Part 5 (1/2)

All kinds of birds are sometimes seen with the tail feathers gone: have they barely escaped in this condition from the clutches of the hawk?

Blackbirds, thrushes, and pigeons are frequently struck: the hawk seems to lay them on the back, for if he is disturbed that is the position his victim usually remains in. Though hawks do not devour every morsel, yet as a rule nothing is found but the feathers--usually scattered in a circle. Even the bones disappear: probably ground vermin make away with the fragments.

The hawk is not always successful in disabling his prey. I have seen a partridge dashed to the ground, get up again, and escape. The bird was flying close to the ground when struck; the hawk alighted on the gra.s.s a few yards further in a confused way as if overbalanced, and before he could reach the partridge the latter was up and found shelter in a thick hedge.

The power to hover or remain suspended in one place in the air does not, as some have supposed, depend upon the a.s.sistance of the wind, against which the hawk inclines the plane of his wings like an artificial kite.

He can accomplish the feat when the air is quite still and no wind stirring. Nor is he the only bird capable of doing this, although the others possess the power in a much less degree. The common lark sometimes hovers for a few moments low down over the young green corn, as if considering upon what spot to alight. The flycatcher contrives to suspend itself momentarily, but it is by a rapid motion of the wings, and is done when the first snap at the insect has failed. It is the rook that hovers by the a.s.sistance of the wind as he rises with his broad, flat wings over a hedge and meets its full force, which counterpoises his onward impetus and sustains him stationary, sometimes compelling him to return with the current.

Hawks have a habit of perching on the tops of bare poles or dead trees, and are there frequently caught in the gin the keeper sets for them.

The cuckoo, which so curiously resembles the hawk, has the same habit, and will perch on a solitary post in the middle of a field, or on those upright stones sometimes placed for the cattle to rub themselves against. Though ”wild as a hawk” is a proverbial phrase, yet hawks are bold enough to enter gardens, and even take their prey from the ivy which grows over the gable of the house. The destruction they work among the young partridges in early summer is very great. The keeper is always shooting them, yet they come just the same, or nearly; for, if he exterminates them one season, others arrive from a distance. He is particularly careful to look out for their nests, so as to kill both the old birds and to prevent their breeding. There is little difficulty in finding the nest (which is built in a high tree) when the young get to any size; their cry is unmistakable and audible at some distance.

Against sparrow-hawk and kestrel, and the rarer kinds that occasionally come down from the mountains of the north or the west--the magazines of these birds--the keeper wages ceaseless war.

So too with jay and magpie; he shoots them down whenever they cross his path, unless, as is sometimes the case, specially ordered to save the latter. For the magpie of recent years has become much less common.

Though still often seen in some districts, there are other localities where this odd bird is nearly extinct. It does not seem to breed now, and you may ask to be shown a nest in vain. A magpie's nest in an orchard that I knew of was thought so great a curiosity that every now and then people came to see it from a distance. In other places the bird may be frequently met with, almost always with his partner; and so jays usually go in couples, even in winter.

The jay is a handsome bird, whose chatter enlivens the plantations, and whose bright plumage contrasts pleasantly with the dull green of the firs. A pair will work a hedge in a sportsmanlike manner, one on one side, the second on the other; while the tiny wren, which creeps through the bushes as a mouse through the gra.s.s, cowers in terror, or slips into a knot-hole till the danger is past. When the husbandman has sown his field with the drill, hardly has he left the gateway before a legion of small birds pours out from the hedgerows and seeks for the stray seeds.

Then you may see the jay hop out among them with an air of utter innocence, settling on the larger lumps of clay for convenience of view, swelling out his breast in pride of beauty, jerking his tail up and down, as if to say, Admire me. With a sidelong hop and two flaps of the wing, he half springs, half glides to another coign of vantage. The small birds, sparrows, chaffinches, greenfinches--instantly scatter swiftly right and left, not rising, but with a hasty run for a yard or so. They know well his murderous intent, and yet are so busy they only put themselves just out of reach, aware that, unlike the hawk, he cannot strike at a distance. This game will continue for a long time; the jay all the while affecting an utter indifference, yet ever on the alert till he spies his chance. It is the young or weakly partridges and pheasants that fall to the jay and magpie.

The keeper also destroys owls--on suspicion. Now and then some one argues with the keeper, a.s.suring him that they do not touch game, but this he regards as pure sentimentalism. ”Look at his beak,” is his steady reply. ”Tell me that that there bill weren't made to tear a bird's breast to bits? Just see here--all crooked and pointed: why, an owl have got a hooked bill like an eagle. It stands to reason as he must be in mischief.” So the poor owls are shot and trapped, and nailed to the side of the shed.

