is now a vanished industry. Ten years ago the banks of the river from
Staines to the upper waters at Cricklade were honeycombed with crayfish
holes, like sandmartins' nests in a railway cutting. These holes were
generally not more than eighteen inches below the normal water line of the
river. In winter when the stream was full fresh holes were dug higher up
the bank. In summer when the water fell these were deserted. The result
was that there were many times more holes than crayfish, and that for
hundreds of miles along the Thames and its tributaries these burrows made
a perforated border of about three feet deep. The almost complete
destruction of the crayfish was due to a disease, which first appeared
near Staines, and worked its way up the Thames, with as much method as
enteric fever worked its way down the Nile in the Egyptian Campaign after
Omdurman. The epidemic is well known in France, where a larger kind of
crayfish is reared artificially in ponds, and serves as the material for
_bisque d'ecrevisses_, and as the most elegant scarlet garnish for
cold and hot dishes of fish in Paris restaurants; but it was new to recent
experience of the Thames. Perhaps that is why its effects were so
disastrous. The neat little fresh-water lobsters turned almost as red as
if they had been boiled, crawled out of their holes, and died. Under some
of the most closely perforated banks they lay like a red fringe along the
riverside under the water. Near Oxford, and up the Cherwell, Windrush, and
other streams they were, before the pestilence, so numerous that making
crayfish pots was as much a local industry as making eel-pots, the smaller
withes, not much larger than a thick straw, being used for this purpose.
Most cottages near the river had one or two of these pots, which were
baited on summer nights and laid in the bottom of the stream near the
crayfish holes. It must be supposed that they only use them by day, and
come out by night, just as lobsters do, to roam about and seek food on a
larger scale than that which they seize as it floats past their holes by
day. That time of more or less enforced idleness the crayfish used to
spend in looking out of their holes with their claws hanging just over the
edge ready to seize and haul in anything nice that floated by. Their
appetite by night was such that no form of animal food came amiss to them.
The "pots" were baited with most unpleasant dainties, but nasty as these
were they were not so unsavoury as the food which the crayfish found for
themselves and thoroughly enjoyed, such as dead water-rats and dead fish,
worms, snails, and larvae. They were always hungry, and one of the
simplest ways of catching them was to push into their holes a gloved
finger, which the creature always seized with its claw and tried to drag
further in. The crayfish, who, like the lobster, looked on it as a point
of honour never to let go, was then jerked out into a basket. They rather
liked the neighbourhood of towns and villages because plenty of dirty
refuse was thrown into the water. In the canalised stream which runs into
Oxford city itself there were numbers, which not only burrowed in the
bank, but made homes in all the chinks of stone and brick river walls, and
sides of locks, and in the wood of the weiring, where they sat ensconced
as snugly as crickets round a brick farmhouse kitchen fireplace. They were
regularly caught by the families of the riverine population of boatmen,
bargees, and waterside labourers, and sold in the Oxford market. A dish of
crayfish, as scarlet as coral, was not unfrequently seen at a College
luncheon. Possibly the recovery from the epidemic may be rapid, and the
small boys of Medley and Mill Street may earn their sixpence a dozen as
delightfully as they used to. Young crayfish, when hatched from the egg,
are almost exactly like their parents. The female nurses and protects
them, carrying them attached to its underside in clinging crowds. They
grow very fast, and this makes it necessary for the youthful crayfish to
"moult" or shed their shells eight times in their first twelvemonth of
life, as the shell is rigid and does not grow with the body. The constant
secretion of the lime necessary to make these shells is so exhausting to
the youthful crayfish that only a small number ever grow up. In America,
where a large freshwater crayfish nearly a foot long is found, its
burrowing habits are a serious nuisance, especially in the dykes of the
Mississippi. In those streams from which these interesting little
creatures have entirely disappeared it might be worth while to introduce
the large Continental crayfish. As it is bred artificially, there would be
no difficulty in obtaining a supply, and it would be a useful substitute
for the small native kind.
Sea crayfish, which grow to a very large size, are not much esteemed in
this country. They are not so well flavoured as their cousin the lobster.
