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The Naturalist on the Thames

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[Illustration: FOX FLUSHING PHEASANTS. _From a drawing by Lancelot
Speed._]


THE NATURALIST ON THE THAMES

BY

C.J. CORNISH, F.Z.S.






PREFACE

Having spent the greater part of my outdoor life in the Thames Valley, in
the enjoyment of the varied interests of its natural history and sport, I
have for many years hoped to publish the observations contained in the
following chapters. They have been written at different intervals of time,
but always with a view to publication in the form of a commentary on the
natural history and character of the valley as a whole, from the upper
waters to the mouth. For permission to use those which have been
previously printed I have to thank the editors and proprietors of the
_Spectator_, _Country Life_, and the _Badminton Magazine_.

C.J. CORNISH.

ORFORD HOUSE,
CHISWICK MALL.






CONTENTS


THE THAMES AT SINODUN HILL

THE FILLING OF THE THAMES

THE SHELLS OF THE THAMES

THE ANTIQUITY OF RIVER PLANTS

INSECTS OF THE THAMES

"THE CHAVENDER OR CHUB"

THE WORLD'S FIRST BUTTERFLIES

BUTTERFLY SLEEP

CRAYFISH AND TROUT

FOUNTAINS AND SPRINGS

BIRD MIGRATION DOWN THE THAMES

WITTENHAM WOOD

SPORT AT WITTENHAM

SPORT AT WITTENHAM (_continued_)

