Wild Life in a Southern County Part 17

The loam discolours the water during a storm for several yards out to sea, so to say; so that in a boat pa.s.sing by you know by the hue of the waves when you are approaching the dangers of the cliffs. This continuous eating away of the earth proceeds so fast that an old hollow oak tree now stands--at what may be called the high tide of summer--so far from the strand that a boat may pa.s.s between.

Like a wooden island the old oak rears itself up in the midst; the waves break against it, and when there is but a ripple the sunlight glancing on the water is reflected back, and plays upon the rugged trunk, illuminating it with a moving design as the wavelets roll in. The water is so shallow at the edge that the shadows of the ridges of the waves follow each other over the sandy floor. They reflect the bright rays upon the tree trunk, where they weave a beautiful lacelike pattern-- beneath, their own shadows glide along the sand. That sand, too, is arranged by the ripple in slightly curved lines. These wave-marks, though so slight that with the hand you may level fifty at a sweep, have yet sometimes proved durable enough to tell the student after many centuries where water once has been. Under the foundations of some of the oldest churches--the monks loved to build near water--the wave-mark has been found on the original soil.

In a hollow of the old oak starlings have made their nest and reared their young in safety for several seasons. They seem to understand that the water gives them protection, for their nest would not be out of reach were the tree on land.

Just as at the seash.o.r.e the wave curls over in an arch as it comes in before dissolving in surf and spray, so here when a gale is blowing, these lesser waves, as they reach the shelving strand, also curl over.

In the early morning, as the sun begins to acquire some strength, the white mists sweep over the surface and visibly melt and disappear. One hot summer, when the lake was full, and kept so artificially by the hatches and dams, I found by observation that its level sank nearly half an inch every day. This was the more striking because there was at the same time an influx more than enough to repair the loss from leakage.

Now the evaporation of half an inch of water over such a width of surface meant the ascension into the atmosphere of many thousands of gallons; and thus even this insignificant pool might form a cloud of some magnitude in a few days. What immense vapours may then arise from the surface of the ocean!

Sometimes a winter's morning is, I think, almost as beautiful as summer, when the ice is thick with the sharp frost, and the sun s.h.i.+nes in a blue sky free from clouds. One such morning, while putting on my skates, I happened to look up, and was surprised to see a bird of unusual appearance, and large size, soaring slowly overhead. I immediately recognised an eagle; and that was the solitary occasion on which I ever saw one here. The bird remained in sight some time, and finally left, going south-east towards the sun.

On the afternoon of the day before the beginning of the frost the wind gradually sinks, and the dead leaves which have been blown to and fro settle in corners and sheltered places. As the sun sets all is still, and there is a sense of freshness in the air. Then the logs of wood thrown on the fire burn bright and clear--the surface of a burning log breaks up into small irregular squares; and the old folk shake their heads and say, 'It will freeze.' As the evening advances the hoofs of horses pa.s.sing by on the road give out a sharp sound--a sign that the mud is rapidly hardening. The gra.s.s crunches under foot, and in the morning the elms are white with rime; icicles hang from the thatch, and the ponds are frozen.

But there is nothing so uncertain as frost: it may thaw, and even rain, within a few hours; and, on the other hand, even after raining in the afternoon, it may clear up about midnight, and next morning the ice will be a quarter of an inch thick. Sometimes it will begin in so faint-hearted a fas.h.i.+on that the ground in the centre of the fields is still soft, and will 'poach' under the hoofs of cattle, while by the hedge it is hard. But by slow degrees the cold increases, and ice begins to form. Again, it will freeze for a week and yet you will find very little ice, because all the while there has been a rough wind, and the waves on the lake cannot freeze while in motion. So that a long frost is extremely difficult to foresee.

But it comes at last. Two really sharp frosts will cause ice thick enough to bear a lad at the edge of the lake; three will bear a man a few yards out; four, and it is safe to cross: in a week the ice is between three and four inches thick, and would carry a waggon. The character of ice varies: if some sleet has been falling--or snow, which facilitates freezing--it is thick in colour; if the wind was still it is dark, sleek, perfectly transparent. It varies, however, in different places, in some having a faint yellowish hue. There are always several places where the ice does not freeze till the last--breathing-holes in which the ducks swim; and where a brook enters it is never quite safe.

The snipes come now to the brook and water-meadows. Following the course of the stream, fieldfares and redwings rise in numbers from every hawthorn bush, where they have been feeding on the peggles. Blackbirds start out from under the bushes, where there is perhaps a little moist earth still. The foam where there is a slight fall is frozen, and the current runs under a roof of ice; the white bubbles travel along beneath it. The moorhens cannot get at the water; neither can the herons or kingfishers. The latter suffer greatly, and a fortnight of such severe weather is fatal to them.

