Adventures among birds

Front matter

HERTFORDSHIRE COUNTY COUNCIL

Natus CGrceal846=2 Obits |

| i pon aon

CHAPTER I THE Book: An ApoLocy : : ; Q

A preliminary warning—Many books about a few birds— People who discover well-known birds—An excuse for the multiplicity of bird-books—Universal delight in wild birds—Interview with a county councillor—A gold-crest’s visit to a hospital—A rascal’s blessing— Incident of the dying Garibaldi and a bird.

Chapter VII

The title justified — Position of BPM aS in he neue a animal qualities—Friendships between horses—A pet wolf—Peter the fox—Friendships among birds—A jackdaw and a small boy—Stories of teal—Birds caring for injured companions—The helping instinct— Partridge and pony—Strange case of a swan and a trout.

CHAPTER VIII THE SACRED BirD (Phasianus colchicus)

The pheasant in Romano-British times—The cnodesn craze for it—Destruction of bird life by keepers—A heronry depopulated—An indiscriminate massacre— “ Keeping an eye’ on the hawks—Beauty of the pheasant in autumn woods—Absence of great soaring birds from English skies.

CHAPTER XIV Birp Music : . : F

Modern indifference to delicate music—Charm due to past associations—A willow-wren at Harrogate—Intrinsic charm of some bird voices—Effect of special circumstances—A rain-washed world—Exceptional songs of chaffinch and whinchat—A wonderful blackbird.

ix

PAGE 103 x CONTENTS

CHAPTER XXII GOLDFINCHES AT RyME INTRINSECA

Yetminster—Ryme Intrinseca—Mobbed by ettenches Recent increase of goldfinches in Dorset—Effect of bird-protection orders—Abundance of the goldfinch in Cobbett’s days—Goldfinches and thistles: a misleading statement—Recollections of the Argentine goldfinch— Caged birds—A Spanish poem about a goldfinch—The translator’s difficulties—A prose rendering of E/ Colorin de Filis.

Chapter XXIII

The barren days of early March—On the track a the absent nightingale—The mystery of its return—The immortal bird of the poets—Its puzzling distribution—The parish nightingale—A rector’s story of a nightingale— Birds striking against window-panes—The nightingale a home-keeping bird—Its human enemies—The fight to save our wild birds—Educating the country children.

PAGE 192 xii CONTENTS

CHAPTER XXIV Tue CLERK AND THE Last RAVENS

The parish clerk at Itchen Abbas—William Neave’s epitaph —The parish clerk’s reminiscences—A ghost story— Fascination of the raven—The last ravens at Avington —Tree-climbing feats—Persecution of tame young ravens by the old birds.

CHAPTER XXV Tur TEMPLES OF THE HILLs

History of the chalk hills—Hill-top gover -Thels bee aspect—Abundance of wild life in them—Carrion-crows —Nesting sparrow-hawks—The fascinating spectacle of the chase—Long-eared owls—The owl as a practical joker—A keeper’s gibbet—The great woods of Wiltshire—What is lacking in them.

Chapter XXVI Autumn, I9i2

Wells-next-the-Sea—A great man’s reason for residing there—The enviable chameleon—Black redstart— Antics of a squirrel—The dreariness of desk-work— Observations on a pair of late-nesting martins—Conflicting instincts—Swallows observed in mid-winter— A curious story of nesting martins and sparrows.

CHAPTER XXVII Witp WINGS: A FAREWELL . : t ; A

An abundance of wild geese—Hooded crows—Their evening amusements—A sociable mixed gathering—Herons at play—A ringed dotterel’s fun—Gull and pewit—Kestrel harried by starlings—Starlings flying in company with wild geese—Behaviour of starling flocks—Wounded goose and redshanks—An inquisitive crow—Evening return of the geese—Migrant crows and fieldfares— Last sight of the wild geese.

