BIRDS IN TOWN & VILLAGE

BY

W. H. HUDSON, F. Z. S. 

AUTHOR OF "THE PURPLE LAND, " "IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA, " "FAR AWAY ANDLONG AGO, " ETC. 

1920

PREFACE

This book is more than a mere reprint of _Birds in a Village_ firstpublished in 1893. That was my first book about bird life, with someimpressions of rural scenes, in England; and, as is often the case witha first book, its author has continued to cherish a certain affectionfor it. On this account it pleased me when its turn came to be reissued, since this gave me the opportunity of mending some faults in theportions retained and of throwing out a good deal of matter whichappeared to me not worth keeping. 

The first portion, "Birds in a Village, " has been mostly rewritten withsome fresh matter added, mainly later observations and incidentsintroduced in illustration of the various subjects discussed. For theconcluding portion of the old book, which has been discarded, I havesubstituted entirely new matter-the part entitled "Birds in a CornishVillage. "

Between these two long parts there are five shorter essays which I haveretained with little alteration, and these in one or two instances areconsequently out of date, especially in what was said with bitterness inthe essay on "Exotic Birds for Britain" anent the feather-wearingfashion and of the London trade in dead birds and the refusal of womenat that time to help us in trying to save the beautiful wild bird lifeof this country and of the world generally from extermination. Happily, the last twenty years of the life and work of the Royal Society for theProtection of Birds have changed all that, and it would not now be toomuch to say that all right-thinking persons in this country, men andwomen, are anxious to see the end of this iniquitous traffic. 

W. H. H. 

September, 1919. 

CONTENTS

PAGE

BIRDS IN A VILLAGE:

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

EXOTIC BIRDS FOR BRITAIN

MOOR-HENS IN HYDE PARK

THE EAGLE AND THE CANARY

CHANTICLEER

IN AN OLD GARDEN

BIRDS IN A CORNISH VILLAGE:

I. TAKING STOCK OF THE BIRDS

II. DO STARLINGS PAIR FOR LIFE?

III. VILLAGE BIRDS IN WINTER

IV. INCREASING BIRDS IN BRITAIN

V. THE DAW SENTIMENT

VI. STORY OF A JACKDAW

 BIRDS IN TOWN & VILLAGE

BIRDS IN A VILLAGE I

About the middle of last May, after a rough and cold period, there camea spell of brilliant weather, reviving in me the old spring feeling, thepassion for wild nature, the desire for the companionship of birds; andI betook myself to St. James's Park for the sake of such satisfaction asmay be had from watching and feeding the fowls, wild and semi-wild, found gathered at that favored spot. 

I was glad to observe a couple of those new colonists of the ornamentalwater, the dabchicks, and to renew my acquaintance with the familiar, long-established moorhens. One of them was engaged in building its nestin an elm-tree growing at the water's edge. I saw it make two journeyswith large wisps of dry grass in its beak, running up the rough, slanting trunk to a height of sixteen to seventeen feet, anddisappearing within the "brushwood sheaf" that springs from the bole atthat distance from the roots. The wood-pigeons were much more numerous, also more eager to be fed. They seemed to understand very quickly thatmy bread and grain was for them and not the sparrows; but although theystationed themselves close to me, the little robbers we were jointlytrying to outwit managed to get some pieces of bread by flying up andcatching them before they touched the sward. This little comedy over, Ivisited the water-fowl, ducks of many kinds, sheldrakes, geese from manylands, swans black, and swans white. To see birds in prison during thespring mood of which I have spoken is not only no satisfaction but apositive pain; here--albeit without that large liberty that naturegives, they are free in a measure; and swimming and diving or dozing inthe sunshine, with the blue sky above them, they are perhaps unconsciousof any restraint. Walking along the margin I noticed three childrensome yards ahead of me; two were quite small, but the third, in whosecharge the others were, was a robust-looking girl, aged about ten oreleven years. From their dress and appearance I took them to be thechildren of a respectable artisan or small tradesman; but what chieflyattracted my attention was the very great pleasure the elder girlappeared to take in the birds. She had come well provided with stalebread to feed them, and after giving moderately of her store to thewood-pigeons and sparrows, she went on to the others, native and exotic, that were disporting themselves in the water, or sunning themselves onthe green bank. She did not cast her bread on the water in the mannerusual with visitors, but was anxious to feed all the different species, or as many as she could attract to her, and appeared satisfied when anyone individual of a particular kind got a fragment of her bread. Meanwhile she talked eagerly to the little ones, calling their attentionto the different birds. Drawing near, I also became an interestedlistener; and then, in answer to my questions, she began telling me whatall these strange fowls were. "This, " she said, glad to giveinformation, "is the Canadian goose, and there is the Egyptian goose;and here is the king-duck coming towards us; and do you see that large, beautiful bird standing by itself, that will not come to be fed? That isthe golden duck. But that is not its real name; I don't know them all, and so I name some for myself. I call that one the golden duck becausein the sun its feathers sometimes shine like gold. " It was a rarepleasure to listen to her, and seeing what sort of a girl she was, andhow much in love with her subject, I in my turn told her a great dealabout the birds before us, also of other birds she had never seen norheard of, in other and distant lands that have a nobler bird life thanours; and after she had listened eagerly for some minutes, and had thenbeen silent a little while, she all at once pressed her two handstogether, and exclaimed rapturously, "Oh, I do so love the birds!"

I replied that that was not strange, since it is impossible for us notto love whatever is lovely, and of all living things birds were mademost beautiful. 

Then I walked away, but could not forget the words she had exclaimed, her whole appearance, the face flushed with color, the eloquent browneyes sparkling, the pressed palms, the sudden spontaneous passion ofdelight and desire in her tone. The picture was in my mind all that day, and lived through the next, and so wrought on me that I could not longerkeep away from the birds, which I, too, loved; for now all at once itseemed to me that life was not life without them; that I was grown sick, and all my senses dim; that only the wished sight of wild birds couldmedicine my vision; that only by drenching it in their wild melody couldmy tired brain recover its lost vigour. 

II

After wandering somewhat aimlessly about the country for a couple ofdays, I stumbled by chance on just such a spot as I had been wishing tofind--a rustic village not too far away. It was not more thantwenty-five minutes' walk from a small station, less than one hour byrail from London. 

The way to the village was through cornfields, bordered by hedges androws of majestic elms. Beyond it, but quite near, there was a wood, principally of beech, over a mile in length, with a public path runningthrough it. On the right hand, ten minutes' walk from the village, therewas a long green hill, the ascent to which was gentle; but on thefurther side it sloped abruptly down to the Thames. 

On the left hand there was another hill, with cottages and orchards, with small fields interspersed on the slope and summit, so that themiddle part, where I lodged, was in a pretty deep hollow. There was nosound of traffic there, and few farmers' carts came that way, as it waswell away from the roads, and the deep, narrow, winding lanes wereexceedingly rough, like the stony beds of dried-up streams. 

In the deepest part of the coombe, in the middle of the village, therewas a well where the cottagers drew their water; and in the summerevenings the youths and maidens came there, with or without jugs andbuckets, to indulge in conversation, which was mostly of the rustic, bantering kind, mixed with a good deal of loud laughter. Close by wasthe inn, where the men sat on benches in the tap-room in grave discourseover their pipes and beer. 

Wishing to make their acquaintance, I went in and sat down among them, and found them a little shy--not to say stand-offish, at first. Rusticsare often suspicious of the stranger within their gates; but afterpaying for beer all round, the frost melted and we were soon deep intalk about the wild life of the place; always a safe and pleasantsubject in a village. One rough-looking, brown-faced man, with iron-greyhair, became a sort of spokesman for the company, and replied to most ofmy questions. 

"And what about badgers?" I asked. "In such a rough-looking spot withwoods and all, it strikes me as just the sort of place where one wouldfind that animal. "

A long dead silence followed. I caught the eye of the man nearest me andrepeated the question, "Are there no badgers here?" His eyes fell, thenhe exchanged glances with some of the others, all very serious; and atlength my man, addressing the person who had acted as spokesman before, said, "Perhaps you'll tell the gentleman if there are any badgers here. "

At that the rough man looked at me very sharply, and answered stiffly, "Not as I know of. "

A few weeks later, at a small town in the neighbourhood, I got intoconversation with a hotel keeper, an intelligent man, who gave me a gooddeal of information about the country. He asked me where I was staying, and, on my telling him, said "Ah, I know it well--that village in ahole; and a very nasty hole to get in, too--at any rate it was so, formerly. They are getting a bit civilized now, but I remember the timewhen a stranger couldn't show himself in the place without being jeeredat and insulted. Yes, they were a rough lot down in that hole--theBadgers, they were called, and that's what they are called still. "

The pity of it was that I didn't know this before I went among them! Butit was not remembered against me that I had wounded theirsusceptibilities; they soon found that I was nothing but a harmlessfield naturalist, and I had friendly relations with many of them. 

At the extremity of the straggling village was the beginning of anextensive common, where it was always possible to spend an hour or twowithout seeing a human creature. A few sheep grazed and browsed there, roaming about in twos and threes and half-dozens, tearing their fleecesfor the benefit of nest-building birds, in the great tangled masses ofmingled furze and bramble and briar. Birds were abundant there--allthose kinds that love the common's openness, and the rough, thornyvegetation that flourishes on it. But the village--or rather, the largeopen space occupied by it, formed the headquarters and centre of aparadise of birds (as I soon began to think it), for the cottages andhouses were widely separated, the meanest having a garden and sometrees, and in most cases there was an old orchard of apple, cherry, andwalnut trees to each habitation, and out of this mass of greenery, whichhid the houses and made the place look more like a wood than a village, towered the great elms in rows, and in groups. 

On first approaching the place I heard, mingled with many other voices, that of the nightingale; and as it was for the medicine of its pure, fresh melody that I particularly craved, I was glad to find a lodging inone of the cottages, and to remain there for several weeks. 

The small care which the nightingale took to live up to his reputationin this place surprised me a little. Here he could always be heard inthe daytime--not one bird, but a dozen--in different parts of thevillage; but he sang not at night. This I set down to the fact that thenights were dark and the weather unsettled. But later, when the weathergrew warmer, and there were brilliant moonlight nights, he was still asilent bird except by day. 

I was also a little surprised at his tameness. 

On first coming to the village, when I ran after every nightingale Iheard, to get as near him as possible, I was occasionally led by thesound to a cottage, and in some instances I found the singer perchedwithin three or four yards of an open window or door. At my own cottage, when the woman who waited on me shook the breakfast cloth at the frontdoor, the bird that came to pick up the crumbs was the nightingale--notthe robin. When by chance he met a sparrow there, he attacked and chasedit away. It was a feast of nightingales. An elderly woman of the villageexplained to me that the nightingales and other small birds were commonand tame in the village, because no person disturbed them. I smile nowwhen recording the good old dame's words. 

On my second day at the village it happened to be raining--a warm, mizzling rain without wind--ind the nightingales were as vocal as infine bright weather. I heard one in a narrow lane, and went towards it, treading softly, in order not to scare it away, until I got within eightor ten yards of it, as it sat on a dead projecting twig. This was a twigof a low thorn tree growing up from the hedge, projecting through thefoliage, and the bird, perched near its end, sat only about five feetabove the bare ground of the lane. Now, I owe my best thanks to thisindividual nightingale, for sharply calling to my mind a commonpestilent delusion, which I have always hated, but had never yet raisedmy voice against--namely, that all wild creatures exist in constant fearof an attack from the numberless subtle or powerful enemies that arealways waiting and watching for an opportunity to spring upon anddestroy them. The truth is, that although their enemies be legion, andthat every day, and even several times on each day, they may bethreatened with destruction, they are absolutely free from apprehension, except when in the immediate presence of danger. Suspicious they may beat times, and the suspicion may cause them to remove themselves to agreater distance from the object that excites it; but the emotion is soslight, the action so almost automatic, that the singing bird will flyto another bush a dozen yards away, and at once resume his interruptedsong. Again, a bird will see the deadliest enemy of its kind, and unlessit be so close as to actually threaten his life, he will regard it withthe greatest indifference or will only be moved to anger at itspresence. Here was this nightingale singing in the rain, seeing but notheeding me; while beneath the hedge, almost directly under the twig itsat on, a black cat was watching it with luminous yellow eyes. I did notsee the cat at first, but have no doubt that the nightingale had seenand knew that it was there. High up on the tops of the thorn, a coupleof sparrows were silently perched. Perhaps, like myself, they had comethere to listen. After I had been standing motionless, drinking in thatdulcet music for at least five minutes, one of the two sparrows droppedfrom the perch straight down, and alighting on the bare wet grounddirectly under the nightingale, began busily pecking at somethingeatable it had discovered. No sooner had he begun pecking than outleaped the concealed cat on to him. The sparrow fluttered wildly up frombeneath or between the claws, and escaped, as if by a miracle. The catraised itself up, glared round, and, catching sight of me close by, sprang back into the hedge and was gone. But all this time the exposednightingale, perched only five feet above the spot where the attack hadbeen made and the sparrow had so nearly lost his life, had continuedsinging; and he sang on for some minutes after. I suppose that he hadseen the cat before, and knew instinctively that he was beyond itsreach; that it was a terrestrial, not an aerial enemy, and so feared itnot at all; and he would, perhaps, have continued singing if the sparrowhad been caught and instantly killed. 

Quite early in June I began to feel just a little cross with thenightingales, for they almost ceased singing; and considering that thespring had been a backward one, it seemed to me that their silence wascoming too soon. I was not sufficiently regardful of the fact that theirlays are solitary, as the poet has said; that they ask for no witness oftheir song, nor thirst for human praise. They were all nesting now. Butif I heard them less, I saw much more of them, especially of oneindividual, the male bird of a couple that had made their nest in ahedge a stone's throw from the cottage. A favourite morning perch ofthis bird was on a small wooden gate four or five yards away from mywindow. It was an open, sunny spot, where his restless, bright eyescould sweep the lane, up and down; and he could there also give vent tohis superfluous energy by lording it over a few sparrows and other smallbirds that visited the spot. I greatly admired the fine, alert figure ofthe pugnacious little creature, as he perched there so close to me, andso fearless. His striking resemblance to the robin in form, size, and inhis motions, made his extreme familiarity seem only natural. The robinis greatly distinguished in a sober-plumaged company by the vivid tinton his breast. He is like the autumn leaf that catches a ray of sunlighton its surface, and shines conspicuously among russet leaves. But theclear brown of the nightingale is beautiful, too. 

This same nightingale was keeping a little surprise in store for me. Although he took no notice of me sitting at the open window, whenever Iwent thirty or forty yards from the gate along the narrow lane thatfaced it, my presence troubled him and his mate only too much. Theywould flit round my head, emitting the two strongly contrasted soundswith which they express solicitude--the clear, thin, plaintive, orwailing note, and the low, jarring sound--an alternate lamenting andgirding. One day when I approached the nest, they displayed more anxietythan usual, fluttering close to me, wailing and croaking more vehementlythan ever, when all at once the male, at the height of his excitement, burst into singing. Half a dozen notes were uttered rapidly, with greatstrength, then a small complaining cry again, and at intervals, a freshburst of melody. I have remarked the same thing in other singing birds, species in which the harsh grating or piercing sounds that properlyexpress violent emotions of a painful kind, have been nearly or quitelost. In the nightingale, this part of the bird's language has lost itsoriginal character, and has dwindled to something very small. Solicitude, fear, anger, are expressed with sounds that are merelispings compared with those emitted by the bird when singing. It isworthy of remark that some of the most highly developed melodists--and Iam now thinking of the mocking-birds--never, in-moments of extremeagitation, fall into this confusion and use singing notes that expressagreeable emotions, to express such as are painful. But in themocking-bird the primitive harsh and grating cries have not been lostnor softened to sounds hardly to be distinguished from those that areemitted by way of song. 

III

By this time all the birds were breeding, some already breeding a secondtime. And now I began to suspect that they were not quite so undisturbedas the old dame had led me to believe; that they had not found aparadise in the village after all. One morning, as I moved softly alongthe hedge in my nightingale's lane, all at once I heard, in the oldgrassy orchard, to which it formed a boundary, swishing sounds ofscuttling feet and half-suppressed exclamations of alarm; then acrushing through the hedge, and out, almost at my feet, rushed andleaped and tumbled half-a-dozen urchins, who had suddenly beenfrightened from a bird-nesting raid. Clothes torn, hands and facesscratched with thorns, hat-less, their tow-coloured hair all disorderedor standing up like a white crest above their brown faces, rounded eyesstaring--what an extraordinarily wild appearance they had! I was backin very old times, in the Britain of a thousand years before the comingof the Romans, and these were her young barbarians, learning theirlife's business in little things. 

No, the birds of the village were not undisturbed while breeding; buthappily the young savages never found my nightingale's nest. One day thebird came to the gate as usual, and was more alert and pugnacious thanever; and no wonder, for his mate came too, and with them four youngbirds. For a week they were about the cottage every day, when theydispersed, and one beautiful bright morning the male bird, in his oldplace near my window, attempted to sing, beginning with that rich, melodious throbbing, which is usually called "_jugging_, " and followingwith half-a-dozen beautiful notes. That was all. It was July, and Iheard no more music from him or from any other of his kind. 

* * *

I have perhaps written at too great length of this bird. The nightingalewas after all only one of the fifty-nine species I succeeded inidentifying during my sojourn at the village. There were more. I heardthe calls and cries of others in the wood and various places, butrefused, except in the case of the too elusive crake, to set down any inmy list that I did not see. It was not my ambition to make a long list. My greatest desire was to see well those that interested me most. Butthose who go forth, as I did, to look for birds that are a sight forsore eyes, must meet with many a disappointment. In all those fruit andshade trees that covered the village with a cloud of verdure, and in theneighbouring woods, not once did I catch a glimpse of the greenwoodpecker, a beautiful conspicuous bird, supposed to be increasing inmany places in England. Its absence from so promising a locality seemedstrange. Another species, also said to be increasing in thecountry--the turtledove, was extremely abundant. In the tall beech woodsits low, montonous crooning note was heard all day long from all sides. In shady places, where the loud, shrill bird-voices are few, one prefersthis sound to the set song of the woodpigeon, being more continuous andsoothing, and of the nature of a lullaby. It sometimes reminded me ofthe low monotone I have heard from a Patagonian mother when singing her"swart papoose" to sleep. Still, I would gladly have spared many ofthese woodland crooners for the sake of one magpie--that bird of finefeathers and a bright mind, which I had not looked on for a whole year, and now hoped to see again. But he was not there; and after I had lookedfor myself, some of the natives assured me that no magpie had been seenfor years in that wood. 

For a time I feared that I was to be just as unlucky with regard to thejay, seeing that the owner of the extensive beech woods adjoining thevillage permitted his keeper to kill the most interesting birds init--kestrels and sparrowhawks, owls, jays, and magpies. He was a newman, comparatively, in the place, and wanted to increase his preserves, but to do this it was necessary first to exclude the villagers--theBadgers, who were no doubt partial to pheasants' eggs. Now, to close anancient right-of-way is a ticklish business, and this was an importantone, seeing that the village women did their Saturday marketing in thetown beyond the wood and river, and with the path closed they would havetwo miles further to walk. The new lord wisely took this intoconsideration, and set himself to win the goodwill of the people beforeattempting any strong measures. He walked in the lanes and was affableto the cottage women and nice to the children, and by and bye heexclaimed, "What! No institute! no hall, or any place where you can meetand spend the long winter evenings? Well, I'll soon see to that. " Andsoon, to their delight, they had a nice building reared on a piece ofland which he bought for the purpose, furnished with tables, chairs, bagatelle boards, and all accessories; and he also supplied them withnewspapers and magazines. He was immensely popular, but appeared tothink little of what he had done. When they expressed their gratitude tohim he would move his hand, and answer, "Oh, I'm going to do a greatdeal more than that for you!"

A few months went by, then he caused a notice to be put up about theneighbourhood that the path through the wood was going to be closed "byorder. " No one took any notice, and a few weeks later his workmenappeared on the scene and erected a huge oakwood barrier across thepath; also a notice on a board that the wood was strictly private andtrespassers would be prosecuted. The villagers met in force at theinstitute and the inn that evening, and after discussing the matter overtheir ale, they armed themselves with axes and went in a body anddemolished the barrier. 

The owner was disgusted, but took no action. "This, " he said, "is theirgratitude"; and from that day he ceased to subscribe to the localcharities or take his walks in the village. He had given the institute, and so could not pull it down nor prevent them from using it. 

It was refreshing to hear that the Badgers had shown a proper spirit inthe matter, and I was grateful to them for having kept the right-of-way, as on most days I spent several hours in the beautiful woods. 

To return to the jay. In spite of the keeper's persecution, I knew thathe was there; every morning when I got up to look out of the windowbetween four and five o'clock, I heard from some quarter of the villagethat curious subdued, but far-reaching, scolding note he is accustomedto utter when his suspicions have been aroused. 

That was the jay's custom--to come from the woods before even theearliest risers were up, and forage in the village. By and bye Idiscovered that, by lying motionless for an hour or so on the dry mossin the wood, he would at length grow so bold as to allow himself to beseen, but high up among the topmost branches. Then, by means of mybinocular, I had the wild thing on my thumb, so to speak, exhibitinghimself to me, inquisitive, perplexed, suspicious, enraged by turns, ashe flirted wings and tail, lifted and lowered his crest, glancing downwith bright, wild eyes. What a beautiful hypocrisy and delightful powerthis is which enables us, sitting or lying motionless, feigning sleepperhaps, thus to fool this wild, elusive creature, and bring all itscunning to naught! He is so much smaller and keener-sighted, able tofly, to perch far up above me, to shift his position every minute ortwo, masking his small figure with this or that tuft of leaves, whilestill keeping his eyes on me--in spite of it all to have him so close, and without moving or taking any trouble, to see him so much better thanhe can see me! But this is a legitimate trickery of science, so innocentthat we can laugh at our dupe when we practise it; nor do we afterwardsdespise our superior cunning and feel ashamed, as when we slaughter wildbirds with far-reaching shot, which they cannot escape. 

* * *

All these corvine birds, which the gamekeeper pursues so relentlessly, albeit they were before him, killing when they killed to better purpose;and, let us hope, will exist after him--all these must greatly surpassother kinds in sagacity to have escaped extermination. In the presentcondition of things, the jay is perhaps the best off, on account of hissmaller size and less conspicuous colouring; but whether more cunningthan the crow or magpie or not, in perpetual alertness and restlessenergy or intensity of life, he is without an equal among British birds. And this quality forms his chief attraction; it is more to the mind thanhis lifted crest and bright eyes, his fine vinaceous brown and the patchof sky-blue on his wings. One would miss him greatly from the woods;some of the melody may well be spared for the sake of the sudden, brain-piercing, rasping, rending scream with which he startles us in oursolitary forest walks. 

It is this extreme liveliness of the jay which makes it more distressingto the mind to see it pent in a cage than other birds of its family, such as the magpie; just as it is more distressing to see a skylark thana finch in prison, because the lark has an irresistible impulse to risewhen his singing fit is on. Sing he must, in or out of prison, yet therecan be little joy in the performance when the bird is incessantly teasedwith the unsatisfied desire to mount and pour out his music at heaven'sgate. 

Out of the cages, jays make charming and beautiful pets, and some whohave kept them have assured me that they are not mischievous birds. Thelate Mark Melford one time when I visited him, had two jays, handsomebirds, in bright, glossy plumage, always free to roam where they liked, indoors or out. We were sitting talking in his garden when one of thejays came flying to us and perched on a wooden ledge a few feet from andabove our heads, and after sitting quietly for a little while hesuddenly made a dash at my head, just brushing it with his wings, thenreturned to his perch. At intervals of a few moments he repeated thisaction, and when I remarked that he probably resented the presence of astranger, Melford exclaimed, "Oh, no, he wants to play with you--that'sall. "

His manner of playing was rather startling. So long as I kept my eyes onhim he remained motionless, but the instant my attention wandered, orwhen in speaking I looked at my companion, the sudden violent dash at myhead would be made. 

I was assured by Melford that his birds never carried off and concealedbright objects, a habit which it has been said the jay, as well as themagpie, possesses. 

"What would he do with this shilling if I tossed it to him?" I asked. 

"Catch it, " he returned. "It would simply be play to him, but hewouldn't carry it off. "

I tossed up the shilling, and the bird had perhaps expected me to do so, as he deftly caught it just as a dog catches a biscuit when you toss oneto him. After keeping it a few moments in his beak, he put it down athis side. I took out four more shilling pieces and tossed them quicklyone by one, and he caught them without a miss and placed them one by onewith the other, not scattered about, but in a neat pile. Then, seeingthat I had no more shillings he flew off. 

After these few playful passages with one of his birds, I couldunderstand Melford's feeling about his free pet jays, magpies andjackdaws; they were not merely birds to him, but rather like so manydelightful little children in the beautiful shape of birds. 

* * *

There was no rookery in or near the village, but a large flock of rookswere always to be seen feeding and sunning themselves in some levelmeadows near the river. It struck me one day as a very fine sight, whenan old bird, who looked larger and blacker and greyer-faced than theothers, and might have been the father and leader of them all, got up ona low post, and with wide-open beak poured forth a long series of mostimpressive caws. One always wonders at the meaning of such displays. Isthe old bird addressing the others in the rook language on some matterof great moment; or is he only expressing some feeling in the onlylanguage he has--those long, hoarse, uninflected sounds; and if so, whatfeeling? Probably a very common one. The rooks appeared happy andprosperous, feeding in the meadow grass in that June weather, with thehot sun shining on their glossy coats. Their days of want were long pastand forgotten; the anxious breeding period was over; the tempest in thetall trees; the annual slaughter of the young birds--all past andforgotten. The old rook was simply expressing the old truth, that lifewas worth living. 

These rooks were usually accompanied by two or three or more crows--abird of so ill-repute that the most out-and-out enthusiast forprotection must find it hard to say a word in its favour. At any rate, the rooks must think, if they think at all, that this frequent visitorand attendant of theirs is more kin than kind. I have related in aformer work that I once saw a peregrine strike down and kill an owl--asight that made me gasp with astonishment. But I am inclined to think ofthis act as only a slip, a slight aberration, on the part of the falcon, so universal is the sense of relationship among the kinds that have therapacious habit; or, at the worst, it was merely an isolated act ofdeviltry and daring of the sharp-winged pirate of the sky, a suddenassertion of over-mastering energy and power, and a very slight offencecompared with that of the crow when he carries off and devours hiscallow little cousins of the rookery. 

* * *

One of the first birds I went out to seek--perhaps the most medicinal ofall birds to see--was the kingfisher; but he was not anywhere on theriver margin, although suitable places were plentiful enough, andmyriads of small fishes were visible in the shallow water, seen at restlike dim-pointed stripes beneath the surface, and darting away andscattering outwards, like a flight of arrows, at any person's approach. Walking along the river bank one day, when the place was still new tome, I discovered a stream, and following it up arrived at a spot where aclump of trees overhung the water, casting on it a deep shade. On theother side of the stream buttercups grew so thickly that the glazedpetals of the flowers were touching; the meadow was one broad expanse ofbrilliant yellow. I had not been standing half a minute in the shadebefore the bird I had been seeking darted out from the margin, almostbeneath my feet, and then, instead of flying up or down stream, spedlike an arrow across the field of buttercups. It was a very bright day, and the bird going from me with the sunshine full on it, appearedentirely of a shining, splendid green. Never had I seen the kingfisherin such favourable circumstances; flying so low above the flowery levelthat the swiftly vibrating wings must have touched the yellow petals; hewas like a waif from some far tropical land. The bird was tropical, butI doubt if there exists within the tropics anything to compare with afield of buttercups--such large and unbroken surfaces of the mostbrilliant colour in nature. The first bird's mate appeared a minutelater, flying in the same direction, and producing the same splendideffect, and also green. These two alone were seen, and only on thisoccasion, although I often revisited the spot, hoping to find themagain. 

Now, the kingfisher is blue, and I am puzzled to know why, on this oneoccasion, it appeared green. I have, in a former work, _ArgentineOrnithology_, described a contrary effect in a small and beautifultyrant-bird, _Cyanotis azarae_, variously called, in the vernacular, "All-colored or Many-colored Kinglet. " It has a little blue on its head, but its entire back, from the nape to the tail, is deep green. It livesin beds of bulrushes, and when seen flying from the spectator in a verystrong light, at a distance of twenty or thirty yards, its colour inappearance is bright cerulean blue. It is a sunlight effect, but howproduced is a mystery to me. In the case of the two green kingfishers, Iam inclined to think that the yellow of that shining field of buttercupsin some way produced the illusion. 

Why are these exquisite birds so rare, even in situations so favourableto them as the one I have described? Are they killed by severe frosts?An ornithological friend from Oxfordshire assures me that it will takeseveral favourable seasons to make good the losses of the late terriblewinter of 1891-92. But this, as every ornithologist knows, is only apart of the truth. The large number of stuffed kingfishers under glassshades that one sees in houses of all descriptions, in town and country, but most frequently in the parlours of country cottages and inns, tell amelancholy story. Some time ago a young man showed me three stuffedkingfishers in a case, and informed me that he had shot them at a place(which he named) quite close to London. He said that these three birdswere the last of their kind ever seen there; that he had gone, weekafter week and watched and waited, until one by one, at long intervals, he had secured them all; and that two years had passed since the lastone was killed, and no other kingfisher had been seen at the place. Headded that the waterside which these birds had frequented was resortedto by crowds of London working people on Saturday afternoons, Sundaysand other holidays; the fact that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pairsof tired eyes would have been freshened and gladdened by the sight oftheir rare gem-like beauty only made him prouder of his achievement. This young man was a cockney of the small shop-keeping class--aPhilistine of the Philistines--hence there was no call to feel surpriseat his self-glorification over such a matter. But what shall we say ofthat writer whose masterly works on English rural life are familiar toeveryone, who is regarded as first among "lovers of nature, " when herelates that he invariably carried a gun when out of doors, mainly withthe object of shooting any kingfisher he might chance to see, as thedead bird always formed an acceptable present to the cottager's wife, who would get it stuffed and keep it as an ornament on her parlourmantelshelf!

Happily for the kingfisher, and for human beings who love nature, theold idea that beautiful birds were meant to be destroyed for fun byanyone and everyone, from the small-brained, detestable cockneysportsman I have mentioned, to the gentlemen who write books about thebeauties of nature, is now gradually giving place to this new one--thatit would be better to preserve the beautiful things we possess. Half acentury before the author of "Wild Life in a Southern Country" amusedhimself by carrying a gun to shoot kingfishers, the inhabitants of thatsame county of Wiltshire were bathed in tears--so I read in an oldSalisbury newspaper--at the tragic death of a young gentleman of greatdistinction, great social charm, great promise. He was out shootingswallows with a friend who, firing at a passing swallow, had themisfortune to shoot and kill _him. _

At the present time when gentlemen practise a little at flying birds, toget their hand in before the first of September, they shoot sparrows asa rule, or if they shoot swallows, which afford them better practice, they do not say anything about it. 

IV

Where the stream broadened and mixed with the river, there existed adense and extensive rush-bed--an island of rushes separated by a deepchannel, some twelve or fourteen yards in width from the bank. This wasa favourite nesting-place of the sedge-warblers; occasionally as many asa dozen birds could be heard singing at the same time, although in nosense together, and the effect was indeed curious. This is not a songthat spurts and gushes up fountain-like in the manner of the robin's, and of some other kinds, sprinkling the listener, so to speak, with asparkling vocal spray; but it keeps low down, a song that flows alongthe surface gurgling and prattling like musical running water, in itsshallow pebbly channel. Listening again, the similitude that seemedappropriate at first was cast aside for another, and then another still. The hidden singers scattered all about their rushy island were small, fantastic, human minstrels, performing on a variety of instruments, someunknown, others recognizable--bones and castanets, tiny hurdy-gurdies, piccolos, banjos, tabours, and Pandean pipes--a strange medley!

Interesting as this concert was, it held me less than the solitarysinging of a sedge-warbler that lived by himself, or with only his mate, higher up where the stream was narrow, so that I could get near him; forhe not only tickled my ears with his rapid, reedy music, but amused mymind as well with a pretty little problem in bird psychology. I couldsit within a few yards of his tangled haunt without hearing a note; butif I jumped up and made a noise, or struck the branches with my stick, he would incontinently burst into song. It is a very well-known habit ofthe bird, and on account of it and of the very peculiar character of thesounds emitted, his song is frequently described by ornithologists as"mocking, defiant, scolding, angry, " etc. It seems clear that atdifferent times the bird sings from different exciting causes. When, undisturbed by a strange presence, he bursts spontaneously into singing, the music, as in other species, is simply an expression of overflowinggladness; at other times, the bird expressed such feelings as alarm, suspicion, solicitude, perhaps anger, by singing the same song. How doesthis come about?

I have stated, when speaking of the nightingale, that birds in which thesinging faculty is highly developed, sometimes make the mistake ofbursting into song when anxious or distressed or in pain, but that thisis not the case with the mocking-birds. Some species of these brilliantsongsters of the New World, in their passion for variety (to put it thatway), import every harsh and grating cry and sound they know into theirsong; but, on the other hand, when anxious for the safety of theiryoung, or otherwise distressed, they emit only the harsh and gratingsounds--never a musical note. In the sedge-warbler, the harsh, scoldingsounds that express alarm, solicitude, and other painful emotions, havealso been made a part of the musical performance; but this differs fromthe songs of most species, the mocking birds included, in theextraordinary rapidity with which it is enunciated; once the song beginsit goes on swiftly to the finish, harsh and melodious notes seeming tooverlap and mingle, the sound forming, to speak in metaphor, a closeintricate pattern of strongly-contrasted colours. Now the songinvariably begins with the harsh notes--the sounds which, at othertimes, express alarm and other more or less painful emotions--and itstrikes me as a probable explanation that when the bird in the singingseason has been startled into uttering these harsh and grating sounds, as when a stone is flung into the rushes, he is incapable of utteringthem only, but the singing notes they suggest and which he is in thehabit of uttering, follow automatically. 

The spot where I observed this wee feathered fantasy, the tantalizingsprite of the rushes, and where I soon ceased to see, hear, or thinkabout him, calls for a fuller description. On one side the wooded hillsloped downward to the stream; on the other side spread the meadowswhere the rooks came every day to feed, or to sit and stand aboutmotionless, looking like birds cut out of jet, scattered over about halfan acre of the grassy, level ground. Stout old pollard willows grew hereand there along the banks and were pleasant to see, this being the oneman-mutilated thing in nature which, to my mind, not infrequently gainsin beauty by the mutilation, so admirably does it fit into and harmonizewith the landscape. At one point there was a deep, nearly stagnant pool, separated from the stream by a strip of wet, rushy ground, its stilldark surface covered with water-lilies, not yet in bloom. They were justbeginning to show their polished buds, shaped like snake's heads, abovethe broad, oily leaves floating like islands on the surface. The streamitself was, on my side, fringed with bulrushes and other aquatic plants;on the opposite bank there were some large alders lifting their branchesabove great masses of bramble and rose-briar, all together forming asrich and beautiful a tangle as one could find even in the most luxuriantof the wild, unkept hedges round the village. The briars especiallyflourished wonderfully at this spot, climbing high and dropping theirlong, slim branches quite down to the surface of the water, and in someplaces forming an arch above the stream. A short distance from thistangle, so abundantly sprinkled with its pale delicate roses, the waterwas spanned by a small wooden bridge, which no person appeared to use, but which had a use. It formed the one dry clear spot in the midst ofall that moist vegetation, and the birds that came from the wood todrink and search for worms and small caterpillars first alighted on thebridge. There they would rest a few moments, take a look round, then flyto some favourite spot where succulent morsels had been picked up onprevious visits. Thrushes, blackbirds, sparrows, reed-buntings, chaffinches, tits, wrens, with many other species, succeeded each otherall day long; for now they mostly had young to provide for, and it wastheir busiest time. 

