NEW FOREST LIFE IN WINTER.
IN midwinter, and in the New Forest, the wild life of primitive England is seen at its lowest denomi- nator. Even now in great districts of the primeval Forest and waste man does not count. There is no agriculture. The plough never turns the soil. There are no crops, not even mown grass. There are no corn-stacks, no corn, no cattle- yards, none of the two or three scores of vegetables and grain with which man has covered most of the rest of England. On the other hand, there are trees for ever in many parts, naturally sown and ancient trees, artificially planted and modern trees ; heather and bog plants, holly, and such store of acorns and beech-mast as once fed many thousands of swine, though the swine are not now seen there.
Yet the result is that the Forest, while still the most beautiful region of trees left in this country, is singularly devoid of life. In winter the landscape is a study of branches and of the effects of wind, cloud, and vapours upon and over trees of every kind, shape, and grouping. There is no sound but the sound of trees,—the voices of the pines in the wide and formal woods planted in the late Queen's reign, or the singing of the wind through the boughs of the ancient beeches and the oaks, sprung from seed that fell five centuries ago. The ponies, and the few cattle of the commoners, and the little Forest donkeys browse incessantly in the open parts of the dark though genial Forest, making their way in winter always towards the light, perhaps because the pasture is sounder there than in the narrower glades. The only men seen in the " walks " of the vast domain are looking for lost cattle. Like Saul the son of Kish, one inquires, " Have you seen my father's asses ? " only he calls them by the Saxon name ; while another seeks a cow, which has "strayed since last Sunday." They can track their cattle in some degree, a gift inherited from the days when deer were numerous and the warrantable bucks were known partly by the track.
The ponies, in their winter jackets, are still in fair condition up till the New Year. It is only in the famine months of February and March that their bodies grow lean, and their coats more long, ragged, and discoloured than those of the Cossacks' ponies on the Steppes of the Dnieper. The scarcity of the birds that stay, and of the small quadrupeds which make up the wild winter life of rural England, is sur- prising. The owls are doubtless there, though their voices, beard much by daylight in spring and vociferously through the summer nights, are silent in the dark winter days. That there should be so few woodpeckers, and almost no magpies or crows, is difficult to explain. The rooks naturally forsake a district where there is no ploughing. Even starlings are few; there are few larks, which prefer the corn lands and clover layers, almost no thrushes, few blackbirds and jays ; even the tits and tree - creepers are less numerous than around tame cultivated enclosures. The writer found bags of eggs of spiders, or some such creature, like yellow herring roe done up in woolly bags, in places so conspicuous that if tits had been numerous they could not have failed to find them. Yet the small birds
Though the visitor who knows the Forest in summer sees little animal life remaining in the winter days, he- will find more than ever to charm and interest him in the forms and growth of the trees, both in the wild forest and in the more recent woods. The latter are the forest of the future. From each, as it reaches maturity, the girdle of youth is to be loosened, and the fences removed, when it will be left open and wild for ever. Looking at the woods as Cobbett might have done, for Cobbett was a lover of trees as well as an economist, it is possible to be hopeful as to some. The pine plantations, with their broad green avenues, may in time become what the beautiful pine woods of Esher and Claremont are now,—only they are planted on flats, not on the hillocky Bagshot sand. The different ages of these trees, of which some are being cut for thinning, can be accurately told by counting the rings. The sections of three trees felled near to one another all had thirty-nine rings. The lowest growing branches on two showed twenty-nine rings, and something of the date and growth of other branches could be learned in like fashion. But these woods are featureless. It is a relief to come to a space where a fire has burnt an opening or a bog has pre- cluded planting. The " artificial " oak woods will doubtless improve with time. But nothing equals the work of those natural landscape gardeners, the cattle and ponies, in the old Forest, and nothing devised by man can approach the natural form and setting of oak and beech, ash and thorn, yew and holly, as it grew up to make the open woods as we see them to-day. They are incomparable. They are not " sized " to a standard. They are of all ages, and all sizes, and all kinds. The hollies and thorns have nursed the beeches and oaks, and Nature has brought each tree up to be a picture in itself. The most striking contrast is in such plantations as were enclosed first, and in which the old trees were marked for destruction, before the happy day on which Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, then Lord Henry Scott, told the House of Commons what he had seen in a
have few enemies, for hawks are scarce, probably because there is so little prey. Foxes, unfortunately, are far too numerous, which may account for the scarcity of rabbits, of hares, and of the larger ground birds. The blackcock, for which the Forest is admirably suited, have almost or quite disappeared, partly, it is said, because they were unduly shot on some private ground, partly, there can be little doubt, because of the increase of foxes. That there should be so few rabbits is extraordinary. Epping Forest, for instance, swarms with them. Indeed, there is more wild life, including rabbits, oidgem, jays, pigeons, and wild duck of various kinds, in he small area of Epping Forest and Wanstead Ponds, a few miles from London, than in double that space of the average New Forest area. The writer, for curiosity, tried many hundreds of acres in different parts with an "all-round" setter used to ground game, both woodland and heath, and except near two small warrens, found only three rabbits and three pheasants in as many long walks. The only quadruped at all common is not conspicuous. It is the mole. There must be squirrels, for the ground in many of the plantations is strewn with the cores of pine-cones they have eaten ; but even the squirrels do not show.
Scarcity of food and the presence of ground vermin must account for this absence of animal life in winter. In the summer, when the Forest supplies unnumbered insects, many almost unknown in other districts, it swarms with oversee birds, which fly there to nest, and find abundant food. But that is another story. There is one wild boar loose in the Forest now, which must find a living somehow. But it is doubtful whether even in Norman days, when the boar was one of the beasts of the Forest by law established, this curiously foodless tract could have supported many. With the deer it is different. But the deer have become shy from the constant hunting, and they hide like hares in the thick enclosed planta- tions. There seems no reason to think that the Normans used packs of bounds to run down their game. The old drawings and sculpture show fast greyhound-like dogs, used probably to run the bucks quickly to bay, just as the foresters used them until the Crown gave up its deer rights. If a part of the Forest, say for a radius of two or three miles round Lyndhurst, could be kept as a sanctuary, it might be possible before long to see the deer in the open again. morning's ride, and obtained a respite which was turned into a reprieve. In these the old trees stand, and beside them new woods also. In time the seedlings of the ancient trees may spring up uninjured by cattle, and show whether old forest can reproduce itself. At present the only danger to the beauties of the Forest is the reproductive power of a single and intrusive tree. In the old days fir was not allowed to be planted. It wasted the national defences by occupying ground that should have grown oak. Now the Scotch firs first planted in the enclosures have seeded over the open heaths, and before long these may be choked by masses of scrubby conifers. The heaths are the lungs of the Forest. They keep it healthy, and give views and shape to the woodlands. The Act which forbids the cutting of timber in the wild forest needs revision to check the encroachment of these "escaped" firs.
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