But upon the crow the full vials of the keeper's wrath are poured, and not without reason. The crow among birds is like the local professional among human poachers: he haunts the place and clears everything--it would be hard to say what comes amiss to him. He is the impersonation of murder. His long, stout, pointed beak is a weapon of deadly power, wielded with surprising force by the sinewy neck. From a tiny callow fledgling, fallen out of the thrush's nest, to the partridge or a toothsome young rabbit, it is all one to him. Even the swift leveret is said sometimes to fall a prey, being so buffeted by the sooty wings of the a.s.sa.s.sin and so blinded by the sharp beak striking at his eyes as to be presently overcome. For the crow has a terrible penchant for the morsel afforded by another's eyes: I have seen the skull of a miserable thrush, from which a crow rose and slowly sailed away, literally split as if by a chisel--doubtless by the blow that destroyed its sight.

Birds that are at all diseased or weakly, as whole broods sometimes are in wet unkindly seasons, rabbits touched by the dread parasite that causes the fatal ”rot,” the young pheasant straying from the coop, even the chicken at the lone farmstead, where the bailiff only lives and is in the fields all day--these are the victims of the crow.

Crows work almost always in pairs--it is remarkable that hawks, jays, magpies, crows, nearly all birds of prey, seem to remain in pairs the entire year--and when they have once tasted a member of a brood, be it pheasant, partridge, or chicken, they stay till they have cleared off the lot. Slow of flight and somewhat lazy of habit, they will perch for hours on a low tree, croaking and pruning their feathers; they peer into every nook and corner of the woodlands, not like the swift hawk, who circles over and is gone and in a few minutes is a mile away. So that neither the mouse in the furrow nor the timid partridge cowering in the hedge can escape their leering eyes.

Therefore the keeper smites them hip and thigh whenever he finds them; and if he comes across the nest, placed on the broad top of a pollard-tree--not in the branches, but on the trunk--sends his shot through it to smash the eggs. For if the young birds come to maturity they will remain in that immediate locality for months, working every hedge and copse and ditch with cruel pertinacity. In consequence of this unceasing destruction the crow has become much rarer of late, and its nest is hardly to be found in many woods. They breed in the scattered trees of the meadows and fields, especially where no regular game preservation is attempted, and where no keeper goes his rounds.

Even to this day a lingering superst.i.tion a.s.sociates this bird with coming evil; and I have heard the women working in the fields remark that such and such a farmer then lying ill would not recover, for a crow had been seen to fly over his house but just above the roof-tree.

Trespa.s.sers give him a good deal of trouble, for a great wood seems to have an irresistible attraction for all sorts of semi-Bohemians, besides those who come for poaching purposes. The keeper thinks it much more difficult to watch a wood like this, which is continuous and all in one, than it is to guard a number of detached plantations, though in the aggregate they may cover an equal area. It is impossible to see into it any distance; to walk round it is a task of time. A poacher may slink from tree to tree and from thicket to thicket, and, unless the dogs chance to sniff him out, may lie hidden in tangled ma.s.ses of fern and bramble, while the keeper pa.s.ses not ten yards away. But plantations laid out in regular order with broad open s.p.a.ces, sometimes with small fields between, do not afford anything like cover for human beings. If a man is concealed in one of these copses, and finds that the keeper or his a.s.sistants are about to go through it, he must move or be caught; and in moving he has to pa.s.s across an open s.p.a.ce, and is nearly sure to be detected. In a continuous wood of large extent, if he hears the keepers coming he has but to slip as rapidly and silently as possible to one side, and often has the pleasure to see them pa.s.s right over the spot where only recently he was lying.

Therefore, although a wood is much more beautiful from an artistic point of view, with its lovely greens in spring and yellow and browns in autumn, its shades and recesses and fern-strewn glades, yet if a gentleman desires to imitate the monarch who laid out the New Forest and plant wood, and his object be simply game, the keeper is of opinion that the somewhat stiff and trim plantations are preferable. They are generally of fir; and fir is the most difficult of trees to slip past, being decidedly of an obstructive turn. The boughs grow so close to the ground that unless you crawl you cannot go under them. The trunks-- unlike those of many other trees--will flourish so near together that the extremities of the branches touch and almost interweave, and they are rough and unpleasant to push through. To shoot or trap, or use a net or other poacher's implement, is very difficult in a young fir plantation, because of this thickness of growth; so that in a measure the tree itself protects the game. Then the cover afforded is warm and liked by the birds; and so for many reasons the fir has become a great favourite, notwithstanding that it is of very little value when finally cut down.

