This peculiar beauty and richness of hue is seen in its perfection only while the rain is falling and the streaming water is glistening on the surface of the leaf, but is best when the rain is nearly over and the clouds are full of light. No sooner does the rain cease than the rich glistening red begins to grow dull and fades as the wet dries. In a little while, in a drying sun and wind, the red hue quite vanishes and the fern is again the old faded rag it was before.
In this part of West Cornwall there was more furze and bracken together than I had ever seen, where both plants grow in the greatest luxuriance, unmixed with other tree and bush vegetation, and with nothing among it but the grey lichened rocks which served to intensify the effect of the intermingled sombre green and glistening rich red. Nor had I long to wait for the falling drops which brought the loveliness into existence, seeing that it rains on most days, and when it was mild and the wind not too strong the rainy day was nearly as good as the rare golden day of clear skies and genial sunshine.
On one occasion when I was out in the hills feasting my sight on the beautiful strange aspect of things, when the rain was so heavy and continuous that it soaked through my waterproof and wetted me, I was surprised to find a lady artist at work under a big umbrella. She was one of a colony of forty or fifty artists in the small town close by, but the first one I had seen out in that wild place in wet weather. Her subject was a small, rather squalid-looking farm-house on the further side of a narrow green field—one which could have been better painted on a fine day. I was told that the artists of this one colony alone turn out about a thousand landscapes a year, and I wondered if any one had ever attempted to paint that wonderful sight just at their threshold—the dead bracken among the furze with the silvery-grey rain on it.
On the higher slopes where the furze is less abundant the bracken predominates, covering large areas with its red tapestry, and on most days throughout the winter it keeps its deep strong colour, owing to the excessive amount of moisture in the air. It disappears only when the new fern springs and spreads a wave of monotonous green over the rough land and well-nigh obliterates all other plant life. Only at very long intervals there is another winter aspect of the hills and moors, when they are whitened with a heavy fall of snow. "About every ten years," people say; but although the weather was exceptionally cold in December, 1906, I had no hope of witnessing that change, and going away to spend my Christmas elsewhere missed the very thing I wanted to see. It was not so much the sight of the hills in their ghostly white I desired as the accompanying phenomenon of the vast multitude of birds flying from the fury of winter; for whenever a wave of cold, with snow, comes over the southern half of England, the birds, wintering in myriads all over that part of the country, are driven further west, and finally concentrate on the Cornish peninsula and stream down to the very end of the land.
No sooner had I gone away than the bitterly cold weather with snow and sleet, which prevailed over a great part of the country at Christmas, swept over the southern and western counties and drove the birds before it. The first news I had of it was in a letter, dated December 30, from a naturalist friend, Mr. G. A. B. Dewar, who was staying on the towans, overlooking St. Ives Bay, close to Hayle. "I wonder," he wrote, "did you see much of the marvellous migration scene which took place here on Friday morning? For hours—till about midday—redwings, thrushes, larks and fieldfares streamed across St. Ives Bay, coming from the east. There was a great highway of birds, which must have been miles broad. We saw them first from the window as we dressed.... Most of the birds crossed the Bay, going towards Land's End, but thousands and tens of thousands dropped exhausted among the sand dunes, or towans, here, and among these I found golden plover, ring plover, sanderlings, lapwings, etc.—altogether an extraordinary assemblage. On Saturday morning, lasting till one o'clock p.m., the birds returned in a great highway east again. Mingled among them were many small birds, linnets, etc. A most wonderful pathetic scene, I assure you. I wondered if any ol the travellers crossed the Channel, or whether they all stopped in this extreme westerly bit of land. I did not think England had so many fieldfares and redwings."
On my return a few days later, I found on inquiring along the coast that large numbers of the birds had appeared at the Land's End towards evening and settled down to roost in the furze and heath and among the stones. At one house, I was told, numbers of thrushes and starlings crowded on the window sills, and some of them that were stiff with cold were taken in but were found dead in the morning. From all I could hear the migration appears to have spent itself at this spot.
To me the "pathetic" part of it was the reception the starved fugitives met with from the good people along the coast, especially at St. Ives with its horn or "island" beyond the town thrust out into the sea, a convenient resting-place for the birds after flying across the bay. My information on the subject, which would fill some twenty pages of a blue-book, was gathered from men and lads, mostly fishermen, who had taken part in the massacre. Each person buys a handful of small fish-hooks, manufactured for the purpose and sold, a dozen for a penny, by a tradesman in the town. Ten to twenty baited hooks are fastened with short threads to a string, two or three feet long, called a "teagle," and placed on a strip of ground from which the snow has been cleared. To these strips of mould or turf the birds fly and seize the hooks, and so blind to danger are they made by hunger that they are not deterred by the frantic struggles of those already hooked. Many birds succeed in freeing themselves by breaking the thread in their struggles, but always with that bit of barbed bent wire in their mouths or stomachs, which must eventually cause their death. In one garden where food was placed for the birds and their hunters kept out, eleven dead and dying birds were picked up in one day among the shrubs, all with hooks in their gullets.
One young fisherman told me with great glee that he had found two hooks besides his own in the mouth of a blackbird he had taken from his teagle.
