Test and Itchen—Vegetation—Riverside villages—The cottage by the river—Itchen valley—Blossoming limes—Bird visitors—Goldfinch—Cirl bunting—Song—Plumage—Three common river birds—Coots—Moor-hen and nest—Little grebes' struggles—Male grebe's devotion—Parent coot's wisdom—A more or less happy family—Dogged little grebes—Grebes training their young—Fishing birds and fascination.
There are no more refreshing places in Hampshire, one might almost say in England, than the green level valleys of the Test and Itchen that wind, alternately widening and narrowing, through the downland country to Southampton Water. Twin rivers they may be called, flowing at no great distance apart through the same kind of country, and closely alike in their general features: land and water intermixed—greenest water-meadows and crystal currents that divide and subdivide and join again, and again separate, forming many a miniature island and long slip of wet meadow with streams on either side. At all times refreshing to the sight and pleasant to dwell by, they are best
When it is summer and the green is deep.
Greens of darkest bulrushes, tipped with bright brown panicles, growing in masses where the water is wide and shallowest; of grey-green graceful reeds and of tallest reed-mace with dark velvety brown {243} spikes; behind them all, bushes and trees—silvery-leafed willow and poplar, and dark alder, and old thorns and brambles in tangled masses; and always in the foreground lighter and brighter sedges, glaucous green flags, mixed with great hemp agrimony, with flesh-coloured, white-powdered flowers, and big-leafed comfrey, and scores of other water and moisture-loving plants.
Through this vegetation, this infinite variety of refreshing greens and graceful forms, flow the rapid rivers, crystal-clear and cold from the white chalk, a most beautiful water, with floating water-grass in it—the fascinating Poa fluviatilis which, rooted in the pebbly bed, looks like green loosened wind-blown hair swaying and trembling in the ever-crinkled, swift current.
Test and Itchen
They are not long rivers—the Test and Itchen—but long enough for men with unfevered blood in their veins to find sweet and peaceful homes on their margins. I think I know quite a dozen villages on the former stream, and fifteen or sixteen on the latter, in any one of which I could spend long years in perfect contentment. There are towns, too, ancient Romsey and Winchester, and modern hideous Eastleigh; but the little centres are best to live in. These are, indeed, among the most characteristic Hampshire villages; mostly small, with old thatched cottages, unlike, yet harmonising, irregularly placed along the roadside; each with its lowly walls set among gaily coloured flowers; the farm with its rural sounds and smells, its big horses and {244} milch-cows led and driven along the quiet streets; the small ancient church with its low, square tower, or grey shingled spire; and great trees standing singly or in groups or rows—oak and elm and ash; and often some ivy-grown relic of antiquity—ivy, indeed, everywhere. The charm of these villages that look as natural and one with the scene as chalk down and trees and green meadows, and have an air of immemorial quiet and a human life that is part of nature's life, unstrenuous, slow and sweet, has not yet been greatly disturbed. It is not here as in some parts of Hampshire, and as it is pretty well everywhere in Surrey, that most favoured county, the Xanadu of the mighty ones of the money-market, where they oftenest decree their lordly pleasure-domes. Those vast red-brick habitations of the Kubla Khans of the city which stare and glare at you from all openings in pine woods, across wide heaths and commons, and from hill-sides and hill-tops, produce the idea that they were turned out complete at some stupendous manufactory of houses at a distance, and sent out by the hundred to be set up wherever wanted, and where they are almost always utterly out of keeping with their surroundings, and consequently a blot on and a disfigurement of the landscape.
Itchen Valley
Happily the downland slopes overlooking these green valleys have so far been neglected by the class of persons who live in mansions; for the time being they are ours, and by "ours" I mean all those who love and reverence this earth. But which of the two {245} is best I cannot say. One prefers the Test and another the Itchen, doubtless because in a matter of this kind the earth-lover will invariably prefer the spot he knows most intimately; and for this reason, much as I love the Test, long as I would linger by it, I love the Itchen more, having had a closer intimacy with it. I dare say that some of my friends, old Wykehamists, who as boys caught their first trout close by the ancient sacred city and have kept up their acquaintance with its crystal currents, will laugh at me for writing as I do. But there are places, as there are faces, which draw the soul, and with which, in a little while, one becomes strangely intimate.
