egin to rise up towards the
Downs. Certainly, I have seldom seen such vast numbers of small birds.
Up from the stubble flew sparrows, chaffinches, greenfinches,
yellow-hammers, in such flocks that the low-cropped hedge was covered
with them. A second correspondence appeared in the spring upon the same
subject, and again the scarcity of small birds was deplored.

So far as the neighbourhood of London was concerned, this was the exact
reverse of the truth.

Small birds swarmed, as I have already stated, in every ploughed field.
All the birdcatchers in London with traps and nets and limed twigs could
never make the slightest appreciable difference to such flocks. I have
always expressed my detestation of the birdcatcher; but it is founded on
other grounds, and not from any fear of the diminution of numbers only.
Where the birdcatcher does inflict irretrievable injury is in this
way--a bird, say a nightingale, say a goldfinch, has had a nest for
years in the corner of a garden, or an apple-tree in an orchard. The
birdcatcher presently decoys one or other of these, and thenceforward
the spot is deserted. The song is heard no more; the nest never again
rebuilt.

The first spring I resided in Surrey I was fairly astonished and
delighted at the bird life which proclaimed itself everywhere. The
bevies of chiffchaffs and willow wrens which came to the thickets in the
furze, the chorus of thrushes and blackbirds, the chaffinches in the
elms, the greenfinches in the hedges, wood-pigeons and turtle-doves in
the copses, tree-pipits about the oaks in the cornfields; every bush,
every tree, almost every clod, for the larks were so many, seemed to
have its songster. As for nightingales, I never knew so many in the most
secluded country.

There are more round about London than in all the woodlands I used to
ramble through. When people go into the country they really leave the
birds behind them. It was the same, I found, after longer observation,
with birds perhaps less widely known as with those universally
recognised--such, for instance, as shrikes. The winter when the cry was
raised that there were no birds, that the blackbirds and thrushes had
left the lawns and must be dead, and how wicked it would be to take a
nest next year, I had not the least, difficulty in finding plenty of
them.

They had simply gone to the water meadows, the brooks, and moist places
generally. Every locality where running water kept the ground moist and