At Home with Wild Nature 



The mammals would appear to have been more 

 evenly shared out than the members of the avian tribes. 

 The excess of the latter in Surrey is no doubt accounted 

 for by the well-wooded character of the country round 

 the moor. Of reptiles I have made no notes, but these 

 are undoubtedly far more numerous and of greater 

 variety in the southern county than in the northern. 



I have visited the Surrey moor, with which this 

 chapter deals, off and on, for a long series of years. 

 Like its fellow-wilderness in my native county it con- 

 sists of a series of commons, the boundaries of which are, 

 luckily in both cases, still unmarked by such modern 

 abominations as barbed wire and galvanized iron. 



Let the reader picture to himself, or herself, a 

 stretch of moorland six to eight miles in areal extent 

 consisting of sandy furze-clad hills of no great height or 

 steepness ; long carpet-like stretches of heather growing 

 from a thin layer of peat that lies on a deposit of silver 

 sand as hard as a rock ; acres and acres of shallow bog, 

 white in places with the waving blossoms of cotton 

 grass and yellow in others with patches of sphagnum 

 moss clustering round still, dark pools ; here and there 

 a fast silting-up pond, still beloved of coot and moor- 

 hen, sends music into the air from the dead wind-swept 

 reed stems standing up gaunt and stark over three parts 

 of its surface; now and then you come upon a silent 

 trickle of water shimmering in the sun, but never a 

 bubbling spring or prattling beck ; bright green patches 

 of birch, battling for a footing wherever the ground is 

 dry enough, are to be seen here and there; dark pine 



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