THE BIRD AND THE GARDEN 133 



&quot; And crash the cruel coulter passed.&quot; Our Cambridge 

 rollers on dry tilth or young corn may roll out the scrapes 

 and, indeed, the nest of plover. Our tractors and cutters 

 lay waste the haunt of the corncrake, which migrates in 

 despair from the grass meadows by the Huntingdonshire 

 Ouse to the wild shores of Pembroke or the marshes by 

 Newcastle. The fairway mower, taming too much of 

 the wilder common, passes over the snug nest of the lark ; 

 the ivy on the wall is trimmed too close by the gardener s 

 shears, and the wrens miss their favourite site on the 

 well-clothed trunk; the proper forester deprives owl 

 and woodpecker, and even nuthatch and tree-creeper, of 

 their properest homes ; the mechanising farmer destroys 

 his most English hedgerow and on his shriven acres no 

 birds sing. All this is true. The birds love their farms 

 and gardens and commons, nevertheless and notwith 

 standing. 



On a beautiful and most modern intensive farm in 

 Worcestershire several acres are devoted to raspberries ; 

 by the nature of the crop the rotary cultivators work only 

 between the rows : there is no transverse ploughing ; 

 and this the plover have discovered. No single nest was 

 put in the midst. The birds decided that in medio 

 tutissimus ibis meant between the plants, not between 

 the rows. We found several nests. The birds pay little 

 attention to cultivator, whether man or machine, and are 

 only a little disturbed by the sprayer. The eggs were 

 warm and neatly arranged. It happens, I suppose natur 

 ally, that the thin ends come together in an automatic 

 neatness of package ; but how is it that they are gener 

 ally, as in this particular case, true to the compass, con 

 sisting of four eggs, pointing North and South, and East 

 and West ? The idea is perhaps mere fancy (as our pet 

 discoveries are apt to prove in the eyes of science), but 



