How Badly It
Contrasts With The Other Trees And Bushes That Flourish On The
Downs - Furze, Juniper, Holly, Blackthorn, And Hawthorn!
Two years ago, one day in the early spring, I was walking on
an extensive down in another part
Of Wiltshire with the tenant
of the land, who began there as a large sheep-farmer, but
eventually finding that he could make more with rabbits than
with sheep turned most of his land into a warren. 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.
Who would have thought to find a tree-planter in the wheatear,
the bird of the stony waste and open naked down, who does not
even ask for a bush to perch on?
It then occurred to me that in every case where I had observed
a clump of elder bushes on the bare downside, it grew upon a
village or collection of rabbit burrows, and it is probable
that in every case the clump owed its existence to the
wheatears who had dropped the seed about their nesting-place.
The clump where I had sought a shelter from the storm was
composed of large old dilapidated-looking half-dead elders;
perhaps their age was not above thirty or forty years, but
they looked older than hawthorns of one or two centuries; and
under them the rabbits had their diggings - huge old mounds and
burrows that looked like a badger's earth. Here, too, the
burrows had probably existed first and had attracted the
wheatears, and the birds had brought the seed from some
distant bush.
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