One day last June (1902) I was walking with two friends by the Itchen, when a little below the village of Ovington we sat down to rest and to enjoy a gleam { 267} of sunshine which happened to visit the world about noon that day. We sat down on a little wooden bridge over the main current and fell to watching the swifts, which were abundant, flying up and down just over our heads and, swift-like, paying no more heed to us than if we had been three wooden posts or three cows. We noticed that ephemeræ of three or four species were rising up, and, borne by a light wind, drifting down-stream towards us and past us; and after watching these flies for some time we found that not one of them escaped. Small and grey, or dun, or water-coloured and well-nigh invisible, or large and yellow and conspicuous as they rose and slowly fluttered over the stream, they were seen and snapped up, every one of them, by those fateful sooty-coloured demons of the air, ever streaming by on their swift scythe-shaped wings. Not a swallow nor a martin was in sight at that spot.
It is plain, then, that if the mayfly is declining and dying out because some too greedy bird snatches its life before it can lay its eggs to continue the species, or drop upon the water to supply the trout with its proper succulent food, the swift and not the swallow is the chief culprit.
It is equally plain that these (from the angler's point of view) injurious birds are not breeders by the waterside. Their numbers are too great: they come, ninety per cent. of them I should say, from farm-houses, villages, and towns at a distance of a good many miles from the water.
The revels of the swifts were brought prematurely { 268} to an end by a great change in the weather, which began with a thunderstorm on 27th July, and two days later a greater storm, with hail the size of big marrowfat peas, which fell so abundantly that the little lawn was all white as if snow had fallen. From that time onwards storm succeeded storm, and finally the weather became steadily bad; and we had rough, cold, wet days right on to the 10th of August. It was a terrible time for the poor holiday people all over the country, and bad too for the moulting and late-breeding birds. As a small set-off to all the discomfort of these dreary days, we had a green lawn once more at the cottage. I had made one or two attempts at watering it, but the labour proved too great to a lazy man, and now Nature had come with her great watering-pot and restored its spring-like verdure and softness.