148 BIRD HAUNTS AND NATURE MEMORIES 



stands a fine old oak, many hundreds of years old, slowly 

 perishing in the strangle-hold of the flourishing ivy; here 

 beneath the sombre fir the grass is withered, robbed of the 

 moisture it craved; there the trailing bramble has invaded 

 and choked a bed of hyacinths ; there rushes crowded out the 

 blue forget-me-not. Park and woodland are a battlefield. 



" But having entered in, 



Great growths and small, 

 Show them to men akin, 



Combatants all ! 

 Sycamore shoulders oak, 



Bines the slim sapling yoke, 

 Ivy-spun halters choke 



Elms stout and tall." 



Here lies a rabbit, bitten in the neck by a stoat; there 

 a duckling mallard, torn and mangled by the murderous 

 brown rat. Beside the tussock where the tree pipit has 

 its cosy nest are the callow nestlings, stark and stiff, 

 shouldered out of house and home by that diabolical 

 foster-brother, the infant cuckoo. Nailed on the barn 

 are the festering, wind-dried, grinning trophies of the 

 keeper's prowess hawks, owls, jays, magpies, slender 

 stoats and weasels, grey-pated daws and a rook or two, 

 a squirrel, and the tails of sundry domestic cats. 



Under the owl roost, the thick ivy on another oak, lie 

 a litter of pellets, larger than those of the kestrel but 

 easier to break up and analyse; these show what destruc- 

 tion goes on amongst the lesser woodland folk when the 

 reeling barn owl makes its rounds. Rat skulls are there 

 the murderer murdered jaws and limbs of bank, field, 

 and water vole, house and field mice, shrews galore, even 

 bats mingled with fragments of sparrows and finches, 

 torn in the night watches from their perches. The heron 

 has left an unfinished meal on the margin of the pool, and 

 on the unpicked shoulder of this bream is a deep wound 



