Adventures among birds

ADVENTURES
AMONG BIRDS

the Same Author

THE LAND'S END

AFOOT IN ENGLAND

A SHEPHERD'S LIFE

HAMPSHIRE DAYS

NATURE IN DOWNLAND

THE NATURALIST IN LA PLATA

IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA

SOUTH AMERICAN STRETCHES

THE PURPLE LAND

GREEN MANSIONS

A CRYSTAL AGE

BIRDS AND MAN

ADVENTURES
BIRDS

By

W. H. HUDSON

WITH Jl PORTRAIT

NEW YORK

MITCHELL KENNERLEY
1915

Printtd in Great Britain

OBRARY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA UARHAKA

A CONSIDERABLE portion of the matter contained
herein has appeared in the English Review,
Cornhill Magazine, Saturday Review, Nation,
and a part of one chapter in the Morning Post.
These articles have been altered and extended,
and I am obliged to the Editors and Publishers
for permission to use them in this book.

Once 1 was part of the music I heard

On the boughs or sweet between earth and sky,
For joy ol the beating of wings on high

My heart shot into the breast of a bird.

I hear it now and 1 see it fly,
And a life in wrinkles again is stirred,
My heart shoots into the breast of a bird,

As it will for sheer love till the last long sigh.

MEREDITH.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. THE BOOK: AN APOLOGY . . . i

II. CARDINAL : THE STORY OF MY FIRST

CAGED BIRD . . . . .12

III. WELLS- NEXT-THE- SEA, WHERE WILD

GEESE CONGREGATE . . • - • 25

IV. GREAT BIRD GATHERINGS . . -34
V. BIRDS IN AUTHORITY .... 43

VI. A WOOD BY THE SEA .... 56

VII. FRIENDSHIP IN ANIMALS . . .66

VIII. THE SACRED BIRD .... 85

IX. A TIRED TRAVELLER (Turdus iliacus) . 95

X. WHITE DUCK . . . . .104

XI. AN IMPRESSION OF AXE EDGE . .117

XII. BIRDS OF THE PEAK .... 125

XIII. THE RING-OUZEL AS A SONGSTER . .133

XIV. BIRD Music 141

XV. IN A GREEN COUNTRY IN QUEST OF

RARE SONGSTERS . . . .150

viii CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAOK

XVI. IN A HAMPSHIRE VILLAGE . .160

XVII. THE FURZE-WREN OR FURZE- FAIRY . 169

XVIII. BACK TO THE WEST COUNTRY . .178

XIX. AVALON AND A BLACKBIRD . .185

XX. THE LAKE VILLAGE . . .195

XXI. THE MARSH WARBLER'S Music . . 203

XXII. GOLDFINCHES AT RYME INTRINSICA . 215

XXIII. THE IMMORTAL NIGHTINGALE . .231

XXIV. THE CLERK AND THE LAST RAVENS . 251
XXV. THE TEMPLES OF THE HILLS . . 260

XXVI. AUTUMN, 1912 . . . . 280

XXVII. WILD WINGS : A FAREWELL . . 295

INDEX . , . . . 313

ADVENTURES AMONG
BIRDS

CHAPTER I
THE BOOK : AN APOLOGY

THE 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 oil-
skins, 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 opera-
tion until the persecuted fowl began to diminish so
I

2 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

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

THE BOOK: AN APOLOGY 3

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 m) 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 appear-
ance 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 be-
neath— 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

4 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

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 them-
selves 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 — whist-
ling, 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

THE BOOK: AN APOLOGY 5

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 recognizes 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 recognizes 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

6 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

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, joy-
giving 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

THE BOOK: AN APOLOGY 7

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 some one 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.

8 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

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 re-
freshed and brightened them so much in their weari-
some 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 civilized than ours. I had a neighbour
in my home for whom I had little love. He was a

THE BOOK: AN APOLOGY 9

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 sweep-
ing by us over the water burst into a storm of loud
ringing jubilant cries and liquid notes. My com-
panion 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 ! "

io ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

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 affec-
tionately 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 e allegro 1 "
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-Italianized

THE BOOK: AN APOLOGY 11

— 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.

Garibaldi was beaten again and again, and finally
driven from the Plate by a better fighter — an English-
man 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

A ONCE familiar but long unheard sound coming
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.

This is a bird of the finch family of southern South
America — about the size of a starling, but more

12

CARDINAL 13

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 recog-
nised 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

i4 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

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 c^veral
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

CARDINAL 15

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 circum-
stances, for I was a timid, somewhat sensitive little
boy, and he a very big stern man with a large clean-
shaved colourless face that had no friendliness in it ;
nor could I forget an unhappy incident which oc-
curred 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 door-handle, 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

16 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

cow-birds, the yellow-breasted and the crimson-
breasted 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

CARDINAL 17

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 fledgelings 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 bird-
dealers in Buenos Ayres ; so that my bird had practi-
cally 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
2

1 8 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

veranda ; 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
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.

So it went on from day to day, until the vine-
leaves, grown large, spread a green roof to keep the
hot sun from him — a light roof of leaves which, stirred
by the wind, still let the sparkling sunbeams fall
through to enliven him, while outside the sheltering
vines the bright world was all before him. If any
person, even the wisest, had then told me that my
cardinal was not the happiest bird in the world — that
not being free to fly he could not be as happy as
others — I should not have believed it ; consequently
it came as a shock to me when one day I discovered
the cage empty — that my cardinal had made his
escape ! The cage, as I have said, was large, and the
wires were so far apart that a bird the size of a linnet
or siskin could not have been confined in it; but
for the larger cardinal it was a safe prison. Unfor-

CARDINAL 19

tunately one of the wires had become loose — perhaps
the bird had loosened it — and by working at it he had
succeeded in bending it and finally had managed to
squeeze through and make his escape. Running out
into the plantation I was soon apprised of his where-
abouts by his loud call-note ; but though he could
not fly, but only hop and flutter from branch to
branch — his wings never having been exercised — he
refused to be caught. I was advised to wait until
he was hungry, then to try him with the cage. This
I did, and, taking the cage, placed it on the ground
under the trees and retired a few paces, holding it
open by means of a string which when released would
cause the door to fly to. He became greatly excited
on seeing the cage, and being very hungry soon came
down to the ground and, to my joy, hopped up to
it. But he did not go in : it seemed to me that he
was considering the matter, if the state he was in
of being pulled in opposite directions by two equally
importunate impulses may be so described. " Must
I go in and satisfy my hunger — and live in prison ; or
stay out and keep my freedom and go hungry ? "
He stood at the door of the cage, looking in at the
seed, then turned and looked at me and at the
trees, then looked at the seed again, and raised and
lowered his shining crest and flirted his wings and
tail, and was excited and in two minds and a
quandary ; finally, after taking one more look at
the tempting seed, he deliberately flew or fluttered up
to the nearest branch, then to another, and so on,

20 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

till he had gone to the, very top of the tree, as if
to get as far from the tempting cage as he could !

It was a great disappointment, and I now deter-
mined to hunt him down ; for it was late in the day,
and he was not a cunning wild bird to save himself
from rats and owls and black and yellow opossums and
other subtle enemies who would come presently on
the scene. I hunted him from the first tree on to
the next, then to another, until I had driven him
out of the plantation to an open place, where he
fluttered over the surface until he came to the bank
of the huge ditch or foss, about twelve feet deep and
half as wide as the Regent's Park canal. He would
drop into it, I thought, and I would then be able to
capture him ; but after a moment's rest on the bank
he rose and succeeded in flying across, pitching on
the other side. " Now I have him ! " I exclaimed,
and, getting over the foss, I was quickly in hot pursuit
after him ; for outside the foss the earth spread out
level and treeless, with nothing but grass and giant
thistles growing on it. But his wings were now
getting stronger with exercise, and he led me on
and on for about a mile, then disappeared in a clump
of giant thistles, growing on a warren or village of
the vizcachas — the vizcacha being a big rodent that
lives in communities in a dozen or twenty huge bur-
rows, their mouths placed close together. He had
escaped down one of these holes, and I waited in vain
for him to come out, and in the end was compelled to
go home without him.

CARDINAL 21

I don't know if I slept that night, but I was up
and out an hour before sunrise, and, taking the cage,
set out to look for him, with little hope of finding
him, for there were foxes in that place — a family of
cubs which I had seen — and, worse still, the large
blood-thirsty black weasels of that country. But no
sooner was I at the spot where I had lost him than
I was greeted with his loud note. And there he was,
hopping out from among the thistles, a most forlorn-
looking object, his plumage wet and draggled, and
his feet thickly covered with wet clay ! And he was
glad to see me ! As soon as I put the cage down
he came straight to it and, without a moment's
hesitation, hopped in and began feasting on the
seed.

It was a happy ending. My bird had had a lesson
which he would not forget ; there would be no more
tugging at the wires, nor would he ever wish to be
free again. So I imagined. But I was wrong. From
that time the bird's disposition was changed : ever
in a restless anxious state, he would flit from side to
side of his cage, chirping loudly, but never singing —
never one note ; the gladness that had made him
sing so wonderfully had quite gone out of him. And
invariably, after hopping about for a few moments,
he would go back to the wire which had been loosened
and bent — the one weak spot which was now repaired
— and tug at and shake it again. And at last, greatly
to my surprise, he actually succeeded in bending the
same wire once more and making his escape !

22 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

Once more I went to look for him with the cage in
my hand, but when I found him he refused to be
tempted. I left him for a day to starve, then tried
him again ; and then again many and many times
on many following days, for he was now much too
strong on the wing to be hunted down ; but though
he invariably greeted and appeared to welcome me
with his loud chirp, he refused to come down, and
after excitedly hailing me and flirting his feathers for
a few moments he would fly away.

Gradually I grew reconciled to my loss, for, though
no longer my captive — my own bird — he was near
me, living in the plantation and frequently seen.
Often and often, at intervals of a few or of many
days, when my lost, yet not wholly lost, cardinal
was not in my mind, I would come upon him, some-
times out on the plain, feeding with a flock of purple
cow-birds, or yellow-breasted troupials, or some other
species ; and when they would all rise up and fly
away at my approach, he alone, after going a little
distance with them, would drop out of the crowd and
pitch .on a stalk or thistle-bush, just, as it would
appear, to look at me and hail me with his loud note
— to say that he remembered me still ; then off he
would fly after the others.

That little action of his went far to reconcile me
to his loss— to endear him still more to me, changing
my boyish bitterness to a new and strange kind of
delight in his happiness.

But the end of the story is not yet : even at this

CARDINAL 23

distance, after so many changing and hardening years,
I experience a certain reluctance or heaviness of
heart in telling it.

The warm bright months went by and it was
winter again — the cold season from May to August,
when the trees are bare, the rainy south wind blows,
and there are frosty nights, frosts that would some-
times last all day or even several days. Then it was
that I missed my bird and wondered often what had
become of him. Had he too flown north to a warmer
country with the swallows and other migrants ?
It could not be believed. But he was no longer in
the plantation — that little sheltering island of trees
in the level grassy sea-like plain ; and I should never
see him more or know what his fate had been.

One day, in August, the men employed about
the place were engaged in a grand annual campaign
against the rats — a sort of spring-cleaning in and
out of doors. The shelter of the huge old foss, and
of the trees and thickets, wood-piles, many out-
buildings and barns full of raw or untanned hides,
attracted numbers of these unpleasant little beasts
and made it a sort of rats' metropolis ; and it was
usual to clear them out in early spring before the
new grass and herbage sprang up and covered the
ground. They were suffocated with smoke, made
deadly with brimstone and tobacco, pumped into
their holes. I was standing by one of the men who
was opening one of the runs after the smoking process,
when I caught sight of a gleam of scarlet colour in a

24 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

heap of straw and rubbish he was turning over with
his spade, and, jumping down, I picked up the shining
red object. It was my lost cardinal's crest ! And
there too were his grey wing and tail feathers, white
feathers from his breast, and even some of his bones.
Alas ! he had found it too cold to roost in the naked
trees in the cold wind and rain, and, seeking a more
sheltered roosting-place on the ground, had been
caught and carried into its den and devoured by a rat.
I experienced a second and greater grief at his
miserable end — a feeling so poignant that the memory
has endured till now. For he was my loved cardinal
— my first caged bird. And he was also my last. I
could have no other, the lesson he had taught me
having sunk into my heart — the knowledge that to a
bird too the world is very beautiful and liberty very
sweet. I could even rejoice, when time had softened
my first keen sorrow, that my cardinal had succeeded
in making his escape, since at the last he had experi-
enced those miraculous months of joyous existence,
living the true bird-life for which nature had fashioned
and fitted him. In all the years of his captivity he
could never have known such a happiness, nor can
any caged bird know it, however loudly and sweetly
it may sing to win a lump of sugar or a sprig of ground-
sel from his tender-hearted keeper and delude him
with the idea that it is well with his prisoner — that
no injustice has been done.

CHAPTER III

WELLS-NEXT-THE-SEA, WHERE WILD GEESE
CONGREGATE

THERE are few places in England where you can get
so much wildness and desolation of sea and sand-hills,
wood, green marsh, and grey saltings as at Wells, in
Norfolk, the small old red-brick town, a mile and a
quarter from the beach, with a green embankment
lying across the intervening marsh connecting town
and sea. Here you can have it all in the space of a
half-day's prowl or saunter — I cannot say " walk,"
seeing that I am as often standing or sitting still as
in motion. The little village-like town in its quietude
and sense of remoteness from the world is itself a
restful place to be in ; going out you have on the
land side the quiet green Norfolk country of winding
roads and lanes, old farm-houses and small red villages
which appear almost deserted. As I passed through
one the other day, the thought was in my mind that
in this village not one inhabitant remained, when all
at once I caught sight of a very old man, shrunk and
lean and grey, standing in a cottage garden behind
its grey palings. His clothes, too, like his hair and
face, were a dull grey, so like the hue of the old

26 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

weathered and lichen-stained wood of the palings
as to make him almost invisible. It was an instance of
protective resemblance in the human species. He
was standing motionless, leaning on his stick, peering
at me out of his pale dim eyes as if astonished at the
sight of a stranger in that lonely place.

But I love the solitariness on the side towards the
sea best, the green marsh extending to Holkham on
your left hand, once a salt flat inundated by the sea
but long reclaimed by the making of that same green
bank I have mentioned — the causeway which con-
nects Wells with the beach. On the right side of this
bank is the estuary by which small ships may creep
up to the town at high tide, and the immense grey
saltings extending miles and miles away to Blakeney.
Between the flats and the sea are the sand-hills, rough
with grey marram grass ; then the beach, and, if
the tide is up, the sea ; but when the water is out,
you look across miles of smooth and ribbed sands,
with no life visible on its desolate expanse except a
troop of gulls resting in a long white line, and very
far out a few men and boys digging for bait in the
sand, looking no bigger than crows at that distance.
Beyond the line of white gulls and the widely scattered
and diminished human forms is the silvery-grey line
of the sea, with perhaps a sail or two faintly visible
on the horizon.

What more could any one desire ? — what could add
to the fascinations of such a retreat ? A wood !
Wejl, we have that too, a dark pine wood growing on

WELLS-NEXT-THE-SEA 27

the slopes of the sand-hills on the land side and ex-
tending from the Wells embankment to Holkham a
couple of miles away. Many an hour in the late
afternoons and evenings have I spent in that perfect
solitude listening to the sea-wind in the pines when
the sound of wind and sea were one, and finding the
deep shelter warm and grateful after a long ramble
over the sands and dunes and marshes.

For I go not to Wells in " the season," when days
are long and the sun is hot, the scattering time for
all those who live " too thick," when even into this
remote spot drift a few of the pale town-people with
books in their pockets and cameras and green butterfly-
nets in their hands. The wild geese are not there
then, they are away breeding in the Siberian tundra
or Spitzbergen ; and for that wild exhilarating
clangour which they make when passing overhead to
and from the sea, and for the era-era of the hooded
crow — his harsh war-cry and curse on everything—-
you hear lark and titlark, dunnock and wren, with
the other members of the " feathered choir " even as
in all other green places.

Autumn and winter is my time, and at no other
place in the kingdom can the grey geese be seen to
better advantage, despite the fact that to this spot
the wild-fowler comes annually in numbers, and that
many of the natives, even the poorest, possess a gun
and are always on the look-out for geese. The birds
come in undiminished numbers, probably because
they find here the one green spot on which they

28 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

can repose in comparative safety. This spot is the
reclaimed marsh or meadowland which I have men-
tioned as lying between the Wells embankment and
Holkham. It is not a perfect sanctuary, since the
geese are shot a few times during the winter by the
lord of the manor and his guests ; but the dangerous
days are so few and far between at this place that
the geese have come to regard it as a safe refuge, and
are accustomed to congregate daily in large numbers,
two or three thousand or more being often seen
together.

How intelligent these noble birds are ! The whole
human population of the country round are against
them, waiting for them morning and evening in various
hiding-places to shoot them down as they pass over-
head to and from the sea. This incessant persecution
had made them the wariest of all wild birds and most
difficult to approach. Yet here, where their enemies
are most numerous, where they keep the sharpest
watch when feeding and roosting, and when on the
wing fly high to keep out of range of those who lie
in wait for them — on this one green spot they drop
down to rest and feed by the hour and pay but the
slightest attention to the human form and the sights
and sounds of human life ! This camping-ground is
backed by the sand-hills and pine wood ; on the
opposite side is the coast road and sight of people
driving and walking, and nearer still the line of the
railway from Lynn to WellsN The marsh, too, is
fed by cattle and horses and sheep ; there is the

WELLS-NEXT-THE-SEA 29

shepherd with his dog, and others from the farms
going about ; but the geese do not heed them, nor
do they show alarm when a train rushes past a couple
of hundred yards away puffing out steam and making
a mighty noise on that flat moist earth. They have
made the discovery that there is no harm in it not-
withstanding its huge size, its noise and swift motion.
To find at this spot that I was able to look at a
flock of a thousand or two of geese at a short distance
has been one of my most delightful experiences in
bird-watching in England. I had heard of their
tameness from others, but could hardly credit it
until witnessing it myself. The best time was in
fine weather as we occasionally get it in October and
November, when the wind is still and the sunshine
bright and warm, for the birds are then in a drowsy
state and less vigilant than at other times, especially
after a moonlight night when they have been feeding
on the stubble and pastures. You can then get
quite near to them and see them at their best, and
with a good binocular bring them as close to your eyes
as you like. It is a very fine sight — this assemblage
of large wild birds on the green turf sitting or standing
in every attitude of repose. At a distance they look
almost black ; seen closely one admires the shading of
their plumage, the dark upper barred greys and
browns, and the buff colouring on neck and breast
and pink beak and legs. The sight is peculiarly fine
when, as frequently happens, great numbers of birds
of other species gather at the same spot as if a parlia-

3o ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

ment of the feathered nations were being held. Rooks
and crows, both black and hooded, and daws are often
there in hundreds ; lapwings too in hundreds, and
black-headed gulls and starlings and wintering larks,
with other small birds. The geese repose, the others
are mostly moving about in search of worms and
grubs. The lapwings are quietest, inclined to repose
too ; but at intervals they all rise up and wheel
about for a minute or so, then drop to earth again.

As I stand motionless leaning on a gate watching
them, having them, as seen through the glasses, no
more than twenty yards away, I note that for all
their quietude in the warm sleepy sunshine they are
wild geese still, that there are always two or three
to half a dozen who keep their heads up and their
eyes wide open for the general good, also that the
entire company is subject at intervals to little con-
tagious gusts and thrills of alarm. It may be some
loud unusual noise — a horse on the road suddenly
breaking into a thunderous gallop, or the " hoot-
hoot " of a motor-car ; then the enraged scream of a
gull or carrion-crow at strife with his neighbour ;
the sleepers wake and put up their heads, but in a
few moments they are reposing again. Then a great
heron that has been standing motionless like a grey
column for an hour starts up and passes swaying and
flapping over them, creating a fresh alarm, which
subsides as quickly as the first. By-and-by a fresh
flock of geese arrive, returning from some inland
feeding-ground, where the gunners have been after

WELLS-NEXT-THE-SEA 3 1

them, flying high with a great clamour which you
hear before they become visible. Arrived at the
refuge, they wheel round and begin their descent,
but do not alight ; again they rise to circle about
and again descend, and when close to the earth,
every bird dropping his bright-coloured legs to
touch the ground, suddenly they change their minds
and rise to wheel about for a minute or two and then
go right away out to sea.

It was no doubt my presence on several occasions
which prevented them from settling down with the
others ; for it was no harmless shepherd or farm-
labourer which they perceived looked on standing
motionless by the gate watching their fellows, a
suspicious-looking object in his hand. It might be
a gamekeeper or sportsman whose intention was to
send a charge of shot into the crowd. But this
going away of the flock instead of alighting would
prove too much for the others : they would now be
all awake ; the suspicion would grow and grow, every
bird standing up with outstretched neck ; then they
would draw closer together, emitting excited cackling
sounds, all asking what it was — what had frightened
their fellows and sent them away — what danger in-
visible to them had they spied from aloft ? And
then they would spring simultaneously into the air
with a rushing noise of wings and tempest of screams,
and rising high go straight away over the sea, soon
vanishing from sight, only to return half an hour later
and settle down once more in the same green place.

32 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

To the naturalist, to any bird-lover in fact, a large
gathering of big birds is, of all sights, the most ex-
hilarating, especially in this country where the big
birds have been diligently weeded out until few are
left. At Wells I had two matters in my mind to
enhance the pleasure experienced. One was in the
thought of the birds' striking intelligence, as shown
by their changed demeanour during their daily visits
to that camping-spot on the marsh where they relax
their extreme wildness. It is often borne in on me
in observing birds that the position of a species or
family in the scale of nature from the point of view of
the anatomist and evolutionist is not a criterion of
its intelligence. Thus the Anatidae, or ducks, which
in any natural classification would be placed far below
the crows and parrots, are mentally equal to the
highest of the bird order. It was purely the intelli-
gence of these geese which made it possible for me to
observe them so nearly at that spot, which was no
sand-bar with the protecting sea all round it, but a
small space in the very midst of the enemies' country.
It gave me even a higher pleasure to think that
there are still a few great landowners in England, like
the present and the late Lord Leicester, who do not
look on our noble bird life as something to be des-
troyed for sport, or in the interests of sport, until it
has been wiped out of existence. It is not only the
geese which receive protection here. Ducks in thou-
sands are accustomed to winter in the park at Holkham.
All breeding species, from the beautiful sheldrake to

WELLS-NEXT-THE-SEA ft

the small redshank and ringed dotterel, are protected
as much as they can be in a place where every one has
a gun and wants to get something for the pot. In
summer the common and lesser tern have their breed-
ing place on the sand-hills, and a watcher is placed
there to prevent them from being disturbed and
harried by trippers and egg-stealing collectors. One
curious result of the protection given to the terns was
that two or three years ago two pairs of black-headed
gulls started breeding close to them. It was as if
these gulls had observed what was being done and
had said to one another : " This is not a suitable breed-
ing-place for gulls, though a proper one for terns
who prefer sand and shingle ; but what an advantage
to have a man stationed there to protect the nests
from being harried ! Come, let us make our nests
here, just on the border of the terns' gullery, on the
chance of our eggs coming in for protection too."
The experiment turned out well, and last summer
no fewer than sixteen pairs nested and brought off
their young at that spot.

CHAPTER IV
GREAT BIRD GATHERINGS

THIS chapter is nothing but a digression, suggested
by what goes before ; for the subject touched on in
the account of the wild geese on the East Coast is
one which stirs the naturalist and bird-lover deeply
— the delight of witnessing immense congregations
of birds, especially those of large size and noble ap-
pearance. The remembrance of such scenes is a joy
for ever, in many instances clouded by the thought
that the sight which it is a happiness to recall will
be witnessed no more.

Some years ago the distinguished naturalist and
palaeontologist, Mr. Richard Lydekker, went out to
Buenos Ayres to look over and arrange the collection
of tertiary fossils in the famous La Plata Museum.
He had read my Naturalist in La Plata with indus-
trious zeal, quoting from it in rather a wholesale way
when compiling his Royal Natural History. He had
also read Darwin and other naturalists who have
described that same region, and had a hundred things
to look at besides the fossils. One thing he desired to
see was the crested screamer — that great spur-winged
loud-voiced bird which has puzzled zoologists to

34

GREAT BIRD GATHERINGS 35

classify, some thinking it ralline others anserine in
its affinities, while Huxley considered it was related
to the archaeopteryx. Having established himself
on the back of a horse, Mr. Lydekker — a biological
Dr. Syntax of the twentieth century — set out in
quest of this singular fowl, and eventually in some
wild and lonely spot succeeded in catching sight at
a vast distance of a specimen or two. This did not
satisfy him ; he wanted to see the great birds as I had
seen them, when I rode among them across a vast
marshy plain and saw them in pairs and parties, and
in bunches of a score or two to a hundred, like an in-
numerable widely scattered flock of grazing sheep
spread out and extending on every side to the horizon.
And he wanted to hear them as I had heard them,
"counting the hours," as the gauchos say, when at
intervals during the night they all burst out singing
like one bird, and the powerful ringing voices of the
incalculable multitude produce an effect as of thou-
sands and tens of thousands of great chiming bells,
and the listener is shaken by the tempest of sound and
the earth itself appears to tremble beneath him.

All this, our naturalist was informed by persons
on the spot, was pure romance ; no such vast congre-
gations of crested screamers were ever seen, and no
such great concerts were ever heard ; the bird, as
he had witnessed, was quite rare, and so it had always
been.

This vexed him, and he resolved to have it out
with me on his return to England. The castigation

36 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

was to be made in public and the Naturalist in La
Plata to be for ever discredited. Luckily for my
poor little reputation he had made further enquiries
before quitting the country and discovered that I
had told the simple truth, that the screamer, albeit
a very big bird, had been excessively abundant and
in dry seasons often formed the stupendous gatherings
I had described ; finally, that in about a quarter of
a century it had been practically extirpated on the
pampas. All this I had from his own lips on his
return, an almost incredible example of candour, for
it is well known that we naturalists, like the early
Christians, love one another.

Alas ! the crested screamer is but one of many noble
species which have met with the same fate in southern
Argentina. The rhea, the great blue heron, the
flamingo, the wood ibis, and the great blue ibis of
the marshes and the great black-faced ibis of the
uplands with its resounding cries as of giants beating
with hammers on iron plates ; and storks and upland
geese, and the white and the black-necked swans.
Then follow others of lesser size — the snowy egrets
and other herons and bitterns, glossy ibis, rails and
courlans, big and little, the beautiful golden-winged
jacana, curlews and godwits, and waders and ducks
too numerous to mention. They were in myriads
on the rivers and marshes, they were seen in clouds
in the air, like starlings in England when they con-
gregate at their roosting-places. They are gone now,
or are rapidly going. Their destruction was proceed-

GREAT BIRD GATHERINGS 37

ing when I left, hating the land of my birth and the
Italian immigration that was blighting it, wishing
only that I could escape from all recollection of the
scenes I had witnessed — of the very land where I
first knew and loved birds.

How amazing it seems that the chief destroyers
should be the South Europeans, the Latins, who are
supposed to be lovers of the beautiful and who are
undoubtedly the most religious of all people ! They
have no symbol for the heavenly beings they worship
but a bird. Their religious canvases, illuminations,
and temples, inside and out, are covered with re-
presentations of ibises, cranes, pigeons, gulls, modified
so as to resemble human figures, and these stand for
angels and saints and the third person of the Trinity.
Yet all these people, from popes, cardinals, princes,
and nobles down to the meanest peasant on the land,
are eager to slay and devour every winged creature,
from noble crane and bustard even to the swallow
that builds in God's house and the minute cutty
wren and fairy-like firecrest — the originals of those
sacred emblematic figures before which they bow in
adoration !

But it is not the Latins only that are concerned
in this dreadful business ; our race too — a nobler race
as we try to think — at home, in North America,
Africa, and Australasia, have been only too diligently
occupied in exterminating. Let it not be forgotten
that down to 1868, the date of our first wild Bird
Protection Act? the chief breeding-places of our sea.

38 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

birds were invaded every year at holiday time by
train-loads and ship-loads of trippers with guns to
engage in the wholesale massacre of the birds on the
cliffs and the sea. Nor was it confined to the trippers
from London, Manchester, Birmingham, and other
great centres of population ; the fascination of it
drew men of all classes, including those who annually
shot (and even owned) the moors and coverts. For
in June and July the grouse and partridge and pheasant
were not yet ready for killing, and it was great fun
in the meantime to have a few days with the gannets,
terns, kittiwakes, guillemots, and other auks. It was
nothing to them that the birds were breeding, that
the result of this wholesale slaughter would be the
extirpation of the multitudes of sea birds which people
the cliffs before the century was out, since they were
no man's birds — only God's.

Happily there were a few men in England who had
the courage to lift up their voices against this hideous
iniquity, who eventually succeeded in getting an
Act for its suppression. Thus it came about that
our sea birds were saved and we have them still, and
that we were given courage to go on and try to save
our land birds as well.

And with this business we are still occupied, fight-
ing to save our country's bird life from destruction —
how strange that so long and strenuous a fight should
be necessary to secure such an object ! But that it
is a winning fight becomes more evident as the years
go on. There is now a public feeling on our side :

GREAT BIRD GATHERINGS 39

we are not a brutish nation ready to stamp out all
beauty from the earth so long as the killing and stamp-
ing out processes minister to our pleasure or profit.
On the contrary we can affirm that a majority of the
inhabitants of this country are desirous of preserving
its beautiful wild bird life. Those who are on the
other side may be classified as the barbarians of means
who are devoted mainly to sport, and would cheer-
fully see the destruction of most of our birds above
the size of a thrush for the sake of that disastrous
exotic, the semi-domestic pheasant of the preserves ;
secondly, the private collector, that " curse of rural
England " ; and last but not least, the regiment of
horrible women who persist in decorating their heads
with aigrettes and carcases of slaughtered birds. In
the forty odd years that have passed since a first at-
tempt was made to give some protection to our wild
birds much has been done in England ; and happily
in other lands and continents occupied by men of
British race our example is being followed. Would
that the Americans had begun to follow it three
decades sooner, since owing to their tardiness they
have many and great losses to lament. It is not
strange that the crested screamer, with many other
noble species, has quickly been done to death in a
country overrun by Italians, when it is remembered
that in the United States of America the passenger
pigeon, the most abundant species in all that continent,
has been extirpated in very recent times without an
effort having been made to save it. Now that it is

40 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

gone the accounts given by Audubon and Fenimore
Cooper of its numbers when its migrating flocks
darkened the sun at noon read like the veriest fables
— inventions as wild as those of the crested screamer
congregations in my La Plata book, and of the mi-
gration of fishes in the Pacific described by Herman
Melville.

To return to the subject which was uppermost in
my mind when I sat down to write this chapter, or
this digression. It was the peculiar delight produced in
us by the sight and sound of birds, especially those of
large size, in flocks and multitudes. The bird itself
is a thing of beauty, supreme in this respect among
living forms, therefore, as we have seen, the symbol
in art of all that is highest in the spiritual world.
Nevertheless we find that the pleasure of seeing a
single bird is as nothing compared to that of seeing
a numerous company of birds. Take this case of the
wild grey goose — a large, handsome bird, a joy to
look at whether flying or standing motionless and
statuesque with head raised, on the wide level flats
and marshes. But the pleasure is infinitely greater
when I see a flock of a thousand or of two or three
thousands as I do here where I am writing this on the
East Coast. They come over me, seen first very far
off as a black line, wavering, breaking, and re-forming,
increasing like a coming cloud and changing its form,
till it resolves itself into the host of great broad-winged
birds, now black against the pale immense sky, now
flashing white in the sun. I hear them too, even

GREAT BIRD GATHERINGS 41

before they become visible, a distant faint clangour
which grows and changes as it comes and is a beautiful
noise of many shrill and deep sounds, as of wind and
stringed instruments, producing an orchestral effect,
as of an orchestra in the clouds.

What is the secret of the delight which possesses
me at such a spectacle, which seems at the moment to
surpass all other delights, giving me a joy that will
last for days ? It is not merely that the pleasure
in the single bird is intensified, or doubled or increased
a hundred-fold. It is not the same old feeling in a
greater degree ; there is a new element in it which
makes it different in character. The sight dwells
with pleasure on a pleasant landscape ; but if we then
ascend a hill and look upon the scene from that higher
standpoint a quite different feeling is experienced ;
the wider horizon is a revelation of vastness, of a great-
ness which is practically new, since the mind had
previously become attuned to earth as viewed from
the lower level. Now we get the element of sublimity.
So, in the case of the large bird seen in flocks and
vast numbers — seen and heard ; it is a sudden revelation
of wild life in its nobler aspect — of its glorious freedom
and power and majesty.

We get this emotion in various degrees at the
various breeding stations of our larger birds, notably
on the Yorkshire and Northumberland coasts, the
Bass Rock, the Orkneys and Shetlands, and " utmost
Kilda's lonely isle." Those who have experienced
it value it above all the delights this spectacular world

42 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

can afford them, and their keenest desire is for its
repetition. It is to taste this feeling that thousands
of persons, some with the pretext of bird-study or
photography, annually visit these teeming stations
within the kingdom, whilst others who are able to go
further afield seek out the great bird haunts in other
countries.

But the feeling is incommunicable, and is a treasured
memory and secret, a joy for ever in the heart. Those
who do not know it — who have had no opportunity
of finding out for themselves — cannot imagine it.
To these it may seem strange that any man should
turn his back on the comforts of civilised life to spend
long laborious days in dreary desert regions, scorched
by tropical suns, devoured by mosquitoes, wading in
pestilential swamps ; not for sport, the fascination of
which is universally known, but just for the sake of
seeing a populous rookery or congregation of big birds
in their breeding haunts. Those who do know will
bear these discomforts, and even greater ones, for the
sake of that glorious gladness which the sight will
produce in them. This rather than the notes and
bundle of photographs which they bring back is what
they have gone out to seek.

CHAPTER V
BIRDS IN AUTHORITY

I WAS on my way to the West of England, and from
Waterloo for about a hundred and twenty miles
had but one fellow-traveller in the carriage. A man
of a fine presence, about sixty ; from his keen, alert
eyes, hard weathered face, and his dress I took him
to be a sportsman. He very soon let me know that he
was one, as great an enthusiast as one could meet ;
and as he was companionable and we talked the
whole time, I got to know a good deal about him.
Shooting and fishing were his chief pleasures and in-
terest in life : he had followed both from his early
years, in and out of England. For the last ten or
twelve years he had lived at the antipodes, where he
held an important position in one of the colonies ;
but somehow the sports he loved best had not the
same relish for him in that distant country as at home,
and he was accustomed to take frequent and long
holidays to have a month on the moors and in the
coverts and to go on shooting and fishing excursions
to the continent. Wild-fowling was perhaps the
kind of sport he loved best of all, and we soon got on
the subject of wild geese.

43

44 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

That bird was much in my mind at the moment,
for I was just back from the east coast, where I had
been staying with the wild geese, so to speak, at
Wells-next-the-Sea, watching them every day in
their great gatherings and listening to their multi-
tudinous resounding cries, which affect one like bells,
" jangled, out of tune and harsh " it may be, but the
sense of wildness and freedom the sound imparts
is exceedingly grateful.

Some of his adventures among the geese caused me
to remark that, even if I had not long ceased to be a
sportsman, I would never again lift a gun against a
wild goose ; it was so intelligent a bird that it would
be like shooting at a human being. He had no such
feeling — could not understand it. If geese were
more intelligent than other species, that only made
them the better sporting birds, and the pleasure of
circumventing them was so much the greater. There
was nothing better to get the taste of shooting half-
tame hand-fed driven birds out of the mouth than
a week or two after wild geese. He had just had a
fine time with them on the coast of Norway. This
reminded him of something. Yes, the wild goose
was about as intelligent a bird as you could find.
The friend he had been staying with was the owner
of a small group of islands or islets on the coast of
Norway ; he had bought them a good many years
ago purely for sporting purposes, as the geese invariably
came there on migration and spent some time on the
islands. There was one island where the geese used

BIRDS IN AUTHORITY 45

to congregate every year on arrival in large numbers,
and here one autumn some years ago a goose was
caught by the leg in a steel trap set for a fox. The
keeper from a distance saw the whole vast gathering
of geese rise up and circle round and round in a cloud,
making a tremendous outcry, and going to the spot
he found the bird struggling violently in the trap.
He took it home to another and larger island close
by where his master, my informant's friend, had a
farm. From that day the wild geese never settled
on that islet, which had been used as a resting-place
for very many years. The bird he had accidentally
caught was an old gander, and had its leg smashed ;
but the keeper set to work to repair the injury, and
after binding it up he put the bird in an outhouse
and eventually it got quite well. He then pinioned
it and put it out with the other birds. A little while
before the old gander had been caught the foxes
had become so troublesome at the farm that it was
found necessary to secure all the birds every night in
enclosures and houses made for the purpose, and as
the birds preferred to be out the keeper had to go
round and spend a good deal of time every evening
in collecting and driving them in. Now before the
old wild goose had been able to go about many days
with the others it was noticed that he was acquiring
a kind of mastery over them, and every day as evening
approached he began to try to lead and, failing in
that, to drive them to the enclosures and buildings.
The keeper, curious to see how far this would go,

46 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

began to relax his efforts and to go round later and later
each evening, and as his efforts slackened the gander's
zeal increased, until he was left to do the whole work
himself and all the keeper had to do was to go round
and shut the doors. This state of things had now
continued for some years, and the old wild goose was
the acknowledged leader and master of all the birds
on the farm.

The story of this wise gander, its readiness in adapt-
ing itself to a wholly new way of life and in taking in
the situation — the danger by night and need of some-
one in authority over that heterogeneous crowd of birds
who had lost the power of flight, and, from being
looked after, had grown careless of their own safety —
and, finally, the taking of it all on himself, putting
himself in office as it were, may strike us as very strange,
but it agrees well enough with the character of the
bird as we know it in its domestic condition. It is
common to hear of the masterful old gander at farm-
houses, the ruler and sometimes tyrant of the farm-
yard. I have myself observed and have heard of many
instances of long-lasting and exceedingly bitter feuds
between an imperious gander and some other member
of the feathered community, a turkey cock or Muscovy
duck or peacock who refused to be governed by a
goose. But I was specially pleased to have had this
story of the bird in Norway from a sportsman and
enthusiastic wild-fowler, one of the class who do not
like to think too much about the psychology of the
creatures it is their pleasure to follow and destroy.

BIRDS IN AUTHORITY 47

I have also heard of cases of birds of other species
taking on themselves the leadership and guardianship
of their fellows. One from South America relates
to the trumpeter, the strange and delightful Psophia
leucoptera, a quaint, beautiful creature, a little ostrich
in shape, taller than a fowl, very dark, with white
wings, the head and neck glossed with purple and
green. A singular bird, too, in its voice and manner,
when three or four get together and have a sort of
drum and trumpet performance, keeping time to the
music with measured steps and bowings and various
quaint gestures and motions. Alas ! they are delicate
birds, and all the beautiful trumpeters we had some
time ago in the Zoological Gardens are now dead —
to come to life again, let us hope, in their distant home
in some Brazilian forest.