The unsullied beauty and solitariness of this spot made me wish at firstthat I was a boy once more, to climb and to swim, to revel in thesunshine and flowers, to be nearer in spirit to the birds and dragonflies and water-rats; then, that I could build a cabin and live thereall the summer long, forgetful of the world and its affairs, with nohuman creature to keep me company, and no book to read, or with only oneslim volume, some Spanish poet, let me say Melendez, forpreference--only a small selection from his too voluminous writings; forhe, albeit an eighteenth-century singer, was perhaps the last of thatlong, illustrious line of poets who sang as no others have sung of thepure delight-fulness of a life with nature. Something of this charm isundoubtedly due to the beauty of the language they wrote in and to thefree, airy grace of assonants. What a hard, artificial sound the rhymetoo often has: the clink that falls at regular intervals as of astone-breaker's hammer! In the freer kinds of Spanish poetry there arenumberless verses that make the smoothest lines and lyrics of oursweetest and most facile singers, from Herrick to Swinburne, seem hardand mechanical by comparison. But there is something more. I doubt, forone thing, if we are justified in the boast we sometimes make that thefeeling for Nature is stronger in our poets than in those of othercountries. The most scientific critic may be unable to pick a hole inTennyson's botany and zoology; but the passion for, and feeling ofoneness with Nature may exist without this modern minute accuracy. Bethis as it may, it was not Tennyson, nor any other of our poets, that Iwould have taken to my dreamed-of solitary cabin for companionship:Melendez came first to my mind. I think of his lines to a butterfly:

 De donde alegre vienes Tan suelta y tan festiva, Las valles alegrando Veloz mariposilla?*

* May be roughly rendered thus:

 Whence, blithe one, comest thou With that airy, happy flight-- To make the valleys glad, O swift-winged butterfly?

and can imagine him--the poet himself--coming to see me through thewoods and down the hill with the careless ease and lightness of heart ofhis own purple-winged child of earth and air--_tan suelta y tanfestiva_. Here in these four or five words one may read the whole secretof his charm--the exquisite delicacy and seeming art-lessness in theform, and the spirit that is in him--the old, simple, healthy, naturalgladness in nature, and feeling of kinship with all the children oflife. But I do not wish to disturb anyone in his prepossessions. Itwould greatly trouble me to think that my reader should, for the spaceof a page, or even of a single line, find himself in opposition to andnot with me; and I am free to admit that with regard to poetry one'spreferences change according to the mood one happens to be in and to theconditions generally. At home in murky London on most days I shouldprobably seek pleasure and forgetfulness in Browning; but in suchsurroundings as I have been describing the lighter-hearted, elf-likeMelendez accords best with my spirit, one whose finest songs are withouthuman interest; who is irresponsible as the wind, and as unstained withearthly care as the limpid running water he delights in: who is brotherto bird and bee and butterfly, and worships only liberty and sunshine, and is in love with nothing but a flower. 

Nearly midway between the useful little bridge and the rose-blossomingtangle I have spoken of there were three elm-trees growing in the opengrassy space near the brook; they were not lofty, but had verywide-spreading horizontal branches, which made them look like oaks. Thiswas an ideal spot in which to spend the sultry hours, and I had nosooner cast myself on the short grass in the shade than I noticed thatthe end of a projecting branch above my head, and about twenty feet fromthe ground, was a favourite perch of a tree-pipit. He sang in the airand, circling gracefully down, would alight on the branch, where, sitting near me and plainly visible, he would finish his song and renewit at intervals; then, leaving the loved perch, he would drop, singing, to the ground, just a few yards beyond the tree's shadow; thence, singing again, he would mount up and up above the tree, only to slidedown once more with set, unfluttering wings, with a beautiful swayingmotion to the same old resting-place on the branch, there to sing andsing and sing. 

If Melendez himself had come to me with flushed face and laughing eyes, and sat down on the grass at my side to recite one of his mostenchanting poems, I should, with finger on lip, have enjoined silence;for in the mood I was then in at that sequestered spot, with thelandscape outside my shady green pavilion bathed and quivering in thebrilliant sunshine, this small bird had suddenly become to me more thanany other singer, feathered or human. And yet the tree-pipit is not veryhighly regarded among British melodists, on account of the littlevariety there is in its song. Nevertheless, it is most sweet--perhaps thesweetest of all. It is true that there are thousands, nay, millions ofthings--sights and sounds and perfumes--which are or may be described assweet, so common is the metaphor, and this too common use has perhapssomewhat degraded it; but in this case there is no other word so wellsuited to describe the sensation produced. 

The tree-pipit has a comparatively short song, repeated, with somevariation in the number and length of the notes, at brief intervals. Theopening notes are thick and throaty, and similar in character to thethroat-notes of many other species in this group, a softer sound thanthe throat-notes of the skylark and woodlark, which they somewhatresemble. The canary-like trills and thin piping notes, long drawn out, which follow vary greatly in different individuals, and in many casesthe trills are omitted. But the concluding notes of the song I amconsidering--which is only one note repeated again and again--are clearand beautifully inflected, and have that quality of sweetness, oflusciousness, I have mentioned. The note is uttered with a downwardfall, more slowly and expressively at each repetition, as if the singerfelt overcome at the sweetness of life and of his own expression, andlanguished somewhat at the close; its effect is like that of the perfumeof the honeysuckle, infecting the mind with a soft, delicious languor, awish to lie perfectly still and drink of the same sweetness again andagain in larger measure. 

To some who are familiar with this by no means uncommon little bird, itmay seem that I am overstating the charm of its melody. I can only saythat the mood I was then in made me very keenly appreciative; also thatI have never heard any other individual of this species able to produceprecisely the same effect. We know that there are quite remarkabledifferences in the songs of birds of the same species, that amongseveral that appear to be perfect and to sing alike one will possess acharm above the other. The truth is they are not alike; they affect usdifferently, but the sense is not fine enough or not sufficientlytrained to detect the cause. The poet's words may be used of thisnatural melody as well as of the works of art:

 "O the little more and how much it is!"

There were about the village, within a few minutes' walk of the cottage, not fewer than half-a-dozen tree-pipits, each inhabiting a favouritespot where I could always count on finding and hearing him at almost anyhour of the day from sunrise to sunset. Yet I cared not for these. Tothe one chosen bird I returned daily to spend the hot hours, lying inthe shade and listening to his strain. Finally, I allowed two or threedays to slip by, and when I revisited the old spot the secret charm hadvanished. The bird was there, and rose and fell as formerly, pouring outhis melody; but it was not the same: something was missing from thoselast sweet, languishing notes. Perhaps in the interval there had beensome disturbing accident in his little wild life, though I could hardlybelieve it, since his mate was still sitting about thirty yards from thetree on the five little mottled eggs in her nest. Or perhaps hismidsummer's music had reached its highest point, and was now in itsdeclension. And perhaps the fault was in me. The virtue that draws andholds us does not hold us always, nor very long; it departs from allthings, and we wonder why. The loss is in ourselves, although we do notknow it. Nature, the chosen mistress of our heart, does not changetowards us, yet she is now, even to-day--

 "Less full of purple colour and hid spice, "

and smiles and sparkles in vain to allure us, and when she touches uswith her warm, caressing touch, there is, compared with yesterday, onlya faint response. 

V

Coming back from the waterside through the wood, after the hottest hoursof the day were over, the crooning of the turtle-doves would be heardagain on every side--that summer beech-wood lullaby that seemed never toend. The other bird voices were of the willow-wren, the wood-wren, thecoal-tit, and the now somewhat tiresome chiffchaff; from the distancewould come the prolonged rich strain of the blackbird, and occasionallythe lyric of the chaffinch. The song of this bird gains greatly whenheard from a tall tree in the woodland silence; it has then a resonanceand wildness which it appears to lack in the garden and orchard. In thevillage I had been glad to find that the chaffinch was not too common, that in the tangle of minstrelsy one could enjoy there his vigorousvoice was not predominant. 

Of all these woodland songsters the wood-wren impressed me the most. Hecould always be heard, no matter where I entered the wood, since allthis world of tall beeches was a favoured haunt of the wood-wren, eachpair keeping to its own territory of half-an-acre of trees or so, andsomewhere among those trees the male was always singing, far up, invisible to eyes beneath, in the topmost sunlit foliage of the talltrees. On entering the wood I would, stand still for a few minutes tolisten to the various sounds until that one fascinating sound would cometo my ears from some distance away, and to that spot I would go to finda bed of last year's leaves to sit upon and listen. It was an enchantingexperience to be there in that woodland twilight with the green cloud ofleaves so far above me; to listen to the silence, to the faint whisperof the wind-touched leaves, then to little prelusive drops of musicalsound, growing louder and falling faster until they ran into oneprolonged trill. And there I would sit listening for half-an-hour or awhole hour; but the end would not come; the bird is indefatigable andwith his mysterious talk in the leaves would tire the sun himself and sendhim down the sky: for not until the sun has set and the wood has growndark does the singing cease. 

On emerging from the deep shade of the beeches into the wide grassy roadthat separated the wood from the orchards and plantations of fruittrees, and pausing for a minute to look down on the more thanhalf-hidden village, invariably the first loud sounds that reached myear were those of the cuckoo, thrush, and blackbird. At all hours in thevillage, from early morning to evening twilight, these three voicessounded far and near above the others. I considered myself fortunatethat no large tree near the cottage had been made choice of by asong-thrush as a singing-stand during the early hours. The nearest treeso favoured was on the further side of a field, so that when I woke athalf-past three or four o'clock, the shrill indefatigable voice came inat the open window, softened by distance and washed by the dewyatmosphere to greater purity. Throstle and skylark to be admired must beheard at a distance. But at that early hour when I sat by the openwindow, the cuckoo's call was the commonest sound; the birds wereeverywhere, bird answering bird far and near, so persistently repeatingtheir double note that this sound, which is in character unlike anyother sound in nature, which one so listens and longs to hear in spring, lost its old mystery and charm, and became of no more account than thecackle of the poultry-yard. It was the cuckoo's village; sometimes threeor four birds in hot pursuit of each other would dash through the treesthat lined the further side of the lane and alight on that small tree atthe gate which the nightingale was accustomed to visit later in the day. 

Other birds that kept themselves very much out of sight during most ofthe time also came to the same small tree at that early hour. It wasregularly visited, and its thin bole industriously examined, by thenuthatch and the quaint little mouse-like creeper. Doubtless theyimagined that five o'clock was too early for heavy human creatures to beawake, and were either ignorant of my presence or thought proper toignore it. 

But where, during the days when the vociferous cuckoo, with hoarsechuckle and dissyllabic call and wild bubbling cry was so much withus--where, in this period of many pleasant noises was the cuckoo's mate, or maid, or messenger, the quaint and beautiful wryneck? There are fewBritish birds, perhaps not one--not even the crafty black and whitemagpie, or mysterious moth-like goatsucker, or tropical kingfisher--moreinteresting to watch. At twilight I had lingered at the woodside, alsoin other likely places, and the goatsucker had failed to appear, glidingand zig-zagging hither and thither on his dusky-mottled noiseless wings, and now this still heavier disappointment was mine. I could not find thewryneck. Those quiet grassy orchards, shut in by straggling hedges, should have had him as a favoured summer guest. Creeper and nuthatch, and starling and gem-like blue tit, found holes enough in the old trunksto breed in. And yet I knew that, albeit not common, he was there; Icould not exactly say where, but somewhere on the other side of the nexthedge or field or orchard; for I heard his unmistakable cry, now on thishand, now on that. Day after day I followed the voice, sometimes in myeagerness forcing my way through a brambly hedge to emerge withscratched hands and clothes torn, like one that had been set upon andmauled by some savage animal of the cat kind; and still the quaintfigure eluded my vision. 

At last I began to have doubts about the creature that emitted thatstrange, penetrating call. First heard as a bird-call, and nothing more, by degrees it grew more and more laugh-like--a long, far-reaching, ringing laugh; not the laugh I should like to hear from any person Itake an interest in, but a laugh with all the gladness, unction, andhumanity gone out of it--a dry mechanical sound, as if a soulless, lifeless, wind-instrument had laughed. It was very curious. Listening toit day by day, something of the strange history of the being once but nolonger human, that uttered it grew up and took shape in my mind; for weall have in us something of this mysterious faculty. It was no bird, nowryneck, but a being that once, long, long, long ago, in that samebeautiful place, had been a village boy--a free, careless, glad-heartedboy, like many another. But to this boy life was more than to others, since nature appeared immeasurably more vivid on account of his brightersenses; therefore his love of life and happiness in life greatlysurpassed theirs. Annually the trees shed their leaves, the flowersperished, the birds flew away to some distant country beyond thehorizon, and the sun grew pale and cold in the sky; but the brightimpression all things made on him gave him a joy that was perennial. Thebriony, woodbine, and honeysuckle he had looked on withered in thehedges, but their presentments flourished untouched by frost, as if hiswarmth sustained and gave them perpetual life; in that inner magicalworld of memory the birds still twittered and warbled, each after itskind, and the sun shone everlastingly. But he was living in a fool'sparadise, as he discovered by-and-by, when a boy who had been hisplaymate began to grow thin and pale, and at last fell sick and died. Hecrept near and watched his dead companion lying motionless, unbreathing, with a face that was like white clay; and then, more horrible still, hesaw him taken out and put into a grave, and the heavy, cold soil castover him. 

What did this strange and terrible thing mean? Now for the first time hewas told that life is ours only for a season; that we also, like theleaves and flowers, flourish for a while then fade and perish, andmingle with the dust. The sad knowledge had come too suddenly and in toovivid and dreadful a manner. He could not endure it. Only for aseason!--only for a season! The earth would be green, and the sky blue, and the sun shine bright for ever, and he would not see, not know it!Struck with anguish at the thought, he stole away out of sight of theothers to hide himself in woods and thickets, to brood alone on such ahateful destiny, and torture himself with vain longings, until he, too, grew pale and thin and large-eyed, like the boy that had died, and thosewho saw him shook their heads and whispered to one another that he wasnot long for this world. He knew what they were saying, and it onlyserved to increase his misery and fear, and made him hate them becausethey were insensible to the awful fact that death awaited them, or solittle concerned that they had never taken the trouble to inform him ofit. To eat and drink and sleep was all they cared for, and they regardeddeath with indifference, because their dull sight did not recognize thebeauty and glory of the earth, nor their dull hearts respond to Nature'severlasting gladness. The sight of the villagers, with their solemnhead-shakings and whisperings, even of his nearest kindred, grewinsupportable, and he at length disappeared from among them, and wasseen no more with his white, terror-stricken face. From that time he hidhimself in the close thickets, supporting his miserable existence onwild fruits and leaves, and spending many hours each day lying in somesheltered spot, gazing up into that blue sunny sky, which was his togaze on only for a season, while the large tears gathered in his eyesand rolled unheeded down his wasted cheeks. 

At length during this period there occurred an event which is theobscurest part of his history; for I know not who or what it was--mymind being in a mist about it--that came to or accidentally found himlying on a bed of grass and dried leaves in his thorny hiding-place. Itmay have been a gipsy or a witch--there were witches in those days--who, suddenly looking on his upturned face and seeing the hunger in hisunfathomable eyes, loved him, in spite of her malignant nature; or aspirit out of the earth; or only a very wise man, an ancient, white-haired solitary, whose life had been spent in finding out thesecrets of nature. This being, becoming acquainted with the cause of theboy's grief and of his solitary, miserable condition, began to comforthim by telling him that no grief was incurable, no desire that heartcould conceive unattainable. He discoursed of the hidden potentproperties of nature, unknown only to those who seek not to know them;of the splendid virtue inherent in all things, like the green and violetflames in the clear colourless raindrops which are seen only on rareoccasions. Of life and death, he said that life was of the spirit whichnever dies, that death meant only a passage, a change of abode of thespirit, and the left body crumbled to dust when the spirit went out ofit to continue its existence elsewhere, but that those who hated thethought of such change could, by taking thought, prolong life and livefor a thousand years, like the adder and tortoise or for ever. But no, he would not leave the poor boy to grope alone and blindly after thathidden knowledge he was burning to possess. He pitied him too much. Themeans were simple and near to hand, the earth teemed with the virtuethat would save him from the dissolution which so appalled him. He wouldbe startled to hear in how small a thing and in how insignificant acreature resided the principle that could make his body, like hisspirit, immortal. But exceeding great power often existed in smallcompass: witness the adder's tooth, which was to our sight no more thanthe point of the smallest thorn. Now, in the small ant there exists aprinciple of a greater potency than any other in nature; so strong andpenetrating was it that even the dull and brutish kind of men whoenquire not into hidden things know something of its power. But thegreatest of all the many qualities of this acid was unknown to them. Theants were a small people, but exceedingly wise and powerful. If a littlehuman child had the strength of an ant he would surpass in power themightiest giant that ever lived. In the same way ants surpassed men inwisdom; and this strength and wisdom was the result of that acidprinciple in them. Now, if any person should be able to overcome hisrepugnance to so strange a food as to sustain himself on ants andnothing else, the effect of the acid on him would be to change andharden his flesh and make it impervious to decay or change of any kind. He would, so long as he confined himself to this kind of food, beimmortal. 

Not a moment did the wretched boy hesitate to make use of this new andwonderful knowledge. When he had found and broken open an ant-hill, soeager was he that, shutting his eyes, he snatched up the maddenedinsects by handfuls and swallowed them, dust and ants together, and wasthen tortured for hours, feeling and thinking that they were still alivewithin him, running about in search of an outlet and frantically biting. The strange food sickened him, so that he grew thinner and paler, untilat last he could barely crawl on hands and feet, and was like a skeletonexcept for the great sad eyes that could still see the green earth andblue sky, and still reflected in their depths one fear and one desire. And slowly, day by day, as his system accustomed itself to the new diet, his strength returned, and he was able once more to walk erect and run, and to climb a tree, where he could sit concealed among the thickfoliage and survey the village where he had first seen the light and hadpassed the careless, happy years of boyhood. But he cherished no tendermemories and regrets; his sole thought was of the ants, and where tofind a sufficiency of them to stay the cravings of hunger; for, afterthe first sensations of disgust had been overcome, he had begun to growfond of this kind of food, and now consumed it with avidity. And as hisstrength increased so did his dexterity in catching the small, activeinsect prey. He no longer gathered the ants up in his palm and swallowedthem along with dust and grit, but picked them up deftly, and conveyedthem one by one to his mouth with lightning rapidity. Meanwhile that"acid principle, " about which he had heard such wonderful things, washaving its effect on his system. His skin changed its colour; he grewshrunken and small, until at length, after very many years, he dwindledto the grey little manikin of the present time. His mind, too, changed;he has no thought nor remembrance of his former life and condition andof his long-dead relations; but he still haunts the village where heknows so well where to find the small ants, to pick them from off theant-hill and from the trunks of trees with his quick little claw-likehands. Language and song are likewise forgotten with all human things, all except his laugh; for when hunger is satisfied, and the sun shinespleasantly as he reposes on the dry leaves on the ground or sits alofton a branch, at times a sudden feeling of gladness possesses him, and heexpresses it in that one way--the long, wild, ringing peal of laughter. Listening to that strange sound, although I could not see I could yetpicture him, as, aware of my cautious approach, he moved shyly behindthe mossy trunk of some tree and waited silently for me to pass. A lean, grey little man, clad in a quaintly barred and mottled mantle, woven byhis own hands from some soft silky material, and a close-fitting brownpeaked cap on his head with one barred feather in it for ornament, and asmall wizened grey face with a thin sharp nose, puckered lips, and apair of round, brilliant, startled eyes. 

So distinct was this image to my mind's eye that it became unnecessaryfor me to see the creature, and I ceased to look for him; then all atonce came disillusion, when one day, hearing the familiar high-pitchedlaugh with its penetrating and somewhat nasal tone, I looked and beheldthe thing that had laughed just leaving its perch on a branch near theground and winging its way across the field. It was only a bird afterall--only the wryneck; and that mysterious faculty I spoke of, sayingthat we all of us possessed something of it (meaning only some of us)was nothing after all but the old common faculty of imagination. 

Later on I saw it again on half-a-dozen occasions, but never succeededin getting what I call a satisfying sight of it, perched woodpecker-wiseon a mossy trunk, busy at its old fascinating occupation of deftlypicking off the running ants. 

It is melancholy to think that this quaint and beautiful bird of aunique type has been growing less and less common in our country duringthe last half a century, or for a longer period. In the last fifteen ortwenty years the falling-off has been very marked. The declension is notattributable to persecution in this case, since the bird is not on thegamekeeper's black list, nor has it yet become so rare as to cause theamateur collectors of dead birds throughout the country systematicallyto set about its extermination. Doubtless that will come later on whenit will be in the same category with the golden oriole, hoopoe, furze-wren, and other species that are regarded as always worth killing;that is to say, it will come--the scramble for the wryneck'scarcass--if nothing is done in the meantime to restrain the enthusiasmof those who value a bird only when the spirit of life that gave itflight and grace and beauty has been crushed out of it--when it is nolonger a bird. The cause of its decline up till now cannot be known tous; we can only say in our ignorance that this type, like innumerableothers that have ceased to exist, has probably run its course and isdying out. Or it might be imagined that its system is undergoing someslow change, which tells on the migratory instinct, that it is becomingmore a resident species in its winter home in Africa. But allconjectures are idle in such a case. It is melancholy, at all events forthe ornithologist, to think of an England without a wryneck; but beforethat still distant day arrives let us hope that the love of birds willhave become a common feeling in the mass of the population, and that thevariety of our bird life will have been increased by the addition ofsome chance colonists and of many new species introduced from distantregions. 

I have lingered long over the wryneck, but have still a story to relateof this bird--not a fairy tale this time, but true. 

On the border of the village adjoining the wood--the side where birdswere more abundant, and which consequently had the greatest attractionfor me--there stands an old picturesque cottage nearly concealed fromsight by the hedge in front and closely planted trees clustering roundit. On one side was a grass field, on the other an orchard of oldcherry, apple, and plum trees, all the property of the old man living inthe cottage, who was a character in his way; at all events, he had notbeen fashioned in quite the same mould as the majority of the cottagersabout him. They mostly, when past middle life, wore a heavy, dull andsomewhat depressed look. This man had a twinkle in his dark-grey eyes, an expression of intelligent curiosity and fellowship; and his fullface, bronzed with sixty or sixty-five years' exposure to the weather, was genial, as if the sunshine that had so long beaten on it had notbeen all used up in painting his skin that rich old-furniture colour, but had, some of it, filtered through the epidermis into the heart tomake his existence pleasant and sweet. But it was a very rough-castface, with shapeless nose and thick lips. He was short andbroad-shouldered, always in the warm weather in his shirt-sleeves, ashirt of some very coarse material and of an earthen colour, his brownthick arms bare to the elbows. Waistcoat and trousers looked as if hehad worn them for half his life, and had a marbled or mottled appearanceas if they had taken the various tints of all the objects and materialshe had handled or rubbed against in his life's work--wood, mossy trees, grass, clay, bricks, stone, rusty iron, and dozens more. He wore thefield-labourer's thick boots; his ancient rusty felt hat had long lostits original shape; and finally, to complete the portrait, a short blackclay pipe was never out of his lips--never, at all events, when I sawhim, which was often; for every day as I strolled past his domain hewould be on the outside of his hedge, or just coming out of his gate, invariably with something in his hand--a spade, a fork, or stick ofwood, or an old empty fruit-basket. Although thus having the appearanceof being very much occupied, he would always stop for a few minutes'talk with me; and by-and-by I began to suspect that he was a very socialsort of person, and that it pleased him to have a little chat, but thathe liked to have me think that he met me by accident while going abouthis work. 

One sunny morning as I came past his field he came out bearing a hugebundle of green grass on his head. "Whatl" he exclaimed, coming to astand, "you here to-day? I thought you'd be away to the regatta. "

I said that I knew little about regattas and cared less, that a dayspent in watching and listening to the birds gave me more pleasure thanall the regattas in the country. "I suppose you can't understand that?"I added. 

He took the big green bundle from his head and set it down, pulled offhis old hat to flap the dust out of it, then sucked at his short clay. "Well, " he said at length, "some fancies one thing and some another, butwe most of us like a regatta. "

During the talk that followed I asked him if he knew the wryneck, and ifit ever nested in his orchard. He did not know the bird; had never heardits name nor the other names of snake-bird and cuckoo's mate; and when Ihad minutely described its appearance, he said that no such bird wasknown in the village. 

I assured him that he was mistaken, that I had heard the cry of the birdmany times, and had even heard it once at a distance since ourconversation began. Hearing that distant cry had caused me to ask thequestion. 

All at once he remembered that he knew, or had known formerly, thewryneck very well, but he had never learnt its name. About twenty orfive-and-twenty years ago, he said, he saw the bird I had just describedin his orchard, and as it appeared day after day and had a strangeappearance as it moved up the tree trunks, he began to be interested init. One day he saw it fly into a hole close to the ground in an oldapple tree. "Now I've got you!" he exclaimed, and running to the spotthrust his hand in as far as he could, but was unable to reach the bird. Then he conceived the idea of starving it out, and stopped up the holewith clay. The following day at the same hour he again put in his hand, and this time succeeded in taking the bird. So strange was it to himthat after showing it to his own family he took it round to exhibit itto his neighbours, and although some of them were old men, not one amongthem had ever seen its like before. They concluded that it was a kind ofnuthatch, but unlike the common nuthatch which they knew. After they hadall seen and handled it and had finished the discussions about it, hereleased it and saw it fly away; but, to his astonishment, it was backin his orchard a few hours later. In a few weeks it brought out its fiveor six young from the hole he had caught it in, and for several years itreturned each season to breed in the same hole until the tree was blowndown, after which the bird was seen no more. 

What an experience the poor bird had suffered! First plastered up andleft to starve or suffocate in its hollow tree; then captured and passedround from rough, horny hand to hand, while the villagers werediscussing it in their slow, ponderous fashion--how wildly its littlewild heart must have palpitated!--and, finally, after being released, togo back at once to its eggs in that dangerous tree. I do not know whichsurprised me most, the bird's action in returning to its nest after suchinhospitable treatment, or the ignorance of the villagers concerning it. The incident seemed to show that the wryneck had been scarce at thisplace for a very long period. 

The villager, as a rule, is not a good observer, which is not strange, since no person is, or ever can be, a good observer of the things inwhich he is not specially interested; consequently the countryman onlyknows the most common and the most conspicuous species. He plods throughlife with downcast eyes and a vision somewhat dimmed by indifference;forgetting, as he progresses, the small scraps of knowledge he acquiredby looking sharply during the period of boyhood, when every livingcreature excited his attention. In Italy, notwithstanding the paucity ofbird life, I believe that the peasants know their birds better. Thereason of this is not far to seek; every bird, not excepting even the"temple-haunting martlet" and nightingale and minute golden-crestedwren, is regarded only as a possible morsel to give a savour to a dishof polenta, if the shy, little flitting thing can only be enticed withintouching distance of the limed twigs. Thus they take a very stronginterest in, and, in a sense, "love" birds. It is their passion for thiskind of flavouring which has drained rural Italy of its songsters, andwill in time have the same effect on Argentina, the country in which thewithering stream of Italian emigration empties itself. 

VI

From the date of my arrival at the village in May, until I left it earlyin July, the great annual business of pairing, nest-building, andrearing the young was going on uninterruptedly. The young of some of theearliest breeders were already strong on the wing when I took my firstwalks along the hedgerows, still in their early, vivid green, frequentlyobserving my bird through a white and rose-tinted cloud ofapple-blossoms; and when I left some species that breed more than oncein the season were rearing second broods or engaged in making new nests. On my very first day I discovered a nest full of fully fledged blue titsin a hole in an apple tree; this struck me as a dangerous place for theyoung birds; as the tree leaned over towards the lane, and the holecould almost be reached by a person standing on the ground. On the nextday I went to look at them, and approaching noiselessly along the lane, spied two small boys with bright clean faces--it was on aSunday--standing within three or four yards of the tree, watching thetits with intense interest. The parent birds were darting up and down, careless of their presence, finding food so quickly in the gooseberrybushes growing near the roots of the tree that they visited the holeevery few moments; while the young birds, ever screaming for more, weregathered in a dense little cluster at the entrance, their yellow breastsshowing very brightly against the rain-wet wood and the dark interior ofthe hole. The instant the two little watchers caught sight of me theexcited look vanished from their faces, and they began to move off, gazing straight ahead in a somewhat vacant manner. This instantaneousand instinctive display of hypocrisy was highly entertaining, and wouldhave made me laugh if it had not been for the serious purpose I had inmy mind. "Now, look here, " I said, "I know what you are after, so it'sno use pretending that you are walking about and seeing nothing inparticular. You've been watching the young tits. Well, I've beenwatching them, too, and waiting to see them fly. I dare say they willbe out by to-morrow or the next day, and I hope you little fellows won'ttry to drag them out before then. "

They at once protested that they had no such intention. They said thatthey never robbed birds' nests; that there were several nests at home inthe garden and orchard, one of a nightingale with three eggs in it, butthat they never took an egg. But some of the boys they knew, they said, took all the eggs they found; and there was one boy who got into everyorchard and garden in the place, who was so sharp that few nests escapedhim, and every nest he found he destroyed, breaking the eggs if therewere any, and if there were young birds killing them. 

Not, perhaps, without first mutilating them, I thought; for I knowsomething of this kind of young "human devil, " to use the phrase whichCanon Wilberforce has made so famous in another connexion. Later on Iheard much more about the exploits of this champion bird-destroyer ofthe village from (strange to say) a bird-catcher by trade, a man of arather low type of countenance, and who lived, when at home, in a Londonslum. On the common where he spread his nets he had found, he told me, about thirty nests containing eggs or fledglings; but this boy had goneover the ground after him, and not many of the nests had escaped hissharp eyes. 

I was satisfied that the young tits were quite safe, so far as theseyoungsters were concerned, and only regretted that they were such smallBoys, and that the great nest-destroyer, whose evil deeds they spoke ofwith an angry colour in their cheeks, was a very strong boy, otherwise Ishould have advised them to "go" for him. 

Oddly enough I heard of another boy who exercised the same kind ofcruelty and destructiveness over another common a few miles distant. Walking across it I spied two boys among the furze bushes, and at thesame moment they saw me, whereupon one ran away and the other remainedstanding. A nice little fellow of about eight, he looked as if he hadbeen crying. I asked him what it was all about, and he then told me thatthe bigger boy who had just run away was always on the common searchingfor nests, just to destroy them and kill the young birds; that he, myinformant, had come there where he came every day just to have a peep ata linnet's nest with four eggs in it on which the bird was sitting; thatthe other boy, concealed among the bushes had watched him go to the nestand had then rushed up and pulled the nest out of the bush. 

"Why didn't you knock him down?" I asked. 

"That's what I tried to do before he pulled the nest out, " he said; andthen he added sorrowfully: "He knocked me down. "

I am reminded here of a tale of ancient Greece about a boy of thisdescription--the boy to be found in pretty well every parish in theland. This was a shepherd boy who followed or led his sheep to adistance from the village and amused his idle hours by snaring smallbirds to put their eyes out with a sharp thorn, then to toss them upjust to see how, and how far, they would fly in the dark. He was seendoing it and the matter reported to the heads or fathers of the village, and he was brought before them and, after due consideration of the case, condemned to death. Such a decision must seem shocking to us and worthyof a semi-barbarous people. But if cruelty is the worst of alloffences--and this was cruelty in its most horrid form--the offencewhich puts men down on a level with the worst of the mythical demons, itwas surely a righteous deed to blot such an existence out lest otheryoung minds should be contaminated, or even that it should be known thatsuch a crime was possible. 

* * *

All those birds that had finished rearing their young by the sixteenthof June were fortunate, for on the morning of that day a great andcontinuous shouting, with gun-firing, banging on old brass and ironutensils, with various other loud, unusual noises, were heard at oneextremity of the village, and continued with occasional quiet intervalsuntil evening. This tempest of rude sounds spread from day to day, untilthe entire area of the village and the surrounding orchards wasinvolved, and the poor birds that were tied to the spots where theirtreasures were, must have existed in a state of constant trepidation. For now the cherries were fast ripening, and the fruit-eating birds, especially the thrushes and black-birds, were inflamed at the gleam ofcrimson colour among the leaves. In the very large orchards men and boyswere stationed all day long yelling and firing off guns to frighten themarauders. In the smaller orchards the trees were decorated withwhirligigs of coloured paper; ancient hats, among which were some of thequaintly-shaped chimney-pots of a past generation; old coats andwaistcoats and trousers, and rags of all colours to flutter in the wind;and these objects were usually considered a sufficient protection. Someof the birds, wiser than their fellows, were not to be kept back by suchsimple means; but so long as they came not in battalions, but singly, they could have their fill, and no notice was taken of them. 

I was surprised to hear that on the large plantations the men employedwere not allowed to use shot, the aim of the fruit grower being only toscare the birds away. I had a talk with my old friend of the wryneck onthe subject, and told him that I had seen one of the bird-scarers goinghome to his cottage very early in the morning, carrying a bunch of abouta dozen blackbirds and thrushes he had just shot. 

Yes, he replied, some of the men would buy shot and use it early in themorning before their master was about; but if the man I had seen hadbeen detected in the act, he would have been discharged on the spot. Itwas not only because the trees would be injured by shot, but thisfruitgrower was friendly to birds. 

Most fruit-growers, I said, were dead against the birds, and anxiousonly to kill as many of them as possible. 

It might be so in some places, he answered, but not in the village. Hehimself and most of the villagers depended, in a great measure, on thefruit they produced for a living, and their belief was that, taking onebird with another all the year round, the birds did them more good thanharm. 

I then imparted to him the views on this bird subject of a well-knownfruit-grower in the north of England, Mr. Joseph Witherspoon, ofChester-le-Street. He began by persecuting the birds, as he had beentaught to do by his father, a market-gardener; but after years ofcareful observation he completely changed his views, and is now soconvinced of the advantage that birds are to the fruit-grower, that hedoes all in his power to attract them, and to tempt them to breed in hisgrounds. His main idea is that birds that are fed on the premises, thatlive and feed among the trees, search for and attack the gardeners'enemies at every stage of their existence. At the same time he believesthat it is very bad to grow fruit near woods, as in such a case thebirds that live in the woods and are of no advantage to the garden, swarm into it as the fruit ripens, and that it is only by liberal use ofnets that any reasonable portion of the fruit can be saved. 

