each year, but I wish they were going up even quicker!  I'm impatient.

Can you imagine Gordon Brown making a speech where he mentions the corncrake?  I doubt it.

But back in May 1924, Stanley Baldwin, in a short period of opposition between two of his three stints as Prime Minister, said this:

To me, England is the country, and the country is England. And when I ask myself what I mean by England, when I think of England when I am abroad, England comes to me through my various senses - through the ear, through the eye, and through certain imperishable scents. I will tell you what they are, and there may be those among you who feel as I do. The sounds of England, the tinkle of hammer on anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewey morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been in England since England was a land, and may be seen in England long after the Empire has perished and every works in England has ceased to function, for centuries the one eternal sight of England. The wild anenomies in the woods of April, the last load at night of hay being drawn down a lane as the twilight comes on, when you can scarcely distinguish the figures on the horses as they take it home to the farm, and above all, most subtle, most penetrating and most moving, the smell of wood smoke coming in an autumn evening, or the smell of the scutch fires: that wood smoke that our ancestors, tens of thousands of years ago, must have caught on the air when they were still nomads, and when they were still roaming the forests and the plains of the continent of Europe. These things strike down into the very depths of our nature, and touch chords that go back to the beginning of time and the human race, but they are chords that with every year of our life sound a deeper note in our innermost being. These are things that make England, and I grieve for it that they are not the childish inheritance of the majority of people to-day in our country.

Well, that feels like a long time ago - and I wonder how true the images were then - but the idea of today's politicians talking about the countryside and its nature with such ease and enthusiasm seems just as dated as the idea of anvils and scythes.  But it would have been true that corncrakes were then familiar birds in the English countryside - we are putting them back.