LIFE IN A BEECH WOOD

COMING into the beech wood I always turn aside to see the gamekeeper's larder. These gibbet bestiaries, fashioned of a couple of wooden bars nailed roughly between two tree-trunks, have some vestiges of the morbid fascination which belonged to the grim human kind, but that is the least part of their significance. They are, above all, indicators : they tell the stranger at once which of our outlawed wild creatures the wood holds, and even how many of them. Further, they paint the character of the gamekeeper himself—how he does his work and what opinions he holds, for there are more important differences of opinion between gamekeepers than between politicians. Many, perhaps most, are now converted to the faith that owls are generally harmless ; some extend immunity to the kestrel ; and. under enlightened landlords the buzzard and other great hawks, ferocious to look at but innocent of poaching, are also ordered to be spared. But here in Buckingham- shire the opportunity to spare them has long since slipped past.

The keeper. of my beech wood is a die-hard. His larder contains not only a sparrowhawk and eight jays (which receive no quarter anywhere), but a little owl, a brown owl, and even a barn owl, the paragon among birds of prey, whose character by the unanimous judgment of all naturalists is even whiter than his soft plumage. The animals are in a majority—fourteen hedgehogs, four or five of the long pathetic shreds which used to be stoats and weasels, a few plump rats and a sprinkling of squirrels' tails. Magpies and carrion crows are missing not because the keeper would for a moment tolerate them, but for the reason that their• accounts are already closed in these par" s.

As the sinister sight of a gibbet on the brow of the - hill used to give respectable travellers the sensation which they termed " reminders of mortality," so these. modern gamekeepers' larders impress on nature-lovers the system of terrorism which still sueceeds in subduing more than a dozen of the most interesting wild creatures' which it has not yet utterly exterminated. Not life in a beech. wood but death in a beech wood is the cold. truth of it.

One is tempted to add it all up into an ironic balance sheet. Paid—for five milliards of spoon-fed pheasants • —in capital out of the English fauna, all eagles, honey buzzards, marsh harriers, hen harriers, kites, pine-- martens, and polecats, without reserve ; and in annual' interest perhaps 100,000 jays, 80,000 kestrels and. sparrowhawks, 60,000 magpies, 5,000 brown and barn owls, 200 buzzards, and 20,000 squirrels, omitting, of course, a vast quantity of money and grain, and the keeping of half the woods in this country as inaccessible to the average nature lover as Tibet.

And the aim of all this squandering of money and' wild life is not to preserve game—that exists of its own, accord—but to preserve such an unnatural superfluity, of game that the sport afforded is not increased but diminished and made dull.

The present sporting system is certainly expensive.

For every ten Englishmen who have a good knowledge of birds there is hardly one who takes the same keen interest in wild animals.. The reasons are not hard to. find. Fewer British mammals than. British birds have. become extinct within historic times, but in proportion to the whole number infinitely more. When our land. animals. of any considerable size number scarcely more than a dozen, every individual of the rarer species is precious.. In this part of Buckinghamshire there have vanished, besides the polecat and pine-marten, the fox. and, so far as is known, the badger. That leaves the rare and shy otter as the largest surviving quadruped : even fishermen who spend their lifetime on the Thames. count the sight of him a rare event. In a year's vigil: one may find no beast more majestic than a hare.

Hares are not only, the largest animals commonly. met with in this neighbourhood, but also the most interesting. They seem to have some strong attachment to beech, judging by the number of times they have surprised me by bounding away in the depths of large woods of this kind, making a tremendous clatter on the dead leaves and brittle twigs. What brings them here I have never discovered : but the attraction is certainly a fairly permanent one, for I have notes of hares in beech woods during almost every month between August and April. The last seen, just before Christmas, was not for some time aware of my presence, and he scampered round boisterously time after time in small' circles, following almost always the same track among the grey tree trunks, until my closer approach alarmed him. These forest hares are almost always alone : though once in March three bolted helter-skelter from under. a bush by which I happened to stop suddenly.

After the hare the animal most in evidence is. the Ivo squirrel, who has learnt to temper his taste for hiber- nation with a useful ability to come to life again whenever a. spell of mild; sunny weather in mid-winter encourages, a breach of the strict rule. Even when the puddles are frozen there are, still some squirrels at large : the outlandish• grey kind seems to be hardier and to count. more days in his years than our own handsomer red.. The close beech-tops provide. him with first-class roads, in all directions : he runs up the smooth, straight trunks, without difficulty, and the mast is one of his favourite) foods. The squirrel seems to feel that he does. not fully appreciate the freedom of the treetops without open.

ground beneath to contrast with them. He will. travel. as far, and at least as fast, on. the leaf-mould underfoot as among the living leaves.

If the jay is not the most cunning of British crows. it is undoubtedly the most difficult to shoot. In this open beeeh wood which affords little cover from a gun.

(for the trees are nowhere of any great height) there. must be at least a. hundred jays, though generations of gamekeepers have waged a war of extermination against.

them. At each end the wood rises to some height on the chalk hills, but directly through the centre runs a.

deep coombe or bottom and along it a straight, narrow lane, leading only to a few isolated farms. Up the wooded side of this valley there is a point on a." ride " through the patch of dwarf beech-scrub, which. commands.

a view of the whole west part of the wood beyond the lane, tilted by the slope of the hill so that one seems to look down on it from directly overhead. At this view- point it is impossible to wait more than a minute or two without hearing the rending shriek, and seeing jay after jay flit stealthily from place to place above the red-stained crowns of the more distant beeches, or cross the valley at a prudent height above the road on curiously flickering wings—as it were swimming along, Gilbert White would have said.

It was more or less by accident that I discovered the presence in this wood of an even shyer bird than the jay the supernaturally elusive hawfineh. Though the largest of his family in England, and the most uncouth, he contrives to exist even in the suburban gardens of London without affording more than a very occasional glimpse to the most persevering bird-lover. At a point where a little valley, a tributary of the main bottom, runs up into the woods, stand two battered yews, the only trees of their kind to be found in the whole area. Their jealous, low-spreading branches maintain a small gap in the unending living roof overhead, through which the passers-by across•the blue, wood pigeons and an occas- ional sparrowhawk, may be watched uninterrupted. Standing at this point one day, after seeing the coal-tit call on his journey from conifer to conifer—the beeches he almost always passes over as barren ground—I heard an unknown flight-call, like the note of a yellowhammer but clipped and more abrupt. The hawfinch flew directly above me, progressing like a woodpecker with regular, almost bounding undulations, his white wing-bar and uncommonly massive bill plainly discernible. He alighted within a hundred yards, but the dry leaves and rotten twigs, cracking like fog-signals at every step, frustrated all attempts to obtain a second view.

E. M. N,