NATURE AND MAN

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 102, 3 May 1938, Page 3

NATURE AND MAN

A CHAT ABOUT SANCTUARIES PLACES FOR PEACE (Edited by Leo Fanning.) To people who live in almost any street of a city or town or village of New Zealand a lull of life free from man-made noises—especially the ruthless radio—has become a luxury. Vexed by devils of discord, nature-lovers yearn for the peace of a sylvan sanctury where the songs of birds and the murmur of bright rills among ferns will not be mingled with queer croonings and staccato instrumental splutterings known as “modern music,” as crude as a small boy's first bangings of a stick or stone on a tank or tin. Some of the folk, doomed to inhabit localities where neighbours never cease from troubling with their roaring radio sets, must envy Alan Devoe, who tells the story of his sanctury in Nature Magazine. “It is only ten acres, the Sanctury, but for me it has become a kind of world-in-little,” he writes. “I know every inch of it—every stone and sapling and hickory stump— as a woodchuck knows the turns and twists in his burrow, and 1 have a finger on the life-pulse of all my teantry. In the summer I am a sort of godfather to numberless broods of vireos and catbirds, thrushes and scarlet tanagers, and in the winter I climb up the hillside on snowshoes and carry dinner to beleaguered rabbits. Today, in the shelter of an icicled grove of pine trees, high on the hill, I played crumb-bearer to a band of chickadees. They perched on my fingers, and all but rummaged in my pockets, and were not afraid.

“A Sanctury need not be a pretentious of gravelled walks and trimmed shrubbery and marble bird-baths. Certainly mine is not like that. Fa M and drink and exclusion of the al O human world; that is what makes < Sanctuary, or so it seems to me. Ani so I have not pruned a twig or thinned a thicket, for twigs are the natural home-sites for vireos, and brown thrashers and cuckoos dearly love a thicket. Not a bird-bath have I imported. Instead, with a hammer and chisel, I have chipped shallow depressions in boulders, to catch and hold the rain. In the hottest days of July and August I perform the duty of a supplementary rain-god, and carry a watering-can on my rounds. And so familiar a sight have I become in the Sanctuary at all hours and in all weathers, that, even the hermit thrushes will come to drink at their rockpools while I stand close at hand.

“Wild creatures will give to one, in exchange for a home and fair treatment, a degree of trust and confidence I hat will put their host deeply in debt. To everyone I recommend the setting aside of a sanctuary. It may be a little place—a meadow-lot or a suburban garden or even a city back-yard. Any of these—even the last—may be made, by simple blandishments, to re-assume its ancient role of dwelling-place for furred and feathered things. And a sanctuary, I think, is a good thing, and for a two-fold reason. It is proper that, having dispossessed small creatures so ruthlessly in the building of our urban and mechanical civilization, we should make an effort now to offer them hospice. And it is a good thing, too, in a world of change and confusion, for a man to have some spot—how ever small—to which he can turn for refreshment and there find abiding peace.”

Ruin of Erosion. Millions of people in the United States of America are now filled with fear of the demon of erosion which is spreading ruin over vast areas. New Zealanders would have similar fear if they had full knowledge of the penalties which their country is already doomed to suffer from the destruction of protective forests on watersheds. “For one acre of American land that has been ruined by erosion, there are fifty where the process has just started,” writes Henry H. Collins. “The total amount of soil eroding from the fifty is far greater than that now washing from the one. Ruined, nearruined, and visibly threatened acres are startling. They attract attention. Something obviously should be don'’, and now, due to the work or influence of the Soil Conservation Service, something probably is being done about them. But what care are we giving the hundreds of millions of acres of our land where erosion, though it can be observed by the discerning, escapes general attention? It is there, where little is noticed and nothing done, that the attention of soil conservationists and of the public must be more and more directed, for the time to stop erosion is now. The time to save the soil is before the soil is imperilled; while there is still something left to save. “Accelerated erosion can be stopped —and the little teeth reduced to their paltry fare of red-man years. But it will not be stopped until it is recognized that even a little erosion is a dangerous thing; that land, apart from all other forms of property, is affected with a peculiar social quality, and that individuals should no longer be allowed to treat it without regard for the public welfare. Accelerated erosion can be stopped; but it will not be until public opinion forces legislatures to recognize that one man's sheep cause another man’s silt, and one man’s goats another man's gully.” Live, or Dead Birds? Everybody except, an ardent collector or a one-eyed ornithologist, will admit that it. is better to have two more live birds in the bush than a dead one in hand. This is the firm belief of Mrs. Perrine Moncrief, who has this not in the preface of her helpful hand-book “New Zealand Birds and How to Identify Them.”— “The most laborious, least efficient, and most discouraging method of mastering a language is that which is based upon a study of its grammar. The pleasantest and quickest way is to learn it by natural intercourse, and so it is when studying birds. You may retire with a dead bird to your room and laboriously learn the irregular verbs of ornithology, or you may betake yourself to the bush and get to know the birds themselves. Mark Twain must have had the former procedure in mind when he defined an ornithologist as a man who, on seeing a bird sitting in a tree, got his gun and shot it.” A Ballad of Trees and the Master. Into the woods my Master went, I Clean forspent, forspent, Into the woods'my Master came, I Forspent with love and shame.

But the olives they were not blind to Him, The little gray leaves were kind to Him; The thorn free had a mind to Him When into the woods He came. Out of the woods my Master went, And he was well content. Out of the woods my Master came, Content with death and shame. When Death and Shape would woo Him last, From under the trees they drew Him last, ’Twas on a tree they Slew Him--last When out of the woods He came. Sidney Lanier in “Nature Magizine.”