Letter to the editor:

I cannot disagree more with Caroline Snow’s article in the Okehampton Times regarding pheasants in our countryside this week!

I have 16 hen pheasants and six cock pheasants that I throw mixed bird seed to every morning here on the farm for the past six years! I have pied wagtails, chaffinches, starlings, blue tits, cole tits, great tits, robins, blackbirds, thrushes sparrows aplenty. I wouldn’t bother to feed if I didn’t have the pheasants visiting every morning.

Maybe Caroline doesn’t like the pheasants, and is trying to stop the shoots, I don't know, but most true country folk love to see the pheasants strutting their stuff.

Yes, they might be an Asian import many years ago, but they add a bit of colour to our countryside, nothing nicer than to hear the cock pheasant early in the mornings.… If she is so worried about the decline of smaller birds she only has to open her eyes to how many crows and rooks there are now who attack nests in the spring and eat the baby birds. Has she seen this? I very much doubt it. It’s these birds that need controlling, not the pheasants …

Sandra Loud

by email