2i 4 AUTUMN AND WINTER 



top of the hill the larks sang, and on the other side where 

 the path passes a spinney, the thrushes let out now and again 

 a burst of spring merriment. The leaves of the honeysuckle 

 are an inch long, and catkins hang from the hazel. Can 

 this be called winter ? December is, of course, the beginning 

 not the middle of winter, as we often regard it. Presently 

 bitter and perhaps ' bearing ' frosts will change all this. The 

 wheat will be happily protected under snow or, if it is too 

 luxuriant ' winter proud ' in the delightful country phrase 

 and snow is sparing it may be cut to death. Yet one of the 

 necessary qualities of winter is absent when we enter a new 

 year. ' Vere novo incipiendus erat ' ; we ought to have 

 begun our year in spring. But most of us feel the argument, 

 expressed with great force by a Lancashire naturalist, that 

 spring begins as soon as the days lengthen. The drawing 

 out of the days influences us almost as much as it stirs and 

 encourages the birds. They exult marvellously in longer 

 hours of sunlight. A curious example was found in the 

 Zoological Gardens where numbers of the small equatorial 

 birds at first perished of darkness. It was against their 

 instinct to feed in gloom and twilight : they would rather 

 starve. When at last a sympathetic keeper lengthened day 

 by the aid of electric light, their health and appetite returned. 

 It is so with our native birds. 



Longer hours of sunlight have their effect, however stern 

 or cloudy the weather may be. Of course, very hard frost, 

 if it lasts long, ruffles their feathers and may even kill them 

 through starvation, but at a breath of warmth or moisture 

 the sense of spring, of a new life returns. One cannot 

 remember a year where partridges have not paired before 

 January was out, or when spring songs had not been heard 

 from tits and hedge-sparrows. Every January some of the 

 spring flowers are out, and the number is increasing at great 



