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