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THE COURSE OF NATURE

SPARROWHAWKS AND WAGTAILS

FROM A CORRESPONDENT

C6 un-

There is continuing interest in the usual" birds which from time to time may be seen in London. Sometimes, perhaps, the bird is not as unusual as one might imagine. The Times has, for instance, lately heard from Mr. George Watts that some time before Christmas a friend of his (Mr. Roland Garnett) watched a sparrowhawk flying at about 100ft, on a south-westerly course from King's Cross towards New Oxford Street.

This might seem extraordinary if one had not heard, as recently as last September, of the sparrowhawk which came scudding across the cricket ground at Lord's, causing some of those audacious M.C.C. sparrows to duck and make for the labyrinthine sanctuary they know so well under the seats of the covered stands." The very fact that these cockney sparrows at once took shelter suggests that they know all about sparrowhawks, which have quite possibly their regular "beats" in inner London, issuing forth, in quiet hours of the day, from unsuspected haunts in, possibly, the grounds of Holland House or on the heights of Hampstead.

There is evidence, too, that the grey wagtail whose recent appearance at an emergency water-supply tank in Burlington Arcade so staggered a Piccadilly stroller was not on its first visit to London. Mr. John O. Thornton writes that he saw a grey wagtail in an emergency water-supply tank at the junction of Blackfriars Bridge Road and Stamford Street on March 15, 1946, and had previously scen one on the mud under Hungerford Bridge. A grey wagtail has, it will be remem- bered, also been seen in a half-empty tank at Brixton, and another on a roof top in the West End. Nor is London the only city thus honoured.

Mr. A. Croome Leach says that last winter, right in the centre of Bristol, several grey wagtails were seen in and around static water tanks, and he rather believes that they nested, the following spring, in the ruins near by.

From THE TIMES of 1847

66

THURSDAY, January 14, 1847. Price, with a Supplement, 5d. [Two full pages are occupied with the French documents relating to the Spanish marriages." A leading article comments on Lord Palmerston's conduct of the negotiation.] We think with LORD PALMERSTON on the main point of the conduct pursued by the French Government

but we should

be sorry to adopt his mode of defending his positions, and we should be disinclined to expend as many words as he has done in demonstrating an evil without suggesting a remedy.

The whole discussion is retrospective; and as nothing in the existing state of things can now be altered, the enormous length to which these remonstrances have run is at least superfluous and redundant. One single page which would convince the people of this country and of Europe that the Foreign Minister of England is resolved to exert his whole powers for the preservation of peace and the maintenance of an amicable understanding with our neighbours, would be worth infinitely more than a volume of verbose recrimination. The facts are on our side; but the higher tone in this controversy must be sought in the despatches of our antagonist; and LORD PALMERSTON has not made up for the ground he lost in the negotiation by the superior quality he has displayed in the conduct of the subsequent discussion..

*Graver matters were in issue. Poland had been obliterated. Other European liberties were menaced. Dissension between France and Great Britain had already (said The Times of the previous day) " proved a direct encouragement to the aggressive tendencies of one Power, and it may even operate upon the timorous hardihood of another.'

TR

Soldiers loading an army lorry wit yesterday morning. The first ba: nine o'ch

A military control post at Smithfiel shows a meeting of workers at the cease work when the troops arri