Add files from ibiblio as of 2025-03-09 00:05:10HEADmain

1 files changed, 3071 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/40249-0.txt b/40249-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1a0061f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/40249-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3071 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40249 ***
+
+In a Cheshire Garden
+
+
+[Illustration: The Flower Garden.]
+
+
+
+
+In a Cheshire Garden
+
+Natural History Notes
+
+BY
+
+GEOFFREY EGERTON-WARBURTON,
+
+_Rector of Warburton_.
+
+
+LONDON
+
+SHERRATT AND HUGHES
+
+Manchester: 34 Cross Street
+
+1912
+
+
+ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+These Notes appeared from April to June this year in _The Warrington
+Guardian_ and afterwards came out in a de-localised form in _The
+Staffordshire Weekly Sentinel_.
+
+I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. P. Ramsdale, of Heatley, for the
+photographs of The Old Church, The Yew-tree, and The Flower Garden (as
+it was some years ago).
+
+My thanks are due also to Mr. Garrett for kindly allowing me to use his
+very interesting photograph of The Two Nests referred to on page 94.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHAP.                                                             PAGE
+
+   I. Introductory                                                   1
+
+  II. Weeds and Alien Plants                                         5
+
+ III. Birds--Thrushes                                               11
+
+  IV. Chats, Robins, and Warblers                                   26
+
+   V. Tits and Wrens                                                37
+
+  VI. Wagtails, Flycatchers, Swallows, and other Insect-eaters      46
+
+ VII. Sparrows and other Finches                                    57
+
+VIII. Finches, Starlings, and Crows                                 67
+
+  IX. Other Birds                                                   77
+
+   X. British Mammals                                               95
+
+  XI. Dogs and Cats                                                103
+
+      Index                                                        113
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+Flower Garden                              _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                    FACE
+                                                    PAGE
+Old Church                                             6
+
+The Old Yew                                           23
+
+The Sundial                                           38
+
+A Corner in the Garden with Allium Dioscorides        55
+
+Two Nests                                             70
+
+The Food-stand                                        87
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+INTRODUCTORY.
+
+
+Although much of the neighbourhood has become semi-urban and any idea
+of rural seclusion is destroyed, at least in summer, by the crowds that
+find their way to it from Manchester and other large towns, yet the
+Cheshire village of Warburton in which this garden is situated is a
+real country place still. How long it will remain so is another thing.
+One salt works has been set up at Heatley about a mile away and we are
+now (1912) promised another, while there is every prospect of land
+being let for works in Warburton itself. Who knows, in a few years
+perhaps the whole place may be reduced to the desolation of another
+Widnes. Then, when it has become a rare thing to find even a blade of
+grass on the dreary black waste or to see any bird but a grimy sparrow,
+a record of what was once here may be strange reading.
+
+The garden itself about which I write is quite on the northern boundary
+of Cheshire, in old days divided from Lancashire by the Mersey only.
+The soil is light and sandy, not far from the rock in places and in
+places with water at a very little depth below the surface. It is well
+suited to hollies and rhododendrons, both of which grow abundantly and
+luxuriantly, as also do yews. There are a good number of ordinary
+deciduous trees, chiefly on the old bank of the river, such as oak,
+sycamore, chestnut, birch, beech, and alder, but no conifers of any age
+except one or two Scotch firs. There is one flourishing deadara which I
+planted myself and a few young Austrian pines that seem to be doing
+well.
+
+A spruce fir that I once planted behaved in an extraordinary way;
+instead of growing straight, it shot up in a zigzag fashion, the
+leading shoot one year going off at an angle of 60 degrees or so, and
+the next year harking back and starting in the opposite direction at
+about the same angle.
+
+Few of the trees can be more than 80 years old. I think most of them
+would have been planted by my father, who was rector from 1833 to 1849.
+There is however a remarkable old yew in the adjoining churchyard. The
+half of it, just below where the branches spring, measures nearly nine
+feet round. The other half has entirely gone, so has practically the
+whole of the substance, the wood of the trunk, and what is left of the
+still standing side is little more than a shell with a coating of bark.
+Notwithstanding this there is quite a fair-sized head of leafy young
+branches (which by the way has greatly increased since I first remember
+the tree 40 years ago) growing up amidst the ruins of the old
+far-reaching boughs. These yet remain to tell something of the wide
+and grateful shade they once afforded to our "rude forefathers" as on
+summer Sundays they waited for service to begin, just as I remember the
+last generation gathered and gossipped under younger yews when this was
+the Parish Church. This yew is the "thousand-year-old tree" of the
+clerk's tale to visitors, and if one thinks how many years of slow
+growth it must have taken to form a trunk of that thickness, say 18
+feet in circumference, and how many more for it to have decayed away to
+its present condition, it does indeed carry us back to an early date in
+English history when the little green shoot that sprang from the
+crimson-coated seed first saw the light.
+
+One great drawback from a gardener's point of view is the prevalence of
+strong, cold, N.-W. winds in spring. The winters are not so severe as
+they often are further south, but the late spring frosts are sometimes
+disastrous. We have had potatoes cut down by frost as late as June
+21st, but the worst spring frost I have known was in May, 1894, just
+about the time that Queen Victoria came to Manchester to open the Ship
+Canal. On three consecutive nights, May 19, 20 and 21, there was frost,
+and its intensity seemed to increase each night. Not only were potatoes
+cut, but garden peas and many hardy herbaceous plants and even common
+weeds. (I noticed that those with a northern aspect suffered least.)
+The shoots and buds of roses were scorched, and the young leaves of
+most trees and shrubs. Hollies suffered especially, but even yew and
+rhododendron, oak, sycamore, and chestnut did not escape. The only tree
+that weathered the cold with impunity was the hawthorn, the tenderest
+leaves and tips of which were not injured. (This was not the case
+though in the severe frost of Easter 1903.) Royal, male, and lady ferns
+were shrivelled up to a greater or less degree, but parsley and oak
+fern were unharmed.
+
+We miss one gardener's friend here, but we escape the attentions of one
+enemy. Though frogs are common enough, toads are very rare. I remember
+to have seen only one during all the many years I have known the
+garden. On the other hand, whilst I have a dim recollection of having
+once found an old snail-shell, I cannot say for certain that I have
+ever seen a snail, though of shell-less slugs in all sizes there is no
+scarcity.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+WEEDS AND ALIEN PLANTS.
+
+
+A slight knowledge of botany adds greatly to the interest of a garden,
+and is besides often of practical value. With such knowledge, one forms
+a habit of looking even at weeds with some interest, and this has led
+to my finding several strange plants among them. I have for example
+come across the following in the kitchen garden:
+
+"Saponaria vaccaria," with its curious angled calyx and pretty pink
+flower.
+
+"Galium tricorne," very much like common goose-grass or cleavers, but
+rare in England, and quite unknown in this neighbourhood.
+
+Annual mercury (closely allied to the common perennial Dog's mercury),
+green and dull-looking, only of interest because it is rare.
+
+"Holosteum umbellatum," which again is rare and not much more
+attractive to the casual observer.
+
+"Draba muralis," allied to "Shepherd's purse," and not unlike it, but
+as rare as that is common.
+
+"Melilotus officinalis," a graceful yellow pea-flower. When this first
+appeared it was quite a stranger in these parts, but afterwards for
+several years it was continually turning up in different corners of
+the garden, indeed even in 1911, twenty-six years since its first
+visit, I found a stray specimen.
+
+"Ranunculus arvensis," a weak-looking buttercup with curious rough seed
+vessels.
+
+"Scandix Pecten-Veneris," an ordinary unattractive umbelliferous plant,
+but with extraordinary long beaks to the fruit, which are supposed to
+be like the teeth of a comb. Both of these are I believe common in
+other parts of the country, but they are unusual here.
+
+"Poa nemoralis," a stranger grass of elegant growth, came one year in
+the rougher part of a rock-border. It was made welcome and kindly
+treated, but though allowed to follow its own devices and though
+several seedlings sprang up round it, they were all gone in a year or
+two. A rarer grass still, "Setaria glauca," once turned up in a
+cucumber frame.
+
+In 1907, a seedling fig came up close to the wall of the house. It has
+now (1912) several shoots about eight feet long. The same year another
+seedling fig appeared in the kitchen garden, and that too I have
+transplanted to a warm corner of the house-wall, where it has made a
+nice bush.
+
+For several years we have found seedling tomatoes growing in the
+kitchen garden, and in 1911 we gathered seven pounds of green tomatoes
+from two plants to make into jam.
+
+[Illustration: Old Church.]
+
+When first I came here, and for a long time afterwards, "Erysimum
+cheiranthoides" was always among the kitchen garden weeds, and one year
+I found growing in a bed of onions its near relative "Erysimum
+orientale," which is quite a rare British plant.
+
+Greater celandine, a rather handsome perennial with somewhat glaucous
+leaves and bright yellow flowers, used to be an abundant weed on the
+banks and among the bushes, and is still (1911) to be found in the
+garden, though in diminished quantity.
+
+In 1889, a strange plant appeared which puzzled me a good deal at
+first. It was tall and straggling, but had no flowers. Next spring
+there were several of the same plants, very much branched with
+something of the habit of a mugwort, and long spikes of flowers at the
+end of every branch. I discovered it to be a species of "Ambrosia," a
+native of North America, but I soon discovered also that it increased
+by underground runners in every direction, and was only too thankful to
+get rid of it.
+
+Two years before, I had found another visitor, this time from South
+America, with bright yellow flowers, evidently allied to forget-me-not,
+which proved to be an "Amsinckia" (intermedia ?). There were about 20
+plants of this annual in one border and several others in other parts
+of the garden. With some consideration, but with no particular care on
+my part, it has maintained itself in more or less quantity in the same
+herbaceous border ever since.
+
+In 1897, a single plant of an "Allium" appeared and grew to a height of
+more than five feet, straight up with very stout stems, one and a half
+inches in circumference, and handsome heads of reddish-green
+bell-shaped flowers on drooping stalks, which afterwards, in fruit,
+became quite straight and upright. I found it to be "Allium
+Dioscorides," a native of Sicily and Sardinia. There were many tubers
+at the root when I took it up, but none of them ever grew so tall and
+fine as the original.
+
+One or two plants that I have introduced myself have proved very
+tiresome weeds. In 1875 or thereabouts, I brought back from the wild
+part of a large garden in the neighbourhood a balsam with rather a
+conspicuous yellow flower ("Impatiens noli-me-tangere," I think). It
+made itself at home at once, but as it would keep within no bounds, I
+have done all I could "to get without it," as they would say here, but
+it defies me to my face and in spite of relentless persecution, again
+and again every spring it comes up smiling in an abundant crop.
+
+So indeed does a tall polygonum ("P. cuspidatum" I believe it is) that
+I brought back from the same garden about the same time. It absolutely
+refuses to budge from the place where I first allowed it to grow. It
+does not perpetuate itself by seed like the balsam, but from little
+odds and ends of rootlets and suckers that hide themselves in the soil.
+
+What I take to be a variety of "Oxalis corniculata," a very pretty
+little thing with dark reddish-brown leaves and deep yellow flowers, is
+another uncontrollable subject. It is perennial and yet increases by
+seed as fast as a balsam.
+
+A plant which on the top of a stone wall is very pretty, "Linaria
+vulgaris," has proved a veritable plague to me in the garden. I had it
+sent to me originally by a nurseryman for the "Peloria" variety, and as
+if the disappointment of that were not enough, it added insult to
+injury, or rather injury to insult, by running below the surface in a
+provoking and persevering manner and showing itself in most unexpected
+places. Although the normal "vulgaris" is so irrepressible, I have
+found "Peloria" quite the reverse, and have never been able to keep it
+above a year or two.
+
+The double-flowered varieties of most plants are, as a rule, more
+difficult than the ordinary single, but a little potentilla ("reptans"
+?) with a yellow ball of double flower has proved an exception here. No
+single-flowered plant could get over and under the ground faster than
+this has done.
+
+In 1886, in an out-of-the-way path among trees, an orchid, "Epipactis
+latifolia," came up in the very middle. I took care that it was not
+disturbed, and found it again in exactly the same place four years
+later, no sign of it having been seen in the interval. Never before, or
+since, have I found a plant of that or any other orchis growing wild in
+the garden.
+
+One year (1887) in a border nearly full of rhododendrons, close to the
+front door, a curious looking thing made its way above the ground,
+which, at first sight might have been put down as something between a
+hyacinth and a lily-of-the-valley, but was said to be "Muscari
+comosum." I had never planted it and during the fifteen years that I
+had been here had never seen anything like it. I very carefully marked
+the spot when it died down, but from that time to this (1911) during
+all the 24 years that have passed it has never shown itself again.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+BIRDS--THRUSHES.
+
+
+You can feel something like affection even for a plant, when you have
+watched over it and attended to its likes and dislikes as to aspect,
+soil, moisture, shade and so on, and when it has responded to your care
+and rewarded you for the pains you have spent upon it, but birds become
+personal friends, it is an interest and amusement to study their
+characters and habits, and a delight to listen to their voices. And
+this friendship is not for any one particular bird (though of course
+there may be that sometimes), but for the particular species of bird,
+any one of which that you happen to meet with anywhere seems like an
+old friend. A lively impudent tom-tit for instance is the same amusing
+companion and it is the same pleasure to hear his cheery note, whether
+you find him in a suburban garden or in some shady corner of a wood.
+
+Of course it is a day to be marked with a white stone when you come
+across a new or a rare bird, but if you watch the commonest
+sympathetically and intelligently you have an endless fund of interest
+and amusement. The quarrels, the loves, the boldness and ingenuity even
+of a sparrow may divert your mind pleasantly and help you to put away
+worries. Then how eagerly in spring does one listen for the first note
+of a willow-warbler, what an interest is the first sight of a swallow,
+and how gladly one welcomes each of our summer visitors as in turn they
+arrive from passing the winter in the Sahara oases or among our friends
+in the Transvaal or Cape Colony.
+
+In a country unexplored or newly settled it may not be the same, but in
+England there is no need to spoil the charm of friendship by use of the
+collector's gun. All British birds have been so well illustrated and
+described that it ought to be possible to tell most of them by careful
+observation without actually having them in one's hand. In the
+interests of science, to make sure of the discovery of a new species or
+the distribution of a known one, birds must sometimes be shot (and
+after all to be shot is a less cruel end than to fall a prey to their
+natural enemies), but to shoot a well-known bird simply for the sake of
+its skin is another matter. A man who shoots every rare bird he sees,
+that he may add it to his private collection, is sacrificing bird-life
+for his own selfish pleasure and disregarding the sentiments and
+interests of the great body of nature-lovers and students. The true
+naturalist does not collect specimens as he would postage stamps; to
+study the life of a wren in its natural surroundings is more to him
+than anything he can do with the dried skin of a golden eagle.
+
+They say that there is in Switzerland a law which forbids the shooting
+of any bird without a licence. If some such law could be enforced here,
+rare birds that seek hospitality among us would no longer be at the
+mercy of every idle lout who happens to have a gun. And is it
+impossible that children might be taught to find pleasure in watching,
+and not, as seems generally the case now, in destroying life?
+
+We often have a pair of missel-thrushes ("shercocks" in Cheshire)
+nesting here. Generally they build in a tree at some distance away,
+where they make their presence known by noisy attacks on other birds;
+but once they had their nest in a Scotch fir close to the house, and
+then they were so quiet as almost to escape notice altogether.
+
+There were two nests in the old churchyard this year (1912). One in a
+Spanish Chestnut was about thirty feet from the ground, in the middle
+of a clump of little shoots that grew straight up on the top side of a
+thick branch. This branch overhangs a patch of grass running close to
+the boundary wall and on this green boys were playing football with
+much shouting and noise every evening. The nest stood out plainly to be
+seen, and for a week before they flew (which they did on April 20th)
+you could easily count all four young ones. The other nest was in a
+yew, under which there is a seat in summer, and was simply set on the
+top of one of the lowest spreading boughs without any attempt at
+concealment. It was at the end of the bough and not six feet from the
+ground, within easy reach of anyone. It could, however, only be seen
+when you were actually under the tree and probably would never have
+been noticed at all but for the behaviour of the birds themselves.
