COUNTRY LIFE The C.P.R.E.
The Council for the Preservation of Rural England has recently celebrated its tenth birthday. The King has become patron ; and his patronage is the most highly cherished of the birthday presents. Opportunities for the beneficent work of the C.P.R.E. accumulate both in inspiring and pro- moting suitable legislation and in more patient and direct service in the resistance of particular threats. Such oppor- tunities increase much more rapidly than the funds of the Council ; and a great effort is to be made to expand the number of associate members, who in return for a guinea a year receive monthly accounts of the work of the Council— and very interesting and important these are. It is suggested that readers of The Spectator, who have given much evidence of their sympathetic interest, should help to enlarge this roll of associate members. The power of the Council depends very largely on the number of its members ; and there is no corner of Britain that does not owe a good deal to the Council. The address of the C.P.R.E. is Hobart Place, London, S.W.
Leicester Pioneers
The Council is establishing this week a Leicestershire branch, with the co-operation of the Lord Lieutenant (a keen horticul- turist) and the Mayor. Leicester, though in this regard a late starter, has been a pioneer in certain aspects of rural preserva- tion and regional planning. One of its citizens, Mr. Peach, did excellent work, not only locally, but with his travelling circus, with its store of persuasive photographs of the right and the wrong way to build and advertise and the rest. The Leicestershire preservers proved one point of great importance. They demonstrated that you can combine the public ideal of free access with the specialist's ideal of sanctuary. In any con- siderable wood you may keep any remoter corner as sanctuary without risking disturbance of its serenity. You may, in short, do what has been done at the Whipsnade Zoo, where all mariner of shy birds and rare birds disregard the neighbour- hood of crowds and the personally Conducted parties through the sanctuary itself. The Leicestershire branch deserves a wide membership and should do good service to the Council in general. In no county is the hunting community so eager for preservation, though perhaps it is the preservation of the " Oxer " that matters most to them. The county has recently sent out experts Ls hedge-laying to many other counties, especially Essex.
A London Bird Among the several birds that seem to have a natural bias towards towns is the great or spotted woodpecker. One of the species has been a regular visitor to a garden not far from Lord's cricket ground; and others are reported elsewhere. One must not generalise from a few instances ; but in this case one is supported by examples of other woodpeckers in other places. Nothing more astonished me in Toronto, for example, than the frequency of a woodpecker with very balient red, white and dark patches in the squares and other open spaces in the midst of that spacious city. In the yet Larger city of Montreal a green woodpecker was to be seen any day on the slopes of the hill that gives the city its name. Our own green woodpecker is, I think, much. shyer than the greater spotted. The lesser spotted again is one of the most difficult of all birds—or so it seems to me—to catch a glimpse of. Unlike the good child, it is more often heard than seen, though it is one of the birds that falls victim to the window pane.
Finchley Finches - An ardent watcher of birds, who does most of his observa- tion in the garden of a Rectory in Finchley, has noticed, as others thereabouts have noticed, that the place is a great favourite with -finches of several species. The greenfinch nests there, and Uses what building material is at hand. One eggless nest was discovered and a discussion arose as to its -date; but the dispute was soon settled by the discovery of a piece of newspaper woven into the nest, for the bird had found that pert of it which bears the date : the nest was only a few days old. Will the students of the derivation of place names allow the conclusion that Finchley was called
Finehley because it was always populous with finches ? It is said that the surname Finch makes many appearances in the registers !
Healthy Owls
The case for and against the little owl, to which soino reference was made last week, has been judicially summed up by a final article in the Field. The two essential facts, at least in my opinion, are that it is a destroyer of beetles, voles and mice for most of the year—and in these respects useful to the farmer—but a bitter enemy of nesting birds when it has young to feed. It kills the sitting bird as well as the young, and has dedroyed birds as far removed as the stormy petrel and nightingale. Some of the analysts regard it as the healthiest of all birds. It stores up against the hungry winter at least as much fat as, prop3rtionately, the hibernating bears ; and it is singularly free from maladies. Herein lies the danger. It would be welcome enough if it did not multiply beyond reason ; and one of the dangers of excessive multiplication is that it drives off, and consumes the food of, that wholly beneficent native bird, the barn owl.
The Frog's Enemy
A grins discovery was made the other day in a Buc'eing- hamshire garden. The gardener probing a large hole in a willow tree found it full of parts of frogs which had served as a meal for some animal unknown: Had the frogs (which choose many strange places for hibernation) collected there for wintering and been discovered by an enemy, or had they been carried there ? It is more than likely that a rat was the murderer, however the frogs got there. Hibernation is no more safe than migration as a device for avoidink winter dangers. Those animals that sleep completely, such a bats and perhaps queen wasps, and those that are half awake like hive bees or are awakened by bouts of warmth, suffer from particular perils. Frogs are perhaps less successful than toads (which sleep longer). A warm winter kills many worker bees and a wet winter many a chrysalis. A con- tinuously cold winter is worst for birds. They cannot live on the fat that they accumulate against the winter. It is probably best for most insects, above all hive bees.
A Neglected Tree
A new part of the most expensive of all such publications, Curtis's Botanical Magazine, has just been published by Quaritch for the Royal Horticultural Society, price 17s. Cid. The coloured illustrations are incomparable. The art of such reproductions in colour could hardly go further. The volume opens with a double-page illustration of a rare Catalpa. Its history and definition are of course chiefly of interest to specialists in botany ; but perhaps it may help to draw attention to a tree that should be much more widely planted. The Catalpa—of which good specimens are to be seen in London—in Gray's Inn and Battersea Park for example— has been strongly recommended for coronation planting by the special committee. The flowers are lovely, the leaves are lovely, the stature is not too big ; and a less superficial and obvious quality is the tree's length of life. It grows, as was said in a previous suggestion abut Coronation trees, at a very fair rate and is extremely hardy.
Birds in the Snow
The coming of snow makes some very sudden changes in the needs of birds and in their behaviour. It always brings rooks close to my house ; and they will hover and poise on the wing over a bird-table or scattered food, almost like a wind-hover hoping to stoop at a mouse. The birds that suffer most from a frosted or snow-covered ground are, in my experience, rooks, green plover, and redwing and long-tailed tits. Perhaps those skilful anatomists who have told us that the little owl, like the domestic hen, is particularly successful in covering his body with fat as winter approaches will tell us whether these victims of cold have less capacity than others for such storage. Presumably migrant birds are thinner in this respect that the permanent denizens
of a tolerably northern clime. W. BEACH TI1031.1.S.
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