FEBRUARY IN THE WOODS.
fliIHERE is an old country saying that snow in February is
"the crown of the year," of which the meaning presumably is that the snow comes as a consummation of the natural work and labour of the fields and woods ; after the melting of the snow, the toil and the birth that is to begin will be of a new year. Certainly the February that is with us has been crowned with ermine and diamonds ; it must be ten years or more since the snow lay so long nnmelted in the Southern counties, as it lay in the opening days of the present month. In woods where there is an abundance of wild life, as in the deep and wonderful forests that belt the Sussex Weald, a fall of snow adds a peculiar fascination to a walk among the leaf-strewn rides and open patches of rain-bleached grass. If not a glint of feather or fur is to be seen stirring in the trees or undergrowth, yet the whole ground is traced and patterned, crossed and cries-crossed, with written evidence of a wealth of life in the still covert which would not be credited, were the writing not so plain in the snow. Here, all along the narrow path, and traversing it from side to side, run the tracks of a dozen pheasants; you can easily distinguish the strong, deep monogram of the proud and heavy cock from the lighter trail of the lien, and can notice, too, not only the lines left between his footmarks by his middle toe as be has walked daintily over the covered leaves, but the trace of his fine long tail brushing the snow behind him. A little further, and three or four rabbits have come lopping out from a neigh- bouring bury; there is a curious resemblance between the trail of their pairs of fore-feet and hind-feet, the former dainty and small lying behind the longer and deeper imprint of the latter, and the marks left by the shoes of a horse after a jump. The smaller, rounder marks of the horse's lore-feet always lie behind the longer, larger cups cut into the turf by the heavy hind-feet, and so do those of the rabbit. No one could mistake a rabbit's track for that of a hare; the hare's is quite twice as large, and of course proportionately deeper with the heavier weight of body. Hardly so distinct is the footprint of the fox, which might easily be that of a terrier ; but you cannot go wrong over that light and delicate trail of round, soft pads, in an almost exactly straight line one behind another. That is a cat, one of the worst of poachers. The writer has never shot a cat, but it must be owned that a cat slinking on evil errands through a wood loses half her grace and all her majesty. A tortoiseshell cat poaching is positively unlovely ; perhaps a large grey Persian might manage the business with more dignity.
February has her own charm for the shooter, the more marked, perhaps, because most February shooting is solitary work, or needs, at all events, no more than the assistance of an attendant or under-keeper. The last cock pheasant has sailed over the line of guns outside the covert, and the last covey of partridges has broken over the hedgerow before the advancing flags of the beaters. Snipe and wildfowl may call to the marsh and to the saltings, and in Irish woodlands there may be certain days still waiting for the gunner, when the sudden woodcock will flit silently out from the trees, or cross the open glade as he crosses it in Turner's happy painting. But the characteristic shooting of the early days of February is the ferreting of the deep and scattered rabbit buries in the woods. In the fields and hedgerows the ferrets have been worked already, but the buries inside the coverts have perhaps been left undisturbed so as to keep the pheasants at home for the last thinning of the cocks in January. Certainly such sport has its proper fascination. It will not give the opportunity for the exercise of such skill as is needed, say, to account satisfactorily for partridges driven late in the season on a windy day, or really fast high pheasants, and for that reason the suspense of waiting for rabbits to bolt from a bury is not so keen as the almost painful pleasure of standing expectant for difficult birds. Still, there is a keenness of pleasure in the suspense, and in the successful dealing with the flurrying, rusty grey occupants tumbling out of one hole into another with incredible cleverness, or darting straight away up the bank in a way which will sometimes puzzle the best and quickest of shots, who forgets that the rabbit, besides going away, is also going up. Nor is the working of the ferrets a business which can be undertaken by the first- corner. The management of half-a-dozen inquisitive little trackers, white-furred, limber, and furious for blood, is a matter not to be lightly undertaken ; it needs long experience to know how and where to dig, if one or two of the little beasts "lie up," and the handling alone of creatures with such abominably sharp teeth is a thing that takes some learning. But ferreting for rabbits is not only fascinating for the sport it affords. The opportunities it gives for the study of wild life are long and quiet, and the walk from one bury to another, along paths rarely used at other seasons, may often be invested with the charm of discovery. It was daring such a walk, earlier in the year, that the writer first came across traces of that strange disease which has decimated the huge flocks of pigeons which this year have peopled the woods of Hampshire and Sussex. The ground was strewn with perhaps ten or fifteen patches of feathers, where dying birds had fallen. Under the protecting branches of a spruce a single pigeon was moping on the ground ; picked up, it appeared to be choking from some form of diphtheria,—" acorn disease," or "beechmast disease," keepers call it, and will tell you that it is always epidemic when acorns or beechmast are very plentiful. More probably it is due to overcrowding, and is allied to what is known, among the diseases of tame pigeons, as dipbtheric roup.
But a man need not be a shooter to find peculiar enjoyment in February woodlands. February is a month in which the trees of the wood and hedge stand barer to the sky than in any month in winter. Wind, rain, and frost are not strong enough to strip some of the oaks and beeches of all their foliage, and it is not until the rising sap in the new buds begins to push the brown and withered leaves of last year from their holding that the tree stands naked to the air. Not until then can its shape and habit wholly be seen. In modern landscape-gardening great care is taken when planting trees so to arrange them that they shall be a pleasure to the eye, not only when pink and white blossom is heavy on the boughs in April, or when the deciduous trees whose flowers are incon- spicuous have clothed themselves in the deep rich green of July, but when they stand out, stark and bare, to the snow-laden grey and white of December clouds. And it is from the woods in winter that the landscape-gardener gets his best lessons, when be can contrast the light grace of birches with the strong splendours of chestnut and beech and oak. It is only, too, when the deciduous trees are bare that it is possible to see in their true setting the worth and charm of English evergreen trees, yew and holly and the "bonny ivy-tree" for which the North Country maiden sighs in the song. In summer the yew must sometimes seem sombre, with the wealth of brighter leafage bursting over and round its branches. But in the clear sunlight of February it takes on a brilliance and a luminous depth of green which set it first among the trees of a British winter landscape, stronger and more restful than the Scotch pine or the glistening holly. An Englishman knows first in winter that there drives some spirit akin in Saxon blood and the sap of yews.
And for woodland audiences, it is in February that the singing of the birds begins again. Through nearly all the winter months the robin and the song-thrush bare sung on the days when the world has been warm with sunlight, and on the high and wind-threshed branches of the elms the missel- thrush has shouted into the rain-storms of January. But it is not until the February evenings grow longer that the woods
become alive with the strength of singing birds. There is nothing in February bird-song like the tumultuous anthems of April; but in the sunnier woodlands and orchards you will hear the ringing mating-call of the great-tit a full six weeks before he begins his nest; a lark rises from the wet plough at the corner of the wood; and, most springlike and most characteristic of February changing to March, the evenings are filled with the rich melody of the "boxwood flute" of the blackbird. That careless; song is sung to black and dripping oak boughs; but late in the month on a warm evening, the bird is deep enough in love with singing to carry his hearer with him three months further into the year, and to rehearse, in February, the full mating-song poured into blue air from hawthorn branches red with may.
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