132 AUTUMN AND WINTER 



will choose almost any quarters that are dark and hidden. 

 They are very fond of the old hollowed scooped willows, 

 growing in pollarded shape along the brooks. In there you 

 have to dig them out of the half-rotten wood into which they 

 burrow, such is the writer's experience ; but they are sup- 

 posed as a rule to hang themselves up. If you climb to one 

 of their haunts where suitable beams provide a hooking- 

 place, you will see, if you peer close, a thing that looks as 

 lifeless as a withered lichen. The creature hangs upside 

 down, as if it were preserved like bacon on a kitchen 

 chimney. It might have been nailed there as a keeper 

 nails weasels to a tree. Life is indeed very nearly extinct, 

 so far as tests go. The heart beats only just perceptibly, 

 the temperature sinks to the limit, sight and hearing pro- 

 bably cease. But the dormancy is not that of the lily bulb 

 which must pass through its period. Exceptional weather 

 will wake the bat, and for a few minutes one springlike 

 evening it will fly out into an early air quite devoid of 

 insects ; and after a few minutes' vague hawking will return 

 to the intermitted sleep. But the varieties differ. The 

 little pipistrelle, which is the commonest, wakes more easily 

 than the noctule, which begins its winter sleep as early as 

 August, it 'aestivates' as well as hibernates and 'diurnates,' 

 or, if English words are allowable, it summers, it winters, and 

 it sleeps by day. Like the flies, the bats, especially the 

 pipistrelle, winter in companies, often clinging on to one 

 another, as Homer, among other naturalists, noted and 

 described in haunting lines. 



Some scientific writers say that the hedgehog winters in 

 a state of deeper coma than even the bat. This is not 

 agreeable with experience in a Midland county where 

 hedgehogs greatly abounded. It was quite easy to find 

 them hidden under the mossy snags of coppiced bushes 



