I
Wondered Where Its Mate Was, Following It From Place To Place
As It Flew, Determined Now I Had Found A Bird To Keep It In
Sight.
Presently a great blackness appeared low down in the
cloudy sky, and rose and spread, travelling fast towards me,
and the little wheatear fled in fear from it and vanished from
sight over the rim of the down.
But I was there to defy the
weather, and so instead of following the bird in search of
shelter I sat down among some low furze bushes and waited and
watched. By and by I caught sight of three magpies, rising
one by one at long intervals from the furze and flying
laboriously towards a distant hill-top grove of pines. Then I
heard the wailing cry of a peewit, and caught sight of the
bird at a distance, and soon afterwards a sound of another
character - the harsh angry cry of a carrion crow, almost as
deep as the raven's angry voice. Before long I discovered the
bird at a great height coming towards me in hot pursuit of a
kestrel. They passed directly over me so that I had them a
long time in sight, the kestrel travelling quietly on in the
face of the wind, the crow toiling after, and at intervals
spurting till he got near enough to hurl himself at his enemy,
emitting his croaks of rage. For invariably the kestrel with
one of his sudden swallow-like turns avoided the blow and went
on as before. I watched them until they were lost to sight in
the coming blackness and wondered that so intelligent a
creature as a crow should waste his energies in that vain
chase. Still one could understand it and even sympathize with
him. For the kestrel is a most insulting creature towards the
bigger birds. He knows that they are incapable of paying him
out, and when he finds them off their guard he will drop down
and inflict a blow just for the fun of the thing. This
outraged crow appeared determined to have his revenge.
Then the storm broke on me, and so fiercely did the rain and
sleet thrash me that, fearing a cold soaking, I fled before it
to the rim of the plain, where the wheatear had vanished, and
saw a couple of hundred yards down on the smooth steep slope a
thicket of dwarf trees. It was, the only shelter in sight,
and to it I went, to discover much to my disgust that the
trees were nothing but elders. For there is no tree that
affords so poor a shelter, especially on the high open downs,
where the foliage is scantier than in other situations and
lets in the wind and rain in full force upon you.
But the elder affects me in two ways. I like it on account of
early associations, and because the birds delight in its
fruit, though they wisely refuse to build in its branches; and
I dislike it because its smell is offensive to me and its
berries the least pleasant of all wild fruits to my taste. I
can eat ivy-berries in March, and yew in its season, poison or
not; and hips and haws and holly-berries and harsh acorn, and
the rowan, which some think acrid; but the elderberry I can't
stomach.
How comes it, I have asked more than once, that this poor tree
is so often seen on the downs where it is so badly fitted to
be and makes so sorry an appearance with its weak branches
broken and its soft leaves torn by the winds? How badly it
contrasts with the other trees and bushes that flourish on the
downs - furze, juniper, holly, blackthorn, and hawthorn!
Two years ago, one day in the early spring, I was walking on
an extensive down in another part of Wiltshire with the tenant
of the land, who began there as a large sheep-farmer, but
eventually finding that he could make more with rabbits than
with sheep turned most of his land into a warren. The higher
part of this down was overgrown with furze, mixed with holly
and other bushes, but the slopes were mostly very bare. At
one spot on a wide bare slope where the rabbits had formed a
big group of burrows there was a close little thicket of young
elder trees, looking exceedingly conspicuous in the bright
green of early April. Calling my companion's attention to
this little thicket I said something about the elder growing
on the open downs where it always appeared to be out of
harmony with its surroundings. "I don't suppose you planted
elders here," I said.
"No, but I know who did," he returned, and he then gave me
this curious history of the trees. Five years before, the
rabbits, finding it a suitable spot to dig in, probably
because of a softer chalk there, made a number of deep burrows
at that spot. When the wheatears, or "horse-maggers" as he
called them, returned in spring two or three pairs attached
themselves to this group of burrows and bred in them. There
was that season a solitary elder-bush higher up on the down
among the furze which bore a heavy crop of berries; and when
the fruit was ripe he watched the birds feeding on it, the
wheatears among them. The following spring seedlings came up
out of the loose earth heaped about the rabbit burrows, and as
they were not cut down by the rabbits, for they dislike the
elder, they grew up, and now formed a clump of fifty or sixty
little trees of six feet to eight feet in height.
Who would have thought to find a tree-planter in the wheatear,
the bird of the stony waste and open naked down, who does not
even ask for a bush to perch on?
It then occurred to me that in every case where I had observed
a clump of elder bushes on the bare downside, it grew upon a
village or collection of rabbit burrows, and it is probable
that in every case the clump owed its existence to the
wheatears who had dropped the seed about their nesting-place.
The clump where I had sought a shelter from the storm was
composed of large old dilapidated-looking half-dead elders;
perhaps their age was not above thirty or forty years, but
they looked older than hawthorns of one or two centuries; and
under them the rabbits had their diggings - huge old mounds and
burrows that looked like a badger's earth.
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