Waddell started as a gamekeeper when he was 16. He was brought up by his uncle who was a farmer rather than a keeper, but he remembers him as a man who had terrific respect for the natural world. “ There was a generation of gamekeepers like that, men who were great naturalists,” he told me.

During the time Lindsay was a keeper, his profession transformed. Shooting used to be a pastime that depended on harvesting a small but sustainable surplus of wild game, such as grey partridges and hares. But over Lindsay’s career, it became big business. In the uplands, medication was used to sustain artificially high numbers of grouse, and in the lowlands, more and more reared game birds were released to sate ever-growing demand. In the early Eighties, it was reckoned that 10 million pheasants were shot in England during the season. Five million of those were reared and released, and five million were wild. Forty years on, it’s estimated that we shoot some 70 million pheasants each year, of which only a very small percentage will have bred naturally. “There were people in the Nineties who were just upping the ante all the time,” Lindsay told me, as we watched oystercatchers wheeling through the rain beyond the window, “it was man’s greed that took over.”

This summer, there has been a steady drip of news stories about gamekeepers losing their jobs because of avian flu on the Continent. Agricultural intensification means it’s almost impossible, in many parts of the UK, for wild hen pheasants to find quiet, insect-rich corners where they can raise a brood, and intensively rearing game birds in the UK is banned. Consequently, in normal years, shoots import some 20 million pheasants and 15 million partridges from France. The weather there is better suited to rearing game. We’ve destroyed vast swathes of habitat in under 100 years, but no matter: importing birds allows us to keep shooting while pretending everything’s fine.

Or it did anyway, until the spring of this year, when Defra announced a temporary ban on the import of game birds from parts of France where bird flu was running rife. Almost 13% of shoots have said that they aren’t going to operate at all this season and the National Gamekeepers Organisation believes that 111 keepers have been let go. Every time the papers cover the story, Shooting Times, gets tagged in jubilant posts on social media. The Twitter consensus is damning: shooting is awful and keepers deserve every bit of misery they get.

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There can be little doubt that the sport has become bloated, and it’s generally recognised that releasing excessive numbers of hungry birds denudes the land of invertebrates and flora. But it’s absurd to suggest that gamekeepers are the architects of shooting’s explosion. When Lindsay was a boy, many more keepers were employed, and far fewer birds were shot.

I know one keeper who has been at the same estate in East Anglia for 30 years. Initially, he had two lads beneath him, and they were tasked with running a wild bird shoot, which at that point, was let to an old bachelor who was happy to pay vast sums in the hope of a day or two of good sport. When the grey partridges on the estate bred well, he shot, and in poor breeding years he didn’t. All these years later, on that same estate, they sell three shoot days a week, 200 French partridges a go, and the keeper works singlehanded.

Like Lindsay, that East Anglian keeper is a naturalist at heart, and he’d love to be running a wild bird shoot. But when the old bachelor died, he was replaced by a shoot tenant who is a businessman first and foremost. Admittedly, there are fewer and fewer people able to fork out for shooting as it used to be. Britain is a different country now — the rural rich aren’t as rich as they once were, and labour is expensive.

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Last Christmas, Gerald Gray, formerly the headkeeper at one of Norfolk’s best wild bird shoots, told me he’d spent his life managing his boss’s expectations: often, he had to deliver the news that they wouldn’t be shooting at all, because the weather hadn’t been kind and the chicks hadn’t made it. If they’d gone ahead and shot, they’d have killed all their breeding stock for the following year. With reared birds, nature has been taken out of the equation and there’s no requirement for delayed gratification. Late capitalism promises us that we can have what we want, whenever we want — cherries in December and a 300-bird partridge day just as soon as the cheque’s made out.

It’s not that there are leagues of keepers out there wanting to go bigger and bigger; it’s that the people employing them make money out of doing so. When those Twitter users attack gamekeepers, they’ve got the wrong man.

Demonising gamekeepers can have grievous consequences. It’s tough and lonely, and keepering is a career with a suicide rate that’s three times the national average. On more than one occasion recently, I’ve been told by keepers who are under pressure that the struggle is often compounded by coming home to a slew of uninformed vitriol on social media. The natural word has been destroyed, the narrative runs, and it’s all their fault.

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Of course, not every keeper is an angel. There are still people out there illegally killing badgers and birds of prey, to limit the loss of game — but I’m not convinced they’re hellbent on destroying the natural world. Shooting has been turned into a numbers game and, too often, jobs depend on those numbers adding up. But I’ve met impressive keepers over the years who’ve handed in their notice when they’ve been asked to do things that go against their principles. The shooting world is a small one and walking away from a salary, a truck, and a place to live takes grit.

This year, my book on Britain’s endangered birds was published. It only took a couple of weeks for people to start telling me I’d wasted my time. One conservationist said that, frankly, he was disappointed I’d spent so much time talking to keepers about saving wildlife rather than organisations like the RSPB. I’ve met some wonderful RSPB staffers, but the myopic elitism of suggesting we should ignore a group of people who spend all their days, from dawn until often long after dusk, caring for a patch of ground is shameful.

While some who purport to care about wildlife take to the internet, gamekeepers are hard at work out there. They maintain woodland and hedges, manage moorland, and plant crops for game birds that provide sustenance for other wildlife. It’s hard to put a price on what they do, but the Scottish Gamekeepers’ Association reckons that the UK’s 3,000 full-time keepers carry out roughly £140 million’s worth of conservation work every year. When bird flu puts 111 keepers out of a job, we’ll lose a few who are doing things they shouldn’t. But we’ll lose many more who are doing their best to save endangered species, including the curlew, the capercaillie, and the black grouse. Farewell to them all.

