THE ORCHARD--EMIGRANT MARTINS--THE MISSEL-THRUSH--CARAVAN ROUTE OF BIRDS
AND ANIMALS--A FOX IN AMBUSH--A SNAKE IN A CLOCK.
Broad green paths, wide enough for three or four to walk abreast, lead
from the garden at Wick into the orchard. On the side next the meadows
the orchard is enclosed by a hawthorn hedge, thick from constant
cropping; on the other a solid stone wall, about nine feet high, parts
it from the road. One summer day a party of martins attacked this wall
outside, and endeavoured to make their nest-holes in it. These birds
are called by the labourers `quar-martins,' because they breed in holes
drilled in the face of the sandy precipices of quarries. The boys
`draw' their nests--climbing up at the risk of their limbs--by inserting
a long briar, and, when they feel the nest, giving it a twist which
causes the hooked prickles of the stick to take firm hold, and the nest
is then dragged bodily out. The flight that came to the orchard wall
numbered about ten or twelve, and for the best part of the day they
remained there, working their very hardest at the mortar between the
stones.
The wall being old, some of the mortar had crumbled--it was not of the
best quality--and here and there was a small cavity. These a portion of
the birds tried to enlarge, while others boldly laboured in places where
no such slight openings existed. It was interesting to watch their
patient efforts as they clung to the perpendicular wall like bats. Now,
two or three flew off and described a few circles in the air, as if to
rest themselves, and then again returned to work. At last, convinced of
the impossibility of penetrating the mortar, which was much harder
beneath the surface, they went away in a body with a general twitter,
leaving distinct marks of their shallow excavations. The circumstance
was the more interesting because the road was much-frequented (for a
rural district) and many people stopped to look at them; but the birds
did not seem in the least alarmed, and evidently only left because they
found the wall impenetrable. Instinct, infallible instinct, certainly
would not direct these birds to such an unsuitable spot. Neither was
there any peculiar advantage to attract them; it was not quiet or
retired, but the reverse. The incident was clearly an experiment, and
when they found it unsuccessful they desisted.
If we suppose this flight of martins to represent a party emigrating
from a sand quarry (there were three such quarries within a mile
radius), where the population had overflowed, it seems possible to trace
the motive which animated them. I imagine that the old birds drive the
young ones away, when the young return to this country with their
parents after the annual migration. This is particularly the case after
a very favourable breeding season, when more than the usual proportion
of young birds survive. After such a season, upon returning next year
to the sand quarry, the older birds drive off the younger; and if these
are so numerous that they cannot find room in another part of the
quarry, they emigrate in small parties.
I think the same thing happens with rooks. The older rooks will only
permit a few of their last year's offspring to build near them. If a
gentleman has an avenue of fine elm trees in which he desires to have a
rookery, but cannot contrive to attract them, though perhaps now and
then a nest is partly built and then deserted, an experiment founded on
this idea might be tried. It would be necessary to ask the assistance
of the proprietors of the nearest rookeries, and beg them for one year
to refrain from shooting the young rooks, after the well-known custom.
An unusual proportion of young birds would then survive, and next
building season the larger part of these would return to the old trees
and be immediately met in battle by their older relatives. Being driven
away from the hereditary group of trees, they would resort to the next
nearest avenue or grove; if they attempted to mix with a strange tribe,
they would encounter a still fiercer resistance. In this way possibly
the avenue in question might become stocked with rooks.
One reason, I fancy, why nests begun in such distant trees are so often
deserted before completion is that a solitary nest exposes both the
building birds and their prospective offspring to grave danger from
hawks. No hawk will attempt to approach a rookery--the rooks would
attack him _en masse_ and easily put him to flight. Chickens are safer
under or near a rookery from this cause: a hawk approaching them would
alarm the rooks and be beaten away. The comparative safety afforded by
numbers is perhaps a reason why many species of birds are gregarious.
