Hampshire Days

by W. H. Hudson

It may be observed that we must be out and well away from the woods and have a wide horizon all around in order to feel the sun flowing through us. Many of us have experienced these "divine raptures," this sublimated state of feeling; and such moments are perhaps the best in our earthly lives; but it is mainly the Trahernes, the Silurist Vaughans, the Newmans, the Frederic Myers, the Coventry Patmores, the Wordsworths, that speak of them, since such moods best fit, or can be made to fit in with their philosophy, or mysticism, and are, to them, its best justification.

This wide heath, east of Beaulieu, stretching miles away towards Southampton Water, looks level to the eye. But it is not so; it is grooved with long valley-like depressions with marshy or boggy bottoms, all draining into small tributaries of the Dark Water, which flows into the Solent near Lepe. In these bottoms and in all the wet places the heather and furze mixes with or gives place to the bog myrtle, or golden withy; and on the spongiest spots the fragrant yellow stars of the bog asphodel are common in June. These spots are exceedingly rich in colour, with greys and emerald greens and orange yellows of moss and lichen, flecked with the snow-white of cotton-grass.

Here, then, besides that cause of contentment which we find in openness, there is fragrance in fuller measure than in most places. One may wade through acres of myrtle, until that subtle delightful odour is in one's skin and clothes, and in the air one breathes, and seems at last to penetrate and saturate the whole being, and smell seems to be for a time the most important of the senses.

Among the interesting birds that breed on the heath, the nightjar is one of the commonest. A keen naturalist, Mr. E. A. Bankes, who lived close by, told me that he had marked the spot where he had found a pair of young birds, and that each time he rode over the heath he had a look at them, and as they remained there until able to fly, he concluded that it is not true that the parent birds remove the young when the nest has been discovered.

I was not convinced, as it did not appear that he had handled the young birds: he had only looked at them while sitting on his horse. The following summer I found a pair of young not far from the same spot: they were half-fledged and very active, running into the heath and trying to hide from me, but I caught and handled them for some minutes, the parent bird remaining near, uttering her cries. I marked the spot and went back next day, only to find that the birds had vanished.

Snipe: Redshank

The snipe, too, is an annual breeder, and from what I saw of it on the heath I think we have yet something to learn concerning the breeding habits of that much-observed bird. The parent bird is not so wise as most mothers of the feathered world, since her startling cry of alarm, sounding in a small way like the snort of a frightened horse, will attract a person to the spot where she is sheltering her young among the myrtle. She will repeat the cry at intervals a dozen times without stirring or attempting to conceal the young. But she does not always act in the same way. Sometimes she has risen to a great height and begun circling above me, the circles growing smaller or larger as I came nearer or went farther from the spot where the young were lurking.

It was until recently a moot question as to whether or not the female snipe made the drumming or bleating sound; some of the authorities say that this sound proceeds only from the male bird. I have no doubt that both birds make the sound. Invariably when I disturbed a snipe with young, and when she mounted high in the air, to wheel round and round, uttering her anxious cries, she dashed downwards at intervals, and produced the bleating or drumming which the male birds emit when playing about the sky.

In all cases where I have found young snipe there was but one old bird, the female, no doubt. In some instances I have spent an hour with the young birds by me, or in my hands, waiting for the other parent to appear; and I am almost convinced that the care of the young falls wholly on the female.

The redshank, that graceful bird with a beautiful voice, breeds here most years, and is in a perpetual state of anxiety so long as a human figure remains in sight. A little while ago the small vari-coloured stonechat or fuzz-jack, with red breast, black head and white collar, sitting upright and motionless, like a painted image of a bird, on the topmost spray of a furze bush, then flitting to perch on another bush, then to another, for ever emitting those two little contrasted sounds—the guttural chat and the clear, fretful pipe—had seemed to me the most troubled and full of care and worries of all Nature's feathered children—so sorrowful, in spite of his pretty harlequin dress! Now his trouble seems a small thing, and not to be regarded in the presence of the larger, louder redshank. As I walk he rises a long way ahead, and wheeling about comes towards me—he and she, and by-and-by a second pair, and perhaps a third; they come with measured pulsation of the long, sharp, white-banded wings; and the first comer sweeps by and returns again to meet the others, clamouring all the time, calling on them to join in the outcry until the whole air seems full of their trouble. To and fro he flies, to this side and that; and finally, as if in imitation of the small, fretful stonechat, he sweeps down to alight on the topmost spray of some small tree or tall bush—not a furze but a willow; and as it is an insecure stand for a bird of his long thin wading legs, he stands lightly, balancing himself with his wings; beautiful in his white and pale-grey plumage, and his slender form, on that airy perch of the willow in its grey-green leaves and snow-white catkins; and balanced there, he still continues his sorrowful anxious cries—ever crying for me to go—to go away and leave him in peace. I leave him reluctantly, and have my reward, for no sooner does he see me going than his anxious cries change to that beautiful wild pipe, unrivalled except by the curlew among shore birds.