Odd Hours With Natu 00 Ur Quia La

THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
ODD HOURS WITH
NATURE
ALEXANDER URQUHART
WITH 32 ILLUSTRATIONS
T. FISHER UNWIN
LONDON ADELPHI TERRACE
:
LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE zo
First published in 1913
(All rights reset ved)

Q\\
INTRODUCTORY
THESE papers make no pretence to scientific status ;
at most they claim the merit of work capable of

exciting an interest and of ministering in some
small measure to the love of nature so general
among people of all classes to-day. Dealing as

they do with the class of subject, the study of
which forms the writer's recreation,it is hoped
that the reader will find in them too some breath

of the garden, the river-side, the hills, and the
woodland.
Thanks are due to the proprietors of the Dundee
Advertiser for their ready assent to the appearance
of the papers in this form.
A. U.
870901
CONTENTS
JANUARY
PAGE
INDEPENDENT BIRDS . . ... .
-I?
THE BROWN EARTH . . . .
23
THE HARDY MIDGE ......

THE UNSQUEAMISH BIRD . . . . .28
33
FEBRUARY
FAIR MAIDS OF FEBRUARY .... .
-39
THE ROOKERY .
^ i . . . .
44
RESPECTABLE AND DISREPUTABLE RELATIVES . .
49
TUNING UP . . . . . . .
54
MARCH
MARCH SUNSHINE ......

THE CUNNING OF TROUT
.......
. . . . 6l
67
TOWN GULLS
MARCH HARES ...... 72
78
8 CONTENTS
APRIL
PAGE
A SPRING TROUBLE
PLOVERS' EGGS
THE ROBIN'S COURTSHIP

......
. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
-85
-95
90
THE GREAT SCULPTOR IOO
THE TOM-TITS AND THEIR BOX . . . .

107
BIRDS IN THE GARDEN .112

...
. . . .
THE YOUNG DEER ......

THE NESTING OF THE ROBIN
.-
.
117
122
JUNE
THE FANCIES OF THE TROUT
A TERN COLONY
.....
...... 129
134
A SUMMER- DAY TRAGEDY
SOME BIRDS' NESTS
PUSSY HUNTING
......
......
. . . . r
144
149
39
JULY
TROUT
.....
IN ISOLATED
THE BIRD OF THE BURNS

MIDGES ... ....
LOCHS . . . .
.
-157
162
167
THE RED-DEER IN SUMMER 172
FOXES OF THE HILLS . . . . .

-177
CONTENTS 9
AUGUST
THE SLUGGARD'S MODEL
ROBBER BEES . .
..... . . . .
PAGE
185
IQO
THE GLORIOUS TWELFTH . . . . .

IQ5
ARE WILD CATS SCARCE? . ,, . . .

IQ9
WASP PLAGUES . . ...

'
... . .
204
SEPTEMBER
THE BUSY BEE . . . . . . .211
THE SPARROW'S HOLIDAY . , . . 216
A GENTLEMAN IN VELVET . . . . . 222
THE ANTLERS OF THE RED-DEER . . .

227
THE FAIRY RING . '.-.'-. . .

237
OCTOBER
THE BRAMBLE . . . . . . .
245
SEED DISPERSAL . . . . ''-,.. . .

250
MASCULINE FEMININES
THE SWALLOWS ......

.....
. . . . .
.255
2OO
THE STARLING IN
A BEAUTIFUL CHARACTER .....

AUTUMN 265
270
NOVEMBER
A QUESTION OF CHOICE .....
...... 279
BIRDS AND STORM
THE FLOCKING OF THE BIRDS

HAWKS IN TOWN
.....
......
284
289
294
io CONTENTS
DECEMBER
A WINTER SLEEPER .....
......
PAGE
30!
THE WILD SWAN
.....
......
WINTER PLAY OF BIRDS
THE ARMED PLANT
306
312
316
INDEX 321
ILLUSTRATIONS
IN STAG GROUND Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
GARBAGE FEEDERS 30
SNOWDROPS .
39
SPARROWS NEST IN IVY 53
A WET-FLY STREAM 64
NEST OF BLACKHEADED GULL 74
NESTING CLIFF OF KITTIWAKE 76
THE YOUNG HARE 81
A MORNINGS CATCH
LAPWINGS NEST 90
YOUNG LAPWING 92
12 ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PACK
A TOM-TIT FAMILY . . . . .
.107
INSIDE THE TIT'S BOX . . . . . Ill
THE GREENFINCH'S AGE OF INNOCENCE . . .116
FEEDING THE YOUNG DEER .... 124
WHERE TROUT ARE FASTIDIOUS . . .

.132
NEST OF SONG THRUSH ..... 144
NEST OF THE BLACKBIRD . . . .

.148
FALL ISOLATING A LOCH ..... 158
A HAUNT OF THE DIPPER ..... 164
SANCTUARY OF A NORTHERN DEER-FOREST . .

174
A FAMILY OF HILL FOXES ..... 178
THE ROBBER BEE . ..... IQ2
THE GROUSE ....... 196
WILD CATS ....... 199
WILD CAT COUNTRY ...... 2O2
THE WATER VOLE . . . . . .

224
ILLUSTRATIONS 13
FACING PAGE
THE ANTLERS OF THE DEER . . . J" .
232
THE BRAMBLE . . . . , .
245
HEN CAPERCAILIE ASSUMING MALE PLUMAGE . .

256
NESTING-HOLES OF SAND MARTINS .-'. . 260
SAND MARTIN'S NEST EXPOSED. . . , .

263
JANUARY
INDEPENDENT BIRDS
IT a food problem rather than a cold problem
is
that winter presents to the birds. Sympathetic

souls pity the feeble little creatures exposed to the
blast and the biting atmosphere, protected by no
better a dress than that with which nature endows
them for summer use. But it is pity misapplied.
Give the birds food and the nipping and eager
air will trouble them little if at all. The real
pinch is the locking of the larder door, and it is
locked by frost and buried out of sight by snow.
Succulent slugs and snails are withdrawn from the
light of day, and the most industrious blackbird or
thrush searches for one in vain. No worm comes
to the surface, and insect grubs are as safe from
inquisitive beaks as if protected by paving stones.
Hence that great movement towards the haunts of
man, an anomalous creature at the best of times,
but a special providence at the worst. For even
when he displays no active charity his strange
nature -righting ways are constantly exposing bits
of brown earth where a bird's eye can see things
worth picking up. Then he has stores of produce
from which what many birds filch will never be
missed and the things he rejects are treasure to
;
a legion.
i8 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
There are many birds, however, which are little
troubled by the hardest winter, and which never
court the charity of man. For the most part they
are neither large nor strong, and rarely capable
of wrestling with the tiniest of physical difficulties.
On the contrary, they are amongst the smallest of
the whole race. With the first touch of autumn
chill the vast majority of insect -eating birds
depart for milder lands, but some, and these the
puniest of all, remain. Just now every pine wood
or plantation in northern shires is inhabited by
hundreds of golden -crested wrens. From every
tree their tiny cheep may be heard, though little
will be seen except by searching eyes. Watch the
needle -covered branches and the little creature will
be found crawling among them, sometimes back up,
sometimes down, never for a moment still, a marvel
of intent industry. There is no ca' canny policy
here, for, though the gold-crest's whole body
weighs but a fraction of an ounce, a full day's toil
is necessary to sustain it. Its food consists of the
minute insects which find a sufficient shelter at the
base of a pine needle, and it takes a very large
number of them to make even a gold-crest's meal.
Hence the absorbed, mouse -like creep through the
needles of the little green bird. Nothing that man
has to offer would be of the least value to it, so
it never joins the flock of pensioners, though some-
times the evergreen shrubs of a garden may tempt

it to a visit of even the suburb of a town. Another
insect-eater which relies wholly its own exertions
on
throughout the hardest winter the tree-creeper,
is
a tiny native which may much more fitly be likened

INDEPENDENT BIRDS 19
to a mouse. No wood with rough-barked trees is

without it, and no human analogy can describe its
laborious activity there. Watch it alight at the
foot of a tree trunk. It has scarcely touched
the bark when its spiral ascent begins. Creeping
round the trunk and upward it searches every
cavity with sensitive bill, pulling from their recesses
the larvse of small insects, and apparently getting
little reward for a great deal of labour. Up
it goes till the smooth bark near the top
is reached, when it drops with the swiftness of
a stone and the lightness of a feather to the

foot of the next bole, where the spiral pursuit
begins again. From daybreak to dusk never a
moment is squandered, for life is very exacting
in the winter woods. Both the gold-crest and
the creeper have, however, the reward of their
independence, for the natural supplies on which
they rely, if scanty, have none of the precarious
-
ness of charity, and rare thing among the smaller

birds of Britain both species are, with the exten-
sion of woodlands, steadily on the increase.
Few of the finches disdain the human aid offered
by, at any rate, the farmyard. Even the brambling
comes down from the heights and joins the goodly
company of sparrows, linnets, larks, chaffinches,
greenfinches, and buntings which seek at once the
shelter and the stores of the hospitable cornstacks.
But the siskin is a notable exception. No matter
how deep the snow, how hard the frost, or fierce
the wind, this little green finch pins its reliance
to the alder-trees which fringe the river. The
alder catkins are now hardened into cones, but
20 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
they still retain their seed, and the siskin is a
wonderful adept at their extraction. Walk along
a river bank on a day when the snow covers the
ground, and it is easy to follow the movements
of the siskin flock. Under each tree the birds
have visited the snow is speckled with the debris
of broken catkins or scattered seed. Equally
easy is it to find the birds themselves. They
are social creatures in the cold weather, and
move about in flocks which may number hundreds.
As they work at the hanging cones, themselves
suspended like green fruit, they maintain an in-
cessant musical chattering which tells their where-
abouts a hundred yards away. Alarm them, and
with heightened note they wheel simultaneously
into the air, fly round a large circle, and alight
again in a single tree not far from that which they
left. In a moment they are as busy as ever,
worrying the seed -bearing cones, more often than
not with their backs to the earth. The gregarious
habits of the siskin and its absorbed devotion to
its work of food-getting render it an easy victim
of the birdcatcher, who can, with care, approach
sufficiently near to pick it off the branch on which
it is feeding with the limed tip of a fishing-rod.
The result is visible in every bird-dealer's window,

and, there is reason to fear, in the diminishing
abundance of the species. In some ways resem-

bling the siskin, though in others very different,
is the many-coloured, most parrot -like of British
birds, the crossbill. Nothing that man possesses

can tempt it from the fir and larch woods in
which its whole life is passed, and where it tears
INDEPENDENT BIRDS 21
up the great cones for the seed they contain, with

as much ease as the siskin masters the catkin
of the alder. Britain has few more
Nature in
interesting sights than that of a flock of cross-
bills engaged in this crackling, rending, tearing
work of harvesting coniferous seed.
Few of the larger perching birds continue to
behave as if man had no place in the land. The
feeding habits of rooks, jackdaws, pigeons, and
most of the members of the thrush family have
come to relate themselves intimately to cultiva-
tion,and most of these birds make close approaches
when the kindly brown face of the earth is buried
in snow. The hooded crow, however, still acts
as his ancestors may be supposed to have acted
in tertiary times. He keeps to the ancient
traditions of the crows, and prefers man and aJl
his works at a distance. In the solemn raucous
speeches he addresses to his young he no doubt
tells them that man is a parvenu that the crows
;
were an old family in the land before he had

appeared to plague the face of it and that they ;
must just contrive to win through the winter as

their neolithic ancestors did, and maintain the
dignity of the race untarnished by the acceptance
of charity from the newcomer. Thus crows show
their independence by going to the seaside in
winter, and but for man it is possible that many
more birds would pass the hard season there. To
set against its wind-swept wintry bleakness the
shore has many advantages. It is never frozen
up, and every tide leaves something behind it,

dead or alive. A dead fish is perhaps not sump-
tuous faring, but it is sustaining, and the crow is
nothing if not austere. So he eats dead fish and
maintains his forbidding aloofness and savage self-
respect. .When he comes to the back door for
scraps the conquest of man will be complete.
THE BROWN EARTH
To the landscape of winter the brown earth con-
tributes one of the dominant notes. Grey skies,
distances of a deeper blue -grey, fields far greener
than those of autumn, and others which plough
and harrow have transformed into a chocolate
brown sober tones all they speak of the time
when sunshine is neither abundant nor strong.
But the fields of naked earth are not quite so
naked as they look. Examine them closely, and
the bare surface is found starred with many a
hundred of tiny plantlets, each with an expression
almost of appeal in its aspect of tender helpless-
ness. That is a misreading of expression if ever
there was one, for of all the living things on earth
these are perhaps the best able to take care of
themselves, and the least in need of considerate
treatment. They are, in fact, the weeds with
which the farmer wages Incessant warfare, on which
he is constantly inflicting reverses, but over which
he never wins decisive victory. Of these weeds of
field and garden it has been said that in the
course of their continual warfare with one another,
with the animals which prey on them, and with
that particular animal which attempts to extirpate
them, they have equipped themselves with a code
of dodges more than equal to any reverse of
fortune or assault of art that may be made upon
them. And the saying is entirely true. The bare
fieldsspeak eloquently of one great and effective
dodge. Just consider the significance of the fact
that the surfaceon which the weeds of the summer
cast their seeds has been buriedmany inches deep
by the plough with all the seeds upon it. They
are much too deeply laid, most of them, to get
their heads up, yet here is a pretty crop already
anticipating the spring. What is the explanation?

Simply this, that the seeds of the great majority
of weeds are equipped with the power of biding
their time. Those that are springing on the
ploughed and dug ground to-day are not those
that were cast a few months ago, but those of it
may be many years ago.
A great deal has been written on the vitality
of seeds which will not stand the test of experi-
ment. It is an old, old story, for example, that
mummy wheat, taken out of Egyptian graves

formed thousands of years ago, has been success-
fully germinated. As a matter of fact, wheat loses
itspower of germination in a relatively short time,
probably ten years at the most. But many other
seeds, particularly those rich in oils, will retain
their life for three or four times as long ; and
some of them, especially those of the most familiar
of weeds, can wait for the favourable moment,
even when buried in earth. Take the case of
the familiar charlock the wild mustard which
makes so glorious a display of yellow gold in the
summer fields. It is a familiar fact that along
THE BROWN EARTH 25
with certain crops the charlock will not grow. If

the field in which its seeds lie by the million is
sown with grass or clover, it will lie low and
wait for more congenial company. Knowing this
the farmer may put a badly infested field into
grass for several years, and flatter himself that
he has vanquished the enemy. Vain hope Dr.
!
Edward Carpenter tells how a farmer of his

acquaintance, pestered with charlock, tried to
extirpate the pest by laying down in grass a field
which the enemy had marked out for its own. At
last, after seventeen years, he thought himself safe,
turned up the ground, and lo !the first spring
'*
it was ablaze with yellow again. How," he
"
asks, did those seeds during all those seventeen
years manage to understand the situation, and know
it was best to lie
that quite still in their little beds
" "
without stirring? Probably they did not know "
anything about it. They awaited the fitting stimu-
lation. But they as good as know, and it is
difficult in such a case to avoid the language
applicable to intelligence.
The " dodge " of biding time makes for effi-
ciency on a large and conquering scale only when
accompanied by the dodge of number, and no
really successful weed neglects to make provision
in this way. The prodigal plan of providing
against the chances of life and death has been
made familiar to most people, chiefly in connection
with fish. The cod produces ten thousand (or is
itten times ten thousand?) eggs in order that one

or two may reach maturity. I do not know if
any one has attempted to count the seeds produced
by a single vigorous chickweed plant, which has
appropriated to itself a square foot of earth by its
plan of squatting upon it and subjecting rivals
to light starvation. It is unlikely that it is far,
ifany, behind the cod's, for its seed capsules are
to be counted in hundreds, and each contains its
dozen or score of seed. A dock plant is almost
equally prolific, and the more pestilent of the
weeds of composite order, such as the
the
groundsel, probably beat both. For a groundsel
plant begins to flower in an open January, and
many of the family flower in an open December.
They may be said to be puffing out seeds for
ten months of the year, and even pulling out by
the roots only discourages and does not stop their
efforts to inherit the earth. For a groundsel will
continue to throw seed after it has been cast on
the dungheap, turning up its head to the sunshine
when its root is shrivelled. The outcome of all
this seed production is that the ground is full of
seeds, all biding their time. There is much more
than earth in the brown fields which the plough
has passed over, and a handful of earth examined
with a lens would be found well stocked with
dormant plant life.
All this is excellent for the birds. On a piece

of dug ground in front of me several sparrows,
two or three greenfinches, and many chaffinches,
have been busy at intervals all day. They are
" "
coming and going, but the break is never
without some feathered labourers. They are peck-
ing as busily as chickens in a fowl-run, and
apparently always getting something, and always
THE BROWN EARTH 27
getting it on the surface, for they never scrape.

I examine the face of the soil, and can see nothing
but soil. Evidently the birds have better micro-
scopic vision, for they see something every-
where, and are doing the gardener a service
which he is not too willing to remember when the
fruit comes on. That the little eyes of the seed-
eating birds are extraordinarily competent in the
detection of minute objects disguised in neutral
tints is a fact of easy observation. I once lay and
watched a wood-lark on a sandy slope near the

and noted that it
sea, scantily covered with bent,
lifted something as quickly and incessantly as if
grain had been spread on the place. Examining

the surface of the sand I could find nothing bu,t
sand, crossed here and there by the wandering
roots of the bent. The lark apparently went over
the surface with a microscopic lens. But all this
careful surface clearance the weeds can stand.
They have provided for it, and have plenty of
seeds underneath. Those that are buried less
than an inch in depth will germinate as the soil
warms under the spring sun those that are
;
deeper down will wait till some

incident in agri-
culture brings them up. And if one in ten
thousand reaches maturity, and casts seed in its
turn, the purpose of the plant will have been served,
for the position of the species will have been
maintained.
THE UNSQUEAMISH BIRD
IN their natural healthy state birds are, almost
without exception, dainty creatures, but daintiness
does not always or often characterize their actions.
Indeed, one who walks abroad in winter days, and
watches the feathered people, is struck above
all things by their absolute superiority to that
characteristic human trait squeamishness. They
have no objection to dirt, even when it is rank
and smells high, and they approach putrescence
with the serenity of an analytical chemist.
These remarks were suggested by contemplation
of a bird assembly on a stubble-field. The field
comprised the brow of a low ridge, and the slope
of it extending down to a public road. Ranged
on the brow was an immense host of black -headed
gulls, a majority of them in immature plumage.
"
They appeared to have done themselves well,"
and were reposing, every one with his head thrown
well into its shoulders, and its beak extended to
the prevailing wind. Close by the gulls that is
to say, well away from the road was a con-
siderable company of rooks, all hard at work
and the nearer part was "crawling" with starlings,
certainly thousands strong. Searching the surface
carefully one soon found that besides these con-
THE UN SQUEAMISH BIRD 29
spicuous tenants the field had many others. There

were blackbirds and song-thrushes in numbers.
Missel-thrushes and fieldfares were abundant, and
one little company of redwing, prettiest and
trimmest of all the thrushes on the British list,
kept in a corner by themselves. All the com-
moner finches were present, though on the field
surface it took some searching to pick them
out.
The field on the right was also in stubble, and
itcontained not a single bird. That on the left
was ploughed, but, with its surface frozen hard,
itwas equally tenantless. .What, then, brought all
the vast assemblage to the particular field favoured
by so many diverse kinds? Simply this, that
preparatory to ploughing it the farmer had spread
its surface with dung To gulls, rooks, starlings,
1
thrushes, finches, this made it a perfect Eldorado,

and with the exception of the gulls, which are
among the few birds that seem capable of repose,
they were working it with the eagerness of miners
in a hurry to get rich. -What they were finding it
is difficult to guess. Undigested grain was no
doubt part of the treasure. The larvae of flies
that live in manure doubtless added variety and
succulence to the meal. Perhaps the heat of the
fermenting stuff had thawed the ground around the
heaps, and opened the door of the birds' great
treasure-house, the earth. But whatever it may
have been it gave to the field all the alluring
qualities of a table well spread, and brought the
guests in thousands from far and near. And of
disgust not a sign. Probably man is the only
animal capable of experiencing that emotion, and
if so, it furnishes material for a new definition,
capable of putting him in a class by himself.

Most of the others, as in these learned days, every-
body knows, have broken down.
One who searches the bird world for other
manifestations of unfastidiousness will not have
to go far to find them. What could be daintier
than a tit feeding from a cut cocoanut or a sus-
pended lump of firm fat? Nothing, unless it be
another tit. But if instead of a cocoanut you
hang up a dead dog, which has begun to "go
wrong," the tit will appreciate the treat equally
well. It is just nourishment to him, and he is
serenely undisturbed by the fact that chemical or

bacteriological processes are liberating gases which
do not have the same smell as ozone. There is
no daintiness about his senses, and for all the
difference a good high odour makes to him, he
might be without the sense of smell. He has
his own sense of beauty ; he knows that his
plumage looks very fine, and his mate is reputed
to have so nice a sense of colour and arrange-
ment that she chooses her husband on the strength
of the superiority of a shade. But neither is
repelled by ugly things.
The sea-gull's happiness in the manured field
has been referred to. The fascination exercised
over him by the exit of a city drain is known to
all who happen to live in a town on river or
sea. There the wild and romantic seamew may
be seen every day of the year breasting the current
where it is nastiest, and not to be tempted away to
THE UNSQUEAMISH BIRD 31
the places where it is clean. What the gull finds

there is a matter in dispute. Itmay be the ejecta
of the city, or it may be the little fishes which also
gather where the water contains a good deal more
than oxygen and nitrogen. Probably it is both.
If you wish a really good opportunity to make
photographic pictures of the romantic seamew,

there is equal a city manure depot,
no place to
placed away among fields and conveniently

the
fenced in. Their hours of labour are passed on
the wing, their hours of ease on the rail, and
at the time of afternoon repose it is lined with
them as tightly as they can squeeze. But though
the gulls have a hearty delight in a thoroughly
dirty place, it must be admitted that they always
manage to keep themselves spotlessly clean. They
have mastered the problem of touching dirt,
revelling in dirt, absorbing dirt, without themselves
becoming defiled, and that is more than humanity
has done.
It might be supposed from all this that birds
have no sort of natural dislike of dirt. Generally
speaking, however, it can be said that as house-
keepers they are cleanly animals. With a few
exceptions, they keep their nests clean, and put
themselves to much pains to remove accumulations.
In short, they have a sanitary system which is
quite effective if not precisely nice. And where
there are exceptions, dirty homes are a result of
the birds' mode of feeding their young. Thus the
nest of the golden eagle, before its two young
inmates are able to take to the wing, might be
discovered by the sense of smell. When the
parent birds take a grouse or hare which is meant
for the provision of the young, they pluck their
prey clean of fur or feather before taking it to
the nest, and they have usually one place, which
becomes exceedingly well marked, for the purpose.
But the indifferently picked bones are left about
the nest, and in due course .become very high.
What is true of the eagle is true too of the larger
hawks. The vicinity of the nest of many sea-
birds becomes exceedingly foul, and the odour
arising from the putrid remains of fish becomes,
in the case of the cormorant, overwhelming. The
cormorant herself seems to sniff it in with appre-
ciation, and would probably think it a poor home
which did not smell of peace and plenty. One of
the dirtiest of birds' nests is that of the little
sand-martin, but the filth of it, consisting mainly
of fleas, is rather the bird's misfortune than its
fault. The martin is an expert insect catcher-
lives on insects, in fact and never varies its diet.
But it takes all its prey on the wing, and itself
becomes to a lamentable extent the prey of insects
which do not fly. In its case the aptera may
be said to avenge the wrongs committed daily,
hourly, momentarily on their far-away relatives,
the diptera, on which the swallows chiefly subsist.
THE HARDY MIDGE
A COLUMN of midges dancing in the sunshine is a
summer-like spectacle, and, speaking in a general
way, nothing is more characteristic of winter than
the dormancy of insect life. But several midges
of the group known to science as Chironomus are
exceptions to the rule which sends insects out of
sight for half the year. There is not a roadside
wall which is not the home of countless thousands
of them. If the weather is cold and frosty they
retire to its crevices, which afford excellent
stabling if the sun shines long enough to impart
;
the feeblest glow of heat to the atmosphere, out

they come and dance dancelike mad. They have
little and they do it very well.
else to do,
This midge is one of the most insignificant of
winged creatures, yet it has virtues which almost
entitle it to a respectful study. It is the good
brother of the story, and it might advertise, as
men of conscious rectitude troubled with bad
"
relations sometimes do, No connection with
the other people of the same name." It does not
bite. Its morals may be bad, but its ethics are
admirable, and the story of them is one of the

most curious in evolutionary science. If one of
these dancing midges is examined it will be found
3
to present a general resemblance to the familiar
daddy-long-legs very much reduced. It has long
legs, a thin body, a relatively large, shall I say,

chest, and a small head. The head has to casual
observation the usual equipment of mouth and
sucking parts. Let the examination be pushed
further, and it will be found that in the body there
is something distinctly resembling the usual equip-
ment of digestive organs. But for all that, the
midge never eats, and therefore it never digests
any food. Never eats !
How, then, does it live?
The truth is it never eats as a midge. By far the
greater part of its life is spent at the bottom of
"
water as a larva, and in that state it does a
power of eating." But when it emerges its sole
business is to find a mate and reproduce its kind,
and in order that it may not go foraging after
provender it does not really need, when it emerges
in the perfect state its mouth is soldered up.
Probably a long way back in the history of
the family our innocent midge was a bloodsucker.
The biting midge, better designated as the gnat, is
a not remote relative, and its armoury is one of
most ingenious things in nature, being a complex
arrangement of lancet, fretsaw, and pump. For
the purpose of piercing skin and sucking blood
it would be impossible to improve upon it, and
everybody who has passed a summer day in the
parts of the country where swampy ground occurs
knows that its appetite is as keen as its weapons.
Yet to the vast majority of blood-sucking gnats
their weapons and the desire to use them repre-
sent in all probability nothing but an exquisitely
THE HARDY MIDGE 35
torturing curse. There are large areas of the

world's surface where biting gnats and mosquitoes
the same thing abound in uncountable millions,
and where of the larger forms of animal life there
is practically none. Mr. Hudson has described
such areas in Southern Argentina. The biters
exist in clouds, and when a man visits these parts
they assail him with a ravenous greed ; but year

in year out they never taste blood, though they
want it all the time. Their case is very much
the same in those large parts of the Amazon area,
where the biters thicken the air.
In this state of things the naturalist may find
a hint of the explanation of the loss of eating
powers in the innocent midge, for the blood-sucking
capacity cannot be much of an advantage where
there is no blood to suck. At any rate, the loss
"
of its power does not seem to have hurt its
prospects," for its various species continue to
abound in regions where the biter has become
extinct. And it is altogether a hardier creature.
Though the biting gnats abound from Greenland
to Patagonia, they are, as flying insects, em-
phatically creatures of the warm days. The other
is much less at the mercy of cold. Every-day
experience shows that it can survive the hardest
frosts experienced in Britain, and come out smiling
in the intervals. Indeed, it has been alleged that
even when it is frozen as hard as glass it can
be thawed out again into active life.
The statement is not so incredible as it looks.
There is a prevalent belief that a hard winter is
destructive of insect life, but it is doubtful if
it has any such effect. Definite observations have
proved that in this country insects are not less
abundant after a severe winter than after a mild
one. But there is ample proof that insects in
their larval form can survive almost any degree
of frost. There is no country in the world more
afflicted with insects than Lapland. In summer
they thicken the air, and render even breathing a
matter of difficulty. They prove too much for
the far from delicate cuticle of the Lapp and of
his companion, the shaggy reindeeer, and both are
forced to seek relief in the heights. But the larval
form of these same insects pass the winter at the
bottom of the innumerable shallow lakes of the
country, or in the water of its swamps, which are
frozen hard to their depths. Stories of frozen
fishesresuming their active life are probably in-
debted to their maker, but that larval insects can
endure a freezing hardly admits of a doubt. The
midge may carry the power a step further on in
its life.
FEBRUARY
SNOWDROPS.
FAIR MAIDS OF FEBRUARY
IN the floral poverty of the early year we lavish

admiration on the snowdrop, but it is quite pretty
enough to claim a glance even if rivals lay in
cohorts around it. Purity could find no more
perfect emblem than this chaste little blossom,
whose delicacy and temerity in braving what is
often the surliest month of the year, excite in us

a mixture of emotions in which recognition of
pluck is dashed with pity. Daffodils
come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty ;
but here is a mere child of a flower, compared

with the robust beauty of March, defying the winter
as if it were a paragon of hardiness.
The snowdrop is never seen at its best where
it is most often seen in the garden border. Like
most flowers which spring from a bulb, its proper
place is among grass, and to realize the effect
it is capable of producing, one has to see it
growing masses from the sward under

in irregular
old trees. In sucha situation as this the flower
lives long and multiplies freely, and nothing the
year has to show can excel such a family party

in pure and appealing beauty. Snowdrops form
a family known to botanists as Galanthus, and
there are about two dozen natural species and
some varieties available to the gardener.
florists'
All natural species are beautiful, and some
the
of them are much larger than the British species.
The florists' varieties, particularly the -doubles, are
conspicuous failures to improve upon Nature.
Extreme earliness of flowering is the most
marked peculiarity of the snowdrop tribe, though
there are species which depart from the rule. It
has sometimes been jestingly said of the florist
that in his efforts to make early flowers flower
"
earlier he has turned them into lates," and it
is a fine question whether a narcissus
certainly
made to bloom at Christmas is a late flower or
an early one. What the gardener has done in
this way some of the snowdrops have done for
themselves without his assistance. The habit of
the family is to begin business the moment there
is a break of the snow, but some of the species,

in their anxiety, as it were, not to miss a chance,
get through with their flowering just before the
snow begins. These are the autumn snowdrops.
The snowdrops illustrate a phase in the strategy
of life which by no means peculiar to them-
is
selves. We are accustomed to think of the

inhabitants of the sterile parts of the earth, whether
they be flower people or other people, as excep-
tional examples of hardiness, and generally they
are as hardy as they are esteemed. But it was not
hardiness that sent them to the sterile parts. On
the contrary, it may safely be inferred that origin-
FAIR MAIDS OF FEBRUARY 41
ally they went there because they were relatively

a feeble folk. They retired before a competition
which they could not face, and left the more
desirable parts of the earth's surface to the
stronger races who were capable of seizing and
holding them. This is probably true of most of
the mountain plants. Take the case, for example,
of the lycopodiums, or club mosses. Far back
in the world's history they were among the
dominant plants of the earth, and, of tree -like
dimensions, played a great part in the formation
of the coal. To-day they are dwarfs confined
to the higher altitudes, where competition for space
is slight. They have yielded up the good grounds
to more pushing rivals, and have prolonged
existence by adapting themselves to an environ-
ment where the struggle is slack.
And just as there is a surrender to competition
in space, so there is a yielding in time. June and
July are great flower months, but they are also
the months of intensest struggle. The plants on
the sunny side of the hedge are fighting one
another for root space, straining to overtop one
another and get the most of the sun, competing
furiously with one another for the attention of
insects, resorting to all manner of cunning devices
for the successful deposition of their seed. Those
of them which cannot keep their heads up in the
struggle must either submit to extinction or get
into a less crowded part of the year. Some have
got over the difficulty by waiting till the crowd
has passed, and these are the autumn plants.
Others have solved the problem by getting to
work before the crowd has assembled, and these
are the flowers of spring. The snowdrops have
found it difficult to compete even with the flowers
of spring, and have pushed back to the very gates
of winter, where they find themselves without com-
petitors for such sunshine as is and for the
attention of such insects as are then abroad.
From action of this struggle -evading character
it isnot necessary to infer a general all-round
weakness on the part of the evading organism.
A single defect of quality might suffice as the
determinant, and there must be powers of adapta-
tion of other kinds if the evasion is to be a success.
The American expression, " Get out or get on,"
describes the case. The bulb plants of spring
have got out and got on, and their device of the
bulb is the secret of their success. They flower
early and scatter their seed, but after getting these
vital functions done they use the heat of early
summer to store up, by means of roots and leaves,
food supplies which enable them to rush through
with the vital processes at a time in the following
year when without their store they would be lost.
They have also furnished themselves with means
of resistance to cold, and it is a curious fact that
the air within the drooping bell of the snowdrop
is always two or three degrees higher in tempera-
ture than the air without. This is a matter of
importance, for in time of frost the organs of the
flower are always the first to suffer, and when
the anthers are frost-bitten the flower containing
them produces no seed. But bulb plants, with
their power of budding from the bulb, are less
FAIR MAIDS OF FEBRUARY 43
dependent upon seed for their multiplication than

most.
The history of plants in time is a very long-
story, and we know little about it except by the
methods of inference. In human affairs it is well
known that races driven into the least desirable
parts of the earth by the competition of stronger
rivals often acquire in their new environment a
new strength, in virtue of which they are able to
retaliate upon their ancient enemies, grown soft
with easy living. Most of the great conquering
races,whether in Europe or Asia, came out of the
North, and if we could push back their history
we should almost certainly find that they did not
go into the North as conquerors. Whether any-
thing analogous to this has occurred in the slow
evolution of plant forms no one can say, but
there are facts which suggest it. Not a few with
the distinctive equipment of the spring plant
the store of nutrition enveloping the well-formed
flower, ready to push up at the earliest suitable
moment and live in a hungry season on its own
capital occur in the wealth of summer when such
a provision is unnecessary. An imaginative
botanist would say that they are plants which
got out and got on, and got strong and came
back. But if there are any such the snowdrop
is not among their number. It is still a
backgoer, seeking a place for itself outside the
competition.
THE ROOKERY
THERE is more human nature
in the average rook
than in manya dry human stick or, at any rate,
;
that is the opinion a close watoher of the rook

community is almost bound to carry away. The
rookery I have in mind became a scene of active
lifeduring the last week of February. One bright
morning the tenants returned to inspect their old
homes, and the first beginnings were made with
the work of hauling out the sodden and rotten
parts of the structures to make way for the new.
It was observable that at this time the male rook
was more advanced in the seasonal amorous frenzy
than his mate. He assumed attitudes before her,
flirted his wings, fanned his tail, put his head and
neck into queer contortions, and made distinct
efforts to sing, eyeing her with glances of devotion
the while.She observed those attentions with
good nature, just tinged with contempt, and when
" "
he approached her sidled along the bough,
"
saying in the plainest of rook language, Get
"
along, you giddy old thing !
But soon she came under the influence herself,

and scenes of sentimental comedy followed, which
are probably unique in bird life. When he atti-
tudinized she fluttered her wings in the manner
THE ROOKERY 45
of young birds which have just left the nest, and

made petted noises in her throat. Sparrows do
this, but not what followed for,
; having done
all done by deportment to manifest
that could be
the state of his beating heart, Mr. Rook descended
to the field, caught a wireworm, and, returning
with fed the lady, who received the morsel,
it,
again the manner of the young.

in Many male
birds feed their mates after incubation has begun,
but the rook alone introduces the function among
the offices of courtship. Thus he may be s^id to
have reached that stage of emotional evolution
which the comic papers affect to believe has been
attained only by cooks who lavish on policemen
at once the treasures of the heart and of the
pantry.
It no doubt because he wears a black coat
is
that the rook is reputed to take sober views of

life. In truth there is no more frolicsome creature
living, and the business of getting a rookery
a-going is enlivened with fun and joke through-
out. The repairing of old nests and the building
of new ones goes on very slowly, and in explanation
of this it has been said that the rooks spend more
time in stealing sticks from one another than in
getting sticks for themselves. It would be idle
to deny that they do steal from one another, but
when they do so it is probable that they do it to
gratify their sense of humour rather than in the
spirit of larceny. Often they do no more than
pull out the carefully adjusted twigs and leave
them on the top of the nest and those members
;
of the community whose own nests are completed

up tothe lining stage, and who are, therefore,
in no need ofsticks, are not one whit less active
in this sort of sport than the rest. In my rookery
the practical jokers were numerous and deter-
mined, and their favourite joke was not to steal
a stick, but to pull it out, drop it to the ground,
and next moment affect to be absorbed in the
labours of plumage preening. Then they are all
prodigious talkers, and while the renovation went
on they conversed without ceasing all the time,
criticizing one another's work and engaging in
sentimental interludes. Twice the communal sense
asserted itself. In one case a couple, presumably
young, commenced to build a new nest at a con-
siderably higher altitudethan the general level
of the rookery. They worked in peace for a day,
but on the second day an Act of Parliament was
invoked against the aspirants, and their nest was
pulled to bits. If a pair of rooks care to build
at a lower level than prevails they are permitted
to go on ; the discomfort will be theirs. But if
they try to get unduly up in the world, it is quite
a different affair. Then the public interest comes
in. The other pair which outraged the law did
it by attempting to build in the top of an ash a
hundred yards away from the group of elms

favoured by the community. They were punished
for their aloofness by having their work wrecked
after they had laboured on it for three days. As
allthese leisurely repairing operations are carried
out in the mornings, and the greater part of each
day is spent in the fields, two or three weeks
pass before the rookery is actually a going con-
THE ROOKERY 47
cern ;but in the last week of March black tails

will become visible sticking over the edges of
many of the nests, evidence that the labours of
incubation have begun.
It is during sitting-time that the rook shows
himself at his best and also, alas at his worst-
!
as a family man. Some observers of rooks have

denied that they ever enter into the bonds of
matrimony in the strict sense of the term. Each
male undoubtedly does undertake the duty of pro-
viding food for one wife and family, but this,
it is alleged, is merely an apportionment of
communal labour, and does not carry with it
monogamist obligations. The indictment is un-
proved. What is true is that the rook is a great
and unabashed flirt. During April he labours
hard in the fields to feed himself and collect
enough to satisfy the appetite of the sitting lady
in the tree -top. But when he has fed her he
thinks nothing of hopping on to the edge of
another nest and breathing soft nothings to its
occupant. In nine cases out of ten the matron
will receive him with asperity, but there is
generally a tenth case in which the conduct of the

tempted fowl will not bear investigation. And
the curious thing is that the
legitimate spouse
of the flirt may be eyeing him
all the time, but
she retains an unconcerned placidity, and, in the
language of Marjory's poem about the turkey,
"
does not give a single dam."
It has often been remarked as puzzling that
the number of rooks in a rookery never corre-
sponds with the number of nests. In the case
I write about there are twenty -three nests three,
however, untenanted and I have been able to
count forty-nine birds. There are thus nine birds
which are either bachelors, spinsters, widows, or
widowers. Probably they are bachelors and
widows. The rooks that are shot in springtime
by farmers who suspect depredations on their
autumn -sown wheat are generally male birds, for
after rookery business has got well under way
the females go little to the fields. It is likely,
therefore, that the rookery contains some widows,

and as there are some among the supernumeraries
which have been observed to do temporary sitting
duty while a cramped mother stretched her legs
and wings, the probability is increased. But there
are bachelors too. Among most birds a pro-
portion of the one-year-olds fight shy of family
responsibilities, and rooks are no exception to
the rule. The social instinct compels those un-
attacheds to join the rookery, and their influence,
it is to be feared, is uplifting by no manner of
means.
RESPECTABLE AND DISREPUTABLE
RELATIVES
THE case of the house-sparrow and the tree-sparrow

has been employed as one wherewith to challenge
the adequacy of the theory of natural selection.
There is a slight difference in the colouration of
the males, and whereas in the case of the house-
sparrow the male and female have distinct plumage,
in the case of the tree-sparrow the sexes are nearly
"
indistinguishable. Such differences," says a
"
distinguished naturalist, cannot be explained by
any theory of their survival value." The case is
not one of the strongest, for sex dimorphism, what-
ever may be its explanation, is undoubtedly a con-
siderable fact. But probably most Darwinians
would admit that there has been a great deal
too much of that sort of fine-spun argument which
detects survival value in fine shades of difference
in plumage. It is recognized that an
widely
obvious mark of between species, as
difference
in plumage, may have no direct significance what-
ever. Modifications rarely take place singly, and
there are certain modifications of parts which
always take place in groups or pairs. One of
them, and that not the patent one, may be the
change that counts. The stock case is that of
<9
4
white cats with blue eyes, which are always deaf.
It seems impossible for a white cat to acquire
blue eyes without at the same time losing its
power of hearing. To put the matter in the form
of a proposition the patent modification may
:
be only the outward and visible sign of some

invisible grace or defect, which grace or defect
tells in survival and not the thing that meets the
eye.
In the case of the two sparrows it is perfectly
safe to say that the thing that counts is not the
slight difference in plumage, but a psychological
difference which may or may not be related to
it. And here too readily taken for granted
it is
that we have a case

of a remarkable success in life
the house-sparrow, and a comparative failure
the tree-sparrow. Despite its obviousness the
assertion may be challenged. In a good natural
history sense the tree -sparrow, a perfectly respect-
able finch, is an honester and more stable success
in life than its squalid relative. To begin with,
the species has proved its adaptability to an area
of enormously wide geographical range, extending
from China to Britain. Nor is it a back -going
species, for though nowhere outrageously numerous,
it has extended its range in quite recent times to
such outlying parts as the Faroe Islands. But

the important thing about it is that its success
is securely based on nature, and if all the
artificial conditions created on the earth's surface
by civilized man were to disappear, the tree-

sparrow would not be seriously incommoded by
their disappearance. Human cultivation is not
RESPECTABLE AND DISREPUTABLE RELATIVES 51
inimical to it ;even takes advantage of it.

it
But it is no more dependent upon it than any other

member of the finch family. Thus it may be said
to be a healthy success.
How does the case stand with the house-sparrow,
commonly called ubiquitous? As a matter of fact,
it is not ubiquitous by any means. There is hardly
a country in the world to-day in which the house-
sparrow, or one of its local races, does not abound,
but in each and every one of them its area is
almost strictly the area of cultivation. There are
still vast expanses of Russia where it is unknown,
though it faithfully follows upon the heels of the

cultivator when he breaks open new ground. Even
in Scotland there are considerable tracts where it
is unknown a glen which has neither habitation

nor cultivation is a place where it cannot live.
In short, the house -sparrow is a parasite, and
despite its seeming success there is that precarious-
ness in its state incident to the state of all
"
parasites. It is sometimes spoken of as the avian
rat," but it is really more of a parasite on man-
kind than the rat. The rat enters into and enjoys
the fruits of human industry to the full, but it
can get on without them. There are rats on the
seashore far from human works, and rats have
been trapped very near the top of our highest
mountains. To these and many more likely places
the house -sparrow does not penetrate.
What does all this imply? It probably implies
that at no distant date, biologically speaking, the
house-sparrow was a creature of much more
limited range than 'its cousin the tree-sparrow,
which is of no such dependant nature. If it existed
at all in the time of palaeolithic man, who was
a hunter, it must have been a very moderate
success indeed. The psychological modification
which marks it off from all the other finches,
and is its real distinction, could have been of no
survival value to it, but when neolithic man, the
cultivator, came in, Mr. Sparrow got his chance.
His case is like that of the sub-species of man,
flourishing greatly to-day, distinguished by pre-
eminent ability to operate successfully on the
Stock Exchange. There were doubtless always
men with this talent embedded in their brains, but
it was no useto them a worthless modification
through all the ages of simple industry. They

got their chance for the first time when Stock
Exchanges were invented.
I have said that there is something of that
precariousness in the position of the house-sparrow
incident to the position of all parasites. The
success of a parasite always depends on the
success of its host, and if the host discover a
means of guarding itself the parasite's day is done.
The sparrow's human host seems in a fair way
to survive, but if he made up his mind that
the sparrow was seriously injurious to him and
must be extirpated, the work of extirpation would
not be really difficult. If an order were issued for
the destruction of almost any one of the finches
it would be extremely difficult to carry it out. They
are not easily found when wanted, and their nests,
without exception, are well hid. The nests of
the house-sparrow, on the other hand, are always
RESPECTABLE AND DISREPUTABLE RELATIVES 53
easily found. Were an Act of Parliament passed

requiring the owners of property to destroy the
nests of all sparrows harbouring on their property,
it would be a somewhat laborious but otherwise
easy thing to give it effect. A ladder would be

the sole equipment necessary for the campaign.
Five -sixths of the nests are placed in buildings,
and if they were not advertised by their untidiness
their owners would obligingly point out where they

are. Those placed in trees are invariably of studied
conspicuousness.
In their nesting habits the house-sparrows ex-
hibit another phase of their tendency to parasitism.
What we may take to be their own natural nest
is a clumsy domed structure placed in trees.
When they nest in buildings they omit the dome,
and are always ready to dispense with nest -build-
ing altogether if they can steal another bird's
nest. In this connection the swallows are their
chosen victims, and there is some reason to believe
that they occasionally steal nests from one another.
But they give no symptom of a desire to pursue
further than this the road of the cuckoo, for the
sparrow has a genuine pleasure in the labours
of family-raising.
TUNING UP
THERE is an early phase of the spring madness
of the birds which so far has little to do with
love. A quickening of the pulses, an accession of
vitality, comes with lengthening days. Spirits are
rising high with the temperature and call for
liberation. They are highest in the case of the
early nesters. Here, for example, are the tits.
They are high-spirited little animals at the worst
of times, but they are pre-eminently summer
nesters, and it is still winter with them. They
have not broken up their companies, and they come
all day long to feed on the lump of suet hung
up for their benefit. The note of the great tit has

risen in shrillness and frequency, and the saffron (or
is itsulphur?) of his breast is perceptibly brighter
than a month ago. But he is not yet thinking of
love, and he is not more sportive than it is his
prevailing habit to be. With the blackbird it
is very different. He is in the jocund mood of
early spring, and in a very few days he will rise
to the blithe heights of pugnacity and fight all-
comers of his kind just because he feels astonish-
ingly vigorous and fit.
To watch the ongoings of the blackbirds as
February advances is a pure pleasure. Here are
TUNING UP 55
two cocks on the same lawn. One is diligently

searching for worms, and from the gusto with
which he goes at the labour of hauling one out
whose head he has caught it may be inferred
that spring worm is good. There may even be
intoxicating qualities in spring worm capable of
accounting for much. However that may be, the
first blackbird is upon the extraction and
intent
deglutition of the unhappy annelid, which doubt-
less had its own hopes in a world warming up.
The second blackbird is probably digesting the
contents of a full crop, and for the moment has
no need to look for worms. Suddenly he fans
his tail, droops his wings, and with head turned
towards his fellow begins a curious posturing
march or run in front of him. To all appearance
"
he is trailing his coat." The other goes on with
his worm and takes no note. It is a fine big
worm, and has to be cut into sections. The cutting

is done in a truculent fashion, the poor victim
being simply dashed and shaken till he breaks.

