Chapter 8

The return of the birds, and especially of wild fowl, to the London river is the result partly of the same causes which have restored the fish to its waters; partly, also, of measures affecting a wider area, but carried out with far less physical difficulty. Their presence is evidence that the tidal Thames now yields them a stock of food so abundant as to tempt birds like the heron, the water-hen, and the kingfisher back to their old haunts. It shows, secondly, that the by-laws for the protection of birds passed by the counties of London, Surrey, and Middlesex, and by the Thames Conservancy (which was the pioneer in this direction by forbidding shooting on the river), are so far effective that the stock is rapidly increasing; and, lastly, that the birds are preserved and left in peace to a great extent on the London river itself. The following are the most marked instances of this return of river fowl which have come under the writer's notice; but in every case there have been preliminary advances on the part of the birds, which show that what is now recorded is only one step further in the general tendency to resume their old habits, or even to go beyond their former limits of place and time in resorting to the river. The herons from Richmond Park have extended their usual nightly fishing ground, which formerly ended at Kew Bridge, four miles further down the river, almost to Hammersmith Bridge, and in place of coming late at night, under cover of darkness, have made a practice of flying down at dusk, and pitching on the edge of Chiswick Eyot.[1] Their regular appearance led to various inquiries as to the nature of the "big birds like geese" which flew down the river and made a noise in the evening, questions which were answered, in one case, by the appearance of one of the birds as it swung round in the air opposite a terrace of houses, and dropped in the stream to fish, not twenty yards from the road. As the heron is naturally among the shyest of all waterside birds, and seeks solitude above all things, these visits show that the quantity of fish in the lower river must be great, and also that the London herons, now never shot at, are losing their inbred dislike of houses and humanity. Their footprints have been found on the mud opposite a creek in Hammersmith, round which is one of the most crowded quarters of the poorer folk of West London. The birds had been fishing within ten yards of the houses, which at this point are largely inhabited by organ-grinders and vendors of ice-creams, callings which do not promote quiet and solitude in the immediate neighbourhood. In the evening and early morning a few wild ducks accompany the herons as low as the reach above Hammersmith Bridge, and single ducks have been seen even at midday flying overhead. At sunrise one Midsummer Day I saw a sheldrake (probably an escaped bird) flying down the river, looking very splendid in its black, white, and red plumage, in the bright light of the morning. It haunted the reach for some days, and was not shot. Among other visitors to this part of the river and its island during spring were a curlew, which fed for some time on the eyot during the early morning, and a pair of pheasants, one of which, an old-fashioned English cock bird, was subsequently captured unhurt. A flock of sandpipers remained there for some weeks, and during the summer numbers of sedge-warblers have nested on and around the eyot; the cuckoo has been a regular visitor to the osier-bed in the early morning, probably with a view to laying its eggs in the sedge-warblers' nests. As a set-off to these early visits of the cuckoo, a nightjar has hunted round the islet for moths, both at dusk and during the night, when its note may often be heard. This is a fairly long list of interesting birds revisiting a portion of the river which the London boundary crosses. At a distance of less than half a mile, on some ornamental water near the river, an even more unexpected increase of the bird population has been noted. A pair of kingfishers nested and reared their brood in an old gravel-pit, while several nests of young dabchicks hatched by the pool.[2] There also during the spring a pair of tufted ducks appeared, and remained for some days before going on their journey to their breeding haunts. One lamentable event in the bird life of the Thames deserves mention. A pair of swans ventured to nest within a few hundred feet of the London boundary. The hen, a very shy young bird, laid three eggs on Chiswick Eyot, and the pair, being supplied with material, diligently built up their nest day by day until it was above the tide level. They sat for five weeks, the cock bird keeping anxious guard day and night, while the hen would probably have died of starvation unless fed by kindly neighbours, for the river affords very little food for a swan, and this required far longer time to find than the bird was willing to spare from her nest. This was then robbed in the night, and the cock bird maltreated in defending it. The return of fish and fowl to the London Thames shows by the best of tests that the efforts of the Thames Conservancy to preserve the amenities of the river, of the Sewage Committee of the County Council to maintain its purity, or rather to render it less impure at its mouth, and of the adjacent County Authorities to protect bird life, are all yielding good results, and justify the courage with which such an apparently hopeless task was undertaken. To the Conservancy I would offer one or two suggestions, which County Councillors might also consider. The river is the only large _natural_ feature still left in the area of London and Greater London. Now that it contains water in place of sewage, there is a guarantee that its main element as a natural amenity in a great city will be maintained, and as it becomes purer, so will the facilities which it offers for boating, fishing, and bathing increase. But it should not be _embanked_ beyond the present limit at Putney. Stone walls are not a thing of beauty, and a natural river-bank is. At present, from Putney to Richmond the greater part of the Thames flows between natural boundaries. If these can be maintained, the growth of willows, sedge, hemlock, reeds, water ranunculus, and many other fine and luxuriant plants affords insect food for the fish and shelter for the birds, besides giving to the river its natural floral border. If this is replaced by stone banks the birds and the fish will move elsewhere.

