The Deer
Need Keep No Watch, There Are No Wolves To Pull Them Down; And It Is
Quite Probable That The Absence Of Any Danger Of That Kind Is The Reason
Of Their Tameness Even More Than The Fact That They Are Not Chased By
Man.
Nothing comes creeping stealthily through the fern, or hunts them
through the night.
They can slumber in peace. There is no larger beast of
prey than a stoat, or a stray cat. But they retain their dislike of dogs,
a dislike shared by cattle, as if they too dimly remembered a time when
they had been hunted. The list of animals still living within the pale
and still wild is short indeed. Besides the deer, which are not wild,
there are hares, rabbits, squirrels, two kinds of rat, - the land and the
water rat, - stoat, weasel, mole, and mouse. There are more varieties of
mouse than of any other animal: these, the weakest of all, have escaped
best, though exposed to so many enemies. A few foxes, and still fewer
badgers, complete the list, for there are no other animals here. Modern
times are fatal to all creatures of prey, whether furred or feathered;
and so even the owls are less numerous, both in actual numbers and in
variety of species, than they were even fifty years ago.
But the forest is not vacant. It is indeed full of happy life. Every
hollow tree - and there are many hollow trees where none are felled - has
its nest of starlings, or titmice, or woodpeckers. Woodpeckers are
numerous, and amusing to watch. Wood-pigeons and turtle-doves abound, the
former in hundreds nesting here. Rooks, of course, and jackdaws, - daws
love hollow trees, - jays, and some magpies. The magpie is one of the
birds which have partly disappeared from the fields of England. There are
broad lands where not one is to be seen. Once looking from the road at
two in a field, a gentleman who was riding by stopped his horse and
asked, quite interested, 'Are those magpies?' I replied that they were.
'I have not seen any since I was a boy till now,' he said. Magpies are
still plentiful in some places, as in old parks in Somersetshire, but
they have greatly diminished in the majority of instances. There are some
here, and many jays. These are handsome birds, and with the green
woodpeckers give colour to the trees. Night-jars or fern-owls fly round
the outskirts and through the open glades in the summer twilight. These
are some of the forest birds. The rest visit the forest or live in it,
but are equally common to hedgerow and copse. Woodpeckers, jays, magpies,
owls, night-jars, are all distinctly forest and park birds, and are
continually with the deer. The lesser birds are the happier that there
are fewer hawks and crows. The deer are not torn with the cruel tooth of
hound or wolf, nor does the sharp arrow sting them.
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