TERNS, PLOVERS, AND SHINGLE.
ON the pebbly, wind-swept banks and hollows which the receding sea has piled behind it east of the Sussex Bother you can watch the soil forming in the sun and rain better, perhaps, than anywhere else in these islands. Three or four miles inland the level pastures are dotted with sheep and horses, browsing on rich grass ; nearer the sea you will find in May or June a strip of turnips in flower, a blaze of canary yellow, scenting the wind like a mustard-field. Turnip- seed is the best crop they get in that light sand, and if the farmer has luck in the matter of weather it is "worth grow- ing," you learn from a local informant; the litotes would please a classical farmer, watching admiration for the shining field light in the man's eyes. Beyond the turnip-seed begins the shingle, and on the shingle the soil, in every stage of
its making. On the long ridge last left by some great spring-tide, and never touched by salt water again, the pebbles are beginning to coat and spot themselves with dark lichens ; on the next ridge, perhaps, the lichens have rotted to form some scanty humus on the surface, in which the dryest, thinnest grasses have taken root ; further still inland the grasses are thicker and greener, and among them the dwarf white caropions and pink crane's-bills drive their straggling fibres deep down in the pebbles,—how deep you do not guess until you try to lift a campion root and all, and find the knotted, stringy wood actually thickening below the surface. Even a hundred yards inland the broom seedlings have already set themselves strongly in the soil, and spread their gleaming chrome mats and carpets, to follow, a month later, the vanishing splendour of the gorse. Under the gorse, which inland a mile is as thick, in patches, as on a Surrey common, there must be soil deep enough almost to plough, if you chose; the rabbits have tunnelled far into it, and a white scut flickers above the burrow as you crunch up over the stony bank. They get a good living enough, and trim the gorse- bushes as high as they can reach standing on their bind-legs, smooth and close as if a gardener had clipped the shoots for years,—an admirable piece of natural topiary.
On this wide stretch of shingle and grass, gorse and broom, perhaps a dozen different sorts of birds regularly make their homes in May and June. Some of them are common, and nest on almost every piece of waste or moorland ground in the country ; others are so scarce and so local that only a very rare combination of knowledge of the ground, knowledge of birds, and luck would enable even a skilled bird's-nester to find their eggs or young. One of the common birds, for instance, is the lapwing, and one of its rare neighbours is the Kentish plover; you might walk and watch for days, unless you knew where to go and what to do, without seeing a Kentish plover. If you are shown where and how to look, it may be quite a simple matter to find a nest, for luckily the Kentish plover is breeding in larger numbers every year ; and increased protection makes the taking of its eggs difficult and dangerous. The survival of the Kentish plover as a bird which breeds every spring in England is, indeed, due almost tntirely to the untiring work of the Society for the Protection of Birds. The bird is legally protected throughout the year; but legal protection is of very little value unless it is known by would-be egg-stealers that they are pretty sure to be prosecuted for breaking the law, and that if they are prosecuted they will not only be fined, but will have to give up the stolen eggs. The Society season after season pays a skilled watcher, who knows the ground and gets to know almost every nest on it, and he is authorised to use various powers which would make the position of an egg-stealer caught in the act extremely disagreeable. Of other birds besides the Kentish plover which nest on protected ground there are the common and lesser terns, the black-headed gull, the ringed plover, and the Norfolk plover or stone curlew. Nearly all of them come back in larger numbers to nest the next year.