The apparently defenceless martins and swallows in this way dwell in
some amount of security. If a hawk comes near the sand quarry (or the
house--in the case of swallows) they all join together and pursue him,
twittering angrily, and as a matter of fact generally succeed in sending
him about his business. Even those birds which do not build in close
contiguity no sooner find that a hawk is near than they rise
simultaneously and follow and annoy him: so much so that he will
sometimes actually drop the prey he has captured. It is astonishing
with what temerity small birds, emboldened by numbers--chaffinches,
finches generally, sparrows, swallows, and so on--will attack a hawk.
The `quar-martins' that came to the orchard wall--emigrating from the
quarry, and wandering about in search of a suitable habitation--if young
birds, as we have supposed them to be, would naturally not yet have had
much experience, and so might think the steep wall (roughly resembling
the face of a quarry) available for their purpose till they had made the
experiment. I have thought, from watching the motions of birds that go
in flights, that most of them have a kind of leader or chief. They do
not yield anything like the same obedience or reverence to the chief as
the bees do to the queen-bee, and exhibit little traces of following his
motions implicitly. He is more like the president of a republic; each
member is individually free, and twitters his or her mind just as he or
she likes. But it seems to be reserved to one bird to give the signal
for all to move. So these martins, after lingering about the wall for
hours--some of them, too, leaving it and flying away only to come back
again--finally started altogether. It is difficult to account for such
simultaneous and combined movements, unless we suppose that it is
reserved to a certain bird to give the signal.
In the fork of a great apple tree--a Blenheim orange--the missel-thrush
has built her nest. Missel-thrushes, doubtless of the same family, have
used the tree for many years. Though the nest is large, the young birds
as they grow up soon get too big for it and fall out. This period--just
before the young can fly--is the most critical in their existence, and
causes the greatest anxiety to the parents. Without the resource of
flight, weak and unable even to scramble fast through the long grass,
betraying their presence by continually crying for food, they are
exposed to dangers from every species of vermin.
The missel-thrush is a bold, determined bird, and does his utmost in the
defence of his offspring. When the young birds fall out of the nest (so
soon as one has clambered over, the others quickly follow), the parents
rarely leave the orchard together. One or other is almost always close
at hand. If any enemy approaches they immediately set up an angry
chattering, by which noise you may at once know what is going on. I
have seen two missel-thrushes attack a crow in this way. The crow came
and perched upon a bough within a yard of their nest, which contained
young. The old birds were there immediately, and they so annoyed and
buffeted the murderous robber that he left without achieving his fell
purpose.
The cat is the worst enemy of the missel-thrush. It is noticeable that
while these thrushes will attack anything that flies they are not so
bold on the ground, but seem afraid to alight. They will strike even at
the human hand that touches their nest. The crow, strong as he is, they
courageously drive away; but the enemy that stealthily approaches along
the ground to the helpless young bird in the grass they cannot resist.
On the wing they can retreat quickly if pressed; on the ground they
cannot move so swiftly, and may themselves fall a prey without affording
any assistance. The missel-thrushes come to the orchard frequently
after the nesting season is over and before it commences. They do not
seem in search of food, but alight on the trees as if to view their
property. They are strong on the wing, and fly direct to their object:
there is something decided, courageous, and, as one might say, manly in
their character.
The bark of some of the apple trees peels of itself--that is, the thin
outer skin--and insects creep under these brown scales curled at the
edges. If you sit down on the elm butt placed here as a seat and watch
quietly, before long the little tree-climber will come. He flies to the
trunk of the apple tree (other birds fly to the branches), and then
proceeds to ascend it, going round it as he rises in a spiral. His
claws cling tenaciously to the bark, his tail touches the tree, and
seems to act as a support--like what I think the carpenters call a
`knee'--and his head is thrown back so as to enable him to spy into
every cranny he passes. After a few turns round the trunk he is off to
another tree, to resume the same restless spiral ascent there; and in a
minute or so off again to a third; for he never apparently examines
one-half of the trunk, though, probably, his eyes, accustomed to the
work, see farther than we may imagine. The orchard is never long
without a tree-climber: it seems a favourite resort of these birds.
They have a habit of rushing quickly a little way up; then pausing, and
again creeping swiftly another, foot, or so, and are so absorbed in
their pursuit that they are easily approached and observed.