A FEBRUARY FOX HUNT

EWELME--A HISTORICAL RELIC

EEL-TRAPS

SHEEP, PLAIN AND COLOURED

SOME RESULTS OF WILD-BIRD PROTECTION

OSIERS AND WATER-CRESS

FOG AND DEW PONDS

POISONOUS PLANTS

ANCIENT THAMES MILLS

THE BIRDS THAT STAY

ANCIENT HEDGES

THE ENGLISH MOCKING BIRD

FLOWERS OF THE GRASS FIELDS

RIVERSIDE GARDENING

COTTAGES AND CAMPING OUT

NETTING STAGS IN RICHMOND PARK

RICHMOND OLD DEER PARK

FISH IN THE LONDON RIVER

CHISWICK EYOT

CHISWICK FISHERMEN

BIRDS ON THAMES RESERVOIRS

THE CARRION CROW

LONDON'S BURIED ELEPHANTS

SWANS, BLACK AND WHITE

CANVEY ISLAND

THE LONDON THAMES AS A WATERWAY

THE THAMES AS A NATIONAL TRUST






LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


A FOX FLUSHING PHEASANTS

WILD DUCK

A FULL THAMES

SHELLS OF THE THAMES

A FLOWERY BANK

BURR REED AND FLOWERING RUSH

A MONSTER CHUB

BUTTERFLIES AT REST

A TROUT

OTTERS

A WATERHEN ON HER NEST

A DABCHICK

A BADGER

FOX AND CUB

EWELME POOL

A NIGHTJAR AND YOUNG ONE

A REED-BUNTING

PEELING OSIERS

BOTLEY MILL

EEL BUCKS

ORCHIS

WATER VIOLET AND WILD IRIS

A NETTED STAG

BREAM AND ROACH

A GRAMPUS AT CHISWICK

SMELTS

THE LOBSTER SMACK INN, CANVEY ISLAND

THE STEPPING-STONES AT BENFLEET

HAULING THE NETS FOR WHITEBAIT

FISHING BOATS AT LEIGH






THE NATURALIST ON THE THAMES




THE THAMES AT SINODUN HILL


Fresh water is almost the oldest thing on earth. While the rocks have been
melted, the sea growing salter, and the birds and beasts perfecting
themselves or degenerating, the fresh water has been always the same,
without change or shadow of turning. So we find in it creatures which are
inconceivably old, still living, which, if they did not belong to other
worlds than ours, date from a time when the world was other than it is
now; and the fresh-water plants, equally prehistoric, on which these
creatures feed. Protected by this constant element the geographical range
of these animals and plants is as remarkable as their high antiquity.
There are in lake Tanganyika or the rivers of Japan exactly the same kinds
of shells as in the Thames, and the sedges and reeds of the Isis are found
from Cricklade to Kamschatka and beyond Bering Sea to the upper waters of
the Mackenzie and the Mississippi. The Thames, our longest fresh-water
river, and its containing valley form the largest natural feature in this
country. They are an organic whole, in which the river and its tributaries
support a vast and separate life of animals and plants, and modify that of
the hills and valleys by their course. Civil law has recognised the Thames
system as a separate area, and given to it a special government, that of
the Conservators, whose control now extends from the Nore to the remotest
springs in the hamlets in its watershed; and natural law did so long
before, when the valley became one of the migration routes of certain
southward-flying birds. Its course is of such remote antiquity that there
are those who hold that its bed may twice have been sunk beneath the sea,
and twice risen again above the face of the waters.[1] It has ever been a
masterful stream holding its own against the inner forces of the earth;
for where the chalk hills rose, silently, invisibly, in the long line from
the vale of White Horse to the Chilterns the river seems to have worn them
down as they rose at the crossing point at Pangbourne, and kept them
under, so that there was no barring of the Thames, and no subsequent
splitting of the barrier with gorges, cliffs, and falls. Its clear waters
pass from the oolite of the Cotswolds, by the blue lias and its fossils,
the sandstone rock at Clifton Hampden, the gravels of Wittenham, the great
chalk range of the downs, the greensand, the Reading Beds, to the
geological pie of the London Basin, and the beds of drifts and brick earth
in which lie bedded the frames and fragments of its prehistoric beasts. In
and beside its valley are great woods, parks, downs, springs, ancient
mills and fortresses, palaces and villages, and such homes of prehistoric
man as Sinodun Hill and the hut remains at Northfield. It has 151 miles of
fresh water and 77 of tideway, and is almost the only river in England in
which there are islands, the famous eyots, the lowest and largest of which
at Chiswick touches the London boundary.

After leaving Oxford the writer has lived for many years opposite this
typical and almost unspoilt reach of the London river, and for a
considerable time shot over the estate on the upper Thames of which
Sinodun Hill is the hub and centre. This fine outlier of the chalk, with
its twin mount Harp Hill, dominates not only the whole of the Thames
valley at its feet, but the two cross vales of the Thame and the Ock. On
the bank opposite the Thame joins the Isis, and from thence flows on the
THAMES. Weeks and months spent there at all seasons of the year gave even
better opportunities for becoming acquainted with the life of the Upper
Thames, than the London river did of learning what the tidal stream really
is and may become. Fish, fowl and foxes, rare Thames flowers and shy
Thames chub, butterflies, eel-traps, fountains and springs, river shells
and water insects, are all parts of the "natural commodities" of the
district. There is no better and more representative part of the river
than this. Close by is Nuneham, one of the finest of Thames-side parks,
and behind that the remains of wild Oxfordshire show in Thame Lane and
Clifton Heath. How many centuries look down from the stronghold on Sinodun
Hill, reckoning centuries by human occupation, no one knows or will know.
There stands the fortress of some forgotten race, and below it the double
rampart of a Roman camp, running from Thame to Isis. Beyond is Dorchester,
the abbey of the oldest see in Wessex, and the Abbey Mill. The feet of the
hills are clothed by Wittenham Wood, and above the wood stretches the
weir, and round to the west, on another great loop of the river, is Long
Wittenham and its lovely backwater. Even in winter, when the snow is
falling like bags of flour, and the river is chinking with ice, there is
plenty to see and learn, or in the floods, when the water roars through
the lifted hatches and the rush of the river throbs across the misty
flats, and the weeds and sedges smell rank as the stream stews them in its
mash-tub in the pool below the weir.

[1] Phillips, "Geology of Oxford and of the Valley of the Thames."




THE FILLING OF THE THAMES


In the late autumn of 1893, one of the driest years ever known, I went to
the weir pool above the wood, and found the shepherd fishing. The river
was lower than had ever been known or seen, and on the hills round the
"dowsers" had been called in with their divining rods to find the vanished
waters.

