Down With the Lark?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 727, 19 June 1953, Page 16

Down With the Lark?

by

SUNDOWNER

MAY 23

HEN I had to ask a veterinary surgeon. three or four weeks ago to deliver Elsie’s fourth calf I felt embarrassed by the fact that I had not joined the local veterinary club. But it was not parsimony that kept me out. It was shyness. It does not strain my sense of the ridiculous to call myself

a shepherd, since I own a smal) flock of sheep and keep them under

daily observation. But I hesitate to call myself a sheep-farmer. I can’t, with one cow, a heifer, and an eighteen-months-old steer, call myself a dairy or cattle farmer. Throwing in two dogs and two pups, seventeen fowls, and a cat, still leaves me so near the ridicule line that I must either stay out of the club or be conscious of the general sniggering if I join. But I did not know until today that if I had joined I would have been a member of one of the oldest clubs in the world, Our own club, I think, is about fifteen months old. But there was a veterinary club in Ceylon, nation-wide in its operations, more than fifteen centuries ago, with public hospitals for animals. There were veterinary surgeons with Constantine’s army in 322, and Romans writing

about animal diseases at least 300 years earlier. The Egyptians probably practised veterinary surgery centuries before Rome began, and it was certainly taught and practised in Greece five centuries before Christ. I am not sure that I would have trusted one of those practitioners with the delivery of Elsie’s calf, but if I had known that a cheque for two guineas would have given me a kind of fellowship with Hippocrates and Varro, I might not have been so squeamish about filling it in. Now the stream of history has swept past me. aa Kk

MAY 28

DON’T feel any older or any younger, any bigger or any smaller, any wiser or any more foolish because this is my seventieth birthday. I feel grateful that I have reached 70 in reasonably. good health, that my eyes and ears still work, that it gives me no trouble yet to touch my toes, lace my boots, digest a good

meal, and sleep an unbroken eight hours. But I try at the same time

not to deceive myself. Seventy is three score and a half, and only the lucky get the other half. It is a shortening tether, a rapidly narrowing circle, contemporaries going, forebears gone. It is the last

span on Mirza’s bridge, eyes averted as companions drop through, ears trying not to hear the splash. It can happen that the heart preserves its rhythm to the last plank, the spirit its serenity; but it does not happen often. When a man is in-

se different to death he has probably been unresponsive to life — a sleepwalker who never woke up. In any case here I am and here I can’t stay; and not many of us enjoy that knowledge. We may not be afraid, but we are not often exhilarated. Less often are we amused. We . may smile when death comes, in the few cases in which we see it coming, but I don’t think we ever laugh. I certainly am _ = not laughing today. I accept my age, and face the implications (I _ think) without anxiety or fear. But I don’t welcome them or rejoice in them, I can’t be as indifferent as Shaw pretended to be at my age, and perhaps was, since he had another quarter of a century to go, and had _ almost bluffed himself into believing then that age was

ignorance and stupidity. But I am not as depressed as Wells was, who knew at 70 that disease had overtaken him, and that his remaining years would be measured in units of insulin. All I sat down to say however was this-that I

would not have known I had reached 70 if the calendar had not shouted it out. 5 te * aan ~

_ MAY 30

ad Pe > C.M., Dunedin, wants to know what * I think about this passage in a book he. has just read (Animals and Man, by G. S. Cansdale, Superintendent of the London Zoological Gardens): The birds introduced to New Zealand were mostly of British species: some are useful or neutral, but others have turned into ts, including the skylark, which is now listed as the second worst bird pest there. I think the man who wrote that knew as much as I did when I wondered if

bats had disappeared from New Zealand and thought that the whistling

frog was heard only in Westland. But I think there was more excuse for him than there was for me, A man living in one part of the world gets his information about other parts of the world from those who live there. In particular he gets it from books written there, and in this case the New Zealand authorities are on the Londoner’s side. First, there is this paragraph about larks in the standard book about New Zealand birds written by Dr. W. R. B. Oliver: On account of its habit of eating grain and seeds, and especially of pulling young plants out of the ground as they are just appearing above the surface, the skylark is reckoned the most destructive pest after the sparrow. It is quite a common bird and therefore especially troublesome to farm and garden . crops. Dr. Oliver said that about 1930, but G. M. Thomson had said the same thing,

in approximately. the samé words, neatly ten years earlier. Here is a paragraph from The Naturalisation of Animals and Plants in New Zealand published by the Cambridge Press in 1921: Next to the sparrow the skylark is considered by farmers to be the most destructive of the small birds which have been introduced into New Zealand. They are particularly destructive in spring, when they pull wheat and other grains out. of the ground just as these are springing. They also uproot seedling cabbage, turnip and other farm plants. In the Foxton district pea-growing is quite impossible, owing to their depredations. Respectful as I wish to be to all authorities, and especially to these two, I think they have both written as recklessly as I now do in contradicting them. Larks have never been numerous enough anywhere in New Zealand to challenge the bad pre-eminence of sparrows, and I should like to know in what district last year (when Dr. Cansdale’s book was written) they were numerous enough to alarm a single farmer. Whatever the situation was in Foxton when G. M. Thomson wrote his paragraph, I suspect that he set down what someone else told him, and that his informant was not given to under-statement. Started on its way by G. M. Thomson and the Cambridge Press the remark would go round and round the world, and I don’t like to think how often it has been round already. This note will of course not stop it, but it will be something if it checks or diverts it for a day or two, and makes others in addition to H.C.M. scratch their heads. (To be continued)