Wildlife and the war

[Guest grantaloch]

Good evening all.

I am talking about the somme here. Before the battle started, we have read about the beautiful countryside ,where the battle was going to take place. The woods. The streams. Ect. And I am sure we have read about the abundance of wild life that inhabited these places. Now my question is when the bombardment and counter bombardment started and destroyed the countryside all around. where did all the animals dissapear too. I know again that at 7.30 on the first july when the artillery lifted they were supposed to have heard skylarks singing. After that what do you think(Grantaloch.) Bob.

[andigger]

Actually since the field of battle was relatively narrow and stagnant the wild things probably only move residences a few miles from the sound of the guns and made a new life for themselves.

Andy

Actually since the field of battle was relatively narrow and stagnant the wild things probably only move residences a few miles from the sound of the guns and made a new life for themselves.

Andy

[mebu]

Saki (HH Munro), the famous short-story writer, wrote "Birds on the Western Front" while on the Somme, this gives much info on birds that lived through barrages and desolation. Fascinating reading....also other stories of life on the Somme, such as "The Square Egg", about a discussion between a poilu and a tommy.

Saki did not survive and is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial (legend says his last words, to a soldier lighting a fag were "put that bloody light out" when he was shot by a sniper).

Suggest get a copy of Saki stories from library, Peter.

[paul guthrie]

Actually since the field of battle was relatively narrow and stagnant the wild things probably only move residences a few miles from the sound of the guns and made a new life for themselves.

Andy

Actually since the field of battle was relatively narrow and stagnant the wild things probably only move residences a few miles from the sound of the guns and made a new life for themselves.

Andy

I know I am getting personal Andy but what's with the stutter?

[andigger]

Thats odd... don't know. I guess it was such a great answer it came to me twice. Either that or I wanted to make sure everyone understood me through the accent.

Andy

[paul guthrie]

Thats odd... don't know. I guess it was such a great answer it came to me twice. Either that or I wanted to make sure everyone understood me through the accent.

Andy

What accent? If you got an accent I got an accent, nobody round here thinks so!

[Guest grantaloch]

Come on boys you have hijacked my thread. What about my question about the wildlife, it can't be that boring surely. While i am at it. Iknow the zone of the armies spread over a very large area on theSomme and it was being fought forward all the time, so the wildlife must had a fair way to travel, to get out of the way of the fighting. Where did they go.(Grantaloch.) Bob.

[Owen D]

As you refered to the Somme and the fighting started in July, then the breeding season for the Birdlife would have near enough finished. First broods would have hatched April/May. The fledglings would then start foraging for food. The bombardment would possibly scare them away.

By August they'd start migrating anyway.

House martins and swallows have been recorded nesting in dug-outs, no different to them to the caves they would have bred in before houses.

Come the winter time the migrating birds from the North would find little or no food and so fly on to less devestated areas.

Some birds, mainly the crow family have always found food on the battlefields since man started fighting.

Larger wildlife, Deer , Boar may well have survived for awhile but as the devestation increased they either be killed or move on.

That's my ideas, may not be right but hope it gets the thread back on topic.

[uxbull]

Sorry, not the war but wildlife.

Last week while walking along Kiolmetre Lane, My son and I were surprised by 3 huge deer that simply seemed to 'appear' out of the field to our right, only a couple of yards away, they ran round us for a couple of minutes and then ran over the Serre road. Quite impressive!

[Guest Simon Bull]

As you refered to the Somme and the fighting started in July, then the breeding season for the Birdlife would have near enough finished. First broods would have hatched April/May. The fledglings would then start foraging for food. The bombardment would possibly scare them away.

By August they'd start migrating anyway.

That's my ideas, may not be right but hope it gets the thread back on topic.

I think they would probably have been second brooding by 1/7/1916.

However, when one considers the state of the area (ie pretty grassy) before the Battle started I suspect that it might have been quite busy with birds. Furthermore, I would have thought that the presence of so many people and their detritus would have attracted insects, and, thus, birds.

I have noticed how common (as compared to in the UK) skylarks still are on the battlefields.

[Neil Mackenzie]

I know it is not exactly the same (you may think it not even close!) but there is an interesting article on BBC today concerning the repopulation of the Chernobyl area by wildlife after the human population had moved away after the nuclear disaster.

