January turns to February and we are blessed with some superb clear blue mornings. There is a cold wind from the snow capped hills to the west and north but standing in the full sunshine on a path high in the forestry on the northern flanks of the Sidlaw Hills with the whole of the Strathmore valley laid out below me must count as one of lifes rare pleasures. I am about half a mile from the car and for me it has been a steep climb although hardly that to anyone younger. Well into the worry zone but my pulse monitor tells me I am OK and to be frank, it is worth the risk for the sheer pleasure of being there.

Above me on the flank of the hill two buzzards are busy quartering the patch of felled trees, making graceful arabesques in the air. Their cries seem to echo across the valley but in reality they are not echoes but those of another pair hunting above a patch of woodland further down towards the river. Don't ask me whether such places are designed by God or are the result of natural selection and thousands of years of habitation, I really don't want to decide between the chicken and the egg, but simply be grateful that I am here to appreciate it.

Buzzard numbers have recovered so well that the pheasant shooting lot want to be given permission to shoot them again on the excuse that they are taking too many pheasant chicks. Hopefully such rubbish will be treated with the contempt it deserves. If any bird deserved protection in these hills it is the buzzard, not the incredibly stupid highly coloured, noisy nuisance immigrant pheasant, bred only for the pleasure of shooting it by "sportsmen" who generally make a more thorough nuisance of themselves than any foxhunters ever did.

Sadly the large estates have come to depend on their shooting income, employing gamekeepers to generally make a nuisance of themselves, and on the less responsible estates, are regularly caught poisoning birds of prey in the name of "protection"! I would make sure that any gamekeeper who worked for me who did that would never work again, and given the power, I would make sure that any landowner who encouraged it would be drummed out of the brownies.

If we must hunt, and perhaps there is an instinct there which needs to be preserved, then why not return to the days of the falconer, use hawks to kill the game, riding out with the falcons in the early morning and leaving the 4x4 and the Harrods Hamper and the matched Purdeys in the garage? It may be medaeval but I am sure it was a damn sight more skilled and truly enjoyable than tramping around the countryside blasting great quantities of lead shot at anything unfortunate enough to fly within range.

At which point in my story, three young ladies rode down the hill accompanied by two "proper" dogs. We exchanged greetings and comments on the day and I walked back down the path to the car, leaving the buzzards and the hill behind. Hopefully it will be there tomorrow and (dv) so will the buzzards.