THE rooks are now busy in the elms of the churchyard, and drifting thwartwise the wind with sticks for their nests. Sometimes a young male bird comes with food for his mate as she pleaches the twigs with claw and beak; she flutters her wings like a fledgeling, gapes widely, and squawks with satisfaction. Daws come to the trees, perching head to the south-west breeze, ejaculating sharply. Periodical visitants are the starlings, their songs of mimicry swelling with sudden rush and wheezing. One bird has learnt the chattering cry of a kestrel, the mating call, and deceives the rooks into thinking that one of the brown mouse-hawks is near. That rooks are thieves among themselves is well known, stealing sticks from their neighbours. To-day I watched one taking material that a young and enthusiastic sister brought with difficulty every five minutes or so from the distant beech clump. The thief was an artist, she was subtle, and cunning. A quick hop took her to the young bird’s pile, she seized a stick, and drifted upwards into the wind, swung round in a half circle and brought it to her own nest in the same tree with a soft caa-caa, as though implying relief at reaching home again. Her mate, judging by his white face, is an ancient bird; he is wise; he does no work; he fetches no food for his toiling wife; but perches near the nest, approving her method of labour, and guarding its results. He is the nearest approach to a bird “fence” that it would be possible to find.
A lane of red mud leads through the beech-clump. Life here is hard, but the celandines show their spoke-rays to the sun and wind-washed heaven, braving the half-gales that come across the Atlantic and twirl the fallen numbers of autumn’s leaves among their yellow flowers. A tawny owl lives in a pollard hornbeam in this clump; he comes regularly at dusk to my cottage and hoots with mournful insistence to the barn owls that roost under the thatch. Rabbits’ bones and fur, finches’ feathers, and the fragile skulls of mice hang in the crevices of the tree, hundreds of them, some fresh and white, others hidden under the brown dust of decay that trickles from the old tree’s dead heart. Tap his home, and he flaps out, pursued by any small birds searching for spiders or grubs in the spinney. The trees are dwarfed, bent by the salt winds; a few larches grew here, but never more the sap will rise and burst in emerald foam on their wispy branches. Constant buffeting with the winds of the ocean has killed them. A magpie is prospecting the mazed brittleness of one of them for a nesting site; she appears nearly every morning.
Beyond the clump is a combe, or valley, where every year a pair of carrion crows nest. They fly away as soon as they see me, four hundred yards below—they are crafty, and leave nothing to chance. In the stone hedges the celandines, flowers much bigger than those around London, shine like spilled meteor fragments against their leaves. Primroses grow with them, and the white blossom of the wild strawberry, and in places the stitchwort is in bloom. A flock of linnets sings in a hawthorn, a silver twittering of song coming as the wind rests; with a rustling of wings the flock leaves for the bloom of the gorse which everywhere is scenting the air. The apple trees in the orchard close below are beginning to bud, already goldfinches haunt their lichened branches, now fighting with gold-barred wings aflutter, now pausing to pipe sweet whispers of coming vernal glory, when the blossoms shall spill in showers of loveliness. Afar are the Burrows, and over their sogged wastes the green plovers wheel and fall, uttering wild calls to the wind, while their mates stand below, diving with broad pinions to earth as though they would die for love. High above a buzzard is sailing. To the right a great horse draws a plough against the skyline, and a dozen gulls follow in its wake; behind them trip and whistle four dishwashers, or wagtails. They say in the village that three pairs of ravens are nesting on the headland this year; I have seen but one. In this district a raven has only once been known to kill or “eye-pick” lambs, but that was many years ago, and then their breeding ledge was robbed in revenge. The raven has come near to extermination, like the peregrine falcon; but here both of these mighty fliers rarely molest the belongings of man; the one feeds on offal and dead rabbits that the stoats have left, and the other takes stock-doves, oystercatchers, wild duck, snipe, and ring-plover. In the early spring they stoop at gulls and diving birds just for exuberance of spirit. Certainly every tide leaves its dead among the seaweed and the beach-wrack: gulls and auks with their backs torn and ripped by the swift blue-hawks.