COUNTRY LIFE
The Famous Shearwater A photograph has been taken by Mr. LocIdey of the two most miraculous birds in history. They carry, if not bells on their fingers yet rings on their toes, in evidence of their authentic identity. They are the shearwaters which were taken by air to Venice and released there. The distance from their home in Skokholm is a thousand miles, as the crow flies. Whether the shearwaters flew as directly as the crow is not known, but they flew home at once by a tolerably quick route. No other miracle of the homing instinct equals this, for the journey does not coincide with a migratory route and there is none of the so-called "inherited memory" involved. Mi. Lockley, who set afoot more than one new line of enquiry into the behaviour of birds, publishes some further account of life in his "dream island" in the latest number of the Countryman. The island becomes a sort of Heligoland in bird history ; but this isolated experiment
with the shearwaters stands Henn outside all migratory theory.
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A Strange Species
The stiecies is one of the strangest in the list. Like the gannet it has a peculiar fondness for particular spots and like the storm petrel (though it does not habitually travel so far from its base) it seems to be independent of light. Some inward light directs it. One of the strangest of all experiences in bird' observations is the sound rather than the sight of shearwater coming home to their buried nests in the darkness. They fly with the impetus of a missile, almost regardless of intervening objects. Some few are killed by the lighthouses, not as other birds are killed by moth-like blundering against the light, but by their headlong habit of sheering the top of things. They are killed by the dark projection above the lamp. The less normal birds seem to have certain instincts more highly developed than in tit:: common herd. For example : the young cuckoos, which have just flown off in a south-easterly direction, precede their parents (with whom of course they never have had any association). Their long flight is pure instinct or tropism or whatever word you may prefer ; and the birds are without any experience of the sort whatever. It is, however, much easier to imagine an initinctive sympathy with astronomical forces persuading an animal to move in a particular direction, than such a purposeful and yet adventitious journey as the shearwater took to a particular home. Temperature, food or the • new theory of terrestrial magnetism can have no place. Home-loving birds have more than homely wits. * * * *
Poor Man's Stock In travelling the other day through the Fen country in the shires of Cambridge and Huntingdon I was much struck by the multitude of goats tethered by the roadside. It is a feature of these rich and (to those who know them) these delectable plains that the 'margins of the roads are broad and generous,, and this wealth- of cheap grass has perhaps encouraged the keeping of this 'form of poor man's stock. On the other hand in most goat-keeping districts of the Continent (the neighbour- hood of Malaga for example) flocks of goats are kept alive, sometimes only just alive, by pulling down for their consump-' lion the branches of any available tree or shrub ; and one feature of the Fens is the comparative absence of trees and bushes. In his delightful book on Open Fields, Mr. C. S. Orwin incidentally denies that any modern farmer would think of using the leaves as fodder for his stock;. but he reckons without Norway, where tree leaves are not only used green but converted into a sort of hay. French shepherds, as I have described before, regard ivy as one of the more valuable forms of winter fodder for their hungry sheep. Again tree and bulb leaves are used a good deal in the Whipsnade Zoo, and doubtless elsewhere, for the grazing animals. Indeed, at Whipsnade not uniinporinnt discoveries have been made in the comparison of English tree leaves with foreign as sources of food. Imported deer or wallaby will flourish on certain leaves only because they contain much the same essential vitamins as the leaves
they consumed in their native haunts. * * * *
Wasted Food A deal of natural food and fodder is wasted, but the waste does not extend to the mushrOom. Mushroom fields are invaded by crowds of pickers with whom neither farmers nor keepers can successfully deal. Some of the invaders come from great distances; and these more professional trespassers usually anticipate the native. They clear the fields about the hour of dawn. They confine their attention to the field agaric with an occasional horse mushroom thrown in. I do not know that I have ever seen a champignon purposely plucked in England. There are Continental cooks who profess to make a dainty dish out of the puff-ball, which is one of the only mushrooms generally found in the immediate neighbourhood of the field agark. It is in great quantity at the moment. It is an odd experience that the surest find for mushrooms in my experience is an old gravel pit or rather scoop, where the plant (usually cultivated on almost unqualified manure) has no apparent nutriment at all beyond a film of else barren sub-soil. On the subject of wild animals and mushrooms a correspondent calls attention to the frequent nibbling by rabbits, but the rabbits, like the squirrel of whom I wrote, never finish the meal. They do not really like mushroom food. Does any animal except the pigs that dig so ardently and successfully for the savoury truffle ?
Maternal Pheasants Some rather gloomy estimates have been published of the ill effects of the season on the health of pheasants ; but there is, I think, very little doubt that the wild pheasants have reared highly successful broods. The lamentable truth is that the tame pheasant, the artificially reared pheasant, is generally regarded as of very much more importance than the wild. In some districts virtually all the pheasants are tame. There are, for example, places in Scotland (which ought to know better) where pheasants are reared intensively, for the §ake of two days' heavy shooting in the season ; and there is little doubt that they interfere with the population of grouse (our one exclusively British wild bird) and black game. It is alleged that the pheasant is a bad mother. "My experience is to the contrary. The wild bird is a more obstinate sitter, even than that ideal parent, the partridge. She will on occasion continue to sit close though all the surrounding cover is cut and though she herself has been wounded with the scythe. The cock pheasant, of course, is a mere brigand and not to be compared with the cock partridge, which is quite as parental as the hen. He is excellent only as a target and very greatly excels the partridge in speed of flight. There is a general yule, though it is contrary to the semblance, that the bigger the bird the faster. The chief exception is among the duck ; the little teal can give the mallard a considerable start.
In the Garden The brightest of all the flowers in blossom at the moment is the scarla creeper Tropaecdum Speciosum. I saw it last week in more than usual beauty on the wall of a Norfolk bungalow. The scarlet patches stood out both on the north and the western walls. That original and suggestive but not undogmatk gardener, Mr- H. J. Denham, scorns the popular idea that it is especially well suited to a yew hedge. The yew is of course one of the greediest of all hedge plants, and this nasturtium like other plants needs plentiful nutriment. Yet it will endure the yew's greed. A particular Hereford- shire creeper that flourishes only less than the Norfolk is planted on the smith side of a yew hedge which one would, think the worst possible place ; but it is well established and protests only by burrowing through the hedge which is thick; and blooming only on the north side. The loveliest creeper that I ever saw growing on a yew hedge was a dark leaved garden nasturtium with scarlet flowers, and if it is desired to decorate the south or west side of such a hedge, such climbing nasturtiums are much more suitable than their cousin the scarlet tropaeohun which is proverbially capricious though it can be made to flourish even in South England hardly less well than in Norfolk or Scotland, if its roots are rightly shaded from the sun and a sort of woodland soil is compounded. Incidentally the canariense, once extremely popular both in window boxes and in cottage gardens, seems to have lost some of its weil.deserved favour.
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