[1] Mr. J.E. Vincent tells me that in 1902 the herons were heard as far down the river as Chelsea.

[2] In the beautiful grounds of Chiswick House, where the present occupier, Dr. T. Tuke, carefully preserves all wild birds.

OSIERS AND WATER-CRESS

Osiers, the shoots of which are cut yearly for making baskets, crates, lobster-pots, and eel-traps are a form of crop of which not nearly as much is made in the Thames Valley as their profitable return warrants. Properly managed they nearly always pay well, and, in addition, they are very ornamental, and for the whole of the summer, autumn, and winter are one of the very best forms of covert for game. They are commonly seen near rivers, especially in parts where the ground is flooded in winter. But osiers may be grown anywhere on good ground, and are a rapid and paying crop, giving very little trouble, though they need some attention even on the banks of tidal rivers. It is estimated that in the whole of Great Britain there are only between 7,000 and 8,000 acres of osier beds, but these average three tons of rods per acre, and the value of the crop when harvested is often at least L15 per acre gross return. As fruit cultivation is immensely increasing in England, there is a corresponding increase in the demand for baskets to put the fruit in. This is the main reason why osiers, unlike most farm crops, keep up their price. Immense quantities are now imported from Belgium, France, and Germany because our own crop is not nearly sufficient.[1] They do not require a wet soil or to be near water: all that the willow roots need is that the land shall be good and not too dry or sandy. Stagnant, boggy ground does not suit them at all, though they will grow well in light loam. Many species of osier are of most brilliant colouring in winter and early spring. In some the rods are golden yellow; in others the bark is almost scarlet with a bright polish, and the osier bed forms a brilliant object from December to February, just before the rods are cut. The kind of willow grown varies from the slender, tough withes used in making small baskets and eel-traps, to the large, fast-growing rods suited for making crates for heavy goods. The planter must find out for which kind there is the readiest market in the neighbourhood, and then get his land ready. It needs thorough clearing and trenching to the depth of from twenty to thirty inches. The young osiers should then be put in. These should be taken from a nursery in which they have been "schooled" for one year, as in that case they will produce a crop fit to cut one year earlier than if the cuttings have been put at once in the new osier-bed. The cuttings when transferred to the bed should be put in twelve inches apart in the rows, and these rows made at two feet distance from each other. They will need hoeing to keep the ground clear, which will cost Ll to L2 per acre for the first two years, and this should be done before the middle of June. When the osiers are well started they grow so densely that they kill out the weeds themselves. The rate of growth even on ordinary field-land is astonishing; they will add eighteen inches in a week. February and March are the months for planting, and March also sees the osier harvest when the time comes to cut them. In the fens the harvesting of the rods begins earlier, but this depends usually on the season, the object being to cut them before the sap begins to rise. Osiers particularly invite the attention of those who are desirous of planting coverts for game. They are a paying crop, and a quick crop, giving cover sooner and of better quality than almost any other form of underwood, and are also very ornamental. It is true that they are cut yearly, but this is not till the shooting season is over. Meantime there is no covert which pheasants like so much as osier-beds, especially if they are near water.

On Chiswick Eyot, which is entirely planted with osiers, there are standing at the time of writing six stacks of bundles set upright. Each stack contains about fifty bundles of the finest rods, nine feet high. Thus the eyot yields at least three hundred bundles. This osier-bed is cut quite early in the year, usually in January, and by February all the fresh rods are planted. Before being peeled the osiers are stood upright in water for a month, and some begin to bud again. This is to make the sap run up, I presume, by which means the bark comes off more readily. I believe that the Chiswick osiers, being of the largest size, are used for making crates, and that they are cut early because there is no need to peel them.

