LATER MIGRANTS 145 



for the spotted egg and pendant nest, if not for the golden 

 wing. We may hope ; and yet not six months ago a 

 man came every Sunday morning to a neighbouring 

 common and stretched his pull-nets for our own gold 

 finch in the very heart of an English paradise ! 



8. 



One of the signals of the year, looked for and found 

 over a long period by a naturalist in Herefordshire, has 

 been altogether missing of late. Among the fine trees on 

 Credon hill, commanding the valley of the Wye and 

 protecting one of the most homelike villages of the West 

 (a paradise too for the naturalist), are a number of chest 

 nuts. They have always supplied a spring diet to the 

 brown squirrels which have abounded in this spot, and 

 indeed in the county generally. Now squirrels, even the 

 brown, are omnivorous, or at least multivorous, but they 

 are vegetarians first, and like nothing more than the 

 sweet stickiness about the opening buds. You could 

 be sure at this date, if you had the long experience proper 

 to the happy native, of finding the ground littered with 

 the relic buds dropped from the feast. The presence of 

 the squirrels has been as surely proclaimed by this as it 

 is in a semi-tropical garden in the Isle of Wight by the 

 gnawed remnants of the fir cones in autumn. The 

 squirrels are as obviously proclaimed by such spilth on 

 the ground as by their own delightful gambols in the 

 tree tops, or their great dreys in the branches. There 

 are no chestnut buds on the carpet of the grove as 

 there used to be. 



This region in the West is outside the range of the 

 greedy competition of the grey alien, though that rodent 

 flourishes now in Warwickshire, for example, in the 



K T.V.E. 



