W. H. Hudson

“ The hornet, one of my first favourites, has, to our minds, nothing mysterious like our glow-worm, and nothing serpentine or supernatural about him, but he is a nobler, more powerful and splendid creature than any dragon-fly. I care not to look at a vulgar wasp nor at any diurnal insect, however fine, when he is by, or his loud, formidable buzzing hum is heard. As he comes out of the oak-tree shade and goes {129} swinging by in his shining golden-red armature, he is like a being from some other hotter, richer land, thousands of miles away from our cold, white cliffs and grey seas. ”

“ The harsh wailing sound of his crying voice as he wheels about overhead, the mad downward rushes, when his wings creak as he nears you, give the idea that he is almost crazed with anxiety; and one feels ashamed at causing so much misery. Oh, poor bird! is there no way to make you understand without leaving the ground, that your black-spotted, olive-coloured eggs are perfectly safe; that a man can walk about on the heath and be no more harmful to you than the Forest ponies, and the ragged donkey browsing on a furze bush, and the cow with her tinkling bell? ”

“ In this out-of-the-way corner of the Forest one could imagine the time come when this one small piece of England which lies between the Avon and Southampton Water will be a sanctuary for all rare and beautiful wild life and a place of refreshment to body and soul for all men.
The richest, fullest time of the year is when June is wearing to an end, when one knows without the almanac that spring is over and gone. Nowhere in England is one more sensible of the change to fullest summer than in this low-lying, warmest corner of Hampshire. ”

“ The trees were mostly oaks, in the young vivid green of early June foliage. And one day when the sky, seen through that fresh foliage, was without a stain of vapour in its pure azure, when the wood was full of clear sunlight—so clear that silken spider webs, thirty or forty feet high in the oaks, were visible as shining red and blue and purple lines—the bird, after drumming high above my head, flew to an oak tree just before me, and clinging vertically to the bark on the high part of the trunk, remained there motionless for some time. ”

“ Watching one of these busy companies of small birds at work, one is amazed at the thought of the abundance of larval insect life in these oak woods. The caterpillars must be devoured in tens of thousands every day for some weeks, yet when the time comes one is amazed again at the numbers that have survived to know a winged life. On July evenings with the low sun shining on the green oaks at this place I have seen the trees covered as with a pale silvery mist—a mist composed of myriads of small white and pale-grey moths fluttering about the oak foliage. ”

“ Occasionally you will discover a light at a distance shining with a strange glory, a light which might be mistaken for a will-o'-the-wisp, and on a close view you will probably find that a male is on the scene, and the female, aware of his presence though he may be at some distance from her, invisible in the darkness, has been wrought up to the highest state of excitement. You will find her clinging to a stem or leaf, her luminous part raised, and her whole body swaying in a measured way from side to side. ”

“ And, by-and-by, three fiddlers, or pond-skaters, "sagacious of their quarry from afar," came skating into sight on the space of bright water; and to these mysterious, uncanny-looking creatures—insect ghosts that walk on the water, but with very unghost-like appetites—I began tossing some of the flies; and each time a fiddler seized a floating fly he skated away into the shade with it to devour it in peace and quiet all alone by himself. For a fiddler with a fly is like a dog with a bone among other hungry dogs. ”

“ If the insect happens to be a foot or two above the ground, in a tangle of bramble and bracken, with other plants with slender stems and deep-cut leaves, the appearance is singularly beautiful. The light looks as if enclosed within an invisible globe, which may be as much as fifteen inches in diameter, and within its circle the minutest details of the scene are clear to the vision, even to the finest veining of the leaves, the leaves shining a pure translucent green, while outside the mystic globe of light all is in deep shadow and in blackness. ”

“ To and fro he flies, to this side and that; and finally, as if in imitation of the small, fretful stonechat, he sweeps down to alight on the topmost spray of some small tree or tall bush—not a furze but a willow; and as it is an insecure stand for a bird of his long thin wading legs, he stands lightly, balancing himself with his wings; beautiful in his white and pale-grey plumage, and his slender form, on that airy perch of the willow in its grey-green leaves and snow-white catkins ”

