COUNTRY LIFE
War on the Wood-Pigeon
Farmers have announced the organisation of serious war, at last, on the wood-pigeon, that symbolically peaceful bird so powerfully beautiful in flight and so gluttonously pestilential in habit. It is the wholesale stripping, in some districts, of acres of winter greenstuffs that is troubling farmers. The pigeon is merciless towards the brussels-sprout. In hard winters he attacks it because other food is scarce ; in mild winters he attacks it because he is a glutton anyway. He lacerates the whole plant, crown, buttons and all, with a savage voracity that makes the nibblings of rabbits look almost like the chimblings of mice. The flocks this winter seem greater, if anything, and far less shy, than usual. They have fed much under oaks and beeches, evidently on acorns and mast. I was once shown, by an animal trainer, the claw of a lion. The beak of the wood pigeon has something in common with it. For the piece of hooked lion-steel could have ripped open the flesh of a man as easily as the pigeon- beak rips open the pod of a pea. That ragged but fatal slash at the lush pods of summer seems, in fact, altogether too ferocious for the dove of peace. But then, has not history taught us that olive branches are now offered on the points of a million bayonets ?
The Charm of Pigeons
Much though I hate his slash at my winter greens and my summer peas, I like the wood-pigeon. I like, especially, two things about him : I like his summer voice and I like, almost as much, one special and almost crazy aspect of his flight. That summer note, of all bird-notes the most sum- mery, should begin to be heard, according to the authorities, somewhere about the end of February. This year it had already begun, on mild wet days, at the beginning of Feb- ruary. Heard in the dark mornings, it was almost like a dream. It is a note belonging to the high orchestras of summer, a tender honeyed moan, more monotonous than the cuckoo's, that must first have connected the bird with peace. The flight has also something in common with the cuckoo's : the same straightforward direction of power, much the same pace. But its one special idiosyncrasy, which Gilbert White remarked on but did not stop to describe, is unique. That sudden upward swoop and clap of wings at the crest, followed by a dying fall, is one of the loveliest and strangest stunts in all bird flight. It never fails to take me by surprise. There is a kind of mock tragedy in it, as though the bird had been shot by a spasm of joy and had fallen in some sort of ecstatic imitation of death.
The Wild Gladiolus The wild English gladiolus, Gladiolus Illyricus, is one of those indigenous plants whose native existence, like that of Daphne Mezerium, seems always to have been en the verge of mythical. This small -spiked, bright purple little species has never been found except in one locality, the New Forest. The Victoria County History of Hampshire confirms this, and guide books on that county take pride in it. On the other hand Sowerby, in that great compilation made at the end of the eighteenth century, does not mention it. Step does not mention it. Moore, in a Victorian work on English wild flowers, does not mention it, though he includes the Daphne. Indeed I find it very hard to find anyone who does mention it—except, oddly enough, the seed catalogues, which offer this too-modest, mythical little thing at sixpence a packet. I have a feeling, somehow, that G. Illyricus is one with that wild pink cyclamen reputed to grow in parts of Cornwall and Wales, on which the authorities are also silent ; and which in turn may have something in common with those wild Chiltern snowdrops which I once went to find on the advice of the local enthusiast, and which turned out, at last, to be primroses.
A Garden Stoat I count it a lucky day when the stoat appears from his home in the Lonicera hedge to do a bit of hunting or exploration or some brief moments of almost squirrel-like exercise on the grass. He appears rarely enough, though more often now than the pair of weasels living in the same hedge, which at one time I saw almost every day, when they explored the hedge like small brown, almost saffron-bellied snakes. In the summer the stoat often hunted in the garden. We were plagued by a family of young rabbits, about six all told, which had squeezed in under the wire. The stoat came to hunt them, until finally there were no more to hunt. He was a swift performer, and I never saw any of that grand guignol drama, the slow circumvention and so-called hypnotism, that arouses horror among those who persist in applying man- made laws to the world of nature. The young rabbits had seats in the rock roses or among the small forests of anthemis and alstromeria, and the stoat had nothing more to do than a boy who falls on a young rabbit with his hands in the hay- field. But one afternoon the hunt came out into the oper., and as I sat on the lawn a rabbit ran past my feet at full speei and the stoat came bounding after him, with amazingly swift squirrel-like leaps of pursuit. The rabbit took to the hedge, a fatal thing, and in a second it was all over. When I went .co look, in half a minute, stoat and rabbit had gone as completely as though they had Wiped each other out.
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Stoat and Birds
All this was really against the rules, according to which the stoat should have gone round in dithering circles, the rabbit limping helplessly in mesmerised terror, the performance inexorable, long-drawn-out. But it is, I think, a mistake to suppose that that strange process of terrorising is inevitable. A stoat will sometimes kill swiftly, especially in the case of young rabbits. And later this same stoat was to break another rule. He ran across the lawn, one winter morning, and scaled the willow-tree. His feet made small cat-like scratching noises on the furrowed bark. By some odd chance the tree was crowded with small birds, tits, sparrows, chaffinches. Hudson has described how, at the approach of a weasel, a group of such birds was striken into a state of excited terror. But in the willow-tree nothing happened at all. It is one of those old trees, hollow-trunked, known in some parts as doddle-willows. The stoat ran about among the branches and inside the trunk for a long time. But the birds showed no movement and no excitement. It was an hour before the stoat came down again. By that time the first birds had gone and others had replaced them. But during the whole time not a single feather had shown a flutter of alarm or fear. Does a stoat in a tree lose all its power of terror ?
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First Spring
At the beginning of January we took our pleasure, as always, more from the remnants of summer than the promise of spring. We made much of the ragged stuff of lingering roses, old-maidish veronicas, shabby bits of marigold and alyssum, the usual out-of-season lupins. A month worked a miracle. By the beginning of February primroses were not only out in copses, but strong, upstanding, with real spring freshness. Sallows had gone beyond a mere flickering of silver buds and were luminous against the winey background of chestnuts. Celandines were but by the third of the month, Wonderfully vivid, sun-varnished. Skylarks were strong. Thrushes, all ready indomitable in the mornings, began to reach a wonderful pitch of clarity in the twilights. Bluebells were far up. In the garden the desolation of too much rain began to be broken up by crocus of half a dozen kinds. Almonds Were pink in bud. And in :the hedgerows, more significant even than hazel or sallow or the green ears of honeysuckle, a miracle of change had come over the hawthorn. Its buds were not only red, but green. They seemed like the first true stitches in the fabric of spring. But by the middle Of the month the fabric could show another and perhaps even more remarkable stitch : the first buds of blackthorn flower, creamy brown; fat-clustered on the spring branches. Ready to break, they were almost two full months before their time. They should break in a fortnight ; which means, according to tradition, a blast of snow for March. The countryman takes gloomy delight in this bitter coincidence of snow and blackthorn, and calls it blackthorn winter and triumphantly reminds you
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