Welsh Journals

The Welsh National Wildlife Species of Animals and Plants that are Wales National Species By ERIC HARDY, F.Z.S. I LIKE the man who likes Wales because he has gone out into the wonderful wildness of the Principality and there stepped just beyond the highway to watch Nature's wild things as unrestrained in their fascinating life as they were in the veritable backwoods of primitive Britain. It is only natural that the kite which was native to England should make its last British Isles retreat from persecution in the wild Welsh hills of Radnorshire, seeing the very people of Wales today are the remnants of a race that was native to England, and like much of the wildlife, driven westwards by the invading persecutors, until the wild Welsh hills offered them the sanctuary they could not have in England. Wales still affords sanctuary to many fascinating forms of wildlife, but most interesting of all are those many species of animals and plants that are national species^ belonging to Wales and named after Wales. It is time someone for truth's sake wrote a nature book about these special Welsh species instead of contributing to this silly spate of books about Hampshire and other southern counties, copying (and badly, too) the original methods of Gilbert White and W. H. Hudson there, without ever thinking of doing what those great nature-lovers did, and that was explore new haunts. English naturalists have yet to awake to the wild beauty of Wales, but we hope soon to have one, of the summer naturalists' gatherings of the British Empire Naturalists' Association held in Wales; then the world will know what Welsh nature-lovers know now. This winter has been mild so far, but even in severe winters, you will still find in sheltered parts of the Welsh woods and thickets that pretty and in fact remarkable fern which the great Linnaeus named the Welsh Polypody (Polypodium cambricum). Unlike the polypody fern of the English waysides and hedgebanks that dies down as soon as the frost strikes it, the Welsh Polypody has the lobes to its fronds broader, and instead of being simple or undivided, they are deeply and irregularly lobed a second time. Under slight shelter, where its fronds are persistent (though they never seem to bear fruit), it is one of the