Who can stay indoors when the goldfinches are busy among the bloom on
the apple trees? A flood of sunshine falling through a roof of rosy
pink and delicate white blossom overhead; underneath, grass deeply green
with the vigour of spring, dotted with yellow buttercups, and strewn
with bloom shaken by the wind from the trees: is not this better than
formal-patterned carpets, and the white flat ceilings that weigh so
heavily upon the sight? Listen how happy the goldfinches are in the
orchard. Summer after summer they build in the same trees--bushy-headed
codlings; generation after generation has been born there and gone forth
to enjoy in turn the pleasures of the field.
A year--nay, a single summer--must be a long time in their chronology,
for they are so very very busy: a bright sunshiny day must be like a
month to them. Now coquetting, now splashing at the sandy edge of a
shallow streamlet till the golden feathers glisten from the water and
the red top-knot shines, away again along the hedgerow searching for
seeds, singing all the while, and the tiny heart beating so rapidly as
to compress twice as many beats of emotion into the minute as our
sluggish organisations are capable of. Though a path much-frequented by
the household passes beneath the trees in which they build, they show no
fear.
Just as men from various causes congregate in particular places, so
there are spots in the fields--in the country generally--which appear to
specially attract birds of all kinds. Wide districts are almost bare of
them: on a single farm you may often find a great meadow which scarcely
seems to have a bird in it, while another little oddly-cornered field is
populous with them. This orchard and garden at Wick is one of the
favourite places. It is like one of those Eastern marts where men of
fifty different nationalities, and picturesquely clad, jostle each other
in the bazaars: so here feathered travellers of every species have a
kind of leafy capital. When the nesting time is over the goldfinches
quit the orchard, and only return for a brief call now and then. I
almost think the finches have got regular caravan routes round and
across the fields which they travel in small bands.
In the meadow, just without the close-cropped hawthorn which encloses
one side of the orchard, is a thick hedge, the end of which comas right
up to the apple trees, being only separated by the ha-ha wall and a
ditch. This hedge, dividing two meadows, is about two hundred yards
long and well grown with a variety of underwood, hazel, willow, maple,
hawthorn, blackthorn, elder, etc, and studded with some few elms and
ashes, and a fine horse-chestnut. Down the ditch for some distance runs
a little stream (except in a long drought); and where another hedge
branches from it is a hollow space arched over and roofed with boughs.
Now this hedge is a favourite highway of birds and other wild creatures,
and leads direct to the orchard. Most of the visitors to the house and
garden come down it--it is one of their caravan routes.
If on a summer's morning you go and sit in the gateway about half-way up
the hedge, partly hidden by a pollard ash and great hawthorn bushes, you
will not have long to wait before you hear the pleasant calls of the
greenfinches coming. They seem always to travel two or more pairs
together, and constantly utter a soothing call, as if to say to their
companions, "Here we are, close by, dearest." They all appear to know
exactly where they are going--flitting across the gateway one by one,
moving of one accord in the same direction; and their contented notes
gradually become inaudible as they go towards the orchard. The
goldfinches use the same route; so do the bullfinches. Even the
starlings, before they come to the house, usually perch on an ash tree
in this hedge.
There is another hedge, running parallel to it, 150 yards distant, the
end of which also approaches the premises, but it is comparatively
deserted. You may wait there in vain and see nothing but a robin.
By the same caravan route the blackbirds come to the garden; they,
however, are not such travelling birds as the finches. But the tomtits
are: they work their way from tree to tree for miles; they also come to
the orchard by this hedge highway. As I have said before, it abuts on
the orchard; and a straight line carried across to the orchard wall,
over that and the road outside, would strike another great hedge which,
were it not for the intervention of the garden, would be a continuation
of the first. The finches, after spending a little time in the apple
and damson trees, fly over the wall and road to this second hedge, and
follow it down for nearly half a mile to a little enclosed meadow,
which, like the orchard, is a specially favourite resort. The fondness
of birds for this route is very striking; they are constantly passing up
or down it. There is another such a favourite route at some distance,
running beside a brook and likewise leading to the same enclosed
meadow--of which more presently. I think I could make a map of these
fields, showing the routes and resorts of furred and feathered
creatures.
