Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/202

148 stands a fine old oak, many hundreds of years old, slowly perishing in the strangle-hold of the flourishing ivy; here beneath the sombre fir the grass is withered, robbed of the moisture it craved; there the trailing bramble has invaded and choked abed of hyacinths; there rushes crowded out the blue forget-me-not. Park and woodland are a battlefield.

Here lies a rabbit, bitten in the neck by a stoat; there a duckling mallard, torn and mangled by the murderous brown rat. Beside the tussock where the tree pipit has its cosy nest are the callow nestlings, stark and stiff, shouldered out of house and home by that diabolical foster-brother, the infant cuckoo. Nailed on the barn are the fostering, wind-dried, grinning trophies of the keeper's prowess—hawks, owls, jays, magpies, slender stoats and weasels, grey-pated daws and a rook or two, a squirrel, and the tails of sundry domestic cats.

Under the owl roost, the thick ivy on another oak, lie a litter of pellets, larger than those of the kestrel but easier to break up and analyse; these show what destruction goes on amongst the lesser woodland folk when the reeling barn owl makes its rounds. Rat skulls are there—the murderer murdered—jaws and limbs of bank, field, and water vole, house and field mice, shrews galore, even bats mingled with fragments of sparrows and finches, torn in the night watches from their perches. The heron has left an unfinished meal on the margin of the pool, and on the unpicked shoulder of this bream is a deep wound