PAGE

ADVENIURES AMONG BIRDS

Chapter I

A preliminary warning—Many books about a few birds—People who discover well-known birds—An excuse for the multiplicity of bird-books—Universal delight in wild birds— Interview with a county councillor—A gold-crest’s visit to a hospital—A rascal’s blessing—TIncident of the dying Garibaldi and a bird.

HE book-buyer in search of something to

read before making his purchase as a rule opens a book and glances at a few lines on

the first page, just to get the flavour of it and find out whether or not it suits his palate. The title, we must presume, has already attracted him as indicating a subject which interests him. This habit of his gives me the opportunity of warning him at the very outset that he will find here no adventures of a wild-fowler, if that’s what he is seeking; no thrilling records of long nights passed in a punt, with a north wind blowing and freezing him to the marrow in spite of his thick woollen clothing and long boots and oilskins, and the glorious conclusion of the adventure when he happily succeeds in sending a thousand pellets of burning lead into an innumerable multitude of mallard, widgeon, teal, pochard, and pintail;

how for several, successive winters he repeated the A I operation until the persecuted fowl began to diminish so greatly in numbers that he forsook that estuary or haunt on the coast to follow them elsewhere, or transferred his attentions to some other far-distant point, where other wholesale killers had not been before him. No, this is not a sporting record, despite the title, and if long titles were the fashion nowadays, it would have been proper to call the book “The Adventures of a Soul, sensitive or not, among the feathered masterpieces of creation.” This would at all events have shown at once whence the title was derived, and would have better served to indicate the nature of the contents.

It all comes to this, that we have here another book about birds, which demands some sort of apology.

In England, a small country, we have not too many species—two or three hundred, let us say, according to the number of visitants we include or exclude; all exceedingly well known. For birds are observed more than any other class of creatures, and we are not only an observant but a book-writing people, and books have been written on this subject since the time of Queen Elizabeth—as a fact the first book (1544) was before her time—and for the last century have been produced at an ever-increasing rate until now, when we have them turned out by the dozen every year. All about the same few well-known birds! To many among us it seems that the thing is being over-done. One friend expostulates thus: ‘What, another book about birds? You have already written several— three or four or five—I can’t remember the number.

I don’t know much about the subject, but I should have thought you had already told us all you know about it. I had hoped you had finished with that subject now. There are so many others—Man, for instance, who is of more account than many sparrows. Well, all I can say is, I’m sorry.”

If he had known birds, I doubt that he would have expressed regret at my choice of a subject; for many as are the observers of birds and writers on them in the land, there are yet a far greater number who do not properly know them, and the joy they are or may be to us.

The people who discover birds are now common with us, and though the story of their discoveries is somewhat boring, it amuses at the same time. A lady of your acquaintance tells you the result of putting some crumbs on a window-sill—-the sudden appearance to feed on the crumbs of a quaint fairy-like little bird which was not a sparrow, nor robin, nor any of those common ones, but a sparkling lively little creature with a crest, all blue above and yellow beneath—very beautiful to look at, and fantastic in its actions. A bird she has never seen before though all her life has been passed in the country. Was it some rare visitor from a distant land, where birds have a brighter plumage and livelier habits than ours?

Two or three years ago a literary friend wrote to me from the north of England, where he had gone for a holiday and was staying at a farm, to say that he wished me there, if only to see a wonderful bird that visited the house every day. It was probably a species, he thought, confined to that part of the country, and perhaps never seen in the south, and he wanted very much to know what it was. As I couldn’t go to him he would try to describe it. Every morning after breakfast, when he and his people fed the birds on the lawn, this strange species, to the number of a dozen or more, would appear on the scene—a bird about the size of a thrush with a long sharp yellow beak, the entire plumage of a very dark purple and green colour, so glossy that it sparkled like silver in the sunshine. They were also sprinkled all over with minute white and cream-coloured spots. A beautiful bird, and very curious in its behaviour. They would dart down on the scraps, scattering the sparrows right and left, quarrelling among themselves over the best pieces; and then, when satisfied, they would fly up to the roof and climb and flit about over the tiles and on the chimneys, puffing their feathers out and making all sorts of odd noises— whistling, chattering, tinkling, and so on.

