COUNTRY LIFE Faithful Flycatchers
A pretty and unusual episode has been watched in a cottage garden, which is a great favourite with birds. Two years ago flycatchers nested in a Forsythia that grows the full height of the cottage wall. The nest was just within reach of a bedroom window. Last year the same pair returned and copied the ravens : they used the same nest for the second time. The faithful birds came back once more this year, and built a new nest just above the old one. While they were building, the owner of the cottage, merely for amusement. repaired and cleaned the old nest. The observant birds noted the work and by way of grateful acknowledgement decided to adopt it, in spite. of the hours of work spent on the new nest. They laid the first egg last week, and bid fair to rear a third family in the old home.
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Repaired Nests
The incident suggests that gardeners might do more for their birds in this direction. Personally, I pull down old nests. so that the desirable sites may be as many as possible. Would it be better to furbish up these old nests on the chance of the birds using them for a second season ? Old nests. of course. are popular with many creatures. To give some personal experiences, they may be used as a hive for bumble-bees. as a sleeping place for a stoat or a bat, as a storehouse for food, or as a nesting place for some other species of bird. Wrens, for example, will use an old thrushes nest as a basis, and tits make a hole in the bottom of a rook's nest. Wrens will use their summer nests for winter harbourage ; but in general our birds very seldom return to the same nest either in the same year or later. Some of the crow tribe are an exception. I know a pair of ravens that keep two nests in being ; and use them alternately, though the rule has exceptions. Presumably they like the weather to have time to cleanse the old struc- ture. Buzzards will return again and again to the same nesting place, but all want to add what almost amounts to a new nest each year. I climbed to one at no great height in a Radnorshire spruce, which was not less than six or seven feet high. The Argentine parakeet has the same habit. Its great stick nest, big enough after the first building, is increased every year, and often enough grows so heavy or cumbrous that it breaks the branch or tumbles over. In that country stick nests of considerable proportions are common, and are mostly used more than once, perhaps because sticks are more lasting than bents and moss and mud. Sonic are so capacious that they attract the opossum ; and it is not always a safe proceed- ing to put your hand down one of the long tunnels in the sticks to seek for eggs.
Supplying Material How much we may do in our gardens towards the actual work of nest building another experience of this summer will suggest. A cottager (whose cottage consists of about a room and a half) is in the habit of shaking the out-door mat over a little plot of grass in front of the door. It was observed that a brown linnet descended upon the shakings ; and with great care selected any hairs dropped from the mat and carried them off to her nest in the furze close by. flair of any sort is perhaps the most precious of birds' building material • and it is often hard to come by. In any bird-haunted garden the provision of such material would be a popular act, and would supply a good quantity- of observation. Though each sort of bird builds a nest as uniformly characteristic of the species, they often pick up the nearest available material. To be precise, small white feathers will be immediately collected by swallows, and sometimes used as playthings as well as building material. It is interesting to watch cage-birds building and making characteristic nests of any material supplied them. I once put a number of bents into a large aviary containing American robins, which are of the thrush family. They would take the bents singly, put them in the water, drag them through mud near the drinking bowl, and then, when there was sufficient mud-mortar attached, weave them into the nest.
* * * * Poppy Vitality The double question has been put to me : is it true and, if so, why is it true that poppies are the first flowers to
appear if downland is ploughed up'' The fact must be known to every soldier who fought in France. On the eve of the Somme Battle in 1916 many of our front-line trenches were dug out of the chalk ; and the subsoil thrown up as a parapet. Some of these ridges, especially in my recollection on the extreme right of our line. were a brilliant ribbon of poppy and charlock, and in places of milfoil. 1 saw a s. 'tar outbreak of these flowers, not otherwise plentiful in the immediate neighbourhood, on a mound made from the digging of a well. Both seeds arc oily and therefore long lived ; and there is no better method of seed preservation then burying in a dry and close subsoil. Some gardeners say that if they bastard-trench a piece of ground they always get a crop of f 'tory, so perhaps different depths give the best conditions for the emiservat jolt of particular seeds. Very starchy seeds, such as wheat, live the least haw. The Ioppy and charlock are virtually indestructible. All wheat seed would clean vanish in less than a decade.
* * * * Meadow Pruning
The old sort of hay harvest. is succeeding to t he new ; and the country grows sweet with the scent of new-mown hay. The scent of the older grasses is altogether different from the new : and indeed the fields cut young (for the driers) have released a quite new perfume on the countryside, us well as a new product. Hay-making will HOW occupy several months of the year. The young grasses are cut On the new principle in May, and the second cutting conies six or seven weeks later. just. after the old-fashioned haysel. A third cutting - very different in quality from the old aftermath-- may succeed to that. Even after our very brief and slender experience an important change in the influence of the early harvesting is being observed. The method puts an end to all seeding and encourages those perennial plants that profit by pruning. In consequence the composition of the fields that are bayed and re-hayed collies to differ in important particulars from fields that are mown when foxtail grasses have shed their pollen and butter- cups and daisies and moon-daisies set their seed. It is probable that nettle and biennial thistle will be eliminated ; but it is not known what effect the system may have on that worst weed of the pastures, the buttercup. It is avoided by stock. has the endurance of all bulbous rooted plants, and sets its seed freely and germinates readily. If it could 1w wiped out, the grazing value of many fields would he almost doubled. Careful scientific inventories are to be made of the newer harvest fields.
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The Daisy's Optimum Close mowing of lawns and golf courses has, of course, well-known effects. Maintains learn a dwarf habit, and seed below the reach of the cutting blades. Daisies are very greatly multiplied where fairways are cut by machines not fitted with boxes. (Inc reason is that daisies (those eyes of day as Chaucer loved to say) like all the light they can get ; the other that the seed is broadcast. Sonic golf links (as of the early holes at Portrush) are so beset by (tunics that a golf ball is as hard to find as a plover's egg ; and those who cross the links immediately after the hour when the daisies have closed their eyes find balls lying with surprising distinctness on the open ground. In such places the buttercup is, I think, discouraged by the mower. On greens and pitches cut close repeatedly every growth, even of the most perennial grasses. is discouraged, unless the ground is top-dressed and manured. On this subject the Green Committee have made valuable discoveries in their Yorkshire Research station.
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Western Hay
In the West of England the weather of June has been so favourable to growth that one at least of the new driers has been unable to keep pace. It has been working continuously for a month or more, and in a period of almost ceaseless rain has turned out tons of perfect bay. The farm is not a big one ; but there is every sign that hay-making will continue for another month or two. It is a new paradox that much rain in June should favour hay-making.
W. th:ACH THOMAS.
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