204 SUMMER 



carefully and regularly for the song which marks the end of 

 their season. Even the positive signs of change, that tell 

 definitely of autumn waxing, and not simply of spring depart- 

 ing, are of a kind that is usually missed. Every one notices 

 the brilliant scarlet bunches of rowan berries when they 

 weigh down their stems in late September, but few mark 

 their slow growth and the gradual kindling of their colour 

 through the months after the blossom faded in May, when 

 they seem lost in the dull green of the summer foliage. It 

 gives a strangely quiet and steady sense of the onward 

 movement of the year to watch week by week the progress 

 of these unregarded berries which will make so conspicuous 

 a show in days to come. In July they are already large, but 

 still hard, and at one stage in their development they display 

 a singular neutral tint which includes both the unripe green 

 and the ripe red. To combine these complementary colours 

 might seem impossible, but it is achieved by the mountain- 

 ashes in July. Hawthorn berries and rose-hips change 

 colour with equally few to mark them ; but their gradations 

 of colour are often less precise, and they transform them- 

 selves into succulent bird-food more suddenly on autumn's 

 near approach. But even in July there is an anticipation of 

 the autumn pillage of the ripe berries. Wood-pigeons are 

 very experimental in their diet, and sometimes turn at this 

 time of year to the clustered green berries of the whitebeam, 

 which yield their kernels in autumn to the great tit. 



Wood-pigeons do their best to cheat themselves and us 

 out of the knowledge that the year is passing ; they murmur 

 their spring rhythm until late in September, and occasionally 

 have eggs and young in the garden firs up to the end of 

 August. But most birds have now finished nesting, and the 

 empty nests hidden in every bush and hedge are one of the 

 most significant signs of the season. Sometimes they are 



