BIRD-HAUNTED LONDON 117 



never so early as this. He got his name into the papers ! 

 Such visitations from birds of marsh and virgin upland 

 do indeed blow away the missish stuffiness of Suburbia. 



ni 



The spring with us is not by any means the season 

 of rejoicing and renewal it is elsewhere. The sombre, 

 brown fields hardly smile when warmer airs fan their 

 weather-beaten cheeks and trees, bushes, hedges and 

 wild flowers are too few for a profusion of " budded 

 quicks." Apart from the trees, we have little, out- 

 side a few hawthorns, to measure the season by 

 except the elderberry. In the babe-like winter of 

 1919-20, the stiff, metallic, coppery-green leaves of 

 this somewhat surly and plebeian plant were out 

 in the first week of February, and in the middle of 

 January in 1921. It is by loss, not enrichment, then, 

 that we measure the retreat of winter, bawled at and 

 buffeted as he yields a reluctant field to the March 

 winds, like mistle-thrushes driving off a hawk. For 

 the winter congregations gradually break up and steal 

 away, reintegrating if the temperature drops, yet 

 leaving us poorer almost day by day, and only re- 

 turning when the nesting season is over. Blackbird, dun- 

 nock, ring-dove, throstle, robin, tits, starling, crow, and, 

 strange and handsome to record, linnet and yellow wagtail, 

 alone nested with us. A pair of larks remained the 

 whole year, but I never found their nest, if they had 

 one. Rarely if ever do these nests escape robbery, 

 but it was a sore thing to find the linnet's nest in 

 the orchard destroyed and the bluey-white eggs, 

 powdered with chestnut and purplish-red spots, taken. 

 In London one sees more of the autumn than the 

 spring migratory currents, and the only time I heard 

 or saw anything of the latter was on February 25, 

 1919, when the sounds of a great migrating host 

 (mixed waders) billowed across the night sky. I was 

 out in ten seconds, but could see nothing, though 

 the night was cloudless. To stand out in the great 

 vault of night under the " bright patient stars " and 



