Wild Life in a Southern County

by Richard Jefferies

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.