Water-cress growing is an increasing business in the Thames Valley, where the head of every little brook or river in the chalk is used for this purpose. This is good both for business in general and for the fish, for water-cress causes the accumulation of a vast quantity of fish food in various forms.

The artificial culture of water-cress is comparatively modern, and a remarkably pretty side-industry of the country.

Formerly, the cress gatherer was usually a gipsy, or "vagrom man," who wandered up to the springs and by the head waters of brooks at dawn, and took his cresses as the mushroom-gatherer takes mushrooms--by dint of early rising and trespass.

The places where water-cress grows naturally are usually singularly attractive. The plant grows best where springs actually bubble from the ground, either where the waters break out on the lower sides of the chalk downs, or in some limestone-begotten stream where springs rise, sometimes for a distance of one or two miles, bubbling and swelling in the very bed of the brook. There, among dead reeds and flags, the pale green cresses appear very early in the spring, for the water is always warmer which rises from the bosom of the earth. Trout and wild duck haunt the same spots, and one often sees, stuck on a board in the stream, a notice warning off the poor water-cress gatherer, who was supposed to poach the fish.

The happy-go-lucky cress gathering is now a thing of the past, and there are few rural industries more skilfully and profitably conducted. I knew a farmer who, having lost all his capital on a large farm on the downs, took as a last resource to growing the humble "creases" by the springs below. He has now made money once more, and been able to take and cultivate another farm nearly as large as that he worked before, while the area of his water-cress beds still grows.

Wherever a chalk stream, however small, breaks out of the hills, it is usual to let it to a water-cress grower. He widens the channels, and year by year every square foot of the upper waters is planted with cress. Each year, too, new and larger beds are added below, and the cresses creep down the stream. When they encroach on good spawning ground this is very bad for trout; but the beds are pretty enough, forming successive flats, on different levels, of vivid green.

The scene on the Water-cress Farm shows the complete metamorphosis undergone by what was once a swift running brook when once the new culture is taken in hand. When left to Nature, the little chalk stream might truly have said, in the words of the poem--

"I murmur under moon and stars In brambly wildernesses, I linger by my shingly bars, I loiter round my cresses."

Now all the brambles and shingle are gone, and the stream is condemned to "loiter round its cresses," and to do nothing else. The water must not be more than six inches deep, and it must not flow too fast. To secure these conditions little dams, some made of earth and some of boards, are built from side to side of the brook. The water thus appears to descend in a series of steps, each communicating with the next by earthen pipes, through which the water spouts. When a fresh bed of cresses is to be planted, which is done usually towards the end of summer, a sluice is opened, and only an inch or so of water left. On this cuttings from the cress are strewn, which soon take root, and make a bed fit for gathering by next spring.

From February to April the cresses are at their best. Their flavour is good, their leaves crisp, and they come at a time when no outdoor salad can be grown. As the beds are set close to the fresh springs, they are seldom frozen. Hence, in very hard weather all the birds flock to the cress-beds, where they find running water and a certain quantity of food. If the beds do freeze, the cress is destroyed, and the loss is very serious.

Gathering cresses is a very pleasant job in summer, but in early spring one of the most cheerless occupations conceivable short of gathering Iceland moss. The men wear waterproof boots, reaching up the thighs, and thick stockings inside these. But the water is icy cold. The cress plants are then not tall, as they are later, but short and bushy. They need careful picking, too, in order not to injure the second crop. Then the cold and dripping cresses have to be trimmed, tied into bundles, and packed. When "dressed" they are laid in strong, flat hampers, called "flats," the lids of which are squeezed down tight on to them. The edges are then cut neatly with a sharp knife, and the baskets placed in running water, until the carts are ready to drive them to the station. Not London only but the great towns of the North consume the cress grown in the South of England. A great part of that grown in the springs which break out under the Berkshire Downs goes to Manchester.

One basket holds about two hundred large bunches. From each of these a dozen of the small bunches retailed at a penny each can be made; and every square rod of the cress-bed yields two baskets at a cutting.

In one of the East London suburbs, near to the reservoirs of a water company, it has been found worth while to create an artificial spring, by making an arrangement with the waterworks for a constant supply. This flows from a stand-pipe and irrigates the cress-beds, which produce good cresses, though not of such fine flavour as those grown in natural spring water and upon a chalk soil.