But as river crayfish of a superior kind can be cultivated, and are reared
for the table abroad, it might be worth while to pay some attention to
what has been done in the United States to replenish by artificial
breeding the stock of lobsters now somewhat depleted by the great
"canning" industry. The method of obtaining the young lobsters is
different from that employed to rear trout from ova. The female lobsters
carry all their eggs fastened to hair-fringed fans or "swimmerets" under
their tails, the eggs being glued to these hairs by a kind of gum which
instantly hardens when it touches the water. For some ten months the
female lobster carries the eggs in this way, aerating them all the time
with the movement of the swimmerets. When they are caught in the
lobster-pots in the months of June and July, the eggs are taken to the
hatchery, and the ova are detached. As they are already fertilised, they
are put into hatching jars, where in due course they become young
lobsters, or rather lobster larvae, for the lobster does not start in life
quite so much developed as does the infant crayfish. It is about one-third
of an inch long, has no large claws, and swims naturally on the surface of
the water, instead of lurking at the bottom as it does when it has come to
lobster's estate. It seems to be compelled to rise to the surface, for
sunlight, or any bright illumination, always brings swarms of lobsterlings
to the top of the jars in which they are hatched. In the sea this impulse
towards the light stands them in good stead, for in the surface-waters
they find themselves surrounded by the countless atoms of animal life, or
potential life, the eggs and young of smaller sea beasts. The young
lobster is furiously hungry and voracious, because, like the young
crayfish, it has to change not only its shell but the lining of its
stomach five times in eighteen days. Unfortunately, in the hatching jars
there is no such store of natural food as in the sea. The result is that
the young lobsters have to eat each other, which they do with a cheerful
mind, if they are not at once liberated. When they have reached their
fifth month they go to the bottom and "settle down" in the literal sense
to the serious life of lobsters.
[Illustration: A TROUT. _From a photograph by Charles Reid._]
I believe no one ever saw trout spawning in the Thames, though there are
plenty of shallows where they might do so. Consequently the Thames trout
must be regarded as a fish which was born in the tributaries and descended
into the big river, and as the mouths of these trout-holding tributaries,
such as the Kennet at Reading, the Pang, the lower Colne, and others,
become surrounded with houses and the trout no longer haunt the
_embouchure_, so the tendency is for fewer trout to get into the
Thames. Still, places like the Windrush, the Evenlode, and the other upper
tributaries hold rather more trout than they did, as they are better
looked after; and the Fairford Colne is still a beautiful trout stream.
For some reason, however, the Thames trout do not seem fond of the upper
waters, where if found they seem to keep entirely in the highly aerated
parts by the weirs, but mainly haunt the lower ones from Windsor
downwards, and one was recently caught in the tidal waters below the
bridge. It is very difficult to see why there are so few above Oxford, or
from Abingdon to Reading. It is not because they are caught, for very few
are caught. A friend of mine who had lived on the river near Clifton
Hampden for some eight years, could only remember eight trout being caught
in that time. I thought I was going to have one once. I was fishing for
chub with a bumble bee, and a great spotted trout rose to it in a way
which made me hope I was going to have a trophy to boast of for life. But
he "rose short," and I saw him no more. I believe _all_ the brooks
which rise in the chalk hills of the Thames Valley have trout in them. One
runs under the railway line at Steventon. A resident there had quite a
number of tamed trout in the conduit which took the stream under the line,
and used to feed them with worms as a show. At the head waters of the
Lockinge brook, close to the springs, I saw the trout spawning on New
Year's Day. The big fish had wriggled up into the very shallowest water,
and were lying with their back fins and tails out, I suppose from some
instinct either that this water is the most highly aerated, or because
floods do less harm on a shallow, or for both reasons combined. At Long
Wittenham, though I never saw a trout in the river (they are, however,
taken there), Admiral Clutterbuck recently had a fine old stew pond in the
picturesque old grounds of the Manor House cleaned out, and stocked it
with rainbow trout. They did well and grew fast, and so far as I know,
none died. The water was not suited for their breeding, but the fish were
very ornamental, and rose freely to the fly.
