Aubyn Trevor-Battye—Random Lines



163



This is the time of year when we get our daily and nightly visits from

Herons, who take serious toll of the big trout. Kingfishers also are

hard at work on the fry, and though they are a beautiful feature in

this garden f sometimes wish they were not always feeding ! 1 may say

the same of the foxes, for if it is one of our great delights to watch

three large cubs playing on a sunny bank behind the house, they

want a lot of feeding, and I greatly fear their vixen has been paying

attention to the pinioned Waterfowl. If I add that an old lien

Sparrowhawk for the second year in succession shot right through

the gatehouse into the courtyard and carried off young prize-bred

chickens all but as big as partridges, it will be admitted that we

have our share of wild-life troubles as well as of its delights

and joys.


But we mourn no loss so greatly as that of our Kestrels. We had

two pairs, and they nested just above the house. The tiercel of one pair

was, for a wild Falcon, a confiding bird ; he was my constant delight

as he stooped at the voles in the paddock, or rested on his favourite

perch, a bare ash bough not thirty yards from where I sit and write.


The story is rather a long one, but briefly it is this. In the autumn

and winter of 1918 and the spring of 1919 we suffered from a severe

visitation of field-voles and of wood-mice. They were in myriads, and

did great damage to the meadow-grass, garden-stuff, and shrubs.

They killed laurels and ate through the “ collars ” of the old yuccas

so that the great severed heads lay on the ground. In the woods

trees were whittled, and the fine, slender twigs of spindle-trees showed

white and glistening through the bark. The Kestrels and Barn Owls

had a great time then. Suddenly, in the beginning of April last year,

this plague was stayed. In a night, as it seemed, the host had

vanished. Not a vole or mouse was to be seen. The traps, in which

we had been taking numbers every day, now yielded not one. If

it was a relief for us it was not so for the birds ; our Kestrels

disappeared—I have not seen them since. We also, from the same

cause, lost our Barn Owls.


These Owls, who some years ago occupied one of the large Owl-

boxes, of which several are fixed up here in trees-—one up in a large

ash, one in a big oak, another in a big silver-fir, a fourth in a deodar—