I replied that the birds were starlings, and he was rather unhappy about it, since he had known the starling as a common bird all his life, and had imagined he knew it too well to take it for a strange and rare species. But then, he confessed, he had never looked closely at it; he had seen it in flocks in the pastures, always at a distance where it looks plain black.

If the lady who discovered the blue-tit, or nun, and my friend who found out the starling, would extend their researches in the feathered world they would find a hundred other species as beautiful in colouring and delightful in their ways as those two, and some even more so.

Much, too, might be said on the subject of many books being written about birds. They are not necessarily repetitions. When a writer of fact or fiction puts his friends and acquaintances in a book, as a rule it makes a difference, a decline, in the degree of cordiality in their relations. That is only, of course, when the reader recognises himself in the portrait. He may not do so, portraits not always being “pure realism,” as Mr. Stanhope Forbes says they are. But whether the reader recognises his own picture or not, the writer himself experiences a change of feeling towards his subject. It is, to put it brutally, similar to that of the boy towards the sucked orange. There is nothing more to be got out of it. It need not be supposed for a moment that the fictionist is friendly towards or interested in his fellow-creatures for the sake of what he can get out of them—that, like the portrait-painter, he is on the look-out for a subject. He has no such unworthy motive, and the change in his feeling comes about in another way. Having built up his picture he looks on it and finds it an improvement, and infinitely more interesting than the original, and the old feeling inevitably changes—it is transferred from the man to the picture. These changes in feeling never occur in the case of the feathered friends we have made, and find pleasure in portraying. We may put them again and again in books without experiencing any diminution in our feelings towards them.» On the contrary, after doing our best we no sooner look again on the originals than we see how bad the portrait is, and would be glad to put it out of sight and forget all about it. This lustre, this peculiar grace, this expression which I never marked before, is not in the picture I have made; come, let me try again, though it be but to fail again, to produce yet another painting fit only for the lumber-room.

After all it does not need a naturalist nor an artist nor a poet to appreciate and be the better for that best thing in a wild bird, that free, joyous, joygiving nature felt by every one of us. The sight of a wild, free, happy existence, as far as the fairies’ or angels’ from ours, yet linked to us by its warm red blood, its throbbing human-shaped heart, fine senses, and intelligent mind, emotions that sway it as ours sway us. A relative, a “little sister,” but clothed for its glory and joy in feathers that are hard as flint, light as air and translucent, and wings to lift it above the earth on which we walk. Is there on earth a human being who has not felt this? Not one!

I remember going once to see a member of a county council to try to enlist his interest in the subject of bird protection for his county. I was told that he was the biggest man on the council and had immense weight with his fellow-members on account of his wealth and social position, that without getting him on our side it would be difficult to obtain an order. He was certainly a big man physically, a very giant in stature, with a tread like that of an elephant when he entered the vast dim room into which a servant had conducted me. So huge a mass, so heavy and stolid, as he stood there silently staring at me out of his great expressionless boiled-gooseberry-coloured eyes, waiting to hear what I had to say to him. I said it, and handed him some papers, which I wanted him to look at. But he was not listening, and when I finished he held out the papers for me to take them back. “No,” he said, “I have too many calls on me —I can’t entertain it.” “Will you kindly listen,” I said, then repeated it again, and he muttered something and taking the papers once more inclined his head to indicate that the interview was over, and, thanking him for his ready sympathy, I went my way to someone else.

My next visit was to an enthusiastic sportsman. I told him where I had been, and he exclaimed that it was a mistake, a waste of time. “That chunk of a man is no good,” he said. “If he sees a roast goose on the table he knows what it is and he can distinguish it from a roast turkey, and that’s all he knows about birds.” Perhaps it was all he knew, from the natural history point of view at all events; yet even this “chunk of a man” had doubtless felt something of that common universal joy in a bird, which makes the bird so much to us, for by-and-by it was with his help that the order for the county was obtained.

