On a Chapter of Accidents. 347


A CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS.


By A. Trevor-Battye, M.A., F.L.S., M.B.O.U.


When our late Honorary Secretary kindly asked rue to

send an aviary letter to the Magazine, I thought it better to wait

until the breeding season was over and there was more to say, for

here we only keep a few birds. But meanwhile perhaps the

following remarks on the bad luck this year of certain of the

wild birds of our garden may not be uninteresting to some of our

members.


If it does not make this letter too long I may just sketch

the kind of country in which the garden lies.


We are on the slope of a hill which falls to the valley of

the Test ; at this point the river is nearly one hundred and fifty

feet above the level of the sea. A quarter of a mile below the

house the river runs, split here into two widely-separated chan¬

nels, and receiving a considerable tributary from the Micheldever

hills. The valley below is all green and soft; water-carriers, bog-

lands and peat-holes are its characteristics, from the big common

of Bransbury above us, to Stockbridge, and further, below. Above

the house rise the high down-lands (now for the greater part

ploughed up) stretching away to Winchester and the Itcheu valley.

Across the valley the corresponding chalk hills range away to the

Berkshire border and the valley of the Kennett. These hills are

generally bare, saving for solitary clumps of beeches or some¬

times of fir.


About two miles away lies a wood of some two thousand

acres—the remains of the ancient forest of Harewood, where

Daphne mezereum grows wild—and some of the landed estates

have fair-sized coverts; yet it is an open not a wooded country,

with an almost total want of hedgerow timber.


Of course each of these areas has its own distinctive

character of plant, insect and bird life. The down-lands have

their gentian, Chalk-hill blue butterflies, Wheatears, and Thick-

knee Plovers, and in the fir-clumps Long-eared Owls ; the valley

has its sundew, buck-bean, Ephemeridce , Water-rails, Snipe, Dab-

chicks, and Duck ; the great isolated woodland its yews, White

Admiral butterflies, Woodpeckers, Nuthatches, and Tawny Owls.



