At the farm there are two very old yew trees growing in the back-yard, and one of these, in an advanced state of decay, is full of holes and cavities in its larger branches. Here about half a dozen pairs of starlings nest every year, and by the middle of June there are several broods of fully-fledged young. At this time it was amusing to watch the parent birds at their task, coming and going all day long, flying out and away straight as arrows to this side and that, every bird to its own favourite hunting-ground. Some had their grounds in the meadow, just before the house where the cows and geese were, and it was easy to watch their movements. Out of the yew the bird would shoot, and in ten or twelve seconds would be down walking about in that busy, plodding, rook-like way the starling has when looking for something; and presently, darting his beak into the turf, he would drag out something large, and back he would fly to his young with a big, conspicuous, white object in his beak. These white objects which he was busily gathering every day, from dawn to dark, were full-grown grubs of the cockchafer. When watching these birds at their work it struck me that the enormous increase of starlings all over the country in recent years may account for the fact that great cockchafer years do not now occur. In former years these beetles were sometimes in such numbers that they swarmed in the air in places, and stripped the oaks of their leaves in midsummer. It is now more than ten years since I saw cockchafers in considerable numbers, and for a long time past I have not heard of their appearance in swarms anywhere.
The starling is in some ways a bad bird, a cherry thief, and a robber of other birds' nesting-places; yaffle and nuthatch must hate him, but if his ministrations have caused an increase of even one per cent. in the hay crop, and the milk and butter supply, he is, from our point of view, not wholly bad.
In late June the unkept hedges are in the fullness of their midsummer beauty. After sunset the fragrance of the honeysuckle is almost too much: standing near the blossom-laden hedge when there is no wind to dissipate the odour, there is a heaviness in it which makes it like some delicious honeyed liquor which we are drinking in. The honeysuckle is indeed first among the "melancholy flowers" that give out their fragrance by night. In the daytime, when the smell is faint, the pale sickly blossoms are hardly noticed even where they are seen in masses and drape the hedges. Of all the hedge-flowers, the rose alone is looked at, its glory being so great as to make all other blooms seem nothing but bleached or dead discoloured leaves in comparison.
Beauty of the hedge rose
He would indeed be a vainly ambitious person who should attempt to describe this queen of all wild flowers, joyous or melancholy; but substituting flower for fruit, and the delight of the eye for the pleasure of taste, we may in speaking of it quote the words of a famous old writer, used in praise of the strawberry. He said that doubtless God Almighty could have made a better berry if He had been so minded, but doubtless God Almighty never did.
I esteem the rose not only for that beauty which sets it highest among flowers, but also because it will not suffer admiration when removed from its natural surroundings. In this particular it resembles certain brilliant sentient beings that languish and lose all their charms in captivity. Pluck your rose and bring it indoors, and place it side by side with other blossoms—yellow flag and blue periwinkle, and shining yellow marsh-marigold, and poppy and cornflower—and it has no lustre, and is no more to the soul than a flower made out of wax or paper. Look at it here, in the brilliant sunlight and the hot wind, waving to the wind on its long thorny sprays all over the vast disordered hedges; here in rosy masses, there starring the rough green tangle with its rosy stars—a rose-coloured cloud on the earth and Summer's bridal veil—and you will refuse to believe (since it will be beyond your power to imagine) that anywhere on the earth, in any hot or temperate climate, there exists a more divinely beautiful sight.
If among the numberless cults that flourish in the earth we could count a cult of the rose, to this spot the votaries of the flower might well come each midsummer to hold their festival. They would be youthful and beautiful, their lips red, their eyes full of laughter; and they would be arrayed in light silken garments of delicate colour—green, rose, and white; and their arms and necks and foreheads would shine with ornaments of gold and precious stones. In their hands would be musical instruments of many pretty shapes with which they would sweetly accompany their clear voices as they sat or stood beneath the old oak trees, and danced in sun and shade, and when they moved in bright procession along the wide grass-grown roads, through forest and farm-land.
Lesser whitethroat
In the summer of 1900 I found the lesser whitethroat—the better whitethroat I should prefer to call it—in extraordinary abundance in the large unkept hedges east of the woods in the parishes of Fawley and Exbury. Hitherto I had always found this species everywhere thinly distributed; here it was abundant as the reed-warblers along the dykes in the flat grass-lands on the Somerset coast, and like the reed-warblers in the reed- and sedge-grown ditches and streams, each pair of whitethroats had its own part of the hedge; so that in walking in a lane when you left one singing behind you heard his next neighbour singing at a distance of fifteen or twenty yards farther on, and from end to end of the great hedge you had that continuous beautiful low warble at your side, and sometimes on both sides. The loud brief song of this whitethroat, which resembles the first part of a chaffinch's song, is a pleasant sound and nothing more; the low warbling, which runs on without a break for forty or fifty seconds, or longer, is the beautiful song, and resembles the low continuous warble of the blackcap, but is more varied, and has one sound which is unique in the songs of British birds. This is a note repeated two or three times at intervals in the course of the song, of an excessive sharpness, unlike any other bird sound, but comparable to the silvery shrilling of the great green grasshopper—excessively sharp, yet musical. The bird emits this same silver shrill note when angry and when fighting, but it is then louder and not so musical, and resembles the sharpest sounds made by bats and other small mammals when excited.