Near the ha-ha wall, where the great meadow hedge comes up to the
orchard, is a summer-house, with a conical thatched roof and circular
window. It is hung all round under the ceiling with festoons of eggs
taken by the boys of the farmstead, cordially assisted by the carters'
lads when not at work. There may be perhaps forty varieties, arranged
so as to increase in size from the tiny tomtits up to the large
wood-pigeons, the peewits, corncrake, and crow: some milk-white, others
splotched with dark brown spots and veins, others again blue. These
eggs, when taken and the yolk blown out, were strung on a bennet and so
carried home. The lads like to get them as soon after laid as possible,
because they blow best then; if hard set the shell may break.
In the circular window they have left a nest of the long-tailed tit, or
`titmouse,' built exactly in the shape of a hut with roof and tiny
doorway, and always securely attached in the midst of a thorn bush to
branches that are stiff and unlikely to bend with the breeze, so that
this beautiful piece of bird-architecture may not be disturbed. To take
it, it is generally necessary to cut away several boughs. Such nests
are often seen in farmhouses placed as an ornament on the mantelpiece.
Spiders have filled the window with their webs, and to these every now
and then during the day--there is no door to the summer-house--come a
robin, a wren, and a flycatcher. Either of these, but more particularly
the two last, will take insects from the spider's web.
The flycatcher has a favourite perch close by, and may perhaps hear the
shrill buzz when an insect is caught. The flycatcher is a regular
summer visitor: in the orchard, garden, and adjacent rickyard at least
three pairs build every year. Under the shady apple trees near the
summer-house one may be seen the whole day long ever on the watch. He
perches on a dead branch, low down--not up among the boughs, but as much
as possible under them. Every two or three minutes he flies swiftly
from his perch a few yards, darts on an insect--you cannot see it, but
can distinctly hear the snap of the bill--and returns to his post. He
uses the same perch for half an hour or more; then shifts to another at
a little distance, and so works all round the orchard, but regularly
comes back to the same spot. By waiting near it you may be certain of
seeing him presently; and he is very tame, and will carry on operations
within a few yards--sometimes picking up a fly almost within reach of
your hand. It is noticeable that many insect-eating birds are
especially tame. They will occasionally dart after a moth, but drop it
again--as if they did not care for that kind of food, and yet could not
resist the habit of snapping at such things.
I once saw a flycatcher rush after a buff-coloured moth, which fluttered
aimlessly out of a shady recess: he snapped it held it a second or two
while hovering in the air, and then let it go. Instantly a swallow
swooped down, caught the moth, and bore it thirty or forty feet high,
then dropped it when, as the moth came slowly down, another swallow
seized it and carried it some yards and then left hold, and the poor
creature after all went free. I have seen other instances of swallows
catching good-sized moths to let them go again.
The brown linnet is another regular visitor building in the orchard; so
too the blackcap, whose song, though short, is sweet; and the bold
bright bullfinches use the close-cropped hawthorn. They have always a
nest there, made of slender fibres dexterously interwoven. There, is a
group of elms near the further end of the enclosure and another by the
rickyard; linnets seem fond of elms.
A pair of squirrels sometimes come down the same hedge--it is a
favourite highway of wild animals as well as birds--to the orchard, and
play in the apple trees: they even venture to a tree only a few yards
from the house. If not disturbed they stay a good while, and then
return by the way they came to a copse at the top of the meadow. The
corner formed by the hedge and the copse--quiet, but in easy view from
the house--is especially frequented by them. Their lively motions on
the ground are very amusing: they visit the ground much oftener than may
be generally supposed. Fir trees seem to attract them--where there is a
plantation of firs you may be sure of finding a squirrel.