When the last wriggling fragment is down and
the feaster has lifted his head and twisted his
neck to settle the feast in its right place, his eye
falls upon the posturer a yard away. Then his
tail opens out, too, in a downward fan, his wings
droop and trail, and he performs his own semi-

circular march. In this way the two keep per-
forming around one another, till suddenly, with a
clash of harsh notes, one of them breaks up the
performance and flies away.
There has been no approach to a fight. The
two have merely performed at each other, and
there was no lady to show off before. Some
distance away, under the shrubs, a hen blackbird
was busy looking for anything good to eat, scatter-
ing the dead leaves in the blackbird fashion, which
is quite different from the fashion of the fowl
and its kind, in that the beak and not the feet
performs the chief part. But she never looked
up at the little play, and the players never looked
towards her. In a wee,k or two their manner will
change, and so will hers, for when the courtship
fury really blazes up the hen blackbird takes a
masterful share in it.
The robins are a trifle further advanced than
the blackbirds, for they are engaged in little
pugilistic passages not the furious fights that will
take place next month when an angry pair of cocks
will grapple and roll over one another, making
the feathers fly but showy encounters with less
rage than style. Here is one on the lowest branch
of an apple-tree, wings half-expanded, beak open,
making threatening bobs at another on the ground.
The groundling is looking up with beak half -open,
wings just raised from the body and no more,
evidently watching for the next move in the game.
As the upper bird drops the lower rises, and away
the two go on a swift chase, passing through the
branches, one close behind the other, with a speed
which seems to court a crushing mishap. But they
thread the maze in safety every time.
There has been curiously little love-making
among the sparrows, which always make an early
start with their family affairs. But, perhaps, that
is because the sparrow, when he does begin, gets
TUNING UP 57
to business with great expedition. He does not

dispense with courtship by any means. On the
contrary, no small bird goes through a more
ostentatious love-making. But the lady is not coy ;
she quickly makes up her mind to accept a good
offer, and then the two proceed to nest -making
without an hour's delay. In the meantime they
are getting up steam on yellow crocuses. The
passion of thesparrow for yellow crocuses has
never been explained. It is not a simple matter
of gastatory taste, for if it were the question would
be simple. Most of my yellow crocuses have been
torn to bits, but most of the bits are lying about
still. And why are the white and purple flowers
left untouched?
During all the winter I have obtained enter-
tainment by hanging up suet for the tits, but
have just learned late in the day that this sort
of amusement may be varied with no loss of sport.
A piece of fat suspended clear from a string is the
tits' own
property. No other bird can make any-
thing of and only the robin tries. The other
it,
day I was offered a very large lump of fat, and

as the tits' string was well plenished I hung this
fresh supply among the branches of a currant-
bush nailed against a wall. There was one ex-
cellent perch from which it could be assailed.
Blue tits were the first to find it out, but soon the
sparrows found that they, too, could share, and
from that moment the blue tits had hardly a chance.
The sparrows kept the treasure, and there were
seldom fewer than four of them waiting a turn on
the perch. The great tit alone among the smaller
birdscould bounce them out of the way. But
soon another claimant appeared upon the scene
in the person of the starling. Now the starling
is about as vulgar a fellow as the sparrow, though
a much better humoured vulgarian, and he is twice

or three times as strong. The manner in which
he dominated this situation was as good as a
piece of low comedy. He simply ignored the
very existence of his vulgar little brothers. When
he arrived to have his peck there was always one
of them on the perch ;
Master Starling just hopped
down on its back as if it were not there, leaving
Master Sparrow to find a way out for himself, which
he did, ruffled and angry. But though the sparrows
must make way for the starling, as a light-weight
must make way for a heavy-weight, they are not
afraid of him. They sit on the perch beside him
waiting till he moves away, and when he tears
off more fat than he can get inside his beak all
at one time the sparrow next to him complacently,
and without evoking any sign of resentment, picks
off the projecting morsels.
MARCH
THE CUNNING OF TROUT
IT is possible for a vast aggregate of thinking
to be performed around a particular problem with-

out advancing its solution. Thus, on the first
brilliant Saturday afternoon in March ever since
the close of the ice age the goodly army of anglers
have turned a willing mind to the great question
of fish. From then till October, throughout all
the intervening ages, they have speculated on fish,
told stories about fish, and even lied about fish.
They have fondly rolled their agile conceptions
of fish into and out of every corner of their crania.
They have despised and mistrusted their fellow -
men who are in imperfect sympathy with fish ;
and even the angling peasants of Cumberland

looked down with lofty contempt upon Wordsworth
"
because, as one of them put it, there wasn't a
bit o' fish in him." Yet, notwithstanding all this,
the psychology of trout remains in a backward
state. Indeed, it is highly probable, though not
subject to proof, that neolithic man, after a day
of it on the river with hooks made out of thorns,
black or white, said precisely the same things
about trout as are said to-day by every little
assembly of fishers gathered at a wayside station
to await the last train. He paid his tribute to
the great mental powers of the trout so do they.
;
He remarked on its great ability to learn

from experience ;
its mastery of the disguises
of hooks ; its profound wisdom in old age so
do they. He wondered what trout thought about
him ; and to-day they raise conjectures on the
"
subject of what the old fellow is saying to
"
himself about them as he lurks in his favourite
hole beneath the big root of the alder-tree.
Neolithic man credited trout with firmly held views
as to the relative safety of blackthorn hooks
used with or without the bark, and his modern
descendant has merely changed the mechanism of
the opinion, and credits his quarry with views on
tinsel or hackel of hare lug. Then, as now, the
sceptical man who ventured (within reach of water)
to declare that trout have no power of thinking
at all, that they are as unteachable as a dead
machine, would stand in imminent danger of a
watery martyrdom as fit retribution for his most
accursed heresy.
And yet the heretic would be very near the
truth, for it is only in fables and anglers' tales
that fish are creatures of intelligence. They are
born with a certain endowment of fear, suspicion,
and fixed utilitarian instinct, and an endowment
which experience hardly, if at all, modifies up or
down. When a naturalist wishes to find examples
of unteachableness he goes to the fish kingdom ;
for though fish stand higher in the order of life
than the insects and other articulated creatures,
their adaptive intelligence is universally lower. A
spider, for example, may be taught in ten minutes
THE CUNNING OF TROUJ 63
to get the better of its inherited instincts, if some
disagreeable result follows the attempt to gratify

them. Present one with a fly dipped in an un-
pleasantly tasting substance like turpentine, and
after two will learn to subordinate the
trials it
whole teaching of its countless ancestors that a

fly within reach is a thing to be pounced upon.
But a fish will go on plunging at a thing which,
were it a teachable creature, experience would have
warned it to leave alone. There are countless
examples of salmon, and even trout, taking the
fly within a few minutes of being struck, and
there are many cases of a salmon being caught
with the hook still in its jaw which it had broken
off after a mighty struggle half an hour before.
But more striking experiments than these have
attested the unteachableness of fish. Mr. Bateson
tells how none of the fish in his aquarium seemed
to get a lasting appreciation of the nature of the
glass wall of the tank. The same fish again

and again knocked their heads against the glass in
trying to seize objects moving on the other side,
and some of the oldest inhabitants continued to
the last subject to the fish's natural instinct to
pounce, though it meant a damaged snout every
time. Even the examples of teachableness in fish
only emphasize a general belief in their unteach-
ableness, as in the well-known case of the pike
which dashed itself for three months against a
glass partition in the attempt to get at some
minnows in the next division of the aquarium, and
became at last so firmly persuaded of the danger
of attacking them that, when the partition was
removed, it left them quite unmolested. In this
case the pike never learned anything about the
partition. It merely got fixed hard in its head a
dull notion that there was something about those
minnows which interfered with their usefulness as
articles of diet. Of course, in support of the
belief of the teachableness of fish there will be
cited the case of those young hatchery trout which
come up in shoals to be fed on their attendant
making the customary sign. This, however, is
not a case of intelligence. It is but a free response
to a natural impulse, the almost mechanical per-
formance of an action in the direct sequence of
a stimulus acting on one of the senses. The
stupidest moth will quickly learn to respond in
the same way to a scent which it associates with
food. It is not in responding to, but in the inhibi-
tion of, such impulses that intelligence, and par-
ticularly the sort attributed to fish, should be
shown.
How, then, is the so-called cunning of the trout
to be accounted for? The question is not very
difficult if one keeps steadily in mind the fact that
they have been fished for since, at any rate, the

days of neolithic man and teachableness has not
;
necessarily any part in the problem. Through

all those ages man has. been
steadily extracting
from the water the fish with an inferior original
endowment of suspicion and, considering the
;
length of time during which the process has been

going on, the surprising thing is, not that fish are
suspicious, but that there are any strains left with
so little suspicion that they may still be deceived
A WET-FLY STREAM.
THE CUNNING OF TROUT 65
with a confection of steel, feathers, tinsel, and hair.

There were wary and less wary fish in the waters
when man began to operate with rod and line.
The wary strain, or the more wary members of
it, have survived to multiply their kind, while
the unwary and the less wary have found their
way into the basket. Thus the fish in much-
fished rivers have not acquired their reputation
for cunning because greater experience has taught
them: more, but because all the simpletons have
been taken out. Nor is the case of the cunning
old trout at all destructive of this theory of
elimination. argued that this trout must
It is
have learned a lot, or he would never have grown

so old. But the dangers of the old trout were
just as great they were even greater when he
was young as they are now that he is old. As he
successfully eluded them then, the probability is
that he was as naturally wary then as now. The
theory that fish are taught great cunning by
experience is hardly capable of statement in a
particular case, and is, indeed, always set forth in
general terms applicable to entire rivers. Just
consider the amount and kind of experience neces-
sary to teach a trout the sort of angler -defy ing
wisdom attributed to it. It is known already
that the amount
of experience needed to teach a
fish is very great, and in this case the kind of it
must be actual contact with a hook. By this
proposition, therefore, the fish must have been on
a hook and escaped hundreds of times, if hundreds
of experiments would suffice to impress the kind
of brain which fails, after months of constant
5
teaching, to learn the obstructive nature of a glass
barrier. The idea that fish can learn from seeing
others drawn out is absurd, since it credits them
with powers both of indirect observation and
logical reasoning. It may even be questioned if
the so-called wisdom of fish is at all of the nature
of intelligence, whether acquired by experience or
by heredity, assisted by elimination. To a large
extent the elusive actions of fish are mechanical
responses to stimuli acting through acute senses ;
and when the effectiveness of the senses is reduced,

as in darkness, the caution of the fish is propor-
tionately diminished. There is nothing more
certain, however, than that trout will continue to
be credited with keen, conscious wisdom, accumu-
lating with experience in old fish. It is necessary
for the angler's story that it should be so, and
that truth -loving person will not tamely be
deprived of the groundwork of those moving
1
dramas in which, with marvellous success, he

matches his intelligence against the more than
human sagacity of ancient fish.
MARCH SUNSHINE
FINE days in early March are, by an ancient
"
tradition, placed among the flatteries of the
faithless year." This year (1911) flatteries of
such sort have been few, and every dust -liveried
servant of the soil will tell you that the season is
backward. Yet some of the processes of Nature
go on without consulting a laggard thermometer,
and even when skaters and curlers were still active
on the ice the blackbird was making furtive dashes
at his future mate. He had no notion why he did
it, and after each dash shamefacedly accused
himself of idiocy unworthy of a blackbird male.
But the foolishness was repeated, and all the while
the bird's black coat was becoming glossier and
his bill a richer orange. The hen bird has been
slower to respond to the seasonal feelings, and
the silly outbursts of the males have surprised the
still sane gravity of her temper. As she hastily
evaded that mad dash of his, and turned to look
at him from a safe distance, with head critically
jerked to one side, her judgment was contemptuous
in the last degree. After all, she concluded, male
blackbirds were not among the things of life to
be taken seriously, and she promptly resumed the
search for slugs, which was real business. But
67
her day came, too. It may have been a mere
glint of wintry sunshine on his glossy wing or

the set of his wonderful waxy bill. Something,
at any rate, has happened, and if the little chases
are stopped she feels neglected ;
if directed at
another bird she feels an intolerable sense of wrong,

which is promptly gratified in a fierce feminine
fight and a scolding which disturbs a whole
shrubbery. All the birds of the thrush family fall in
love betimes. The song-thrushes were courting in
the hard frost of a fortnight since, and the queer
antics of the missel-thrushes have now for many
days been working o'ut the prologue of the summer
comedy. Anthropologists tell us that marriage
by capture was once a universal practice among
mankind, and that traces of it continue in some
marriage rituals and in some children's games.
One might almost suppose that time was when the
missel-thrush took a wife in this way too, and that
he pretends to do it still. His courtship is a chase
with something in it of the formality of ritual.
A wire fence may be the scene of it. There the
birds hop swiftly from post to post, the male
alighting on one top precisely at the moment the
hen alights on the next ahead, the pursuer uttering
a very curious and rapid clucking note all the
while. The whole performance is ridiculous, and
so from time to time the performers think, for
"
every now and then, coming to themselves," they
abandon it precipitately, and zealously search for
worms like sensible birds, subject to an unaccount-
able aberration.
Of course, there is excellent reason for birds
MARCH SUNSHINE 69
of the thrush tribe beginning an early courtship.

Summer commences for them with the first real
sunny day the first day to soften the hard earth
and send life stirring among the many creeping
things that inhabit it. Leaves and blossom are,
no doubt, an amenity, but grubs are the thing.
To the blackbird, indeed, grubs make a summer
the rest are trimmings and pleasant flummery.
On the other hand, there are many birds to whom
summer is still far out a broken
away. Hang
cocoanut or a lump of suet, and the tits will be
little less grateful than if the rigours of February
were still at their worst. Summer to them means

the sumptuous time when the myriads of the insect
world are about and laying eggs, when caterpillars
lurk in the folds of every leaf ready to be eaten,
and when five -sixths of the day may be devoted
to the gratification of a lively curiosity. And as
that time is not yet for many days, winter con-
tinues for the tits, no matter how the sun may
shine. So we still have them in gardens, about
stables, on the roads, and about houses whose
inhabitants know how to treat them. Nobody
but a professional humorist ever saw a tomtit look
dispirited, but to see the birds at their best hang
out for them a lump of suet suspended by a string.
While it lasts their whole life is an acrobatic
ecstacy when it is done they may be supposed
;
to a few moments of sad thought to the

give
unanswerable question, Why does not suet grow
on every tree? Why titmice which never found
anything like it in Nature think cooked fat superb
feeding is a matter only less difficult of explanation
than their mad and reckless devotion to cocoanut,
for which they are ready to forget the dangers
of both men and cats. Even to the robin, which
can feast upon a worm, the opening of the frozen
ground is much less of a summer reality than to
the thrush. For though worms are very fine in
their way, and provide an excellent and substantial
basis of a meal, there are infinitely finer things
in the insect world shortly to be unsealed. Insects,
however, must wait upon vegetation, and so far
life has hardly made a move. There are catkins
on the willow, but not even the adventurous lesser
celandine has shown a blossom.
The most pleasing result of March sunshine
is thesudden stimulus it gives to the song of
birds. Even in hard frost the tuning of the
orchestra had proceeded. Blackbird and thrush
have been tentatively trying their notes, and the
starlings have been chattering in competition with
the sparrows. But with the first real spring day
the blackbird essays a full song. These early-
songs of both blackbird and thrush are by no
means the perfect flute-like utterances we shall
hear as the season advances. There are broken
notes and halting phrases. The songster seems
conscious of effort. He goes back upon defects,
repeats halting passages, and gradually rises to
elaborate combinations, becoming more and more
wrapped up in himself as he develops his own
powers as a musician. There is little doubt that
the birds listen to one another, learn from one
another, and deliberately, even passionately, com-
pete. Thus, to an attentive listener, a still bare
MARCH SUNSHINE 71
orchard becomes a kind of school, where rivalries

are marked by intermittent outbursts of harsh and
brawling notes, and even by angry combats. Then
the starling supplies a real comic element.
Nature presents few sights more exquisitely absurd
than that of the starling posted in a tree not far.
from one in which a blackbird is singing. It
takes up its position on the topmost bough, and
throws itself into the ecstatic attitude of a great
artist. The bill set at a high upward angle,
is
the throat swells, and the feathers which cover

it are in rippling motion. The whole body of
the bird quivers as if with the pride of masterly
execution, yet at twenty yards not a sound can
be heard but a low, castanet-like rattling of the
rapidly moving mandibles. At ten yards the song
can be heard an unmistakable imitation of the
blackbird's, wonderfully perfect in its way. It
would be admirable, but the whole pose of the
songster seems to express his absolute conviction
that his reduced version is even superior to the
real thing, and the impression is one of comicality
alone. The starling's own song is a far from
unpleasant twitter, but the bird is full of vanity,
and is constantly proving to its own satisfaction
that it can out-sing the finest songster in the grove.
In a week or two its greatest efforts will be lost
in the grand chorus.
TOWN GULLS
SPRINGTIME is excellent, but it is not all tulips,
"
crocuses, and daffodillies rare." From the point
of view of the dweller in towns the season of bud
and blossom, if a great bestower of good things,
isin some measure a robber as well. To those
who take no careful note of such things the long
list of birds that dwell in or visit towns during
winter is an astonishment. It runs into dozens,

and includes many which are by no means the
most common of avian names. But with the
advance of spring most of these town -seeking
species bid a ready or reluctant farewell to urban
scenes, and betake themselves to the fields, the
hedges, or the shore. Reluctant, because there
are some birds which in modern times have
developed a fancy for town life which only the
strongest of natural instincts can overcome, and

''
notable among them are the gulls. The wild
"
seamew has a place all his own in the stock
scenery of romantic literature. There he is the
very spirit of aloofness and self-dependence. He
rides upon the storm, and experiences all the
primal emotions which surge through Ossianic
poetry. Perhaps the gull was once like that. In
our time there is not a bit of poetry in him, and
TOWN GULLS ft
is almost painful to
it
speculate upon the grossly
prosaic nature of his real thoughts. There seems
to be little doubt that the town-frequenting habits
of the gulls are of recent origin. Certainly the
habit has developed enormously in the last twenty
or thirty years, and unsavoury thought some
authorities have traced it to the development of
modern sanitary systems. The gulls revel in sewer
outfalls, though, perhaps, the attraction in their
case is secondary, for the sewer draws to it many
species of small fish on which gulls feed. But they
are foul feeders themselves, and scorn no garbage.
Whatever be the cause, they delight in the life
of towns. The ridge of a roof is an excellent
place for themto perch upon, and if a human
citizen cares to offer those feathered citizens food
they will quickly discover his good intentions, and

no false pride will stand in the way of their
accepting his charity. And generally the human
citizen is interested in his gulls. They are charm-
ing objects on a river front, whether swimming
with the tide or sailing on easy wing. Their
"
readiness to come to be fed," their deftness in
catching a thrown morsel, the perfection and dainty
spotlessness of their plumage, all dispose him to
reckon them among the redeeming amenities of
his environment and in some places, as in
;
London, they have stirred in him an almost pro-

prietary interest.
But the moment comes when the gulls must
seek the haunts of their ancestors. Sitting for the
last time on the great pipe which has been their
town seat for many months, the conversation that
"
passes among them is easily imaginable. Why
should we leave this most eligible sewer," objects
"
a blase young bird there is everything here
;
that could delight the heart of a gull." The truth

of the observation is admitted, but the patriarchs
of the flock point out that this going away in the
month of March is a very ancient custom of the
gulls, which, even in these unsettling times, it
would be unwise to disregard. Young gulls sneer

at ancient customs with the levity of bachelor
men -about -town, but one fine morning they are
all gone. Five-sixths of the gulls which haunt
the river are of the black -headed breed, a species
which is on the high road to the abandonment of
all claim to be considered a sea-bird. They are

at home in towns
they follow the plough like
;
rooks, and in the breeding season they betake

themselves to inland lochs and marshes, often far
away among the hills or woods, where they may
be seen in the company of such purely inland
birds as coots and waterhen. This choice of a
breeding haunt can, however, be no modern custom,
for it has consequences of which the gulls must
strongly disapprove. For one thing their eggs
"
are regularly harvested," a process which is
carried out amid great emotional clamour. As,
however, the birds go on resolutely laying more,
they are always able to raise a brood. But it
is much more interesting to follow the common
gull and kittiwake to nesting-places more charac-

teristic of the tribe. The cliffs are the great
gathering ground, and from a convenient post on
the crest of them the whole comedy of gull love,
TOWN GULLS 75
courtship, and marriage may be observed. Ardour

isnot the word to describe a gull's courtship. A
mated pair will sittogether by the hour, rarely
looking at each other ; but an intruding unmarried
bird is at once assaulted with vigour. If defeated,
he may take up his post on a point of rock where
he can watch the pair, and from which he seems
to throw sarcastic remarks which check any ten-
dency to public endearments. When nesting has
actually begun the blandishments are all on the
side of the female, and the male gull seems to
think the whole situation a trifle absurd. He
spends most of his time over the water hunting for
fish,occasionally remembering his mate, and bring-
ing her a trifle, which he disgorges before her in
an apologetic sort of way, as if to say, " Try
this little kickshaw. Young whiting is excellent
for incubating gulls." When, however, the young
1
are hatched, the male gull drops his half -ashamed

demeanour, and brings little kickshaws with
fatherly assiduity. And parents and young have
reason to bless the ancestors which selected a
nesting-place practically inaccessible to the
marauder, man.
Gulls do not tarry long at the nesting-places
when their domestic duties are over, and we shall
have them back to the delights of estuary and
even town life before the autumn. The young
rapidly reach maturity, and their first lessons in
fishing are got in the water below the nesting cliffs.
What they feed upon in these positions is a matter
of some doubt, but it must consist in the main of
very small surf ace -swimming creatures, for, as no
gulls they are quite unable to follow the
dive,
larger From time to time they are able to
fish.
pounce upon a fish too big to be swallowed at a

gulp, and when that happens there is a strong
probability that the captor will be mobbed by
his own kind till he drops the prize. But even
when a gull has swallowed his fish he is not sure
of it. The skuas are great gull robbers, and
there is reason for suspecting that they have quite
abandoned the habit of hunting for themselves.
Instead of doing so they watch the gulls, and
when one takes a fish in the sight of these bullies
it is chased and battered till it disgorges. Then
the fish is caught by the robber as it falls. This
particular experience of gull life has affected the
gull's way of thinking in all emergencies. It is
in its natural state accustomed to escape a great
annoyance, and even danger, by disgorging its
food, and under totally different conditions it tries
the same expedient. Thus if a tame gull in a
garden is chased by its owner it imagines that he
is after its worm.
last It will run, but as soon
"
as the chase becomes critical it will up with
"
it,"croaking out in gull language, There, then,
have it," and it is mightily surprised if the chase
is continued after that. Considering that gulls
are among the commonest of birds, it is a little
curious that erroneous ideas are general about some
of theircommonest actions. People who see them
every day will be found ready to swear that they
are expert divers. Yet they never get under the
surface of the water. When hunting they fly
slowly over it, the head moving from side to side ;
TOWN GULLS 77
and the descent upon the prey is

rarely, except
in the case of the kittiwake, tobe described as
a swoop. The kittiwake plunges, but never dis-
appears. Thus if food thrown to gulls does not
float they lose it unless it is caught in the air or
just as it touches the water. But perhaps in the

prevalent error there is nothing strange at all.
Few are accurate observers. Five people out of
" " "
six are floored with the question, .Which are
"
in front, the horns or ears of a cow?
MARCH HARES
" "
MAD as a March hare is an expression which
"
goes with Mad as a hatter," and there is as
much of a mystery about the one as about the other.
The learned Brewer conjectures that " mad as
"
a hatter is a corruption of
"
mad as an atter "
(the Saxon for adder) and he makes the search-
;
ing suggestion that hares are reputed mad in

March because it is their mating season. One's
only difficulty with this is that March is the mating
season with three -fourths of the animated creation
in the temperate zone, and many other creatures
get quite as mad over their love affairs as puss.
But he who seeks an explanation of popular lore
about hares has a big task on hand, part of it
being the natural history of the witch.
Hares begin the business of love-making in
February, and sometimes earlier, and if high spirit
is madness they can be mad enough. Though
ordinarily as timid creatures as any that run on
legs, a couple of bucks that have placed their
affections on the same doe manifest a most
amazing pugnacity and valour. It is even said that
they have been known to fight a duel to the
death, and certainly in quite a common encounter
in the lists of love they make the fur fly. Possibly
MARCH HARES 79
the hare's reputation for madness has been put

about by witnesses of these fights, in which there
are always some remarkable and arresting
passages. The combatants, for example, have a
habit of indulging in most astonishing sidelong
jumps which might well suggest that the animal
"
is off its head." But these curious jumps are
not exclusively a feature of the love fights, and
the performance is not by any means confined
to the month of March. And at his maddest a
hare does not look half so mad as a tom-cat in
the throes of amorous sentiment, adding to many
wonderful contortions of body a vocal performance
more suggestive of all-gone insanity than anything
for which four-footed creature is responsible.
The hare is pre-eminently our type of fleetness,
and it is interesting to speculate on the conditions
of life which evolvedremarkable powers in
its
this respect. Only the very swiftest of our dogs
can run a hare down, and it is doubtful if the one
surviving native British canine hunter, the fox,
could capture a hare which had a yard of a start.
Manifestly, therefore, the hare's wonderful run-
ning power is not an adaptation to existing con-
ditions. But as the hare existed in its present
form long before the human period, it is not a
matter of conjecture but of fact that the evolution
of its swiftness was an adaptation to a danger
present in a very old environment. That danger
was in all probability the wolf. Nearly two cen-
turies have passed since the slaying of the last
British wolf, but there was a time when wolves
roamed the British fields and woods in numbers,
8o ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
and were the chief enemy of all lesser animals
capable of furnishing them with a meal. It may
thus be said in no very fanciful sense that in the
long legs of the modern hare we have a record
of the activity of the ancient wolf, which played
the part of natural selection on all those hares
which did not evolve the needed length of bone
and strength of sinew to escape.
It is not only the swiftness of the Jiare that
speaks eloquently of a prolonged course of school-

ing in which the schoolmaster was a swift chaser.
In running before a dog a hare shows itself a
perfect bundle of tricks, all aimed at delaying a
pursuer. it selects ground which is
Instinctively
more difficult dog than to itself, and it
to the
cleverly leads for obstacles which it can run under,
but which the larger pursuer has to surmount.
The most characteristic point in the hare's strategy
of escape is, however, its invariable choice of the
uphill line. an inclination in the coun-
If there is
try over which the hare is being chased it will go up

it, and in an uphill run the great length of its hind
legs give it an advantage which is generally quite

decisive. This instinct, though common to the
whole family of hares, is most strikingly mani-
fested in the case of the blue or variable hare of
the Highlands. On most Highland properties these
hares are the objective of a grand annual hunt, in
which they are driven towards the guns. But it
isabsolutely useless to attempt to drive them down-
hilland the easiest thing in the world to drive them'
up. The beaters are under no necessity, as is
the case with other game, to advance in continuous
*
y
*
Ex^u;
. ** mmw^l^y \.
*A
^^f;>
MARCH HARES 81
line. They have merely to zigzag upwards, while

the shooters are posted at or near the top. The
hares will with one mind ascend from danger.
It is a good case in which an instinct acquired for
the avoidance of a particular dangerous emergency
comes into play to the owner's undoing on the
stimulus of any kind of danger whatever.
To many people the hare and the rabbit are
such close allies as to be hardly distinguishable,
and the resemblances are certainly very real and
considerable. Cousins by descent, they have the
same general protective colouration and the same
general shape. But considering the close genetic
connection, the differences are really very astonish-
ing and deep. The flesh of a pig does not differ
more completely from that of a deer than the flesh
of a hare does from that of a rabbit, and when it
is remembered that both animals derive from a
common ancestor and subsist on the same kind

of food and live in the same climate, the difference
is one which the evolutionary physiologist finds it
far from easy to explain.
There is an equally marked, though by no means
so difficult to account for, difference in the mode
of production of the young of the two species.
Rabbits, as at any rate every country schoolboy
knows, produce young which are naked, blind,
and helpless. The young hare, on the other hand,
is born complete, clothed, with its eyes
open, and
capable of running almost at once. Like the young
plover, it is also born with its hiding instincts
fully developed, and within an hour of birth the
members of a hare family know enough to scatter
6
and hide on the approach of danger. Probably
it is in this habit that we should
find the explana-
tion of the erroneous but widespread popular belief
that the hare produces only a single young at
a birth. The chances are strong that the country-
man who puts up a brood hare will only find one
of her young in the form or in its vicinity, and
stronger still that he will fail to get his hands on
that one.
Of course the very great difference between the
two species in the matter of young production is
an adaptation to their respective modes of living.
Being a burrower the rabbit can afford to produce
immature young, and being a surface dweller the
hare compelled to carry her progeny till they
is
have developed powers of body which young
rabbits do not acquire till a fortnight after birth.
A strain of hares which produced helpless young
would promptly be exterminated by the host of
enemies, from crows to foxes, which, even as it
is, levy a heavy toll on the race.
APRIL
A SPRING TROUBLE
ANY one who looks into the gardener's calendar

for the month of March will find that the salient
feature of the month's zoology is snails. More
lively and arresting animals, it is true, present
themselves for observation in the days of early
spring. But the gardener's calendar is a com-
pilation of a practical turn, and the relations of the
snail to the practical economy of the garden in
spring are among the considerations that really

matter. Just consider the situation. Late in the
autumn our mollusc, fat with rich feeding, sought
out for himself the dry under side of a stone in
rockery or broken wall, well out of the way of
draughts, reasonably sheltered from frost and rain.
Finding the retreat to his taste, he retired into his
shell, and with one operation glued up the front
door and attached the whole house to its winter
site. With the growth of spring warmth he
emerges to find his fat consumed and the demands
of a reviving appetite slowly but surely asserting
themselves. Slowly but surely is the snail's plan
of life. On the first sensation of hunger he does
not rush from his bed. He takes a day or two
to think of it. But at last, cautiously and tenderly,
" "
his foot is extruded, and the snail finds that
he is awake. And what is the first thing that
catches his eye as he pokes out his horns?
Seedlings.
There are still people who believe that the whole
universe has been arranged to serve the purposes
of man. The snail can hardly doubt that it has
been arranged to serve the purpose of snails, and
in the spring circumstances point very definitely
to the truth of this doctrine. In the first place,
a wise and ancient mollusc (and snails, barring
accidents, are long livers) might point out to the
juveniles of the breed, that when the snail awakes
with a delicate and fastidious stomach after a long
fast, he finds that by a providential arrangement
the most delicate kinds of young plants are laid
out in rows to tempt him. It is not much he wants
in March, but it is an unusual season if he does
not find ready for him a row of early vegetables
tender shoots which may be browsed without the
trouble of climbing. After a feast or two of
seedlings the inevitable touch of sour, surly
weather will send him back to his bed. Probably
his next awakening will be in April, and then
what a time is his !
Probably the British snail dates the beginning

of the millennium from the time when the sale
of flower seeds became an organized business.
Prior to that the amateur's garden, at any rate, was
a very so-so affair. The amateur himself dealt
largely in roots (mostly begged or borrowed),
which means hardy perennials. Now hardy peren-
nials have the vice of coming up strong from the
very start, and though a snail can do with a four-
A SPRING TROUBLE 87
year-old wallflower, he certainly does not like it.

The advent of the cheap and ready seed assort-
ments made a wonderful change. The amateur
who does not buy at least twenty kinds is a poor
creature. He sows the contents of his packets
on nice little plots, perhaps in pretty geometrical
patterns, and, leaving the rest to Nature, hopes
for a summer display which will dazzle the
beholders' eyes. It probably happens that 50 per
cent, of the assortment is of seed badly adapted
to the ground, and that 25 per cent, more are
difficult to persuade that the British climate is
quite the right thing. But in reality these are

considerations of small moment, for most of the
seeds do germinate, and that is the great thing.
They are required to make delicate seedlings,
nothing more, and the grateful snail eats them
off flush with the ground. The result is neat and
tidy so different from the time when the snail
had to depend wholly on hardy herbaceous feed-
ing, and, its tough nature, was obliged
by reason of
to select the softer parts of leaves, imparting to
the whole the ragged and unkempt appearance
so objectionable to sensitive taste.
These assortments and " selections carry snails
"
through April with a variety and delicacy of diet

unknown to them in past ages, and when May
comes they are sportive and carry a heart for any
fate. In other words, they are just ready to
appreciate the bedding-out plants which a benefi-
cently developed commercial system brings into
the market at the gastronomic moment. Asters,
stocks, marigolds tough enough later on are just
nice at the time selected for planting out, and it
does a snail-raiser's heart good to see the way
his efforts are appreciated. But that is the charm
of snails they are so appreciative. Get something
very special and they are sure to like it no coaxing
needed. They may be said to dote on chrysan-
themum slips, and if the variety is new and expen-
sive they will travel far to show how highly

they esteem it. They eat it down close to the
ground, and do not leave a fragment lying about.
There can hardly be an amateur gardener who
has not lamented the fact that the British people
are not, like their Continental neighbours, able
to appreciate snails as food. Their indifference
detractsgreatly from the charm of gardening.
With the aids alluded to almost anybody can make
gardening a triumphantly successful branch of
stock-raising. Indeed, one can hardly help one-
self. It about as simple as pressing a button.
is
Dust out the seed, keep the sparrows from absorb-

ing an undue share, and the snail stock appears
upon the land and does the rest itself. But it is
disheartening to find, when you have discovered
the thing you can do really well, that there is no
market for the produce. The waste is positively
heartrending. Getting up unusually early one
morning last May, I captured fifty-nine snails on
about ten square yards of varied culture, edged
with a rockery rich in conveniently situated sites.
They were browsing with an appreciative abandon
which quite touched the heart. Next morning
I made the hundred of it. There were slugs, too,,
which are to snails what sheep are to cattle, and
A SPRING TROUBLE . 89
the variety of breed added interest to the stock.

But it did detract from the pleasure of having
so many animals on one's estate, all doing well,
to think that they could be turned to no sort
of use.
Of course, this utilitarian spirit can be overcome.
One can educate oneself to the point of appre-
ciating snails for their own sake just as one used
to rear rabbits and cherish sticklebacks without
any ulterior purpose in view. But this state of
mind is not reached in a ,day. Old ideas will
keep on asserting themselves. You put down
lettuces, and, in spite of yourself, keep on expect-
ing a crop of lettuces ;
and when your snails
eat them all up before they are an inch high an
unreasonable sense of disappointment will not
be kept back. But when once you have taught
yourself that a success with snails is better than
a failure with the finest vegetable that ever grew,
all goes well ; then you put down seeds with a
sure and certain faith that you will not be dis-
appointed. If, on the other hand, you stick to
the idea of raising flowers instead of snails and
their little brothers the slugs, there are means
which may be adopted. You can surround your
most precious plants with defences of soot, which
no snail will rush so long as the soot is dry or
;
you may get up before sunrise and collect the

browsing herds, popping each individual as you
find him into a vessel containing salt. In the
early morning they are very tame, trustful, and
approachable. But this is a cruel business.
PLOVERS' EGGS
THERE is a story of a wealthy convalescent who

was heard to say, with a wistful look in her eyes,
"
What a nice thing a new-laid egg would be
if it were not so cheap." This is the whole secret
of the charm of the plover's egg, whose first
appearance in the spring market is to some the
first genuine proof of spring. Plovers' eggs are
delicacies, partly because they are tolerably good
eggs, but chiefly because they run to a fancy price.
" "
They are better to eat than terns' eggs ;
but
terns' eggs are often sold as plovers' eggs, and
90 per cent, of the eaters declare that they per-
ceive in them that subtle deliciousness of flavour
which they believe to be appropriate to the egg
of the lapwing. Having consumed eggs in great
variety and number, at an age when consideration
of price is incapable of affecting gastronomic
judgment, I should say that those of the barndoor
fowl, fresh, hold, for sheer merit, an easy first
place;
that those of the game birds pheasant,
partridge, grouse are entitled to tie for second
place ; that those of the plover come in before,
and those of the tern and black -headed gull after,
those of the duck. But the plover's egg is early
PLOVERS' EGGS 91
and its season is short, and it is, therefore, nicely
situated in the calendar for adoption by fashion.

