Tarka the Otter, first published in the Twenties, and later Salar the Salmon were enormously popular books. They introduced readers to a host of fish, fur and other creatures that populated the rivers and riverbanks of Devon where the author, Henry Williamson, lived. As well as these and other nature books, he wrote novel after novel, mostly autobiographical, and many based on his experiences in and memories of the trenches in the 1914-1918 war. Williamson produced, according to Jonathan Sale in The Sunday Times a week or two ago, more than seventy books. There was a series of novels The Flax of Dream, and now an English publisher, Sutton, is republishing his long novel sequence A Chronicle of Ancient Sun- light, which for length, (15 volumes), outdoes Anthony Powell's series A Dance to the music of Time, which ran to 12. Williamson went over to Oswald Mosley's fascist party and became highly unpopular even with former admirers. He died in 1977. All this comes back when a friend gives a Christmas present of a small, softback book Nature Trails, volume one, by Richard Williamson. This is a selection from thirty years of contributions to a local newspaper group. It runs in the family, for he is a son of Henry Williamson. He has lived in Sussex since his appointment as warden of a National Nature Reserve near Winchester. He goes through the year as Michael Viney does in his book A Year's Turning.
Williamson's entries for December include stories of the redwings and other birds which have arrived from the harsher climate of the Continent. Same with us here, of course: a whole flock of coal tits must have come on the same invasion together, and they are still in one group or colony. Some fifty gather daily (several timers) at the bird-feeders. Come to think of it, they are there nearly all the time. Williamson writes of his area: "One of the first birds to see the writing on the air, were those smallest of European birds, the goldcrests and firecrests. A friend told him of their arrival on the Essex marshes. One day after 48 hours of wind from the east he "tapped a tamarisk bush with his stick and 30 goldcrests flew out" along with others. None went far. They just collapsed into the long grass and bushes. In the woods he found goldcrests everywhere; they had moved on two days later. Exhausting going. Perhaps some of them moved on to Ireland. Like the coal tits, this year.