+After the eggs were hatched they attacked everybody who went under or
+even near the tree, swooping down suddenly from you didn't know where
+and almost dashing into your face, indeed they would often hit your
+hat. I am glad to say this display of courage was not wasted, for the
+young birds safely flew on May 17th.
+
+Missel-thrush is said to be short for mistletoe-thrush, and to mark the
+singular taste of the bird for mistletoe berries. Mistletoe is scarce
+with us, but they do appear to depend more upon berries of every kind
+than either throstles or blackbirds, and one year I remember when the
+yews bore an extraordinary crop of berries, the trees were quite alive
+with the missel-thrushes that came to eat them. I would say, by the
+way, that a great part of the holly berries are sometimes left
+untouched by birds, and I have seen trees in summer quite red with the
+berries of the previous year.
+
+One or two missel-thrushes generally come to the food-stand in winter
+and show themselves expert in getting fat from the supposed
+sparrow-proof receptacles.
+
+Though missel-thrushes are common their song is not familiar. It has
+been described as much better than a throstle's; I do not know if that
+is the general opinion. It certainly is simpler without the same
+repetition, and it has seemed to me more mellow, more like a
+blackbird's when I have heard it, but that is not often. Throstles will
+sometimes sing continuously all the winter through, and early in the
+year I have listened most carefully to catch the notes of their bigger
+brothers, but only very seldom with success. They have, however, an
+autumn song which I first noticed at the end of September a good many
+years ago. I became aware one day of a bird's song that seemed to be
+sometimes the note of a blackbird, sometimes of a throstle. After
+listening for several days I came to the conclusion that it must have
+been one of the many starlings that were singing everywhere, one that
+had learnt more or less successfully to imitate a throstle. However, I
+never could make sure, for I never could catch sight of the singer, he
+would hide himself in a holly or a yew, and would at once stop singing
+if I went near. At last, one day I heard him at the top of a sycamore
+which was nearly bare of leaves, and managed to bring a glass to bear
+on him; even then his body was hidden by a bough and his head was all
+that I could see, but the head was plainly that of a thrush. While I
+watched I could distinctly see him turn his eye down on me, and he was
+off in an instant; but though I only got a glimpse as he flew away,
+there was no mistaking the flight of a missel-thrush. It seemed curious
+to me at the time that he should be singing at all then, and that he
+should be so shy about it.
+
+Song-thrushes, or throstles as they are called in Cheshire, are always
+plentiful, but not always to the same extent. They were, for instance,
+very much thinned in numbers by the hard winter of 1895, but in a
+couple of years they abounded again, and I heard people complain of
+their night's rest being spoilt, there were so many and they sang so
+early and so loud. From April to June they sing almost incessantly,
+from earliest light until quite dark. They begin at three in the
+morning, or even earlier, and sing their loudest for about an hour;
+then there seems somewhat of a lull, but they soon start again in full
+chorus, and go on singing more or less throughout the day, sometimes
+until past nine at night. In 1905, on the longest day of the year, I
+woke at 2-30 a.m. to hear a throstle in full song just outside my
+window, and at 9-30 p.m. a throstle, almost certainly the same bird,
+was singing in the same place. I have often wondered how, with so much
+time devoted to musical exercises, they manage to find enough for the
+more important business of feeding themselves and their hungry broods.
+
+A blackbird's song is, I think, always a love song, but mere exuberance
+of spirits will make a throstle sing. I have seen one sing snatches of
+his song whilst hunting for worms on the grass, as though he were too
+full of joyousness to contain himself, and a couple of them will sing
+at one another during intervals of quarrelling on the ground. There
+seems at all times more rivalry and contention between throstles
+throughout the whole season, and less of the spirit of _camaraderie_
+that one so often sees with blackbirds, at least when once they have
+settled the momentous question of pairing.
+
+Within the bounds of general similarity much variety can be heard in
+the songs of throstles; no two seem to be exactly alike, and some birds
+are far better singers, have a much clearer, more musical note than
+others.
+
+In 1907, and again in 1909, I noticed that throstles were in full song
+everywhere on July 15th, just as though it had been the middle of May.
+
+A particular throstle will choose his favourite spot to sing from, and
+will keep to it more or less throughout the season. The point of a
+gable of the house is one such place (it is a Cheshire belief that a
+throstle brings you good luck when he chooses your house to sing
+from), the top of the highest chimney has been another, and the
+weathercock on the outbuildings has been chosen year after year by a
+throstle as his own peculiar stand. This last is a favourite platform
+for the musical performances of other birds as well; a robin constantly
+uses it, and a swallow, and more than once I have seen a little wren
+there singing away with all his might, a might altogether out of
+proportion to his tiny body.
+
+Whilst most throstles seem to like as high a perch as possible to sing
+from, I remember one that habitually poured forth the flood of his
+melody raised above the level of the ground by a clod of earth only.
+
+One morning (in March, 1897) I heard a throstle uttering a peculiar
+shrill kind of cry, not a long-drawn-out note such as I have twice
+heard from a blackbird, but a succession rather of short notes. At
+first I couldn't make out what or where the noise was, but traced it
+after a time to the thrush, who continually uttered the cry as he was
+hunting for worms on the grass.
+
+A standing marvel is the way in which a thrush can tell that there is a
+worm below the ground at a particular place. As he goes hopping about
+in a promiscuous sort of way, he suddenly stops with his head on one
+side looking and listening for a second, then he pounces on the exact
+spot and forthwith pulls out a worm. Sometimes he makes a mistake, or,
+at all events, fails to make a catch, but not often. How does he do it?
+Does his quick sight detect some slight movement, or his quick ear some
+slight sound? Or has he any other sense of smell or sensation that
+helps him? Another marvel about the matter to anyone who has himself
+tried to pull a worm out of the ground is the ease with which a thrush
+manages so neatly and quickly to extract its victim entire.
+
+I have found a throstle's nest in the side of a haystack, and was told
+of one in a pigstye and of another inside the porch of a house. In 1901
+a throstle built in the roof of the lychgate of the churchyard close to
+this garden. Although the first nest was taken she made another in the
+same place and had very nearly hatched her eggs when again the
+thoughtless cruelty of boys made all her labour vain and abused the
+confidence she had so bravely shown in men. She used to sit on quite
+calmly, though only just above the heads of people as they went through
+the gate.
+
+Generally speaking, throstles are so tame here that they hardly move
+out of your way, at most hopping a foot or two further off; and one
+will go on with his song undisturbed as I pass through an archway of
+pink thorn on which he is perched not two feet above. They are
+naturally, I think, more friendly in their disposition towards human
+beings than blackbirds, which go clattering off whenever they see you
+near them.
+
+In May, 1902, there must have been at least 20 throstles' nests in the
+garden itself. There were five, all in holly bushes, within 30 yards,
+by the side of one path, two in one tree, both of which had young ones
+in them at the same time. One bird had a nest just over the entrance to
+the house porch, through which we were in and out the whole day long,
+and we saw nothing of it until the young were hatched. Another chose an
+extraordinarily exposed situation, in a rhododendron just opposite the
+front door, from which we could see her quite plainly as she sat. The
+nest was actually not more than a foot or so from a little narrow path.
+We were constantly up and down this path and could hardly avoid
+brushing the leaves at the end of the very bough on which the nest was
+built, yet I never once saw her fly off. She used to keep her eye on
+us, but did not move even if we stood still only a few feet away and
+looked at her. This nest was under continual observation from the
+laying of the first egg to the flight of the last nestling, which
+remained for the best part of a day after the rest had flown.
+
+On the other hand, in strange contrast to this confidence, there were
+three nests farther away from the house (one indeed absurdly close to a
+gate in constant use), from which the birds flew off with a loud,
+startled cry if one waited for a moment near them. In one of these
+three nests the brood was reared, but of the other two one was deserted
+and one taken.
+
+In 1899 a friend in the village assured me that there had been a
+throstle's nest with eight eggs in it close to her house. As only four
+of them, she said, hatched, perhaps the first hen was killed after she
+had laid her complement of eggs, and the cock brought home another mate
+to his ready-made nest.
+
+I find a note that once I saw throstles join with starlings in their
+raid upon elder-berries, but I have seen nothing since to confirm this.
+
+Until the winter of 1910-11 I very seldom found a throstle attempt to
+get the fat put out for tits; they generally content themselves with
+the crumbs that have fallen on the ground underneath. If the weather is
+at all severe they will come with sparrows to the fowls' food, but in a
+sharp, continuous frost they disappear almost entirely. (Blackbirds and
+some missel-thrushes remain.) This was very marked in February, 1902.
+Before the severe cold began throstles were plentiful; after it had
+continued for a few days not a single one was to be seen; but when the
+thaw set in, in less than a week they abounded again on every side.
+
+Some redwings come here every winter, but they are less common than
+fieldfares and they are not so noticeable. The points of difference
+between a redwing and a throstle, the rather smaller size, the red on
+the side, the slight variations in shades of colour and markings, may
+easily be passed over.
+
+I have from my window seen a single redwing quite close to the house,
+in company with a single fieldfare, both busy with the holly berries,
+and in February, 1909, I saw all five of the commoner British thrushes
+collected together and between them quite covering a field which had
+lately been broken up by a subsoil cultivator.
+
+A farmer tells me that the local name for redwing is "Kit," but I see
+in "The Birds of Cheshire" that "Kit" is given as one of the names for
+fieldfare.
+
+We see fieldfares chiefly when they first arrive in October, and again
+in early spring, before they leave, but, of course, there are some with
+us most of the winter. The people here call them "Bluebacks," and it
+was remarked as a curious thing in the late cold spring of 1891 that on
+April 24th bluebacks were heard on one side of a field and a cuckoo on
+the other.
+
+[Illustration: Old Yew Tree.]
+
+Blackbirds are, I think, nearly as plentiful as throstles, in spite of
+relentless persecution by strawberry-growing market gardeners.
+Sometimes, indeed, one is oneself compelled to own that we have a few
+more blackbirds than we really want. In hot, dry summers, when the
+ground is hard, they do much damage to the apple crop. Not content with
+making short work with the "windfalls," they peck holes in some of the
+best fruit on the trees. I noticed this especially in 1899, and again
+in 1901 and 1911. In 1899 I saw four cock blackbirds amicably devouring
+a fallen apple together.
+
+Though a blackbird's song is beautifully mellow, it is generally
+disconnected and fragmentary, but I remember hearing one once that
+seemed continuous, or at least much more so than usual.
+
+One day at the end of March (in 1895) I saw perched on a twig of an oak
+tree and sitting quite close up against the trunk, a cock blackbird,
+which continually uttered a small, thin sharp note, almost like the
+squeaking of a slate pencil. He sat still in the same position for a
+considerable time, only opening his mouth at intervals of about a
+minute, or half a minute, to make this doleful noise. The same year, on
+June 15th, in exactly the same place, a cock blackbird went through
+exactly the same performance.
+
+Every winter blackbirds have been amongst the most regular pensioners
+at the food-stand.
+
+Several times during May in 1898, and again in 1899 and 1900 and since,
+I noticed a meeting of three, always, I think, three, cock blackbirds
+at one particular spot, always the same, near a holly tree on the
+lawn, which happens to be just opposite my window, where I could watch
+them easily and unobserved. They seemed to go through a regular set
+performance, like a game or a dance. They did not fight, though they
+sometimes sparred a little, but ran round and round and in and out,
+following and passing one another. It reminded me of a friendly
+gathering of husbands for amusement, while their wives were busy with
+household cares at home!
+
+I was much interested one day (March, 1902) in the proceedings of two
+pair of blackbirds. One very elegant cock, slender and graceful, with
+intensely black coat and very bright orange bill, was seeking to
+impress the hen of his choice by a series of little runs on every side
+of her, with his tail spread out and sweeping the grass, his body in
+the shape of a bow, his beak almost touching the ground; meanwhile, the
+object of all this attention seemed to consider it a mere matter of
+course and to be calmly indifferent. Presently another cock, not nearly
+so spruce, came on the scene accompanied by another mate. The gallant
+dandy evidently had no stomach for fighting, and promptly disappeared
+behind a holly bush when the newcomer threatened to assault him. His
+partner, however, was made of sterner stuff, and without more ado
+attacked and drove away both the intruders.
+
+I have never heard that there is any real difference in size, but hen
+blackbirds appear bigger than cocks, just as young gulls in immature
+plumage seem larger than old ones. I suppose the different colour has
+something to do with it, and perhaps the cock's feathers are more
+closely set than the hen's.
+
+My wife told me that she had seen one evening in September (1907) 16
+blackbirds on the tennis ground together. This seems perhaps rather a
+large order, as they say, but in the following September I counted nine
+myself, to the best of my belief, all of them cocks.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+CHATS, ROBINS AND WARBLERS.
+
+
+In spring, and again in autumn, wheatears pass through, and may be seen
+about for several days at a time. In April and May, 1908, a pair stayed
+so long in some rough ground near the bank of the Ship Canal that I
+thought they might be going to take up their quarters there for the
+season, but by May 31st they had disappeared.
+
+We always have a fair number of whinchats in the meadows, and hardly a
+year passes without seeing them on the grass in the garden itself. One
+very wet summer, when in the low-lying lands the haycocks were standing
+for days surrounded by water, I remember being struck by the number of
+whinchats to be seen perching and chatting first on one haycock and
+then on another.
+
+Though whinchats are so comparatively common, and their usual note,
+exactly like the knocking of two pebbles together, is constantly heard,
+their pretty little song, a cadence of a few notes repeated over and
+over again, I do not remember to have noticed here.
+
+Only once have I seen a stonechat in the neighbourhood of this garden.
+This was in October, 1890. On the opposite side of the river the land
+had been raised by material excavated in the making of the Ship Canal,
+and was at that time wild and covered with a strong growth of all kinds
+of weeds. It was on a wire fence that ran along this bank that I saw
+the bright little bird. And there, with a curious pendulum-like
+movement of its tail, it continued to sit for a considerable time,
+giving me ample opportunity to study it leisurely through a
+field-glass.
+
+Though redstarts are not uncommon in Dunham Park a few miles away, only
+once have I seen one in the garden, in August, 1894. It stayed for
+several days, and was never far away from the place where I first saw
+it. I noticed that other birds who are at home here, wagtails
+especially, seemed to look upon it as an interloper and resented its
+intrusion.
+
+One of the first things that I remember about the natural history of
+Warburton is a brood of four white--or more strictly speaking,
+cream-coloured--robins that were hatched in a neighbouring garden in
+1872. They were jealously watched over by the owner of the garden, and
+I often saw two of them until the autumn. Then they must either have
+been taken (and many people were after them) or have moulted to the
+ordinary robin colours, for we saw them no more.
+
+Robins are plentiful in the garden and in the neighbourhood generally.
+They show much courage and skill in getting at the fat on the
+food-stand, no matter how greatly the difficulties of doing so may have
+been multiplied.
+
+It has been said that robins have more power than most birds to see
+through the window into a room, and I certainly have observed that
+though as a rule neither robins nor tits take much notice if I am
+standing close by the window, yet sometimes a robin appears that will
+spy me out as I sit by the fire quite far away and be off in an
+instant. I have sometimes wondered if such wild robins might be
+immigrants from the Continent, where by all accounts they are less tame
+than in England.
+
+Robins are pugnacious, and their duels are not unfrequently to the
+death. I have seen a robin pursue a sparrow and even fly straight at a
+great-tit and knock it off the food-stand, but I have noticed that
+generally a robin makes way for a sparrow, and seldom stands up to a
+tit of any kind, not even a marsh or a coal-tit, birds hardly half its
+size. I remember one, however, in the winter of 1900-01 who
+indiscriminately attacked all tits on the food-stand. He was very
+friendly with me, and used to watch as I filled the receptacles, when
+he would come close up and wait for a bit to be thrown to him, and
+often as he saw me coming he would sit on a corner of the porch roof
+and warble a little song of welcome. Another year (1901-02) two,
+sometimes three, and occasionally four, robins would be there together
+almost under my feet and ready to pick up anything I threw them. Very
+unlike most robins, they seemed on perfectly good terms with one
+another.
+
+In November, 1905, a robin used to come into the house through the open
+windows and make himself quite at home; he would sometimes sit and sing
+on the bannisters in the hall.
+
+I saw a very tame robin at Budworth in 1904. I was in the garden with
+the lady to whom it belonged when the bird flew on to her hand, and he
+used to come into the drawing-room without any hesitation and take his
+place at afternoon tea.
