COUNTRY LIF E

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October 17th In my records—so far as I have kept any—the sharpest change in the year, following the , first hard frosts, comes round about October 17th, exactly six months after a day that most often marks the arrival of the nightingale and cuckoo in the spring. The tenderer things collapse : vegetable mar- rows, nasturtiums, dahlias, beans and sometimes chestnut and ash leaves. Yet no date can be a' true average, as the preliminary frosts already experienced have well illustrated ; for within the same parish the gourds in the valleys have alto- gether wilted while those on the open upland have managed to hold their heads up. It is the habit of cold air to roll downwards ; and this wad of stagnant cold is the cause of the valley's inferiority. Similarly, it surpasses the hill when the blizzard is in force.

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Gone to Ground The change in the year is marked even in commerce. The eider-makers reach their pitch of highest activity, not only because the harvest of eider-apples in England begins to accelerate, but because it is now for the first time legal to import apples. They may not be imported from some contin- ental districts earlier because the Colorado beetle, so it is judged, may be still at large. The nasty yellowish caterpillar of that destructive insect goes to ground in October and none is at large after the second week. A good many of our native insects and even animals seek a hibernaculum nowabouts the noctule bat (one of which I saw on the last day of Septem- ber) creeps into a crack in a heap of stones—to give one dis- covered retreat—about this season. The queen wasps are under the loose elm bark and the bees are being shut up for the winter. The sap in the twigs of trees retires very much for the same purpose as the animals and you begin this week for the first time to detect in the general view of the wood the negative influeace of the retiring dyes, for autumnal coloration is chiefly a change due more to subtraction than addition. And our house-living swallows and martins seek their winter quarters, not in a stuffy hole or protected twig, but in sunnier southern lands. Their hibeniaculum is Africa, not Europe.

* * * * Coronation Clumps

The pretty idea of planting clumps of trees over the length England as a record of the Coronation is described with a plan and details in the first number of the new little Quarterly Trees, produced by the Men of the Trees. Some such idea was fostered, I believe, by the Jacobites, and certain circles of lime trees are alleged, I do not know on what authority, to be a symbol of Jacobite loyalty. However that may be, trees make the best of historical monuments. They are not

less lovely than architecture : The tricks of art that builders learned of trees" are many, and their planting would coincide with the revival of a "tree sense " in Britain and indeed in the Empire. Are we not now making floors and furniture of West Australian Jarrah that was recently either destroyed or used only for paving? Lord Bledisloe (in a characteristic foreword) refers to the giant antiquity of the Kauri woods of North Auckland. We habitually exaggerate the age of our own trees, but about the world exist a good many that have lasted a cool thousand years : even such little trees as Dragon tree by Government House in Gibraltar and the gargoyle olives by Majorcan roads go near to, such antiquity. Oaks in England, say by Alder- maston in Berkshire, or in Hatfield Park or the Monnington oak, have seen perhaps 700 years of history at least. The newly proposed clumps are to be in shield, not circular form. I understand that land is being offered for their reception.

Songs and Words

Several attempts have been made of recent years, both in Germany, where students of birds are many, and in the United States, to secure gramophone records of the songs of birds, None of them, I believe, has proved so successful as the latest attempt made in conjunction by Mr. Koch and. Mr. Nicholson. The first is almost wholly ,responsible

for the actual recording, in which he has been helped among others by Mr. Julian. Huxley, who offered him facilities in the' charming little Wlid bird sanctuary at Whipsnade. Perhaps the chief difficulty of recording songs in nature is the sensitiveness of the microphone. The soughing (how- ever yompronotinee it) of the wind, the rustle of the leaves, the hum of an engine miles away, the interference of other songs all spoil a record. One singularly perfect and amenable blackbird, singing on a most suitable site, carolled in vain, for whenever he began a wren was inspired to do the same ; and the effect on. the microphone was devastating. Even an echo may prove fatal. Nevertheless, in spite of all difficulties the songs of fifteen different British species were well secured ; and when carefully reproduced they give the real impression. I should not like to say, as Mr. Julian Huxley said at a private performance, that the illusion is thorough, that. the song of the nightingale—one of the best —summons up a Surrey spinney at night ; or that the euckcitt's

call "begets the golden time again " ; but there is the song, true, distinct and pleasing, to be analysed at will or used by the less learned for identification. The accomplishment is as nearly as may be unique. The publication of a book with sound illustrations is, I should say, properly unique.

Yet only the fringe of the subject is tciuched. How amusing and how instructive it would be to give a bird's record throughout the year : its calls and cries, its spring song and its winter song, its lyrics and its challenges. Tennyson once lamented that he had not enjoyed the opportunities in his youth of South Kensington, when doubtless he would have polished hopelessly precise phrases about the colours of many more birds than the linnet, robin, pigeon and plover. The nature poet of the future will doubtless have the chance of a joint film and song ; and the urban lyricist be able to give points to his rural eompetitors * * *

Sound Illustrations

The provision of illustrations in sound (as-well as in colour) is in itself a delightfully new idea ; and Mr. Witherby is to be congratulated on this sequel to other pioneer work. He is almost the" author and begetter" of the craft of bird-ringing in Britain ; and in this regard is to Britain what Mr. Jack Miner of Ontario is to Canada. The width and extent and zeal of the ringers, who hope to solve by their artifice many of the problems of bird (and now of fish) migration, are due to his energy and ideas. It is exciting, to say no more,r.to receive from a publisher a box as well as a book. The book and its holder conceal the underlying gramophone discs on which the songs of 15 British birds are reproduced.. If nae day in the fields you heard a warbler and wondered. if- it might not be a willow warbler, and went home and turned on the willow warbler's ditty, you would be a good deal surer of a correct identification than if you saw the bird and looked up a picture of it (even if that picture were by Mr. Seaby himself). The record preserves the sweet cadence of the ultimate notes with singular and persuasive fidelity, "once heard never forgotten."

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The Pioneers All those concerned with this publication are in some real sense pioneers : the publisher, the recorder and the writer of the words. Mr. Nicholson has enjoyed what is called a meteoric career among scientific ornithologists. After a very brief novitiate he- established himself as an authority solely by the accurate ingenuity of his views. He was in the forefront of the makers of bird censuses The review of the heron population was a masterpiece in London and elsewhere and starling roosts were afterwards estimated with less accuracy, as- conditions made necessary, but with extreme. ingenuity. He has broken new ground in Several directions, and breaks it-in- this book. The. value lies -chiefly in- his recognition of the many different causes of song and- his- singularly apt and :well-observed observations. He was -an admirable -field- observer before he became a critic and. never generalises except on. the authority of his eyes and ears.- His hook is not a .last- word, but it is likely-to be a-lasting