Neil

BBC website

[Owen D]

Quote from "A Bird in the Bush A social History of Birdwatching" Stephen Moss.page 111.

Charles Raven, later to achieve eminence as a Cambridge don and author of several works on the history of ornithology,recalled ...

"A small incident happened which brought back my love of birds with a rush. We were in the fighting for Vimy, and cut to pieces in front of Oppy wood in April 1917. The battalion was sent back for a rest,150 instead of 800 strong. We marched back from Roclincourt to La Comte, and settled down, to my joy, on the edge of a wood where Golden Orioles wer nesting. I had just spent a first morning watching the gorgeous cock, when the Colonel announced that we had to return at once to the line."

Raven and his comrades were,as can be imaged, far from happy with this development-indeed he describes their mood as 'venomous...too sore even to grumble'. But then, as he put it.'a miracle happened'-the men discovered that a pair of Swallows was building their nest in the entrance to their temporary HQ, an old signalling station:

"These birds were angels in disguse.It is a truism that one touch of nature makes the whole world kin:those blessed birds brought instant relief to the nerves and tempers of the mess...we all regarded the pair with devoted affection."

From then on, the whole battalion became obsessed with the swallows' fortunes.They began placing bets on when the first egg would appear, organizing a daily inspection using an elaborate trench-periscope.When the battalion was relieved, the incoming soldiers were given strict instructions on guarding the nest from harm, while during a particularly heavy German bombardment . 'our cheif anxiety was lest astray shell might "casualty" the birds'.

Nice little story.Don't know how it ends and my fingers are killing me after all that keying in.

Lots of other little stories in that Chapter on Birding and WW1. A few comments about birdlife in the devastated areas. Worth a look might even get you a new hobby.

[lassuy]

The birds may have done quite well, after all flies are one of the chief foods of swallows. No shortage of flies along the front, it may have actually attracted them. A regular feast, as it were.

[marina]

I would never have thought that a thread about birds on the western front would be of much interest - but this is really good. Any more like the tale of the swallows?

Marina

[Owen D]

Just found this on the web.http://www.bibliomania.com/0/5/153/456/8629/1/frameset.html

SAKI. Birds on the Western Front

Considering the enormous economic dislocation which the war operations have caused in the regions where the campaign is raging, there seems to be very little corresponding disturbance in the bird life of the same districts. Rats and mice have mobilised and swarmed into the fighting line, and there has been a partial mobilization of owls, particularly barn owls, following in the wake of the mice, and making laudable efforts to thin out their numbers. What success attends their hunting one cannot estimate; there are always sufficient mice left over to populate one’s dug-out and make a parade-ground and race-course of one’s face at night. In the matter of nesting accommodation the barn owls are well provided for; most of the still intact barns in the war zone are requisitioned for billeting purposes, but there is a wealth of ruined houses, whole streets and clusters of them, such as can hardly have been available at any previous moment of the world’s history since Nineveh and Babylon became humanly desolate. Without human occupation and cultivation there can have been no corn, no refuse, and consequently very few mice, and the owls of Nineveh cannot have enjoyed very good hunting; here in Northern France the owls have desolation and mice at their disposal in unlimited quantities, and as these birds breed in winter as well as in summer, there should be a goodly output of war owlets to cope with the swarming generations of war mice.

Apart from the owls one cannot notice that the campaign is making any marked difference in the bird life of the country-side. The vast flocks of crows and ravens that one expected to find in the neighbourhood of the fighting line are non-existent, which is perhaps rather a pity. The obvious explanation is that the roar and crash and fumes of high explosives have driven the crow tribe in panic from the fighting area; like many obvious explanations, it is not a correct one. The crows of the locality are not attracted to the battlefield, but they certainly are not scared away from it. The rook is normally so gun-shy and nervous where noise is concerned that the sharp banging of a barn door or the report of a toy pistol will sometimes set an entire rookery in commotion; out here I have seen him sedately busy among the refuse heaps of a battered village, with shells bursting at no great distance, and the impatient-sounding, snapping rattle of machine-guns going on all round him; for all the notice that he took he might have been in some peaceful English meadow on a sleepy Sunday afternoon. Whatever else German frightfulness may have done it has not frightened the rook of North-Eastern France; it has made his nerves steadier than they have ever been before, and future generations of small boys, employed in scaring rooks away from the sown crops in this region, will have to invent something in the way of super-frightfulness to achieve their purpose. Crows and magpies are nesting well within the shell-swept area, and over a small beech- copse I once saw a pair of crows engaged in hot combat with a pair of sparrow-hawks, while considerably higher in the sky, but almost directly above them, two Allied battle-planes were engaging an equal number of enemy aircraft.

