The' Life of the Fields rpHE meadows with their hawthorn
walls, and their green floors whose pattern changes as one dominant -flower succeeds another, are a new feature of the English landscape. They are new, that is to say, compared with the woodland and marsh and moor at the expense of which they were made, and the wild life of the country -has not yet grown used to them.
The old aristocracy of our fauna—the badger, fox, wild-cat, pine-marten and otter, the bittern, buzzard, raven, golden eagle and black grouse, and the swallowtail butterfly for example—belong predominantly to the forests and fens and unfrequented coasts, and have been losing ground steadily ever since the new-fangled fields appeared, although it was bitter persecution which in many cases proved the last' straw. As the old fauna was driven back into smaller and smaller refuges, a partial vacuum was created. A type of country which had once been insignificant and supported a limited wild life expanded until it could claim, taking tillage and pasture together, three acres in four of English soils The flora, mingled with adventurous alien stock, had little difficulty in keeping pace with its opportunities, but the higher animals found more trouble in adapting themselves, and to this day a large part of the country is as under- populated with these as it is with men on the land.
If we look narrowly at the present inhabitants of our fields we can see that they are mostly colonists; and even form some idea of their earlier haunts. This is true particularly of the birds. The lapwing undoubtedly over- flowed from the marshes and moorland, or rather held its 'own 'when they were converted into pasture and arable. The house-sparrow, a hanger-on of man in the country as well as in the town, attaches himself to the buildings, farmyards, and cornfields rather than the meadows. Skylark, corn-bunting, partridge, and yellow wagtail are genuine field birds, spreading from the native grassland of hills and river-levels. Chaffinch, robin, blackbird, throstle, and mistlethrush are pure woodlanders, which, together with the linnet, whitethroat, and yellowhammer of brambly gorse-commons, must make up more than half _the ordinary farm population. Their conversion is very recent, having only been made possible by the hedges, and that of the mistlethrush, for instance, is still going on. In Germany, where the change was later in happening, there are observers still alive who can remember the whole course of their transformation from the time when they were purely forest birds. But with us the most notable example is the starling, which has become, through a successful adaptation to life in the fields, one of the most abundant British species. One has only to remem- ber that in the old order the starling filled an insignificant niche to understand how completely the face of the land has changed. In no conceivable circumstances, with the soil clothed in the way it is clothed now, could the starling be anything but a dominant form. It would need to be smothered again in reeds and interminable forests to reduce him to his former status.
On a more limited scale, the black-headed gull has done the same, while the rook and jackdaw seem to have attached themselves so early to agriculture that how they existed in prehistoric Britain is not very clear. Both must have been rare birds then, as they still are over a large part of the Continent. In fact, there is no better way of realizing how artificial our farmland community is than by looking for its dominant forms anywhere except just the other side of the Channel. Not only is it a mere hasty improvisation of Nature, but it is quite a different improvisation from those which were made wherever else, through the breaking up of virgin soil, a similar problem arose. It is true that there are far more " English sparrows " in America than there are in England—by rough calculations based on the census there are twenty times as many east of the Mississippi alone. It is also true that the starling is making rapid headway as an alien in the United States, and that over great tracts of country these two British forms are dominint. But the animal community is different, and their.place in it is different also.
The food of. the starling in America bears little resemblance to his diet in England, and he is at present in the curious position of being useful to agriculture on one side of the Atlantic and injurious on the other. These, moreover, are exceptional birds ; the thrushes, rook and daw, robin, gulls and lapwing play no great part as birds of the farm in Europe as a whole. The balance of nature by which web-footed gulls of several species and the arboreal green woodpecker are pressed into service as supernumerary insect-killers in the field is a peculiar insular development ; our farm-birds, to an even greater degree than those of other countries, are doing work which they must find very strange.
One lookg vainly for that complex interdependence of the web of life which biologists call a food-chain ; rela- tions, of course, exist, but they are haphazard and makeshift, and there are enormous apparent gaps, only to be explained when we realize that England is another Australia. Environments have been altered much faster than the fauna can keep up with them, and fresh invaders, finding no checks devised for their repression; have run riot ' before settling down as dominant but orderly members of the new population. The Canadian pond- weed, which choked the waterways of England for a period and then relapsed into obscurity, was not uncharacteristic.
The hedge, old as it looks, was not there to hinder the manoeuvres of Cromwell's cavalry ; pasture and hayfields traversed by the rolling ridges of former cornlands are not many centuries older. In our sight England has the mellowness of age, but in a bird's-eye view she must appear as a bewilderingly new country, more completely changed than the prairies of the Middle West, and still in the throes of the resulting struggle for dominance—a struggle in which part of the old fauna has gone down and the rest is striving to hold at bay the invading hordes which have been pouring in from the arrival of the rabbit or the black rat to the modem onslaught of grey squirrel and little owl. E. M. NICHOLSON.
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