Читать книгу Neighbourhood: A year's life in and about an English village онлайн

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Other berry supplies, such as the privet and holly, seem to be preserved to the last because they are universally distasteful, though nourishing at a pinch. But it is the hips, or rose-berries, which provide the best example of Nature’s way of conserving the lives of birds throughout hard weather against their own foolish, squandering instinct. These berries do not ripen all at once, whether late or early in the season. On every bush, the scarlet hips soften in regular, long-drawn-out succession, some being ready in early winter, and some not until well on in the new year. When the hip is ripe, the tenderest beak can get at its viscid fruit; but until it begins to soften, there is hardly a bird that can deal with it. The rose-berries, with their scanty but never-failing stores, are really the mainstay of all in hard times. It is doubtful, indeed, whether the birds that die wholesale in prolonged frosty weather, are killed by hunger at all. Probably their death is due rather to thirst. So long as the brooks run, bird life can hold against the bitterest times. But once silence has settled down over the country-side—the only real silence of the year, when all the streams are locked up at their source—then begins the steady footfall under the holly-hedge, and you must needs turn from the crimson sunset light upon the wall.