+
+In 1910 a pair of robins built in the pulpit desk of Oughtrington
+Church near here, and hatched out four young ones. A friend who went to
+service one Sunday evening in June saw a robin flying about and singing
+until the sermon began, but then it took up a position on the back of a
+seat near the pulpit and looked up at the preacher, quite silent and
+apparently listening.
+
+One of the prettiest little episodes of bird-life is the delicate
+attention bestowed by a robin on the chosen partner of his joys and
+cares that I have several times witnessed during April and May. Whilst
+she remained watching and waiting on the ground below, he would fly up
+to the food-stand and secure a morsel which, with a tender grace, he
+presented to her. The gallant devotion so plainly expressed by the one
+and the caressing, coquetting airs of the other were most amusing. I
+have seen, too, about the same time of the year, one robin feeding
+another with flies picked from the grass and the lower boughs of a
+deadara tree. The robin that was being fed did not attempt to pick up
+anything for itself, but sat there on the grass quivering its wings and
+opening its mouth like a nestling.
+
+Robins often catch flies in the air, flying up from the ground after
+them, and I have seen one dart off from the branch of a tree, capture a
+passing fly and return again to the same perch, for all the world like
+a flycatcher.
+
+One showery day in spring I saw a robin on the food-stand washing
+itself in the rain, spreading out its wings, shaking its feathers,
+bobbing and ducking about as though it had been in a bath, and I have
+noticed one washing in wet leaves and drinking from the tips of leaves.
+
+Greater whitethroats are as common in this garden and neighbourhood as
+in most places. One that had its nest by the old river bank used to
+come and scold whenever I went near, and never ceased until I left.
+Such a proceeding looks like a case of instinct playing a bird false,
+and serving only to draw attention to what it is wished to conceal.
+
+Lesser whitethroats come to us every year, and may be said to be fairly
+common in the village. They are always shy and restless and more
+frequently heard than seen.
+
+There was a lesser whitethroat's nest one year (1898) in a holly bush,
+in which all five young ones used to be, whenever I looked at them,
+apparently sleepy, with their heads shoved up over the side of the
+nest. They never opened their mouths when we went near, and yet often
+as I watched I never saw the parents feed them.
+
+Blackcaps are not uncommon within easy reach of us, but only twice have
+I seen one actually in the garden. The first time the unusual sound of
+its wonderfully clear note attracted my attention was in July, 1899.
+The bird stayed here then for several days, singing occasionally all
+the while. The second time a blackcap came was in May, 1903. It was in
+the garden for about ten days, and I hoped it might be going to nest
+here, especially as one day I thought I saw a pair.
+
+I noticed a difference in habits between the July bird and the one that
+came in May. In July, when the joys and cares of family life were over,
+there was more deliberation and less shyness. I was able to watch the
+bird easily and for a long time together. In May he was restless and
+very wary, and it was with difficulty I could get a glimpse of him. He
+was always on the move, hunting about in the tops of the trees, and, I
+thought, singing in competition with the willow-wrens.
+
+The blackcap is often placed next to the nightingale as a songster, but
+there is a very wide interval between them. The most inattentive
+listener can hardly fail to notice a nightingale's song, but people who
+are not accustomed to distinguish the different notes of birds are
+often quite unaware of the presence of a singing blackcap, as the tone
+of his song mingles with the general chorus.
+
+Golden-crested wrens are not uncommon in winter, but I have never found
+a nest here. I notice them most often in October and November, as they
+are hunting in and out the yews and Scotch firs, sometimes a large
+party, sometimes only a single pair.
+
+One June day I was sitting in a cousin's garden in Wales, when out of
+an arbor-vitæ close by appeared a dilapidated-looking gold-crest, which
+set to work violently and persistently to abuse me. Herein, I think,
+like the whitethroat mentioned before, it displayed either a perversion
+of instinct or a want of sense. If it had only kept quiet I should not
+have thought of a nest, but it told me so plainly that it had one in
+that very tree that I looked as a matter of course and found it,
+packed with fully-fledged young ones.
+
+Chiffchaffs never stay with us, though they are to be found only a few
+miles away, but I sometimes see them and hear their well-known note in
+spring and autumn for a day or two.
+
+Willow-warblers abound ("Peggy whitethroat" is the Cheshire name), and
+it is a delight to catch for the first time each spring their lovely
+little song, of which, unlike the wearisome iteration of the
+chiffchaff, one never tires. The American naturalist, John Burroughs,
+describes the willow-warbler's strain as the most melodious he heard in
+England, and the only one exhibiting the best qualities of American
+songsters. He adds: "It is too fine for the ordinary English ear!" As
+if on a visit of a few weeks to a strange country he could possibly
+know what most English people either thought or liked!
+
+Willow-wrens as a rule keep pretty high up in the trees, but one
+sometimes sees them on the grass picking up flies or flying up after
+them in the air. Later on in summer they hunt for insects in the
+kitchen garden, and are often to be seen running up and down the
+pea-sticks.
+
+Though silent in July, they sing again after the middle of August. I
+have known a willow-wren's nest here in the middle of a roughish piece
+of ground that was continually walked over, about as unprotected
+position as you could wish, and yet the young were successfully reared.
+I have seen a willow-wren attack and drive away a perfectly inoffensive
+marsh-tit that happened to alight near it on the grass.
+
+The wood-wren, with its "sibilous shivering note," I have heard at
+Budworth, a few miles away, but never in this garden or immediate
+neighbourhood.
+
+The garden-warbler, too, is quite a stranger, and I have never
+recognised it in these parts at all. In May, 1900, I saw and heard one
+for several days in a garden in North Wales, where it is generally
+supposed to be unknown.
+
+Sedge-warblers sing incessantly when first they come, but after they
+have been here for a little while are much less frequently heard. They
+usually are hidden in the depths of a bush when singing, but I have
+seen one pouring out its impetuous song mounted on a telephone wire in
+the open, 20 feet from the ground, and another that sang as it was
+flying. For several years a sedge-warbler has begun to sing again here
+in July, not having been heard for some weeks previously. In 1907, for
+example, from July 24th to August 2nd, he could, without much
+exaggeration, be said to have sung all day and all night. I heard him
+at seven in the morning when I got up and at twelve at night when I
+went to bed, and I have a note of much the same thing in 1910, about
+the same date. The bird that year chose as his special platform the
+lower branches of a sycamore, and would every now and then fly off into
+the air singing all the while at the very top of his voice, and then
+return to the tree to sing again.
+
+Hedgesparrows are common enough all the year round, and are great
+favourites of mine. They are elegant birds in their modest way, they
+are unobtrusive and useful, and their song, if not brilliant, is
+pleasant, and like that of the wren and the robin, it helps to cheer
+the dull winter months when the more famous warblers are away enjoying
+the warmth of some sunny southern country.
+
+There is no month in the year in which at one time or another I have
+not heard the hedge-sparrow's song, but March is the time of all others
+to hear it, then it seems impossible to get away from it at any hour of
+the day.
+
+Hedgesparrows creep about in a mouse-like fashion peculiar to
+themselves, with a series of little running jumps, and the continual
+shuffling or flipping movement of their wings is very noticeable.
+
+They will take their share of the fowls' food with other birds, and
+will come all round the food-stand and pick up the minutest morsels of
+something on the ground, but (except in the case of a bird in the cold
+weather of January, 1902), I have never seen one make an attempt to get
+at the food on the stand itself.
+
+Sometimes on first turning out on a dark winter's morning, between
+seven and eight, hedgesparrows will be squatting on the path, and will
+almost let you walk over them before they get out of your way.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+TITS AND WRENS.
+
+
+Only once, in August, 1904, have I caught sight of a party of
+long-tailed tits in the garden, but a friend who lived hardly a mile
+away used to tell me that little parties of eight or nine might be seen
+flying through his orchard nearly every winter. I think he said they
+called them "churns," or something that sounded like that.
+
+Great-tits are common the whole year round; and very handsome they look
+when their suits of velvet-black and yellow are at their best. They are
+constant visitors to the food-stand, and are not baffled by any
+contrivance for excluding sparrows, but they are not so plucky or so
+clever at it as tom-tits. They are hectoring, full of bustle and
+importance, and make themselves generally disagreeable to other birds,
+but I have seldom, if ever, seen one great-tit attack another.
+Sometimes one sees a pair of the quietest possible character; on the
+most affectionate terms with one another they will come to the stand
+together and appear perfectly oblivious of the presence there of any
+other birds.
+
+It is not at all uncommon to see a great-tit with a crooked tail,
+slightly sickle-shaped. It cannot always be the same bird, for it is 16
+years since I first noticed a bird with such a tail, and nearly every
+year still (1912) I see one.
+
+One may often hear a tapping sound in trees and shrubs that is made by
+a great-tit, and I have watched the bird after considerable tapping
+draw out a grub of some sort from under the bark. I noticed on another
+occasion that a tit in making this tapping noise was beating something
+(through the glass it looked like a beetle) which it held in its beak
+against a bough of the tree.
+
+Like tom-tits, great-tits will fly off with grains of Indian corn, and,
+like coal-tits, they are fond of sunflower seeds. (In spite of what
+Gilbert White says, I have never seen tom-tits here touch sunflower
+seeds.)
+
+A great-tit has a note very much like the "pink, pink" of a chaffinch,
+which he occasionally uses.
+
+Though great-tits are, no doubt, handsome birds, they are not nearly so
+interesting in my opinion as either of the other three common kinds of
+tit. None of them, indeed, can really compare in interest with that
+audacious little villain, the tom-tit, or blue-tit, or, as he is called
+here, blue-cap. He is so full of spirits, so resolute and domineering,
+I delight to hear his cheery little song, if it is to be called a
+song.
+
+[Illustration: Sundial in Old Church Yard.]
+
+Tom-tits in abundance come to the food-stand, which in the first
+instance was specially intended for their benefit. They will come more
+or less the whole year through if the food is left there, but, of
+course, many more in winter than in summer, and most of all in February
+and the beginning of March, when I have counted twelve on the stand at
+once, but the numbers fall off very quickly towards the middle of
+March.
+
+I have noticed every year that at certain times of the day, especially
+from about 12.30 to 1.30, there is a marked increase in numbers. In
+winter at least no five minutes passes without one or more birds
+appearing, but at mid-day, and again to a lesser extent just before it
+begins to get dark, they seem literally to swarm.
+
+I have found that all tits, as well as sparrows and robins, prefer a
+mixture of bread and fat to fat alone. During February and March, 1897,
+I weighed all the bread and fat consumed on the food-stand and found
+that it was as nearly as possible eleven pounds. Lately I have added
+cocoanuts to the bill of fare; they are appreciated by the tits, but
+blackbirds, robins and thrushes prefer the bread and fat mixture, or
+rather they do not seem to care at all for the cocoanuts.
+
+It is curious to see how quickly birds discover that food has been put
+out on the stand. One year, after the receptacles had been empty for
+weeks in the summer, I put in some fat, and in less than five minutes
+a tom-tit was there. Another time I made a longish block of wood,
+bored nearly through with holes, which were filled with fat smoothed
+off level with the surface. This block was hung with the holes
+downwards, so that from above it could look like a bit of wood only. It
+was hung up at 10.30 a.m., and at 11.30 a tom-tit had found it out, and
+was eating away at the fat as he clung to the block back downwards.
+
+Tom-tits, unlike great-tits, bully one another most unmercifully. They
+can recognize each other at a great distance. A tom-tit on the
+food-stand seems to know at once whether another arriving on the
+nearest tree, some ten yards or more away, is his superior or inferior
+in prowess. Sometimes he will ruffle up his feathers as if in
+resentment at threatened intrusion, at other times he is prepared to
+make way at once. As is the case with a herd of cows on a farm, the
+relative standing between them seems to be an acknowledged matter and
+is seldom contested. To us a couple of tom-tits appear as like as two
+peas if we have them actually in the hand, and though it is easy to
+understand that they can themselves distinguish differences at close
+quarters, and may have some other sense than we have to help them, yet
+it is a marvellous thing that they can do so without doubt or
+hesitation at a distance of yards.
+
+The whole question as to how birds recognize one another is very
+interesting. We know that a shepherd can tell one sheep of his flock
+from another as easily as we can distinguish between two men, but in
+the feathered face of a bird there seems to us so little room for
+difference of expression, and, generally speaking, if we take feather
+by feather the description of one bird will apply equally well to any
+other of the same species.
+
+Tom-tits as a rule make way for a great-tit, but I have seen them fight
+occasionally, and the tom-tit does not always come off second-best.
+They are complete masters of both marsh and coal-tits, neither of which
+dream of resisting them. They pay scarcely any heed one way or another
+to sparrows or robins.
+
+Both tom-tits and great-tits in the flush of their spring-time ardour
+pay to their chosen helpmates the same delicate attentions as do
+robins. It is always a pretty picture to see them present their
+offerings of food, but with tits it seems a rather more business-like
+matter and to lack something of the tender sentiment so plainly shown
+by the robins.
+
+Though not nearly so plentiful as tom-tits, both marsh and coal-tits
+are with us more or less all the year round. Of the two, perhaps the
+marsh-tit is the more regular, sometimes a pair seem to make the garden
+their headquarters and to be always about, but several years may pass
+without our seeing one coal-tit; then they will become almost as common
+as tom-tits for a year or so, when again the number will dwindle down
+to, it may be, a single pair.
+
+Some years ago all four kinds of tit used to come together to the
+food-stand, but (with the exception of a pair of coal-tits in the
+winter of 1910-11) since 1899 tom-tits and great-tits have had it all
+to themselves, neither marsh nor coal-tits have been there, though both
+are still frequent visitors to the garden at all times of the year.
+
+In June broods of young tits appear flying from tree to tree in little
+parties. The old birds tirelessly hunt for food, whilst the
+greeny-yellowy little ones sit expecting and cheeping among the boughs.
+
+In comparing the marsh and coal-tits together one might imagine that
+they each originally had the same amount of black allowed them for the
+head, but while the marsh-tit preferred to have all his in one patch at
+the back, the coal-tit would have a bit cut out to make a bib for his
+chin! Of the two the marsh-tit is my favourite. I like the delicate
+tints of its more sober colouring better than the more contrasted yet
+more commonplace colours of the coal-tit.
+
+There seems something savouring of meanness about coal-tits; they are
+cautious and artful and carry away their food presumably to store,
+there is not time to have swallowed it before they are back again at
+the stand.
+
+A pair of coal-tits that were here one winter seemed quite demoralised
+by the food-stand, and to have altogether given up hunting for their
+natural food.
+
+Both kinds are perfectly amicable together, but a marsh will make way
+for a coal-tit. The marsh-tit seems to excite special animosity in
+tom-tits, whilst the coal-tit watches his opportunity, and, nipping in
+just at the right moment, escapes much persecution. Of the two the
+coal-tit has a more musical voice and a greater variety of notes, but
+once (in 1899) when watching a party of marsh-tits, I heard, besides
+the usual harsh note, a kind of continuous warble every now and then,
+which I could attribute to no other bird, though I could not actually
+see a marsh-tit uttering it.
+
+The delightful little wrens are always with us, and the loud, clear
+ringing notes of their sweet song may be heard almost throughout the
+year. In July, when most birds are silent, the wren does his best to
+make up for it, he seems to take a pleasure in having the field to
+himself, and his song may be heard, and often his alone every day until
+the middle of August. By that time some of the robins, having recovered
+from their moult, begin to tune up, and the wren leaves it to them to
+keep the ball going whilst he retires from the scene to complete his
+own change of feather. Apparently with such a tiny body to cover that
+is not a long business, for his bright little voice may be heard again
+early in September. I always myself feel inclined to say "thank you" at
+the conclusion of a wren's musical effort, and have been surprised to
+find that there are people, it may be many people, who do not hear his
+song at all of themselves, and when their attention is specially drawn
+think it "only a bird squeaking!"
+
+Wrens never seem to be tame in the same way that robins are, nor do
+they ever attempt to get at the food on the stand, or to share in the
+fowls' meals, but they often come close to the windows, creeping up and
+down the frames, in quest of spiders and other small game.
