The Higher
Part Of This Down Was Overgrown With Furze, Mixed With Holly
And Other Bushes, But The Slopes Were Mostly Very Bare.
At
one spot on a wide bare slope where the rabbits had formed a
big group of burrows there was a close little thicket of young
elder trees, looking exceedingly conspicuous in the bright
green of early April.
Calling my companion's attention to
this little thicket I said something about the elder growing
on the open downs where it always appeared to be out of
harmony with its surroundings. "I don't suppose you planted
elders here," I said.
"No, but I know who did," he returned, and he then gave me
this curious history of the trees. Five years before, the
rabbits, finding it a suitable spot to dig in, probably
because of a softer chalk there, made a number of deep burrows
at that spot. When the wheatears, or "horse-maggers" as he
called them, returned in spring two or three pairs attached
themselves to this group of burrows and bred in them. There
was that season a solitary elder-bush higher up on the down
among the furze which bore a heavy crop of berries; and when
the fruit was ripe he watched the birds feeding on it, the
wheatears among them. The following spring seedlings came up
out of the loose earth heaped about the rabbit burrows, and as
they were not cut down by the rabbits, for they dislike the
elder, they grew up, and now formed a clump of fifty or sixty
little trees of six feet to eight feet in height.
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