He answered that with regard to the last point he did not quite agreewith Mr. Witherspoon. All the gardens and orchards in the village wereraided by the birds from the wood, yet he reckoned they got as muchfruit from their trees as others who had no woods near them. Then therewas the big cherry plantation, one of the biggest in England, so thatpeople came from all parts in the blossoming time just to look at it, and a wonderful sight it was. For a quarter of a mile this particularorchard ran parallel with the wood; with nothing but the green roadbetween, and when the first fruit was ripening you could see all the bigtrees on the edge of the wood swarming with birds--jays, thrushes, blackbirds, doves, and all sorts of tits and little birds, just waitingfor a chance to pounce down and devour the cherries. The noise kept themoff, but many would dodge in, and even if a gun was fired close to themthe blackbirds would snatch a cherry and carry it off to the wood. Thatdidn't matter--a few cherries here and there didn't count. The starlingswere the worst robbers: if you didn't scare them they would strip a treeand even an orchard in a few hours. But they were the easiest birds todeal with: they went in flocks, and a shout or rattle or report of a gunsent the lot of them away together. His way of looking at it was this. In the fruit season, which lasts only a few weeks, you are bound tosuffer from the attacks of birds, whether they are your own birds onlyor your own combined with others from outside, unless you keep them off;that those who do not keep them off are foolish or indolent, and deserveto suffer. The fruit season was, he said, always an anxious time. 

In conclusion, I remarked that the means used for protecting the fruit, whether they served their purpose well or not, struck me as being veryunworthy of the times we lived in, and seemed to show that the Britishfruit-growers, who were ahead of the world in all other mattersconnected with their vocation, had quite neglected this one point. Athousand years ago cultivators of the soil were scaring the birds fromtheir crops just as we are doing, with methods no better and no worse, putting up scarecrows and old ragged garments and fluttering rags, hanging a dead crow to a stick to warn the others off, shouting andyelling and throwing stones. There appeared to be an opening here forexperiment and invention. Mere noise was not terrifying to birds, andthey soon discovered that an old hat on a stick had no injurious brainsin or under it. But certain sounds and colours and odours had a strongeffect on some animals. Sounds made to stimulate the screams of somehawks would perhaps prove very terrifying to thrushes and other smallbirds, and the effect of scarlet in large masses or long strips might betried. It would also be worth while to try the effect of artificialsparrow-hawks and other birds of prey, perched conspicuously, moving andperking their tails at intervals by clockwork. In fact, a hundred thingsmight be tried until something valuable was found, and when it lost itsvalue, for the birds would in time discover the deception, some new planadopted. 

To this dissertation on what might be done, he answered that if any onecould find out or invent any new effective means to keep the birds fromthe fruit, the fruit-growers would be very thankful for it; but that nosuch invention could be looked for from those who are engaged on thesoil; that it must come from those who do not dig and sweat, but sitstill and work with their brains at new ideas. 

This ended our conversation, and I left him more than satisfied at theinformation he had given me, and with a higher opinion than ever of hisgeniality and good practical sense. 

It was a relief when the noisy, bird-scaring business was done with, andthe last market baskets of ripe cherries were carried away to thestation. Very splendid they looked in such large masses of crimson, asthe baskets were brought out and set down in the grassy road; but Icould not help thinking a little sadly that the thrushes and blackbirdswhich had been surreptitiously shot, when fallen and fluttering in thewet grass in the early morning, had shed life-drops of that samebeautiful colour. 

VII

After the middle of June the common began to attract me more and more. It was so extensive that, standing on its border, just beyond the laststraggling cottages and orchards, the further side was seen only as aline of blue trees, indistinct in the distance. As I grew to know itbetter, adding each day to my list from its varied bird life, the woodsand waterside were visited less and less frequently, and after thebird-scaring noises began in the village, its wildness and quiet becameincreasingly grateful. The silence of nature was broken only by birdsounds, and the most frequent sound was that of the yellow bunting, as, perched motionless on the summit of a gorse bush, his yellow headconspicuous at a considerable distance, he emitted his thin monotonouschant at regular intervals, like a painted toy-bird that sings bymachinery. There, too, sedentary as an owl in the daytime, the cornbunting was common, discharging his brief song at intervals--a sound asof shattering glass. The whinchat was rarely seen, but I constantly metthe small, prettily coloured stonechat flitting from bush to bush, following me, and never ceasing his low, querulous tacking chirp, anxious for the safety of his nest. Nightingales, blackcaps andwhite-throats also nested there, and were louder and more emphatic intheir protests when approached. There were several grasshopper-warblerson the common, all, very curiously as it seemed to me, clustered at onespot, so that one could ramble over miles of ground without hearingtheir singular note; but on approaching the place they inhabited onegradually became conscious of a mysterious trilling buzz or whirr, lowat first and growing louder and more stridulous, until the hiddensingers were left behind, when by degrees it sank lower and lower again, and ceased to be audible at a distance of about one hundred yards fromthe points where it had sounded loudest. The birds hid in clumps offurze and bramble so near together that the area covered by the buzzingsound measured about two hundred yards across. This most singular sound(for a warbler to make) is certainly not ventriloquial, although if onecomes to it with the sense of hearing disorganized by town noises orunpractised, one is at a loss to determine the exact spot it comes from, or even to know from which side it comes. While emitting its prolongedsound the bird is so absorbed in its own performance that it is noteasily alarmed, and will sometimes continue singing with a humanlistener standing within four or five yards of it. When one is near thebird, and listens, standing motionless, the effect on the nerves ofhearing is very remarkable, considering the smallness of the sound, which, without being unpleasant, is somewhat similar to that produced bythe vibration of the brake of a train; it is not powerful enough to jarthe nerves, but appears to pervade the entire system. Lying still, witheyes closed, and three or four of these birds singing near, so thattheir strains overlap and leave no silent intervals, the listener canimagine that the sound originates within himself; that the numberlessfine cords of his nervous network tremble responsively to it. 

There are a number of natural sounds that resemble more or less closelythe most unbirdlike note of this warbler--cicada, rattlesnake, and somebatrachians. Some grasshoppers perhaps come nearest to it; but the mostsustained current of sound emitted by the insect is short compared tothe warbler's strain, also the vibrations are very much more rapid, andnot heard as vibrations, and the same effect is not produced. 

The grasshopper warblers gave me so much pleasure that I was often atthe spot where they had their little colony of about half-a-dozen pairs, and where I discovered they bred every year. At first I used to go toany bush where I had caught sight of a bird and sit down within a fewyards of it and wait until the little hideling's shyness wore off, andhe would come out and start reeling. Afterwards I always went straightto the same bush, because I thought the bird that used it as hissinging-place appeared less shy than the others. One day I spent a longtime listening to this favourite; delightedly watching him, perched on alow twig on a level with my sight, and not more than five yards from me;his body perfectly motionless, but the head and wide-open beak jerkedfrom side to side in a measured, mechanical way. I had a side view ofthe bird, but every three seconds the head would be jerked towards me, showing the bright yellow colour of the open mouth. The reeling wouldlast about three minutes, then the bird would unbend or unstiffen andtake a few hops about the bush, then stiffen and begin again. While thusgazing and listening I, by chance, met with an experience of that rarekind which invariably strikes the observer of birds as strange andalmost incredible--an example of the most perfect mimicry in a specieswhich has its own distinctive song and is not a mimic except once in awhile, and as it were by chance. The marsh warbler is our perfectmocking-bird, our one professional mimic; while the starling incomparison is but an amateur. We all know the starling's ever varyingperformance in which he attempts a hundred things and occasionallysucceeds; but even the starling sometimes affects us with a mildastonishment, and I will here give one instance. 

I was staying at a village in the Wiltshire downs, and at intervals, while sitting at work in my room on the ground floor, I heard thecackling of a fowl at the cottage opposite. I heard, but paid noattention to that familiar sound; but after three days it all at oncestruck me that no fowl could lay an egg about every ten or twelveminutes, and go on at this rate day after day, and, getting up, I wentout to look for the cackler. A few hens were moving quietly about theopen ground surrounding the cottage where the sound came from, but Iheard nothing. By and by, when I was back in my room, the cacklingsounded again, but when I got out the sound had ceased and the fowls, asbefore, appeared quite unexcited. The only way to solve the mystery wasto stand there, out of doors, for ten minutes, and before that time wasover a starling with a white grub in his beak, flew down and perched onthe low garden wall of the cottage, then, with some difficulty, squeezedhimself through a small opening into a cavity under a strip of zincwhich covered the bricks of the wall. It was a queer place for astarling's nest, on a wall three feet high and within two yards of thecottage door which stood open all day. Having delivered the grub, thestarling came out again and, hopping on to the zinc, opened his beak andcackled like a hen, then flew away for more grubs. 

I observed the starling a good deal after this, and found thatinvariably on leaving the nest, he uttered his imitation of a fowlcackling, and no other note or sound of any kind. It was as if he wasnot merely imitating a sound, but had seen a fowl leaving the nest andthen cackling, and mimicked the whole proceeding, and had kept up thehabit after the young were hatched. 

To return to my experience on the common. About fifty yards from thespot where I was there was a dense thicket of furze and thorn, with ahuge mound in the middle composed of a tangle of whitethorn and bramblebushes mixed with ivy and clematis. From this spot, at intervals of halfa minute or so, there issued the call of a duck--the prolonged, hoarsecall of a drake, two or three times repeated, evidently emitted indistress. I conjectured that it came from one of a small flock of ducksbelonging to a cottage near the edge of the common on that side. Theflock, as I had seen, was accustomed to go some distance from home, andI supposed that one of them, a drake, had got into that brambly thicketand could not make his way out. For half an hour I heard the callswithout paying much attention, absorbed in watching the quaint littlesongster close to me and his curious gestures when emitting hissustained reeling sounds. In the end the persistent distressed callingof the drake lost in a brambly labyrinth got a little on my nerves, andI felt it as a relief when it finally ceased. Then, after a shortsilence, another sound came from the same spot--a blackbird sound, knownto everyone, but curiously interesting when uttered in the way I nowheard it. It was the familiar loud chuckle, not emitted in alarm andsoon ended, but the chuckle uttered occasionally by the bird when he isnot disturbed, or when, after uttering it once for some real cause, hecontinues repeating it for no reason at all, producing the idea that hehas just made the discovery that it is quite a musical sound and that heis repeating it, as if singing, just for pleasure. At such times thelong series of notes do not come forth with a rush; he beginsdeliberately with a series of musical chirps uttered in a measuredmanner, like those of a wood wren, the prelude to its song, the notescoming faster and faster and swelling and running into the loudchuckling performance. This performance, like the lost drake's call, wasrepeated in the same deliberate or leisurely manner at intervals againand again, until my curiosity was aroused and I went to the spot to geta look at the bird who had turned his alarm sound into a song andappeared to be very much taken with it. But there was no blackbird atthe spot, and no lost drake, and no bird, except a throstle sittingmotionless on the bush mound. This was the bird I had been listening to, uttering not his own thrush melody, which he perhaps did not know atall, but the sounds he had borrowed from two species so wide apart intheir character and language. 

The astonishing thing in this case was that the bird never uttered anote of his own original and exceedingly copious song; and I could onlysuppose that he had never learned the thrush melody; that he had, perhaps, been picked up as a fledgling and put in a cage, where he hadimitated the sounds he heard and liked best, and made them his song, andthat he had finally escaped or had been liberated. 

The wild thrush, we know, does introduce certain imitations into his ownsong, but the borrowed notes, or even phrases, are, as a rule, few, andnot always to be distinguished from his own. 

Sometimes one can pick them out; thus, on the borders of a marsh whereredshanks bred, I have heard the call of that bird distinctly given bythe thrush. And again, where the ring-ouzel is common, the thrush willget its brief song exactly. When thrushes taken from the nest are rearedin towns, where they never hear the thrush or any other bird sing, theyare often exceedingly vocal, and utter a medley of sounds which aresometimes distressing to the ear. I have heard many caged thrushes ofthis kind in London, but the most remarkable instance I have met withwas at the little seaside town of Seaford. Here, in the main shoppingstreet, a caged thrush lived for years in a butcher's shop, and pouredout its song continuously, the most distressing throstle performance Iever heard, composed of a medley of loud, shrill and harshsounds--imitations of screams and shouts, boy whistlers, saw filing, knives sharpened on steels, and numerous other unclassifiable noises;but all, more or less, painful. The whole street was filled with thenoise, and the owner used to boast that his caged thrush was the mostpersistent as well as the loudest singer that had ever been heard. Hehad no nerves, and was proud of it! On a recent visit to Seaford Ifailed to hear the bird when walking about the town, and after two orthree days went into the shop to enquire about it. They told me it wasdead--that it had been dead over a year; also that many visitors toSeaford had missed its song and had called at the shop to ask about thebird. The strangest thing about its end, they said, was its suddenness. The bird was singing its loudest one morning, and had been at it forsome time, filling the whole place with its noise, when suddenly, in themiddle of its song, it dropped down dead from its perch. 

To drop dead while singing is not an unheard of, nor a very rareoccurrence in caged birds, and it probably happens, too, in birds livingtheir natural life. Listening to a nightingale, pouring out its powerfulmusic continuously, as the lark sings, one sometimes wonders thatsomething does not give way to end the vocalist's performance and lifeat the same instant. Some such incident was probably the origin of theold legend of the minstrel and the nightingale oa which Strada based hisfamous poem, known in many languages. In England Crawshaw's version wasby far the best, and is perhaps the finest bird poem in our literature. 

The blackbird, like the thrush, sometimes borrows a note or a phrase, and, like the thrush again, if reared by hand he may become a nuisanceby mimicking some disagreeable sound, and using it by way of song. Iheard of such a case a short time ago at Sidmouth. The ground floor ofthe house where I lodged was occupied by a gentleman who had a fondnessfor bird music, and being an invalid confined to his rooms, he kept anumber of birds in cages. He had, besides canaries, the thrush, chaffinch, linnet, goldfinch and cirl bunting. I remarked that he didnot have the best singer of all--the blackbird. He said that he hadprocured one, or that some friend had sent him one, a very beautifulou?el cock in the blackest plumage and with the orange-tawniest bill, and he had anticipated great pleasure from hearing its fluting melody. But alas! no blackbird song did this unnatural blackbird sing. He hadlearnt to bark like a dog, and whenever the singing spirit took him hewould bark once or twice or three times, and then, after an interval ofsilence of the proper length, about fifteen seconds, he would barkagain, and so on until he had had his fill of music for the time. Thebarking got on the invalid's nerves, and he sent the bird away. "It waseither that, " he said, "or losing my senses altogether. "

* * *

As all or most singing birds learn their songs from the adults of thesame species, it is not strange that there should be a good deal of whatwe call mimicry in their performances: we may say, in fact, that prettywell all the true singers are mimics, but that some mimic more thanothers. Thus, the starling is more ready to borrow other birds' notesthan the thrush, while the marsh-warbler borrows so much that hissinging is mainly composed of borrowings. The nightingale is, perhaps, an exception. His voice excels in power and purity of sound, and what wemay call his artistry is exceptionally perfect; this may account for thefact that he does not borrow from other birds' songs. I should say, frommy own observation, that all songsters are interested in the singing ofother species, or at all events, in certain notes, especially the moststriking in power, beauty, and strangeness. Thus, when the cuckoo startscalling, you will see other small birds fly straight to the tree andperch near him, apparently to listen. And among the listeners you willfind the sparrow and tits of various species--birds which are nevervictimized by the cuckoo, and do not take him for a hawk since they takeno notice of him until the calling begins. The reason that the doublefluting call of the cuckoo is not mimicked by other birds is that theycan't; because that peculiar sound is not in their register. Thebubbling cry is reproduced by both the marsh warbler and the starling. Again, it is my experience that when a nightingale starts singing, thesmall birds near immediately become attentive, often suspending theirown songs and some flying to perch near him, and listen, just as theylisten to the cuckoo. Birds imitate the note or phrase that strikes themmost, and is easiest to imitate, as when the thrush copies the pipingand trilling of the redshank and the easy song of the ring-ouzel, which, when incorporated into his own music, harmonizes with it perfectly. Buthe cannot flute, and so never mimics the blackbird's song, although hecan and does, as we have seen, imitate its chuckling cry. 

There is another thing to be considered. I believe that the bird, likecreatures in other classes, has his receptive period, his time to learn, and that, like some mammals, he learns everything he needs to know inhis first year or two; and that, having acquired his proper song, headds little or nothing to it thereafter, although the song may increasein power and brilliance when the bird comes to full maturity. This, Ithink, holds true of all birds, like the nightingale, which have asinging period of two or three months and are songless for the rest ofthe year. That long, silent period cannot, so far as sounds go, be areceptive one; the song early in life has become crystallized in theform it will keep through life, and is like an intuitive act. This isnot the case with birds like the starling, that sing all the yearround--birds that are naturally loquacious and sing instead of screamingand chirping like others. They are always borrowing new sounds andalways forgetting. 

The most curious example of mimicry I have yet met with is that of atrue mocking-bird, Mimus patachonicus, a common resident species innorthern Patagonia, on the Atlantic side, very abundant in places. He isa true mocking-bird because he belongs to the genus Mimus, a branch ofthe thrush family, and not because he mocks or mimics the songs of otherspecies, like others of his kindred. He does not, in fact, mimic the setsongs of others, although he often introduces notes and phrases borrowedfrom other species into his own performance. He sings in a sketchy wayall the year round, but in spring has a fuller unbroken song, emittedwith more power and passion. For the rest of the time he sings to amusehimself, as it seems, in a peculiarly leisurely, and one may say, indolent manner, perched on a bush, from time to time emitting a note ortwo, then a phrase which, if it pleases him, he will repeat two orthree, or half a dozen times. Then, after a pause, other notes andphrases, and so on, pretty well all day long. This manner of singing isirritating, like the staccato song of our throstle, to a listener whowants a continuous stream of song; but it becomes exceedinglyinteresting when one discovers that the bird is thinking very much abouthis own music, if one can use such an expression about a bird; that heis all the time experimenting, trying to get a new phrase, a newcombination of the notes he knows and new notes. Also, that when sittingon his bush and uttering these careless chance sounds, he is, at thesame time, intently listening to the others, all engaged in the sameway, singing and listening. You will see them all about the place, eachbird sitting motionless, like a grey and white image of a bird, on thesummit of his own bush. For, although he is not gregarious as a rule, anumber of pairs live near each other, and form a sort of loosecommunity. The bond that unites them is their music, for not only dothey sit within hearing distance, but they are perpetually mimickingeach other. One may say that they are accomplished mimics but prefermimicking their own to other species. But they only imitate the notesthat take their fancy, so to speak. Thus, occasionally, one strikes outa phrase, a new expression, which appears to please him, and after a fewmoments he repeats it again, then again, and so on and on, and if youremain an hour within hearing he will perhaps be still repeating it atshort intervals. Now, if by chance there is something in the new phrasewhich pleases the listeners too, you will note that they instantlysuspend their own singing, and for some little time they do nothing butlisten. By and by the new note or phrase will be exactly reproduced froma bird on another bush; and he, too, will begin repeating it at shortintervals. Then a second one will get it, then a third, and eventuallyall the birds in that thicket will have it. The constant repeating ofthe new note may then go on for hours, and it may last longer. You mayreturn to the spot on the second day and sit for an hour or longer, listening, and still hear that same note constantly repeated until youare sick and tired of it, or it may even get on your nerves. I rememberthat on one occasion I avoided a certain thicket, one of my favouritedaily haunts for three whole days, not to hear that one everlastingsound; then I returned and to my great relief the birds were all attheir old game of composing, and not one uttered--perhaps he didn'tdare--the too hackneyed phrase. I was sharply reminded one day by anincident in the village of this old Patagonian experience, and of thestrange human-like weakness or passion for something new and arrestingin music or song, something "tuney" or "catchy. "

It chanced that when I left London a new popular song had come out andwas "all the rage, " a tune and words invented or first produced in themusic-halls by a woman named Lottie Collins, with a chorus toit--_Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay_, repeated several times. First caught up inthe music-halls it spread to the streets, and in ever-widening circlesover all London, and over all the land. In London people were gettingtired of hearing it, but when I arrived at my village "in a hole, " andsettled down among the Badgers, I heard it on every hand--in cottages, in the streets, in the fields, men, women and children were singing, whistling, and humming it, and in the evening at the inn roaring it outwith as much zest as if they had been singing _Rule Britannia. _

This state of things lasted from May to the middle of June; then, onevery hot, still day, about three o'clock, I was sitting at my cottagewindow when I caught the sound of a rumbling cart and a man singing. Asthe noise grew louder my interest in the approaching man and cart wasexcited to an extraordinary degree; never had I heard such a noise! Andno wonder, since the man was driving a heavy, springless farm cart inthe most reckless manner, urging his two huge horses to a fast trot, then a gallop, up and down hill along those rough gully-like roads, hestanding up in his cart and roaring out "Auld Lang Syne, " at the top ofa voice of tremendous power. He was probably tipsy, but it was not a badvoice, and the old familiar tune and words had an extraordinary effectin that still atmosphere. He passed my cottage, standing up, his legswide apart, his cap on the back of his head, a big broad-chested youngman, lashing his horses, and then for about two minutes or longer thethunder of the cart and the roaring song came back fainter, until itfaded away in the distance. At that still hour of the day the childrenwere all at school on the further side of the village; the men away inthe fields; the women shut up in their cottages, perhaps sleeping. Itseemed to me that I was the only person in the village who had witnessedand heard the passing of the big-voiced man and cart. But it was not so. At all events, next day, the whole village, men, women and children, were singing, humming and whistling "Auld Lang Syne, " and "Auld LangSyne" lasted for several days, and from that day "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay"was heard no more. It had lost its charm. 

VIII

Just out of hearing of the grasshopper warblers, there was a good-sizedpool of water on the common, probably an old gravel-pit, its bottom nowovergrown with rushes. A sedge warbler, the only one on the common, lived in the masses of bramble and gorse on its banks; and birds of somany kinds came to it to drink and bathe that the pool became afavourite spot with me. One evening, just before sunset, as I lingerednear it, a pied wagtail darted out of some low scrub at my feet andfluttered, as if wounded, over the turf for a space of ten or twelveyards before flying away. Not many minutes after seeing the wagtail, areed-bunting--a bird which I had not previously observed on thecommon--flew down and alighted on a bush a few yards from me, holding awhite crescent-shaped grub in its beak. I stood still to watch it, certainly not expecting to see its nest and young; for, as a rule, abird with food in its beak will sit quietly until the watcher losespatience and moves away; but on this occasion I had not been standingmore than ten seconds before the bunting flew down to a small tuft offurze and was there greeted by the shrill, welcoming cries of its young. I went up softly to the spot, when out sprang the old bird I had seen, but only to drop to the ground just as the wagtail had done, to beat theturf with its wings, then to lie gasping for breath, then to flutter ona little further, until at last it rose up and flew to a bush. 

After admiring the reed-bunting's action, I turned to the dwarf bushnear my feet, and saw, perched on a twig in its centre, a solitary youngbird, fully fledged but not yet capable of sustained flight. He did notrecognise an enemy in me; on the contrary, when I approached my hand tohim, he opened his yellow mouth wide, in expectation of being fed, although his throat was crammed with caterpillars, and the whitecrescent-shaped larva I had seen in the parent's bill was still lying inhis mouth unswallowed. The wonder is that when a young bird had beenstuffed with food to such an extent just before sleeping time, he canstill find it in him to open his mouth and call for more. 

* * *

How wonderful it is that this parental instinct, so beautiful in itsperfect simulation of the action of the bird that has lost the power offlight, should be found in so large a number of species! But when wefind that it is not universal; that in two closely-allied species onewill possess it and the other not; and that it is common in suchwidely-separated orders as gallinaceous and passerine birds, in pigeons, ducks, and waders, it becomes plain that it is not assignable tocommunity of descent, but has originated independently all over theglobe, in a vast number of species. Something of the beginnings andprogressive development of this instinct may be learnt, I think, bynoticing the behaviour of various passerine birds in the presence ofdanger, to their nests and young. Their actions and cries show that theyare greatly agitated, and in a majority of species the parent bird flitsand flutters round the intruder, uttering sounds of distress. Frequentlythe bird exhibits its agitation, not only by these cries and restlessmotions, but by the drooping of the wings and tail--the action observedin a bird when hurt or sick, or oppressed with heat. These languishingsigns are common to a great many species after the young have beenhatched; the period when the parental solicitude is most intense. Inseveral species which I have observed in South America, the languishingis more marked. There are no sorrowful cries and restless movements; thebird sits with hanging wings and tail, gasping for breath with open bill--in appearance a greatly suffering bird. In some cases of thisdescription, the bird, if it moves at all, hops or flutters from ahigher to a lower branch, and, as if sick or wounded, seems about tosink to the ground. In still others, the bird actually does drop to theground, then, feebly flapping its wings, rises again with great effort. From this last form it is but a step to the more highly developedcomplex instinct of the bird that sinks to the earth and flutterspainfully away, gasping, and seemingly incapable of flight. 

It would be a great mistake to suppose that the bird when fluttering onthe ground to lead an enemy from the neighbourhood of its nest is infull possession of all its faculties, acting consciously, and itself inas little danger of capture as when on its perch or flying through theair. We have seen that the action has its root in the bird's passion forits young, and intense solicitude in the presence of any dangerthreatening them, which is so universal in this class of creatures, andwhich expresses itself so variously in different kinds. This must be inall cases a painful and debilitating emotion, and when the bird dropsdown to the earth its pain has caused it to fall as surely as if it hadreceived a wound or had been suddenly attacked by some grievous malady;and when it flutters on the ground it is for the moment incapable offlight, and its efforts to recover flight and safety cause it to beatits wings, and tremble, and gasp with open mouth. The object of theaction is to deceive an enemy, or, to speak more correctly, the resultis to deceive, and there is nothing that will more inflame and carryaway any rapacious mammal than the sight of a fluttering bird. But inthus drawing upon itself the attention of an enemy threatening thesafety of its eggs or young, to what a terrible danger does the parentexpose itself, and how often, in those moments of agitation anddebility, must its own life fall a sacrifice! The sudden spring and rushof a feline enemy must have proved fatal in myriads of instances. Fromits inception to its most perfect stage, in the various species thatpossess it, this perilous instinct has been washed in blood and madebright. 

What I have just said, that the peculiar instinct and deceptive actionwe have been considering is made and kept bright by being bathed inblood, applies to all instinctive acts that tend to the preservation oflife, both of the individual and species. Necessarily so, seeing that, for one thing, instincts can only arise and grow to perfection in orderto meet cases which commonly occur in the life of a species. Theinstinct is not prophetic and does not meet rare or extraordinarysituations. Unless intelligence or some higher faculty comes in tosupplement or to take the place of instinctive action then the creaturemust perish on account of the limitation of instinct. Again, the higherand more complete the instinct the more perilous it is, seeing that itsefficiency depends on the absolutely perfect health and balance of allthe faculties and the entire organism. Thus, the higher instinctivefaculty and action of birds for the preservation of the species, that ofmigration, is undoubtedly the most dangerous of all. It is so perfectthat by means of this faculty millions and myriads of birds of animmense variety of species from cranes, swans, and geese down to minutegoldcrests and firecrests and the smallest feeble-winged-leaf warblers, are able to inhabit and to distribute themselves evenly over all thetemperate and cold regions of the earth, and even nearer the pole: andin all these regions they rear their young and spend several months eachyear, where they would inevitably perish from cold and lack of food ifthey stayed on to meet the winter. We can best realize the perfection ofthis instinct when we consider that all these migrants, including theyoung which have never hitherto strayed beyond the small area of theirhome where every tree and bush and spring and rock is familiar to them, rush suddenly away as if blown by a wind to unknown lands and continentsbeyond the seas to a distance of from a thousand to six or seventhousand miles; that after long months spent in those distant places, which in turn have grown familiar to them, they return again to theirnatal place, not in a direct but ofttimes by a devious route, now north, now north-east, now east or west, keeping to the least perilous linesand crossing the seas where they are narrowest. Thus, when the returningmultitude recrosses the Channel into England, coming by way of Franceand Spain from north or south or mid-Africa and from Asia, they at onceproceed to disperse over the entire country from Land's End to Thursoand the northernmost islands of Scotland, until every wood and hill andmoor and thicket and stream and every village and field and hedgerow andfarmhouse has its own feathered people back in their old places. Butthey do not return in their old force. They had increased to twice orthree times their original numbers when they left us, and as a result ofthat great adventure a half or two-thirds of the vast army has perished. 

The instinct which in character comes nearest to that of the parentsimulating the action of a wounded and terrified bird struggling toescape in order to safeguard its young, is that one, very strong in allground-breeding species, of sitting close on the nest in the presence ofdanger. Here, too, the instinct is of prime importance to the species, since the bird by quitting the nest reveals its existence to theprowling, nest-seeking enemy--dog, cat, fox, stoat, rat, in England;and in the country where I first observed animals, the skunk, armadillo, opossum, snake, wild cat, and animals of the weasel family. By leavingits nest a minute or half a minute too soon the bird sacrifices the eggsor young; by staying a moment too long it is in imminent danger of beingdestroyed itself. How often the bird stays too long on the nest is seenin the corn-crake, a species continually decreasing in this countryowing to the destruction caused by the mowing-machine. The parent birdsthat escape may breed again in a safer place, but in many cases the birdclings too long to its nest and is decapitated or fatally injured by thecutters. Larks, too, often perish in the same way. To go back to theailing or wounded bird simulating action: this is perhaps most perfectin the gallinaceous birds, all ground-breeders whose nests are mostdiligently hunted for by all egg-eating creatures, beast or bird, andwhose tender chicks are a favourite food for all rapacious animals. Inthe fowl, pheasants, partridges, quail, and grouse, the instinct issingularly powerful, the bird making such violent efforts to escape, with such an outcry, such beating of its wings and struggles on theground, that no rapacious beast, however often he may have been deceivedbefore, can fail to be carried away with the prospect of an immediatecapture. The instinct and action has appeared to me more highlydeveloped in these birds because, in the first place, the demonstrationsare more violent than in other families, consequently more effective;and secondly, because the danger once over, the bird's recovery to itsnormal quiet, watchful state is quicker. By way of experiment, I have atvarious times thrown myself on pheasants, partridges and grouse, when Ihave found them with a family of recently-hatched chicks; then on givingup the chase and turning away from the bird its instantaneous recoveryhas seemed like a miracle. It was like a miracle because the creaturedid actually suffer from all those violent, debilitating emotionsexpressed in its disordered cries and action, and it is the miracle ofNature's marvellous health. If we, for example, were thrown into theseviolent extremes of passion, we should not escape the after-effects. Ourwhole system would suffer, a doctor would perhaps have to be called inand would discourse wisely on metabolism and the development of toxinsin the muscles, and give us a bottle of medicine. 

I will conclude this digression and dissertation on a bird's instinct byrelating the action of a hen-pheasant I once witnessed, partly becauseit is the most striking one I have met with of that instantaneousrecovery of a bird from an extremity of distress and terror, and partlyfor another reason which will appear at the end. 

The hen-pheasant was a solitary bird, having strayed away from thepheasant copses near the Itchen and found a nesting-place a mile away, on the other side of the valley, among the tall grasses and sedges on itsborder. I was the bird's only human neighbour, as I was staying in afishing-cottage near the spot where the bird had its nest. Eventually, it brought off eight chicks and remained with them at the same spot on theedge of the valley, living like a rail among the sedges and tall valleyherbage. I never went near the bird, but from the cottage caught sight ofit from time to time, and sometimes watched it with my binocular. Therewas, I thought, a good chance of its being able to rear its young, unlessthe damp proved injurious, as there was no dog or cat at the cottage, andthere were no carrion crows or sparrow-hawks at that spot. One morningabout five o'clock on going out I spied a fox-terrier, a poaching dogfrom the neighbouring village, rushing about in an excited state ahundred yards or so below the cottage. He had scented the birds, andpresently up rose the hen from the tall grass with a mighty noise, thenflopping down she began beating her wings and struggling over the grass, uttering the most agonizing screams, the dog after her, franticallygrabbing at her tail. I feared that he would catch her, and seizing astick flew down to the rescue, yelling at the dog, but he was too excitedto obey or even hear me. At length, thanks to the devious course taken bythe bird, I got near enough to get in a good blow on the dog's back. Hewinced and went on as furiously as ever, and then I got in another blowso well delivered that the rascal yelled, and turning fled back to thevillage. Hot and panting from my exertions, I stood still, but soonerstill the pheasant had pulled herself up and stood there, about threeyards from my feet, as if nothing had happened--as if not a ripple hadtroubled the quiet surface of her life! The serenity of the bird, justout of that storm of violence and danger, and her perfect indifference tomy presence, was astonishing to me. For a minute or two I stood stillwatching her; then turned to walk back to the cottage, and no sooner didI start than after me she came at a gentle trot, following me like a dog. On my way back I came to the very spot where the fox-terrier had foundand attacked the bird, and at once on reaching it she came to a stop anduttered a call, and instantly from eight different places among the tallgrasses the eight fluffy little chicks popped up and started running toher. And there she stood, gathering them about her with gentlechucklings, taking no notice of me, though I was standing still withintwo yards of her!

Up to the moment when the dog got his smart blow and fled from her shehad been under the domination of a powerful instinct, and could haveacted in no other way; but what guided her so infallibly in hersubsequent actions? Certainly not instinct, and not reason, whichhesitates between different courses and is slow to arrive at a decision. One can only say that it was, or was like, intuition, which is as muchas to say that we don't know. 

IX

Among the rarer fringilline birds on the common were the cirl bunting, bullfinch and goldfinch, the last two rarely seen. Linnets, however, were abundant, now gathered in small flocks composed mainly of youngbirds in plain plumage, with here and there an individual showing thecarmine-tinted breast of the adult male. Unhappily, a dreary fate was instore for many of these blithe twitterers. 

On June 24, when walking towards the pool, I spied two recumbent humanfigures on a stretch of level turf near its banks, and near them asomething dark on the grass--a pair of clap-nets! "Still another serpentin my birds' paradise!" said I to myself, and, walking on, I skirted thenets and sat down on the grass beside the men. One was a roughbrown-faced country lad; the other, who held the strings and wore theusual cap and comforter, was a man of about five-and-twenty, with paleblue eyes and yellowish hair, close-cropped, and the unmistakable Londonmark in his chalky complexion. He regarded me with cold, suspiciouslooks, and, when I talked and questioned, answered briefly and somewhatsurlily. I treated him to tobacco, and he smoked; but it wasn't shag, and didn't soften him. On mentioning casually that I had seen a stoat anhour before, he exhibited a sudden interest. It was as if one had said"rats!" to a terrier. I succeeded after a while in getting him to tellme the name of the man to whom he sent his captives, and when I told himthat I knew the man well--a bird-seller in a low part of London--hethawed visibly. Finally I asked him to look at a red-backed shrike, perched on a bush about fifteen yards from his nets, through myfield-glasses, and from that moment he became as friendly as possible, and conversed freely about his mystery. "How near it brings him!" heexclaimed, with a grin of delight, after looking at the bird. Theshrike had greatly annoyed him; it had been hanging about for some time, he told me, dashing at the linnets and driving them off when they flewdown to the nets. Two or three times he might have caught it, but wouldnot draw the nets and have the trouble of resetting them for soworthless a bird. "But I'll take him the next time, " he saidvindictively. "I didn't know he was such a handsome bird. "Unfortunately, the shrike soon flew away, and passing linnets droppeddown, drawn to the spot by the twitterings of their caged fellows, andwere caught; and so it went on for a couple of hours, we conversingamicably during the waiting intervals. For now he regarded me as afriend of the bird-catcher. Linnets only were caught, most of them youngbirds, which pleased him; for the young linnet after a month or two ofcage life will sing; but the adult males would be silent until the nextspring, consequently they were not worth so much, although the carminestain in their breast made them for the time so much more beautiful. 

