A favourite New Forest haunt--Summertide--Young blackbird's
call--Abundance of blackbirds and thrushes, and destruction of
young--Starlings breeding--The good done by starlings--Perfume of the
honeysuckle--Beauty of the hedge rose--Cult of the rose--Lesser
whitethroat--His low song--Common and lesser whitethroat--In the
woods--A sheet of bracken--Effect of broken surfaces--Roman mosaics
at Silchester--Why mosaics give pleasure--Woodland birds--Sound of
insect life--Abundance of flies--Sufferings of cattle--Dark
Water--Biting and teasing flies--Feeding the fishes and fiddlers with
flies.
Looking away from Beaulieu towards Southampton Water there is seen on
the border of the wide brown heath a long line of tall firs, a vast
dark grove forming the horizon on that side. This is the edge of an
immense wood, and beyond the pines which grow by the heath, it is
almost exclusively oak with an undergrowth of holly. It is low-lying
ground with many streams and a good deal of bog, and owing to the
dense undergrowth and the luxuriance of vegetation generally this
part of the forest has a ruder, wilder appearance than at any other
spot. Here, too, albeit the nobler bird and animal forms are absent,
as is indeed the case in all the New Forest district, animal life
generally is in greatest profusion and variety. This wood with its
surrounding heaths, bogs, and farm lands, has been my favourite
summer resort and hunting-ground for {54} some years past. With a
farm-house not many minutes' walk from the forest for a home, I have
here spent long weeks at a time, rambling in the woods every day and
all day long, for the most time out of sight of human habitations,
and always with the feeling that I was in my own territory, where
everything was as Nature made it and as I liked it to be. Never once
in all my rambles did I encounter that hated being, the collector,
with his white, spectacled town face and green butterfly net. In
this out-of-the-way corner of the Forest one could imagine the time
come when this one small piece of England which lies between the Avon
and Southampton Water will be a sanctuary for all rare and beautiful
wild life and a place of refreshment to body and soul for all men.
The richest, fullest time of the year is when June is wearing to an
end, when one knows without the almanac that spring is over and gone.
Nowhere in England is one more sensible of the change to fullest
summer than in this low-lying, warmest corner of Hampshire.
The cuckoo ceases to weary us with its incessant call, and the
nightingale sings less and less frequently. The passionate season is
well-nigh over for birds; their fountain of music begins to run dry.
The cornfields and waste grounds are everywhere splashed with the
intense scarlet of poppies. Summer has no rain in all her wide, hot
heavens to give to her thirsty fields, and has sprinkled them with
the red fiery moisture from her own veins. And as colour {55}
changes, growing deeper and more intense, so do sounds change: for
the songs of yesterday there are shrill hunger-cries.
[Sidenote: Young blackbird's call]
One of the oftenest heard in all the open woods, in hedges, and even
out in the cornfields is the curious musical call of the young
blackbird. It is like the chuckle of the adult, but not so loud,
full, happy, and prolonged; it is shriller, and drops at the end to a
plaintive, impatient sound, a little pathetic--a cry of the young
bird to its too long absent mother. When very hungry he emits this
shrill musical call at intervals of ten to fifteen seconds; it may be
heard distinctly a couple of hundred yards away.
The numbers of young blackbirds and throstles apparently just out of
the nest astonish one. They are not only in the copses and hedges,
and on almost every roadside tree, but you constantly see them on the
ground in the lanes and public roads, standing still, quite
unconscious of danger. The poor helpless bird looks up at you in a
sort of amazement, never having seen men walking or riding on
bicycles; but he hesitates, not knowing whether to fly away or stand
still. Thrush or blackbird, he is curiously interesting to look at.
The young thrush, with his yellowish-white spotty breast, the remains
of down on his plumage, his wide yellow mouth, and raised head with
large, fixed, toad-like eyes, has a distinctly reptilian appearance.
