Chat and Tortoiseshell
Autumnal weather has been such that a number of birds of different species have been tempted to nest late in the year and much beyond their usual date. The most mteresting of these is being watched in a North Devon garden of very small dimensions. A whinchat has built in the shelter of a thin line of low gorse some three yards from the windows. The young are now just about ready to fly, and the parents—as happens, I fancy, with such late broods—work even more furiously than usual to feed up their late-corners against the approaching winter. These whinchats have been falling upon an unusual form of prey. They have decimated, if the word is not too mild, the tortoiseshell butterffies that abound in the garden as never before within memory. Close to the gorse-bush where the nest is concealed is a patch of valerian that con- tinues to flower, as far beyond its proper date as the bird has nested and bred. The patch is very vivid in my own memory, for I saw it one day in early June or late May besieged by more Humming Bird Hawk-moths and Painted Ladies than I have ever seen. The belated flowers—some red, some pink, some white—have been visited this autumn by a yet larger company of Tortoiseshells. The multiplicity of these beauti- ful butterflies may be suggested by one figure. When the curtains of some rooms that had been shut up were shaken out no fewer than seventeen Tortoiseshell butterflies emerged. They had doubtless sought this warm retreat for their hiber- nation chambers. No other butterfly (though the clothes moth is an exception) is quite so fond of a house in winter time ; and few hibernate in the perfect state so successfully.
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