I remarked incidentally that there were some who looked with unfriendlyeyes on his occupation, and that, sooner or later, these people wouldtry to get an Act of Parliament to make bird-catching in lanes, oncommons and waste lands illegal. "They can't do it!" he exclaimedexcitedly. "And if they can do it, and if they do do it, it will be theruination of England. For what would there be, then, to stop the birdsincreasing? It stands to reason that the whole country would be eatenup. "

Doubtless the man really believed that but for the laborious days thatbird-catchers spend lying on the grass, the human race would be verybadly off. 

Just after he had finished his protest, three or four linnets flew downand were caught. Taking them from the nets, he showed them to me, remarking, with a short laugh, that they were all young males. Then hethrust them down the stocking-leg which served as an entrance to thecovered box he kept his birds in--the black hole in which their captivelife begins, where they were now all vainly fluttering to get out. Goingback to the previous subject, he said that he knew very well that manypersons disliked a bird-catcher, but there was one thing that nobodycould say against him--he wasn't cruel; he caught, but didn't kill. Heonly killed when he caught a great number of female linnets, which werenot worth sending up; he pulled their heads off, and took them home tomake a linnet pie. Then, by way of contrast to his own merciful temper, he told me of the young nest-destroyer I have writ-ten about. It madehim mad to see such things! Something ought to be done, he said, to stopa boy like that; for by destroying so many nestlings he was taking thebread out of the bird-catcher's mouth. Passing to other subjects, hesaid that so far he had caught nothing but linnets on the common--youcouldn't expect to catch other kinds in June. Later on, in August andSeptember, there would be a variety. But he had small hopes of catchinggoldfinches, they were too scarce now. Greenfinches, yellow-hammers, common buntings, reed sparrows--all such birds were worth only tuppenceapiece. Oh, yes, he caught them just the same, and sent them up toLondon, but that was all they were worth to him. For young male linnetshe got eightpence, sometimes tenpence; for hen birds fourpence, or less. I dare say that eightpence was what he hoped to get, seeing that youngmale linnets are not unfrequently sold by London dealers for sixpenceand even fourpence. Goldfinches ran to eighteenpence, sometimes as muchas two shillings. Starlings he had made a lot out of, but that was allpast and over. Why?

Because they were not wanted--because people were such fools that theynow preferred to shoot at pigeons. He hated pigeons! Gentlemen used toshoot starlings at matches; and if you had the making of a bird to shootat, you couldn't get a better than the starling--such a neat bird! Hehad caught hundreds--thousands--and had sold them well. But now nothingbut pigeons would they have. Pigeons! Always pigeons! He caughtstarlings still, but what was the good of that? The dealers would onlytake a few, and they were worth nothing--no more than greenfinches andyellow-hammers. 

My colloquy with my enemy on the common tempts me to a fresh digressionin this place--to have my say on a question about which much has alreadybeen said during the last three or four decades, especially during the'sixties, when the first practical efforts to save our wild-bird lifefrom destruction were made. 

There is a feeling in the great mass of people that the pursuit of anywild animal, whether fit for food or not, for pleasure or gain, is aform of sport, and that sport ought not to be interfered with. So strongand well-nigh universal is this feeling, which is like a superstition, that the pursuit is not interfered with, however unsportsmanlike it maybe, and when illegal, and when practised by only a very few persons inany district, where to others it may be secretly distasteful or evenprejudicial. 

Even bird-catching on a common is regarded as a form of sport and thebird-catcher as a sportsman--and a brother. 

A striking instance of this tameness and stupidly acquiescent spirit inpeople generally was witnessed during the intensely severe frosts of theearly part of the late winter (1882-3), when incalculable numbers ofsea-birds were driven by hunger and cold into bays and inland waters. Atthis time thousands of gulls made their appearance in the Thames, but nosooner did they arrive than those who possessed guns and licences toshoot began to shoot them. The police interfered and some of thesesportsmen were brought before the magistrates and fined for the offenceof discharging guns to the public danger. For upwards of a fortnightafter the shooting had been put a stop to, the gulls continued tofrequent the river in large numbers, and were perhaps most numerous fromLondon Bridge to Battersea, and during this time they were watched everyday by thousands of Londoners with keen interest and pleasure. The riverhere, flowing through the very centre and heart of the greatest city ofthe world, forms at all hours and at all seasons of the year a noble andmagnificent sight; to my eyes it never looked more beautiful andwonderful than during those intensely cold days of January, when therewas nothing that one could call a mist in a chilly, motionlessatmosphere, but only a faint haze, a pallor as of impalpable frost, which made the heavens seem more white than blue, and gave a hoarinessand cloud-like remoteness to the arches spanning the water, and the vastbuildings on either side, ending with the sublime dome of the citycathedral; and when out of the pale motionless haze, singly, in twos andthrees, in dozens and scores, floated the mysterious white bird-figures, first seen like vague shadows in the sky, then quickly taking shape andwhiteness, and floating serenely past, to be succeeded by others and yetothers. 

It was not merely the ornithologist in me that made the sight sofascinating, since it was found that others--all others, it might almostbe said, --experienced the same kind of delight. Crowds of people camedown to the river to watch the birds; workmen when released from theirwork at mid-day hurried down to the embankment so as to enjoy seeing thegulls while eating their dinners, and, strangest thing of all, to feedthem with the fragments!

And yet these very men who found so great a pleasure in observing andfeeding their white visitors from the sea, and were exhilarated with thenovel experiences of seeing wild nature face to face at their owndoors--these thousands would have stood by silent and consenting if thehalf-a-dozen scoundrels with guns and fish-hooks on lines had beenallowed to have their will and had slaughtered and driven the birds fromthe river! And this, in fact, is precisely what happened at a distancefrom London, where guns could be discharged without danger to thepublic, in numberless bays and rivers in which the birds sought refuge. They were simply slaughtered wholesale in the most wanton manner; inMorecambe Bay a hundred and twelve gulls were killed at one discharge, and no hand and no voice was raised to interfere with the hideous sport. Not because it was not shocking to the spectators, but because it was"Sport. "

Doubtless it will be said that this wholesale wanton destruction of birdlife, however painful it may be to lovers of nature, howeverreprehensible from a moral point of view, is sanctioned by law, andcannot therefore be prevented. This is not quite so. We see that theWild Birds Protection Act is continually being broken with impunity, andwhere public opinion is unfavourable to it the guardians of the lawthemselves, the police and the magistrates, are found encouraging thepeople to break the law. Again, we find that where commons are enclosed, and the law says nothing, the people are accustomed to assemble togetherunlawfully to tear the fences down, and are not punished. For, afterall, if laws do not express or square with public will or opinion, theyhave little force; and if, in any locality, the people thought proper todo so--if they were not restrained by that dull, tame spirit I havespoken of--they would, lawfully or unlawfully, protect their sea-fowlfrom the cockney sportsmen, and sweep the bird-catchers out of theirlanes and waste lands. 

One day I paid a visit to Maidenhead, a pleasant town on the Thames, where the Thames is most beautiful, set in the midst of a rich anddiversified country which should be a bird's paradise. In my walks inthe town, I saw a great many stuffed kingfishers, and, in the shops ofthe local taxidermists, some rare and beautiful birds, with others thatare fast becoming rare. But outside of the town I saw no kingfishers andno rare species at all, and comparatively few birds of any kind. Itmight have been a town of Philistine cockneys who at no very distantperiod had emigrated thither from the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. I came home with the local guide-book in my pocket. It is now before me, and this is what its writer says of the Thicket, the extensive andbeautiful common two miles from the town, which belongs to Maidenhead, or, in other words, to its inhabitants: "The Thicket was formerly muchinfested by robbers and highwaymen. The only remains of them to be foundnow are the snarers of the little feathered songsters, who imprison themin tiny cages and carry them off in large numbers to brighten by theirsweet, sad sighs for liberty the dwellers in our smoky cities. "

On this point I consulted a bird-catcher, who had spread his nets on thecommon for many years, and he complained bitterly of the increasingscarcity of its bird life. There was no better place than the Thicketformerly, he said; but now he could hardly make his bread there. Ipresume that a dozen men of his trade would be well able to drain thecountry in the neighbourhood of the Thicket of the greater portion ofits bird life each year so as to keep the songsters scarce. Will anyperson maintain for a moment that the eight or nine thousand inhabitantsof Maidenhead, and the hundreds or thousands inhabiting the surroundingcountry could not protect their songbirds from these few men, most ofthem out of London slums, if they wished or had the spirit to do so?

It is true that the local authorities in some country towns have madeby-laws to protect the birds in their open spaces. Thus, at TunbridgeWells, since 1890, bird-trapping and bird's-nesting have been prohibitedon the large and beautiful common there; but, so far as I know, suchmeasures have only been taken in boroughs after the birds have beenalmost exterminated. 

Doubtless the day will come when, law or no law, the bird-catcher willfind it necessary to go warily, lest the people of any place where hemay be tempted to spread his nets should have formed the custom oftreating those of his calling somewhat roughly. That it will come soonis earnestly to be wished. Nevertheless, it would be irrational tocherish feelings of animosity and hatred against the bird-catcherhimself, the "man and brother, " ready and anxious as we may be to takethe bread out of his mouth. He certainly does not regard himself as aninjurious or disreputable person; on the contrary he looks on himself asa useful member of the community, and in some cases even more. If anyoneis to be hated or blamed, it is the person who sends the bird-catcherinto the fields; not the dealer, but he who buys trapped birds and keepsthem in cages to be amused by their twitterings. This is not a questionof morality, nor of sentimentality, as some may imagine; but rather oftaste, of the sense of fitness, of that something vaguely described asthe feeling for nature, which is not universal. Thus, one man will dinewith zest on a pheasant, partridge, or quail, but would be choked by alark; while another man will eat pheasant and lark with equal pleasure. Both may be good, honest, moral men; only one has that something whichthe other lacks. In one the soul responds to the skylark's music"singing at heaven's gate, " in the other not; to one the roasted lark ismerely a savoury morsel; the other, be he never so hungry, cannotdissociate the bird on the dish from that heavenly melody whichregistered a sensation in his brain, to be thereafter reproduced atwill, together with the revived emotion. It is a curious question, andis no nearer to a settlement when one of these two I have describedturns round and calls his neighbour a gross feeder, a worshipper of hisbelly, a soulless and brutish man; and when the other answers"pooh-pooh" and goes on complacently devouring larks with great gusto, until he is himself devoured of death. 

To those with whom I am in sympathy in this matter, who love to listento and are yearly invigorated by the skylark's music, and whose soulsare yearly sickened at the slaughter of their loved songsters, I wouldhumbly suggest that there is a simpler, more practical means of endingthis dispute, which has surely lasted long enough. It goes withoutsaying that this bird's music is eminently pleasing to most persons, that even as the sunshine is sweet and pleasant to behold, its silveryaerial sounds rained down so abundantly from heaven are delightful andexhilarating to all of us, or at all events, to so large a majority thatthe minority are not entitled to consideration. One person in fivethousand, or perhaps in ten thousand, might be found to say that thelark singing in blue heaven affords him no pleasure. This being so, andours being a democratic country in which the will or desire of the manyis or may be made the law of the land, it is surely only right andreasonable that lovers of lark's flesh should be prevented fromgratifying their taste at the cost of the destruction of so loved abird, that they should be made to content themselves with woodcock, andsnipe on toast, and golden plover, and grouse and blackcock, and anyother bird of delicate flavor which does not, living, appeal so stronglyto the aesthetic feelings in us and is not so universal a favourite. 

This, too, will doubtless come in time. Speaking for myself, and goingback to the former subject, little as I like to see men feeding onlarks, rather would I see larks killed and eaten than thrust into cages. For in captivity they do not "sweeten" my life, as the Maidenheadguidebook writer would say, with their shrill, piercing cries forliberty, but they "sing me mad. " Just as in some minds this bird'smusic--a sound which above all others typifies the exuberant life andjoy of nature to the soul--cannot be separated from the cooked anddished-up melodist, so that they turn with horror from such meat, so Icannot separate this bird, nor any bird, from the bird's wild life ofliberty, and the marvellous faculty of flight which is the bird'sattribute. To see so wild and aerial a creature in a cage jars my wholesystem, and is a sight hateful and unnatural, an outrage on ouruniversal mother. 

This feeling about birds in captivity, which I have attempted todescribe, and which, I repeat, is not sentimentality, as that word isordinarily understood, has been so vividly rendered in an ode to "TheSkylarks" by Sir Rennell Rodd, that the reader will probably feelgrateful to me for quoting a portion of it in this place, especially asthe volume in which it appears--_Feda, with Other Poems_--is, I imagine, not very widely known:

 "Oh, the sky, the sky, the open sky, For the home of a song-bird's heart! And why, and why, and for ever why, Do they stifle here in the mart: Cages of agony, rows on rows, Torture that only a wild thing knows: Is it nothing to you to see That head thrust out through the hopeless wire, And the tiny life, and the mad desire To be free, to be free, to be free? Oh, the sky, the sky, the blue, wide sky, For the beat of a song-bird's wings!

 * * *

 Straight and close are the cramping bars From the dawn of mist to the chill of stars, And yet it must sing or die! Will its marred harsh voice in the city street Make any heart of you glad? It will only beat with its wings and beat, It will only sing you mad. 

 * * *

 If it does not go to your heart to see The helpless pity of those bruised wings, The tireless effort to which it clings To the strain and the will to be free, I know not how I shall set in words The meaning of God in this, For the loveliest thing in this world of His Are the ways and the songs of birds. But the sky, the sky, the wide, free sky, For the home of the song-bird's heart!"

How falsely does that man see Nature, how grossly ignorant must he be ofits most elemental truths, who looks upon it as a chamber of torture, aphysiological laboratory on a very vast scale, a scene of endless strifeand trepidation, of hunger and cold, and every form of pain andmisery--and who, holding this doctrine of

 "Oh, the sky, the sky, the open sky is the home of a song-bird's heart, "

Nature's cruelty, keeps a few captive birds in cages, and is accustomedto say of them, "These, at any rate, are safe, rescued from subjectionto ruthless conditions, sheltered from the inclement weather and fromenemies, and all their small wants abundantly satisfied;" who once ortwice every day looks at his little captives, presents them with a lumpof sugar, whistles and chuckles to provoke them to sing, then goes abouthis business, flattering himself that he is a lover of birds, a being ofa sweet and kindly nature. It is all a delusion--a distortion andinversion of the truth--so absurd that it would be laughable were itnot so sad, and the cause of so much unconscious cruelty. The truth is, that if birds be capable of misery, it is only in the unnaturalconditions of a caged life that they experience it; and that if they arecapable of happiness in a cage, such happiness or contentment is but apoor, pale emotion compared with the wild exuberant gladness they havein freedom, where all their instincts have full play, and where theperils that surround them do but brighten their many splendid faculties. The little bird twitters and sings in its cage, and among ourselves theblind man and the cripple whistle and sing, too, feeling at times alower kind of contentment and cheerfulness. The chaffinch in EastLondon, with its eyeballs seared by red-hot needles, sings, too, in itsprison, when it has grown accustomed to its darkened existence, and isin health, and the agreeable sensations that accompany health prompt itat intervals to melody, but no person, not even the dullest ruffianamong the baser sort of bird-fanciers would maintain for a moment thatthe happiness of the little sightless captive, whether vocal or silent, is at all comparable in degree to that of the chaffinch singing in April"on the orchard bough, " vividly seeing the wide sunlit world, blue aboveand green below, possessing the will and the power, when its lyric ends, to transport itself swiftly through the crystal fields of air to othertrees and other woods. 

I take it that in the lower animals misery can result from two causesonly--restraint and disease; consequently, that animals in a state ofnature are not miserable. They are not hindered nor held back. Whetherthe animal is migrating, or burying himself in his hibernating nest orden; or flying from some rapacious enemy, which he may, or may not, beable to escape; or feeding, or sleeping, or fighting, or courting, orincubating, however many days or weeks this process may last--in allthings he is obeying the impulse that is strongest in him at thetime--he is doing what he wants to do--the one thing that makes himhappy. 

As to disease, it is so rare in wild animals, or in a large majority ofcases so quickly proves fatal, that, compared with what we call diseasein our own species it is practically non-existent. The "struggle forexistence, " in so far as animals in a state of nature are concerned, isa metaphorical struggle; and the strife, short and sharp, which is socommon in nature, is not misery, although it results in pain, since itis pain that kills or is soon outlived. Fear there is, just as in fineweather there are clouds in the sky; and just as the shadow of the cloudpasses, so does fear pass from the wild creature when the object thatexcited it has vanished from sight. And when death comes, it comesunexpectedly, and is not the death that we know, even before we taste ofit, thinking of it with apprehension all our lives long, but a suddenblow that takes away consciousness--the touch of something that numbsthe nerves--merely the prick of a needle. In whatever way the animalperishes, whether by violence, or excessive cold, or decay, his death isa comparatively easy one. So long as he is fighting with or strugglingto escape from an enemy, wounds are not felt as wounds, and scarcelyhurt him--as we know from our own experience; and when overcome, ifdeath be not practically instantaneous, as in the case of a small birdseized by a cat, the disabling grip or blow is itself a kind of anodyne, producing insensibility to pain. This, too, is a matter of humanexperience. To say nothing of those who fall in battle, men have oftenbeen struck down and fearfully lacerated by lions, tigers, jaguars, andother savage beasts; and after having been rescued by their companions, have recounted this strange thing. Even when there was no loss ofconsciousness, when they saw and knew that the animal was rending theirflesh, they seemed not to feel it, and were, at the time, indifferent tothe fate that had overtaken them. 

It is the same in death from cold. The strong, well-nourished man, overtaken by a snowstorm on some pathless, uninhabited waste, mayexperience some exceedingly bitter moments, or even hours, before hegives up the struggle. The physical pain is simply nothing: the wholebitterness is in the thought that he must die. The horror at the thoughtof annihilation, the remembrance of all the happiness he is now about tolose, of dear friends, of those whose lives will be dimmed with grieffor his loss, of all his cherished dreams of the future--the sting ofall this is so sharp that, compared with it, the creeping coldness inhis blood is nothing more than a slight discomfort, and is scarcelyfelt. By and by he is overcome by drowsiness, and ceases to struggle;the torturing visions fade from his mind, and his only thought is to liedown and sleep. And when he sleeps he passes away; very easily, verypainlessly, for the pain was of the mind, and was over long before deathensued. 

The bird, however hard the frost may be, flies briskly to its customaryroosting-place, and with beak tucked into its wing, falls asleep. It hasno apprehensions; only the hot blood grows colder and colder, the pulsefeebler as it sleeps, and at midnight, or in the early morning, it dropsfrom its perch--dead. 

Yesterday he lived and moved, responsible to a thousand externalinfluences, reflecting earth and sky in his small brilliant brain as ina looking-glass; also he had a various language, the inherited knowledgeof his race, and the faculty of flight, by means of which he couldshoot, meteor-like, across the sky, and pass swiftly from place toplace, and with it such perfect control over all his organs, suchmarvellous certitude in all his motions, as to be able to drop himselfplumb down from the tallest tree-top or out of the void air, on to aslender spray, and scarcely cause its leaves to tremble. Now, on thismorning, he lies stiff and motionless; if you were to take him up anddrop him from your hand, he would fall to the ground like a stone or alump of clay--so easy and swift is the passage from life to death inwild nature! But he was never miserable. 

Those of my readers who have seen much of animals in a state of nature, will agree that death from decay, or old age, is very rare among them. In that state the fullest vigour, with brightness of all the faculties, is so important that probably in ninety-nine cases in a hundred anyfalling-off in strength, or decay of any sense, results in some fatalaccident. Death by misadventure, as we call it, is Nature's ordinance, the end designed for a very large majority of her children. Nevertheless, animals do sometimes live on without accident to the veryend of their term, to fade peacefully away at the last. I have myselfwitnessed such cases in mammals and birds; and one such case, whichprofoundly impressed me, and is vividly remembered, I will describe. 

One morning in the late summer, while walking in the fields at my homein South America, I noticed a few purple martins, large, beautifulswallows common in that region, engaged, at a considerable height, inthe aerial exercises in which they pass so much of their time each day. By and by, one of the birds separated itself from the others, and, circling slowly downward, finally alighted on the ground not far fromme. I walked on: but the action of the bird had struck me as unusual andstrange, and before going far, I turned and walked back to the spotwhere it continued sitting on the ground, quite motionless. It made nomovement when I approached to within four yards of it; and after I hadstood still at that distance for a minute or so, attentively regardingit, I saw it put out one wing and turn over on its side. I at once tookit up in my hand, and found that it was already quite dead. It was alarge example of its species, and its size, together with a something ofdimness in the glossy purple colour of the upper plumage, seemed to showthat it was an old bird. But it was uninjured, and when I dissected itno trace of disease was discernible. I concluded that it was an old birdthat had died solely from natural failure of the life-energy. 

But how wonderful, how almost incredible, that the healthy vigour andjoy of life should have continued in this individual bird down to withinso short a period of the end; that it should have been not only strongenough to find its food, but to rush and wheel about for long intervalsin purely sportive exercises, when the brief twilight of decline andfinal extinction were so near! It becomes credible--we can even believethat most of the individuals that cease to exist only when the vitalfire has burnt itself out, fall on death in this swift, easymanner--when we recall the fact that even in the life-history of mensuch a thing is not unknown. Probably there is not one among my readerswho will not be able to recall some such incident in his own circle--thecase of someone who lived, perhaps, long past the term usually allottedto man, and who finally passed away without a struggle, without a pang, so that those who were with him found it hard to believe that the spirithad indeed gone. In such cases, the subject has invariably been healthy, although it is hard to believe that, in the conditions we exist in, anyman can have the perfect health that all wild creatures enjoy. 

X

After my long talk with the bird-catcher on June 24, and two more talksequally long on the two following days, I found that something of thecharm the common had had for me was gone. It was not quite the same asformerly; even the sunshine had a something of conscious sadness in itwhich was like a shadow. Those merry little brown twitterers thatfrequently shot across the sky, looking small as insects in the wideblue expanse, and ever and anon dropped swiftly down like showers ofaerolites, to lose themselves in the grass and herbage, or perch singingon the topmost dead twigs of a bush, now existed in constant imminentdanger--not of that quick merciful destruction which Nature has for herweaklings, and for all that fail to reach her high standard; but of aworse fate, the prison life which is not Nature's ordinance, but one ofthe cunning larger Ape's abhorred inventions. Instead of taking my usuallong strolls about the common I loitered once more in the village lanesand had my reward. 

On the morning of June 27 I was out sauntering very indolently, thinkingof nothing at all; for it was a surpassingly brilliant day, and thesunshine produced the effect of a warm, lucent, buoyant fluid, in whichI seemed to float rather than walk--a celestial water, which, like themore ponderable and common sort, may sometimes be both felt and seen. The sensation of feeling it is somewhat similar to that experienced by abather standing breast-deep in a dear, green, warm tropical sea, socharged with salt that it lifts him up; but to distinguish it with theeye, you must look away to a distance of some yards in an open unshadedplace, when it will become visible as fine glinting lines, quivering andserpentining upwards, fountain-wise, from the surface. All at once I wasstartled by hearing the loud importunate hunger-call of a young cuckooquite close to me. Moving softly up to the low hedge and peering over, Isaw the bird perched on a long cross-stick, which had been put up in acottage garden to hang clothes on; he was not more than three to fouryards from me, a fine young cuckoo in perfect plumage, his barredunder-surface facing me. Although seeing me as plainly as I saw him, heexhibited no fear, and did not stir. Why should he, since I had not comethere to feed him, and, to his inexperienced avian mind, was only one ofthe huge terrestrial creatures of various forms, with horns and manes ontheir heads, that move heavily about in roads and pastures, and arenothing to birds? But his foster parent, a hedge-sparrow, wassuspicious, and kept at some distance with food in her bill; thenexcited by his imperative note, she flitted shyly to him, and depositeda minute caterpillar in his great gaping yellow mouth. It was likedropping a bun into the monstrous mouth of the hippopotamus of theZoological Gardens. But the hedge-sparrow was off and back again with asecond morsel in a very few moments; and again and again she darted awayin quest of food and returned successful, while the lazy, beautifulgiant sat sunning himself on his cross-stick and hungrily cried formore. 

This is one of those exceptional sights in nature which, however oftenseen, never become altogether familiar, never fail to re-excite the oldfeelings of wonder and admiration which were experienced on firstwitnessing them. I can safely say, I think, that no man has observed somany parasitical young birds (individuals) being fed by theirfoster-parents as myself, yet the interest such a sight inspired in meis just as fresh now as in boyhood. And probably in no parasiticalspecies does the strangeness of the spectacle strike the mind so sharplyas in this British bird, since the differences in size and colouringbetween the foster-parent and its false offspring are so much greater inits case. Here nature's unnaturalness in such an instinct--a close unionof the beautiful and the monstrous--is seen in its extreme form. Thehawk-like figure and markings of the cuckoo serve only to accentuate thedisparity, which is perhaps greatest when the parent is thehedge-sparrow--so plainly-coloured a bird, so shy and secretive in itshabits. One never ceases to be amazed at the blindness of the parentalinstinct in so intelligent a creature as a bird in a case of this kind. Some idea of how blind it is may be formed by imagining a case in widelyseparated types of our own species, which would be a parallel to that ofthe cuckoo and hedge-sparrow. Let us imagine that some malicious ArabianNight's genius had snatched up the infant male child of a Scandinaviancouple--the largest of their nation; and flying away to Africa with it, to the heart of the great Aruwhimi forest had laid it on the breast of alittle coffee-coloured, woolly-headed, spindle-shanked, pot-bellied, pigmy mother, taking away at the same time her own newly-born babe; thatshe had tenderly nursed the substituted child, and reared and protectedit, ministering, according to her lights, to all its huge wants, untilhe had come to the fullness of his stature, yet never suspected, thatthe magnificent, ivory-limbed giant, with flowing yellow locks andcerulean eyes, was not the child of her own womb. 

XI

Bright and genial were all the last days of June, when I loitered in thelanes before the unwished day of my return to London. During this quiet, pleasant time the greenfinch was perhaps more to me than any othersongster. In the village itself, with the adjacent lanes and orchards, this pretty, seldom-silent bird was the most common species. The villagewas his metropolis, just as London is ours--and the sparrow's; its laneswere his streets, its hedges and elm trees his cottage rows and tallstately mansions and public buildings. . We frequently find thepredominance of one species somewhat wearisome. Speaking for myself, there are songsters that are best appreciated when they are limited innumbers and keep their distance, but of the familiar, unambitiousstrains of swallow, robin, and wren I never tire, nor, during thesedays, could I have too much of the greenfinch, low as he ranks amongBritish melodists. Tastes differ; that is a point on which we are allagreed, and every one of us, even the humblest, is permitted to have hisown preferences. Still, after re-reading Wordsworth's lines to "TheGreen Linnet, " it is curious, to say the least of it, to turn to someprosewriter--an authority on birds, perhaps--to find that this species, whose music so charmed the poet, has for its song a monotonous croak, which it repeats at short intervals for hours without the slightestvariation--a dismal sound which harmonizes with no other sound innature, and suggests nothing but heat and weariness, and is of allnatural sounds the most irritating. To this writer, then--and there areothers to keep him in countenance--the greenfinch as a vocalist rankslower than the lowest. One can only wonder (and smile) at such extremedivergences. To my mind all natural sounds have, in some measure anexhilarating effect, and I cannot get rid of the notion that so itshould be with every one of us; and when some particular sound, orseries of sounds, that has more than this common character, and isdistinctly pleasing, is spoken of as nothing but disagreeable, irritating, and the rest of it, I am inclined to think that there issomething wrong with the person who thus describes it; that he is notexactly as nature would have had him, but that either during hisindependent life, or before it at some period of his prenatal existence, something must have happened to distune him. All this, I freely confess, may be nothing but fancy. In any case, the subject need not keep uslonger from the greenfinch--that is to say, _my_ greenfinch not anotherman's. 

From morning until evening all around and about the cottage, and out ofdoors whithersoever I bent my steps, from the masses of deep greenfoliage, sounded the perpetual airy prattle of these delightful birds. One had the idea that the concealed vocalists were continually meetingeach other at little social gatherings, where they exchanged prettyloving greetings, and indulged in a leafy gossip, interspersed withoccasional fragments of music, vocal and instrumental; now a longtrill--a trilling, a tinkling, a sweeping of one minute finger-tip overmetal strings as fine as gossamer threads--describe it how you will, youcannot describe it; then the long, low, inflected scream, like a lark'sthroat-note drawn out and inflected; little chirps and chirrupingexclamations and remarks, and a soft warbled note three or four or moretimes repeated, and sometimes, the singer fluttering up out of thefoliage and hovering in the air, displaying his green and yellow plumagewhile emitting these lovely notes; and again the trill, trill answeringtrill in different keys; and again the music scream, as if someunsubstantial being, fairy or woodnymph had screamed somewhere in hergreen hiding-place. In London one frequently hears, especially in thespring, half-a-dozen sparrows just met together in a garden tree, oramong the ivy or creeper on a wall, burst out suddenly into a confusedrapturous chorus of chirruping sounds, mingled with others of a finerquality, liquid and ringing. At such times one is vexed to think thatthere are writers on birds who invariably speak of the sparrow as atuneless creature, a harsh chirper, and nothing more. It strikes onethat such writers either wilfully abuse or are ignorant of the rightmeaning of words, so wild and glad in character are these concerts oftown sparrows, and so refreshing to the tired and noise-vexed brain! Butnow when I listened to the greenfinches in the village elms andhedgerows, if by chance a few sparrows burst out in loud gratulatorynotes, the sounds they emitted appeared coarse, and I wished thechirrupers away. But with the true and brilliant songsters it seemed tome that the rippling greenfinch music was always in harmony, forming asit were a kind of airy, subdued accompaniment to their loud and ringingtones. 

I had had my nightingale days, my cuckoo and blackbird and tree-pipitdays, with others too numerous to mention, and now I was having mygreenfinch days; and these were the last. 

One morning in July I was in my sitting-room, when in the hedge on theother side of the lane, just opposite my window, a small brown birdwarbled a few rich notes, the prelude to his song. I went and stood bythe open window, intently listening, when it sang again, but only aphrase or two. But I listened still, confidently expecting more; foralthough it was now long past its singing season, that splendid sunshinewould compel it to express its gladness. Then, just when a fresh burstof music came, it was disturbed by another sound close by--a humanvoice, also singing. On the other side of the hedge in which the birdsat concealed was a cottage garden, and there on a swing fastened to apair of apple trees, a girl about eleven years old sat lazily swingingherself. Once or twice after she began singing the nightingale broke outagain, and then at last he became silent altogether, his voiceoverpowered by hers. Girl and bird were not five yards apart. Itgreatly surprised me to hear her singing, for it was eleven o'clock, when all the village children were away at the National School, a timeof day when, so far as human sounds were concerned, there reigned analmost unbroken silence. But very soon I recalled the fact that this wasa very lazy child, and concluded that she had coaxed her mother intosending an excuse for keeping her at home, and so had kept her libertyon this beautiful morning. About two minutes' walk from the cottage, atthe side of the crooked road running through the village, there was agroup of ancient pollarded elm trees with huge, hollow trunks, andbehind them an open space, a pleasant green slope, where some of thevillage children used to go every day to play on the grass. Here I usedto see this girl lying in the sun, her dark chestnut hair loosed andscattered on the sward, her arms stretched out, her eyes nearly closed, basking in the sun, as happy as some heat-loving wild animal. No, it wasnot strange that she had not gone to school with the others when herdisposition was remembered, but most strange to hear a voice of suchquality in a spot where nature was rich and lovely, and only man was, ifnot vile, at all events singularly wanting in the finer human qualities. 

Looking out from the open window across the low hedge-top, I could seeher as she alternately rose and fell with slow, indolent motion, nowwaist-high above the green dividing wall, then only her brown headvisible resting against the rope just where her hand had grasped it. Andas she swayed herself to and fro she sang that simple melody--probablysome child's hymn which she had been taught at the Sunday-school; but itwas a very long hymn, or else she repeated the same few stanzas manytimes, and after each there was a brief pause, and then the voice thatseemed to fall and rise with the motion went on as before. I could havestood there for an hour--nay, for hours--listening to it, so fresh andso pure was the clear young voice, which had no earthly trouble in it, and no passion, and was in this like the melody of the birds of which Ihad lately heard so much; and with it all that tenderness and depthwhich is not theirs, but is human only and of the soul. 

It struck me as a singular coincidence--and to a mind of so primitive atype as the writer's there is more in the fact that the wordimplies--that, just as I had quitted London, to seek for just such aspot as I so speedily found, with the passionately exclaimed words of ayoung London girl ringing in my ears, so now I went back with thisvillage girl's melody sounding and following me no less clearly andinsistently. For it was not merely remembered, as we remember mostthings, but vividly and often reproduced, together with the variousmelodies of the birds I had listened to; a greater and principal voicein that choir, yet in no wise lessening their first value, nor ever outof harmony with them. 

EXOTIC BIRDS FOR BRITAIN

There are countries with a less fertile soil and a worse climate thanours, yet richer in bird life. Nevertheless, England is not poor; thespecies are not few in number, and some are extremely abundant. Unfortunately many of the finer kinds have been too much sought after;persecuted first for their beauty, then for their rarity, until now weare threatened with their total destruction. As these kinds becomeunobtainable, those which stand next in the order of beauty and rarityare persecuted in their turn; and in a country as densely populated asours, where birds cannot hide themselves from human eyes, suchpersecution must eventually cause their extinction. Meanwhile the birdpopulation does not decrease. Every place in nature, like every property inChancery, has more than one claimant to it--sometimes the claimants aremany--and so long as the dispute lasts all live out of the estate. Forthere are always two or more species subsisting on the same kind offood, possessing similar habits, and frequenting the same localities. Itis consequently impossible for man to exterminate any one specieswithout indirectly benefiting some other species, which attracts him ina less degree, or not at all. This is unfortunate, for as the brightkinds, or those we esteem most, diminish in numbers the less interestingkinds multiply, and we lose much of the pleasure which bird life isfitted to give us. When we visit woods, or other places to which birdschiefly resort, in districts uninhabited by man, or where he pays littleor no attention to the feathered creatures, the variety of the bird lifeencountered affords a new and peculiar delight. There is a constantsuccession of new forms and new voices; in a single day as many speciesmay be met with as one would find in England by searching diligently fora whole year. 

