Recently a report on the effect on birds of modern motorway traffic, especially in Britain and Holland, was commented on here. One aspect was a possible change in birdsong, also the effect on breeding. As a postscript this corner raised the question of how birds fared at the front lines in the first World War in France; also how they survived the incessant bombing from the air around such cities as Berlin in the second World War. Now John B. Doherty from Ballyraise, Letterkenny, writes enclosing a print-off from a chapter in The Square Box by Saki, or H. H. Munro. The essay is Birds on the Western Front. Saki was known for piquant, ironical short stories above all.
According to him, in spite of the huge impact of war on the front, "there seems to be very little corresponding disturbance in the bird life of the same district." The rats and mice that swarmed into the trenches were followed by barn owls. As for nesting accommodation, the barn owls found whole streets and clusters of ruined houses. And, typically Saki, "as these birds breed in winter as well as summer, there should be a goodly output of war owlets to cope with the swarming generations of war mice." (His natural history may not be as good as his prose.) The rook, normally gun-shy, is not at the front, but "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 rattle of machine-guns going on around him. All this has made his nerves steadier than before." He notes that crows and magpies are nesting "well within this shell-swept area".
The skylark, amazingly, has stuck to the meadows and croplands "now seamed and bisected with trenches and honeycombed with shell-holes". And, on a misty morning, would suddenly dash skyward "and pour forth a song of jubilation." To which Saki, the ironist, had to add that it "sounded horribly forced and insincere." And once, he writes, he had to throw himself down among all those shell-holes and what-not, to find himself nearly on top of a brood of young larks, two of which had been hit by something but the rest were normal nestlings. He came across a "wee hen-chaffinch" which he suspected had a nest in apple trees nearby. All the deafening explosions had not scared local partridges away, and they were raising their broods. Saki was killed in France in November 1916.