About twenty years ago an American naturalist,
one Dr. Rusby, was in a part of Bolivia where it was
common to keep a pet trumpeter, and he says that
the Spanish settlers almost worshipped them on
account of their amiable and affectionate domestic
habits. Early in the morning the trumpeter would
go into a sleeper's room and salute him on rising by
dancing about the floor, bowing its head and dropping
its wings and tail, continuing the performance until
its presence was noticed and it was spoken to, where-
upon it would depart to visit another bedroom, to
repeat the ceremony there, then to another, until
the whole household had been visited and bid " Good-
morning." Afterwards, when all were up, it would

48 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

attach itself to some one member of the family and
follow him or her about most of the day. The
trumpeter loved and took an interest in every one of
the house, including the stranger within the gates,
but was specially devoted to one or two individuals.

It is right to remember that this beautiful dis-
position of the trumpeter and all its pretty actions
have not been acquired through companionship with
human beings : they are mere survivals of its own
wild life in the forest with its own fellows, and possibly
with birds of other species with which it associates.
At all events, I have heard of cases in which a tame
trumpeter, in a country house in Brazil or Venezuela,
where fowls and birds of various kinds were kept and
allowed to roam about at will, placing himself in
charge of the others, attending them at their feeding-
grounds, keeping watch, giving the alarm at the ap-
proach of danger, and bringing or hunting them home
at roosting-time.

If my reader happens not to be of those who regard
a bird merely as a creature to be taken and destroyed
for man's pleasure or for the decoration of his women,
who like a lovely hat to match the lovely spirit within,
I trust that he will not think that these be tall stories
about a wise grey goose in grey north lands and a
benevolent trumpeter in the tropics, for then he will
perhaps say that the story I have got to tell in con-
clusion is taller still.

It is a common fact in natural history that the males
of certain species exhibit a good deal of anxiety about

BIRDS IN AUTHORITY 49

the proper care of the eggs, and exercise supervision
and authority over the females, compelling them
during the period of incubation to return to the nest
when they are inclined to stay out too long. Our
swift is a familiar example. But has any one ever
observed an individual of any species, one of a colony,
presumably a male, exercising this kind of mastership
over a number of females in the absence of their
mates ? Yet this is exactly what I witnessed on one
occasion, and if I were to ask a dozen or fifty naturalists
to name the species they would all guess wrong, for
the bird in question was the small, delicate, gentle,
moth-like sand-martin — the " mountain butterfly,"
as it is prettily named in Spain.

Near Yeovil I found a breeding-place of these birds
in a vast old sand-pit. It was in May, and no doubt
they were incubating. There were about fifty holes
in the steepest side of the sand-bank, and when I
began watching them there were about fourteen or
fifteen birds flying round and round within the basin
of the pit, hawking after flies, and perhaps prolonging
their play-time after their morning feed. By-and-by
I noticed one bird acting in a singular manner ; I
saw him come out of one hole and go quickly into
another, then another still, until he had visited several,
remaining about five or six seconds in each, or as long
as it would take him to run to the end of the burrow
and return. Finally, having finished inspecting the
holes, he began pursuing one of the birds flying
aimlessly about in the pit ; the chase increased in
4

So ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

speed and violence until the hunted bird took refuge
in one of the burrows. He then started chasing
another of the birds flying about, and in due time
this one was also driven into one of the holes. Then
a third chase began, then a fourth and so on until
every bird had been driven into a hole, always after
a good deal of rushing about, and he remained alone.
After flying up and down a few times he finally flew
off, probably to some water-course or moist meadow
abounding in flies at a distance from the pit, where
he would join the other males of the colony.

I remained for some time on the spot, keeping a
close watch on the little black burrows on the orange-
coloured sand-bank, but not a bird flew or even peeped
out ; nor did any of the absent birds return to the
pit.

Is it a habit of this swallow in the breeding-time for
one male to remain behind when the others go away
to feed, and the females, or some of them, are still
off their eggs, just as, in other species, when the
company settles down to feed or sleep one keeps
awake and on guard ? The action of the swallow
in putting back the others on their eggs strikes one
as a development of some such habit or instinct as
that of the swift, and it is possible that in the sand-
martin the social habit is in a more advanced state
and the communities more close-knit than in most
species. But there is a good deal to learn yet about
the inner life of birds.

Observers of animals are familiar with the fact of a

BIRDS IN AUTHORITY 51

bird of masterful temper making himself head and
tyrant of his fellows, albeit it is less common or less
noticeable among birds that have the social habit
than it is among mammals. It appears to me that
the instances given above are not of this kind. The
spirit, the motive, is different. Here the bird is
seen to take the mastership for the general good,
and we can only suppose that, with or without greater
strength and intelligence than his fellows, he un-
doubtedly possesses a keener sense of danger, or superior
alertness, and a larger measure of that helpful spirit
without which wild animals could not exist in a social
state. The action of the gander and of the trumpeter
in driving their fellows home in the evening must
be regarded as similar in its origin to that of the
male swift when he hunts his mate back to the nest
and of the sand-martin I observed chasing the fe-
males of the colony to their burrows. In a lesser
way it may be seen in any flock of birds ; they move
about in such an orderly manner, springing, as it
appears to us, simultaneously into the air, going
in a certain direction, settling here or there to feed,
presently going away to another distant feeding-ground
or alighting to rest or sing on trees and bushes, as to
produce the idea of a single mind. But the flock is
not a machine ; the minds are many ; one bird
gives the signal — the one who is a little better in his
keener senses and quicker intelligence than his com-
panions ; his slightest sound, his least movement, is
heard and seen and understood and is instantly and

52 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

simultaneously acted upon. So well and quickly is
he understood and obeyed that the fact of his leader-
ship or promptership is difficult to detect. Another
manifestation of this same helpful spirit with which
observers of wild animals are familiar, is seen in the
self-appointed guardian or sentinel of the feeding or
sleeping flock. In some mammals it appears in a
striking way, as in the guanaco on the Patagonian
plains, when one member of the herd ascends a hill
or other high spot to keep watch while his fellows are
browsing on the bushes or grazing on the plain below.
In some birds the watchful spirit is so powerful that
the sentinel and alarm-giver is not satisfied to see
only those of his own species obey his warning ; he
would have every feathered creature within hearing
escape from danger. The curlew is an example and
has been observed by wild-fowlers swooping violently
upon and trying to drive up a duck that had remained
on the ground after all the other birds in the place
had taken flight.

Much more could be said on the subject if there
were not so many others to be dealt with in this
book : probably every wild-fowler, and in fact every
close observer of the actions of birds who reads this
chapter will be able to recall some incident he has
witnessed which illustrates this helpful spirit. But I
cannot conclude before giving one remarkable example
of a bird or of birds making themselves masters of a
flock not with any important purpose as in the fore-
going instances, but purely in play, or for fun. I

BIRDS IN AUTHORITY 53

witnessed this incident many years ago, and told it
briefly in Argentine Ornithology, but that work is
little known and unobtainable, and I am rather pleased
at the opportunity of relating it again more fully
in this place.

The bird was a Vanellus, a lapwing in its shape,
crest, and the colour of its plumage closely allied to
our familiar bird of the moors and pasture-lands, but
a third bigger, with pink beak, crimson eyes, scarlet
spurs on its wings, and bright red legs, and these
touches of colour, " angrie and brave," give it a
strikingly bold appearance. Our green plover is
like a small weak copy of the Argentine bird. The
voice of the latter, too, is twice as loud, and its temper
more jealous and violent. In its habits it resembles
the peewit, but has a greater love of play, which it
practises, both when flying and on the ground. This
play on the ground, called by the natives the bird's
" dance," is performed by a set of three, and is in-
dulged in every day at intervals all the year round.
So fond of it are they that when the birds are dis-
tributed in pairs all over the plains, for some time
before and during the breeding season, one bird may
frequently be seen to leave his mate at home and
fly away to visit another pair in the neighbourhood.
These, instead of rising up with angry screams to
hunt him furiously away from their sacred ground
as they would any other bird, receive his visit with
manifest pleasure, and running to him where he
stands motionless, they place themselves behind him,

54 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

standing abreast, their plumage puffed out, and then
with loud, rhythmical, drumming notes uttered by
the pair, and loud single measured notes by the
leader, they begin a rapid march, stepping in time
to the music ; then, when the march is ended the
leader as a rule lifts his wings and holds them erect,
still emitting loud notes, while the two behind, still
standing abreast with slightly opened wings and
puffed-out feathers, lower their heads until the tips
of their beaks touch the ground, at the same time
sinking their voices until the drumming sound dies
to a whisper. The performance is then over, and is
repeated, or if the visitor is in a hurry he takes his
departure, to rejoin his mate and receive a visitor
himself by-and-by.

One dry summer, long after the breeding-season
was over while out riding I passed by a lagoon, or
lakelet, where the birds from all the plain for some
miles round were accustomed to come to drink, and
noticed a gathering of about a hundred lapwings
standing quietly near the water. It was evident
they had all had their drink and bath, and were drying
and preening their feathers and resting before going
back to their several feeding-grounds. On seeing
them my attention was instantly arrested by the
singular behaviour of two birds, the only restless
noisy ones in that quiet, silent company. It was not a
close company; every bird had a good space to
himself, his nearest neighbour standing a foot or
more away, and right in among them the two restless

BIRDS IN AUTHORITY 55

birds were trotting freely about, uttering loud com-
manding notes, and apparently greatly excited about
something. I had seen nothing like that before, and
it puzzled me to account for their action. By-and-by
there was a fresh arrival ; a lapwing came to drink,
and instead of dropping down on the edge of the
water, he alighted about thirty feet away, at a distance
of two or three yards from the others, and remained
there, standing erect and motionless as if waiting.
The two busy birds, still crying aloud, now made
their way to him, and placing themselves behind him
and observing all the attitudes and gestures used in
their " dances " or marches and giving the signal,
the three set off at a trot" to the sound of drums and
the thirsty bird was run down to the water. He at
once went in to the depth of his knees and drank,
then squatting down, bathed his feathers, the whole
process lasting about half a minute. He would, no
doubt, have taken much longer over his refreshment
but for the two birds who had run him down to the
water, and who continued standing on the margin
emitting their loud authoritative cries. Coming out,
he was again received as at first, and trotted briskly
away with drumming sounds to a place with the
others. No sooner was this done than the two,
smoothing their feathers and changing their notes,
resumed their marching about among their fellows,
until another lapwing arrived, whereupon the whole
ceremony was gone through again.

Without a doubt this performance had nothing

56 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

but play for a motive, the remarkable thing about it
was that it was made to fit so admirably into the
serious business which brought them together at that
spot. They came, one by one, from all over the
plain, at noon on a hot thirsty day, solely for re-
freshment, yet every bird on arrival instantly fell
into the humour of the moment and took his ap-
pointed part and place in the game. It struck me at
the time as a very strange thing, for well as I knew
the bird, I had never witnessed an act precisely like
this before. Yet it does not stand alone, except in
form ; any day and every day we may see acts in
other species of social disposition or habits, which are
undoubtedly inspired by a similar spirit. Little sham
quarrels and flights and chases ; we see them squaring
up to one another with threatening gestures and
language ; playing little practical jokes too, as when
one approaches another in a friendly way and subtly
watches him to snatch a morsel from his beak ; or
when another pretends to have found something
exceptionally good and makes a great fuss about it to
deceive a comrade, and when the other carries the
joke further by capturing and carrying off the bit of
dry stick or whatever it is, and pretending to feast
on it with great satisfaction. These and a hundred
other little playful acts of the kind are common
enough and mingle with and are like a part of the
food-getting or other business of the moment.

The strangeness of the plover's performance was
due to the singular form which play in them almost

BIRDS IN AUTHORITY 57

invariably takes — the military discipline in all their
movements, their drumming sounds and commanding
cries, the tremendous formality of it all ! The two
birds were like little children pretending to be some
mighty personages who owned everything and lorded
it over the others. They were dispensers of the
water of the lake, and were graciously pleased to
allow any thirsty bird that came to drink and bathe,
but only after the proper ceremonies had been per-
formed ; also the drinking and bathing had to be
cut short rather on this occasion.

CHAPTER VI
A WOOD BY THE SEA

ONE of my favourite haunts at Wells, in Norfolk, is
the pine wood, a mile or two long, growing on the slope
of the sand-hills and extending from the Wells em-
bankment to Holkham — a black strip with the yellow-
grey dunes and the sea on one side and the wide level
green marsh on the other. It is the roosting-place
of all the crows that winter on that part of the coast,
and I time my visits so as to be there in the evening.
Rooks and daws also resort to that spot, and altogether
there is a vast concourse of birds of the crow family.
My habit is to stroll on to the embankment at about
three o'clock to watch and listen to the geese on their
way from their feeding-grounds to the sea, always
flying too high for the poor gunners lying in wait for
them. So poor, indeed, are some of these men that
they will shoot at anything that flies by, even a
hooded crow. They do not fire at it for fun — they
can't afford to throw away a cartridge : one of them
assured me that a crow, stewed with any other bird
he might have in the larder — peewit, redshank, curlew,
or gull — goes down very well when you are hungry.
Later I go on to the sea, meeting the last of the
58

A WOOD BY THE SEA 59

fishers, or toilers in the sands, returning before dark ;
men and boys in big boots and heavy wet clothes,
burdened with spades and forks and baskets of bait
and shell-fish. With slow, heavy feet they trudge
past and leave the world to darkness and to me.

On one of these evenings as I stood on the ridge
of the dunes, looking seaward, when the tide was out
and the level sands stretched away to the darkening
horizon, an elderly woman made her appearance, and
had evidently come all that way down to give her dog
an evening run. Climbing over the ridge, she went
down to the beach, where the dog, a big rough-haired
terrier, was so delighted with the smooth sands that he
began careering round her in wide circles at his utmost
speed, barking the while with furious joy. The
sound produced an extraordinary effect ; it was re-
peated and redoubled a hundred-fold from all over
the flat sands. It was my first experience of an echo
of that sort heard from above — perhaps if I had been
below there would have been no echo — but I could
not understand how it was produced. It was not
like other echoes — exact repetitions of the sounds
emitted which come back to us from walls and woods
and cliffs — but was fainter and more diffused, the
sounds running into each other and all seeming to
run over the flat earth, now here, now there, and fading
into mysterious whisperings. It was as if the vigorous
barkings of the living dog had roused the ghosts of
scores and hundreds of perished ones ; that they
had come out of the earth and, unable to resist the

60 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

contagion of his example and the " memory of an
ancient joy," were all madly barking their ghost
barks and scampering invisible over the sands.

The chief thing to see was the crows coming in to
roost from about four to six o'clock, arriving con-
tinually in small parties of from two or three to thirty
or forty birds, until it was quite dark. The roosting-
place has been shifted two or three times since I have
known the wood, and, by a lucky chance, on the last
occasion of their going to a fresh place I witnessed
the removal and discovered its cause. For two evenings
I had noticed a good deal of unrest among the roosting
birds. This would begin at dusk, after they were all
quietly settled down, when all at once there would be
an outburst of loud angry cawings at one point, as
unmistakable in its meaning as that sudden storm of
indignation and protest frequently heard in one part
of our House of Commons when the susceptibilities of
the party or group of persons sitting together at that
spot have been wantonly hurt by the honourable
member addressing the House. It would subside only
to break out by-and-by at some other spot, perhaps
fifty yards away ; and at some points the birds would
rise up and wheel and hover overhead, cawing loudly
for a minute or two before settling down again.

I concluded that it was some creature dangerous to
birds, probably a fox, prowling about among the trees
and creating an alarm whenever they caught sight of
him ; but though I watched for an hour I could detect
nothing.

A WOOD BY THE SEA 61

On the third evening the disturbance was more wide-
spread and persistent than usual, until the birds could
endure it no longer. The cawing storms had been
breaking out at various spots over an area of many-
acres of wood, when at length the whole vast con-
course rose up and continued hovering and flying about
for fifteen or twenty minutes, then settled once more
on the topmost branches of the pines. Seen from the
ridge on a level with the top of the wood the birds
presented a strange sight, perched in hundreds, sitting
upright and motionless, looking intensely black on
the black tree-tops against the pale evening sky. By-
and-by, as I stood in a green drive in the midst of
the roos ting-place, a fresh tempest of alarm broke out
at some distance and travelled towards me, causing the
birds to rise ; and suddenly the disturber appeared,
gliding noiselessly near the ground with many quick
doublings among the boles — a barn owl, looking
strangely white among the black trees ! A little
later there was a general rising of the entire multitude
with a great uproar ; they were unable to stand the
appearance of that mysterious bird-shaped white
creature gliding about under their roosting-trees any
longer. For a minute or two they hovered overhead,
rising higher and higher in the darkening sky, then
began streaming away over the wood to settle finally
at another spot about half a mile away ; and to that
new roosting-place they returned on subsequent
evenings.

It was a curious thing to have witnessed, for one

62 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

does not think of this bird — " Hilarion's servant, the
sage Crow " — as a nervous creature, subject to need-
less alarms ; but a few evenings later I was so fortunate
as to witness something even more interesting. In
this instance a pheasant was the chief actor, a species
the field naturalist is apt to look askance at because
it is a coddled species and the coddling process has
incidentally produced a disastrous effect on our native
wild-bird life. Once we rid our minds of these un-
fortunate associations we recognize that this stranger
in our woods is not only of a splendid appearance, but
has that which is infinitely more than fine feathers —
the intelligent spirit, the mind, that is in a bird.

On a November evening I came out of the wood to
a nice sheltered spot by the side of a dyke fringed with
sedges and yellow reeds, and the wide green marsh
spread out before me. There are many pheasants in
the wood, which are accustomed to feed by day on
the marsh or meadow lands ; now I watched them
coming in, flying and running, filling the wood with
noise as they settled in their roosting-trees, clucking
and crowing. In a little while they grew quiet, and
I thought that all were at home and abed ; but pre-
sently, while sweeping the level green expanse with
my glasses, I spied a cock pheasant about two hundred
yards out, standing bunched up in a dejected attitude
at the side of a dyke and wire fence with a few bramble
bushes growing by it. He looked sick, perhaps suffer-
ing from the effects of a stray pellet of lead in his body
if not from some natural disease. I watched him for

A WOOD BY THE SEA 63

twenty or twenty-five minutes, during which he made
not the slightest motion. Then a blackbird shot out
from the wood, passing over my head, and flew straight
out over the marsh, and, following it with my glasses,
I saw it pitch on the bush near which the pheasant was
standing. The pheasant instantly put up his head ;
the blackbird then flew down to him, and immediately
both birds began moving about in search of food, the
pheasant stepping quietly over the sward, pecking as
he went ; the blackbird making his quick little runs,
now to this side, then to that, then on ahead and at
intervals running back to the other. Presently the
sudden near loud cry of a carrion-crow flying to the
wood startled the blackbird, and he rushed away to the
bush, where he remained perched for about a minute ;
the other was not startled, but he at once left off feed-
ing and stood motionless, patiently waiting till his com-
panion returned to him, and they went on as before.
The pheasant now discovered something to his taste,
and for several minutes remained still, pecking rapidly
at the same spot, the other running about in quest of
worms until he found and succeeded in pulling one out
and spent some time over it ; then came back again
to the pheasant.

During all this time I could not detect any other
birds from the wood, not even a thrush that feeds latest,
on all the marsh ; they were all at roost, and it was
impossible not to believe that these two were friends,
accustomed to meet at that spot and feed together ;
that when I first spied the pheasant, standing in that

64 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

listless attitude after all his fellows had gone, he was
waiting for his little black comrade and would not have
his supper without him.

It was getting dark when the blackbird at length
flew off to the wood, and at once the pheasant, with
head up, began walking in the same direction ; then
running and soon launching himself on the air he flew
straight into the pines.

My experience is that friendships between bird and
bird, if the preference of two individuals for each
other's company can be described by that word, is not
at all uncommon, though I usually find that game-
keepers " don't quite seem to see it." That is only
natural in their case ; it is but a reflex effect of the
gun in the hand on the keeper's mind. Yet one of the
keepers on the estate, to whom I related this incident,
although inclined to shake his head, told me he had
observed a ringed dotterel and a redshank keeping
company for a space of two or three months last year.
It was impossible not to see, he said, what close friends
they were, as they invariably went together even when
feeding with other shore birds. It is a thing we notice
sometimes when the companionship is between two
birds of different species, but it is probable that it is
far more common among those of the same species,
and that among the gregarious and social kinds the
unmated ones as a rule have their chums in the flock.

The friendship I observed between the two birds at
Wells reminded me of the case of a pheasant who had
human friends ; it is the only instance I have met

A WOOD BY THE SEA 65

with of a pheasant being kept as a household pet,
and was related to me by my old friend the late Dr.
Cunninghame Geikie, of Bournemouth, author of
religious books. The bird was a handsome cock,
owned by a lady of that place, who kept it for many
years — he said nineteen, but he may have been mistaken
about the time. The main thing was his disposition,
his affection for his people and the fine courage he dis-
played in protecting them. His zeal in looking after
them was at times inconvenient. He was particularly
attached to his mistress, and liked to attend her on her
walks, and made himself her guardian. But he was
distrustful of strangers, and when she was at home
he would keep watch, and if he saw a visitor approach-
ing the house — some person he did not know — he would
boldly sally forth to meet and order him off the
premises with suitable threatening gestures, which if
not quickly obeyed would be followed by a brisk
attack, the blows, with spurs, being aimed at the
intruder's legs.

CHAPTER VII

FRIENDSHIP IN ANIMALS

SOME lordly-minded person has said that it is a misuse
or an abuse of the word to describe as friendship the
distinct preference for each other's company and
habitual consorting together of two individuals among
the lower animals ; because — this wise man continues
— being lower animals, they cannot rise to the height
of that union between two minds, or souls, common
among men. Where then does the capacity for this
union begin ? for who will venture to say that the
two-legged upright or man-shaped mammalian of
Tierra del Fuego or the Andaman Islands or of the
Aruwhimi forest, is capable of a feeling beyond the
power of elephants, dogs, seals, apes, and in fact of all
other vertebrates — beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes ?
There is no broad line of demarcation between our
noble selves and these our poor relations — even the
wearers of feathers and scales. We have had to learn,
not without reluctance and a secret bitterness, that
even our best and highest qualities have their small
beginnings in these lowlier beings. That union or
feeling of preference and attachment of an individual
towards another of its own or of a different species,

66

FRIENDSHIP IN ANIMALS 67

which I first began to observe in horses during my
boyhood, is, like play, unconcerned with the satis-
faction of bodily wants and the business of self-
preservation and the continuance of the race. It is a
manifestation of something higher in the mind, which
shows that the lower animals are not wholly immersed
in the struggle for existence, that they are capable
in a small way, as we are in a large way, of escaping
from and rising above it. Friendship is in fact the
highest point to which the animal's mind can rise.
For whereas play, which has its origin in the purely
physical state of well-being and in instinctive impulses
universal among sentient beings, does indirectly serve
a purpose in the animal's life, friendship can serve no
useful purpose whatever and is the isolated act of an
individual which clearly shows a perception on his part
of differences in the character of other individuals,
also the will and power to choose from among them the
one with which he finds himself most in harmony.
Furthermore, such friendships do not come into exist-
ence inevitably, or automatically, as the result of a
feeling on the part of an individual : the feeling must
be expressed or exhibited and approaches made.
These may or may not be accepted, since the animal
approached has a will of his own. The result is some-
times a very one-sided friendship, as in the case of an
individual who forms an attachment for another which
is like an infatuation, and who is happy if his presence
is tolerated and who will go on day after day for weeks
and months following the indifferent one about. In

68 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

other cases the advances are resented, and if persisted
in will develop a quite savage animosity in their object,
resulting in bites and kicks or blows with whatever
weapon Nature may have endowed the species.

All these actions may be easily observed in our
domestic animals and are common enough, although
probably not nearly so common in England as in the
pastoral countries where the animals are not housed
and fed but are allowed to lead a semi- independent life.
I have said that I first observed friendship in horses.
We usually kept fifteen or twenty, and as the country
was all open then, our horses did sometimes take
advantage of their liberty to clear out altogether ;
as a rule they kept to their own grazing ground within
a mile or so of home, and when a fresh horse or horses
were wanted some one was sent to drive the troop in.
As a boy who wanted to spend at least half of every day
on horseback I went after the troop very often and
grew to be very familiar with their little ways. There
were always horses in the troop that went in couples,
and who were chums, and inseparable. After one of
a couple had been in use for some hours or for a day,
on being liberated he would gallop off in quest of the
troop and on catching sight of them neigh aloud to
announce his coming. Then his chum would neigh
in response and start off at a trot to meet him, and
meeting him the two would stand for a few moments,
touching noses, which is the horse's way of kissing or
expressing affection. They would then go quietly back
together to the others and begin grazing side by side.

FRIENDSHIP IN ANIMALS 69

This book has birds for its subject, and we shall
get to something about them by-and-by : just now
I want to emphasize the fact of a feeling and union
among animals generally, which is in its nature
identical with what we call friendship in human beings.
The fact is more readily accepted when we treat of
mammals, just because they suckle their young and have
hair instead of feathers to clothe them. We, evolu-
tionists think, were hairy too in our far past, and some
mammals, like ourselves, have lost their hairy cover-
ing. That some animals are capable of a strong
affection for a human being or master is a fact familiar
to every one ; we think instantly of the dog in this
connexion ; the dog is indeed commonly described
as the " Friend of Man," but if the description implies
a superiority in this respect it is certainly unjust to
other species.

An acquaintance of mine keeps a timber wolf as a
pet — the biggest, most powerful, probably the most
ferocious of all the numerous varieties of that terrible
beast. Yet his owner assures me that his wolf is as
much attached to him as any dog could be to a man,
that he would trust him as he would the most in-
telligent, affectionate, and gentlest-mannered dog.
Though so big, this wolf is privileged to lie on the
hearthrug at his feet, and if there are children about
they are permitted to sit on or roll over him, to pull
his ears and open his mighty mouth to look at his
fangs. It is true that the wolf is next door to the dog,
but the fox is not quite so near a neighbour although

70 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

he lives not far off ; he is specialized in a different
direction, and on account of this specialization, of his
nature, his genius, one would hardly suppose him
capable of a very close friendship with a human master.
Let me relate here the story of Peter the fox, for the
truth of which I vouch although I am not at liberty
to give the name and address of its owner.

Peter's mistress is a lady living in a Shropshire
village, and the lady and fox are so much to one another
that they are not happy when apart. When she goes
for a walk or to make a call she takes the fox, just as
Mary took her little lamb, and she laughs at those
who say warningly that a fox makes a dangerous pet ;
that his temper is uncertain and his teeth sharp ; also
that he has an ineradicable weakness for certain things
— things with feathers, for example. Peter, she
affirms, never did and never will do anything he ought
not to do and is moreover the sweetest-tempered and
most affectionate pet that any person ever possessed.

After having had Peter for about a year he vanished
and his loss was a great grief to her, and it was no
consolation to be told by her friends that it was just
what they had thought would happen, that sooner or
later the call of the wild would come and prove irre-
sistible.

One afternoon, when Peter had been gone several
days, she remembered him and was heavy at heart and
it then first came into her mind to try an experiment.
If her fox still lived, she thought, where would he be
but in the wood a mile or so from the village ? There

FRIENDSHIP IN ANIMALS 71

she would go and seek for him. It was near sunset
when she reached the wood, and after making her way
to its innermost part she stood still and raising her
voice to its highest pitch sent forth a loud shrill call —
Peter — Pee-ter — Peee-ter ! and then waited. By-and-
by she heard a sound, and looking in the direction it
came from she spied Peter himself coming towards
her at his topmost speed, making the dead leaves fly
about him with the wind he created ; but when
he got to her there was no touching him, though she
was eager to clasp her dear recovered friend in her arms,
for he was beside himself with joy and could only rush
round and round her in a wide circle and then charg-
ing straight at her leaped clear over her head, and then
again, and then a third time ! This sounds incredible,
but the lady sticks to it that her fox did accomplish
this feat, and says that she was astonished at the sight
of its transports of joy at finding her. Then, when he
had thus worked off his excitement, they went home
together, Peter trotting along at her side and breaking
out from time to time into fresh demonstrations of
delight and affection.

Friendship among birds is less remarked than it is
in mammals, simply, I believe, because their inner
life is less openly revealed to us ; in other words, be-
cause they have wings to fly with, and quicker, brighter,
more variable or volatile minds to match the ae'rial life.
Numbers of species pair for life, including many that
are gregarious ; I take it that in such cases the bond
wjiich unites male and female throughout the year is

72 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

essentially the same as that between two horses, or
goats, or cows, or llamas, or any other species, wild
or domestic, that become attached to one another.
The union is different in origin, but once the sexual
motive is over and done with the life-partners are no
more than friends or chums. Again, birds being so
free and light in their motions do not keep so close
together as mammals do, hence a comradeship between
two in a crowd is not easily detected. We notice and
are arrested by it when a friendship exists between
two widely-different species, as in such cases as those
given in the last chapter of a pheasant and a blackbird,
and of a ringed dotterel and a redshank, and of another
I observed in South America of a lesser yellowshanks
and a pectoral sandpiper who were inseparable, even
when mixed in a flock of their own species.

Cases of birds becoming strongly attached to a
human being are quite common — so common indeed
that any industrious person could compile a volume of
them. One of a pheasant and a lady has been given
in the last chapter and I had set down several more to
relate in this one, but in view of the multiplicity of
subjects, or adventures, to be treated in the book
they must be left out. Or all but one given here for
a special reason. This is the case of a jackdaw which
was found last year, unable to fly, and taken home by
a boy in the village of Tilshead in the South Wiltshire
downs. In a very few days the bird recovered from his
weakness and was perfectly well and able to fly again,
but he did not go away ; and the reason of his remain-

FRIENDSHIP IN ANIMALS 73

ing appeared to be not that he had been well treated
but because he had formed an extraordinary attach-
ment, not, as one would naturally suppose, to the
boy who had rescued and fed him but to another,
smaller boy, who lived in the next cottage ! It was
quite unmistakable ; the bird, free to go away if
he liked, began to spend his time hanging about the
cottage of his chosen little friend. He wanted to be
always with him, and when the children went to school
in the morning the daw would accompany them, and
flying into the schoolroom after them settle himself
on a perch where he would sit until the release came.
But the proceedings were always too long for his
patience, and from time to time he would emit a loud
caw of remonstrance, which would set the children
tittering, and eventually he was turned out and the
door shut against him. He then took to sitting on
the roof until school was over, whereupon he would
fly down to the shoulder of his little friend and go
home with him. In the same way he would follow
his friend to church on Sunday morning, but even
there he could not repress his loud startling caw,
which made the congregation smile and cast up its
eyes at the roof. My friend the vicar, who by the
by is a lover of birds, could not tolerate this, and
the result was that the daw had to be caught and con-
fined every day during school and church hours.

There are three or four more jackdaw anecdotes
among those I am compelled to leave out. No doubt
some species of birds are much more capable of these

74 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

attachments than others : thus, the bullfinch, among
caged birds, is noted for his affectionate disposition
and many instances have been recorded of the bird's
death from pure grief after losing its mistress. The
daw too is a bird of that character, in spite of his
wicked little grey eyes and love of mischief. Probably
he was first called 'Jack on account of his human
qualities ; we might also describe him as the Friendly
Daw.

I have told this story just to show that it is not in
every case, as some imagine, mere cupboard love that
inspires an attachment of this kind.

An even more remarkable case than that of the
daw remains to be told. A friend of mine, an Anglo-
Argentine residing at Buenos Ayres, one day when out
duck-shooting winged a teal, one of a common species
— Querquedula flavirostris. The sight and feel of
the bird when he had it in his hand, its graceful shape
and beautiful plumage and the bright frightened
eyes and beating heart, softened him so that he could
not kill it, and putting it in his bag he took it home ;
and after bandaging the broken wing the best way he
could, he placed the bird in the large courtyard and
supplied it with food and water. In a short time its
wound healed but it did not recover its power of flight
and made no attempt to escape. It became perfectly
tame and would come at call to be fed or caressed.
The strange thing was that although all the people of
the house were interested in the teal and made it a
pet, its whole affection was given to the man who

FRIENDSHIP IN ANIMALS 75

had shot it. To the others it was indifferent, although
they were always in the house taking notice of and
petting it, while this chosen friend was absent on busi-
ness in the city every day from morning to the late
afternoon. The teal would keep near him when he
had breakfast, then accompany him to the door open-
ing out of the courtyard to the street, and having seen
him off she would return to her place and pass her day
in a quiet contented manner as if she had forgotten all
about the absent one. But invariably at about four
o'clock in the afternoon she would go to the open
street door to wait for his return, and if he was an hour
or so late she would sit there the whole time on the
threshold, her beak turned city-wards, to the astonish-
ment of the passers-by. On his appearance she was
all joy and would run to his feet, nodding her head
and flirting her wings and emitting all the quacking
and other curious little sounds the bird uses to express
its happy emotions. Like most teals it is a loquacious
bird, and very excitable. After that the great happi-
ness of the teal was to have permission to sit at his
feet, when he settled himself in his chair to rest and
read. She would actually sit on his foot.

It happened that some years ago I told this story of
the teal in an article in a monthly magazine. My
belief was that it was a very strange story, that the
experience of my Buenos Ayres friend was absolutely
unique — for who would have imagined that any other
person in the world had found a loved and affectionate
pet in a teal, which he had himself shot with the

76 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

intention of eating it ? But I soon received a letter
from a gentleman residing in South Kensington who
said he had read the incident of the teal with astonish-
ment, that it had appeared to him just as if I had taken
an incident which occurred in South Africa, transferred
it to South America, and slightly altering the circum-
stances related the first half of the story. My inform-
ant had been out to The Cape, and while there went
to stay with a friend on his estate. His friend told him
that one day when out shooting he winged a teal and
on picking it up experienced so strong a pang of com-
passion for it that he took it home and set to work to
bind up the wound, intending if the bird recovered
the use of its wings to restore it to liberty. In a little
while the teal became attached to him, precisely as
in the case I had described, and would trot about after
him all over the place just like a little dog. Eventually,
when pairing time came round again the teal flew away
to the marshes, for it had recovered the full use of its
wings, and he never expected to see or at all events to
recognize his quacking little friend again. One day
when out shooting he had his eye on a bunch of teal
flying past at a considerable distance when all at once
one of the birds detached itself from the flock and
came swiftly towards him and pitched at his very
feet ! It was his lost pet, and the teal appeared as
delighted at the meeting as he was. After staying
with him a few minutes expressing its pleasure and
receiving caresses it flew away again in search of its
companions. Since that encounter there had been

FRIENDSHIP IN ANIMALS 77

others at long intervals, the teal always recognizing its
old master and friend at a distance and flying straight
to him, but it had never returned to the house.

One imagines that the two persons concerned in
these incidents, one in South Africa, the other in
South America, cannot now enjoy eating or even
shooting teal as much as they did formerly.

Friendships between bird and bird of the same
species, if we exclude the companionship of such as pair
for life, are exceeding difficult, almost impossible, to
detect for reasons already given. If it were not so we
should probably find as many pairs of inseparables in
any flock of bachelor chaffinches in winter as in a herd
of horses or cattle existing in a semi-feral state.

Another thing to be borne in mind is that it is
possible to mistake for friendship an action which, at
all events in its origin, is of a different nature. The
following cases will serve as illustrations.

One relates to an exotic species, the military starling
of the pampas — a bird of a social disposition, like
most of its family, the Troupials. Breeding over, the
birds unite in large flocks and lead a gipsy life on the
great plains. They are always on the move, the flock
presenting an extended front, the beaks and scarlet
breasts all turned one way, the hindmost birds con-
tinually flying forward and dropping down in or a little
in advance of the front line. It is a pretty spectacle,
one I was never tired of seeing. One day I was sitting
on my horse watching a flock feeding and travelling
in their leisurely manner when I noticed a little dis-

78 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

tance behind the others a bird sitting motionless on
the ground and two others keeping close to it, one on
each side. These two had finished examining the
ground and prodding at the roots of the grass at the
spot, and were now anxious to go forward and rejoin
the company, but were held back by the other one.
On my going to them they all flew up and on, and I
then saw that the one that had hung back had a broken
leg. Perhaps it had not long been broken and he had
not yet accommodated himself to the changed condi-
tions in which he had to get about on the ground and
find his food. I followed and found that, again and
again, after the entire scarlet-breasted army had moved
on, the lame bird remained behind, his two impatient
but faithful companions still keeping with him. They
would not fly until he flew, and when on the wing still
kept their places at his side and on overtaking the flock
all three would drop down together.

The next case is from Penzance and was told to me
when I was staying there. A lady of that town, a
member of one of its oldest and most distinguished
families, is a great bird-lover and feeds the birds during
the winter on her lawn. She noticed that a blackbird
and thrush always came together to the food, and then
that the blackbird fed the other, picking up the morsels
and placing them in its open mouth. In looking more
closely it was discovered that the thrush had lost its
beak : this had been cut off close to the head, pro-
bably by a steel or a sudden-death spring trap, such as
the children in Cornwall commonly use to catch or

FRIENDSHIP IN ANIMALS 79

kill small birds. The bird was incapable of feeding
itself.

Another case of a beakless bird with a friend was told
to me by Mr. E. Selley of Sidmouth, a gardener and
local naturalist. His father kept a magpie in a large
hutch surrounded by wires through which small birds
would pass in to steal the food. Among these was a
robin that had lost its beak in a steel trap ; and this
bird the magpie befriended though he was at enmity
with the others and hunted them out of his house.
The robin with no beak to peck with could only pick
up small crumbs, and the magpie taking a piece of
bread on its perch would pick it into small pieces to
feed the robin. " It sounds like a fairy tale," said Mr.
Selley ; it is however a very credible kind of fairy
tale to those who know a bird.

Yet another case told to me recently by a friend who
was himself a witness to it. A lark was kept in a cage
hanging against the front wall of the house, and it was
noticed that some sparrows had formed the habit of
clinging to the wires and feeding from the seed-box.
To stop this plundering the box was transferred from
the front to the back of the cage, where it was well
out of their reach. Nevertheless their visits continued
and they appeared to be faring as well as ever. With
a little closer watching it was discovered that the lark
itself was feeding them, not by putting the seed into
their beaks but by conveying it from the box to the
other side of the cage-floor where the sparrows could
get at it.

8o ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

I take it that in these instances the act does not pro-
ceed from friendship but from the helping instinct
common in animals of social habits. We know it best
in the large mammals — cattle, swine, peccaries, deer,
elephants, and many more. Even the unsocial cat will
sometimes feed a fellow-cat. In birds it appears to
have its origin in the parental instinct of feeding and
protecting the young from danger. A young bird
that has lost its parents will sometimes find a response
to its hunger-call from a bird stranger, and in some
instances the stranger is of a different species. It may
be noted here that, in some species, the incubating
female when fed by the male reverts to the hunger-cry
and gestures of the young. The cry of distress too in
an old bird, when captured or injured, which excites
its fellows and brings them to its rescue, is like the cry
of distress and terror in the young.

