Fresh Fields

by John Burroughs

this species is not the carrion crow, like ours, though so closely resembling it in appearance. It picks up its subsistence about the fields, and is not considered an unclean bird. The British carrion crow is a much more rare species. It is a strong, fierce bird, and often attacks and kills young lambs or rabbits.

What is true of the birds is true of the rabbits, and probably of the other smaller animals. The British rabbit breeds seven times a year, and usually produces eight young at a litter; while, so far as I have observed, the corresponding species in this country breeds not more than twice, producing from three to four young. The western gray rabbit is said to produce three or four broods a year of four to six young. It is calculated that in England a pair of rabbits will, in the course of four years, multiply to one million two hundred and fifty thousand. If unchecked for one season, this game would eat the farmers up. In the parks of the Duke of Hamilton, the rabbits were so numerous that I think one might have fired a gun at random with his eyes closed and knocked them over. They scampered right and left as I advanced, like leaves blown by the wind. Their cotton tails twinkled thicker than fireflies in our summer night. In the Highlands, where there were cultivated lands, and in various other parts of England and Scotland that I visited, they were more abundant than chipmunks in our beechen woods. The revenue derived from the sale of the ground game on some estates is an

important item. The rabbits are slaughtered in untold numbers throughout the island. They shoot them, and hunt them with ferrets, and catch them in nets and gins and snares, and they are the principal game of the poacher, and yet the land is alive with them. Thirty million skins are used up annually in Great Britain, besides several million hare skins. The fur is used for stuffing beds, and is also made into yarn and cloth.

But the Colorado beetle is our own, and it shows many of the European virtues. It is sufficiently prolific and persistent to satisfy any standard; but we cannot claim all the qualities for it till it has crossed the Atlantic and established itself on the other side.

There are other forms of life in which we surpass the mother country. I did not hear the voice of frog or toad while I was in England. Their marshes were silent; their summer nights were voiceless. I longed for the multitudinous chorus of my own bog; for the tiny silver bells of our hylas, the long-drawn and soothing tr-r-r-r-r of our twilight toads, and the rattling drums, kettle and bass, of our pond frogs. Their insect world, too, is far behind ours; no fiddling grasshoppers, no purring tree-crickets, no scraping katydids, no whirring cicadas; no sounds from any of these sources by meadow or grove, by night or day, that I could ever hear. We have a large orchestra of insect musicians, ranging from that tiny performer that picks the strings of his instrument so daintily in the summer twilight, to

the shrill and piercing crescendo of the harvest-fly. A young Englishman who had traveled over this country told me he thought we had the noisiest nature in the world. English midsummer nature is the other extreme of stillness. The long twilight is unbroken by a sound, unless in places by the "clanging rookery." The British bumblebee, a hairy, short-waisted fellow, has the same soft, mellow bass as our native bee, and his habits appear much the same, except that he can stand the cold and the wet much better (I used to see them very lively after sundown, when I was shivering with my overcoat on), and digs his own hole like the rabbit, which ours does not. Sitting in the woods one day, a bumblebee alighted near me on the ground, and, scraping away the surface mould, began to bite and dig his way into the earth,—a true Britisher, able to dig his own hole.

In the matter of squirrel life, too, we are far ahead of England. I believe there are more red squirrels, to say nothing of gray squirrels, flying squirrels, and chipmunks, within half a mile of my house than in any county in England. In all my loitering and prying about the woods and groves there, I saw but two squirrels. The species is larger than ours, longer and softer furred, and appears to have little of the snickering, frisking, attitudinizing manner of the American species. But England is the paradise of snails. The trail of the snail is over all. I have counted a dozen on the bole of a single tree. I have seen them hanging to the

bushes and hedges like fruit. I heard a lady complain that they got into the kitchen, crawling about by night and hiding by day, and baffling her efforts to rid herself of them. The thrushes eat them, breaking their shells upon a stone. They are said to be at times a serious pest in the garden, devouring the young plants at night. When did the American snail devour anything, except, perhaps, now and then a strawberry? The bird or other creature that feeds on the large black snail of Britain, if such there be, need never go hungry, for I saw these snails even on the tops of mountains.

The same opulence of life that characterizes the animal world in England characterizes the vegetable. I was especially struck, not so much with the variety of wild flowers, as with their numbers and wide distribution. The ox-eye daisy and the buttercup are good samples of the fecundity of most European plants. The foxglove, the corn-poppy, the speedwell, the wild hyacinth, the primrose, the various vetches, and others grow in nearly the same profusion. The forget-me-not is very common, and the little daisy is nearly as universal as the grass. Indeed, as I have already stated in another chapter, nearly all the British wild flowers seemed to grow in the open manner and in the same abundance as our goldenrods and purple asters. They show no shyness, no wildness. Nature is not stingy of them, but fills her lap with each in its turn. Rare and delicate plants, like our arbutus, certain of our orchids and violets, that hide in the woods, and are

very fastidious and restricted in their range, probably have no parallel in England. The island is small, is well assorted and compacted, and is thoroughly homogeneous in its soil and climate; the conditions of field and forest and stream that exist have long existed; a settled permanence and equipoise prevail; every creature has found its place, every plant its home. There are no new experiments to be made, no new risks to be run; life in all its forms is established, and its current maintains a steady strength and fullness that an observer from our spasmodic hemisphere is sure to appreciate.