When alarmed or chased a squirrel always ascends the tree on the
opposite side away from you--he will not run to a solitary tree if he
can possibly avoid it: he likes a group, and his trick is, the moment he
thinks he is out of sight among the upper branches, to slip quietly from
one tree to the other till, while you are scanning every bough, he has
travelled fifty yards away unnoticed. If the branches are not close
enough to hide him, he gets as much as possible behind a large branch,
and stretches himself along it--at the same time his tail, which at
other times is bushy, seems to contract, so that he is less visible. He
will leap in his alarm to dead branches, and, though his weight is
trifling, occasionally they snap under the sudden impact; but that does
not distress him in the least, because a bough rarely breaks clean off
but hangs suspended by bark or splinters, so that he can scramble to the
ivy that winds round the trunk. Or if he is obliged to slip down, the
next branch catches him; and I have never seen a squirrel actually fall,
though sometimes in their frightened haste they will send a number of
little dead twigs rustling downwards. When the tail is spread out, so
to say, its texture is so fine and silky that the light seems to play
through it. They love this particular corner because just there the
hedge is composed of hazel bushes, and even when the nuts are gone from
the branches they still find some which have dropped upon the bank and
are hidden in the dry grass and brown leaves.
In this corner, too, the bank being dry and sandy, there is a large
settlement of rabbits, and now and then some of these find their way to
the orchard and garden along the hedge. Rabbits have their own social
laws and customs adapted to the special conditions of their way of life.
At the breeding season there seems to be a tendency to migrate on the
part of the younger rabbits from the great `bury' hitherto their home.
Many solitary holes at some distance are then occupied, and the fresh
sand thrown out shows that a tenant has entered on possession. In this
way one or two take up their residence more than half-way down the hedge
towards the orchard. Then the doe seems to have a desire to separate
herself at a certain period from the rest. She goes out into the mowing
grass perhaps thirty yards from the `bury,' and there the young are born
in a short hole excavated for the purpose. The young rabbits naturally
remain close to their birthplace; they are conducted to the hedge as
soon as they are old enough to run about; and so a fresh colony is
formed. As they get larger, or, say, soon after midsummer, they appear
to show a tendency to roam; and by the autumn, if left undisturbed,
descendants from the original settlement will have pushed outposts to a
considerable distance. These, having been bred near, have little fear
of entering the orchard, or even the garden, and next season will rear
their offspring close at hand and feed in the enclosure, using the
close-cropped hawthorn as a cover.
Weasels also occasionally come down the hedge into the orchard for the
various prey they find there; they visit the outhouses and sheds, too,
at intervals in the cattle yards adjoining the house. More rarely the
stoat does the same. A weasel may frequently be found prowling in the
highway hedge. When a weasel runs fast on a level hard surface--as
across a road--the hinder quarters seem every now and then to jump up as
if rebounding from the surface; his legs look too short for the speed he
is going. This peculiar motion gives them when in haste an odd
appearance. In a less degree, a mouse rushing in alarm across a road
does the same. The motion ceases the moment mouse or weasel reaches the
turf, which is rarely quite level.
The brown field-mouse may be found in the orchard hedge, but is so
unobtrusive that his presence is hardly observed. There are many more
of these mice in the hedges than are suspected to be there; their little
bodies slip about so near the surface of the brown earth, the colour of
which they resemble, that few notice them unless they chance to be
calling each other in their shrill treble. Even then, though the sound
be audible, the mouse is invisible; but you cannot sit quiet in a hedge
very long in summer without becoming aware of their presence. Some of
the older branches of the hawthorn bushes, bent down when young by the
hedge-cutter, are nearly horizontal and free for some part of their
length of twigs. The mice run along these natural bridges from one part
of the hedge to the other.
Last spring I watched a mouse very busily engaged sitting on such a
branch, about a foot above the bank, nibbling the tender top leaves of
the `clite' plant. The `clite' grows with great rapidity, and climbs up
into the hedge; this plant had already pushed up ten or twelve inches,
so that the mouse on the branch was just about on a level with the upper
and tenderest leaves. These he drew towards him with his fore feet and
complacently nibbled. When he had picked out what suited his fancy he
ran along the branch, and in an instant was lost to sight on the bank
among the grass.
The nests of the `harvest trow'--a still smaller mouse, seldom seen
except in summer--are common in the grass of the orchard (and in almost
every meadow) before it is mown. As the summer wanes their dead bodies
are frequently found in the footpaths; for a kind of epizoic seems to
seize them at that time, and they die in numbers. It is curious that an
animal which carefully conceals itself in health should at the approach
of death seek an open and exposed place like a footpath worn clear of
grass.