Many other cases one meets with of a close com-
panionship between individuals result from the im-
patience of solitude in a social species. So intolerable
is loneliness to some animals that they will attach them-
selves to any creature they can scrape acquaintance with,
without regard to its kind or habits or of disparity in
size. I remember a case of this kind which was re-
corded many years ago, of a pony confined by itself in
a field and a partridge — a solitary bird who was perhaps
the only one of its species in that place. They were
always to be seen together, the partridge keeping with
the pony where he grazed, and when he rested from
grazing sitting contentedly at his feet. No doubt

FRIENDSHIP IN ANIMALS 81

this companionship made their lonely lives less irk-
some.

Another even stranger case must be told in con-
clusion— the sad case of a lonely swan in search of a
friend, and as it is a story of the " incredible " sort
I am glad I have permission to give the names of the
persons who witnessed the affair. The place is Little
Chelmsford Hall, near Chelmsford, and the witnesses
are Lady Pennefather and her friend Miss Guinness
who resides with her. Near the house there is an
artificial lake of considerable length, fed by a stream
which flows into the grounds on one side and out at
the other. Lake and stream are stocked with trout.
A pair of swans are kept on the lake and three or four
years ago they reared a single young one, which after
some months when it was fully grown they began to
persecute. The young swan however could not
endure to be alone, and although driven furiously off
to a distance a hundred times a day he would still re-
turn. Eventually he was punished so mercilessly that
he gave it up and went right away to the further end
of the lake and made that part his home. About this
time Miss Guinness started making a series of water-
colour sketches at that end of the lake, and her presence
was a happiness to the swan. Invariably on her ap-
pearance he would start swimming rapidly towards
her, then leaving the water he would follow her about
until she sat down to do a sketch, whereupon the swan
would settle itself by her side to stay contentedly with
her until she finished. This went on for five or six
6

82 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

weeks till the sketching was done and Miss Guinness
went away on a visit. Again the poor bird was alone
and miserable until a man was sent to work in the
shrubbery by the lake and at once the swan made a
companion of him ; each morning it would come from
the lake to meet him to spend the whole day in his
company. In due time the work was finished and
the man went away. Once more the swan was miser-
able, and it made the lady of the house unhappy to
see it, so anxious appeared the bird to be with her
whenever she went near the lake, so distressed when
she left it. All at once there was a change in its be-
haviour ; it was no longer waiting and watching for
a visitor to the lake-side and ready to leave the water
on her appearance. It now appeared quite contented
to be alone and would rest on the water at the same
spot for an hour at a time, floating motionless or else
propelling itself with such a slow and gentle move-
ment of its oars as to make it appear almost stationary.
It was an astonishing change but a welcome one, as
the unhappiness of the swan had begun to make every-
body feel bad and now it looked as if the poor bird
had become reconciled to a solitary life. A little later
the reason of this change appeared when the extra-
ordinary discovery was made that the swan was not
alone after all, that he had a friend who was constantly
with him — a big trout ! The fish had his place at the
side of the bird, just below the surface, and together
they would rest and together move like one being.
Those who first saw it could hardly credit the evidence

FRIENDSHIP IN ANIMALS 83

of their own senses, but in a short time they became
convinced that this amazing thing had come to pass
that these two ill-assorted beings had actually become
companions.

How can we explain it ? The swan, we have seen,
was in a state of misery at his isolation and doubtless
ready to attach himself to and find a solace in the com-
pany of any living creature on land or in the water, and
a fish happened to be the only creature there. But

ow about the trout ? I can only suppose that he got
some profit out of the partnership, that the swan when
feeding by the margin accidentally fed the trout by
shaking small insects into the water, and that in this
way the swan became associated with food in what
we are pleased to call the trout's mind. The biologist
denies that it — the poor fish — has a mind at all, since
it has no cortex to its brain, but we need not trouble
ourselves with this question just now. I also think it
possible that the swan may have touched or stroked
the back of his strange friend with his beak, just as one
swan would*caress another swan, and that this contact
was grateful to the trout. Fish have as much delight
in being gently stroked as other creatures that wear
a skin or scales. I have picked up many " wild worms
in woods " and many a wild toad, if wild toads there
be, and have quickly overcome their wildness and made
them contented to be in my hands by gently stroking
them on the back.

The sequel remains to be told. There came to the
Hall a visitor from London, who being a keen angler

84 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

got up very early in the morning and went to the lake
to try and get a trout for breakfast. About eight
o'clock he returned and finding his hostess down
proudly exhibited to her a magnificent trout he had
caught. He had not looked for such a big one, and
he would never forget catching this particular trout for
another reason. A wonderful thing had happened
when he hooked it. One of the swans was there on the
water, and followed the fish up when it was hooked,
and when he drew it to land the swan came out and
dashed at and attacked him with the greatest fury.
He had a good deal of trouble to beat her off ! " Oh,
what a pity ! " cried the lady. " You have killed the
poor swan's friend ! "

From that time the swan was more unhappy than
ever ; the sight of it became positively painful to my
compassionate friends, and by-and-by hearing of an
acquaintance in another part of the country who wanted
a swan they sent it to him.

CHAPTER VIII
THE SACRED BIRD
Phasianus Colcbicus

IT was hardly necessary to add the scientific name
to any British species spoken of as "sacred." Cer-
tainly it is not the ibis and no mistake is possible
seeing that England is not ancient Egypt, or Hindustan,
or Samoa, or any remote barbarous land, where certain
of the creatures are regarded with a kind of religious
veneration. We call our familiar pheasant the sacred
bird to express condemnation of the persons who
devote themselves with excessive zeal to pheasant-
preserving for the sake of sport.

To shoot a pheasant is undoubtedly the best way to
kill it, and would still be the best way — certainly better
than wringing its neck — even if these semi-domestic
birds were wholly domestic, as I am perfectly sure they
were in the time of the Romans who first introduced
them into these islands. I am sure of it because this
Asiatic ground-bird, which in two thousand years has
not become wholly native, and, as ornithologists say,
is in no sense an English bird, could not have existed
and been abundant in the conditions which prevailed
in Roman times. The fact that pheasant bones come
85

86 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

next in quantity to those of the domestic fowl in the
ash and bone pits examined by experts during the
excavations at Silchester shows that the bird was a
common article of food. The country about Silchester
was a vast oak forest at that period, probably very
sparsely inhabited ; a portion of the forest exists to
this day, and is in fact one of my favourite haunts.
The fox, stoat, and sparrowhawk were not the only
enemies of the pheasant then : the wolf existed, the
wild cat, the marten, and the foumart ; while the list
of rapacious birds included the eagle, goshawk, buzzard,
kite, hen-harrier, peregrine falcon, and hobby, as well
as all the species which still survive, only in very much
larger numbers. Then there were the crows : judging
from the number of bones of the raven found at Sil-
chester we can only suppose that this chief and most
destructive of the corvidae was a protected species and
existed in a semi-domestic state and was extremely abun-
dant in and round Calleva — probably at all the Roman
stations. It is probable that a few tame pheasants
escaped from time to time into the woods, also some
may have been turned out in the hope that they would
become acclimatised, and we may suppose that a few
of the most hardy birds survived and continued the
species until later times ; but for hundreds of years
succeeding the Romano-British period the pheasant
must have been a rarity in English woods. And a
rarity it remains down to this day in all places where
it is left to itself, in spite of the extermination of most
of its natural enemies. Unhappily for England the

THE SACRED BIRD 87

fashion or craze for this bird became common among
landowners in recent times — the desire to make it
artificially abundant so that an estate which yielded a
dozen or twenty birds a year to the sportsman would
be made to yield a thousand. This necessitated the
destruction of all the wild life supposed in any way
and in any degree to be inimical to the protected
species. Worse still, men to police the woods, armed
with guns, traps, and poison, were required. Consider
what this means — men who are hired to provide a
big head of game, privileged to carry a gun day and
night all the year round, to shoot just what they please !
For who is to look after them on their own ground to
see that they do not destroy scheduled species ? They
must be always shooting something ; that is simply a
reflex effect of the liberty they have and of the gun in
the hand. Killing becomes a pleasure to them, and
with or without reason or excuse they are always doing
it — always adding to the list of creatures to be extir-
pated, and when these fail adding others. " I know
perfectly well," said a keeper to me, " that the nightjar
is harmless ; I don't believe a word about its swallow-
ing pheasant's eggs, though many keepers think they
do. I shoot them, it is true, but only for pleasure."
So it has come about that wherever pheasants are strictly
preserved, hawks — including those that prey on mice,
moles, wasps, and small birds ; also the owls, and
all the birds of the crow family, saving the rook on
account of the landowner's sentiment in its favour ;
and after them the nightjar and the woodpeckers and

88 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

most other species above the size of a chaffinch — are
treated as " vermin." The case of the keeper who
shot all the nightingales because their singing kept
the pheasants awake at night sounds like a fable. But
it is no fable ; there are several instances of this having
been done, all well authenticated.

Here is another case which came under my own eyes.
It is of an old heronry in a southern county, in the park
of a great estate about which there was some litigation
a few years back. On my last visit to this heronry at
the breeding season I found the nests hanging empty
and desolate in the trees near the great house, and
was told that the new head keeper had persuaded the
great nobleman who had recently come into possession
of the estate to allow him to kill the herons because
their cries frightened the pheasants. They were shot
on the nests after breeding began ; yet the great noble-
man who allowed this to be done is known to the
world as a humane and enlightened man, and, I hear,
boasts that he has never shot a bird in his life ! He
allowed it to be done because he wanted pheasants for
his sporting friends to have their shoot in October,
and he supposed that his keeper knew best what should
be done.

Another instance, also on a great estate of a great
nobleman in southern England. Throughout a long
mid- June day I heard the sound of firing in the woods,
beginning at about eight o'clock in the morning and
lasting until dark. The shooters ranged over the whole
woods ; I had never, even in October, heard so much

THE SACRED BIRD 89

firing on an estate in one day. I enquired of several
persons, some employed on the estate, as to the mean-
ing of all this firing, and was told that the keeper was
ridding the woods of some of the vermin. More than
that they refused to say ; but by-and-by I found a
person to tell me just what had happened. The
head keeper had got twenty or thirty persons, the men
with guns and a number of lads with long poles with
hooks to pull nests down, and had set himself to rid
the woods of birds that were not wanted. All the
nests found, of whatever species, were pulled down,
and all doves, woodpeckers, nuthatches, blackbirds,
missel and song thrushes, shot ; also chaffinches and
many other small birds. The keeper said he was not
going to have the place swarming with birds that were
no good for anything, and were always eating the
pheasants' food. The odd thing in this case was that
the owner of the estate and his son, a distinguished
member of the House of Commons, are both great
bird-lovers, and at the very time that this hideous
massacre in mid-June was going on they were telling
their friends in London that a pair of birds of a fine
species, long extirpated in southern England, had come
to their woods to breed. A little later the head keeper
reported that these same fine birds had mysteriously
disappeared !

One more case, again from an estate in a southern
county, the shooting of which was let to a gentleman
who is greatly interested in the preservation of rare
birds, especially the hawks. I knew the ground well,

90 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

having received permission from the owner to go
where I liked: I also knew the keepers and (like a
fool) believed they would carry out the instructions of
their master. I informed them that a pair of hobby-
hawks were breeding in a clump of trees on the edge
of the park, and asked them to be careful not to mistake
them for sparrowhawks. At the same time I told
them that a pair of Montagu's harriers were con-
stantly to be seen at a lonely marshy spot in the woods,
a mile from the park ; I had been watching them for
three days at that spot and believed they were nesting.
I also told them where a pair of great spotted wood-
peckers were breeding in the woods. They promised
to " keep an eye " on the hawks, and I daresay they
did, seeing that both hobbys and harriers had vanished
in the course of the next few days. But they would
not promise to save the woodpeckers : one of the
under-keepers had been asked by a lady to get her a
few pretty birds to put in a glass case, and the head
keeper told him he could have these woodpeckers.

Did I in these cases inform the owner and the shoot-
ing-tenant of what had happened ? No, and for a
very good reason. Nothing ever comes of such telling
except a burst of rage on the part of the owner against
all keepers and all interfering persons, which lasts for
an hour or so, and then all goes on as before. I have
never known a keeper to be discharged except for the
one offence of dealing in game and eggs on his own
account. In everything else he has a free hand ; if it
is not given him he takes it, and there is nothing he

THE SACRED BIRD 91

resents so much as being interfered with or advised or
instructed as to what species he is to spare. Tell
him to spare an owl or a kestrel and he instantly re-
solves to kill it ; and if you are such a faddist as to
want to preserve everything he will go so far as to
summon his little crowd of humble followers and
parasites and set them to make a clean sweep of all the
wild life in the woods, as in the instance I have de-
scribed. No, it is mere waste of energy to inform
individual owners of such abuses. The craze exists
for a big head of game, or rather of this exotic bird of
the woods, called in scorn and disgust the " sacred
bird " by one who was himself a naturalist and sports-
man ; the owners are themselves responsible for the
system and have created the class of men necessary
to enable them to follow this degraded form of sport.
I use the word advisedly : Mr. A. Stuart- Wortley, the
best authority I know on the subject, an enthusiast
himself, mournfully acknowledges in his book on the
pheasant that pheasant shooting as now almost univer-
sally conducted in England is not sport at all.

One odd result of this over-protection of an exotic
species and consequent degradation of the woodlands
is that the bird itself becomes a thing disliked by the
lover of nature. No doubt it is an irrational feeling,
but a very natural one nevertheless, seeing that what-
soever is prized and cherished by our enemy, or the
being who injures us, must come in for something of
the feeling he inspires. There is always an overflow.
Personally I detest the sight of semi-domestic pheasants

92 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

in the preserves ; the bird itself is hateful, and is the
one species I devoutly wish to see exterminated in
the land.

But when I find this same bird where he exists com-
paratively in a state of nature, and takes his chance
with the other wild creatures, the sight of him affords
me keen pleasure : especially in October and No-
vember when the change in the colour of the leaf all
at once makes this familiar world seem like an enchanted
region. We look each year for the change and know it
is near, yet when it comes it will be as though we now
first witnessed that marvellous transformation — the
glory in the high beechen woods on downs and hill-
sides, of innumerable oaks on the wide level weald, and
elms and maples and birches and ancient gnarled
thorns, with tangle of vari-coloured brambles and ivy
with leaves like dark malachite, and light green and
silvery grey of old-man's-beard. In that aspect of
nature the pheasant no longer seems an importation
from some brighter land, a stranger to our woods,
startlingly unlike our wild native ground-birds in their
sober protective colouring, and out of harmony with
the surroundings. The most brilliant plumage seen
in the tropics would not appear excessive then, when
the thin dry leaves on the trees, rendered translucent
by the sunbeams, shine like coloured glass, and when
the bird is seen in some glade or opening on a wood-
land floor strewn with yellow gold and burnished
red, copper and brightest russet leaves. He is one
with it all, a part of that splendour, and a beautifully

THE SACRED BIRD 93

decorative figure as he moves slowly with deliberate
jetting gait, or stands at attention, the eared head and
shining neck raised and one foot lifted. Many a writer
has tried to paint him in words ; perhaps Ruskin alone
succeeds, in a passage which was intended to be de-
scriptive of the colouring of the pheasants generally.
" Their plumage," he said, " is for the most part warm
brown, delicately and even beautifully spotty ; and in
the goodliest species the spots become variegated,
or inlaid as in a Byzantine pavement, deepening into
imperial purple and azure, and lighting into lustre of
innumerable eyes."

But alas ! not infrequently when I have seen the
pheasant in that way in the coloured woods in October,
when after the annual moult his own colouring is
richest and he is seen at his best, my delight has
vanished when I have lifted my eyes to look through
the thinned foliage at the distant prospect of earth
and the blue overarching sky. For who that has
ever looked at nature in other regions, where this
perpetual hideous war of extermination against all
noble feathered life is not carried on, does not miss
the great soaring bird in the scene — eagle, or vulture,
or buzzard, or kite, or harrier — floating at ease on
broad vans, or rising heavenwards in vast and ever-
vaster circles ? That is the one object in nature which
has the effect of widening the prospect just as if the
spectator had himself been miraculously raised to a
greater altitude, while at the same time the blue dome
of the sky appears to be lifted to an immeasurable

94 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

height above him. The soaring figure reveals to sight
and mind the immensity and glory of the visible world.
Without it the blue sky can never seem sublime.

But the great soaring bird is nowhere in our lonely
skies, and missing it we remember the reason of its
absence and realise what the modern craze for the
artificially reared pheasant has cost us.

CHAPTER IX

A TIRED TRAVELLER

(T urdus iliacus)

IT was fine weather on the morning of the first day of
November on the east coast. Coming out, I looked
for grey clouds travelling before a biting wind, a grey
clammy mist brooding on the flat desolate land, and
found, instead, a clear day without a vapour, the
sun shining very brightly, the air almost still and
deliciously warm. It was, for November, the most
perfect day I could have had for a ramble on the grey
flat saltings between Wells-next-the-Sea and Stifflkey :
they are not as in summer at this time of year, but have
the compensating charm of solitariness. I had them
all to myself on that morning ; there was no sound of
human life except the church bells, the chimes coming
faintly and musically over the wide marshes. Even
the birds were few. From time to time a hooded
or carrion crow flew by with his sullen kra-kra, or a
ringed dotterel started up from a creek or pool before
me and went away with his wild melancholy cry.
Only the larks were singing everywhere about me ;
but it was their winter song — a medley of harsh and
guttural sounds, without the clear, piercing, insistent
95

96 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

summer note ; nor do they rise high at this season, but
after fluttering upwards a distance of forty of fifty
yards drop again to earth.

Seawards I had for horizon the low ridge of the
sandhills overgrown with coarse grey-green grass, and
when on the ridge itself I looked over a vast stretch of
yellowish-brown sand ; for it was low tide, with the
sea visible as a white line of foam and the gleam of
water more than a mile away. Here on the sandy
ridge there is an old sea-ruined coastguard station, and,
coming to it, I sat down on a pile of brushwood at the
side of the half-fallen buildings, and after I had been
there two or three minutes a bird fluttered up from the
grass close to my feet and perched on the wood three
or four yards from me. A redwing ! A tired traveller
from the north, he had no doubt arrived at that spot
during the night, and was waiting to recover from his
great fatigue before continuing his journey inland.
He must have been very tired ro remain by himself
in such beautiful weather at that spot, when, close by
on the further side of the salt grey marsh, the green
wooded country, blue in the haze, was so plainly
visible. For the redwing is a most sociable bird, and
so long as his wings can bear him up he cannot endure
to be left behind. Furthermore, he is exceedingly
shy of the human form, especially when he first arrives
on our shores ; yet here was this shy bird, alone and
sitting very quietly, within three or four yards of me !
Still, it was evident that he was a little troubled at
my presence, a little suspicious, from the way he eyed

A TIRED TRAVELLER 97

me, flirting his tail and wings ; and once or twice,
opening wide his beak, he uttered his alarm-note, a
sound closely resembling the harsh, prolonged cry
of the familiar missel thrush. But these little signs
of alarm were soon over, and he grew quiet, only con-
tinuing to emit his low musical chirp a dozen or more
times a minute.

To me the meeting was a peculiarly happy one, since
if I had been asked to choose a bird, one of our
common winter visitors, to be with me in this
quiet, lonely place, I think I should have said " Let
it be a redwing." He has a special attraction for me
for various reasons. He is, I think, the most charming
of the thrushes, both in shape and colouring. All
of this family are dear to me, and I perhaps admire
the others more — the fieldfare, for instance, the
chattering winter " blue-bird " ; and the missel-
thrush, the loud-voiced storm-cock that sings in wet
and blowy weather in February ; and, above all, the
blackbird, the big, ebony-black thrush with a golden
bill and fluting voice ; but I love the redwing more.
There is a wildness, a freshness, in the feeling he gives
me which may be partly due to the fact that he is not
a cage-bird, that, on this account, there are no degrad-
ing images and associations connected with this species.
It is true that he is a sweet singer, the " Swedish
nightingale " of Linnaeus, but he only sings his full
song with the louder notes at home, in summer, in the
distant north ; and on this account those dreariest
Philistines, the bird fanciers or " aviculturists," as they
7

98 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

are beginning to call themselves, who love a bird
only when they hold it in the hateful cage, the most
iniquitous of man's many inventions, have so far
neglected this thrush. All the images called up by
the redwing, the sight or sound or thought of him,
are of rural winter scenes, and are pleasing, especially
those of the evening gatherings of redwings in copse or
shrubbery ; for, like the linnet and starling, they
love to hold a kind of concert, or grand musical con-
fabulation or corroboree, in which all the birds chirp,
twitter and scream together before settling down to
sleep in the evergreens, which look black in the twilight
against the luminous evening sky. In my case there
are still other associations, for it happens that the
soft musical chirp of the redwing reminds me vividly
of other birds which have a sound resembling it,
birds that were dear to me in my boyhood and youth ;
one a true thrush, another the social military starling of
the grassy pampas and Patagonia. That dark bird
with the scarlet breast and beautiful voice was to me,
in winter time in that distant land, what the redwing
is to many an English boy.

Now as I rested there against the pile of brushwood
on which he sat so near me he continued to emit these
soft low chirping notes or little drops of musical
sound ; and it seemed in part a questioning note, as
if he was asking me what I was ? Why I regarded
him so attentively ? What were my intentions to-
wards him ? And in part it was a soliloquy, and this
was how I interpreted what he appeared to be saying :

A TIRED TRAVELLER 99

" What has come to me — what ails me that I cannot
continue my journey ? The sun is now as high as it
will be : the green country is so near — a few minutes'
flight would carry me across this flat sea-marsh to the
woods and thickets where there are safety and the
moist green fields to feed in. Yet I dare not venture.
Hark ! that is the hooded crow ; he is everywhere roam-
ing about over the marshland in quest of small crabs
and carrion left by the tide in the creeks. He would
detect this weakness I find in me which would cause
me to travel near the surface with a languid flight ;
and if he saw and gave chase, knowing me to be a sick
straggler, my heart would fail and there would be
no escape. Day and night I have flown southwards
from that distant place where my home and nest was in
the birches, where with my mate and young and all
my neighbours we lived happily together, and finally
set out together on this journey. Yesterday when it
grew dark we were over the sea, flying very high ; there
was little wind, and it was against us, and even at a
great height the air seemed heavy. And it grew black
with clouds that were above us, and we were wetted
with heavy rain ; it ceased and the blackness went
by, and we found that we had dropped far, far down
and were near the sea. It was a quiet sea, and the sky
had grown very clear, sprinkled with brilliant stars as
on a night of frost, and the stars were reflected below
us so that we seemed to be flying between two starry
skies, one above and one beneath. I was frightened
at that moving, black, gleaming sky beneath me, and

ioo ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

felt now that I was tired, and when the flock rose
higher and still higher I laboured to rise with it. At
intervals those who were leading uttered cries to pre-
vent the others from straggling, and from far and
near there were responsive cries ; but from the time
that the dark, wetting cloud had come over us I uttered
no sound. Sometimes I opened my beak and tried to
cry, but no cry came ; and sometimes as we flew my
eyes closed, then my wings, and for a moment all
sensation was lost, and I would wake to find myself
dropping, and would flutter and struggle to rise and
overtake the others. At last a change came, a sudden
warmth and sense of land, a solid blackness instead of
the moving, gleaming sea beneath us, and immediately
we dropped earthwards like falling stones, down into
the long grass by the shore. Oh, the relief it was to
fold my wings at last, to feel the ground under me, the
close, sheltering stems round and over me, to shut
my tired eyes and feel no more !

" When morning came, the cries of my fellows woke
me : they were calling us up and going away over the
marshes to the green country ; but I could not follow
nor make any response to their calls. I closed my eyes
again, and knew no more until the sun was high above
the horizon. All were gone then — even my own
mate had left me ; nor did they know I was hidden
here in the grass, seeing that I had not answered to
the call. They thought perhaps that I had fallen out
a long way back, when the rain oppressed and drove
us down and when probably other members of the

A TIRED TRAVELLER 101

flock dropped exhausted into the sea. They could
not remain here in this treeless exposed place, where
the water is salt and there is little food to find. I was
looking for something to eat at the roots of the grasses
when this man appeared and caused me to flutter up
to my perch. Had this strange weakness not been in
me I should have rushed away in the greatest terror
on seeing him so near ; for we are exceedingly shy of
man, fearing him even more than hawk or hooded
crow. But my weakness would not allow me to fly,
and now I have lost my fear, for though he continues
to watch me it is plain that he has no intention of
harming me."

Having finished this little rambling talk to himself,
a review of his late experiences and present condition,
he once more attempted to fly, but settled again on a
stick not twenty yards away, and there he appeared dis-
posed to stay, his head well drawn in, the beak raised,
his bright eyes commanding a view of the wide sky
above. He would be able to see a flock of passing red-
wings and call to them, and if the feeble sound reached
them it would perhaps bring them down to have
speech with and cheer him in his loneliness. He would
also be able to catch sight of a prowling crow coming
his way ; for he feared the crow, knowing it for an
enemy of the weak and ailing, and would have time
to hide himself in the long grass.

There I left him, going away along the shore, but an
hour or two later I returned to the same spot, coming
over the wide sands, and lo ! where I had left one red-

102 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

wing there were now two. One flew wildly away at
my approach to a distance of eighty or a hundred
yards before alighting again ; the other remained,
and when I drew near it again moved on its perch,
a little alarmed as at first, flirting its wings and tail
and once uttering its call note ; and then, recovering
from its fear, it began uttering little chirps as before.
Those tender little musical sounds, reminiscent of
vanished days in distant lands, were somewhat sad,
as if the bird complained at being left alone. But his
mate had not forsaken him after all, or perhaps she had
gone on with the others and then returned to look for
him at the last roosting-place.

Having found my bird, I determined to make the
most of our second meeting. I had never had an
opportunity of looking at a redwing so closely before
in such a favourable light, and, seeing it in that way,
I found it a more beautiful bird than I had thought
it. Perched at a height of above five feet, it was seen
against the pale sky in that soft sunlight, pale but
crystal clear, and its eyes and every delicate shade in
its colouring were distinctly visible. The upper
parts were olive-brown, as in the throstle, but the
cream-coloured band over the large dark eye made it
very unlike that bird ; the dark spotted under-parts
were cream-white, tinged with buff, the flanks bright
chestnut-red. I could not have seen it better, nor so
well, if I had held it dead with glazed eyes in my hand ;
but the dead bird, however brilliant in its colours it
may be, I cannot admire. It is beautiful nevertheless,

A TIRED TRAVELLER 103

it may be said, because of the colour and the form. Ah
yes, but it is dead, and what I see and hold is but the
case, the habit, of the living, intelligent spirit which
is no more. This gold-red hair, which sparkles like
gold in the sunlight when I hold it up, which was
exceedingly beautiful when it glorified the head of
one that has vanished — this hair is not now beautiful
to me but only ineffably sad. Yet I would not grieve
at the thought that the lovely children of the air must
cease to live, that their warm, palpitating flesh so
beautifully clothed with feathers must be torn and
devoured ; or that they must perish of hunger and
cold when the frost has its iron grip on the earth ; or
fall by the way or on the wide sea, beaten down by
adverse bitter winds and rain and sleet and snow.
Indeed, I would grieve at no natural ending of life,
however premature or painful or tragical it might
appear, nor think of death at all ; rather I would re-
joice with every breath in ail this abounding wonder-
ful earthly life in which I have a share. It only grieves
me and darkens my mind to think that man should
invent and practise every conceivable form of perse-
cution and cruelty on these loveliest of our fellow-
beings, these which give greatest beauty and lustre
to the world ; and, above all cruelties, that they
should deprive them of their liberty, that which
sweetens life and without which life is not life.

CHAPTER X
WHITE DUCK

THE green colour of earth is pale in this March month
to what it will be a few weeks hence ; nevertheless
on this evening, a fortnight before the first day of
spring, after a long day spent sauntering in quiet places
in this Norfolk land, I seem to have been living in the
greenest of worlds. Grass and the colour of it is so
grateful to me, and even necessary to my well-being,
that when removed from the sight of it I am apt to fall
into a languishing state, a dim and despondent mind,
like one in prison or sick and fallen on the days

Which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmerings and decay*.

How good for mind and body, then, to be abroad at
this time when the increasing power of the sun begins
to work a perceptible change in the colour of earth !
How natural that at such a season, just at the turn of
the year, I should take an entire day in the fields solely
to look at the grass, to rejoice in it again after the long
wintry months, nourishing my mind on it even as
old King Nebuchadnezzar nourished his body ! The
sight of it was all I went for, all I wanted, and what-
104

WHITE DUCK 105

ever I saw besides pleased me only because it formed
a suitable background, or made it seem brighter by
contrast or served in some way to set it off. Old red-
brick farmhouses, seen at a distance, nestling among
evergreen and large, leafless trees, in many cases the
deep, sloping roofs stained all over with orange-coloured
lichen ; quiet little hamlets too, half hidden beneath
their great elms as under a reddish purple cloud ; the
endless grey winding road, with low thorn hedges on
either side winding with it, leafless and a deep purple
brown in colour except where ivy had grown over and
covered them with dark green brown-veined leaves
silvered with the sunlight. A hundred things besides
— red cows grazing on a green field, a flock of starlings
wheeling about overhead and anon dropping to the
earth ; gulls, too, resting in another field, white and
pale grey, their beaks turned to the wind : they were
like little bird-shaped drifts of snow lying on the green
turf, shining in the sun. For all day long the weather
was perfect — a day of soft wind and bright sunshine
following a spell of cold, rough weather with flooding
rains ; a soft blue sky peopled with white and pale grey
clouds travelling before the wind.

And seeing these things — seeing and forgetting as
one sees whatever comes into the field of vision when
eyes and mind are occupied with some other thing —
the time went on until a little past noon, when I
suddenly came upon a new sight which gave me a thrill
and hold me, and after I had passed on would not
allow me to drop it out of my mind. All the objects

io6 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

I had seen that day, the lichened farmhouses and
grey barns, trees and roads and purple hedges, red and
black cows in a green field, and gulls and rooks and
distant low hills and pine-woods, with many more,
had appeared to me but as a fringe and small parts of
an irregular scattered pattern on the green mantle of
earth. This new sight was of a different order, for it
took me out of my spring-grass mood, and the green
mantle which had seemed the chief thing was now but
a suitable setting to this lovely object.

This, then, is what I saw. In the middle of a green
pasture I came on a pool of rain-water, thirty or forty
feet long, collected in a depression in the ground, of
that blue colour sometimes seen in a shallow pool in
certain states of the atmosphere and sunlight — an
indescribable and very wonderful tint, unlike the
blue of a lake or of the deep sea, or of any blue flower
or mineral, but you perhaps think it more beautiful
than any of these ; and if it must be compared with
something else it perhaps comes nearest to deep sap-
phire blues. When an artist in search of a subject
sees it he looks aside and, going on his way, tries to
forget it, as when he sees the hedges hung with spider's
lace sparkling with rainbow-coloured dewdrops, know-
ing that these effects are beyond the reach of his art.
And on this fairy lake in the midst of the pale green
field, its blue surface ruffled by the light wind, floated
three or four white ducks ; whiter than the sea-gulls,
for they were all purest white, with no colour except
on their yellow beaks. The light wind ruffled their

WHITE DUCK 107

feathers too, a little, as they turned this way and that,
disturbed at my approach ; and just then, when I
stood to gaze, the sun shone full out after the passing
of a light cloud, and flushed the blue pool and floating
birds, silvering the ripples and causing the plumage
to shine as if with a light of its own.

" I have never seen a more beautiful thing ! " I
exclaimed to myself ; and now at the end of the long
day it remains in my mind, vividly as when I looked
at it at that moment when the sunbeams fell on it,
and is so persistent that I have no choice but to write
it down. The beauty I saw was undoubtedly due
to the peculiar conditions — to the blue colour of the
water, the ruffling wind, the whiteness of the plumage,
and the sudden magic of the sunlight ; but the effect
would not have been so entrancing if the floating birds
had not also been beautiful in themselves — in shape
and in their surpassing whiteness.

Now I am quite sure the reader will smile and per-
haps emit the sound we usually write pish — a little
sibilant sound expressing contempt. For though he
will readily admit that the sun beautifies many things,
he draws the line at a duck — the common domestic
one. Like all of us, he has his prepossessions and can't
get away from them. Every impression, we are told
by Professor James, no sooner enters the consciousness
than it is drafted off in some determinate direction,
making connection with the other materials there,
and finally producing a reaction. In this instance the
impression is the story of a duck described as beautiful,

108 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

the reaction an incredulous smile. The particular
connections it strikes into are determined by our past
experiences and the association of the present im-
pression with them. The impression arouses its old
associates ; they go to meet it ; it is received by them,
and rearranged by the mind. It is the fate of every
impression thus to fall into a mind preoccupied with
memories, ideas, and interests. This mental escort
is drawn from the mind's ready-made stock. Our
philosopher adds : " In all apperceptive operations
of the mind a certain general law makes itself felt —
the law of economy. In admitting a new experience
we instinctively seek to disturb as little as possible
the pre-existing stock of ideas."

All this is illuminating and helpful, since it enables
me to see into my smiling reader's mind and to indulge
in a smile on my part. For with what in this case
will the object described (a white duck) connect itself ?
What are the memories, ideas, interests, already in
stock, which will be its associates and form its escort
and take it in ? They are of the duck as he has seen,
eaten, and known it all his life — the familiar duck of
the farmyard, a heavy bird that waddles in its walk
and is seen dibbling in horse-ponds or in any mud-
puddle. It is the bird which the hen-wife fattens for
the market while her husband is fattening the pigs.
If any pleasing memories or associations connect them-
selves with it they are not of an aesthetic character :
they refer to the duck without its feathers, to its smell
and taste when eaten with green peas in their season.

WHITE DUCK 109

If I am asked how I escaped from these inconvenient,
not to say degrading, associations, the only answer
would be that associations of another kind were prob-
ably formed at some early period. Perhaps when
my infant eyes began to look at the world, when I
had no stock of ideas, no prepossessions at all, except
with regard to milk, I saw a white duck and was de-
lighted at it. In any case the feeling for its beauty goes
far back. I remember some years ago when strolling
by the Itchen I stood to admire a white duck floating
on the clear current where it is broad and shallow
and where the flowering wild musk was abundant.
The rich moist green of the plant made the white
plumage seem whiter, and the flowers and the duck's
beak were both a very beautiful yellow. " If," thought
I, " the white duck were as rare in England as the
white swallow, or even the white blackbird, half the
inhabitants of Winchester would turn out and walk
to this spot to see and admire so lovely a thing."

Many and many a time have I stopped in my walk
or ride to admire such a sight, but the white ducks
seen to-day, floating, sun-flushed, on a blue pool in
a green field, had a higher loveliness, a touch of the
extra-natural, and served to recall an old tradition
of a primitive people concerning the country of the
sky, where the dead inhabit, and all trees and flowers
abound as on earth, and all animals and birds, including
ducks, but more beautiful than here below. Every
one may know that the country is there because of the
blueness ; for the air, the void, has no colour, but all

i io ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

matter seen at a distance appears blue — water and
trees and mountains ; only the sky country is at so
vast a distance that we see nothing but the blue colour
of it. But there are openings or windows in the great
plain, and these are the stars, and through these win-
dows the clear, brilliant light of that country shines
down on us when it is dark.

How do the dead get there — flying like soaring
birds, up, up, up, until they come to it ? They can
certainly fly like birds, but no high-soaring bird and
no disembodied spirit can rise by flying to so immense
a height; yet when men die they have no thought
and desire but for that country, and have no rest or
pleasure here, but roam up and down the earth, flying
from the sight of human beings, even of their nearest
relations and friends, because they are now invisible
to mortal eyes, and to find themselves unrecognised
and unheard when they speak and no longer re-
membered is intolerable to them. Therefore, by day,
when people are abroad, they fly to forests and unin-
habited places, where they lie, but at night they come
forth to range the earth in the form of owls and night-
jars and loons and rails and all other wandering night-
birds with wild and lamentable voices. Night by
night they wander, crying out their misery and asking
of those they meet to tell them of some way of escape
from earth so that they might come at last to the
country of the dead ; but none can tell them, for they
are all in the same miserable case, seeking a way out.
But at last, after months and perhaps years, they come

WHITE DUCK in

in their wanderings to the end of the earth and the
stupendous walls and pillars of stone which hold up
the immense plain of the sky ; there they eventually
discover some way by which to ascend and reach that
happy country which is their home.

It was not always so ; once the passage from earth
to heaven was comparatively an easy one ; there was
a way then known to every one, dead or living, in the
world. It was a tree growing on the river-bank, so
high that its topmost branches reached up to heaven.
Imagine what a tree that was, its buttressed trunk so
big round that a hundred men with arms outspread
and hands touching could not have spanned it ! There
was ample room under the shade of its lower branches
for the entire nation to gather and sit at meat, every
one in his place. On higher branches great birds had
their nesting-places, and higher still other great birds,
eagles and vultures and storks, might be seen soaring
skywards, circling upwards until they appeared like
black specks in the blue, but beyond these specks the
tree rose still until it faded from sight and mixed itself
with the universal blue of heaven. By this tree the
dead ascended to their future home, climbing like
monkeys, and flitting and flying like birds from branch
to branch, until they came to the topmost branches
and to an opening in the great plain, through which
they passed into that bright and beautiful place.

Unhappily this tree fell a long time ago — oh, a very
long time ago ! If you were to range the whole earth
in search of the oldest man in it, and at last discovered

ii2 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

him sitting in his cabin, bent down like a dead man,
with his clawlike fingers clasped together on his knees,
his brown face covered with a hundred wrinkles,
his hair white, and his eyes turned white too with
blindness, and asked him of the tree, he would say that
it fell before his time, a long time before, perhaps
in his grandfather's or great-grandfather's time, or
even before then. And this is how it fell — it is surely
one of the saddest chapters in the history of the world !
It came to pass that an old and evil-tempered woman
died, and, going to the tree, in due time reached the
sky, and was happy to find herself at last in that bright
and beautiful place. She was very hungry after her
long journey and climb, and, making inquiry of those
she met, they told her very pleasantly that the readiest
way to procure food was to catch some fish in one of
the lakes close by. They also gave her a rod and line
and directed her to the nearest lake. Away she went,
pleased with herself and everything, her mouth water-
ing at the thought of those green-and-blue and red-and-
yellow little fishes which were easy to catch and de-
licious to eat. It was a small round lake of clear water,
about a mile in circumference, to which she had been
directed, and on approaching it she saw that a good
number of persons were there standing, rod in hand,
on the margin. One of the anglers, happening to turn
his head, caught sight of the old woman hurrying down
to them, and to have a little fun he cried out to those
near him : " Look ! here comes an old woman, just
arrived, to fish ; let's close up and say there is no

WHITE DUCK 113

room for another here and have a laugh at her ex-
pense."

Here the reader must be told that the part of a man
which survives death is in appearance the exact coun-
terpart of the man when alive. To mortal eyes he is
invisible, being of so thin a substance ; but the dead
and immortal see him as he was, young or old and ugly,
with his grey hair and wrinkles and every sign of
suffering and care and passion on his countenance.
And as with the face and the whole body so it is with
the mind : if it has been evil, full of spite and malice,
it is so still. But he must be told, too, that this state
is not permanent, for in that bright and buoyant
atmosphere it is impossible for the marks of age and
misery to endure ; they fade out as the easy, happy
existence finds its effect ; they grow youthful in ap-
pearance once more ; and the change is also in the
mind. The old woman had, alas ! not been long
enough in that happy land for any change to have
taken place in either her appearance or her spiteful
temper.

