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