THE DUTCH "POLDERS" IN MAY.
THE long drought of the present spring, which has destroyed or dwarfed the pastures of Southern Eng- land, has raised in the wet meadows of Holland a crop of grass and flowers such as has not been seen for twenty seasons. In draining their flats the Dutch have created a region of pasture unlike that in any country of the world, and in spite of the labour of keeping it clear of water, they would probably refuse to exchange their "polders," as these sunken meadows are called, for any other district of the same area. The general appearance of these pastures, with their herds of black and white cattle, and innumerable " rhines " and ditches, is familiar to travellers. But they are difficult of access, as, apart from the absence of hedges, the Dutch farmers object to trespass on their precious grass-land. The bird-life of the polder is in curious contrast to that of the ancient meadows of England. The whole tribe of whitethroats, linnets, finches, blackcaps, thrushes, fly- catchers, robins, and other hedge and thicket living birds are absent in a region where dykes take the place of fences, and there is no hedgerow timber. Only in the dense copses of alder, rooted in stagnant water and matted with a jungle of marsh-plants, do the riverside warblers appear. There the sedge-bird, the reed-warbler, and the great sedge-warbler, the finest of all Continental song-birds, except the nightingale, may be heard at all hours of the day. But in the open polders between the long shines of water which run parallel, like lines of ribbon, between the strips of sound ground, even the lark and pipit are scarcely seen. Their place is taken by birds which in England are only found in the salt-marshes or on the high moors. Hundreds of redshanks nest in the mowing grass, and every few acres holds a pair of these noisy but most ornamental birds. They are inces- santly in motion, skimming low over the grass and water, with bright red legs stretched backwards, and uttering their musical call. Godwits, a larger wader, are almost equally common, and their fine olive-clouded eggs, as well as those of the redshank, are brought in numbers into the towns for sale as "plover's eggs." Another polder bird is the oyster- catcher. These not only nest in the meadows, but fly in at all times of the year when the flood-tide has driven them from the sands of the shallow sea beyond the dunes. Of all the birds of the district the oyster-catchers are the most restless and vociferous, dashing at any trespassers, whether dog or man, and pursuing them with incessant screams until they have left the neighbourhood of their nest, when the pursuit is generally taken up by a second pair. The curlews nest on the margin of the sand-dunes, but haunt the wet meadows at all hours of the day and night. Even swallows and martins are not common, their place being taken near the coast by the beautiful white terns, the `- sea- swallows," which twist and hover over the canals and dykes on the watch for fish. These terns are as tame as English sparrows; tamer perhaps, for while the sparrow has the bold-
ness which comes from familiarity with danger, the terns pursue their fishing by the roadside as if man did not exist. Each bird beats a certain length of canal, drifting on long white wings almost as the wind carries it, and falling in- stantaneously to the surface when it sees a fish. When tired the birds fly to the locks, and there sit sunning themselves on the black-and-white mooring-posts which stud the water near the bank. Wild-ducks are scattered over the whole of the "polders," though nowhere in great numbers, except round the large country-houses where they are preserved. But every alder copse seems to hold a brood, and the old mallards lie out all day in the sun in the thick grasses among the butter-burrs.
Herons frtquent every part of the polder flats, and the number of heronries in the thick canal-bordered woods which surround the mansions of the Dutch country squires is very large. That at the "Loo" Palace, which was the scene of the last meets of the Royal Hawking Club, is the largest and best known. But in many of the least wooded districts they seem equally common, though suitable sites for nesting-places do not exist. Like the cormorants in the Amsterdam Zoological Gardens, which have built nests upon the ground adjoining the lakes, these herons have abandoned their usual habits, and nest wherever a few trees offer a home. One considerable colony, between the Hook of Holland and Schiedam, is built in the small elms surrounding a farm- house and buildings, and the herons, with a number of rooks, bring up their young above the sights and sounds of a cow- stable and poultry-yard. Storks, formerly so common, seem to be gradually deserting Holland. A pair have built in the topmost pinnacle of the spire of the new Reichs Museum at Amsterdam, and a tree which was inhabited eighteen years ago near the house of Oeaterbeg, at the Hague, still holds a nest. But the spectacle of a brood of young storks, wading about in the wet grass and catching frogs in the evening, is no longer one of the common sights of Holland. Towards the southern shore of the Zuyder Zee the level of the polders sinks, and there, at more than one point, even the Dutch engineers are unable to free the flat from stagnant waters. But the transition from dry polder to wet polder, and thence to marsh, is shown only by change of vegetation and the disappearance of sheep from the meadows. The bird-life remains the same. Even in the present drought it is not safe to feed sheep upon the lowest pastures ; those which are kept for milking are tethered on the high embankments, where they share the pasture with the goats, each animal being supplied with a small tin mug of water,--presumably filled from some source less likely to contain the germs of the parasitic "fluke" than the ditches of the marsh. On these wet meadows wild-flowers seem almost to take the place of grass, the fields presenting the appearance of the trial seed- grounds of Sutton or Veitch. The edges of the rhines of water, here almost as broad as the strips of dry ground which they divide, are fringed a yard deep with cuckoo- flower. Between these fringes, and extending to the utmost limits of the polder, are beds of marsh-marigold, the flowers almost touching, and covering the land with an unbroken mass of orange. With a drop of a few inches in the level these flowers disappear, and the polder becomes an iris-bed, covered from dyke to dyke with flowers of the fleur.tie-lis. Beyond the iris fields lies the lowest level of the tract, in which shallow water tops the land, producing in place of grass or flowers, wide beds of reeds down to the foot of the high embankment which shuts out the Znyder Zee. These reeds are a source of wealth to the thrifty Dutch. In a dis- trict where wheat-straw is unknown they provide the thatch which covers not only the roofs but the sides of their barns and windmills, and is used, like bamboo, for lines of shelter fences, dividing the tulip-gardens and vegetable-fields, which lie under the dunes towards the sea.
That the same reclamations which have produced the polders have yielded land which is a vast garden of flowers and fruit is not the least astonishing feature of the flats of North Holland. When, a thousand years ago, the sea dammed the mouth of the old Rhine with sand, the whole tract between Leyden and ICatwyk-on-Sea was changed into a feverish swamp, while the main waters of the Rhine turned south and flowed in the channel of the Waal. The site of thia swamp, still locally called the Rhineland, is now a smiling land of garden and sound meadow, the scattered clumps of ancient alder-trees alone showing that it was once a fen. Through it what remains of the old Rhine runs between banks set for miles with blazing beds of scarlet tulip% till it enters the "desert region" of the sand - dunes: Here the Dutch have cat through the hills and ones more given to the river its ancient exit to the sea, barred, by double sluices of granite and ateeL The tulip-beds creep on by the riverside into the dunes, the scarlet patches divided by mounds of helm-covered sand, on which the fisher. men's nets are laid to dry, and the Rhineland fisher-children sail their models of the flat-bottomed fishing-boats, impresaed, perhaps, by the fact that a Dutch "pink" spends almost as much time upon the sand as it does upon the water. At lowest ebb the sluices of the slow river are opened, and what is left of the mighty Rhine slips out between sole-backed, famine. fringed groins of granite across the waste of blowing sands, into the North Sea. The basin within the sluices holds no ships, except the shrimping-boats of Katwyk, whose skippers tell the visitors, with a smile, that this is indeed the Rhine "but we want no river here. The river is the enemy; and the sluices were made to let the river go, and leave for us the polders and the land."
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