The people who pay eighteen shillings a dozen
for plovers' eggs, if they pay more than the article
is worth, can at least natter themselves that twenty

to one they get the thing they pay for. When the
lapwing begins to lay it has few rivals in egg
production, and those few of its own kind. A
little later the tern's egg, which is a colourable
imitation, comes into the market to deceive the

inexpert. But nobody need be deceived who takes
the slightest trouble to learn the points which
distinguish the two. Both are about the same
size, and though the tern's is an extremely vari-
able egg in respect of colour, both present the
same general aspect of blotched black and brown
on olive-green. But the tern's egtg is of a perfectly
normal egg -shape, whereas that of the lapwing
is invariably more pointed at the thin end. The
eggs of all the members of the
plover family
present the same peculiarity
dunlin, sandpiper,
seapie, redshank but these others differ so
;
markedly in colour and size that they are not in

the competition. There are other less satisfactory
tests. When boiled the white of the tern's egg
becomes a white opaque, while that of the lapwing's
egg remains translucent.
The lapwing holds a very distinct place in the
common stock of Nature knowledge. There are
few who ever come into touch with rurality who
do not know it as the typical bird producing eggs
"
with a protective colouration," and fewer still
who do not know it as the stock instance of the
bird which, by devious arts, decoys the intruder
from eggs and young. Those who know nothing
more about it know these things. Yet, strangely
enough, both statements may be, and have been,
disputed. Though usually described as a bird
of the moor and natural pasture land, the lapwing
has really a much wider range. The most pro-
ductive nesting-place I ever knew was a stretch
of low-lying links-land, on which grass and short
bell -heather held about equal space, and which
was broken up with ramifying channels filled at
high tide with the water from an estuary. But
the peewit nests on all sorts of permanent pasture
where the grass is not long and cultivated fields,
;
particularly of winter-sown wheat, serve its pur-

pose perhaps better than any other kind of ground.
Wherever it lays the eggs are always easily found,
(
partly because the bird never fails to call atten-

tion, in the most clamorous fashion, to the fact
that they are there, and partly because the formal
cross in which they are arranged is, despite the
colouration, conspicuous. The protective coloura-
tion is undeniable. Seen on a piece of heathy
pasture, their olive -greens, with brown and black
blotchings, stand as a perfect mingling of the
colours of the environment. But they fail to pro-
tect, at any rate, from human eyes. In some
related birds the protection is incomparably more
effective. The -oyster -catcher or seapie, for
instance,makes its nest among the large gravel
spreads of river-beds or among the pebbles of
old beaches which abound on some parts of the
coast, separated by newer deposits from the sea.
PLOVERS' EGGS 93
Among the stones one may find oneself looking

at the large cream-coloured eggs, irregularly
spotted and blotched with brown and black, with-
out seeing them. They are in colour the exact
reproduction of the stones they lie among, and
their shape and shadowing are not noticeably
different. Shape and shadowing make the lap-
wing's eggs stand out. It is probable, none the
less, that the colouring of the plover's egg does

protect it, though not from its chief modern enemy,
man. It is as nearly certain as anything of which

we have little direct proof can be, that the lapwing
and all its family are much v
older inhabitants of
the earth than man, and that both its defensive
instincts and its egg -colouration were evolved for
the evasion of foes of quite a different kind-
crows, ravens, and, once upon a time, possibly
wolves.
The artfulness of the lapwing in decoying
intruders away from its eggs and young is almost
"
proverbial. Chaucer
refers to the bird as the
"
false lapwing of trecherie
full (trickery), and
Shakespeare has his allusions to its pranks. In
almost every natural history book it is taken as
the stock example of the birds which feign a
broken wing to draw enemies away. But it cer-
tainly does not perform this trick with anything
like the perfection of deception of the snipe and
more than one kind of wild duck. Mr. Edmund
Selous, who has made bird-watching an art, is
inclined to deny that it ever does it at all. Come
upon a wild duck with young or a nesting snipe
and the bird contracts broken wing with almost
automatic certainty. It is like pressing the button
"
and the figure works. Whilst these birds,"
"
says Mr. Selous, have always, in my experience,
gone off, so to speak, like clockwork when the
occasion for it arrived, I have never known a
peewit to do so, though I have probably disturbed
as many scores perhaps hundreds of them, under
the requisite conditions, as I have units of the
others." It is not a point on which one can affect
certainty unless fresh from observation but if ;
the peewit does not try broken wing, it unques-

tionably does try, by methods of its own, to lead
possible enemies away from eggs or young. The
strategy I have watched scores of times, and in
its main lines it is always the same. The hen
bird runs away furtively, hardly ever rising.
Meanwhile her mate flies about in a low and
distressed fashion, uttering cries of alarm. He
always manages to convey the impression that it
would be easy to catch him. Tried on a man
the device invariably a failure, for the stupidest
is
schoolboy once sees through the dodge.

at
Indeed, far from being a protection, the trick is
a disadvantage, since it acts as an advertisement
that eggs or young are here. But it is very
different when the enemy is a dog. The most
intelligent canine is at once filled with a wild
faith that he can catch the bird, so away he goes
after it ; and one has only to see the performance
to feel that the instinct was originally developed
for the frustration of enemies of this kind. The
Wild Birds Protection Acts do more for the peewit
in these days than all its native arts.
THE ROBIN'S COURTSHIP
AT any season of the year bird-watching is an
occupation with some of the interest of drama,
but for emotional passages there is, of course, no
time like the spring". Then, as the poet say s,,
(
the robin's breast assumes a richer orange, and

the robin himself assumes certain airs and graces
most remarkably unlike those worn by him at all
other times. Everybody is supposed to know the
ordinary bearing of the robin. As a matter of
fact, the robin has two very distinct and yet quite
ordinary manners of carrying himself. Most fre-
quently we see him as a prim and trig little bird,
with all his feathers neatly and tightly laid down
on his slight but vigorous frame. He suggests
that he is all there, very capable of taking care
of himself,and very well and hearty despite bad
weather and shortage of the grub supplies.
But very nearly as often, especially at times
of cold thaw, we find the robin resembling a
loose ball of feathers, with its circular contour
broken only by a head at one end and a tail at
the other. Robins in this state are sometimes
thought to be sick. They look just a little sick,
as if they had swallowed a worm which was
proving just a trifle big or a trifle tough, and was
taking an unconscionable time to digest. Actually
they are not a bit sick, and if you dig up a few
spadefuls of earth for them they will demonstrate
on the spot that they have room and the appetite
for more. Probably the rotund, loose -feathered
pose is adopted for warmth, and feathers thus
disposed have undoubtedly the power, common to
blankets and fluffy fabrics in general, of retaining
in the form of warm air the heat emanating from
the body they invest. Be that as it may, these
are the two common poses of the robin.
The love-making pose is a thing all by itself.
The other day I devoted an hour to the ongoings
of three robins, two, of which at least were affected
with the season madness. One of the three was
a hen, and still calm as calm could be. For eight
months out of the twelve robins are solitary birds,
disliking particularly the society of their own kind,
and this hen was still indisposed for company.
But wherever she liked to fly the other two flew
after her. She looked at them with what novelists
call mingled annoyance and surprise. They were
most troublesome, not to say rude, and she mani-
fested her sense of their unseemly conduct by
running a tilt at each on turn as it came too near,
" "
and letting it have one on the ribs with her
beak. But though robins are pugnacious or
nothing, they retaliated with no violence. Their
one object, from time to time achieved, was to
get posted right in front of her, and there go
through a little pantomime. This consisted in
turning up the tail till it hung over the back at
THE ROBIN'S COURTSHIP 97
an angle which made its wearer resemble in
general outline a wren, and to puff out the red

breast and sway the body from side to side. The
whole air of the bird in this performance was one
"
of intense satisfaction with himself. I am un-
"
mistakably beautiful," he seemed to say, and
if this little person would only look at me, she
could not possibly help admiring." And from the

way in which he puffed it out and threw back
his head, he appeared to be very conscious that
the colour of his breast, now at its brightest, was
his strong decorative point, and a feature of which
he was well justified in making the most.
From time to time the little comedy was
interrupted. Cock robin Number One would
become aware of the proximity of Number Two,
and make a flying dash at him. They fought with
great heartiness, tumbling over one another, peck-
ing hard, speaking high, and disarranging one
another's feathers. But each bout was short, and
a moment after it was over, the one who had the
best of it was back at his love-making and going
through the same attitudinizings again. Up and
down the garden they went, now among the berry
bushes, now on the bare ground, the lady soberly
looking for worms, the others in a fever of fine
sentiment. And in the end she went over the
wall out of my territory, and they followed a yard
in her wake.
As everybody knows, fine theories have been
spun around the courting habits of birds. What
" "
is known as sexual selection is then supposed
to be going on. It is a theory in two parts, and
7
it is quite simple, though it has been worked out
in rather bewildering detail. In the first place,
male birds with one another for possession
fight
of the plumpest, most vigorous, and best -looking
females. The strongest succeed, and, in the case
of polygamousbirds, get the biggest harem, and,
in the case of monogamists, the best mates. In
both cases the triumphant warrior gives rise to
a large progeny of good stock like himself. The
vanquished, on the other hand, has to content
himself in the one case with a small harem, and
in the other with an old, unattractive hen of
diminished fertility, with a result of small and
feeble progeny. Thus the race is improved by
the increase of the good fighting stock and the
reduction of the poor fighting stock. In these
cases the cock selects the hen.
To a much greater extent, however, the theory
of sexual selection concerns itself with those cases
in which the hen is supposed to select the cock.
In a great number of cases, as everybody knows,
the males of birds are much more magnificently
clothed than their mates. The hen peafowl is
quite a plain customer, and the same is true
through the whole family of pheasants to which
it belongs. As a family, this one includes the
most gorgeous birds in the world, but all the
finely coloured individuals are males. Why? By
the theory the males are finely coloured because
the hens, themselves plain, have a most remarkably
well-developed taste, and, other things equal, will
always prefer to ally themselves with the finest
cock bird of their acquaintance. In support of
THE ROBIN'S COURTSHIP 99
the theory, there is the indisputable fact that male

birds do, in the mating season, display themselves
in the most ostentatious way to the females and ;
nobody can look at a peacock exhibiting his mag-

nificent tail coverts, quivering his feathers, and
strutting before the hen
always keeping in front
of her and doubt that he is conscious of his
splendour, and is trying to impress her with it.
There is a certain obviousness about the theory,
and yet it has fallen in recent times rather seriously
into dispute. The fighting part of it stands all
tests the best fighters undoubtedly get the mates
;
they want. But the other part of it credits the

hen birds with aesthetic perceptions of so extra-
ordinarily fine a kind that credulity is very
seriously strained. We may admit that even a
hen peafowl is capable of realizing that her lord's
tail is something very fine as well as large. But
the theory supposes much more than that. It
supposes that when two peacocks are competing

for her favour, she is capable of critically select-
ing the one whose amazing blazoning is just a
trifle finer than the others, for by this selection of
fine differences on the line of improvement the
wonder is supposed to have been produced. Belief
becomes none the easier when it is remembered
that such undoubted aesthetic tendencies as birds
display take, for example, the thefts of shining
objects and coloured rags by magpies and jack-
daws are of the crudest sort.
THE GREAT SCULPTOR
IN the low country of a northern shire one of the
common stock of stories was concerned, in good-
natured derision, with a Highland woman who,
on a journey, came to a river and sat down to
wait till it ran past. I have been spending some
rainy days in the country where this lady came

from. Before me is a very steep and rocky hill.
It is about a mile long, of nearly uniform height,
irregularly notched in a score of places at the

sky-line. The upper half of it is very nearly
precipitous grey rock, and the lower half slopes
more freely to a flat glen bottom. After three
weeks of fair weather it looked nearly as dry
as a cinder -heap, and could not, one would say
from its appearance, ever become very wet.
"
But after the drought one of those depres-
"
sions the weather prophets are always telling
us about comes creeping across the Atlantic, and
as soon as its edge is over us our scene is changed.
The barometer had stood at 30*5 it went down
;
to 29-4. With almost startling suddenness great

vapour masses begin to condense on the mountain-
tops, differing both in character and extent from;
the nightcap they are apt to assume of an evening
in the best of times. No nightcaps these, but
THE GREAT SCULPTOR 101
great wet blankets, detaching ample portions of

1
themselves to occupy and fill up the corries and

the hollows between the ridges that occur on even
the steepest mountain -side. When you look at
a mountain in sunlight, it seems to offer an almost
uniform upward climb. If you have ever climbed
one you know that there are many breaks in the
rise, many flat and even hollow places to cross,
where you lose some of the altitude you have
achieved. When the vapour mass of a depression
comes upon the hills, its wandering arms of grey
reveal those large irregularities, and, even in con-
cealing much of the hill, disclose important aspects
of its true character which the brightest sunshine
conceals. With nightfall comes rain no gentle
"
shower, but the downright, determined precipi-
"
tation of wet weather in the hills.
Next morning it is still at it, and there is
nothing to do but look out at the hill opposite,

with a description of which I began. I said that
in about a score of places its sky-line is notched,
and each notch was the apparent starting-point
of a long scar, seaming the hill from top to
bottom. To-day each scar is marked out with the
white of falling water, each with its little tributary
threads, and the whole system covers the hillside
with a loosely woven lace. When a gust of wind
comes along, the threads of the lace are caught
at the steepest places, lifted clean- out of their
courses, and transformed into fine clouds of travel-
ling spray. With an extra strong gust the whole
hill-face seems to be involved in white smoke,
but the smoke disappears, and the white -lace
system is restored the instant the gust has
passed.
I brave the elements, and
pass over to examine
the hill -face. At the bottom of each scar I find
a rushing burn, which in two or three cases can
only be crossed at a more than ordinarily boulder-
blocked part of its course. Looking up, each
important thread in the lace system is seen to be
a deeply cut gully, down which the stream comes
in a long series of leaping cascades.
Returning, I resume the more distant examina-

tion of the whole with the aid of a glass, and
note that the notches that break the sky-line are
of very diverse degrees of importance. The chief
of them is, in reality, the opening to the main
slope of a little glen cut into the tableland on the
top, and the gully through which its burn descends
is a glen in the making. Over a part of its
course this gully-glen has widened its sides so
far that it has captured to itself the waters of
three smaller gullies. Each of these starts on its
own course straight down the hill, and about half-
way down is deflected abruptly to the larger gully,
whose lateral erosion has cut into the channel of
the smaller neighbour. It is still possible to detect
the now streamless lower part of the gully whose
water has been arrested. By this process of
annexing neighbours the stream in the big gully
is gathering power, and its manifest destiny in
the course of ages is to cut into two hills -the

single hilldown whose face it is now tumbling
and leaping. At both ends the hill is separated
from neighbouring hills by deep glens cut down
THE GREAT SCULPTOR 103
to within a couple of hundred feet of sea -level.

The work of the streams which occupy them is
well on the way to completion. But at one time,
very long ago, they were just long gullies in the
long range they have now cleft into three distinct
hills.
To return to my starting-point. On the third
day the depression has passed over us far enough
to give us the easterly slant of wind which means
dry weather on the West Coast, and the type of
weather changes from steady downpour to
"
showers." On the fourth day we have blue
" "
sky. While it was still showers more than
half the white lacing of the hill-face disappeared.
With dry weather all the threads of white water
vanish but two, and a single day of dry weather
reduces their number to one that in the large
gully. And the stream in the large gully
-
twenty :
four hours ago a torrent seething and boiling

among boulders in its channel at the bottom of
the hill hardly covers the small pebbles in its
course. Its fine waterfalls where it leaps down
the hillside have become mere threads. It never
runs dry, for by lowering its col it has appro-
priated a large gathering -ground ; but a month
of drought brings it very near to the vanishing-
point.
If the old lady of the story had spent her days
in this glen, and derived her notions of streams
all
from those that occur in it, experience would have
justified her expectation. Most of the hill streams
begin to run after a day or two of heavy rain.
Those of them that never run dry become for-
104 ODD HOURS WI1H NATURE
midable only in heavy rain, and they diminish
with almost incredible rapidity when the rain stops.
The main valley river itself, to which all those
hill streams are tributary, becomes in rain a great
and impressive body of water, and within a few
hours of the appearance of blue sky dwindles to
fordable proportions. On the last day of the rain
referred to, it became so fine a spectacle that I
"
resolved to take photographs of it as soon as
the light became good." Next morning the light
was excellent,but the impressiveness had gone
completely out of the picture. The spate outlived
the rain by only a few hours.
The geologist pictures Scotland of a very remote
past as a tableland which has been cut and
furrowed by the forces of erosion, chiefly running
water. In regions of easy slopes and mild rain-
fall the idea is not easily absorbed, and hence
the persistence of the popular notion that our
mountains are the results of great upheavals.
Among the western hills in rainy weather the con-
ception of the country as a low dome sculptured
"
by running water soaks in."
MAY
THE TOM-TITS AND THEIR BOX
I HAVE a pair of subtenants, and though they pay
no rent I take a great interest in their welfare.
A year ago they took up their quarters in a hole
in the wall of my domicile. It was a narrow hole,
but within its cavernous recess the subtenants,
being merely tom-tits, managed to rear a large
family, if not with comfort, certainly with security,
which is the chief thing a nesting torn-tit seeks.
This year, in the middle of a robustuous April,

they came upon the scene again, and to show there
was no ill-feeling on the landlord's part a lump
of suet was hung up for their favourable con-
sideration.
Between the suet and the hole the pair passed
a hilarious day, and within a week they commenced
the business of furnishing. It was begun in no
very resolute fashion. Mrs. Tom-tit would

approach the aperture with a beak laden with
bedding material, warranted not to shrink, but as
often as not she would forget why she had gathered
it, drop it to the ground, and have some more
suet. Soon, however, business began in earnest,
and it was at this stage that the sense of my
duties as a landlord came home to me, and I
resolved to provide a box. The hole was mani-
io8 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
festlya poor place in which to bring up a family,
and the Local Government Board would condemn
it on the score of air
space alone. Was I to be
reckoned among the bad landlords? Never. And
so the box was built, six inches by six every
way, with a nice slit at the right upper corner
in order that the opening might be placed as near
the opening of the hole as might be, and all
possibility of mistake avoided.
The placing of the box was a delicate business.
It had to be done betweenand done it was
visits,
in most masterly style of philanthropy.
the A
piece of wood was driven into the hole while the
tenants were away, blocking it, and to the wood
the box was screwed. It was so bestowed that
the slit was in the angle formed by box and wall
and within half an inch of the place where the
hole ought to be.
Then the drama began. The proud husband
flew on to the nearest rose-tree, beak laden witlh
nesting stuff, and thence to the hole. But no
hole was there, and never was little animal more
surprised. He clung to the wall, and inspected
all that remained of the domiciliary aperture, first
with one eye, and then with the other, many times.
The identity of the rose-tree was questioned, but
found all right, and the wall was swiftly examined
lest peradventure the hole had moved. But there
was no other hole, and it became stupefyingly
certain that dark influences
were at work. His
remarks were easily translated out of the blue tit
language.
" " "
Great cats 1 he ejaculated, what has gone
THE TOM -TITS AND THEIR BOX 109
wrong? Am
I in my sober senses? The hole was
here minutes since, and it is gone. Did ever
five
"
any tit hear of a hole which shut itself?
Then after rubbing his eyes he had another
inspection. Flying up, he tried the off-side of
the box, but there was no hole there. From the
top of the box, by the sure and certain method of
the alternate eye, he once more inspected the
remains of the hole, and finally popped into the
"
box itself, saying as he vanished Well, I never : 1
If this isn't the hole after all." But the interior

was new and strange, and he emerged declaring
in emphatic soliloquy that never since the begin-
ning of the world had such a thing happened to
any little bird. Clearly the situation demanded
the best advice, and on swift wing he sought it.
Inside of three minutes the tit, whose cosmos
had been shaken, returned with his mate, the two
in rapid conversation.
"
I you," he was saying, as they reached
tell
"
the rose-tree, it is gone, vanished, shut."
"
And I tell you," the lady remarked, " that
those spring caterpillars have been too much for
you. I find them heady myself."
"
Well, look for yourself."
"
Follow me, you old stupid, and I'll soon put
you Eh 1 Great sparrow-hawks ! It should be
"
here here here !
The tom-tit laughed a twittering, irritating

" "
laugh, and Well, put me right
said : !
"
It's gone," she admitted.
14
Oh, not at all. Those spring caterpillars have
been too much for you."
no ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
" " "
Brute she exclaimed with a sob.
! You
have the heart to jest, and I shut out of house
and home."
That took the laugh out of him, and they kissed
and made it up. But the great fact stood out now
in both brains that a cruel, heartless eviction had
taken place.
The succeeding conference in the rose-tree was
long and solemn. The possible causes of the
catastrophe were debated, and when the torn-tit
attributed everything to the vernal equinox his
partner agreed that he had had an inspiration.
But practical considerations asserted themselves.
"
Another hole must be found," said the torn-tit.
"
Something within tells me that it must be
found at once," replied his wife.
"
Isn't it horrible," went on the gentleman, and
me so partial to this garden? I was hatched in
that hole."
" "
I wonder," queried the lady, if
anything
could be made of this new hole? I hate novelties,
but good holes are scarce."
Thereupon she hopped on to the top of the box,
and applied first her left and then her right eye
to the aperture.
"
Looks rather nice and dry," was her com-
ment.
"
I can't endure
damp," said he.
" "
None
here," the lady proceeded. Situation
nice and airy, in close proximity to all the best
fruit trees. Lighting just right."
" "
What about cats?
"
Might have been made to keep them out,"
THE TOM-TITS AND THEIR BOX in
"
she replied. Really, we might do worse than
think about this hole."
"
And neighbours? "
"
They're all right. I saw the man putting water
on flowers and raking ground. Men of that sort
are quite harmless."
"
One can't be too careful about one's neigh-
bours. Fortunately, there are no children."
But before coming to a final decision the troubled
pair evidently resolved to inspect all the other
holes in the neighbourhood, and they vanished for
a whole day. The search cannot have been pro-
ductive, for when next seen they entered the box,
and made a long stay. Conversation was resumed
on the rose-tree.
'* "
I think,"said the lady, this will make a
most eligible residence dry, secure, self-contained,
cat-proof, and quite beyond the reach of small
boys."
"
I really believe we could not do better," said
"
her mate, and house-hunting is such a bore."
"
Then let us take it," said she decisively ; and
"
the other said, Done."
And " done " it was. They have now got in
all their sticks, and there may be an egg in the
box any morning. It has one great advantage
over the hole that I can open the lid, just to see
that the conditions of a reasonable tenancy are
being observed.
BIRDS IN THE GARDEN
VEGETABLE life in the garden has sprung into
activity with almost startling suddenness during

the past week, a common enough but always
striking and pleasing experience when spring,
instead of upon the country by inches,
stealing
is delayed, and comes in with a stride (1910).
The first day of March was so passably good that
the cultivator of the soil found himself asking,
" "
Is this the lion or the lamb? Many decided
that it was good enough for the laying of seed,
and no small quantities of peas and sweet peas
were put down. On the second of the month the
leonine characteristics declared themselves, and
leonine March remained to the end. Throughout
the month seed sown on the first made not a
move, and, saturated with cold water for many
days, much of it may have rotted away. But
late April sunshine brought up with a rush what
remained good on well -drained slopes, and then
the carnival of the birds began.
Most birds I am ready to defend through twelve
months of the year, but there are periods when
partizanship is put to a severe strain, and one
of them is here now. Probably the brilliancy of
April's opening, following upon the prolonged
BIRDS IN THE GARDEN 113
dourness of March, had an intoxicating effect on

sparrows, blackbirds, and tits certain it is they
;
set themselves now to the work of destruction

with a spirited abandon suggesting nothing but
revelry. When the sweet peas came above ground
Mr. Sparrow nipped every plant flush for the
off
sheer fun of the thing. He did not pretend to
eat them. He merely hauled them out and left
them lying, chirruping loudly the while, and
dusted himself with the dried surface earth when
his wicked work was done. His whole demeanour
was that of a gamin let loose. The blackbird's
sins were equally bad in effect, though less wanton
in intention. Hespecialized on the larger peas,
carefully seizing the plant well down its stem and
pulling it free of the soil. Germinating peas are
not a food he cares about, but his ancestors long
ago made the discovery that when a young plant
is pulled out by the root some succulent grub may
be pulled out along with it. So the information

was passed on, and every blackbird makes a
point of acting upon it. The tits, great and blue,
liberated the wickedness of their nature on the
apple and pear-tree buds, and watching half a
dozen of them at work raining down the fragments,
I found it difficult to believe that they were after
food, and not merely revelling in spring-time fun.
Curiously enough the wickedest sinner of the
three is the most easily circumvented. Since
stretching black threads along the lines of the
sweet peas not a sparrow has come near them.
Mr. Sparrow is not only clever, but thinks himself
even cleverer than he is. He knows that mankind
8
ii4 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
is capable of tricks, and
flatters himself that he
is just the bird whomthose tricks won't take in.
When I descended upon the pea lines, thread reel
in hand, the marauders hastened to the nearest
tree and watched. What was done they could
not see, for a black thread against black ground
isvery nearly invisible. But they showed by their
prolonged conference that they suspected some
nefarious plot. At last one made a cautious
descent, and, finding nothing wrong at the first
hop, reported all well. Then the others, with
varying degrees of doubt and boldness, ventured
upon the ground. Suddenly two found the thread
"
against their legs, and with a shriek, I told you
so," they started away, followed on the instant by

the whole flock. The succeeding tree conference
was loud and prolonged. In every variant of
sparrow language they assured one another that
they were convinced all along there was
devilry afoot, that if they were not wonderfully
clever the last sparrow among them would have
been snared, that nevertheless the thing was im-
possible considering the brightness and alertness
of their intellects, and that once again the human
enemy was to be baulked in his fiendish desire
for sparrow pie. So the sweet peas are left alone.
The blackbird is a creature of another nature.
When he runs his legs against a string and falls
over it, he just gets upon his feet again and resumes
work. A well-constructed scare may keep him
away for half an hour, but an object which does
not move has no permanent terrors for him, and
soon he will be found perched upon it. At another
BIRDS IN THE GARDEN 115
period of the year the blackbird will be found

robbing the fruit-trees, currant bushes, and straw-
berry beds, and nothing will render him harmless
now or then but a net, and if there is a tear in
the net he will find it out. Small wonder that as
he goes round his hedges and finds in them the
well-constructed nest of the tuneful robber, the
gardener, without scruple or mercy, tears it down.
But the act is of small avail, for the blackbird
which means to rear a family will not be dis-
couraged by one domestic catastrophe or two.
What the tits are after as they tear up the
flower buds of the apple and pear-trees is still
something of a mystery. They certainly do not
eat the buds or any part of them, though occa-
sionally a bud-scale, which is not food, has been
found in the crop of a little wrecker shot in the
act. It is hardly more than a surmise that they
are searching for minute insects or larvae con-
cealed in the buds, but a careful examination of
buds thrown down by them has resulted in a
failure to find a brace of insects of any kind.
Probably, however, they break up the buds with
the hope of finding inserts, just as the blackbird
tears up the peas in the hope of finding grubs,
and as the rooks tear up the young corn on the off-
1
chance of bringing up a wire worm or leather

jacket at the same time. That it is food they
are after is pretty nearly proved by the fact that
a counter-attraction has been found completely
successful in diverting their attention from the
trees. As long as pieces of fat, meat, or bones
(with something on them) are hung up in the
n6 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
vicinity, no tit will trouble about buds. Their
appetite for meat, cooked or raw, is
insatiable,
and they become very bold in the attempt to gratify
it. There is, indeed, a record, on unimpeachable
authority, of blue tits entering the window of a
butcher's shop and feeding on the meat exposed
for sale. Another tale is told of an orchard owner
who secured immunity for his trees by hanging
up in one of them a dead dog, and if he only
took the trouble toi skin the dog there is
no reason why his story should not be accepted
as true. As a carnivore the tit is superior to
prejudice.
The bullfinch, as most people know, is one of
the worst of garden pests in the bud season, in the
districts where
it abounds. Bully's red breast has
made him a favourite with the birdcatcher, and
hence the species is never abundant in the vicinity
of towns. Another finch, however, which goes
through the world with no very bad name, can
make himself very troublesome in the spring. On
the balance the greenfinch is emphatically a useful
bird, consuming as it does enormous quantities of
weed seeds, and particularly those of the charlock
or wild mustard. But it has one troublesome
passion, for it is ready at any time to risk its
head for a meal of germinating radish seed, and
it has just completely cleared a bed for me.
The unnetted bed of radishes which it discovers is
doomed.
THE NESTING OF THE ROBIN
THERE is no British bird whose habits all the year
round provide more interesting, and, what is about

as important, more easily available matter for study
than the robin. And this because, having adopted
mankind into its scheme of life, it is a bird passing
through an experimental phase, imperfectly served
by the long-descended instincts of its race. To
appreciate this point it is necessary to know some-
thing of what may be called the stock habits of
the species. The range of the robin is wide,
including most of the European and some part
of the Asiatic continent, and our robins are an
insular strain of the family. It follows that the
continental robins, being the main body, will
exhibit to better purpose the natural manners and
customs of the bird than the insular detachment.
And the British naturalist on the continent is soon
struck by Jhe fact that the robin is there by no
means so closely associated with humanity as here.
It is, on the contrary, a shy bird, solitary for the
most part, spending the greater part of its life
in shady and retired parts of woods and thickets,
and avoiding familiarity with mankind at all times
almost as decisively as its most furtive relative
the nightingale.
117
n8 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
How account for the difference? There can
hardly be a doubt that the character of our insular
robins is one of the many by-products of our
insular climate.Over the greater part of Northern
and Central Europe, where winter descends with
continental rigour, the robin is a migratory bird.
It shifts its quarters in winter to the regions
bordering on the Mediterranean. Thus neither in

its summer nor its winter home is it urged by
necessity to seek human aid in the working of its
economy. The British robins, on the other hand,
stay within the British Isles. The climate is not
hard enough to drive them out, yet, subject to
burst of boreal energy, savage enough to make
robins grateful for pensioner's fare. So they come
to the bread crumbs and develop latent aptitudes
for turning mankind to account. For it is highly
improbable that there is any sense of friendship
on the robin's side of the account. They recognize
mankind as objects in the landscape usefully asso-
ciated with the food supply, and utilize us just
as the water wagtails utilize cattle, having recog-
nized that cows are excellent for disturbing insects
that lurk in the grass.
Naturally the robin in its nesting habits is a
shy bird, choosing a well-hidden place for its
home ;
and many of our robins retain the race
habit in this respect to the full, particularly those
that live in the country. Shallow holes at the
bottom of trees, recesses in banks well shrouded
with herbage, and low set holes in walls are its
typical resorts and the discovery of the nest in
these natural conditions is never an easy matter.
THE NESTING OF THE ROBIN 119
But no bird can compare in advenrurousness as

a nester with robin which has thoroughly
the
familiarized itself with humanity by a residence
in town or village gardens. About this time of
the year there is always a crop of paragraphs in
the papers about strange nesting-places, and if
any one took the trouble to collect these paragraphs

he would quickly make the discovery that they
are almost entirely related to the nests of three
birds. About twenty per cent, of the cases of
queer nests would be cases in which great tits
or blue tits had chosen letter-boxes or hollow
iron gate pillars in which to rear their families.
The other eighty per cent, would be cases of
robins. With the humanized robin the one natural
idea about a nesting-place firmly held is that
it must be a shallow hole.It is not necessary that
it should be a secluded hole or a hole in any way

hidden by greenery. An old boot, a flower-pot
lying on its side on the ground, a watering-pan
"
hung on a nail, are likely to be pronounced the
very thing." But these are almost normal sites
compared with others on record. The grease-
box of a railway wagon lying in a siding has been
resorted to more than once, and only the other
day the case was reported of a robin which insisted
on making its nest in a fold in the tarpaulin
covering a tradesman's van, which every day went
its rounds.
The courage of the robin is at no time greater

than when it is on the nest. During the month
I have paid a daily visit to a sitting bird which
has its nest in an open recess in a wall against

which currant bushes are nailed. On my first
visit the bird flew off when I advanced a finger
within half a foot of her. Since then she has
kept her place, even when touched. The pair,
cock and hen, take turns in the labour of incuba-
tion, though probably the hen does the most qf
it, but in both the feathers of the tail show traces
of cramped quarters.
is very generally thought that the robin,
It
so ready to be a dependant during hard weather,
is indifferent to human assistance in the summer.
This by no means the case.
is I have only to
take a rake in hand and begin scratching the

ground to have one of the pair referred to in
front of me within a couple of minutes. During
the period of dry winds my gardening friend has
been putting in odd half-hours, pushing the Dutch
hoe through the beds of his growing plants to
kill the young weeds. Well do the robins know
the significance of this manoeuvre, for they ,are
in front of him in an instant, watching the broken
earth with eyes marvellously capable of detecting
the movement of any creeping thing. Abig worm
is seized and rapidly pecked to fragments, and a
small one is got over whole. Centipedes and
millipedes are regarded as a special dainty, and
the unearthing of one will bring the robin almost
into the hoe's grip. Every now and again the
feaster remembers his companion on the nest, and
vanishes with a wriggling dainty, which he deposits
in her beak.
.With their liberal and experimental views on
nesting quarters, the robins are of the small num-
THE NESTING OF THE ROBIN 121
ber of birds which are ready to utilize a place

specially provided for them. They are well served
with a box about six inches square, having an
entrance hole quite twice as large as the hole in
a tit's box, that Is to say, a. hole about two inches
square. The box should be placed against a wall,
about three feet from the ground and facing the
east, where the entrance will catch the morning
sunlight. But though your garden may be the
regular haunt of a pair which have fought away
from it all intruders of their own kind, and though
this box is undoubtedly the most eligible building
site within its wall, the chances are just about two
to one that the robins will find some outrageously
inappropriate place and prefer it. In that case
they have just to be humoured.
In a week or two the young robins will be
hopping about the gardens and hedgerows, and it
is worth while to note that in their first, immature
plumage they are dressed not as robins, but as

thrushes. Their speckled coat closely resembles
that of the mavis, and indicates a relationship
about which no ornithologist is now in doubt. In
other words, robins are of the thrush family, and
both young robins and old thrushes get their
speckled feathers from a common ancestor.
THE YOUNG DEER
FEW would hesitate to answer with an emphatic
" "
Yes the question whether the fear of man in
the red-deer is innate. It is certainly in full
operation at a very early age, and, of course,

through life is a most powerful factor in the
animal's conduct. The deer, where it is not made
familiar with much cease-
artificial provisioning, is
lessly vigilant, and its vigilance is wholly directed

at man and his companion the dog for no other
animal survives in this country which it has any
occasion to dread. Altogether this fear of man,
with the elaborate strategy that serves it, has the
appearance of an instinct engraven on the deepest
nerve tissue, innate in the strictest sense of the
word.
Yet it is doubtful if the fear of man in the red-
deer is any more innate than in those birds of
newly discovered oceanic islands, the description
of whose conduct on first acquaintance makes such
entertaining reading in more than one of Darwin's
"
books, particularly in the Voyage of the Beagle."
During June I had an opportunity of making some
observations bearing on the subject. While
holidaying in a northern deer forest I read Scrope's
"
Deer-stalking in the Scottish Highlands," and
THE YOUNG DEER 123
asked a keeper his opinion of the passage in which

that old worthy describes the conduct of the hind
and her calf at the time of the birth of the latter.
The passage is as follows :
"
She drops her fawn in high heather, where
she leaves concealed the whole day, and returns
it
to it late in the evening, when she apprehends no

disturbance. She makes it lie down by a pressure
of her nose, and it will never stir or lift up its
head the whole of the day unless you come right
upon it, as I have often done. It lies like a
dog, with its nose to its tail. The hind, however,

although she separates herself from the young
fawn, does not lose sight of its welfare, but remains
at a distance to the windward, and goes to its
succour in case of an attack of the wild cat, or
fox, or any other powerful vermin. I have heard
Mr. John Crerer say, and it is doubtless true, that

if you find a young fawn that has never followed
its dam, and take it up and rub its back, and

put
your finger in its mouth, it will follow you home
for several miles but if
;
ithas once followed
its dam for ever so small a space before you
found it, it will never follow human beings."
My friend's comment on this was that no such
"
formal ritual was necessary, or, as he put it, You
don't need to take so much
a young trouble." If
deer is found in this early stage and handled, .it
will follow the person who has lifted it. He and
his fellows were collecting a number of hind calves
for transportation to a remote forest, whose owner
wished an admixture of fresh blood. The finding
of them called for a prolonged and patient watching
I2 4 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
of the mature hinds with the glass, and about half
the calves discovered were young stags. These
were liberated immediately after their sex had
been ascertained. But in most cases they tried
to follow the person who had lifted them from
the lair in which the dam had laid them, in some
cases so persistently that, in order to shake them
off, the finder had to climb some bit of rock where
it was too difficult for them to follow.
I was offered an
opportunity of accompanying
a searcher, and found the work far from exciting.
It meant a long tramp over a rocky mountain-side,
several long lies while the hinds in sight were
watched through the glass, and finally the dis-
covery of one which seemed to have just left her
calf. When the spot was reached, there was the
calf, sure enough. The searcher carried a long
stick with a hook of wire at the end of it. Some-
times, I was told, the young calf would start up
and keep moving a yard or two ahead of its
pursuer, hence this implement. But in our case
the implement was unnecessary. The calf never
moved till it was lifted, and then it showed not
the slightest tremor of alarm. It was stroked,
and at once accepted its finder as trustfully as if
he were its dam. Rather from want of faith in
its ability than its will to follow he put it in his
g'ame-bag, with the head and neck sticking out,

and in that way carried it home. At headquarters
half a dozen persons had to stroke and admire
it, and it accepted all without a hint of dis-
turbance or hostility. And when offered the bottle,
it took to it with the readiness and eagerness of a
ewe-bereft lamb.
THE YOUNG DEER 125
At all stages of its life-history the red-deer is

a beautiful animal, and but for one thing a fair
case might be made for the assertion that this
first stage is the most beautiful of all. The deer
has then much of the exquisite and delicate grace
of form of the gazelle. The body is not much
larger than that of a good-sized hare, and the
skin has a velvety smoothness and gloss which
quickly diminishes. It is marked throughout with
fallow-like spots, which also disappear early in
life, but at this stage speak very plainly of a
remote spotted ancestry. As is the case with the
young of the horse, however, so with the young of
the deer :the legs are a trifle disproportionately
large for the body, though this is a defect which
hardly diminishes the exceeding grace of the
animal's movements.
Scrope's assertion that a deer which has onoe
followed its dam for ever so small a space will
never follow human beings might be questioned.
The fear of man, which certainly is not innate hi
the very young animal, though it rapidly develops
in it as it accompanies its dam and catches up
her alarms, is easily overcome in later life,
especially in the case of the hinds. In the forest
referred to, as in most others, winter feeding is
provided, and many of the immature hinds keep
about the customary feeding-place throughout the
summer. During our search for calves we had
to pass this place, and in order to entertain and pos-
sibly surprise me, the keeper blew a shrill whistle
on his fingers. In any other part of the forest
such a sound would set every deer within a mile on
i26 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
the move away from its point of origin, for the deer
is hardly less attentive to sounds than to smells.
As old Scrope puts it, the red-deer " takes the
note of alarm from every living thing on the
moor " and I have myself seen a bunch of them
suddenly lift their heads on the first cry of an
anxious redshank, whose family feeding-ground
I had invaded. Here the effect of the keeper's
whistle was very different. From three sides
the fourth side was a loch shore hinds began
to troop in till there were about thirty of them
in the space of three acres. They came quite close
up to their friend of the snowy days, and followed
the two of us in a troop till we were a considerable
distance beyond the feeding-ground. None of
these deer had been hand-reared or taken from
their dams in youth. Their tameness was a result
of their winter feeding and nothing else.
JUNE
THE FANCIES OF THE TROUT
MOST people who go into the remoter parts of
the Highlands to fish for the first time carry with
them a light-hearted contempt of the trout of these
out-of-the-way regions. They are unsophisticated
rustics, with none of the highly developed intelli-
gence which marks (in books) the educated
denizens of chalk streams and some lowland lakes ;
therefore, to deceive them will be almost too easy

a work to be interesting. Dwellers in a hungry
country, they are ill-fed therefore, they will rush
;
greedily at anything- presenting the semblance of

the material of a meal, and, in particular, they will
prove unable to resist the beautifully finished lures
which the visitor has taken with him in a well-
stocked fly-book. As regards some of the lochs
of Sutherlandshire, one is, or a few years ago was,
tempted to accept this view of Highland trout
as true. As regards Highland lochs in general,
the visitor soon learns that he has carried a fond
delusion, and comes to understand that among
the mountains, as elsewhere, the trout is a creature
of themost unaccountable moods and appetites.
Consider a perfectly common experience of the
curious fastidiousness displayed by trout, which
should be reckoned among the most unsophisti-
I2 9
9
cated of their kind. During the last week of June
I fished two Ross -shire lochs one lying high, and
probably untouched by gut twice in twelve months ;
the other larger, and at a much lower level of

the same district, but regularly fished throughout
the season. On the first a cast was used of three
flies of medium size a grouse and claret, a teal
and red, and a blue Zulu, very popular as a
dropper in recent years in the North. For an
hour, though wind and sky were just right and
the water ideal in character and depth, nothing
came of this tempting offer. The loch might
have been uninhabited. Then, overcoming a
reluctance, partly theoretical and partly indolent,
I took off the Zulu and put on a teal and green
a pretty thing to look at, but in this part of the

country a fly with no sort of reputation at all.
But straightway the fish began to rise, and within
an hour and a half the basket contained thirteen
"
trout, sizable," but not large. Every one of
the thirteen was taken on the teal and green,
and at least as many rises, unfollowed by capture,
were to the same fly.
Feeling that I had struck, by a happy chance,
upon the secret of success, I hastened to the lower
loch, in which the run of fish is larger. But here,
strange to say, in the same weather and the same
water (the burn from the upper loch discharges
into the lower), the teal and green was of no use
whatever. It did not even excite an idle curiosity.
But, on the other hand, the teal and red found
itself in a first-class market. Eight fish, running
from half a pound to a pound and half, were all
THE FANCIES OF THE TROUT 131
taken on it, and in the end a big one went away

with it in his jaw. I had not another teal and
red, so put on the nearest thing to it a nondescript

teal and claret. But the trout would not have
it, though the difference between teal and red
and teal and claret is merely the difference of
a shade. Thus in one loch teal and red and blue
Zulu were treated with a cold indifference, and teal
and green was seized with gustatory zest while ;
in the other, teal and red was accepted with
avidity, while teal and green, grouse and claret,

and teal and claret were all presented in vain.
This, as I have said, is no uncommon experi-
ence, for every angler who habitually fishes High-
land lochs can recall many one -fly days when all
other flies are as untempting as bull-beef to a
Spaniard. But the experience is none the less

puzzling on that account, and none of the many
theories offered to explain it some of them offered
with extraordinary cocksureness satisfies many
besides their authors. What may be called the
fly -on-the -water theory is probably first favourite
among them all, but there are many occasions, at
any when it will not do. On the day referred
rate,
to Iwas particularly attentive to the fly on the
water, and it for one abounded and others were
extremely rare presented no sort of resemblance
to teal and red or teal and green, the successful
lures. This abounding fly was a blae, and rested
on the surface with upright wings. An upright
Greenwell would have imitated it very closely ;
but did not try a Greenwell, partly because it