If you are a bird's-nester and want to walk over ten or twelve square miles of shingle with a good chance of finding the rare plovers at home with their eggs, the first thing to do is to get permission from the Society to go over the protected ground with their watcher. The next is to meet the watcher
at a convenient spot; an extra mile or two over shingle makes more difference than a mile or two along a road. You must wear backstays, which are flat pieces of strong board about twelve inches by eight ; you thrust your foot through a leather strap, and if you are wise tie the things on in other ways to your boot. The resources of civilisation have not exhausted themselves in the devising of backstays ; walking over shingle with backstays is a dreadful mode of progression, the only thing worse being. walking over shingle without them. Tied tightly into your backstays, then, you clatter over the pebbles after your guide, making a din which you would suppose would scare every bird for miles. But it does not. You are walking towards a spot where there is a stone curlew nesting ; and she is sitting so hard that you are within thirty yards of her before the long-legged, brown-mottled bird steals off her nest and flits slowly near the ground to the cock a hundred yards away. If you have marked carefully where she rose, the buff. greyeggs, streaked and splotched like dead bracken, are easy to see. There is no nest ; the eggs lie on the bare pebbles and grass under a patch of foxgloves. The stone curlew, although so shy a creature, is a bird of engagingly open habits. Your guide tells you of another bird which nests every season on a particular bank, not only in the immediate line of fire of artillery practice, but actually under the spot where the great shells burst. The torn shard crashes within a few yards of the nest; but the mother sits quiet, and brings off her brood every year. She adds a peculiarly effective form of protection to the efforts of the Society and the law. Other plovers are less confiding. Perhaps the most difficult of all to find is a nest of the Kentish plover, even though it may be one of a colony, known to be breeding on a peculiarly inaccessible stretch of shingle two or three miles distant. You can judge the distance by an Ordnance map for yourself; but what your guide calls a mile, and what turns out to be no more than a mile afterwards, can seem an appallingly long distance under a strong sun and in the high wind which often blows over those stony slopes. You stumble over what feels as if it were three or four miles, and your guide decides that it is the time and place to lie behind the shoulder of a pebbly bank and look for the plover through the glasses. He shows you, soon, or if you are lucky you find for yourself, the small sand-grey bird, running or flitting over the stones, eventually dia. appearing behind a ridge. There is a nest there; not easily found, for if you do not know the level of the ridge on which the nest is likely to lie, your difficulty is multiplied endlessly. Another nest, found in the same way, lies in a strangely charmed circle. The bird has placed her eggs in the centre of a ring formed by the whitened skeleton of a hare.
The Norfolk and Kentish plovers watch strangers approach- ing their nests in silence. Other bird parents are less self- contained. Far in the distance, almost on the horizon, you may catch sight of white specks dancing in the sunshine. If you shuffle oyer the stones to the spot, the noise of crying birds comes down wind till it rises to a din. Hundreds of black-headed gulls rise from the shores and reedy islands of an open stretch of water, wheeling and circling above their olive-brown, sepia-splashed eggs, protesting that decent, top. hatted gentlemen walking along the Embankment they know; but who are these in wooden boots walking actually inside the nursery, if not absolutely on the eggs ? The gull's rule is to cry out before he is hurt. So is the tern's; but the tern anxiously watching intruders near his nest is a more beautiful bird. No bird is more gracefully unhappy. Up over the plain shingle where the nesting couples scrape their tiny hollows the white wings and forked tails dart and poise and sink to dart up again, the common terns making a lament that is half a cat's mew and half the twist of a rusty key, and the lesser terns, small and light on the wing, crying like anxious swallows before their flight in autumn. The gull's note is half anger, half alarm ; the tern's is the kind of sorrow that Latin bird mythology gives to the spirits of dead lovers. Does any visitor ever do any serious damage ? you ask your guide, who tells you that the real foes of the protected colonies are not individual collectors, but certain of the professional, com- mercial egg-dealers. A half-sovereign offered to a fisherman's schoolboy son is a large sum, and he will try to earn another. That is detestable enough, for the careful watching of months in a national cause may be wasted by the rapacity of a single collector. But what is to be said of a " naturalist " who, desirous of obtaining a tern in full adult plumage for stuffing, shot seventeen young ones, and threw them into the sea, because he could not tell old from young on the wing, before be killed the bird he wanted ? That happened off the shore one August day a year or two ago, and it is difficult to think of a proper penalty. If it were not for the work of the watchers, and the Society which employs them, who can say what else might not happen ? As it is, the Society sets a guard over one of the wildest and most fascinating stretches of English ground, and every year helps to rear increasing numbers of rare and beautiful birds. Few memories, for a bird's-nester, linger in sight and sound longer than an after- noon spent in the sun and wind over those miles of shingle ; the small, hardly seen, spotted eggs in the slope of the pebbles ; above them, clear sky to the circle of the sea, and the poised white wings of crying, soaring terns.
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