That was how the people by the lake no sooner
beheld the newcomer than they knew her for what she
had been, and was still — a spiteful old woman; and
being of a merry disposition they were only too ready
to take part in the joke. As she drew near they closed
up and cried out : " No room for another fisher here ;
go further on and find yourself a place."

On she went ; but those who were further up saw
what the fun was, and they too in their turn cried :
8

ii4 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

" No room, no room here, old woman ; go a little
further on." And she went on, only to be sent further
still, until she had gone all the way round the lake
and was back at the spot where she had started where
she was received with a shout of laughter and the cry
of " No room here, old woman."

Then in a rage she flung the rod down, and, cursing
the people for making a fool of her, she fled from their
laughter ; and, arrived back at that very opening
through which she had climbed into heaven, she cast
herself down on the upper branches of the great tree
and began her long descent to earth again. She alone
of all the dead who had reached that country turned
her back on it and returned to this world, to our ever-
lasting sorrow. Arrived at the earth, and mad with
rage and the desire of revenge, she turned herself into
a huge water-rat, a creature found by that river, a rat
as big as a retriever dog, with four great teeth, hard
and sharp as steel chisels, two in the upper and two
in the lower jaw. Making herself a den at the roots
of the mighty tree, she began gnawing the wood, work-
ing day and night for many, many days, and for months
and years ; and if ever she grew tired of her huge task
she thought of the indignity she had suffered and of
the mocking laughter of the people by the lake, and was
roused to fresh fury and continued exertions. In
this way the great roots and lower part of the trunk
were riddled through and through and hollowed out.
Nor was it known to any one what the malignant old
woman was doing, since the vast quantities of wood

WHITE DUCK 115

which she threw out were carried away by floods and
the current of the great river. Thus even to the end
did her evil spirit sustain her, and the tree bent and
swayed in the mighty wind, and at last fell with a noise
as of many thunders, shaking the world with its fall,
and filling all its inhabitants with terror. Only when
they saw the tree which had stood like a vast green
pillar reaching to the sky lying prone across the world
did they know the dreadful thing which had been done.

So ended that great tree named Caligdawa ; and so
ends my story, originally taken down from the lips
of wise old men who preserved the history and tradi-
tions of their race by a missionary priest and read by me
in my early youth in the volume in which he relates it.

But I will venture to say that the story has not
been dragged in here ; I had no thought of using it when
I sat down this evening to write about a white duck.
That vision of the sunlit, surprisingly white, yellow-
billed ducks floating on the wind-rippled blue pool —
for it was like a vision — had to be told ; but how,
unless I said that it was like a glimpse into some un-
earthly place where all things are as on earth, only
more beautiful in the brighter atmosphere ? My blue
pool with white birds floating on it, in a spring-green
field, blown on by the wind and shone on and glorified
by the sun, was like a sudden vision, a transcript of
that far-up country.

And now, just at the finish, another chance thought
comes to help me. The thought has, in fact, been
stated already when I said that half the inhabitants of

n6 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

Winchester would turn out to gaze at and admire the
white duck seen by the Itchen if white ducks were
rare as white swallows in the land. How many things
which are beautiful seem not so because of their com-
monness and of the uses to which they are put ! What
comes now to help me is the memory of a matter in
old English history. Close upon a thousand years
ago there lived a very beautiful lady of whom little
is known except that she was an earl's daughter, and
that the young king, who had a passion for beauty ex-
ceeding that of all men, even in those wild and violent
times, loved and made her his queen. After bearing
him a son, who was king too in his time, she died,
to England's lasting sorrow. And she was known
throughout the realm as the White Duck, on account
of her great beauty. We can only suppose that at
that distant period the white duck was a rarity in
England, therefore that those who saw it looked with
concentrated attention at it as we look at any rare and
lovely thing — a kingfisher, let us say — and were able
to appreciate its perfect loveliness.

CHAPTER XI
AN IMPRESSION OF AXE EDGE

THE ornithologists of to-day are a somewhat numerous
tribe, including persons of varied tastes, habits, am-
bitions, and, above everything, means. Among them
are a few fortunate individuals whose object in life is
to seek out the least familiar species, the rarest in
the land or the most local in their distribution, or
most difficult to get at and observe closely. Many
of us would like to do our birding in that way, but few
are free to take the whole year for a holiday, to travel
long distances, to spend days, weeks, months in the
quest — just to see and study some bird in its haunts
— a pine forest in Rothiemurchus or some such " vast
contiguity of shade," or a beetling cliff on the coast
of Connemara, or a boggy moor or marsh in the Shet-
lands or Orkneys, or in " utmost Kilda's lonely isle."
They must be young, or, at all events, physically
tough, and unless they can make it pay by procuring
specimens for their numerous friends (dealers and
collectors all) they must have money enough to exist
without work. These being the conditions, it is
not strange that this wide-wandering, perpetual-
holiday band should, if we exclude the suspects, be
117

n8 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

a small one and as enthusiastic in their pursuit as other
open-air men are apt to be about hunting the fox,
golfing, fishing, cricketing, shooting, motoring, and
other forms of sport.

Call them sportsmen, ornithologists, or bird-lovers
pure and simple, I envy them their magnificent freedom
and could ask for no happier life than theirs. It is
like that of the person whose delight is in anthropology
in passing from land to land, seeing many and various
races of men, visiting remote districts whose inhabitants
through long centuries of isolation have preserved the
features and mental characteristics of their remote
progenitors. To pursue wild birds in that way — to
follow knowledge like a sinking star, to be and to
know much until I became a name for always wander-
ing with a hungry heart — that was my one desire ; but
alas ! it was never in my power. Compared with the
disencumbered ones I am like an ordinary man, walk-
ing on the earth, to men of lighter bodies and nimbler
minds who have found out how to fly and are like
birds chasing birds.

Nevertheless there are compensations. The very
restraints which annoy us may not be without their
advantages. The rare experience of finding myself at
last in the presence of some long-v/ished-for bird,
comparing it with its imaginary mental portrait and
with the mental images of its nearest relations, and
finally of being able to add this one new portrait to the
gallery existing in the mind — my best possession and
chief delight — perhaps affords me a keener pleasure

AN IMPRESSION OF AXE EDGE 119

than can be experienced by the man of unlimited
opportunities. My humbler triumph is like that of
the lover of literature of small means, who from time
to time, by some lucky chance, becomes the possessor
of some long-desired book. For how much greater
is his joy in fingering and in reading it than the wealthy
owner of a great library can know ? It is true the
poor book-lover dreams of better things : more leisure
to hunt, more money to buy — a legacy perhaps from
some kindly being he knows not of, which will enable
him to grasp greater prizes than have ever come in his
way. So with me : year by year I dream of longer
journeys into remoter and wilder places in search of
other charming species not yet seen in their native
haunts. And that was my dream last winter — it
always is my dream — which, when summer came
round, found its usual ending. The longer journey
had to be postponed to another year and a shorter one
taken ; so it came about that I got no further than
the Peak district, just to spend a few weeks during the
breeding season with half a dozen birds, all familiar
enough to most ornithologists, but which are not
found, at all events not all together, nearer to London
than the Derbyshire hills.

Axe Edge, where I elected to stay, is not the highest
hill in that part, being about eighteen hundred feet
above the sea, whereas Kinder Scout rises to quite two
thousand ; but I found it high enough for one who
modestly prefers walking and cycling on the level
ground. And here I found what I wanted — the bird

120 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

life peculiar to the district — grouse, curlew, golden
plover, snipe and summer snipe, water and ring ouzel.
The unlovely town of Buxton is close by, set in a
hollow in the midst of monstrously ugly lime works.
The little town is also much tortured with motor cars
and is blown on with stinging, suffocating white dust.
Happily I was soon off the hated limestone, settled in
one of the poor little stony farmhouses in a hollow or
valley-head on the adjacent hill, the whole central part
of which forms a vast moor or tableland, broken at
the borders and cut through with ravine-like valleys,
or cloughs with steep rocky sides and rushing burns
below, the beginnings of the Wye, the Dove, the Dane,
and the Goyt rivers. From Axe Edge on one side you
look down on Buxton and the hilly limestone country
beyond — a naked ugly land with white patches show-
ing everywhere through the scanty grass covering.
From this prospect of scabby or leprous-looking hills
one turns with unspeakable relief to the immense table-
land of Axe Edge, where you are off the lime on the
grit-stone formation, harsh and desolate in aspect,
but covered with a dense growth of heather, bilberry,
and coarse bog grasses — a habitation of birds.

Few persons live on this high moor ; the farms are
not visible until you get to the edge of it and can look
down on the slopes below and the valleys, where the
small cottage-like stone farmhouses are seen sprinkled
over the earth, each with its few little green fields
walled round with stone. They are the meanest-look-
ing, most unhomelike farms you will find in England,

AN IMPRESSION OF AXE EDGE 121

for they have no gardens, few or no shade trees, and
there is no sign of cultivation anywhere. From one
side, looking towards Leek, I counted twenty-six farms,
and at not one of them did they grow a potato or a
cabbage or a flower ; and if you go all round the hill
you could count two or three hundred farms like these.
Each one has its stone-fenced fields, on which a few
cows feed, and, if the summer is not too cold, a little
hay is made for the winter. It is all the cattle get,
as there are no roots. The sheep, if any are kept, are
up on the moor, a long-woolled, horned animal with
black spotted face and looking all black from its habit
of lying in the peat holes. They are not in flocks and
are not folded, but live on the moor in small parties
of two or three to half a dozen. The farmers depend
mainly on their lean ill-fed cows for a livelihood ; they
make butter and feed a pig or two with the skim milk.
They live on bacon and buttermilk themselves, and
bread which they make or buy, but vegetables and fruit
are luxuries. To one from almost any other part of
the country it seems a miserable existence, yet the
farmers are not less attached to their rude homes and
little bleak holdings than others, and though they abuse
the landlord or his agent because they cannot have the
land for nothing, they appear to be fairly well satisfied
with their lot. I sometimes thought they were even
too well contented and wanted to know why they did
not try to grow a few cabbages or potatoes in some
sheltered nook for the house ; some said it was useless
to attempt it on account of the May and June frosts,

122 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

and others said that the owners objected to the
ground being broken up ! I also asked several farmers
why they did not cut bracken, which was plentiful
enough, to serve as bedding for the cows, since they
could not get straw. They answered that occasionally
a farmer did so, but it was not the custom and they
thought the cows did just as well without any bedding
at all !

I pitied the cows ; but perhaps they were right ; it
may well be that the domestic animals, like their
masters, have become adapted during many genera-
tions to a starvation land, to lie in winter on a hard
cold stone floor and to keep alive on the smallest
amount of food of the poorest kind, and yet to flourish
in a way and yield milk.

But though they appear to be a contented, they are
not a happy-looking or a lively people. They have
colourless faces and for good looks or brightness or
intelligence compare badly with the inhabitants of the
adjoining districts and with the people of England
generally, north and south. The children are naturally
more attractive than the adults ; they have the bright-
ness proper to their time of life, which makes their
dirty little faces shine ; but it is rare to find a pretty
one. What has made this people of the Peak what
they are, so unlike their neighbours, so wholly absorbed
in their own affairs and oblivious of the world outside ;
mentally isolated, like the inhabitants of a lonely island?
It was a depressing experience to converse with youths
and young men of an age when if any romance, any

AN IMPRESSION OF AXE EDGE 123

enthusiasm, exists it is bound to show itself. They
were too serious — they were even solemn, and gave
one the idea that they had all been recently converted
to Methodism and were afraid to smile or to say a frivo-
lous or unnecessary word lest it should be set down
against them by an invisible recording clerk, standing,
pen behind his ear, at their elbow, intently listening.
There was no trace of that fiery spirit, that intensity
of life, that passion for music, sport, drinking and
fighting, for something good or bad which distinguishes
their very next-door neighbours, the Lancastrians.
What is it then — the soil, the altitude and bleak cli-
mate, the hard conditions of life, or what ? One knows
of other districts where life is just as hard, where the
people have yet some brightness of mind, some energy,
some passion in them. I gave it up ; there was no
time for brooding over such problems ; my quest
was birds, not men.

Moreover, now at the end of May the first unmis-
takable signs of spring were becoming visible on that
lofty moor of a hard and desolate aspect which I had
made my home. Frosts and fogs and cold winds were
not so persistent ; there were better intervals ; then
came a beautiful warm day — the first fine really warm
day, the natives proudly assured me, which they had
experienced since the previous August. The little
stone-enclosed fields had taken a livelier green, and on
wet spots and by the burns the shining yellow marsh-
marigolds were in bloom. But the chief change to
spring on the high wintry moor was in the appearance

124 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

of the bilberry bushes, growing everywhere in dense
patches among the heather. They had now put on
their first leaves and they were like the young leaves
of the oak in spring

Against the sun shene —
Some very red and some a glad light grene.

And this wild place was a habitation of birds, and
these were the people I had come to see and listen to,
who were, indeed, more to me than the human in-
habitants.

CHAPTER XII
BIRDS OF THE PEAK

LUNCHING one day at Buxton, I hobnobbed with
a man whose classic features, fine physique and mag-
nificent beard filled me with a great admiration. He
was the vicar of a neighbouring parish, a man of the
open air, a cultivated mind, and large sympathies —
the very person I wanted to meet, for doubtless he
would know the birds and be able to tell me all I wanted
to learn. By-and-by the subject was introduced, and
he replied that he did not know very much about
birds, but he had noticed a particularly big crow in his
parish — big and black — and he would like to know what
it was. There were always some of them about.
Perhaps it was a carrion crow or a rook, he couldn't
say for certain ; but it was exceptionally big — and very
black.

One meets with many disappointments when asking
for information about the bird life of any locality ;
one is apt to forget that such knowledge is not common,
that it is easier to find a poet or a philosopher in any
village than a naturalist. Nevertheless I was singularly
fortunate at Buxton in meeting with that same rarity
in the person of a tradesman of the town, a Mr. Micah
125

126 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

Salt, who had studied the birds of the district all his
life. But not in books ; he did not read about birds,
he observed them for his own pleasure and it was a
pleasure to him to talk about them, but it went no
further. He did not even make a note ; bird-watch-
ing was his play — a better outdoor game than golf,
as it really does get you a little forrarder, and does
not make you swear and tell lies and degenerate from
a pleasant companionable being to an intolerable bore.
It was through his advice that I went to stay on Axe
Edge, where I would find all the birds I wanted to
watch, and where it seemed to me on first going on to
the moor that about five-sixths of the bird life consisted
of two species — cuckoo and meadow pipit. At the
low-roofed stone cabin where I lodged a few wind- torn
beeches had succeeded in growing, and these were a
great attraction to the moorland cuckoos and their
morning meeting-place. From half-past three they
would call so loudly and persistently and so many to-
gether from trees and roof as to banish sleep from that
hour. And all day long, all over the moor, cuckoos
were cuckooing as they flew hither and thither in their
slow, aimless manner, with rapidly beating wings,
looking like spiritless hawks, and when one flew by a
pipit would rise and go after him, just to accompany
him, as it appeared, a little distance on his way. Not
in anger like some of the small birds, even the diminu-
tive furze-jack who cherishes a spite against the cuckoo,
but in pure affection. For the meadow pipit is like
that person, usually a woman, whom we call a " poor

BIRDS OF THE PEAK 127

fool " because of a too tender heart, who is perhaps
the mother of a great hulking brute of a son who
gobbled up all he could get out of her, caring nothing
whether she starved or not, and when it suited his
pleasure went off and took no more thought of her —
of the poor devoted fool waiting and pining for her
darling's return. The pipit's memory is just as faith-
ful ; she remembers the big greedy son she fed and
warmed with her little breast a year or two ago, who
went away, goodness knows where, a long time back ;
and in every cuckoo that flies by she thinks she sees him
again and flies after him to tell him of her undying love
and pride in his bigness and fine feathers and loud
voice.

Who that knows it intimately, who sees it creeping
about among the grass and heather on its pretty little
pink legs, and watches its large dark eyes full of shy
curiosity as it returns your look, and who listens to its
small delicate tinkling strain on the moor as it flies up
and up, then slowly descends singing to earth, can fail
to love the meadow pipit — the poor little feathered
fool ?

Concerning the breeding habits, the friendship and
very one-sided partnership between these two species,
Mr. Salt informed me that all the cuckoos' eggs he had
found in fifty-five years, during which he had been
observing the birds of the district, were in meadow
pipits' nests. Nor had he ever seen a young cuckoo
being tended by the numerous other species supposed
to be its foster parents — warblers, wagtails, chats, the

128 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

robin, redstart, dunnock and wren. Furthermore, he
had discussed this subject with numbers of persons
living in the district, and their experience agreed with
his. His conclusion was that the meadow pipit was
the only dupe of the cuckoo, in spite of what was said
in the books. The conclusion was wrong, but his
facts may be right with regard to this particular district.
Doubtless, if this be so, there must be eggs laid from
time to time in the nests of other species, but in the
long run the instinct of parasitism on dunnock or wag-
tail or some other species would be swamped by that
of the majority of cuckoos, all parasites on the meadow
pipit exclusively.

Of all the small musical sounds emitted by birds
on moors and other lonely places I think I love the
aerial tinkle of the pipit best, unless it be the warble
of the whinchat heard in the same situations. Few
persons appear to know the whinchat's song, yet it
may be heard every day from April to July all over
the country wherever the bird has its haunts.
The main thing is to know a sound when you hear
it. This chat is a shy singer as well as an incon-
spicuous bird, and as a rule becomes silent when
approached. One hears a delicious warble at a con-
siderable distance and does not know whose voice it is ;
but if on any silent heath or common or grassland, or
any furze-grown brambly waste, you should catch a
very delicate warbled song, a mere drop of sound, yet
to all other bird sounds about it like the drop of dew or
rain among many other crystal, colourless drops, which

BIRDS OF THE PEAK 129

catches the light at the right angle and shines with love-
liest colour, you may safely say that it was a whinchat.
A fugitive sound heard at a distance, of so exquisite a
purity and sweetness, so tender an expression, that you
stand still and hold your breath to listen and think,
perhaps, if it is not repeated, that it was only an
imagined sound.

An even more characteristic sound of the high moor
than these small voices which are not listened to is the
curlew's voice : not the beautiful wild pipe nor the
harsh scream, the whaup's cry that frightens the super-
stitious, but the gentler lower varied sounds of the
breeding season when the birds are talking to one
another and singing over their nests and eggs and little
ones. Best of all of these notes is the prolonged trill,
which sounds low yet may be heard distinctly a quarter
of a mile away or further, and strongly reminds me of
the trilling spring call of the spotted tinamou, the
common partridge of the Argentine plains — a trill
that is like a musical whisper which grows and dwells
on the air and fades into silence. A mysterious sound
which comes out of the earth or is uttered by some
filmy being half spirit and half bird floating invisible
above the heath. I liked these invisible curlews, sing-
ing their low song, better than the visible bird, mad
with anxiety and crying aloud when the nest was looked
for. But the curlew has one very fine aspect when,
at your approach, he rises up before you at a distance
of three or four hundred yards and comes straight at
you, flying rapidly, appearing almost silver-white in
9

130 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

the brilliant sunshine, the size so exaggerated by the
light and motion as to produce the illusion of a big bird,
the only one left alive by the Philistines and destroyers.
But it is a beautiful illusion which lasts only a few
moments. In all this Peak district you will not find a
larger bird than a curlew or mallard or crow, that very
big bird which my clergyman told me about. Not a
buzzard, not a harrier, not a raven, or any other species
which when soaring would seem an appropriate object
and part of the scenery in these high wild places.

What a contrast between all these delicate voices of
the moorland, from the faint tinkle of the rising and
falling pipit to the curlew's trill, and others I have
omitted, the golden plover and water-ouzel, the aerial
bleat of the snipe, the wail of the peewit and thin sharp
pipe of the sandpiper or " water-squealer " as the
natives call it — between all these and the red grouse.
He has no music in him, but great power. On these
high moors his habit is to sit or stand on a stone wall
to sun himself and keep an eye on his wives and rivals
and the world generally. He stands, head erect,
motionless, statuesque, the harsh-looking heap of dark
gritstone forming an appropriate pedestal. For he is
like a figure cut in some hard dark red stone himself
— red gritstone, or ironstone, or red granite, or, better
still, deep-red serpentine, veined and mottled with
black, an exceedingly hard stone which takes a fine
polish. And in voice and character the bird is what
he looks, hard and brave, both as wooer and fighter.
Even near the end of May when many hens are in-

BIRDS OF THE PEAK 131

cuba ting — I stumble on a dozen nests a day — he is
wooing and fighting all the time, and the fights are
not mere shows like those of the ruff, a pretty little
feathered French duellist, and other quarrelsome
species that fight often without hurting one another.
The red grouse that looks like a stone hurls himself
like a stone against his adversary, and whether he
breaks bones or not he makes the polished feathers fly
in clouds. Yet in his wooing this stone-like bird some-
time attains to grace of motion. That is when,
carried away by his passion, he mounts into the air,
and if there is any wind to help him rises easily to a
good height and performs in descending a love flight
resembling that of the cushat and turtle-dove. But
in his vocal performances there is no grace or beauty,
only power. You are astonished at the sounds he emits
when he bursts out very suddenly rattling and drum-
ming— rrrrrr-rub-a-dub-dub ; or you may liken it to
a cachinnatory sound as if a gritstone rock standing
among the heather had suddenly burst out laughing.
Then he changes his tone to a more human sound like
a raven's croak prolonged, which breaks up into shorter
sounds at the end — ah-ha ! come here, come back,
go back, go back, quack, quack, or quick, quick, which
is probably what he really means.

From the grouse and his rude noises I must now go
back to the delicate songsters, to give an impression
of the ring ouzel ; for oddly enough I had hitherto
had no opportunity of really watching and listening
to it during the breeding season. Certain birds at

132 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

certain times, or on certain rare days, take possession
of and hold us to the exclusion of all others. A similar
experience is familiar to the lovers of the sublime and
beautiful in nature and art, in music and poetry.
So (to compare small things with great) we naturalists
have our buzzard or raven or wild geese days, and,
better still, our days with this or that fascinating melo-
dist— black-cap or blackbird, or linnet, or wheatear,
or nightingale. And when the day is finished and
the mood over it is not wholly over even then ; we are
like the poet who has listened to voices even more un-
earthly than birds' :

I thenceforward and long after
Listen to their harp-like laughter,
And carry in my heart for days
Peace that hallows rudest ways.

Moreover I was here on a special visit to this species ;
he was more in my mind than the golden plover or any
other. I came to be more intimate with him — to
have my ring-ouzel day and mood.

CHAPTER XIII
THE RING-OUZEL AS A SONGSTER

FROM the Peak northwards the ring-ouzel is not an
uncommon species in mountainous districts, but in
the greater part of England it is unknown, or known
only by name like the merlin, crested tit, and phalarope.
Indeed to most of us a first sight of it comes as a sur-
prise. The sight of a new species will always produce
a shock of pleasure in those who are interested in birds :
in the case of the ring-ouzel there is another element
in the feeling — something of a mixture of incredulity
and even resentment. And all because we find in
this until now unknown species a veritable blackbird
— black of hue (and comely) with orange-tawny bill ;
also possessing the chuckle and all the manners and
gestures of that familiar being ; yet not the real black-
bird, not our blackbird, the old favourite of wood
and orchard and garden. For this real blackbird, the
" garden ouzel," as our ancients of the seventeenth
century called it, is to us so unlike all other feathered
beings in figure, colouring, flight, gestures, voice ;
withal so distinguished among birds, that we have
come to look on it as the one and only blackbird in
»33

134 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

existence. A thrush, it is true, but modified and raised
as far above those olive-coloured spotty birds as the
lovely and graceful grey wagtail is above the modest
little creeping pipits it springs from. That we have
been told of other blackbirds in many lands does not
matter, since what we hear about such things does not
impress us — we forget and practically disbelieve it.
The sight of a ring-ouzel thus deprives us of an
illusion.

I was not affected in that way at the Peak, having met
the bird a long time before in other parts of the
country, but its song had remained unknown and I
had come to hear it. Nor had I long to wait for that
pleasure. On my way to the small hovel of a farm-
house, on Axe Edge, where I had arranged to stay,
while walking in the old forsaken road, worn very
deep and thickly bestrewn with loose stones like the
bed of a dry mountain torrent, I caught the sound
of a bird voice unknown to me, and peeping over
the bank at the roadside, beheld the ring-ouzel
within twenty yards of me, sitting on a stone wall,
emitting his brief song at intervals of less than half a
minute.

After listening for about fifteen minutes till he flew
off, I went on my way rejoicing at a new experience
and marvelling that this simple little bird melody,
which one would imagine any child could imitate or
describe to you so that when heard afterwards it could
easily be identified, had yet never been described in
the ornithological books. Such a statement may seem

THE RING-OUZEL AS A SONGSTER 135

incredible considering the number of books on birds
which we possess ; but let any reader take down one
from his shelves and try to form a definite idea as to
what this song is like from the author's account. Some
naturalists compare it with the blackbird and missel-
thrush. It is unlike both, being a short set song, as
in the chaffinch and chiffchaff, without any variation
and alike in every individual ; whereas the blackbird
and missel-thrush vary their phrases with every re-
petition of the song, and no two individuals sing quite
alike. In the quality of the sound there is also some
difference. Again, it is frequently described as a
warble, or warbled song, which it is not. The word
warble, as Mr. Warde Fowler has said, is used of birds'
singing in a sense which may -be guessed from Milton's
lines :

Fountains, and ye that warble as ye flow
Melodious murmurs, warbling tune his praise.

" The word," he adds, " seems to express a kind of
singing which is soft, continuous, and legato." It is
precisely because they sing in this way that several of
our smaller songsters, including the blackcap and
willow-wren, have received the English generic name
of Warblers.

The song is also variously characterised as desultory,
wild, monotonous, sweet, plaintive, mellow, fluty,
which is all wrong, and if by chance one word had been
right it would have given us no definite idea of the
ring-ouzel's song — its shape. It is a whistle, repeated

1 36 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

three and sometimes four times without pause, uttered
at short intervals twenty or thirty or more times. Let
the reader think of any such word as spero, hero,
wheero, then whistle, musically, as he is able, a loud
brisk imitation of the word three or four times in
quick succession, and he will reproduce the song well
enough to deceive any person within hearing that it is
a ring-ouzel singing. The difference will be that the
whistled imitation will never get the expressive bell-
like musical character of the bird. The sound has
intrinsic beauty, but its charm is mainly due to the
place you hear it in, the wildness and solitude of the
rocky glens or the mountain side.

By going all round the mountain, visiting every
clough, I succeeded in locating about forty or fifty
breeding pairs and failed to detect any individual
differences in their singing. As in other songsters,
the ring-ouzel lowers his voice when approached by
a man or when watched ; when singing freely the
voice carries far, and may be heard distinctly from the
opposite side of a glen three or four hundred yards
wide, and refined by distance it has then a beautiful
bell-like quality.

In May the ring-ouzels were mostly laying their
eggs when the earlier-breeding blackbirds were bring-
ing their young off. One day, within a ten minutes'
walk of the house, I spied a young blackbird out among
the rocks on the glen side, and captured it just to hold
it a minute or so in my hand for the sake of its beauty,
also to see what its parents would do. They came at

THE RING-OUZEL AS A SONGSTER 137

me in a fury, to flutter about within two or three
yards of me, screaming and scolding their loudest ;
and very soon their noise brought a pair of ring-
ouzels on the scene to help them. Here was a fine
opportunity of comparing our two British blackbirds
— two pairs, male and female, all animated by the
same passion, and acting together like birds of the
same species, dashing close to my face, as I sat on a
stone holding the richly-coloured young bird in my
hand, showing it to them.

The ring-ouzel always looks like a lesser blackbird,
even when they are thus seen side by side, although it
is about the same size ; but he is not so black as his
cousin, for black, being the most conspicuous colour
in nature, exaggerates the size of an object, especially a
living moving one, to the eye. In some lights the
ring-ouzel has a rusty appearance owing to the pale
tips of the feathers. The female is less black than the
male and varies in colour according to the light, some-
time appearing olive-black or brown, and in some
lights a greenish-bronze colour.

On my liberating the young bird the four demon-
strators flew off. On the following day I found the
ring-ouzel's nest in a tuft of bilberry growing on a
ledge of rock at the glen side. It contained four eggs.
The male continued to sing at intervals during the day
when the female was sitting, but his favourite time was
late in the evening, when perched on a stone about a
hundred yards from his mate he would repeat his song
about twice every minute until it was dark. He was

1 38 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

the latest of the songsters, and would sing on the
coldest evenings, even when it was raining.

My daily visits to this nest were greatly resented by
the birds. It was their misfortune that they had
builded their home so near me and had made it so
beautiful. I was also much interested in the various
cries and sounds they emitted when excited by my
presence. The male would flit and fly about at a
distance, uttering loud clacking or chacking cries
interspersed with a variety of little exclamatory notes,
while the female, more anxious, would dash at me,
chacking and screaming all the time. But the instant
I left the site their rage would vanish ; the male would
begin his set " wheero-wheero " whistle, while the
female would break out in a sort of song of her own
which resembled the first attempts at singing of a
young throstle — a medley composed of a variety of
guttural and squeaking notes interspersed with more
or less musical chirps.

What struck me as most curious was that when
troubled with my presence at the nest they uttered
two distinct sounds which are not in the blackbird's
language but are part of the language of the typical
thrushes (Turdus) ; one was the prolonged, tremulous,
harsh and guttural alarm cry of the missel-thrush, the
other the low, long-drawn, wailing note of the throstle
when anxious about its nest or young, a note so high-
pitched as to be inaudible to some persons. It can only
be supposed that these different sounds, expressing
apprehension or anger, have been inherited by

THE RING-OUZEL AS A SONGSTER 139

thrushes and the ring-ouzel, and have been lost in the
blackbird. I have been told that the blackbird does
occasionally emit the low robin-like wailing note
when its nest is approached, but have never heard
it myself.

One would like to listen to and compare the sounds
emitted by all the thrushes of the world — the spotted
ground thrushes (G*4tbicla), supposed to be the
parental form ; the typical thrushes (Turdus) ; and the
blackbirds (Merula). Ornithologists pay little or no
attention to the language of birds when considering
the question of evolution, but here it might help us to
a right conclusion of the question whether the black-
birds are an offshoot of the typical thrushes, or sprang
independently from the ground thrushes. In studying
the language of the blackbird alone one might spend
half a lifetime very pleasantly. In the development
of their vocal organs they stand highest among birds,
and they have a world-wide distribution, numbering
about seventy species. What more fascinating object
in life for a wandering Englishman who desires to see
all lands, who loves birds and above all others the
" garden ouzel " of his home ? A missionary writes
that there is no living thing in Samoa which gives him
so much the home feeling as this bird — its blackbird,
Merula samoensis. The English spring is recalled to
another in Ceylon by the ouzel of that country. Yet
another wanderer in Somaliland is delightfully re-
minded of home by the native blackbird. And doubt-
less others have had the same feeling produced in them

i4o ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

by other blackbirds in other regions — in Siberia ; in
Cuba, in the Amazonian forests ; in the Andes and the
Himalayas ; and in Burma, Japan, Formosa, the Philip-
pines, New Guinea, Borneo, Java, Fiji, New Hebrides,
Norfolk Island, the Louisiades, and other islands and
countries too many to name.

CHAPTER XIV

BIRD Music

To those who delight in bird music it appears strange
that there should be many persons who are quite
indifferent to it, who will hear you speak of its charm
or beauty with impatience and perhaps incredulity.
It is probable that in many cases the indifference is
the result of a town life and the dulling effect on the
sense of hearing of an atmosphere of loud jarring
noises, also of the loudness of the instrumental music
to which they are accustomed. Our civilisation is a
noisy one, and as it increases in noisiness the smaller,
more delicate musical instruments which must be heard
in a quiet atmosphere lose their ancient charm and
finally become obsolete. The tendency is towards
louder instruments and masses of sound ; the piano
is a universal favourite, and the more thunder you
get out of it the better it is liked.

In this as in other things our gain is our loss ; if in
human music the sweetest, most delicate instrumental
sounds cease to please, or even to be tolerable, on
account of their small volume, how could the very
best of the natural music of birds delight us — the small
exquisite strains emitted by the wagtails and pipits,
141

1 42 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

the wheatear and whinchat, the willow wren and wood
wren, the linnet and reed warbler ? The very most
that can be said of such minute melodies is that, like
the little gurgling and lisping sounds of a pebbly
streamlet and of wind in leaves and the patter of rain,
it is soothing.

Another cause of indifference is that for some
persons the sounds are without expression.

We know that when the occasions of past happiness,
and the fact of the happiness itself, have been forgotten
something yet remains to us — a vague, pleasurable
emotion which may be evoked by any scene, or object,
or melody, or phrase, or any sight or sound in Nature
once associated with such happiness. It is this halo,
this borrowed colour of a thing, which gives the
expression. Those who say that they find an indefin-
able charm or beauty in any sight or sound do not as a
rule know that it is not a quality of the thing itself
which moves them, that their pleasure is almost wholly
due to association, and that in this case they " receive
but what they give."

An instance of this charm which any natural object
or sound may have for us is given by Gilbert White in
his description of an insect. " The shrilling of the
field cricket," he says, " though sharp and stridulous,
yet marvellously delights some hearers, filling their
minds with a train of summer ideas of everything that
is rural, verdurous, and joyous." There can be no
such " train of ideas " nor any vague sense of happiness
due to association caused by a bird's voice to one

BIRD MUSIC 143

whose life or its early, most happy, and impressible
period has been spent apart from rural scenes. The
voice may be agreeable if the quality is good, but it is
expressionless.

To others, especially to those who have lived with
and have been lovers of Nature from the cradle, even
a slight bird sound may produce a magical effect, and
I here recall an experience of the kind which I had
two or three summers ago at Harrogate.

I should say, judging from its fine appearance and
the numbers of fine people frequenting it, that Harro-
gate must be highly esteemed by town-loving folk ;
it is a parasitic town nevertheless, and on that account
alone distasteful to me ; and to make matters worse
I there found myself in a numerous company of the
sick — pilgrims from all parts of the land to that pool
in which they fondly hoped they would be cured of
their ills. Perhaps they did not all hope for a com-
plete cure, as there was a very large proportion of well-
nourished, middle-aged, and elderly gentlemen with
hard red or port-wine faces and watery eyes who walked
or hobbled painfully, some with the aid of two sticks,
others with crutches, while many were seen in bath-
chairs. I took it that these well-to-do well-fed gentle-
men were victims of gout and rheumatism.

In this crowd of sufferers mixed with fashionables
I was alone, out of my element, depressed, and should
have been miserable but for a small bird, or rather of
a small small bird voice. Every day when I went to
the well in the gardens to drink a tumbler of magnesia

144 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

water and sit there for an hour or so I heard the same
delicate wandering aerial sound, the thin plaintive note
of the same little bird, a willow wren, which had taken
up its summer-end residence at that spot. I do not
mean a song ; a little bird when moulting concealed in
a thick shrubbery, has no heart to sing: it was only
his familiar faint little sorrowful call-note.

People came in numbers at certain hours of the day
to the spring and pavilion to drink water and sit in
groups chatting, flirting, laughing, or to pace the
walks, while the children ran and romped about
the green lawns or sailed their little boats on the
running water ; and by-and-by the crowd would
begin to drift away as meal time approached, until
the gardens would be silent and deserted. But the
small bird was always there, and though hidden among
the bushes where they grew thickest he was not wholly
invisible. At intervals his minute shadowy flitting
form could be discerned at some spot where there was
a slight opening among the dense clustered leaves, seen
for a moment or two, then gone. And even when
the place was fullest of people and the sound of talk
and laughter loudest, still at brief intervals that faint,
tenuous, sorrowful little sound would be audible
through it all. Listening for it and hearing it, and
sometimes catching a glimpse of the small restless
creature among the deep green foliage near my seat,
a curious mental change would come over me. The
sense of dissatisfaction, of disharmony, would pass
away ; the pavilion, the kiosks, the gravelled walks and

BIRD MUSIC 145

offensive flower-beds, the well-dressed invalids and
idlers, the artificiality of the scene, with big hotel
buildings for background, would be to me something
illusory — a mental picture which I could dismiss from
my mind at any moment, or an appearance which
would vanish at a breath of wind or on the coming of
a cloud over the sun. The people sitting and moving
about me had no real existence ; I alone existed there,
with a willow wren for companion, and was sitting
not on an iron chair painted green but on the root of
an old oak or beech tree, or on a bed of pine needles,
with the smell of pine and bracken in my nostrils,
with only that wandering aerial tender voice, that
gossamer thread of sound, floating on the silence.

This is doubtless an extreme example of the power
of expression, and could perhaps only be experienced
by one whose chief pleasure from childhood has been
in wild birds and who delights in bird voices above all
sounds. But expression is not everything : there is
a charm in some sounds so great that we love them from
the first time of hearing, when they are without associa-
tions with a happy past ; and in such cases we can sup-
pose that the emotional expression, if it exists at all, is
produced indirectly and forms but a slight element
in the aesthetic effect.

There is, besides expression, another thing not
often taken into account which makes some bird
melodies impress us more than others — the state of
mind, or mood, we are in and the conditions in which
it is heard. Yet it makes a world of difference even
10

146 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

in the songs of species which we love best for their
intrinsic beauty. The curious thing is that after
hearing a particular bird music in exceptionally favour-
able circumstances the hearer should become con-
vinced that this musician is the best. It may not be
at its best on the next occasion of hearing it, or ever
again, but the image of the intense pleasure it once
produced persists in his mind and the delusion remains.

There are states of the atmosphere when distant
objects seem near and all Nature takes on a rare loveli-
ness which makes it like a new earth. There are states,
too, when bird sounds seem purer, brighter, more
resonant than at other times, in some instances surpris-
ing us with new and mysteriously beautiful qualities.

After copious rains in summer there is often a tender
silveriness in the sunlit air, the effect of abundant
moisture ; and on such occasions we sometimes note a
difference in bird songs and cries, as if they, too, like
all else, had been washed and purified ; and just as we
inhale the new delicious air into our lungs we take the
new melody into our souls. In this case the exhilarat-
ing effect of the newly washed and brightened air and
sight of the blue sky after the depressing cloud has
passed undoubtedly count for much ; the responsive
physical change in us acts on the sense organs, and
they, too, appear to have been washed and made clean
and able to render truer and brighter images than
before.

Then, too, we have the other cause, in which all
natural sounds, especially bird sounds, produce an

BIRD MUSIC 147

unusual effect owing to some special circumstances
or to a conjunction of favourable circumstances.
It is pure chance ; the effect of to-day will never be
repeated ; it has gone for ever, like the last beautiful
sunset we witnessed. But there will be many more
beautiful sunsets to gladden our sight.