And yet this may happen in a district possessing no more species thanEngland boasts; and the actual number of individuals may be even lessthan with us. In sparrows, for instance, of the one common species, weare exceedingly rich; but in bird life generally, in variety of birds, especially in those of graceful forms and beautiful plumage, we havebeen growing poorer for the last fifty years, and have now come to solow a state that it becomes us to inquire whether it is not in our powerto better ourselves. It is an old familiar truth--a truism--that it iseasier to destroy than to restore or build up; nevertheless, somecomfort is to be got from the reflection that in this matter we have uptill now been working against Nature. She loves not to bring forth foodwhere there are none to thrive on it; and when our unconsidered actionhad made these gaps, when, despising her gifts or abusing them, we haddestroyed or driven out her finer kinds, she fell back on her lowlierkinds--her reserve of coarser, more generalized species--and gave themincrease, and bestowed the vacant places which we had created on them. What she has done she will undo, or assist us in undoing; for we shouldbe going back to her methods, and should have her with and not againstus. Much might yet be done to restore the balance among our nativespecies. Not by legislation, albeit all laws restraining the wholesaledestruction of bird life are welcome. On this subject the HonourableAuberon Herbert has said, and his words are golden: "For myself, legislation or no legislation, I would turn to the friends of animals inthis country, and say, 'If you wish that the friendship between man andanimals should become a better and truer thing than it is at present, you must make it so by countless individual efforts, by making thousandsof centres of personal influence. '"

The subject is a large one. In this paper the question of theintroduction of exotic birds will be chiefly considered. Birds have beenblown by the winds of chance over the whole globe, and have found restfor their feet. That a large number of species, suited to the conditionsof this country, exist scattered about the world is not to be doubted, and by introducing a few of these we might accelerate the change sogreatly to be desired. At present a very considerable amount of energyis spent in hunting down the small contingents of rare species that onceinhabited our islands, and still resort annually to its shores, persistently endeavouring to re-establish their colonies. A less amountof labour and expense would serve to introduce a few foreign specieseach year, and the reward would be greater, and would not make usashamed. We have generously given our own wild animals to othercountries; and from time to time we receive cheering reports of anabundant increase in at least two of our exportations--to wit, therabbit and the sparrow. We are surely entitled to some return. Deadanimals, however rich their pelt or bright their plumage may be, are nota fair equivalent. Dead things are too much with us. London has become amart for this kind of merchandise for the whole of Europe, and thetraffic is not without a reflex effect on us; for life in the inferioranimals has come or is coming to be merely a thing to be lightly takenby human hands, in order that its dropped garment may be sold for filthylucre. There are warehouses in this city where it is possible for aperson to walk ankle-deep--literally to wade--in bright-plumagedbird-skins, and see them piled shoulder-high on either side of him--asight to make the angels weep!

Not the angel called woman. It is not that she is naturally more cruelthan man; bleeding wounds and suffering in all its forms, even the sighof a burdened heart, appeal to her quick sympathies, and draw the readytears; but her imagination helps her less. The appeal must in most casesbe direct and through the medium of her senses, else it is not seen andnot heard. If she loves the ornament of a gay-winged bird, and is ableto wear it with a light heart, it is because it calls up no mournfulimage to her mind; no little tragedy enacted in some far-off wilderness, of the swift child of the air fallen and bleeding out its bright life, and its callow nestlings, orphaned of the breast that warmed them, dyingof hunger in the tree. We know, at all events, that out of a femalepopulation of many millions in this country, so far only ten women, possibly fifteen, have been found to raise their voices--raised so oftenand so loudly on other questions--to protest against the barbarous andabhorrent fashion of wearing slain birds as ornaments. The degradingbusiness of supplying the demand for this kind of feminine adornmentmust doubtless continue to flourish in our midst, commerce not beingcompatible with morality, but the material comes from other lands, unblessed as yet with Wild Bird Protection Acts, and "individualefforts, and thousands of centres of personal influence"; it comesmainly from the tropics, where men have brutish minds and birds abrilliant plumage. This trade, therefore, does not greatly affect thequestion of our native bird life, and the consideration of the means, which may be within our reach, of making it more to us than it now is. Some species from warm and even hot climates have been found to thrivewell in England, breeding in the open air; as, for instance, the blackand the black-necked swans, the Egyptian goose, the mandarin and summerducks, and others too numerous to mention. But these birds aresemi-domestic, and are usually kept in enclosures, and that they canstand the climate and propagate when thus protected from competition isnot strange; for we know that several of our hardy domestic birds--thefowl, pea-fowl, Guinea-fowl, and Muscovy duck--are tropical in theirorigin. Furthermore, they are all comparatively large, and if they everbecome feral in England, it will not be for many years to come. 

That these large kinds thrive so well with us is an encouraging fact;but the question that concerns us at present is the feasibility ofimporting birds of the grove, chiefly of the passerine order, andsending them forth to give a greater variety and richness to our birdlife. To go with such an object to tropical countries would only be tocourt failure. Nature's highest types, surpassing all others inexquisite beauty of form, brilliant colouring, and perfect melody, cannever be known to our woods and groves. These rarest avian gems may notbe removed from their setting, and to those who desire to know them intheir unimaginable lustre, it will always be necessary to cross oceansand penetrate into remote wildernesses. We must go rather to regionswhere the conditions of life are hard, where winters are long and oftensevere, where Nature is not generous in the matter of food, and themouths are many, and the competition great. Nor even from such regionscould we take any strictly migratory species with any prospect ofsuccess. Still, limiting ourselves to the resident, and consequently tothe hardiest kinds, and to those possessing only a partial migration, itis surprising to find how many there are to choose from, how many arecharming melodists, and how many have the bright tints in which ournative species are so sadly lacking. The field from which the supply canbe drawn is very extensive, and includes the continent of Europe, thecountries of North Asia, a large portion of North America and AntarcticAmerica, or South Chili and Patagonia. It would not be going too far tosay that for every English species, inhabiting the garden, wood, field, stream, or waste, at least half a dozen resident species, with similarhabits, might be obtained from the countries mentioned which would besuperior to our own in melody (the nightingale and lark excepted), bright plumage, grace of form, or some other attractive quality. Thequestion then arises; What reason is there for believing that theseexotics, imported necessarily in small numbers, would succeed in winninga footing in our country, and become a permanent addition to itsavifauna? For it has been admitted that our species are not few, inspite of the losses that have been suffered, and that the birdpopulation does not diminish, however much its character may havealtered and deteriorated from the aesthetic point of view, and probablyalso from the utilitarian. There are no vacant places. Thus, the streamsare fished by herons, grebes, and kingfishers, while the rushy marginsare worked by coots and gallinules, and, above the surface, reed andsedge-warblers, with other kinds, inhabit the reed-beds. The decayingforest tree is the province of the woodpecker, of which there are threekinds; and the trunks and branches of all trees, healthy or decaying, are quartered by the small creeper, that leaves no crevice unexplored inits search for minute insects and their eggs. He is assisted by thenuthatch; and in summer the wryneck comes (if he still lives), anddeftly picks up the little active ants that are always wildly careeringover the boles. The foliage is gleaned by warblers and others; and noteven the highest terminal twigs are left unexamined by tits and theirfellow-seekers after little things. Thrushes seek for worms in moistgrounds about the woods; starlings and rooks go to the pasture lands;the lark and his relations keep to the cultivated fields; and there alsodwells the larger partridge. Waste and stony grounds are occupied by thechats, and even on the barren mountain summits the ptarmigan gets hisliving. Wagtails run on the clean margins of streams; and littoral birdsof many kinds are in possession of the entire sea-coast. Thus, the wholeground appears to be already sufficiently occupied, the habitats ofdistinct species overlapping each other like the scales on a fish. Andwhen we have enumerated all these, we find that scores of others havebeen left out. The important fly-catcher; the wren, Nature's diligentlittle housekeeper, that leaves no dusty corner uncleaned; and thepigeons, that have a purely vegetable diet. The woods and thickets arealso ranged by jays, cuckoos, owls, hawks, magpies, butcher-birds--Nature's gamekeepers, with a licence to kill, which, after the manner ofgame-keepers, they exercise somewhat indiscriminately. Above the earth, the air is peopled by swifts and swallows in the daytime, and bygoatsuckers at night. And, as if all these were not enough, the finchesare found scattered everywhere, from the most secluded spot in nature tothe noisy public thoroughfare, and are eaters of most things, fromflinty seed to softest caterpillar. This being the state of things, onemight imagine that experience and observation are scarcely needed toprove to us that the exotic, strange to the conditions, and where itsfinest instincts would perhaps be at fault, would have no chance ofsurviving. Nevertheless, odd as it may seem, the small stock of factsbearing on the subject which we possess point to a contrary conclusion. It might have been assumed, for instance, that the red-legged partridgewould never have established itself with us, where the ground wasalready fully occupied by a native species, which possessed theadditional advantage of a more perfect protective colouring. Yet, inspite of being thus handicapped, the stranger has conquered a place, andhas spread throughout the greater part of England. Even more remarkableis the case of the pheasant, with its rich plumage, a native of a hotregion; yet our cold, wet climate and its unmodified bright colours havenot been fatal to it, and practically it is one of our wild birds. Thelarge capercailzie has also been successfully introduced from Norway. Small birds would probably become naturalized much more readily thanlarge ones; they are volatile, and can more quickly find suitablefeeding-ground, and safe roosting and nesting places; their food is alsomore abundant and easily found; their small size, which renders theminconspicuous, gives them safety; and, finally, they are very much moreadaptive than large birds. 

It is not at all probable that the red-legged partridge will ever driveout our own bird, a contingency which some have feared. That would be amisfortune, for we do not wish to change one bird for another, or tolose any species we now possess, but to have a greater variety. We arebetter off with two partridges than we were with one, even if theinvader does not afford such good sport nor such delicate eating. Theyexist side by side, and compete with each other; but such competition isnot necessarily destructive to either. On the contrary, it acts andre-acts healthily and to the improvement of both. It is a fact that insmall islands, very far removed from the mainland, where the animalshave been exempt from all foreign competition--that is, from thecompetition of casual colonists--when it does come it proves, in manycases, fatal to them. Fortunately, this country's large size andnearness to the mainland has prevented any such fatal crystallization ofits organisms as we see in islands like St. Helena. That any Englishspecies would be exterminated by foreign competition is extremelyunlikely; whether we introduce exotic birds or not, the only losses weshall have to deplore in the future will, like those of the past, bedirectly due to our own insensate action in slaying every rare andbeautiful thing with powder and shot. From the introduction of exoticspecies nothing is to be feared, but much to be hoped. 

There is another point which should not be overlooked. It has after allbecome a mere fiction to say that _all_ places are occupied. Nature'snice order has been destroyed, and her kingdom thrown into the utmostconfusion; our action tends to maintain the disorderly condition, whileshe is perpetually working against us to re-establish order. When shemultiplies some common, little-regarded species to occupy a space leftvacant by an artificially exterminated kind, the species called in as amere stop-gap, as it were, is one not specially adapted in structure andinstincts to a particular mode of life, and consequently cannot fullyand effectually occupy the ground into which it has been permitted toenter. To speak in metaphor, it enters merely as a caretaker or ignorantand improvident steward in the absence of the rightful owner. Again, some of our ornamental species, which are fast diminishing, are fittedfrom their peculiar structure and life habits to occupy places in naturewhich no other kinds, however plastic they may be, can even partiallyfill. The wryneck and the woodpecker may be mentioned; and a stillbetter instance is afforded by the small, gem-like kingfisher--theonly British bird which can properly be described as gem-like. When the goldfinch goes--and we know that he is going rapidly--othercoarser fringilline birds, without the melody, brightness, and charm ofthe goldfinch--sparrow and bunting--come in, and in some rough fashionsupply its place; but when the kingfisher disappears an important placeis left absolutely vacant, for in this case there is no coarser bird ofhomely plumage with the fishing instinct to seize upon it. Here, then, is an excellent opportunity for an experiment. In the temperate regionsof the earth there are many fine kingfishers to select from; some areresident in countries colder than England, and are consequently veryhardy; and in some cases the rivers and streams they frequent areexceedingly poor in fish. Some of them are very beautiful, and they varyin size from birds no larger than a sparrow to others as large as apigeon. 

Anglers might raise the cry that they require all the finny inhabitantsof our waters for their own sport. It is scarcely necessary to go asdeeply into the subject as mathematical-minded Mudie did to show thatNature's lavishness in the production of life would make such acontention unreasonable. He demonstrated that if all the fishes hatchedwere to live their full term, in twenty-four years their productionpower would convert into fish (two hundred to the solid foot) as muchmatter as there is contained in the whole solar system--sun, planets, and satellites! An "abundantly startling" result, as he says. To be wellwithin the mark, ninety-nine out of every hundred fishes hatched mustsomehow perish during that stage when they are nothing but suitablemorsels for the kingfisher, to be swallowed entire; and a portion of allthis wasted food might very well go to sustain a few species, whichwould be beautiful ornaments of the waterside, and a perpetual delightto all lovers of rural nature, including anglers. It may be remarked inpassing, that the waste of food, in the present disorganized state ofnature, is not only in our streams. 

The introduction of one or more of these lovely foreign kingfisherswould not certainly have the effect of hastening the decline of ournative species; but indirectly it might bring about a contrary result--asubject to be touched on at the end of this paper. Practical naturalistsmay say that kingfishers would be far more difficult to procure thanother birds, and that it would be almost impossible to convey them toEngland. That is a question it would be premature to discuss now; but ifthe attempt should ever be made, the difficulties would not perhaps befound insuperable. In all countries one hears of certain species ofbirds that they invariably die in captivity; but when the matter isclosely looked into, one usually finds that improper treatment and notloss of liberty is the cause of death. Unquestionably it would be muchmore difficult to keep a kingfisher alive and healthy during a longsea-voyage than a common seed-eating bird; but the same may be said ofwoodpeckers, cuckoos, warblers, and, in fact, of any species thatsubsists in a state of nature on a particular kind of animal food. Still, when we find that even the excessively volatile humming-bird, which subsists on the minutest insects and the nectar of flowers, andseems to require unlimited space for the exercise of its energies, canbe successfully kept confined for long periods and conveyed to distantcountries, one would imagine that it would be hard to set a limit towhat might be done in this direction. We do not want hard-billed birdsonly. We require, in the first place, variety; and, secondly, that everyspecies introduced, when not of type unlike any native kind, as in thecase of the pheasant, shall be superior in beauty, melody, or some otherquality, to its British representative, or to the species which comesnearest to it in structure and habits. Thus, suppose that theintroduction of a pigeon should be desired. We know that in alltemperate regions, these birds vary as little in colour and markings asthey do in form; but in the vocal powers of different species there isgreat diversity; and the main objects would therefore be to secure abird which would be an improvement in this respect on the native kinds. There are doves belonging to the same genus as stock-dove andwood-pigeon, that have exceedingly good voices, in which the peculiarmournful dove-melody has reached its highest perfection--weird andpassionate strains, surging and ebbing, and startling the hearer withtheir mysterious resemblance to human tones. Or a Zenaida might bepreferred for its tender lament, so wild and exquisitely modulated, likesobs etherealized and set to music, and passing away in sigh-like soundsthat seem to mimic the aerial voices of the wind. 

When considering the character of our bird population with a view to itsimprovement, one cannot but think much, and with a feeling almost ofdismay, of the excessive abundance of the sparrow. A systematicpersecution of this bird would probably only serve to make mattersworse, since its continued increase is not the cause but an effect of acorresponding decrease in other more useful and attractive species; andif Nature is to have her way at all there must be birds; and besides, nobird-lover has any wish at see such a thing attempted. The sparrow hashis good points, if we are to judge him as we find him, without allowingwhat the Australians and Americans say of him to prejudice our minds. Possibly in those distant countries he may be altogether bad, resembling, in this respect, some of the emigrants of our species, who, when they go abroad, leave their whole stock of morality at home. Evenwith us Miss Ormerod is exceedingly bitter against him, and desiresnothing less than his complete extirpation; but it is possible that thislady's zeal may not be according to knowledge, that she may not know asparrow quite so well as she knows a fly. At all events, theornithologist finds it hard to believe that so bad an insect-catcher isreally causing the extinction of any exclusively insectivorous species. On her own very high authority we know that the insect supply is notdiminishing, that the injurious kinds alone are able to inflict anannual loss equal to £10, 000, 000 on the British farmer. To put asidethis controversial matter, the sparrow with all his faults is a pleasantmerry little fellow; in many towns he is the sole representative of wildbird life, and is therefore a great deal to us--especially in themetropolis, in which he most abounds, and where at every quiet intervalhis blithe chirruping comes to us like a sound of subdued and happylaughter. In London itself this merriment of Nature never irritates; itis so much finer and more aerial in character than the gross jarringnoises of the street, that it is a relief to listen to it, and it islike melody. In the quiet suburbs it sounds much louder and withoutintermission. And going further afield, in woods, gardens, hedges, hamlets, towns--everywhere there is the same running, rippling soundof the omnipresent sparrow, and it becomes monotonous at last. We havetoo much of the sparrow. But we are to blame for that. He is theunskilled worker that Nature has called in to do the work of skilledhands, which we have foolishly turned away. He is willing enough to takeit all on himself; his energy is great; he bungles away without ceasing;and being one of a joyous temperament, he whistles and sings in histuneless fashion at his work, until, like the grasshopper ofEcclesiastes, he becomes a burden. For how tiring are the sight andsound of grasshoppers when one journeys many miles and sees themincessantly rising like a sounding cloud before his horse, and hearstheir shrill notes all day from the wayside! Yet how pleasant to listento their minstrelsy in the green summer foliage, where they are not tooabundant! We can have too much of anything, however charming it may bein itself. Those who live where sceres of humming-birds are perpetuallydancing about the garden flowers find that the eye grows weary of seeingthe daintiest forms and brightest colours and liveliest motions thatbirds exhibit. We are told that Edward the Confessor grew so sick of theincessant singing of nightingales in the forest of Havering-at-Bowerthat he prayed to Heaven to silence their music; whereupon the birdspromptly took their departure, and returned no more to that forest untilafter the king's death. The sparrow is not so sensitive as the legendarynightingales, and is not to be got rid of in this easy manner. He isamenable only to a rougher kind of persuasion; and it would beimpossible to devise a more effectual method of lessening hispredominance than that which Nature teaches--namely to subject him tothe competition of other and better species. He is well equipped for thestruggle--hardy, pugnacious, numerous, and in possession. He would notbe in possession and so predominant if he had not these qualities, andgreat pliability of instinct and readiness to seize on vacant places. Nevertheless, even with the sturdy sparrow a very small thing might turnthe scale, particularly if we were standing by and putting a littleartificial pressure on one side of the balance; for it must be borne inmind that the very extent and diversity of the ground he occupies is aproof that he does not occupy it effectually, and that his position isnot too strong to be shaken. It is not probable that our action inassisting one side against the other would go far in its results; still, a little might be done. There are gardens and grounds in the suburbs ofLondon where sparrows are not abundant, and are shyer than the birds ofother species, and this result has been brought about by means of alittle judicious persecution. Shooting is a bad plan, even with anair-gun; its effects are seen by all the birds, for they see more fromtheir green hiding-places than we imagine, and it creates a generalalarm among them. Those who wish to give the other birds a chance willonly defeat their own object by shooting the sparrows. A much betterplan for those who are able to practise it prudently is to take theirnests, which are more exposed to sight than those of other birds; butthey should be taken after the full complement of eggs have been laid, and only at night, so that other birds shall not witness the robbery andfear for their own treasures. Mr. Henry George, in that book of hiswhich has been the delight of so many millions of rational souls, advocates the destruction of all sharks and other large rapaciousfishes, after which, he says, the ocean can be stocked with salmon, which would secure an unlimited supply of good wholesome food for thehuman race. No such high-handed measures are advocated here with regardto the sparrow. Knowledge of nature makes us conservative. It is so veryeasy to say, "Kill the sparrow, or shark, or magpie, or whatever it is, and then everything will be right. " But there are more things in naturethan are dreamt of in the philosophy of the class of reformersrepresented by the gamekeeper, and the gamekeeper's master, and MissOrmerod, and Mr. Henry George. Let him by all means kill the sharks, buthe will not conquer Nature in that way: she will make more sharks out ofsomething else--possibly out of the very salmon on which he proposes toregale his hungry disciples. To go into details is not the presentwriter's purpose; and to finish with this part of the subject, it issufficient to add that in the very wide and varied field occupied by thesparrow, in that rough, ineffectual manner possible to a species havingno special and highly perfected feeding instincts, there is room for theintroduction of scores of competitors, every one of which should bebetter adapted than the sparrow to find a subsistence at that point orthat particular part of the field where the two would come into rivalry;and every species introduced should also possess some quality whichwould make it, from the aesthetic point of view, a valuable addition toour bird life. This would be no war of violence, and no contravention ofNature's ordinances, but, on the contrary, a return to her safe, healthy, and far-reaching methods. 

There is one objection some may make to the scheme suggested here whichmust be noticed. It may be said that even if exotic species able tothrive in our country were introduced there would be no result; forthese strangers to our groves would all eventually meet with the samefate as our rarer species and casual visitors--that is to say, theywould be shot. There is no doubt that the amateur naturalist has been acurse to this country for the last half century, that it is owing to the"cupidity of the cabinet" as old Robert Mudie has it--that many of ourfiner species are exceedingly rare, while others are disappearingaltogether. But it is surely not too soon to look for a change for thebetter in this direction. Half a century ago, when the few remaininggreat bustards in this country were being done to death, it was suddenlyremembered by naturalists that in their eagerness to possess examples ofthe bird (in the skin) they had neglected to make themselves acquaintedwith its customs when alive. Its habits were hardly better known thanthose of the dodo and solitaire. The reflection came too late, in so faras the habits of the bird in this country are concerned; but unhappilythe lesson was not then taken to heart, and other fine species havesince gone the way of the great bustard. But now that we have so clearlyseen the disastrous effects of this method of "studying ornithology, "which is not in harmony with our humane civilization, it is to be hopedthat a better method will be adopted--that "finer way" which Thoreaufound and put aside his fowling-piece to practise. There can be no doubtthat the desire for such an improvement is now becoming very general, that a kindlier feeling for animal, and especially bird life is growingup among us, and there are signs that it is even beginning to have someappreciable effect. The fashion of wearing birds is regarded by most menwith pain and reprobation; and it is possible that before long it willbe thought that there is not much difference between the action of thewoman who buys tanagers and humming-birds to adorn her person, and thatof the man who kills the bittern, hoopoe, waxwing, golden oriole, andDartford-warbler to enrich his private collection. 

A few words on the latest attempt which has been made to naturalize anexotic bird in England will not seem out of place here. About eightyears ago a gentleman in Essex introduced the rufous tinamou--a handsomegame bird, nearly as large as a fowl--into his estate. Up till thepresent time, or till quite recently these birds have bred every year, and at one time they had increased considerably and scattered about theneighbourhood. When it began to increase, the neighbouring proprietorsand sportsmen generally were asked not to shoot it, but to give it achance, and there is reason to believe that they have helped to protectit, and have taken a great interest in the experiment. Whatever theultimate result may be, the partial success attained during these fewyears is decidedly encouraging, and that for more reasons than one. Inthe first place, the bird was badly chosen for such an experiment. Itbelongs to the pampas of La Plata, to which it is restricted, and whereit enjoys a dry, bright climate, and lives concealed in the tallclose-growing indigenous grasses. The conditions of its habitat aretherefore widely different from those of Essex, or of any part ofEngland; and, besides, it has a peculiar organisation, for it happens tobe one of those animals of ancient types of which a few species stillsurvive in South America. That so unpromising a subject as this largearchaic tinamou should be able to maintain its existence in thiscountry, even for a very few years, encourages one to believe that withbetter-chosen species, more highly organized, and with more plianthabits, such as the hazel hen of Europe for a game bird, success wouldbe almost certain. 

Another circumstance connected with the attempted introduction of thisunsuitable bird, even of more promise than the mere fact of the partialsuccess achieved, is the greatest interest the experiment has excited, not only among naturalists throughout the country, but also amonglandlords and sportsmen down in Essex, where the bird was not regardedmerely as fair game to be bagged, or as a curiosity to be shot for thecollector's cabinet, but was allowed to fight its own fight withoutcounting man among its enemies. And it is to be expected that the sameself-restraint and spirit of fairness and intelligent desire to see afavourable result would be shown everywhere if exotic species were to belargely introduced, and breeding centres established in suitable placesthroughout the country. When it once became known that individuals weredoing this thing, giving their time and best efforts and at considerableexpense not for their own selfish gratification, but for the generalgood, and to make the country more delightful to all lovers of ruralsights and sounds, there would be no opposition, but on the contraryevery assistance, since all would wish success to such an enterprise. Even the most enthusiastic collector would refrain from lifting a weaponagainst the new feathered guests from distant lands; and if by anychance an example of one should get into his hands he would be ashamedto exhibit it. 

The addition of new beautiful species to our avifauna would probably notbe the only, nor even the principal benefit we should derive from thecarrying out of the scheme here suggested. The indirect effect of theknowledge all would possess that such an experiment was being conducted, and that its chief object was to repair the damage that has been done, would be wholly beneficial since it would enhance the value in our eyesof our remaining native rare and beautiful species. A large number ofour finer birds are annually shot by those who know that they are doinga great wrong--that if their transgression is not punishable by law itis really not less grave than that of the person who maliciously barks ashade tree in a park or public garden--but who excuse their action bysaying that such birds must eventually get shot, and that those whofirst see them might as well have the benefit. The presence of even asmall number of exotic species in our woods and groves would no doubtgive rise to a better condition of things; it would attract publicattention to the subject; for the birds that delight us with theirbeauty and melody should be for the public, and not for the fewbarbarians engaged in exterminating them; and the "collector" would findit best to abandon his evil practices when it once began to be generallyasked, if we can spare the rare, lovely birds brought hither at greatexpense from China or Patagonia, can we not also spare our ownkingfisher, and the golden oriole, and the hoopoe, that comes to usannually from Africa to breed, but is not permitted to breed, and manyother equally beautiful and interesting species?

MOOR-HENS IN HYDE PARK

The sparrow, like the poor, we have always with us, and on windy dayseven the large-sized rook is blown about the murkiness which does dutyfor sky over London; and on such occasions its coarse, corvine droningsseem not unmusical, nor without something of a tonic effect on ourjarred nerves. And here the ordinary Londoner has got to the end of hisornithological list--that is to say, his winter list. He knows nothingabout those wind-worn waifs, the "occasional visitors" to themetropolis--the pilgrims to distant Meccas and Medinas that have fallen, overcome by weariness, at the wayside; or have encountered storms in thegreat aerial sea, and lost compass and reckoning, and have been lured byfalse lights to perish miserably at the hands of their cruel enemies. Itmay be true that gulls are seen on the Serpentine, that woodcocks areflushed in Lincoln's Inn Fields, but the citizen who goes to his officein the morning and returns after the lamps have been lighted, does notsee them, and they are nothing in his life. Those who concern themselvesto chronicle such incidents might just as well, for all that it mattersto him, mistake their species, like that bird-loving butunornithological correspondent of the Times who wrote that he had seena flock of golden orioles in Kensington Gardens. It turned out that whathe had seen were wheatears, or they might draw a little on theirimaginations, and tell of sunward-sailing cranes encamped on the dome ofSt. Paul's Cathedral, flamingoes in the Round Pond, great snowy owls inWestminster Abbey, and an ibis--scarlet, glossy, or sacred, according tofancy--perched on Peabody's statue, at the Royal Exchange. 

But his winter does not last for ever. When the bitter months are past, with March that mocks us with its crown of daffodils; when the sunshines, and the rain is soon over; and elms and limes in park andavenue, and unsightly smoke-blackened brushwood in the squares, aredressed once more in tenderest heart-refreshing green, even in London weknow that the birds have returned from beyond the sea. Why should theycome to us here, when it would seem so much more to their advantage, andmore natural for them to keep aloof from our dimmed atmosphere, and therude sounds of traffic, and the sight of many people going to and fro?Are there no silent green retreats left where the conditions are bettersuited to their shy and delicate natures? Yet no sooner is the springcome again than the birds are with us. Not always apparent to the eye, but everywhere their irrepressible gladness betrays their proximity; andall London is ringed round with a mist of melody, which presses on us, ambitious of winning its way even to the central heart of our citadel, creeping in, mist-like, along gardens and tree-planted roads, clingingto the greenery of parks and squares, and floating above the dull noisesof the town as clouds fleecy and ethereal float above the earth. 

Among our spring visitors there is one which is neither aerial inhabits, nor a melodist, yet is eminently attractive on account of itsgraceful form, pretty plumage, and amusing manners; nor must it beomitted as a point in its favour that it is not afraid to make itselfvery much at home with us in London. [Footnote: Note that when this waswritten in 1893, the moor-hen was never known to winter in London; hishabits have changed in this respect during the last two decades: he isnow a permanent resident. ] This is the little moor-hen, a birdpossessing some strange customs, for which those who are curious aboutsuch matters may consult its numerous biographies. Every spring a fewindividuals of this species make their appearance in Hyde Park, andsettle there for the season, in full sight of the fashionable world; fortheir breeding-place happens to be that minute transcript of naturemidway between the Dell and Rotten Row, where a small bed of rushes andaquatic grasses flourishes in the stagnant pool forming the end of theSerpentine. Where they pass the winter--in what Mentone or Madeira ofthe ralline race--is not known. There is a pretty story, whichcirculated throughout Europe a little over fifty years ago, of a Polishgentleman, capturing a stork that built its nest on his roof everysummer, and putting an iron collar on its neck with the inscription, "Haec Ciconia ex Polonia. " The following summer it reappeared withsomething which shone very brightly on its neck, and when the stork wastaken again this was found to be a collar of gold, with which the ironcollar had been replaced, and on it were graven the words, "India cumdonis remittit ciconian Polonis. " No person has yet put an iron collaron the moor-hen to receive gifts in return, or followed its feeblefluttering flight to discover the limits of its migration which isprobably no further away than the Kentish marshes and other wetsheltered spots in the south of England; that it leaves the country whenit quits the park is not to be believed. Still, it goes with the wave, and with the wave returns; and, like the migratory birds that observetimes and seasons, it comes back to its own home--that circumscribedspot of earth and water which forms its little world, and is more to itthan all other reedy and willow-shaded pools and streams in England. Itis said to be shy in disposition, yet all may see it here, within a fewfeet of the Row, with so many people continually passing, and so manypausing to watch the pretty birds as they trip about their little plotof green turf, deftly picking minute insects from the grass and notdisdaining crumbs thrown by the children. A dainty thing to look at isthat smooth, olive-brown little moor-hen, going about with such freedomand ease in its small dominion, lifting its green legs deliberately, turning its yellow beak and shield this way and that, and displaying thesnow-white undertail at every step, as it moves with that quaint, graceful, jetting gait peculiar to the gallinules. 

Such a fact as this--and numberless facts just as significant allpointing to the same conclusion, might be adduced--shows at once howutterly erroneous is that often-quoted dictum of Darwin's that birdspossess an instinctive or inherited fear of man. These moor-hens fearhim not at all; simply because in Hyde Park they are not shot at, androbbed of their eggs or young, nor in any way molested by him. They fearno living thing, except the irrepressible small dog that occasionallybursts into the enclosure, and hunts them with furious barkings to theirreedy little refuge. And as with these moor-hens, so it is with all wildbirds; they fear and fly from, and suspiciously watch from a safedistance, whatever molests them, and wherever man suspends his hostilitytowards them they quickly outgrow the suspicion which experience hastaught them, or which is traditional among them; for the young andinexperienced imitate the action of the adults they associate with, andlearn the suspicious habit from them. 

It is also interesting and curious to note that a bird which inhabitstwo countries, in summer and winter, regulates his habits in accordancewith the degree of friendliness or hostility exhibited towards him bythe human inhabitants of the respective areas. The bird has in fact twotraditions with regard to man's attitude towards him--one for eachcountry. Thus, the field-fare is an exceedingly shy bird in England, butwhen he returns to the north if his breeding place is in some inhabiteddistrict in northern Sweden or Norway he loses all his wildness andbuilds his nest quite close to the houses. My friend Trevor Battye saw apair busy making their nest in a small birch within a few yards of thefront door of a house he was staying at. "How strange, " said he to theman of the house, "to see field-fares making a nest in such a place!"

"Why strange?" said the man in surprise. "Why strange? Because of theboys, always throwing stones at a bird. The nest is so low down, thatany boy could put his hand in and take the eggs. " "Take the eggs!" criedthe man, more astonished than ever. "And throwing stones at a bird! Whoever heard of a boy doing such things!"

