Wild Life in a Southern County

by Richard Jefferies

How many times I have endeavoured to trace the V said to be formed by duck while flying, and failed to detect it! They fly, it is true, in some sort of order, but those that come to the mere here travel rather in a row, or line, slanting forwards, something like what military men call in echelon. The teal seem much bolder than the wild duck: they are often shot as they rise out of the brooks; but the ducks very rarely go to the brooks at all, and can still more rarely be approached when they do. They swim in the water-carriers in the great irrigated meadows, but are careful to remain far out of range; so that the only way to shoot them by day is for two or more sportsmen to post themselves behind the hedges in different places while a third drives them up.

The first snipes are seen generally in the arable lands, afterwards round the lake—the muddy shores by choice—and finally in the brooks. As the winter advances they seem to quit the lake in great part and go down to the brooks. A streamlet that runs through a peaty field is a favourite spot. The little jack-snipe frequent the water-carriers in the irrigated meadows and the wet furrows. When the lake is frozen over the wild duck stand on the ice in the daytime for hours together, leaving the marks of their feet on it.

In walking along the shore lines of drift may be noticed, marking the height to which the waves driven by the wind have carried the floating twigs, weeds, and leaves: just as along the sea the beach is formed into terraces by the changing height of the tides. The shallower parts of the lake are so thickly grown in summer with aquatic weeds that a boat can only be forced through them with the utmost difficulty. Some of these grow in as much as eight or even ten feet of water. On the shore, where it is marshy, the mare’s-tail flourishes over some acres: there is often a slight marshy odour here, which increases as the foot presses the yielding mud.

When the water is low in autumn these are mown, and, with the aquatic grasses at the edge and the rushes, made into the roughest kind of hay imaginable. The coarser parts are used as litter; the best is mixed with fodder and eaten by cattle. Many waggon-loads are thus taken away, but as many more remain; and in walking over the spongy ground a smart ‘pop’ is continually heard: it is caused by the sudden compression of air under the foot in the mare’s-tails lying about; for their stems are hollow, and have knots at regular intervals.

After a continuance of the wind in one quarter for a few days—south or south-west—the opposite shores are lined with such weeds carried across, together with great quantities of dead branches fallen from the trees and willows. So that on a small scale the same thing happens as with the drift wood of the ocean; and, indeed, by studying the action of natural forces as exhibited in our own pools and brooks, it becomes much easier to comprehend the gigantic operations by which the surface of the earth is altered.

For instance, the north-eastern edge of the water is continually encroaching on the land, eating away the sandy soil, showing that the prevalent winds are south and west. The waves, thrown against the shore with the force they have acquired in rolling six or seven hundred yards, wash away the earth and undermine the bank, forming a miniature cliff or precipice, the face of which is always concave, projecting a little at the foot and also at the top. So much is this the case that an unwary person walking too near the edge may feel the sward suddenly yield and find it necessary to scramble off before a few hundredweights of earth subside into the water.

In this process the loamy part of the earth is dissipated, or rather held in suspension, while the small stones and ultimately the heavier sand fall to the bottom and form the sandy floor preferred by the fish. The loam discolours the water during a storm for several yards out to sea, so to say; so that in a boat passing by you know by the hue of the waves when you are approaching the dangers of the cliffs. This continuous eating away of the earth proceeds so fast that an old hollow oak tree now stands—at what may be called the high tide of summer—so far from the strand that a boat may pass between.

Like a wooden island the old oak rears itself up in the midst; the waves break against it, and when there is but a ripple the sunlight glancing on the water is reflected back, and plays upon the rugged trunk, illuminating it with a moving design as the wavelets roll in. The water is so shallow at the edge that the shadows of the ridges of the waves follow each other over the sandy floor. They reflect the bright rays upon the tree trunk, where they weave a beautiful lacelike pattern—beneath, their own shadows glide along the sand. That sand, too, is arranged by the ripple in slightly curved lines. These wave-marks, though so slight that with the hand you may level fifty at a sweep, have yet sometimes proved durable enough to tell the student after many centuries where water once has been. Under the foundations of some of the oldest churches—the monks loved to build near water—the wave-mark has been found on the original soil.

In a hollow of the old oak starlings have made their nest and reared their young in safety for several seasons. They seem to understand that the water gives them protection, for their nest would not be out of reach were the tree on land.

Just as at the seashore the wave curls over in an arch as it comes in before dissolving in surf and spray, so here when a gale is blowing, these lesser waves, as they reach the shelving strand, also curl over. In the early morning, as the sun begins to acquire some strength, the white mists sweep over the surface and visibly melt and disappear. One hot summer, when the lake was full, and kept so artificially by the hatches and dams, I found by observation that its level sank nearly half an inch every day. This was the more striking because there was at the same time an influx more than enough to repair the loss from leakage. Now the evaporation of half an inch of water over such a width of surface meant the ascension into the atmosphere of many thousands of gallons; and thus even this insignificant pool might form a cloud of some magnitude in a few days. What immense vapours may then arise from the surface of the ocean!