On looking on a meadow yellow with buttercups
I have seen one flower, or a single petal, far out, per-
haps, in the middle of the fields, which instantly
caught and kept my sight — one flower amongst a
thousand thousand flowers, all alike. It was because
it had caught and reflected the light at such an angle
that its yellow enamelled surface shone and sparkled
like a piece of burnished gold. By some such chance
a song, a note, may reach the sense with a strange
beauty, glorified beyond all other sounds.

One evening, walking in a park near Oxford, I
stopped to admire a hawthorn tree covered with its
fresh bloom. On a twig on the thorn a female
chaffinch was perched, silent and motionless, when
presently from the top of an elm tree close by its mate
flew down, describing a pretty wavering curve in its
descent, and arriving at the bush, and still flying,
circling round it, he emitted his song ; not the usual
loud impetuous song he utters when perched ; in
form, or shape only it was the same, the notes issuing
in the same order, but lower, infinitely sweeter,
tender, etherealised. The song ended as the bird
dropped lightly by the side of its little mate.

I could hardly credit my own senses, so beautiful

148 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

had seemed this subdued lyric from a songster we
regard as very inferior to some of the warblers in
delicacy and expressiveness.

On another occasion I was walking across a furze-
grown common after dark on a very cold windy evening
in early April when at a distance of about forty yards
from me a whinchat warbled the fullest, sweetest song
I ever listened to from that bird. After a brief in-
terval the song was repeated, then once again. Whether
it was the exceeding purity of the sound, so clear, so
wondrously sweet, so unexpected at that hour, or
the darkness and silence of that solitary place which
gave it an almost preternatural beauty I cannot say,
but the effect on me was so great that I have never
walked by night in spring in any furzy place without
pausing and listening from time to time with the
pleased expectation of hearing it again.

Probably in these two instances and in a dozen others
which I could cite the song was uttered by chance at
the precise moment when it would be most impressive
— when the conditions and the mood they had induced
were most favourable. But the sound too may create
the mood, as was the case in the following instance.

I have heard many wonderful blackbirds, for like
all songsters, feathered as well as human, they vary
greatly in merit, and 'pace Dr. A. R. Wallace, there is
such a thing as genius in nature, but I think the one
which most impressed me was just an ordinary black-
bird. I was staying at a farmhouse in the New Forest,
and on the side of the house where I slept there was a

BIRD MUSIC 149

large arbor vitse in which a blackbird roosted every
night on a level with my window. Now, every morn-
ing at half-past three this bird would begin to sing and
go on repeating his song at short intervals for about
half an hour. It was very silent at that time ; I could
hear no other bird ; and the sound coming in at the
open window from a distance of but five yards had
such a marvellous beauty that I could have wished for
no more blessed existence than to lie there, head on
pillow, with the pale early light and the perfume of
night-flowers in the room, listening to that divine
sound.

CHAPTER XV

IN A GREEN COUNTRY IN QUEST OF RARE
SONGSTERS

I CAN understand the feeling experienced by some
visitors from far-distant sunburnt lands — our Anti-
podean " dependencies," for example — on first coming
to England, at a time of year when the country is
greenest. The unimagined brilliancy of the hue and
its universality affect them powerfully ; for though
green was known to them in sea and sky and earth
and in a parrot's plumage it is not really the colour of
nature in their world as in ours. It is a surprise to all
and in some a pure delight, but to others it appears
unnatural, and it is degraded by its association in the
mind with fresh green paint. But to those who live
in England, especially in the southern parts, this
verdure is never more delightful and refreshing to the
soul than when we come to it straight from some such
hilly and moorland district as, say, that of the Peak of
Derbyshire, with its brown harsh desolate aspect.
All the qualities which go to make our southern land-
scape what it is to us are then intensified, or " illus-
trated by their contraries," as Defoe would have said.
Thus it was that, on coming south from the Peak
150

IN A GREEN COUNTRY 151

district at the end of May, it seemed to me that never
since I had known England, from that morning in early
May when I saw the sun rise behind the white cliffs
and green downs of Wight and the Hampshire shore,
had it seemed so surpassingly lovely — so like a dream
of some heavenly country. There have been days of
torment and weariness when the wish has come to me
that I might be transported from this ball to the
uttermost confines of the universe, to the remotest of
all the unnumbered stars, to some rock or outpost
beyond the furthest of them all, where I might sit with
all matter, all life, for ever behind and with nothing
but infinite empty space before me, thinking, feeling,
remembering nothing, through all eternity. Now
the wish or thought of a journey to the stars came to
me again, but with a different motive : in the present
instance it was purely for the sake of the long and
wholly delightful journey, not for anything at the
end. My wish was now to prolong the delight of
travelling in such scenes indefinitely. Could any one
imagine a greater bliss than to sit or recline at ease
in a railway carriage with that immortal green of
earth ever before him, so varied in its shades, so flowery,
splashed everywhere with tender, brilliant gold of
buttercups, so bathed in sunlight and shaded with
great trees — green woods with their roots in the divine
blue of the wild hyacinth. Who would not wish to
go on for days, months, years even, to the stars if we
could travel to them in that way !

I don't know much about the stars, nor am I anxious

152 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

to visit them ; it was only the thought of the long green
way that fascinated me. By-and-by it came into
my mind that some one had said, just to enable us to
grasp the idea of their distance from earth, that it
would take a non-stopping express train forty million
years to get to a star — which star, if any particular one
was meant, I don't remember. The thought of it be-
gan to oppress me, for by-and-by, after a few centuries
perhaps, I should begin to wish for a break, a stop for
half an hour, let us say, at some small wayside station
to enable me to lie down for a few minutes on my back
in the grass to gaze up into the blue sky with its floating
white clouds, and, above all, to listen to the skylark
and to every other sweet singing bird. I began to
think that seeing is not everything, since we have
other senses ; I wanted to hear and smell and taste
and feel ; to wrap myself about with these sensations,
to pierce and dwell in them as some tiny insect pene-
trates to the hollow chamber of a flower to feed at
ease on its secret sweetness. I recalled the complaint
of the spiritual-minded author of the Cynthiades to
his Cynthia, that he was not content even in their
moments of supremest bliss — even when she was so
close to him that they knew each other's thought
without a whisper : —

Yet I desire
To come more close to thee arid to be nigher ;

still dissatisfied to find that their souls remained
distinct and separate when he would have, had them

IN A GREEN COUNTRY 153

touch like two neighbouring rain-drops and become
one.

There was no such bar in my case ; being one we
could not asunder dwell. For my mistress is more to
me than any Cynthia to any poet ; she is immortal
and has green hair and green eyes, and her body and
soul are green, and to those who live with and love her
she gives a green soul as a special favour.

With this feeling impelling me I quitted the train
and took to the wheel, which runs without a sound,
as a serpent glides or a swallow skims, and brings you
down to a closer intimacy with the earth.

How unspeakably grateful we should be for this
gift — we lovers of the road and of nature's quietude
who have a meek and quiet spirit — to go on our way
like the owl by night on its downy silent wings ! So
quiet is the wheel that on two separate occasions I
have passed a blind man on a quiet country road, so
closely as almost to touch him without his knowing
it until I spoke. This seemed marvellous to me
when I considered the almost preternatural keenness
of the hearing sense in the blind, especially in blind
men who are accustomed to go freely about in country
places. In both instances the man, when spoken to,
started and wheeling partly round delivered his reply
in the direction from which the voice had come,
though the speaker was no longer there, having gone
twenty or thirty yards past the point.

My second encounter with a blind man was during
the ramble in a green country. I alighted, and

154 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

watched him go on feeling his way along the edge
of the road with his stick. He was a mile or more
from the village at a spot where the road went
by a wood. A little further on by the roadside
the benevolent landlord — would that there were
more like him ! — had placed a garden bench in the
shade for tired travellers to rest on. The man was
making his way to this seat and after he had
settled down I went back and sat by him. He was a
big healthy fine-looking man, a native of the village,
a son of a farm labourer. He, more ambitious, left
his home as a youth to find other employment, but it
was a dangerous trade he took up and as a result of an
explosion of powder in his face his vision was destroyed
for ever. He came back to his village which, he said,
he would never quit again. It was the one place
known to him and although it was now covered with
darkness he would still see it with his inner eye — the
streets and houses, the fields, roads, hedges, woods,
and streams — all this area which had been his play-
ground in his early years was so well remembered that
he could still find his way about in it.

He told me he made his living by selling tea which
he procured in quantities direct from a London mer-
chant and retailed to the cottages in half and quarter-
pound packets. They took their tea from him because
he served them at their own doors. On certain days
of the week he visited the neighbouring villages doing
a circuit of twenty-five or thirty miles in the day. On
these occasions he had a iittle girl of ten to guide him.

IN A GREEN COUNTRY 155

Of course she had to attend school on most days but
on Saturdays she was free and she could generally get
permission to absent herself from school on another
day. Failing her he had to take a larger girl, out of
school, who was not half so intelligent as the other and
not so well liked by the cottage women.

I noticed that this man, like many other blind
persons I have met, though big and strong and in the
prime of life, was a very quiet still man who spoke
in a low voice and was subdued and gentle in manner.
I think it is the habit of always listening that makes
them so quiet, and I wondered what his sensations
were when a motor cyclist passed us, going by like a
whirlwind, a horrible object, shaking the earth, and
making it hateful until he was a mile away with a
torrent of noise.

In my quieter way on my wheel I rambled on from
county to county viewing many towns and villages,
conversing with persons of all ages and conditions ; yet
all this left but slight and quickly-fading impressions,
for in my flittings about a green land when it was
greenest I had an object ever present in my mind —
the desire to see and hear certain rare singing birds,
found chiefly in the south, whose rarity is in most cases
due to the collectors for the cabinet, bird-catchers,
and other Philistines, who occupy themselves in the
destruction of all loveliest forms of life. Thus, the
clear whistle of a golden oriole, when I listened to it
in a strictly-guarded wood, where it breeds annually
and where I was permitted to spend a day, was more to

156 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

me than the sight of towns, villages, castles, ruins, and
cathedrals, and more than adventures among the
people.

This, then, is but a hasty and careless itinerary.

Going west I was at Blandford, then at Wimborne,
where I found nothing in the town to detain me except
the minster, and nothing in that but the whiteness of
the stones with which it is built, with here and there
one of a surprising red placed at random, giving the
structure a harlequin appearance, unlike that of any
other church known to me. At Wareham, a small
ancient village-like town in a beautiful unspoilt-
looking country, I was long in S. Mary's Church,
absorbed in the contemplation of Edward the Martyr's
stone coffin, when a great gloom came over the earth
and made the interior almost dark. Coming out I was
astonished to find that while I had been in there with
the coffin and the poor boy-king's ghost, the streets
outside had been turned into muddy, rushing torrents,
and going to a group of men standing near, I asked
them where all that water came from. " From
above, I imagine," replied one, smiling at my simplicity,
which reply brought back to my mind a story of a good
little boy read in my childhood. This little boy had
been religiously taught to say about everything painful
or unpleasant which befell him, from the loss of a toy
or a wetting or a birching, to an attack of measles or
mumps or scarlatina, that it " came from above."
Now one day, during a very high wind, he was knocked
down senseless by a tile falling on his head, and, re-

IN A GREEN COUNTRY 157

covering consciousness, found himself surrounded by
a number of persons who had come to his assistance.
Picking himself up and pointing to the tile at his feet
which had knocked him down, he solemnly remarked,
" It comes from above." At which the crowd laughed,
for they were a frivolous people in that town, and
they asked him where else it could come from ?

That little town of ancient memories and a cloud-
burst, with the villages round it, is a good place to be
in, but it could not keep me since I could not find there
what I had gone out to seek ; so very soon I turned
eastward again, going by way of Poole, which I had
not seen for some years. There I met with a surprising
experience. There is a fine public park at Poole, with
extensive green spaces and a lake for boating — the
largest lake in any public park in England. At six
o'clock in the evening it was thronged with the towns-
people who had gathered at that place to recreate
themselves after their day's work, and never have I
seen a people enjoy themselves more heartily, or one
that seemed more like a naturally joyous people. The
greatest crowd was round the bandstand, where
hundreds of people were resting on chairs or sitting
and lying on the grass, whilst others danced on the
green or on the large open-air dancing floors made for
the purpose. Further away youths and boys were
running races and playing ball on the lawns, whilst
numbers of prettily-dressed girls flitted up and down
the paths on bicycles. So much liberty in a public
park was very unusual. Now just when I came on the

158 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

scene at about six o'clock a big cloud rose up from the
south-east and grew and grew until it covered half the
entire heavens with its blackness ; and as it spread
higher and nearer the thunder heard at intervals
increased in power and was more frequent, accom-
panied with vivid flashes of forked lightning which,
one would imagine, would have sent the people in
terror to their homes. For a very little more and the
storm would be directly over us and the whole crowd
deluged with rain. But though it remained near us
for about an hour and a half, without losing that black,
exceedingly threatening aspect, with occasional little
tempests of rain, it did not quite reach us, and I then
noticed, when strolling about the ground, that there
was not the slightest appearance of apprehension or
nervousness in the people. The fun and frolic con-
tinued without a break through it all until, at nine
o'clock, the people dispersed to their homes.

Now I can imagine that the people I had been staying
with on those cold, harsh moors in Derbyshire would
have stared and gasped with astonishment at such a
scene, and would perhaps have refused to believe that
it was an everyday scene in that place, that this was
how the people spent their summer evening after each
day's work. I can imagine, too, that some nona-
genarian or centenarian, who had from his youth
dreamed of a freer, sweeter, more joyous life for the
people of his country, on coming down from some
such unchanged district as the one just mentioned
and looking upon the scene I have described, would

IN A GREEN COUNTRY 159

be able to say from his very heart, " Now lettest Thou
Thy servant depart in peace."

Quitting Poole, I ran for ten miles along a continuous
thoroughfare, through Bournemouth to Christchurch,
with the ugliness and infernal jar and clang of the
electric trams the whole way. Only when I got to
the shade of the grey old priory church did I feel that
I was safely out of Pandemonium and on the threshold
of that county richest of all in wild life which con-
tinually calls me back from all others, east, west, and
north, to its heaths and forests and rivers.

CHAPTER XVI
IN A HAMPSHIRE VILLAGE

GOING further into Hampshire I was by-and-by at
a spot which cannot be named owing to the faet that
I was there in quest of a rare and elusive little bird.
For we who desire to save our birds must keep the
private collector in mind ; that injurious person who
is ever anxious to secure the very last British-killed
specimens of any rare species. And should a species
be near its end — in other words, should it be rare —
then, says the leader and lawgiver of all this rapacious
gang, our right and proper course is to finish it off as
quickly as may be, seeing that by so doing we furnish
our cabinets with a large number of specimens for the
benefits of science and of posterity. The law does
not protect our birds and country from these robbers ;
they have too many respected representatives in high
places, on the benches of magistrates, in the Houses of
Parliament, and among important people generally.
For are they not robbers and of the very worst descrip-
tion ? Those who break into our houses to steal our
gold steal trash in comparison ; while these, who are
never sent to Portland or Dartmoor, are depriving
the country with its millions of inhabitants of one of
its best possessions — its lustrous wild life.

160

IN A HAMPSHIRE VILLAGE 161

Here I came to a village which happened to be one
of the very few, certainly not above half a dozen, in
all that county never previously visited by me ; and
as it was within easy distance of the spot I had come
to explore I had some idea of settling in it for a few
days. I had long known it by name, and it had further-
more been minutely and lovingly described to me by
an old soldier, decorated with many medals, who is
now a keeper in one of the Royal parks. One day last
spring he showed me a blackbird's nest in which he took
a somewhat anxious interest on account of its unsafe
position pn a wart or projection on the trunk of a
Spanish chestnut tree, a few feet from the ground and
plainly visible to mischievous eyes. Our talk about
this careless blackbird and other birds led to his telling
me of his boyhood in a small out-of-the-world Hamp-
shire village, and I asked him how, with such a feeling
as he had revealed about his native place, he had been
able to spend his life away from it, and why he did not
go back there now ? That, he answered, was his de-
sire and intention, not only since he had begun to grow
old, but he had cherished the idea even when he was
a young man and in his prime, in India, Burma, Af-
ghanistan, Egypt. Now at last the time seemed near
when his desire would be fulfilled ; two years more in
the park and he would retire with a small pension,
which, added to his soldier's pension, would enable
him to pass the remnant of his life in his native village.

I thought of him now, the tall straight old soldier,
with his fine stern face and grey moustache and hair,
ii

162 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

who had spent his years in defending the Empire in
many distant lands, and was now anxiously guarding
a blackbird's nest in a park from the wild, lawless little
Afghans and Soudanese of the London slums. It was
nice to think of him here where he would soon be back
in his boyhood's haunts, as I sat on the trunk of a
sloping tree by the stream, a stone's throw from the
churchyard. I was practically in the village, yet not
a sound could be heard but the faint whisper of the
wind in the trees near me and the ripple and gurgling
of the water at my feet. Then came another sound —
the sudden loud sharp note of alarm or challenge of a
moorhen a few yards away. There she stood on the
edge of the clear water, in a green flowery bed of water-
mint and forget-me-not, with a thicket of tall grasses
and comfrey behind her, the shapely black head with
its brilliant orange and scarlet ornaments visible above
the herbage. We watched each other, and it was in-
deed peaceful at that spot where nature and man lived
in such a close companionship, and very sweet to be
there ; nevertheless, it did not suit me to stay in that
village. Its charm consisted mainly in its seclusion,
in its being hidden from the world in a hollow among
woods and hills, and I love open spaces best, wide pros-
pects from doors and windows, and the winds free to
blow on me from all quarters. Accordingly, I went
to another village, a mile and a half away, where it was
more open, and settled there in a cottage with working
people — man and wife and one child, a little boy of
eleven.

IN A HAMPSHIRE VILLAGE 163

My usual good luck attended me in this place, for
seldom have I stayed with people I liked better. The
wife was intelligent enough to let me live just as I liked
without any fuss, so that I could get up at four o'clock
in the morning when they were still sleeping to make
tea for myself in the kitchen before going out, and
come in when I liked and have what I liked in the way
of food. The man, too, was a perfect host ; his good
qualities and cleverness in his work had raised him to
a better position than that of most working-men. He
was actually earning about three pounds a week, but
prosperity had not spoiled him ; he might have been
making no more than fifteen or eighteen shillings like
others of his class, in the village. His manner was
singularly engaging, and he was quiet and gentle in the
house. One might have thought that he had been
subdued by his wife — that she was the ruling spirit ;
but it was not so : when they were together, and when
they sat at table, where I sometimes sat with them, she
tuned herself to him and talked with a gentle cheerful-
ness, watching his face and hanging on his words.
Their manner was so unlike that of most persons in
their state of life that it was a puzzle to me, and I might
have guessed the secret of it from a peculiar pathos in
his voice and the inward-gazing dreamy expression in
his eyes which haunted me ; but I guessed nothing,
and only learnt it just before quitting the village.

Then there was the boy, who in the house was just
as still, gentle, and low-voiced as his father ; a boy who
disliked his books and crawled reluctantly to school

164 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

and took no part in games, but who had an intense love
of the wild, a desire to be always out of doors by
himself, following and watching the birds.

I was like that myself at his age, but was more happily
placed, having no school to crawl to nor miserable
books to pore over.

One day, just before leaving, I came in to my six-
o'clock meal, after a long spell on the heath, to find
my landlady, as usual ready and even eager to listen
to anything I had to tell her. For she, too, at home in
her cottage, had been alone all day, except for a few
minutes when her boy came in at noon to swallow his
dinner and run off to the nearest wood or heath to get
as much time as possible before the clanging of the
school-bell called him in again. Now everything
I ever told her about my rambles on the heath had
appeared to interest her in an extraordinary way. She
would listen to an account of where I had been, to which
old ditch, or barrow, or holly clump, also what birds
I had found there, and to the most trivial incidents, as
if to some wonderful tale of adventure ; she would
listen in silence until I ended, when she would ask a
dozen questions to take me all over the ground again
and keep up the talk about the heath. On this occasion
she said more, telling me that the heath had been very
much to her ; then little by little she let out the
whole story concerning her feeling for it. It was
the story of her life from the time of her marriage up
to little over a year ago, when her two children were
aged nine and six respectively. For there were two

IN A HAMPSHIRE VILLAGE 165

children then, and they lived in a cottage at the side
of a pine and oak wood on the border of the heath.
Her husband was fond of birds and of all wild animals ;
he knew them well, and in time she, too, grew to like
them just as much. She loved best to hear their songs
and calls ; bird-voices were always to be heard, day and
night, all the year round. You couldn't but hear
them, even the faintest note of the tiniest bird, it was
so silent at that spot where there was no road and no
house near. Her solace and one pleasure outside the
house was in their singing. She was very much alone
there ; she read little and never heard any music —
one would have to go miles to hear a piano ; so the songs
of birds came to be the sweetest sounds on earth for
her, especially the blackbird, which was more to her
than any other bird. When she first came to live in
the village she could hardly endure the noises — so
many cocks crowing, children shouting, people talking,
carts rattling by and all kinds of noises ! It made her
head ache at first. Then at night, how they missed
the night birds' sounds — the hooting of the wood owls,
especially in winter, and in summer the reeling of night-
jars, and the corncrake and the nightingale.

Thus for half an hour the poor woman talked and
talked about her old life on the heath, laughing a little
now and then at her own feelings — the absurdity of her
home-sickness when she was so near the old spot — but
always with a little break in her voice, avoiding all the
time the one subject uppermost in her mind — the very
one I was waiting for her to come to. And in the end

166 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

she had to come to it, and after putting her hand up
to hide the tears that could not be kept back, she was
relieved, and began to speak freely of the lost child.
Violet was her name, and every one who knew her said
that no fitter name could have been given her, she was
so beautiful, so like a flower, with eyes that were like
violets. And she had the greatest love of flowers for a
small child. Nobody had seen anything like it. Dolls
and toys she didn't care for — she was all for flowers.
As for sense, she had as much of it as any grown-up
person when she was no more than five. She was a
most loving little thing, but cared most for her father,
and every evening when he came home she would fly
to meet him, and would sit on his knee till bedtime.
What talks those two had ! Now the most curious
thing remains to tell, and this was about both the
children — the way in which they would spend most of
their time. At that distance from the village the boy
was allowed, after a good deal of bother about it, to
learn his letters at home. If the weather was fine,
those two would be up and have breakfast very early,
then, taking their dinner in a little basket, would go to
the heath, and she would see no more of them till about
five o'clock in the afternoon. The boy was always
fondest of birds and animals, like his father, and was
happy following and watching them all day long. The
girl loved the flowers best, and whenever she found
a flower that was rare or wholly new to her she would
cry out with joy and make as much fuss as if she had
found a splendid jewel on the heath. She was a strong

IN A HAMPSHIRE VILLAGE 167

child, always the picture of health, so that when she
suddenly fell ill of a fever it surprised and alarmed them
greatly, and the doctor was sent for. He didn't think
it a serious case, but he seemed doubtful about its
nature, and in the end he made a fatal mistake — he
himself said it was a mistake. The crisis came, and
the poor child got so bad that he was sent for, but it
was long to wait, and in the meantime something had
to be done, and what she did was to give it a hot bath.
Then the fit passed, and with it the fever, and the
child went off in a quiet sleep with every sign of re-
turning health. Then came the doctor and said
the child was getting well — the right thing had been
done — but he must wake her up and give her a draught.
She begged him not to ; he insisted, and roused and
made the child drink, and no sooner had the little thing
swallowed the medicine than she fell back white as
ashes and was dead in a few minutes.

It was going on for two years since their loss ; they
had been long settled in the village and had grown used
to the village life : the boy was gradually becoming
more reconciled to school ; her husband had a different
employment, which suited him better than the former
one, and was highly regarded by his master ; then,
too, they had pleasant relations with their neighbours.
But this improvement in their condition brought them
no happiness — they could not get over the loss of
their child. She, the wife, had her grief when she was
alone during long hours every day in the house ; but
when her man came home in the evening she could.

168 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

and did, throw it off, and was always cheerful, her
whole care being to make him forget his sorrow. But
it seemed useless ; he was a changed man ; all his
thoughts, all his heart, were with his lost child. He
had always been good-tempered and kind, but he had
been merry too, full of fun and laughter ; now he was
what I had seen — a very quiet, still man who smiled
a little at times, but who appeared to have forgotten
how to laugh.

CHAPTER XVII

THE FURZE-WREN OR FURZE-FAIRY

I CAME to that unnamed little village, as I have said,
in quest of one of our rarest songsters ; then the
people of the cottage where I lodged came between
me and my subject with their human sweetness and
sorrows, and telling of them I forgot to say whether
or not I had found my bird or even to mention its
species.

It happened that about a year or fourteen months
before I started on this quest, a friend wrote to inform
me that by chance he had discovered a new locality
for the Dartford Warbler, that delicate birdling of the
furze bushes, our furze-wren, so persistently sought
after for many years past by our collectors. He was
cycling in the south country, and when going by a
side-road at the edge of a wide heath or moor caught
sight of a pair flitting among some furze bushes. He
had never previously seen the bird, but I was satisfied
that he was right in his identification — that he was
about the last man to make a mistake in such a matter.
I may add that this same keen observer is not known
to me personally ; we correspond, and having the

i yo ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

same feeling about birds are naturally friends. He is
one of those strange but not very uncommon persons
who lead a double life. To some of us he is known
as an ornithologist ; to the theatre-going public he is
a finished actor, and those who know him only in his
impersonations would, I imagine, hear with surprise,
perhaps incredulity, that, off the boards, he is a
haunter of silent, solitary places where birds inhabit,
that in these communings he has a joy with which the
playgoer intermeddleth not.

The heath was a very extensive one, covering an area
of several square miles, and it was not strange that
when I searched the spot he had described I failed to
find the birds. I then set patiently and methodically
to work to search the furzy places, especially where
the growth was thickest, in other parts, and after two
entire days spent in this quest I began to fear I was not
going to find them after all. But I had spent so many
days and weeks on former occasions in searching for
this same most elusive little creature in eight or nine
other spots where I have found him in the south and
west country, and knew his hiding habits so well, that
I still allowed myself to hope. However, after yet
another morning spent in vain I resolved to give it up
that same evening and go back west. It had been
labour in vain, I thought sadly, then smiled and felt
a little encouraged to remember that " Labour in
Vain " was the actual name of a barren stony piece of
ground with a little furze growing on it, where many
years ago I had found my first furze-wren — a spot dis-

THE FURZE-WREN 171

tant about thirty miles from the nearest known locality
for the bird.

I then went to a high barrow on the heath and sat
down to meditate and cool myself in the wind ; there
my attention was attracted to a litter of feathers near
my feet of some small bird on which a sparrow-hawk
had recently fed. The body feathers were red or
chestnut brown, the quills black or blackish brown.
I began to speculate as to the species, when it all at
once occurred to me that these were the two colours
of the furze-wren. The wind was blowing strong and
carrying the feathers, red and black, fast away — in
two or three minutes there would be few left to judge
from. I quickly gathered those that remained clinging
to the stunted heath on the barrow-top and began
examining them. No, the sparrow-hawk had not
struck down and devoured that most unlikely bird,
the furze-wren : there remained one little quill
with a white border and one small pure white
feather. They were linnet's feathers — the dark
wing feathers and the chestnut red body feathers
from the back.

Now this trivial incident of the barrow-top, where I
went to meditate and did not do so, served as a fillip
to my flagging energies, and I immediately went off
across the heath in quest of my bird again, making for
a point about three-quarters of a mile away which I
had hunted over two or three days before. I had not
proceeded more than about three hundred yards when,
in the most unlikely spot in the whole place, I caught

172 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

sight of a minute, black-looking bird flitting rapidly
out of one low ragged furze-bush and vanishing into
another. Here was my furze-wren !

Nothing now remained to do but to snuggle down
in a cluster of heather and to sit there motionless and
watch, and in due time the bird reappeared with his
mate, and they came to and scolded me, then, seeing
me so still, went away about their business.

In one thing this pair disappointed me. My first
object in going to the heath was to make sure that
they were still there ; I had another, which was not
to pull their nesting-bush to pieces, to let in the sun-
light, rearrange it, and then photograph the nest " in
its natural surroundings," as our fictionists of the
camera have it, but to describe the song immediately
after listening to it, when the impression would be fresh
in the mind. This bird, from dawn to dark, declined
to sing or say any thing except that he objected to my
presence. His girding note is like that of a refined
whitethroat — he chides you like a fairy. The songless-
ness was no doubt due to the fact that there was no
other pair, or no cock bird, to provoke him, in that
part.

One evening, three days later, I was in another part
of the heath, about half a mile from the breeding-place
of the first pair, when a small bird flitted up from the
furze and perched for a few moments on the topmost
twig of a bush ; another furze-wren, his dainty figure
silhouetted, black as jet, against the pale evening sky,
on the summit of his black and gold furze-bush ! It

THE FURZE-WREN 173

was a joyful moment, a discovery wholly unexpected,
as I had previously explored that part and found
nothing. It was in a spot where the furze grew in a
dense thicket, four to six or seven feet high, and cover-
ing three to four acres of ground. As a rule the bird
prefers a sparser growth with open spaces among the
bushes.

My bird soon vanished and refused to come out
again. Something better followed ; fifty yards further
on a second bird appeared and perched on a bush
began to sing, allowing me to approach to within
twenty yards of him. He too then dived down into
the thicket and was seen no more. I went home with
that small song in me, but did not attempt to describe
it, as I wished first to hear it again more freely and fully
uttered.

Next day I found no fewer than nine pairs, all living
and breeding near together, at that one point in the
vast dense thicket. Outside it was all empty and
barren ; just there the little living gems sparkled in
profusion. But how melancholy to think that any
cunning scoundrel hired by a private collector, or the
keeper of a bird-stuffer's shop who calls himself
" Naturalist," might appear any moment with an air-
gun and extirpate the whole colony in the course of
a morning !

I found that my best time to observe these birds
was about five o'clock in the morning, when they are
most excitable and vocal. I would then sometimes
have two, at times three, pairs about me, flitting hither

174 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

and thither, vanishing and reappearing, scolding and
by-and-by fighting ; for any spot in which I stationed
myself to observe them would be within the territory
of a particular pair, and when other pairs came in to
assist in the demonstration against me, they were re-
garded as intruders. The cock in possession of the
ground would resent their presence and sing defiantly,
the other would reply, but was never able to stand
against the furious onset which would follow ; in every
case he was chased ignominiously back to his own
ground. The victor would then return to pour out his
triumph and challenge to all outsiders.

The song, albeit so passionate, does not carry far, so
that to hear it well the listener must be as near as
he can possibly get to the bird. It is short, lasting
only a few seconds at each repetition, but when in the
singing spirit the little vocalist will sometimes continue
the performance for several minutes at a stretch. As
to the character of the song, Montagu, who was the
first man in England to write about it, said that it
resembled the song of the stonechat. That is true,
since the little chat's song is composed of a few low
and guttural notes interspersed with others bright and
clear ; but Montagu omitted to say that he spoke only
of the chat's song uttered from a perch and not the
song the same bird emits when he rises high in the air
and, falling and rising, pours out his little rhythmical
melody — his better song. But the song, or rather
songs, of the stonechat are known to few persons,
owing to the fact that this bird is intolerant of the

THE FURZE- WREN 175

presence of a human being near him. Heard at a con-
siderable distance, the lower notes in the song of the
furze-wren are lost, and the sound that reaches the
ear might be taken for a stonechat, or linnet, or
dunnock, or even a pipit. The whitethroat, heard in
the same localities, has a louder, coarser song, which is
not much softened or etherealised by distance. The
whitethroat's girding or chiding note is familiar to
every one ; the chiding note of the furze-wren is like
the same note subdued and softened. It is this same
chiding or scolding note which is used in singing, only
louder and more musical and uttered with such extra-
ordinary rapidity that the note may be repeated
eighteen or twenty times in three seconds of time.
The most hurried singing of the sedge-warbler seems
an almost languid performance in comparison. This
rapid utterance produces the effect of a continuous
or sustained sound, like the reeling of the grass-hopper-
warbler ; the character of the sound is, however, not
the same ; it is rather like a buzzing or droning, as of
a stag beetle or cockchafer in flight, only with a slightly
metallic and musical quality added. This buzzing
stream of sound is interspersed with small, fine, bright,
clear notes, both shrill and mellow. Some of these
are very pure and beautiful.

Meredith says of the lark's song that it is a

silver chain of sound
Of many links, without a break.

The same may be said of many other songsters all the

176 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

world over — all, in fact, that do not sing in a leisurely
manner, or, like the throstle and nightingale, with
frequent pauses. But chains differ in form ; so with
these chains of sound of the rapid singers : in some the
links (otherwise, the notes) may be seen and distin-
guished as separate parts of the piece. In the furze-
wren it is not so ; the excessive rapidity with which the
notes are emitted and repeated makes the performance
more like a close-woven cord than a chain, and, to
continue the metaphor, we may see it as a black or
grey cord, set and sparkling with loose thread-ends of
silver, gold and scarlet. The black or sombre cord
represents the low chiding or buzzing sound, the
brilliant threads the bright, shrill and delicate
sounds.

The furze-wren is one of our minor songsters, rank-
ing with the stonechat, dunnock, redstart, and lesser
whitethroat. Its chief interest is its originality — its
unlikeness to that of any other singer. This makes it
difficult to describe, since we cannot convey an impres-
sion of a bird sound or song except by likening it to
other well-known sounds or songs. Our ornithologists,
who have written about the bird for the last century
and a half, have not attempted to describe its song.
I remember that I once asked the late Howard Saunders
why this was so, and his reply was that the furze-wren
has such a curious little jiggy song that you couldn't
describe it. Of course one can describe the song of
any unhuman being, from a shrill insect to an angel,
but the sad truth of the matter is that the impression

THE FURZE- WREN 177

cannot be properly conveyed by words to another.
Nevertheless the description may be a help to the
bird-seeker. It does not give him a perfect image of
the song — only the bird itself can do that, but it helps
him to identify the singer when he first hears it.

12

CHAPTER XVIII
BACK TO THE WEST COUNTRY

MY object gained, I quitted the little Hampshire
village the richer for three prized memories : first
and best was that of the people I had been staying
with in their cottage ; next in order of merit, the image
of those little feathered fairies in a vocal rage ; and last,
that of five white or cream-coloured cows issuing from
some small or cottage farm at the side of the heath,
driven or followed by a young woman to their daily
grazing-place on some distant part of the moor. Every
morning they appeared from among the green foliage
of trees and shrubs, behind which the homestead was
hidden, to take their slow way over the wide brown
heath in a scattered procession, always followed by that
young woman, tall and straight, her head uncovered,
her limp gown of a whitey-grey colour almost like the
white of the cows. A beautiful strange spectacle,
seen from afar as they moved across the moor in the
dewy shimmering light of the early sun. They had a
misty appearance, and there was something, too, of
mystery in it, due perhaps to association — to some dim
suggestion of ancient human happenings, in a time
178

BACK TO THE WEST COUNTRY 179

when there were gods who heeded man and white cows
that were sacred to them.

I had seen and heard and made these precious things
mine ; now I wanted to turn back to the west again,
to be in other green flowery places before the bloom
was gone. It was nearing mid-June and by making
haste now I might yet find some other feathered rarity
and listen to some new song before the silent time. The
golden oriole and furze-wren were but two of half a
dozen species I had come out to find.

At Yeovil I delayed two or three days with a
double motive.

One of the most delightful experiences of a rambler
about the land is, when the day's end has brought him
to some strange or long unvisited place, to remember
all at once that this is the spot, the very parish, to which
old friends came to settle two or three or more years
ago. He missed their dear familiar faces sadly in that
part of the country where he had known them, but
he has never wholly forgotten or ceased to love them,
and now how delightful to find and drop in by surprise
on them, to take pot luck as in the old days, to talk of
those same dear old days and the old home, of every
person in it from the squire to the village idiot.

It is hardly necessary to add that these lost friends
one goes about to recover are not persons of importance
who keep a motor-car, but simple people who live and
for long generations have lived the simple life, who
are on the soil with some of the soil on them, who
see few visitors from a distance — from the great world,

i8o ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

and whose glad welcome is one of the sweetest
things in life.

This then was motive the first, and when I dis-
covered my lost friends not far from the town I found
them unchanged, still in the old mind, the feeling
that I was one of them, of their very kin, and though
rarely seen and perhaps regarded as the vagabond of
the family, not less well loved on that account.

My second object was to look at Montacute House
and park which had been missed on previous visits.
The park held me for several hours, for it is like a
wilderness or a place in a dispeopled land that was once
a park, but I found no feathered rarity there or any-
where in the country round.

As to the famous Montacute house, it is built of Ham
Hill stone — the one building stone I cannot abide.
By others it is greatly admired, and it is perhaps worth
explaining why I, loving colour as I do, yellows as
much as any, have this feeling about our famous yellow
stone. It is, I take it, an associate feeling due to the
disagreeable effect which yellow as an interior colour
produces in me. Sherborne Abbey is without a doubt
one of our noblest ecclesiastical buildings, more beautiful
in the stone sculpture enriching its roof than any cathe-
dral or church in the land. Yet I cannot appreciate
it, since the effect of the colour is a severe headache,
a profound depression. After an hour inside I feel
that I am yellow all through, that my very bones are
dyed yellow, that if I were to drop down among the
furze-bushes on some neighbouring common and rest

BACK TO THE WEST COUNTRY 181

there undiscovered for several years those who found
me would not believe that my remains were human,
but only a skeleton cunningly carved out of Ham Hill
stone. This sensation, or its memory, or the feeling
which remains in the mind when the memory and
images have vanished, enters in and gives an ex-
pression to all buildings of this same yellow material.
This feeling was in me when I spent a couple of hours
in full sight of Montacute House ; otherwise I should
probably have thought, as no doubt most persons do,
that the colour of the stone added greatly to the
beauty of the building, that it harmonized with its
surroundings, the green spaces and ancient noble trees,
bathed in a brilliant sunlight, and the wide blue sky
above.