Here is a little incident in which we can see just the feeling a bird is able to inspire in us. A friend writes to me:

I have just heard from Miss Paget, who says her most interesting news is the visit of a gold-crested wren at the Connaught

Hospital. It flew in through one of the open windows and at once became friendly with the patients, perching on their fingers and being fed by them to their great delight. Then, having cheered them for a day and night, it flew away and has not been seen since. The men long for its return, for nothing has pleased and refreshed and brightened them so much in their wearisome hours as its companionship.

Miss Rosalind Paget is so well known for her work in the military hospitals that I hope she will forgive me for giving her name without her permission when relating this incident.

But the effect of the bird is due as much to the voice as to the dainty winged shape, the harmonious colouring, and the graceful easy motions in the air. That peculiar aerial vibrant penetrative character of bird-notes moves us as other sounds do not, and there are certain notes in which these qualities are intensified and sometimes suggest an emotion common to all mankind, which pierce to the listener’s heart, whatever his race or country may be or his character or pursuits in life.

I here recall an incident of my young days in a far land, less civilised than ours. I had a neighbour in my home for whom I had little love. He was a greedy rascal, a petty rural magistrate with an itching palm, and if justice was required at his hands it had to be bought with money like any other commodity. One summer afternoon he rode over to my home and asked me to go for a walk with him by the river. It was a warm brilliant day in early autumn, and when we had walked about a couple of miles along the bank to a spot where the stream was about fifty yards wide, we sat down on the dry grass under a large red willow. A flock of birds was in the tree—a species of a most loquacious kind—but our approach had made them silent. Not the faintest chirp fell from the branches that had been full of their musical jangle a few minutes before. It was a species of troupial, a starling-like bird of social habits, only larger than our starling, with glossy olive-brown plumage and brilliant yellow breast. Pecho amarillo (yellow breast) is its vernacular name. Now as soon as we had settled comfortably on the grass the entire flock, of thirty or forty birds, sprang up into the air, going up out of the foliage like a fountain, then suddenly they all together dropped down, and sweeping by us over the water burst into a storm of loud ringing jubilant cries and liquid notes. My companion uttered a sudden strange harsh discordant laugh, and turning away his sharp dry fox-like face, too late to hide the sudden moisture I had seen in _ his eyes, he exclaimed with savage emphasis on the first word— Curse the little birds—how glad they are!”

That was his way of blessing them. He was a hardened rascal, utterly bad, feared and hated by the poor, despised by his equals; yet the sight and sound of that merry company, its sudden outburst of glorious joy, had wrought an instantaneous change in him that was like a miracle, and for a moment he was no longer himself, but what he had been in the past, in some unimaginably remote period of his existence, a pure-hearted child, capable of a glad, beautiful emotion and of tears.

I will remark in passing that the actual words of his blessing are hardly translatable; for he didn’t call them “little birds,’ but addressed them affectionately as fellow-mortals of diminutive size—“little children of a thousand unvirtuous mothers” was more nearly his expression.

One is reminded of a famous historical incident —of the exclamation of the dying Garibaldi, when a small bird of unrecorded species alighted for a moment on the ledge of his open window, and burst out into a lively twittering song. ‘Quanto é allegro!” murmured the old passing fighter. The exclamation would have seemed quite natural on the lips of a dying Englishman, but how strange on his! Does it find an echo in the heart of the people he liberated, who appreciate a bird not for its soul-gladdening voice but for its flavour? It can only be supposed that Garibaldi during his furious fighting years in the Argentine Confederation, in the forties of the last century, had become in some ways de-Italianised —that he had been infected with the friendly feeling towards birds of his fellow “pirates and ruffians,” as they were called, and of the people generally, from his enemy the Dictator Rosas himself, the “Nero of South America,” down to the poorest gaucho in the land. They, the fighters, were mostly ruffians in those days in a country where revolution (with atrocities) was endemic, but they did not kill or persecute “God’s little birds,” as they called them. The foreigners who did such things were regarded with contempt.