Closely related to this error is another error, which is that noise initself is distressing to birds, and has the effect of driving them away. To all sounds and noises which are not associated with danger to them, birds are absolutely indifferent. The rumbling of vehicles, puffing andshrieking of engines, and braying of brass bands, alarm them less thanthe slight popping of an air gun, where that modest weapon ofdestruction is frequently used against them. They have no "nerves" fornoise, but the apparition of a small boy silently creeping along thehedge-side, in search of nests or throwing stones, is very terrifying tothem. They fear not cattle and horses, however loud the bellowing maybe; and if we were to transport and set loose herds of long-neckedcamelopards, trumpeting elephants, and rhinoceroses of horrible aspect, the little birds would soon fear them as little as they do the familiarcow. But they greatly fear the small-sized, quiet, unobtrusive, andmeek-looking cat. Sparrows and starlings that fly wildly at the shoutof a small boy or the bark of a fox-terrier, build their nests underevery railway arch; and the incubating bird sits unalarmed amid the ironplates and girders when the express train rushes overhead, so close toher that one would imagine that the thunderous jarring noise would causethe poor thing to drop down dead with terror. To this indifference tothe mere harmless racket of civilization we owe it that birds are sonumerous around, and even in, London; and that in Kew Gardens, which, onaccount of its position on the water side, and the numerous railroadssurrounding it, is almost as much tortured with noise as Willesden orClapham Junction, birds are concentrated in thousands. Food is not moreabundant there than in other places; yet it would be difficult to find apiece of ground of the same extent in the country proper, where all issilent and there are no human crowds, with so large a bird population. They are more numerous in Kew than elsewhere, in spite of the noise andthe people, because they are partially protected there from their humanpersecutors. It is a joy to visit the gardens in spring, as much to hearthe melody of the birds as to look at the strange and lovely vegetableforms. On a June evening with a pure sunny sky, when the air is elasticafter rain, how it rings and palpitates with the fine sounds that peopleit, and which seem infinite in variety! Has England, burdened with careand long estranged from Nature, so many sweet voices left? What aerialchimes are those wafted from the leafy turret of every tree? Whatclear, choral songs--so wild, so glad? What strange instruments, notmade with hands, so deftly touched and soulfully breathed upon? Whatfaint melodious murmurings that float around us, mysterious and tenderas the lisping of leaves? Who could be so dull and exact as to ask thenames of such choristers at such a time! Earthly names they have, thenames we give them, when they visit us, and when we write about them inour dreary books; but, doubtless, in their brighter home in cloudlandthey are called by other more suitable appellatives. Kew isexceptionally favoured for the reason mentioned, but birds are alsoabundant where there are no hired men with red waistcoats and brassbuttons to watch over their safety. Why do they press so persistentlyaround us; and not in London only, but in every town and village, everyhouse and cottage in this country? Why are they always waiting, congregating as far from us as the depth of garden, lawn, or orchardwill allow, yet always near as they dare to come? It is not sentiment, and to be translated into such words as these: "Oh man, why are youunfriendly towards us, or else so indifferent to our existence that youdo not note that your children, dependants, and neighbours cruellypersecute us? For we are for peace, and knowing you for the lord ofcreation, we humbly worship you at a distance, and wish for a share inyour affection. " No; the small, bright soul which is in a bird isincapable of such a motive, and has only the lesser light of instinctfor its guide, and to the birds' instinct we are only one of thewingless mammalians inhabiting the earth, and with the cat and weaselare labelled "dangerous, " but the ox and horse and sheep have no suchlabel. Even our larger, dimmer eyes can easily discover theattraction. Let any one, possessing a garden in the suburbs of London, minutely examine the foliage at a point furthest removed from the house, and he will find the plants clean from insects; and as he moves back hewill find them increasingly abundant until he reaches the door. Insectlife is gathered thickly about us, for that birdless space which we havemade is ever its refuge and safe camping ground. And the birds know. Onecame before we were up, when cat and dog were also sleeping, and areport is current among them. Like ants when a forager who has found ahoney pot returns to the nest, they are all eager to go and see andtaste for themselves. Their country is poor, for they have gathered itsspoils, and now this virgin territory sorely tempts them. To those whoknow a bird's spirit it is plain that a mere suspension of hostileaction on our part would have the effect of altering their shy habits, and bringing them in crowds about us. Not only in the orchard and groveand garden walks would they be with us, but even in our house. Therobin, the little bird "with the red stomacher, " would be there for thecustomary crumbs at meal-time, and many dainty fringilline pensionerswould keep him company. And the wren would be there, searchingdiligently in the dusty angles of cornices for a savoury morsel; for itknows, this wise little Kitty Wren, that "the spider taketh hold withher hands, and is in king's palaces"; and wandering from room to room itwould pour forth many a gushing lyric--a sound of wildness and joy inour still interiors, eternal Nature's message to our hearts. 

Who delights not in a bird? Yet how few among us find any pleasure inreading of them in natural history books! The living bird, viewedclosely and fearless of our presence, is so much more to the mind thanall that is written--so infinitely more engaging in its spontaneousgladness, its brilliant vivacity, and its motions so swift and true andyet so graceful! Even leaving out the melody, what a charm it would addto our homes if birds were permitted to take the part there for whichNature designed them--if they were the "winged wardens" of our gardensand houses as well as of our fields. Bird-biographies are always in ourbookcases; and the bird-form meets our sight everywhere in decorativeart Eastern and Western; for its aerial beauty is without parallel innature; but the living birds, with the exception of the unfortunatecaptives in cages, are not with us. 

 A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage, sings Blake prophet and poet; and for "robin redbreast" I read everyfeathered creature endowed with the marvellous faculty of flight. Wild, and loving their safety and liberty, they keep at a distance, at the endof the garden or in the nearest grove, where from their perches theysuspiciously watch our movements, always waiting to be encouraged, waiting to feed on the crumbs that fall from our table and are wasted, and on the blighting insects that ring us round with their livingmultitudes. 

THE EAGLE AND THE CANARY

One week-day morning, following a crowd of well-dressed people, Ipresently found myself in a large church or chapel, where I spent anhour very pleasantly, listening to a great man's pulpit eloquence. Hepreached about genius. The subject was not suggested by the text, nordid it have any close relation with the other parts, of his discourse;it was simply a digression, and, to my mind, a very delightful one. Hebegan about the restrictions to which we are all more or less subject, the aspirations that are never destined to be fulfilled, but are mockedby life's brevity. And it was at this point that--probably thinking ofhis own case--he branched off into the subject of genius; and proceededto show that a man possessing that divine quality finds existence amuch sadder affair than the ordinary man; the reason being that hisaspirations are so much loftier than those of other minds, thedifference between his ideal and reality must be correspondingly greaterin his case. This was obvious--almost a truism; but the illustration bymeans of which he brought it home to his hearers was certainly born ofpoetic imagination. The life of the ordinary person he likened to thatof the canary in its cage. And here, dropping his lofty didactic manner, and--if I may coin a word--smalling his deep, sonorous voice, to a thinreedy treble, in imitation of the tenuous fringilline pipe, he went onwith lively language, rapid utterance, and suitable brisk movements andgestures, to describe the little lemon-coloured housekeeper in hergilded cage. Oh, he cried, what a bright, busy bustling life is hers, with so many things to occupy her time! how briskly she hops from perchto perch, then to the floor, and back from floor to perch again! howoften she drops down to taste the seed in her box, or scatter it abouther in a little shower! how curiously, and turning her bright eyescritically this way and that, she listens to every new sound and regardsevery object of sight! She must chirp and sing, and hop from place toplace, and eat and drink, and preen her wings, and do at least a dozendifferent things every minute; and her time is so fully taken up thatthe narrow limits confining her are almost forgotten--the wires thatseparate her from the great world of wind-tossed woods, and of bluefields of air, and the free, buoyant life for which her instincts andfaculties fit her, and which, alas! can never more be hers. 

All this sounded very pretty, as well as true, and there was a pleasedsmile on every face in the audience. 

Then the rapid movements and gestures ceased, and the speaker wassilent. A cloud came over his rough-hewn majestic visage; he drewhimself up, and swayed his body from side to side, and shook his blackgown, and lifted his arms, as their plumed homologues are lifted by somegreat bird, and let them fall again two or three times; and then said, in deep measured tones, which seemed to express rage and despair, "Butdid you ever see the eagle in his cage?"

The effect of the contrast was grand. He shook himself again, and liftedand dropped his arms again, assuming, for the nonce, the peculiaraquiline slouch; and there before us stood the mighty bird of Jove, aswe are accustomed to see it in the Zoological Gardens; its deep-set, desolate eyes looking through and beyond us; ruffling its dark plumage, and lifting its heavy wings as if about to scorn the earth, only to dropthem again, and to utter one of those long dreary cries which seem toprotest so eloquently against a barbarous destiny. Then he proceeded totell us of the great raptor in its life of hopeless captivity; hisstern, rugged countenance, deep bass voice, and grand mouth-fillingpolysllables suiting his subject well, and making his description seemto our minds a sombre magnificent picture never to be forgotten--at allevents, never by an ornithologist. 

Doubtless this part of his discourse proved eminently pleasing to themajority of his hearers, who, looking downwards into the depths of theirown natures, would be able to discern there a glimmer, or possibly morethan a glimmer of that divine quality he had spoken of, and which was, unhappily for them, not recognized by the world at large; so that, forthe moment, he was addressing a congregation of captive eagles, allmentally ruffling their plumage and flapping their pinions, and utteringindignant screams of protest against the injustice of their lot. 

The illustration pleased me for a different reason, namely, because, being a student of bird-life, his contrasted picture of the two widelydifferent kinds, when deprived of liberty, struck me as being singularlytrue to nature, and certainly it could not have been more forcibly andpicturesquely put. For it is unquestionably the fact that the misery weinflict by tyrannously using the power we possess over God's creatures, is great in proportion to the violence of the changes of condition towhich we subject our prisoners; and while canary and eagle are both moreor less aerial in their mode of life, and possessed of boundless energy, the divorce from nature is immeasurably greater in one case than in theother. The small bird, in relation to its free natural life, is lessconfined in its cage than the large one. Its smallness, perchingstructure, and restless habits, fit it for continual activity, and itsflitting, active life within the bars bears some resemblance except inthe great matter of flight, to its life in a state of nature. Again, itslively, curious, and extremely impressible character, is in many ways anadvantage in captivity; every new sound and sight, and every motion, however slight, in any object or body near it, affording it, so tospeak, something to think about. It has the further advantage of avaried and highly musical language; the frequent exercise of the facultyof singing, in birds, with largely developed vocal organs, no doubtreacts on the system, and contributes not a little to keep the prisonerhealthy and cheerful. 

On the other hand, the eagle, on account of its structure and largesize, is a prisoner indeed, and must languish with all its splendidfaculties and importunate impulses unexercised. You may gorge it withgobbets of flesh until its stomach cries, "Enough"; but what of all theother organs fed by the stomach, and their correlated faculties? Everybone and muscle and fibre, every feather and scale, is instinct with anenergy which you cannot satisfy, and which is like an eternal hunger. Chain it by the feet, or place it in a cage fifty feet wide--in eithercase it is just as miserable. The illimitable fields of thin cold air, where it outrides the winds and soars exulting beyond the clouds, alonecan give free space for the display of its powers and scope to itsboundless energies. Nor to the power of flight alone, but also to avision formed for sweeping wide horizons, and perceiving objects atdistances which to short-sighted man seem almost miraculous. Doubtless, eagles, like men, possess some adaptiveness, else they would perish intheir enforced inactivity, swallowing without hunger and assimilatingwithout pleasure the cold coarse flesh we give them. A human being canexist, and even be tolerably cheerful, with limbs paralyzed and hearinggone; and that, to my mind, would be a parallel case to that of theeagle deprived of its liberty and of the power to exercise its flight, vision, and predatory instincts. 

As I sit writing these thoughts, with a cage containing four canaries onthe table before me, I cannot help congratulating these little prisonerson their comparatively happy fate in having been born, or hatched, finches and not eagles. And yet albeit I am not responsible for therestraint which has been put upon them, and am not their owner, beingonly a visitor in the house, I am troubled with some uncomfortablefeelings concerning their condition--feelings which have an admixture ofsomething like a sense of shame or guilt, as if an injustice had beendone, and I had stood by consenting. I did not do it, but we did it. Iremember Matthew Arnold's feeling lines on his dead canary, "PoorMatthias, " and quote:

 Yet, poor bird, thy tiny corse Moves me, somehow, to remorse; Something haunts my conscience, brings Sad, compunctious visitings. Other favourites, dwelling here, Open lived with us, and near; Well we knew when they were glad Plain we saw if they were sad; Sympathy could feel and show Both in weal of theirs and woe. 

 Birds, companions more unknown, Live beside us, but alone; Finding not, do all they can, Passage from their souls to man. Kindness we bestow and praise, Laud their plumage, greet their lays; Still, beneath their feathered breast Stirs a history unexpressed. Wishes there, and feeling strong, Incommunicably throng; What they want we cannot guess. 

This, as poetry, is good, but it does not precisely fit my case; my"compunctious visitings" being distinctly different in origin andcharacter from the poet's. He--Matthew Arnold--is a poet, and the authorof much good verse, which I appreciate and hold dear. But he was not anaturalist--all men cannot be everything. And I, a naturalist, hold thatthe wishes, thronging the restless little feathered breast are notaltogether so incommunicable as the melodious mourner of "Poor Matthias"imagines. The days--ay, and years--which I have spent in the society ofmy feathered friends have not, I flatter myself, been so wasted that Icannot small my soul, just as the preacher smalled his voice, to bringit within reach of them, and establish some sort of passage. 

And so, thinking that a little more knowledge of birds than most peoplepossess, and consideration for them--for I will not be so harsh to speakof justice--and time and attention given to their wants, might removethis reproach, and silence these vague suggestions of a too fastidiousconscience, I have taken the trouble to add something to the seed withwhich these little prisoners had been supplied. For we give sweetmeatsto the child that cries for the moon--an alternative which often actsbeneficially--and there is nothing more to be done. Any one of us, evena philosopher, would think it hard to be restricted to dry bread only, yet such a punishment would be small compared with that which we, in ourignorance or want of consideration, inflict on our caged animals--ourpets on compulsion. Small, because an almost infinite variety offlavours drawn from the whole vegetable kingdom--a hundred flavours forevery one in the dietary which satisfies our heavier mammaliannatures--is a condition of the little wild bird's existence andessential to its well-being and perfect happiness. And so, to remedythis defect, I went out into the garden, and with seeding grasses andpungent buds, and leaves of a dozen different kinds, I decorated thecage until it looked less like a prison than a bower. And now for anhour the little creatures have been busy with their varied greenfare, each one tasting half a dozen different leaves every minute, hopping here and there and changing places with his fellows, glancingtheir bright little eyes this way and that, and all the time utteringgratulatory notes in the canary's conversational tone. And theirlanguage is not altogether untranslatable. I listen to one, a prettypure yellow bird, but slightly tyrannical in his treatment of theothers, and he says, or seems to say: "This is good, I like it, only theold leaf is tough; the buds would be better. . . . These are certainlynot so good. _I tasted them out of compliment to nature, though theywere scarcely palatable. . . . _" No, that was not my own expression; itwas said by Thoreau, perhaps the only human a little bird can quote withapproval. "This is decidedly bitter--and yet--yes, it does leave apleasant flavour on the palate. Make room for me there--or I shall makeyou and let me taste it again. Yes, I fancy I can remember eatingsomething like this in a former state of existence, ages and ages ago. "And so on, and so on, until I began to imagine that the whole thing hadbeen put right, and that the uncomfortable feeling would return totrouble me no more. But at the rate they are devouring their green stuffthere will not be a leat, scarcely a stem left in another hour; andthen? Why, then they will have the naked wires of their cage all roundthem to protect them from the cat and for hunger there will be seed inthe box. 

After all, then, what a little I have been able to do! But I flattermyself that if they were mine I should do more. I never keep captivebirds, but if they were given to me, and I could not refuse, I should doa great deal more for them. All my knowledge of their ways and theirrequirements would teach me how to make their caged existence lessunlike the old natural life, than it now is. To begin the amelioratingprocess, I should place them in a large cage, large enough to allowspace for flight, so that they might fly to and fro, a few feet eachway, and rest their little feet from continual perching. That wouldenable them to exercise their most important muscles and experience oncemore, although in a very limited degree, the old delicious sensation ofgliding at will through the void air. The wires of their new cage wouldbe of brass or of some bright metal, and the wooden parts and perchesgreen enamelled, or green variegated with brown and grey, and the roofwould be hung with glass lustres, to quiver and sparkle into drops ofviolet, red, and yellow light, gladdening these little lovers of brightcolours; for so we deem them. I should also add gay flowers and berries, crocus and buttercup and dandelion, hips and haws and mountain ash andyellow and scarlet leaves--all seasonable jewellery from woods andhedges and from the orchard and garden. Then would come the heaviestpart of my task, which would be to satisfy their continual craving fornew tastes in food, their delight in an endless variety. I should go tothe great seed-merchants of London and buy samples of all the cultivatedseeds of the earth, and not feed them in a trough, or manger, like heavydomestic brutes, but give it to them mixed and scattered in smallquantities, to be searched for and gladly found in the sand and graveland turf on the wide floor of the cage. And, higher up, the wires oftheir dwelling would be hung with an endless variety of seeded grasses, and sprays of all trees and plants, good, bad, and indifferent. For ifthe volatile bird dines on no more than twenty dishes every day heloves to taste of a hundred and to have at least a thousand on the tableto choose from. 

Feeding the birds and keeping the cage always sweet and clean wouldoccupy most, if not the whole of my time. But would that be too much togive if it made me tranquil in my own mind? For it must be noted that Ihave done all this, mentally and on paper, for my own satisfactionrather than that of the canaries. Birds are not worth much--_to us_. Arenot five sparrows sold for three farthings? I have even shot many birdsand have felt no compunction. True, they perished before their time, butthey did not languish, and being dead there was an end of them; but thecaged canaries continuing with us, cannot be dismissed from the mindwith the same convenient ease. After all, I begin to think that myimaginary reforms, if carried out, would not quite content me. The"compunctious visitings" would continue still. I look out of the windowand see a sparrow on a neighbouring tree, loudly chirruping. And as Ilisten, trying to find comfort by thinking of the perils which doenviron him, his careless unconventional sparrow-music resolves itselfinto articulate speech, interspersed with occasional bursts of derisivelaughter. He knows, this fabulous sparrow, what I have been thinkingabout and have written. "How would you like it, " I hear him saying, "Owise man that knows so much about the ways of birds, if you were shut upin a big cage--in Windsor Castle, let us say--with scores of menials towait on you and anticipate your every want? That is, I must explain, every want compatible with--ahem!--the captive condition. Would you behappy in your confinement, practising with the dumb-bells, riding up anddown the floors on a bicycle and gazing at pictures and filigree casketsand big malachite vases and eating dinners of many, many courses? Orwould you begin to wish that you might be allowed to live on sixpence aday--_and earn it_; and even envy the ragged tramp who dines on ahandful of half-rotten apples and sleeps in a hay-stack, but is free tocome and go, and range the world at will? You have been playing atnature; but Nature mocks you, for your captives thank you not. Theywould rather go to her without an intermediary, and take a scantiermeasure of food from her hand, but flavoured as she only can flavour it. Widen your cage, naturalist; replace the little twinkling lustres withsun and moon and milky way; plant forests on the floor, and let there behills and valleys, rivers and wide spaces; and let the blue pillars ofheaven be the wires of your cage, with free entrance to wind and rain;then your little captives will be happy, even happy as I am, in spite ofall the perils which do environ me--guns and cats and snares, with wetand fog and hard frosts to come. "

And, seeing my error, I should open the cage and let them fly away. Evento death, I should let them fly, for there would be a taste of libertyfirst, and life without that sweet savour, whether of aerial bird orearth-bound man, is not worth living. 

CHANTICLEER

During the month of September I spent several days at a house standingon high ground in one of the pleasantest suburbs of London, commanding afine view at the back of the breezy, wooded, and not very far-off Surreyhills; and all round, from every window, front and back, such a mass ofgreenery met the eye, almost concealing the neighbouring houses, that Icould easily imagine myself far out in the country. In the garden theomnipresent sparrow, and that always pleasant companion the starling, associated with the thrush, blackbird, green linnet, chaffinch, redstart, wren, and two species of tits; and, better than all these, notfewer than half a dozen robins warbled their autumn notes from earlymorning until late in the evening. Domestic bird-life was alsorepresented by fifteen fowls, and the wise laxity existing in theestablishment made these also free of the grounds; for of eyesores andpainful skeletons in London cupboards, one of the worst, to my mind, isthat unwholesome coop at the back where a dozen unhappy birds areusually to be found immured for life. These, more fortunate, had ampleroom to run about in, and countless broad shady leaves from which topick the green caterpillar, and red tortoise-shaped lady-bird, andparti-coloured fly, and soft warm soil in which to bathe in their owngallinaceous fashion, and to lie with outstretched wings luxuriating bythe hour in the genial sunshine. And having seen their free wholesomelife, I did not regard the new-laid egg on the breakfast-table with afeeling of repugnance, but ate it with a relish. 

I have said that the fowls numbered fifteen; five were old birds, andten were chickens, closely alike in size, colour and general appearance. They were not the true offspring of the hen that reared them, buthatched from eggs bought from a local poultry-breeder. As they advancedin age to their teens, or the period in chicken-life corresponding tothat in which, in the human species, boy and girl begin to diverge, their tails grew long, and they developed very fine red combs; but thelady of the house, who had been promised good layers when she bought theeggs clung tenaciously to the belief that long arching tails and statelycrests were ornaments common to both sexes in this particular breed. Byand by they commenced to crow, first one, then two, then all, and stoodconfessed cockerels. Incidents like this, which are of frequentoccurrence, serve to keep alive the exceedingly ancient notion that thesex of the future chick can be foretold from the shape of the egg. As Ihad no personal interest in the question of the future egg-supply of theestablishment, I was not sorry to see the chickens develop into cocks;what did interest me were their first attempts at crowing--those gratingsounds which the young bird does not seem to emit, but to wrench outwith painful effort, as a plant is wrenched out of the soil, and notwithout bringing away portions of the lungs clinging to its roots. Thebird appears to know what is coming, like an amateur dentist about toextract one of his own double-pronged teeth, and setting his feetfirmly on the ground, and throwing himself well back before an imaginarylooking-glass, and with arched-neck, wide-open beak, and rolling eyes, courageously performs the horrible operation. One cannot help thinkingthat a cockerel brought up without any companions of his own sex and agewould not often crow, but in this instance there were no fewer than tenof them to encourage each other in the laborious process of tuning thejrharsh throats. Heard subsequently in the quiet of the early morning, these first tuning efforts suggested some reflections to my mind, whichmay not prove entirely without interest to fanciers who aim at somethingbeyond a mere increase in our food-supply in their selecting andrefining processes. 

To continue my narration. I woke in the morning at my usual time, between three and four o'clock, which is not my getting-up time, for, asa rule, after half an hour or so I sleep again. The waking is notvoluntary as far as I know; for although it may seem a contradiction interms to speak of coming at will out of a state of unconsciousness, wedo, in cases innumerable, wake voluntarily, or at the desired time, notperhaps being altogether unconscious when sleeping. If, however, thisearly waking were voluntary, I should probably say that it was for thepleasure of listening to the crowing of the cocks at that silent hourwhen the night, so near its end, is darkest, and the mysterious tide oflife, prescient of coming dawn, has already turned, and is sending thered current more and more swiftly through the sleeper's veins. I havespent many a night in the desert, and when waking on the wide silentgrassy plain, the first whiteness in the eastern sky, and the flutingcall of the tinamou, and the perfume of the wild evening primrose, haveseemed to me like a resurrection in which I had a part; and something ofthis feeling is always associated in my mind with the first far-heardnotes of Chanticleer. 

It was very dark and quiet when I woke; my window was open, with only alace curtain before it to separate me from the open air. Presently theprofound silence was broken. From a distance of fifty or sixty yardsaway on the left hand came the crow of a cock, soon answered by anotherfurther away on the same side, and then, further away still, by a third. Other voices took up the challenge on the right, some near, some far, until it seemed that there was scarcely a house in the neighbourhood atwhich Chanticleer was not a dweller. There was no other sound. Not foranother hour would the sparrows burst out in a chorus of chirrupingnotes, lengthened or shortened at will, variously inflected, and with aringing musical sound in some of them, which makes one wonder why thisbird, so high in the scale of nature, has never acquired a set song foritself. For there is music in him, and when confined with a singingfinch he will sometimes learn its song. Then the robins, then the tits, then the starlings, gurgling, jarring, clicking, whistling, chattering. Then the pigeons cooing soothingly on the roof and window-ledges, takingflight from time to time with sudden, sharp flap, flap, followed by along, silken sound made by the wings in gliding. At four the cocks hadit all to themselves; and, without counting the cockerels (not yet outof school), I could distinctly hear a dozen birds; that is to say, theywere near enough for me to listen to their music critically. The varietyof sounds they emitted was very great, and, if cocks were selected fortheir vocal qualities, would have shown an astonishing difference in themusical tastes of their owners. A dozen dogs of as many differentbreeds, ranging from the boar-hound to the toy terrier, would not haveshown greater dissimilarity in their forms than did these cocks in theirvoices. For the fowl, like the dog, has become an extremely variablecreature in the domestic state, in voice no less than in size, form, colour, and other particulars. At one end of the scale there was theraucous bronchial strain produced by the unwieldy Cochin. What a bird isthat! Nature, in obedience to man's behests, and smiling with secretsatire over her work, has made it ponderous and ungraceful as any clumsymammalian, wombat, ardvaark, manatee, or hippopotamus. The burnished redhackles, worn like a light mantle over the black doublet of the breast, the metallic dark green sickle-plumes arching over the tail, all thebeautiful lines and rich colouring, have been absorbed into flesh andfat for gross feeders; and with these have gone its liveliness andvigour, its clarion voice and hostile spirit and brilliant courage; itis Gallus bankiva degenerate, with dulled brains and blunted spurs, andits hoarse crow is a barbarous chant. 

And far away at the other end, startling in its suddenness andimpetuosity, was a trisyllabic crow, so brief, piercing, and emphatic, that it could only have proceeded from that peppery uppish little bird, the bantam. And of the three syllables, the last, which should be thelongest, was the shortest, "short and sharp like the shrill swallow'scry, " or perhaps even more like the shrieky bark of an enraged littlecur; not a _reveille_ and silvern morning song in one, as a crow shouldbe, but a challenge and a defiance, wounding the sense like a spur, andsuggesting the bustle and fury of the cockpit. 

If this style of crowing was known to Milton, it is perhaps accountablefor the one bad couplet in the "Allegro":

 While the cock with lively din Scatters the rear of darkness thin. 

Someone has said that every line in that incomparable poem brings atleast one distinct picture vividly before the mind's eye. The picturethe first line of the couplet I have quoted suggests to ray mind is notof crowing Chanticleer at all, but of a stalwart, bare-armed, blowsy-faced woman, vigorously beating on a tin pan with a stick; butfor what purpose--whether to call down a passing swarm of bees, or tosummon the chickens to be fed--I never know. It is only my mentalpicture of a "lively din. " As to the second line, all attempts to seethe thing described only bring before me clouds and shadows, confusedlyrushing about in an impossible way; a chaos utterly unlike the serenityand imperceptible growth of morning, and not a picture at all. 

By and by I found myself paying special attention to one cock, about ahundred yards away, or a little more perhaps, for by contrast all theother songs within hearing seemed strangely inferior. Its voice wassingularly clear and pure, the last note greatly prolonged and with aslightly falling inflection, yet not collapsing at the finish as suchlong notes frequently do, ending with a little internal sound or croak, as if the singer had exhausted his breath; but it was perfect in itsway, a finished performance, artistic, and, by comparison, brilliant. After once hearing this bird I paid little attention to the others, butafter each resounding call I counted the seconds until its repetition. It was this bird's note, on this morning, and not the others, whichseemed to bring round me that atmosphere of dreams and fancies I existin at early cockcrow--dreams and memories, sweet or sorrowful, of oldscenes and faces, and many eloquent passages in verse and prose, writtenby men in other and better days, who lived more with nature than we donow. Such a note as this was, perhaps, in Thoreau's mind when heregretted that there were no cocks to cheer him in the solitude ofWalden. "I thought, " he says, "that it might be worth while keeping acockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of this oncewild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird's, andif they could be naturalized without being domesticated it would soonbecome the most famous sound in our woods. . . . To walk in a wintermorning in a wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, andhear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for milesover the surrounding country--think of it! It would put nations on thealert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier oneach successive morning of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise?"

Soon I fell into thinking of one in some ways greater than Thoreau, sounlike the skyey-minded New England prophet and solitary, so much moregenial and tolerant, more mundane and lovable; and yet like Thoreau inhis nearness to nature. Not only a lover of generous wines--"That markupon his lip is wine"--and books "clothed in black and red, " all naturalsights and sounds also "filled his herte with pleasure and solass, " andthe early crowing of the cock was a part of the minstrelsy he loved. Perhaps when lying awake during the dark quiet hours, and listening tojust such a note as this, he conceived and composed that wonderful taleof the "Nun's Priest, " in which the whole character of Chanticleer, hisglory and his foibles, together with the homely virtues of DamePartlett, are so admirably set forth. 

And longer ago it was perhaps such a note as this, heard in imaginationby the cock-loving Athenians, which all at once made them feel sounutterably weary of endless fighting with the Lacedaemonians, andinspired their hearts with such a passionate desire for the longuntasted sweets of security and repose. Is it one of my morning fanciesmerely--for fact and fancy mingle strangely at this still, mysterioushour, and are scarcely distinguishable--or is it related in history thatthis strange thing happened when all the people of the violet-crownedcity were gathered to witness a solemn tragedy, in which certain verseswere spoken that had a strange meaning to their war-weary souls? "Thosewho sleep in the morning in the arms of peace do not start from them atthe sound of the trumpet, and nothing interrupts their slumbers but thepeaceful crowing of the cock. " And at these words the whole concoursewas electrified, and rose up like one man, and from thousands of lipswent forth a great cry of "Peace! Peace! Let us make peace with Sparta!"

Hark! once more that long clarion call: it is the last time--the verylast; for all the others have sung a dozen times apiece and have gone tosleep again. So would this one have done, but cocks, like minstrelsamong men, are vain creatures, and some kind officious fairy whisperedin his ear that there was an appreciative listener hard by, and so toplease me he sang, just one stave more. 

Lying and listening in the dark, it seemed to me that there were twoopposite qualities commingled in the sound, with an effect analogous tothat of shadow mingling with and chastening light at eventide. First, itwas strong and clear, full of assurance and freedom, qualities admirablysuited to the song of a bird of Chanticleer's disposition; a lusty, ringing strain, not sung in the clouds or from a lofty perch midwaybetween earth and heaven, but with feet firmly planted on the soil, andearthly; and compared with the notes of the grove like a versifiedutterance of Walt Whitman compared with the poems of the true inspiredchildren of song--Blake, Shelley, Poe. Earthly, but not hostile andeager; on the contrary, leisurely, _peaceful_ even dreamy, with a touchof tenderness which brings it into relationship with the more aerialtones of the true singers; and this is the second quality I spoke of, which gave a charm to this note and made it seem better than the others. This is partly the effect of distance, which clarifies and softenssound, just as distance gives indistinctness of outline and etherealblueness to things that meet the sight. To objects beautiful inthemselves, in graceful lines and harmonious proportions and colouring, the haziness imparts an additional grace; but it does not make beautifulthe objects which are ugly in themselves, as, for instance, an uglysquare house. So in the etherealizing effect of distance on sound, whenso loud a sound as the crowing of a strong-lunged cock becomes dreamyand tender at a distance of one hundred yards, there must be goodmusical elements in it to begin with. I do not remark this dreaminessin the notes of other birds, some crowing at an equal distance, othersstill further away. All natural music is heard best at a distance; likethe chiming of bells, and the music of the flute, and the wild confusedstrains of the bagpipes, for among artificial sounds these come thenearest to those made by nature. The "shrill sharps" of the thrush mustbe softened by distance to charm; and the skylark, when close at hand, has both shrill and harsh sounds scarcely pleasing. He must mounthigh before you can appreciate his merit. I do not recommend any one tokeep a caged cock in his study for the sake of its music, crow it neverso well. 

To return to the ten cockerels; they did not crow very much, and atfirst I paid little attention to them. After a few days I remarked thatone individual among them was rapidly acquiring the clear vigorousstrain of the adult bird. Compared with that fine note which I havedescribed, it was still weak and shaky, but in shape it was similar, andthe change had come while its brethren were still uttering brief andharsh screeches as at the beginning. Probably, where there is a greatmixture of varieties, it is the same with the fowl as with man in thediversity of the young, different ancestral characters appearing indifferent members of the same family. This cockerel was apparently themusical member, and promised in a short time to rival his neighbour. Having heard that it was intended to keep one of the cockerels to be theparent of future broods, I began to wonder whether the prize in thelottery--to wit, life and a modest harem--would fall to this finesinger or not. The odds were that his musical career would be cut shortby an early death, since the ten birds were very much alike in otherrespects, and I felt perfectly sure that his superior note would weighnothing in the balance. For when has the character of the voiceinfluenced a fancier in selecting? Never I believe, odd as it seems. Ihave read a very big book on the various breeds of the fowl, but thecrowing of the cock was not mentioned in it. This would not seem sostrange if fanciers had invariably looked solely to utility, and theirhighest ambition had ended at size, weight and quality of flesh, earlymaturity, hardihood, and the greatest number of eggs. This has not beenthe case. They possess, like others, the love of the beautiful, artificial as their standards sometimes appear; and there are breeds inwhich beauty seems to have been the principal object, as, for instance, in several of the gold and silver spangled and pencilled varieties. But, besides beauty of plumage, there are other things in the fowl worthy ofbeing improved by selection. One of these has been cultivated by man forthousands of years, namely, the combative spirit and splendid courage ofthe male bird. But there is a spirit abroad now which condemnscock-fighting, and to continue selecting and breeding cocks solely fortheir game-points seems a mere futility. The energy and enthusiasmexpended in this direction would be much better employed in improvingthe bird's vocal powers. 

The morning song of the cock is a sound unique in nature, and of allnatural sounds it is the most universal. "All climates agree with braveChanticleer. He is more indigenous even than the natives. His health isever good; his lungs are sound; his spirits never flag. " He is a petbird among tribes that have never seen the peacock, goose, and turkey. In tropical countries where the dog becomes dumb, or degenerates into amere growler, his trumpet never rusts. It is true that he was cradled inthe torrid zone, yet in all Western lands, where he "shakes off thepowdery snow, " with vigorous wings, his voice sounds as loud andinspiriting as in the hot jungle. Pale-faced Londoners, and blacks, andbronzed or painted barbarians, all men all the world over, wake at mornto the "peaceful crowing of the cock, " just as the Athenians woke ofold, and the nations older still. It is not, therefore, strange thatthis song has more associations for man than any other sound in nature. But, apart from any adventitious claims to our attention, the soundpossesses intrinsic merits and pleases for its own sake. In our otherdomestic birds we have, with regard to this point, been unfortunate. Wehave the gobbling of turkeys, and the hoarse, monotonous come back ofthe guinea-fowl, screaming of peacocks and geese, and quacking, hissing, and rasping of mallard and mus-covy. Above all these sounds the ringing, lusty, triumphant call of Chanticleer, as the far-reaching toll of thebell-bird sounds above the screaming and chattering of parrots andtoucans in the Brazilian forest. A fine sound, which in spite of manychanges of climate and long centuries of domestication still preservesthat forest-born character of wildness, which gives so great a charm tothe language of many woodland gallinaceous birds. As we have seen, it isvariable, and in some artificial varieties has been suffered todegenerate into sounds harsh and disagreeable; yet it is plain that animproved voice in a beautiful breed would double the bird's value froman aesthetic point of view. As things now are, the fine voices are in avery small minority. Some bad voices in artificial breeds, i. E. , thosewhich, like the Brahma and Cochin, diverge most widely from the originaltype--are perhaps incurable, like the carrion crow's voice; for thatbird will probably always caw harshly in spite of the musical throatwhich anatomists find in it. We can only listen to our birds, and beginexperimenting with those already possessed of shapely notes and voicesof good quality. 