On my first evening in the town I went out into the
neighbouring wood on the steep slope above the little
river Yeo, and listened to a nightingale for half an
hour, the only one I could find in the place. On the
following afternoon I had sitting opposite to me at
the table when taking tea at the hotel a commercial
traveller whose appearance and speech amused and
interested me. A tall bony uncouth-looking young
man with lantern jaws and sunburned skin, in a rough
suit of tweeds and thick boots ; he was more like a
working farmer than a " commercial," who as a rule
is a towny, dapper person. I ventured the remark
that he came from the north. Oh yes, he replied,
from a manufacturing town in Yorkshire ; he had
been visiting the West of England for the last two

182 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

or three years, and this was the first time he had
elected to spend the night at Yeovil. He had
nothing more to do in the place, having finished
his business early in the afternoon. He could have
got to Bristol or gone on to Exeter ; he was staying
only to hear the nightingale. He had never heard it,
and he didn't want to finish his rounds on this occasion
and go back north without that long-desired experience.
These rough fellows from the north, especially from
Yorkshire and Lancashire, are always surprising us
with their enthusiasm, their aesthetic feeling ! One
Sunday morning not long ago I was on the cathedral
green at Salisbury watching the pigeons and daws on
the vast pile, when I noticed a young working man
with his wife and child sitting on the grass by
the elm-trees. They had a luncheon basket with
them, and were evidently out for the day. By-
and-by the young man got up and strolled over
to where I was standing, looking up at the birds
soaring round the spire, and, entering into conver-
sation with me he told me that he was a zinc-
worker from Sheffield, that he had been sent south to
work at Tidworth in the erection of zinc and iron build-
ings for the Army. When he saw Salisbury Cathedral
and heard the choir he was so delighted that he resolved
to spend his Sundays and any day he had off at the
cathedral. He was musical himself, and belonged to
some musical society in his own town. He talked of
his love of music with sparkling eyes, and while he
talked he continued watching the birds, the daws sweep-

BACK TO THE WEST COUNTRY 183

ing round and round, mounting higher and higher until
they were above the cross ; and then from that vast
height they would hurl themselves suddenly downwards
towards the great building and the earth. All at once,
as we watched a bird coming down, he threw his arms
up and cried excitedly, " Oh, to fly like that ! "

And you, said I to myself, born in a hideous grimy
manufacturing town, breathing iron dust, a worker in
an ugly material engaged in making ugly things, have
yet more poetry and romance, more joy in all that is
beautiful, than one could find in any native of this soft
lovely green south country !

Does not this fact strike every observer of his
fellows who knows both north and south intimately ?
How strange then to think that well-nigh all that is
best in our poetic literature has been produced by
southerners — by Englishmen in the southern half of the
country ! Undoubtedly the poetic feeling is stronger
and more general in the north, and we can only conclude
that from this seemingly most favourable soil the
divine flower of genius springeth not.

To return to my commercial traveller. I told him
where to go in search of the nightingale, and meeting
him later that evening asked him if he had succeeded.
Yes, he replied, he had found and listened for some
time to its song. It was a fine song, unlike that of
any other bird known to him, but it did not come up
to his expectations, and he had formed the idea that
this bird was probably not a very good specimen of its
kind. It consoled him to be told that he was absolutely

1 84 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

right, that Yeovil's one nightingale was a rather poor
performer.

From Yeovil to Glastonbury is but a few miles,
some fifteen as the crow flies — no distance at all to the
person of importance in a motor-car and nothing to
detain him by the way. To me — to all whose desire
in travelling is not to arrive at their destination — it
was as far as I liked to make it. It was in fact a
vast green country where I discovered several small
ancient towns and more villages than I can remember ;
churches in the shadow of whose grey old towers one
would like to spend the slow last years of life ; inns too
where bread and cheese and beer, if nothing else, can
be obtained for refreshment, and the cottage homes of
the people one loves best. They are never wildly
enthusiastic like the Lancastrians about anything,
but they are sweeter, more engaging in temper and
manner, whether on account of their softer climate or
the larger infusion of Celtic blood in their Anglo-
Saxon veins I know not. They are perhaps a perfect
amalgam, like their Welsh neighbours on the other
side of the Severn with the harsh lines of the Welsh
features subdued, and like their Saxon neighbours
on the east side without their stolidity. Moreover,
they are not without a spark of that spirit which is in
the northerner — the romance, the inner bright life
which is not wholly concerned with material things.

CHAPTER XIX

AVALON AND A BLACKBIRD

AT Glastonbury I spent some hours at the Abbey,
somewhat disturbed at the huge diggings and a little
saddened at the sight of the repairs and restorations ;
yet they were necessary if this loveliest ruin in England
is to be kept standing a few centuries longer. Un-
fortunately, however skilfully the restoring work is
done, the new portions will insist on looking out-
rageously new. Time will doubtless restore the lost
harmony, the ancient venerable appearance, but it will
be long before these staring fresh parts will cease to
have the effect of patches of a new cloth on the frayed
and faded garment. Fifty years of sun and rain will
prepare the fresh, hard surfaces for the vegetation that
makes a ruin beautiful — valerian, ivy-toadflax, wall-
flower, and grey and green lichens and mosses.

In the course of a conversation I had with some of
those engaged in these works at the Abbey, during
which the subject of birds came up, Mr. Blythe Bond,
the gentleman who has charge of the excavations,
informed me that a blackbird in his garden whistled
a perfect musical phrase.

He took me to hear it at his house in the High Street,
which had a large garden at the back ; there we seated
ourselves in the summer-house and in a very few
185

1 86 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

minutes the bird began fluting his little human
roundelay for our benefit. My host whistled and
hummed it after him, then took me to his drawing-
room and touched it off on his piano, and finally when
I told him that after all it would perhaps escape my
memory he noted it down for me, and here it is :

It is not a rare thing to hear phrases in the black-
bird's singing which are like human music and speech
and may be taken down in our musical notation. I
will give a quotation here on this subject from one of
C. A. Johns' pleasant but forgotten little books —
Home Walks and Holiday Rambles (1863).

" A blackbird had stationed himself on the top of a
tree hard by, and seemed resolved to sing on until
fine weather returned. The burden of his song was
the following passage, which was repeated so often
that if one could tire of natural music I should have
been tired then :

" All the other strains were unmetrical, and there
seemed to be in them no melodious arrangement of
notes ; so that the general effect was nearly what could
be produced by a person talking in his natural tone of
voice, and repeatedly introducing a snatch of an old

AVALON AND A BLACKBIRD 187

song by which his memory was haunted, though he
was unable to recall either the words or the melody of
the remainder."

This is interesting because it is so common — the
perfect musical phrase occurring in a song which is
for the rest of a quite different character.

The question arises, are these phrases imitations or
natural to the bird ? Human music in bird-song is
a subject an American naturalist, Mr. Henry Oldys,
has made peculiarly his own, and he will be welcomed
by all lovers of bird music when he carries out his
intention of coming over to us to make a study of the
British songsters. Meanwhile we have the late C. A.
WitchelPs Evolution of Bird-Song to go on with. He
has recorded in musical notation no fewer than seventy-
six blackbird strains in his book, and his views as to the
origin of this kind of singing, in which the phrases
of the bird are identical with our musical intervals,
are of very great interest, as he is the only person in this
country who has made a special study of the subject.
There is, he writes, nothing surprising in these phrases
when we consider the imitative powers of the best
singers, and the frequency of human music in their
haunts. The field-labourer whistles ; from villages
issue louder, though not always sweeter, musical
sounds ; throughout the year music is heard in country
towns. It appears also that our musical scale is of
remote origin, and that for thousands of years the
intervals which we now employ have been wafted from

1 88 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

musical instruments used by men to the ears of listen-
ing birds.

This is far from convincing. Some of our song-
birds are imitative in a much higher degree than the
blackbird, yet never come near to human music in their
songs. The cuckoo with us and numerous other species
all the world over, many of them in wild lands where
human-made music is never wafted to their ears, do
yet observe the same intervals as in our own scale in
their calls and songs. My belief is that the blackbird
sings in this way naturally, that he approaches nearer
to us in his musical scale just as the grasshopper-
warbler, the red night-reeler, and the furze-wren go
further from us and are like insects in their music,
simply because it is his nature to. Blackbirds, we
have seen, are distributed pretty well all over the globe
and are of many species, ranging in size from those no
bigger than a throstle to others large as or larger than
jays, but all have beautiful voices which remind
English travellers in tropical forests and distant temper-
ate regions of the home bird, and in some instances it
is said to sing better than our bird. I think that if these
travellers had been specially interested in this subject
and had listened attentively to the exotic species, they
would have found that these too have phrases that
sound like fragments and snatches of human melodies.

The blackbird often reminds me of the common
Patagonian mocking-bird, Mimus patacbonicus, not in
the quality of the sounds emitted, nor in the shape of
the song, nor in any resemblance to human melody,

AVALON AND A BLACKBIRD 189

but in the way the bird throws out his notes anyhow,
until in this haphazard way he hits on a sequence of
notes, or phrase, that pleases him, and practises it with
variations. Finally, he may get fond of it and go on
repeating it for days or weeks. Every individual singer
is, so to speak, his own composer.

In listening to a blackbird, even where there is no
resemblance to a man-made melody, it always appears
to me to come nearer to human music than any other
bird songs ; that the bird is practising, or composing,
and by-and-by will rise to a melody in which the
musical intervals will be identical with those of our
scale. I recall the case of a blackbird of genius I once
heard near Fawley in the New Forest. This bird did
not repeat a strain with some slight variation as is usually
the case, but sang differently each time, or varied the
strain so greatly as to make it appear like a new melody
on each repetition, yet every one of its strains could
have been set down in musical notation. A musical
shorthand-writer could in a few days have filled a
volume with records of its melodies, and they would,
I think, have been far more interesting than the
seventy odd recorded by Witchell. No person who
had listened for half an hour to this bird could believe
that these strains were borrowed. They were too
many and they came as spontaneously as water gushing
from a rock. The bird was in a thorn hedge dividing
two grass fields, and there I stood for a long time, how
long I do not know, in the fading light, my astonish-
ment and admiration growing all the time, and I was

190 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

like one in a trance, or like the monk in the legend,
only my wonderful bird was black instead of white.
By-and-by he flew away and that was the last of him,
for on other days I searched and listened for him in
vain. Perhaps on the very morning after that evening
he fell to the gun of some person anxious about the
safety of his reddening strawberries — some farmer or
cottager who did not know that he was killing an angel.
However, a worse fate would have befallen him if one
of those who prefer to have their birds in cages had
chanced to hear his wonderful song and had proceeded
to capture him for exhibition about the country,
winning great glory from the " fancy " and perhaps
making a thousand pounds out of his prisoner for life.

This character of the blackbird's music, which I
have been discussing — its resemblance to human-made
music — is not the whole nor the principal cause of its
charm. The charm is chiefly due to the intrinsic
beauty of the sound ; it is a fluty sound and has that
quality of the flute suggestive of the human voice, the
voice in the case of the blackbird of an exquisitely pure
and beautiful contralto. The effect is greatly increased
by the manner in which the notes are emitted —
trolled out leisurely, as if by a being at peace and
supremely happy, and able to give the feeling its most
perfect expression.

It is this delicious song of the blackbird — a voice
of the loveliest quality, with an expression derived from
its resemblance to a melodious, brightened human
voice, uttered in a leisurely and careless manner, as of

AVALON AND A BLACKBIRD 191

a person talking sweetly and mingling talk with
snatches of song — it is all this combined which has
served to make the blackbird a favourite and more
to most of us as a songster than any other, not excepting
the nightingale. If the editor of some widely-circu-
lating newspaper would put the question to the vote,
the blackbird would probably come first, in spite of
the myths and traditions which have endeared certain
other species to us from childhood — the cuckoo the
messenger of spring, the dove that mourns for its
love, and Philomel leaning her breast upon a thorn;
the temple-building martlet, and robin redbreast
who in winter comes to us for crumbs and has so great
an affection for our kind that in woods and desert
places he will strew leaves over the friendless bodies
of unburied men.

But, it may be said, we have always had the blackbird
in Britain, a resident species, very common and univer-
sally distributed — why does it not figure more promi-
nently in our old literature ? If this can be taken as
a test undoubtedly the blackbird comes a long way
after the nightingale, though this species is known only
in a portion of England, actually less than a fourth
part of the British area over which the black ouzel with
orange-tawny bill is a familiar songster. It is however
not a good test. The fact that our older poets, in-
cluding those of Scotland and Wales, make much of
the nightingale merely serves to show that they
were following a convention of the Continental poets,
ancient and modern.

192 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

Ireland is an exception, to judge from the transla-
tions of the very early Irish poetry made by Professor
Kuno Meyer. Here, one is glad to find, are no old
imported bird myths and conventions, but a native
bird life and a feeling for birds which amaze us in
those remote and barbarous times. Many species are
mentioned in these poems, from the largest — eagle
and raven and wild goose — down to the little kitty
wren, but the blackbird is first on account of its lovely
voice — " sweet and soft and peaceful is his note," one
has it.

There is one blackbird poem in the collection which
might have been written by a poet of to-day. For we
are apt to think that to love birds as we love them, not
merely as feathered angels, beautiful to see and hear,
but with human tenderness and sympathy as beings
that are kin to us, is a feeling peculiar to our own times.
The poet laments the bird's loss when it has seen its
nest and fledglings destroyed or taken by ruthless cow-
boy lads. He can understand the bird's grief " for
the ruin of its home," because a like calamity has been
his : his wife and little ones are dead, and though their
taking off was bloodless it is terrible to him as slaughter
by the sword. He cries out against the injustice of
heaven, for even as that one nest was singled out among
many for destruction so were his home and loved ones :

O Thou, the Shaper of the world !

Uneven hands Thou layest on us ;
Our fellows at our side are spared,

Their wives and children are alive.

AVALON AND A BLACKBIRD 193

There is another remarkable poem conceived in the
spirit of that time of wild passions and the shedding of
blood, in which the first early note of the blackbird
with its message to the " faithful " is introduced in a
wonderfully impressive way. This tells how Fothad
Canann carried off the wife of Alill with her consent,
and was hotly pursued by Alill, and how they met and
fought until both were slain. Now Fothad had ar-
ranged with the woman to meet her in the evening
after the fight, and true to his word he kept the tryst.
As he comes to her she flies to meet him, to clasp him
with her arms and pour out all her passion on his breast.
But he will not have it, he waves her back imperiously
and will not allow her to utter a word. He must do all
the talking himself, for he is overflowing with great
matters, great news, and the time for telling them is
short. He tells her how they fought, how well they
were matched, what a glorious battle it was ! One
can see it — the deadly meeting of those two long-haired
men, their blue-grey eyes glinting with rage and the
joy of battle ; the shouts of defiance and insult ; the
furious onset and the swift movements of their lithe
and powerful frames, as of tigers ; the ringing blows
on shield and steel, and the end when they are down,
their shields shattered and weapons broken, their
bodies hacked and pierced, their spilt blood spreading
and mingling in one pool !

To such a fighter, slain in such a fight, what else
was there in the world to talk about ! She, and her
passion and everlasting grief for her slain lover — it
'3

194 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

was not worth a thought ! The fight was the thing,
and she must listen in silence to the story of it — she,
the last human listener he would ever have.

Suddenly the torrent of speech is arrested ; the voice
of the blackbird " sweet and soft and peaceful," comes
to them out of the darkness. Hark ! he cries to her
before vanishing for ever from her sight,

I hear the dusky ouzel send a joyous greeting to the faithful,

My speech, my shape, are spectral — hush, woman, do not speak to me !

CHAPTER XX
THE LAKE VILLAGE

FROM the Abbey to the prehistoric Lake Village is but
a step of two miles, and here I spent agreeable hours
with Dr. Bulleid, the discoverer and excavator of this
little centre of British life of the dawn, turning over
his finds dug out of the black, peaty soil. Here is an
enthusiast if you like — there are some in the south ! —
a busy doctor who works every day of the year in his
practice, excepting when he takes an annual summer
holiday of a few weeks and spends every day of it, from
morn to dewy eve, at the excavations, studying every
spadeful of earth thrown up by his dozen diggers.
My chief interest was in the bones of the large water-
birds on which the lake-dweller subsisted, and the
weapons with which he slew them — the round, hard
clay balls which were hurled from slings.

From the village I rambled on over the bed of the
ancient lake to its deeper part, which is still a wet
marsh, though partly drained and intersected with
hedges and dykes. Here there are large areas of boggy
ground so thickly grown over with cotton-grass that
at a little distance it looks like an earth covered with
snow. Straying in this place, revelling in that wind-
195

196 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

waved feathery fairy whiteness all round me, I finally
sat down by the water-side to watch and listen.
Mallard, moorhen, and water-rail, the last heard
though not seen, and little grebe were there, but no
unfamiliar sound came to me from the songsters in the
sedges and bulrushes or from the osiers and alders.

I was perhaps inattentive ; mine on this occasion
was a wandering mind ; I was still suffering from the
effect of my interview with Dr. Bulleid ; for even the
dullest person among us cannot very well spend an
hour with an enthusiast without catching something
from him — a slight rise in his tepid temperature, a
little rose-coloured rash on his skin, which will presently
vanish and leave him well again — as sane and healthy
a person as he ever was and ever will be to the end of
his comfortable, humdrum existence. But just then,
with the infection still in me, I was inhabiting two
worlds at one and the same time — that dank green
marshy world, whitened with cotton-grass, once a
great inland . lake and before that an estuary which
was eventually cut off from the Severn Sea through
the silting up of the sand at its mouth. And I was also
in that same shallow inland sea or lake, unmoved by
tides, which had been growing shallower year by
year for centuries with a rank aquatic vegetation spread-
ing over it as far as the eye could see — a green watery
world. I could hear the wind in the bulrushes —
miles on miles of dark polished stems, tufted with ruddy
brown : that low, mysterious sound is to me the most
fascinating of all the many voices of the wind. The

THE LAKE VILLAGE 197

feeling is partly due to early associations, to boyhood,
when I used to ride into the vast marshes of the pampas
in places where, sitting on my horse, the tufted tops
of the bulrushes were on a level with my face. I
sought for birds' nests, above all for that of the strange
little bittern. It was a great prize, that small plat-
form of yellow sedge leaves, a foot or two above the
water, with three oval eggs no bigger than pigeon's eggs
resting on it, of a green so soft, brilliant, indescribably
lovely, that the sight of them would thrill me like some
shining supernatural thing or some heavenly melody.

Or on a windy day when I would sit by the margin
to listen to the sound unlike any other made by the
wind in the green world. It was not continuous,
nor one, like the sea-like sound of the pines, but in gusts
from this part or that all round you, now startlingly
loud, then quickly falling to low murmurings, always
with something human in it, but wilder, sadder, more
airy than a human voice, as of ghost-like beings, invisible
to me, haunting the bulrushes, conversing together
and calling to one another in their unearthly tones.

And the birds ! Ah, to be back in the Somerset of
that far time — the paradise of birds in its reedy inland
sea, its lake of Athelney !

I have often wished to be back in the old undrained
Lincolnshire for the sake of its multitudinous wild bird
life in far more recent times, as described by eye-
witnesses— Michael Dray ton for example, no longer
ago than the time of Elizabeth. Does any bird-loving
reader know the passage ? I doubt it, for is there any

198 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

one in England, including the student of the poetry of
that period, who can say with his hand on his heart
that he has read the whole of " Polyolbion " — every
twelve-foot line of its many thousands, each line
laboriously dragging its slow length along ? It is hard
to read even the hundred lines descriptive of the fens
except for the picture conjured up of those marvellous
bird gatherings. It was Lincolnshire's boast, according
to Drayton, that no such abundance could be seen in
any other part of the kingdom. I imagine that there
was an even greater abundance and variety in the
Somerset lake of prehistoric times. It was a better
climate, a more sheltered district, and birds must have
been far more numerous in the ages before man found
out how to slay them at long distances with guns and
to frighten them with smoke and flame and a noise like
thunder.

Now, with Drayton's picture in my mind and many
old memories of immense congregations of wild fowl
in the lakes and marshes of a distant region, witnessed
in my early years but nevermore to be seen, I could
reconstruct the past. Indeed, for a little space, while
the infection lasted, I was there afloat on that endless
watery wilderness as it appeared to the lake dweller of,
say, twenty-five centuries ago. The lake dweller him-
self was with me, poling and paddling his long canoe by
devious ways over the still waters, by miles and leagues
of grey rushes and sedges vivid green, and cat's-tail
and flowering rush and vast dark bulrush beds and
islets covered with thickets of willow and alder and

THE LAKE VILLAGE 199

trees of larger growth. It was early morning in early
spring : at all events the geese had not gone yet, but
were continually flying by overhead, flock succeeding
flock, filling the world with their clangour. I watched
the sky rather than the earth, feasting my eyes on the
long-unseen spectacle of great soaring birds. Buzzard
and kite and marsh harrier soared in wide circles above
me, raining down their wild shrill cries. Other and
greater birds were there as well, and greatest of all
the pelican, one of the large birds on which the marsh-
men lived, but doomed to vanish and be forgotten
as a British species long ages before Drayton lived.
But his familiar osprey was here too, a king among the
hawks, sweeping round in wide circles, to pause by-and-
by in mid career and closing his wings fall like a stone
upon the water with a mighty splash. We floated in
a world of birds ; herons everywhere standing motion-
less in the water, and flocks of spoonbills busily at feed,
and in the shallower places and by the margins innumer-
able shore-birds, curlews, godwits, and loquacious
black and white avocets. Sheldrakes too in flocks
rose up before us, with deep honking goose-like cries,
their white wings glistening like silver in the early
morning sunlight. Other sounds came from a great
way off, faintly heard, a shrill confused buzzing clan-
gour as of a swarm of bees passing overhead, and looking
that way we saw a cloud rising out of the reeds and
water, then another and another still — clouds of birds,
each its own colour, white, black, and brown, according
to the species — gulls, black terns, and wild duck. Seen

200 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

at that distance they appeared like clouds of starlings
in the evening at their winter roosting haunts. Pre-
sently the clouds dispersed or settled on the water
again, and for a little space it seemed a silent world.
Then a new sound was heard from some distant spot
perhaps a mile away — a great chorus of wild ringing
jubilant cries, echoing and re-echoing all over that
illimitable watery expanse ; and I knew it was the
crane — the giant crane that hath a trumpet sound !

These birds were all very real to me, seen very
vividly, their voices so loud and clear that they startled
and thrilled me ; but the long-haired brown-skinned
marshman who was my boatman was seen less dis-
tinctly. The anthropological reader will be disap-
pointed to learn that no clear image was retained of his
height, build, features, and the colour of his eyes and
hair, and that the sense of all his wild jabber and
gestures has quite gone out of my memory.

From all this greatness of wild bird life, seen in a
vision, I returned to reality and to very small things ;
one of which came as a pleasant surprise. I went on to
the Cheddar valley and near Winscombe I dropped in
on an old friend, a writer and a lover of birds, who had
built himself a charming bungalow among the Mendips.
We had tea on the terrace, a nice cool rose and creeper-
shaded place after my long hot ramble, a green lawn
beneath us, with a row of large pine trees on its other
side. My friend was telling me of a flock of crossbills
which to his delight had been haunting the place for
some days past, when lo! down came the very birds,

THE LAKE VILLAGE 201

and there for half an hour we had them right before
us while we drank tea and ate strawberries, and watched
them working at the cones — our quaint pretty little
parrots of the north, so diversely coloured — one red like
a red cardinal, one or two yellow, others green or mixed.
On the following day I was at Wells ; it was Sunday,
and in the morning, happening to see the bell-ringers
hurrying into St. Cuthbert's church, I was reminded
of an old wish of mine to be in a belfry during the bell-
ringing. This wish and intention was formed some
years ago on reading an article in the Saturday Review
by Walter Herries Pollock, describing his sensations
in a belfry. Here then was my opportunity — a better
could not have been found if I had sought for it. St.
Cuthbert's is one of the greatest of the great Glaston-
bury church towers, with a peal of eight big bells. I
had often listened to them with pleasure from a re-
spectable distance, and now I felt a slight twinge of
apprehension at the prospect of a close acquaintance.
The bell-ringers were amused at my request : nobody
ever wanted to be among the bells when they were
being rung, they assured me ; however, they did not
object, and so to the belfry I climbed, and waited, a
little nervously, as some musical enthusiast might wait
to hear a symphony from the days of the giants, com-
posed (when insane) by a giant Tschaikovsky, to be
performed on " instruments of unknown form " and
gigantic size. I was not disappointed ; the effect was
too awful for words and was less musical than I had
thought it would be. In less than three minutes it

202 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

became unendurable, and I then slipped out on to the
roof to save myself from some tremendous disaster.
In a minute I was back again, and with intervals of
escape to the roof I remained till the ringing finished.
I could not have stood it otherwise, and as it was,
I feared every moment that it would deafen me per-
manently so that I would no more hear birds sing.
That, to me, would be the end of all things. Pollock,
in the article mentioned above, has described the
sensations I experienced in a sentence or two. " It
is not like the voice of any single singer nor like the
voices of a trained choir," he wrote. " It is more the
speech, resolved into musical sound, of a vast crowd
half perhaps rather than wholly human, whose accents
vary from the highest joyousness to the deepest mel-
ancholy, from notes of solemn warning to cries of
terrifying denunciation and all that of course with an
infinity of half and quarter shades of expression."

Probably the St. Cuthbert bells were larger than
those he heard, and perhaps I was closer to them — I was
in fact in the belfry with them — as I found no joyous
expression in the sound at all ; it was all terrible, and
the worst thing in it, which he does not mention, was
a continuous note, a single loud metallic sound, per-
sisting through all the shrieking, crashing, and roaring,
like the hum of a threshing-machine so loud and sharp
that it seemed to pierce the brain like a steel weapon.
It was this unbroken sound which was hardest to endure
and would, I imagined, send me out of my senses al-
together if I stayed too long in the belfry.

CHAPTER XXI

THE MARSH WARBLER'S Music

FROM Wells I went on to Bristol and thence to Chep-
stow, where, a few miles out, I hoped to find one of
my rare birds, but on enquiry discovered that it had
long vanished from this haunt. There was nothing
for me but to extract what pleasure I could from the
castle, the valley of the Wye, and Tintern Abbey.
At Chepstow, a small parasitic town much given to
drink, I saw two wonderful things, which the guide-
book writers probably do not notice — a walnut tree and
an ivy tree, both growing in the castle. The first
must be one of the finest walnut trees in the country :
one of its enormous horizontal branches measured
eighteen yards from the trunk to the end ; the branch
on the opposite side of the trunk measured fifteen
yards, giving the tree a breadth of ninety-nine feet !
The other, the ivy, was a tree in the ordinary sense
of the word, that is to say, a plant above the size of a
bush which is not a parasite supported by another tree
but wholly self-sustained. It grows near but not touch-
ing the wall, with a round straight bole three feet in
circumference and fifteen feet in height, with a rough
elm-tree-like bark, crowned with a dense round mass
203

204 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

of branches and leaves. Doubtless it once grew on
a tree and had a strong straight bole of its own when
the tree died, and during the slow dying and gradual
decay of the support it added to its wood and grew
harder to meet the changing situation, until when
the old trunk it grew against had crumbled to dust it
was able to stand erect, a perfect independent tree.

At the too famous Abbey the chief interest was in
the birds. Starlings, sparrows, and daws were there in
numbers, and many blue and ox-eye tits, fly-catchers,
and redstarts, all feeding their young or bringing them
off. The starlings were most abundant, and the young
were being spilt from the walls all over the place. I
talked with a slow old labourer who was lazily sweeping
.the dead leaves and straws from the smooth turf which
forms the floor of the roofless ruin, when one of the
young birds, more stupid than the others, began
following us about, clamouring to be fed. The old
sweeper, using his broom, gently pushed the poor fool
away : " There, there, go away, or you'll be getting
hurt," he said, and the bird went.

" No more rare birds this season ! " I said and turned
homewards ; but in Gloucestershire I found a man who
told me of a colony of the marsh warbler, a rarity I had
not counted on meeting ; better still, he took me to
it, although he wished me to understand that it was his
colony, his own discovery, also that he had been making
a good thing out of it. He left me on the spot to
experience that rarest delight of the bird-seeker, the
making the acquaintance, and growing hourly and

THE MARSH WARBLER'S MUSIC 205

daily more intimate with, a new species. In this
instance it was nothing but a plain little brown bird,
plainer than the nightingale and hardly to be distin-
guished, even in the hand, from the familiar reed
warbler, but in virtue of its melody of a lustre surpassing
our blue kingfisher or indeed any shining bird of the
tropics.

The colony was in a withy bed of a year's growth,
the plants being three or four feet high, the whole
ground being covered with a dense growth of tall
grasses and sedges, meadow-sweet, comfrey, and nettles.
It was moist and boggy in places but without water,
except in one small pool which served as a drinking and
bathing place to all the small birds in the vicinity.

Sitting on a mound a few feet above the surface I
could survey the whole field of seven to eight acres
enclosed by high hedges and old hedgerow elm and oak
trees on three sides, with a row of pollarded willows
on the other, and I was able to make out about nine
pairs of marsh warblers in the colony. It was easy
to count them, as each couple had its own territory,
and the males were conspicuous as they were con-
stantly flying about in pursuit of the females or chasing
away rival cocks, then singing from the topmost twigs
of the withy-bushes. This, I found, was but one of a
group of colonies, the birds in all of which numbered
about seventy pairs. Yet it only became known in
quite recent years that the marsh warbler is a British
breeding species ! It had been regarded previously
as a chance or occasional visitor from the continent,

206 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

until Mr. Warde Fowler discovered that it was a
regular summer visitant to Oxfordshire, also that it
was the latest of our migrants to arrive and a later
breeder by several weeks. It is curious that in a small
country so infested with ornithologists as ours this species
should have been overlooked. They, the ornithologists
and collectors, say that it is not so, that a bird with so
beautiful a song, so unlike that of his nearest relations
the reed and sedge warblers, could not have been over-
looked. Undoubtedly it was overlooked, and this
colony, or group of colonies, numbering seventy or
more pairs, must be quite an ancient one. There are
others too in Somerset, and no doubt many besides in
the west country and midlands. The species has not
diffused itself more in the country, I imagine, on ac-
count of its habit of nesting almost exclusively in the
withy beds, where their nests are as much exposed to
destruction as those of the skylark and land-rail in the
corn. The moist grounds where the willows are
planted are covered annually with a luxuriant growth
of grasses and herbage which must be cut down to give
air and life to the willows. The cutting usually takes
place about mid-June when the eggs are being laid
and incubation is already in progress in many nests.
The nests, whether attached to the withies or to the
tall stems of the meadow-sweet and other plants, are
mostly destroyed.

I have gone into these details just to show that it
would be easy to give this bird a better chance of in-
creasing its numbers by inducing the owners of withy

THE MARSH WARBLER'S MUSIC 207

beds where they are known to breed to do the mowing
at the end of May instead of in the middle of June or
later. This could be best done by local bird-protect-
ing societies in Gloucestershire and Somerset and in
other counties where colonies may be found.

Certainly no sweet songster in Britain is better
worth preserving than the marsh warbler. I should
class it as one of our four greatest — blackbird, nightin-
gale, skylark, marsh warbler. The blackbird is first
because of the beautiful quality of its voice and its
expression, due to its human associations. The marsh
warbler compared with lark and nightingale has a
small voice, which does not carry far, but in sweetness
he is the equal of any and in variety excels them all.
It could not be otherwise, since he is able to borrow
the songs of the others, even of the best. He is

That cheerful one who knoweth all
The songs of all the winged choristers,
And in one sequence of melodious sound
Pours all their music.

Thus wrote Southey of the American bird in one of
the very few quotable passages in the vast volume of
his numerous epics : his three or four happy lines are
worth more as giving the bird its characteristic ex-
pression, than all the verses of the transatlantic poets
on the subject.

The mocking-bird, I may say here, is a powerful
singer, and I noticed that in listening to the white-
winged mocking-bird of Patagonia, which I believe
to be the greatest of the genus, he subdued or smalled

208 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

his voice when imitating the small or weak- voiced
songsters, but in spite of the subduing the song,
coming from his larger organ, had gained in
power and penetration. With the marsh warbler
it is just the reverse : the low songs are reproduced
with fidelity, the loud strains while retaining their
exact form are emitted in a lower tone. Thus, he can
copy the phrases of the thrush, but the notes do not
carry much further than his imitation of the willow-
wren. One is reminded of Sir John Davies' lines —

All things received do such proportions take
As those things have wherein they are received ;

So little glasses little faces make,
And narrow webs on narrow frames be weaved.

On the other hand he makes many of the songs he
copies sweeter and more beautiful than their originals.
We may say that he is a perfect artist in his borrowings,
and brings the songs of all the others into harmony
with his own native notes and with one another. This
was observed by Warde Fowler, who was the first in
England to describe the song. He wrote : " In spite
of many imitations in which the bird indulges there is
always a very sweet silvery individuality about the
song, which makes it quite unmistakable." In that
native quality of the voice, its silvery sweetness,
it comes nearest, I think, to the reed warbler's song.
Its silvery sweet quality is indeed the principal merit
of this warbler's strains, which can only be properly
appreciated when the listener stands or sits on a level
with the reeds within a very few yards of the singer.

THE MARSH WARBLER'S MUSIC 209

Listening to the marsh warbler at some distance
it seemed to me at first that he sang his own song
interspersed with imitations, that the borrowed songs
and phrases were selections which accorded best with
his own notes, so that the whole performance was like
one ever-varying melody. On a closer acquaintance I
found that the performance was mainly or nearly all
imitations in which the loud, harsh, and guttural sounds
were subdued and softened — that the mocker's native
silvery sweetness had in some degree been imparted to
all of them. The species whose songs, detached phrases,
and calls I recognized were the swallow, sparrow,
goldfinch, greenfinch, chaffinch, redpoll, linnet, reed-
bunting, blackbird (its chuckle only), throstle, missel-
thrush (its alarm or anger cry), blackcap, willow-wren,
robin, redstart, whinchat, yellow wagtail, tree-pipit,
skylark, and partridge — its unmistakable call, but
subdued and made musical. There were also some
notes and phrases that seemed perfect copies from
the nightingale, but I would not say that they were
imitations as there were no nightingales at that spot,
and I came to the listening in a sceptical spirit, quite
resolved not to believe that any note or phrase or
song could be an imitation unless the bird supposed
to be imitated could be found in the vicinity. Another
bird I could not find in the place was the grasshopper
warbler, yet one day one of the birds I listened to pro-
duced what seemed to me a most perfect imitation of
its reeling performance.

But how, the reader will ask, could the marsh

210 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

warbler have acquired the redpoll's song seeing that
the redpoll would be far away in its breeding haunts
in the pine forests of the north when the warbler
was in the west country ? Strange to say there was a
small colony of half a dozen redpoll pairs breeding in
the hedgerow elms at the side of the withy bed. My
guide to the spot had told me of these birds, and it
was a rare pleasure to listen in southern England to
their slight pretty song in the elm tops, with its
curious little breezy trill like a dry leaf rapidly
fluttered by the wind against another leaf.

I did not hear an imitation of the blackbird's song,
although its chuckling notes were sometimes given,
and it struck me that the marsh warbler, good artist
that he is, does not attempt, like the bungling starling,
to reproduce sounds that are outside of his register.
Other listeners, however, have said that he does mimic
the blackbird's song. Then, as to the whinchat, in
two days' listening I heard no imitation of its song,
although the bird was present and building in the
withy bed. I thought that that little delicious tender
song too was beyond the warbler's power ; but I was
mistaken, and by-and-by I heard it reproduced so per-
fectly that I could hardly believe my ears. The wren's
song I did not hear and concluded that the warbler
refused to copy it on account of its peculiar distinctive
sharp quality which some persons associate in their
minds with an acid flavour.

I think the imitation which pleased and surprised
me most was that of the willow wren's exquisite joyous

THE MARSH WARBLER'S MUSIC 211

yet tender melody. Until I heard it I could not have
believed that any feathered mocker could reproduce
that falling strain so perfectly.

One of the greatest pleasures in life — my life I mean
— is to be present, in a sense invisible, in the midst of
the domestic circle of beings of a different order,
another world, than ours. Yet it is one which may be
had by any person who desires it. Some of the smaller
birds lend themselves easily to this innocent prying.
And one is more in sympathy with them than with the
smaller, more easily observed insects. The absolute
indifference of these to our presence only accentuates the
fact of their unlikeness to us in their senses and faculties.
There is a perpetual fascination in some social insects,
ants especially, but it disquiets as well as delights us
to mark their ways. They baffle our curiosity, and if
we be of animistic mind we become when watching
them uncomfortably conscious of a spirit, an entity,
in or behind nature that watches us and our watching
with an unfathomable look in its eyes and a challenging
and mocking smile on its lips.

One of our most distinguished biologists, who has
written books on some lower forms of life which are
classics, has never included insects in his studies just
because he has never been able to free himself from a
sense of uncanniness they give him. In me, too, they
produce this feeling at times : — these myriads of
creatures that float like motes in the sunbeam ; minute,

212 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

gemlike, winged bodies of strange shapes and gem-like
minds to match, they come upon us like a living glitter-
ing dust shaken from the tail of some comet in our
summer skies — a dust that will settle down by-and-
by and vanish when the air grows cool at the ap-
proach of winter.

But little birds — dear little birds or darlings as we
may call them without rebuke — are vertebrates and
relations, with knowing, emotional, thinking brains
like ours in their heads, and with senses like ours, only
brighter. Their beauty and grace, so much beyond ours,
and their faculty of flight which enables them to
return to us each year from such remote outlandish
places, their winged swift souls in winged bodies, do
not make them uncanny but only fairy-like. Thus we
love and know them, and our more highly developed
minds are capable of bridging the gulf which divides
us from them, and divides bird from mammal.
Small as they are bodily, in some cases no bigger than
one of a man's ten toes, we know they are on the
same tree of life as ourselves, grown from the same
root, with the same warm red blood in their veins,
and red blood is thicker than water — certainly it is
thicker than the colourless fluid which is the life of
the insect.

To come back to particulars, and the subject of this
chapter, there are very great differences in the temper
and behaviour of even the smallest birds of different
species in the presence of their human fellow-beings.
Some are strangely, unaccountably shy, and so sus-

THE MARSH WARBLER'S MUSIC 213

picious that they will not comport themselves as they
do immediately we are out of sight and mind. What
a contrast in this respect is there between such species
as the stonechat and goldcrest ! One is always watch-
ing us, always anxious, and refuses not only to go on
with his love-making or nest-building but even refuses
to sing if we are there ; while to the other our presence
is no more than that of a rock or tree. I was delighted
to find that the marsh warbler was more like the
last than the first, that he went on with his feeding,
wooing, nest-building, his feud with his rivals, or with
the neighbouring cock who from time to time ventured
to intrude on his little dominion, and above all with his
beautiful singing, just as though I had not been there
at all. My greatest pleasure was to mark a spot which
a pair of the birds had selected as their own and to go
and settle myself down in the very middle of the
sacred ground. There the cock would quickly come to
me, evidently recognizing in me a living creature of
some kind — a big animal with the faculty of loco-
motion, and at first he would appear to be a little
anxious about the safety of his nest, but after a few
minutes the trouble would vanish from his little volatile
mind and he would be all freedom and gladness and
melody, with transitory fits of rage and other emotions,
as before. On these occasions I sometimes had one
singing almost continuously for several minutes to half
an hour within a dozen yards of where I sat. At such
times his strains sounded louder but no less sweet than
when heard at a distance of forty of fifty yards. On

214 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

one occasion I had him even nearer, owing to a mishap.
I was walking along the dry bottom of a wide old ditch
under a hedge at the side of the withy bed, when I came
to a deep pool or hole full of mud and slimy water, and
to save myself the trouble of going round it I took
hold of an overhanging willow branch and swung my-
self across to the other side, but failed to get quite
clear and was plunged deep into the slime. After
scraping off the fetid mud and slime which covered me
I went back to the deep pool of clear water in the withy
bed and taking off my tweed suit and boots spent an
hour in washing them, then spread them out in the
sun. The drying I thought would take five or six
hours, and as I could not roam about in my stockings
and underclothing which had not got wet or return to
the town and civilized life to get a meal or tea, I thought
my best plan was to spend the rest of the day lying
down close to one of the marsh warbler's favourite
singing bushes. There I made myself a nice bed of dry
sedges in a sunny spot within two yards of the singing-
bush, and presently the cock bird came and flew round
and perched here and there on the stems, scolding and
singing. He went and came a good many times, but
at last gave up being troubled at my presence and
eventually began coming to his own withy-plant and to
sing there fully and freely for long intervals at that
short distance of two yards from my head.