FOUNTAINS AND SPRINGS
Is it true that our fountains and springs of sweet water are about to
perish? A writer in _Country Life_ says "Yes," that in parts of the
Southern counties the hidden cisterns of the springs are now sucked dry,
and that the engineers employed to bring the waters from these natural
sources to the village or the farm lament that where formerly streams
gushed out unbidden, they are now at pains to raise the needed water by
all the resources of modern machinery. When the old fountains fail new
sources are eagerly sought, and where science fails the diviner's art is
called in to aid. At the Agricultural Show the water-diviner sits
installed, surrounded by votive tablets picturing the springs discovered
by his magic art; and County Councils quarrel with the auditors of local
expenditure over sums paid for the successful employment of his mysterious
gift.
It is not strange that the springs of England should still suggest a faint
echo of Nature-worship. If rivers have their gods, fountains and springs
have ever been held to be the home of divinities, beings who were by right
of birth gods, even though, owing to circumstances, they did not move
exactly in their circle. _Procul a Jove, procul a fulgure_ may have
been the thought ascribed by Greek fancy to the gracious beings who made
their home by the springs, for whether in ancient Greece or in our Western
island, they breathe the sense of peace, security, and quiet, and to them
all living things, animal and human, come by instinct to enjoy the sense
of refreshment and repose. A spring is always old and always new. It is
ever in movement, yet constant, seldom greater and seldom less, in the
case of most natural upspringing waters, syphoned from the deep cisterns
of earth. Absolutely material, with no mystery in its origin, it impresses
the fancy as a thing unaccountable, like the source of life embodied,
something self-engendered. It has pulses, throbbing like the ebb and flow
of blood. Its dancing bubbles, rising and bursting, image emotion. It is
the only water always clear and sparkling. Streams gather mud, springs
dispel it. They come pure from the depths, and never suffer the earth to
gather where they leap from ground. They are the brightest and the
cleanest things in Nature. From all time the polluter of a spring has been
held accursed.
One of the sources of the Thames was a real spring, rising from the earth
in a meadow, until the level of the subterranean water was reduced.
These suddenly uprising springs are not common in our country, and need
seeking. Our poets, who borrowed from the classics all their epithets for
natural _fountains_, wrongly applied them to our modest springs
welling gently from the bosom of the earth. The springs of old Greece and
Italy gushed spouting from the rocks or flowed like the fountains of
Tivoli in falling sheets over dripping shoots of stone. Even a Greek of
to-day never speaks of a "spring," because he seldom sees one. "Fountain"
is the word used for all waters flowing from the earth, and the difference
of words corresponds to a difference of fact. The springs of his land
_are_ fountains, waters gushing from the rock or flowing from caverns
and channels in the hills. The fountains of Greece flow down from above,
and do not bubble up from below. These are the waters that tell their
presence by sound, and have been the natural models of all the drinking
fountains ever built,--jets that, spouting in a rainbow curve, hollow out
basins below them, cut in the marble floor, cool cisterns ever running
over, at which demi-gods watered their horses, and the white feet of the
nymphs were seen dancing at sundown.
