3c4 FIELD AND HEDGEROV. 
and turtle-doves abound, the former in hundreds nesting 
here. Rooks, of course, and jackdaws,—daws love 
hollow trees,—jays, and some magpies. The magpie 
is one of the birds which have partly disappeared from 
the fields of England. There are broad lands whcre 
not one is to be seen. Once looking from the road at 
two in a field, a gentleman who was riding by stopped 
his horse and asked, quite interested, ‘Are those mag- 
pics?’ I replicd that they were. ‘I have not seen any 
since I was a boy till now,’ he said. Magpies are still 
plentiful in some places, as in old parks in Somerset- 
shire, but they have greatly diminished in the majority 
of instances. There are some here, and many jays. 
These are handsome birds, and with the green wood- 
peckers give colour to the trees. Night-jars or fern- 
owls fly round the outskirts and through the open 
glades in the summer twilight. These are some of the 
forest birds. The rest visit the forest or live in it, but 
are equally common to hedgerow and copse. Wood- 
peckers, jays, magpies, owls, night-jars, are all distinctly 
forest and park birds, and are continually with the deer. 
The lesser birds are the happier that there are fewer 
hawks and crows. The decr are not torn with the 
cruel tooth of hound or wolf, nor does the sharp arrow 
sting them. It is a little piece of olden England with- 
out its terror and bloodshed. 
The fawns fed away down the slope and presently 
into one of the broad green open paths or drives, where 
the underwood on each side is lined with bramble and 
with trailing white rose, which loves to cling to bushes 
scarcely higher than itself. Their runners stretch out at 
the edges of the drive, so that from the underwood the 
mound of green falls aslant to the sward. This gradual 
descent from the trees and asb to the bushes of hawthorn, 
