Free Over the Farmer's Gate by Roger Evans

more used to adversity and become more pragmatic, but I tolerate Bill Oddie because I enjoy seeing the wildlife.
    It’s a classic case of a ‘celebrity’ who thinks his ego is more important than the programme. On one show he talked about a species of bird being reintroduced to the UK. The reintroduction was set back a year when the birds strayed off their sanctuary on to a farm where they were ‘inevitably’ poisoned. He was saying quite clearly that farms are synonymous with a poisoned environment. How disgraceful is that?
    He wants squeezing into a wetsuit and dropping in a cold loch, where, with a bit of luck, he might be picked up by an osprey and fed to its young – all shown on camera, of course.
    We move our own conversation on, thankfully, and it gets a bit competitive with, ‘Have you seen this?’ and ‘Have you ever seen that?’
    I can compete quite well until they tell me they have often seen otters. I’m quite envious, I’ve never seen an otter in the wild– lots of people who spend their lives in the countryside never do. It’s often down to chance, right place, right time sort of stuff. My son David was coming to work once and found two dead on the road, which was a real shame.
    My bed and my book are calling and I get up to go, but they haven’t quite finished. ‘I tell you what we haven’t seen for years and years,’ one of them says. ‘A brown hare.’
    I turn in the doorway and reply, ‘I can show you a hare.’
    I arrange to collect them at the front door next morning, to take them to see a hare.
    Next day I look inside my truck and decide it will take longer to make it clean than I have time to do it, so I borrow David’s. Mert, my dog, has to come which is a bit of a treat for him, but he can’t see as much out of the front window because there are two rows of seats in this vehicle, so he’s not so pleased as he thought he would be. The first field we go in is the one we have to leave in stubble for 12 months for the ground-nesting birds. It starts off as a clean stubble but, come the spring, everything grows, be it weeds or seed from previous crops.
    So now we have a waist-high jungle of wheat, barley, oilseed rape, grasses, docks, thistles and nettles. It’s perfect cover for ground-nesting birds because the height of the growth is cover from aerial predators. The keeper tells me a fox has been living there for two months, which isn’t quite so perfect.
    I drive slowly through the field and wonder if the hares will turn up. It’s getting quite hot now and they may have sought some shade.
    Fifty yards away I see the grasses move suddenly and a glimpse of a brown body. The movement continues and I suspect we’ve found the fox. I drive up closer in to a clearer space and we find two hares fighting and playing.
    I switch the engine off and they play round and round us forabout five minutes. My guests are in raptures and camcorders and cameras are kept busy. It’s almost like a safari where the big cats come up to the vehicles.
    We and the hares move on and I drive around the fields we have recently cut for silage. The regrown grass is almost 6in tall now, about up to a reclining hare’s shoulders, and we can see brown hares everywhere. We started counting them, but gave up when we reached 20.
    As we continue our short journey, we meet hares coming towards us, hares running away, and hares up on their haunches, watching us watching them. Hares to the right of us, hares to the left of us.
    As if on cue, all the birds turn up as well – lots of different species and, to be fair, my guests are very knowledgeable. Our journey done, we return home. It’s not taken an hour, but their thanks are profuse. ‘What you’ve just shown us is priceless,’ says the woman. ‘No, it isn’t,’ I reply, ‘we charge £3 a hare and Ann will put it on your bill.’
    I don’t get £3 a hare, but I do get a very nice bottle of red wine.

    I OFTEN fill my car up with petrol on Sunday mornings