“ Yet these same oak woods, great as their charm is, their green everlasting gladness, have a less enduring hold on the spirit than the open heath, though this may look melancholy and almost desolate on coming {38} to it from those sunlit emerald glades with a green thought in the soul. It seems enough that it is open, where the wind blows free, and there is nothing between us and the sun. It is a passion, an old ineradicable instinct in us: the strongest impulse in children, savage or civilised, is to go out into some open place. ”

“ Day by day, during this long spell of summer wet and cold, these birds diminished in number, until they were almost all gone—swifts, swallows, and house-martins; but we were not to be without a swallow, for as these went, sand-martins came in, and increased in numbers until they were in thousands. We had them every day and all day before us, flying up and down the valley, in the shelter of the woods, their pale plumage and wavering flight making them look in the distance like great white flies against the wall of black-green trees and gloomy sky beyond. ”

“ To have always about me that wildness which I best loved—the rude incult heath, the beautiful desolation; to have harsh furze and ling and bramble and bracken to grow on me, and only wild creatures {50} for visitors and company. The little stonechat, the tinkling meadow-pipit, the excited whitethroat to sing to me in summer; the deep-burrowing rabbit to bring down his warmth and familiar smell among my bones; the heat-loving adder, rich in colour, to find when summer is gone a dry safe shelter and hibernaculum in my empty skull. ”

“ The worst day during the bad weather when the young cirl buntings left the nest brought the wintry spell to an end. A few days of such perfect weather followed that one could wish for no higher good than to be alive on that green earth, beneath that blue sky. One could best appreciate the crystal purity and divine blueness of the immense space by watching the rooks revelling on high in the morning sunshine, looking in their blackness against the crystalline blue like bird-figures with outspread, motionless wings, carved out of anthracite coal, and suspended by invisible wires in heaven. ”

“ Not so the young blackbird, standing motionless on the road, in doubt too as to what you are; his short tail raised, giving him {56} an incipient air of blackbird jauntiness; his plumage not brown, indeed, as we describe it, but rich chestnut-black, like the chestnut-black hair of a beautiful Hampshire girl of that precious type with oval face and pale dark skin. A pretty creature, rich in colour, with a musical, pathetic voice, waiting so patiently to be visited and fed, and a weasel perhaps watching him from the roadside grass with hungry, bright little eyes! ”

“ A beautiful and far-famed insect—do not mistake, I mean neither the Emperor, nor the King of Sardinia, but a much finer specimen—the fire-fly. Their bright light is evanescent, and alternates with the darkness, as if the swift whirling of the earth struck fire out of the black atmosphere; as if the winds were being set upon that planetary grindstone, and gave out such momentary sparks from their edges. Their silence is more striking than their flashes, for sudden phenomena are almost invariably attended with some noise, but these little jewels dart along the dark as softly as butterflies. ”

“ It grows as high as a man's knees, or higher, and even in the driest, hottest season keeps its wonderfully vivid fresh green, as near a brilliant colour as any green leaf can be; and the stalks and graceful spikes after the flowering time are pale yellow-brown, and have a golden lustre in the bright August and September sunlight. Could our poetical viridissima have a more suitable home! And here, coming out from the thick oaks and sauntering about the heath I caught the sound of his delicate shrilling, and to my delight found myself in the midst of a colony. ”

“ But here the most charming butterfly to my mind is the white admiral, when they are seen in numbers, as in the abundant season of 1901, when the oak woods were full of them. Here is a species which, seen in a collection, is of no more value æsthetically than a dead leaf or a frayed feather dropped in the poultry-yard, or an old postage stamp in an album, without a touch of brilliance on its dull blackish-brown and white wings; yet which alive pleases the eye more than the splendid and larger kinds solely because of its peculiarly graceful flight. ”

“ When stridulating it appeared to be the ambition of every male grasshopper to get up as high as he could climb on the stiff blades and thin stalks of the grass; and there, very conspicuous in his uniform green colour which in a strong sunlight looked like the green of verdigris, his translucent overwings glistening like a dragon-fly's wings, he would shrill and make the grass to which he was clinging tremble to his rapidly vibrating body. ”