[1] Fishermen in the Isle of Wight send all the way to the Midlands to get the little scarlet withes required for making lobster-pots.

FOG AND DEW PONDS

The cycle of dry seasons seems to be indefinitely prolonged. During the period, now lasting since 1893, in which we have had practically no wet summers, and many very hot ones, a very curious phenomenon has been remarked upon the high and dry chalk downs. The dew ponds, so called because they are believed to be fed by dew and vapours, and not by rain, have kept their water, while the deeper ponds in the valleys have often failed. The shepherds on the downs are careful observers of these ponds, because if they run dry they have to take their sheep to a distance or draw water for them from very deep wells. They maintain that there are on the downs some dew ponds which have never been known to run dry. Others which do run dry do so because the bottom is injured by driving sheep into them and so perforating the bed when the water is shallow, and not from the failure of the invisible means of supply. There seem to be two sources whence these ponds draw water, the dew and the fogs. Summer fogs are very common at night on the high downs, though people who go to bed and get up at normal hours do not know of them. These fogs are so wet that a man riding up on to the hills at 4 a.m. may find his clothes wringing wet, and every tree dripping water, just as during the first week of last November in London many trees distilled pools of water from the fog, as if it had been pouring with rain. Such was the case on July 4th, 1901. The fogs will draw up the hollows towards the ponds, and hang densely round them. Fog and dew may or may not come together; but generally there is a heavy dew deposit on the grass when a fog lies on the hills. After such fogs, though rain may not have fallen for a month, and there is no water channel or spring near the dew pond, the water in it rises prodigiously. Every shepherd knows this, but the actual measurements of this contribution of the vapour-laden air have not often been taken. Yet the subject is an interesting one, and of real importance to all dwellers on high hills, especially those which, like the South Downs, are near the sea, and attract great masses of fog and vapour-laden cloud, but contain few springs on the high rolls of the hills.

The following are some notes of the rise in a dew pond caused by winter fogs on the Berkshire Downs. They were recorded by the Rev. J.G. Cornish at Lockinge, in Berkshire, and taken at his suggestion by a shepherd[1] in a simple and ingenious way. Whenever he thought that a heavy dew or fog was to be expected (and the shepherds are rarely wrong as weather prophets) he notched a stick, and drove it into the pond overnight, so that the notch was level with the surface. Next morning he pulled it up, marked how high the water had risen above the notch, and nicked it again for measurement. On January 18th, after a night of fog, the water rose 1-1/2 in.; on the next day, after another fog, 2 in.; and on January 24th, 1 in. Five nights of winter fog gave a total rise of 8 ins.--a vast weight of water even in a pond of moderate area. Five days of heavy spring dew in April and May, with no fog, gave a total rise in the same pond of 3-1/2 ins., the dews, though one was very heavy, giving less water than the fogs, one of which even in May caused the water to rise 1-1/2 ins.[2] The shepherds say that it is always well to have one or two trees hanging over the pond, for that these distil the water from the fog. This is certainly the case. The drops may be heard raining on to the surface in heavy mists. During the first October mists of 1891 the pavement under certain trees was as wet as if it had been raining, while elsewhere the dust lay like powder. The water was still dripping from these trees at 7 a.m. Under the plane-trees the fallen leaves were as wet from distilled moisture as if they had been dipped in water; yet the ground beyond the spread of the tree was dry. The writer tried a simple experiment in this distilling power of trees. At sundown, two vessels were placed, one under a small cherry-tree in full leaf, the other on some stone flags. Heavy dew was falling and condensing on all vegetation, and on some other objects, with the curious capriciousness which the dewfall seems to show. The leaves of some trees were already wet. In the morning the vessel under the tree, and that in the open, both held a considerable quantity of water, that on the stone caught from dew and condensation, that under the tree mainly from what had dripped from the leaves, which clearly intercepted the direct fall of dew. But the vessel under the tree held just twice as much water as that in the open, the surplus being almost entirely derived from drops precipitated from the leaves. Mr. Sanderson, the manager of the elephant-catching establishment of the Indian Government, noted that in heavy dews in the jungle the water condensed by the leaves could be heard falling like a heavy shower of rain.