All that day, sunlessness and quiet seas. I told the granfers that they were wrong (I am young and self-confident). I explained that their knowledge of nature was not great—had one not told me that swallows sleep in the mud of the river Taw during winter?
But that night clouds came up and hid the stars, the owls called mournfully, the wind shook the elms in the churchyard. A moan under the door, a rattling of the window; the spaniels on my bed whined uneasily. Something was astir—a great silence hollow and foreboding. The chimney tun hummed a little song of rue in the dark; I was instantly awake, and waiting.
A faint roar overbore the near sounds. It was the sea on the rocks two miles away. Suddenly the rain came, like goose-shot against the window, on the trees: the blast tore at the thatch. All through the night it continued until a gray dawn showed low clouds going over like the canvas of ancient galleons, windburst and tattered.
The next morning tons of seaweed—deep-sea plant, too—heaved and shuddered in the rockpools, while a belt of oil fuel lay on the sand with spars and planks. Had there been a wreck somewhere? No one knew. Certainly it looked as though a cargo had gone overboard, for from the headland one could see another black belt where the walls of gray-green water toppled in foam.
But the gulls? They had gone inland, right up the wide sandy estuary of the river. How did they know, so many hours before, that the storm was coming?
The more one thinks one knows of nature the more open should be the mind of the naturalist. I am learning, or should I say, unlearning?
A BIRD MYSTIC
Every year the ragtailed swallows are fewer, for many are destroyed as the hosts sweep southward in autumn, killed by electric wires on the Continent “for food” (I have seen them, with thrushes and blackbirds, laid out, pitifully small and gentle, in the Italian shop-windows—Nero in hell must be awfully pleased with this sure sign of degeneracy among the descendants of that race of which he declared himself to be “a genius.”)
In all the tallats[1] of my Devon village there were but four swallows’ nests during the summer of 1921. There are over fifty tallats. Under the rafters are the ruins of nearly two hundred mud mansions—belonging to past summers. Some, indeed, are intact, others utilised by flycatchers, others have been selected by wrens for foundations of their domed nests. But only four are being used this year.
Although the swallows are becoming extinct the swifts are increasing. I have met many people who do not know one bird from the other. Yet it is easy to tell.