Not so the young blackbird, standing motionless on the road, in doubt
too as to what you are; his short tail raised, giving him {56} an
incipient air of blackbird jauntiness; his plumage not brown, indeed,
as we describe it, but rich chestnut-black, like the chestnut-black
hair of a beautiful Hampshire girl of that precious type with oval
face and pale dark skin. A pretty creature, rich in colour, with a
musical, pathetic voice, waiting so patiently to be visited and fed,
and a weasel perhaps watching him from the roadside grass with
hungry, bright little eyes! How they die--thrushes and
blackbirds--at this perilous period in their lives! I sometimes see
what looks like a rudely painted figure of a bird on the hard road:
it is a young blackbird that had not the sense to get out of the way
of a passing team, and was crushed flat by a hoof or wheel. It is
but one in a thousand that perishes in that way. One has to remember
that these two species of thrush--throstle and blackbird--are in
extraordinary abundance, that next to starlings and chaffinches they
abound over all species; that they are exceedingly prolific,
beginning to lay in this southern country in February, and rearing at
least three broods in the season; and that when winter comes round
again the thrush and blackbird population will be just about what it
was before.
Fruit-eating birds do not much vex the farmer in this almost
fruitless country. Thrushes and finches and sparrows are nothing to
him: the starling, if he pays any attention to the birds, he looks on
as a good friend.
[Sidenote: Starlings breeding]
At the farm there are two very old yew trees growing in the
back-yard, and one of these, in an {57} advanced state of decay, is
full of holes and cavities in its larger branches. Here about half a
dozen pairs of starlings nest every year, and by the middle of June
there are several broods of fully-fledged young. At this time it was
amusing to watch the parent birds at their task, coming and going all
day long, flying out and away straight as arrows to this side and
that, every bird to its own favourite hunting-ground. Some had their
grounds in the meadow, just before the house where the cows and geese
were, and it was easy to watch their movements. Out of the yew the
bird would shoot, and in ten or twelve seconds would be down walking
about in that busy, plodding, rook-like way the starling has when
looking for something; and presently, darting his beak into the turf,
he would drag out something large, and back he would fly to his young
with a big, conspicuous, white object in his beak. These white
objects which he was busily gathering every day, from dawn to dark,
were full-grown grubs of the cockchafer. When watching these birds
at their work it struck me that the enormous increase of starlings
all over the country in recent years may account for the fact that
great cockchafer years do not now occur. In former years these
beetles were sometimes in such numbers that they swarmed in the air
in places, and stripped the oaks of their leaves in midsummer. It is
now more than ten years since I saw cockchafers in considerable
numbers, and for a long time past I have not heard of their
appearance in swarms anywhere.
{58}
The starling is in some ways a bad bird, a cherry thief, and a robber
of other birds' nesting-places; yaffle and nuthatch must hate him,
but if his ministrations have caused an increase of even one per
cent. in the hay crop, and the milk and butter supply, he is, from
our point of view, not wholly bad.
In late June the unkept hedges are in the fullness of their midsummer
beauty. After sunset the fragrance of the honeysuckle is almost too
much: standing near the blossom-laden hedge when there is no wind to
dissipate the odour, there is a heaviness in it which makes it like
some delicious honeyed liquor which we are drinking in. The
honeysuckle is indeed first among the "melancholy flowers" that give
out their fragrance by night. In the daytime, when the smell is
faint, the pale sickly blossoms are hardly noticed even where they
are seen in masses and drape the hedges. Of all the hedge-flowers,
the rose alone is looked at, its glory being so great as to make all
other blooms seem nothing but bleached or dead discoloured leaves in
comparison.
[Sidenote: Beauty of the hedge rose]
He would indeed be a vainly ambitious person who should attempt to
describe this queen of all wild flowers, joyous or melancholy; but
substituting flower for fruit, and the delight of the eye for the
pleasure of taste, we may in speaking of it quote the words of a
famous old writer, used in praise of the strawberry. He said that
doubtless God Almighty could have made a better berry if He had been
so minded, but doubtless God Almighty never did.