+
+A sight was reported to me the other day that I would have given a good
+deal to have seen with my own eyes. When for two days in January (1912)
+the ground was thickly covered with snow, I put a plate of scraps for
+the birds in the open porch. In the evening of the second day of snow,
+when the maid went to light the porch lamp, she saw this plate, as she
+described it, full of wrens (little birds with their tails turned up
+over their backs, she called them); there must have been, she thought,
+certainly not less than fifteen of them. When they saw her they flew
+off in a flock to the creeper outside, just where for two or three
+years there has been a wren's nest. Perhaps this little company was
+made up of the family that owned that nest as their home. In was in
+1909 that a wren first built there among the stems of the Virginian
+creeper close to the front door. The body of the nest was quite hidden
+between the creeper and the wall, the little entrance-hole alone being
+visible. We constantly saw the bird going in and out, taking a turn to
+stretch his wings or bringing home provisions for his household, and
+often he would sit close by and give vent to his feelings in a joyous
+burst of song. He appears to have been pleased with the success of his
+first venture on this site, for he has used the very same nest for the
+last two years.
+
+A wren has the same directness of flight as a kingfisher or a dipper;
+it has none of the up and down course of most small birds, but it
+follows a bee-line to its destination, with rapidly-beating wings, but
+making comparatively slow progress. I was much struck by this, as one
+day I watched a wren fly from a low bush to a height of 40 or 50 feet
+up a poplar, it seemed to take quite an age to get there.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+WAGTAILS, FLYCATCHERS, SWALLOWS AND OTHER INSECT-EATERS.
+
+
+Pied wagtails never entirely desert us, though, of course, there are
+many more, and they are much more in evidence, in summer than in
+winter. It is a continual pleasure to watch them, to see the speed with
+which they run in pursuit of a fly, the deftness of the capture, and
+the satisfaction so plainly displayed at the feat, by the eloquent
+balancing of the long tail. One day in August (1899) I watched a
+wagtail through a glass, and distinctly saw him capture and devour four
+"daddy-long legs" in succession. Besides running after them on the
+ground, they will often fly up at insects in the air.
+
+Pied wagtails are no respecters of persons as far as other birds are
+concerned; I have seen a single wagtail at one time pursuing a peewit,
+at another a sandpiper, and their encounters with swallows on the grass
+are most amusing to watch. When the swallows are flying low the
+wagtails will deliberately fly at them and even for a little way after
+them.
+
+A family of pied wagtails usually take possession of the lawn opposite
+one of our windows, and we can observe the process of education in the
+art of catching flies, from the stage in which the young are content
+to be fed entirely by their parents through that in which they
+supplement the supply by their own efforts, until finally little
+difference in skill is to be noticed between old birds and the young.
+This family appear to resent the intrusion of other birds on their
+domain (as shown in their behaviour towards swallows), and I have seen
+them persistently drive away young yellow wagtails who presumed to
+trespass on their hunting ground.
+
+Yellow wagtails are not so often seen in the garden, though they are
+plentiful enough in the neighbourhood. They are lively and attractive
+and their bright colour contrasts strongly with the freshly ploughed
+earth so that their arrival is always noticed by the farmers and seems
+to interest them more than the coming of any other migrant except the
+cuckoo.
+
+Meadow pipits are common in the fields around, but I cannot remember
+ever to have seen one actually in the garden. On a rough bit of ground
+near the Ship Canal bridge they are always to be found, and I have
+watched one there for twenty minutes or more at a time as he soared up
+to a considerable height, singing all the time, and then came down
+again to the ground with wings and tail spread out, after the manner of
+a tree-pipit, with a little musical twitter just as he landed. It kept
+repeating this performance over and over again all the time I was
+there.
+
+For some years a tree-pipit used to take up his abode with us every
+summer and give us the benefit of his energetic song. I was very much
+amused once to watch him on some iron hurdles at the end of the garden.
+He was so much in earnest and so full of energy; he would sing a little
+bit, then run along the top rail a little way, then sing again, and so
+on until he had gone nearly the whole length of the railings. This
+entertainment he went through day after day for a fortnight or more at
+the end of June and the beginning of July.
+
+Spotted flycatchers have not been as common with us lately as they were
+at one time, when they always made their home here during their summer
+visit to this country, and were constantly in evidence. We have not had
+a nest for several years, and last year (1911) I did not see a single
+flycatcher in the garden, but this year, I am glad to say, they have
+come back again and there has been a nest in the ivy on the house wall.
+It was placed so low down that we could easily look into it, but never
+once did I surprise the old bird; she seemed to hear one's footsteps at
+a distance, and long before one reached the nest she was off. The young
+were hatched on June 29th, but their eyes did not open until July 6th.
+Whilst they were blind and as they grew bigger the nest seemed much
+too small for them, and often one fancied two of them must inevitably
+have been smothered, as they were quite hidden under the other three.
+Even after they could see there was some confusion during the heat of
+the day; but it was one of the prettiest sights imaginable when they
+were tucked in for the night; all five heads with their sharp little
+beaks and bright black eyes were arranged in perfect order, all looking
+together in the same direction out of the nest. People in the village
+call these birds by the name of "old man," and it seems expressive,
+somehow peculiarly appropriate to their greyish colouring and quiet
+unobtrusive manners.
+
+For five years running a pair of flycatchers built in a fork of a thick
+ivy-stem on the old church tower. They chose a most exposed place by
+the side of a walk trodden by dozens of visitors to the church nearly
+every day of the summer. The first time we noticed it (in 1894) the
+nest was so low and so exposed that nothing could save it. In 1895,
+when it was placed higher up and better concealed, the young were
+successfully reared. In 1896 they chose a position actually not more
+than three feet from the ground, and yet, marvellous to relate, owing
+to watchful care on the part of human friends, and the continual
+replacing of a screen of ivy leaves, they scored another success. In
+1897, though the site was higher up and apparently much safer, the
+young birds were taken, but in 1898 they were again able to escape the
+attentions of cats and boys and bring off their brood without mishap;
+in 1899 they wisely abandoned the dangerous situation altogether.
+
+I was once watching a flycatcher perched on the food-stand opposite and
+close to my open window, when I noticed that besides a
+constantly-repeated weak single note, it had every now and then a
+cadence of two and again of three notes, and sometimes a very faint
+kind of inward warble.
+
+The iron boundary hurdles on the south side of the garden are a
+favourite stand for flycatchers, and I have seen them busily occupied
+there in catching flies, which they carried to their young ones in the
+trees near by, whilst every now and then the prettily-marked youngsters
+would themselves come down to the top rail and sit there to be fed.
+Croquet hoops on the grass near these hurdles seem to have a great
+attraction for them. Two, sometimes three, would be there at the same
+time. After each pursuit of a passing fly they would return now to the
+same hoop, now to another, and sometimes they seemed to go the round of
+all the hoops in turn. Every day throughout the summer they would be
+there, and in the white line under each hoop was left indisputable
+evidence of their regular occupation.
+
+Towards the end of July, 1902, we were much interested in a pair of
+flycatchers with their little family of three. One of the old birds
+would spend its time catching flies for the young ones, whilst the
+other rested, sitting quite unconcerned by itself on the rails. When
+the working parent brought a fly to one of the family the other two
+would hurry up, and there was constantly a small crowd of four
+gesticulating little birds in one part or other of the lawn. Between
+the intervals of being fed the young birds learnt to forage for
+themselves, not, I noticed, flying off the ground after insects, but
+running after them on the grass. These five birds stayed with us until
+September 9th. They often flew down from the trees to catch flies on
+the grass, and would hover in front of shrubs and tall plants whilst
+they picked off the flies near them.
+
+When flycatchers have been on the croquet hoops and swallows were
+flying low, they had not seldom to get pretty sharply out of the way to
+avoid a collision, as the swallows appeared purposely to fly at them.
+
+In 1908 we were fortunate enough to see a bird here that is very seldom
+found in Cheshire, namely, a pied flycatcher. It was in the evening of
+August 25th that we saw it. The strange little bird came quite close up
+to the French window of the room in which we were sitting, and we
+noticed plainly the white patch on his wing. It did not seem at all
+shy, and I watched it about the house for an hour or so.
+
+It is said in "The Fauna of Cheshire" that while birds are sometimes
+seen during the spring migration, there is no other record of a pied
+flycatcher in Cheshire on the return journey in autumn.
+
+Of swallows there is no lack. Nearly every year there are one or two
+nests in the outbuildings, and in 1900 a pair began to build against
+the wall of the house porch just over the front door. The wall was
+perfectly flat, and they began to fasten mud against it as a
+house-martin would have done. To save possible untoward consequences to
+the hats of visitors I rigged up a shelf over the door; this, perhaps,
+frightened them, at any rate, they did not go on with their work.
+
+In 1908 a pair set their minds on building in the old church, and build
+they did in spite of all we could do in the way of keeping doors and
+windows shut (they must have found their way through some broken quarry
+of a window). However, when we saw that we were beaten we made the best
+of it, and really there was very little mess, and it was pleasant to
+hear them warbling in the roof. When the young birds were hatched in
+July the old ones were more wary than ever. If they saw anyone in the
+church, instead of going on to the nest, they would turn back and fly
+away with their mouthful of dainties. However, by hiding, I managed to
+see the nestlings fed, and noticed that though they were very
+vociferous when they guessed there was an immediate prospect of their
+hunger being satisfied, a warning note from the old bird seemed to
+silence them at once.
+
+For a good many years a pair of swallows have nested in the porch of
+the new church, and in 1910 an old trimmed straw hat that hung on a
+nail in an outbuilding at the church-house was chosen by another pair
+as a suitable foundation for their nest, and in this rather
+strangely-placed nursery they brought up a young family.
+
+There is something very charming in the swallow's warbling song, beyond
+its association with warm and beautiful weather; and when in autumn
+they are congregating by thousands, to hear them all chanting together
+as they fill the air, and, sailing round and round in widening and
+interlacing circles, mount higher and higher until the highest are
+almost out of sight, is to my mind wonderfully grand and impressive.
+
+Sometimes the swallows melt away without any noticeable gatherings,
+while in other years they assemble in such flocks about the end of
+September that in certain favourite hunting grounds the sky is almost
+darkened by them, and to watch the intricate maze of perpetual motion
+is enough to make one giddy, while as at intervals they sit resting,
+they seem to stretch away for miles in long lines on the telegraph
+wires.
+
+Swallows and wagtails apparently grudge one another (and flycatchers) a
+share in their insect sporting rights, if their mutual spitefulness has
+any meaning. This common taste for the same kind of food often brings
+the three into close quarters, and it is curious to notice the
+different methods they use to compass the same end; the swallow
+ceaselessly rushing at full speed through the air, the wagtail trusting
+to his nimbleness of foot, and the flycatcher making a series of little
+excursions upwards after his prey. I have seen swallows walking about
+on the grass and picking up flies, and when their young ones are
+resting on the ground they will often bring them food there, alighting
+by the side first of one and then of another.
+
+Ten years ago it was only on two or three houses in the village that
+house-martins built, and they were seldom seen except in the immediate
+neighbourhood of these, but now (1911) they have become comparatively
+abundant everywhere. The wooden hay-sheds recently put up at many of
+the farms seem to have attracted them in the first instance, but when
+once they were led to look more closely into the matter they evidently
+found that there were many more eligible building sites in Warburton
+than they had had any idea of before. They have never yet made their
+real home with us, but during the latter part of the summer they come
+in crowds to the garden, and there are among them many only just able
+to fly, who spend most of their time on the roof of the house, waiting
+to be fed.
+
+[Illustration: A Corner in the Garden with Allium Dioscorides.]
+
+Two house-martins fell down a bedroom chimney here, and when I opened
+the window to let them out, whilst one took advantage of it at once the
+other kept flying round and round quite close up to the ceiling and
+resting on a bell-wire that ran across. It was a long time, more than
+half an hour, before I could persuade him that he was looking in the
+wrong place for a way of escape.
+
+At one time after the Ship Canal had been begun and traffic had ceased
+on the river, a large colony of sand-martins established themselves
+under the disused towing-path almost opposite, and naturally they were
+then plentiful enough. Now, as far as we are concerned, the river with
+all its belongings is a thing of the past, and it is only occasionally
+that we see the little brown birds hawking for flies in the garden.
+
+I was surprised not long ago to find in a field-sandpit, a mile away
+from any other sand-martins' nests that I knew of, a solitary nest in a
+hole within easy reach of my hand. The young must have been hatched,
+for I watched the birds go in with food.
+
+Sand-martins have a peculiar interest as being perhaps the most
+universally distributed of all small birds. One likes to think that
+nearly everywhere one went, in Asia, Africa or America, the very same
+little brown swallows might be seen ceaselessly flitting about,
+bringing back to mind the green fields and cloudy skies of home in
+England.
+
+Only once have I seen that other cosmopolitan, the tree-creeper, in the
+garden. One morning in May, 1895, I heard a strange, small, rather
+shrill song and found that it came from a little brown tree-creeper on
+an oak just opposite my window. I watched it for some time through
+field glasses as it climbed about, prying into every crack of the bark
+and singing as it worked.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+SPARROWS AND OTHER FINCHES.
+
+
+Although I have never myself seen a goldfinch in the garden, they have
+been seen here, and on the rough ground near the Ship Canal they are
+not uncommon, indeed, I have heard of several shillings a week being
+made by birds that have been caught there in spite of County Council
+orders. They are usually known here as "red linnets," but another
+Cheshire name for them is "nickers."
+
+Greenfinches (green linnets in Cheshire) abound; in early spring they
+are more than usually conspicuous, as in their brightest feather they
+pursue one another in and out among the hollies and dark yew hedges.
+Though then less evident to the eye, throughout the summer they let us
+know by their unmistakable and wearisome notes that they are with us
+still.
+
+As early as April 29th, in 1890, I watched a greenfinch on a thorn
+opposite my window feeding what appeared to be a fully-fledged young
+one. It was pumping up the food from its craw, in the same way that a
+pigeon does. The end of April is so unusually early for a greenfinch
+family to have flown, that perhaps it was only another instance of
+delicate marital attention, such as I have noticed in the case of
+robins and tits.
+
+In February, 1893, a hen hawfinch was shown me. It had just been shot
+in the village, and in 1894 I heard of a nest in the gardens at Lymm
+Hall, rather more than two miles away.
+
+My wife told me one morning in October, 1910, that she had seen on a
+tree near her window a thick-set bird with a big head and short tail
+and neck, whose colour she described as some shades of brown. Two or
+three little birds appeared to be mobbing it, and it kept pecking at
+them like a parrot. She only saw it for a minute or two, before it flew
+away round the corner of the house. It altogether sounds as though it
+might have been a hawfinch.
+
+House-sparrows abound here, and are interesting and amusing to the
+unprejudiced looker-on who doesn't suffer from their depredations.
+There is no denying that sparrows are vulgar, and bold and pushing, or
+that they are tiresomely persevering in the mischief that they do. They
+are coarsely built and have no song, while their monotonous chirp is
+distracting, but they have that which for the race of life stands them
+in more stead than either beauty or musical talent; they have courage
+and intelligence, a wonderful power of adapting themselves to
+circumstances and a sound healthy constitution, with a digestion that
+an ostrich might envy.
+
+The food-stand has shown me what sparrows are and what they can do.
+When I set it up I had no wish to feed sparrows, and could not bear to
+see them devouring all before them in the greedy, systematic way that
+they have. So I set my wits to work to see if I could not contrive
+something by which they might be baffled without depriving the tits of
+their food. It proved more than I could do to prevent any of the
+sparrows getting any of the food, but I was able to make it more
+difficult for them, so difficult that only a few could manage it. They
+differ very much individually: some are far bolder and more
+enterprising than others, but I have found that some sparrows can do
+almost anything that a tit can do in the way of acrobatic performances,
+though not, of course, with the same easy grace. I tried many devices.
+I had seen somewhere that if food were suspended from a pliable twig
+only tits would venture to attack it. It didn't take long to prove the
+fallacy of this idea. The swinging of the net made not the slightest
+difference to the sparrows; they alighted on it just as readily as if
+it had been lying on the ground. Then I tried hanging the net at one
+end of a stick and a movable weight at the other. The stick acted as a
+balance, and the net went down directly a bird settled on it. This
+instability frightened the sparrows for a long time, but in the end
+they got quite used to it. It was the same with many other contrivances
+that I tried, they answered their purpose for a time, it may be
+altogether as far as most went, but in every case sooner or later some
+sparrows learnt to overcome every difficulty, and it struck me that
+each successive year they seemed to do so more easily, as though they
+turned the experience of one year to good account in the next.
