Show Notes
Send us Fan Mail In the bustling heart of Norwich city centre beneath the clock tower of City Hall and the ledges of St Peter Mancroft, Chris Skinner answers listener Jocelyn Baxter’s question about five different-coloured pigeons in her garden. Surrounded by swirling flocks of up to 500 feral pigeons (the domesticated descendants of the wild rock dove), he traces their extraordinary journey from remote Scottish cliffs and Welsh caves to urban rooftops, including their role as ancient Egyptia...
More from Chris Skinner's Countryside Podcasts
Send us Fan Mail On a warm, unseasonably sunny mid-October morning at High Ash Farm, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin are stopped in the pickup by a spectacular feeding display beside the farmyard. A charm of around 250 goldfinches — the “clown faces” with their red masks and yellow wing bands — is working the five-acre teasel plot. The birds prise the loose, nutritious seeds from the prickly heads with their specialised beaks, rising briefly to the electricity wires to watch for sparrowhawks...
Send us Fan Mail On a misty mid-October morning at High Ash Farm, with the clay pond in the woodland completely dry and deer tracks printed in the mud, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin turn their attention to ivy — the last great pollen and nectar flow of the year. Thick stems, some four inches across and fifty years old, climb the oaks without rooting into them, clinging instead by tiny sucker discs. Chris explains the plant’s two lives: the pointed juvenile leaves on the trunk, and the smoo...
Send us Fan Mail On a bright early-October morning at High Ash Farm, autumn has arrived in earnest at Fox’s Grove. Horse-chestnut leaves are already brown and falling as the corky abscission layer seals each leaf from its stalk, while field maples around the field edges glow scarlet and gold in the low sun. Fallen ash trees, victims of dieback, lie among the leaf litter, and a lawyer’s wig ink cap stands at perfection before it begins to eat itself — dripping black ink that attracts flies and...
Send us Fan Mail On a bright late-September morning at High Ash Farm, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin sit on a homemade oak bench with a panoramic view of Norwich and begin an unusual episode. 452 acres of the farm have been put on the market for around £2.5 million, yet the 1947 Agricultural Holdings Act means Chris — and in time his son Daniel — remain tenants for life. The pair set off to show what a buyer would actually acquire: not just land and cottages, but a working conservation land...
Send us Fan Mail On a fine mizzling mid-September morning at High Ash Farm, Chris Skinner and Matthew Gudgin begin in the farmyard and notice that September has lived up to its name as the changeling month. The swallows have vanished almost overnight — more than a hundred young sent south after a successful season — while a handsome young cockerel struts among the nest boxes and a robin still sings. The pair then set out on a fungal foray. At the base of an oak they find beefsteak fungus, a r...