The first English cathedral I ever saw was that of Winchester: that was a long time ago; it was then and on a few subsequent occasions that I had glimpses of the river that runs by it. They were like momentary sights of a beautiful face, caught in passing, of some person unknown. Then it happened that in June 1900, cycling Londonwards from Beaulieu and the coast by Lymington, I came to the valley, and to a village about half-way between Winchester and Alresford, on a visit to friends in their summer fishing retreat.
A riverside cottage
They had told me about their cottage, which serves them all the best purposes of a lodge in the vast wilderness. Fortunately in this case the "boundless contiguity of shade" of the woods is some little distance away, on the other side of the ever green Itchen valley, which, narrowing at this spot, is not much more than a couple of hundred yards wide. {246} A long field's length away from the cottage is the little ancient, rustic, tree-hidden village. The cottage, too, is pretty well hidden by trees, and has the reed- and sedge- and grass-green valley and swift river before it, and behind and on each side green fields and old untrimmed hedges with a few old oak trees growing both in the hedgerows and the fields. There is also an ancient avenue of limes which leads nowhere and whose origin is forgotten. The ground under the trees is overgrown with long grass and nettles and burdock; nobody comes or goes by it, it is only used by the cattle, the white and roan and strawberry shorthorns that graze in the fields and stand in the shade of the limes on very hot days. Nor is there any way or path to the cottage; but one must go and come over the green fields, wet or dry. The avenue ends just at the point where the gently sloping chalk down touches the level valley, and the half-hidden, low-roofed cottage stands just there, with the shadow of the last two lime trees falling on it at one side. It was an ideal spot for a nature-lover and an angler to pitch his tent upon. Here a small plot of ground, including the end of the lime-tree avenue, was marked out, a hedge of sweetbriar planted round it, the cottage erected, and a green lawn made before it on the river side, and beds of roses planted at the back.
Nothing more—no gravel walks; no startling scarlet geraniums, no lobelias, no cinerarias, no calceolarias, nor other gardeners' abominations to hurt one's eyes and make one's head ache. And no dog, {247} nor cat, nor chick, nor child—only the wild birds to keep one company. They knew how to appreciate its shelter and solitariness; they were all about it, and built their nests amid the great green masses of ivy, honeysuckle, Virginia creeper, rose, and wild clematis which covered the trellised walls and part of the red roof with a twelve years' luxuriant growth. To this delectable spot I returned on 21st July to see the changeful summer of 1900 out, my friends having gone north and left me their cottage for a habitation.
"There is the wind on the heath, brother," and one heartily agrees with the half-mythical Petulengro that it is a very good thing; it had, indeed, been blowing off and on in my face for many months past; and from shadeless heaths and windy downs, and last of all, from the intolerable heat and dusty desolation of London in mid-July, it was a delightful change to this valley.
During the very hot days that followed it was pleasure enough to sit in the shade of the limes most of the day; there was coolness, silence, melody, fragrance; and, always before me, the sight of that moist green valley, which made one cool simply to look at it, and never wholly lost its novelty. The grass and herbage grow so luxuriantly in the water-meadows that the cows grazing there were half-hidden in their depth; and the green was tinged with the purple of seeding grasses, and red of dock and sorrel, and was everywhere splashed with creamy white of meadow-sweet. The channels of the swift {248} many-channelled river were fringed with the livelier green of sedges and reed-mace, and darkest green of bulrushes, and restful grey of reeds not yet in flower.
Bird visitors
The old limes were now in their fullest bloom; and the hotter the day the greater the fragrance, the flower, unlike the woodbine and sweetbriar, needing no dew nor rain to bring out its deliciousness. To me, sitting there, it was at the same time a bath and atmosphere of sweetness, but it was very much more than that to all the honey-eating insects in the neighbourhood. Their murmur was loud all day till dark, and from the lower branches that touched the grass with leaf and flower to their very tops the trees were peopled with tens and with hundreds of thousands of bees. Where they all came from was a mystery; somewhere there should be a great harvest of honey and wax as a result of all this noise and activity. It was a soothing noise, according with an idle man's mood in the July weather; and it harmonised with, forming, so to speak, an appropriate background to, the various distinct and individual sounds of bird life.
The birds were many, and the tree under which I sat was their favourite resting-place; for not only was it the largest of the limes, but it was the last of the row, and overlooked the valley, so that when they flew across from the wood on the other side they mostly came to it. It was a very noble tree, eighteen feet in circumference near the ground; at about twenty feet from the root, the trunk divided into two central boles and several of lesser size, and {249} these all threw out long horizontal and drooping branches, the lowest of which feathered down to the grass. One sat as in a vast pavilion, and looked up to a height of sixty or seventy feet through wide spaces of shadow and green sunlight, and sunlit golden-green foliage and honey-coloured blossom, contrasting with brown branches and with masses of darkest mistletoe.