I
is a bother to change flies, but chiefly because

the natural Greenwell seemed to rest on the water
in perfect security at least, so far as the assault
of fish was concerned.
But for what did the fish take the two teals?
Tremblingly one ventures to doubt whether they
took them for anything with which they are
familiar in the air above or in the waters beneath,
and to suggest that, like the Athenians of old,
they are drawn by some new thing. Some of
the artificial flies are carefully modelled on the
natural fly, this being particularly the case with
the May-fly, the March brown, and the Alder ;
others were possibly sketched on natural flies, and

have been improved out of all semblance. Certain
it is that, were an expert entomologist asked to
name the species in a fly-book, he would, as

regards the vast majority of them, recoil from
the task in dismay. But even if all artificial
flies were models of natural flies, it does not follow
that the fish would take the most successful model

among them for the fly it imitates. To justify this
doubt, one has only to take the natural fly and as
close an imitation of it as can be found in the
and, immersing both, pull them through
fly -book,
the water. Thus circumstanced, the appearance
of the two becomes widely different, for the
behaviour of the tissue of an insect's wing in
water is quite unlike the behaviour of a confection
of fur, pig's wool, and feather. As regards the

lure, colourand even pattern are changed. Then
the with which the fish are most seriously
flies
concerned are not the flies which are the most

obvious objects of their attention those resting
THE FANCIES OF THE TROUT 133
on or skipping above the surface, at which trout

jump or thrust up their noses. For one fly taken
in that way, probably scores are taken as they rise
from the bottom, where they have passed their
larval life, and while on this rise their wings are
as yet unexpanded. If, however, the fish takes
the immersed artificial fly, seen by it darting
through the water some distance below the
surface, for any sort of natural fly, it is for this
rising fly with the unexpanded wings, on which
no fly is modelled.
Yet nothing is more certain than that fish have
fancies for patterns, or something in patterns
fancies which vary from day to day, and even
from hour to hour, but are absolutely determinative
while they last. What that something is it is hard
to determine, but it is a something which often
remains when the wings of the fly are almost
entirely frayed away. And it may be more
decisively present in the most crudely dressed fly
than in the finest product of the shops, as I have
often noted on that dour stream, the Clyde, where
the Lanarkshire miners, with home-dressed hooks
of the least promising aspect, always get the best
baskets. And whatever it is, the unsophisticated
trout of the remote lochs are just as discriminating
in picking it out as their relatives anywhere.
A TERN COLONY
THERE is the widest possible diversity of opinion

as to the effect of the Wild Bird Protection Acts
in securing the object they have in view. A
writer, dealing with the county of Kent, declared
that the Acts had completely eliminated the interest
of the small boy in birds and nests, from which
followed a long sequence of effects, eventuating
in the disappearance of large trout from the chalk
streams no bird-nesting, more birds more birds,;
fewer insects ; fewer insects, reduced supplies of

the best fish-fattening provender fewer sizable
;
fish, disappointed anglers. Without working out

a story about it, the owners of Scottish fishings
allege something of the same sort when they say
that black -headed gulls have increased in number,
and that their increase involves the destruction
of countless salmon ova and fry.
So far as the North Country is concerned, the
writer has had good reason for thinking that where
no special protection is afforded the pleasing pas-
time of gathering eggs is as much indulged in as
ever it was. Twenty years ago he was very familiar
with a colony of common terns which, many
hundreds strong, had its quarters on a low head-
land projecting into the waters of the Moray Firth.
A TERN COLONY 135
Revisiting the scene this

month, a longafter
lapse of time, he found the community a mere

shadow of its former self, about a hundred nests
being found on an extent of surface where five
times as many could have been easily counted two
decades ago.
" "
Despite this, however, the Point remains
an excellent place for studying the nesting customs
of what is certainly the most graceful of the
British sea-birds. An arid promontory, with the
waves ceaselessly singing or sighing on two sides
of it, it nevertheless presents a diversity of sur-
face which would be interesting if only because its
geological history is so easily read. Patently, it
is composed of a series of pebble beaches, whose
varying ages are marked not only by their position

inside one another, but by the degrees in which
a scanty vegetation has been able to effect a
lodgment upon them. The outermost beach is
composed of wave-rounded pebbles, the shining
whiteness of whose piled-up mass is broken only
by the line of dried seaweed and other marine
jetsam flung there at the highest reach of winter
tempests. On the second beach, well marked oft
from the first by a depression, but following the
same line within, patches of stonecrop have taken
root, and redeem it from utter barrenness. A
third beach, just traceable inside the others, is
partly hid with stonecrop, bent, and patches of

depauperized bell-heather ; and into the heart of
the angle fringed by all three, the neighbouring
moor has thrust a long finger of its own substance,
and the family of heath plants imperfectly cover
the expanse of stones, here blackened with such
lichens and mosses as flourish in sea air.
Like most ground-building birds, the terns lay
eggs which hint very broadly at protective coloura-
tion. Ranging in ground shade from a dull yellow
to a deep olive -green, and in the blotches from
a black -brown to a dirty grey, they harmonize
with their surroundings in a wonderfully perfect
fashion, despite their diversity, when placed amid
the lichen-spotted pebbles of the oldest of the
beaches. Again and again the searcher is startled
by the success of a deception which fails to human
eyes only through the formal and orderly arrange-
ment of the clutch, and which, it is easy to believe,
would effectually deceive the eyes of the maraud-
ing crow. Yet, though Nature seems to have
endowed the tern with this useful provision of
a protectively coloured egg, wandering over the
beaches one is driven to the conclusion that the
birds themselves have quite failed to realize their
advantage and, so to speak, play up to it. For
it appears to be the merest chance if the gg is
deposited in a harmonious setting. At the
extremity of the point there is an area of about
an acre of perfectly white sand, unbroken by
any scrap of herbage or any other object, save
here and there the projecting twigs of ancient
and buried driftwood. No more unsuitable spot
could be imagined for any purpose of conceal-
ment, yet of all the varied surfaces presented
by the point none is more favoured by the terns
than this. It unnecessary to search for their
is
eggs here ; they stand out with the conspicuous-

A TERN COLONY 137
ness of absolute contrast from a ground on which

they form the only contrast.
But if the terns have no notion of selecting the
best places for the concealment of their eggs,
the colony, excepting those members of it which
lay on the sandy extremity, do seem to follow a
method in nest -making. Moving at random from
clutch to clutch, struck by their extreme
one is
variety of practice in this respect. Here the eggs

are deposited on the ground with no rest what-
ever there on the merest perfunctory sketch
;
of a nest and here, again, on quite a massive

;
and elaborate bed. But soon something suggest-

ing an order is discernible. There on the outer-
most beach, which is strewn with bunches of dried
seaweed, the birds construct a bulky nest. They
rarely lay on one of the bunches provided by
Nature, but the collection made by themselves
resembles one of these. The whole nest, there-
fore,fits into its surroundings. The sketchy nests
are found on the inner beach, where the patches
of stonecrop occur and as they are made of
;
the dead fibre of this plant, they closely resemble

those numerous patches of it which have
succumbed to the aridity of the situation. Among
the lichen-spotted stones the terns make no nest
whatever, and, as has been said, those which select
this situation achieve, in the matter of conceal-
ment, the largest success.
It is not improbable that in a modification of
habit we should seek the explanation of the tern's
haphazard use, or no use, of the protective colour-
ing of its eggs. Almost certainly the general
scheme of their colouration is a very ancient
adaptation, for it is common to the whole group
of sea-birds of which it is a highly specialized
member. A
description of the tern's egg, as regards
everything but size, would apply to the eggs of the
kittiwake, common gull, lesser black -backed gull,
and the black -headed gull ; and such a community
of colouring points to the scheme being an adapta-
tion to the breeding conditions of the common
ancestor. But to-day each species selects a
different kind of nesting -place, and in the case
of some of them the protection of colour is
obviously not even sought. The kittiwake depends
upon the security of its rock shelf, and the black -
headed gull on the isolation of its swampy
islands ; perhaps, too, on the strength of its com-
munities, which is always sufficient to keep thieving
birds at a distance. Of the common gull some-
thing of the same might be said. Since inspecting
"
the ternery," the writer has visited a colony of
the common gull (not, by the way, the commonest
of gulls by any means), which has its home on the
rock -strewn shore of one of the largest of the
inland Highland lochs. The eggs are in perfect
harmony with the mossy blocks among which they
lie, but all the advantage of elusive colouring
is thrown away by the structure of the nests,
which are in every case large and conspicuously

made of pale yellow, bleached grass -stalks and
kindred dead vegetation. Apparently in some
members of the family the protective colouration
of the eggs is a functionless survival of an
acquisition which may have been advantageous at
some remote time.
A SUMMER-DAY TRAGEDY
A WEEK ago the rookery was the gayest place

in the world, and its clamorous population had
a mighty fine opinion of themselves. They began
fifty strong in February, and found themselves
nearly three times that strength in the second
week of May. On every nest-bearing bough sat
three, and in some cases as many as five, young
rooks, intent at once on acquiring the art of
balance and the proper inflections of the rook
language. They took to language more readily
than to balancing no doubt because every time
they nearly tumbled off they felt obliged to make
a tremendously long story about it. Now and
again one actually tumbled off, and learnt with a
pride which nearly overcame his fright that he
could fly. It was, to be sure, a downward fly,
an agitated parachutic descent, ending with a
splash among the leaves and twigs of a shrub
dreadfully near that alarming country, the ground.
But flying is flying, up or down, and a great thing
to accomplish. Moreover, it is the first step, for
even a young rook can recognize that if he comes
down he must get up again, and in the effort to
get up he really and truly learns to fly. And in
this way quite a score of the new generation had
learnt to use their wings, and could make very
creditable circles in the air above the rookery
clump of elms.
Old rooks told one another without ceasing
about the phenomenal success of their colony.
"
We are a great colonizing people," they said,
"
and the wisest of birds. Next year the rookery
will be five hundred strong, and the finest of its
kind in a day's flight. When we go to the fields
it will be the grandest sight ever presented to
bird eyes." To the young ones they explained
that the rooks were a very ancient family upon
the earth, and that their heads were positively
heavy with the wisdom they had accumulated in
many generations. Sagacity was almost a failing
with them. To which the young ones replied,
"
with many a caw," that they felt within them
the truth of all this, and meant, in the hundred
or more happy years in front of them, to add to
the vast accumulations of corvine lore.
The day's conversation had just got well under
way when human enemy were
three figures of the
observed approach. Old rooks inspected them,
to
uneasily, and explained to the young that though

the risk was small it was always just as well to
"
keep these animals at a safe distance. There-
"
fore," said they, let us all go up." And they
set the example by circling skyward. But, alas !
the young rooks did not go. On the contrary,

they were very curious about the animals coming
over the ground, and straddled along their boughs
in search of the very best seeing -perches. Aloft
the old birds screamed out in clanging chorus,
A SUMMER-DAY TRAGEDY 141
" "
Come up, come up ! but only succeeded in
communicating to their progeny a feeling that
all was not well. But if all was not well, they
said, surely the safest place was at home. Then
came a horrid, disconcerting bang, and a glossy
young bird flew downward with a strange direct-
ness and struck the ground with a sickening thud.
All the young ones cried out, using up the words
they knew ; and they had just begun to go over
their repertoire a second time, the better to express
their surprise, when that dreadful noise came
again, and down went number two. And then,
amid lamentable cries from tree -top and sky, the
work of destruction went on fast and furious.
Young rooks strewed the ground, some dead, some
dying, and in pauses of the fusillade the shooters
seized the dying and wrung their necks. Perhaps
it was those seizures that at last caused the sur-
vivors dimly to realize the significance of the

parental admonitions. It was bad to think that
some unrealized power might cause them to fly
down in that strange, headlong fashion, but worse
still to think of being handled by those monsters
below. So, a sorry score, they betook themselves

to the wing and joined the crying host aloft.
A rook -shooting at the end of the nesting season
is one of the most melancholy functions of rural
life. To begin with, it takes the community just

at the grand moment of accomplishment. They
have worked incessantly for two months at the
labour of bringing up their families, and chattered
about every incident in the process with the volu-
bility of the true social animal. Parental and
communal pride combined to welcome the young
generation on their first unsteady excursions among
the branches. And just in the crowning hour of
success, with all kinds of care behind and the
glorious summer before, comes this heart-breaking
tragedy. It is now, by general consent, admitted
that birds of the crow family possess the highest
development of avian intelligence, and the fact
lends credibility to the belief that the massacre
means more to them than to most birds liable to
a similar experience. This, of course, may be
no more than an impression of the senses. Grouse,
after a drive, slip away into the heather, and if
they lament the losses of the tribe they make no
show of it. An outraged rookery, on the other
hand, gives every evidence of lamentation. Hours
after the slaughter has stopped they are still on
the wing, at a great height above the scene of
it, deploring with hoarse outcry the injury their
community has suffered, and, doubtless, expressing
their opinion of the hideous barbarity of the
destroyer man. To birds of most species the
sight of a dead member of their kind is quite
without meaning. The rook is intelligent enough
to realize that there is something sinister and of
ill -omen about a dead rook. Farmers learnt this
long ago, when they found that a dead rook
hung on a stick makes a genuine scarecrow ;
and the fact is still more strikingly shown when

a feeding flock comes without warning upon a
dead rook lying on the ploughed land. When
this happens the host fly with vast clamour to the
nearest trees, and debate the horror with an
A SUMMER-DAY TRAGEDY 143
excitement which can be recognized half a mile

away.
Whether, in the interest of the farmer, rooks
should be thinned down at the end of the nesting
season is a question whose answer depends on
their number. In a recent publication of the
Board of Agriculture, on the subject of the food
"
of birds, they are pronounced decidedly bene-
ficial." Probably no bird does more good work
in the destruction of peculiarly noxious insects,
such as the wireworm and the leather -jacket, and
their skill in finding the latterand extracting it
from the soil is not short of wonderful. The
leather-jacket lives in a J-shaped burrow,and
retreats during the day into the curve, where it
is safe from most bird enemies. But rooks
systematically search for the burrows, and, thrust-
ing their powerful beaks into the soil above the
curve, pick out the larva with certainty and ease.
A piece of ground over which a flock has worked
will not at the end of the day contain many of
these destructive root-eaters. But doubtless there
can be too many rooks, as of other good things,
for the bird is catholic in its tastes, and has often
been shot with a crop stuffed with wheat and other
grains. It is therefore reasonable to assume that
where the birds are too abundant they levy an
undue toll on the kinds of food that are more easily
procured. As a general thing, however, rooks
work well for their wages.
SOME BIRDS' NESTS
BIRDS, as everybody knows, make nests, as well

"
as produce young, after their kind." Over an
immensely great area the individuals of a species
build their domiciles with an astonishingly close
adherence to a uniform architectural plan. The
chaffinch, to take an example, ranges from Britain
to Japan, with one or two considerable chaffinch-
less spaces between and the British boy familiar
;
with the bird's dainty structure at home would

instantly recognize it for what it is, were he to
find it in the land of the Rising Sun. How are
we to account for this uniformity of design?
Up to a certain point there is virtual agreement

as to the answer. The form of the nest was struck
out or reached by remote ancestors of the
chaffinches, succeeding generations faithfully
reproducing it in all the lands over which they
have since extended their range. To this extent
the nest explained in much the same terms as
is
the bird itself. But the inheritance of structure

and the persistence of a complicated act, involving
something very like volition and choice, cannot
be conveniently further compared. Thus arises
the other question : How is the knowledge of the
design passed on? To which many naturalists
XEST OF SONG THRUSH.
SOME BIRDS' NESTS 145
attempt no answer, while those who try are far

from being at one.
Some naturalists of great authority have
recently adopted the theory that the young bird
lays up a mental picture of the nest while still
an inmate of it, and from this picture works when
its own nest -building time comes, and they sup-
port their theory by relating some very curious

facts regarding the behaviour of birds hatched
out in captivity. Broadly, these are to the effect
that a wild bird hatched out by, say, a canary
will, if it subsequently mates, fail to make the
nest of its kind, even if supplied with the right
material. Its ideas are hazy it
: fumbles with
the building stuff, and the thing it ultimately
contrives is a mere generalized sketch of a nest,
lacking in every distinctive detail. Hence, it is
argued, instinct prompts the nest -making but;
without actual knowledge of nests acquired by

the individual bird it cannot do more. And as
building birds do not gladly tolerate onlookers,
it is assumed that the
year-old bird must work
on a memory of the nest in which it was reared.
At present the hedges are full of the nests of
blackbirds and thrushes, both interesting specimens
of avian architecture, and both capable of throw-
ing some light on the question raised. Though
not precisely pretty, the nest of the mavis is one
of the neatest and least haphazard of the nests
built by British birds. Its plan, moreover, is
adhered to with an unvarying rigidity over an
immense area. Wherever the bird occurs in the
Old World the nest has the same marked charac-
teristics, and Darwin has commented on the
strange fact that those characteristics reappear
in the nest of the thrush of South America,
separated as it is from its European relative by
half the world, and, as it must be, by geological
ages in time. The foundation of the nest is laid
with rough grass roots, dead leaves, and root
stems. As the work proceeds, a finer kind of
root fibre is employed, and with this a bowl-shaped
structure is fashioned, which would pass for a
fairly well-finished nest if the bird did nothing
more. But it does more. Having built its nest,
it
proceeds to plaster it. This is done with a
mixture whose composition varies with the
resources of the district. Sometimes mud alone
is used, with just enough fibrous material to give
it coherence. Not infrequently decayed wood

enters largely into the composition of the plaster,
and more frequently still horse or cow dung.
Whatever is used it is worked into a paste in the
beak of the thrush, which, at the nesting season,
may often be seen resorting to rain puddles for

the purpose. The plaster is laid on to the inside
of the nest with the beak, and if the nest is
examined at the right stage the soft coating will
be found scored all over with bill-markings. But
when the bird has finished its work the inside
is perfectly smooth. When the work is finished
the thrush leaves the nest to dry, and by the time
the first egg is deposited in it the whole cup is
firm enough and hard enough to hold water. It
would be difficult to say what special advantage
the mavis gets from a nest of this type, with its
SOME BIRDS' NESTS 147
indurated interior, the great majority of passerines

showing a marked preference for a soft lining
to the house destined to accommodate helpless
and featherless young. The point to be noted
just now is, that it is a physically possible thing
for the inmates of such a nest, given the intelli-
gence, to see and lay up a mental picture of it,
outside and in. Assuming them capable of the
examination, most of the nest is open to their
inspection.
But examine the nest of the blackbird, which
is also a thrush with a difference.In size, general
form, and external appearance it is the same as
the nest of the mavis. Inside, however, instead
of the hard lining of dried mud, there is a yielding
lining of fine root and other fibre. It would
seem, therefore, that the blackbird, as nest -builder,

makes a simpler nest than its 'cousin the thrush,
leaving off operations at that point where the
mavis begins its plastering. And so
is repre-
it
sented in more than one book of natural history.

But the truth is very different, as any one who
takes the trouble to carefully break up an old
or deserted blackbird's nest finds out. The first
stage of the building process is the same in both,
and the second stage is not very different. Like
the thrush, the blackbird lines with mud a nest
which has already a passably finished look about
it. The plastering is not so carefully done, as
in the case of the thrush, particularly in the matter
of finish, but it is done. Having completed it,
the blackbird proceeds to a third stage, and lines
the plastered lining with soft fibre. The com-
pleted structure looks a less fine piece of crafts-
manship than the nest of the thrush, but, to human
eyes, a more comfortable cradle for nestlings.
The point is, contains a stage in the work-
that it
manship which is absolutely concealed. Neither

by inspection while in the nest nor by inspection
after leaving it could the blackbird's young dis-
cover the existence of the intermediate cup of
mud. So far as the blackbird is concerned, we
are therefore pushed back to the old theory of
instinct. The idea, that instruction enters into
the work of nest -building is not, however, ex-
cluded by excluding teaching of the young. Both
birds take part in the work, and, unless they are
both birds of a, year, one of them, has already
learnt the way. If it could be assumed that one
of a pair is always older than the other, we should
have a manner of transmission. Unfortunately
for that theory, there are cases not a few in which
the male takes no part in the building.
NEST OF THE BLACKBIRD.
PUSSY HUNTING
THERE is no census of the cats that prowl about

the sleeping town, but everybody who knows the
streets between midnight and dawn knows that
their numbers are very great. A proportion of
them are, of course, animals which own a home
and are merely out for a night of it, a kind of
relaxation on which even the most respectable
and domesticated of cats insists every now and
again. But a goodly number are cats that owe
allegiance to no man, or maid, and manage to
make a living of a kind on a footing of inde-
pendence. How do they do it? They search the
dust-buckets laid out by householders for the dis-
posal of the Cleansing Department, and doubtless
find something in them occasionally to stay the
pangs of hunger. But, on the whole, the economy
of the town cat is involved in obscurity, and a
benevolent society which interests itself in feline
happiness thinks that it does these ownerless
"
animals a service by putting them out of pain."
For my own part I have a very strong belief in
the competence of the cat to look after itself,
and think that much of this lethal kindness con-
sidered strictly as kindness to cats is misplaced.
In the early summer months, however, there is
no mystery whatever about the sources of pussy's
income. She is living on the daintiest of bird
diet, and is able to get it in plenty. The other
day I met a cat walking in very leisurely fashion
along a garden -path with a young mavis in her
mouth. In the interest of bird -life I threw a
stone at her, and she dropped the bird and moved
away in no very hasty manner. There was some-
thing about the whole action and gait of the
animal, and particularly her readiness to abandon
her prey, which struck one as being strangely
out of character, for generally a cat will perform
prodigies of exertion rather than relax her grasp
upon a living thing she has captured. The
gardener explained it by saying that the cats
"
which frequented his domain were fair glutted
with young birds." They were killing them and
leaving them half eaten, and for the time being,
at any rate, were able to lead the life of overfed
epicures.
It isonly necessary to have some acquaintance
with larger gardens and shrubberies about
the
the town to realize the truth of this. In these
places the birds nest in security and in numbers
which it is difficult to realize. Most of the black-
birds and thrushes have now raised their first
brood, and the young birds are to be met with'
everywhere. Awkward in their movements, with
obtrusively yellow edges to their beaks, they have
inexperience written all over them and they;
regard with only half-aroused suspicion any

animal, human or other, that comes within their
vision. A little later they take no chances, but
PUSSY HUNTING 151
for the time being they take a good long look at

any moving object approaching them. And having
decided that the object is not to be trusted, they
as often as not reckon that it will suffice for th!e
emergency hop away. So the cats get a great

to
number of them, and enjoy life hugely while the
feast lasts, feeling very fine and wild and per-
haps despising themselves for ever having
descended to garbage when it is so clear that
Nature meant them for the hunter's life. If they
have any fault to find with the conditions it is
that their prey is too easily captured, and hardly
justifiesthe skill they put into the work.

To watch a cat at its hunting is an extraordinary
interesting spectacle, if only one can keep one's
sympathy with the birds well enough in hand to
appreciate the beauties of stealthy movement dis-
played. I watched a cat the other day stalking
a fledgling mavis through a large bed of rhubarb

in a market -garden, and nothing could have been
prettier in its way. Pussy was no stray. She had

all the appearance of a well-cared-for house cat,
but she might have had a prolonged and
thorough jungle education, so perfect were her
jungle manners. She was uphill, and sighted the
bird on the farther side of the rhubarb -bed about
thirty yards away. The first part of the approach
was made by crawling under the large leaves of
the plants, and as each row was passed she lifted
her head cautiously during a long pause. When
about quarter of the distance had been covered
the mavis happened to turn tail on to its un-
suspected enemy. Instantly the cat took advantage
iS2 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
of the movement, and advanced over a dozen rows
in a succession of rapid loups, without, however,
shaking a blade. Another movement of the bird
and the cat crouched out of sight, and resumed
its stalk in the old way, getting at last, still 'in
cover, to within a yard and a half of its prey.

There it extended itself flat on the ground. Little
nervous, side-to-side movements of the tail indi-
cated a state of high muscular and nervous tension,
and movements of the hind quarters and of the
feet showed the animal preparing for the fatal
spring. But just at that moment the still unsus-

pecting mavis flew into a neighbouring apple-tree,
and pussy's fine work was all thrown away. She
took her disappointment very calmly, having, no
doubt, already breakfasted delicately on young
bird.
A friend of mine, who has a leopard among'
his trophies, has described to me its manner of
approaching a goat tethered as a bait. In every
detailits action resembled that of the cat approach-
ing the bird, even the reflex actions which moved

the tail at the approach of the critical moment
being the same. The difference is wholly a
difference of size. This detailed similarity of
almost all the members of the extensive cat family
is one of the most remarkable facts about them.
It means that the typical form is very ancient,

and it means, too, that since the typical form
was evolved Nature has been able to make few
improvements upon it. The adaptations of the
various species have been in the main adapta-
tions of size and colour. Save in these regards
PUSSY HUNTING 153
the wild cat of the Highlands and the despised

prowler of the back yards are in all essentials
the same as the leopard and the tiger, down to
the nerves which at exciting moments agitate their
tails. There are exceptions. The cheetah has
evolved length of leg and has become a chaser,
losing to a great extent the characteristically cat-
like power of retracting its claws in the process.
The most apart members of the family, the lynxes,
are more particularly adapted an arborescent
to
life,and certain not very considerable peculiarities
of body the long, tufted external ears, for example
distinguish them in appearance. But otherwise
the cat family, with its great number of species
and its wo rid -wide range, is a family with remark-
able adherence to one design.

The prowling cats at present hunting in the 1
gardens have few sympathizers, and everybody is

ready to fling a stone at them. Probably, how-
ever, the town sparrow, with its rat -like powers
of multiplication, its seven -month -long breeding
season, and the complete security of its nesting -
places, would become a great nuisance were its
cheepers not extensively thinned by feline enter-
prise. Already the farmers are complaining that
the town sparrows visit them in vast droves in the
autumn and take heavy toll of their ripening grain.
JULY
TROUT IN ISOLATED LOCHS
How the apples got into the dumpling was not

half so much of a problem to the prince in the
story as how the fish got into the lochs is to
the angler who troubles his head about such sub-
jects. Most of the upland lochs of Scotland are
stocked with trout. Many of them, however,
possess no practicable connection with any other
trouting water. How, then, did they get stocked?
To take a particular case I have just explored,
:
not for the first time, an elevated rocky plateau in

a north-western county, on which there are seven
lochs. The lowest of them and the largest is
marked on the Ordnance Survey as standing at
exactly a thousand feet elevation. The other six
are from a hundred to three hundred feet higher.
Of the seven, only two are connected by stream
with one another^ and all are drained by burns
which make the whole descent of their thousand
and odd feet in, a,t most, a couple of miles. In
one case the draining burn makes a sheer fall at
one point in its course of over a hundred feet ;
and beyond the leaping powers of either

falls far
trout or salmon occur on all the others. As they
are fed from aboVe by mere rills, their isolation is
complete.
157
But of these seven lochs six are inhabited by
a native race of brown trout,, and the seventh
uninhabited one differs so much in character from
the others that its tenantless condition is almost
certainly to be attributed to its unsuitable waters/
and not to its isolation. The six fish-frequented
lochs are longish rock basins, shallowed in parts
with drift material, on which rushes and sedges
grow thinly. The seventh has been encroached
upon allround by the deep peat of the moor ;
and the plants of the bog-bean showing over much

of its surface indicate a peaty bottom. One may,
therefore, cherish a conviction that if all seven
lochs were of equally good water, all seven, despite
their complete detachment from any recruiting
stream or lake, would be peopled with trout.
About the state of affairs on this particular
plateau there is nothing whatever exceptional. It
is repeated again and again all over the north-
west Highlands and islands, where thousands of

small, isolated lochs, fed by mere trickles and
drained by small and steep burns, occur, and in the
large majority of cases contain trout. Usually
the isolation of the inhabitants of each loch is
stamped upon them by shades of colouring and
markings so distinctive, that the people of the
district can tell at a glance from which of the
lochs a trout has been taken.
As a rule, the people of the district carry their
questionings no farther, and satisfied with the
belief that when the world was created its Creator
put the right fish into the right waters, they would
class the efforts at explanation made by the
FALL ISOLATING A LOCH.
TROUT IN ISOLATED LOCHS 159
visiting strangers among the many forms of impiety

generated in the South. And impious or not,
most of the explanations carry themselves with a
far-fetched air. Thus Darwin, referring to fresh-
"
water productions, says that fishes still alive are
not very rarely dropped at distant points by whirl-
"
winds," and though the old stories of showers
"
of frogs and fishes are certainly not so mythical
as they were once esteemed, they strain credulity
when applied to the case of the thousands of hill
tarns. Another explanation is that the ova may
be carried from water to water adhering to the
legs of wading and swimming birds. As the ova
of fresh-water fish retain their vitality for a con-
siderable time after removal from the water, this
solution of the problem is not one to be instantly
rejected. It has been proved in the most con-
clusive fashion that water-fowl do frequently carry
with the mud
adhering to their legs the seeds
of water-plants,and newly-hatched fresh-water
molluscs have been found adhering to their feet.
It is also suggested that water-fowl which eat
fish ova may carry some uncrushed on their beaks
from water to water. But these methods, with
their bare possibility, their dependence upon acci-
dent, are far from satisfying when applied to a
case in which so very many accidents are required.
A by sober science repels by
third solution offered
its sheer
stupendousness. The levels of the
country, we are reminded, were not always what
they are to-day. Streams which now run in deep
valleys have dug out those valleys for themselves,
and one which to-day runs a thousand feet below
the top waters of its petty tributaries must at
one time have followed a course not much lower
than theirs. It is lower to-day because its cutting
and transporting power has been greater. Scot-
land, as one of our greatest geologists has put it,
once existed as a low dome with a very gentle
rise from its circumference to its crown of not
more than one in a hundred. Its existing diver-
sified have been sculptured out of the
features
dome by action of its streams.
the But the
sculpturing has been a very slow process, and
if we
are to get the trout from the streams to
the lochs by harking back to the time when
hill
the connection between them was gradual and
easy, we shall almost certainly reach a time before
the trout, as trout, existed.
In such a case a breath of the perfectly com-
monplace is refreshing. Talking with an intelligent
gamekeeper, I asked him how he accounted for
the trout in a certain loch lying in a depression
"
thirteen hundred feet up a western ben. Very
'*
easily," he replied. Thirty years ago there were
no trout in that loch. The hill was then under
sheep, and a shepherd named Duncan Matheson
occupied a shieling beside the loch. He was very
fond of fishing, and had the idea of putting fish
into it. So he caught a number out of the burn
in the glen and carried them up in a pail." The
only thing about it that struck him as strange was
that, whereas the burn trout are a dark brown
and rarely exceed four ounces in weight, their
descendants in the loch frequently run over the
half-pound, and are a finely-coloured breed.
TROUT IN ISOLATED LOCHS 161
Speaking on this subject, he indicated a burn well-

known to me for the size and abundance of its
trout. It is formed by two small streams which
issue from a great corrie on the mountain side,
wanders slowly through a nearly flat piece of land
below the corrie, and falls fifty feet perpendicular
into a large loch. The isolation of the burn is
as complete as that of any hill loch. To-day the
whole area in which it runs is included in a deer
forest but less than thirty years ago the Jiill
;
was sheep ground and the flat was a croft, the

house of which still stands in a ruinous condition.
"
The crofter who lived there," my gamekeeping
"
friend went on, had several boys who went to
school at (a village three miles away). They
carried their dinner with them in tin pails, and
one of them got into the way of catching trout
and carrying them with him in his pail to put
into the burn at home. The trout in the burn
are all the descendants of those he put in." And
as the burn is slow and deep, and the flat land of
the old croft is now an insect -haunted swamp,
the trout are large beyond the generality of hill-
burn fish. Here, then, are two examples of arti-
ficial stocking in one district quite unconnected
with the modern pisciculture, and it would be a
little absurd to suppose that they stand alone.
Trout in past times formed an important and easily-

procured part of the Highlander's food supplies,
and it is not extravagant to suppose that the old
Celt was capable of taking the very obvious steps
necessary to transform sterile into productive
waters.
IT
THE BIRD OF THE BURNS
THERE are some birds which associate themselves
so closely with certain scenery that it is impossible
to think of them apart from their setting. You
can think of a sparrow anywhere, and of a chaffinch
almost anywhere. The seagull looks about as
much at home at the plough tail as on the sea,
and the rook fits easily and familiarly into half
a dozen different situations. But the water ouzel
is a creature of a single environment, from which
it will not be divorced either in imagination or

reality.
(When the days become warm and long a certain
kind of angler, who does not take himself in that
character too seriously, loves, above all things, to
wander to a hill burn and ply his line for trout,
which make up for not being very big by demand-
ing little in the way of artful alluring. But with
the hill -burn fisher trout are only a pretext. Con-
sciously or unconsciously, he is in love with the
burn and burn nature, and would find no sort of
compensation for it in more and bigger trout taken
from an artificial channel with nothing of the
burn's natural variety. He finds an exquisite
satisfaction looking into its deep, clear pools,
watching its swirling rush among the stones, in
THE BIRD OF THE BURNS 163
the ferns and flowers that spring so fresh and

verdant from trie clefts of its rocky banks, and
in the birds which ever and again reveal themselves

to him as he passes from stream to pool and pool
to stream, dropping a fly for occupation's sake
on the likely places. And of all the birds of the
burn the dipper is the one he is surest to see
and most certain to welcome. It belongs to the
place, and the placeis hardly complete without it.
He turns a bend, and there it is before him.

It is standing on a boulder which divides and
just rises above the water. Dark brown, almost
black of colour, with a pure white waistcoat, and
nearly as big as a blackbird, it would claim some
attention if it did nothing in particular, but its
actions are arresting. As it sits on the stone it
"
bobs up and down, curtsies," and the action, and
the upturn of the tail, suggest that it is a wren
of a larger growth. It is, as a matter of fact,
no sort of relative of the wren, and very unwrenlike
is the next thing it For as the angler looks
does.
it drops plump stone into the water and
off its
disappears. If the watcher hides himself he may

see something more of this diving faculty, so
remarkable in a bird of thrush-like affinities. In
a minute or so the dipper comes again to the
surface and resumes its place on its stone, as dry
to appearance as when it went down.
all Then
it makes ashort, arrow -straight flight, and alights
on the gravel bank just below where the watcher
is ensconced. It begins to pick up minute objects
between the stones, and when it reaches the edge
of the stream walks right on, as if the water
1 64 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
were not there. In favourable circumstances it
is possible to follow its

subaquatic perambulations,
when it is seen to walk ,at the bottom of the
water searching for food, to all appearance as
much at home there as a blackbird under the goose-
berry bushes.
There is a mystery about this submerging power
of the dipper that has never been explained. Like
every other live bird, it is lighter than water.
How, then, does it keep itself down? The ortho-
dox divers keep under by using the power of their
propeller-like feet. In other words, their under-
water course is a swimming course, and none of
them walks on the bottom. That is just what
the dipper does, and though it can swim in a
fashion on the surface, its under-water movement
is not a swim. Indeed its feet, which are the
normal feet of a passerine bird, are not in the
least adapted for such a performance. It is ia
problem, then, how it gets down, and how it keeps

down once it is there. The surmise has been
made that it grips the bottom with its claws, but
it is not an easy surmise to prove and I have
;
seen a dipper walk into a pool with a smooth

rock bottom and emerge a couple of yards from
where it entered. There was nothing but smooth,
water-worn rock for it to hold to.
The dipper's attachment to the stream is stronger
than that of the angler himself, for it never leaves
it. It seems to dislike flying over dry land, and
in its low, rapid flights it follows the course of
the stream, taking all its bends, not even lopping
off a sharp one. Even when pursued by a hawk
THE BIRD OF THE BURNS 165
it keeps to the course of the stream, and will

make in this way for some well-known shelter of
the bank, though it might shorten its journey to
safety by crossing the bends. Its pleasant little
song is almost invariably sung when the bird is

seated on a stone in the stream. In short, the
channel of the stream is its whole world, and to,
see a dipper anywhere else is the rarest of sights.
There must, it is true, be some crossing of water-
sheds, for the dipper raises two or three broods
a year, the members of which must seek fresh
quarters. But these migrations are never or hardly
ever witnessed.
Thenesting habits of the dipper are in harmony
with itsother habits. The nest, a large domed
structure, resembling in this respect the nest of
the wren, and adding another similarity between
the two, is always built into some hole or support
in the bank. A favourite place is among the
large roots of trees so often exposed under a,n
overhanging bank into which the stream is cutting.
A cleft in a rock immediately above water
is another favourite site, and not infrequently the
nest has been built against the rock behind a
small waterfall, through which the bird plunged on
entering and leaving. It is a large structure, with
the entrance placed rather low down, so low down
at times that the eggs seem in danger of rolling
out. The eggs number five or six, and are white,
and the first brood is hatched out in the spring
before most birds have got well started with their
courtship.
To the naturalist the dipper is interesting as
a remarkable adaptation of habit. Its closest
affinitiesare the members of the thrush group,
not one of which in this country manifests the
smallest approach to fitness for an aquatic life.
But in America there are birds of the same order
as the dipper which seem to exhibit a stage in
the process by which its very complete water habits
have been acquired. These water thrushes find
their livelihood chiefly by wading in the shallow
margins of streams and picking up the aquatic
insects and
larvae to be found there. They, so
to speak, have begun to exploit a place in nature
left blank by their own kin. The dippers have
gone a stage farther, exploiting the blank place
1
more fully and making it their own.

MIDGES
IN the Highlands the doctrine that God created

all living things with a purpose in some way
related to the service of man remains of un-
challenged validity. The person who questions
it is once recognized as no better than he should
at
be, and unfit for membership of the Free Kirk.
I asked a pillar of that sanctuary how he disposed
of the midges, but it was almost too easy a question

to be worthy of so profound a theologian. Midges,
he told me, like a great many other things, were
brought into being to prevent us from getting too
well pleased with this world. It is a yale of
tears, and it is well we should not forget it. .We

dwell in tabernacles, and it is bad for the higher
life if we take it into our heads that they are
lasting dwelling-places. And much more to the

same effect.
This theory has the merit that it fits all the
facts contemplated by it. Life in the Highlands,
particularly their more westerly and wetter parts,
is not such during the winter months as to
encourage the lotus -eating state of mind. But
generally in early summer there falls a perfectly
delightful time when the glens are good to live
in, a time which, if it endured, would transform
the whole character of the Gael. Then come the
midges. In May there are none. About the
end of the second week in June they appear in
meagre companies. A week later they occupy
the evening air in battalions. During July their
armies grow in strength, and in August, particularly
in districts where there is much swampy ground, the
usual formula for atmospheric air becomes utterly
inadequate, and must be supplemented by a plus
midge, for they become one of its constituents.
They settle upon the exposed parts of the human
person in hundreds. Their mere crawling over the
face and neck is an intolerable misery to most
people, but crawling is the least of their offences.
It is a mere preliminary to a bite, which, consider-
ing its minuteness, is astonishingly irritating. All
suffer under it, repeated as it may be many hun-
dreds of times, and some acquire bloated and
swollen countenances as the result of it.
In size this biting midge of the Highlands is
one of the most insignificant of insects. A tenth
of an inch is rather more than its extreme length,
and it takes good eyes to see the fine thread-like
body of an unfed specimen between the relatively
broad wings. The common dancing midge with
which the Lowlander is familiar is a huge giant
compared with it. But the one is a good-natured
and harmless giant, and the other a virulent and
poisonous pigmy. The dancing midge cannot bite,
because it has not the means. Those of the
minute biting midge are amazingly efficient. Just
consider what they can do. In size the midge
is to a man what a man is to Ben Nevis. The
MIDGES 169
human skin is, to the midge, a far grosser defence

than the skin of the rhinocerous viewed from the
human standpoint. A man who had to bite
through the hide of the rhinoceros for a meal

would starve in the neighbourhood of plenty. But
the midge alights on the (relatively to itself) much
thicker human epidermis, and in about five seconds
it has bored a shaft through it, and is pumping
up its own fill of human gore. worth while
It is
watching the process out. You are seated on a

"
rock at the loch side, and the midges are biting
bad." A score of them are operating on your
hands and wrists, and you cover one of them with
a lens. Under the lens you see that its body is
a mere thread of transparent grey, but as you
watch the colour changes to a lively red. And
not only does the colour change. In about a
minute and a half the thread -bodied insect becomes
a corpulent and distended little sack of blood. It
has had the time of its life the time that can
;
come to so very few of its kind.

