Country diary: the psychology of seeing off those thieving pigeons
Written by Simon Ingram
Great Casterton, Rutland: Those bangs are meant to sound like guns – because birds know what guns do
Appearances aside, true peace is elusive here. The A1, just over a rise, keeps the background away from silence most days. It’s subtle, like an endless exhale, and you don’t notice it’s there – but you notice when it’s not. Sunday mornings come close. Then, you register other sounds. Different sounds. More deliberate. Designed to scare.
I walk the lane that leads to a low amphitheatre of farmland four miles wide, and I hear one: a distant crack, softly reverberating. Sometimes they are dull and boxy, echoless, like a finger flicked against cardboard. Sometimes they sound like cannon, and bounce around the landscape’s shallow folds.
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