COUNTRY LIFE*
Swan for Dinner
At least one distinguished novelist has eaten an unusual Christmas dinner—a swan. The bird—whether a cob (male) or pen (female) I do not know—was very large and from all accounts very good. The flesh seems to have been like goose, but lighter, more delicate. After having seemed a little fishy while cooking it later turned out, roasted and stuffed with chestnuts, to be well worthy of Chaucer's famous praise of the bird. All of which recalls a very different episode related in masterly fashion by Hudson. It concerns the cooking of a heron, Hudson having met the two daughters of a man who had cherished a lifelong ambition to taste that bird. For years his daughters had put him off, but finally Hudson relates how he procured a bird and ordered it, tyrannically, in spite of all protests, to be cooked. And cooked it was, with ghastly results. The flesh turned out to be hideously black, fishy and uneatable, the daughters were almost poisoned, the countryside was fouled by a stench as of many diabolically ancient fishshops, and at least one person was cured for ever of a desire to eat fish-loving birds. Swans are, I think, presumed to be the property of the King and of certain Companies such as the Dyers and Vintners Company, the royal swans being marked with five nicks, two lengthwise and three crosswise, on the bill. Peacocks are another matter ; and there is on record the charming story of a girl who, while shooting, innocently mistook one for a pheasant. But it was a shallow excuse, since neither peacock nor pheasant was hers to shoot anyway.
Grass Drying
Something like a revolution is going to take place in English grassland farming if the problems of drying grass for winter fodder arc finally and successfully solved. It has been known for some time that grass cut at the height of a few inches and dried by hot air or particular gases will retain far higher nutritive values than hay, the dried grass retaining almost the qualities of fresh grass. Experiments have already shown that a drier introducing gases at 250 degrees C. does no harm to the grass, that the grass keeps its colour well, and that there is a singular decline in the feeding value of grass from May to the end of June, albuminoids and fats declining by about a third. Even the layman must see what this means : that a grazier may, on good land, by judicious cutting and feeding, obtain a production of highly nutritive young grass throughout the summer instead of a single crop at a time when the feeding values of the material have greatly fallen. Such a yield might very well double the value of land. Estimates made by a committee of the Agricultural Research Council put the pro- duction cost of a ton of raw material at about 40s., and the value of a ton of dried grass, as compared with current prices of other foodstuffs, at about E6 10s. What now seems to be needed most of all is a cheap small-scale plant to do the job. If it conies, and if grass-drying in this country proves a suc- cess, we may very well see summer fields like lawns and hear the clack of the grass-cutter from June till September.
Willows and Osiers
The total area of willows and osiers under cultivation in England has declined by half in ten years, and stands now at something like 3,000 acres, of which more than half are in Somerset. The introduction of all sorts of substitutes, Chinese sea-grass, cane in split or pulp form, fibre and so on, has been largely responsible for it, but the competition of foreign rods, in spite of a decline in imports since 1930, has also helped. There has been a large decrease in importa- tion from Holland and Belgium, but a large increase from an unexpected country, the Argentine, one-year-old Argentine rods apparently attaining a greater length, without a corre- sponding increase in diameter at the butt, than those grown elsewhere. Polish and Silesian rods have also increased. The four chief varieties grown here, Salix triandra, S. Amygdalina, S. viminalis and S. Purpurea, have produced some attracting named varieties : Black Hollanders, Glib Skins, Pomeranians, Spaniards, Brown Merrins, Dicky Meadows, Long Skins and Dark Dicks, which read rather more like the characters out of piratical romance. As to cultivation and cutting, this is another case where, as with sweet chestnut, everything looks very pretty, but is in reality
very expert. Cultivation is something more than the mere planting of sets in marshy ground, and cutting far more than the mere hacking off of leafless rods. The time of cutting depends entirely on the treatment which rods are subsequently to undergo : so that rods for " buffing," or buff colour, are cut as soon as the leaf has fallen, rods for " brown " not until the whole leaf crop has fallen, and rods for " white " not until early spring. Standing osiers and willows have always seemed to me among the best of trees in winter. But it was not until December that I saw such a plantation of bloody orange as flamed up by the side of a small Kentish mill : in the late afternoon the rods seemed to be covered with a kind of fiery varnish, so rich that they seemed to give out a tawny blood-shining light in the falling darkness.
A Census of Birds' Nests
Looking up an old number of The Countryman I find one of those obvious, simple queries which occur to all of us when someone else has thought of them first. " How many of us know within 10 per cent. the number of nests in any given acreage of English countryside ? " The writer is suggesting a census of nests, his purpose being to test a statement by a firm of bird-seed suppliers that the mortality among young wild birds every year is 80 per cent., a figure which he doubts. He goes on to detail a bird-map, made for his purpose, of a garden of ten acres, the site containing 67 nests. One at once sees the value of such a record, since nothing fades more quickly than last year's spring and the detail of its nests unless it is last year's summer and the detail of its flowers. If we make and keep plans for herbaceous borders why not plans for fields and the nests in them ? A plan might resolve itself into a five-year plan : so that the increase or decrease of birds might be tested, the par- tiality of birds for certain sites, the incoming or disappearance of rarer birds, the use by certain species of almost the same site over and over again. I cannot remember, for the life of me, how many nests I discovered last spring. It would vary from twenty to forty, perhaps, every afternoon I went out. The species have got mixed up. I know there were a great many chaffinches. Many odd wrens. A particular eirl-bunting's. I could mark, perhaps, fifteen or twenty sites. The rest are forgotten. A map—it would be a delightful pastime for all children—would not only have recorded them all but would have formed a working plan for the coming spring, the excitement of which would no doubt have been doubled in consequence. In short, the idea of a census of bird's nests seems to me just as worth carrying out as the recent census of starlings. Perhaps more.
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Poaching : Old and New
Civilisation threatens many rural figures, but not the poacher. He survives and flourishes in a world which has long since annihilated the smuggler. I may be pardoned, I hope, for a profound admiration for the true poacher, a survivor of a wilder life, the sole remaining example in these islands of the hunter who is also hunted. He carries on a craft which needs insuperable courage and cunning and which is often pretty poor in its rewards and harsh in its penalties; I am not so sure of the modern poaching upstart, the gent who now• brings his lorry to country lanes and picks up, by the hundred, poached game for the town. This new type of mechanised poaching is now quite common, and the possibilities of turning it into a racket, gangster fashion, seem to me considerable. The snag would come with the intimidation of solitary poachers, and I like to speculate on its chances of success with an old poaching acquaintance, who has just died. He used to take his wife with him. She seems to have been a lean little woman,• like a ferret, tough as hawthorn, and she went wherever he went, which might be twenty or thirty or even forty miles, by night, in winter, and was ready, like him, for anything. He himself was a man of fifteen stone, a bruiser, and it must have been a good sight to see them working together, he so big, she no bigger beside him than a dog. And she deserves, I think, the record of his verdict : " A good gal. And as good a hand as I ever * Sir William Beach Thomas is on a visit to South America. He will resume responsibility for this page on his return next month.
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