"Thee've got no water in 'ee, and if 'ee don't fill'ee avore New Year,
'ee'll be no more good for a stree-um"! Thus briefly, to Father Thames,
the shepherd of Sinodun Hill. He had pitched his float into the pool below
the weir--the pool which lies in the broad, flat fields, with scarce a
house in sight but the lockman's cottage--and for the first time on a
Saturday's fishing he saw his bait go clear to the bottom instead of being
lost to view instantly in the boiling water of the weir-pool. He could
even see the broken piles and masses of concrete which the river in its
days of strength had torn up and scattered on the bottom, and among them
the shoals of fat river fish eyeing his worm as critically as his master
would a sample of most inferior oats. Yet the pool was beautiful to look
upon. Where the water had sunk the rushes had grown taller than ever, and
covered the little sandbanks left by the ebbing river with a forest of
green and of red gold, where the frost had laid its finger on them. In the
back eddies and shallows the dying lily leaves covered the surface with
scales of red and copper, and all along the banks teazles and frogbits,
and brown and green reeds, and sedges of bronze and russet, made a screen,
through which the black and white moorhens popped in and out, while the
water-rats, now almost losing the aquatic habit, and becoming pedestrian,
sat peeling rushes with their teeth, and eyeing the shepherd on the weir.
Even the birds seemed to have voted that the river was never going to fill
again, for a colony of sandpipers, instead of continuing their migration
to the coast, had taken up their quarters on the little spits of mud and
shingle now fringing the weir-pool, and were flitting from point to point,
and making believe it was a bit of Pagham Harbour or Porchester Creek. On
every sunny morning monster spiders ran out from the holes and angles of
the weir-frame, and spun webs across and across the straddling iron legs
below the footbridge, right down to the lowered surface of the water,
which had so sunk that each spider had at least four feet more of web than
he could have reckoned upon before and waxed fat on the produce of the
added superficies of enmeshed and immolated flies. So things went on
almost till New Year's Eve. The flats of the Upper Thames, where the
floods get out up the ditches and tributaries, and the wild duck gather on
the shallow "splashes" and are stalked with the stalking-horse as of old,
were as dry as Richmond Park, and sounded hollow to the foot, instead of
wheezing like a sponge. The herons could not find a meal on a hundred
acres of meadow, which even a frog found too dry for him, and the little
brooks and land-springs which came down through them to the big river were
as low as in June, as clear as a Hampshire chalk stream, and as full of
the submerged life of plants. Instead of dying with the dying year at the
inrush of cold water brought by autumn rains, all the cresses, and
tresses, and stars, and tangles, and laced sprays of the miniature growth
of the springs and running brooks were as bright as malachite, though
embedded in a double line of dead white shivering sedge. And thus the
shortest day went by, and still the fields lay dry, and the river shrank,
and the fish were off the feed; and though murky vapours hung over the
river and the flats and shut out the sun, the long-expected rains fell not
until the last week's end of the year. Then at last signs and tokens began
by which the knowing ones prophesied that there was something the matter
with the weather. The sheep fed as if they were not to have another bite
for a week, and bleated without ceasing, strange birds flew across the sky
in hurrying flocks, and in all the country houses and farmers' halls the
old-fashioned barometers, with their dials almost as big as our eight-day
clocks and pointers as long as a knitting-needle, began to fall, or rather
to go backwards, further than was ever recorded. And whereas it is, and
always has been, a fact well known to the owners of these barometers that
if they are tapped violently in the centre of their mahogany stomachs the
needle will jerk a little in the direction of recovery, and is thereby
believed to exercise a controlling influence in the direction of better
weather, the more the barometers were tapped and thumped the more the
needle edged backwards, till in some cases it went down till it pointed to
the ivory star at the very bottom of the dial, and then struck work and
stuck there.

[Illustration: WILD DUCK. _From a photograph by Charles Reid._]

[Illustration: A FULL THAMES. _From a photograph by Taunt & Co._]

That night the storm began. To connoisseurs in weather in the
meteorological sense it was a joy and an ensample, for it was a perfect
cyclonic storm, exactly the right shape, with all its little dotted lines
of "isobars" running in ovals one inside another. From another point of
view it was the storm of an hour spread over two days, so that there was
plenty of time to see and remember the normal ways of cyclones, which may
be briefly described as first a flush of heat whether in summer or winter,
then a furious wind, then hurrying clouds and much rain, with changes of
wind, then more clouds and more rain, then a "clearing shower" with most
rain, then a furling and brailing-up of the rain clouds, splashes of blue
in the sky, with nets of scud crossing them, sudden gleams of sun, sudden
cold, and perhaps a hail shower, and then piercing cold and sunlight. All
which things happened, but took a long time about it. The storm began in
the night, and howled through the dark. The rain came with the morning;
but it was the "clearing shower," which lasted ten hours, which caused the
filling of the Thames. The wind still blew in furious gusts, but the rain
was almost too heavy to be moved. The sky was one dark, sombre cloud, and
from this the rain poured in slanting lines like pencils of water. But
across this blanket of cloud came darker, lower, and wetter clouds, even
more surcharged with water, from which the deluge poured till the earth
was white like glass with the spraying drops. Out in the fields it was
impossible to see through the rain; but as the end of the column of cloud
began to break and widen the water could be seen in the act of passing
from the land to the river. On the fallows and under the fences all the
surface earth was beaten down or swept away. All seeds which had sunk
naturally below the surface were laid bare. Hundreds of sprouting horse
chestnuts, of sprouting acorns beneath the trees, thousands of grains of
fallen wheat and barley, of beans, and other seeds of the farm were
uncovered as if by a spade.