Forty years ago, there would have hardly been a house on the peninsula that wasn’t lived in by somebody who wasn’t working the land. But like so much of the Highlands, its beauty has been its undoing and after the estate was sold off, a busy period of house-building began. My cousins got on board. Over the years, as well as farming, they’ve made hay out of holiday properties. But I do wonder, when my uncle’s out after deer at dawn, up on the hill, if he looks down to the coast and wonders about the part he’s played in taming a wild place he loved.

Last year, I drove through the West Highlands and on up to the Isle of Skye to talk to a young crofter about corncrakes. A little over 100 years ago, the corncrake’s strange “crex crex” call could be heard in spring, in most British counties. The latest counts suggest there are now fewer than 1,000 male corncrakes returning each year, almost all of them bound for Scotland’s northwestern periphery.

The crofter I was going to see, Cheryl, lives right at the other end from where the ferry docks, so I stopped for a beer in Armadale on my way. I realised, perched on a wall there, that I could see right across the water to my cousin’s house on the other side. “Your aunt won’t go to Skye anymore in the summer,” my mother replied when I texted her. “Traffic jams all across the island.” She was right. During my stay there were caravans backed up on the road to the Fairy Pools, there was never any parking in Portree, and an old farmer told me he’d given up on Highland cattle and gone into Galloways instead. “There were folks taking photos just non-stop and it doesn’t do to harass the cattle like that”.

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The precipitous decline in corncrake numbers, in mainland Britain, has been largely caused by agricultural intensification. Corncrakes traditionally nested in hay meadows and the bulk of them would have fledged by the time the hay was cut. But with the advent of the tractor and the transition to silage, which is cut earlier, countless nests and chicks die beneath the blades. The crofting system in the Western Isles is far less intensive and there are schemes that provide financial incentives for crofters to delay cutting until the corncrakes have taken flight.

As Cheryl pointed out, lots of farmers have just given up completely on their marginal crofting operations and turned to tourism. “The corncrakes do need the grass to be cut, they don’t like rank vegetation, but people just stop farming. Instead now you’ve got sometimes three holiday houses per croft”. Climbing up into her tractor to get back to cutting the field, Cheryl said to me she’s not yet heard a corncrake on the island. A lot of her day-to-day life is taken up with crofting in a way that doesn’t theoretically endanger the few birds that remain, but she suspects there haven’t actually been any corncrakes in her part of Skye for some 20 years.

Still, the impact of tourism is more complicated than many people pretend. Magnus Davidson, whose work at the University of the Highlands and Islands focuses on setting out a new vision for rural Scotland, told me that he no longer goes to Skye in the summer either. It’s very easy, he admits, to condemn tourists, but in lots of places they are the lifeblood of rural economies and achieving any sort of balance is next to impossible. “When tourism starts to negatively affect things like roads or the environment, infrastructure can help alleviate the impact but when it comes to cultural degradation” — the loss of dialects and languages and even ways of living — “you can’t infrastructure your way out of that”. Magnus admits that there probably are parts of the UK where the tourism is harmonious but it’s ever-evolving. “It could be that somewhere is only ever one Instagram post away from the scales being tipped”.

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Magnus was also keen to point out that too much low-cost tourism risks a place becoming flooded, but make it too expensive and you run the risk of exclusivity. In some instances, locals have to contend with both. Last month, in North Norfolk, where coastal cottages often change hands for over a million quid, I met an environmentalist who was on her way to a meeting about beachgoers peeing on the dunes at Wells. The quantity of urine there has become so great that it is having a serious ecological impact.

Tourism has been the ruin of many places, but parts of Scotland desperately need more of it. A little over six months ago, my parents left Dumfriesshire, a place of remarkable tranquillity, where most summer evenings, the sun casts the hills in heavy golden light. But the village pub had closed, like the village butcher, and the village shop before it. They could all have done with a few well-heeled holidaymakers in search of some local ales and a bit of beef for their smart new barbecues.

On Skye, the truth is that a crofter with three camping pods — on what was once fine corncrake habitat — can make more in a month out of people than they ever made in a year out of cattle. But that’s not to say that tourism is always necessarily terrible for wildlife. There are some places, such as Knepp Castle in Sussex, where the extraordinary recovery of birds has been facilitated by it. Nature was suffering there because of intensive agriculture, but the shift to making money out of people — out of shepherds’ huts, yurts, and pleasant places to pitch a tent — has meant they can manage the land in a far gentler and more ecologically sound way. In a binary world, we tend not to realise that there are different flavours of agriculture. Where the corncrakes of the Hebrides need farming, to keep the grass sward in check, farming in Sussex has done for turtle doves by tearing out hedgerow habitat in order to make fields bigger.

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It was five or six years ago that I last went north to see my cousins. Beneath snipe drumming and harriers cutting circles in the air, I fished for a couple of days — just a few small brown trout and one sea trout lost. On the last evening I was there, my uncle said I could go down to his farm the following morning and shoot a goose if I fancied it — the greylags had been eating his animals’ grass for too long.

I drove to the bay before dawn and picked my way across the marsh before settling in behind a cattle trough. For 20 minutes the geese grew louder and louder out on the sand. Just before the sun rose they got up and passed me 30 yards to the right, dark shapes against a cold blue sky. I took one out of the back of the skein. Two shots sent it tumbling into the reeds and the marsh lifted with the crying shadows of curlew, lapwing, and dunlin.

Then behind me, all around the bay, lights came on in houses that I hadn’t realised were there. I wandered back along the lane with the warm goose tucked under my jacket. I didn’t want to spoil things for any of those holidaymakers, as they sat down to croissants and the picture postcard view.