The rooks are now busy in the elms of the churchyard, and drifting thwartwise the wind with sticks for their nests. Sometimes a young male bird comes with food for his mate as she pleaches the twigs with claw and beak; she flutters her wings like a fledgeling, gapes widely, and squawks with satisfaction. Daws come to the trees, perching head to the south-west breeze, ejaculating sharply. Periodical visitants are the starlings, their songs of mimicry swelling with sudden rush and wheezing. One bird has learnt the chattering cry of a kestrel, the mating call, and deceives the rooks into thinking that one of the brown mouse-hawks is near. That rooks are thieves among themselves is well known, stealing sticks from their neighbours. To-day I watched one taking material that a young and enthusiastic sister brought with difficulty every five minutes or so from the distant beech clump. The thief was an artist, she was subtle, and cunning. A quick hop took her to the young bird’s pile, she seized a stick, and drifted upwards into the wind, swung round in a half circle and brought it to her own nest in the same tree with a soft _caa-caa_, as though implying relief at reaching home again. Her mate, judging by his white face, is an ancient bird; he is wise; he does no work; he fetches no food for his toiling wife; but perches near the nest, approving her method of labour, and guarding its results. He is the nearest approach to a bird “fence” that it would be possible to find. A lane of red mud leads through the beech-clump. Life here is hard, but the celandines show their spoke-rays to the sun and wind-washed heaven, braving the half-gales that come across the Atlantic and twirl the fallen numbers of autumn’s leaves among their yellow flowers. A tawny owl lives in a pollard hornbeam in this clump; he comes regularly at dusk to my cottage and hoots with mournful insistence to the barn owls that roost under the thatch. Rabbits’ bones and fur, finches’ feathers, and the fragile skulls of mice hang in the crevices of the tree, hundreds of them, some fresh and white, others hidden under the brown dust of decay that trickles from the old tree’s dead heart. Tap his home, and he flaps out, pursued by any small birds searching for spiders or grubs in the spinney. The trees are dwarfed, bent by the salt winds; a few larches grew here, but never more the sap will rise and burst in emerald foam on their wispy branches. Constant buffeting with the winds of the ocean has killed them. A magpie is prospecting the mazed brittleness of one of them for a nesting site; she appears nearly every morning.