There were many missel-thrushes about the Chace; they are fond of a wooded district. They pack together in summer and part in winter—just opposite in that respect to so many other birds, which separate in warm weather and congregate as it grows cold, so that the lower the temperature the larger the flock. In winter and spring the missel-thrushes fly alone or not more than two together. After their young have left the nest they go in small packs. I saw ten or twelve rise from an arable field on the 18th of June last year; there do not often seem to be more than a dozen together. I have counted ten in a pack on the 16th of September, and seven together as late as the 2nd of October. Soon after that they appear to separate and act on their individual wishes. Starlings in like manner pack after their young can fly, but then they do not separate in autumn.
It may be remarked that by autumn the young missel-thrushes would not only fly well, but would have been educated by the old birds, and would have come to maturity. Their natural independence might then come into play. But these are effects rather than causes, besides which I think birds and animals often act from custom rather than for advantage. Among men customs survive for centuries after the original meaning has been lost. I had always been told by country people that the missel-thrush was a solitary bird, and when I first observed a pack and mentioned it some incredulity was expressed. Very naturally in summer people do not see much but hay and wheat. It was noticed on the farms about the Chace in the springs of 1878 and 1879 that the corncrakes, which had formerly been so numerous and proclaimed their presence so loudly, were scarcely heard at all.
It is a little outside my subject, since it did not occur in the Chace, but the other day a friend was telling me how he had been hunted by bucks while riding a bicycle. He was passing through a forest in the summer, when he suddenly became aware of six or seven bucks coming down a glade after him. The track being rough he could not ride at full speed—probably they would have outstripped him even if he had been able to do so—and they were overtaking him rapidly. As they came up he saw that they meant mischief, and fearing a bad fall he alighted by a tree, behind which he thought to dodge them. But no sooner did he touch the ground than the bucks so furiously rushing after him stopped dead in their career; he stepped towards them, and directly they saw him walking they retreated hastily to a distance.
The first berries to go as the autumn approaches are those of the mountain-ash. Both blackbirds and thrushes began to devour the pale-red bunches hanging on the mountain-ashes as early as the 4th of September last year. Starlings are fond of elder-berries: a flock alighting on a bush black with ripe berries will clear the bunches in a very short time. Haws, or peggles, which often quite cover the hawthorn bushes, are not so general a food as the fruit of the briar. Hips are preferred; at least, the fruit of the briar is the first of the two to disappear. The hip is pecked open (by thrushes, redwings, and blackbirds) at the tip, the seeds extracted, and the part where it is attached to the stalk left, just as if the contents had been sucked out. Greenfinches, too, will eat hips.
Haws are often left even after severe frosts; sometimes they seem to shrivel or blacken, and may not perhaps be palatable then. Missel-thrushes and wood-pigeons eat them. Last winter in the stress of the sharp and continued frosts the greenfinches were driven in December to swallow the shrivelled blackberries still on the brambles. The fruity part of the berries was of course gone, and nothing remained but the seeds or pips, dry and hard as wood; they were reduced to feeding on this wretched food. Perhaps the last of the seeds available are those of the docks.
This is well known to bird-fowlers, and on a dry day in January they take two large bunches of docks—'red docks' they call them—tied round the centre like faggots and well smeared at the top with birdlime. These are placed on the ground, by a hedge, and near them a decoy goldfinch in a cage. Goldfinches eat dock-seed, and if any approach the decoy-bird calls. The wild bird descends from the hedge to feed on the dock-seed and is caught. Goldfinches go in pairs all the winter and work along the hedges together. In spring the young green buds upon the hawthorn are called 'cuckoo's bread and cheese' by the ploughboys.
HAMLET FOLK.
It happened one Sunday morning in June that a swarm of bees issued from a hive in a cottage garden near Okebourne church. The queen at first took up her position in an elm tree just outside the churchyard, where a large cluster of bees quickly depended from a bough. Being at a great height the cottager could not take them, and, anxious not to lose the swarm, he resorted to the ancient expedient of rattling fire-tongs and shovel together in order to attract them by the clatter. The discordant banging of the fire-irons resounded in the church, the doors being open to admit the summer air; and the noise became so uproarious that the clerk presently, at a sign from the rector, went out to stop it, for the congregation were in a grin. He did stop it, the cottager desisting with much reluctance; but, as if to revenge the bee-master's wrongs, in the course of the day the swarm, quitting the elm, entered the church and occupied a post in the roof.