I esteem the rose not only for that beauty which {59} sets it highest
among flowers, but also because it will not suffer admiration when
removed from its natural surroundings. In this particular it
resembles certain brilliant sentient beings that languish and lose
all their charms in captivity. Pluck your rose and bring it indoors,
and place it side by side with other blossoms--yellow flag and blue
periwinkle, and shining yellow marsh-marigold, and poppy and
cornflower--and it has no lustre, and is no more to the soul than a
flower made out of wax or paper. Look at it here, in the brilliant
sunlight and the hot wind, waving to the wind on its long thorny
sprays all over the vast disordered hedges; here in rosy masses,
there starring the rough green tangle with its rosy stars--a
rose-coloured cloud on the earth and Summer's bridal veil--and you
will refuse to believe (since it will be beyond your power to
imagine) that anywhere on the earth, in any hot or temperate climate,
there exists a more divinely beautiful sight.
If among the numberless cults that flourish in the earth we could
count a cult of the rose, to this spot the votaries of the flower
might well come each midsummer to hold their festival. They would be
youthful and beautiful, their lips red, their eyes full of laughter;
and they would be arrayed in light silken garments of delicate
colour--green, rose, and white; and their arms and necks and
foreheads would shine with ornaments of gold and precious stones. In
their hands would be musical instruments of many pretty shapes with
which they would sweetly accompany their clear voices as they sat or
stood {60} beneath the old oak trees, and danced in sun and shade,
and when they moved in bright procession along the wide grass-grown
roads, through forest and farm-land.
[Sidenote: Lesser whitethroat]
In the summer of 1900 I found the lesser whitethroat--the better
whitethroat I should prefer to call it--in extraordinary abundance in
the large unkept hedges east of the woods in the parishes of Fawley
and Exbury. Hitherto I had always found this species everywhere
thinly distributed; here it was abundant as the reed-warblers along
the dykes in the flat grass-lands on the Somerset coast, and like the
reed-warblers in the reed- and sedge-grown ditches and streams, each
pair of whitethroats had its own part of the hedge; so that in
walking in a lane when you left one singing behind you heard his next
neighbour singing at a distance of fifteen or twenty yards farther
on, and from end to end of the great hedge you had that continuous
beautiful low warble at your side, and sometimes on both sides. The
loud brief song of this whitethroat, which resembles the first part
of a chaffinch's song, is a pleasant sound and nothing more; the low
warbling, which runs on without a break for forty or fifty seconds,
or longer, is the beautiful song, and resembles the low continuous
warble of the blackcap, but is more varied, and has one sound which
is unique in the songs of British birds. This is a note repeated two
or three times at intervals in the course of the song, of an
excessive sharpness, unlike any other bird sound, but comparable to
the silvery shrilling of the great {61} green
grasshopper--excessively sharp, yet musical. The bird emits this
same silver shrill note when angry and when fighting, but it is then
louder and not so musical, and resembles the sharpest sounds made by
bats and other small mammals when excited.
One day I sat down near a hedge, where an old half-dead oak stood
among the thorns and brambles, and just by the oak a lesser
whitethroat was moving about and singing. Out among the furze bushes
at some distance from the hedge a common whitethroat was singing,
flitting and darting from bush to bush, rising at intervals into the
air and dropping again into the furze; but by-and-by he rose to a
greater height to pour out his mad confused strain in the air, then
sloped away to the hedge and settled, still singing, on the dead
branch of the oak. Up rose the lesser whitethroat and attacked it
with extreme fury, rising to a height of two or three feet and
dashing repeatedly at it, looking like a miniature kestrel or hobby;
and every time it descended the other ducked his head and flattened
himself on the branch, only to rise again, crest erect and throat
puffed out, still pouring forth its defiant song. As long as this
lasted the attacking bird emitted his piercing metallic anger-note,
rapidly and continuously, like the clicking of steel machinery.
Alas! I fear I shall not again see the lesser whitethroat as I saw
him in that favoured year: in 1901 he came not, or came in small
numbers; and it was the same in the spring of 1902. The spring was
cold and backward in both years, and the bitter {62} continuous east
winds which prevailed in March and April probably proved fatal to
large numbers of the more delicate migrants.
In this low, level country, sheltered by woods and hedgerows, we feel
the tremendous power of the sun even before the last week in June.
