COUNTRY LIFE

An Exciting Week

The most exciting week of the year, at least for the naturalist, has arrived. In my records, which concern the parts just north of London, nightingales are heard for the first time on April 17th exactly, and in the same patch of bushes. This year the earlier arrivals have come very pat to their proper dates. Martins were seen for the first time on April 9th and, I believe, just one or two swallows were seen on the West Coast about the same day. Chiffchaff and wheatear were, of course, seen and heard, in March ; but touching the chiffchaff it is curious how many amateurs confuse the note with the great tits. The tit's is a much sharper and harder sound ; and is not marked by the triple succession of notes which more often than not distinguishes the chiffchaff. A good many birds have clutches of eggs ; but it is remarkable that the linnets are still in little companies. The cuckoo, in my experience, usually precedes the nightingale by a few days.

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The Craft of the Graft The new system of grafting fruit-trees—sometimes known as the Porcupine system—is enjoying an ample vogue. I found fruitgrowers in South Africa doing, even more thoroughly, just what they are doing in Kent and Worcestershire. One pear tree in the famous wine and fruit orchard of Schoongezicht had just been grafted in one hundred and seventy places and the business was by no means completed. The advantage, of course, of this multiple grafting of comparatively young and small shoots is that a variety can be changed in a twinkling ; and a large tree begins producing the new sort of pear or what not with the minimum of delay. The art is not difficult, though demonstration by a specialist or a very careful illus- tration is doubtless necessary. You shave a portion of the twig with a sharp knife, bend it till it cracks in a " green fracture," insert into the break the graft shaped to a sort of wedge, and the natural resilience or spring of the twig recovering its proper position holds the graft firmly in place. A little wax or grease does the rest. The speed at which an expert works is scarcely credible. I believe that in Australia trees have borne the new fruit in the summer immediately following the spring grafting.

* * * Useful Starlings

In the same garden a delightful example of the economic value of birds was recently demonstrated. Some of the fruit trees were suffering greatly from the greed of very numerous beetles. The only known method of dealing with them was to lean a few small turfs against one another, and from day to day to collect the beetles which had sought this agreeable shady refuge. The gardener had absorbed the general view that among the enemies of fruit that should be destroyed were the starlings, which are only less numerous at the Cape than in England. Happily he observed one day a number of starlings going methodically from turf refuge to turf refuge, throwing back the turfs and devouring with speed and gusto all the harbouring beetles. Since that day the gun has been silent in Schoongezicht. The starling is only less frequent at the Cape than in England ; and the species are numerous. One of the handsomest and most obvious of the common birds is a redwinged species very handsome on the wing.

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More Waxwings

The number of people interested in birds is so great that almost any reasonable enquiry elicits satisfactory answers, not only from home but from abroad. For example : I made some mention a week or two ago of those bright migrants from the North, the waxwings which had appeared in fair numbers in Scotland at the end of February. A reader of The Spectator travelling to the Continent saw this bird in numbers at The Hague in the second week of March. It is always interesting to trace migration routes, and it seems not unlikely that this bunch of waxwings were returning from North Britain to their proper nesting homes in the north of Europe and Asia. Perhaps the best place in the world for observing the migration of birds lies between Britain and Scandinavia ; and bird observers will hope that among the bristling fortifications of Heligoland, the Germans, who are fond and faithful observers of birds, still keep the island as a sanctuary as well as a fortress.

A Plant Elixir

Now and again some " blessed word " strays from the laboratory into the domain of popular speech and enjoys a wide circulation. Vitamin was a good example. Its latest successor is " hormone," a rather more palpable thing than a vitamin, but still evasive. Scientific botanists all over the world have joined in the chase, and definite results are in sight. You may now, for example, treat your cuttings with a solution that stimulates hormones in the shoots and their beneficent activity is such that roots are produced quickly and certainly. There is some ground for the expectation that the multiplication of most plants will be rendered very much more easy than it has been in the past. Though some cuttings root freely and certainly, such as willows, poplars, or lonicera nitida or currants, others too numerous to quote, arc utterly obstinate, except under singular conditions.

Hortomone A Hormones have of course long been studied in animal life, and their favourite place of residence has been discovered (chiefly in the ductless glands, I believe). It is a new discovery that they are found in plants ; and the discovery once more emphasises the essential likenesses between animals and plants. The modern man of science can look at a flowering plant and quote his Wordsworth with approval.

" I must believe, do all I can.

That there is pleasure there."

Plant hormones and animal hormones fulfil very much the same function in some regards, but what concerns the gardener is their part in starting roots : the warmth and wet and aeration and other conditions recommended in text books arc an attempt to set the hormones into active work. Now laboratory workers have made it possible to compound a chemical fluid, named for the moment Hortomone A, which co-operates with the plant hormones to the production of roots from else obstinate twigs. The I.C.I. has been busy with tests of the new chemical, and results are proving satisfactory.

Horse and Lion

If any lover of horses wishes to realise how much the English horse has improved of late years—that is, in the last two thousand years or so—he should make pilgrimage, as I did last week, to the Vale of the White Horse. The vast chalk outline seems to some scoffers less like a horse than some prehistoric monster ; but there they are wrong. The animal bears so close a resemblance in general form to the horse as known to the early Briton, that students of such matters are enabled to make a plausible conjecture at the artist's date. He must have flourished before the Roman occupation ; and the latest view, I understand, is that he drew, or scraped, this historic portrait a century or so before the Romans came in force to Britain. Such inferences of course are liable to error. For example, the plausible but imperfect lion chalked out on the Dunstable Downs below Whipsnade does not indicate the date when lions were first introduced into this country. The lion is well placed ; and after standing on the downs above both horse and lion I was struck by the similarity of the two views over the valleys below.

Winter Diet

Here are some further notes on the feeding habits of little owls recorded from a Hertfordshire brickyard last week : " Swallows also nested in the shed to which the owls had access but were never disturbed by them. In the winter and early spring the owls' diet was mainly mice and beetles, as shown by the contents of the ' quids ' dropped in the shed where they had nested; they may have had an occasional bird judging by the feathers sometimes found but it was doubt- ful whether these were from fresh kills or remains of summer feasts turned out of the nest which they still frequented. On one occasion on a ledge in another shed I found five or six dead mice, all headless, no doubt deposited there by owls who had caught more than their immediate needs required."

W. BEACH THOMAS.