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Updated: June 24, 2025
There were a great many Stonechats in the Vale when I was there this year . Generally they seemed earlier in their breeding proceedings than either Wheatears, Tree Pipits, or Sky Larks, which were the three other most numerous birds about that part of the Island, as there were several young ones about when we first went to live in the Vale early in June; still occasionally nests with eggs more or less hard sat might be found, but the greater number were hatched when fresh eggs of Tree Pipits and Sky Larks were by no means uncommon.
Under a cloudless sky, Maximilien heads the procession of his colleagues in a blue coat and yellow breeches, carrying in his hand a bouquet of wheatears, cornflowers and poppies. He ascends the mountain and proclaims the God of Jean-Jacques to the Republic, which hears and weeps.
The wives and daughters of the Kentish farmers came from the neighbouring villages with cream, cherries, wheatears, and quails. To chaffer with them, to flirt with them, to praise their straw hats and tight heels, was a refreshing pastime to voluptuaries sick of the airs of actresses and maids of honour. Milliners, toymen, and jewellers came down from London, and opened a bazaar under the trees.
Here, too, the burrows had probably existed first and had attracted the wheatears, and the birds had brought the seed from some distant bush. Crouching down in one of the big burrows at the roots of an old elder I remained for half an hour, listening to the thump-thump of the alarmed rabbits about me, and the accompanying hiss and swish of the wind and sleet and rain in the ragged branches.
It then occurred to me that in every case where I had observed a clump of elder bushes on the bare downside, it grew upon a village or collection of rabbit burrows, and it is probable that in every case the clump owed its existence to the wheatears who had dropped the seed about their nesting-place.
They were once very plentiful on the Sussex Downs and seaside cliffs, and as a boy walking from my first school at Rottingdean to visit my people at Brighton, from Saturday to Sunday night, I have passed hundreds of traps consisting of rectangular holes cut in the turf, having horsehair nooses inside, set by the shepherds who took thousands of wheatears to the poulterers' shops in the town.
The great field you see was filled with gold corn four feet deep as a pitcher is filled with water to the brim. Of yore the rich man is said, in the Roman classic, to have measured his money, so here you might have measured it by the rood. The sunbeams sank deeper and deeper into the wheatears, layer upon layer of light, and the colour deepened by these daily strokes.
There was no counting now on Lord Ormont's presence in the British gathering seasons, when wheatears wing across our fields or swallows return to their eaves. He forsook the hunt to roam the Continent, one of the vulgar band of tourists, honouring town only when Mayflies had flown, and London's indiscriminate people went about without their volatile heads.
A marked sign of spring in Brighton is the return of the wheatears; they suddenly appear in the waste places by the houses in the first few days of April. Wheatears often run a considerable distance on the sward very swiftly, usually stopping on some raised spot of the turf.
It was not that I had or have any quarrel with the creatures I have named, or would have them other than they are carrion-eaters and scavengers, Nature's balance-keepers and purifiers. The only creatures on earth I loathe and hate are the gourmets, the carrion-crows and foxes of the human kind who devour wheatears and skylarks at their tables.
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