THE WEATHBFA.
IF there can be said to be an aanus classicus of had weather, it is perhaps the year 1879, when the harvest, such as it was, was delayed until November. Another rainy year which must have been in the minds of many people lately was 1903, when more than three inches fell in three June days in Lon- don, and when the total rainfall for June and July was 11.62 inches, the highest record for forty-five years. The question is whether the present year is not going to rank with, or even surpass, the worst years in the annals of British weather.- We have had practically no summer. June nearly everywhere was dull and rainy, and in some parts, particularly in the North of England and the Border Country, it was excep- tionally wet ; there were records of five, six, and even seven inches of rain for the month, and on only one day out of the thirty was there any bright sunshine. July, except for a few very hot days, was not much more cheerful than June, and added to its chilly rains a succession of cold high winds. And then, following two of the worst months of the year, has come an August which for vileness of general behaviour, combined with exceptional outbreaks of storm and rain, is probably without a parallel in the records of the Meteorological Office. The climax of the month was reached on Monday, when no less than 6.31 inches of rain fell at Norwich in twenty-four hours —the largest amount which is known to have fallen in a single day in England south of Northumberland and the Lake District. (The complete record, furnished by Mr. A. W. Preston, of Christchurch Lodge, Eaton, is 7.34 inches for 29 hours, from 4 am. on August 26th to 9 a.m. on August 27th.) There is a record of 6-70 inches of rain which fell at Morpeth on September 7th, 1898, and there are nine records of over six inches standing to the credit of Seathwaite, Borrowdale, which heads the list with 8-03 inches on November 12th, 1897. But six inches in a normally dry county like Norfolk is unparalleled ; and the nearest records to that of Norwich are those of her neighbours in the Eastern Counties. There were 5-26 inches at Great Yarmouth; 3.05 inches at Lowe- stoft; 2-55 inches at Clacton-on-Sea; 2.41 inches at Raunds, Northampton; 229 inches at Felixstowe ; and 2.01 inches at Walton-on-the-Naze. A new and unhappy record is esta- blished in the fact that Norwich, in which thousands of persons have been rendered homeless by floods, for two days was cut off from railway communication, and that the Great Eastern Railway Company were compelled on Tuesday to post notices at Liverpool Street announcing that tickets could not be issued to a large number of their stations in Norfolk, including such important places as Cromer and Sheringham.
But the weather of the year has been remarkable for other manifestations besides rain. The spring began with a drought which in many places lasted through the whole month of April. May was a month of sunshine, cold winds, and very little " growing weather," so that when June came in there was no bottom to the grass in the hayfields, and in the gardens many of the spring-sown seeds had failed alto. gether. Drought and sunshine early in the year always produces remarkable effects upon wild life, and the spring of this year must have added several new records in the way of early appearances of insects and young birds. Orange-tips were on the wing in April, and in the second week in May there were Red Admirals and Painted Ladies in the wood- land rides next to the bluebells. Painted Ladies, of course, are erratic creatures, and pay small regard to times and seasons; they are migrant butterflies, and arrive in England at odd intervals, sometimes in enormous numbers, from their native place, which is probably North Africa. But
Red Admirals are pretty regular June visitants from the Continent, and their arrival in May is a rare occurrence.
It was possibly these unexpected arrivals in years of spring drought which led some of the earlier entomo- logists to class Red Admirals among the butterflies which hibernate through the English winter, though there is no established record of the butterfly having actually been dis-
covered hibernating. Another entomological phenomenon due to the rainless spring was the prodigious quantity of caterpillars which in whole districts of the Southern Counties stripped the oak trees bares than in midwinter. In December oak branches are tipped with unopened buds ; in May this year the caterpillars, mostly of the Dotted Border and Mottled Umber moths, devoured the buds almost before they had broken into leaf. These plagues of caterpillars, however, may be expected almost in any dry May. More unexpected were the early hatchings of some of the birds, particularly the game birds, whose seasons of nesting are almost as regular as the dates in the calendar on which they may be legally shot. Partridges in an average season hatch out their eggs between June 12th and 20th. This year there were nests batched out in the third week in May, and it was on May 26th that the present writer pub up a brood of young wild pheasants which flew over an eight-foot hedge. They looked as well-grown as pheasants usually are at two months, and, though they cannot have been so old as that, they can hardly have been less than five or six weeks, which brings the date of their hatching back to the middle of April; if before that you allow twenty-four days for incubation, you are back in March for the laying of the clutch of eggs. These early hatchings of partridges and wild pheasants have led this year to a rather curious problem. Generally speaking, it is safe to conclude that heavy or prolonged rain in June and July means the complete extinction of the young broods, which get caught in the wet grass, and, if not actually drowned, become chilled, and die of pneumonia and other effects of the cold. Doubtless this has happened in many places this year; in the Border Country, for instance, the young broods are reported to have been absolutely wiped out, so that with the losses among the parent birds taken into calculation there are actually fewer partridges on the ground than were left at the close of last year's shooting season. But these losses have not occurred to the same extent everywhere. Among wild pheasants the mortality has doubtless been heavy, for the hen pheasant is a careless mother, and if she and her brood get caught in the rain she does not wait for her family, and see that each little bird follows her, but lets them drag along as best they can. Partridges, on the other hand, are most care- ful parents, and both the father and mother will take great trouble to see that their little ones are duly following them to a drier place if they can find one. There was an instance recorded this spring of a pair of partridges which hatched out their brood near a disused shed, into which they took the young birds whenever it rained. And now that the corn is cut, and it is possible to see with some certainty what birds are left on the ground, the reports of the partridges are much more reassuring than they seemed likely to be a few weeks ago. On high or sandy ground in particular the coveys seem to be large and strong on the wing, and no doubt, where this is so, the young birds have been able to get through the cold and wet owing to their having been hatched earlier, and so being proportionately stronger than in an average season.
The chief losses of a year such as this, of course, fall on the farmer, and already in some parts of England there must be many farmers faced with ruin. In the North, where the harvest is later, there is still time for the weather to change, and if the cornfields could only get a few weeks' sunshine the harvest might still be satisfactory. In the South and the Midlands, however, much of the corn harvest is already irretrievably lost. In field after field there is the same gloomy spectacle: shocks of oats with bunches of young green springing from their sodden tops, wheat and barley blackened and sprouting in the ear. The corn crops are the worst of all in any wet summer; there is practically nothing that can be done to save corn. But potatoes are different. All over the country we hear of potato disease ; and yet how many of the spoiled fields and gardens have been sprayed P Of course spraying may not be an infallible preventive of disease, and heavy rain continued day after day, so that the spraying solution is washed from the leaves, may make the most strenuous effort futile. But spraying has, as a fact, saved many crops of potatoes this wet summer, and there could be no more convincing object lesson than the contrast between two fields as you may see them, perhaps, with only the road between them ; the one with the haulms and leaves green and sturdy, the other black and rotten. Not even a month of sunshine will save a diseased patch of potatoes. With the other crops, sunshine is now the single thing needed. With enough sun there is plenty of corn that can still be cut and carried, and with more sun the root crops may even be better than usual. It is the heavy soils for which a long spell of warmth is most needed. On light and sandy soils heavy rain drains easily away, and it is in the rainiest years that gardens on sandy soils have their happiest spells of growth and flower. It was an odd contrast on Wednesday, in a sandy part of Surrey, to read of the rain of Monday and thirteen feet of water in Norwich streets, to go out in the garden and watch the butterflies in the sunshine over the sedums and asters, and then to drive out on the road and be smothered with the dust of a dozen motor cars.
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