I am not going to be so ill-mannered as to conclude without an apologyto those among us who under no circumstances can tolerate the crowing ofthe cock. It is true that I have not been altogether unmindful of theirprepossessions, and have freely acknowledged in divers places thatChanticleer does not always please, and that there is abundant room forimprovement; but if they go further than that, if for them there existsnot on this round globe a cock whose voice would fail to irritate, thenI have not shown consideration enough, and something is still owing totheir feelings, which are very acute. It is possible that one of thesesensitive persons may take up my book, and, attracted by its title, dipinto this paper, hoping to find in it a practical suggestion for theeffectual muzzling of the obnoxious bird. The only improvement whichwould fall in with such a one's ideas on the subject of cock-crowingwould be to improve this kind of natural music out of existence. Naturally the paper would disappoint him; he would be grieved at thewriter's erroneous views. I hope that his feelings would take no acuterform. I have listened to a person, usually mild-mannered, denouncing aneighbour in the most unmeasured terms for the crime of keeping acrowing cock. If the cock had been a non-crower, a silent member, itwould have been different: he would hardly have known that he had aneighbour. There is a very serious, even a sad, side to this question. Mr. Sully maintains that as civilization progresses, and as we grow moreintellectual, all noise, which is pleasing to children and savages, andonly exhilarates their coarse and juvenile brains, becomes increasinglyintolerable to us. What unfortunate creatures we then are! We have gotour pretty rattle and are now afraid that the noise it makes is going tobe the death of us. But what is noise? Will any two highly intellectualbeings agree as to the particular sound which produces the effect ofrusty nails thrust in among the convolutions of the brain? Physiciansare continually discovering new forms of nervous maladies, caused by theperpetual hurry and worry and excitement of our modern life; and perhapsthere is one form in which natural sounds, which being natural should beagreeable, or at any rate innocent, become more and more abhorrent. Thisis a question which concerns the medical journals; also, to some extent, those who labour to forecast the future. Happily, all our maladies arethrown off, sooner or later, if they do not kill us; and we cancheerfully look forward to a time when the delicate chords in us shallno longer be made to vibrate "like sweet bells jangled out of tune andharsh" to any sound in nature, and when the peaceful crowing of the cockshall cease to madden the early waker. For, whatever may be the fateawaiting our city civilization, brave Chanticleer, improved as to hisvoice or not, will undoubtedly still be with us. 

IN AN OLD GARDEN

A sunny morning in June--a golden day among days that have mostly aneutral tint; a large garden, with no visible houses beyond, but greenfields and unkept hedges and great silent trees, oak and ash andelm--could I wish, just now, for a more congenial resting-place, or evenimagine one that comes nearer to my conception of an earthly paradise?It is true that once I could not drink deeply enough from the sweet andbitter cup of wild nature, and loved nature best, and sought it gladlywhere it was most savage and solitary. But that was long ago. Now, afteryears of London life, during which I have laboured like many another "toget a wan pale face, " with perhaps a wan pale mind to match, that pastwildness would prove too potent and sharp a tonic; unadulterated naturewould startle and oppress me with its rude desolate aspect, no longerfamiliar. This softness of a well-cultivated earth, and unbroken verdureof foliage in many shades, and harmonious grouping and blending offloral hues, best suit my present enervated condition. I had, I imagine, a swarter skin and firmer flesh when I could ride all day over greatsummer-parched plains, where there was not a bush that would haveafforded shelter to a mannikin, and think that I was having a pleasantjourney. The cloudless sky and vertical sun--how intolerable they wouldnow seem, and scorch my brain and fill my shut eyes with dancing flames!At present even this mild June sun is strong enough to make the oldmulberry tree on the lawn appear grateful. It is an ancient, rough-barked tree, with wide branches, that droop downwards all round, and rest their terminal leaves on the sward; underneath it is a naturaltent, or pavilion, with plenty of space to move about and sling ahammock in. Here, then, I have elected to spend the hottest hours of myone golden day, reading, dreaming, listening at intervals to the finebird-sounds that have a medicinal and restorative effect on the jarredand wounded sense. 

From the elms hard by comes a subdued, airy prattle of a few sparrows. It is rather pleasant, something like a low accompaniment to the notesof the more tuneful birds; the murmurous music of a many-stringedinstrument, forming the indistinct ground over which runs the brightembroidery of clear melodious singing. 

This morning, while lying awake from four to five o'clock, I almosthated the sparrows, they were there in such multitudes, and so loud andpersistent sounded their jangling through the open window. It set methinking of the England of the future--of a time a hundred years hence, let us say--when there will remain with us only two representatives offeral life--the sparrow and the house-fly. Doubtless it will come, unless something happens; but, doubtless, it will not continue. It willstill be necessary for a man to kill something in order to be happy; andthe sportsmen of that time, like great Gambetta, in the past, will sitin the balconies, popping with pea-rifles at the sparrows until not oneis left to twitter. Then will come the turn of the untamed and untamablefly; and he will afford good sport if hunted a la Domitain, with fine, needle-tipped paper javelins, thrown to impale him on the wall. 

One of our savants has lately prophesied that the time will come whenonly the microscopic organisms will exist to satisfy the huntinginstinct in man. How these small creatures will be taken he does nottell us. Perhaps the hunters will station themselves round a table witha drop of preserved water on its centre, made large and luminous bymeans of a ray of magnifying light. When that time comes theamoeba--that "wandering Jew, " as an irreverent Quarterly Reviewer hascalled it--will lose its immortality, and the spry rotifer will fall avictim to the infinitesimal fine bright arrows of the chase. A strangequarry for men whose paeliolithic progenitors hunted the woolly mastodonand many-horned rhinoceros and sabre-toothed tiger!

That sad day of very small things for the sportsman is, however, notnear, nor within measurable distance; or, so it seemed to me when, anhour ago, I strolled round the garden, curiously peering into everyshrub, to find the visible and comparatively noble insect-life in greatabundance. Beetles were there--hard, round, polished, and of variouscolours, like sea-worn pebbles on the beach; and some, called lady-birdsin the vernacular, were bound like the books that Chaucer loved in blackand red. And the small gilded fly, not less an insect light-headed, avotary of vain delights, than in the prehistoric days when awhite-headed old king, discrowned and crazed, railed against sweetNature's liberty. And ever waiting to welcome this inconstant lover(with falces) there sits the solitary geometric spider, an image andembodiment of patience, not on a monument, but a suspended wheel ofwhich he is himself the hub; and so delicately fashioned are the silverspokes thereof, radiating from his round and gem-like body, and therings, concentric tire within tire, that its exceeding fineness, likeswift revolving motion, renders it almost invisible. Caterpillars, too, in great plenty--miniature porcupines with fretful quills on end, andsome naked even as they came into the world. This one, called theearth-measurer, has drunk himself green with chlorophyll so as to escapedetection. Vain precaution! since eccentric motion betrays him to keenavian eyes, when, like the traveller's snake, he erects himself on thetip of his tail and sways about in empty space, vaguely feeling forsomething, he knows not what. And the mechanical tortrix that rolls up aleaf for garment and food, and preys on his own case and shelter untilhe has literally eaten himself stark naked; after which he rolls up asecond leaf, and so on progressively. Thus in his larval life does hesymbolize some restless nation that makes itself many successiveconstitutions and forms of government, in none of which it abides long;but afterwards some higher thing, when he rests motionless, in form likea sarcophagus, whence the infolded life emerges to haunt the twilight--agrey ghost moth. There is no end to rolled-up leaves, and to the varietyof creatures that are housed in them; for, just as the "insect tribes ofhuman kind" in all places and in all ages, while seeking to improvetheir condition, independently hit on the same means and inventions, soit is with these small six-legged people; and many species in manyplaces have found out the comfort and security of the green cylinder. 

So many did I open that I at last grew tired of the process, like a manto whom the post has brought too many letters; but there was one--thelast I opened--the living active contents of which served to remind methat some insects are unable to make a cylinder for themselves, havingneither gum nor web to fasten it with, and yet they will always find onemade by others to shelter themselves in. Here were no fewer than sixunbeautiful creatures, brothers and sisters, hatched from eggs on whichtheir parent earwig sat incubating just like an eagle or dove orswallow, or, better still, like a pelican; for in the end did she notgive of her own life-fluid to nourish her children? Unbeautiful, yet notwithout a glory superior to that of the Purple Emperor, and the angelicblue Morpho, and the broad-winged Ornithoptera, that caused anillustrious traveller to swoon with joy at the sight of its supremeloveliness. Du Maurier has a drawing of a little girl in a garden gazingat two earwigs racing along a stem. "I suppose, " she remarksinterrogatively to her mamma, "that these are Mr. And Mrs. Earwig?" andon being answered affirmatively, exclaims, "What could they have seen ineach other?" What they saw was blue blood, or something in insectologycorresponding to it. The earwig's lustre is that of antiquity. Heexisted on earth before colour came in; and colour is old, although notso old as Nature's unconscious aestheticism which, in the organic world, is first expressed in beauty of form. It is long since the great Mayflies, large as swifts, had their aerial cloudy dances over the vasteverglades and ancient forests of ferns; and when, on some dark night, abrilliant Will-o'-the-wisp rose and floated above the feathery foliage, drawn in myriads to its light, they revolved about it in an immensemystical wheel, misty-white, glistening, and touched with prismaticcolour. Floating fire and wheel were visible only to the stars, and thewakeful eyes of giant scaly monsters lying quiescent in the black watersbelow; but they were very beautiful nevertheless. The modest earwig wasold on the earth even then; he dates back to the time, immeasurablyremote, when scorpions possessed the earth, and taught him to frightenhis enemies with a stingless tail--that curious antique little tailwhich has not yet forgot its cunning. 

Greater than all these inhabitants of the garden, ancient or modern byreason of their numbers, which is the sign of predominance, are thesmall wingless people that have colonies on every green stem and underevery green leaf. 

These are the true generators of that heavenly sweat, or saliva of thestars, concerning which Pliny the Younger wrote so learnedly. And theyare many tribes--green, purple, brown, isabel-line; but all are onenation, and sacred to that fair god whom the Carian water-nymph lovednot wisely but too well. For, albeit the children of an ancient union, they marry not, nor are given in marriage, yet withal multiplyexceedingly, so that one (not two) may in a single season produce abillion. And at last when autumn comes, won back from the cold god tohis hot mother, they know love and wedlock, and die like all marriedthings. These are the Aphides--sometimes unprettily called plant-lice, and vaguely spoken of by the uninformed as "blight"--and they nourishthemselves on vegetable juices, that thin green blood which is theplant's life. 

This, then, is the fruit which the birds have, come to gather. In Juneis their richest harvest; it is more bountiful than September, whenapples redden, and grapes in distant southern lands are gathered for thewine-press. In yon grey wall at the end of the lawn, just above theclimbing rose-bush, there are now seven hungry infants in one smallcradle, each one, some one says, able to consume its own weight ofinsect food every day. I am inclined to believe that it must be so, while trying to count the visits paid to the nest in one hour by theparent tits--those small tits that do the gardener so much harm! Weknow, on good authority, that the spider has a "nutty flavour"; and mostinsects in the larval stage afford succulent and toothsome, or at allevents beaksome, morsels. These are, just now, the crimson cherries, purple and yellow plums, currants, red, white, and black--andsun-painted peaches, asking in their luscious ripeness for a mouth tomelt in, that fascinate finch and flycatcher alike, and make thestarlings smack their horny lips with a sound like a loving kiss. 

Not that I care, or esteem birds for what they eat or do not eat. Withall these creatures that are at strife among themselves, and that birdsprey upon, I am at peace, even to the smallest that are visible--the redspider which is no spider; and the minute gossamer spider clinging tothe fine silvery hairs of the flying summer; and the coccus that fallfrom the fruit trees to float on their buoyant cottony down--a summersnow. Fils de la Vierge are these, and sacred. The man who canneedlessly set his foot on a worm is as strange to my soul as DeQuincey's imaginary Malay, or even his "damned crocodile. " The worm thatone sees lying bruised and incapable on the gravel walk has fallen amongthieves. These little lives do me good and not harm. I smell the acidants to strengthen my memory. I know that if I set an overturnedcockchafer on his legs three sins shall be forgiven me; that if I amkindly tolerant of the spider that drops accidentally on my hand orface, my purse shall be mysteriously replenished. At the same time, onehas to remember that such sentiments, as a rule, are not understood bythose who have charge over groves and gardens, whose minds are ignorantand earthy, or, as they would say, practical. Of the balance of naturethey know and care naught, nor can they regard life as sacred; it isenough to know that it is or may be injurious to their interests forthem to sweep it away. The small thing that has been flying about anduttering musical sounds since April may, when July comes, devour acertain number of cherries. Nor is even this plea needed. If it isinnocent for the lower creatures to prey upon one another, it cannot beless innocent for man to destroy them indiscriminately, if it gives himany pleasure to do so. It is idle to go into such subtle questions withthose who have the power to destroy; if their hands are to be restrainedit is not by appealing to feelings which they do not possess, but totheir lower natures--to their greed and their cunning. For the rest ofus, for all who have conquered or outgrown the killing instinct, theimpartiality that pets nothing and persecutes nothing is doubtless man'sproper attitude towards the inferior animals; a godlike benevolentneutrality; a keen and kindly interest in every form of life, withindifference as to its ultimate destiny; the softness which does nowrong with the hardness that sees no wrong done. 

To return to the birds. The starlings have kissed like lovers, andfluttered up vertically on their short wings, trying to stream likeeagles, only to return to the trees once more and sit there chatteringpleasant nothings; at intervals throwing out those soft, round, modulated whistled notes, just as an idle cigarette-smoker blows ringsof blue smoke from his lips; and now they have flown away to the fieldsso that I can listen to the others, A thrush is making music on a tall tree beyond the garden hedge, and Iam more grateful for the distance that divides us than for the song;for, just now, he does not sing so well as sometimes of an evening, whenhe is most fluent, and a listener, deceived by his sweetness and melody, writes to the papers to say that he has heard the nightingale. Just nowhis song is scrappy, composed of phrases that follow no order and do notfit or harmonize, and is like a poor imitation of an inferiormocking-bird's song. 

Between the scraps of loud thrush-music I listen to catch the thin, somewhat reedy sound of a yellow-hammer singing in the middle of theadjoining grassy field. It comes well from the open expanse of purplinggrass, and reminds me of a favourite grasshopper in a distant sunnyland. O happy grasshopper! singing all day in the trees and tallherbage, in a country where every village urchin is not sent afield to"study natural history" with green net and a good store of pins, shall Iever again hear thy breezy music, and see thee among the green leaves, beautiful with steel-blue and creamy-white body, and dim purple over andvivid red underwings?

The bird of the pasture-land is singing still, perhaps, but all at onceI have ceased to hear him, for something has come to lift me above hislow grassy level, something faint and at first only the suspicion of asound; then a silvery lisping, far off and aerial, touching the sense aslightly as the wind-borne down of dandelion. 

If any place for any soul there be Disrobed and disentrammelled, doubtless it is from such a place and such a soul that this sublimatedmusic falls. The singer, one can imagine, has never known or hasforgotten earth; and if it is visible to him, how small it must seemfrom that altitude, "spinning like a fretful midge" beneath him in thevast void!

It is the lark singing in the blue infinite heaven, at this distancewith something ethereal and heavenly in his voice; but now the widecircling wings that brought him for a few moments within hearing, haveborne him beyond it again; and missing it, the sunshine looks lessbrilliant than before, and all other bird-voices seem by comparison dulland of the earth. 

Certainly there is nothing spiritual in the song of the chaffinch. Therehe sits within sight, motionless, a little bird-shaped automaton, madeto go off at intervals of twelve or thirteen seconds; but unfortunatelyone hears with the song the whirr and buzz of the internal machinery. Itis not now as in April, when it is sufficient in a song that it shall bejoyous; in the leafy month, when roses are in bloom, one grows critical, and asks for sweetness and expression, and a better art than thisvigorous garden singer displays in that little double flourish withwhich he concludes his little hurry-scurry lyric. He has practised thatsame flourish for five thousand years--to be quite within the mark--andit is still far from perfect, still little better than a kind of musicalsneeze. So long is art!

Perhaps in some subtle way, beyond the psychologist's power to trace, hehas become aware of my opinion of his performance--the unspokendetraction which yet affects its object; and, feeling hurt in hisfringilline _amour propre_, he has all at once taken himself off. Nevermind; a better singer has succeeded him. I have heard and seen thelittle wren a dozen times to-day; now he has come to the upper part ofthe tree I am lying under, and although so near his voice soundsscarcely louder than before. This is also a lyric, but of another kind. It is not plaintive, nor passionate; nor is it so spontaneous as thewarbling of the robin--that most perfect feathered impressionist; nor isit endeared to me by early associations since I listened in boyhood tothe songs of other wrens. In what, then, does its charm consist? I donot know. Certainly it is delicate, and may even be described asbrilliant, in its limited way perfect, and to other greater songs likethe small pimpernel to a poppy or a hollyhock. Unambitious, yetfinished, it has the charm of distinction. The wren is the leastself-conscious of our singers. Somewhere among the higher greentranslucent leaves the little brown barred thing is quietly sitting, busy for the nonce about nothing, dreaming his summer dream, andunknowingly telling it aloud. When shall we have symbols to express asperfectly our summer-feeling--our dream?

That small song has served to remind me of two small books I broughtinto the garden to read--the works of two modern minor poets whose"wren-like warblings, " I imagined, would suit my mood and the genialmorning better than the stirring or subtle thoughts of greater singers. Possibly in that I was mistaken; for there until now lie the booksneglected on a lawn chair within reach of my hand. The chair was draggedhither half-an-hour ago by a maiden all in white, who appeared halfinclined to share the mulberry shade with me. She did not continue longin that mind. In a lively manner, she began speaking of some trivialthing; but after a very few moments all interest in the subjectevaporated, and she sat humming some idle air, tapping the turf with herfantastic shoe. Presently she picked up one of my books, opened it atrandom and read a line or two, her vermilion under-lip curling slightly;then threw it down again, and glanced at me out of the corners of hereyes; then hummed again, and finally became silent, and sat bendingforward a little, her dark lustrous eyes gazing with strange intentnessthrough the slight screen of foliage into the vacant space beyond. Whatto see? The poet has omitted to tell us to what the maiden's fancylightly turns in spring. Doubtless it turns to thoughts of somethingreal. Life is real; so is passion--the quickening of the blood, the wildpulsation. But the pleasures and pains of the printed book are not real, and are to reality like Japanese flowers made of coloured bits of tissuepaper to the living fragrant flowers that bloom to-day and perishto-morrow; they are a simulacrum, a mockery, and present to us a palephantasmagoric world, peopled with bloodless men and women that chattermeaningless things and laugh without joy. The feeling of unrealityaffects us all at times, but in very different degrees. And perhaps Iwas too long a doer, herding too much with narrow foreheads, drinkingtoo deeply of the sweet and bitter cup, to experience that pureunfailing delight in literature which some have. Its charm, I fancy, isgreatest to those in whom the natural man, deprived in early life of hisproper aliment, grows sickly and pale, and perishes at last ofinanition. There is ample room then for the latter higher growth--theunnatural cultivated man. Lovers of literature are accustomed to saythat they find certain works "helpful" to them; and doubtless, being allintellect, they are right. But we, the less highly developed, arecompounded of two natures, and while this spiritual pabulum sustainsone, the other and larger nature is starved; for the larger nature isearthly, and draws its sustenance from the earth. I must look at a leaf, or smell the sod, or touch a rough pebble, or hear some natural sound, if only the chirp of a cricket, or feel the sun or wind or rain on myface. The book itself may spoil the pleasure it was designed to give me, and instead of satisfying my hunger, increase it until the craving andsensation of emptiness becomes intolerable. Not any day spent in alibrary would I live again, but rather some lurid day of labour andanxiety, of strife, or peril, or passion. 

Occupied with this profound question, I scarcely noticed when myshade-sharer, with whom I sympathised only too keenly in her restlessmood, rose and, lifting the light green curtain, passed out into thesunshine and was gone. Nor did I notice when the little wren ceasedsinging overhead. At length recalled to myself I began to wonder at theunusual silence in the garden, until, casting my eyes on the lawn, Idiscovered the reason; for there, moving about in their various ways, most of the birds were collected in a loose miscellaneous flock, a kindof happy family. There were the starlings, returned from the fields, andlooking like little speckled rooks; some sparrows, and a couple ofrobins hopping about in their wild startled manner; in strange contrastto these last appeared that little feathered clodhopper, the chaffinch, plodding over the turf as if he had hobnailed boots on his feet; last, but not least, came statuesque blackbirds and thrushes, moving, whenthey moved, like automata. They all appear to be finding something toeat; but I Watch the thrushes principally, for these are more at home onthe moist earth than the others, and have keener senses, and seek fornobler game. I see one suddenly thrust his beak into the turf and drawfrom it a huge earthworm, a wriggling serpent, so long that although heholds his head high, a third of the pink cylindrical body still rests inits run. What will he do with it? We know how wandering Waterton treatedthe boa which he courageously grasped by the tail as it retreated intothe bushes. Naturally, it turned on him, and, lifting high its head, came swiftly towards his face with wide-open jaws; and at this suprememoment, without releasing his hold on its tail, with his free hand hesnatched off his large felt hat and thrust it down the monster's throat, and so saved himself. 

Just as I am intently watching to see how my hatless little Watertonwill deal with _his_ serpent, a startling bark, following by a canineshriek, then a yell, resound through the silent garden; and over thelawn rush those three demoniacal fox-terriers, Snap, Puzzy, and Babs, all determined to catch something. Away fly the birds, and though nowhigh overhead, the baffled brutes continue wildly careering about thegrounds, vexing the air with their frantic barkings. No more birdsto-day! But now the peace-breakers have discovered me, and come tearingacross the lawn, and on to the half-way chair, then to the hammock, scrambling over each other to inflict their unwelcome caresses on myhands and face. 

Ah well, let them have their way and do their worst, since the birds aregone, and I shall go soon. It is a consolation to think that they arenot my pets; that I shall not grieve, like their mistress, when theirbrief barking period is over; that I care just so much and no more forthem than for any other living creature, not excepting the_fer-de-lance_, "quoiled in the path like rope in a ship, " or thebroad-winged vulture "scaling the heavens by invisible stairs. " None areout of place where Nature placed them, nor unbeautiful; none areunlovable, since their various qualities--the rage of the one and thegentleness of the other--are but harmonious lights and shades in theever-changing living picture that is so perfect. 

BIRDS IN A CORNISH VILLAGE

I

TAKING STOCK OF THE BIRDS

Having begun, or first written, this book in one village, which was nearLondon, I am now finishing, or re-writing, it in another in "the westestpart of all the land, " over three hundred miles from the first. Here Ihad to go over this ancient work of twenty-three years ago, which wasalso my first English bird book, to prepare it for a new edition; andafter all necessary corrections, omissions and additions of fresh mattermade in the foregoing parts, it seemed best to throw out the whole ofthe concluding portion, which dealt mainly with the question ofbird-preservation as it presented itself at that time and is now out ofdate, thanks to the legislation of recent years and to the growth inthis country of the feeling or desire for birds during the last two orthree decades. In place of this discarded matter I propose to give herethe results of recent observations on the bird life of a Cornishvillage. 

My residence in the Cornish Village (or villages) was during May andJune, 1915, and again from October of the same year to June, 1916. Thesewere months of ill-health, so that I was prevented from pursuing mycustomary outdoor rambling life; but, like that poor creature thebarnyard fowl that can't use its wings, instinctively, or from oldhabit, I used my eyes in keeping a watch on the feathered (and flying)people about me. 

The village, Lelant, is on the Hayle estuary, and to see the Atlanticone has but to walk past the grey old church at the end of the street, where the ground rises, to find oneself in a wilderness of towans, asthe sand-hills are there called, clothed in their rough, grey-greenmarram grass and spreading on either hand round the bay of St. Ives. Abeautiful sight, for the sea on a sunny day is of that marvellous bluecolour seen only in Cornwall; far out on a rock on the right hand standsthe shining white Godrevy lighthouse, and on the left, on the oppositeside of the bay, the little ancient fishing-town of St. Ives. 

The river or estuary, in sight of the doors and windows of the village, was haunted every day by numbers of gulls and curlews. These lastnumbered about one hundred and fifty birds, and were always there exceptat full tide, when they would fly away to the fields and moors. Of allmy bird neighbours I think that these gave me most pleasure, especiallyat night, when lying awake I would listen by the hour to the perpetualcurlew conversation going on in the dark--an endless series of clearmodulated notes and trills, with a beautiful expression of wildness andfreedom, a reminder of lonely seashores and mountains and moorlands inthe north country. What wonder that Stevenson, sick in his tropicalisland--sick for his cold grey home so many thousands of miles away, wished once more to hear the whaup crying over the graves of hisforefathers, and to hear no more at all!

Of bird music by day there was little; you would hear more of it in onemorning in that small rustic village in Berkshire where the first partof this book was written than in a whole summer in one of these WestCornwall villages, so few comparatively are the songsters. Nor was thisscarcity in the village only; it was everywhere, as I found when able toget out for a few hours during my two spring seasons in the place. Closeby were the extensive woods of Trevalloe, where I was struck by theextraordinary silence and where I listened in vain for a single notefrom blackcap, garden-warbler, willow-wren, wood-wren, or redstart. Thethrushes, chaffinch, chiff-chaff, and greenfinch were occasionallyheard; outside the wood the buntings, chats, and the skylark were fewand far between. 

This scarcity of small birds is, I think, due in the first place to theextraordinary abundance of the jackdaw, the diligent seeker after smallbirds' nests, and to the autumn and winter pastime of bush-beating towhich men and boys are given in these parts, and which the Cornishauthorities refuse to suppress. 

After a time, when, owing to increasing debility, I was confined moreand more to the village, I began to concentrate my attention on a fewcommon species that were always present, particularly on the threecommonest--rook, daw, and starling; the first two residents, thestarling, a winter visitor from September to April. 

In October, I started feeding the birds at the house where I was stayingas a guest, throwing the scraps on a lawn at the back which sloped downtowards the estuary. First came all the small birds in the immediateneighbourhood--robin, dunnock, wagtail, chaffinch, throstle, blackbird, and blue and ox-eye tits. Then followed troops of starlings, and soonall the rooks and daws in the village began to see what was going on andcome too, and this attracted the gulls from the estuary--I wished thatit had drawn the curlews; and all these big ones were so greedy andbold, so noisy and formidable-looking that the small birds were quitedriven out; all except the starlings that came in hungry crowds and weredetermined to get their share. 

At the beginning of December I had to move to a nursing-home at theConvent of the Sisters of the Cross at the adjacent village of Hayle, just across the estuary. The Convent buildings and grounds and gardensare fortunately outside the ugly village, and my room had anexceptionally big window occupying almost the whole wall on one side, with an outlook to the south over the green fields and moors towardsHelston. An ideal sick-room for a man who can't be happy without thecompany of birds, and here, even when lying on my bed before I was ableto sit or stand by the window, a large portion of the sky, rainy orblue, was visible, and rooks and daws and gulls and troops of starlings, and the curlews from the river, were seen coming and going all day long. 

But it was much better when I was able to go to the window, since now, by feeding them, I could draw the birds to me. I fed them on a greenfield beneath my window, where the Convent milch-cows were accustomed tograze for some hours each day. All through the winter there was grassfor them, and I was glad to have them there, as the cow is my favouritebeast, and it was also pleasant to see the wintering starlingsconsorting with them, clustering about their noses, just as they do inthe pasture lands in summer time. But I found it best to feed the birdswhen the cows were not there, on account of the behaviour of one ofthem, a young animal who had not yet been sobered by having a calf ofher own. She was a frivolous young thing and when tired of feeding, shewould start teasing the old cows, pushing them with her horns, thenflinging up her hind legs to challenge them to a romp. The sight of acrowd of birds under my window would bring her at a gallop to the spotto find out what all the fuss was about, and the birds would be drivenoff. 

One morning I was at my window when the field was empty of bird andbeast life with the exception of a solitary old rook, a big bird who wasa constant attendant and so much bigger than most of the rooks that Ihad come to know it well. By and by the young cow walked into the fieldby herself and, after gazing all round as if surprised at finding theplace so lifeless, she caught sight of and fixed her eyes on the oldrook working at the turf some fifty or sixty yards away. Presently shebegan walking towards it, and when within about twenty yards put herhead down and charged it. The rook paid no attention until she wasalmost on it, then rose up, emitting its angriest, most raucous screamswhile hovering just over her head, and having thus relieved itsindignant feelings it flew heavily away to the far end of the field, andsettling down began prodding away at the soil. The cow, standing still, gazed after it, and one could almost imagine her saying: "So you won'tget out of the field! Well! I'll soon make you. I'm going to have itall to myself this morning. " And at once she began rapidly walkingtowards the bird. But half-way to it was the post set up in the middleof the field for the cows to rub their hides, and on coming abreast ofit the sight of it and its proximity suggested the delight of a rub, andturning off at right angles she walked straight to the post and beganrubbing herself against it. The rook went on with its business, andafter that there was no more quarrelling. 

Another morning this same old rook came with his mate to the field:separating, they came down a distance of a hundred yards or more apartand began searching for grubs. By and by the old cock discoveredsomething particularly good and after vigorously prodding the turf for afew moments he sprang up and flew excitedly to his mate, who instantlyknew what this action meant and began fluttering her wings and cryingfor the dainty morsel which he proceeded to deliver into her wide-openmouth. Having fed her, he flew back to the same spot and began workingagain. 

This is a common action of the rooks, and I saw this same bird feed hismate on other occasions during the winter months, when I have no doubtthat he, poor wretch, could hardly find food enough to keep himselfalive during the dark season of everlasting wind and rain when the dimdaylight lasted for about six hours. But I never saw a daw or starlingfeed his mate, or feed another daw or starling, although I watchedclosely every day and often for an hour at a stretch, and though I amconvinced that the starling, like the rook and crow and daw, and in factall the Corvidae, pairs for life. To this point I will return presently;let me first relate another incident about our frivolous andirresponsible young cow. 

One morning when the cows were in the field, some herring-gulls driftedby and a few of them remained circling about above the field. I threwout a piece of bread, and a troop of starlings rushed to it, and one ofthe gulls dropped down and took possession of it, but had scarcely begantearing at it when two more gulls dropped down and the first bird, lifting his wings began screaming "Hands off!" at the others, and theothers, also raising their wings, screamed their wailing screams inreply. The young cow, attracted by the noise, gazed at them for a fewmoments, then all at once putting her head down furiously charged them. The three gulls rose up simultaneously and floated over her and thenaway, leaving her standing on the spot, shaking her head in anger anddisgust at their escape. A rhinoceros charging a ball of thistledown ora soap-bubble, and causing it to float away with the wind it created, would not have been a more Iudicrous spectacle. 

II

DO STARLINGS PAIR FOR LIFE?

From my boyhood, when I first began to observe birds, I started with theimbibed notion that those which paired for life were the rareexceptions--the dove that rhymed with love, the eagle, and perhaps halfa dozen more. Who, for instance, would imagine that the sexes could befaithful in parasitical species like the cuckoo of Europe and thecow-birds of America? Yet even as a boy I made the discovery that anArgentine cow-bird that lays its eggs in the nests of other species, does actually pair for life; and so effectually mated is it, that on noday and no season of the year will you see a male without his female: ifhe flies she flies with him and feeds and drinks with him, and when heperches she perches at his side, and he never utters a sound but aresponsive sound immediately falls from her devoted beak. 

Again, it may seem unlikely that there can be pairing for life inspecies, like the chaffinch of northern Europe and, with us, ofScotland, in which the sexes separate and migrate separately. Also ofnon-gregarious species like the nightingale in which the males arrive inthis country several days before the females. Yet I am confident that ifwe could catch and mark a considerable number of pairs it would be foundthat the same male and female found one another and re-mated every year. 

It comes to this, that birds may pair for life, yet not be all the timeor all the year together, as in the case of hawks, crows, owls, herons, and many others. In numberless species which undoubtedly pair for lifethe sexes keep apart during several hours each day, and there is someevidence that those that separate for a part of the year remain faithful. 

An incident, related by Miss Ethel Williams, of Winchester, in hernatural history notes contributed to a journal in that city, bears onthis point. She had among the bird pensioners in the garden of her houseadjoining the Cathedral green, a female thrush that grew tame enough tofly into the house and feed on the dining-room table. Her thrush pairedand bred for several seasons in the garden, and the young, too, weretame and would follow their mother into the house to be fed. The malewas wild and too shy ever to venture in. She noticed the first year thatit had a wing-feather which stuck out, owing probably to a malformationof the socket. Each year after the breeding season the male vanished, the female remaining alone through the winter months, but in spring themale came back--the same bird with the unmistakable projectingwing-feather. Yet it was certain that this bird had gone quite away, otherwise he would have returned to the garden, where there was food inabundance during the spells of frosty weather. As he did not appear itis probable that he migrated each autumn to some warmer climate beyondthe sea. 

I have noticed that wagtails, thrushes, blackbirds, and some otherspecies when the young are out of the nest, divide the brood betweenmale and female and go different ways and spend the daylight hours at adistance apart, each attending to the one or two young birds in its charge. 

One winter, a few years ago, I was staying for a few days at a cottagefacing Silchester Common, and on going out after breakfast to feed thebirds I particularly noticed a male grey wagtail among those that cameto me, on account of its beauty and tameness. Every morning I fed it, and on my speaking to my landlady about it she said, "Oh, we know thatbird well; this is the fourth winter it has spent with us, but it alwayscame before with its mate. The poor little thing had only one leg, butmanaged to hop about and feed very well; this year the poor thing didn'tturn up with its mate, so we suppose it had met its death somewhereduring the summer. "

I have often watched the gatherings of pied wagtails (always with acertain number of the grey species among them) in places where theyspend the winter in our southern counties, at some spot where they areaccustomed to congregate each evening to hold a sort of frolic beforegoing to roost, and it has always appeared to me that the birds, bothpied and grey, were in pairs. So too, in watching the starlings dayafter day in the field in front of my window. Well able with mybinocular to observe them closely, I saw much to convince me that thestarling, too, lives all the year with his mate. 

Each morning the birds that had made our village their dailyfeeding-ground, would, on arrival from the roosting-place in one body, break up into numerous small parties of half a dozen to twenty or morebirds. All day long these little flocks were hurrying about from fieldto field, spending but a short time at one spot, so hungry were they andanxious to find a more productive one, and in every field they wouldmeet and mix with other small groups, and presently all would fly, andbreaking up into small parties again go off in different directions. Thus one had a constant succession of little flocks in the field frommorning till night, and I found from counting the birds in each smallgroup that in three cases in four they were in even numbers. Again, Ihave often seen a group of three, five, seven or nine birds on thefield, and after a while a solitary starling from a neighbouring fieldor from some treetop near by has flown down to join the group and makethe numbers even. 

The birds when feeding, I have said, are always in a desperate hurry, and little wonder, since after a night, usually wet and cold, of fromsixteen to eighteen hours and only about six to feed in, they must be ina half-starved state and frantic to find something to swallow. No soonerdo they alight than they begin running about, prodding with their beaks, and all the time advancing, the birds keeping pretty well abreast. Now, from time to time you will notice that a bird finds something to delayhim and is left behind by the others. On they go--prod, prod, then alittle run, then prod, prod again and run again--while he, excited overhis find, and vigorously digging at the roots of the grass, lets them goon without him until he is yards behind. Whenever this happens you willsee one of the advancing birds pause in its prodding to look back fromtime to time as if anxious about the one left behind; and by and by thissame bird, its anxiety increasing, will suddenly spring into the air andfly back to place itself at the side of the other, to wait quietly untilit has finished its task; and no sooner does the busy one put up itshead to signal that he is ready than up they spring and fly together onto the flock. No one witnessing this action can doubt for a moment thatthese two are mates, and that wherever they paired and bredoriginally--in Lincoln or York or Thurso or perhaps in one of thewestern islands--they paired for life and will stick together, summerand winter and in all their wanderings, as long as they live. 

