COUNTRY LIFE
families arc small and few, in some large and many. This has been shown in surprising detail in certain enquiries into the ways of migrant wild duck. We have, I think, just passed through an unusually prolific
period, though it has given strange contrasts, at least among insects. Wasps, for example, and bumble-bees have been as multitudinous as butterflies have been most surprisingly scarce. Clutches of eggs were large among many birds, not least partridges. In my paddock and in a neighbour's partridges each laid eighteen eggs. Their fortunes differed. One was robbed, it was thought by squirrels. In the other eighteen chicks were successfully reared. How the bird covered so many is a puzzle, though on one occasion, at any rate, cock and hen were seen brooding side by side. That great ornithologist who organised the I.C.I. partridge farm advised keepers to remove all eggs over a dozen, on the ground that fewer "runts," so to call them, or weaklings were produced. He did not support the proverb (so little supported in France), Dieu Unit les grandes families. As to other birds, three successive families were almost the rule among blackbirds, and rabbits seem to have been giving birth to successive litters for the last nine months. Two rat litters I dug up were each of nine young.
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