Page:Bird Life Throughout the Year (Salter, 1913).djvu/289

Rh and has stored this double handful of haw-stones in a crevice of the limestone rock.

A fruitful autumn is hailed as making all the difference between plenty and want. Note the riotous rejoicing of rooks, jays, pheasants, wood-pigeons when there is a heavy fall of acorns and beech-mast. And in addition to these larger fowl, which bolt them whole or in good-sized fragments until their crops are round and firm as a cricket ball, acorn and beech-nut afford entertainment for weeks to chaffinches and bramblings, great and coal-tits, which peck and hammer chippings from them in a more retail manner. Look further at all the lavish profusion of the hedgerows in a kindly season, at bryonies white and black, cornel, buckthorn, privet and guelder-rose. One of the beauties of a fine and warm autumn is that the wood of tree and shrub being well ripened, we are sure next spring of a profusion of blossom, first and foremost requisite for an abundance of hedge-fruit later in the year. Much must of course depend upon the state of the weather at the time of flowering, for, by no possible understanding of the law of cause and effect are we able to see in a plentiful supply of berries an anticipation of the needs of the birds during a severe winter to follow.

It is evident that some of the hedge-fruits are not favourites with the birds; these are probably unpalatable or actually unwholesome. The coral ropes of