At home with the partridge family
I parked the truck underneath a gnarled old oak that crookedly stands at the end of a hedge, a mix of elm sucker, maple and hawthorn. My eyes were on the bund that lay 50m away, made by piling subsoil from a pond creation into a 2m-high ridge on to which tussock grass and wildflower seed had been sown two autumns ago. The imperfect mound made perfect grey partridge nesting habitat. Greys adore broken ground.
On one side of the bund lay a grass track cutting through a rough meadow; on the other, a field of well-tilled beans, their emerald shoots poking through the tilth. I twiddled the reticule on my binos, and the clumps of burdock and ribwort plantain,