Until one observes starlings in this close way, even to their minutestactions--I had indeed little else to do during my three winter months inthis nursing-home--it is only natural to believe that among gregariousspecies the starling is one of those least likely to pair for life, seeing that in it the gregarious instinct is intensified and more highlydeveloped than in most others. One would suppose that the flock, whichis like an organism--that is to say, the attachment to the flock--would, out of the breeding season, take the place of the close relation orcompanionship between bird and bird seen in species known to pair forlife. Only the pairing passion, one would suppose, could serve todissolve the company of birds and this only for a brief season of abouta couple of months' duration. There is but one brood raised in theseason, and the whole business of reproduction is well over before theend of June. Later breeders are those that have lost their first eggs orbroods. And no sooner are the young brought off and instructed in thestarling's sole vocation (except his fruit-eating) of extracting thegrubs it subsists on from the roots of the grass--a business whichdetains them for a week or two--than the married life is apparently overand the communal life resumed. The whole life of the bird is thenchanged; the sole tie appears to be that of the flock; home and youngare forgotten: the birds range hither and thither about the land, and byand by migrate to distant places, some passing oversea, while othersfrom the northern counties and from Scotland and the islands come downto the south of England, where they winter in millions and myriads. There they form the winter habit of congregating in immense numbers inthe evening at their favourite roosting-places, and hundreds andthousands of small flocks, which during the daylight hours existdistributed over an area of hundreds of square miles all make to onepoint and combine into one flock. At such times they actually appear torejoice in their own incalculable numbers and gather earlier than theyneed at the roosting-place, so that the whole vast gathering may spendan hour or so in their beloved aerial exercises. 

To anyone who witnesses these gatherings and sees the birds rising fromtime to time from the wood, and appearing like a big black cloud in thesky, growing lighter and darker alternately as the birds scatter wide ormass themselves in a closer formation, until after wheeling about forsome minutes they pour back into the trees; and who listens to the noisethey make, as of a high wind in the wood, composed, as it is, of aninfinity of individual voices, it must seem incredible that all thesebirds can keep in pairs. For how could any couple hold together in suchcircumstances, or when separated ever meet again in such a multitude, or, should they ever meet by chance, how recognize one another when allare exactly alike in size, shape, colour and voice?

They can, and certainly do, keep together, and when forced apart as, when pursued by a hawk, they scatter in all directions, they can quicklyfind one another again. They can do it because of their perfectdiscipline, or instinct, or the perfection of the system they followduring their autumn and winter wanderings and migrations. 

The breeding season over, the birds in each locality unite in a smallflock composed of twenty or thirty to fifty or more pairs and starttheir wandering life. Those in the north migrate or drift south, andvast numbers, as we see, spend the winter in the southern counties. Andhere they have their favourite roosting-places and are accustomed toassemble in tens and hundreds of thousands. But the original small flockcomposed of a few pairs, is never broken up--never absorbed by themultitude. Each morning when it is light enough, the birds quit theroosting-wood, but not all together; they quit it in flocks, flockfollowing flock so closely as to appear like a continuous stream ofbirds, and the streams flow out in different directions over thesurrounding country. Each stream of birds is composed of scores andhundreds of units, and each unit drops out of the stream and slopes awayto this or that side, to drop down on its own chosen feeding-ground, towhich it returns morning after morning through the winter. When all theunits have dropped out and settled on their feeding areas for the day, it may be seen that the whole country within a circuit of ten or twelveor more miles from the roosting-place has been occupied, that each flockhas its own territory, where it splits up into some groups and spendsits short hours flying about and exploring every green field, and onemight almost say "every grass. " One can only explain this perfectdistribution by assuming that each unit instinctively looks forunoccupied ground in its winter habitat, and that consequently there isvery little overlapping. It must also be assumed that at the place ofassembly in the evening each flock has its own roosting-place--its owntrees and bushes where the members of the flock can still keep togetherand to which after each aerial performance they can return. The flockcomes back to sleep on its own tree, and no doubt every couple roostsside by side on its own twig. 

On the return of Spring the birds do not migrate in a body, but slipaway, flock by flock, to reappear about the end of April in their oldbreeding-place in the North Country, with, perhaps, the loss of a fewmembers--the one that was old and died in the season of scarcity; andone that was taken at the roost by a brown owl, and one that had itsfeet frozen to the perch; and was killed by a jackdaw when struggling tofree itself; and one that was struck down by a sparrow-hawk on hishomeward journey. 

What I have so far been unable to trace is the career of the young afterAugust. We see that once they are able to fend for themselves they clubtogether in small flocks and continue together during their "brownthrush" stage, but by and by they get the adult plumage and language andare no longer distinguishable as young. Do they, then, join the oldbirds before the wandering and migrating south begins? And do they pairor not before the winter?

III

VILLAGE BIRDS IN WINTER

Throughout the winter of 1915-16, and more particularly during my threemonths in the hospital at Hayle, from the beginning of December toMarch, I was greatly impressed at the perpetual state of hunger in whichthe birds exist, especially the three commonest species in ourvillage--rook, daw, and starling. Little wonder that the sight of apiece of bread thrown out on the green field below my window would bringall these three and many others with a rush from all sides, every oneeager to get a morsel! But the birds that live most in a groove, as itwere, like the rook and starling, and have but one kind of food and oneway of finding it, are always the worst off in winter. These subsist onthe grubs and other minute organisms they are able to pick out of thegrass roots, and are life workers paid by the piece who must labour hardand incessantly to make enough to keep themselves alive; their winterlife is accordingly in startling contrast to that of the daw--one thatlives on his wits and fares better and altogether has an easier and moreamusing time. 

It was the habit of the three species named to quit the wood where theyroosted as soon as it was light enough for them to feed, the timevarying according to the state of the weather from half-past eight toten o'clock, the mornings being usually wet and dark. The rooks that hadtheir rookery in the village numbered forty or fifty birds, and thesewould remain at the village, getting their food in the surroundingfields for the rest of the day. The daws would appear in a body of twoor three hundred birds, but after a little while many of them would goon to their own villages further away, leaving about sixty to eightybirds belonging to the village. Last of all the starlings would appearin flocks and continuous streams of birds often fighting their wayagainst wind and rain, leaving about a couple of hundred or more behind, these being the birds that had settled in the village for the season, and worked in the grass fields in and surrounding it. Rooks andstarlings would immediately fall to work, while the daws, the flockbreaking up into small parties of three or four, would distributethemselves about the village and perch on the chimney-pots. They wouldperch and then fly, and for all the rest of the day would be incessantlyshifting about from place to place, on the look-out for something toeat, dropping from time to time to snatch up a crust of bread or thecore of an apple thrown away by a child in the road, or into a backgarden or on to a dust-heap where potato-parings and the head of amackerel or other refuse had been thrown. They were very bold, but notas courageous as the old-time British kite that often swooped to snatchthe bread from a child's hand. 

From time to time one, or a pair, of a small party of these daws woulddrop down on the field before my window when the rooks and starlingswere there prodding busily at the turf, but though I watched them athousand times I never detected them trying to find something forthemselves. They simply stood or walked about among the working birds, watching them intently. Grub-finding was an art they had not acquired, or were too indolent or proud to practise; but they were not too proudto beg or steal; they simply watched the other birds in the hope ofbeing able to snatch up a big unearthed grub and run away with it. As arule after a minute or two they would get tired of waiting and rush offwith a lively shout. Back they would go to the chimney-pots and to theirflying up and down, suspending their flight over this or that yard orgarden, and by and by one would succeed in picking up something big, andat once all the other daws in sight would give chase to take it fromhim; for these village daws are not only parasites and cadgers, butworse--they are thieves without honour among themselves. 

In spite of all the time and energy wasted in their perpetual races andchases going on all over the village, every bird exerting himself to theutmost to rob all he can from his pals, they get enough to eat; for whenthe day is over and other daws from other villages drop in to visitthem, all unite in a big crowd and wheel about, making the place ringwith their merry yelping cries, before sailing away to the wood. Onemight say after witnessing and listening to this evening performancethat they have great joy in their rascally lives. 

But for the poor starling there is little joy in these brief, dark, wetwinter days, even if there is little frost in this West Cornwallclimate. A frost of a few days' duration would be fatal to incalculablenumbers, especially if, as in the great frosts of the winters of 1894-5and 1896-7, severest in the south and west of England, it should comelate in winter, I think it can be taken as a fact that a long oroverseas migration takes place before midwinter or not at all. InJanuary and February, when birds are driven to the limits of the land bya great cold they do not cross the sea, either because they are too weakto attempt such an adventure or for some other reason unknown to us. Wesee that on these occasions they come to the seashore and follow itsouth and west even to the western extremity of Cornwall, and theneither turn back inland or wait where they are for open weather, manyperishing in the meantime. 

During those three winter months, when I watched the starlings at workon the field before my hospital window, they appeared to be in aperpetual state of extreme hunger and were always running over theground, rapidly prodding as they moved, and apparently finding theirfood almost exclusively on the surface--that is to say, on the surfaceof the soil but under the grass, at its surface roots. At other seasonsthey go deep when they know from the appearance of every blade of grasswhether or not there is a grub feeding on its roots beneath the surface. Without shooting and examining the stomachs of a large number ofstarlings it was not possible to know just what the food consisted of;but with my strong binocular on them I could make out that at almostevery dig of the beak something was picked up, and could actually see itwhen the beak was held up with the minute morsel at its tip--a small, thread-like, semi-transparent worm or grub in most instances. Two orthree of these atomies would hardly have made a square meal for aladybird, and I should think that a starling after swallowing a thousandwould fed very hungry. And on many days this scanty, watery food had tobe searched for in very painful conditions, as it rained heavily on mostdays and often all day long. At such times the birds in their soddenplumage looked like drowned starlings fished out of a pool andgalvanized into activity. Nor were they even seen to shake the wetoff--a common action in swallows and other birds that feed in the rain;they were too hungry, too anxious to find something to eat to keep thestarling soul and body together before the long night of eighteen ortwenty hours would overtake them. 

No doubt the winter of 1915-16 was exceptionally wet and cold, althoughwithout any severe frosts; a long frost in February, when the birds weremost reduced, would probably have proved fatal to at least half theirnumber. But though it continued wet and cold, things began to mend forthe starlings towards the end of February, and in March the improvementwas very marked; they were not in such a perpetual hurry; their time waslonger now, and by the end of the month their working day had increasedfrom five or six to twelve or fourteen hours, and the light hadincreased and grubs were easier to find. By April, the starlings nolonger appeared to be the same species as the poor, rusty, bedraggledwretches we had been accustomed to see; they are now lively, happy birdswith a splendid gloss on their feathers and beaks as bright a yellow asthe blackbird's. Finally, in April they left us, not going in a body, but flock by flock, day after day, until by the end of the month allwere gone back to their homes in the north--all but the two or three tohalf a dozen pairs in each village. And these few that stay behind arenew colonists in West Cornwall. 

IV

INCREASING BIRDS IN BRITAIN

About the daw, or Jackie, or Dorrie or Jackie-Dorrie, as he is variouslyand familiarly called, and his village habits, there will be more to saypresently; just now my concern is with another matter--a veritable dawproblem. 

For the last twenty years or longer it has seemed to me that the daw isan increasing species in Britain; at all events I am quite sure that itis so in the southern half of England, particularly along the coast ofSomerset, Devon, Dorset, and in Cornwall, more than in any other county. And why is it? He is certainly not a respectable bird, like thestarling, for example--if we do not go to the cherry-grower for thestarling's character. He is and always has been on the keeper's andfarmer's black list, and scarcely a week passes but you will find himdescribed in some gamekeeper's or farmer's journal as "even worse thanthe rook. " Even the ornithologists who are interested in birds as birdshaven't a good word to say of the daw. According to them he alone isresponsible for the disappearance of his distinguished relation, thechough. (The vulgar daw is of course devoid of any distinction at all, unless it be his grey pate and wicked little grey eyes. )

The ornithologists were wrong about the chough, just as they had beenwrong about the goldfinch, during the late years of the nineteenthcentury, and as they were wrong about the swallows and martins in lateryears. Of the goldfinch, they said, and solemnly put it down in theirbooks, that owing to improved methods of agriculture the thistle hadbeen extirpated and the bird, deprived of his natural food, had forsakenthis country. But no sooner did our County Councils begin to availthemselves of the powers given them by the Bird Act of twenty years agoto protect the goldfinch from the bird-catcher, than it began toincrease again and is still increasing, year by year, all over the country. 

Of the decrease of swallows and martins, they said it resulted from theaction of the sparrows in ousting them from their nests andnesting-sites. But we know the true cause of the decline of these twospecies, the best loved and best protected of all birds in Britain, noteven excepting robin redbreast. The French Government, in response torepresentations on this matter from our Foreign Office, have causedenquiries to be made and have found that our swallows are beingdestroyed wholesale in France during the autumn migration, and havepromised to put a stop to this deplorable business. They do not appearto have done so, since the promise was made three years ago, and I cansay from my own observation in the south and west countries that thedecline has continued and that we have never had so few swallows come tous as in the present summer of 1916. 

The daw--to return to that subject--has always been regarded as aninjurious species, and down to a quarter of a century ago every farm ladin possession of a gun shot it in the interests of the henwife, even ashe had formerly shot the kite, a common British species and a familiarfeature in the landscape down to the early years of last century. Doubtless it was a great thing to bring down this great bird "that soarssublime" and nail it to the barn-door. By the middle of the last centuryit had become a rarity, and the ensuing rush for specimens and eggs forprivate collectors quickly brought about its virtual extinction. Thekite is but one of several species--six of them hawks--extirpated withinthe last forty years. Why, then, does the daw, more injurious to thegame-preserver and henwife than any one of these lost hawks, continue toflourish and increase in numbers? It is, I imagine, because of thegrowth of a sentiment which favours its preservation. But it is not thesame as that which has served to preserve the rook and made it socommon. That is a sentiment confined to the landowning class--to thosewho inherit great houses where the ancient rookery with its crowd ofbig, black, contentious birds caw-cawing on the windy elms, has come tobe an essential part of the establishment, like the gardens and park andstables and home-farm and, one might add, the church and village. Thissentiment differs, too, from the heron-sentiment, which serves to keepthat bird with us in spite of the annual wail, rising occasionally inSouth Devon to a howl, of human trout-fishers. It is a traditionalfeeling coming down from the far past in England--from the time ofWilliam the Conqueror to that of William of Orange and the decay offalconry. That a species without any sentiment to favour it and withoutspecial protection by law may increase is to be seen in the case of thestarling. This increase has come about automatically after we haddestroyed the starling's natural enemies and then ceased to persecute itourselves. Of all birds it was the most preyed on by certain raptorialspecies, especially by the sparrowhawk, which is now becoming so rare, assisted by the hobby (rarer still) and the merlin. It was more exposedthan other birds to these enemies owing to its gregarious and feedinghabits in grasslands and the open country, also to its slower flight. The greatest drain on the species, came, however, from man. The starlingwas a favourite bird for shooting-matches up till about thirty yearsago, and was taken annually in large numbers by the bird-catchers forthe purpose. It is probable that this use of the bird for sport causedpeople to eat it, and so common did the habit become that at the end ofsummer, or before the end, shooting starlings for the pot was practisedeverywhere. Old men in the country have told me that forty or fiftyyears ago it was common to hear people on the farms say that of allbirds the starling was the best to eat. 

When starling and sparrow shooting-matches declined, the starling wentout of favour as a table-bird, and from that time thyspecies has beenincreasing. At present the rate of increase grows from year to year, andduring the last decade the birds have colonized every portion of thenorth of Scotland and the islands, where the starling had previouslybeen a rare visitor--a bird unknown to the people. Here in West Cornwallwhere I am writing this chapter the starling was only a winter visitoruntil recently. Eight years ago I could only find two pairs breeding inthe villages--about twenty-five in number--in which I looked for them;in the summer of 1915 I found them breeding in every town and village Ivisited. At present, June, 1916, there are six pairs in the village I amstaying at. It may be the case, and from conversations I have had withfarmers about the bird I am inclined to believe it is so, that a strongfeeling in favour of the starling (in the pastoral districts) is growingup at the present time, a feeling which in the end is more powerful toprotect than any law; but such a feeling has not become general as yet, and consequently has had nothing to do with the extraordinary increaseof the bird. 

The wood-pigeon is another species which, like the starling, hasincreased greatly in recent years, without special protection and withno sentiment in its favour. . . . The sentiment is all confined to thenature-lovers, whose words have no effect on the people generally, leastof all on the farmers. I am reminded here of the experience of a youngman, an ardent bird-lover, on his visit to a Yorkshire farm. His host, who was also a young man, took him a walk across his fields. It was aspring day of brilliant sunshine, and the air was full of the music ofscores of soaring skylarks. The visitor long in cities pent, wasexhilarated by the strains and kept on making exclamations of rapturousdelight, "Just listen to the larks! Did you ever hear anything like it!"and so on. 

His host, his eyes cast down, trudged on in glum silence. Finally theyoung man, carried away by his enthusiasm, stopped and turning to hiscompanion shouted, "Listen! Listen! Do you hear the larks?"

"Oh, yes, " drawled the other, looking more glum than ever, "I hear themfast enough. And I wish they were all dead!"

So with the other charming species. The moan of doves in immemorial elmsis a pleasing sound to the poets, but it does not prevent the farmersthroughout the land from wishing them all dead; and every person whopossesses a gun is glad to help in their massacre. For the bird is apest and he who shoots it is doing something for England; furthermore, shooting it is first-rate sport, not like slaughtering wretched littlesparrows or innocent young rooks just out of their windy cradles. Andwhen shot it is a good table-bird, with as much tasty flesh on it as awoodcock or partridge. 

How, then can we account for the increase of such a species? One causeis undoubtedly to be found in the removal by gamekeepers of its threechief enemies--the carrion crow, magpie, and jay--all these three beinggreat devourers of pigeon's eggs, which of all eggs are most conspicuousand open to attack. Then again the winter immigration of wood-pigeonsfrom northern Europe appears to be on the increase, and it may beconjectured that a considerable number of these visitors remain annuallyto breed with us. There has also been an increase in the stockdove andturtle-dove in recent years, and the former species is extending itsrange in the north. The cause or causes of the increase of theturtledove are not far to seek. Its chief feathered enemies, the egg andfledgling robbers, are the same as the wood-pigeon's; moreover, theturtledove is least persecuted by man of our four pigeons, and beingstrictly migratory it quits the country before shooting-time begins; addto this that the turtle-dove has been specially protected under SirHerbert Maxwell's Act of 1894 in a good number of English counties, fromSurrey to Yorkshire. 

Of the stock-dove we can only say that, like the ring-dove, it hasincreased in spite of the persecution it is subject to, since no personout after pigeons would spare it because it is without a white collar. With the exception of the county of Buckinghamshire it is not on theschedule anywhere in the country. One can only suppose that this specieshas been indirectly benefited by the bird legislation and all that hasbeen done to promote a feeling favourable to bird-preservation duringthe last thirty years. 

V

THE DAW SENTIMENT

I have spoken of the wood adjacent to the villages of Hayle and Lelantwhere the rooks, daws, and starlings of the neighbourhood have theirwinter roosting-place. This is at Trevelloe, the ancient estate of thePraeds, who now call themselves Tyringham. Here the daws congregate eachevening in such numbers that a stranger to the district and to the localhabits of the bird might imagine that all the cliff-breeding jackdaws inWest Cornwall had come to roost at that spot. Yet the cliff-breeders, albeit abundant enough, are but a minority of the daw population of thisdistrict. The majority of these birds live and breed in the neighbouringvillages and hamlets--St. Ives, Carbis Bay, Towadneck, Lelant, Phillack, Hayle, and others further away. It is a jackdaw metropolis and, as wehave seen, every village receives its own quota of birds each morning, andthere they spend the daylight hours and subsist on the waste food and onwhat they can steal, just as the semi-domestic raven and the kite did informer ages, from Roman times down to the seventeenth century. 

Early in May the winter congregation breaks up, the cliff-breeders goingback to the rocks and the village birds to their chimneys, where theypresently set about relining their old nests. There are plenty of placesfor all, since there are chimneys in almost every cottage where firesare never lighted, and as ventilation is not wanted in bedrooms thebirds are allowed to bring in more materials each year, until the wholeflue is filled up. Year by year the materials brought in, sink lower andlower until they rest on the closed iron register and change in time toa solid brown mould. Thus, however long-lived a daw may be--and thereare probably more centenarians among the daws than among the humaninhabitants of the villages--it is a rare thing for one to be disturbedin his tenancy. 

In the cottage opposite the one I was staying in, its owner, an oldwoman who had lived in it all her life, had recently died, agedeighty-seven. 

She was very feeble at the last, and one cold day when she could notleave her bed, the extraordinary idea occurred to some one of her peoplethat it might be a good thing to light a fire in her room. The fireplacewas examined and was found to have no flue, or that the flue had beenfilled with earth or cement. The village builder was called in, and withthe aid of a man on the roof and poles and various implements hesucceeded in extracting two or three barrow-loads of hard earth whichhad no doubt once been sticks, centuries ago, as the building was veryancient. No one had remembered that the daws had always occupied thesame chimney; the old dame herself had seen them going in and out of itfrom her childhood, and her end was probably hastened by the disturbancemade in cleaning it. Now she is gone the daws here are in possession ofit once more. 

All through the month of May daws were to be seen about the village, dropping from time to time upon the chimney-pots where they had theirnests and occasionally bringing some slight materials to form a newlining, but it was very rare to see one with a stick in his beak. Theflues were already full of old sticks and no more were wanted. It wasamusing to see a bird flying about, suddenly tumble out of the air on toa chimneypot, then with tail tipped up and wings closed, dive into thecavity below. One wondered how the young birds would be got out!

Talking with the rector of the neighbouring parish of Phillack one dayon this subject, he said, "Don't imagine that the daws restrictthemselves to the chimneys where fires are not lighted. At all events itisn't so at Phillack. Perhaps we have too many daws in our village, butevery year before lighting fires in the drawing and dining-rooms we haveto call in a man with a pole to clear the flues out. " He told me that afew years ago, one cold June day, a fire was lighted in thedrawing-room, and as the smoke all poured out into the room a man wassent up to the roof with a pole to clear the obstruction out. Presentlya mess of sticks came down and with them two fully-fledged youngjackdaws, one dead, killed with the pole, the other sound and lively. This one they kept and it soon became quite tame; when able to fly itwould go off and associate with the wild birds, but refused to leavethe house until the following summer, when it found a mate and went away. 

The head keeper at Trevelloe, a remarkably vigorous and intelligentoctogenarian who has been in his place over half a century, gave me someinteresting information about the daws. He says they have greatlyincreased in recent years in this part of Cornwall because they are nolonger molested; no person, he says, not even a game-keeper anxiousabout his pheasants, would think of shooting a jackdaw. But this is notbecause the bird has changed its habits. He is as great a pest as everhe was, and as an example of how bad jackdaws can be, he related thefollowing incident told him by a friend of his, a head keeper on anestate adjoining a shooting his master took one year on the northwestcoast of England. It happened that a big colony of daws existed within amile or two of the preserves, and one day the keeper was called' away ina hurry and left the coops unattended for the best part of a day; it wasthe biggest mistake he had ever made and the chief disaster of his life. On his return he found that the daws had been before him and that allhis precious chicks had been carried off. For several hours of that daythere was a steady coming and going of birds between the cliffs and thecoops, every daw going back with a chick in his beak for his hungryyoung in the nest. 

Yet my informant, this ancient and singularly intelligent old man, agamekeeper all his life, who knows his jackdaw, could not tell me whygamekeepers no longer persecute so injurious a bird I He will not allowa sparrow-hawk to exist in his woods, yet all he could say when Irepeated my question was, "No keeper ever thinks of hurting a jack now, but I can't say why. "

The reason of it I fancy is plain enough; it is simply the sentiment Ihave spoken of. In a small way it has always existed in certain places, in towns, where the jackdaw is associated in our minds with cathedralsand church towers--where he is the "ecclesiastical daw"; but the modernwider toleration is due to the character, the personality, of the birditself, which is more or less like that of all the members of thecorvine family, with the exception of the rook, who always tries hisbest to be an honest, useful citizen; but it is not precisely the same. They may be regarded as bad hats generally In the bird community, and onthis very account--"I'm sorry to say, " to quote Mr. Pecksniff--theytouch a chord in us; and the daw being the genial rascal in feathers parexcellence is naturally the best loved. 

It has thus come about that of all the Corvidae the daw is now thefavourite as a pet bird, and in the domestic condition he is accordedmore liberty than is given to other species. We think he makes betteruse of his freedom, that he does not lose touch with his human friendswhen allowed to fly about, and appears more capable of affection. 

Formerly, the raven and magpie came first as pets. The raven vanished asa pet, because like the goshawk, kite, and buzzard, he was extirpated inthe interests of the game-preserver and hen-wife. The magpie was thenfirst, and has only been recently ousted from that ancient, honourableposition. The pie was a superior bird as a feathered pet in a cage; heis beautiful in shape and colour in his snow-white and metallicdark-green and purple-glossed plumage, and his long graduated tail. Moreover, he is a clever bird. To my mind there is no more fascinatingspecies when I can find it in numbers, in places where it is notpersecuted, and is accustomed to congregate at intervals, not as rooksand starlings do merely because they are gregarious, but purely forsocial purposes--to play and converse with one another. Its language atsuch times is so various as to be a surprise and delight to thelistener; while its ways of amusing itself, its clowning and the littletricks and practical jokes the birds are continually playing on eachother, are a delight to witness. All this is lost in a caged bird. He ishandsome to look at and remarkably intelligent, but he distinguishesbetween magpies and men; he doesn't reveal himself; his accomplishments, vocal and mental, are for his own tribe. In this he differs from thedaw; for the daw is less specialized; he is an undersized common crow, livelier, more impish than that bird, also more plastic, more adaptive, and takes more kindly to the domestic or parasitic life. Human beings tohim are simply larger daws, and unlike the pie he can play his tricksand be himself among them as freely as when with his feathered comrades. We like him best because he makes himself one of us. 

Undoubtedly the chough comes nearest to the daw mentally, and as it is afar more beautiful bird--the poor daw having little of that quality--itwould probably have been our prime favourite among the crows but for itsrarity. Formerly it was a common pet bird, caged or free, in all thecoast districts where it inhabited, and it may be that the desire for apet chough was the cause of its decline and final disappearance allround the south and west coasts of England, except at one spot nearTintagel where half a dozen pairs still exist only because watchersappointed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds are always onthe spot to warn off the nest-robbers during the breeding season. But ofthe chough in captivity or as a domesticated bird we know little now, asno records have been preserved. I have only known one bird, taken from aNorth Devon cliff about forty years ago, at a house near the coast; avery beautiful pet bird with charming, affectionate ways, always free torange about the country and the cliffs, where it associated with thedaws. It was the last of its kind at that place, and I do not know if itstill lives. 

Next to the chough the jay comes nearest to the daw mentally of all ourcrows, and as he excels most of our wild birds in beauty he wouldnaturally have been a first favourite as a pet but for the fact that itis only in a state of nature in which he is like the daw--lively, clever, impish; in captivity he is more like the magpie and affiliateseven less than that bird with his human associates. In confinement he isa quiet, almost sedate, certainly a silent bird: He is essentially awoodland species; all his graces, his various, often musical, language, with many imitations of bird and animal sounds, and his spectaculargames and pretty wing displays, are for his own people exclusively. Hemust have his liberty in the woods and a company of his fellow-jays toexhibit his full lustre. 

The difference between jay and daw is similar to that between fox anddog; or rather let us say, between one of the small desert foxes ofSyria and Egypt--the fennec, for instance--and the jackal, the domesticdog's progenitor; the first gifted with exquisite grace and beauty, wastoo highly specialized to suit the domestic condition; hence thegeneralized un-beautiful beast was chosen to be man's servant andcompanion. In the same way it looks as if we were taking to the daw inpreference to the more beautiful bird because he is more like us, orunderstands us better, or adapts himself more readily to our way oflife. 

I believe that about nine out of every ten interesting and amusingstories about charming pet birds I have heard in England during the lastquarter of a century relate to the daw, and this, I think, goes to showthat he is a prime favourite as a feathered pet, at all events in thesouthern and western counties. 

VI

STORY OF A JACKDAW

When I laid my pen down after concluding Part V it pleased me to thinkthat I had written the last word, that, my task finished, I was free togo on to something else. But I was not yet wholly free of the jackdaws;their yelping cries were still ringing in my mental ears, and theirremembered shapes were still all about me in their black dress, orcassock, grey hood, and malicious little grey eyes. The persistentimages suggested that my task was not properly finished after all, thatit would be better to conclude with one of those anecdotes or stories ofthe domesticated bird which I have said are so common; also that thisshould be a typical story, which would serve to illustrate the peculiardaw sentiment--the affectionate interest we take in him, not only inspite of his impudence and impishness and naughtiness, but also to someextent because of these same qualities, which find an echo in us. Accordingly I set myself to recall some of the latest anecdotes of thiskind which I had heard, and selected the one which follows, not becauseit was more interesting as a daw story than the others, but mainly onaccount of the shrewd and humorous and dramatic way in which it wasrelated to me by a little boy of the working class. 

I met him on a bright Sunday morning at the end of June in the park-likegrounds of Walmer Castle. I had not long been seated on a garden benchwhen a daw came flying to a tree close by and began craning her neck andeyeing me with one eye, then the other, with an intense, almost painfulcuriosity; and these nervous movements and gestures immediately revealedto me that she had a nestful of young birds somewhere close by. Afterchanging her position several times to view me from other points andfind out what I was there for, she came to the conclusion that I was notto be got rid of, and making a sudden dash to a tree standing justbefore me, disappeared in a small hole or cleft in the trunk aboutforty-five feet above the ground, and in a few seconds came out againand flew swiftly away. In four or five minutes she returned, and aftereyeing me suspiciously a short time flew again to the tree and, vanishing from sight in the hole, remained there. I was intentlywatching that small black spot in the bark to see her emerge, when alittle boy came slowly sauntering past my bench, and glancing at him Ifound that his shrewd brown eyes were watching my face and that he had aknowing half-smile on his lips. 

"Hullo, my boy!" I said. "I can see plainly enough what is in _your_mind. You know I'm watching a hole in the tree where a jackdaw has justgone in, and your intention is, when no one is about, to swarm up thetree and get the young birds. "

"Oh, no, " he returned. "I'm not going to climb the tree and don't wantany young jackdaws. I always come to look because the birds breed inthat hole every year. Two years ago I had a bird from the nest, but Idon't want another. "

Then at my invitation he sat down to tell me about it. One morning whenhe came the young had just come off, and he found one squatting on theground under the trees, looking stupefied. No doubt when it flew out ithad struck against a trunk or branch and come down bruised and stunned. 

He wrapped it up in a handkerchief and took it home to Deal and put itin a box; then mother got some flannel and made a sort of bed for it, and warmed some milk and they opened its beak and fed it with ateaspoon. Next day it was all right and opened its beak to be fedwhenever they came near it, and in two or three days it began flyingabout the room and perching on their shoulders. Then he brought it backto Walmer and let it go and saw it fly off into the trees, but when hegot home mother scolded him for having let it go when its parents werenot about; she said it would die of starvation, and was going on at himwhen in flew the jackdaw and came flop on her shoulder! After thatmother and father said they'd keep the daw a little longer, and then hecould let it go at a distance where there were other daws about. By andby they said they'd let it stay where it was. Father liked a bloater forhis tea, and there was nothing the jackdaw was fonder of, so he wasalways on the table at tea-time, eating out of father's plate. Then hegot to be troublesome. He was always watching for a door or window ofthe parlour to be opened to let the air in, and that was the room motherwas so careful about, and every time he got in he'd fly straight to themantelpiece, which was covered with photographs and ornaments. They weremostly those little things--pigs and dogs and parrots and all sorts ofanimals made of glass and china, and the jackdaw would begin to pickthem up and throw them down on to the fender, and of course he broke alot of them. That made mother mad, and she scolded him and told him toget rid of the bird. So he wrapped it up so as it shouldn't know whereit was going and went off two or three miles along the coast, and let itgo where there were other daws. It flew off and joined them, and hecame home. That afternoon Jackie came back, and they wondered how he hadfound his way. Father said 'twas plain enough, that the bird had justfollowed the coast till he got back to Deal, and there he was at home. He said the only way to lose it was to take it somewhere away from thesea; so he wrapped it up again and took it to his Aunt Ellen's atNorthbourne, about five miles from Deal. His aunt told him to carryit to the park, where he'd find other daws and settle down. And that'swhat he did, but Jackie came back to Deal again that same day; thestrangest thing was that mother and father made a great fuss over it andfed it just as if they were glad to have it back. Next day it got intothe parlour and broke some more things, and mother scolded him for notgetting rid of the bird, and father said he knew how it could be done. One of his pals was going to Dover, and he would ask him to take thebird and let it go up by the castle where it would mix with the jackdawsthere, and that would be too far away for it to come back. But it didcome back, and after that he sent it to Ashford, and then to Canterbury, and I don't know how many other places, but it always came back, andthey always seemed very glad to see it back. All the same, mother wasalways scolding him about the bird and complaining to father about thedamage it did in the house. Then one day Aunt Ellen came to see mother, and told her the best way to get rid of the daw would be to send itabroad; she said her husband's cousin, Mr. Sturge, was going out to hisrelations in Canada to work on their farm, and she would gether husband to ask him to take the jackdaw. It would never come backfrom such a distant place. A week afterwards Mr. Sturge sent word thathe would take the bird, as he thought his relations would like to have areal old English jackdaw to remind them of home. So one day Aunt Ellencame and took Jackie away in a small covered basket. The funniest thingwas the way father went on when he came home to tea. "A bloater with asoft roe, " he says; "just what Jackie likes! Where's the bird got to?Come to your tea, Jackie!"

"He's gone, " says mother, "gone to Canada, and a good riddance, too!"

"Oh, gone, has he?" says father. "Then we're a happy family and going tolead a quiet life. No more screams and tears over broken chiny dolls!And if ever Billy brings another jackdaw into the house we'll dust hiscoat for him. "

Here Billy interposed to say that if he ever made such a mistake againthey could thrash him as much as they liked. 

"Oh, yes, " said father, "we'll thrash you fast enough; mother'll do itfor the sake of her chiny toys and dolls. "

That put mother up. "You're in a nasty temper, " she says, "but you knowI miss the bird as much as you do!"

"Then, " said father, "why the devil didn't you tell that sister of yoursto mind her own business when she came interfering about my jackdaw! Andthat Sturge, he'll soon get tired of the bird and give it away for apint of beer before he gets to Liverpool. "

"So much the better, " says mother. "If Jackie can get free before theytake him aboard you may be sure he'll find his way back to Deal. "

And that's what they went on hoping for days and days; but Jackie nevercame back, so I s'pose Mr. Sturge took him out all right and that he'sin Canada now.