Unlike the barn owls, the magpise have had their choice of building sites considerably restricted by the ravages of war; the whole avenues of poplars, where they were accustomed to construct their nests, have been blown to bits, leaving nothing but dreary-looking rows of shattered and splintered trunks to show where once they stood. Affection for a particular tree has in one case induced a pair of magpies to build their bulky, domed nest in the battered remnants of a poplar of which so little remained standing that the nest looked almost bigger than the tree; the effect rather suggested an archiepiscopal enthronement taking place in the ruined remains of Melrose Abbey. The magpie, wary and suspicious in his wild state, must be rather intrigued at the change that has come over the erst-while fearsome not-to-be-avoided human, stalking everywhere over the earth as its possessor, who now creeps about in screened and sheltered ways, as chary of showing himself in the open as the shyest of wild creatures.

The buzzard, that earnest seeker after mice, does not seem to be taking any war risks, at least I have never seen one out here, but kestrels hover about all day in the hottest parts of the line, not in the least disconcerted, apparently, when a promising mouse-area suddenly rises in the air in a cascade of black or yellow earth. Sparrow-hawks are fairly numerous, and a mile or two back from the firing line I saw a pair of hawks that I took to be red-legged falcons, circling over the top of an oak-copse. According to investigations made by Russian naturalists, the effect of the war on bird life on the Eastern front has been more marked than it has been over here. ‘During the first year of the war rooks disappeared, larks no longer sang in the fields, the wild pigeon disappeared also.’ The skylark in this region has stuck tenaciouslyto the meadows and crop-lands that have been seamed and bisected with trenches and honeycombed with shell-holes. In the chill, misty hour of gloom that precedes a rainy dawn, when nothing seemed alive except a few wary waterlogged sentries and many scuttling rats, the lark would suddenly dash skyward and pour forth a song of ecstatic jubilation that sounded horribly forced and insincere. It seemed scarcely possible that the bird could carry its insouciance to the length of attempting to rear a brood in that desolate wreckage of shattered clods and gaping shellholes, but once, having occasion to throw myself down with some abruptness on my face, I found myself nearly on the top of a brood of young larks. Two of them had already been hit by something, and were in rather a battered condition, but the survivors seemed as tranquil and comfortable as the average nestling.

At the corner of a stricken wood (which has had a name made for it in history, but shall be nameless here), at a moment when lyddite and shrapnel and machine-gun fire swept and raked and bespattered that devoted spot as though the artillery of an entire Division had suddenly concentrated on it, a wee hen-chaffinch flitted wistfully to and fro, amid splintered and falling branches that had never a green bough left on them. The wounded lying there, if any of them noticed the small bird, may well have wondered why anything having wings and no pressing reason for remaining should have chosen to stay in such a place. There was a battered orchard alongside the stricken wood, and the probable explanation of the bird’s presence was that it had a nest of young ones whom it was too scared to feed, too loyal to desert. Later on, a small flock of chaffinches blundered into the wood, which they were doubtless in the habit of using as a highway to their feeding-grounds; unlike the solitary hen-bird, they made no secret of their desire to get away as fast as their dazed wits would let them. The only other bird I ever saw there was a magpie, flying low over the wreckage of fallen tree-limbs; ‘one for sorrow,’ says the old superstition. There was sorrow enough in that wood.

The English gamekeeper, whose knowledge of wild life usually runs on limited and perverted lines, has evolved a sort of religion as to the nervous debility of even the hardiest game birds; according to his beliefs a terrier trotting across a field in which a partridge is nesting, or a mouse-hawking kestrel hovering over the hedge, is sufficient cause to drive the distracted bird off its eggs and send it whirring into the next county.

