W. H. Hudson - The Book of a Naturalist

W. H. HUDSON

This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-4005-0

PREFACE

I T is necessary that a book should have a title, and important that this should be descriptive of the book: accordingly, I was pleased with my good fortune and myself when I hit upon one which was not merely descriptive but was attractive as well.

This was a long time ago when these studies, essays and sketches of animal life began to accumulate on my hands and I foresaw the book. Unhappily, long before my book was ready my nice title had occurred to some one else and was duly given by Sir E. Ray Lankester to his Diversions of a Naturalista collection of papers on a vast variety of subjects which had been appearing serially under another title. I was very much annoyed, not only because he is a big man and I am a little one and my need was therefore greater, but also because the title appeared to me better suited to my book than to his. He deals with the deep problems of biology and is not exactly a naturalist in the old original sense of the word: one who is mainly concerned with the "life and conversation of animals" and whose work is consequently more like play than his can be, even when it is Science from an Easy Chair.

What then was I to do, seeing that all possible changes had been rung on such general titles as Journals, Letters, Notes, Gleanings, and what not, of a Naturalist? There was no second string to my bow since Recreations had already been used by my friend J. E. Harting for his book. In sheer desperation I took this title, which would fit any work on Natural History ever published. Doubtless it would have been an improvement if I could have put in the "Field" before "Naturalist" to show that it was not a compilation, but the title could not be made longer even by a word.

Some of the chapters in this volume now appear for the first time; more of them, however, are taken from or based on articles which have appeared in various periodicals: the Fortnightly Review, National Review, Country Life, Nation, the New Statesman, and others. I am obliged to the Editors of the Times and Chambers's Journal for permission to use two short copyright articles on the Rat and Squirrel which appeared in those journals.

W. H. H UDSON.

CONTENTS

I

LIFE IN A PINE WOOD

P EOPLE, B IRDS, A NTS

S OME years ago a clever gentleman, a landowner no doubt with pine plantations on his property, made the interesting discovery that the ideal place to live in was a pine wood, owing to the antiseptic and medicinal qualities emanating from the trees. You could smell them and began to feel better the moment you entered the wood. Naturally there was a rush to the pines just as there had been a rush to the hill-tops in response to Tyndall's flag-waving and exultant shouts from Hindhead, and as there had been a rush over a century earlier to the seaside in obedience to Dr. Russell's clarion call. I have no desire myself to live among pines, simply because I cannot endure to be shut off from this green earth with sight of flocks and herds. Woods are sometimes good to live in: I have spent happy months in a woodman's cottage in a forest; but the trees were mostly oak and beech and there were wide green spaces and an abundant wild life. Pine woods, especially plantations, are monotonous because the trees are nearly all pines and one tree is like another, and their tall, bare trunks wall you in, and their dark stiff foliage is like a roof above you. I, too, like being in a pine wood, just as I like being by the sea, for a few hours or a day, but for a place to live in I should prefer a moor, a marsh, a sea-salting, or any other empty, desolate place with a wide prospect.

In spite of this feeling I actually did spend a great part of last summer in such a place. It is an extensive tract, which when the excitement and rush for the medicinal pines began, was first seized upon by builders as being near London and in a highly aristocratic neighbourhood. Immediately, as by a miracle, large ornate houses sprang up like painted agarics in the autumn woodshouses suitable for the occupation of important persons. The wood itself was left untouched; the houses, standing a quarter of a mile or more apart, with their gardens and lawns, were like green, flowery oases scattered about in its sombre wilderness. Gardens and lawns are a great expense, the soil being a hungry sand, and for all the manuring and watering the flowers have a somewhat sad and sickly look, and the lawns a poor thin turf, half grass and half moss.

As a naturalist I was curious to observe the effect of life in a pine wood on the inhabitants. It struck me that it does not improve their health, or make them happy, and that they suffer most in summer, especially on warm windless days. They do not walk in their woods; they hasten to the gate which lets them out on the road and takes them to the villageor to some point from which they can get a sight of earth outside the pines. They are glad to escape from their surroundings, and are never so happy as when going away on a long visit to friends living no matter where, in the country or abroad, so long as it was not in a pine wood. I should imagine that Mariana herself, supposing that she had survived to the present day and had been persuaded to come down south to try the effect of living in a pine wood, would soon wish to go back to her moated grange on a Lincolnshire flat, for all its ancient dust and decay, with no sound to break the sultry noonday brooding silence save the singing of the blue fly i' the pane and the small shrill shriek of the mouse behind the rotting wainscot.

So much for the human dwellers among the "crepuscular pines." I am quoting an expression of the late lamented Henry James, which he used not of pine woods generally but of this very wood, well known to him too when he was a guest in the house. But he didn't love it or he would have been a more frequent visitor; as it was, he preferred to see his dear friendsall his friends were very dear to himwhen they were away from the twilight shelter of their trees in ever bright and beautiful London.

I was perhaps more interested in the non-human inhabitants of the wood. The wood that was mine to walk in, the part which belonged to the house and which as a fact I alone used, covered an area of about sixty acres and was one with the entire wood, only divided from the rest by oak palings. When one turned from the lawns and gardens into the wood it was like passing from the open sunlit air to the twilight and still atmosphere of a cathedral interior. It was also a strangely silent place; if a thrush or chaffinch was heard to sing, the sound came from the garden I had quitted or from some other garden in the wood still farther away. The only small birds in these pines were those on a brief visit, and little parties of tits drifted through. Nevertheless, the woodthe part I was privileged to walk inhad its own appropriate faunasquirrels, wood-pigeons, a family of jays, another of magpies, a pair of yaffles, and one of sparrow-hawks. Game is not preserved in these woods which are parcelled out to the different houses in lots of a dozen to fifty or more acres; consequently several species which are on the gamekeeper's black list are allowed to exist. Most of the birds I have named bred during the summerthe hawks and yaffles, a dozen or more pairs of wood-pigeons, and a pair each of magpies and jays. The other members of the family parties of the last two species had no doubt been induced by means of sharp beaky arguments to go and look for nesting-places elsewhere.