24S



Mr. P. F. M. Galloway,



THE WEATHER AND OUR SUMMER BIRDS. #


By P. F. M. Galloway.


It is interesting to note the habits of our wild birds and

the effect the weather has upon them.


As our last real spring and summer weather took place

in 1906, it allows 11s a fair time of unsettled bad weather to

note its ill effect on birds of the insectivorous species

especially.


During the spring and summer of last year (which never

arrived) our summer migrants had a bad nesting season. They

arrived here well to their time and we had a fortnight of brilliant

warm weather at Easter, which was, as we all know, earlier last

year than this, and that warm settled weather came with the

wind in the N.E. from the very quarter that is bringing Arctic

weather now. After that fortnight, with the exception of an

hour or two of sunshine and this at long intervals, we had

nothing but overcast, cool, windy, and rainy weather until the

grass was cut, somewhere about the end of June or early July,

farmers then had about a fortnight of fine warm weather in

which to make their hay, and those that did not make it then

must have made manure of it, for we had dull gloomy damp

weather from that time right on to the end of the first week of

September, when the harvest had begun, the remainder of that

month being fine and practically speaking the best month of

the year ; after the harvest the same dull weather prevailed and

there was hardly a day passed in which it was not blowing roughly,

cloudy and rainy. The strawberries ripened last year it is true,

but they were ripe one side and covered with mildew the other.

The effect the weather of last year had upon our summer

migrants was this : —The continuance of cold and absence of

sunshine prevented the old birds from rearing all their young,

for they could scarcely find sufficient live insect food to keep

themselves upon, to say nothing of rearing a brood of young.

I found several nests of Tree Pipits, Willow Wrens and even

Tree Creepers, all the young dead in their nests, and I have no

doubt there were many more that I did not find in the same



Written in April, 1908, at Reading'.