I thought I had never listened to sweeter music than
this bird's, and that my fall into the mud-hole had
proved an exceedingly happy accident.

CHAPTER XXII
GOLDFINCHES AT RYME INTRINSICA

THERE is much in a name, and when I left Yeovil to
run to Dorchester by that lonely beautiful road which
takes you by the clear swift Cerne and past the ancient
figure of a giant with a club on the down side over
against Cerne Abbas, I went a little distance out of
my way to look at a small village solely on account
of its singular and pretty name. Or rather two
villages — Yetminster and Ryme Intrinsica. Who
would not go a dozen miles out of his road for the
pleasure of seeing places with such names ! At the first
I was unlucky, since the only inhabitant I made ac-
quaintance with was an unprepossessing voluble old
woman with greedy eyes who, though not too poor,
at once set herself to conjure a shilling out of my
pocket. In the end we quarrelled and I went away re-
gretting I had met her, seeing that her unpleasing
image would be associated in my mind with the picture
of Yetminster — its noble, ancient church standing in
its wide green space, surrounded by old stone-built
thatched houses with valerian and ivy-leaved toad-flax
and wallflower growing on the crumbling walls.

At Ryme Intrinsica I was more fortunate. It was
215

216 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

a charming village with stone cottages, as is usual in
that stone country, and a pretty little church standing
in the middle of a green and flowery churchyard.
Here there were several small yew trees, and no sooner
had I got inside the gate than out fluttered a goldfinch
in brilliant feather, emitting his sharpest alarm note.
Then from trees and bushes all round where they had
been concealed, more goldfinches fluttered forth, until
there were twelve, all loudly protesting against my
presence at that spot, flitting from tree to tree and
perching on the terminal twigs within three or four
yards of my head. Never had I seen goldfinches so
excited, so bold in mobbing a man : I could only
suppose that very few visitors came into that secluded
churchyard, where they were breeding, and doubtless
a stranger in the place was a much more alarming figure
to them than the parson or any of the native villagers
would have been. But it was a new and delightful
experience to find so many pairs breeding together,
making their nests within reach of a man's hand.

Now as I stood there watching the birds I by chance
noticed that a man and his wife and little girl standing
at their cottage door hard by were intently and sus-
piciously watching me. On coming out I went over
to them and asked the man how long they had had
goldfinches breeding so abundantly in their church-
yard. A very few years ago I had been told that the
goldfinch had almost ceased to exist in Dorset. He
replied that it was true, that goldfinches had begun
to increase only during the last three Q,r four years

GOLDFINCHES AT RYME INTRINSICA 217

since they had been protected by law all the year
round.

He could not have given me more agreeable news.
I remembered with a keen sense of satisfaction that
the late Mr. Mansel Pleydell-Bouverie, of Whatcombe
in Dorset, had written to me asking my advice in draw-
ing up a new bird-protection order for the county,
and that in replying I had strongly urged him to secure
the fullest protection the law can afford to this most
charming and most persecuted of all small birds.

Two or three years before that date I spent several
weeks in Somerset, walking a good deal, without once
seeing or hearing a goldfinch, yet if I had come within
fifty yards of a copse or orchard inhabited by a pair,
their sharp, unmistakable whit-whit would have ad-
vertised their presence. At Wells I made the ac-
quaintance of a man past middle age who had taken
to bird-catching as a boy and still followed that fascinat-
ing vocation. " Have you never had goldfinches in
these parts ? " I asked him ; to which he replied that
he remembered the time when they were abundant,
but for the last thirty years or longer they had been
steadily decreasing and were now practically gone.
They had gone because they were too much sought
after ; then he added : " I daresay they would come
again if there was a law made to stop us from catching
them." I expressed the hope that such a law would
come in time, at which he shook his head and grunted.
Now Somerset has such a law and I hear that gold-
finches are again to be seen in the Wells district. In

2i 8 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

fact, county after county has taken up the cause of
this pretty and useful little bird, and in a small map of
the country lying before me, in which the counties
where the goldfinch receives protection throughout
the year are coloured red, I find that on more than
three-fourths of the entire area of England and Wales
the bird is now safeguarded. As a result it is increasing
all over the country, but it will be many years before
we have it in its former numbers. How abundant it
was about eighty years ago, before its long decline
began, may be gathered from the following passage
in Cobbett's Rural Rides describing his journey from
Highworth to Malmesbury in Wiltshire.

" Between Somerford and Ocksey, I saw, on the side
of the road, more goldfinches than I had ever seen
together ; I think fifty times as many as I had ever seen
at one time in my life. The favourite food of the
goldfinch is the seed of the thistle. The seed is just
now dead ripe. The thistles all cut and carried away
from the fields by the harvest ; but they grow along-
side the roads, and in this place in great quantities.
So that the goldfinches were got here in flocks, and, as
they continued to fly before me for nearly half a mile
and still sticking to the roads and brakes I do believe
I had, at last, a flock of 10,000 flying before me."

Cobbett rightly says that the seed of the thistle is
the favourite food of the bird ; and once upon a time
an ornithologist made the statement that the improved
methods of agriculture in England had killed the
thistle, thus depriving the goldfinch of its natural food,

GOLDFINCHES AT RYME INTRINSICA 219

the result being that the bird had declined in numbers
to the verge of extinction. The statement has been
copied into pretty well every book on British birds
since it was made. O wise ornithologists, what does
the goldfinch live on during nine months of the year ?
How does he exist without his natural food ? How
does he live even in the unnatural conditions of a cage
without thistle-seed ? I know of one case in which
the poor prisoner lived shut up in his little wire box
for eighteen years. Besides, the museum or closet
naturalist is very much out of it when he talks about
the extirpation of the thistle. The good old plant is
doing very well. Long before the Act of 1894-5
which empowers the local authorities to protect their
birds, I had been a frequent visitor to, and a haunter
of, many extensive thistle-grown places in southern
England — chalk downs that were once wheatfields,
gone out of cultivation for half a century or longer,
ruined sheep-walks, where in July and August I could
look over hundreds of acres of rust-brown thistles,
covered with their glistening down, the seed " dead
ripe," and never a goldfinch in sight !

And now I must go back to Ryme Intrinsica — the
pretty name of that village makes me reluctant to leave
it — and to its goldfinches, the little company of twelve
fluttering with anxious cries about my head, a very
charming spectacle,and to an even more brilliant picture
or vision of the past which was all at once restored
to my mental eye. We are familiar with the powerful
emotional effect of certain odours, associated with

220 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

our early life, in this connection ; occasionally effects
equally strong are produced by sights and sounds, and
this was one. As I stood in the churchyard watching
the small flutterers in their black and gold and crimson
liveries, listening to their excited cries, a vision of my
boyhood was brought before me, so vivid as to seem
like reality. After many years I was a boy once more,
in my own distant home, and the time was October,
when the brilliant spring merges into hot summer.
I was among the wind-rustled tall Lombardy poplars,
inhaling their delicious smell, at that spot where a
colony of a couple of dozen black-headed siskins were
breeding. They are without the crimson on their
faces ; their plumage is black and gold, but to all
English-speaking people in that far country they are
known as goldfinches, and in flight and habits and love
of thistle-seed and in melodyand in their anxious piping
notes they are like our English bird. They are now
fluttering about me, like these of Ryme Intrinsica,
displaying their golden feathers in the brilliant sun-
shine, uttering their agitated cries, while I climb tree
after tree to find two or three or four nests in each —
dainty little mossy down-lined cups placed between the
slender branches and trunk, each with its complement
of shining pearly eggs — a beautiful sight to a boy !

Then another picture follows. We are now in the
burning days of November and December, the vast
open treeless plains as far as one can see parched to a
rust-brown, and cattle and horses and sheep in thou-
sands to be watered at the great well. I see the native

GOLDFINCHES AT RYME INTRINSICA 221

boy on his big horse drawing up the canvas bucket ;
the man by the well catching the hoop as it comes to
the surface and directing the stream of clear cold water
into the long wooden troughs. But the thing to see
is the crowd of beasts, the flocks and herds gathering
before noon at the accustomed spot, first seen coming
in troops and lines, walking, trotting, galloping from
all that shadeless illimitable expanse where the last
liquid mud in the dried pools has been sucked up.
What a violent crowd ! What a struggling and what
an uproar of bellowings, whinnyings and multitudinous
bleatings! And what dreadful blows of horns and
hoofs rained on each other's tough hides ! For they
are all mad at the sight and smell of water, and only
a few at a time have room to drink at the trough.

But the crowding and fighting and drinking are now
ended ; even the sheep, the last to get to the water,
have had their fill and streamed away over the plain
once more, and the spilt water lying in pools at the
side of the long wooden troughs is visited by crowds
on crowds of little birds — small crested song-sparrows,
glossy purple cow-birds, with other-coloured troupials,
the " starlings " of the New World ; and tyrant-birds
of diver colours — olive-green, yellow, chestnut, black
and white and grey and many more ; doves, too, and
finches in great variety. The best of these were the
goldfinches, in close little flocks and in families, the
young birds clamouring for food and drink with
incessant shrill tremulous reedy cries.

What a contrast between this dainty bright-coloured

222 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

crowd of feathered drinkers and that of the pushing
fighting bellowing beasts ! And what a sight for a
boy's eyes ! There I would stay in the hot sun to
watch them when all the others, the work of watering
over, would hurry away to the shade of the house
and trees, and my desire to see them more closely, to
look at them as one can look at a flower, was so in-
sistent and so intense as to be almost a pain. But I
had no binocular and didn't even know that such an
instrument existed ; and at last to satisfy the craving
I took it into my head to catch them — to fill my
hands with goldfinches and have them in numbers. It
was easily done. I put an old deal box or packing-case
over a pool of water, one side propped up with a stick,
to which a long string was attached. With the end
of the string in my hand I sat and waited, while birds
of many kinds came and took their half-dozen sips and
flew away, but when a flock of goldfinches appeared
and gathered to drink under the box, I pulled the string
and made them prisoners. Then I transferred them
to a big cage, and, placing it on a stand under the trees,
sat down to feast my eyes on the sight — to look at a
goldfinch as I would look at a flower. And I had my
reward and was supremely happy, but it was a short-
lived happiness, for very soon the terror and distress
of my little captives, and their senseless frantic efforts
to get out of their prison, began to annoy and make
me miserable. I say "senseless" because I had no
intention of keeping them in captivity, and to my
small boy brain it seemed that they might have re-

GOLDFINCHES AT RYME INTRINSICA 223

strained themselves a little and allowed me to enjoy
seeing them for an hour or two. But as their flutter-
ings and strainings and distressing cries continued
I opened the cage and allowed them to fly away.

Looking back on that incident now, it strikes me as
rather an inhuman thing to have done ; but to the
boy, whose imagination has not yet dawned, who does
not know what he is doing, much has to be forgiven.
He has a monkey-like, prying curiosity about things,
especially about living things, but little love for them.
A bird in a cage is more to him as a rule than many
birds in a bush, and some grow up without ever getting
beyond this lower stage. Love or fondness of or
kindness to animals, with other expressions of the kind,
are too common in our mouths, especially in the
mouths of those who keep larks, linnets, siskins, and
goldfinches in cages. But what a strange " love " and
" kindness " which deprive its object of liberty and
its wonderful faculty of flight ! It is very like that of
the London east-end fancier who sears the eye-balls
of his chaffinch with a red-hot needle to cherish it
ever after and grieve bitterly when its little darkened
life is finished. " You'll think me a soft-hearted
chap, but 'pon my soul when I got up and went to
say good-morning to my bird, and give him a bit of
something to peck at, and found poor Chaffie lying
there dead and cold at the bottom of his cage, it made
the tears come into my eyes."

It is love of a kind, no doubt.

The east-ender is " devoted " to his chaffinch, but

224 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

for the generality the first favourite is undoubtedly
the goldfinch, and if few are seen in cages compared
with larks and linnets it is because they are much rarer
and cost more. Our " devotion " to it, as we have
seen, nearly caused its extermination in Britain, and
we now import large numbers from Spain to supply
the demand. One doubts that the bird will stand
this drain very long, as the Spanish are just as fond of
it (in a cage) as we are.

Here I am reminded of a very charming little poem
about a caged goldfinch by one of my favourite authors
— El Colorin de Filis, by Melendez, an eighteenth-
century poet. I do not think that any one who reads
this poem and others of equal merit to be found in the
literature of Spain, would deny that the sentiment of
admiration and tenderness for birds is sometimes
better and more beautifully expressed in Spanish poetry
than in ours. Not only in the old, which is best, but
occasionally in reading modern verse I have been sur-
prised into the exclamation, Would that we could
have this poem, or this passage, suitably translated !
This may seem strange, since we cannot allow that the
Spanish generally, wedded as they are to their ancient
barbarous pastimes, and killers of all small birds for the
pot as they are now becoming in imitation of their
French neighbours, can surpass or even equal us in
sympathy for the inferior creatures. It is the lan-
guage which makes the difference : the Spanish is
better suited to the expression of tender sentiments
of that kind. The verse flows more freely, with a

GOLDFINCHES AT RYME INTRINSICA 225

more natural music than ours ; it is less mechanical
and monotonous in sound, and as it is less distinct from
prose and speech in form we are never so conscious
of the artistry. The feeling appears more genuine,
more from the heart, because of the seeming artless-
ness. We see it all in this little goldfinch poem and
say at once that it is untranslatable, or that it would
be impossible to render its spirit, because in English
verse the tender feeling, even if it could be expressed
so delicately and beautifully, would not convey the
same air of sincerity. Swinburne could not do it,
which may seem a bold thing to say, seeing that he has
given a music to our language it never knew before.
It is a music which in certain supreme passages makes
one wonder, as if it did not consist in the mere cunning
collocation of words but in a magic power to alter their
very sound, producing something of a strange, exotic
effect, incomparably beautiful and altogether new in
our poetry. But great as it is it never allows us to
escape from the sense of the art in it, and is unlike the
natural music of Melendez as the finest operatic singing
is unlike the spontaneous speech, intermingled with
rippling laughter, of a young girl with a beautiful
fresh sparkling voice.

From Swinburne to Adelaide Anne Proctor is a long
drop, but in this lady's works there is a little poem
entitled " The Child and the Bird," which, if not pre-
cisely a translation, strikes me as a very close imitation
of the " Phyllis, and her Goldfinch " of Melendez,
or of some other Continental poet, probably Spanish,
15

226 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

who has treated the same subject. At all events, the
incident related is the same, except that a little girl
has been substituted for the girl wife of the original.
Here is the first stanza :

Wherefore pinest them, my bird ?
Thy sweet song is never heard.
All the bird's best joys surround thee,
Ever since the day I found thee.
Once thy voice was free and glad,
Tell me why thou art so sad ?
If this coarse thread cause thee pain,
Thou shalt have a silken chain.

What poor, artificial stuff it is ! How it bumps you,
each line ending with the dull, hard, wooden thud of
the rhyme ! Doubtless if a better poet had written
it the result would not have been so bad ; my sole
reason for quoting it is that I can find no other transla-
tion or version in our literature. We abound in bird
poems, some of them among the most beautiful lyrics
in the language ; but I confess that, for the reasons
already given, even the best, such as those of Words-
worth, Hogg, Shelley, Meredith, and Swinburne him-
self, particularly in his splendid ode to the sea-mew,
fail to give me entire satisfaction.

I am bad at translating, or paraphrasing, anything,
and the subject of the Spanish poem is one peculiarly
suited to verse; if taken out of that sublimated
emotional language, I fear it must seem flat, if not
ridiculous. Nevertheless, I will venture to give here
a simple prose translation of the anecdote, and will

GOLDFINCHES AT RYME INTRINSICA 227

ask the reader to retranslate it in imagination into swift-
flowing verse, in a language perhaps unknown to him
which reproduces to the eye and ear of the mind the
sights and sounds described — the disordered motions,
the flutterings and piercing cries of the agitated bird,
and the responsive emotions of its tender-hearted mis-
tress, which come, too, in gusts, like those of her
captive, and have, too, their own natural rhythm.

The poem tells that one day Phyllis finds her pet
goldfinch in a strangely excited state, in revolt against
its destiny, at war with the wires of its cage.

Phyllis of the tender heart, the simple tastes, the
lover of little birds from a child, who, though now a
wife, finds in them still her dearest, most intimate
happiness.

What ails her bird ? He strikes his little beak on
the wires, then strikes again ; he clings to the side of
his cage ; he flits, above, below, to this side and to
that, then grasping a wire with his small mandibles,
tugs and tugs as if he hoped by putting forth all his
little strength to break it. He cannot break nor bend
it, nor can he rest, but tired of tugging he thrusts his
head through the close bars and strives and strains
to force his way out, beating on them with his wings.
Then, after a brief pause, renews and redoubles his
puny efforts ; and at last, taken out of himself, dashes
from side to side, until the suspended cage is shaken
with his passion.

Ah, my birdling, cries lovely Phyllis, astonished

228 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

and grieved at the spectacle, what a poor return you
are making me ! How badly this temper fits you ! —
how unlike your gentle twittering this new sharpness
in your voice which wounds me ! But I know the
cause too well ! Fear not, dear bird, to alienate my
love — that I shall forget in this your rebellious moment
the charm that made you precious, and charge you
with ingratitude and in anger and disdain thrust you
from my sight. For what avails my solicitude and
affection — what does it matter that with my own hands
I supply you with food and drink and a hundred
delicate morsels besides ; that with my fingers I
tenderly caress you ; that I kiss you with my lips ?
It is nothing that you are dear to me, that my chief
delight is in listening to your sweet lively trills and
twitterings, since I am but your gaoler who holds you
from that free air which is your home and the sweet
mate you would be with ! No, you cannot be glad ;
nor is it possible you should not fear the hand that
ministers to your wants, since it is the same hand
that has cruelly hurt you and may hurt you again
with a yet closer, more barbarous confinement.

Alas, I know your pain, for I too am a captive and
lament my destiny, and though the bonds that hold me
are woven with flowers I feel their weight and they
wound me none the less. Left an orphan early in
life, it was my fate to leave my home before complet-
ing my seventeenth year, at the will of others, to be a
wife. He who took me was amiable and more than
kind to me. Like a brother, a friend, a passionate

GOLDFINCHES AT RYME INTRINSICA 229

lover, he protects, he honours, he worships me, and in
his house my will is law. But I have no pleasure in it.
His devotion, his gifts, are like mine to you, when I
am carried away by the charm of your beauty and
melody, when I call you my sweet little one, and you
come to my call to bite me caressingly with your little
beak and flutter your black and yellow wings as if to
embrace me ; when in my ardour I take you tenderly
in my hands to hold you to my heaving breast and wish
and wish that in kissing you I could breathe into you
my very life !

Even so does my owner with me : when in the de-
lirium of passion he strains me to him, when he showers
gold and gems and all beautiful gifts on me, and seeks
after every imaginable pleasure for my delight, and
would give his very life for me — his mistress, bride
and queen, who is more than all the world to him.
In vain — in vain ! Here in my heart there is a voice
which asks me : Does it delight you ? Does it
sweeten your captivity ? Oh, no, no, his benefits
do but increase this secret eternal bitterness !

Even so do you, oh, my little bird, reward me for
all my love and tenderness and blame me with those
painfully sharp notes for this tasteless life to which
you are doomed ; even so do you cry for your lost
liberty, and open and flutter your wings with the desire
to fly.

You shall not open them in vain — your pleadings
have pierced my heart. You shall go, my beloved
bird — you shall go in peace. My love can no longer

230 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

deny you the boon desired so ardently — so easily be-
stowed ! Go, and know the happiness which freedom
gives, which is now yours, but can nevermore, alas ! be
mine.

So saying, Phyllis opens the cage and sets it free.
Away it flies ; tears burst forth at the sight ; with
misty eyes she watches it winging its way through
the air till its little form is lost in the distance ; and
gazing still, for one sweet moment has the illusion
that she, too, has flown, following it, that she too has
recovered her lost liberty.

CHAPTER XXIII
THE IMMORTAL NIGHTINGALE

NEVER is earth more empty of life than during the early
days of March before the first of the migrants have
returned to us. The brighter sun serves only to show
the nakedness of nature and make us conscious of its
silence. For since the autumn, through all the cold,
hungry winter months, the destroyer has been busy
among the creatures that stayed behind when half the
bird population forsook the land ; the survivors now
seem but a remnant. To-day, with a bleak wind blow-
ing from the north-east, the sun shining from a hard
pale grey sky, the wide grass and ploughed fields seem
emptier and more desolate than ever, and tired of my
vain search for living things I am glad to get to the
shelter of a small isolated copse, by a tiny stream, at
the lower end of a long sloping field. It can hardly
be called a copse since it is composed of no more than
about a dozen or twenty old wide-branching oak
trees growing in a thicket of thorn, hazel, holly, and
bramble bushes. It is the best place on such a day,
and finding a nice spot to stand in, well sheltered from
the wind, I set myself to watch the open space before
me. It is shut in by huge disordered brambles, and
331

232 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

might very well tempt any living creature with spring
in its blood, moving uneasily among the roots, to come
forth to sun itself. The ground is scantily clothed
with pale dead grass mixed with old fallen leaves and
here and there a few tufts of dead ragwort and thistle.
But in a long hour's watching I see nothing ; — not a
rabbit, nor even a woodmouse, or a field or bank vole,
where at other season I have seen them come out, two
or three at a time, and scamper over the rustling leaves
in pursuit of each other. Nor do I hear anything;
not a bird nor an insect, and no sound but the whish
and murmur of the wind in the stiff holly leaves and
the naked grey and brown and purple branches. I
remember that on my very last visit this same small
thicket teemed with life, visible and audible; it was
in its spring foliage, exquisitely fresh and green, spark-
ling with dewdrops and bright with flowers about
the roots — ground ivy, anemone, primrose, and violet.
I listened to the birds until the nightingale burst into
song and I could thereafter attend to no other. For
he was newly arrived, and although we have him with
us every year, invariably on the first occasion of hearing
him in spring, the strain affects us as something wholly
new in our experience, a fresh revelation of nature's
infinite richness and beauty.

I know that in a few weeks' time he will be back at
the same spot; in this case we do not say "barring
accidents " ; they are not impossible, but are too rare
to be taken into consideration. Yet it is a strange
thing ! He ceased singing about June 20, nearly

THE IMMORTAL NIGHTINGALE 233

nine months ago ; he vanished about the end of Sep-
tember ; yet we may confidently look and listen for
him in about six weeks from to-day ! When he left
us, so far as we know, he travelled, by day or night,
but in any case unseen by even the sharpest human
eyes, south to the Channel and France ; then on
through the whole length of that dangerous country
where men are killers and eaters of little birds ;
then across Spain to another sea ; then across
Algeria and Tripoli to the Sahara and Egypt, and,
whether by the Nile or along the shores of the
Red Sea, on to more southern countries still. He
travels his four thousand miles or more, not by a
direct route, but now west and now south, with
many changes of direction until he finds his winter
home. We cannot say just where our bird is ;
for it is probable that in that distant region where
his six months' absence is spent the area occupied
by the nightingales of British race may be larger
than this island. The nightingale that was singing
in this thicket eleven months ago may now be in
Abyssinia, or in British East Africa, or in the Congo
State.

And even now at that distance from his true home —
this very clump where the sap is beginning to move
in the grey naked oaks and brambles and thorns — some-
thing stirs in him too : not memory nor passion per-
haps, yet there may be something of both in it — an
inherited memory and the unrest and passion of mi-
gration, the imperishable and overmastering ache and

234 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

desire which will in due time bring him safely back
through innumerable dangers over that immense dis-
tance of barren deserts and of forests, of mountain
and seas, and savage and civilised lands.

It is not strange to find that down to the age of
science, when the human mind had grown accustomed
to look for the explanation of all phenomena in matter
itself, an exception was made of the annual migration
of birds, and the belief remained (even in Sir Isaac
Newton's mind) that the impelling and guiding force
was a supernatural one. The ancients did not know
what became of their nightingale when he left them,
for in Greece, too, he is a strict migrant, but his re-
appearance year after year, at the identical spot, was
itself a marvel and mystery, as it still is, and they
came inevitably to think it was the same bird which
they listened to. We have it in the epitaph of Calli-
machus, in Cory's translation :

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead ;

They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed ;

I wept when I remembered how often you and I

Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that you are lying, my dear old Carian guest,

A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,

Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake,

For death he taketh all away, but these he cannot take.

It is possible to read the thought in the original
differently, that immortality is given to the song, not
the bird. As one of my friends who have made literal
translations for me has it : " Yet thy nightingale's notes
live, whereon Hades, ravisher of all things, shall not

THE IMMORTAL NIGHTINGALE 235

lay a hand," or " But thy nightingales (or nightingales'
songs) live ; over these Hades, the all-destroyer, throws
not a hand."

Keats, too, plays with the thought in his famous ode :

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

No hungry generations tread thee down ;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard

In ancient days by emperor and clown :
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home

She stood in tears amid the alien corn ;
The same that oft-times hath

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

His imagination carries him too far, since the "self-
same song " or the song by the same bird, could never
be heard in more than one spot — at Hampstead, let
us say; for though he may travel far and spend six
months of every year in Abyssinia or some other re-
mote region, he sings at home only. Of all the British
poets who have attempted it, George Meredith is
greatest in describing the song which has so strong an
effect on us ; but how much greater is Keats who
makes no such attempt, but in impassioned stanza
after stanza of the supremest beauty, renders its effect
on the soul. And so with prose descriptions ; we turn
wearily from all such vain efforts to find an ever-fresh
pleasure in the familiar passage in Izaak Walton, his
simple expressions of delight in the singer " breathing
such sweet loud music out of her little instrumental

236 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

throat, that it might make mankind to think that
miracles are not ceased."

The subject of the nightingale's superiority as a
singer does not, however, now concern us so much
as its distribution in England, and its return each year
to the same spot. To this small isolated thicket, let
us say, the very bird known here in past years, now
away perhaps in Abyssinia, will be here again about
April 8 — alone, for he will not brook the presence of
another of one of his species in his small dominion,
and the female with which he will mate will not ap-
pear until about a week or ten days later.

How natural, then, for the listener to its song to
imagine it the same bird he has heard at the same
place in previous years ! Even the oldest rustic, whose
life has been passed in the neighbourhood, who as a
small boy robbed the five olive-coloured eggs every
season to make a " necklace " of them with other
coloured eggs as an ornament for the cottage parlour ;
whose sons took them in their childhood for the same
purpose, and whose grandchildren perhaps rob them
now — even he will think the bird he will listen to by-
and-by the same nightingale of all these years. But
this notion is, no doubt, strongest in those parts of the
country where the bird is more thinly distributed.
Here, on the borders of Surrey and Hampshire, we
are in the very heart of the nightingale country, and
in these localities where two birds are frequently heard
singing against each other and are sometimes seen
fighting, it might be supposed that when the bird

THE IMMORTAL NIGHTINGALE 237

inhabiting a particular copse or thicket comes to an
end, another will quickly take the vacant place. The
three counties of Hampshire, Surrey, and Kent abound
most in nightingales ; they are a little less numerous
in Sussex and Berkshire ; but these five counties (or
six if we add Buckinghamshire) undoubtedly contain
more nightingales than all the rest of England together.
The bird, coming to us by way of France, travels north,
each to his ancestral place, the majority finding their
homes in the south of England, on its south-eastern
side ; the others going north and west are distributed
more thinly. On a map coloured red to show the dis-
tribution, the counties named above would show the
deepest colour over a greater part of the entire area ;
while north and west there would be a progressive
decrease in the depth over the south-western counties,
the home counties north of the Thames, the Mid-
lands, East Anglia, and north to Shropshire and South
Yorkshire, where it would disappear. And on the
west side of England it would finish on the Welsh
border and in East Devon. In all of Devonshire west
of the valley of the Exe, with Cornwall ; in practically
all Wales and Scotland and Ireland, there are no
nightingales.

It is a singular distribution, a puzzling one ; for why
is it that the blackcap, garden warbler, wood-wren,
and other delicate migrants who come to us by the same
route, extend their range so much further north and
west ? We can only say that the nightingale's range
is more restricted, but not by climatic conditions, and

238 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

that he is more local ; in other words, that we don't
know. Some have imagined that he is a delicate feeder
and goes only where he can find the food that pleases
him ; others, that he inhabits where cowslips grow
kindly ; still others, that he seeks a spot where there
in an echo. These are but a few of many fancies and
fables about the nightingale.

Not only is it a singular distribution, but in a way
unfortunate, since every one would like to hear the
nightingale — the summer voice which has, over and
above the pleasing associations of the swallow and
cuckoo and turtle-dove, an intrinsic beauty surpassing
that of all other bird voices. As it is, a large majority
of the population of these islands never hear it. In
districts where it is thinly distributed, as in Somerset
and East Devon, there will be perhaps only one nightin-
gale in an entire parish, and the villages will be proud
of it and perhaps boast that they are better off than
their neighbours for miles around.

I was staying late in April at a village near the
Severn when one Sunday morning the working man I
was lodging with informed me that he had heard of
the arrival of their nightingale (there was but one),
and together we set out to find it. He led me through
a wood and over a hill, then down to a small thicket
by a running stream, about two miles from home.
This was, he said, the exact spot where he had heard
it in previous years ; and before we had stood there
five minutes, silently listening we were rewarded by
the sound we had come for issuing from a thorny tangle

THE IMMORTAL NIGHTINGALE 239

not more than a dozen yards away — a prelusive sound
almost startling in its suddenness and power, as of
vigorous, rapidly repeated strokes on a great golden
wire.

And as in this one, so it is in hundreds of parishes all
over the country where the nightingale is thinly
scattered. Each home of the bird is known to every
man in the parish ; he can find it easily as, when
thirsty, he can find the spring of clear water hidden
away somewhere among the rocks and trees of his
native place ; and the song, too, is a fountain of beauti-
ful sound, crystal pure and sparkling, as it gushes from
the mysterious inexhaustible reservoir, refreshing to
the soul and a joy for ever.

The loss of one of these nightingales where there
is but one, is a sorrow to the villagers, especially to the
young lovers, who are great admirers of the bird and
take a peculiar delight in listening to its evening per-
formance. For it does sometimes happen that the
nightingale whose " solitary song " is the delight of a
village, disappears from his place and returns no more.
The only explanation is that the faithful bird has at
length met with his end, after a dozen or twenty years,
or as many years as any old man can remember. The
most singular case of the loss of a bird I have come
across was in East Anglia, in a place where there were
very few nightingales. In my rambles I came to a
little rustic village, remote from railroads and towns,
which has a small, ancient, curious-looking church
standing by itself in a green meadow half a mile away

240 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

I was told that the rector kept the key himself, and that
he was something of a recluse, a studious learned
man, Doctor of Divinity, and so on.

Accordingly I went to the rectory, a charming house
standing in its own extensive grounds with lawns,
shrubbery, large garden and shade trees, and a wood or
grove of ancient oaks separating it from the village.
I found the rector digging in his garden and could
not help seeing that he was not too well pleased at
my request ; but when I begged him not to leave his
task and promised to bring back the key, if he would
let me have it, he threw down his spade and said
that he must accompany me to the church himself, as
there were points about it which would require to be
explained.

There were no monuments, and when we had looked
at the interior and he had pointed out the most in-
teresting features, he came out and sat down in the
porch.

" Are you an archaeologist or what ? " he said.

I replied that I was nothing so important, that I
merely took an ordinary interest in old churches.
I was mainly interested in living things — a sort of
naturalist.

Then he got up and we walked back. " In birds ? "
he asked presently.

" Yes, especially in birds."

"And what do you think about omens — do you
believe in them ? "

The question made me curious, and I replied with

THE IMMORTAL NIGHTINGALE 241

caution that I would tell him if he would first tell me
the particular case he had in his mind just then.

He was silent ; then when we had got back to the
rectory he took me round the house to where a large
French window opened on the lawn and a shrubbery
beyond. " This," he said, " is the drawing-room, and
my wife, who was very delicate, used always to sit
there behind the window on account of the aspect.
We had a nightingale then ; we had always had him
since I came to this parish many years ago. He was a
most beautiful singer, and every morning, as long as the
singing time lasted, he would perch on that small tree
on the edge of the lawn, directly before the window,
and sing for an hour or two at a stretch. We were
very proud of our bird and thought him better than
any nightingale we had ever heard. And he was the
only one in the neighbourhood ; you would have had to
go a mile to find another.

" One morning about eleven o'clock I was writing in
my study at the other side of the house, when my wife
came in to me looking pale and distressed, and said a
strange thing had happened. She was sitting at her
work behind the closed window when a little bird had
dashed violently against the glass ; then it had flown a
little distance away and, turning, dashed back against
the glass as at first ; and again it flew off, only to turn
and strike the glass even more violently than before ;
then she saw it fall fluttering down and feared it had
injured itself badly. I went quickly out to look,
and found the bird, our nightingale, lying gasping and
16

242 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

shivering on the stone step beneath the window. I
picked it up and held it to the air in my open hand ;
but in two or three seconds it was dead.

" I lost my wife shortly afterwards. That was five
years ago, and from that time we have had no nightin-
gale here."

It was not strange that the tragedy of the little bird
had made a very deep impression on him ; that the
death of his wife coming shortly afterwards had actually
caused him to think there was something out of the
natural in it. But I could not say that I was of his
opinion, though I could believe that the acute distress
she had suffered at witnessing such a thing, and possibly
the effect of thinking too much about it, had aggra-
vated her malady and perhaps even hastened her end.

For the rest, the accident to the nightingale, which
deprived the rectory and the village of its singer, is not
an uncommon one among birds ; our windows as well
as our overhead wires are a danger to them. I have
seen a small bird on a good many occasions dash itself
against a window-pane ; and, in one instance, at a
country house in Ireland, the bird, a chiffchaff, came
violently against my bedroom window twice when I
stood in the room watching it. The attraction was a
fly crawling up the pane inside. But this explanation
does not fit the case of the nightingale with other
cases I have observed ; he is not like the warblers and
the pied wagtail (a frequent striker against window-
glass) a pursuer of flies. No doubt birds are some-
times dazzled and confused, or hypnotised by the

THE IMMORTAL NIGHTINGALE 243

glitter of the glass with the sun on it, and in this case
the singing-bush of the bird was directly before the
window, at a distance of twenty-five to thirty feet.
The singer, motionless on his perch, had looked too
long on it, and the effect was such that even after two
hurting-blows on the glass his little brain had not re-
covered from its twist. Then came its third and fatal
blow.

To return to the subject of the nightingales' curious
distribution in England. The facts appear to show
that practically the species is stationary with us ; that
it remains strictly within the old limits and in about
the same numbers. Bird-catchers, birds'-nesting boys,
and cats extirpate them round the towns ; but, taking
the whole country, we do not observe any great changes
such as we note in some other migrants — the swallow
and martin, for example, and among warblers, to name
only one, the lesser whitethroat. The conclusion
would seem to be that each season's increase is just
sufficient to make good the annual losses from all
natural causes and from man's persecution ; that
every bird returns to the exact spot where it was
hatched, and that no new colonies are formed or the
range extended.

The practical question arises : Would it not make
a difference if the annual destruction through human
agency could be done away with ? I believe it would.
Each cock nightingale, we find, takes possession of his
own little domain on arrival, and, like his relation,
the robin, will not allow another to share it with him ;

244 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

so that if two or more males of a brood, or family, sur-
vive to return to the same spot, one presently makes
himself master, and tlje other or others, driven away,
settle where they can, as near by as possible. It is
probably harder for the nightingale to go a mile away
from his true home, the very spot where he was hatched
and reared, than to fly away thousands of miles to his
wintering place in the autumn. The bird is exceed-
ingly reluctant to leave his home, but if the annual
increase was greater, a third greater let us say, more
and more birds would be compelled to go further
afield. They would go slowly, clinging to unsuitable
places near their cradle-home rather than go far, but
the continual pressure would tell in the end ; the best
places within the nightingale country, the ten thousand
oak and hazel copses and thickets which are now
untenanted, would be gradually occupied, and eventu-
ally the limits would be enlarged. That they cannot
be extended artificially we know from the experiments
in Scotland of Sir John Sinclair and of others in the
north of England, who procured nightingales' eggs
and had them placed in robins' nests. The young
were hatched and safely reared, and, as was expected,
disappeared in the autumn, but they never returned.
We can only assume that the " inherited memory " of
its true home, which was not Scotland nor Yorkshire,
but where the egg was laid, was in every bird's brain
from the shell, that if it ever survived to return from
its far journey it came faithfully back to the very spot
where the egg had been taken*

THE IMMORTAL NIGHTINGALE 245

That man's persecution tells seriously on the species
may be seen from what has happened on the Continent,
even in countries where the hateful custom of eating
nightingales with all small birds is unknown, but where
it is greatly sought after as a cage bird. Thus, in
Southern Germany the nightingales have been de-
creasing for very many years and are now generally
rare and have been wholly extirpated in many parts.
With us, too, the drain on the species has been too
heavy ; it is, or has been, a double drain — that of birds'-
nesting boys and of the bird-catchers.

With regard to the first, there is unfortunately no
sentiment of superstition concerning the nightingale
as in the case of his cousin, the redbreast — "yellow
autumn's nightingale," as it was beautifully called
by one of the Elizabethan poets. How effective
such a sentiment can be I have witnessed scores of times
when I have found that even the most thorough-paced
nest-takers among the village children are accustomed
to spare the robin, because as they say something
bad will happen to them, or their hand will wither up,
if they harry its nest. The nightingale's eggs, like
those of the throstle and shufflewing and Peggie white-
throat, are taken without a qualm ; they are, indeed,
more sought after than others on account of their
beauty and unusual colouring and because they are
less common.

I believe that the increase of the birds each summer
would be about a third more than it is but for the loss
from this cause alone.

246 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

The destruction caused by the bird-catcher is not
nearly so serious now as it has been, even down to the
sixties of the last century, when a single London bird-
catcher would trap his hundred or two hundred cock
nightingales on the birds' arrival. And this drain had
gone on for centuries ; at all events we find that as
far back as Elizabethan times the nightingale was
eagerly sought after as a cage bird. Willughby, the
" Father of British Ornithology," in his account of the
bird, gives eight times as much space to the subject
of its treatment in a cage as to its habits in a state of
nature.

The cost to a species of caging is probably greater
in the case of the nightingale than of any other songster.
It is well known that if the bird is taken after it has
paired — that is, immediately after the appearance of the
females, a week or ten days later than the males — it
will quickly die of grief in captivity. Those taken
before the females appear on the scene may live on to
the moulting time, which almost always proves fatal.
Scarcely one in ten survives the first year of captivity.