It is good to feel, to bathe in the heat all day long; but at noon
one sometimes finds it too hot even on the open heath, and is forced
to take shelter in the woods. It was always coolest on the high
ground among the pines, where the trees are very tall and there is no
underwood. In spring it was always pleasant to walk here on the
thick carpet of fallen needles and old dead fern; now, in a very
short time, the young bracken has sprung up as if by miracle to a
nearly uniform height of about four feet. It spreads all around me
for many acres--an unbroken sea of brilliant green, out of which rise
the tall red columns of the pines supporting the dark woodland roof.
[Sidenote: A sheet of bracken]
Why is it, when in June the luxuriant young bracken first drops its
fully developed fronds, so that frond touches frond, many
overlapping, forming a billowy expanse of vivid green, hiding, or all
but hiding, the brown or red soil beneath--why is it the eyes rest
with singular satisfaction on it? It is not only because of the
colour, nor the beauty of contrast where the red floor of last year's
beech leaves is seen through the fresh verdure, and of dark red-boled
pines rising from the green sea of airy fronds. Colours and
contrasts more beautiful may be seen, and the pleasure they give is
different in kind.
{63}
Here standing amid the fern, where it had at last formed that waving
surface and was a little above my knees, it seemed to me that the
particular satisfaction I experienced was due to the fine symmetrical
leafing of the surface, the minute subdivision of parts which
produced an effect similar to that of a mosaic floor. When I
consider other surfaces, on land or water, I find the same
gratification in all cases where it is broken or marked out or
fretted in minute, more or less orderly subdivisions. The glass-like
or oily surface of water, where there are no reflections to bring
other feelings in, does not hold or attract but rather wearies the
sight; but it is no sooner touched to a thousand minute crinkles by
the wind, than it is looked at with refreshment and pleasure. The
bed of a clear stream, with its pavement of minute variegated pebbles
and spots of light and shade, pleases in the same way. The sight
rests with some satisfaction even on a stagnant pond covered with
green duckweed; but the satisfaction is less in this case on account
of the extreme minuteness of the parts and the too great smoothness.
The roads and open spaces in woods in October and November are
delightful to walk in when they are like richly variegated floors
composed of small pieces, and like dark floors inlaid with red and
gold of beech and oak leaves. Numberless instances might be given,
and we see that the effect is produced even in small objects, as, for
instance, in scaly fishes and in serpents. It is the minutely
segmented texture of the serpent which, with the colour, gives it its
wonderful richness. {64} For the same reason a crocodile bag is more
admired than one of cowhide, and a book in buckram looks better than
one in cloth or even vellum.
The old Romans must have felt this instinctive pleasure of the eye
very keenly when they took such great pains over their floors. I was
strongly impressed with this fact at Silchester when looking at the
old floors of rich and poor houses alike which have been uncovered
during the last two or three years. They seem to have sought for the
effect of mosaic even in the meaner habitations, and in passages and
walks, and when tesseræ could not be had they broke up common tiles
into small square fragments, and made their floors in that way. Even
with so poor a material, and without any ornamentation, they did get
the effect sought, and those ancient fragments of floors made of
fragments of tiles, unburied after so many centuries, do actually
more gratify the sight than the floors of polished oak or other
expensive material which are seen in our mansions and palaces.
There is doubtless a physiological reason for this satisfaction to
the eye, as indeed there is for so many of the pleasurable sensations
we experience in seeing. We may say that the vision flies over a
perfectly smooth plain surface, like a ball over a sheet of ice, and
rests nowhere; but that in a mosaic floor the segmentation of the
surface stays and rests the sight. To go no farther than that, which
is but a part of the secret, the sheet of fern fronds, on account of
this staying effect on the vision, increases what we see, {65} so
that a surface of a dozen square yards of fern seems more in extent
than half an acre of smooth-shaven lawn, or the large featureless
floor of a skating-rink or ball-room.
[Sidenote: Harshening bird-voices]
On going or wading through the belt of bracken under the tall
firs--that billowy sea of fronds in the midst of which I have so long
detained my patient reader--into the great oak wood beyond and below
it, on each successive visit during the last days of June, the
harshening of the bird voices became more marked. Only the wren and
wood-wren and willow-wren uttered an occasional song, but the bigger
birds made most of the sound. Families of young jays were then just
out of the nest, crying with hunger, and filling the wood with their
discordant screams when the parent birds came with food. A pair of
kestrels, too, with a nestful of young on a tall fir incessantly
uttered their shrill reiterated cries when I was near; and one pair
of green woodpeckers, with young out of the breeding-hole but not yet
able to fly, were half crazed with anxiety. Around me and on before
me they flitted from tree to tree and clung to the bark, wings spread
out and crest raised, their loud laugh changed to a piercing cry of
anger that pained the sense.
