THE HAUNT OF THE MIGRANT FALCON.
THE hobby, our "summer falcon," was formerly a rare bird in most parts of England. Recently, owing to the feeling against killing down our raptorial birds, it has _much increased in numbers, and in some counties, especially on the upper Thames and in the great woods of Berke and Oxfordshire, it is now commonly seen. In form and colour, though not in size, the hobby almost exactly resembles the peregrine-falcon ; but, unlike the peregrine, it is a migrant, reaching this country rather late in the spring, but always -returning to the same neighbourhood, if not to the same tree, to nest.
At one point on the Thames, where the Thame joins the Isis, two pairs of these falcons were last year nesting within a mile of each other, and this spring the birds have reap- peared in the same haunts. One pair have chosen for their
nesting-place the most beautiful corner of the great wood, to which they annually return from their winter home. One
wonders whether the birds, whose recollection of the home- ward journey is so unerring, ever recall to memory the picture of the haunt to which they are returning, and
contrast the wood by the banks of the Isis with the deserts and palm-groves of the river of Egypt, or the plains of Southern India. The nest is built in a tall oak on the margin of the wood, where it abuts on a meadow now ablaze with buttercups, below which lie the river and the white waters of the weir. Close to the tree in which the nest is placed a spring rises, inside the wood, and fills a deep round basin with clear water, paved at the bottom with little white land shells. The overflow of this spring is the falcons' drinking-place and bathing-pool, judging by a few feathers which are scattered on the surface. Round the spring, and by the banks of the rill which flows from it, and beneath the thousand oaks of the wood, is the second crop of spring flowers,—the " temperate flowers " of the English woodlands, for which the falcons have exchanged the dusty plants of the Nubian rocks, and the lotus and reed flowers of the swamps of the Nile. For colour and scent the wild hyacinths take the first place. The whole wood is perfumed with their odour, and its ground-surface, alike in sunshine and shadow, is stained in great patches with the dark-blue spikes. On the driest and hardest turf in the wood-paths, and where the copse-wood was cut down last winter, the leaves and blossoms of the wild strawberry carpet the ground. With this are mixed beds of purple eyebright, and the pure blue and white of the speedwell. In all the damper parts of the wood the young teazle-plants, like great green stars, break through the ground, and purple orchis and arum are scattered throughout the wood. In the quarter which the hobbies have chosen for their home many oaks have been felled this spring, and their stems and limbs, stripped of their bark, and redolent of tannin, lie in all directions among the bluebells and ground-elder. When the nest is approached the birds, according to their usual habit, come circling round the tree, screaming and dashing in anxious flight down and among the vistas of the wood. The oak was an easy one to climb. One of the big wicker-crates used for carrying the oak-bark made a platform from which to reach the first limb. Thence farther progress offered no difficulty, and the nest was reached in due course. The eggs were not yet laid, bat the nest was beautifully lined with rabbit's fur, unlike the rude platform of sticks on which the young sparrowhawks and kestrels are reared in the adjacent wood.
In September last, when the rain-storms which fell daily cleared towards evening, and the setting sun flooded the harvest fields with welcome light, the hobbies were the writer's daily companions in the shooting field. There were two broods of young birds on different parts of the ground, which were then being taught to fly, though regularly fed by their parents. One family of young hobbies haunted some very tall elms near the Thames. The second brood had their dwelling in the wood, from which a hundred-acre field of barley standing in stooks stretched away to the top of a rounded hill. Over the shoulders of this hill the evening sun streamed in broad beams between the barley-stooks, which in turn sent grey shadows down the stubble, and on to the oaks of the great wood which fringed all the lower limits of the field. There at that hour all the partridges of the neighbour- hood used to assemble to feed among the barley-stooks, and enjoy the warmth and brightness of the evening sun. There also went the writer in search of partridges, and for him the hobbies used to wait by the margin of the wood. As soon as he appeared they world dash out over the stubble and circle round high in the air, apparently in the hope that some very young and weakly partridge, or moulting lark, would be flushed to make their sapper. Their curiosity grew each evening, until the hen bird would make a complete circle at full speed at a distance of not more than twenty yards, her bright black eye fixed and gazing as she dashed in front of the writer's face. As she rushed past, with wings not so much beating as vibrating, the head motionless and sunk between the shoulders, like a hawk-moth, and back and shoulders as blue as a plum, she was the image, in miniature, of a peregrine rushing full speed to take the " lure." Another pair, also with a brood of fall-grown young, used to join the
shooters on the flats, and though less confiding than the hobbies of the hill, they sometimes chased a lark, or even a young partridge. One of the old hobbies caught a half.
grown partridge, and carried it to a row of heaps stand- ing in the open field. The young birds saw the capture, and one instantly flew across to demand a share of the food, screaming and pursuing the parent bird from one heap to another.
Another very beautiful haunt of the hobby was, and probably is still, at a point higher up the course of the Isis, at Godstow, not far from Rosamond's Bower. There, too, the birds had built close to, and almost above, a running spring of water in a wood, near to the main river. The whole course of the rivulet was not more than a few hundred yards, from its source to the point where it fell into the Isis, and the greater part of this lay in the wood. There it wound deviously round the roots of huge grey poplars, making at every turn a pool, which was a perfect model in miniature of the pools of the Isis itself. These clear basins were bordered with masses of purple and white flowered comfrey, water. dock, and ranunculus, and floored with stones and shingle.
Small perch, small pike, 'caches, and minnows swarmed in
the deepest holes, and the kingfishers were as busy catching these, and carrying them to a hole among the roots and earth
at the base of an uprooted poplar, as the swallows and swifts were in snapping up the may-flies on the main Isis stream. The wood was also a favourite haunt of cuckoos, probably on account of the swarm of insects breeding in its stream, in its rank undergrowth, and among the willow-stems and osiers. The hobbies seemed to arrive in the wood some days later than the cuckoos, being almost the latest migrants noticed there. Their nesting operations consisted only in the annex- ation of an old crow's nest, in which they laid their eggs without any of the attention to comfort shown in the nest above described.
In the vale of the " White Horse," among the thousands of acres of richly-wooded meadows, and by the banks of the old canal, the hobby is quite a common bird. From May till the end of August he haunts the vale, nesting there, and exhibiting fine feats of flight and a most vociferous anxiety when his nest or young are near. One most charm- ingly situated nest was in a sloping meadow at no great distance from the canal, in which " Tom Brown" first learnt the art of fishing. The long meadow, bordered on one side by a brake of oaks and thorns, had in its centre a beautifully grown clump of elms, tall, elegant, and with branches spring- ing from their stems at such regular intervals that the foliage surrounded them, not in shapeless masses, but in level tiers, with space and light between each shelf of green. From the centre of this " Hall of Columns " a blue hawk dashed out, and wheeling round in the air like a giant swift, showed its species beyond doubt. The nest held four eggs, rounded and blunt at either end, and covered with minute reddish splashes and dots of pinky grey. In the autumn, before leaving the country, these birds come up to the edge of the open land abetting on the downs, and though insects, beetles, and moths are said to form the greater part of their food, they may occasionally be seen to give chase to a lark or swallow, pursuing it at a speed comparable to nothing except the rush of the peregrine-falcon. Young birds taken from the nest, and brought up to fly to the lure like a falcon, make beautiful and charming pets, though their deficiency in the killing instinct in respect to other birds makes them useless as falcons for the chase.
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