THE BOOK: AN APOLOGY II

Garibaldi was beaten again and again, and finally driven from the Plate by a better fighter—an Englishman of the name of Brown; but the beaten “pirate” lived to liberate his own country and to see his people going out annually in tens of thousands to settle in the land where he had fought and lost. How melancholy to think that from the bird-lover’s point of view they have been a curse to it, that, but for the wealthy native and English landowners who are able to give some protection to wild life on their estates, the detestable swarm of aliens would have made the land they have populated as birdless as their native Italy.

Chapter II Cardinal: The Story Of My First Caged Bird

The past recalled by a sound—A caged cardinal—A memory of childhood—The clergyman’s cardinal—My first caged bird —History of its escapades and ultimate fate.

unexpectedly to us will sometimes affect the

mind as it is occasionally affected through the sense of smell, restoring a past scene and state so vividly that it is less like a memory than a vision. It is indeed more than a vision, seeing that this is an illusion, something apparently beheld with the outer or physical eyes; the other is a transformation, a return to that state—that forgotten self—which was lost for ever, yet is ours again; and for a glorious moment we are what we were in some distant place, some long-vanished time, in age and freshness of feeling, in the brilliance of our senses, our wonder and delight at this visible world.

Recently I had an experience of that kind on hearing a loud glad bird-note or call from overhead when walking in a London West-End thoroughfare. It made me start and stand still; when, casting up my eyes, I caught sight of the bird in its cage, hanging outside a first-floor window. It was the beautiful cardinal of many memories. 12

\ ONCE familiar but long unheard sound coming

This is a bird of the finch family of southern South America— about the size of a starling, but more gracefully shaped, with a longer tail; the whole upper plumage clear blue-grey, the underparts pure white; the face, throat, and a high pointed crest an intense brilliant scarlet.

It had actually seemed to me at the moment of hearing, then of seeing it, that the bird had recognised me as one from the same distant country—that its loud call was a glad greeting to a fellow-exile seen by chance in a London thoroughfare. It was even more than that: this was my own bird, dead so many, many years, living again, knowing me again so far from home, in spite of all the changes that time had wrought in me. And he, my own cardinal, the first cardinal I ever knew, remembered it all even as I did—all the little incidents of our life together; the whole history was in both our minds at that same moment of recognition.

I was a boy, not yet eight years old, when my mother took me on one of her yearly visits to Buenos Ayres. It was a very long day’s journey for us in those pre-railroad times; for, great and prosperous as that city and republic now are, it was not so then, when the people were divided, calling themselves Reds and Whites (or Blues), and were occupied in cutting one another’s throats.

In Buenos Ayres we stayed at the house of an English missionary clergyman, in a street near the waterside. He was a friend of my parents and used to come out with his family to us in the summer, and in return my mother made his house her home for a month or so in winter. This was my first visit, and I remember the house was like a luxurious palace to my simple mind accustomed to rude surroundings. It had a large paved courtyard, with ornamental shrubs and orange and lemon trees growing in it, and many prettily decorated rooms; also a long passage or balcony at the back, and, at its far end, facing the balcony, the door of the study. This balcony at the back had an irresistible attraction for me, for on the wall were hung many cages containing beautiful birds, some unknown to me. There were several canaries, a European goldfinch, and other kinds; but the bird that specially attracted me was a cardinal in fine plumage, with a loud, glad, musical call-note—just such a note as that with which the bird in a London thoroughfare had pierced my heart. But it did not sing, and I was told that it had no song except that one note, or not more than two or three notes, and that it was kept solely for its beauty. To me it was certainly most beautiful.

Every day during our six or seven weeks’ visit I used to steal out to the balcony and stand by the hour watching the birds, above all the cardinal with his splendid scarlet crest, thinking of the joy it would be to possess such a bird. But though I could not keep away from the spot, I was always ill at ease when there, always glancing apprehensively at the closed door at the end—for it was a glass door, and in his study behind it the clergyman, a grave studious man, was sitting over his books. It made me tremble to think that, though invisible to me in that dim interior, he would be able to see me through the glass, and, worse still, that at any moment he might throw open the door and come out to catch me gazing at his birds. Nor was this feeling strange in the circumstances, for I was a timid, somewhat sensitive little boy, and he a very big stern man with a large cleanshaved colourless face that had no friendliness in it; nor could I forget an unhappy incident which occurred during his visit to us in the country more than half a year before. One day, rushing in, I stumbled in the verandah and struck my head against the doorhandle, and, falling down, was lying on the floor crying loudly with the pain, when the big stern man came on the scene.