I recollect walking by a brook like this, and seeing the blue plumage of a kingfisher perched on a bush. I swung my gun round ready to shoot as soon as he should fly, but the bird sat still and took no notice of my approach. Astonished at this--for the kingfisher sat in such a position as easily to see anyone coming; and these birds generally start immediately they perceive a person--I walked swiftly up opposite the bush. The bird remained on the bough. I put out the barrel of my gun and touched his ruddy breast with the muzzle: he fell on the ice below.

He had been frozen on his perch during the night, and probably died more from starvation than from cold, since it was impossible for him to get at any fish.

More than once afterwards the same winter I found kingfishers dead on the ice under bushes, lying on their backs with their contracted claws uppermost, having fallen dead from roost. Possibly the one found on the branch may have been partly supported by some small twig.

That winter snow afterwards fell and became a few inches thick, drifting in places to several feet. Then it was the turn of the other birds and animals to feel the pain of starvation. In the meadows the tracks of rabbits crossed and recrossed till the idea of following their course had to be abandoned. At first sight it seemed as if the snow had suddenly revealed the presence of a legion of rabbits where previously no one had suspected the existence of more than a dozen. But in fact a couple of rabbits only will so run to and fro on the snow as to cover a meadow with the imprints of their feet--looking everywhere for a green blade.

Yet they only occasionally scratch away the snow, and so get at the gra.s.s. Though the natural instinct of rabbits is to dig, and though here and there a place may be seen where they appear to have searched for a favourite morsel, yet they do not seem to acquire the sense of systematically clearing snow away. They then bark ash--and, indeed, nearly any young sapling or tree--and visit gardens in the night, as the hares do also. They creep about along the mounds, being driven by hunger to search for food all day instead of remaining part of the time in the buries.

As to the hares, little more than a week of deep snow cripples their strength: they will run but twenty or thirty yards, and may be killed occasionally with a stick or captured alive. They are even more helpless than rabbits, because the latter still have holes to take refuge in from danger; but the hare while the snow lasts is a wretched creature, and knows not where to turn. Birds resort to the cattle-sheds, to roost; among them the blackbirds, who usually roost in the hedges. Birds come to the houses and gardens in numbers because the snow is there cleared away along the paths.

During severe weather the water-meadows are the most frequented places.

They are rarely altogether frozen. If in the early morning there are sheets of ice, by noonday a great part will be flooded an inch or two deep, the water rising over the ice, and forced by it to spread farther, softening the ground at the sides. The water-carriers are long before they freeze. Thrushes and blackbirds come to the hedges surrounding these meadows; the fieldfares and redwings are there by hundreds, and fly up to the trees if alarmed.

The old folks say that the irrigated meadows (and other open waters) do not freeze in the evening till the moon rises; a bright clear moon is credited with causing the water to 'catch'--that is, the slender, thread-like spicules form on the surface, and, joining together, finally cover it. It is, of course, because the water-meadows are long before altogether frozen that the duck and teal come down to them. When the brooks are frozen is almost the only time when the dabchick can be got to rise: at other times this bird will dive and redive, and double about in the water, and rather be caught by the spaniels than take wing. But when the ice prevents this they will fly. Wood-pigeons go to the few places that remain moist, and also frequent the hawthorn bushes with the fieldfares. They seem fond of trees that are overgrown with ivy, probably for the berries.

The fish are supposed to go down upon the mud; but the jacks certainly do the reverse: they may be seen lying just beneath the ice, and apparently touching it with their backs. They seem partly torpid. In open winters, such as we have had of recent years, the hedge fruit remains comparatively untouched by birds: from which it would appear that it is not altogether a favourite food.

The country folk, who are much about at night and naturally pay great heed to the weather, are persuaded that on rainy nights more shooting stars are seen than when it is bright and clear. The kind of weather they mean is when scudding clouds with frequent breaks pa.s.s over, now obscuring and now leaving part of the sky visible, and with occasional showers. These shooting stars, they say, are but just above the clouds, and are mere streaks of light: by which they mean to convey that they have no apparent nucleus and are different from the great meteors which are sometimes seen.

I have myself been often much interested in the remarkable difference of the degree of darkness when there has been no moon. There are nights when, although the sky be clear of visible cloud and the stars are s.h.i.+ning, it is, in familiar phrase, 'as black as pitch.' The sky itself is black between the stars, and they do not seem to give the slightest illumination. On the other hand, there are nights without a moon when it is (though winter time) quite light. Hedges and trees are plainly visible; the road is light, and anything approaching can be seen at some distance, and this occasionally happens though the sky be partly clouded. So that the character of the night does not seem to depend entirely upon the moon or stars. The shepherds on the hills say that now and then there comes an intense blackness at night which frightens the sheep and makes them leap the hurdles.

