For some years, until 1918, goldfinches were quite common in Hampshire and Dorsetshire.  I have seen a flock of over forty together.  I had seven nests on my premises here one summer; they go on breeding very late, and I have found their nests with young birds half-fledged while summer-pruning apple trees in August.  They come into my garden close to the windows in May, after the ripening seeds of the myosotis (forget-me-not) in the spring-bedding.  I never remember seeing a goldfinch at Aldington, which should show that the thistles were well under control, for the seed is a great attraction.  One often hears the practice of allowing thistles to run to seed condemned as criminal, for everybody knows that each thistle-down, carried by the wind, contains a seed, and that the attachment of a light structure of plumes is one of Nature’s methods of ensuring dissemination.  But, in Worcestershire, it is always asserted that thistle seed will not germinate—­I am referring to Cnicus arvensis—­and it is said that a prize of L50 offered for a seedling thistle remains unclaimed to this day.  I failed, myself, in trying to obtain young plants from seeds sown in a flower-pot, and I have never seen a seedling in all the thousands of miles I must have walked over young cornfields when my men were hoeing.

I have heard an interesting story about rooks which were causing a farmer much damage in a field newly sown with peas.  He erected a small shelter of hurdles, from which to shoot them, and for a time the shelter was sufficient to scare them, until they got used to it; but, when he entered it with his gun, they would not come near.  Thinking to deceive their sentinel, watching from a tree, he took a companion to the shelter, who remained for a time and then left, but still no rooks came near.  The farmer then took two companions, and presently sent them both away.  The arithmetic was too much for the rooks, and the scheme succeeded.  He concluded that their powers of enumeration were limited to counting “two,” and that “three” was beyond them.

Nightingales are scarce in the Forest; they do not like the solitude of the great woods, apparently preferring to inhabit roadsides and places where people and traffic are constantly passing.  They are specially abundant at the foot of the Cotswolds, and it is a treat to cycle steadily along the road between Broadway and Weston Subedge on a summer evening, where you no sooner lose the liquid notes of one, than you enter the territory of another, so continuous is the song for miles together.

In severe winters wood-pigeons did much damage at Aldington to young clover a few inches high; they roosted in “the island” adjoining my garden.  When they first descended they alighted in the wide-spreading branches of the leafless black poplars, where they could see all round, and reconnoitre the position; then, if all was quiet, in about ten minutes they took to the shelter of the fir trees for the night with much fluttering and beating of wings against the thick branches.  They devour the acorns in the Forest very greedily in the autumn, and I have seen one with crop so full that on my approach it could only with difficulty fly away to a short distance.  I found it near a small pond where, apparently, it had been drinking, and the acorns had expanded to an inconvenient extent.