' 1 



304 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



and turtle-doves abound, the former in hundreds nesting 

 here. Rooks, of course, and jackdaws, — daws love 

 hollow trees, — ^jays, and some magpies. The magpie 

 is one of the birds which have partly disappeared from 

 the fields of England. There are broad lands where 

 not one is to be seen. Once looking from the road at 

 two in a field, a gentleman who was riding by stopped 

 his horse and asked, quite interested, ' Are those mag- 

 pies ? ' I replied that they were. * I have not seen any 

 since I was a boy till now,' he said. Magpies are still 

 plentiful in some places, as in old parks in Somerset- 

 shire, but they have greatly diminished in the majority 

 of instances. There are some here, and many jays. 

 These are handsome birds, and with the green wood- 

 peckers give colour to the trees. Night-jars or fern- 

 owls fly round the outskirts and through the open 

 glades in the summer twilight. These are some of the 

 forest birds. The rest visit the forest or live in it, but 

 are equally common to hedgerow and copse. Wood- 

 peckers, jays, magpies, owls, night-jars, are all distinctly 

 forest and park birds, and are continually with the deer. 

 The lesser birds are the happier that there are fewer 

 hawks and crows. The deer are not torn with the 

 cruel tooth of hound or wolf, nor does the sharp arrow 

 sting them. It is a little piece of olden England with- 

 out its terror and bloodshed. 



The fawns fed away down the slope and presently 

 into one of the broad green open paths or drives, where 

 the underwood on each side is lined with bramble and 

 with trailing white rose, which loves to cling to bushes 

 scarcely higher than itself Their runners stretch out at 

 the edges of the drive, so that from the underwood the 

 mound of green falls aslant to the sward. This gradual 

 descent from the trees and ash to the bushes of hawthorn. 