““What’s the matter with you?” he demanded.

“Oh, I’ve hit my head on the door and it hurts me so!” I sobbed.

“Does it?” he said, with a grim smile. “Well, it doesn’t hurt me,” and, stepping over me, he went in.

What wonder that I was apprehensive, would shrink almost in terror, when by chance he came suddenly out to find me there, and, after staring or glaring at me through his gold-rimmed glasses for a few moments, would pass me by without a word or smile! How strange, how unnatural, it seemed that this man I feared and hated should be a lover of birds and the owner of that precious cardinal!

The long visit came to an end at last, and, glad to return to the birds I had left—to the purple cow-birds, the yellow-breasted and the crimsonbreasted troupials, the tyrant birds, the innumerable sweet-voiced little crested song-sparrows, and a hundred more—yet sad to leave the cardinal which I admired and had grown to love above all birds, I was taken back to my distant home on the great green plains. So passed the winter, and the swallow returned and the peach-trees blossomed once more; the long, long dry hot summer season followed; then autumn —the three beautiful months of March, April, and May, when the sunshine was soft and we were among the trees, feasting on ripe peaches every day and all day long.

Then again winter and the annual visit to the distant town; but none of us children were taken on this occasion. My mother’s return after one of these long absences was always a great joy and festival to us children. To have her with us again, and the toys and the books and delicious things she brought us, made us wild with happiness; and on this occasion she brought me something compared with which all the other gifts—all the gifts I had ever received in my life-—were as nothing. She had a large object covered from sight with a shawl, and, drawing me to her side, asked me if I remembered my visit to the city over a year ago, and how the birds at the parsonage had attracted me? Well, our friend the clergyman, she went on to say, had gone back to his own country and would never return. His wife, who was a very gentle, sweet woman, had been my mother’s dearest friend, so that she could hardly speak of her loss without tears. Before going away he distributed his birds among his closest friends. He was anxious that every bird should have an owner who would love it as much as he had loved it himself and tend it as carefully; and remembering how he had observed me day after day watching the cardinal, he thought that he could not leave it in better hands than mine. And here was the bird in its big cage! The cardinal was mine! How could I believe it, even when I pulled the shawl off and saw the beautiful creature once more and heard the loud note! The gift of that bird from the stern ice-cold man who had looked at me as if he hated me, even as I had certainly hated him, now seemed the most wonderful thing which had ever happened in the world. _ It was a blissful time for me during that late winter season, when I lived for the bird; then, as the days grew longer and brighter with the return of the sun, I was happier every day to see my cardinal’s increasing delight in his new surroundings.

It was certainly a great and marvellous change for him. The cardinals are taken as fledglings from the nests in forests on the upper waters of the Plata river, and reared by hand by the natives, then sent down to the birddealers in Buenos Ayres; so that my bird had practically known only a town life, and was now in a world of greenest grass and foliage, wide blue skies, and brightest sunshine for the first time. By day his cage was hung under the grape-vines outside the verandah; there the warm fragrant wind blew on him and the sun shone down through the translucent red and green young vine-leaves. He was mad with B excess of joy, hopping wildly about in his cage, calling loudly in response to the wild birds in the trees, and from time to time bursting out in song: not the three or four to half a dozen notes the cardinal usually emits, but a continuous torrent, like the soaring lark’s, so that those who heard it marvelled and exclaimed that they had never known a cardinal with such a song. I can say for myself that I have, since then, listened to the singing of hundreds of cardinals, both wild and caged, and never heard one with a song so passionate and sustained.