Skylarks and Seed Dressing

I have done my first day's seed dressing of the season.  I drive and operate one of the companies mobile seed dressers and enjoy the change from my usual work routine.  Today's job was sixteen tonnes of spring barley for a regular customer.  Everything went well and I ended up  dressing seventeen tonnes.  The  only problem was that I was inside a large shed, hence I couldn't enjoy one of the few clear cold days we have had this year.  When we stopped for lunch I managed to get outside, while I was standing soaking in the sunshine I heard my first Skylark of the year.  These shy little brown birds start singing about this time of year and what a song it is, sung from high above the ground. I find a real joy in the sound of their song. Sadly skylarks are one of the birds that have declined in population over my lifetime.  I suspect but cannot prove that their decline can possibly be attributed to changing farming practice.  Though I remember finding owl pellets as a child and taking them to pieces to try to discover what the owl had been feeding on and it seemed that one of the resident owls specialised in hunting skylarks.  A large number of the owl pellets contained skylark rear claws, these claws are easily recognised by their length.  I have opened many owl pellets over the years since but I have never found skylark claws in owl pellets again.  I suspect that it was a single owl that had learned the knack of catching these little birds and made the most of its particular niche.

To change the subject I spent most of Sunday completing my battle with the ivy infesting my hedge, I have finally cut the last of the ivy away from it's roots so now I have to wait for the infestation in the hedge to realise that it's dead and loosed its hold on the poor hawthorn.  I suspect that I'll have to wait for next winter before that happy event occurs but at that point I will be able to decide how much of the hedge is alive and work out how to regenerate it.  The only good thing about having to wait for next winter is that it gives me the whole of the summer to kill off the ivy roots and ensure any new hedge plants have the best possible start hopefully free from the strangling grasp.