built in the same hedge one spring, and while resting on the gate by the roadside their "coo-coo" mingled with the song of the nightingale and thrush, the blackbird's whistle, the chiff-chaff's "chip-chip," the willow-wren's pleading voice, and the rustle of green corn as the wind came rushing (as it always does to a gateway).
Goldfinches come by occasionally, not often, but still they do come. The rarest bird seems to be the bullfinch. I have only seen bullfinches three or four times in three seasons, and then only a pair. Now, this is worthy a note, as illustrating what I have often ventured to say about the habitat of birds being so often local, for if judged by observation here the bullfinch would be said to be a scarce bird by London. But it has been stated upon the best authority that only a few miles distant, and still nearer town, they are common.
The road now becomes bordered by elms on either side, forming an irregular avenue. Almost every elm in spring has its chaffinch loudly challenging. The birdcatchers are aware that it is a frequented resort, and on Sunday mornings four or five of them used to be seen in the course of a mile, each with a call bird in a partly darkened cage, a stuffed dummy, and limed twigs. In the cornfields on either hand wood-pigeons are numerous in spring and autumn. Up to April they come in flocks, feeding on the newly sown grain when they can get at it, and varying it with ivy berries, from the ivy growing up the elms. By degrees the flocks break up as the nesting begins in earnest.
Some pair and build much earlier than others; in fact, the first egg recorded is very little to be depended on as an indication. Particular pairs (of many kinds of birds) may have nests, and yet the species as a species may be still flying in large packs. The flocks which settle in these fields number from one to two hundred. Rooks, wood-pigeons, and tame white pigeons often feed amicably mixed up together; the white tame birds are conspicuous at a long distance before the crops have risen, or after the stubble is ploughed.
I should think that the corn farmers of Surrey lose more grain from the birds than the agriculturists whose tenancies are a hundred miles from London. In the comparatively wild or open districts to which I had been accustomed before I made these observations I cannot recollect ever seeing such vast numbers of birds. There were places, of course, where they were numerous, and there were several kinds more represented than is the case here, and some that are scarcely represented at all. I have seen flocks of wood-pigeons immensely larger than any here; but then it was only occasionally. They came, passed over, and were gone. Here the flocks, though not very numerous, seem always to be about.
Sparrows crowd every hedge and field, their numbers are incredible; chaffinches are not to be counted; of greenfinches there must be thousands. From the railway even you can see them. I caught glimpses of a ploughed field recently sown one spring from the window of a railway carriage, every little clod of which seemed alive with small birds, principally sparrows, chaffinches, and greenfinches. There must have been thousands in that field alone. In autumn the numbers are even greater, or rather more apparent.
One autumn some correspondence appeared lamenting the scarcity of small birds (and again in the spring the same cry was raised); people said that they had walked along the roads or footpaths and there were none in the hedges. They were quite correct—the birds were not in the hedges, they were in the corn and stubble. After the nesting is well over and the wheat is ripe the birds leave the hedges and go out into the wheatfields; at the same time the sparrows quit the house-tops and gardens and do the same. At the very time this complaint was raised, the stubbles in Surrey, as I can vouch, were crowded with small birds.
If you walked across the stubble flocks of hundreds rose out of your way; if you leant on a gate and watched a few minutes you could see small flocks in every quarter of the field rising and settling again. These movements indicated a larger number in the stubble there, for where a great flock is feeding some few every now and then fly up restlessly. Earlier than that in the summer there was not a wheatfield where you could not find numerous wheatears picked as clean as if threshed where they stood. In some places, the wheat was quite thinned.
Later in the year there seems a movement of small birds from the lower to the higher lands. One December day I remember particularly visiting the neighbourhood of Ewell, where the lands begin to rise up towards the Downs. Certainly, I have seldom seen such vast numbers of small birds. Up from the stubble flew sparrows, chaffinches, greenfinches, yellow-hammers, in such flocks that the low-cropped hedge was covered with them. A second correspondence appeared in the spring upon the same subject, and again the scarcity of small birds was deplored.
So far as the neighbourhood of London was concerned, this was the exact reverse of the truth.
Small birds swarmed, as I have already stated, in every ploughed field. All the birdcatchers in London with traps and nets and limed twigs could never make the slightest appreciable difference to such flocks. I have always expressed my detestation of the birdcatcher; but it is founded on other grounds, and not from any fear of the diminution of numbers only. Where the birdcatcher does inflict irretrievable injury is in this way—a bird, say a nightingale, say a goldfinch, has had a nest for years in the corner of a garden, or an apple-tree in an orchard. The birdcatcher presently decoys one or other of these, and thenceforward the spot is deserted. The song is heard no more; the nest never again rebuilt.
The first spring I resided in Surrey I was fairly astonished and delighted at the bird life which proclaimed itself everywhere. The bevies of chiffchaffs and willow wrens which came to the thickets in the furze, the chorus of thrushes and blackbirds, the chaffinches in the elms, the greenfinches in the hedges, wood-pigeons and turtle-doves in the copses, tree-pipits about the oaks in the cornfields; every bush, every tree, almost every clod, for the larks were so many, seemed to have its songster. As for nightingales, I never knew so many in the most secluded country.
There are more round about London than in all the woodlands I used to ramble through. When people go into the country they really leave the birds behind them. It was the same, I found, after longer observation, with birds perhaps less widely known as with those universally recognised—such, for instance, as shrikes. The winter when the cry was raised that there were no birds, that the blackbirds and thrushes had left the lawns and must be dead, and how wicked it would be to take a nest next year, I had not the least, difficulty in finding plenty of them.
They had simply gone to the water meadows, the brooks, and moist places generally. Every locality where running water kept the ground moist and permitted of movement among the creeping things which form these birds' food, was naturally resorted to. Thrushes and blackbirds, although they do not pack—that is, regularly fly in flocks—undoubtedly migrate when pressed by weather.
They are well known to arrive on the east coast from Norway in numbers as the cold increases. I see no reason why we may not suppose that in very severe and continued frost the thrushes and blackbirds round London fly westwards towards the milder side of the island. It seems to me that when, some years since, I used to stroll round the water meadows in a western county for snipes in frosty weather, the hedges were full of thrushes and blackbirds—quite full of them.
Now, though there were thrushes and blackbirds about the brooks by London last winter, there were few in the hedges generally. Had they, then, flown westwards? It is my belief that they had. They had left the hard-bound ground about London for the softer and moister lands farther west. They had crossed the rain-line. When frost prevents access to food in the east, thrushes and blackbirds move westwards, just as the fieldfares and redwings do.
That the fieldfares and redwings do so I can say with confidence, because, as they move in large flocks, there is no difficulty in tracing the direction in which they are going. They all went west when the severe weather began. On the southern side of London, at least in the districts I am best acquainted with, there was hardly a fieldfare or redwing to be seen for weeks and even months. Towards spring they came back, flying east for Norway. As thrushes and blackbirds move singly, and not with concerted action, their motions cannot be determined with such precision, but all the facts are in favour of the belief that they also went west.
That they were killed by the frost and snow I utterly refuse to credit. Some few, no doubt, were—I saw some greatly enfeebled by starvation—but not the mass. If so many had been destroyed their bodies must have been seen when there