They were now moved only by solicitude and anger: all other passion
and music had gone out of the bird and into the insect world. The
oak woods were now full of a loud continuous hum like that of a
distant threshing-machine; an unbroken deep sound composed of ten
thousand thousand small individual sounds conjoined in one, but
diffused and flowing {66} like water over the surface, under the
trees, and the rough bushy tangle. The incredible number and variety
of blood-sucking flies makes this same low hot part of the Forest as
nearly like a transcript of tropical nature in some damp, wooded
district as may be found in England. But these Forest flies, even
when they came in legions about me, were not able to spoil my
pleasure. It was delightful to see so much life--to visit and sit
down with them in their own domestic circle.
In other days, in a distant region, I have passed many a night out of
doors in the presence of a cloud of mosquitoes; and when during
restless sleep I have pulled the covering from my face, they had me
at their mercy. For the smarts they inflicted on me then I have my
reward, since the venom they injected into my veins has proved a
lasting prophylactic. But to the poor cattle this place must be a
very purgatory, a mazy wilderness swarming with minute hellish imps
that mock their horns and giant strength, and cannot be shaken off.
While sitting on the roots of a tree in the heart of the wood, I
heard the heavy tramping and distressed bellowings of several beasts
coming at a furious rate towards me, and presently half a dozen
heifers and young bulls burst through the bushes; and catching sight
of me at a distance of ten or twelve yards, they suddenly came to a
dead stop, glaring at me with strange, mad, tortured eyes; then
swerving aside, crashed away through the undergrowth in another
direction.
[Sidenote: Dark Water]
In this wood I sought and found the stream well {67} named the Dark
Water; here, at all events, it is grown over with old ivied oaks,
with brambles and briars that throw long branches from side to side,
making the almost hidden current in the deep shade look black; but
when the sunlight falls on it the water is the colour of old sherry
from the red soil it flows over. No sooner had I sat down on the
bank, where I had a little space of sunlit water to look upon, than
the flies gathered thick about and on me, and I began to pay some
attention to individuals among them. Those that came to suck blood,
and settled at once in a business-like manner on my legs, were some
hairy and some smooth, and of various colours--grey, black,
steel-blue, and barred and ringed with bright tints; and with these
distinguished guests came numberless others, small lean gnats mostly,
without colour, and of no consideration. I did not so much mind
these as the others that simply buzzed round without an object--flies
that have no beauty, no lancet to stab you with, and no distinction
of any kind, yet will persist in forcing themselves on your
attention. They buzz and buzz, and are loudest in your ear when you
are most anxious to listen to some distant faint sound. If a
blood-sucker hurts you, you can slap him to death, and there's an end
of the matter; but slap at one of these idle, aimless, teasing flies
as hard as you like, and he is gone like quicksilver through your
fingers. He is buzzing derisively in your ears: "Slap away as much
as you like--it pleases you and doesn't hurt me." And then down
again in the same place!
{68}
When the others--the serious flies on business bent--got too
numerous, I began to slap my legs, killing one or two of the
greediest at each slap, and to throw their small corpses on the
sunlit current. These slain flies were not wasted, for very soon I
had quite a number of little minnows close to my feet, eager to seize
them as they fell. And, by-and-by, three fiddlers, or pond-skaters,
"sagacious of their quarry from afar," came skating into sight on the
space of bright water; and to these mysterious, uncanny-looking
creatures--insect ghosts that walk on the water, but with very
unghost-like appetites--I began tossing some of the flies; and each
time a fiddler seized a floating fly he skated away into the shade
with it to devour it in peace and quiet all alone by himself. For a
fiddler with a fly is like a dog with a bone among other hungry dogs.
When I had finished feeding my ghosts and little fishes, I got up and
left the place, for the sun was travelling west and the greatest heat
was over.
{69}