If you're worried about ticks, put up an owl box.

The animal driving most Lyme disease in the eastern US is the white-footed mouse. Ticks that feed on them are far more likely to come away infected than ticks that feed on other animals. The bigger the local mouse population, the worse the next year's tick year.

A single barred owl pair raising chicks can take hundreds of rodents in a breeding season. Owls also don't carry Lyme. The bacterium can't survive their digestive tract, so an owl that eats an infected mouse is a dead end for the disease.

Researchers at the Cary Institute, the leading lab on Lyme ecology, have been explicit about this: "Landscapes that support predators have reduced Lyme disease risk."

One owl box on its own isn't going to fix a tick year. But a yard with owls, foxes, bobcats, and weasels in it has fewer mice, and a yard with fewer mice has fewer infected ticks.

If you have woods or fields nearby, a properly sized barn owl or screech owl box (different species, different ...

Beatrix Potter left fifteen farms and four thousand acres of the Lake District to the nation, with a condition attached that the fells are still arguing about.

Peter Rabbit money bought that land. Book by book, farm by farm, from 1905 onward, a Londoner with an income and a stubborn streak buying up Lakeland ground as it came available to stop it being sold off in parcels for villas.

What she did with it is the part that gets skipped. She farmed it. Properly. She bought Troutbeck Park in 1923 and built a Herdwick flock of over a thousand, took advice from her shepherd Tom Storey, showed her tups at local shows against men who had been doing it for four generations, and beat them. She was the first woman elected to lead the Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association and died before she could take the chair.

The Herdwick was in trouble for the reason all hill breeds get into trouble. Slow growing, fewer lambs, small carcass. On a balance sheet it loses to a lowland sheep every single time, and the only thing...