Down every furrow, drain, watercourse, ditch, runnel, and watercut, the
turbid waters were hurrying, all with one common flow, all with increasing
speed, to the Thames. The sound of waters filled the air, dropping,
poppling, splashing, trickling, dripping from leaves to earth, falling
from bank to rills below, gurgling under gate-paths, lapping against the
tree-trunks and little ridge piles in the brooks, and at last sweeping
with a hushed content into the bosom of Thames. And the river himself was
good for something more than a "stree-um." He was bank-full and sweeping
on, taking to himself on this side and on that the tributes of his
children, from which the waters poured so fast that they came in almost
clear, and the mingled waters in the river were scarcely clouded in their
flow. The lock-men rose by night and looked at the climbing flood, and
wakened their wives and children, and raised in haste hatch after hatch of
the weirs, and threw open locks and gates. Windsor Weir broke, but the
wires flashed the news on, and the river's course was open, and after the
greatest rain-storm and the lowest barometer known for thirty years, the
Thames was not in flood, but only brimful; and once more a "river of
waters."




THE SHELLS OF THE THAMES


Of the thousands who boat on the Thames during the summer few know or
notice the beauty of the river shells. They are among the most delicate
objects of natural ornament and design in this country. Exquisite pattern,
graceful shapes, and in some cases lovely tints of colour adorn them.
Nature has for once relaxed in their favour her rigid rules, by which she
turns out things of this kind not only alike in shape, but with identical
colour and ornament. Among humming-birds, for instance, each bird is like
the other, literally to a feather. The lustre on each ruby throat or
amethyst wing shines in the same light with the same prismatic divisions.
But even in the London river, if you go and seek among the pebbles above
Hammersmith Bridge when the river is low, you may find a score of
_neretina_ shells not one of which is coloured like the rest or
ornamented with exactly the same pattern, yet each is fit to bejewel the
coronet of some Titania of the waters. A number of these tiny shells,
gathered from below the bridge, lie before the writer, set on black satin
to display the hues. They look at a little distance like a series of mixed
Venetian beads, but of more elegant form. From whichever side they are
seen, the curves are the perfection of flowing line. The colouring and
ornament of each is a marvel and delight. Some are black, with white spots
arranged in lines following the curves, and with the top of the blunt
spiral white. These "black-and-white marble" patterns are followed by a
whole series in which purple takes the place of black, and the spots are
modified into scales. Then comes a row of rose-coloured shells, some with
white lance-heads, or scales, others with alternate bands of white scales
and white dots. Some are polished, others dull, some rosy pink, others
almost crimson. Some are marked with cream and purple like the juice of
black currants with cream in it. In some the scale pattern changes to a
chequer, some are white with purple zig-zags. And lastly come a whole
series in pale olive, and olive and cream, in which the general colour is
that of a blackcap's egg, and the pattern made by alternate spots of olive
and bands of cream. If these little gems of beauty come out of the London
river, what may we not expect in the upper waters of the silver Thames?[1]
A search in the right places in its course will show. But these
_neretinae_ are everywhere up to the source of the river, for they
feed on all kinds of decaying substances. If the pearl is the result of a
disease or injury, the beauty of the _neretina_ is a product or
transformation from foul things to fair ones.