When logs of timber are split for firewood they are commonly stacked 'four square,' and occasionally such a stack, four or five feet high, may be seen all aglow with phosph.o.r.escence. Each individual split piece of wood is distinctly visible--a pale faintly yellow light seems to be emitted from its surface. At the same time the ends of the f.a.ggot-sticks projecting from the adjacent stack of f.a.ggots also glow as if touched with fire. So vivid is the light that at the first glance it is quite startling--as if the whole collection of wood were just on the point of bursting into flame. In pa.s.sing old hollow trees sometimes they appear illuminated from within: the light proceeds from the decaying 'touchwood.' Old willow trees are sometimes streaked with such light from the top to the foot of the trunk. As this phosph.o.r.escence is only occasional, it would seem to depend on the condition of the atmosphere.

I once noticed what looked like a glowworm on a window-blind at night, but there was no glowworm there; the light was of a pale greenish hue.

In the morning an examination showed that the linen was decayed and almost rotten just in that particular spot, and it had slightly turned colour. Glowworms are uncommon in the district which has been more particularly described.

The _ignis fatuus_ is almost extinct; so much so that Jack-o'-the-Lantern has died out of the village folklore. On one occasion, however, I saw what at a distance seemed a bright light s.h.i.+ning in a ditch where two hedges met. Thinking some mischief was going on, I went to the spot, when the light disappeared; but on retiring, after a search which proved that no one was about, it came into view again. A second time I approached, and a second time the light died out. A few nights afterwards it was there again, and must clearly have been some kind of _ignis fatuus_. There was a small quant.i.ty of stagnant water in the ditch, and a good deal of rotting wood--branches fallen from trees.

One of the most interesting phenomena in connection with the weather seems to me to be the radiation of clouds. It appears to be more commonly visible in the evening, and, when fully developed, there is a low bank on the horizon, roughly arched, from which streamers of cloud trail right across the sky, through the zenith and down to the horizon opposite. Near each horizon these streamers or lines almost touch; overhead they are wider apart--an effect of perspective, I suppose.

Often the lines do not stretch so far, hardly to the zenith, where they spread out like a fan. If the sun has gone down, and the cloud chances to be white, these lines greatly resemble the aurora borealis, which takes the same form, and, when pale, can scarcely be distinguished from them, except for the streamers shooting--now extending, now withdrawing--while the cloud streamers only drift slowly. Sometimes there is but one line of cloud, a single streamer stretching right across the sky. So far as I have been able to observe, this radiation is usually followed by wind blowing in a direction parallel to the course of the streamers.

Once while walking in winter I was overtaken by a storm of rain, and took shelter behind a tree, which for some time kept me perfectly dry.

But suddenly there came an increase of darkness, and, glancing round, I saw a black cloud advancing in the teeth of the wind, and close to the earth. The trees it pa.s.sed were instantly blotted out, and as it approached I could see that in the centre it bulged and hung down--or rather slightly slanting forward--in the shape of an inverted cone with the apex cut off. This bulging part was of a slaty black, and the end travelled over the earth not higher than half the elevation of an ordinary elm. It came up with great speed, and in a moment I was completely drenched, and the field was flooded. It did not seem so much to rain as to descend in a solid sheet of water; this lasted a very short time, and immediately afterwards the storm began to clear. Though not a perfect waterspout, it was something very near it. The tree behind which I had taken shelter stood near a large pond, or mere; and I thought at the time that that might have attracted the cloud. The field quite ran with water, as if suddenly irrigated, but the s.p.a.ce thus flooded was of small area--about an acre.

The haymakers sometimes talk of mysterious noises heard in the very finest weather, when it is still and calm, resembling extremely distant thunder. They were convinced it was something 'in the air;' but I feel certain it was the guns of the fleet exercising at sea. In that case the sound of the explosion must have travelled over fifty miles in a direct line--supposing it to come from the neighbourhood of the nearest naval station. I have found by observation that thunder cannot be heard nearly so far as the sound of cannon. I doubt whether it is often heard more than ten miles. Some of the old cottage folk are still positive that it is not the lightning but the thunder that splits the trees; they ask if a great noise does not make the windows rattle, and want to know whether a still greater one may not rive an oak. They allow, however, that the mischief is sometimes done by a thunder-bolt.