+
+In 1899 I made an apparatus like a windmill, with four arms, and food
+in a kind of little box at the end of each. The arms, of course, went
+down directly a bird touched them. This for a long time was effectual,
+and I had begun to flatter myself that I had solved the problem, but
+during a hard frost some one or two sparrows overcame their fears and
+managed to get the fat, and when once they saw it might be done with
+safety many others learnt the trick. I then complicated the idea into a
+wheel, with eight arms, and food only at the extreme point of each.
+This answered so far that no sparrow seemed able to get at the fat from
+the revolving arm itself as they hung on to it (an easy feat for the
+tits), but they used to hover opposite the ends of the arms and pick
+out the food. (Robins did this also.) Independently of its effect in
+discouraging the sparrows, the wheel afforded much amusement by the
+antics it imposed upon the tits as they went round and up and down on
+the arms.
+
+One plan I tried depended for its action on the difference of weight
+between a sparrow and a tit. It was the opposite of the arrangement by
+which sparrows are prevented from appropriating the food put out for
+pheasants, where the pheasant opens the corn-box by his weight on the
+perch outside. I tried so to arrange the balance that the heavier
+sparrow was cut off from the hole which contained the food, whilst for
+the tit it remained open. The practical drawback to this plan was the
+nicety of adjustment required, for though a sparrow is more than twice
+the weight of a tom-tit, the difference between the two weights is
+little more than a quarter of an ounce.
+
+One of the most successful contrivances, after all, is one of the
+simplest. Take a tin canister (one that I used was three inches long by
+2-1/2 in diameter), hang it open end downwards by a string brought
+through a hole in the other end, to this string fasten inside the tin a
+bit of wood about the thickness of a large pencil, and let it hang like
+the clapper in a bell, projecting a quarter of an inch below the bottom
+rim of the tin. Plaster all round the inside of the tin with fat,
+leaving the wooden tongue in the middle free for the birds to cling to.
+In this way both great-tits and tom-tits can feed themselves without
+difficulty, but only one sparrow in twenty can manage with much ado to
+hold on and to eat at the same time. (To see a sparrow with his
+less-practised feet clinging to the edge of the tin, back downwards,
+just like a tit and helping himself to its contents is a good example
+of the energetic enterprise and the adaptability of his nature.) Robins
+do sometimes hold on to the tin in the same way, but generally they get
+quite as much as they want by flying up and pecking at the fat. They
+seem able to aim very accurately, and when the tin is nearly empty can
+make sure of the smallest fragments. Sparrows also attack the food in
+the same way by flying up at it, but they seem to find it more awkward,
+owing, perhaps, to the small space between the sides of the tin and the
+wood in the middle, which barely gives room for their larger heads and
+clumsier beaks.
+
+Another successful plan was to suspend the fat within a roll of
+inch-mesh wire netting. To begin with I put this on the food-stand, at
+some little distance from my window, and though at first only tits and
+robins would venture down within the roll of wire, after a time the
+sparrows followed suit, and, of course, there was nothing to prevent
+them getting as much as they liked but their own caution. I might have
+stopped them by covering the top with netting, but then the great-tits
+and robins would have been excluded as well as the sparrows, and even
+tom-tits could only get through the meshes with difficulty. However, I
+moved the roll quite close up to the glass of the window, leaving the
+top still uncovered (and the bottom closed) as before. Tom-tits came to
+it in its new position almost as readily as when on the food-stand.
+Great-tits came but were always rather uneasy about it, but not one
+sparrow ventured to clamber down inside the roll, although it was there
+for more than a year and we had some very hard frosts. They would
+continually try to get at the food from underneath and from the side,
+but could not make up their minds to go inside the roll itself,
+although it was quite open and they had learnt to go in without scruple
+when it was on the food-stand, before it was put close to the window.
+The most fearless of any birds with regard to this wire roll were two
+robins in the beginning of 1902; they were perpetually scrambling up
+and down inside the wire, and continued to do so until April, when the
+supply of food came to end.
+
+The extreme caution of sparrows enables one to scare them away for a
+time by a fluttering ribbon or a bit of paper, but it is only for a
+time; when they see that tits treat such things with contempt and
+venture close to them with impunity they soon summon up courage to lay
+aside their suspicions.
+
+I once put a wire rat-trap under the food-stand, so arranged that it
+went off when a string was pulled. At first, it was baited with corn,
+but while robins and tits went in and out without the least concern,
+not a sparrow would go near, and for a time the presence of the trap
+kept them away from the food-stand altogether. However, they could not
+resist the temptation of bread, and one or two were caught at last. But
+what was the use of catching them? I hadn't the heart to kill them in
+cold blood and used to let them go, and indeed I quite enjoyed myself
+the sense of joyous relief they must have felt as they flew off
+unharmed into the free air.
+
+However much mischief sparrows may do, some good work must be placed to
+their credit. Through a great part of the year, even in February, I
+have seen them flying up after gnats, and it is a common thing in
+summer to see a sparrow in pursuit of a moth. Its efforts always seem
+ridiculously awkward and sometimes I fancy are ineffectual after all,
+but they must commonly succeed or they would not try so often and so
+persistently.
+
+In the spring of 1900 the grass was covered for many days together with
+some kind of little black fly, and sparrows a dozen or so at a time
+with blackbirds, thrushes and chaffinches found a continual feast in
+them. I noticed again and again quite a big round ball of them
+collected and carried away by a thrush.
+
+It has often been noticed that sparrows are more eager than most birds
+in hunting for aphides, and I have seen a sparrow make short work of a
+"daddy-long-legs." In July and August I have watched them catching
+flies on the grass, running after them much as a wagtail does, indeed
+once I remember seeing a sparrow and a wagtail on the lawn at the same
+time, each followed by a young bird whose hunger they were trying to
+satisfy with flies caught in similar fashion.
+
+Impudence is a marked characteristic of a sparrow. I have seen a
+starling at work in his busy, methodical way, closely followed all over
+the lawn by a sparrow. There he was all the time, close at the
+starling's elbow and ready to pounce upon whatever dainty morsel a
+skill superior to his own might bring to light. The starling was
+plainly bored by his company, but the sparrow would take no hint, and
+maintained his position in spite even of pointed rebuffs from the
+other's beak. (In the dry summer of 1911 I noticed at different times
+both a throstle and a blackbird attended in the same way by a sparrow.)
+
+At another time when a starling has arrived with food in its mouth, and
+not daring on account of my being there to take it into its nest, has
+begun, after the usual unwise custom of starlings, loudly to advertise
+the situation, I have seen two sparrows, attracted by the noise he
+made, take up positions one on either side and try to snatch the food
+away from him. I saw this happen twice on two successive days in June,
+1901.
+
+The dusting habit of sparrows must be counted among their many
+iniquities when they indulge in it, as they often do, in a bed of
+newly-sown seeds, but it was strange to see one dusting during the hard
+frost of 1895; one should have thought that they were so out of the way
+of dusting in winter that no sparrow would have taken advantage of the
+rare opportunity when a long dry frost made it possible.
+
+One day in April, 1899, a sparrow that was sitting on the food-stand
+close by my window made quite a song of his chirping. There was a kind
+of modulation of notes, continuously uttered and accompanied by a
+regular "beating time" movement of his tail. On another occasion I have
+heard a sparrow sitting alone on the ridge of a roof, singing, one
+could only call it, quite a little song in subdued tones.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+FINCHES, STARLINGS AND CROWS.
+
+
+The spruce, handsome chaffinch (in Cheshire "pied finch") is with us
+all the year round, and his song here, as I suppose everywhere, is one
+of the most familiar of the pleasant voices of spring.
+
+One or more chaffinches generally feed with the fowls (and sometimes
+they are quite extraordinarily tame, hens more so, perhaps, than
+cocks), but they do not often attempt to get food from the stand.
+Though they sometimes do, for instance in the winter of 1910-11, there
+was one that came regularly.
+
+The gait of the chaffinch strikes one as peculiar, it is as a fact a
+hopping movement, but it gives the impression of a run.
+
+I have frequently noticed something like rivalry or competition in
+singing between a chaffinch and another bird, such as a tree-pipit or a
+lesser whitethroat, or a willow-wren.
+
+One night as I was going the round of the house the last thing, about
+12 o'clock, I heard a great fluttering and found that a light had been
+left on a table close to an unshuttered window, and outside beating
+against the glass was a handsome cock chaffinch.
+
+In February, 1911, a brambling was brought to me for identification. It
+had been shot at the other side of the village, one of a large flock.
+I have never seen one in the garden itself, but not far away I think I
+caught sight of a small flock in March, 1899.
+
+Far more interesting than stuffed specimens in a museum (how seldom,
+even at South Kensington, do you see small birds well set up, even
+sufficiently well to recognize the bird when met with alive!); far more
+interesting is such an outdoor aviary as one finds near the Town Hall
+in Warrington, where the birds appear to want nothing to make their
+lives ideally happy. In this aviary bramblings seem quite at home, and
+may be seen in best condition of health and feather.
+
+Lesser redpoles, which here they call "jitties," I have seen close to
+the garden, and on the other side of the village they are common. I
+have heard of one boy catching 50 in a season with birdlime; for these
+he got a few pence apiece in Warrington.
+
+A lesser redpole was given me in 1900, and a very engaging little bird
+he was. Though supposed to be freshly caught he was tame when first I
+had him, and in a very short time seemed hardly to know fear.
+
+We used to let him out of his cage every day for an hour or so at a
+time. He enjoyed this immensely, and we had great difficulty in
+shutting him up again. He seemed fond of his cage, and would be
+continually going into it, but directly we went near to shut the door
+he was out. I tried a long string, which we pulled from a distance as
+soon as he was in the cage. This answered for a time, but he got to be
+so knowing that when he saw the string fastened to the door he wouldn't
+go into the cage at all. We got the better of him in the end, however,
+by hanging a bit of card inside the doorway; when he pushed against
+this on the outside he could get by into the cage, but he couldn't open
+it from the inside. We only turned the card in when we wanted him to go
+back, leaving him free to go in and out as he liked till then. Oddly
+enough, he used to go in almost directly the card was in its place, and
+never attempted to get out again. He seemed to enjoy the exercise of
+flying very much, and used to go round and round the room again and
+again and again for the mere pleasure of it.
+
+Though he would settle on the different things in the room and stay
+there for some length of time, there was never any need to clean up
+after him, but on the outside of his cage he was not so particular. It
+was a great amusement to him to sit and make faces at himself in a
+looking-glass.
+
+He lived very happily with us for more than two years. In the end he
+died of some kind of wasting disease, but was bright and apparently
+happy to the last.
+
+For some months before he died, if we let him out at meal-times, as we
+often did, he had a curious habit of going to the salt-cellars and
+helping himself to grains of salt; once he took as many as thirteen
+pinches in succession! We often wondered afterwards whether he took the
+salt because he was ill or whether it was the salt that made him ill.
+
+I would gladly sacrifice many fruit buds for the sake of seeing
+bullfinches in the garden, but never yet have I had that pleasure.
+Other people in the village do not regard their visits in the same
+light, and it is only because I hear of their being shot that I know
+they come here.
+
+A bullfinch that belonged to a cousin must I think have reached the
+highest degree of tameness possible in a bird. Tommy, as he was called,
+was taken from the nest before he could fly, and he not only lost all
+sense of fear but showed an extraordinary personal devotion to his
+mistress. He used to wake her in the morning with a kiss, and warble
+his little greeting. He would come directly she called him, and would
+fly after her from room to room. This devotion was at last the cause of
+his death. In May, 1901, he was taken to London to a strange house, and
+one day hearing his mistress's voice as she came in, he flew down the
+stairs to meet her, and somehow struck against the hall lamp with such
+force that he was taken up dead.
+
+[Illustration: The Two Nests.]
+
+I find the following entry in my diary for November 9th, 1895:--"A
+small flight of birds passed along the trees in front of the window.
+Caught a momentary glance of one as it rested on the tree, and noticed
+shades of brown and pink and the peculiar bill. Could they have been
+crossbills?"
+
+Yellow-hammers, or "goldfinches" as they are called here, are often to
+be seen in the fields near, but in the garden we are more familiar with
+the black-headed reed-bunting. We generally have one or two about the
+old bed of the river. I have watched the bird through a telescope on a
+July day, as he sat on an osier twig that was swaying in the wind,
+preening his feathers and uttering his short melody (?) betweenwhiles.
+He would begin as though he had really something to sing, then would
+come two halting notes, indicating doubt of his power to do much after
+all, which would immediately become a certainty, and his brief attempt
+would end in a fizzle. He would, however, be perfectly satisfied with
+the performance himself, and would go through it again and again almost
+as persistently as the yellow-hammer repeats his wearisome monotonous
+phrase. In the spring he has a still simpler song, if it can be called
+a song, consisting of two or three notes of one tone, something like
+the cheep of a chicken, sometimes repeated _ad infinitum_, sometimes
+followed by a short run of three or four notes more.
+
+We have starlings with us all the year round, and I am glad of it. Here
+at any rate they do nothing but good, and they are, besides, handsome,
+and are interesting to watch, while their song, whether a chorus or a
+solo, is always cheerful. Cold and bad weather doesn't seem to affect
+their spirits. On Christmas morning, in 1897, although there was a hard
+frost, starlings were singing away merrily, one of them imitating a
+blackbird's note exactly.
+
+At one time flocks of starlings used to come on autumn evenings to
+roost in the garden. I have watched one detachment after another arrive
+until the trees and evergreens were crowded with them. They did not
+come so much later on when the leaves had fallen, and now that the
+shrubbery has been thinned they do not come at all in any numbers. In
+spring I have heard 30 or more all singing together in this same
+shrubbery as late as April 2nd.
+
+Starlings hunt for their food in a methodical, business-like way. They
+do not seem to have the peculiar gift by which thrushes hit on the
+exact spot where a worm is (I fancy they do not feed much on worms) but
+they go diligently over every square inch of ground in their search,
+probing the turf with their bills widely open, so widely that one can
+hardly see how they can close them on a grub when they find one.
+
+Starlings afford another example of a strange perversion of instinct or
+want of common sense. If you happen to be standing anywhere near the
+place that one has chosen for his nest, and he arrives with his food in
+his mouth, instead of slipping quietly in whilst your eyes are turned
+away, he waits outside making as much racket as he can, and you are
+almost forced to notice him and cannot fail to see the whereabouts of
+his nest, plainly marked as it is sure to be by plentiful splashes of
+white.
+
+It is quite a common thing in spring and summer to see starlings
+catching flies in the air, and I remember in 1906, on September 29th,
+the air was, one might say, full of starlings, floating about in every
+direction with expanded wings, and then shooting up or down or to one
+side when they came within reach of a fly. It was a warm, still day,
+and I fancy the flies they were catching were winged aphides.
+
+For many years now as soon as the elder-berries are ripe numbers of
+starlings, chiefly young ones, arrive on the scene, and in a few days
+clear them off completely.
+
+Jays are not common here, but we have occasionally watched one in the
+garden as he was looking for fallen acorns in the grass close to the
+house.
+
+One may pretty safely count on seeing a magpie near Arley at any time
+of the year, and we do at long intervals see them in this garden and
+in the fields near, but they are very far from common.
+
+I have heard of a magpie at a farm in the next village to this, many
+years ago indeed, who kept his eye on a turkey that was in the habit of
+laying eggs at a little distance from the house, and often managed to
+appropriate the newly-laid egg before the farm people could stop him.
+
+Jackdaws are often about, generally in company with rooks, but I have
+never specially noticed them settling in the garden, as the rooks often
+do.
+
+In Wales once I saw a jackdaw busily engaged exploring the back of a
+pony with its beak. The pony continued quietly grazing all the while,
+but I thought he seemed rather relieved when his visitor left.
+
+In January, 1898, two crows appeared in the garden; I used to see them
+nearly every evening. A month later we saw a single crow, injured in
+one wing, go backwards and forwards over the whole length of the
+opposite bank. Up and down he went, regularly quartering the ground in
+his search for food. He did this for several days, and we felt quite
+sorry for him, he was so diligent and persevering, and it must have
+been so little that he could find within such comparatively narrow
+limits. We put food for him, which he soon found and seemed to
+appreciate. He drove away rooks who tried to share it with him, but as
+he carried away each bit to eat in private the rooks took advantage of
+his absence, and the supply did not last as long as it might have done.