This is one of the most puzzling of the facts
about biting midges. In a non-political address
a few years ago Mr. Arthur Balfour surprised
some of his hearers by speaking of the human
race, which has appropriated so much of the earth's
surface to itself, as "a numerically insignificant
species." We
are in the way of thinking of the
tribes of men as fairly numerous. But Mr. Balfour
was right. In the district of which I write, twenty
square miles of hill territory surrounding a loch,
there are many times more midges than there are
human beings on the whole earth. Numerically
the tribes of men are insignificant compared with
them. Around the loch they are on a mild and
humid evening- numerous enough to make a faint
haze in the near air. But they abound on every
part of the hills up to at least sixteen hundred feet,
and probably farther. And every midge among
those countless billions or, to be more accurate,
every female midge is equipped with the most
wonderfully complex and perfectly adapted instru-
ment for the piercing of mammalian skins and the
sucking of mammalian blood. In its microscopic
proboscis there is a fret saw, with supports for
boring, and a tube and pumping apparatus, and
a mechanism for secreting a liquid which, mixing
with the blood, renders it thin enough to be drawn
through the very fine tube. It is the injection of
this liquid which is supposed to make the attentions
of the midge so highly irritating to the victim.
Butto what an enormous extent is all this
sanguinary equipment thrown away. Hardly one
in a million of the midges of this district can
ever taste blood. The larger animals, chiefly deer,
are so rare on the ground that only careful search
reveals their existence. The human inhabitants
are few, and vast expanses of the hill are practically
never trodden by them. In short, it is certain
that all but an insignificant fringe of the number-
less gnat hordes must die without ever having
tasted blood, for which, to judge by their actions
when the opportunity comes, they are ceaselessly
thirsty. It would be difficult to imagine a case
of more prodigal waste of elaborate armature.
And yet Scotland at its worst presents but a
MIDGES 171
mild example of this phenomenon. The whole

sub -Arctic belt of Europe, Asia, and America, is
infested with blood-sucking members of the gnat
family, and in summer in Lapland they fill the
air in clouds till man and deer can hardly breathe
it without inhaling them. The finest army is
clumsily equipped for war compared with their
equipment for boring skins and drawing blood,
but the overwhelmingly great mass of them never
get any blood to draw. To account for the
evolution of their armature, now seen in the almost
complete absence of the means of exercising it,
is one of the innumerable problems on which the
speculative naturalist is invited to beat his brains.

THE RED-DEER IN SUMMER
THERE is no creature in this country which em-
bodies so perfectly the romance of wild nature as
the red -deer of the Highland hills. Its whole shape
and bearing are romantic, and its action stands for
the very poetry of motion. Its character, built up
by a race of writers in prose and verse, is in

harmony with its superbly picturesque figure. A
denizen of the wild, its lithe and throbbing frame
is filled with a passion of independence, and it
hates man and all his ways. If you would see
it you must seek it with pain and stealth in the
remotest recesses of the mountains.

These are prevailing conceptions. In my own
mind the wild, romantic, aloof red -deer has long,
I must confess, held a place as something of a
humbug. My disillusion began many years ago

when visiting a Highland sheep farm in winter.
"
I found the shepherd pronouncing himself sair
"
bothered with the deer when he laid out food
for his particular charges. And when I accom-
panied him, there they were, sure enough, hanging
on his rear and actually requiring some little
demonstration to drive them away. The poor

creatures were hungry, snowed out of pasture, and
their instinctive fear of man did not stand much
THE RED -DEER IN SUMMER 173
in the way of their seeking food from his hands.

At a later date I had another proof of their tame-
ness under stress of the same teacher, when in
snowy weather I accompanied a keeper with a
cartload of provender for his herd. Their feeding
place was on the side of a loch which bordered a
"
sanctuary," and where, in horrid miskeeping with
the character of the animal in literature and art,
feeding-troughs were laid out for their use. When
the cart approached, the deer, stags and hinds,
came helter-skelter out of the wood and followed
it to the well-known place. And there, no more
troubled by human presence than hungry sheep,
they eagerly regaled themselves on a provided
mess, in which the principal element was, of all
incongruous things in the world, locust beans !
During the present summer (1911) I renewed

an acquaintance with two large and important deer
forests which provide in the shooting season, the
one sixty and the other seventy-five stags (the
numbers a shooting tenant is entitled to kill). The
mountain grass was growing bravely, and the young
shoots of the heather had just begun to tinge with
olive green the faded browns of the hillsides.
Grazing was abundant right up into the high
corries, and the conditions were favourable for the
development in the deer of all their natural wild-
ness. But even thus they continued to display a
disappointing tameness, refusing in the most
favourable circumstances to play up to their
character. Through one of the forests passes a
little frequented public road, and cycling over it
I came upon a herd of thirty-three, of which
thirteen were stags with antlers of various degrees
of development, but all in the velvet. The whole
packet were grazing on the roadside, where, as
is generally the case with moorland roads, the
grass was better than elsewhere. .Quite half a

mile away they got my wind, and instantly stood
at the gaze. And did those wild and shy creatures
gallop off like the wind on detecting the approach
of a human enemy? Not they. They were cer-
tainly not so stiff to move off the road as Highland
cattle, but they moved reluctantly, and only when
the intruder was close upon them, and at the most
they did not go a couple of hundred yards away.
A mile or two farther into the forest a head-
keeper's house, with the usual provision of kennels
and kennel courts, accommodating about a score
of sporting dogs, stands in the middle of a piece
of land bearing all the evidences of having once
been cultivated, that is to say, a well-defined bit
of grass in the midst of bracken, heather, hillrush,
and moss. Grazing peacefully on this, undisturbed
by the presence of half a dozen human beings
engaged on various duties, were from sixty to
seventy deer. As the stranger approached the
dogs in the kennels barked furiously, but neither
his approach nor their clamour disturbed the shy
and fleeting creatures, to stalk which is a high and
almost mystic art.
In the whole extent of the other deer forest
alluded to, there is not so much as a yard of public
road. Yet here, as on the other, I found their
nerve quite untroubled by a human intrusion. To
take one experience from many. Well into the
THE RED-DEER IN SUMMER 175
forest there a crofter's house, with byre, kail-

is
yard, and once cultivated field enclosed in a dry

stone wall. The place was occupied down till
a dozen years ago, but is now a melancholy ruin,
the more melancholy that traces of occupation, such
as faded prints from old illustrated papers hang-
ing half on, half off, the living room, are numerous
about it. .When I approached the enclosure five
deer were placidly cropping the grass within it.
Leaning upon the dry stone fence, I studied them
a stone -throw away, and they studied me with per-
fect composure. When I leapt the wall and pro-
ceeded towards the house they leisurely walked
away, and hopping over the enclosure with superb
ease trotted at a slow pace about eighty yards
up the hill which ascends steeply behind the house.
But beating the stones of the wall with a walking-
stick did not induce them to increase their distance,
and when I left the place at one side they calmly
returned to it from the other. All this in July.
The tameness of the modern wild deer is no
doubt related to the fact that they are artificially
fed in winter, a thing made necessary by the main-
tenance in most of the forests of a larger stock
than they are able naturally to carry the year
through. But it is all very different, one is given
to understand, as the year ripens towards
September. Then the wild deer becomes himself
we know in books and pictures,
again, the creature
to approach which it is necessary to crawl for
half a day with more than the care of a scout in
a Fenimore Cooper novel. Well, there are various
ways of approaching a red -deer, and crawling is
one. When I pressed my friend, the .keeper, to
tell me, really and truly, if the very tame and
trustful animals before us would become wild and
watchful as grey-lag" geese in the course of two
months' time, he slowly dropped one eyelid, and
speaking with thoughtful deliberation, said :
"
Gentlemen who come to the Highlands for deer-
stalking expect deer-stalking, and a keeper who
knows his business knows very well what they
are looking for. It is possible he might take
them within shooting distance of a stag ,with less
trouble than he puts them to, but they would not
think half so much of themselves. And to tell
you the truth, considering what sort of shots some

of our fine gentry are, the deer would not need to
be a very difficult animal to approach. I would
not like to tell you the number of times I have

brought a sportsman within eighty yards of a
stag and seen him miss it, though it gave him a
mark like a barn door. As for the wild goose,"
"
he went on, the deer -stalking sportsman who
could get near enough to one to shoot it would
have some reason to be proud of himself, both as
a shot and as a stalker. Compared with the wild
goose the deer is a stupid brute."
FOXES OF THE HILLS
How many of the people of Scotland, urban or

rural, have seen a fox at large? The answer
to the question is like that to the interrogation
with which mythical Scots are supposed to grace
" "
their toast, Here's tae us ! Wha's like us?
In the English hunting counties the fox is no
uncommon sight. Reynard is a brainy animal, and
he has learnt that in these fair fields only one kind
of danger threatens him, and that when there is
" "
no music of the hounds he is safe. Over the
greater part of Scotland, on the contrary, the fox
knows that man and all his devices are to be
mistrusted, and he is constantly careful to keep
out of sight. Thus, one might spend months in a
hill country where foxes abound and never cast
eyes upon a member of the race ; and it is

probable that not one in a thousand of the tourists
who in the summer months explore the recesses of
the mountains ever sees a hair of the largest of the
surviving native carnivora of Britain. Only game-
keepers and shepherds, who wage constant war
on them, know how numerous foxes still are, and
even they obtain a sight of the animal by laborious
and studied means.
Like the eagle, the Scottish fox in our time finds
its most congenial ground in the deer forests, and
a typical fox haunt is a rugged mountain side,
"
well provided with cairns," or the tumbled
masses of stone that lie at the bottom of all
crags. If the rock is one that weathers in
small fragments it serves badly ;
if it breaks
off in large boulders which lie upon one
another at the foot of the crags in such a
fashion as to leave abundant ramifying spaces
between, it makes an ideal fox's home. In such
a situation the fox is able to penetrate far among
the stones, and its cubs, even when followed by
terriers, can retreat into crannies where they are
perfectly secure. With such a hold as this as a
base Reynard may raise a family with perfect
success, and it is a sterile country, indeed, which
does not provide them with an ample livelihood.
I had, one July day, a prolonged opportunity of
watching a fox family at home. The cairn in

which the den was situated was among the boulders
at the foot of a crag on the side of a high and
narrow glen. A keeper had found it, and was
returning to take offensive measures against it,
and we watched it through stalking glasses from
the opposite side of the glen. The vixen was at
home, and lay basking in the sun on a small patch
of grass and heather in front of the principal
entrance. Four cubs played about her, racing
round her, tumbling over her, waging mimic battles
with one another, and generally behaving in the
pretty manner of well -grown puppies. But there
was a difference. Every now and then the old fox
raised her watchful head and searched the valley
FOXES OF THE HILLS 179
below, and every time she did so the cubs bolted

into the den. After this had gone on for the better
part of an hour, the vixen got up and proceeded
in her stealthy way along the hill -face, and as she
left them the cubs retreated to their stronghold
and appeared no more. With the glass I followed
the vixen on her promenade for more than half
a mile to a spot, doubtless well known to her,
where lay the carcase of a deer. This she began
to tear with every appearance of ravenous hunger,
but the keeper, who was well acquainted with foxes
and their ways, assured me that in reality she
was laying in, a load of flesh which on her return
to the den she would disgorge for the benefit of
her young.
I did not see the return. An assistant keeper
coming down the glen, and making straight for
the den, alarmed the mother, and all prospect
of coming to close quarters with her vanished till
dusk, when she would attempt to reach and feed
her family, even at some peril to herself. Crossing
over to the den we found an interesting sight.
The main entrance, where a huge boulder rested
upon several smaller stones, was a considerable
cavity, and within it, on well-beaten ground, which
smelt vilely, lay a curious assortment of predatory
evidence. There was the leg of a full-grown
deer, doubtless taken from an animal which had
died ;
the hind-quarters of a deer calf, the con-
dition of the feet proving that it had never walked ;
the four feet of a lamb ;
the feet of a hare ;
many fragments of rabbits ; grouse wings and
feathers in abundance, and, strangest of all, a
i8o ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
well-grown rat. There were also many gnawed
bones of kinds not easily identified, all proving
that this particular family had fared sumptuously.
While we examined the antechamber of the den,
three terriers were whining and barking eagerly in
its recesses, but their efforts to reach the cubs
were a failure.
In these circumstances it is the practice of the
keepers to remain at the den till the gloaming in
order to keep the parent foxes out, then to hide
themselves in its imme'diate vicinity in order to
get a shot at the animals as they try to enter
at dusk. The watch has often to be maintained
for two or three nights, but it is generally success-
ful in the end, for when the young begin to cry
out, as they will do after a day of hunger, the
mother will brave much to get to them. There is
something repugnant to ordinary human feeling

in this taking advantage of the fox's best instinct
for its undoing, but such a consideration presented
to a gamekeeper stirs him only to an amused
laugh. Occasionaly he is able to trap a fox, but
it is by using its parental instincts that he is alone
able to keep the tribe within bounds.

In some of the deer forests little effort is made
to keep down the foxes. Indeed, there are cases
in which the sentiment in favour of wild life has
gone so far that every kind of wild animal and bird
is tolerated and one Highland landlord is quoted
;
"
as saying that the only vermin he objected to
were sheep." The harm done by predatory beasts
and birds in a deer forest is, of course, exceed-
ingly small when stalking is the sole interest, and
FOXES OF THE HILLS 181
it is onlywhen grouse form an important part

of the game that vermin-killing for the sake of
sport becomes imperative. But there are few parts
even of the deer forest area which are far removed
from sheep ground, and the sheep farmer demands
a rigorous persecution of foxes as a service to which
he is entitled. Where rabbits abound they form the
staple article in the diet of the fox, but thereis no
doubt whatever that Reynard is a most persistent

lamb -killer, and that if foxes are abundant they
levy a heavy tax on the flocks. From this arise
sharp differences of opinion as to compensation,

and general charges of failure of duty on the part
of the landlord to his tenants. But there is little
fear of the native race of foxes being extirpated.
Their number, as has been said, is greater than is
generally supposed ; and in the boulder -strewn
glens and hillsides their hiding-places are number-
less, and will never be obliterated.
AUGUST
THE SLUGGARD'S MODEL
THE wisdom and energy of the ant have been
extolled since beginning of time, and it is
the
perhaps due to the smallness of the animal itself
and the elusiveness of its habits that its example,
though pointed out with first-rate authority, has
had so little effect in the world of men. You must
humble yourself to the ground if you would find
out what ants are up to, and when you do it, it is
just possible that a contingent may tell themselves

off to show you how they can bite.
I have just been observing ants of set purpose
for the first time. Cutting grass with a large pair
of garden shears, I found that I had sliced the
earthy top of a nest belonging to a.
community of
the brown garden variety (Lasius niger). The
catastrophe must have been something like an
earthquake to them, and its terrible consequences
were visible enough to me. Hundreds of white
larvae were exposed known to bird fanciers as
ants' eggs and the adult members of the colony
were careering about with a mighty stir. With
absolute unanimity and without an instant's delay,
they set themselves to the work of getting their
young underground, and as long as I twatched them
they engaged in no other labour. It was a case
185
of save the baby and let house property take its
chance.
Two days later, when I next inspected the scene
of the wreck, the work of restoration was com-
plete ; the earthen roof of the nest was tolerably
level amidst the grass stubble, and a number of
small round holes were visible leading into an
interior. Ants were moving about in all direc-
tions.
But there was a disappointing want, in the
appearance of things, of that orderly industry and
high intellectuality of which one finds so much
in the books about ants. The vast majority of
the ants were wandering about in a seemingly
aimless fashion, and a map of the course of any,
one of them would resemble a fallen thread.
Altogether, watching ants was such an unevent-
ful work that I resolved to try the experimental
method, so captured a caterpillar and dropped it
where the crowd was thickest. Then the play
brightened up. The first ant that touched the
it, whereupon the reptile
caterpillar tried to taste of
a green with black stripes and slightly hairy
grub from a cabbage turned sharply and tried
to retaliate with its jaws. It got one of the ant's,
legs in its mouth, and was having distinctly the

better of the fight when a second ant took a taste
in the neighbourhood of its tail, and the caterpillar
turned with a convulsive jerk to inspect the new
sore place. Then the first assailant attacked it
again. Soon a dozen or more ants were engaged
fiercely in the assault, and the contortions of their
large prey indicated that even a caterpillar can
THE SLUGGARD'S MODEL 187
give way to rage. But of real material damage

he appeared to suffer none at all, and examining
the struggle with a large reading-glass, I came
to the conclusion that the ants never managed to
do more than bite and pull his hairs. Therefore
I rescued him from torment, and went in search of
something more vulnerable.
A perfectly smooth green cabbage caterpillar
was my next martyr, and his fate soon proved the
value of hairs to creatures which have occasion
to crawl where ants abound. On the smooth cater-
pillar the ants threw themselves with the same
courage that animated them in attacking the hairy
one, and in five minutes the caterpillar was dead
and exuding moisture from every segment.
The scene that followed was highly interesting.
Having game, the ants proceeded to
killed their
take it home, and it was like African pigmies
attempting the transport of a dead elephant. As
many of them as could find standing room around
it bore a hand at the great work, and though as
many more stood upon the body it was actually

with minute jerks moved along. The nearest
entrance to the nest was three inches away, and
in the course of a quarter of an hour the carcase
was actually at the door. But here a great
problem arose. The caterpillar's body was thicker
than the entrance to the nest was wide, and when
his head had been jerked, pushed, and pulled into
it further movement seemed impossible. And un-
fortunately, whether ant ingenuity was equal to
the engineering problem presented I am unable
to say. As long as I watched, the triumphant
tribe continued to run over, round, and under the
body of their quarry, but no advance to a solution
was made. Next day, however, the caterpillar's
body was away.
Proceeding with experiment, but this time giving
deference to the dictates of humanity, I offered
the little people the body of a large moth which
had been dead for at least a year, which time it
had passed impaled on a pin. It was as dry a
piece of pemmican as ever teeth were tried on,

and I expected the ants would turn from it in
disdain. But no. They swarmed over it in the
highest excitement, tried their jaws upon it, and
swiftly came to the conclusion that it was a great
treasure sent by the gods. Probably the experts
announced that, though dry, the magnificent car-
case was rich in proteids, and therefore excellent
for sausages, so they determined to get it home.
The most admirable efforts were put forth, but after,
half an hour of feverish industry the labourers
had succeeded in doing no more than turning the
gigantic body round. Then they changed their
tactics, and showed that ant intelligence is equal
to devising two ways of facing a difficulty.
"
We cannot get this magnificent mine of wealth
home in a lump," they seemed to say, " so we must
take it home in bits." Working on this bright
idea, they began to bite off the legs of the moth,
and one by one succeeded in detaching them. As
each was severed it was hauled along in triumph
to one of the doorways, down which it rapidly
disappeared. Six legs of moth were thus deposited
in the larder. Next the ants assailed the wings,
THE SLUGGARD'S MODEL 189
and, though was a prolonged and difficult job,

it
succeeded in getting all four of them off. It might

be supposed that they would treat these as mere
useless lumber, whose removal was necessary
merely to facilitate the transport of the body.
Not so, thought the ants. Each wing was borne
along to the entrance of the nest, and cut into
fragments small enough to be pulled inside. For
what purpose they were put in store some great
authority on formic economy may be able to say.
Despoiled of its legs and wings, the body of the
moth was hauled along, but when
successfully
darkness put observation to an end it was still
blocking up the door.
Bates, in his book on the Amazon, writes of the
terror with which a moving column of ants fills
every sort of creeping thing. The common little
garden ant wields something of the same power.

A worm is a very leisurely performer as a general
thing, but drop one among a company of ants and
the speed with which he will make for a safe
place gives a new impression of his motor powers.
A long -winged and very lethargic fly abounds just
now on sunflowers, and it is so lazy that it will
allow itself to be pushed off, and will fall to the
ground without trying to save itself. I dropped
one of these among the ants, and the effect upon

it was that of an electric shock. It ran from the
scene with every gesture of frantic alarm.
ROBBER BEES
THE bees have a fine reputation one, indeed, of
which any insect might be proud. They gather
honey all the day, as the poem has it, and in virtue
of this praiseworthy habit are given an honoured
place among the good honest workers of the world.
But that, though the foundation of their reputa-
tion, is far from being the full structure of their,
merit. As every schoolboy knows in these days
of widely diffused scientific they play
erudition,
a powerful and indispensable part in the economy
of the vegetable world. They are the matrimonial
agents of the flowers. When a bee sticks its
head into the heart of a flower it has a purely
selfish purpose. It is either collecting pollen with
which to feed the grubs or floral nectar for
storage as honey. In either case it is equally
useful to the flower, for the pollen adheres to its
head and thorax, and some of it is lefton the
stigma of the next flower it visits. Thus the
flowers are cross-fertilized, and the seeds resulting
from cross-fertilization are both more numerous
and stronger than those resulting from self-
fertilization.
But sometimes things do not follow quite this
order. Some flowers are so shaped that only bees
ROBBER BEES 191
with a long proboscis can reach the honey in them,

and unless this particular bee comes along that
flower is not cross-fertilized. It might be sup-
posed, then, that these flowers are the reserve of

the kind of insect that is equipped to reach their
nectar, and that all the other kinds are tantalizingly
excluded from it. But that is to assume that bees
are both honest and unresourceful. The other
day my attention was arrested by the ongoings of
a bee which was busily engaged working the
beautiful blue flowers of a long spike of
delphinium. The delphinium carries its honey at
the bottom of a long spur formed by the pro-
longation of the upper petal, and presumably only
a bee with a considerable length of proboscis could
get at it. Whether the bee before me was of
that breed, Icould not say. It was of the kind
known in thesimple classification of youth as
a bumbee a hairy person with a coat pre-
dominantly black, pleasingly varied with old gold.
For the time being the point of interest about it
was that it did not enter a single flower or attempt
an entry, but went straight to the bottom of the
spur on the outside. On investigation, every spur
was found to be pierced about a quarter of an
inch from its extremity, and the bee was extract-
ing the honey burglariously without making the
usual payment of service.
I continued to keep an eye on the delphinium,
and found that all the bees that came to it the

hive bee and two or more species of Bombus
were among the visitors went straight to the back
door. One began by going in the right way, but
IQ2 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
it only did this in a single flower. All the other
flowers on the spike visited by her were explored
The inference is that
at the felonious entrance.
when once a honey-thief has pierced an easy
entrance to the nectary of a flower, even the
honestest bee will prefer the easy way.
It is an old story now how when first the agri-
culturist of New Zealand introduced red clover
they failed to get seed off it. The crop grew
splendidly, but the flowers never matured, and for
each succeeding season the farmer had to get seed
imported from Europe. When the matter was
investigated it was found that none of the native
insects of New Zealand was qualified to fertilize
red clover. The honey in the flower of the red
clover is secreted at the base of the stamens, and
lies at the bottom of a tube from 9 to 10 mm. long.
In order to reach this honey in the legitimate
way, an insect must have a proboscis of the same
or greater length, and several of the humble-bees
are suitably equipped for the job. After these
had been imported and established in the country,
red clover did as well in New Zealand as in any
other land.
It seems, however, that all the Bombi are not
equally useful. In two species of the family the

proboscis is less than 9 mm. long, and they are
unable to reach the honey of red clover legiti-
mately. In strict honesty they should refrain from
visiting clover-fields and stick to flowers that suit
their size. But clover is one of the very finest
of honey flowers, and when it is to be had at all
it is generally in vast abundance. It follows that
THE KOBBER BEE.
ROBBER BEES 193
the bee which cannot negotiate the 9 mm. tube

suffers a serious deprivation. Imagine the case of
such a Bombus coming for the first time upon a
field ofred clover in flower. The whole air simply
smells of honey, and the odour, as is well known,
excites a bee as the smell of warm bread excites
a hungry boy. Bombus with the short proboscis
throws herself at the first flower in sight, and
plunges her nose into one of its many florets, only
to make the horrid discovery that she cannot reach
the nectar, though she can get within the breadth
of a finger-nail of it. Bees have short tempers,
and with a bombian gesture of irritation she with-
draws from the first floret and tries another. The
result the same, and half a dozen trials find
is
her in a towering rage. To make matters worse,
she sees another Bombus, not a bit higher in the
scale of being than herself, only longer in the
nose, which detracts rather than otherwise from
her beauty, absorbing honey to her heart's content.
It is more than the short-nosed Bombus can
stand. She must liberate her angry feelings on
something or somebody, and she flies at the clover
again and bites it viciously. And then a queer
thing happens she finds that it is quite easy
;
to bite through the tube, so she bites and drinks

and bites and drinks again. Perhaps, as a
matter of fact, this discovery of the short -nosed
bee was not made on clover. Many of the other
flowers of the same pea order store their honey
at the bottom of a long tube, and the bee which
would get it honestly must have
at strength and
skill to pull the wings and keel of the flower apart,
a process which causes the anthers and stigma to
emerge, and length of proboscis to reach the far
extremity of the flower after it has pushed past
the organs, fertilizing them in the by-going. All
these the short -nosed bees get at by biting a
hole through the protecting petal close to the
point where the honey is stored. Where the bees
known to science as Bom bus orrestris and B. pra-
torum abound it will be found that a large propor-
tion of the flowers of peas and beans have been
pierced in this fashion. As most of the flowers,
nevertheless, set seed it is to be presumed that
honest bees played their part before the robber
came upon the scene, or perhaps failing to notice
that she had opened an easy. way, after her.
If you are growing food plants it is a very
important matter that the flowers should be

properly fertilized by the bees. If, on the other
hand, you are merely growing flowers for their

own sake as flowers, a visit from the bees is of
no value, and is even undesirable. A flower which
is fertilized has a shorter life as a flower than one
which is not. The moment a flower has been

fertilized its purpose in the life-history of the
plant has been served. It has the double purpose

of protecting the essential organs and attracting
the bees to them ;
and when fertilization has
taken place with the deposit of pollen on the
stigma no more attention from the bees is wanted,
and in a very few hours the protection of the
organs ceases to be essential. In the flower-
garden, therefore, the robber bee plays no bad
part.
THE GLORIOUS TWELFTH
THE very true remark has been made that the
shooting of grouse is not the whole of grouse
-
shooting. It is merely, so to speak, the title

element in a festival which derives extraordinary
favour from the fact that it follows a prolonged
fast. There are, no doubt, many of those who, on
the 1 2th of August, step out upon the springy
purple heather to whom the pursuit of the red
grouse is merely one in a ceaseless succession of
sports in which salmon, trout, grouse, deer,
pheasant, and salmon again are the quarry. But
to the great majority of grouse -shooters the
Twelfth is the beginning of the abrupt and
pleasant change from labour in the Senate, in the
Law Courts, and in the office, which thins the
blood and dulls the eye, to the irresponsible con-
tact with Nature, which is the supreme restorer
of vitality to tired tissues. Hence its favour.
If partridge -shooting began on the Twelfth and
grouse-shooting on the ist of September, the

Twelfth would still be the great day, though per-
haps not quite the great day that it is. For who
will dispute that the virtue of contact with Nature
is a more potent virtue on a far -stretching moor-
land than on a well-shaven stubble? In the

scheme of recuperation turnip -tops compete
indifferently with bog-myrtle.
Most of us are the bondservants of purpose
even in our pleasures, and the slaying of the little
red bird is the purpose that takes thousands to
the hills. But even those who seek no more than
the little red bird find more than they seek
refreshment of blood in the strong air of the moun-
tains, refreshment of vision in their colour, tone in
a thousand unconscious impressions. Millais
likened Scotland in the richness of its colouring to
a wet pebble, and at no time does it glow with a
splendour greater than that of August. At all
seasons there are purples on the hills, but they are
the purples of atmosphere, which vanish in the
sunshine. The purple that comes upon hill and
moor in thesecond week of August is a material
reality whose richness is only enhanced with the
full light. With the moorland greens and olives
of rush and fern, of bog-myrtle and horsetail,
which make with it the perfect harmony, it forms
the colour impression that dominates the festival
of the day. The day has its sound impressions,
which dwell no less persistently in the memory.
The silence of the hills has many voices, and it
would be a less impressive silence than it is, were
it unbroken by the sad notes of curlew and
plover,
true children of Nature's own domain such
domain, that is to say, as Nature is permitted in
a land like ours.
For no sport, not even that of grouse-shooting,
is wholly favourable to the retention of the land
surface in the state of Nature. A careful but
THE GLORIOUS TWELFTH 197
never obtrusive system of drainage has greatly

changed the proportions of the plant population
of probably every tnoor and mountain -side in
Scotland. A very large proportion of every natural
moorland and wet hillside is occupied by various
species of rushes, of which there are a score or
more in the British flora ; and their vivid green
suggests a succulent pasturage, which, however,
would serve but poorly for the fattening of sheep
or cattle. Drainage has reduced their area and
given it over to heather. But the changes of sur-
face effected in the course of grouse -preservation
are small compared with those brought about by
the effort to better adapt the land to deer. While
the grouse -preserver wishes to promote the growth
of heather, the deer -preserver wishes to eliminate
the plant, and in many of the forests, by persistent
burning, he has succeeded to such an extent that
an old inhabitant would hardly know the country.
Where there were vast slopes of brown and purple
heath the yellowish -green mountain grasses extend
themselves, and the crofter on some of these dis-
tricts finds difficulty, in what once was the land of
heather, in getting enough of it to thatch his barn.

Even the natural breeds of bird and beast are
not what they were. With the object of increasing
size, many owners have introduced park deer from
England, and some have experimented with even
more remote strains of the red -deer from abroad.
If it be true, as it is probable, that a
wandering
deer might make its way from Cape Wrath to
the Mull of Cantyre, unlikely that the alien
it is
elements have remained in the districts to which

they were brought. It is less generally known,
however, that an analogous process has been at
work modifying the grouse, yet such is the case.
The real old red grouse of the Highlands, thei
bird which the old Highlanders called Coilleach
ruadh, or red cock, is now rather rare, and, accord-
ing to Mr. Harvie -Brown, may only be found
in the Outer Hebrides and in some isolated
localities in the west of the mainland, the pre-
dominant bird of the day being, in his opinion,
the result of innumerable introductions of new
blood and mixing up of types. Other influences,
such as change of living conditions, the breeding of
a far larger stock than the land would naturally
carry, the destruction of natural enemies, and the
substitution for their selective work of the
systematic but operations of the
non-selective
sportsman, have possibly modified the grouse to
such an extent that if Fergus Vich Ian Vhor were
to revisit his hunting-grounds he would hardly
recognize it.
When all this has been said, however, the grouse

remains the grouse and Britain's distinctive bird.
Every other bird in our avi -fauna (perhaps we
should except the St. Kilda wren) may be found
on the European continent, but the grouse is our
own. The real old Coilleach ruadh was not a
distinct species, but merely a strain distinct enough
to form a recognizable variety and the man in
;
the butts, or the man who prefers to follow the

Igame behind a brace of good dogs, may bring his
bird down with a feeling that his quarry is sub-
stantially the same as that which his ancestor, the
ancient Briton, in a different way hunted for
the pot.
ARE WILD CATS SCARCE?
SOMETIMES one is assailed with a doubt whether
animals generally supposed to be rare are actually

as rare as they are reputed to be. When, for
example, the badger is written about it is usually
represented as an animal verging towards extinc-
tion. But occasionally one comes upon a credible
authority on such subjects who declares that it
is by no means scarce, though it is rarely seen.
Strictly nocturnal in its habits, it never will be
seen as one of the chance sights of the country-
side ; and even in the days of its greatest
abundance it was seen in its own haunts only by
the people who specially sought for it and dug it
out. At that time it was the object of a barbarous
sport, now no longer indulged unless it be in secret,
and there was a purpose in seeking it. Now
even the game-preserver feels little urged to per-
secute it, for, despite its strength, size, and
undoubted carnivorous affinities, it
generally is
recognized that it is hardly worth considering as

an enemy of game.
The rarity of the true wild cat is even more a
matter of common belief, and about three times
a year the newspapers contain a paragraph record-
ing the capture of one and setting forth its
dimensions and weight. The paragraph is written
because the writer believes the animal to be very
uncommon, and for the same reason it is given
prominence in the papers. During a visit made
this summer to the head keeper on one of the
large northern estates a man of high intelligence

and great experience I asked his opinion on the
subject, mentioning that the reports of the killing
of wild cats were rare, whatever might be the case
with the creatures themselves. His reply was in-
teresting and characteristic. "I'll tell you what
"
is scarce," he said. In the parts of the country
where there are wild cats, men who write to the
papers are scarce. When you see a report that
in such-and-such a place in the Highlands a wild
cat has been captured, you must not suppose that
wild cats are more abundant there than elsewhere.
It simply means that there is a man there who
writes to the papers."
He took down his vermin book and went on.
" "
Here," he said, we are a good bit from any-
where, and have even to row across the loch to
reach the nearest public road. Nobody but game-
keepers live in the neighbourhood, and they would
as soon think of writing to the police as to the
papers about a wild cat. It follows that any number
of wild cats might be taken here, and nobody but
ourselves would know anything about it. Now
I find that, as a matter of fact, we got eleven wild
cats last year, and that does not look as if they

were very scarce. If we had tried particularly
we might have got more." He went on to relate
with great amusement how he had sent a live
ARE WILD CATS SCARCE? 201
" "
Tom to a great authority on sport, who had
asked him for the first he got. What his corre-
" "
spondent wanted was the body of the first Tom
captured for setting-up purposes, and great was
the embarrassment caused at a certain town office
when an animal with the temper of a tiger arrived
in a box which nobody dared to open.
On the adjoining forest, almost identical in
character, some further light was thrown on the
subject, though the story told was different. I
asked the keeper if he often got wild cats, and

the reply was that they very rarely saw them.
" "
That," I said, is rather strange, for I have
just been told that at L they got no fewer than
eleven last year." "It is not so strange as you
"
would think," the keeper explained. Down at
L where they always grow some oats and
,
turnips, they trap a great many rabbits, and all

those wild cats are taken in the rabMt -traps.
They don't try particularly to get cats, but the
cats come after the rabbits and get into the traps
set for them. Then they are killed, partly because
it'san old habit .with gamekeepers to kill them,
and partly because it's a most ticklish job to take
a wild cat out of a trap alive. Here we shoot a
good many rabbits, but never trap them, and that's
the reason why we never get any cats. But though
we never see cats here, I have no doubt they are
as numerous here as at the other end of the loch.
In the winter-time we often see their tracks in the
snow, and could get them if we had any object,
but in a deer forest they do no sort of harm what-
ever. We do not count their work among the
rabbits harm, for ,if they were more abundant
than they are they would be a nuisance."
Talking about reports of the killing of wild
cats, this keeper, like his neighbour down the loch,
said that those who most often got cats never
" "
thought of putting it in the papers." But," he
went on, " I remember one in this district that was
put in the papers. It was captured by the hotel
people. They were bothered by some animal

killing their hens, and thought it was a fox. So
traps were set, and the very next morning a big
wild cat was found with its fore -feet in one and
its hind-feet in another. It was taken into the
kitchen, held at both ends with the cords of the

traps but even in that state it nearly frightened
;
the girls out of their wits with its ferocious ways.

We carried it over and threw it into the kennel to
try the dogs on it, but, notwithstanding the traps,
it left mark on them before they killed it."
its
Wild cats may abound in a wild bit of country

and never be seen even by those whose business
it is perambulate the ground. They keep
to daily
to their lair the rocks and bracken during
among
most of the day, and do their hunting at night and
in the morning and evening twilight. Even if
they do happen to be abroad in daylight, their
movements are so stealthy that they are with diffi-
culty observed, and in their natural surroundings
their colouration is protective in a marked degree.
In this latter respect they are strikingly different
from the fox, which inhabits the same kind of
country, and whose bright yellow coat is in almost
startling contrast with the dark rocks and heather.
ARE WILD CATS SCARCE? 203
But while the fox is an extremely difficult animal

to trap (or, despite his conspicuousness, to see),
the cat one of the easiest to capture if its
is
presence is suspected and an effort is made to

get it. Setting traps for a fox is almost a high
art. A
single trap beside a bait Reynard is quite
sure to detect, no matter how skilfully it may be
concealed and if he is taken in this way at all it is
;
by means of a second or third trap, into which he

puts a paw after his abundant suspicions have
been lulled by his discovery of the other two.
The cat, on the other hand, will walk into a trap
if it is not in sight, and the same amount of art
that suffices for the capture of a rabbit will suffice

for the capture of the rabbit's great enemy. The
meaning of this great difference is, of course,
that the fox observes the world chiefly through his
nose, and uses his eyes as auxiliaries to that organ,
whereas the cat depends chiefly on its senses of
sight and hearing. And, as the instruments of
cunning, ears and eyes are not to be compared
with a thoroughly efficient organ of smell.
WASP PLAGUES
IT is rarely that in any part of Scotland wasps
become numerous enough to constitute a plague.
They are not scarce by any means, but they do
not take possession of the countryside. In the
South of England, on the other hand, a wasp
plague is a frequent occurrence of the autumn,
and if one may judge from what is said in the
papers, such a plague is in full blast just now
(191 1). Once I made acquaintance with the wasp
in plague numbers. Entering a hostelry in a
western corner of Middlesex, I found every inmate
bearing large and visible traces of combat. There
were bandaged hands and bandaged faces. In
" "
reply to the question, Been to the wars? the
"
lady of the establishment said that the wasps
were terrible bad," and pointed to the window
and sundry saucers of beer arranged in conspicuous
places around the room. In the window wasps
were buzzing in dozens against the glass. In the
beer saucers they lay in scores dead or dead-drunk.
And all around others were freely indulging
"
tasting," as they say in the Highlands till,
tasting too deeply, they tumbled in and died. For
the wasp is a bibulous creature, and likes liquid
bread and plenty of it.
WASP PLAGUES 205
There are various views of wasps' character.

Some say that wasps will not touch people who
leave them alone, others that they are of a perpetu-
ally angry temper and as ready to take offence as
a Corsican. Myself, I can say that I have never
been stung except when carrying out operations
of a distinctly provocative kind. Once a small
boy requested me to poke a fishing-rod into a
hole in the edge of a thatched roof because his
"
ba' was stuck in it." The poke was administered,
the deceptive urchin ran away, and at the same
moment a swarm of wasps emerged and threw
themselves at the innocent disturber like angry
projectiles. Four stings on the face and two on
the hands made up the casualty list. But I have
never been stung when merely watching at close
enough quarters to hear the grinding of their
jaws. Nevertheless, the wasp is an animal to
be treated with respect, and she knows it" she,"
for, as is the case with bees, only the female
carries a sting.
The question is often asked why wasps are so
much more numerous in the autumn than at any
other time of the year, and the answer involves
some little knowledge of vespian economy. Of
the social wasps, only the fertilized female or
queen survives the winter. On the approach of
cold weather she seizes a fibre in some sheltered
nook, and, hanging by the jaw, sleeps the cold
months away. When aroused by returning
warmth, she begins at once to make a nest, under-
ground or suspended from a branch of a tree or
shrub, according to the species, the material being
a kind of paper made by chewing woody fibre.
In the nest is a small comb containing at first
four and later about thirty cells, and in each cell
an egg is laid. When the eggs are hatched the
queen does all the work of feeding the grubs,
which, in about a month's time, develop into
worker wasps. Almost as soon as these have
dried their wings they commence the labour of
enlarging the nest, and henceforth the queen con-
fines herself to the one function of egg-laying.
In this way the wasps' nest grows throughout the
summer, and one which began by being as large
as a golf ball may end by being six inches in
diameter and more than a foot in length, with
a population many thousands strong.
Perhaps the best way of acquiring a little
knowledge of wasp habits is to watch the arrivals

at the nest, noting what they bring home with
them. They neither store nor make honey, and
in their anatomy there is nothing corresponding
to the pollen -basket of the bees. A very brief
vigil at the nest will show that they are beasts of
prey. Every arrival takes something with her
of an animal nature. The most frequent captive
is the aphis or green fly, enormous numbers of
which a prey to the wasps.
fall But the wasp
does not specialize. If she finds fly-maggots she
takes them home flies themselves serve her turn,
;
and spiders have no terrors for her. When she

has flies to carry she generally cuts off the wings
and legs for the simplification of transit, and to
see her at the process is almost to be compelled
to have views on the subject of insect intelligence.
WASP PLAGUES 207
A wasp has been seen to struggle against the

wind with a fly, and, finding that its wings caught
the breeze, to descend and shave them off in the
most knowing fashion. It may thus be said that,
as a fly and maggot and aphis destroyer, the wasp
plays a useful part in the world to set against
its depredations in the orchard when fruit-time
comes round and the occasional poisoned dagger -
work it carries out on the human cuticle.
It must not be assumed, however, that the wasp,
as wasp, a carnivorous animal, for it is not.

is
The grubs are carnivorous, and all the bodies of

aphides and flies brought to the nest are for them.
Inside they are torn up and administered to the
occupants of the cells, which are as voracious
as young cuckoos. If a nest is broken up and
a comb containing live grubs is secured, the grubs
may be fed with fragments of meat and the keen-
ness of their appetite realized. This gross taste
disappears when the young has passed
wasp
through the pupa stage and reaches developed
insecthood. Though it then hunts for flesh for
the use of its younger brethren, it finds its own
sustenance mainly, like the bees, from flowers,
till the fruit is ripe, when it concentrates its atten-
tionon the sweetest it can find, preferably plums
and pears. At this stage in its life -story the
wasp generally gives up the labour of keeping
the community going, knowing, perhaps, that the
first October frost will bring the whole enterprise
to an end and when ripe pears are falling from

;
the tree, there may the marauders be found in

numbers all day long.
2o8 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
It is an interesting sight to watch them when
thus engaged. They prefer to operate on a pear
from which a blackbird or starling has taken a
beakful, and it is no uncommon thing to find
them eat out the entire inside of the fruit, leaving
the skin intact, save for the original bird-made
entrance hole. When thus employed they fight
fierce with one another, grappling and
battles
savagely biting, but apparently never iising the
sting. That seems to be reserved for enemies of
another race. Bluebottle -flies have also a fancy for
ripe pears, and it is amusing to note the hasty way
in which one of them abandons a fruit when a
wasp comes to take possession. When wasps are

engaged on ripe pears, so greedily engrossed do
they become that it is a perfectly easy thing to
seize one by the wings for examination. Its rage
when so seized is great, and frantic efforts are
made to sting, but when liberated it will generally
be found to make straight again for the pear.
A little earlier in the season a wasp, taken liberties
with in this way, would put aside every other
thought in favour of revenge.