The partridge of the war zone shows no signs of such sensitive nerves. The rattle and rumble of transport, the constant coming and going of bodies of troops, the incessant rattle of musketry and deafening explosions of artillery, the night-long flare and flicker of star-shells, have not sufficed to scare the local birds away from their chosen feeding grounds, and to all appearances they have not been deterred from raising their broods. Gamekeepers who are serving with the colours might seize the opportunity to indulge in a little useful nature study

[andigger]

Thinking about this thread this morning.... the field mice and thier cousins the rats also had quite the resurgence for the same reasons as the flies and swallows.

Farm cats and dogs probably also didn't do so bad either.

Andy

[Owen D]

After reading up and thinking about this too, I've changed my opinion seeing the War as bad for wildlife.

I now view No-Man's Land as one vast nature reserve free from Humans,as if they were visable they'd be shot!

I doesn't take Nature long to recolonise devastated ares.

One form of wildlife increased massively in the War.........The LOUSE.

[marina]

Just found this on the web.http://www.bibliomania.com/0/5/153/456/8629/1/frameset.html

Wonderful piece of writing. Liked the wistful chaffinch!

Marina

[Guest grantaloch]

Good Evening All.

I am sorry I have been A bit slow in answering your very interesting posts. Also I must say, I am pleasantly suprised at the interest shown by you all. Its not all war and bloodshed is it. Thank you peter for your post about Saki. I have read about that incident with the fag, I believe he was killed up on that god forsaken area at the time. The Redan Ridge, wasn't he, correct me if I am wrong. Owen now to you. I have recieved your P.Ms. Thanks for taking the trouble to do all that, I will be getting in touch with you. What a interesting article it was, it opens your eyes when you really think about it dosn't it , those men were there they saw it. That little bit about the chaffinch in the orchard by the wood, he wouldn't name it, I wonder which one it was. Theipval. Its funny but its true, talking about birds. I was fishing yesterday, and there was a bird hopping about in the grass in front of us and my mate said to me, whats that one, it was a male chaffinch in all his breeding finery. And another little one, on southern T.V. last night there was a article about a Great Northern Eagle Owl. What a magnificent creature that was. Just another little thing, I am sorry to keep harping on. But what do you think happend to the larger mammels. The deer. the Foxes the badgers. Because lets face it that area was pretty devastated for miles & miles, right down to the French sector as well.(Grantaloch.)Bob.

[IanA]

Hi All,

Wildlife in the trenches, eh? Some years ago I was doing a spot of research in the PRO and, as I recall, reading a war diary of the Scottish Rifles in 1915. There is a wonderful account of an officer watching a mother weasel relocating her kits. She came to the trench where the officer was on duty and stopped. After considering the obstacle she picked them up, one at a time by the scruff, and carried them down the side of the trench and up the other side. When the family were all together again, they resumed their journey. All quiet on the Western Front!

Ian

[marina]

Even weasel Mums have the right priorities!

Marina

[Nathan Greenfield]

Perhaps the most famous "Wildlife" of the war can be found in "In Flander's Fields." Before doing the research for my book, I assumed the "larks" were figures of speech. Such is not the case. Both German regimental histories and Canadian records (both official and personal) refer to the larks --even after the battle began and the two gas attacks.

On an allied topic: The publication in recent years of colour pictures of the war has done much to change (at least) my view of it. Pictures of green grass growing on top of the trench was, to say the least, jarring. Pictures of young men "in the pink" -- that is young, healthy and with the look of health on the skin and in their eyes -- makes the war seem all the more part of our time than do the various grays that make up a black and white picture. I showed the colour pictures to some of my students (I teach at Algonquin College in Ottawa, Ontario), and they were completely taken aback.

[Guest grantaloch]

Hello Nathan. If that is correct.

Thanks for reply, re the larks wild life is amazing isn't it, how it adapts to its suroundings.

Well as to the colour, having been brought up on a diet of black and white photos, that really opens your eyes to dosn't it (Grantaloch.)Bob.

[Nathan Greenfield]

Bob:

Nathan it is.

Left out something really streand. Some of the colour pics are found in Hew Strachan's THE FIRST WORLD WAR, the smaller one of this title published by Viking. They are made with a potato starch process, the details of which are not known. Very vivivd. Very strange.

Cheers,

Nathan

[marina]

I am reading 'The Secret Annexe' - an anthology of War Diarists. One of the diarists is Edward Thomas, KIA 1917. He refers to seeing blackbirds, larks, an owl, and what he he took to be a piece of burnt paper blowing in the wind, which turned out to be a bat!

Marina