Winter Visitors
The spring migration of birds is hardly affected by weather. Swallows, cuckoos and warblers come over, as a rule, pat to particular dates whether spring is late or early, cruel or kind ; but the autumn and winter movements are considerably dependent on weather, especially—as it seems to me—in plover, fieldfares, redwings, bramblings and perhaps pigeons. There is no fixed date for the coming either of the thrush or finch tribes ; and this warm winter some of us towards the south have caught no glimpse of a redwing or fieldfare or brambling, though the year has been notable for the multitude of other winter visitors, above all, larks. The birds are not quite such easy dupes of unseasonable weather as the plants, and no green plant is so gullible as those parasites, the funguses. I can find no reference to any record of the con- tinued crop of large funguses up to the very end of the year. I picked four varieties—and they were fine fresh specimens— on December 28th. On the same day some of us gathered flowers of the pirus Japonica and stock ; and the proper winter flowers (in which perhaps we ought to reckon the primrose) were seldom so fine : Christmas roses, Iris stylosa, yellow jasmine, and various primulas and several species of viburnum, especially fragrans and laurustinus.
Previous page