+
+The poor bird was uncommonly wary: he would spy one out hundreds of
+yards away and disappear in a wonderful manner, seeing that he could
+not fly. At last some Ship Canal workmen caught him. I got him from
+them and kept him for three months, but though he ate pretty well it
+did not seem to do him much good, and he never became in the least tame
+to the day of his death.
+
+We have often hoped that rooks would build in the garden; they come
+sometimes to the higher trees as though they had thoughts of doing so,
+but they have not gone beyond that as yet. In some years when acorns
+are ripe many rooks come here to get them (in 1911, although acorns
+were extraordinarily abundant, I hardly saw a single rook). I have
+never seen them pick up the acorns on the ground, as the jays and
+wood-pigeons do, but they gather them fresh for themselves from the
+tree.
+
+More than once I have seen a single rook pursuing a hawk, and, on the
+other hand, I have seen a rook put to flight by a missel-thrush.
+
+Rather a strange story was told me of a farmer's daughter at Heatley,
+near here. She lived by herself not far from the railway station, and
+every day, summer and winter alike, she fed a number of rooks that
+habitually waited on her bounty. One winter's day, it appears, she
+threw down food for a few rooks that were in a tree behind her house.
+The next day they were there again, and again she fed them, and so it
+grew into a regular thing, and they came expecting to be fed like so
+many fowls every day of the year. My informant often watched the
+proceeding, and said that the birds seemed to know their benefactress
+quite well and not to be at all afraid of her, though they were as shy
+of strangers as any other rooks.
+
+Skylarks are abundant in the neighbourhood, and often in the garden we
+hear one singing overhead. I have seen a lark singing his regular song
+on the ground, and have seen one perched on iron railings by the side
+of a road holding a largish brown moth in its bill, and at the same
+time uttering repeatedly two or three notes of its song.
+
+Larks are very fond of dusting in roads. I remember being struck one
+hot day in June by the number of dusting larks I met with in a ten-mile
+ride. Without any exaggeration there must have been one every twenty
+yards on an average for the whole distance.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+OTHER BIRDS.
+
+
+The wild shriek of swifts, as they dash and wheel through the air at
+their topmost speed, seems to express such intense delight in freedom
+and motion and power, that it imparts something of the same sense of
+exhilaration to the beholder, at least, I know it is so with me.
+
+Swifts, or "long-wings," as they are equally well-named in Cheshire,
+usually find their food at some height in the air, but one day in the
+beginning of July (1899) I noticed a number of swifts, with a great
+many swallows and sand-martins, skimming the surface of a patch of
+clover which had been left standing in a field near the garden. I did
+not discover what it was, but the attraction must have been something
+unusual, for the number of birds passing and re-passing in the very
+small space was so extraordinary that it was really difficult to
+understand how they could avoid collision. All were concentrated in the
+one spot, and never seemed to go beyond it for more than a couple of
+yards.
+
+In 1896 there were swifts about all August, and I saw a pair on October
+19th. I was told by a friend who was at Brighton in June, 1899, that
+whenever the band played on the sea front four swifts would appear and
+fly round and round the bandstand. She never noticed them there, she
+said, when the band was not playing, although it was her favourite seat
+at all times of the day.
+
+Nightjars are not uncommon on "mosses" in Lancashire, only a mile or so
+away, and in Cheshire on the Carrington side of Warburton, but they are
+less frequent just about here. One year, however (1902), a pair
+evidently had made their nest in the rough tussocky ground which at
+that time covered the bed of the old river. From the middle of June to
+the beginning of July we were treated every evening to the full
+programme of their entertainment, both vocal and acrobatic. Several
+times one heard little snatches of the "song," even in the middle of
+the day in fine, hot weather, but nine p.m., sometimes a little
+earlier, was the usual time for beginning. The whirring would go on for
+an hour at a time, with hardly any cessation, but often varying in tone
+and volume, now swelling out louder and then sinking again. We often
+saw the two birds playing about together in the air, one or other of
+them making what is described as a "whipthong" noise and smiting its
+wings together like a pigeon. Sometimes when they first settled again
+after a flight, instead of the loud whirring there would be every now
+and then a soft, liquid, bubbling sound.
+
+A favourite resting-place was the bare bough of a Scotch fir, and here
+as it lay lengthways and perfectly still the bird looked so like part
+of the branch itself that I couldn't persuade a friend who was with me
+that it was a bird until he actually saw it fly away. After July 4th we
+heard no more of them, and for a day or two before that the whirring
+was much more interrupted, in shorter spells, and varied more in
+intensity and clearness than usual.
+
+Before the next spring came round the Ship Canal had covered the
+river-bed with another layer of mud dredgings, and we have neither seen
+nor heard a nightjar in the garden since, but in June, 1910, I heard
+from the keeper that he had watched one flying round an old
+black-poplar just opposite the garden gate, flapping the ends of the
+boughs with his wings and catching the moths that were driven out.
+
+One of the most delightful of country sounds is, I think, the laugh of
+the green woodpecker, and when I heard that a pair of woodpeckers were
+constantly to be seen (January and February, 1901) about some old
+poplars not far away, and that early one morning one was working at the
+rotten posts of a fence in the very next field, my hopes were raised
+that even yet that welcome sound might be heard from the garden. But
+the birds turned out to be greater-spotted woodpeckers and not green,
+and these do not express the joy of living so plainly. I have several
+times since seen one of these spotted woodpeckers in the garden. One
+day (in April, 1908) I watched the bird for a long time as he visited
+in succession each of the posts in a wire fence by the old river-bed.
+
+Green woodpeckers are rare in this part of the country, but
+"lesser-spotted" are found in Dunham Park, and the keeper tells me he
+has seen them in Warburton Fox-cover.
+
+In the low-lying meadows by the Bollin, half a mile away, kingfishers
+have always been found, haunting the little water-courses and ditches,
+but at one time we were able to see them even from the garden itself.
+
+In the making of the Ship Canal a part of the old river just beyond us
+was left unfilled up, and formed a fair-sized pool. Kingfishers used to
+come to this, and as long as there was any water at all in the old
+river-bed I often stood outside this house and watched the blue streak
+of light as the bird, with his peculiar shrill cry, flew straight as an
+arrow past me. Even in August, 1899, when what remained of the river
+was nothing but seething mud, in which I am sure there could have been
+no living fish, I disturbed a kingfisher from an overhanging branch on
+the bank.
+
+A friend in the village, a keen observer of birds, has often seen, he
+tells me, that when kingfishers fly from the meadows to the "pits" on
+higher ground they first rise straight up into the air and then dart
+off in a perfect bee-line to their destination. He also said that
+kingfishers invariably desert a nest that has been touched. He was
+repairing the embankment of the Bollin once when a kingfisher's nest
+was accidentally laid open, and although the nest itself was not
+injured, and the two young ones in it were nearly fledged and fought at
+his hand like little owls, when two days later he was at the place
+again he found them both dead, unable to find food for themselves and
+forsaken by their parents.
+
+The coming of the cuckoo seems to be of more interest to people here
+than any event in natural history, and cuckoos are, I should say, more
+plentiful with us than in many places, and are nearly as often seen as
+heard.
+
+I must have seen a dozen one day in May from the high road during a
+short drive of a few miles, and, generally speaking, in May not a day
+(I should not be far out if I said not an hour of the day) goes by
+without our knowing by sight as well as sound that there are cuckoos in
+the garden.
+
+The widespread belief that cuckoos turn into hawks in winter is still
+seriously held in Cheshire to-day, even by farmers.
+
+For three days in the end of July, 1905, I was able from my study
+window to watch a young cuckoo being fed by its foster-parent, a
+meadow-pipit. The cuckoo was sitting on a wire fence on the opposite
+bank. At first it sat in a floppy kind of way, with its wings hanging
+down on either side, as if to keep its balance, but the next day it
+seemed to have gained strength and sat up better. The little pipit (if
+it was always the same, and I never saw more than one at once) was not
+away for more than a minute or two, except on the third day, when it
+was pouring wet and food seemed harder to find. As soon as the cuckoo
+knew that its nurse was coming it began opening its mouth and quivering
+its wings, while the poor little dupe that brought the food would
+alight a short distance off and run along the wire to its side, then,
+looking ridiculously small for the job, it would manage to pop
+something into its mouth, not all in one go, but in two or three. It
+was curious to notice that every time after being fed the ungrateful
+cuckoo gave spiteful pecks at the poor deluded little slave who was
+working so hard to supply its wants.
+
+One day in May (1908) a cuckoo alighted on a tree close to the house,
+attended by two small birds. He seemed rather uneasy in their company,
+and kept looking suspiciously at them; they, I fancy, were trying to
+make up their minds to attack him, but they let "I dare not" wait so
+long upon "I would" that he went off unmolested.
+
+Barn owls are comparatively common. Farmers are learning to understand
+better their great usefulness, and at least to leave them alone. Some,
+indeed, do more than this, and I know of two cases where the pigeon
+cote in the hay-loft has been given up to them. Through the back door
+of one of these cotes I have been able to see at my ease the funny
+little round-faced hissing young ones, and I was quite surprised to
+find how very long it is before the fully-fledged birds turn out of the
+nest. My friend at Heatley was one of those who entertained the owls,
+and he told me that if an old bird accidentally dropped a mouse as he
+made his way into the loft, he never by any chance attempted to recover
+it. He said he used on winter evenings to see the owls fly along the
+eaves of the neighbouring houses and inside the roof of a hayshed close
+by, beating with their wings to drive out the sparrows that were
+roosting there, and he found the remains of a great many sparrows in
+their casts.
+
+A barn-owl appeared in the garden one day in May, 1899. It did all it
+could to hide itself in the bushes and thick Scotch firs, but in spite
+of its efforts the birds in the neighbourhood, led on apparently by the
+blackbirds, found it out again and again, and kept up a ceaseless noise
+and commotion as long as it was here. (I noticed that the fowls, both
+cocks and hens, joined in the general clamour.) In December, however, I
+have seen an owl fly into one of the out-houses in the middle of the
+day, and even sit calmly in full view on a leafless tree without
+attracting the least notice from any bird.
+
+The keeper tells me that brown, long-eared, and short-eared owls are
+all to be found in Warburton at times, brown owls nesting here
+regularly.
+
+Sparrow hawks come to us occasionally, but not so often as kestrels.
+The difference in the behaviour of small birds with regard to these two
+hawks is remarkable, and plainly shows that they have, as a rule,
+little to fear from kestrels. One November day, for instance, a sparrow
+hawk appeared in a tree just opposite my window, causing the greatest
+commotion and consternation among sparrows and all other birds. A week
+later a kestrel came to the same place at the same time of the day and
+stayed about for a considerable time, but none of the small birds took
+the least notice of him.
+
+My friend at Heatley, who used to have the owls as his tenants, once
+(in 1897) shot a sparrow hawk near his house that had a screaming
+blackbird in his talons, and was tearing off from its back strips of
+feathers and flesh together without apparently having tried to kill it
+first. He told me that twice he had seen a lark escape from a sparrow
+hawk. In both instances the lark's idea seemed to be to rise higher
+than the hawk, and the two kept going up together. The hawk made
+repeated stoops at his quarry, but each time he missed, the lark
+striking now to the right and now to the left. The contest ended in
+both cases by the lark dashing down to cover from a great height; one
+time it found refuge among the shrubs in a garden, and on the second
+occasion it came down faster than he could describe with its wings
+closed against its sides, and just slanting over the tops of some fruit
+trees opposite, dashed straight into the kitchen. To do this it had to
+pass through the sliding door of the back-kitchen, which was not more
+than two feet open, and then through the open door of the kitchen.
+Strange to say, it was able to check its speed sufficiently to alight
+uninjured on the floor, though utterly exhausted and helpless. My
+friend picked it up, and having held it for some minutes in his hand,
+let it fly away seeming none the worse for its perilous adventure. The
+hawk, he said, sailed calmly once or twice round the house before he
+took himself off.
+
+The following is part of a letter I received in November, 1894:--"A
+sparrow hawk took up his nightly abode on the transome of the top light
+of a window in Arley Chapel in the autumn of 1890, and remained
+constant to that roosting place until, at all events, May, 1892, when
+we left Arley. How long it stayed there after we left I cannot say, but
+I was told last winter that it had disappeared. The hawk was always
+solitary; I never saw it with a companion. The roost was always exactly
+on the same stone."
+
+One has heard stories of other birds living the same kind of lonely
+existence, but I never saw a very satisfactory explanation as to how it
+is that they come to do so. The pairing instinct is strong in birds,
+and it must be a powerful motive that makes them disregard it. We are
+told that if a bird of prey loses its mate it does not take it long to
+find another. May we suppose that solitary birds like this at Arley are
+waiting in readiness for such an emergency? Or is such a bird simply
+one that, being old and cantankerous, is bored by female society, or
+feels himself unequal to the cares of a family?
+
+All birds seem to give a sparrow hawk a wide berth, but one often sees
+a kestrel pursued, most frequently perhaps by a rook, but sometimes by
+a peewit or a gull. In October, 1908, I saw from the garden a kestrel
+persecuted by two rooks. He kept dodging their attacks, but didn't seem
+to mind them much and never turned on them. Again, at the end of
+October, 1906, I was watching a kestrel as it hovered over a field
+close by, when I saw it suddenly and violently assaulted by a
+missel-thrush. It gave way for some space, but when in a minute or two
+the thrush flew off, it returned to its first position and continued
+hovering just as if never interrupted.
+
+[Illustration: The Food Stand.]
+
+I have heard from a man here, an old gamekeeper, a story like one that
+I have read somewhere before. He had seen a kestrel pounce upon what he
+supposed to be a mouse and fly off with it. Presently, to his surprise,
+it fell like a stone to the ground and he picked it up quite dead;
+close by it he found a dead stoat.
+
+Wild duck breed in the Bollin meadows and may sometimes be seen in the
+garden as they fly over; we see wild geese, too, sometimes, and
+occasionally a heron. I was much struck one day by the flight of a pair
+of swans over the garden. They were not flying high, but side by side,
+with their long necks stretched out, with strong regular wing-beats;
+without haste and without effort, they held on their straight and even
+course at a good steady pace. It gave me rather a strange impression of
+dignity and power.
+
+One or two pairs of wood-pigeons build in the garden every year, but
+they are not as common in Warburton as in more wooded country, though
+sometimes large flocks visit us in autumn (_e.g._, in 1910). My friend
+at Heatley told me that one year when a great many had come to feed on
+acorns in a wood near his house, he had hoped from the shelter of a
+wooden hut to make a good bag, but he found that in spite of their
+numbers they were extremely wideawake, and though they covered the
+ground in every other direction, they carefully eschewed a trail of
+Indian corn, with which he had hoped to tempt them within reach of his
+gun.
+
+Turtledoves are fairly common in Cheshire, but there are many more in
+some years than in others. I only remember their nesting in this garden
+once (in 1899), when they were to be seen on the lawn every day.
+
+Pheasants are constant visitors; we are very seldom without them at any
+time of the year, and since parts of the old river-bed have been left
+wild they have taken to breeding here. We have often watched from our
+window the cock pheasant strutting about the hen, ruffling up his
+feathers and displaying himself to advantage like a turkey-cock. The
+tufts of ear-like feathers on each side of the head are a marked
+feature in the cock at the courting season and give the bird a curious
+Mephistophelian look.
+
+We noticed once when we came upon them unawares as they were feeding on
+corn we had put for them, that the hen, instead of scuttling off like
+the cock, clapped close to the ground almost within arm's length,
+evidently trusting for concealment to her sober colouring.
+
+One cock who made himself very much at home here in the early part of
+1901, and stayed with us for more than three months, unlike most that
+have been here, was for ever crowing and clapping his wings. He always
+roosted on the same tree, and every evening just before it got dark
+took care to let us know that he was going to bed.
+
+In October, 1910, there was a cock that used to amuse himself by
+sitting for half an hour at a time on the broad top of a clipped yew
+hedge. Several hens would sometimes sit there with him: once we saw
+seven on the top of the hedge at once.