SEPTEMBER
THE BUSY BEE
IN these autumn days the garden, unless the
succession of been very knowingly
flowers has
arranged, acquires a rather bedraggled and empty
look. The summer blooms are all past their best,
and the autumn glory is still to unfold itself.
But sunflowers of all sorts make a very glowing
display, even if they are rather full blown, and
where sunflowers are, there may be found the busy
bee. When, however, I examine the bees in my
sunflowers, I am
forced to the ungenerous thought
that business not their distinguishing trait.
is
"
Here, for example, is a black bumbee." It
rests on the disc of a ripe sunflower, so ripe that
it has curled into the similitude of what a female
person calls an iron-holder. About the bee there

is a strange and uncharacteristic leisureness. It
has tarried on this bloom, to my knowledge, for

half an hour, and to say that it is gathering honey
all is an exaggeration of politeness.
the day It
makes enough movement to show that it is
just
alive. At long intervals it withdraws its pro-
boscis from one full-blown floret and thrusts it into
another, but the whole action is performed with
airs of boundless time to spare. Perhaps this
bee is a bad character, a shirker among a busy
tribe, a person without respect for the glorious
traditions of the apian race. But no I turn
;
to the other sunflowers and find that each has its

bee, some two, and that all the bees are behaving
in substantially the same way. There has evidently
been a complete break up of the moral foundations
of the bee world.
The case must be investigated, so with a pencil
I touch the first bee
prod him in the ribs, so to
speak. Generally speaking, the action of a bee
which is prodded in the ribs may be predicted.
It utters a fierce buzz, rises on speedy wing,
flies bang into the face of the author of the
outrage, and stings. It will not have liberties
taken with it, will a bee. But the behaviour of
the animal on the sunflower is not modelled on
the conventional bee tradition even in this respect.
A large, well-developed, and muscular bee, with
great breadth of beam, it seems pre-eminently
adapted for belligerency, but when pushed in its
hairy side the most it does is to feebly raise one
leg and wave it in the air. There is a weak
sputter of bee -noise, and noise and action together
"
say quite plainly, Go 'way." The bee does not
withdraw its proboscis from the floret. I
push
it more
energetically, and it responds by waving
two legs, but still sticks determinedly to the busi-
ness of suction. Apparently the nectar in the
sunflower is extraordinarily seductive, so good, in
fact, that while it flows down the bee's throat
every passion but that of indulgence goes into
retirement.
The investigation must be pushed further. We
THE BUSY BEE 213
shall see how the bee behaves separated from

this delicious fluid, so I knock it completely off
its sunflower. To such treatment a volcanic out-
burst of rage would be the right response, but
nothing of the sort takes place. The bee has
landed on its back, and so it lies, buzzing weakly
and waving its feet in the air. An active
imagination might detect in its song the words,
"
We won't go home till morning," and there
is a distinct leer in its large eye. A few ribald
remarks follow, not fit for publication, and finally
the bee goes to sleep. In half an hour it bestirs
itself, stretches its legs, and manages with an
effort to get right side up. Then with a prodigious
expenditure of energy and output of noise it
manages to launch itself into the air, and after
one turn round it plunges right into the heart of
the sunflower once again.
By this time it is what policemen call a clear
case. The bee is a drunkard, and the sunflower
"
is its favourite pub." When it first opens shop
and puts out yellow sign, the sunflower is a tem-
its
perance establishment none more respectable. It

opens two or three hundred barrels filled with a per-
fectly innocent beverage, and invites bees to come
and drink. The bees come worthy, industrious,
law-abiding creatures, who extract the nectar and
go home with it, and deposit it in the honeycomb.
But gradually a change comes over the character
of the sunflower. Its nectar ferments, and from
being a temperance-house it becomes a shebeen.

It is then no place for respectable bees. And,
as a matter of fact, those bees of which I have
been writing are not, and never have been, entitled
to the name. They are drones.
There is a tragedy in drone life, and it is being
worked out just now, though in no very tragic
spirit. Throughout the long summer the drone
had a glorious time of it. When the sun shone he
moved from flower to flower, sipping nectar all
the day, and never bothering to take any home.
That was the work of the female in the bee com-
munity. When it rained he stayed in the hive,
and there was always a little drop o' summat on
the chimney-piece to which he could put his lips
when so dispoged. Probably he looked with
lordly scorn upon the drudgeful female working
bees, with their engaged and over-anxious ways.
But all the time those ladies had an eye upon
him. Perhaps they communed with one another
about him and his idle, wasteful habits, nodding
"
the while and saying, Wait, you, till we have
no more use for him." The moment when they
had no more use for him came, and they bundled
him out-of-doors, and if he returned they stung
him to death. Most of the drones did not try
to return they knew better. Down in the mouth,
;
"
they flew to the nearest sunflower pub." to drown
their sorrows in drink, and their last days are
those of the sot. In the cold of the night-time
they become numb and three -fourths dead, and
when the sun rises it thaws them out and they
resume their course of tippling. At noon they
"
are tolerably competent, a little rocky about
the feet," yet able to move from shebeen to
shebeen. By four o'clock they are blind fou.
THE BUSY BEE 215
One cold night a touch of frost will settle their

case, and they will pass away with alcoholic
dreams.
The drone is a great deceiver of human kind.
He is of more robust build and altogether of
more dread -inspiring aspect than the worker bees,
and ninety -nine people out of the hundred treat
him with respect. But he is no more able to
inflict punishment than a bluebottle fly. He is,
in fact, a pure humbug, for, knowing himself un-
armed, he carries himself with all the terrifying
airs ofa gladiator. Capture him and he will raise
his abdomen with the same threatening gesture as
the sting -bearing worker ; blow smoke upon him
and he will erect his hair and execute a series of
menacing movements, all carried out with .such
verisimilitude as to overawe even knowledge of
his helplessness. In short, he trades upon the
real terrors of the ladies of the hives.
How, then, it will be asked, can one distinguish
in order to give respect only where respect is
due? The correct way is to approach your bee,
magnifying-glass in hand. Concentrate attention
upon the two upper segments of its hind leg. If
these, the tibia and the first tarsal joint, are found
to be broadened out and fringed with hairs, leave
that bee alone, for it is a female and bears a
sting, and the appearances alluded to constitute
its pollen-brush and corbiculum or bread-basket.
If the corbiculum is absent the bee is a drone, and
you can afford to be bloody, bold, and resolute.

THE SPARROW'S HOLIDAY
THE sparrow's points of contact with humanity
are, aseverybody knows who has studied his
ways, very numerous. He has adopted our
dwellings as his own. He has so nicely adjusted
himself to human economy that we have, in no
fanciful sense, become his servants and providers.
A creature of urban civilization, he is as familiar
with the dangers of the streets as a gamin, and
makes as little of them. He knows our ways and
our weaknesses, and takes full advantage of both.
His latest tribute to humanity is the adoption of
our habit of treating ourselves to a summer
holiday.
I am the happy possessor of a bit of ivy-
covered wall, which is the happy home of a goodly
sparrow company. There they nightly go to rest
before darkness sets in their one thoroughly
respectable trait. For quarter of an hour their
squabble for the best sleeping -perches makes a
quiet corner clamorous, and fills with futile longing
the pussy cat which is the latest addition to my
live stock. They do not manoeuvre for position ;
there is no finessing about sparrows. They simply

plunge in among the ivy leaves and elbow
vigorously for places, scolding in real backyard
THE SPARROW'S HOLIDAY 217
style they do it.

as This had so long been a
regular nightly performance that the cat counted
upon it as an excitement with a reliable place
in his daily programme.
Quite suddenly one night in August the per-
formance did not take place. Pussy was in his
place, waiting for the excitement. Thinking that
the show was over for the day, and wishing to
gratify him by renewing it, I flung a stone into
the ivy, expecting to see the sparrows come out.
This had been done before, with success gratifying
to the feline spectator. On these occasions the
sleepers had always emerged with a rush, settled
on a neighbouring pear-tree, and after debate,
couched in tones of high resentment, had dropped
back to their places one by one and settled down,
after the inevitable amount of shoving, for the
night. But on this occasion
nothing followed the
flinging of the stone, and when darkness fell not
a sparrow had taken its place. Next night it was
the same, and it became evident that my fifty
feathered tenants has deserted me. How was this
strange behaviour to be accounted for? I was

certainly not to blame. True, in seed-time I had
tried hard to capture and kill, as an example,
some members of the flock, then very active work-
ing havoc in the seed plots. But if that manifesta-
tion of hostility was resented at the time, it had
long been forgiven and forgotten. Perhaps some
owl had taken up his quarters in the ivy, and
rendered it untenable as a dormitory for small
birds.
That that was not the explanation was made
2i8 ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
clear when one night the whole flock reappeared
on their old ground, and resumed their old habits
with all the old airs of confidence and owner-
ship. And then, of course, the whole mystery
was plain as print. They had been away for their
holiday, and, plebeian birds though they are, had
chosen for it the aristocratic holidaymaking-time
of the year. Just about the date when the grouse-
shooters were making for the moors, to drive the
town vapours from their lungs by copious inhala-
tion of ozone and the scent of blooming heather,
the town sparrows shook the dust of the streets
from their wings and made for the fields. Perhaps
they held a parliament of their own on the pear-
tree, and discussed the cause and cure of that
" "
tired feeling and speculated on the benefits
of country air and food. Mrs. Sparrow may have
remarked that caterpillars were getting too big
and gross on the urban cabbage -patches, and that
now the family was up and doing for itself they
might all indulge in a little change. Mrs. Sparrow
may have thought that a" short experience" of the
simple life, a few weeks back to Nature before
facing the winter, would set them all up and
save doctors' bills. Whatever they may have
thought, off they all went and now back they all
;
are, looking brown and fit, chirping with the hearti-

ness of birds which have done themselves well,
and ready to declare that, though the country is
all very fine for a spell, after all the town's the
place.
The farmers, especially those whose holdings
lie within eight or ten miles of a large town,
know all about this autumn visit of the city

sparrows to the country. All the year round the
country population of sparrows is not very great.
In an average rural square mile there are more
sparrows than chaffinches, than buntings, than
greenfinches, than larks, blackbirds, or thrushes.
But there are not more sparrows than all of these
put together. Just when the corn is ripening,
however, there is a sudden and prodigious acces-
sion to the sparrow flocks, which have hitherto
found the roads and farmyards their chief hunting-
grounds, and the little brown-grey scallywags out-
number all other small birds put together. And
the chance 'deposits of semi -digested grain on the
highway no longer interest them. They take to
the standing corn, and the sight of them in full
operation is one to fill the agricultural heart with
rage.
Here is a wheat -field with a line of ash-trees
around its edges. The heads are full and turning
yellow. Passing along on a bicycle it is wonder-
ful how generally the birds have learnt to look
upon a man on a bicycle as safe you notice per-

haps a dozen sparrows hanging on to the grain.
Ride on and they will take no notice of you, but
confine their attention to the business in hand,
which is the consumption of untaxed corn. But
dismount at the nearest point to them, and I
A dozen sparrows, said you? A couple of hundreds

or more instantly rise from the corn, with'a unani-
mous chirping clamour and a noise which would
not discredit a covey of grouse. They make for
a tree at a safe distance, and converse volubly
on the situation. If the watcher moves slowly
away, still keeping an eye on them, he will find

before he has gone fifty paces that first one of
the marauders drops down among the corn in
the old place, then three, then five, then the whole
flock ;
and before he has gone a hundred yards
they are all feeding as greedily again as if they
had been on short -commons for a month. If,
on the other hand, the enemy looks like making
a stay, they will without much loss of time shift
their quarters, and begin operations on another
part of the field at a safe distance away.
The sparrows' digestion of grain must be
enormously rapid, for such is their dexterity in
stripping a head of wheat or oats that they seem
capable of eating in a quarter of an hour as much
as should stuff tight their little insides. Yet they
are at the job the greater part of the day. There
is a period, usually about midday, when they leave
off for a considerable spell. Then it is their joy to

assemble in, for choice, a hawthorn -tree, which
has a great abundance of little branches adapted
to the size of sparrows' feet, for a real good
gossip. To the ear of flesh they seem all to say
the same thing, and to say it in one word repeated
a million times. But the ear of the imagination
readily detects that the conversation is both
animated and varied. It is in praise of corn and
the delights of eating one's fill again and again.
How glorious it is to be nearly choked a dozen

times a day with sheer abundance, after picking
up a living which hardly suffices to keep one's
feathers tight through ten months of the year I
And what a delightful atmosphere they keep in

the country !And how pleasantly few are the
human bipeds to the square mile those worries
of the sparrow life of the towns. Sometimes a
farmer stalks the hawthorn -tree, with a gun well
loaded with scattering shot ;
and if he gets within
forty yards well, it is not nice to be shot. It
is not even nice, though not by any means so
sore, to have some of your relatives and friends

shot. But as a matter of reassuring fact so a
philosophical sparrow would proceed it most
providentiallyhappens that farmers are exceed-
ingly busy just when the corn is ripe, and have
little time to fool about with guns. And if the
farmer should be so malicious that he will go
gunning in sparrow holiday -time, sparrows have
still a very good chance of coming out of the
ordeal all right. They know how to look about

them, and it is a poor flock which cannot keep
an eye on more than fifty yards.
A GENTLEMAN IN VELVET
ONCE upon a time in the ages before work began

"
I read in a boys' paper an article telling How
to become a Taxidermist," and straightway pro-
ceeded to become one. The first thing to be done
was to compound a wonderful preparation for
use in skin-curing, and in defiance of the loudly
expressed protests of a family which took no
delight in evil smells, about enough of the stuff
was made to treat the hide of a horse. The next
thing was to find a subject, and to that end I
sallied forth. During an eager hour the black-
birds and thrushes of the vicinity ran all the risks
of war, but escaped all its penalties. They were
too nimble for a very indifferent marksman. Next
the squirrels experienced all the excitement of pur-
suit without being a penny the worse. But at
last a victim was found to the lust of youthful
"
experiment in a black water-rat."
A water-rat is a bad or a good object on which
to practise the art of taxidermy, just as you look
at it. The creature is endowed by nature with
about as much figure as a potato, with the result
that when it is set up it may fail to satisfy the
cravings of the Aesthetic eye. On the other hand,
no matter how bad your taxidermy may be, your
A GENTLEMAN IN VELVET 223
setting up of a water-rat is bound to be some-

thing of a success. Therefore it is a good beast
for a beginner to begin with.
This reminiscence is set down here merely to
enable me to express the wish that the enemies
of the water-rat were limited to the taxidermists of
tender years, for there is every reason to think
that a very innocent little animal is suffering for
sins not its own. On the brookside where I slew
my victim twenty years ago, I could count any
summer evening on seeing a dozen of them, looking
like miniature beavers, on a hundred yards of bank .
On a recent evening I searched a mile of it and

saw not one. They have been extirpated. And
why? Chiefly because in popular nomenclature
they share the use of a name which for the best
of reasons is in much disrepute ; and as at the
present time an anti-rat crusade is in full swing,
they are likely to suffer even more than in the past.
The first thing to learn about the water-rat is,
that it is not a rat at all. It has the dimensions
and some of the outward semblance of a rat, but
it is merely a vole, and there is no vice in it.
It has not even a nasty tail, an appendage which,
in its scaly forbiddingness, counts for much in
the rat's unpopularity.

The bank of a stream half choked with vegeta-
tion and a June evening are the time and place
to study the water-vole. You move cautiously
along with an eye on the off-side, and, if the
rat -exterminator has not been at work, should soon
catch a glimpse of the martyr to mistaken identity.
Probably he will be attending to his toilet, an
office to which he devotes great attention. Sitting
on his haunches like a little black or brown bear,
he carefully combs the fur of his face and head
with his fore -paws. This smoothed out to his
satisfaction, he surveys the surrounding vegeta-
tion and tries his teeth on the top of a tall grass,
" "
holding it with both hands with a squirrel-like
air. But grass is not much to his taste, and
presently he plunges into the water in search of
better fare. Swimming under the water, his
resemblance to the rat is complete enough to
ensure him the compliment of a stone from almost
any human creature who, seeing him, can lay
hands on one. But if no stone is flung he is soon
on the bank again with a piece of iris leaf or root,
"
which he evidently regards "a bit of all right ;
but almost any kind of water -growing plant

satisfies his sober taste. Barring alarms, this is
his inoffensive programme all day.
It would be difficult to name a
creature more
absolutely harmless than the water-vole. Its
relative the field-vole, as often designated a mouse
as the water-vole is a rat, is not harmless by any
means. When circumstances favour it, it multiplies
at a prodigious rate, and has been known to ruin
vast areas of pasture, not because it eats the
verdure up, as is sometimes thought, but because
it cuts out for itself a most lavish provision of
galleries at the roots of the grass, and thereby
destroys an amount of herbage out of all propor-
tion to its size. Those galleries are made for
the purpose of concealed movement, field -voles
having learnt in the course of their long history
A GENTLEMAN IN VELVET 225
that their fat little bodies are loved to an

embarrassing extent by hawk and owl. And
when industriously seeking the pleasures of obscure
security they give no thought to the interest of
the sheep -farmer, who is a much later comer on
the surface of the earth than themselves.
But the water-vole plays none of these pranks.
If a great congress of the species had been held
to consider ways of living inoffensive to the tyrant
man, it could hardly have devised a better pro-
gramme. It eats none of his crops. It injures
none of his property. It is scrupulously clean in
its habits, and as it does not tolerate fleas, like
the rat, to act as disease -germ disseminators, it
would work him littleno sanitary mischief,

or
even if it frequented his dwellings. But it never
goes near them. Add to its negative virtues that
it does not touch fish or fish ova, or even fish food
in the form of larvae and insects, and it will be

admitted that it is wonderfully successful in the
avoidance of offence. Its positive virtues are less
notable, consisting as they do in the one fact that

it eats
up vegetation which tends to choke water-
courses. But then his one positive virtue is
worked hard all day long, and may be held as
good as half a dozen which are brought only
occasionally into play. The solitary fact brought
against an otherwise blameless character is that
it digs holes in the banks of streams, but as the
holes are not frequent, and as the vole always

selects for them a bank of reliable consistency
where they can do no harm, this as an indictment
is mere carping.
15
Andyet with all its innocence the water-vole
leads a persecuted life. It might say, with
"
Stevenson's pirate, I never knew good come out
o' goodness." When it sallies forth for its blame-
less supper worthy of an anchorite, a supper of
herbs and water, it steps into the trap set for its
feet. When it sits up in conscious rectitude on
the bank in broad daylight to do its back hair the
passing ploughman or fisher heaves a rock at it,
and it succumbs to a touch which would hardly
inconvenience the tougher sinner who has cursed
it with its name. The prime mistake of its evolu-
tion was in the adoption of shape. its
Perhaps
itmade an honest effort to achieve distinction
when it adopted a short tail. But, alas it hides
I
this testifying feature away, and it is rarely seen
by the enemy till the owner is dead. In these

days, when the real black rat has all but dis-
appeared from the land, the colour of the water-
vole, a jet and glossy black, or sometimes a very
dark brown, might save it but it doesn't.
;
It
merely makes it a black rat to the majority.

THE ANTLERS OF THE RED -DEER
ORNAMENTS OR WEAPONS?
A GREAT many fine heads have fallen in the High-

lands during the past month, which in due course
will take their place as decorative elements in
the homes of Britain. In what light should their
owners regard them? Are they defensive weapons
like the horns of the buffalo, or decorative equip-
ment like the tail coverts .of the peacock?
Curiously enough the question is not so easily
answered as it seems.
It can be said confidently, however, that the
horns of the deer are not in the same category
with the horns of the buffalo or of any other
ruminant, while it is highly probable that their
history in the development of the race is as
different from these as it certainly is in the history
of the individual. The horns of all the other
ruminants are permanent, and they are present
on both sexes. This means that they are defensive
weapons in the fullest sense. Those of all the
deer, with the single exception of the reindeer,
are confined to the male sex, and they are shed
annually. The winter, too, is the season when
they are absent. Now, most deer are natives of
countries of which wolves also are, or were, indi-
genous inhabitants, and the winter is the season
when wolves pack and become particularly
dangerous enemies of deer. From this it would
follow that the antlers of the deer have not been
developed as weapons of defence, for if that were
their character they would be possessed by both
sexes, and would last throughout the year. What,
then, is their function and history?
If nothing were known of them beyond the
facts briefly stated above, the naturalist would
feel justified in including* the deer antlers in his
" "
list of secondary sexual characters ;
but a great
deal is known besides which definitely relates them
to sex. Thus if either by accident or purposive
mutilation a stag is desexed, very remarkable con-
sequences follow to his antler development.
Should the operation be carried out when he is
without antlers he will never renew them. Should
it be carried out when he is adorned with antlers he
will never cast them. This means that the whole

set of physiological processes which in normal
circumstances produce the annual growth and
shedding of the antlers is a sex process, and
that it is permanently arrested at the moment
when sex is destroyed. The association is even
more marked if the act is performed at any of
the intermediate periods. When the antlers of
a deer are growing they are soft and tender,
richly supplied with blood-vessels, and covered
with a velvety skin which is cast when the horns
reach their full size. Should the stag by accident
"
or design be desexed when its antlers are in the
THE ANTLERS OF THE RED-DEER 229
velvet," their growth stops from that day and

the velvet is never cast. It dries up, but adheres
hard to the horn.
Another curious fact marks the sex character
of the grand armature of the deer. Antlers on
a female deer are about as rare as a beard on a
woman, but old hinds supposed to be past the
fertile period of life have been known to produce
them. Something of an analogous nature has
been seen in the human species, and it is far from
uncommon the case of fowls.
in In these days
of poultry-rearing and marketing, few
scientific
fowls are ever permitted to attain old age, but
in former days it was common farmyard know-
ledge that hens allowed to live beyond the laying

period tended to develop wattles, and even spurs,
and to crow like cocks.
There is accordingly no doubt that the antlers
of the deers are sexual characters, and that their
evolution is more akin to that of the peacock's
tail coverts than to that of the purely defensive

of offensive weapons of the other ruminants. But
the question remains, Have they been developed
as sex weapons, like the spurs of the polygamous
fowls, or as ornaments, like the wattles and finer
plumage of the cock? It looks like a question
which answers and yet the answer is not so
itself,
certain as it Most naturalists are agreed
seems.
that, especially in the case of polygamous animals,
both ornament and fighting capacity play a great
part in enabling the males to secure the large
harem which they all aim
and the antlers of
at,
the deer are both ornamental and warlike.
Deer fight with their horns and occasionally with
their feet, and nothing in the whole field of animal
belligerency could seem fiercer or more determined
than their combats. But even in their fiercest
enounters there is a good deal of make-believe.
They try to terrify one another like those soldiers
of France who practised the art of looking fierce
in their drill -yards. Their challenge is loud and
long, and when they come to close quarters the
clash and clang of their antlers is awesome to
listen to. But in the great majority of cases the
fight in nothing more than the dashing
consists
of one bony mass against another with prodigious
noise. Cases are known in which the antlers of
the fighters have become interlocked, with fatal
results for both and cases are far from un-
;
common in which one of the fighters receives

wounds from which he dies. But usually weight
carries the day, and the battle ends without either
of the combatants breaking the other's skin. The
defeated stag has simply been overawed by
resounding clash, and there is at least one case on
record of a hornless stag forming a harem and
keeping all rivals at bay. This would suggest
that deer can fight successfully without horns, and
that horns are menacers in the main.
A not uncommon the
sight in
Highlands
during late October or early November disposes
those who witness it to look upon the stag, while
not disputing his real courage in the lists of love,
as a great posturer. Trampers in the hills occa-
sionally come upon patches where over a space
of several square yards the heather, and even the
peaty soil below, is all torn up. If you were within

sight when the heather and turf -tearing was done,
this is on the grazing -ground
what you would see :
there a stag jealously herding the company of

is
hinds he has been able to gather for himself.

On the eminence is another stag trying the effect
of terrifying tactics on the more successful rival
below. up his head and roars. He swings
He lifts
his head about and tears up the turf with his
horns. There is a prodigious show of power,
and generally a suggestion that he has more than
half a mind to go down and tear the other fellow
into shreds. Some of the hinds are manifestly
impressed, and show a disposition to move away
and join the prepossessing young buck on the
ridge. But the old stag rounds them up with many
a disciplinary shove, and that is generally all he
does. Generally, too, menacing is all that the buck
on the ridge does. He is in hope that the stag
below will take fright and run away. This is a per-
formance that usually takes place after the more
real fights which, at an earlier stage, have deter-
mined the question of which stags are to possess
a harem of hinds. When the harem has actually
been formed a wise stag pays little attention to
challenges. He knows precisely what their value
is, and possibly he knows, too, what will happen
if a multiplex husband gets into a scrap. What
takes place when an unwise stag leaves his herd
to beat off an encroaching rival has often been
witnessed. A third stag promptly appears upon
the scene, and attempts, sometimes successfully,
to carry a cluster of the ladies away.
It is often said in these days that the antlers of
the present race of red-deer in Scotland are
diminishing in size, and the owners of many deer
forests, believing this to be true, take special pains
to repair the defect. To this end they from time to
time introduce park deer from England and from
European countries, like Hungary, where the breed
runs to greater weight than with us. Some of
them, believing that big heads go with good feed-
ing to which alone the superior heads of the park
deer are attributed provide their herds with ample
winter supplies.
That on a long view the antlers of deer show
a great reduction in size there is no doubt what-
ever. The antlers and skeletons of stags have
been recovered from the peat mosses of Scotland
immensely larger than any that have ever been
seen on living red -deer, and modern records bear
out strongly the belief that the process is going
on. But there are several reasons why we should
account it strange were it otherwise. The first
was pointed out by Darwin half a century ago,
when he said that the practice of the Scottish
sportsman of steadily killing the finest stags must
inevitably cause the whole race to degenerate a
practice, by the way, which, as Darwin noted,
is exactly the reverse of that followed by the Incas
of Peru. It is true that deer have been hunted

in this country ever since it had human inhabitants.
But down to the era of the rifle the hunter's power
of selecting the best was very limited. He had
generally to take what he could get rather than
what he would like, and as the deer-stalker till
less than a century ago was after venison rather

than a trophy, did not matter to him very much
it
what sort of head he got.

To-day the deer-
stalker is after trophies all the time, and the
modern rifle vastly increases his power of selecting
what he wants. This selection of the great heads
is more likely to affect the stock in the case of
deer than the selection of the best individuals in

almost any other species of animal ; for, thanks
to the deer's polygamous habits, a stag is for all
practical purposes prevented from perpetuating
himself he has acquired his great head. The
till
general result is that one can never read a review

of a stalking-season in these times without finding
the shooting of a stag with a head of long and
thick beam and tine, dark-coloured and rough,
recorded as a rarity" the typical old Highland
stag not often met with now, when horns are
more generally light in colour and smooth in tex-
'ture." The roughness of the deer's antler is
merely the record of the network of blood-vessels,
which built it up when it was soft and growing,
and a smooth horn denotes a deficient blood
supply.
" "
This elimination of the fittest would account
for almost any amount of reduction in the antlers
of the deer, but there is another considerable
probable cause. In our time the deer population of
Scotland is almost confined to the hill country,
so much people think of the moun-
so that many
tains and moorlands as the animal's proper and
chosen habitat. That, however, is a mistake.
Throughout its range, which extends over tern-
perate Europe and Asia, the red-deer is much
more of a forest than a hill animal, and in the
past it ranged over the whole of the British Isles.
It happens that the less valuable ground to which
it now (putting parka aside) almost confined
is
is the most markedly deficient in the plant life
and mineral constituents necessary for the forma-
tion of bone. That deficiency does not affect
carnivorous animals, or, indeed, animals on which
the bone -making demands are normal, but those
of the stag are abnormal in a high degree. A
full-grown stag sometimes carries .twelve or thir-
teen pounds of bone on its head (the forest deer
of Europe carry much more). The massing of
bony material here is not to be compared with
that on the brow of the Cape buffalo, but the
buffalo does not cast its horns from year to year.
It adds continually to The red deer,
their size.
on the other hand a much
smaller animal builds
up a new set every summer, so that a fourteen -
pointer, presumably fourteen years old, might in
the course of his life have produced and cast
away as much as a hundred pounds of bone. How
the vast expenditure is sustained is a puzzle.
The scarcity of lime and salts, the materials of
which bone is formed, is believed to account for
some curious deer forest phenomena. Many
thousands of antlers are cast in the Highlands
every year, but it is rare indeed for a set to be
found. Keepers occasionally find a set, but those
found do not represent one in a hundred of those
shed. What becomes of them? There is no doubt
whatever that they are eaten by the deer them-
selves. Whether the stags ever participate in this

strange food is doubted, but that the hinds eat
them is beyond dispute. They have been seen
at it. When a herd of hinds find a horn one gnaws
at it till she is tired, and when she abandons it
another takes it up. There is a case on record
of a hind found dead with a part of a chewed antler
sticking in its throat, and another case of a deer
shot the tips of whose antlers had been gnawed
on his living head. Though entire antlers are so
rarely discovered, the basal bosses of antlers are
a common enough find, and in these cases the thin
end is always gnawed.
But stag horns are not the only objects capable
of gratifying this curious appetite of the deer.
Any kind of bone left exposed on a moor or hill
inhabited by them quickly vanishes, and there is
a Hebridean case of the skeleton of a horse being
completely consumed by deer in a few months.
Probably the skeletons of dead deer vanish in the
same way. Every one familiar with deer-forest
exploration have observed the abundance of dead
deer and the rarity of skeletons. I have happened
upon as many as a dozen dead deer in a day. The
fresher of them bore evidence of the recent
attention of foxes and crows, and the oldest were
still providing food for maggots. But clean
skeletons hardly ever occur. If we assume that the
ribs and the bones of the legs have been gnawed
by the deer themselves, the burial of the rest by
vegetation would be a simple affair. In justice
to the deer, however, it must be said that this
taste for bones is not peculiar to them;. Other
animals which graze on the hills share it, and
Highland cattle have been seen greedily chewing
at the skeleton of a dead sheep hardly past the
carrion stage.
The production of antlers year by year must
be of some use to the species which produces
them, but the case of some extinct deer suggests
that a point may be reached when whatever advan-
tage big horns bring is more than counterbalanced
by the drain of producing and the labour of carry-
ing them. In the case of the Irish elk which
was not an elk at all, but a true deer the antlers
frequently measured nine feet across, and weighed
as much as from eighty to ninety pounds. When
"
one thinks that this mighty mass of osseous
"
matter was thrown out in the course of a few
months every summer and discarded every winter,
one can readily believe that the sheer uneconomy
of it contributed heavily to the fate which befel
the animal.
THE FAIRY RING
THE warm humidity of the past week or two
has proved very favourable to fungoid growths
of all sorts. On tree-trunks, on decaying wood-
work, and, above all, on old grasslands the pro-
verbial swift maturity of the mushroom family
has been claiming the attention of even incurious
eyes. On the grass plot beside the door you find
in the morning a little forest of brown and for-
bidding-looking agarics, and could swear there

was no sign of them the night before. The golfer,
making his morning round, practises driving on
the temptingly poised umbrella-heads, and leaves
not one in his wake. But next day there are plenty
more. He may even find a whole ring of them,
many yards in circumference, perfect in its circular
drawing, which seems to have come into being
by the magic art of some dark agency of the
night.
The fairy mushroom ring has puzzled mankind
from the earliest times, and it remains in many
ways the most interesting of fungus phenomena
in this country. At all seasons of the year it is
easy to discover on any piece of well -cropped
permanent pasture a circular patch well marked
off from the rest by its colour. The circle may
be anything from a yard or less to a hundred
yards in diameter, and not infrequently it is broken
by what seems to be, and, in fact, is, its coalescence
with another ring. Throughout the greater part
of its extent the ring is occupied by grass much
greener and more vigorous than that of the rest

of the pasture, but generally on its outer edges
the grass is brown, feeble, and occasionally quite
dead. Then at a favourable season, like the
present, around the extreme outside edge of this
brown part there comes into being, with the most
startling suddenness, a circle of mushrooms, grow-
ing side by side with a strangely artificial-looking
regularity. The pileus, or cap, of each at first is
of a brownish ochre in colour, becomes paler with
age, and fades to a rich cream before it finally
diesaway.
How
account for a vegetable family endowed
with so curious a geometrical habit? How the
ancestral wisdom explained it, every child of, at
any rate, the last generation knew perfectly. The
fairies who lived in subterranean dwellings had
certain well-marked habits. On moonlight nights
they issued forth and engaged in dances on the
green, linking hand-in-hand and tripping it round
a circle. Very naturally, indeed, the grass refused
to grow on a circle trodden by such elfish feet,
and no less naturally a plant which formed the
favourite throne of the elf a plant itself of elfish
nature, since it grew without seed selected that
particular place for its development. In short,
the ring mushrooms grew out of the footprints
of the circle -dancing fairies. Thus the brown
THE FAIRY RING 239
ring of withered grass and the ring of fungi were

both explained in the most satisfactory way, and
nothing remained to account for but the verdure
of the grass enclosed in the space within. And
what more simple? All dumb animals have a
special knowledge of, and a deep respect for, the
denizens of the nether world and the sheep, recog-
;
nizing the ground which the fairies had traced out

as their own, took great care not to trespass upon
it. Thus everything was clear.
The humdrum botanist, dissatisfied with these
explanations, has formulated certain others of his
own, and if you care to believe him the mystery
is accounted for in a way something like this :
The fairy ring mushroom, which he prefers to

know as Marasmius oreades, is, like all others
of its kind, parasitic in its nature. It cannot
extract from the soil or the air the material neces-
sary for its existence, so it gets what it requires
from the decaying substance of other forms of
vegetation. Also, like others of its kind, it shows
above ground only its spore -bearing parts, the
equally or more important part of its body, the
mycelium, remaining out of sight. Now, suppose
that a Marasmius has begun to grow from a
spore suitably placed in meadows or pasture soil.
Its growth is a small circular patch of
first
mycelium, which closely invests the roots of the

grass, and these, as a consequence, either become
very unhealthy or die. In due time, what is
popularly known as a mushroom grows from the
mycelium and sheds its spores abroad. This is
the beginning of the fairy ring. Its subsequent
24d ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
development is just an extension of the process.
The mycelium exhausts the ground which it

occupies, and therefore its further growth must
be outward. It follows that in its second stage
there is a small circular patch of exhausted ground
surrounded by an outward -growing circle of living
mycelius. This hi turn exhausts its grounds,
and continues to grow from its outside edge
into the unexhausted soil without. The circle of
growing mushrooms and the circle of withered
grass are therefore explained, and all that remains
to account for is the verdure within. And this is
explained by the fact that the out ward -growing
mycelium, developing from its outside edge, must
always leave behind it a mass of mushroom sub-
stance, which, since it has nothing to live on, dies
and decays. Thus the mushroom, which begins by
impoverishing the ground it occupies, ends by
enriching it with a manure opulent in the most
valuable nitrogenous properties.
It will be seen from this that the fairy ring is
a growth it may be a growth of many years'
endurance and sometimes the green circle
;
becomes so extensive that, if placed on a hillside,

it
may be picked out at a great distance. But
the circular form is not always observed. Some-
times, as has been said, two growing circles meet,
and as they cannot extend into the ground ex-
hausted of mushroom food by each other, they
coalesce and form a figure eight. Where the
ground is particularly favourable many rings may
thus meet and produce an outline of undulating
curves. Again, a growing ring may meet an
THE FAIRY RING 241
obstacle, such as a stone, and a break in the con-

tinuity occurs which perpetuated in the subse-
is
quent growth. Hence the very common occurrence

of partial rings or segments.
In this country practically only one mushroom
is eaten (Agaricus campestris], but a great many
others are equally good as food, some a great

deal better ; and, strange to say, our favourite
is on the Continent no favourite at all, and the
Italians, who are the greatest fungi-eaters in the

world, refuse to look at it. Among the neglected,
but edible, British species is the Fairy Ring mush-
room. One of greatest authorities on the
the
"
subject says that when
of a good size and quickly
grown it is perhaps the best of all fungi for the
table, whether carefully fried or stewed with an
admixture of finely minced herbs and a minute
portion of garlic. It is, at the same time, tender
and easy of digestion, and when once its use is
known and its character ascertained no species
may be used with less fear." The champignon, as
the French know it, can be dried and the caps
strung on a thread, when the mushrooms remain
available for use for a considerable time. But
few are those who ever care to make alimentary
experiments with mushrooms, and when it is known
how closely the good are resembled by the bad,
the prevailing reluctance cannot be pronounced
either absurd or unwholesome.
16
OCTOBER
THE BRAMBLE
THE LATEST SMALL FRUIT
To mention the bramble is to set up a related

order of ideas which vary with the circumstances
in which the name is introduced. In rhetoric, and
particularly in sermons, the bramble is a symbol
of the desolate place, pilgrimage in which is misery.
It goes with thorns and briars the trio of God-
forsaken regions. Outside rhetoric all three enjoy
quite another reputation. The thorn becomes the
hawthorn, a very pleasant shrub whether in flower
or fruit, and not at all partial to really desolate
places. Briar becomes wild rose, the adornment
of the hedges, ready to spring on the margins of
rich land spared by the farmer. More than the
other two the bramble makes a shape of growing
on desolate wastes, but that merely means that
it can grow nearly anywhere. The desolate place
is not its own choice it is the place in which
;
we tolerate most.
it The places that I associate
with brambles are among the pleasantest places
I know. Here is one a road runs almost due
:
north and south, and on its eastern side there is

a beech wood. On the westward side the land
slopes away from it for about a dozen feet, and
at the bottom of the slope is a dry stone wall
about four feet in height. But you have to look
for the wall, for it is completely buried in brambles
rooted on both sides of it, and trailing over it.
There, facing the afternoon sun, the brambles
luxuriate, and are good to look at in all seasons
of the year.
In July this bramble-hedge is full of white
blossom, but its midsummer appearance is its
least attractive. For, though the bramble flower
is a rose, it is a poor specimen of a rose, with
petals which never quite fill their place, and sex

organs which seem to overfill theirs. Late in
August it becomes more attractive. Then it shows
growth, a few rich and luscious
fruit at all stages of
black berries, many more a strong, brownish red,
still more green, and among them, even at this
stage, flowers not a few. It reaches its best about

the last week when most of
of a bright September,
the fruit and conspicuous. At this stage
is ripe
the berry-picking boys and girls come upon the
scene and make the kind of scene dear to Birket
Foster's heart, and though blackberrying is not
exactly a thing of yesterday with me, I could
stillenjoy taking a place in the picture on a sunny
afternoon. And the charm of the bramble hedge
is not all gone when the brambles are picked. The
bramble retains a considerable proportion of its
leaves throughout the winter, and some of them
turn a bright red, and others a vivid yellow.
These, with the long red and green stems, make
a fine picture against the snow when it comes.
The manner of life of the bramble is not such
THE BRAMBLE 247
as to supply pleasing analogies for the human

moralist. Except when attacked by the human
being armed with a spade and bill, it is a success
in life, it succeeds like those people who get
but
on world by creeping over the shoulders of
in the
their fellows. It has long and tough stems, but
they have not the power of standing erect. There-

fore, the bramble gets on best when there are
either hedges or walls to support it. It has the
power of germinating and growing in very poorly

lit
places, and a common starting-point with it
is the shadowy bottom of a hedge. There it sends
up its young stem among the hedge twigs, hooking
itself on to them by means of its strong barbs.
These prevent it from falling back, and in the
course of a month or two it reaches the top. Once
there it sprawls over the hedge and enjoys the best
of the light that fallsupon it. Usually there are
four or five branches coming from one root, and
when they all get to the top of the hedge that part
of the hedge is predominantly bramble. But this
is only the beginning of the career of a bramble.
Its shoots may sprawl for twenty or thirty feet
over the hedge, and sooner or later their tips are
pretty certain to reach the ground again. When
that takes place a strange thing happens. The
growing end undergoes a complete change. The
leafy growth at the tip vanishes the tip ; itself
becomes thick, and seems to be pushing itself
into the earth. If it is pulled out while the process
young, it will be found to be sending down
is still
roots, and in a few weeks it will be as firmly

rooted at this end as at its point of origin. From
this new point of attachment with the earth the
bramble sends out new shoots, which in their turn
sprawl over the hedge, and again form new starting-
points. By this manner of growth it often happens
that what looks like a great mass of brambles
covering a hedge or a wall may be, in strict truth,
no more than a single' plant. Though many kinds
of branches do on occasion root themselves in
contact with moist ground, no other British plant
has the regularly established habit of spreading
itself in this way. Some, however, have methods
not very unlike it. The strawberry, for example,
sends out its runners, on which quasi-independent
plants with both leaves and roots arise, capable of
establishing an independent existence. Many
others have far-travelling underground stems,
which at intervals send down roots and up vege-
tative shoots. When the underground stem is cut
between these, each section goes on as a separate
plant. But the bramble carries out the plan in
a bold, grasping, and, literally, over-reaching
fashion.
" "
Common people speak of the bramble, but
many botanistswould not permit the use of the
singular. Some of them have divided the British
brambles into about a hundred species, each with
its strong point of specific difference from the
others in habit, foliage, flower, or fruit. Some
of the differences are visible to the most ordinary
observation thus brambles with pink instead of
;
the usual white flowers are common. But most

of the differences are slight, and many of them
are doubtless the product of the varying con-
ditions in which the plant finds itself, rather than
of variation established in the plant itself. Some
THE BRAMBLE 249
-
botanists, however, not chargeable with the species
making mania Hooker, for instance have ad-
mitted seventeen varieties of the British bramble,
all well marked and breeding true that is, retaining
their characteristics in changed conditions. It all
means bramble is a plant of flexible con-
that the
stitution a fact which should commend it to a
greater share of the attention of the horticulturist
than it has received in this country. For when
you get a plant with a plastic constitution it means
that it is one of those that present openings to
the improver. The fruit of the bramble is almost
universally appreciated, and it comes at a time
when small fruits are scarce or wholly absent.
Yet, strangely enough, we depend almost entirely
upon the wild supply, and a cultivated bramble
of any kind is a rarity. There is no reasonable
ground for doubting that if the improver took the
plant in hand he could, by choosing the best of
its natural varieties, by crossing them, and by
selection of the individual plants in the progeny
showing desirable points, greatly improve it, and
make of it a most desirable garden -plant. The
bramble has already been hybridized with the rasp,
the product of the union being the loganberry,
which is larger than the parents, but in other
respects not so good a fruit as either. An im-
proved bramble, larger in fruit, tidier of habit,
and carrying" more fruit in relation to its size,
is a much
greater desideratum. In America much
attention has already been paid to this subject,
and several varieties of bramble native to the
North American continent have been improved,
and have a recognized place in the fruit-garden.
SEED DISPERSAL
WE have our seed-time and harvest, but Nature

does not so divide the year. She sows her seed
as soon as they are ripe, and is doing it now in
the most prodigal fashion. A great deal has been
written about the ingenuity of the devices she
has evolved for the more effective accomplishment
of the function, and they are wonderful, indeed,
both in their cunning and variety. For the
scattering of its seeds the vegetable world has
enlisted the services of the animal world. Cherries,
apples, pears., plums, berries of every sort are
all but so bribes offered to animal nature
many
as an inducement to perform the service of carry-
ing the seeds. Birds eat berries, and the seeds
pass through their intestines uninjured. They are
thus carried far and wide. Almost all the fruits
which, in popular language, go by that name,
have hard or bitter seeds, which the eater rejects ;
and the service of diffusion is performed for the

reward offered. In less pleasant ways animals
are impressed in this service. Hooked seeds, of
which there are many, attach themselves to hair,
and stop there till the outer cover with its attach-
ments is reduced to dust, when the true seed falls
250
SEED DISPERSAL 251
to the ground, and perchance finds a fit place to

germinate.
Many of the devices of mechanics have been
anticipated by in their efforts to spread
plants
their seeds. The
dandelion and many of its
relatives have invented the parachute, perfect in
form, efficient in performance, and by means of
it sailtheir seeds down the wind in the search for
new grounds to occupy. Maple, ash, and lime have
devised divers shaped aeroplanes by which their
seeds are carried, even in still weather, well beyond
the shade of the tree that bore them. In the
tension produced in the drying pod of broom or
furze, and many others of their order, there is a
catapult which pitches seeds many yards from the
plant on which they grew. Some plants, like the
wall toad-flax, have actually evolved methods of
planting their own seeds. When the seeds are
ripe the fruit stalk moves away from the light,
and in this way searches out the shady crevices
in walls and rocks, there depositing the seeds in
the position best suited for their germination. And
so one might go on enumerating devices through
many pages.
But when everything has been said about the
" "
cleverness of plants in providing for the
placing of their children in the world, the fact
remains that they put their chief dependence on
prodigality. Seeds are produced in boundless pro-
fusion in order that, peradventure, one may survive.
In a season like the present, which has been as
favourable to wild fruits as it has been unfavourable
to those of the garden, some aspects of this sub-
ject are forced on one's attention as one walks
abroad. The rowans have been particularly beau-
tiful. Many trees have shown red from crown to
lowest branch. Probably nobody ever tried to
count the berries on a rowan-tree, but it is well
within the mark to say that they often run in
numbers into the hundreds of thousands. Yet the
rowan is quite a third-rate
success in spreading
itself, and doubtful if any particular rowan-
it is
tree has a progeny of one in half a century. In

that time it has produced millions of seed, pro-
vided the means of covering each with an alluring
pulpy flesh, all to this little end. It is difficult
to resist the opinion that it would have done as
well if had practised the hardest economy, and

it
thrown all its seeds from it naked and unadorned.

