Foxglove

Where you find cattle, you find flies, and where there are flies there are those who feed off them. Placid brown bovines accumulating beef lazed in marked contrast to the swifts that dived past us like fighter aircraft, timing their passing to the second and the hair's breadth. Their image stayed in our eyes after they had been and gone, for their passage was too fast for focusing the human eye. Swift indeed.

And then, among the black and buff delta wings flickered smaller fighter aircraft, not faster or more agile but taking every advantage of fitting through a smaller space.

The swallows' steel-blue livery showed brightly against the more sombre uniform of the swifts. Is a swift offended when a swallow snips the fly it was aiming for out from under its beak?

You can hear the wingbeats as they dive under our noses and up again over our heads, making the most of the gnats that are attracted to human blood. The cattle doze, and chew, and seem to look benignly at all the activity.

Fortunately, quarry is on the move, and so her attention is distracted from a potentially lovely roll followed by harsh words and a cold bath to a compelling scent and duty to be done. The cattle consider getting up to come and see what we are about, but it is all too much effort.

Nothing is too much effort to a terrier locked onto quarry like a heat-seeking missile. In the cover, we can see small squiffling followed by larger, and the long-legged dogs dance around waiting for the short-legged one to produce something worth chasing.

Rats are small, agile and evidently carry a strong scent, for the dogs can wind them at some distance, closing in on the area and surrounding it. We humans, at greater height, can see the rat break cover and hide again. Sometimes they will climb hedgerows or even trees, leaving dogs checking the ground in puzzlement, though experienced ones like ours know to look upwards now.

For full feature see West Sussex Gazette May 30