+
+I have heard that in Japan at the time of an earthquake, extraordinary
+commotion is noticed among pheasants. There was a slight shock of
+earthquake here on December 17th, 1896, at 5-30 in the morning, and a
+working man who happened then to be near the Fox-cover was especially
+struck by the noise that pheasants were making in the wood.
+
+Nearly every year we have partridge visitors, a family party; in 1895
+there were thirteen young ones with the old pair, and last year, 1911,
+again there were twelve. They always seem happy and light-hearted; they
+dance and jump, they play games like "hide-and-seek" or
+"kiss-in-the-ring," round about and in and out the drooping feathery
+branches of a deadara, that just touch the ground, and in the intervals
+they sun themselves on the walks.
+
+I heard very few corncrakes in 1911, but they are common enough most
+years. In 1908, one took up his abode in the old river-bed just outside
+our window, and used to serenade us every night (May 8th to 26th). He
+went on incessantly, exactly like a clock, quite regularly and evenly.
+He was at it when we went to bed about 12 and never ceased or varied in
+the least as long as we were awake to hear him.
+
+What was once the bed of the Mersey has now (1912), thanks to the Ship
+Canal engineers, become land comparatively speaking dry. But, of
+course, the process of filling up was gradual, and for some years more
+or less water was left in the river-bed. During one stage, which lasted
+perhaps ten years, waterhens, which here are known as coots (true coots
+are called "baldheaded"), became quite common in the garden. We used to
+see them rather as waders than swimmers, but we did constantly see them
+running about on the soft mud, washing in the little pools, and, as
+pairing time came on, fighting desperately together. In the autumn a
+dozen or more would be feeding on the lawn at once, and in the winter
+some would often come to pick up food with the fowls, I have even seen
+one make an attempt to get fat from a net hung out for the tits. We
+often saw them perching quite high up in a tree. In 1907, I had a
+photograph given me showing a waterhen's nest in a small wood near
+Lymm. It was in a tree four feet six inches from the ground, and 200
+yards from any water.
+
+Golden plover come to the Bollin meadows every winter, but not so many
+I think as when the land was more liable to floods, at least I do not
+hear their clear whistle as often as formerly. It is not unusual to see
+them flocking with peewits.
+
+Peewits are called simply "plover" here. There are large flocks on
+every side though not actually in the garden.
+
+In August 1897, there was an extraordinary concourse of peewits on the
+bank of the river just opposite. The noise they made was loud and
+continuous, and birds were flying backwards and forwards all the while.
+The whole of the bank for a hundred yards or more was covered with
+them, others were at the water's edge, washing like ducks or playing
+about and chasing one another, others were picking among the stones or
+drinking. All the time the noise never ceased, and a friend said it
+reminded her of the gulls on the coast of Ireland that she heard on her
+way to America. The assembly on that particular day (August 13th) broke
+up about one p.m., having lasted for more than an hour. Frequently
+during the rest of the month, peewits gathered at the same place, but
+not in the same numbers, and one day in December, 1898, I noticed that
+there was something of the same kind on a small scale going on.
+
+In June, 1901, when the river-bed had been further filled up and the
+pools transformed into a muddy swamp, we were able from our windows to
+watch a brood of peewit chicks from the time when they were first
+hatched until they were old enough to go out into the world. They were
+most interesting when as quite little things with backs the colour of
+the eggs they had left, they busily hunted about for food, or all
+crowded together under the wings of their mother for short spells of
+rest and warmth.
+
+Snipe breed in the Bollin meadows, and common sandpipers were always by
+the river and the river-bed as long as there was any water at all in
+it, always at least in August. They still seem to remember their old
+haunts, and visit us occasionally. In the latter part of August, 1910,
+there was one that had some feathers out of place in one of its wings
+and appeared unable to fly. He seemed content enough and I wondered if
+he would try to face the winter here, but whether by his own act and
+deed, or by someone else's, he had gone when I looked for him in
+September. In August, 1911, a sandpiper used to frequent a pit in
+fields a good way from the river.
+
+In April and May, 1910, a pair of redshanks were constantly to be seen
+in the Bollin meadows towards Dunham, but no nest was found. In 1911
+they were there again, and the keeper found a nest not far from the
+Fox-cover, but I think he must have told too many of his friends about
+it, for within a week of the eggs being hatched it was deserted.
+
+I very well remember a good many years ago, though I can find no note
+of the exact year, that I saw a black tern flying backwards and
+forwards like a swallow over a wet spot in the corner of the garden,
+and the next day I saw what was probably the same bird flying in the
+same way over a large farmyard pit close by the road, about a mile from
+here.
+
+Since the Ship Canal has been opened gulls have been among the most
+frequent and the most noticeable of all birds in these parts. Whenever
+a field is ploughed up, however far it may be from the canal, there you
+are sure to find gulls, and when the plough is at work in the fields
+opposite, which are close to its banks, the gulls come in crowds and
+form one long white line as the furrows are turned, the birds
+continually rising before the plough and settling down again when it
+has passed. I have identified black-headed and lesser black-backed
+gulls among them, but have never attempted to decide to what species
+the majority belong. Indeed, I do not feel very competent to do so,
+having always found it sufficiently difficult to distinguish the
+variations of gull plumage at different ages and at different times of
+the year.
+
+In 1908 the keeper (Mr. J. Porter) showed me a Bohemian waxwing, a
+hooded crow and a hobby, all of which he had shot in Warburton within a
+year or two previously.
+
+He has told me since of stockdoves ("blue rocks" he calls them) nesting
+here, and a curious story of a wren's nest on an ash-stump in the
+Fox-cover in 1910, on the top of which a hedgesparrow built her nest.
+Both broods, he said, hatched about the same time.
+
+I have received from a friend in Northamptonshire (Mr. G. S. Garrett,
+of Little Houghton) a photograph showing a similar instance of two
+nests built one above the other. He says: "A piece of bark about 20
+inches by 13, fell off an elm tree into a fence and dried up into a
+tube-like shape. A spotted flycatcher built its nest in the top and
+laid 5 eggs and a brown wren in the bottom laying 7 eggs.... The nests
+are now in the Rochester Museum."
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+BRITISH MAMMALS.
+
+
+The whole extent of the garden, with its croft and orchard, is not
+three acres, but a fair proportion of the British mammals are from time
+to time to be found there.
+
+The old church, largely built of timber, picturesque and quaint, stands
+within a few yards of the house and its roof affords shelter to many
+bats. We find the wings of moths, the remnants of their feasts,
+scattered on the floor (I have noticed the wings of a tortoise-shell
+butterfly among them), and I have found there more than one dead body
+of a common bat; I cannot say whether that is the only kind we have,
+but in 1908 a bat was seen near the house which, from the description
+given of its size and manner of flight, may perhaps have been a
+noctule.
+
+On May 28th, 1899, there was an eclipse of the sun; it was only
+partial, and made very little difference to the light, but just so long
+as it lasted, from 3 to 4.30 p.m., I saw a bat flying busily round and
+about the church.
+
+The soil is light and worms seem to be abundant, but one hardly ever
+sees a mole-hill in this part of Cheshire. One day, however, in
+December, 1899, we noticed that a bed of parsley had withered in a
+mysterious way, and when we came to look, the ground was quite
+undermined with mole-runs. These were very shallow, and there was no
+sign of a hillock above. Many of the roots of the parsley had been
+entirely eaten off, and we saw that nearly all that remained in the bed
+were full of grubs. These grubs it must have been, I suppose, that
+attracted the mole, but it is curious that such an exceptional
+condition of the roots should have been discovered, considering how
+seldom there is any sign of a mole in the neighbourhood. We noticed
+that the root of a strong raspberry cane on one side of the parsley bed
+had been eaten off in the same way, but it is not very likely that this
+would have had grubs in it.
+
+Hedgehogs are not uncommon and we sometimes see them in broad daylight.
+In July one year (1900) every evening for about a week we used to see a
+large hedgehog running along a broad gravel walk close to the windows
+of the house. It came always at the same time, "just at the edge of
+dark," as they say here, and it always took the same route and
+disappeared at the same place.
+
+Later on in the month we found a young one, a most delightful little
+animal, as friendly and tame as possible. We used to feed him with milk
+every day as long as he stayed here, which was about a week, and once
+when we expected some boys in the garden we brought him into the house
+and put him in a box. He strongly objected to the imprisonment, loudly
+protesting all the time in a voice like the squeaking of a rat, and it
+was surprising to see how nearly he managed to get out, though the
+sides of the box were almost two feet high.
+
+Stoats, commonly called weasels with us, were fairly common when we had
+more rats and rabbits, but we do not often see one now (1912). We had a
+white terrier that killed several, though I had an idea that dogs
+looked on stoats as a kind of ferret and did not hurt them.
+
+We can count a fox among our occasional visitors. I have watched one
+for some time that was smelling about among the shrubs just opposite to
+the front door about eight o'clock on a Sunday morning.
+
+We are out of the regular beat of the Cheshire Hounds here, and I fancy
+the secret slaying of a fox is not accounted a very heinous crime,
+certainly the foxes that are often reported soon disappear. In 1899 a
+fox had its "earth" in the Abbey Croft, a field next to the garden, and
+we used to like to hear him barking in the still summer evenings. In
+the end, however, the keepers were too many for him, and he had to
+shift his quarters or else it may have been his lease of life ran out.
+
+We suffered very much at one time from the plague of rats. They
+infested the out-buildings and the house itself, and for a long while
+we were in despair about them. We tried poison, with the result that
+dead rats made the kitchen uninhabitable and entailed the expense and
+nuisance of taking up the floor, and still they came. We tried every
+kind of trap, we had the whole of the outside walls examined, and every
+possible entrance hole stopped, so at least we thought, but still they
+came. At last we found that the simple expedient of doing away with the
+ashpit deprived the premises of their chief attraction in a rat's eyes,
+for then we had to burn on the kitchen fire all the vegetable and other
+refuse that formerly found its way to the ashpit, and provided such
+abundant and appetizing food. Certain it is that since we did this,
+more than twelve years ago now (1912), we never have had a rat in the
+house.
+
+I have heard of large young fowls being killed by rats at farms not far
+away, but I do not remember that they ever took one of our chickens;
+indeed, at a time when we used to see many rats there, a hen sat in the
+stable and safely hatched her chicks. I recollect an old rat that used
+to come every day to feed with the fowls without any objection to his
+presence on their part.
+
+Rabbits were another great nuisance. They had burrows among the
+tree-roots on the river bank and no one seemed able to get them out or
+to shoot them, so between what they ate and what they dug up, we
+hadn't much pleasure in the garden. At last we cut off so much of the
+garden as we could surround with wire netting and left the rest to take
+its chance. No sooner had we done this than, for what reason I cannot
+tell, the rabbits disappeared completely, and for two or three years we
+hardly ever saw one on our own ground, though they seemed to be as
+plentiful as usual elsewhere.
+
+We have sometimes caught long-tailed field-mice that were eating the
+peas, and the cats seemed to find voles and shrews pretty often.
+
+I must confess to rather a weakness for common mice; they are pretty to
+look at and amusing in their ways. To give an instance of their
+ingenuity and enterprise, I remember some time in the summer of 1899,
+when we used to have a basin of sugar left in our room at night, a
+certain mouse appeared to think that it was placed there for his own
+special benefit, at any rate he was accustomed to help himself very
+freely to it. We could hear him working away to get a lump over the
+side of the basin, then rolling it along to the edge of the table and
+letting it fall to the floor, along which he would again roll it to a
+hole under the skirting-board. Sometimes he would take in this way as
+many as three or four lumps of sugar in one night. Besides the sugar
+there was often bread and butter left in the room between two plates,
+and one morning when I took the top one off out jumped the mouse. I
+cannot imagine how it got in. It certainly couldn't make its way out
+again, which one should have thought a far easier thing to do. The
+plates seemed to be exactly as I had left them the night before, and I
+could not see that any of the bread and butter had been eaten.
+
+I remember what seems to me an extraordinary instance of a mouse's
+power of smelling out food. In the new parish church here (consecrated
+in 1885) the vestry is in the tower, and its ceiling, which is the
+floor of the bellringing-room, must be nearly 20 ft. from the ground.
+Just under this ceiling were suspended at one time three very long
+texts; they were drawn up by pulleys with a rope that was fastened off
+about six feet from the floor. One of these texts was used at harvest
+festivals, and a fringe of corn had been left round the border, but all
+three were elaborately done up together in brown paper, so that none of
+the corn could be seen. Happening to be at the church one day I found
+the caretaker had brought out these texts into the churchyard, because
+he had seen, he said, a mouse running up to them by the suspending
+cord. Sure enough, when he undid the wrapping the poor little thing was
+there, and I am sorry to say was promptly killed. I thought its
+wonderful cleverness deserved a better fate. The church was newly
+built with concrete floors, and there was no regular food supply to
+attract mice, so this particular mouse must have come in casually on
+the mere chance of picking up something, and it must from the floor,
+nearly 20 ft. below, have found out that there was corn in one of the
+bundles of texts behind the brown paper that covered them, and I think
+more wonderful still, it must have discovered the only way of reaching
+it, along the suspending cord.
+
+There used to be an old piano in the Parish Room close to the new
+church. This was not often used and one day when we lifted the cover
+from the back part of the keyboard we found snugly placed in a corner
+of the bass notes an empty mouse's nest, quite round like a bird's, and
+beautifully made of dried bits of grass and coloured worsted. It seems
+strange that a mouse should have found such a place for its nest, and
+stranger still that in a new large bare room, with a solid wood-block
+floor, it should have been able unobserved to go in and out continually
+to fetch the materials for it. This it must have done, since none came
+from the room itself.
+
+The long broad garden walk by the side of the house seems to be a
+favourite thoroughfare for hares; we constantly see them passing at all
+times of the year. I wish myself there were not quite so many hares in
+Warburton as there are. We could do very well with fewer in the gardens
+and orchards, and there would then be less inducement to hold such
+frequent public coursing meetings, which, in my opinion, we could do
+very well without. Some years before 1900 a large number were imported
+and turned down. These were at first a great annoyance to everybody,
+and did much damage to fruit trees even in mild open weather; it was
+almost unbelievable the height to which they could reach, gnawing off
+every bit of bark all the way round. They were, besides, far too thick
+upon the ground for their own comfort. I was told by a man who worked
+on the estate that he often came across bucks fighting together; they
+fought so savagely, he said, that they would hardly get out of his way,
+and almost knocked up against him. They begin fighting, it appears from
+his account, by giving slaps with their forefeet, but in the end they
+go on to worry at one another like dogs.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+DOGS AND CATS.
+
+
+It is hard to say which is the most wonderful, to see how a dog's
+intelligence can be developed by companionship with man or to look at a
+Great Dane and a toy terrier together, and to remember that both breeds
+have by man's agency been produced from the same original stock.
+
+Cats, on the other hand, have never left their wild nature far behind,
+and can easily return to it, as indeed they often do. Dogs are almost
+entirely dependent on their human friends, but most cats do something
+for their living, and some without going wild will find all their own
+food. I remember one cat in particular that did this; she was an old
+cat when first I came, and lived on with me for more than fourteen
+years. As long as she was strong and able to hunt she never came into
+the house and never asked for food (she was tame enough when she met us
+out of doors) it was only when she got to be old and feeble that she
+turned to us and learnt to value the warmth of a fireside. She must
+have been 20, and may well have been nearer 25 when she died, and her
+great age showed itself plainly by every outward sign. In her prime she
+was a large, handsome animal, but she dwindled down to absolute skin
+and bone literally; her face lost all its roundness and got to be quite
+small and her voice died almost completely away. Towards the last she
+spent her days on one particular stool by the fire, eating very little,
+but apparently content and even happy, and responding as best as she
+could to any attention. I do not remember her ever lying down at that
+time, she was always sitting and always on the same spot, which was
+worn quite shiny in consequence. At last one day she failed to appear,
+and we never found her body.
+
+The oddest cat we ever had was a black one that came to us of her own
+accord in 1881. She had such a vile temper and was altogether so
+uncanny that she might well have been possessed by an evil spirit.
+
+When she had been with us only a few days, I found her hanging on to
+the wire-netting of an outhouse door, evidently trying to get some
+pigeons that she could see behind it. Very soon afterwards another cat
+was drowned for persistently taking pigeons, and it really seemed as if
+Blacky understood, for never after that did she look at a pigeon with
+evil intent; she would walk through a number of them as they fed on the
+ground, and so little did they fear her that they hardly moved out of
+her way.
