Natural History Notes BY GEOFFREY EGERTON-WARBURTON, Rector of Warburton . LONDON SHERRATT AND HUGHES Manchester: 34 Cross Street 1912 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED....

These Notes appeared from April to June this year in The Warrington Guardian and afterwards came out in a de-localised form in The Staffordshire Weekly Sentinel . I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. P. Ramsdale, of Heatley, for the photographs of The Old Church, The Yew-tree, and The Flower Garden (as it was some years ago). My thanks are due also to Mr. Garrett for kindly allowing me to use his very interesting photograph of The Two Nests referred to on page 94 ....

Although much of the neighbourhood has become semi-urban and any idea of rural seclusion is destroyed, at least in summer, by the crowds that find their way to it from Manchester and other large towns, yet the Cheshire village of Warburton in which this garden is situated is a real country place still. How long it will remain so is another thing. One salt works has been set up at Heatley about a mile away and we are now (1912) promised another, while there is every prospect of land being let for

A slight knowledge of botany adds greatly to the interest of a garden, and is besides often of practical value. With such knowledge, one forms a habit of looking even at weeds with some interest, and this has led to my finding several strange plants among them. I have for example come across the following in the kitchen garden: "Saponaria vaccaria," with its curious angled calyx and pretty pink flower. "Galium tricorne," very much like common goose-grass or cleavers, but rare in England, and qui

You can feel something like affection even for a plant, when you have watched over it and attended to its likes and dislikes as to aspect, soil, moisture, shade and so on, and when it has responded to your care and rewarded you for the pains you have spent upon it, but birds become personal friends, it is an interest and amusement to study their characters and habits, and a delight to listen to their voices. And this friendship is not for any one particular bird (though of course there may be th

In spring, and again in autumn, wheatears pass through, and may be seen about for several days at a time. In April and May, 1908, a pair stayed so long in some rough ground near the bank of the Ship Canal that I thought they might be going to take up their quarters there for the season, but by May 31st they had disappeared. We always have a fair number of whinchats in the meadows, and hardly a year passes without seeing them on the grass in the garden itself. One very wet summer, when in the low

Only once, in August, 1904, have I caught sight of a party of long-tailed tits in the garden, but a friend who lived hardly a mile away used to tell me that little parties of eight or nine might be seen flying through his orchard nearly every winter. I think he said they called them "churns," or something that sounded like that. Great-tits are common the whole year round; and very handsome they look when their suits of velvet-black and yellow are at their best. They are constant visitors to the

Pied wagtails never entirely desert us, though, of course, there are many more, and they are much more in evidence, in summer than in winter. It is a continual pleasure to watch them, to see the speed with which they run in pursuit of a fly, the deftness of the capture, and the satisfaction so plainly displayed at the feat, by the eloquent balancing of the long tail. One day in August (1899) I watched a wagtail through a glass, and distinctly saw him capture and devour four "daddy-long legs" in

Although I have never myself seen a goldfinch in the garden, they have been seen here, and on the rough ground near the Ship Canal they are not uncommon, indeed, I have heard of several shillings a week being made by birds that have been caught there in spite of County Council orders. They are usually known here as "red linnets," but another Cheshire name for them is "nickers." Greenfinches (green linnets in Cheshire) abound; in early spring they are more than usually conspicuous, as in their br

The spruce, handsome chaffinch (in Cheshire "pied finch") is with us all the year round, and his song here, as I suppose everywhere, is one of the most familiar of the pleasant voices of spring. One or more chaffinches generally feed with the fowls (and sometimes they are quite extraordinarily tame, hens more so, perhaps, than cocks), but they do not often attempt to get food from the stand. Though they sometimes do, for instance in the winter of 1910-11, there was one that came regularly. The g

The wild shriek of swifts, as they dash and wheel through the air at their topmost speed, seems to express such intense delight in freedom and motion and power, that it imparts something of the same sense of exhilaration to the beholder, at least, I know it is so with me. Swifts, or "long-wings," as they are equally well-named in Cheshire, usually find their food at some height in the air, but one day in the beginning of July (1899) I noticed a number of swifts, with a great many swallows and sa

The whole extent of the garden, with its croft and orchard, is not three acres, but a fair proportion of the British mammals are from time to time to be found there. The old church, largely built of timber, picturesque and quaint, stands within a few yards of the house and its roof affords shelter to many bats. We find the wings of moths, the remnants of their feasts, scattered on the floor (I have noticed the wings of a tortoise-shell butterfly among them), and I have found there more than one

It is hard to say which is the most wonderful, to see how a dog's intelligence can be developed by companionship with man or to look at a Great Dane and a toy terrier together, and to remember that both breeds have by man's agency been produced from the same original stock. Cats, on the other hand, have never left their wild nature far behind, and can easily return to it, as indeed they often do. Dogs are almost entirely dependent on their human friends, but most cats do something for their livi