We have had the plague of toads and field rats drowning in the pool, but now it’s getting warmer, we have the Flies that Like Mouths and Noses. This species appear in massive swarms every June, and their sole purpose in life seems to be the close examination of human breathing tracts. I have also decided over the years that they’re deaf, because no matter how many times one rather pointlessly shouts “F**k off!” at them, they keep coming back for more. In a couple of weeks time, it’ll be the turn of the Flies that Like Biting Ankles.  It gets positively biblical here at times.

One heart-rending sight I’ve experienced twice now in the last three days is that of a bird with an injured wing hopping and flopping about on the floor, running in panic to the safety of the hedge whenever one approaches. What twists the knife in the human heart is the knowledge that for them, this is a certain death sentence – and will probably in turn mean the death of their nested brood. I always want to interfere, but for years now I haven’t: there is no point in trying to anthropomorphise wild nature. I loved Kenneth Grahame’s books as a kid, but find yourself face to face with a cornered badger and they are bad-tempered mothers with big claws. My opposition to badger-culling is based not on urban fluffy drivel, but rather my own assessment of the veterinarian facts about bovines, and the certain knowledge that farmers kill badgers anyway – often disguising the cull as road-kill. Owen Paterson is, I think, a good egg on the whole – but he is wrong about bovine TB.

That said, I have a couple of brood-raising sparrow hawks on my land at the moment, and it is very tempting to see them as the archetypal married couple. The missus is a 24-carat harridan, who – you may remember from a previous post – saw off a preying buzzard ten days ago. Given that the buzzards here would seriously consider carrying off a quad bike, she is obviously some lady. Hubby, meanwhile, is your classic Andy Capp figure, and so she has to literally chase him from the nest five times a day. One can almost hear the Geordie accent as Mum says, “Get oot theeyah and catch some wurms, yer littul wastah!”

What I find both awful and awesome at the same time is how cruel and yet charming nature can be. We’re starting to get those evenings now where every time one goes out through the door, the scent of honeysuckle almost makes your head swim – and the smell of mown grass is a sensory announcement that, now and then, bending nature to one’s aesthetic will is not such a bad thing. But then a sudden, vicious flurry of movement reveals a grass snake grabbing a dormouse. Kill or be killed alongside luscious odours is nevertheless the same nature at work: the snake has to eat, and the honseysuckle has to attract bees. Without bees with a keen sense of smell, there would be no honey; and without hungry snakes we’d all be knee-deep in mouse poo.

It is this connection between all things natural that continues to convince me that the theory of a random Universe is unmitigated bollocks. I do not believe in deity, but I do believe in intelligence. There can be no connective plan without intelligence. Something at work in the Universe has an IQ of roughly 476 quadrillion squared. You may not believe in God, but denying the method strikes me as classically human hubris. So there.