248 BIRDS IN LONDON 



ponds might easily be made exceedingly interest- 

 ing, if planted round with willows and rushes 

 and stocked with a few of the smaller pretty 

 ornamental water- fowl in place of their present 

 big unsuitable occupants. 



Tooting Graveney has a fresher, wilder aspect, 

 and is a pleasanter place than its sister common. 

 Its surroundings, too, are far more rural, as it 

 has for neighbours Streatham Park and the 

 wide green spaces of Furze Down and Totter- 

 down Fields. Tooting Graveney itself is in 

 the condition of the old Clapham Common 

 as Macaulay knew it in his boyhood. Its 

 surface is rough with grass-grown mounds, old 

 gravel-pits, and excavations, and it is grown 

 over with bushes of furze, bramble, and brier, 

 and with scattered birch-trees and old dwarf 

 hawthorns, looking very pretty. Wild birds 

 are numerous, although probably few are able 

 to rear any young on the common. The missel- 

 thrush, now very rare in London, breeds in 

 private grounds close by. 



Streatham Common (66 acres) is the least as 

 well as the outermost of the group of large 

 commons ; it is but half the size of Clapham 