A tributary of the Severn, near Bisley, in the Cotswolds, bursts from a
real fountain pouring from a hollow face of stone. But fountains in this
sense are rare in England, though among the Welsh hills and the Yorkshire
dales they may be seen springing full grown from the sides of the glens or
"scarrs," and cutting basins and steps in marble or slate. But in the
South the gentle springs take their place, silent, retiring, seldom found,
except by chance, or by the local tradition which always attaches to the
more important of our English natural wells. These it is the ambition of
misdirected zeal to enclose in walls of stone, and to furnish with steps
and conduits. If the old goddess Tan was once worshipped as the deity of
the spring, it has usually undergone conversion by the early monks and
changed its title to "St. Anne's Well," or been assigned to St. Catherine
or some other of the holy sisterhood of saints.[1] But there are hundreds
of tiny springs in Britain still left as Nature made them, and not yet
settled in trust on any of the modern successors to the water rights of
classic nymphs and Celtic goddesses. He who discovers for himself one of
these springs will visit it each time he passes near. Some are in the
woods, known only to the birds and beasts which live in them, and come
daily to drink the pure, untainted waters. Wood springs are among the most
beautiful of all, for they have a setting of tall timber, and their
margins are never trampled by cattle, or the natural play of their waters
disturbed to draw for the beasts of the farm. In the wood below Sinodun
Hill there rises an everlasting spring. There may be seen how great an
area of land it takes to make and keep one tiny spring. All the waters
which gather in the millions of tons of chalk on Sinodun rise and flow out
in the wood in the one pool, not larger than the circle of a wheel. It is
always full, with the water throbbing up clear from the invisible vents
below, and tiny white water-shells floating and falling in the basin, set
round with liverwort and moss, and watering a bed of teazles in the wood
below. Children drink from it, and pluck wild strawberries by its banks,
and the pheasant and the fox come there to quench their thirst. An
unexpected but not uncommon site of such springs is close to the margin of
streams, which themselves are fed, not mainly by springs, but from the
surface waters. [2] Wherever high ground slopes down to a stream, and ends
in a rising bank at some distance from the river, there a true spring
often rises, with an existence wholly apart from that of the river close
by, into which its surplus of waters flows. Such springs have their
special flora, their own "phenomena," and their own little set of effects
on their liliput landscape. In the centre the waters well up, absolutely
pure, and only discoloured when a more impatient earth-throb drives up a
column of cloudy sand or earth. The spreading circles broaden outwards,
and make their little marsh, planted with water-grass and forget-me-nots
and blue bog-bean, and in the spring with butterburs. Outside, on the
firmer but still moist soil the creeping jenny mats the ground; and the
succulent grasses which attract the cattle to tread the marsh into a muddy
paste. At the foot of the larger chalk downs the springs sometimes break
out in different fashion, a modest imitation of classical fountains. The
chalky soil breaks down, and from its sides the water often spouts in
jets, as may be seen in Betterton glen, above Lockinge House, and in many
other heads of the chalk brooks.
Springs of this kind are the natural outflowing of the water-bearing
strata, where they lie upon others not pervious. But the upflowing springs
are often fed by the accumulations of a great area of country, coming to
the surface like water from the orifice of a syphon, and flowing
permanently neither in greater nor less volume with constant force. If
these cease to run the inference is that the old conditions are seriously
disturbed. This has happened so frequently of late that local authorities
would do well to schedule lists of the larger springs and request the
owners or occupiers of the land to inform them from time to time whether
there is a decrease in the flow. Stored water is almost as valuable as
earth in a cycle of deficient rainfall, and the loss of any of our
fountains and springs is a local misfortune not easily remedied.
[1] "Well deckings" are still common festivals in the North. Quite lately
a Scotch loch was dragged with nets to catch a kelpie, and the bottom
sowed with lime. The Church early forbade well worship.
[2] There is one such just above Marston Ferry, near Oxford, on the
Cherwell, and two in a field below Ardington, near Lockinge.
BIRD MIGRATION DOWN THE THAMES
On September 16, 1896, after a period of very stormy wet weather, I saw a
great migration of swallows down the Thames. It was a dark, dripping
evening, and the thick osier bed on Chiswick Eyot was covered with wet
leaf. Between five and six o'clock immense flights of swallows and martins
suddenly appeared above the eyot, arriving, not in hundreds, but in
thousands and tens of thousands. The air was thick with them, and their
numbers increased from minute to minute. Part drifted above, in clouds,
twisting round like soot in a smoke-wreath. Thousands kept sweeping just
over the tops of the willows, skimming so thickly that the sky-line was
almost blotted out for the height of from three to four feet. The quarter
from which these armies of swallows came was at first undiscoverable. They
might have been hatched, like gnats, from the river.
In time I discovered whence they came. They were literally "dropping from
the sky." The flocks were travelling at a height at which they were quite
invisible in the cloudy air, and from minute to minute they kept dropping
down into sight, and so perpendicularly to the very surface of the river
or of the eyot. One of these flocks dropped from the invisible regions to
the lawn on the river bank on which I stood. Without exaggeration I may
say that I saw them fall from the sky, for I was looking upwards, and saw
them when first visible as descending specks. The plunge was perpendicular
till within ten yards of the ground. Soon the high-flying crowds of birds
drew down, and swept for a few minutes low over the willows, from end to
end of the eyot, with a sound like the rush of water in a hydraulic pipe.