+
+We had a canary once (and we must have had him for more than 10 years),
+whose noisy song was so distracting that we used sometimes to put him
+down on a table and cover his cage with a cloth. One day we went out
+and left him there, and must have forgotten to shut the room door, for
+when we came back we found the cover off the cage and the cat curled up
+fast asleep by the side of it. The canary was unharmed and didn't
+appear to be even frightened; he was hopping about in his cage quite
+content and at ease. That the cat should have pulled off the cover and
+then have left the bird alone seemed the more astonishing, because she
+was a hardened and incurable thief.
+
+Blacky knew the time for afternoon tea, and was always there to the
+minute. However, when something that came to her brought off all her
+hair and made her a pitiable object, she seemed to know of herself that
+she was not presentable, and though we did nothing to prevent her she
+never came into the drawing-room again until her hair had grown; then
+she appeared regularly as before.
+
+There may be some truth in the old saying, "Dogs care for people and
+cats for places," but individuals differ very much; great love of home
+is often seen in dogs, and strong personal affection in cats.
+
+A cat was born here in 1897 and lived with us for two years like any
+other cat. She was indeed rather more intelligent than many. She had
+evidently observed the manner of opening a door, for when she wanted to
+get into a room she used to rattle at the handle. One day she came and
+rattled at the door-handle of the study where I was sitting, but
+instead of coming in when the door was opened, she led me to the
+drawing-room, and standing up put her paw on the handle of the door: as
+plainly as possible she had fetched me to let her in.
+
+Now although this cat was made a great deal of with us and seemed to
+have a strong personal affection for me, spending most of her time with
+me, one fine day she took herself off and disappeared altogether.
+
+As weeks went by and we heard nothing of her we concluded she had met
+with the fate to which pitiless game preservation has consigned many
+another cat. But after about three months I saw her in the garden, when
+though she followed me she refused to be touched. For weeks again we
+never set eyes on her, and we almost came to believe that it was her
+wraith I had seen. At last I happened to notice her sitting outside a
+cottage not 200 yards from this house, by which I passed almost every
+day of my life, but though she looked up when I called her by name she
+would not come to me. After a year or two she very frequently came into
+the garden and was willing enough to be stroked, but she never entered
+this house again until (in 1909) the old man at the cottage died, and
+the home she had chosen for herself was broken up. Then of her own
+accord she returned to us as a matter of course, and up to the day of
+her death (in November, 1911) was as friendly and affectionate as
+possible.
+
+It is odd that a cat should thus deliberately have chosen to leave a
+home that was her birthplace, and where she had been more than kindly
+treated. We thought at the time that it might have been through
+jealousy of her own kitten, that she often found in the study, but if
+of so jealous a disposition, why should she go to be one of a family of
+cats in which as the last-comer she could hardly hope to take the first
+place?
+
+The man she went to sometimes worked here, and as he was fond of cats
+might have taken a fancy to this one, and possibly did something to
+entice her away. If this was so, it is clear that a cat's affection is
+not always for places rather than people.
+
+The strangest part of it all is to me not that she should have left us
+for the cottage, but that at the same time her whole behaviour towards
+us should have so entirely changed that she wouldn't let us touch her,
+and couldn't be induced to set foot in the house.
+
+The old man to whom this cat betook herself was quite a character in
+his way. He could neither read nor write, having been put to work on a
+farm when he was eight years old, but he took a very intelligent
+interest in things. His house was an asylum for stray cats and you
+would find him on a winter's evening sitting in front of a good fire
+with a circle of half a dozen cats round him, all staring like himself
+at the grate. He used to have a fancy for clocks; there must have been
+five or six of all sizes perpetually ticking away in his kitchen, not
+to speak of others that were there but refused to tick any longer. He
+was not content, like other cottagers, with a candle or cheap light,
+but had hanging from the low ceiling a large paraffin lamp, which had
+cost him at least fifteen shillings.
+
+He was never married, and since his mother died, some thirty years ago,
+he never had a woman in the house, and yet few women could have kept it
+cleaner than he did himself.
+
+A white terrier that we had for ten years from 1888 used to associate
+words with ideas even when spoken in ordinary conversation and not
+directly to him. For instance, if he was lying apparently asleep before
+the fire, and we happened in talking without reference to him to
+mention any words that he knew, such as "dog," or "carriage," or
+"walk," he would look up or perhaps just wag his tail.
+
+The same dog had a wonderful gift of reckoning time. He knew Sunday
+perfectly well, and he knew it the first thing in the morning, before
+anything had been done to mark it as different from other days.
+Generally he would lie on the rug at breakfast time and be quite alert
+afterwards and on the watch to go out with us, but on Sundays he went
+straight to his basket when we came down and did not move or look up
+when breakfast was over. From very early days he used to go with my
+wife to afternoon Sunday School. He knew exactly the time when she
+ought to get ready to start, and if then she didn't move he would get
+up and go to her, and he gave her no peace until she went to dress.
+When he arrived at the school he would curl himself up on an old shawl
+in a corner of the room, and until the Lord's Prayer before the final
+grace of the dismissal prayers he would not stir. Directly he heard the
+Lord's Prayer, he would get up in readiness, but he never left his
+corner until the prayers were finished. On one Sunday in the month
+there was catechising in the Church, instead of Sunday school, and Snap
+was wont to be shut up by himself in the schoolroom until the service
+was over. This he didn't much care for, and often when he had started
+joyously as usual for his walk to the school, three-quarters of a mile
+away, as soon as he came near enough to hear the church bell ringing,
+he quietly turned round and went home. When he had been with us for
+about eight years we took him to London for several weeks. He made the
+best of it, and seemed to enjoy himself in a way, but it was almost
+pathetic to see the change directly we got out of the train on our way
+back. We had to drive three miles in a fly, and though Snap's place was
+at the bottom under our feet, as soon as we got within a mile of home,
+he seemed to know the smell of the country and was all excitement, and
+when he found himself really at home he was quite beside himself with
+joy and did not rest until he had visited in turn every familiar nook
+and corner in the garden, then he threw himself down on his own rug in
+his own house with a sigh of relief and satisfaction.
+
+I remember the same love of home in the case of another dog, a mongrel
+long-haired terrier that I had from a puppy. When he was more than ten
+years old he was taken to live in Hertfordshire. His friends there were
+devoted to him and did all they could to make him happy, but his nature
+quite changed, he lost his former boisterous spirits and seemed rather
+to endure than to enjoy life. After he had been away four years I
+brought him back; he was then, of course, old as dogs go, nearly 15,
+but it seemed as though the intervening years had been a dream, and he
+was himself again at once, just as joyous, noisy and
+determined-spirited as he had ever been, and fell into all his old ways
+of life, as if he had been absent only a day.
+
+This same dog, Stumpy we called him, had one little practical joke that
+showed a sense of humour. At a farm about half-a-mile away there was a
+pond, or as we say here a "pit," separated only by a hedge from the
+road. On this pit there were nearly always ducks and it was a favourite
+amusement of Stumpy's to steal quietly up to the road side of the hedge
+just above them, and suddenly give several loud barks. He did this for
+the simple pleasure of seeing the startled ducks rush quacking and
+flapping to the other side of the pond; for he ran on again afterwards
+perfectly unconcerned, content and pleased with himself, and I never
+knew him take the slightest notice of ducks or fowls at any other time.
+
+I remember a rather wonderful instance of intelligence shown by
+Stumpy's father when I had him with me at Oxford. He arrived there for
+the first time late one evening; the next day I took him for a walk
+with friends towards Godstow, and when nearly there we stood to watch
+some men shooting. Sandy hated the sound of a gun, and when we
+remembered him and looked round, he had gone. As he was quite strange
+to the place I scarcely expected to see him again, but I found him
+waiting for me outside the door in Holywell Street when I got home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I may say in bringing these notes to a conclusion that they have in
+substance been taken from a diary, and that I have not had to depend
+upon my memory for what they contain, as I used to put down in this
+diary at the moment any happenings connected with Natural History that
+I noticed and wished to remember. When after several years I came to
+look through the entries, the idea occurred to me that possibly some of
+the matter might have an interest for others; I may very likely, of
+course, be mistaken in this, all the more so, perhaps, because these
+notes do represent what to me has been a source of very great interest.
+I have had to live for many years an unexciting life, in an
+out-of-the-way country place, with little society, and with few
+opportunities of getting away for a holiday; and yet with the garden
+itself, and the little world it embraces, in making the acquaintance of
+its inhabitants and watching the doings of their daily life, I can
+safely say I do not know what it is to be dull. Of course, I do not
+pretend that Natural History has supplied all the interests I have had
+outside my work, for I am thankful to say there is hardly anything in
+the world that doesn't interest me, but it certainly is the case that
+the tom-tits and the robins and the other birds have always been to me
+as human friends, and have continually provided me with amusement and
+pleasure.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX.
+
+
+Aviary, Outdoor--at Warrington, 68.
+
+
+Barn Owls, 82.
+
+Bats in Old Church, 95.
+
+Birds as friends, 11, 112.
+  Power of recognizing one another, 40, 41.
+
+Blackbirds, 17, 22-25, 64, 65, 83, 84.
+
+Blackcaps, 31.
+
+Black Tern, 93.
+
+"Blueback" Cheshire for Fieldfare, 22.
+
+"Blue-cap" Cheshire for Tomtit, 38.
+
+"Blue rock" local name for Stockdove, 94.
+
+Bohemian Waxwing, 94.
+
+Brambling, 67-68.
+
+Bullfinch, 70.
+
+
+Canary, 104.
+
+Cat, changing its home, 106.
+  Extreme old age, 103.
+  Uncanny spirit, 104.
+
+Chiffchaffs, 33.
+
+Chaffinches, 64-67.
+
+Coal-tits, 38, 41-43.
+
+Contrivances for baffling sparrows on the Food-stand, 59-64.
+
+"Coot" Cheshire for Waterhen, 90.
+
+Corncrakes, 89.
+
+Creeper, Tree-, 56.
+
+Crossbills, 71.
+
+Crows, Carrion-, 74.
+  Hooded-, 94.
+
+Cuckoos, 81.
+
+
+Dogs, their intelligence, their love of home, 108-110.
+
+Dogs and cats compared, 103.
+
+
+Earthquake and Pheasants, 89.
+
+Eclipse, a bat flying about while it lasted, 95.
+
+
+Fieldfares, 22.
+
+Figs self-sown, 6.
+
+Flycatchers, Spotted-, 48-51.
+  Pied-, 51.
+
+Food for birds, 39.
+
+Food receptacles, 40.
+
+Food-stand, 59-64.
+
+Fox, 97.
+
+Frosts in spring, 3.
+
+
+Garden-warbler, 34.
+
+Golden-crested wrens, 32.
+
+Golden plover, 91.
+
+Goldfinches, 57.
+
+"Goldfinch" Cheshire for Yellow-hammer, 71.
+
+Greater Spotted woodpecker, 79.
+
+Great Tits, 37, 38, 41.
+
+Greenfinches, 57.
+
+Gulls, 93.
+
+
+Hares, 101.
+
+Hawfinches, 58.
+
+Hawks, Hobby, 94.
+  Kestrel, 84.
+  Sparrowhawk, 84.
+
+Hedgehog, 96.
+
+Hedgesparrows, 35.
+
+Heron, 87.
+
+Hobby, 94.
+
+Holly berries sometimes left untouched, 14.
+
+Hooded crow, 94.
+
+House martins, 54.
+
+House-sparrows, 58-66.
+
+
+Jackdaws, 74.
+
+Jays, 73.
+
+"Jitty" Cheshire for Lesser Redpole, 68.
+
+
+Kestrel, 84-87.
+
+Kingfishers, 80.
+
+"Kit" Cheshire for Redwing, 22.
+
+
+Larks, 76.
+
+Larks and Sparrow Hawk, 84.
+
+Linnet, Green-, see Greenfinch.
+  Red-, Goldfinch.
+
+"Longwings" Cheshire for Swift, 77.
+
+
+Magpies, 73.
+
+Marsh-tits, 41-43.
+
+Martins, House-, 54.
+  Sand-, 55.
+
+Meadow pipits, 47.
+
+Missel Thrush, 13-16, 21, 86.
+
+Mole, 95.
+
+Mouse, Common-, 99-101.
+  Long-tailed, 99.
+
+
+Nightjars, 78.
+
+"Nicker" Cheshire for Goldfinch, 57.
+
+
+"Old man" local name for Spotted flycatcher, 49.
+
+Old man, lover of cats, 108
+
+Owls, Barn or White-, 82.
+  Brown, Longeared, and Shorteared-, 84.
+
+
+Partridges, 89.
+
+Peewits, 91.
+
+"Peggy Whitethroat" Cheshire for Willow-warbler, 33.
+
+Pheasants, 88.
+
+"Pied finch" Cheshire for Chaffinch, 67.
+
+Pied flycatcher, 51.
+
+Pied wagtails, 46, 65.
+
+Pipits, Meadow-, 47.
+  Tree-, 48.
+
+Plants introduced becoming weeds, 8.
+
+Plover, Golden-, 91.
+  Peewits, 91.
+
+
+Rabbits, 98.
+
+Rats, 97.
+
+"Red Linnet" Cheshire for Goldfinch, 57.
+
+Redpoles, Lesser-, 68-70.
+
+Redshanks, 92.
+
+Redstart, 27.
+
+Redwing, 21.
+
+Reed-bunting, 71.
+
+Robins, 18, 27-30, 60, 62, 63.
+
+Rooks, 75.
+
+
+Sand-martins, 55.
+
+Sandpipers, 92.
+
+Sedge-warblers, 34.
+
+"Shercock" Cheshire for Missel Thrush, 13.
+
+Shrews, 99.
+
+Skylarks, 76.
+
+Snails not found in the garden, 4.
+
+Snipe, 92.
+
+Song Thrush, 16-21, 64, 65.
+
+Sparrow Hawks, 84-86.
+
+Sparrow, House-, 58-66.
+
+Sparrows and Owls, 83.
+
+Spotted Flycatchers, 48.
+
+Starlings, 72-73.
+
+Starlings and sparrows, 65.
+
+Stoats, 97.
+
+Stock-doves, 94.
+
+Stonechat, 26.
+
+Swallows, 18, 52-54.
+
+Swallows and Flycatchers, 51, 54.
+
+Swans, 87.
+
+Swifts, 77.
+
+
+Tern, Black-, 93.
+
+"Throstle" Cheshire for Song Thrush, 16.
+
+Thrush, Missel-, 13-16.
+  Song-, 16-21.
+  Five kinds feeding together, 22.
+
+Tits, Blue- or Tomtit, 38-41.
+  Coal-, 38, 41-43.
+  Great-, 37, 38, 41.
+  Long-tailed-, 37.
+  Marsh-, 41-43.
+
+Toads not found in the garden, 4.
+
+Tomatoes self-sown, 6.
+
+Tom-tits, 38-41, 62, 63.
+
+Tree-creeper, 56.
+
+Trees in the garden, 2.
+
+Tree-pipit, 48.
+
+Turtledoves, 88.
+
+Two nests, one above the other, 94.
+
+
+Voles, 99.
+
+
+Wagtails, Pied-, 46, 47.
+  Yellow-, 47.
+
+Wagtails and swallows, 54.
+
+Warrington Town-hall outdoor aviary, 68.
+
+Waterhens, 90.
+
+"Weasel" local name for Stoat, 97.
+
+Wheatears, 26.
+
+Whinchats, 26.
+
+Whitethroats, Greater-, 30.
+  Lesser-, 31.
+
+Wild duck, 87.
+
+Wild geese, 87.
+
+Willow-warblers, 12, 33.
+
+Woodpecker, Greater spotted-, 79.
+  Green-, 79.
+  Lesser spotted-, 80.
+
+Wood-pigeons, 87.
+
+Wood-wren, 34.
+
+Wren, 18, 43-45.
+
+
+Yellow-hammer, 71.
+
+Yew-tree, Old-, in churchyard, 2.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes
+
+Standardized bird name hyphenation, made minor punctuation changes, and
+the following correction:
+
+Page 84: Changed "neast" to "least."
+  Orig: without attracting the neast notice from any bird.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's In a Cheshire Garden, by Geoffrey Egerton-Warburton
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40249 ***