For fox preserving firs are hardly so suitable, because the needles, or small sharp leaves, quite destroy all undergrowth--not only by the turpentine they contain, but by forming a thick mat, as it were, upon the earth. This ma.s.s of needles takes years, to all appearance, to decay, and no young green blade or shoot can get through it; besides which the fir-boughs above make a roof almost impenetrable to air and light, the chief necessities of a plant's existence. Foxes like a close warm undergrowth, such as furze, sedges when the ground is dry, the underwood that springs up between the ash-stoles. Although constantly out of doors--if such a phrase be allowable--foxes seem to dislike cold and draught, as do weasels and all their kind, notably ferrets. But for pure game preserving, and for convenience of watching, the keeper thinks the detached plantations of fir preferable. Doubtless he is professionally right; and yet somehow a great wood seems infinitely more English and appeals to the heart far more powerfully, with its n.o.ble oaks and beeches and ash trees, its bramble-thickets and brake, and endless beauties which a life of study will not exhaust.

But the semi-Bohemians detested by the keeper do not prowl about the confines of a wood with artistic views; their objects are extremely prosaic, and though not always precisely injurious, yet they annoy him beyond endurance. He is like a spider in the centre of a vast spreading web, and the instant the most outlying threads--in this case represented by fences--are broken he is all agitation till he has expelled the intruder. Men and boys in the winter come stealing into the wood where the blackthorn thickets are for sloes, which are reputed to be improved by the first frosts, and are used for making sloe gin, etc. Those they gather they sell, of course; and although the pursuit may be perfectly harmless in itself, how is the keeper to be certain that, if opportunity offered, these gentry would not pounce upon a rabbit or anything else?

Others come for the dead wood; and it does on the face of it seem hard to deny an old woman who has worked all her days in the field a bundle of fallen branches rotting under the trees. The acc.u.mulations of such dead sticks in some places are astonis.h.i.+ng: the soil under the ash-poles must slowly rise from the ma.s.s of decaying wood and ultimately become greatly enriched by this natural manure.

When a hard clay soil is revealed by the operations for draining a meadow, and the crust of black or reddish mould on which the sweet green gra.s.s flourishes is seen to be but spade-deep, the idea naturally occurs that that thin crust must have been originated by some similar process to what is now going on in the ash wood. Those six or nine inches of mould perhaps represent several centuries of forest. But if the keeper admits the old woman s.h.i.+vering over her embers in the cottage to pick up these dead boughs, how can he tell what further tricks others may be up to? The privilege has often been offered and as often abused, until at last it has been finally withdrawn--not only because of the poaching carried on under the cloak of picking up dead wood, but because the intruders tore down fine living branches from the trees and spoiled and disfigured them without mercy. Sometimes gentlemen go to the expense of having wood periodically gathered and distributed among the poor, which is a considerate system and worthy of imitation where possible.

Occasionally men come to search for walking-sticks, for which there is now a regular trade. Just at present ”natural” sticks--that is, those cut from the stem with the bark on--are rather popular, both for walking and for umbrella handles, which causes this kind of search to be actively prosecuted. The best ”natural” sticks are those which when growing were themselves young trees, sprung up direct from seed or shoots--saplings, which are stronger and more pliant than those cut from a stole or pollard. To cut such a stick as this is equivalent to destroying a future tree, and of course a good deal of mischief may be easily done in a short time.

Another kind of ash stick which is in demand is one round which there runs a spiral groove. This spiral is caused by the bine of honeysuckle or woodbine, and in some cases by wild hops. These climbing plants grow in great profusion when they once get fixed in the soil, and twist their tendrils or ”leaders” round and round the tall, straight, young ash-poles with so tight a grasp as to partly strangle the stick and form a deep screw-like groove in it. When well polished, or sometimes in its rough state, such a stick attracts customers; and so popular is this ”style” of thing that the spiral groove is frequently cut by the lathe in more expensive woods than ash. Wild hops are common in many places, and will almost destroy a hedge or a little copse by the power with which they twine their coils about stem and branch. Young oak saplings, in the same way, are frequently cut; and the potential tree which might have grown large enough to form part of a s.h.i.+p's timbers is sold for a s.h.i.+lling.

Holly is another favourite wood for sticks, and fetches more money than oak or ash, on account of its ivory-like whiteness when peeled. To get a good stick with a k.n.o.b to it frequently necessitates a considerable amount of cutting and chopping, and does far more damage than the loss of the stick itself represents. Neither blackthorn nor crab-tree seem so popular as they once were for this purpose.

In the autumn scores of men, women, and children scour the hedges and woods for acorns, which bring a regular price per bushel or sack, affording a valuable food for pigs. Others seek elderberries to sell for making wine, and for a few weeks a trade is done in blackberries.

Chair-menders and basket-makers frequent the sh.o.r.e of the little mere or lake looking for bulrushes or flags: the old rush-bottomed chairs are still to be found in country houses, and require mending; and flag-baskets are much used.

Hazel-nuts and filberts perhaps cause more trouble than all the rest; this fruit is now worth money, and in some counties the yield of nuts is looked forward to in the same way as any other crop--as in Kent, where cob-nuts are cultivated, and where the disorderly hop-pickers are great thieves. I have heard of owners of copses losing ten or fifteen pounds'