And the rowan is only exceptional in its con-
spicuousness. I have just been through a little
wood of alders skirting a river. The undergrowth
is heavy, its most notable components being plants
of the umbel family, particularly cow parsley. In

a narrow quarter of a mile the plants of this
class are many thousand strong, each thrusting up
its tall stalk headed with seed. Passing along
you can fill both hands with seed at every step,
and are tempted to play the part of the sower.
If all the united seed produced in this little strip of
ground were collected, it would suffice to sow cow

parsley over a whole county. But it is a practical
certainty that not one seed in this mighty provision
will ever get beyond the wood in which it has
been produced, and that there will be no more
umbels next year than there have been this year.
SEED DISPERSAL 253
The feeling is not easily forced down that the

umbels overdo it. Then here is a healthy plant
of the humble chick weed. Some one has taken
the trouble to estimate its latent progeny, and has
concluded that if all its seeds grew up and their
progeny were in turn equally successful for just
three years, the family of the single original plant
would cover all the land space of the globe. Yet
chickweed is not much of a success, and would
be even less of a success than it is if gardening
and agriculture had never been invented. For,
though the gardener is its greatest enemy, it makes
but a poor show of it where he or the farmer
have not prepared the ground.
With all their prodigality and all their clever
devices, the flowering plants are not by any means
such successful seed scatterers as the ferns which
in the modern world they have so nearly super-
seded. It is probably no exaggeration to say
that there are fern spores everywhere. Microscopic
in size, they fall from the back of
in millions
every fertile fern frond, float in the air, and form
a part of the impalpable dust which just becomes
visible in an isolated sunbeam. In time they
reach the earth, and only wait the suitable con-
ditions to germinate. But the conditions suitable
to fern germination are relatively rare, and the
fern's plan for reaching them is to powder the
whole world. Thus if there are only half a dozen
spots in a country suitable for a particular fern,
that fern will be found in those places (or would
if collectors had never been permitted to wander
at large). From this it may be inferred that

254 ODD HOURS WITH STATURE
in the success of the flowering plants the essential
element is not their ingenious ways of securing
seed dispersal, for the relatively unsuccessful ferns
manage it better, and not the number of the seeds
they produce, for, great though that number often

is, it is still insignificant compared with the number
of the fern's spores. They succeed better than
the ferns, chiefly because they send forth their
seeds, each provided with a food supply on which
the young plant can live during its tenderest infant
days. To begin development the fern spore must
fall on a damp place. The place, moreover, must
be so conditioned that the infant plant, micro-
scopic in size, can almost from its first cell-division
draw the material of growth from the environment.
At a later stage exceptional conditions are neces-
sary before the conjunction of the sexual elements
necessary to start the growth of the true fern
from the prothallus, which has developed from the
spore, can take place. All those difficulties the
flowering plant overcomes by giving its seeds
something to start life upon, and during its early
days every such plant lives not by its own exertions,
but on its inheritance. Thus love of offspring
may be said to have had its first hint of a begin-
ning in the flowering plants, and their great success
is their reward for inventing it.
MASCULINE FEMININES
" " "
THE difference between maleness and female-
"
ness a subject on which the biologists have
is
long been beating their brains, and the literature of

it would almost make a library by itself but ;
in these days it is open knowledge that the female

may develop a good deal of the male. To the
naturalist this potency is no new thing. I had the
pleasure of examining this week a hen capercaillie

shot in Forfarshire which exhibited the almost
complete plumage of the cock. But for its smaller
size it would have passed for a cock, and only a
sportsman quite familiar with the species would

have noticed that his quarry was a hen.
This power of 'the female to develop the
secondary male attributes, though usually rare
enough to excite interest and surprise, is as wide-
spread as sex dimorphism itself. That is to say,
in allspecies in which the sexes are markedly
different, individual females have been found which
have assumed the marks of the male. In the days
before scientific poultry-raising had been heard of,
the phenomenon was common enough in the farm-
yard to form the basis of a proverb. The henwife
cherished some particular hen for a real or
imaginary grace of character, and it
escaped the
pot till an advanced
age. One morning its mistress
was scandalized to hear it crow. If she spared
it till after its next moult she found it to assume
cock's feathers, and probably wattles as well.

Waterton gives a curious case of a hen which
assumed not only the plumage, voice, and spurs,
but also the warlike disposition of the cock, and
which, when opposed to an enemy, would erect
her hackles and show fight. The order of birds
to which the domestic fowl and the game birds
belong is rich in sexual dimorphism. In every

one of its species which is polygamous, and
that is the large majority,cock has
the
a much more ornamental than the
plumage
hen and in nearly every such case hens have
;
been found manifesting these attributes of the

cocks. In the case of the capercaillie, according
to Millais, there is one such hen in every two or
three hundred killed, but such frequency of occur-
rence as this is probably rare. It is possible,
however, that cases pass unnoticed.
many If the
male and the female are about the same in size
it would be rather remarkable if a case were
detected in which the hen had developed a com-
plete male dress, and in most of the cases on
record the assumption of male plumage was short
enough of complete to attract attention. The
difference in size between the capercaillie sexes
makes discovery easy, and perhaps accounts for
the large proportion of females with male attributes
found.
On somewhat similar grounds we may probably
account for the fact that it is this order of birds
1IKN LAI'KK'CAII.IK ASSUMING MALE PLUMAGE.
MASCULINE FEMININES 257
which has yielded the great majority of examples

of females assuming the characters of the male.
It happens that the birds of this order, being the
best of all food birds, are the most frequently
handled ; whereas in a dimorphic species which
is rarely or never handled, it would be strange
if the occurrence were detected. A female chaf-
finch or bullfinch, for example, might assume male
plumage ;but if it did not happen to be in
captivity, the change could never be observed. But
it is certain that the
development of maleness in
females is not confined to the gallinaceous birds,
for a ten-year-old duck has been known to assume
both the perfect winter and summer plumage of
the drake. Nor is it confined to birds. In at
least two species of deer, hinds have been known
to grow antlers, and, as everybody knows, some-
thing analogous occurs in the human species itself,
varying in notableness from the development of
masculine mental attributes to the development of
so unmistakably masculine an attribute as a
moustache or beard, or both.
Occurrences of this sort are of high scientific
interest for the light they throw on the problem
of sex and sex inheritance. In every investigated
case it has been found that the development of
secondary sexual male characters by the female
is associated either with age or with injury to the
primary sex characters. The barn-door hens which

assume cocks' plumage are almost invariably old
birds which are past laying. In many other
examples subjected to examination it is found
that the fertility of the ovaries has been destroyed
by disease or direct injury, and the appearance of
the secondary male characters after the ruin of
female characters has some important implications.
There is no subject in natural history on which
greater battles of theory have been fought than
the development of the ornamental and other
secondary sex characters of the males of dimorphic
species. Darwin explains them by his famous
theory of sexual selection, which, in the case of
birds, attributes to the female an aesthetic sense
which the male must satisfy. By the constant
selection of the males best capable of gratifying
this sense, the gorgeous tails of the peacock and
argus pheasant have been built up. In this theory

the characters are developed in the male alone,
for in him alone is there a call for them. Another
theory which has somewhat more favour to-day
assumes that the male of, say, peacock or pheasant
represents the normal race development which
would have resulted in equally beautiful members
of both sexes but for some inhibitory force
operating on the female alone. The inhibitory
power is a variation which natural selection has
fixed in the females by eliminating those that did
not possess it conspicuous females falling easy
victims to enemies when tied to the nest by the
duty of incubation. In support of this explanation
it possible to cite many examples, all to the
is
purpose that the birds in which high beauty is

confined to the male are open nesters whereas
;
in the case of hidden nesters is a

the kingfisher
case in point both male and female have evolved
in beauty equal in extent and kind.
MASCULINE FEMINIZES 259
The bearing of this theory on cases like that

of our masculine -feminine capercaillie is obvious
enough. These cases show that the secondary male
characters are undoubtedly transmitted to both
sexes, that they exist latentin the plain female
and may begin to develop any day. So long as
the creature remains a full female they remain
"
latent, but whenever her femaleness," either by
accident, injury, or original sterility, becomes in-
complete, the latent begins to make itself patent.
There is experimental proof, however, that by
certain means not involving direct sex injury the
latent qualities can be stimulated to activity. Dr.
Archdall Reid mentions certain emulsions which,
when injected into hens, supply the necessary
stimulus, and cause them to develop the combs,
wattles, and warlike disposition of cocks. He
does not mention how their laying powers are
affected. The broad fact is that in nature, when
a female begins to assume the attributes of the
male, she has ceased to be a female in the complete
sense.
THE SWALLOWS
BY time of the year the vast majority of the
this
birdshave completed their family business, and
many of them have even begun to flock. That
means that their summer economy is at an end,
and though possibly the best of the summer is
still to come, that their winter economy has begun.
They are seeking food and keeping company in

the way they will adhere to till spring again
arouses in them the instinct which breaks the
flocks up into pairs. But while this is true of
starlings, pigeons, some finches, and many wild-
fowl, it is easy to observe that the swallows are
still as busy with family-rearing cares as they
were in the month of June. Find the nest of a
house-martin under the eaves of some cottage,
and half a minute's watch will prove that the
birds are still coming and going with their
characteristically impetuous rush of wing, bring-
ing insects to feed a brood of young. They are
at it all day, and their energy is unabated after
months of toil.
Swallows raise two broods every season, and
it is, of course, the second brood that is engaging
their attention just now. But why should they

take so long about it? Many birds raise two
THE SWALLOWS 261
broods and have the whole process completed

before August begins, while it is no uncommon
thing for swallows to be hard at work right up
to the end of September. Sometimes, indeed, the
second brood is unfledged when the time for the
migration comes round, and in such a case as
that the old birds have been known to go with
their kind, leaving the young to die of starvation in
the nest. The fact gives one a vivid sense of
the impelling character of the instinct which can
overcome even that of parental affection, so very
strong in all birds ;
but the prolongation of the
nesting season remains unexplained.
It has been suggested that the explanation may
be found in the fact that the nest -making process
in all three species of swallow is a very prolonged
and elaborate affair. This is true. The sand-
martin, the weakest of them all, drives a tunnel
often four or five feet long into banks of sand
sometimes approaching rock in its compactness.
When it is remembered that all this is accomplished
with the soft and short beak of an insect-eating
bird as the only tool, it is possible to realize the
magnitude of the labour. Nor is the driving of
the tunnel the whole work, for at the end of it
the martin builds a nest which, though not an
elaborate piece of architecture, contains a large
mass of fibrous and feathery material which takes
time to collect.
The nests of the swallow and the house-martin
are of a totally different design from that of the
sand-martin, but each in its building takes up
much time. Both the saucer-shaped nest of the
26* ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
swallow and the sphere-shaped nest of the house-
martin are composed of finely worked mud or
clay. This clay the bird collects in suitable places
in mouthfuls and kneads into cohesiveness with its
own saliva. From the very nature of the case it
is impossible that much of the building can be
advanced at one time. The foundation layer is
attached to wall or beam by nothing but its own
cohesiveness, and till it is rigidly hard and dry
no more can be done. It is the same with every
successive layer it must dry before the next can
;
be attached to it, otherwise the whole fabric would

be brought to the ground by its own weight. In
moist weather the drying process must be slow,
and in the best of conditions it cannot be fast.
But, then, it must be remembered, a very large
proportion of swallows of both sorts do not build
their nest every year. They merely repair the
old ones, and if they were as speedy brood-rearers
as some of our native birds, the double brood of
these at least would be already on the wing. But
a house -martin's nest, which I have under observa-
tion just now, was found by the tenants on their
arrival in an almost perfect state so far, at any
rate, as the external masonry was concerned and,
nevertheless, the second brood is not yet far
advanced.
Few of us in these days have ever an opportunity
of seeing the nest of either the house-martin or
the swallow in what may be called their natural
conditions, and for the very good reason that the
vast majority of them have adopted conditions
which, whatever the birds themselves may think
THE SWALLOWS 263
of them, are to us artificial. But it adds wonder-

fully to one's interest in the birds to find their nests
built as they must have been during the long ages
before human dwellings dotted the land, and I
happen to be very familiar with a piece of coast-
line on which the sight may be witnessed summer
after summer. It is a cliff on the northern shore
of a sea loch, blessed therefore with a southern
exposure, and penetrated by half a dozen con-
siderable caves. These were hollowed out by the
sea in a past age, but an uprise of the land has
lifted them about forty feet above sea-level, and
interposed between the cliff-foot and the beach a
broad strip of dry land cumbered with fallen
rocks. The swallows build in the caves, attaching
their clay structures to the roofs, and in the case
of at least one large and vaulted cavern it is
possible to believe that they were tenants of these
roof-sites when the floor was used as the dwelling
of primitive man. On the face of the cliff outside
a much more numerous colony of house-martins
have their abodes, their globe-like nest being
attached to the under angles of the ledges.
But the chief interest of these neighbouring
colonies resides in the illustration they afford of
the swallow mind and its power of recognizing
essentials. In the course of its long evolution
the swallow formed the habit of nesting in caves,
but when it found the first open barn it was able
to recognize that here were all the essentials of a
cave. So now we have swallows "using every man-
made cave to which they can find access. Barns
with open doors, grain lofts with a broken win-
dow, old mills with the rafters conveniently ex-
posed they are all caves to the swallow, giving
the needed elements of a roof overhead, with con-
venient irregularities for the attachment of nests
where cats and other creeping quadrupeds cannot
approach. And as the interior of a building is
a cave to the swallow, the wall of a building is a,
cliff to the house -martin, and the overhang of
the roof or the corner of an elevated window repre-
sents the ledges.
There can be no doubt that the power of
recognizing that a made interior is as good as a
cave, and that a wall is as good as a cliff, has
proved of the greatest utility to these two members
of the swallow family. Over the greater part of
Britain natural cliffs are of rare occurrence, and
natural caves, even if we include great hollows
in trees, are rarer still. If, therefore, the house-
martin and the swallow were confined to them
for nesting sites, both species would be of ex-
ceedingly local distribution. As it is, they occur
in practically every district of the country, except
in the high altitudes. It may be said, then, that
the human settlement of the country has been the
occasion of a great expansion of the numbers of
the swallow tribes one point to set on the credit
side of our account with nature and against the bill
of extermination for which our responsibility cannot
be denied.
THE STARLING IN AUTUMN
AMONG the many characteristic things about the
starling nothing is more characteristic than his
feeding manners and customs. A blackbird feeds
like a conscious pilferer. Even when he is inno-
cently looking for slugs among the gooseberry

bushes he dodges in and out in a furtive fashion,
and is off at the first alarm. The sparrow has no
doubt whatever that he is a thief, and glories in
his shame. But the starling has a large and
homely confidence that all sorts of food are meant
for him.
One best sees this trait of starling nature in
the winter, when playing the charitable part to
the birds. There are all manners of approach to
the spread feast the swift come and the swift go
of the mavis, the reconnoitringly managed side
approach of the chaffinch, the studied stage by
stage advance of the greenfinch. The starling's
manner is to walk right up with a " thank-good-
"
ness-breakfast-at-last sort of expression, and
begin without any airs or graces to tuck in. He
is not quarrelsome, and does not deny other birds
a share, but, nevertheless, he is very sure that
the deposit laid down is meant for him. And
265
when he gets his upper mandible over a fragment
of desirable substance well, the fragment is his.
At present little flocks of starlings are feeding
on the fruit of the elderberry tree, and it requires
a bird of the starling's serenity of assurance about
his place in the world to do justice to such a feast.
The cymes of elderberries are always placed on
the extremity of branches, which are usually slender
and often pendulous. In fact, they form the
extreme outer surface of the mass of the tree. It
follows from this disposition of the fruit that it is
not very easily got at. It extends beyond all the
good perching branches, and as the berries have

to be picked off one by one the job of clearing
them is one of time and detail. The starling
manages it with much wing work. He descends
on the tree with a splash, and after much flounder-
ing gets a hold on among the leaf -stalks. As he
feeds his footing is constantly giving* way, and
before a cluster is cleared he may be resting
on outspread wings, deliberately using them as
supporting limbs. A dozen starlings feeding in
this way in an elder -tree make as much noise as
a cat among the ivy, and if there is a cat in the
neighbourhood he finds the watching of them a
frightfully exciting thing. The starlings are always
falling and always recovering themselves, and pussy
is plainly filled with a hope, against her better
judgment, that one of them will fall right down.
But, of course, one never does.
It is part of the starling's great confidence as
a feeder that he is almost the only bird in this
country which has the audacity to descend upon
THE STARLING IN AUTUMN 267
the backs of sheep and cattle in search of food.

Two or three of them may often be seen at one
time on the back of a cow searching" the hide with
great care from head to tail,and picking
up many trifles of insect -life which the cow is
well pleased to part with. Sheep appear to pro-
vide even better fare, no doubt because they afford
better cover for game, and the starling goes about
the business of hunting with a thoroughness all
his own. He prefers sheep lying down, but if
the animal rises while the bird is still at work the
starling; does not away. He assumes a
fly
balancing attitude, like a boy in a cart which has
begun to move, and then resumes operations when
the sheep comes to a standstill.
Most birds mix up their feeding- and their play-
ing, and are at both nearly all day. Like the
human animal, the starling keeps the two functions
quite apart. He has his working hours and his
hours of recreation, and that is perhaps the reason
why, when he is at work, he makes such a serious
business of it. At present in his daily programme
work is intermitted for at least two hours every
afternoon, and these he devotes to improving con-
versation and music. One of these starling con-
versaziones is as worthy of study as any function
of bird -life. The birds seem to talk and to take
great pleasure in one another's company. I have
been watching one such gathering in a half-bare

pear-tree, and without the aid of a glass it is
possible to see that the feathers of the throat of
every bird are in motion. With a glass one sees
that the birds are going through all the motions
of quite ecstatic song. The head is thrown up
with the gesture of a prima donna, it moves from
side to side, and the bill opens and shuts with
the play that should attend copious utterance. Yet
not a sound is heard. Get a little nearer and you
seem to be approaching a concert in which cas-
tanets are the only instruments employed. The
noise is caused by the rapid opening and shutting
of many bills. A little nearer still and you get
within musical range, and find that the starling
is quite a fine musician in intention, though his
powers of execution are small. He has a good

ear and a fine sense of rhythm, and, in fact, every-
thing that goes to the making of a first-class sing-
ing bird, except size of voice. The voice is hardly
larger than that of a competent cricket, and a
whole flock cannot make so much sound as one
little wren. But, then, the song of the wren is
a marvel in the magnitude of its outburst, even
if it were not contrasted with the tininess of the
bird.
There is, however, one very wonderful thing
about the starling's song. As you listen to it, many
of the notes and phrases seem familiar in a far-
away fashion. One of the performers has got
the notes of a blackbird, and he goes over them
again and again. If the listener knows bird notes
well he can pick out in the concert those of almost
every songster of the grove, but always uttered as
if the performer, in the language of the nursery,
"
were saying it little to himself." The truth is,
the starling is a conscious mimic. He has notions
about music, listens appreciatively to the song of
THE STARLING IN AUTUMN 269
other birds, and in his home-parties tries to repro-

duce them, and with remarkable success in every-
thing but volume. He does not even confine his
mimicry to the songsters of the grove, for he
tackles such a sound as the cry of the curlew, and
at ten yards his effort distinctly suggests a curlew
half a mile away.
But to a great extent these afternoon assemblies
seem to be devoted to gossip. Seated among the
branches, the birds appear to talk to one another
in a fashion which might be pronounced quite
decorously polite, so low are the tones, were it not
for the fact that they all talk together. And the
idea that they are conversing receives rather a
rude shock at times. What looks like conversa-
tion when the talkers are informally grouped among
the branches looks like something quite different
when, as sometimes happen, they select as the
scene of their gathering the telegraph wires. Here
they sit in rows, with gaps separating little groups,
and almost always with the heads looking one way.
In its general appearance an assembly so perched
suggests a comic artist's effort to caricature a
piece of music, and especially is this the case when
there are four or five wires. But the birds go
through the same performance as on the tree,
chattering away as fast as they can find utterance,
but obviously not chattering anything in particular
to one another. Like mankind when they have
nothing to do, they like to do it in company, yet
each individual does it as if he were alone.
A BEAUTIFUL CHARACTER
IN the article on earwigs in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica it is stated that scarcely any naturalists
have made the insect the object of study. If,
therefore, you wish to seek renown in a virgin

field, here you are. Go in and find out all about
it. I have made an
effort myself, without, how-
ever, finding out
enough to discourage anybody.
I
attempted to tame an earwig (by the kindness
method, of course), but found him strangely
unresponsive to affection. In fact, but for one
crowded minute of glorious life he sulked during
the three whole months I held him in captivity.
The episode alluded to occurred when, with the
idea of cheering the captive up, I introduced a
spider to his domicile. I hoped that they might
take to one another and be friends, but from

the first they regarded each other with settled
suspicion. The spider, a fine hearty specimen of
the domestic variety, with good muscular develop-
ment, settled down at once to work out an en-
veloping movement. With a sidelong gait sug-
gestive of a high-spirited horse, he moved around
the earwig, which at the same time rotated on its
axis. Once or twice the newcomer threw out a
270
A BEAUTIFUL CHARACTER 271
silken lasso, .which the earwig cleverly avoided,

and soon became evident that there was to be
it
a wrestling match under catch-as-catch-can rules.

The end came with lightning speed. While the
spider was still making pretty prancing motions,
the earwig rushed in, seized him in a half-Nelson
clasp, and, doubling up his own abdominal region,
scorpion fashion, administered three swift and
deadly crunches with his anal pincers, and it was
all over.
As I am discouraged this display of
easily
ferocity on the part of
my pet brought my taming
experiment to .an end. To another, as Don Quixote
says, is reserved this great achievement, though
I dare say I can claim to be the first since Adam
to try if the thing could be done. Nor was the

experiment altogether without results, since it
proved that the earwig's pincers are not, as some
naturalists allege,mere ornamental terrifiers, but
genuine and even formidable weapons of offence.
If any one wants to go in for earwig-taming,
now is the time. Lion -taming is sort of played
out, and besides lions are not easily got. With
earwigs it is otherwise. Take the bark off any
paling post at this season, and you may capture
a score. Shake a sunflower and out they will
drop by the half-dozen. Above all, look in un-
protected dahlias, and you will find the game
abundant and strong on foot. For the earwig is
as dainty a feeder as the object of a poet's vision.
As long as he can get flowers he will have nothing
else. In his own way he is a downright aesthete.
It will no doubt be said that the earwig is a
repulsive, abominable creeping thing, and that its
ugliness sufficiently explains its neglect by the

naturalists. But that is all a mistake. It is not
half so repulsive as the cockroach, which has
received any amount of attention and is invariably
presented to beginners in the science of en-
tomology and besides and this may be said to
;
be its trump card it has a beautiful character.

When a man says that he married his wife for
her beauty of character, it is generally surmised
that the lady is plain. The earwig undeniably
is plain, though it has its points of prettiness.
Its wings, for example which so few suspect,
tucked tightly as they are under their little covers-
are both delicate and beautiful. But its moral
charm isits real strength.
The vast majority of insects have not the rudi-

ments of a moral character, which, the psychologists
are agreed, arises out of the maternal instinct.
They drop their eggs in more or less appropriate
places, and let their offspring look after them-
selves. Chuck and chance it is their motto. Ants
and bees furnish a doubtful exception to the rule,
for though they take great care of their young,
the ants and bees that do the caring are not the
parents of the young they look after. What they
exhibit is indeed not the maternal instinct, but the
social and economic instinct, and their care is not
affection but interest. The earwig, on the other
hand, goes into the business of maternity with all
the beautiful solicitousness of a bird. She broods
over her own eggs, and if they are disturbed she
will collect them and stand on the defensive with
a courage equal to that of the barn-door fowl.

When the young are hatched she tends them and
leads them in the way earwigs should go.
Now this is surely a point of contact for the
sympathetic and all who like to encourage virtue,
and one fitted to, dimmish
prejudice. Other
positive virtues will almost certainly reveal them-
selves to research, for it is impossible to believe
that the good mother is good in no other respect.
At present, the earwig's other virtues remain un-
catalogued. It feeds robins, but it doesn't do
it willingly ;and centipedes which have not yet
revealed a single good quality do as much. But
if the
catalogue of merits is short it may be said
that the earwig's demerits are in the main mythical.
The first is its plainness, and many people who
would not themselves do much in a beauty com-
petition would crush it for its appearance. But
it must be confessed an animal is just as ugly
as it looks, and the earwig is deficient both in
line and colour. The second demerit is that it
enters people's ears, but how this story originated
is one of the mysteries. There
is absolutely not
one authenticated case of the slandered insect

having invaded the human ear. If an earwig were
to fin^ itself on the side of a human face, disliking
bright light as it does, it would make for the
nearest cover, and it might enter the aperture of
the ear, which from its point of view would seem
to be a kind of cavern. But earwigs do not get
upon people's faces, and their strongest instinct
is tokeep out of the way.
So completely has the search for evidence of
18
an earwigging propensity broken down that some
naturalists have tried to explain the name as a;
corrupted form of earwing. The wing of the
earwig is approximately ear-shaped, and fits into
the explanation very well. But, unfortunately for
the theory, the name occurs in languages in which
the confusion of terms is impossible and so remote
in their locus that they cannot have copied one
another. Thus in Latin it is Auricularia, in
modern European languages it is Perce-oreille,
Ohrwurm, Oorblazer, Ormask, Oerentvist, Gusano
del oido, etc., while in Armenian it is a word
meaning ear-enterer. The inference is that some-
body who lived before the building of Babel had
an earwigging experience which is commemorated
in world-wide nomenclature. Possibly it was Eve.
No garden has ever been free from earwigs, and
doubtless they had their place in Eden. Eve,
moreover, was full of curiosity, and brought worse
than earwigs upon her head. If she was the
person who had the experience she would, as a

matter of course, tell Adam all about it and make
the most of it, and probably more than the little
incident was worth. He would be glad to hear
about it, for it is on record that he named all the
beasts, and he must have been hard put to to get
distinctive appellations for the insect hosts.
It is worth mentioning that, though nobody has
ever been found who had an earwig in his ear, the
remedy for the emergency is ready and easily
applied. It is only necessary to blow tobacco
smoke into the cavity and the earwig will conie
out. The experiment may be made on a dahlia
or a sunflower, and if there is an earwig lurking

in the recesses he will emerge with a haste which
bears eloquent testimony to a sense of smell
cultivated on nothing grosser than floral perfumes.
NOVEMBER
A QUESTION OF CHOICE
THERE is a very laconic entry in Gilbert White's
Nature calendar to the effect that in November

bucks grunt." Any one who has the privilege
of exploring a deer forest at this season will admit
that bucks do grunt, and a good deal more, for
they roar and bellow in a fashion which may be
a little disturbing to weak nerves. The truth is,
the great heart of the stag is just now rilled with
love, which, as is common with male animals all

the world over, manifests itself first in a prodigious
passion of hatred directed against all of his
own sex.
It is not the love of the stag, however, so
much as the love of the hind that I am moved to
write about just now. I have just been reading
a book by a lady who traces most of the evils of

our world back to the fact, real or assumed,
evil
that the human female has been deprived of her
right to choose her mate a right enjoyed by the
female of all the higher animal races. She took
deer as a type, and her view of the case is that
the males fight furiously, and that the females
who have been spectators of the combat and judges
of it choose the better fighter as consort and king.
Thus the high quality of the breed is maintained,
a8o ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
thanks to the good sense and fine judgment
freely exercised by the hinds.
But is this have no
what really happens?
I
very exhaustive personal knowledge of deer forests

in November, but recently I had some talk with
one who knows them all the year round, and his
views and those of the lady do not harmonize.
In November stags begin to collect hinds, and
those graceful ladies are not allowed much choice
in the matter. When a stag has buffeted a few
of them into his train, and still wants more, he
casts his eye on the bevy of beauty another stag
has gathered and fights him for them. If he gets
the better of it in the fight, he drives the beaten
stag away and takes possession of his wives. Their
leave is not asked. If they show a disposition to
follow the beaten husband, the victor simply jostles
them into his train and shepherds them with jealous
eye. In this way a first-rate fighter gathers a
fine harem, and ought to be happy but he
;
is not.
"
Of all the miserable animals in the world,"
"
says my friend, a stag which has gathered a
large harem of hinds is the most wretched." Let
us suppose that his collection is complete. His
success means that a great many other stags-
mettlesome creatures, but younger and lighter are
left in desolate bachelor state. But they do not
accept that condition as inevitable. They hover
near the coveted collection and keep its owner in
perpetual hot water. One of those interested on-
lookers appears on a neighbouring eminence and
utters a challenging roar. He comes nearer, and,
A QUESTION OF CHOICE 281
by way of defiance, sweeps his antlers scythe-wise

through the heather in front of him, leaving a
mark in torn-up heath and peat which survives
the season. When this insolence becomes un-
endurable the master of the herd rushes out to
punish it. There may be a fight. In any case,
his eyes are for some minutes off his charges
while he is engaged chasing the intruder away,
and in those minutes complications arise.
Another young stag has been watching events
from the opposite side, and as soon as the attention
of the dominant one is diverted he approaches,
bold as brass. If there is a fight going ahead
he descends upon the packet of hinds and begins
to cut out a few for himself. It commonly happens
that they are by no means loth to go, and when the
lord of the lot returns it is to find two or three of
his wives trottingaway with a four-legged Jock
o' With a roar he rushes after them,
Hazeldean.
and probably the thievish young male bolts with
allpossible speed. If he stays to make a fight
forit the ladies will wait for the upshot, and only
accompany the victorious old stag when he indig-

nantly prods them back to join his other wives.
They go, in deference to superior force, casting
long, longing looks after the younger stag the
while.
This encounter over, this infidelity punished,
the stag in possession returns, only to find another
episode of the same sort in progress. An inter-
loper, perhaps two of them, are among his wives
inciting them to elopement. His rage flares up
again, and he dashes at them; and after them and
drives them forth and when he returns, weary
;
and moist with sweat, though he may have the

finest head in the forest, he is not the prettiest
stag. He holds his harem as an Arab chief does

his by prowess, and not by consent. For many
days he is kept trotting round his hinds, warning
off rivals, and not till he has beaten all the bachelor
stags in his district does he get anything like

peace. Even then he
is rather more of an angry
shepherd than a husband. The envious ones will

keep showing themselves. The light-headed
feminines will keep looking longingly at their
trim figures, and if they were not watched it would
*' "
be o'er the border and awa' with some of
them. Long before the time arrives for the break-
ing up of the association the great stag is worn to
a shadow, largely by the furious labour required
of him to beat off encroachments from without and
to repress infidelity within.
The whole theory of female choice in the animal
world has fallen a good deal into disrepute, and,
if it were well established, would not afford a
very good basis for an argument positing its
superiority. For it will be noted that most
of the cases on whicji it rests are cases of
polygamous animals. Five-sixths of the cases
on which it rests are taken from the order
of the game birds, which, from the peacock to
the blackcock, make great courtship displays
before the .females, who are supposed to choose
the male .with the finest plumage show, or the
best dancing style, or the finest gift of strutting.
If they do make the choice, it can hardly be called
A QUESTION OF CHOICE 283
a good one when so many of them settle upon the

same mate. In theory makes polygamy
fact, the
a feminine invention. It shows the feminines so
determined to ,have the best that they sink every
other consideration. /They would rather have a
twelfth share of the best than a monopoly of
a second-rater. <But the facts of the deer forest
suggest that ,if the ladies of the herd had their
own way <they would spread their favours much
better, and, instead of crowding upon the best
fighter, would show their appreciation of other
qualities.
BIRDS AND STORM
ON days of high and blustering wind most of

and it would be a puzzle to
the birds disappear,
the most competent of field naturalists to say
where they have gone to. He can do little more
than suppose that they are sheltering themselves
in their roost ing -places, and as a rule these are
very hard to discover. There may be little or
no concealment about them, but, like most other
living creatures, birds become wonderfully near
to invisible when they remain still. A dozen birds
in a leafless tree can easily evade even a searching
eye by remaining motionless, and what is true
of birds in trees is still more true (if that is an
allowable expression) of birds on the ground.
There even large birds, and birds which would
be pronounced conspicuous, merge into their sur-
roundings in a way which usually astonishes those
who discover without rousing them. Thus I recall
how on one occasion when walking through a wood,
a friend pointed out a small object and asked what
it was. It was actually the eye of a sitting hen
pheasant, which he was looking at without seeing.

