WILLIAMSON'S WEEKLY NATURE NOTES

It does not take much change in the agricultural landscape to bring about sweeping declines.

Snipe have been drained away.

When I was a lad, I shot a few snipe with my old damascus-barreled hammer gun. I missed hundreds more.

In the 1950s it was nothing to see whisps (flocks) of 25 snipe on every meadow around my home at Bungay in Suffolk.

In the Arun valley, the editor of The Shooting Times, Noel Sedgwick (known to all as Towerbird) who lived at Pulborough, shot 400 snipe off the Brooks every year. They showed no decline.

Then along came the drainage damage.

My father on his Norfolk farm had already begun his drainage campaign in 1943 in order to help kick-start the nation's self-sufficiency in cereals. He wrote two wonderful books about the experience '“ The Story of a Norfolk Farm (Faber and Faber) and Lucifer Before Sunrise (MacDonalds).

Harry Ferguson gave my father one of his very first tractors at cost price, after reading of father's struggle in his Daily Express articles.

For full feature see West Sussex Gazette September 19