COUNTRY LIFE
The Provocative Fox
The fox is still the most interesting and by- far the most provocative of English wild animals. He has some quality of arousing the passions that none of his fellow creatures comes anywhere near to possessing. We despise the rabbit and show a:mild culinary interest in the hare. The otter and the badger would excite us More if we saw them more often. But the foic seems to be regarded as everyman's common possession, exciting us all to anger or admiration, according to circum- stance. Recently the Countryman opened its columps on the question of fox-hunting. • The result was a crack of impas- sioned fireworks that could not have been surpassed' if the question had been one of cruelty to ,children instead of cruelty to foxes. I do not propose to drag up the ancient question of cruelty here, but clearly there is an extra flash of .Character in an animal that can amuse human passions as much as " Charley " does. It has often been suggested that the fox, but for hunting, would long ago have gone the way of the bear and the wolf. I am not so sure of this. What I am sure of is that no other animal extant in this country could replace the fox. Apart from beauty of appearance, traditional cunning, 'great courage, and- so nn,' he has an extra touch of something somewhere, an indefinable flash of something, not quite nobility but almost, that makes him fascinating and admirable—always providing' one isn't a peultry4armer.
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Foxes as Hunters
Which brings me to the point of these remarks—the question of the fox as a &inter himself. My own note on foxes and sheep has brought an extremely interesting batch of fox notes from a Glamorgan reader, who gets a great deal of pleasure from fox-watching. " It is," he very truly remarks, " always a pleasure to see foxes when they are not being hustled.. . . On my early morning expeditions in search of wild duck on the ' splashes ' in -frostY weather I have several times seen a brace of foxes working together. One goes along the river bank and the other keeps 'about a hundred yards out and drives a moorhen in towards the river down the irrigation ditches. They work as cleverly as sheep-dogs. . . . The two I saw last week were not working together—indeed it might hive been the same fox, so quickly do they travel without apparent effort. The first I saw was loping along the bank on the opposite side of the river—a fine red dog-fox in splendid coat. When he saw or—more likely—winded me, he slipped up into a hedgerow and sat down on his haunches, displaying his white chest and white-tipped brush to great advantage. When I made a slight movement, he vanished Without moving a twig in the undergrowth. Later I was walking along the iailway-line while my companion walked the bracken beside the river to try to get me a driven shot at an old cock pheasant. The golden retriever was working between us. I noticed a wisp of snipe get up wild, and then the' mall birds in the little brake below the line flying up into the trees and chattering. Then I saw a hen pheasant legging it across the metals, followed by what I thought was the dog. A train was coming, so I shouted to it to go back, when to my amused surprise I saw it was a fox again, steadily following up the line of the running bird." I wish space would allow me to quote the rest of these reminiscences : they are full of colour and life and a genuine admiration, almost love, of the fox.
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The Rabbit Plague
By eontrast; my note on the Skokholln rabbit plague has brought nothing hilt the bitterest condemnation of rabbits. No one has a good word for them. The only good word I have been able 'to come across at-all, indeed; is by Gilbert White, who deelared that there was no turf on earth so 'soft and, cloSe as the turf cropped by rabbits. On the same day as my note appeared a correspondent of the Daily Telegraph went so 'far asIesuggest a rabbit week, on the lines of the already estab- lished rat week, an idea I warmly applaud. Now a corre- spondent from Vorkihire comes along—driven to desPeratiou by a garden in which every shoot his been devastatedwith the suggestion that gardeners might consider the growing of Plants which are extremely distasteful to rabbits and so drive them off. Rabbits, I fear, take more driving off than this,- and there is no guarantee, in any case, that distasteful plants will lessen a rabbit's appetite for wallflowers, pinks, the shoot of iris reticulata and ericas, of which they are passionately fond. The problem, maddening though it is to gardeners, is really larger than this. And readers who are plagued by rabbits, either in gardens or on open land, may like to comfort themselves with the following figures. They are simply the official figures for rabbits imported into this country from Australia, New Zealand and certain European countries. The figures are in hundredweights. On an average reckoning there are 25-80 rabbits in a hundredweight. The figures are for 1938: Australia, 434,299 ; New Zealand, 85,755 ; Italy, Netherlands and Belgium, 18,665. Roughly a million rabbits a year, therefore, come into this country from Australia alone. My only comment is that the Ministry of Agriculture, like higher authorities, sometimes moves in a mysterious way.
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New Seeds for Old
The new seed catalogues are out. They flash and flame, as usual, with many so-called • novelties, among which the sweet pea again takes the biscuit. New pink shades or new blues or new scarlets, lavishly illustrated, are offered at fancy prices. I try hard to discover how they differ from last year's pinks and blues and scarlets, which • were also offered at fancy prices and which were also, at that time, " the best pea it has ever been our good fortune to raise." This craze for novel- ties has reached absurd proportions, and one of the best- known plant-collectors in the world has rightly observed that whereas a nurseryman may make a fortune out of a new sweet pea or a new daffodil, a plant-collector, after risking his neck on a Himalayan precipice, is lucky if his genuinely new plant is grown by half a dozen enthusiasts. The craze for something new often means, too, that many lovely and familiar plants are gradually superseded and drop out. The botanical magazines of a century ago are full of illustrations, then called embellishments, of fine plants, beautiful species and hybrids, now completely forgotten. A black ranunculus, a splendid double crimson pelargonium, a black auricula, many beautiful bizarre carnations—they were then the craze. Who grows them now ? The number of species grown in these islands is now something like 12,000 and is rapidly increasing. There seems no need, therefore, for this ramp in novelties. Not that this will interest the fashionable nurseryman. He is a psychologist first, a plantsman second. The public craves for change and, if it can get it, for something that the next- door neighbour hasn't got. Novelties, indeed, flourish wonder- fully on the dunghills of jealousy.
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Redwings, Fieldfares and Starlings
A Yorkshire correspondent reports a flock of redwings in a town garden. " Six or eight in the flock, and most of them contented themselves with holly berries. A ' more daring member, however, came two days running to sample the scraps scattered in our own garden for more normal visitors. On the third day they came in a body to or Pyracanthus creeper, but suddenly they disappeared and have not turned up since: At the same time another observer reports a scarcity of fleldfares and, very surprisingly, of starlings. Though certainly, when one thinks of it, the starling flocks seem to have been of no great size this winter, at least since December. If there is a scarcity, and it is dangerous to rely on hearsay and memory, then it becomes a more astonishing thing than a shortage of rooks or sparrows. Of fieldfares there is certainly a scarcity. In my childhood they were as common, almost, as peewits. We called them felts.' They made fine grey flocks on the winter land, feeding. Yesterday I asked a boy who might be called the crack bird- observer of his village if he had seen any fieldfares at all. He opened a mouth like an egg. Both fleldfares and redwings are among winter visitors here, and redWings, at least, suffer much from cold—the reason given by my Yorkshire corre- spondent for the sudden appearance of the flock—and so no doubt do fieldfares, the two being closely related. But this would not account for a scarcity of fieldfares over a period of relatively mild winters. H. E. BATus.
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