2 DECEMBER 1949, Page 14

For this Late Date

There is still a good supply of hedgerow berries, that should serve as food—for mice as well as birds—in the hungrier months.' Perhaps they will not last long. Our home-birds are not in the same gourmand class as those immigrant thrushes, the fieldfares, which are wont to clean up completely any bushes they attack ; and they are arriving rather late. They are, of course, singularly irregular in their dates of arrival. In spite of what the .books suggest, the flocks may not reach the south-west of England, or at least some districts in the south, till February; and in my experience they are often very late in the southern Midlands.