The Smallholder will appreciate this:

It seemed best to stick with the arrangement that was already in place with the sheep farmers while we improved the land. As part of this process, Paddy insisted that we do something about the rooks.

There were certainly lots of them, a multitude. It’s hard to tell exactly how many as they wheel and soar, spectacular and secret, high above the forest. I didn’t mind them around the place.

They are a nuisance, though. Along with magpies, jackdaws, ravens and jays, rooks are members of the corvid family. They’re tough and clever.

The collective noun for rooks is a parliament, and a parliament of rooks can be deafening. The sheep farmers claim they will peck out newborn lambs’ eyes.

This may well not be true, but they do eat other birds’ eggs, and if you “let it be”, you end up with just rooks. It seemed that the reasonable thing to do was to reduce numbers, to lend a benign hand to the balance of nature, to cull them. Kill them, that is.

Killing rooks is not nice at all. There are no neat boxes for exterminating them; shotguns are the only thng that work and it’s a pretty medieval and messy business, which I don’t enjoy.

But I felt I was acting for the greater good. It was a hard decision for a vegetarian to make, and the moment I made that decision was the moment I became a farmer.