In the ha-ha wall, at that part of the orchard where the highway hedge
comes up, is the square mouth of a rather large drain. The drain itself
is of rude construction--two stones on edge and a third across at the
top. It comes from the cowyard, passing under the outermost part of the
garden a considerable distance away from the house. Very early one
morning the labourers, coming to work, saw a fox slip into the mouth of
the drain through the long grass of the meadow on which it opened. In
the summer, the cattle being all out in the fields, the drain was
perfectly dry, and it was known that now and then the rabbits from the
hedge made use of it as a temporary place of concealment. No doubt the
presence of a rabbit in it was the cause of the fox entering in the
first place. The rabbit must have had a very bad time of it for, the
drain being closed at the other end with an iron grating, no possibility
of escape existed.
From the traces in the grass and on the dry mud at the mouth it appeared
as if the fox had ventured there more than once; and, as there were many
chickens about his object in lying here was evident. The great hedge
being so near, and the narrow space between full of tall mowing grass--
the edge of the ha-ha wall, too, clothed with stonecrop and grasses
growing in the interstices of the loose stones, and further sheltered by
a low box-hedge--it was a place almost made on purpose for. Reynard's
cunning ambuscade. He is as bold or even, bolder than he is cunning. A
young dog sent up the drain came back quicker than he went, and refused
to venture a second time. The fox remained there all day, and of course
`made tracks' at night, knowing that his presence had been discovered by
the commotion and talking at the mouth of his cave. He might easily
have been captured, but that was not attempted on account of the hunt.
Though the fox as a general rule sleeps during the day, he does not
always, but sometimes makes a successful foray in broad daylight.
Fowls, for instance, at night roost in the sheds at some height from the
ground--often the sheds are contrived specially to protect them; but in
the day they roam about in the vicinity of the rickyards where they are
kept. They will make runs down the centre of a double-mound hedge, and
while thus rambling occasionally stroll into the jaws of their foe, who
has been patiently waiting hidden in the long grass and underwood. In
the day, too, rabbits often sit out in a bunch of grass, or dry furrow,
a long way from the `bury.' Their form is usually within a few paces of
a well-marked `run'--they follow the run out into the field, and then
leave it and go among the grass at one side. The run, therefore,
sometimes acts as a guide to the fox, who, sheltered by the tall bennets
and thick bunches, occasionally glides up it in the daytime to his prey.
There is sure to be a snake or two in the grass of the orchard during
the summer, especially if there chance to be an old manure-heap anywhere
near; for that is the place in which they like to leave their chains of
white eggs, out of which, if broken, the little snakes issue only two or
three inches in length. The heat of the manure-heap acts as an
incubator. When it is wet and the hay cannot be touched, the haymakers,
there being nothing else for them to do, are put to turn such heaps, and
frequently find the eggs of snakes. These creatures now and then get
inside farmhouses, whose floors are generally on a level with the
surface of the earth or nearly so. They have been found in the
clock-case--the old upright eight-day clock, standing on the floor; they
come after the frogs that enter at the doors--always wide open in
summer--and are supposed also to eat crumbs.
In the cellar there is sure to be a toad under the barrels on the cool
stone-flags; in the garden there is another, purposely kept in the
cucumber-frame to protect the plant from being eaten by creeping things.
It is curious to notice that they both seem to flourish equally well--
one in the coolest, the other in the hottest place. A third may
generally be found in the strawberry-bed. Strawberries are much eaten
by insects of many kinds; so that the toad really does good service in a
garden.
In winter, when snow is on the ground, a few larks sometimes venture
into the garden where anything green yet shows above the white covering
on the patches. If the weather is severe, the moorhen will come up from
the brook, though two fields distant, in the night, and the marks of her
feet may be traced round the house. Then, as the evening approaches,
the wild ducks pass over, and every now and then during the night the
weird cries of waterfowl resound in the frosty air. The heron sails
slowly over, every night and every morning, backwards and forwards from
the mere to the water-meadows and the brook, uttering his unearthly call
at intervals.