Most animals, birds excepted, know, or act as
if they knew, this secret of invisibility. Thanks
to their flying powers, which can so swiftly
284
BIRDS AND STORM 285
take them out of the way of most of the natural

dangers, birds put their dependence rather upon
their mobility than upon the concealment they
could effect by keeping still. But in stormy
weather they keep to one place, and profit by the
fact that when still they vanish.
There are two or three groups of birds, however,
to which nothing of this can be said to apply.
The gulls and the members of the wading tribe
which frequent the shore do not retire to roosting -
places in stormy weather, and some of their most
interesting motions can then be observed. To
take a familiar example from among the last,
the flocks of ringed plovers, popularly called sand-
larks, keep the shore in all weathers, and some
of their high wind are curious and
actions in
interesting to At such a time it is an

watch.
easy matter to approach a flock feeding on the
flat sand left by the tide to within a dozen
yards. When a human intruder upon their domain
comes within that distance of them, the flock of
little bullet -headed birds, as if moved by one will,
will turn and run down the wind with amazing
speed, and at the end of a dozen yards more will
wheel with simultaneity and precision never
a
equalled by troops on parade. In the curious,
swift run, in which the legs are hardly seen, and
in which no motion is visible but the rapid for-
ward motion of the body, and still more in the
abrupt wheel round to the wind, with which it
ends, these little plovers irresistibly suggest the
action of certain mechanical toys. All animal
motions are in a sense mechanical, but I can think
of no motion which is so completely machine -
like as this one. It is only to be seen in a fairly
strong wind. At all times the ringed plover is

a fast runner, but its speed is greatly accelerated
when it runs down the wind, and the swift turn at
the end of the run is, of course, meant to bring
the lie of the feathers round to the wind before
they are ruffled. For this same reason the birds
always feed up the wind.
Some of the most beautiful of the flight motions
of the gulls, particularly of the larger species,
are seen in wind. For long spells they can be
observed apparently enjoying their powers as aero-
planes with no other purpose than enjoyment.
Facing the wind, with the wings raised to a slight
inclination, they will make an effortless ascent
into the air. On these occasions there is no flight
motion in the wings, no motion of any sort save
a just perceptible quiver ,of the tips of the quill
feathers, which probably assists in the balancing.
Now and again a jerky downward move of the
whole body indicates that for an instant the balance
has been disturbed. After a spell of this wind-
sustained hovering, the gull. turns and sails swiftly
down the wind, then turns again and repeats the
upward gliding performance. Strong gusts give
every kind of variety to the planing, and in abrupt
surprise gusts the birds often shoot into the air
on an almost vertical line. But they never, like
the airman, lose control and come to grief with
a fatal downward plunge.
It is not all aeroplaning with the gulls in stormy
weather. In all states of the weather they have
BIRDS AND STORM 287
a habit of resorting to some bare spot, such as

the highest part of a grass or stubble field, and
preening their feathers there in very quiet and
undemonstrative company. When the wind is very
high, these chosen spots are never without their
congregation. Hundreds of gulls may be seen
in such a place sitting absolutely motionless for
hours on end, with all their beaks pointing as
accurately in one direction as if they were so many
magnets drawn to a pole. In very windy weather
there is no doubt that gulls, in 'common with all
shore birds, have to get along on seriously
diminished fare. Their best feeding-ground is the
strip of shore just uncovered by the tide, on which
small crustacean life is yet unhidden. When the
waves are dashing savagely on the strand, and
racing far up it with every fall, every condition is
against successful hunting.
One of the popular names of the missel-thrush
is the stormcock, and it has received it in deference,
it is said, to the fact that, unlike the other birds
of its family, it sings in winter, and is not silenced

by stormy weather. There
a courageous robust-
is
ness about every action of the missel-thrush which

claims admiration, but I rather suspect that it
does not sing very often in storm At any rate,
1
I have never heard it. It is called missel -thrush

because it feeds on the mistletoe berries. There
are, however, large parts of Britain Scotland
among them where the mistletoe is never seen
save as an import, and there the familiar name
itself is a misnomer. In stormy weather those
three familiar birds of the garden the missel-
thrush, blackbird, and mavis can generally be
found skulking in sheltered places, such as the lee-
side of walls, searching for the elusive worm,
but when
the high wind is accompanied by rain
they vanish like the lesser feathered people.
The smallest of British birds is the least depressed
of all by bad weather. On a day of hard frost
and nipping wind the little wren will suddenly
emerge from a heap of brushwood, and, sitting
on its topmost twig, pour out a burst of song
which would be considered splendid in volume
if it came from a bird ten times the performer in
weight. But wee Mr. Wren is also the greatest

skulker ofall. Nearly all his time is passed creep-
ing about sheltered places looking for the small
game fit for his small crop, and his emergences
into the open rarely last for more than half a
minute at a time. He appears to feel it incumbent
on him to let the world know at intervals that he
is not a mouse, much though he may look like
one creeping about the roots of the hedge.
THE FLOCKING OF THE BIRDS
THE passionate devotion of birds to their young
and the intensity of the maternal instinct make
a favourite theme of the sentimental writers on
natural history, and one not despised by writers
who keep their sentiment well in check. Curiously,
little seems to have been written on the related
subject of its speedy and complete inversion.
When incubating, birds notorious for their shyness
will stick to their nest till actually touched by
the hand of their most dreaded enemy Man.
Others, like members of the plover family, which
in normal circumstances can only with difficulty
be approached within gunshot, will, when they
have young in their charge, abandon every fear
and strike with angry wing at the head of any
intruder on their domain. Their chicks are the
objects of an overwhelming and passionate solici-
tude. Yet in a few brief weeks the whole of this
wonderfully absorbing devotion dries up and
vanishes, and in many cases its place is taken
by a positive and active driving -out hatred.
The driving-out instinct is illustrated best in the
case of eagles, such hawks as adopt a definite
district as their own the buzzard is a case and
the raven and its relatives the crows. All are good
289
19
and affectionate parents, unremitting in the
laborious work of finding plenty of food for their
broods. Most of them are daring in their defence,
and will fearlessly encounter the risk of death in
order to save them from attack, the eagle, strange
to say, being a decided exception. But take the
case of the raven. The young ones are still quite
callow, and follow their parents in the search for
food. They are able to find for themselves, but
are not above flapping their wings petted-ways
and begging when the old birds discover some-
thing good. But one fine morning, while the
youngsters are still in the mood to be led and
catered for, old -man raven looks upon them with
a cold and strangely altered eye. They annoy
him, though yesterday they were the joy of his
heart. The mood swiftly strengthens into aver-
sion, and he attacks them with a fury which fills
them with surprise and pain. He drives them and
buffets them right out of his territory. They
return, sure that it was all a hideous mistake,
only to get buffeted again. And very soon they
accept the situation, and they and their parents
are strangers ever after.
With the smaller birds the driving -out instinct
is less markedly displayed, but it is there all the
same. Very early after the fledging of the brood,

the blackbirds and thrushes dissolve the family
partnership more completely even than the eagles
and ravens, which maintain the marriage-tie. The
blackbird very calmly looks his wife in the face
"
and says, I don't know you," and proceeds to
live strictly for himself alone. Should any of
THE FLOCKING OF THE BIRDS 291
his progeny follow him and claim relationship, he

will fight. In the case of the mavis, the mother
bird seems to take an interest in her young for
some days after her lord and master has resumed
his bachelorhood ;
but very soon the members
of the family party wander off in various ways,
and know one another no more. Within a week of
the fledging, all the members of the household
are established on an individual basis. Of the
small birds, the tits seem to be alone in maintain-
ing a family party for any length of time, but even
with them the institution of the family flock is
in its endurance a thing merely of days.
It is questionable if any British bird is entitled
"
to the epithet Socialist," and the vast majority
of them are individualists of the most absolute
kind. At present many of them have flocked,
but the flock is not a society. There is no sort
of co-operation, unless it be in the avoidance of
danger, every bird searching for and consuming
"
food strictly on his own." And most of the
flocks that frequent stackyards in the winter-time
are composite. Larks, linnets, corn -buntings,
yellow-hammers, greenfinches, chaffinches, bram-
blings are all mingled together, and when the
bird-catcher nets them he generally gets specimens
of all these, and sometimes other species as well.
In some of their actions they seem to be animated
by a spirit in common. The suddenness with
which hundreds of birds will take to flight at
the same instant on some real or fancied alarm
has suggested the conjecture that they possess
a sixth sense of which we know nothing. One
cannot watch for any length of time a composite
flock of birds in a stackyard without being struck
by this peculiarity of conduct. They are all feed-
ing absorbedly. Suddenly, with a simultaneous
rush of wings, they are off in a compact body to
the bare branches of the nearest tree, from which
they drop back in singles and groups as their
fears subside. The same thing occurs again and
again at intervals throughout the feeding-hours,
and generally a visible or audible cause of the
movement is searched for in vain. It is much
easier, however, to suggest a cause there are
usually rats moving about than to explain the
simultaneousness of the flight that makes the flock
move as if animated by an impulse from a single
mind. But all this is not social action and,
;
indeed, it is questionable if the flocking habit

of the birds that make up the winter farmyard
flocks is a natural habit and not a by-product of
man-made conditions. One thing is certain : all
the members of the species which contribute to
these assemblies do not flock, for throughout the
winter plenty of single foragers of all of them
may be found about the fields and hedgerows and
in the Thus the congregating of the
gardens.
birds may mean nothing more than a recognition
on their part of the massing in set places of food
supplies. It takes an effort to realize how greatly
human operations have modified the natural con-
ditions of the wild inhabitants of a country like
Britain, proportions and their relations to
their
one another. To
the lark, for example, we present
great continuous areas of land perfectly adapted
THE FLOCKING OF THE BIRDS 293
to the needs of the bird, and make vast numbers

of larks possible. In winter we concentrate on
set places the food for which, in a natural state,
larks would have to search over a wide area.
Thus large flocks may be said to be directly a
product of cultivation, and without cultivation the
lark flock would be impossible. The bird which,
of all others in the British list, comes nearest to
forming a society is the rook. Rooks build in
company, and, if all tales be true, make love to

one another's wives. They go out to feed in
company, and, there is some reason to believe,
set aside certain of their number to keep a watch
a more truly communal trait than simple associa-
tion. But the feeding habits of the rook are in
every detail adapted to cultivation, and in a country
without cultivation their regimented methods of
feeding could not be carried out. It may be said
that flocking* among many birds which most con-

spicuously display the habit is not brought about
by the desire for society, but by a uniform com-
1
petence in discovering the best places for finding

food. Those birds like the crows, whose food
is rarely or never to be found assembled in one
place, as the food of the rooks is assembled in
a ploughed field, are solitary in habit ; but in
countries where garbage and carrion abound about
the habitations of men, even the crows present
the semblance of social birds.
HAWKS IN TOWN
IT is common knowledgethat in the recent period
bird-life has become greatly more abundant in
towns than used to be the case. In the main,
we are for the change indebted to suburbia. The
great extension during the second half of the nine-
teenth century of the kind of dwelling garden -
surrounded, with abundance of trees and shrubbery
to which the business man betakes himself has
provided safe harbourage for birds of many kinds,

where their only enemy is the prowling cat. In
these they have learnt the relatively great security
of town life, and to-day gardens in the very heart
of large cities have their bird population. It is
hardly too much to say that for a very considerable

number of bird species suburbia is a true
sanctuary, from which the bird-nesting boy and
the man with a gun are alike excluded.
In one sense it is strange, though in another
perhaps it is not, that in these circumstances the
hawks have not come to town. It is one of the
most unfailing of the laws of Nature that when
a food supply becomes abundant the creatures
served by it correspondingly increase in numbers.
When there is a vole plague the owls of an
incredibly wide area find it out and flock to the
HAWKS IN TOWN 295
place,and the smaller hawks are attracted in the

same way. Now, here we have in the towns a
great supply of the smaller birds, on which the
sparrow-hawk and the kestrel habitually prey. But
how often is either of them seen within the borders
of a town? They might hunt with impunity, and
the sparrows are so abundant that nobody would
lament if an enemy would appear, capable of thin-
ning their ranks. But the enemy does not come.
Doubtless the reason is that the gamekeeper has
most numbers and imbued
effectually reduced their
the of mankind that
survivors with such a fear
even the best of good hunting cannot induce them
to take up their quarters where human beings
abound.
But twice within the last month (November,
1912) I have had the pleasure of seeing a hawk
the same hawk, I believe in town. On the
first occasion it appeared and disappeared so
suddenly that I could not decide whether it was
a kestrel or sparrow-hawk, for though their
colouration is very distinct, the bird was between
me and the light, and I saw it all dark. It came
like a stone from above, picked up a hedge-
sparrow, and next moment was gone among the
trees of a neighbouring garden. On the next occa-
sion the 8th of November I saw it in the air,
hovering over a piece of swampy ground sur-
rounded by tall grass. It was at a height of
about two hundred feet, and showed itself at a
glance to be a kestrel by its manner on the wing.
The folk -name of the kestrel is the wind-hover,
and this one might have been bent on proving
the appropriateness of the appellation. I
pointed
it out to a friend, and we stood watching it
together. For exactly seventeen .minutes it kept
the same position, almost as steadily as if it had
been suspended by a string from above. Occa-
sionally it made very slight movements with the
wings, but these never amounted to even a half-
beat. After watching the bird for about five
minutes, my friend denied that it was a bird.
No bird could keep a place in the air like that,
and he was quite sure it was a kind of boy's
kite cut out in the shape of a bird. He was still
searching the vicinity for the boy who held the
string when the kestrel dropped down on a very
steep slope into one of the trees on the bank.
Five minutes later it ascended again, and began
hovering at the same height a little farther to the
west, soon, however, to drop down with the wind
to its old post over the swamp. In all probability
it reckoned this bit good for a mouse. But it
did not get one, and after another ten minutes of
hovering it moved away in a leisurely fashion in
the direction of a neighbouring wooded hill.
This particular kestrel, I have said, hardly
moved its wings as it hovered. At the time a
steady and pretty strong breeze was blowing from
the west, and this, of course, helped it to main-
tain its position without wing -work. But the
kestrel will hover in a dead calm, and when, to
maintain its position, it has to beat its wings with
great speed. This is its habitual way of searching
the ground, and it is doubtless an adaptation to
the habits of the kind of prey it chiefly hunts.
HAWKS IN TOWX 297
The sparrow-hawk is the great hunter of small

birds, and in search them it flies slowly and
of
with pauses along the edge of woods and over the
hedges. Its relative, the kestrel, also takes small
birds. But it is pre-eminently a hunter of ground-
game of the smaller sort that is to say, field mice,
young rats, and voles. And it is not too proud
to stoop to beetles. Quarry of this kind could
rarely be detected by a hawk which hunted in
the manner of the sparrow-hawk. The ground
has to be painstakingly searched from above, and
the searcher must maintain herself so steadily over
the spot she is examining that the smallest move-
ment in the grass will be seen. Of the two
hawks, it will be seen, the sparrow-hawk would
prove the better adapted to town life, where small
birds abound but small ground -animals are scarce.
But I have never seen a sparrow-hawk in town.
It is not altogether improbable, however, that
we may see both of them yet. It has been a
terribly difficult business to teach the gamekeepers
of Britain that every hawk is not his natural and
inevitable enemy. Since modern game -preserva-
tion began, it has been the habit of the keeper
to shoot and destroy the nests of every bird of
prey, hawk or owl. The naturalist bitterly resents
the idea that an interesting bird may rightly be
exterminated merely because it preys (like the
sportsman) on game birds, but his resentment has
counted for little. Very slowly, however, he has
managed to persuade a proportion of game-
preservers and their servants that there are great
differences of character among birds of prey, and
29 B 'ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
that the damage to game done by some of them

is either nothing or negligible. Among the most
innocent in this sense are the owls, and next to
them come the buzzards and the almost extinct
kite, while hardly more injurious to game than
these are the kestrel and sparrow-hawk. The
kestrel, on the other hand, as a great vole and
field-mouse destroyer, is an eminently useful bird.
As a result of the spread of this knowledge,
there is somewhat more toleration of the lesser
hawks than there used to be, and in some parts
of the country they are increasingly common.
DECEMBER
.A WINTER SLEEPER
THE idea of lifelessness which inevitably associates
itselfwith the winter aspect of field, wood, and
garden is, of course, one that will not survive a
second thought. There is, as a matter of fact,
only a little less life inthe ground in winter than

there is on and over the ground in summer. All
the life of the summer is there, latent in
floral
seeds innumerable and in the roots of the biennial
and perennial plants. Most of the insect -life of
the summer is there in the form of hibernating
insects, of larvae or of pupae. Countless numbers
of the unobstrusive little mammals which we know
to be about and active in summer-time, though we
rarely see them, are snugly tucked away in burrows
and crannies, sleeping through the dead days,
destined to emerge and resume the state of activity
in the spring. But the impression of deadness is
so masterful that it is only when chance brings
us upon some of the sleeping inhabitants of the
soil that it is temporarily overcome.
And, though one ought to know that they are
there, it is always with a little shock of surprise
that one comes upon them. The other day I
addressed myself to the task of breaking up the
roots and replanting some delphiniums, and with
301
the first big spadeful of roots and earth out came
a queen humble-bee. Her sleeping-quarters were
wrecked and ruined beyond recognition as the earth
fell away from the spade, but the lady herself was
most wonderfully fresh and clean. There was
not a stain on her velvet, and not a suggestion of
damp. For ten seconds she lay perfectly still
on her back, then her legs began slowly to move,
and in a minute's time she was sufficiently awake
to grasp a straw. But the most wonderful thing
about her was her power of affecting the spectator
with surprise. In all their associations the humble-
bees suggest glorious summer weather in the height
of July. They are seen, it is true, in May, but they
are not numerous then. In August they are getting
scarce again. July is pre-eminently their time, when
Nature is revealing herself in her most opulent
guise and the sun is flooding the world with light
and warmth. Then the great droning, velvet -clad
insectsadd a note to the summer day, so peculiar
to itself that the sound, well imitated, is capable
'of calling up visions of lush vegetation quivering
in a heat haze. And
here was one actually buzzing
on its back on thechill earth on a December
afternoon. One felt for a moment that a trick
had been played with the grand order of things,
or that there is something of a trick or a deception
in the order itself. I made a nest for the dis-
turbed sleeper, put her into it, and buried her

up, and only hope she will get out when the right
time for waking up comes round.
Hibernation is very exceptional among the
mature insects as a way of getting through the
A WINTER SLEEPER 303
cold season. In the case of most insects the life

of the species is carried over this season in the
larval form or in the form of pupae, and in not a
few the chasm of winter is bridged by the well-
protected egg. Some of the butterflies, however,
hibernate, though they do not risk the fate of the
species upon it, for the main current of life is
carried in the chrysalides either buried in the
ground or safely hung up in sheltered nooks. With
the humble-bees and the social wasps hibernation
by the fertilized queens is the only plan, and just
now countless thousands of these are sleeping away
the months either in little cells dug out by them-
selves in the earth or in nests at the bottom of thick
moss. It is a very rare thing to find one of th'e
sleepers. Those that pass the winter in the earth

very generally choose a spot for their little burrow
close to the root of a tree, and such spots are
rarely disturbed by spade or plough. Those that
blanket themselves in moss are equally safe, for
the existence of thick moss means that the place
is left untouched from year to year. Yet, despite
all this, such is our sense of the delicacy of insects
in the mature state, that it is difficult to overcome
the feeling that in trusting to a successful winter
sleep they are trusting to a very precarious plan.
It would be a little difficult to justify the
feeling. A very large proportion of insects fulfil
the whole purpose of their existence in the summer
and die with the
first frosts. But the insect
organization not on this account to be taken
is
as peculiarly incapable of resisting cold. Many

larvae can survive the ordeal of being frozen hard,
and some mature insects as well. The death of
so many at the end of the summer rather implies
senility and the exhaustion of function than simple
inability to resist cold. Insects which have not
completed their functions often experience sharper
night colds in the summer than suffice to kill
them autumn, but, though they become torpid
in the
under the experience, they wake up with renewed
warmth, none the worse of the experience.
The bee referred to above was a queen of one
of the commonest of the species of humble-bees
Bom bus terrestris familiar in its black livery, with
tawny, yellow bands on the thorax and abdomen,
and a tawny, or sometimes dull, white tail. It
has been noted that when it hibernates it generally
selects for its burrow the northern aspect of a
bank the place on which the winter sun never
shines except in an oblique and ineffectual way.
The burrow is carried only about a couple of inches
deep, and the cell is just large enough to hold

the bee. Frequently in winter the earth is frozen
solid to a much greater depth than this, and on
a spot with a northern aspect it may remain frozen
for a long time. From the frequency of the choice
of such a site by the bee, it is inferred that cold
troubles not at all in its hibernating state, and
it
that damp is the thing it has chiefly to guard
against. On the warm side of the bank, subject

to frequent freezings and thawings, the insect would
run much more danger of dampness than on the
northern side.
The queens thus stowed away will be asleep till
the sun of May brings them to life again. Their
A WINTER SLEEPER 305
firstwork will then be to dig themselves out. If

they emerge on a dull day, they will probably
retreat again and wait for a more encouraging
occasion. Provided all is well and the sun shining,
they will warm themselves in its rays, and will
soon become strong enough to fly. Then their
thoughts will turn to honey, and they will visit
the spring flowers and feast on nectar. When the
lady has quite recuperated she will proceed to
search for a suitable site for a nest, and the
selection of one will depend on the species to
which she belongs. Some of the humble-bees
make their nests very near the surface, just under
the moss. Others, like the one referred to, want
a burrow, which may be anything from two to three
feet in length. The deserted burrows of mice
serve them well. When they have found it they
enlarge a chamber at the end of it, and proceed
to construct cells for their first brood. There is-
nothing of regal state in the condition of the queen
at ~this stage, for she must work very hard to
feed both her young family and herself. But soon
the first brood come to maturity, and then her
work is done. Henceforth the family do all the
labour, and the mother is in reality a queen.
20
THE WILD SWAN
ONCE upon a time there appeared in a country
paper the following advertisement, which, for an
indefinite number of days, was the occasion of
torturing apprehension in the bosom of a certain
small boy :
"
REWARD. 5 will be paid for information
leading to the apprehension and conviction of the

person who, during; last week, STOLE the egg's
from the swan's nest on Loch. Apply Estate
Office."
Stamp-collecting and book -collecting, it has

been said, are habits calculated to sap the
moral fibre in the finest natures. Egg-collect-
ing by youthful Britons gets in before the moral
nature has begun to develop. At the age of
thirteen the miscreant alluded to had formed a
collection of eggs which seemed to need nothing
to complete it but the splendid pale green oval
of the swan, and, like the Roc's egg in the tale of
Aladdin, the absence of this trophy reduced all
the rest to nothing, yea, vanity. So one moonlight
night in April he sallied forth on an expedition of
truly marauding intent, tramped five miles, reached
306
THE WILD SWAN 307
a well-known loch in a wood, braved the muddy

traps of its bottom, waded to the artificial island
on which two swans had their home, ravished
it of its treasures in number three and beat a
triumphant retreat with the spoils of enterprise.
Next day when one of the eggs, blown and washed,
was placed in the spot which yearned for it ;
when
the second was swapped for a knife with four
blades, a corkscrew, a toothpick, and an indis-
pensable apparatus for extracting stones from
horses' shoes (without which no boy can consider
himself equipped) ;
and the third for a telescope
ingeniously disguised as a walking-stick that day
was a day of days. Then came the day of dread,
and many more of slowly diminishing fear.
Those eggs were the produce of the so-called
mute swan, common on ornamental waters, a
creature of great beauty, but doubtfully entitled
to rank as, in a natural sense, a member of the
British fauna. Indeed, no swan can be called
unequivocally a native British bird ;
but two, the
whooper and Bewick's swan, are classable among
our real, natural, and regular winter visitors. And
when people speak of having seen a wild swan
it may be taken for granted that in ninety-five
cases out of the hundred they mean the whooper,

which is the common wild swan. There are few
sights more curiously striking when first seen than
that of a wild swan on the wing, and my own first
sight of one is always associated with an idea
which it suggested. How the folk-lorists explain
the mediaeval idea that witches rode on broom-
sticks I do not know, but a swan on the wing 1
conveys a hint with the force of a slap on the
eye. The neck, a yard long, is projected straight
in front, not gracefully curved backwards like the
heron's. The feet prolong the, line behind. On
the line, like a figure astride a stick, is the round
body, to which the wings seen on their upward
movement give elevation. It is, in short, the legend
embodied, and a person unfamiliar with the
creature might puzzle in vain to explain it unless he
had the fortune to see it rise. Then, indeed, there
is little of mystery about the swan, for though,
despite its size, it is a powerful flight bird, its

rise is a performance of prodigious labour. It
will splash along the surface of a loch for fifty
or more yards before it can launch itself into the
air, and It leaves behind it a wake like that of a
motor-boat.
The wild swan is a regular winter visitor to
many of the northern lochs, preferring the shallow
ones, and probably no east coast estuary is for a
winter season without it. Bewick's swan is not
absolutely rare in the same region. But both are
seen at their best and in the greatest abundance
in the western isles and on the western lochs, and
herein lies one of the little puzzles of migratory
distribution. That the common wild swan, the
whooper, should abound as a winter visitor on
the west coast and in the islands is just what one
would expect. The breeding -grounds of those that
come to Scotland are almost certainly situated in
Iceland and Finland, though some may come from
remote Spitzbergen. If we take it that they come
from Iceland, the west coast is the first suitable
THE WILD SWAN 309
feeding -ground they touch that is to say, a region

where " slob lands," shallow lochs, and tidal flats
are rarely or never frozen up. But Bewick's swan
comes from the north-east of Europe, possibly
Siberia, and the great bulk of them prefer to
pass right over the eligible places of the" Scottish
east coast, and take up feeding quarters on the
west. This is one of the preferences which, so
far, no fellow has been able to understand.
The whooper, as I have said, is at home in
Iceland, and thither in March or
April our winter
visitants proceed, and join in great flocks with
those which have passed the winter on the open
waters of the coast. Like Finland, Iceland is
admirably suited to a bird with the peculiar habits
of the swan. Every pair want a loch to them-
selves, and in both these countries the lochs, or,
as they would be called in the Highlands, lochans,
are almost without number. The swans build their
nests on a small island, or, if there is no island,
on a spit of land or a part of the loch-shore which
is sufficiently marshy to be difficult of approach,
there piling up a platform of the twigs of the
willow and scrub birch, intermingled with moss
and grass. A pair return to the same nest year
after year, and if any interloper has tried to take
possession will fight for their property. When the
question of ownership is determined the pair set
about furbishing up the old nest, which in this
way grows in size from year to year, till at last the
mass becomes of considerable dimensions, and two
or three feet in height. On the top of this, on a
fresh layer of moss, the eggs are deposited, rxot
3io ODD HOURS WITH NATURE
like those of the mute swan, of a pale greenish
colour, but of acreamy white. They are hatched
out about the middle of June, and the cygnets are
ready to fly by the time that the rigour of the
Arctic winter locks up all the home supplies of
food.
The vast majority of birds are mature when
they are a year old, and proceed to the respon-
sibilities of rearing a family but as becomes an
;
animal which may live for half a century and

which mates for life, the swan waits till he is
quite sure of his own mind. He does not take a
mate till his third year, having no doubt thoroughly
studied the lady, found out that her temper is
good, and that her neck has the proper curve.
Swans, it is reasonable to suppose, are rather
exacting in the matter of a feature of such con-
sequenceand length. It would, indeed, be
horrible to be tied far life to a stiff-necked partner
when the neck is a yard long,
There was a time when the swan was eaten in
thiscountry, and the ability to do justice to it
was a high point in the equipment of the cook.
In these degenerate days the goose is as much as
we care to sit down in front of, But wild swans

often do appear still on the market, and it is a
subject for the inquiry of the curious what becomes
of them. I have seen one in a poulterer's window,
but was given to understand that its commercial

uses began and ended in the function of advertise-
ment a poor function to be served by one of the
handsomest of animals, which, if all tales be true,
is capable of living happily for more than half a
THE WILD SWAN 311
century, and of forming enduring connubial ties

which should win it the sympathy of a nation of
monogamists, and commend it generally to a people
sentimentally appreciative of the domestic virtues.
WINTER PLAY OF BIRDS
A GREAT silence holds the heart of the wood. The
flight of a startled pigeon breaks in upon it with,
by and you
contrast, the effect of a clap of thunder,
feel as if must be audible a mile away.
the noise
But you may dwell there for half a day and not
see or hear another bird, unless some pheasant
which escaped the shooters has strayed into the
depths. Then all of a sudden the trees around
you are alive with a merry company of noisy
chitterers, and the brooding silence gives way to
a bustling commotion of gay life. Five minutes
more and the merry company is gone and silence
reigns again.
Whathas happened is, that a composite flock
of woodland birds, on business and pleasure bent,
has gone careering through the wood, pausing
for a few moments here and a few moments there,
but lingering nowhere long. Are they down-
hearted? They do not look like it. The tem-
perature may be many degrees below freezing-
point, and the ground may be covered deep with
snow, but these wood-flocks always seem to have
plenty of spirits for a running game. And a
very curious assortment they make. Great tits are
not the most numerous, but the most powerful
WINTER PLAY OF BIRDS 313
and showy members of the band. With them go

the blue tits, relatives, but at other seasons anything
but allies of the friendly kind. Tree-creepers and
gold-crests chum with these incongruous associates,
hold together in company, and hunt and play as
if they were all brothers of the same blood. At
least three very distinct bird families are repre-
sented in the flock, but for the time being they
act as if they were a society with one language,
one nature, and of one kind.
It would be
difficult to give any explanation
of curious associations except the love of
these
company and the love of play. That many birds
do play, all who have watched their habits know,
and these little wood -people indulge in it in an
unmistakable way. They chase one another,
dodging and doubling in the flight, and though
some of them are pugnacious in a high degree,
pugnacity is not the driving power in the game.
It seems to be just a case of high spirits express-

ing themselves in rapid motion, with the zest which
even the young human animal puts into pretended
pursuit.
tits, and creepers are as different
Gold-crests,
in dress and form as passerine birds could be,
but they have one character in common which
probably decides their companionship. They all
seek the same kind of food, and seek it in not
very markedly dissimilar ways. They are after
insects, and have to find them even in the dead
of winter. This necessity has made acrobats of
them all. The tits search the angles of twigs
and the crevices in bud -shoots. An enormous
proportion of the buds produced by trees in the
summer for next year's development go wrong.
The subject is known to foresters who have studied
"
it as natural pruning," and if it were not carried
out, trees under their own weight. A
would fall
large part of this pruning is effected by insects,

which deposit eggs in the buds, from which hatch
grubs. When the tits search the tree, hanging on
to the twigs in every possible attitude, they are
hunting and finding those grubs, dragging them
out and making a meal of them. With their robust
beaks they can tear a bud to fragments and extract
the morsel which lies within it. The whole tribe
has incurred some enmity as bud-destroyers, and
though it is possible that they do destroy healthy
buds, it is likely that the great majority of those
they attack are recognized by them as already
tenanted by a destroyer of another kind.
The gold -crest, tiny midget of a bird that it
is, could not tear a bud in the strong-headed
manner of the great tit but in its own way it
;
finds and consumes immense quantities of minute

insect -life in its dormant winter state. In all their
movements gold-crests resemble the tits, being,
however, even more ceaselessly on move. They
the
prefer evergreens, particularly fir, spruce, and yew-
trees, among the needles of which countless
numbers of small things must lurk which amount
to nothing in human eyes. But trees which, like
the alder, bear catkins are almost equally interest-
ing to them, and appear to yield them a rich feast.
The tree-creepers are the most specialized members
of the company. More exclusively insect -feeders
WINTER PLAY OF BIRDS 315
than either tits or gold-crests, they search for their

prey in the crevices of tree -bark, and their manner
of hunting is always an interesting sight.
But when the whole company is bent on play,

it is little work that the
creepers get done. They
fly with the band, and at every pause begin opera-
tions on a tree. Before they have made half a
" "
dozen turns, a heightened chittering tells them
that the rest are away and after the company
;
they go, not wholly entering into the fun, but

clearly not wishing to be left behind. In their
normal movements there is little wing-work, and
perhaps they feel when the temperature is low
" "
that a little aviation is excellent for promoting
the circulation of the blood.
These wood -flocks of very small fowl do not
hold together all day, like the flocks of serious
feeders which frequent the farmyards. While the
satisfaction of appetite is the dominant issue, each
member labours on his own basis, and some of
them may have special knowledge of wonderful
stores of provision in the shape of cocoanuts or
suspended lumps of fat. When a fair foundation
has been laid, by early afternoon they come
together and enjoy their daily scamper through
the bare branches. Plodders neither by build nor
inclination, they defy mere weather to squeeze the
gaiety out of their lives.
THE ARMED PLANT
A RICH crop of symbolical lore has grown up around
the holly, in a special and pre-eminent degree the
plant of the Christmas season. There are sym-
bolical explanations of its evergreen leaves, of
its red berries, and, of course, of its place in
the decorative scheme of the festival. They are
all simple and obvious enough, and fit happily
and harmoniously into their place in history and
legend. But it is really unnecessary to invent
a tale to account for the part the holly plays in
a midwinter feast. You find everything made clear
by simply stepping into the wood or thicket in
December and searching for something which will
serve. Put aside the spruces and others of their
kind, all aliens and unknown to our ancestors,
and what is left? There is the ivy, clinging in
robustly green masses to the bole of the elm and
wandering over its major branches. Its decorative
value is perceived on the spot, and the decorator
takes heavy toll of its long and leafy limbs. And
what more? Nothing but the holly. With its
brilliantly green foliage and its vivid berry-
clusters, it would be chosen from among many
competitors ;but the simple and unavoidable in-
ference is that it was taken for Christmas adorn-
316
THE ARMED PLANT 317
ment because there is little or nothing besides it

"
to take. It was Hobson's choice," but a very
good choice none the less. The beauty of the
holly is no doubt, in part, that of the rivalless state.
In the summer woods it is not a particularly
arresting tree. It is dark and stiff, with neither
the majesty of the oak nor the grace and poise
and colour of ash and birch. But against a ground
of snow, flecked with the sere stalks of dead grass
and the heads of dry umbels, it stands with a
vigour of colour which holds and delights even the
unobservant eye.
The holly, as everybody knows, is an armed
plant, and certain peculiarities of its armour add
not a little it holds for the student
to the interest
of Nature. a well -grown specimen of the native
If
British species, and one which has never been
mutilated, is examined, it will soon be noticed
that the typical arming of the foliage is not equally
1
developed all over. In fact, it is only on those

parts of the tree which come within three or four
feet of the ground that the leaves are abundantly
supplied with rigid spines. A
little higher up
the spiny quality falls away, and long before the
top of the tree is reached the leaves will be
found to be without anything of the nature of a
prickle. They are oval in shape, and almost entire
in the margins. From this it is no far-fetched
inference that the holly is armed for a purpose,
and that it troubles itself to produce defences
only where they are needed. In short, it is armed
against browsing animals, and does without arms
at a height beyond the ordinary reach of grazers.
This is simple, uncontroversial statement
the
of the but unfortunately for the lover of
case,
simplicity there is quite a holly problem. When
the plant is used to make a hedge, and the hedge
is periodically clipped, the holly will be found to
grow spiny leaves to the very top. Similarly,

when a holly, as sometimes happens, is clipped
into dandified shapes, the leaves become armed
to the uttermost extremity. This is the case with
two hollies well known to the writer, which, though
little, if any, short of twenty feet in height, have
been clipped like a couple of vegetable poodle
dogs. It is also, though in a less general way,
the case with holly-trees which are every year
despoiled of their berry -bearing shoots as a tribute
to the spirit of the festive season. From these
facts it has been inferred, and very strongly held,
that the spiny character of the holly is not a natural

trait of the plant at all, but merely a vigorous
reaction against mutilation, and that if the tree
were never mutilated or browsed it would fail
to produce spiny leaves even near the ground.
Very satisfactory evidence has, however, been pro-
duced that absolutely untouched hollies do produce
the spiny leaves on their lower branches, and that
therefore the tree possesses the power, without
special stimulus, of arming itself as a precaution
against attack, as well as the power of adding to
its defences after attack, and that the spines on
the lower leaves are a strictly hereditary character
of the species. It is part of another and a far
larger question a question which separates two

schools of biologists whether this character
THE ARMED PLANT 319
originated a reaction against the attacks of

as
browsing animals and became hereditary, which
would be the inheritance of an acquired character,
or whether it originated in a chance variation
which, being useful, was fixed by natural selection.
There is, of course, nothing approaching unique-
ness in the fact that the holly has evolved for
itselfa defensive arm against animal attack. In
a great variety of ways hundreds of plants and
whole families of plants have done as much, and
if the holly is at all distinguished, it is in its curious
economy of means. The thorns of hawthorn and
blackthorn and rose, the prickles of the whole
cactus family, the spines of the thistles, the sting
of the nettles, the harsh taste of many herbs and
the bad smell of many others, are all strictly
utilitarian adaptations aimed at defence. And it
is a pretty sound inference that when a plant arms
itself in any of those specialized ways for the
protection of its substance or its foliage, it con-

tains nutritious material which at one time was
used as food by animals. Probably it was preyed
upon to such an extent that the unprotected indi-
viduals of the species were exterminated, and only
those which varied in the defensive direction sur-
vived to perpetuate the race. When the defence
is purely mechanical, it often happens that some
one animal is capable of disregarding it, as, for
example, the donkey disregards the spines of the

thistle and the goat the thorns of the wild rose.
When it eats a thistle, the donkey may be said to
prove that the thistle is a food plant under its
forbidding exterior. A famous American experi-
mentalist has taken the generalization that a
mechanically protected plant is a food plant as
a working hypothesis for experiment. Thus he
is reported to have laboured successfully to pro-
duce a spineless cactus, in the belief that by means

of such a plant, containing in its substance both
food and drink, large areas of scrub and semi-
desert might be turned to account for the grazing
of animals. It is hardly likely, however, that the
animals reared under such condition would be
worth the trouble of providing them with the food
supply. But it is possible that the experimenter
might make something useful out of the thistle if,
by depriving it of its defences, he constrained
it once again to take up its old place as a food
plant, for most members of the family have the
power of growing on ground on which the food
plants of cultivation cannot thrive.
INDEX
Antlers of Red-deer, 227 Bullfinches and buds, 116

Antlers, reduction of size, 233 Buried seed, 27
Antlers eaten by hinds, 234
Antlers, renewal, 236 Capercailie hen in male plu-
Ants in garden, 185 mage, 255
Ants, their industry, 187 Cat as hunter, 149
Cats, wild, their numbers, 1
19
Bees robbing flowers, 190 Cats, wild, ease of capture, 201
Bees, distinction of sexes, 215 Charlock, 24
Bees, hibernation of, 301 Chickweed, 26
Bees, colony forming, 305 Creeper, 18, 313
Birds and cold, 17
Birds and hunger, 17 Dock seed, 26
Birds as housekeepers, 31 Dipper, 162
Birds in storm, 285 Drones and drunkenness, 212
Blackbird fights, 55
Blackbird courtship, 67 Earwig, 270
Blackbird thefts, 113 Earwig fight with spider, 271
Blackbird's nest, 147 Earwig brooding young, 272
Black- headed gulls, 28
Black-headed gulls' nesting- Fairy Ring mushrooms, 237
places, 74 Female birds in male plumage,
Blue Tits' food, 30 255
Blue Tits nesting in box, 107 Ferns' spores, their universality,
Blood appetite of gnat, 169 *S3
Bramble, 246 Fish, unteachableness of, 63
Bramble, possibilities of, 249 Flocking of birds, 289
Flowers and competition, 40
Brambling, 19
Bulbs in plant strategy, 41 Food problem of birds, 17
21
322 INDEX
Foxes of the hills, 177 Midge, 33
Foxes, their prey, 179 Mountain Hare, 80
Mushrooms, edible, but not
Gnats, armature, 35-167 eaten, 241
Golden-crested wren, 18
Greenfinch and seed, 1 16 Nest-building, 144
Groundsel seed, 26 Nest-building of Blackbird, 147
Grouse, 195 Nest of Blackheaded Gull, 74
Gulls, disgorging powers of, 76 Nest of Blue Tit, 107
Gulls as garbage feeders, 31, 72 Nest of House Martin, 262
Gulls as divers, 76 Nest of House Sparrow, 49
Gulls, nesting-places of, 75 Nest of Kittiwake, 77
Nest of Lapwing, 91
Hares, 78
Nest of Robin, 118
Hares, mode of reproduction

Nest of Sand Martin, 261
of, 81
Nest of Terns, 134
Hawks in town, 294 Nest of Thrush, 145
Holly and its armature, 316
Hooded Crow, 21 Ova, dispersal of, 159

House Martin's nest, 262
House Sparrow, 49, 113 Plovers' eggs, 91
Humble-bee, hibernation, 301

Rain and hill sculpture, 100
Humble-bee, colony forming
Red-deer calves, 122
305
Red-deer, tameness of calves,
126
Insects and frost, 35
Isolated
Red-deer forming harem, 280
waters, stocking of,
161
Red-deer in summer, 173
Ring-plover in wind, 285
Kestrel in town, 295
Robin fights, 56
Robin courtships, 95
Kestrel, prey of, 297
Robin nesting, 118
Kittiwake, 77
Rookery, 44
Rook shooting, 139
Lapwing's eggs, 91
Lapwing's enticements, 93
Sand Martin's nest, 261
Manure and birds, 29 Sand Martin and vermin, 32
Microscopic vision of birds, 27 Seed dispersal, 250
INDEX 323
Seed, prodigal provision of, 252 Thrush, nest of, 145

Seed awaiting opportunity, 25 Tits' love of suet, 69
Seed, vitality of, 24 Tits nesting in box, 108
Sexual selection, 98 Tits and buds, 115
Siskin, 19 Tree-sparrow, 50
Snails, 85 Tree-creeper, 18, 313
Snowdrop, 39 Trout, cunning of, 61
Sparrow's holiday, 216 Trout and flies, 129
Starling, feeding, 58 Trout in isolated lochs, 157
Starling, song of, 71
Starling, in autumn, 265
Swallows, 260 Wasps, plagues of, 204
Swallows in caves, 263 Wasps' nest-building, 206
Swan, wild, 306 Wasps and ripe fruit, 208
Water-vole, 222
Water thrushes, 166
Terns' eggs sold as plovers' Wild cats, 119
eggs, 91 Winter play of birds, 312
Terns' nesting-places, 134 Wood lark, 27
cbc Oreebam press,
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED,
WOKING AND LONDON.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY
Los Angeles
This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.
Form L9-50m-7,'54(5990)444
Ur-:uhart -
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THE LIBRARY

(All rights reset ved)

at most they claim the merit of work capable of

among people of all classes to-day. Dealing as

that the reader will find in them too some breath

THE HARDY MIDGE ......

MARCH SUNSHINE ......

THE ROBIN'S COURTSHIP

THE GREAT SCULPTOR IOO

THE TOM-TITS AND THEIR BOX . . . .

BIRDS IN THE GARDEN .112

THE YOUNG DEER ......

A SUMMER- DAY TRAGEDY

SOME BIRDS' NESTS

THE BIRD OF THE BURNS

THE RED-DEER IN SUMMER 172

FOXES OF THE HILLS . . . . .

THE GLORIOUS TWELFTH . . . . .

ARE WILD CATS SCARCE? . ,, . . .

WASP PLAGUES . . ...

A GENTLEMAN IN VELVET . . . . . 222

THE ANTLERS OF THE RED-DEER . . .

THE FAIRY RING . '.-.'-. . .

SEED DISPERSAL . . . . ''-,.. . .

THE SWALLOWS ......

A BEAUTIFUL CHARACTER .....

THE FLOCKING OF THE BIRDS

THE WILD SWAN

IN STAG GROUND Frontispiece

SPARROWS NEST IN IVY 53

NEST OF BLACKHEADED GULL 74

NESTING CLIFF OF KITTIWAKE 76

THE YOUNG HARE 81

INSIDE THE TIT'S BOX . . . . . Ill

THE GREENFINCH'S AGE OF INNOCENCE . . .116

FEEDING THE YOUNG DEER .... 124

WHERE TROUT ARE FASTIDIOUS . . .

NEST OF SONG THRUSH ..... 144

NEST OF THE BLACKBIRD . . . .

FALL ISOLATING A LOCH ..... 158

A HAUNT OF THE DIPPER ..... 164

SANCTUARY OF A NORTHERN DEER-FOREST . .

A FAMILY OF HILL FOXES ..... 178

THE ROBBER BEE . ..... IQ2

THE GROUSE ....... 196

WILD CATS ....... 199

WILD CAT COUNTRY ...... 2O2

THE WATER VOLE . . . . . .

HEN CAPERCAILIE ASSUMING MALE PLUMAGE . .

NESTING-HOLES OF SAND MARTINS .-'. . 260

SAND MARTIN'S NEST EXPOSED. . . , .

that winter presents to the birds. Sympathetic

times the evergreen shrubs of a garden may tempt

a tiny native which may much more fitly be likened

to a mouse. No wood with rough-barked trees is

a stone and the lightness of a feather to the

ness of charity, and rare thing among the smaller

The result is visible in every bird-dealer's window,

abundance of the species. In some ways resem-

birds, the crossbill. Nothing that man possesses

up the great cones for the seed they contain, with

were an old family in the land before he had

must just contrive to win through the winter as

up, and every tide leaves something behind it,