To come to the bird life of this largest of London’s open spaces. Owing to its very openness and large extent, which makes it impossible for the constables to keep a watch on the visitors, especially on the gangs of birds’-nesting boys and young men who make it a happy hunting-ground during the spring and summer months, the Heath is in reality a very unfavourable breeding-place for birds. Linnets, yellowhammers, chaffinches, robins, several warblers, and other species nest every year, but probably very rarely succeed in bringing up their young. Birds are nevertheless numerous and in great variety: the large space and its openness attract them, while all about the Heath large private gardens, woods, and preserves exist, which are perfect sanctuaries for most small birds and some large species. There is a small rookery on some elm-trees at the side of the High Street; and another close to the Heath, near Golder’s Hill, on the late Sir Spencer Wells’s property. And in other private grounds the carrion crow, daw, wood-pigeon, stock-dove, turtle-dove, white owl, and wood owl, green and lesser spotted woodpecker still breed. The corncrake is occasionally heard. The following small birds, summer visitors, breed on the Heath or in the adjacent private grounds, especially in Lord Mansfield’s beautiful woods: wryneck and cuckoo, grasshopper-, sedge- and reed-warblers, blackcap and garden warbler, both whitethroats, wood and willow wrens, chiffchaff, redstart, stonechat, pied wagtail, tree-pipit, red-backed shrike, spotted flycatcher, swallow, house martin, swift, and goldfinch. Wheatears visit the Heath on passage; fieldfares may be seen on most days throughout the winter, and occasionally red-wings; also the redpole, siskin, and the grey wagtail. The resident small birds include most of the species to be found in the county of Middlesex. The bullfinch and the hawfinch are rare.
My young friend, Mr. E. C. H. Moule, who is a keen observer, has very kindly sent me his notes on the birds of Hampstead, made during a year’s residence on the edge of the Heath, and taking his list with my own, and comparing them with the list made by Mr. Harting, published in Lobley’s ‘Hampstead Hill’ in 1885, it appears that there have been very few changes in the bird population of this district during the last decade.
It would be difficult to make the Heath itself a safer breeding-place for the birds, resident and migratory, that inhabit it. The only plan would be to establish small sanctuaries at suitable spots. Unfortunately these would have to be protected from the nest-robbers by spiked iron railings, and that open wild appearance of the Heath, which is its principal charm, would be spoiled.
With the ponds something can be done. There are a good number of them, large and small, some used for bathing in summer, and all for skating in winter, but so far nothing has been done to make them attractive to the birds; and it may be added that a few beds of rushes and other aquatic plants for cover, which would make them suitable habitations for several species of birds, would also greatly add to their beauty. How little would have to be done to give life and variety to these somewhat desolate-looking pieces of water, may be seen on the Heath itself. One of the smallest is the Leg of Mutton Pond, on the West Heath, a rather muddy pool where dogs are accustomed to bathe. At its narrow end it has a small bed of bulrushes, which has been inhabited by a pair of moorhens for several years past. They are very tame, and appear quite unconcerned in the presence of people standing on the margin to gaze at and admire them, and of the dogs barking and splashing about in the water a few yards away. There is no wire netting to divide their own little domain from the dogs’ bathing place, and no railing on the bank. Yet here they live all the year round very contentedly, and rear brood after brood of young every summer. Here, as in other places, it has been observed that the half-grown young birds assist their parents in building a second nest and in rearing the new brood, and it has also been remarked that when the young are fully grown the old birds drive them from the pond. There is room for only one pair in that small patch of rushes, and they know it. The driven-out young wander about in search of a suitable spot to settle in, but find no place on the Heath. Probably some of them spend the winter in Lord Mansfield’s woods. A gentleman residing in the neighbourhood told me that at the end of the short frost in January 1897, when the ice was melted, he saw one morning a large number of moorhens, between thirty and forty, feeding in the meadow near the ponds in Lord Mansfield’s grounds.
I have been told that no rushes have been planted on the Heath, and nothing done to encourage wild birds to settle at the ponds, simply because it has never occurred to anyone in authority, and no person has ever suggested that it would be a good thing to do. Now that the suggestion is made, let us hope that it will receive consideration. I fancy that every lover of nature would agree that a pair or two of quaint pretty moorhens; a pair of lively dabchicks, diving, uttering that long, wild, bubbling cry that is so pleasant to hear, and building their floating nest; and perhaps a sedge-warbler for ever playing on that delightful little barrel-organ of his, would give more pleasure than the pair of monotonous mute swans to be seen on some of the ponds, looking very uncomfortable, much too big for such small sheets of water, and altogether out of harmony with their surroundings.
With the exception of this omission, the management of the Heath by the County Council has so far been worthy of all praise. The trees recently planted will add greatly to the beauty and value of this space, which contains open ground enough for all the thousands that visit it in summer to roam about and take their sun-bath.
Near the Heath, on its east side, in the North London district, we have a group of four highly attractive open spaces. They are ranged in pairs at some distance apart. One pair is Highgate Woods (70 acres) and Churchyard Bottom Wood (52 acres), not yet open to the public; the second pair is Waterlow Park (26 acres) and Highgate Cemetery (40 acres). The two first have a special value in their rough, wild, woodland character, wherein they differ from all other open spaces in or near London. But although these spaces are both wildernesses, and so close together as to be almost touching, they each have an individual character. A very large portion of the space called Highgate Woods is veritably a wood, very thick and copse-like, so that to turn aside from the path is to plunge into a dense thicket of trees and saplings, where a lover of solitude might spend a long summer’s day without seeing a human face. Owing to this thick growth it is impossible for the few guardians of this space to keep a watch on the mischievous visitors, with the result that in summer birds’-nesting goes on with impunity; the evil, however, cannot well be remedied if the woods are to be left in their present state. It would certainly greatly add to their charm if such species as inhabit woods of this character were to be met with here—the woodpeckers, the kestrel and sparrow-hawk and the owls, that have not yet forsaken this part of London; and the vociferous jay, shrieking with anger at being disturbed; and the hawfinch, with his metallic clicking note; and the minute, arrow-shaped, long-tailed tits that stream through the upper branches in a pretty procession. But even the warmest friend to the birds would not like to see these woods thinned and cut through with innumerable roads, and the place changed from a wilderness to an artificial garden or show park.
The adjoining Churchyard Bottom Wood is the wildest and most picturesque spot in North London, with an uneven surface, hill and valley, a small stream running through it, old unmutilated trees of many kinds scattered about in groups and groves, and everywhere masses of bramble and furze. It is quite unspoiled, in character a mixture of park and wild, rough common, and wholly delightful. Indeed, it is believed to be a veritable fragment—the only one left—of the primæval forest of Middlesex.
It is earnestly to be hoped that the landscape gardener will not be called in to prepare this place for the reception of the public—the improver on nature, whose conventional mind is only concerned with a fine show of fashionable blooms, whose highest standard is the pretty, cloying artificiality of Kew Gardens. Let him loose here, and his first efforts will be directed to the rooting up of the glorious old gorse and bramble bushes, and the planting of exotic bushes in their place, especially the monotonous rhododendron, that dreary plant the sight of which oppresses us like a nightmare in almost every public park and garden and open space in the metropolis.