As the Thames is itself the product and union of all its vassal streams,
an "incarnation" of all the rest, so in its bed it holds all the shells
collected from all its tributaries. Different tribes of shells live in
different waters. Some love the "full-fed river winding slow," some the
swift and crystal chalk-stream. Some only flourish just over the spots
where the springs come bubbling up from the inner cisterns of earth, and
breathe, as it were, the freshness of these untainted waters; others love
the rich, fat mud, others the sides of wearings and piles, others the
river-jungles where the course is choked with weeds. But come what may, or
flourish where they please, the empty shells are in time rolled down from
trout-stream and chalk-stream, fountain and rill, mill-pool and ditch,
cress-bed and water-cut, from the springs of the Cotswolds, the Chilterns,
the downs, from the valleys of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Surrey,
Gloucester, Oxford, and Essex, into the Thames. Once there the river makes
shell collections on its own account, sorting them out from everything
else except a bed of fine sand and gravel, in which they lie like birds'
eggs in bran in a boy's cabinet, ready for who will to pick them up or
sift them out of it. These shell collections are made in the time of
winter floods, though how they are made or why the shells should all
remain together, while sticks, stones, and other rubbish are carried away,
it is impossible to say. They are laid on smooth points of land round
which the waters flow in shallow ripples. Across the river it is always
deep, swift, and dark, though the sandbanks come in places near the
surface, and in the shallows grow water-crowfoot, with waving green hair
under water, and white stems above it. The clean and shining sand shelves
down to the water's edge, and continues below the surface. Here are living
shells, or shells with living fish in them. In the bright water lie
hundreds of the shells of the fresh-water mussels, the bearers of pearls
sometimes, and always lined with that of which pearls are made, the
lustrous nacre. The mealy masses of dry sand beyond the river's lip are
stuffed with these mussel shells. They lie all ways up, endways, sideways,
on their faces, on their backs. The pearl lining shines through the sand,
and the mussels gleam like silver spoons under the water. They crack and
crunch beneath your feet as you step across to search the mass for the
smaller and rarer shells. Many of those in the water contain living
mussels, yellow-looking fat molluscs, greatly beloved of otters, who eat
them as sauce with the chub or bream they catch, and leave the broken
shells of the one by the half-picked bones of the other. There was a
popular song which had for chorus the question, "Did you ever see an
oyster walk upstairs?" These mussels _walk_, and are said to be
"tolerably active" by a great authority on their habits. They have one
foot, on which they travel in search of feeding ground, and leave a
visible track across the mud. There are three or four kinds, two of which
sometimes hold small pearls, while a third is the pearl-bearer proper.
_Unio pictorum_ is the scientific name of one, because the shells
were once the cups in which the old Dutch painters kept their colours, and
are still used to hold ground gold and silver for illuminating. The
pearl-bearing mussel is longer than the other kinds, flatter and darker,
and the lining of mother-of-pearl is equal to half the total thickness of
the shell.[2]

[Illustration: SHELLS OF THE THAMES. _From a photograph by E. Seeley_]

Though not so striking from their size and pearly lustre, there are many
shells on the Thames sandbanks not less interesting and in large numbers.
Among these are multitudes of tiny fresh-water cockle shells of all sizes,
from that of a grain of mustard seed to the size of a walnut, flat, curled
shells like small ammonites, fresh-water snail shells of all sizes, river
limpets, _neretinae_, and other and rounder bivalve shells allied to
the cockles. The so-called "snails" are really quite different from each
other, some, the _paludinas_, being large, thick-striped shells,
while the _limnaeas_ are thin, more delicately made, some with fine,
pointed spiral tops, and others in which the top seems to have been
absorbed in the lower stories. There are eight varieties of these
_limnaeas_ alone, and six more elegant shells of much the same
appearance, but of a different race.

The minute elegance of many of these shells is very striking. Tiny
_physas_ and _succineas_, no larger than shot, live among big
_paludinas_ as large as a garden snail, while all sizes of the larger
varieties are found, from microscopic atoms to the perfect adult. Being
water shells, and not such common objects as land shells, these have no
popular names. The river limpets are called _ancylus fluviatilis_.
Some are no larger than a yew berry, and are shaped like a Phrygian cap;
but they "stick" with proper limpet-like tenacity. On the stems of
water-lilies, on piles, on weeds and roots in any shallow streams, but
always on the under side of the leaves, are the limpets of the Thames. The
small ammonite-like shells are called _planorbis_, and like most of
the others, belong also to the upper tertiary fossils. They feed on the
decaying leaves of the iris and other water plants, and from the number of
divisions on the shell are believed to live for sometimes twenty years. Of
the many varieties, one, the largest, the horn-coloured _planorbis_,
emits a purple dye. Two centuries ago Lister made several experiments in
the hope that he might succeed in fixing this dye, as the Tyrians did that
of the murex, but in vain. There are eleven varieties of this creature
alone. It is easier to find the shells than to discover the living
creature in the river. For many the deep, full river is not a suitable
home; they only come there as the water does, from the tributary streams.
Far up in some rill in the chalk, from the bed of which the water bubbles
up and keeps the stones and gravel bright, whole beds of little
pea-cockles may be found, lying in masses side by side, like seeds sown in
the water-garden of a nymph.

[1] I have a series of _neretina_ shells from the Philippines, much
larger in size and brown in colour, in which many of the same kinds of
ornament occur.

[2] A fresh-water mussel shell from North America in my possession is
coloured green, and so marked and crimped as to resemble exactly a patch
of water-weed, such as grows on stones and piles.

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