Country diary

Last month was an "April fool", because we had plenty of showers and only brief blue skies, so the month lived up to its name. Now, spring is in the air and numerous birds are in our garden and in the field hedgerows. And it is a pleasure to see many lambs in neighbouring pastures paying frequent visits to their mothers for a supply of warm milk and, on fine evenings, running races around their fields with their little heads tossing and tails flying in the wind.

There are a lot of crop fields, but it is good still to see grazing sheep and cattle. Primroses are in bloom and numerous clumps of daffodils bring radiance to the garden. I have noticed several cock pheasants too close to the country roads and scurrying off the tarmac as a vehicle approaches. Unfortunately, with the speed of driving today, I now see a few flattened corpses of hares, rabbits and, this week, a hedgehog.

I have a labrador, and she gets me out for a walk every day, whatever the weather. Last week she investigated a hedgerow from which erupted a hen partridge that was already sitting on eggs. I had a quick look to check this - my dog is obedient and immediately sat on command - and we retreated. Then I watched from a respectable distance and the mother bird went back within minutes.

England's largest remaining red squirrel population is in Kielder Forest, and there is an active Save our Squirrels project to try to save the few small colonies of reds that we still have up here. They breed in spring and once mated will stay attached to one another for years. Their dreys are found in a fork of larch or conifer branches, or in a hollow tree trunk, always inconspicuous and hard to find. These will have been constructed of shreds of interlaced moss, grass, leaves and sometimes even strips of bark from a young tree.