FLOODS AND ANIMAL LIFE.
ONE of the most striking and disastrous events of the inundations which followed the gales and rains of the beginning of the month has been the flooding .of Yaxley Fen in Huntingdonshire. All over the big river-basins of the country, but particularly in the valleys of the Thames, the Trent, and the Great Ouse, the damage to agricultural property has been very serious ; but in Yaxley Fen there has been worse than mere inundation by overflow of storm-water. Yarley Fen is part of what was once Whittlesea Mere, an inland sea in winter, and since the bank of the Ham River broke some three weeks ago it has become once more a lake. Farm-buildings, cottages, and stacks are half under water, and, according to the Times correspondent, all hope of next year's harvest has_ been abandoned. It is not expected that
the water can be drained off for three months, and meanwhile gulls and wildfowl wheel and float over a mile and a half of deep water. The Thames and Trent valleys, which always suffer serious damage from floods, have no such melancholy sight as that.
In the Thames valley a. flood seldom lasts long enough to do irreparable damage. In the extraordinary summer flood of June, 1903, there was a great loss of animal life, but the creatures who suffered most were the small deer of the fields and woods, and particularly the breeding birds. The number of young pheasants and partridges which were drowned in the second and third weeks of that month was prodigious. But Thames floods come far more often in the winter than in the summer, and for the last great inundation we must go back to 1894, when the water ran two feet deep down the High Street of Eton, and when there was a rather amusing story told of two Eton boys who decided that the time was opportune for a novel form of boat-race, the boats being baths and the sails umbrellas; the contest, however, was put a atop to by an unsympathetic tutor. Floods at Eton, which has doubtless seen more of inundations than any other school, have never been unpopular. There was a flood in the " eighties" which drove the rats out of the College cellars up into the floors of the boys' rooms ; the rats used to eat the boots put out to be cleaned at night, and did other damage, including gnawing through the boards of the floor into hampers stored with ham and other provisions; but when at last they were evicted it was generally recognised that they bad provided a considerable number of interesting experi- ences. From the rats' point of view it may not have been quite so amusing. Indeed, it is difficult to calculate the enormous disturbance and displacement of animal life caused by floods on a large scale. Rats and mice are driven in every direction for shelter, and thousands are drowned, especially if caught in the current of a stream, for rats are poor swimmers, besides being unable to stand prolonged cold and wet. Hares and rabbits, again, leave their forms and burrows for higher ground, and have even been taken by men in boats from pollard trees and bushes into which they have climbed. There was a curious case near a Nottinghamshire village the other day, when a number of hares had taken refuge on a hill out of the way of the floods. Some of the villagers turned out to catch them, when the hares, which are good swimmers, took to the water, and the men swam after them, catching the poor creatures by their hind- legs. Two of the men were prosecuted for poaching, and pleaded that all they wished to do was to rescue the hares ; however, the Magistrates were not convinced. Smaller creatures than hares and rabbits, and particularly the rabbit's chief enemies, the stoats and weasels, drown in hundreds. Moles are caught in their burrows and drowned before they can dig themselves out. The writer on Tuesday walked over a riverside field which a month ago was covered with mole-runs. Where the floods had subsided there were large patches of molehills spread flat and soaking ; but on the higher part of the field, where moles were still working, the runs were no thicker or more numerous than usual. The field is surrounded with water, so that there was no other place but the higher parts of it to which the moles of the lower ground could have escaped ; the inference is that they must all have been drowned in their runs. With the moles their natural food, the earthworms, would be drowned also,— a point which suggests rather curious speculation. How long does it take for earthworms to return to ground which has been drowned out? Their eggs, probably, would remain ; but it must be a long time before the worms are at work again, perforating and aerating the soil.
Another odd problem is the fate of the insect inhabitants of the grass-field and ploughlands covered with water. It is impossible to estimate the exact effect of temporarily flooding a meadow, as regards its insect life, but certainly insects perish in prodigious quantities. In the summer flood of 1903 the swallows and martins, and even the swifts, were pathetically tame in their search for food, there being practi- cally no hatch of flies for them to hawk after. Last summer has been set down already as one of the worst for butterflies and moths known for years ; but the floods coming after it must have destroyed incalculable numbers of caterpillars and chrysalises, which spend the winter tucked down among the roots of the meadow-grasses, or just below the surface of
the soil. What shall we see in the way of butterflies and moths next summer, and if the supply of insect food is lessened, will there be any corresponding effect among the Migrant birds which come to our shores in spring? As it is, winter floods have extremely widespread effects on the range and local habits of birds. Flood-water drives the birds which seek their food naturally in arable and grass-fields, such as partridges and larks, and birds which feed on the seed of thistles and weeds of waste ground, into all sorts of unaccus- tomed places. On Tuesday the writer put up a covey of partridges in a field surrounded on three sides by houses and on the fourth by flood-water; they had evidently flown in from the flooded fields down by the river. A little further on, where the river lapped across the road, and a cottager and his fifteen-year-old daughter were splashing home in what looked like high sea-boots, there was a little bay into which had drifted a quantity of fragments of reeds and rushes. A hen goldfinch, which ought to have been flitting about dry thistle-heads, was searching over this quaking platform for possible soaked seeds. She was so tame as to take no notice of a spectator a yard away. But it is not only the land birds which floods disturb. The river birds, unable to find their accustomed landmarks, swim anywhere and everywhere ; swans float where cows should graze, and the dabchicks and coots and waterhens seem to become quite confused, and shelter in the most unlikely places. One of the birds which suffer most is the kingfisher. In floods his natural prey, the minnows, are not to be seen or caught; his accustomed bushes, from which he used to dive for them, are under water, and he has nowhere to perch. He comes, it is to be feared, often to an untimely end. He searches, perhaps, for private waters, deserting the public river, and he possibly finds that there is food to be got from a trout hatchery. He is then shot, or may be shot ; the proprietor of a trout hatchery once told the writer that in flood-time he had shot forty kingfishers in a week. The numbers of Thames kingfishers cannot be expected to stand a drain of those proportions frequently. The remedy would seem to be to net-in the hatchery ponds.
A question remains after the floods which can only be answered by the next month or so. Some weather prophets hold the theory that it is just when the soil is thoroughly soaked and all the warmth taken out of it that we must expect the hardest weather. They point, among other years, to the floods of 1894 and the ensuing months of 1895, one of the hardest winters on record. The frost began in January, and, except for a day or two, did not break until well into March. Will the floods of this year be followed by another six weeks of ice and iron-bound soil P We have at least had warning, if there is anything in the theory, and can set about fresh plans of protecting pipes and water-supply. If the floods remain ont in places, at least there should be good skating.
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