A little gruesome today, I’m afraid.

There is a road that goes from (fairly close to) my house to the nearest motorway junction. It’s a single-track road, with farmland on both sides.

At the north end of that road is an entrance to a field, and just beside that entrance I noted this chap and a couple of other birds tied onto a fence. They were gone by the time I travelled the same road in the evening.

I want to say that I make no judgement here. What I know about rural lifestyles could be written on a rather small postage stamp. If people tell me that shooting game birds makes sense in the context of a rural lifestyle, I shall believe them until I have knowledge to contradict them. As a townie I have no more right to contradict rural folk than someone who knows nothing about programming has to complain about how many semicolons I use when writing C++

On the other hand, I did find it a shock to realise that I truly am living quite close to the "real" countryside!