Then by a common impulse the whole mass settled down from end to end of
the island, upon the osiers. Those in the centre of the eyot were black
with swallows--like the black blight on beans.
Next morning, at 6.30 a.m., every swallow was gone. In half an hour's
watching not a bird was seen. Whether they went on during the night, or
started at dawn, I know not. Probably the latter, for Gilbert White once
found a heath covered with such a flock of migrating swallows, which did
not leave till the sun dispelled the mists.
The migration routes of birds follow river valleys, when these are
conveniently in line with the course they wish to take. There is far more
food along a river than elsewhere, and this is a consideration, for most
birds, in spite of the wonderful stories of thousand-mile flights, prefer
to rest and feed when making long migrations, and also those short shifts
of locality which temporary hard weather causes. A friend just back from
Khartoum tells me that he saw the storks descending from vast heights to
rest at night on the Nile sandbanks, and saw their departing flight early
in the morning, these birds being in flocks of hundreds and thousands.
By watching the river carefully for many years I have noticed that it is a
regular migration route for several species besides swallows. The first to
begin the "trek" down the river are the early broods of water-wagtails,
both yellow and pied. They turn up in small flocks so early in the summer
that one might almost doubt if they could fly well enough to take care of
themselves. On June 26th last summer nearly forty were flying about in the
evening, and went across to roost on the eyot. Later numbers of blackbirds
arrive, also moving down the river. Sand-martins, when beginning the
migration, travel down the Thames in small flocks, and sleep each night in
different osier beds. How many stages they make when "going easy" down the
river no one knows. But I have seen the flocks come along just before
dusk, straight down stream, and then dropping into an osier bed.
In the second week of September there is usually an immense migration of
house-martins and swallows down the river. I have already described what I
once saw on a migration night on Chiswick Eyot. Sometimes they go on past
London, and find themselves near Thames mouth with no osier beds or
shelter of any kind. Then they settle on ships. I was told that one
morning the craft lying in Hole Haven off Canvey Island were covered with
swallows, all too numb to move, but that when the sun came out the greater
number flew away towards the sea. The same thing happened on the windmill
at Cley, in Norfolk, a famous starting and alighting place for birds.
Moorhens evidently migrate up or down the river in spring and autumn, and
occasionally dabchicks; otherwise their sudden appearance and
disappearance on the eyot could not be accounted for. Snipe follow the
Thames up the valley. Formerly Chiswick Eyot was their first alighting
place when east winds were blowing, after the fatigue of crossing London;
and persons still living used to go out and shoot them. A friend of mine,
whose family has resided in Chiswick for several generations, used to go
down the outside of the eyot and kill snipe, and also kill teal and duck
in the stream which runs from Chiswick House into the river. Another
friend broke a young pointer to partridges on the market garden between
Barnes Bridge and Chiswick.
Probably a number of the warblers also use the river as a migration road,
though I only notice them in spring. But as I am never here in early
September possibly many pass without being noticed. Also they are silent
in autumn, whereas in spring they sing, a little, but enough to show that
they are there.
Among the birds of this kind which pass up the river, but of which only a
few pairs stay to breed on the eyot, are whitethroats, blackcaps,
chiff-chaffs, and, I believe, nightingales. One beautiful early morning in
spring I could not believe my ears, but I heard a nightingale in a bush by
the side of the garden overhanging the river. It sang for about an hour,
"practising" as nightingales do. Another person in a house near also heard
it, and was equally astonished. It probably passed on, for next day it was
inaudible.
In hard weather a migration of a different kind takes place down the river
towards the sea. These birds are recruited from the ranks of the birds
that stay, with some foreign winter visitors also. They pass down the
river feeding on the mud and among the stones at ebb tide. Among those I
have seen are flocks of starlings and scattered birds, mainly redwings,
thrushes, blackbirds, and occasionally robins. Sandpipers also migrate up
the Thames in spring, and down it in autumn.
WITTENHAM WOOD