COUNTRY LIFE
A Land Survey What may really be called a magnum opus has been almost concluded by the Council for the Preservation of Rural England ; and it deserves wide appreciation. It consists of a Land Utilisation Survey of Britain. It will consist. of .87 parts, one for each county of England, Wales and Scotland. The 78th part—for Berkshire—has just been finished. It should concern all of us, and Dr. L. Dudley Stamp's postbag should be a full one. Particulars may be obtained from him as Director of the Survey from 18 Houghton Street, Aldwych, London, W.C. 2. The need of such a survey was impressed on me this week in the course of a journey made to attend the annual meeting of the Oxfordshire branch of the C.P.R.E. From car and railway at both the start awl end of the journey were seen field after field given up to thistle and ragwort. A pink-roofed bungalow growth is bad. A field of noxious weeds is worse ; and preservation should have to do with both.
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Dorset History The county of Dorset seems to be inspiring its denizens to a delight in their historic and scenic qualities which may compare with the local patriotism of Sussex. The county does not boast such a magazine as the Sussex County Magazine (which is indeed incomparable), but its charms have lately been documented in one of the best of the guide-books for walkers, Walking in Dorset ; and now the women through their institutes have put together a record of local history and tradition, of folk lore, flower names and herbal lore, such as other Women's Institutes might well imitate. Dorset Up Along and Down Along, which costs a shilling, and may be had from the D.F.W.I., County Hall, Dorchester, is a humble pamphlet of 130 pages, but is well edited and illustrated and is full of matter—just the sort of matter that concerns and should concern dwellers in a village. It will preserve a good deal of lore that might have been lost ; and now is the time for such work. To give an example of county pride from further north a book of verse, with some very good natural history in it, reached me this week from Derbyshire, entitled the Dales of Derbyshire.
A Wise Mother In a Norfolk garden, round about which partridges are commoner than sparrows, four pairs have nested this summer. One hen bird was seen to be very lame ; she could and can do no more than hobble ; • but she laid fifteen eggs and incubated them. All the eggs but two were fertile and would have hatched out ; but as soon as seven young were born the mother carried them off and left the nest altogether. In spite of her lameness she has looked after the seven so well that all have survived the thunderstorms and other enemies and are now nearly able to look after themselves. Was the mother aware that a large family was beyond her maimed capacity ? It is, of course, one of the discoveries of the I.C.I. research station that coveys of not more than twelve do better than more numerous families ; and they are restricted to this number on the partridge farm. It is a little surprising that a bird should habitually lay more eggs than are easily hatched. Seventeen is not an unusual number. In one experiment some years ago over seventy young in one season were successfully reared from a single pair. This year, in parts of Norfolk at any rate, the hatched broods were much more than normally large, but the casualties from foul weather have also been large..
* * * • Attracting Migrants A really wise suggestion for the encouragement of particular birds in a garden is contained in a letter to The Times from Folkestone ; and I can give some corroborative evidence on one aspect of the problem. The gardener in question has successfully tempted that rather rare and very attractive bird the wryneck to nest in a box, and attributes the triumph to the plan of keeping the hole into the box closed until the wrynecks arrived. I have known two examples of wrynecks in garden nesting boxes ; but in each case they were ousted by other birds, in one case by great tits. Though the wryneck
comes early among the stream of summer immigrants, our native birds either nest earlier or have chosen a site earlier. The redstart could be encouraged by a similar precaution. It is fond of a nesting box—at any rate in one Surrey garden.
Long-Suffering Grouse
One bird in our long list is said to be exclusively British, the red grouse ; and you would think that such a native would have by this time conquered his enemies ; but it is perhaps more sensitive to particular plagues than any other. This year of eccentric weather it is free—in one northern district at any rate—from the so-called grouse disease ; but has been attacked by a small grub that attacks the feathers of the head. At the same time that most British plant, the heather, is bearing up with difficulty against the heath beetle. It is scarcely credible to a Southron that both these enemies of the grouse have been encouraged by the drought which has prevailed to this date in certain narrow districts of the North.
Healthy Birds
In general our wild birds are singularly free from maladies of any sort. Indeed the wood pigeon is almost the only exception ; and his throat malady is brought from Northern places overseas when numbers are excessive, though the diseases of our urban pigeons indicate a certain weakness in the tribe. On the whole the enemies of birds arc other birds ; and though there is a frequent outcry against keepers for killing hawks and owls, it is quite certain that the extreme number of small birds in Britain is due in the first place to the comparative rarity of carrion crows and magpies, for whose diminution keepers are chiefly responsible. The jay and the jackdaw and perhaps the little owl—all detested by keepers—come next as destroyers of other birds' nests and young.
• • Garden Birds
Our small birds are held to be too numerous by some gardeners ; and of this heresy I had a rather lamentable example this week. A little box, which proved to be a coffin, reached me this week with a query. Could I identify the little corpse? The story of its fate was the mistake of a gardener whose peas were so ravaged by hawfinches that he thought to reduce their number with the gun. One of the supposed hawfinches proved to be this little black and white bird with a red spot on his forehead and a pair of stiff tail feathers. It was a lesser spotted woodpecker. One of the same species was sent to me from the same neighbourhood some years ago. It had killed itself against the glass of a church window. I think the chief reason why it is not recog- nised when alive and when dead is its exceeding smallness. People think a woodpecker must be big. This one was much smaller than a thrush. My impression is that it grows com- moner ; but it is very difficult to find or to watch.
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Wild Garden Flowers It is interesting—at any rate to me—to keep one little corner of a garden exclusively for wild flowers ; but you have to be very careful which wild flowers you admit. Yellow bedstraw, for example, and birds-foot trefoil, very lovely in these places, soon become ineradicable. Tormentil that grows in delightful flat dwarf patches on the Common will become tall and almost bushy. Bugle and ground ivy become enemies to all their neighbours. The wildflowers of the moment that are earning praise are the small St. John's Wort —prettier to my eyes than the giant flowered one of gardens— and the snapdragon or pink-flowered mallord would become any herbaceous border. One mullein, half cut down because it was infested with caterpillar, has sent up a number of flowers, shoots that make a very comely circle. I believe that the seeds of wild flowers can now be bought through the influence of the British Empire Naturalists' Association; a collection of British wild roses was one of the promised attractions of the public garden on Boars Hill, outside Oxford. It would perhaps be worth while making a collection of wild
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