Among the constant succession of bird visitors to the tree above me were the three pigeons—ring-dove, stock-dove, and turtle-dove; finches, tree-warblers, tits of four species, and the wren, tree-creeper, nuthatch, and many more. The best vocalists had ceased singing; the last nightingale I had heard utter its full song was in the oak woods of Beaulieu on 27th June: and now all the tree-warblers, and with them chaffinch, thrush, blackbird, and robin, had become silent. The wren was the leading songster, beginning his bright music at four o'clock in the morning, and the others, still in song, that visited me were the greenfinch, goldfinch, swallow, dunnock, and cirl bunting. From my seat I could also hear the songs in the valley of the reed and sedge warblers, reed-bunting, and grasshopper-warbler. These, and the polyglot starling, and cooing and crooning doves, made the last days of July at this spot seem not the silent season we are accustomed to call it.
Of these singers the goldfinch was the most pleasing. The bird that sang near me had assisted in rearing a brood in a nest on a low branch a few yards away, but {250} he still returned from the fields at intervals to sing; and seen, as I now saw him a dozen times a day, perched among the lime leaves and blossoms at the end of a slender bough, in his black and gold and crimson livery, he was by far the prettiest of my feathered visitors.
Cirl bunting
But the cirl bunting, the inferior singer, interested me most, for I am somewhat partial to the buntings, and he is the best of them, and the one I knew least about from personal observation.
On my way hither at the end of June, somewhere between Romsey and Winchester, a cock cirl bunting in fine plumage flew up before me and perched on the wire of a roadside fence. It was a welcome encounter, and, alighting, I stood for some time watching him. I did not know that I was in a district where this pretty species is more numerous than in any other place in England—as common, in fact, as the universal yellowhammer, and commoner than the more local corn-bunting. Here in July and August, in the course of an afternoon's walk, in any place where there are trees and grass fields, one can count on hearing half a dozen birds sing, every one of them probably the parent of a nestful of young. For this is the cirl bunting's pleasant habit. He assists in feeding and safeguarding the young, even as other songsters do who cease singing when this burden is laid upon them; but he is a bird of placid disposition, and takes his task more quietly than most; and, after returning from the fields with several grasshoppers in his throat and {251} beak and feeding his fledglings, he takes a rest, and at intervals in the day flies to his favourite tree, and repeats his blithe little song half a dozen times.
The song is not quite accurately described in the standard ornithological works as exactly like that of the yellowhammer, only without the thin, drawn-out note at the end, and therefore inferior—the little bit of bread, but without the cheese. It certainly resembles the yellowhammer's song, being a short note, a musical chirp, rapidly repeated several times. But the yellowhammer varies his song as to its time, the notes being sometimes fast and sometimes slow. The cirl's song is always the same in this respect, and is always a more rapid song than that of the other species. So rapid is it that, heard at a distance, it acquires almost the character of a long trill. In quality, too, it is the better song—clearer, brighter, brisker—and it carries farther; on still mornings I could hear one bird's song very distinctly at a distance of two hundred and fifty yards. The only good description of the cirl bunting's song—as well as the best general account of the bird's habits—which I have found, is in J. C. Bellamy's Natural History of South Devon (Plymouth and London), 1839, probably a forgotten book.
The best singer among the British buntings, he is also to my mind the prettiest bird. When he is described as black and brown, and lemon and sulphur-yellow, and olive and lavender-grey, and chestnut-red, we are apt to think that the effect of so many colours thrown upon his small body cannot be very {252} pleasing. But it is not so; these various colours are so harmoniously disposed, and have, in the lighter and brighter hues in the living bird, such a flower-like freshness and delicacy, that the effect is really charming.
When, in June, I first visited the cottage, my host took me into his dressing-room, and from it we watched a pair of cirl buntings bring food to their young in a nest in a small cypress standing just five yards from the window. The young birds were in the pinfeather stage, but they were unfortunately taken a very few days later by a rat, or stoat, or by that winged nest-robber the jackdaw, whose small cunning grey eyes are able to see into so many hidden things.
The birds themselves did not grieve overlong at their loss: the day after the nest was robbed the cock was heard singing—and he continued to sing every day from his favourite tree, an old black poplar growing outside the sweetbriar hedge in front of the cottage.
About this bird of a brave and cheerful disposition, more will ............