We may congratulate ourselves that it is no longer
possible for nightingales to be taken in numbers in this
country, thanks to the legislation of the last fifteen
years, chiefly to Sir Herbert Maxwell's wise Act em-
powering the local authorities to give additional pro-
tection to wild birds and their eggs in counties and
boroughs. It has been a long fight to save our wild
birds, and is far from finished yet, seeing that the law
is broken every day; that bird-dealers and their

THE IMMORTAL NIGHTINGALE 247

supporters the bird-fanciers, and their servants the
bird-catchers, who take the chief risk, are in league to
defeat the law. Also that very many country magis-
trates deal tenderly with offenders so long as they re-
spect "game." A partridge, and probably a rabbit,
is of more consequence to the sportsman on the bench
than a small, plain brown bird, or than many linnets
and goldfinches. The law, we know, is effectual when
it has a strong public feeling on its side ; the feeling
is not yet universal and nowhere strong enough, or as
strong as bird-lovers would wish it to be, but it exists
and has been growing during the last half a century,
and that feeling, supported by the improved laws which
it has called into being, is having its effect. This we
know from the increase during recent years in several
of the greatly persecuted species. The goldfinch is
a striking example. The excessive drain on this species,
one of the favourites of the lover of birds in cages, had
made it exceedingly rare throughout the country
twenty years ago, and in many counties it was, if not
extinct, on the verge of extinction. Then a turn came
and a steady increase until it had ceased to be an un-
common bird, and if the increase continues at the same
rate for another decade it will again be as common as
it was fifty years ago. This change has come about
as a direct result of the Orders giving it all the year
round protection, obtained by the county and borough
councils throughout the country.

The nightingale has not so increased, nor has it in-
creased at all ; it is not so hardy a species, and albeit

248 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

an "immortal bird/' and a "creature of ebullient
heart," it probably does not live nearly as long as our
brilliant little finch. Nor is it so prolific ; moreover it
nests upon or near the ground at the same spot year
after year, so that its breeding-place is known to every
human being in the neighbourhood, and on this ac-
count it is more exposed to the depredations of the
nest-robber than most small birds. The increase of
such a species, which must in any case be exceedingly
slow, can only come about by the fullest protection
during the breeding time. That is to say, protection
from human destroyers ; from wild animals and other
destructive agencies we cannot safeguard it.

This infers a considerable change in the nature or
habits of the country boy, or the growth of a new
sentiment with regard to this species which would be
as great a protection to it as the sentiment about our
tame, familiar, universal robin has been to that bird.
But it is not a dream. I believe this change is being
wrought now in our " young barbarians " of the country
side ; that it is being brought about in many ways by
means of various agencies— by an increased and increas-
ing number of lovers of animals and of nature, who in
towns and villages form centres of personal influence ;
by associations of men and women, such as the Bird Pro-
tection, the Selborne, and kindred societies ; by nature
study in the schools throughout the rural districts,
and by an abundant supply of cheap nature literature
for children. So cheaply are these books now pro-
duced that the very poorest children may have them,

THE IMMORTAL NIGHTINGALE 249

and though so cheap they are exceedingly good of their
kind — well written, well printed, well and often very
beautifully illustrated. I turn over a heap of these
publications every year and sigh to recall the time
when I was a young barbarian myself and had no
such books to instruct and delight me.

But I have another and better reason than the fact
of the existence of all these activities for my belief that
a change is taking place in the country boy's mind, that
his interest and pleasure in the wild bird is growing,
and that as it grows he becomes less destructive. A
good deal of my time is passed in the villages in different
parts of the country ; I make the acquaintance of the
children and get into the confidence of many small
boys and find out what they do and think and feel about
the birds, and it is my experience that in recent years
something new has come into their minds — a sweeter,
humaner feeling about their feathered fellow-creatures,
I also take into account the spirit which is revealed in
the village school children's essays written for the Bird
and Tree competitions established by the Royal
Society for the Protection of Birds. During the last
four or five years I have had to read many hundreds
of these essays, each dealing with one species from the
child's own personal observation and it has proved
a very pleasing task to me because so many of
the young essayists had put their whole heart in
theirs. Their enthusiasm shines, even in the weakest
of these compositions, considered merely as essays,
and we may imagine that the country boy or girl

250 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

of ten or twelve or thirteen finds the task assigned
him not a very simple one, to be placed at a table
with sheets of foolscap paper before him and given
an hour in which to compose an essay on the bird,
selected — the gist of his observations ; to be reminded
at the same time that he is one of the team o{ nine
chosen for the work, that the eyes of the village are
on him, that he must do his best to win the county
shield for the school. The conditions are not too
favourable ; nevertheless, the children are doing re-
markably well, because, as I have said, their heart is in
it, and one is delighted to find that this study of a bird
has not only quickened the child's interest in nature
but has taught him to think of the bird in a new way,
with the feeling which seeks to protect. We may
safely say that these children will not forget this new
lesson they are being taught, whatever else may drop
out of their memories when they leave school ; that
in coming time, when they are fathers and mothers
themselves, they will instil the same feeling into their
own children.

This then of all the various efforts we have made and
are making to save the wild bird life of our country is
to my mind the most promising for the future, and
makes it possible to believe that the bird of greatest
lustre we possess, our nightingale, will not only main-
tain its own ground in undiminished numbers, but in
due time will increase and extend its range.

CHAPTER XXIV
THE CLERK AND THE LAST RAVENS

THE old parish clerk is almost as obsolete as the village
church band or orchestra, but you do come upon him
occasionally " still lingering here " in remote districts,
and until a few years ago there existed one at Itchen
Abbas, a pretty little village on the Itchen, a few miles
above Winchester. Let me hasten to say, lest any-
one's susceptibilities should be hurt, that this same
village in everything except its parish clerk, appeared
to be quite up to date. At the Sunday morning
service he sat near me where I could see and hear him
very well. His quaint appearance and manner first
attracted my attention : it was out of date, out of
keeping, or, shall we say, harmony; yet the harmony
being what it was in that spiritless mechanical service
the little discord came as a rather pleasing relief.

He was a small thin old man with black alert hawk-
like eyes, white beard and a black skull-cap on his grey
head. His high-pitched voice and speech were those of a
Hampshire peasant, and it happened to be the one clear
articulate voice amidst the confused gabble of the
others, all apparently anxious to get on and finish the
tedious business of public worship as quickly as possible.

252 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

When the Psalms were read I tried, as an experiment,
by beginning the instant the minister ceased and
rattling off the words as fast as I could to keep up with
the others, but invariably I finished some words
behind. They had practised the trick too long for an
outsider accustomed to a different method. But he,
the old parish clerk, had never allowed himself to be
carried away by the torrent : his father had taught
him to go slowly, and slowly he would go to the end of
the chapter, in the old ancient way : in a clear high
but quavering voice, he distinctly enunciated each
word, each syllable, in a measured way, finishing
solemnly a good many words after the congregation.
The congregation had, so to speak, thrown him off,
or run away from him, but he would not give in and
gabble or slur anything ; he plodded religiously on,
unregarded but doing his own part of the service
decently and in order, under great difficulties.

For me, a stranger and hater of gabblers, his presence
had made the service endurable and I was glad to make
his acquaintance. It was easily made on a week day :
dressed in his frayed and discoloured old clothes that
hung like sacks about him and rusty shapeless hat, he
was the most familiar figure in the village, in appearance
an animated scarecrow. He was also the busiest man
there. He kept fowls and grew fruit and vegetables in
his cottage garden and an allotment a little distance
away. Twice a week, on market day, he loaded his
little cart with his produce and went off to sell it at
the neighbouring town. His spare time was filled up

THE CLERK AND THE LAST RAVENS 253

with odd jobs — hedge-trimming, lawn- mowing, garden-
ing generally, repairing thatched roofs, and forty things
besides. I never found him sitting down, nor could
get him to sit down for more than five minutes at a
stretch ; but he would rest on his spade sometimes
and give me scraps of his ancient history. Yet he was
a small weak-looking man, aged 74 ! He had been
parish clerk over forty-five years, and his father before
him had held the office for upwards of fifty.

I was reminded of his case afterwards on two occa-
sions in Hampshire churchyards by epitaphs on parish
clerks. One was at Heckfield, near Eversley. The
inscription reads : —

" Beneath this stone lies William Neave, who on
the loth January, 1821, ended a blameless and in-
offensive life of 79 years during 45 of which he
was Clerk of the Parish. His father, Thomas Neave,
and his grandfather, William Neave, had previously
filled this office, which (dedicated as it is to uphold
in its degree the order and decency of the Established
Church) was here uninterruptedly held by three
generations of the Neaves through a series of 136
years. In this period how many for whom they
had prepared the Font and whose giddy childhood
they had effectually chastised were by them finally
conducted to the spots around, where now they rest
in humble hope of resurrection to life eternal."

Let us return to the old clerk of Itchen Abbas,
whose life had been spent in the village and whose
bright memory retained the story of its life during the

254 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

whole of that long period. Squire, parsons, farmers,
labourers, he remembered them all — the old-style
farmers who sat at meat with their men before the
division of classes, and before the piano came in and
the church organ to kill the villagers' music. Also
the fairies and ghosts. The tricksy 'little people were
not seen but were known to be about in a field close
by, " Fairy Field " it was called because when it was
being ploughed the horses invariably stopped short
at a certain spot and refused to go on. Eventually,
during the late owner, Sir Charles Shelley's, time a
well-preserved Roman pavement was discovered by
chance at a depth of three to four feet, just on the spot
over which the horses had always refused to draw the
plough ! The other supernatural story relates to an
old house adjoining the village and overlooking the
quiet valley of the Itchen. Here, tradition says, a
crime was committed by a former owner, and from
the time of his death the place was haunted, but in
a singular way ; at all events I have never heard any
ghost story quite like it. At night when the air was
perfectly still, a sound as of a sudden high wind could
be heard among the trees, travelling like a whirlwind
in the direction of the house but invariably on coming
to the house it would die away into silence.

The old clerk introduced me to one of his life-long
pals and asked him to tell me his story of the ghost.
The story was that when he was a young man about
fifty years ago, he went to the house one still dark night
about midnight to get some apples. There was a

THE CLERK AND THE LAST RAVENS 255

large apple orchard between the woods and the gardens
and lawns surrounding the house and divided from
them by a high stone wall. It was in October and the
trees were laden with tempting ripe apples. Getting
over the wall he began hastily plucking the fruit and
stowing them in his smockfrock after fastening it round
his waist with his belt. When he had got as many
apples as he could carry and began to reflect that with
such a burden it would be difficult to climb the wall,
a sudden rushing sound of wind rose in the wood out'
side the orchard and appeared to be coming swiftly
towards him and the house. He knew from all he had
heard from others that it was the ghost-wind. In
a moment it rose to the sound of a furious tempest
though not a leaf trembled, and in terror he fled before
it and in spite of the huge burden was on the top of
the wall in a moment. A cat, he said, couldn't have
got up quicker and he wondered how he had done
it ! But on the top of the wall he slipped and
came down on the other side; his belt parted at
the same time and the apples were sent rolling
all over the smooth lawn. He didn't stay to
pick them up ; he made a dash for the gate and
cleared it with a flying leap which landed him in the
road and never stayed till he was back in his cottage.
These and other tales of the past were good to hear,
but I was more interested to know the story of the last
ravens of Avington and the old clerk was better able
to tell it than any other person in the village.
The raven, whether we love it or no, is the most

256 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

fascinating of feathered beings. Its powerful character
impresses the imagination. Certainly it has an in-
telligence almost uncanny in a bird ; a savage spirit
too, and power ; a deep human-like voice ; and a very
long life. These qualities affect the mind and have
been the cause of the raven's strange reputation in
former ages — the idea that he was something more
than a bird, a messenger of doom, an evil spirit, or the
spirit of some great dead man revisiting the scenes of
his earthly career.

Common all over the country down to the early years
of the nineteenth century, he has now been pretty well
exterminated as an inland bird. On the iron-bound
coasts in a few spots where his eggs are comparatively
safe, and in a few wild mountainous districts in the
interior, he still exists. But it does not seem long since
he was lost, for his memory still lives : " raven trees "
are common all over the country — trees in which
the vanished birds built their big nests and reared their
young each year. Tales of " last ravens " are also told
in numberless places all over the country. Every one
who knows his " Selborne " will remember the pathetic
history of the last ravens in his neighbourhood
told by Gilbert White. That is a long time back,
and it is known that ravens continued to breed in Hamp-
shire for over a century after White's death. I am here
speaking of the inland-breeding birds ; for up till now
one pair of ravens still breed on the Isle of Wight
cliffs. The last pair of birds that bred inland, on trees,
were the Avington ravens. How long they inhabited

THE CLERK AND THE LAST RAVENS 257

that ancient noble domain I do not know, but it is
certain that they continued to breed annually in the
park until about the year 1 885 . The " ravens' clump "
where the birds had their nest still flourishes, but
the more famous, immeasurably older Gospel Oak which
was an ancient tree when the cathedral at Winchester
was built and is believed to be the tree under which
S. Augustine stood when he preached to the heathen
in these parts, is, alas ! dead for ever, and its hollow
ruinous trunk is slowly crumbling to dust.

These Avington ravens were a good deal persecuted,
but invariably when one lost its life the other would
disappear for a few days to find and bring home a new
mate. At last some scoundrel got both birds, and
that was the end, for of course no others came to fill
their place. The old clerk related that when he was
a young man he worked for some years as under-wood-
man on the estate, and he had many exciting stories to
tell of his tree-climbing feats. In those distant days
— about 1850 — climbing contests were common among
the men who worked in the woods and parks, and he
was the champion tree-climber in the place. One
day, when coming from work with the other men, a
squirrel was seen to run up an exceedingly tall isolated
fir tree, and he, in a moment of madness, undertook
to catch and bring it down. Up after the squirrel he
went until he could go no farther, and the little thing
was still above him, afraid to jump down and give him
a chance to capture it, clinging to a slender branch
directly over his head and out of reach. He then

258 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

thought to knock it down into his hands, and having
selected a small branch for the purpose was engaged
in wrenching it off when the squirrel made his jump,
and as it came flying down past his head he attempted
to capture it, using both hands, but missed it, and at
the same time his legs lost their grip on the branch
he was on ; and down after the squirrel he came, crash-
ing through the higher branches and coming at last
with a thud to the earth. He had fallen on his back,
and was taken up senseless and terribly injured and
sent away to the Hospital at Winchester. For twelve
long months he was kept there, on his back, and when
sent home was told that he would never be fit to do
any outdoor work, although he might perhaps live
for some years. They were wrong; he did get per-
fectly well, and when I knew him, half a century or
more after this terrible accident, he was still hard at
work mowing, digging and wood-cutting.

Two or three years before this terrible fall put an end
to his tree-climbing exploits, a member of the ducal
family who were then the owners of Avington
thought it would be interesting to have some tame
ravens as pets, and the young champion climber was
instructed to take the fledgelings from the nest in
the park.

When he got up to the nest he was surprised to find
six birds, half-fledged ; and he took them all, and all
were safely reared at the house. These birds when
grown remained perfectly tame although they were
never pinioned ; they spent most of their time flying

THE CLERK AND THE LAST RAVENS 259

about the park and outside of it, but invariably came to
the house to be fed and to roost.

As time went on it was observed that the old birds
became more and more jealous of their presence in
their territory and from day to day they persecuted
them with increasing fury. The young accustomed
to be fed at the house, refused to leave the place, as
the young reared annually in the nest are invariably
compelled to do ; and the result was that one by one
they were killed by their savage parents. My inform-
ant actually witnessed the killing of one of them :
the young bird tried to escape by flying to the house,
but was buffeted with such fury that in the end it was
borne down to the earth in the park and was then
quickly done to death by the savage blows of the two
powerful beaks.

There are other birds just as intolerant of the
presence of their full-grown young as the raven. This
is the case with our robin redbreast, but in the case of
this species it is the cock bird only that rights and the
fight is thus a more equal one. The young bird some-
times conquers the old one. In the raven, the mother
bird hates her children as much as the father does,
and as they fight in company, playing into each other's
hands, and take their young one by one, they are
invariably the victors.

CHAPTER XXV

THE TEMPLES OF THE HILLS

M

" THE groves were God's first temples," says the poet ;
and viewed from the outside no groves are so like the
temples made with hands, Christian or pagan, as the
" clumps," as they are commonly called, growing on the
chalk hills in Sussex, Hampshire, Wilts, and Dorset.
Nature's way is to grow her larger trees on the lower
levels, and it is doubtfnl that the downs have ever had a
forest growth other than the kind which we find on them
now, composed mainly of the lesser native trees — haw-
thorn, blackthorn, holly, juniper, and yews of no great
size, mixed with furze, bramble, and wild clematis.
All these plants are perpetually springing into existence
everywhere on the downs, and are persistently fed
down and killed by the sheep ; take the sheep away
from any down, and in a few years, as I have seen, it
becomes an almost continuous thicket, and that, one
imagines, must have been its original condition. We
must suppose that man in early times, or during the
Neolithic period when he had domestic animals and
agriculture, found the chalk hills a better place than
the lowlands, covered as they must then have been
with a dense forest growth, the habitation of wolves
260

THE TEMPLES OF THE HILLS 261

and other rapacious beasts. On the hills where the
thin soil produced only a dwarfish tree vegetation, it
was easier to make a clearing and pasture for his cattle.
No doubt it was also easier for him to defend himself
and his possessions against wild beasts and savage human
enemies in such situations. The hills were without
water, but the discovery and invention of the dew-
pond, probably by some genius of the later Stone Age,
made the hill-people independent of natural springs
and rivers. In later times, when the country was
everywhere colonised and more settled, the hill-people
probably emigrated to the lower lands, where the
ground was better suited for cattle-grazing and for
growing crops. The hills were abandoned to the
shepherd and the hunter ; and doubtless as the ages
went on they became more and more a sheep-walk ;
for it must have been observed from early times that
the effect of the sheep on the land was to change its
character and to make it more and more suited to
the animal's requirements. Thus, the very aspect of
the downs, as we know them, was first imparted and is
maintained in them by the sheep — the thousands on
thousands of busy close-nibbling mouths keeping the
grass and herbage close down to the ground, and killing
year by year every forest seedling. And how wonder-
ful they are — that great sea of vast pale green billowy
hills, extending bare against the wide sky to the horizon,
clothed with that elastic fragrant turf which it is a joy
to walk on, and has nothing like it in the world !

It must have been in quite recent times, probably

262 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

during the last half of the eighteenth century, that the
idea first came into the mind of a landowner here and
there that a grove on the top of a high bare chalk down
would have a noble appearance, and form a striking
landmark for all the country round. The result is our
hill-top clumps : and one would have imagined that
the effect would be altogether bad ; for how could a
tall dark grove on a hill in a country of such an aspect,
of smooth rounded pale-green downs, be anything
but inharmonious ? Either it is not so, or long custom
has reconciled us to this ornament invented by man,
and has even made it pleasing to the eye. Association
comes in, too : I notice that the clumps which please
me best are those which are most temple-like in their
forms. Thus, a grove of trees of various kinds growing
in a dense mass, as in the case of the famous Chancton-
bury Ring on the South Downs, gives me no pleasure
at all : while a grove of Scotch firs, the trunks suffi-
ciently far apart as to appear like pillars upholding the
dark dense foliage, has a singular attraction. In some
instances the effect on the hill itself of its crown of
trees is to give it the appearance of a vast mound
artificially raised by man on which to build or plant his
temple. This is most striking when, as at Badbury
Rings, in Dorset, the hill is round and low, with a
grove of old, very large trees. In this case the effect
is heightened by the huge prehistoric earthworks,
ring within ring, enclosing the grove on the space in-
side. Indeed, the sublimest of these temple-groves
are not those which stand on the highest hills ; in

THE TEMPLES OF THE HILLS 263

many cases they stand but a little above the surround-
ing level, as in the case of Badbury Rings and of Holly-
water Clump in Wolmer Forest, where the soil is sand.

To my mind the best appearance presented by the
higher hill-top groves is on a hot, windless summer
day, during the phenomenon of " visible air," or " heat,"
when the atmosphere near the surface appears as a
silvery mist, or as thinnest white and crystalline flames,
ascending, wavering, dancing, and producing an illusion
of motion in all distant solid objects, such as houses,
fences, trees, and cattle. If the sun had greater power,
this silvery flame-like appearance would become more
visible still and take the appearance of water of a
marvellous brilliancy, as of molten silver, flowing over
the earth, with cattle standing knee-deep in it, and
distant buildings and groves rising like islands out of it.
This effect of mirage is occasionally visible in England
in hot, dry summers, but is very rare. It is on these
burning silvery days, when air and sunlight have a
new magic, that I like best to seethe hill-top grove ;
when at a distance of a mile or two the tall columnar
trunks of the pines, showing the light between, seem to
have a wavering motion, and, with the high dense roof
of branches, look absolutely black against the brilliant
whiteness of the air and the pale hot sky beyond.

The downland groves are, however, less to me in
their aesthetic aspect, and as features in the landscape,
than as haunts of wild life. It is indeed as small islands
of animal life that I view them, scattered over the sea-
like smooth green waste, vacant as the sea. TO others

264 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

it may not be so — to the artist, for example, in search
of something to draw. We have each our distinct
interests, aims, trades, or what you like : that which
I seek adds nothing, and takes nothing from his picture,
and is consequently negligible. We cannot escape
the reflex effect of our own little vocations — our pre-
occupations with one side of things, one aspect of
nature. Their life is to me their beauty, or the chief
element in it, without which they would indeed be
melancholy places. It refreshes me more than the
shade of the great leafy roof on a burning day. On
this account, because of the life in them, I prefer the
clumps on the lower hills. They grow more luxuri-
antly, often with much undergrowth, sometimes sur-
rounded with dense thickets of thorn, furze, and
bramble. These are attractive spots to wild birds,
and when not guarded by a gamekeeper form little
refuges where even the shy persecuted species may
breed in comparative security. It is with a sense of
positive relief that I often turn my back on some
great wood or forest where one naturally goes in quest
of woodland species, even after many disappointments,
to spend a day, or many days, with the feathered in-
habitants of one of these isolated groves.

The birds, too, may be better observed in these
places ; they are less terrified at the appearance of the
human form than in woods and forests where the
pheasant is preserved, and man means (to the bird's
mind) a gamekeeper with a gun in his hand. For, in
many cases, especially in Wiltshire, the hill-groves

THE TEMPLES OF THE HILLS 265

are on land owned by the farmers themselves, who keep
their own shootings, and do not employ a gamekeeper.

One day I was standing under a low oak-tree at the
highest point in an immense wood, where the sight
could range for a long distance over the tree-tops,
when I was astonished at the sight of a carrion-crow
flying low over the trees, and coming straight to-
wards me. It was a wonderful thing to see in that
place where I had spent several days, and had seen no
crow and no bird of any kind banned by the keepers.
Yet this was one of the largest woods in Wiltshire, in
appearance an absolutely wild forest, covering many
miles without a village or house within a mile of its
borders on any side, and with no human occupants
except the four or five keepers who ranged it to look
after its millionaire owner's pheasants. The crow did
not catch sight of me until within about forty yards
from the tree under which I stood, whereupon, with a
loud croak of terror, he turned instantly, and dashed
away at right-angles to his original course at his utmost
speed.

Leaving the great wood, I went a few miles away to
visit one of the large unprotected clumps, and found
there a family of four carrion-crows — two adults and
two young ; at my approach they flapped heavily
from the tree in which they were resting, and flew
slowly to another about fifty yards away, and sat there
peering at me and uttering loud caws as if protesting
against the intrusion.

At another unprotected clump on a low down I

266 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

discovered a varied colony of birds — some breeding,
others with young out of the nest. It was a large grove
of old pine-trees, almost shut in with a thick growth of
thorn and holly, mixed with bramble and masses of
wild clematis. It was full of the crooning sound of
turtle-doves, and in the high firs several wood-pigeons
had their nests. There were several magpies and in-
variably on my coming to the spot they would put in
an appearance — quaint black-and-white birds, sitting
on the top boughs of the thorns always with their
decorative tails behind them. A pair of carrion-crows
were there too, but appeared to have no nest or young.
Better still it was to find a family of long-eared owls —
two adults and three young, beginning to fend for
themselves. Best of all was a pair of sparrow-hawks
with young in their nest ; for the sparrow-hawk is one
of my prime favourites, and the presence of these birds
delighted me even more than that of the owls.

It was evident that these hawks did not associate
my appearance with the quick sharp report of a gun
and the rattle of shot about them, with perhaps the
fiery sting of a pellet of lead in their flesh, for they were
exceedingly bold and vociferous whenever I approached
the nesting-tree. I visited them on several days for
the pleasure of seeing and hearing them. The female
was very bold and handsome to look at. Sometimes
she would perch above me in such a position as to
appear silhouetted against the blue, intensely bright
sky, looking inky-black on her black branch. Then,
flying to another branch where the light woulcl be on

THE TEMPLES OF THE HILLS 267

her and a mass of dark pine-needles for a background,
one could see the colouring of her plumage. Seen
through a powerful binocular, she would appear as
big as a goshawk, and as beautiful as that noblest of our
lost hawks in her pigeon-blue wings and upper plumage,
the white breast barred with brown, thin yellow shanks
and long black claws, and the shining yellow eyes,
exceedingly wild and fierce. Presently her little mate
would appear, carrying a small bird in his claws, and
begin darting wildly about among the trees, screaming
his loudest, but would refuse to visit the nest. In
the end my persistence would tire them out ; gradu-
ally the piercing reiterated cries would grow less and less
frequent, and finally cease altogether. The female
would fly from tree to tree, coming nearer and still
nearer to the nest, until at last she would perch directly
over it and look down upon her young, and finally
drop upon them and disappear from sight. And by-
and-by the male, approaching in the same cautious way,
would at length fly to the nest and, without alighting,
just hovering a moment, drop his bird upon it, then
dash away and quit the grove. She would then refuse
to come off, even when I would strike loudly on the
tree with a stick ; yet on my return on the following
day the whole performance would be gone through
again.

Watching these birds from day today with an endless
delight in their beauty and vigour, their dashing flight,
and shrill passionate cries of anger and apprehension,
I could not help thinking of all the pleasure that hawks

268 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

in general are to the lover of wild life in countries
where these birds are permitted to exist, and, in a
minor degree, even in this tame England — this land
of glorified poultry-farms. There is no more fascinat-
ing spectacle in wild life than the chase of its quarry
by a swift-winged hawk ; and on this account I should
be inclined to put hawking above all other sports but
for the feeling which some of us can never wholly
get away from, that it is unworthy of us as rational
and humane beings possessing unlimited power over
all other animals, to take and train any wild rapacious
creature to hunt others to the death solely for the
pleasure of witnessing its prowess. No such disturbing
feeling can affect us in witnessing the contests of bird
with bird in a state of nature. Here pursuer and
pursued are but following their instincts and fulfilling
their lives, and we as neutrals are but spectators of
their magnificent aerial displays. Such sights are
now unhappily rare with us. At one period of my life
in a distant country they were common enough, and
sometimes witnessed every day for weeks at a stretch.
Here the noblest of our hawks are all but gone. The
peregrine, the most perfect of the falcons — perhaps,
as some naturalists think, the most perfect of the entire
feathered race — maintains a precarious existence on
the boldest sea-cliffs, and as to the hobby, it is now
nearly extinct. The courageous little merlin does not
range in southern England, and is very rare even in
its northernmost counties. The kestrel is with us still,
and it is beautiful to see him suspended motionless in

THE TEMPLES OF THE HILLS 269

mid-air with swiftly vibrating wings like a gigantic
hover-fly ; but he is nothing more than a mouser
and an insect-eater, a falcon that has lost the noble
courage of his tribe. The splendid powerful goshawk,
a veritable king among hawks, has long been extinct ;
only his little cousin, the sparrow-hawk, lives on in
ever-diminishing numbers. But although small and,
as his name implies, a preyer chiefly on little birds, he
has the qualities of his noble relation. In wooded
places I am always on the look-out for him in hopes of
witnessing one of his dashing raids on the feathered
population. As a rule there is little to see, for the
sparrow-hawk usually takes his quarry by surprise,
rushing along the hedgerow, or masked by trees, then
bounding like a small hunting leopard of the air on his
victim and, if the stroke has been missed, speeding on
his way. Even if I do not see this much — if I just catch
a glimpse of the blue figure speeding by, seen for a
moment, then vanishing among the trees — it is a
pleasure to me, a satisfaction to know that he still
exists, this little living link with the better vanished
past, and my day has not been wasted.

Here, on the open downs where the small birds when
feeding have no close refuge into which they can
quickly vanish at the sight of danger, he may oc-
casionally be watched chasing them as a dog on the
ground chases a rabbit ; but the best display is when
he goes after a flock of starlings. At no other time does
a company of these birds appear so like a single organism
composed of many separate bodies governed by one

270 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

will. Only when he is in the midst of the crowd, if,
in spite of their quick doublings, he succeeds in getting
there, do they instantly all fly apart and are like the
flying fragments of a violently shattered mass ; then,
if he has not already made his capture, he singles out
one bird to pursue.

A still better spectacle is afforded by the fiery-
hearted little bird-hunter when, after the harvest,
he ranges over the fields ; when the village sparrows,
mixed with finches of several species, are out on the
stubble, often in immense congregations covering
half a large field from end to end. On such occasions
they like to feed near a hedge and are thickest on the
ground at a distance of three or four seconds' flight
from the thorny shelter. Suddenly the dreaded
enemy appears, topping the hedges at its far end, and
at the same instant, the whole vast gathering, extend-
ing the entire length of the field, is up in the air, their
innumerable, swiftly fluttering, translucent wings,
which produce a loud humming sound, giving them
the appearance of a dense silvery brown mist springing
up from the earth. In another instant they are safe
in the hedge and not a bird is visible. In some in-
stances the hawk is too intent on his prey to hurry on
to other fields hoping for better luck next time. No,
there are thousands here ; he will drive them out
and have one ! Then, heedless of your presence, he
ranges up and down the hedge, rising at intervals to a
height of thirty or forty feet and, pausing to hover a
few moments like a kestrel, dashes down as if to descend

THE TEMPLES OF THE HILLS 271

into the hedge to wrest a sparrow from its perch, and
when just touching the surface of the thorny tangle
the flight is arrested and he skims on a few yards, to
mount again and repeat his feint. And at every down-
ward dash a simultaneous cry of terror is uttered by
the small birds — a strange sound, that cry of thousands
extending the whole length of the hedge, yet like one
cry ! If you then walk by the hedge-side and peer
into it, you will see the small birds crowded together
on branchlets and twigs as near the middle of the hedge
as they can get, each particular bird perched erect,
stiff and motionless, like a little wooden dummy bird
refusing to stir even when you stand within arm's
reach of him. For though they fear and fly from the
human form, the feeling is overmastered and almost
vanishes in their extreme terror of the sharp-winged
figure of the little feathered tyrant hovering above
them.

Undoubtedly it is a fine spectacle — one that lives
in the memory though less beautiful than that of the
peregrine or other high-flying hawk in its chase and
conquest of its quarry at a great height in the air ;
but in this matter of hawks and their fascinating ex-
hibitions we have long come to the day of small things.

Something remains to be said of the owls — or rather
of the long-eared owl, this being the only species I have
met with in the temples of the hills. Strange as it may
seem to readers who are not intimately acquainted with
this bird, I was able to see it even more clearly than
the sparrow-hawk in the full blaze of noonday. The

272 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

binocular was not required. There were five of them
— two old and three young birds — and it was their
habit to spend the daylight hours sitting in a bush
just outside the grove. After discovering their
haunt I was able to find them on most days, and one
day had a rare spectacle when I came upon the whole
family, two in one bush and three sitting close together
in another. I stood for some time, less than a dozen
yards from these three, as they sat side by side on a
dead branch in the hollow of a furze-bush, its spiny
roof above them, but the cavity on my side. I gazed
at them, three feathered wild cats, very richly coloured
with the sun shining full on them, their long black
narrow ears erect in astonishment, while they stared
back at me out of three pairs of round luminous
orange-yellow eyes. By-and-by, getting nervous at
my presence, they flung themselves out, and, flying
to a distance of twenty or thirty yards, settled down in
another bush.

I had another delightful experience with long-eared
owls at another of the downland groves about fifteen
miles distant from the last. Here, too, it was a family
— the parents and two young birds. I could not find
them in the day-time ; but they were always out at
sunset, the young crying to be fed, the parents gliding
to and fro, but not yet leaving the shadow of the
trees. I went at the same hour on several evenings to
watch them and experience pleasing little thrills. I
would station myself in the middle of the grove and
stand motionless against one of the tall pines, while the

THE TEMPLES OF THE HILLS 273

two young birds would fly backwards and forwards
from end to end of the grove perching at intervals
to call in their catty voices, and then resume their
exercises. By-and-by a sudden puff of air would fan
my cheek or it would be slightly brushed with feather-
ends, and an owl would sweep by. This trick they
would repeat again and again, always flying at my head
from behind ; and so noiseless was the flight that I
could never tell that the bird was coming until it
actually touched or almost touched me in passing.
These were indeed the most ghostlike owls I had ever
encountered ; and they had no fear of the human
form, though it evidently excited their curiosity and
suspicion, and no knowledge of man's deadly power :
for this grove, too, stood on land owned by the person
who farmed it, and he was his own gamekeeper.

Thinking on my experience with these owls in an
unprotected clump in Wiltshire, it occurred to me that
owls of different species, where these birds are not
persecuted, are apt to indulge in this same habit or
trick, almost of the nature of a practical joke, of flying
at you from behind and dashing close to your face to
startle you. I remembered that in my early years, in
a distant land where that world-ranging species, the
short-eared owl, was common, I had often been made
to jump by this bird.

It is sad to reflect that the few clumps which form

bird refuges such as the one described — small oases of

wild life in the midst of a district where all the most

interesting species are ruthlessly extirpated — are never

18

274 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

safe from the destroyer. A few years of indifference
or kindly toleration or love of birds on the owner's
or tenant's part may serve to people the grove, but
the shooting may be let any day to the landlord or
shooting-tenant of the adjoining property, whereupon
his gamekeeper will step in to make a clean sweep of
what he calls vermin.

Last summer I visited a hill-grove which was new
to me, about thirteen miles distant from the one where
I met with owls and sparrow-hawks and other perse-
cuted species ; and as it was an exceptionally large
grove, surrounded by a growth of furze and black and
white thorn, and at a good distance from any house,
I hoped to find it a habitation of interesting bird life.
But there was nothing to see or hear excepting a pair
of yellowhammers, a few greenfinches and tits, with
two or three other feathered mites. It was a strictly
protected grove, as I eventually discovered when
I came on a keeper's gibbet where the pines were
thickest. Here were many stoats, weasels, and moles
suspended to a low branch : crows and rooks, a magpie,
and two jays and eleven small hawks; three of these
were sparrow-hawks — one in full, the others in im-
mature plumage — and eight kestrels.

This, judging from the condition of the corpses —
one or two newly killed, while the oldest were dried up
to bones and feathers — was probably the harvest of a
year or more. The zealous keeper had no doubt ex-
hibited these trophies to the noble sportsman, his
master, who probably rejoiced at the sight, though

THE TEMPLES OF THE HILLS 275

knowing that the kestrel is a protected species. This
grove, its central tree decorated after the manner of a
modern woman with wings and carcasses of birds and
heads and tails of little beasts was like a small tran-
script of any one of those vast woods and forests in which
I had spent so many days in this same downland dis-
trict. The curse and degradation were on it, and from
that time the sight of it was unpleasant, even when so
far removed as to appear nothing but a blue cloud-like
mound, no bigger than a man's hand, on the horizon.
There is something wanting in all these same great
woods I have spoken of which spoils them for me and
in some measure, perhaps, for those who have any feel-
ing for Nature's wildness in them. It has been to me
like an oppression during my rambles, year after year,
in such woods as Savernake, Collingbourne, Longleat,
Cranbourne Chase, Fonthill, Great Ridge Wood,
Bentley and Groveley Woods — all within or on the
borders of the Wiltshire down country. This feeling
or sense of something wanting is stronger still in dis-
tricts where there are higher and rougher hills, a larger
landscape, and a wilder nature, as in the Quantocks —
in the great wooded slopes and summits above Over
Stowey, for example ; the loss, in fact, is everywhere
in all woodland and incult places, but I need not go
away from these Wiltshire woods already named.
They are great enough, one would imagine, to satisfy
any person's love of wildness and solitude. Here you
will find places in appearance like a primitive forest,
where the trees have grown as they would for genera-

276 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

tions untouched by man's hand, and are interspersed
with thorny thickets and wide sunny spaces, stony and
barren or bright with flowers. Here, too, are groves
of the most ancient oaks in the land, grey giants that
might have been growing in the time of the Conquest,
their immense horizontal branches rough with growth
of fern and lichen ; in the religious twilight of their
shade you might spend a long summer day without
meeting a human being or hearing any faintest sound
of human life. A boundless contiguity of shade such
as the sensitive poet desired, where he might spend his
solitary life and never more have his ears pained, his
soul made sick, with daily reports of oppression and de-
ceit and wrong and outrage.

To the natural man they have another call. Like
the ocean and the desert they revive a sense and feeling
of which we had been unconscious, but which is always
in us, in our very marrow ; the sense which, as Herbert
Spencer has said, comes down to us from our remote
progenitors at a time when the principal activities of
the race were in woods and deserts. Given the right
conditions and it springs to renewed life ; and we
know it is this which gives to life its best savour, and
not the thousand pleasures, or distractions which
civilised dwellers in towns have invented as substitutes.
Here we are away from them — out of doors, and able
to shake the dust of such artificialities from our souls.
In such moods, in these green shades, we are ready to
echo every grateful word ever spoken of those who for
a thousand years in a populous and industrial country,

THE TEMPLES OF THE HILLS 277

the workshop of the world, have preserved for us so
much of Nature's freshness. Doubtless they did it
for their own advantage and pleasure, but incidentally
the good was for all.

A young American naturalist, writing to me some
time ago, contrasted the state of things with regard
to the preservation of wild life in his and this country.
There, he said, the universal rage for destroying all
the noblest and most interesting species, and the liberty
possessed by every man and boy to go where he likes
and do what he likes in utter disregard of penal laws,
was everywhere producing a most deplorable effect.
Whereas in this happier land, the great entailed estates
of our old county families and aristocracy were like
bulwarks to arrest the devastating and vulgarising
forces, and had served to preserve our native fauna.

He spoke without sufficient knowledge, describing
a condition of things which existed formerly, even
down to about the thirties or forties of the inineteenth
century. Then a change came over the spirit of the
landowner's dreams ; a new fashion in sport had
arisen, and from that time onwards those who had
been, indirectly, the preservers of our country's wild
life became its systematic destroyers. For the sake
of a big head of game, a big shoot in November, the
birds being mainly hand-reared semi-domestic phea-
sants driven to the guns, they decreed the complete
extirpation of our noblest native species :

The birds, great Nature's happy commoners,
That haunt in woods :

278 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

Raven and buzzard, goshawk, kite, harrier-hawks,
and peregrine. Besides these, a score of species
of less size were also considered detrimental to
the interests of the noble poultry-killer. Nor is
this all. Incidentally the keepers, the men with
guns in their hands who patrol the woods, have
become the suppliers to the dealer and private
collectors of every rare and beautiful bird they can
find and kill.

But I wish now to write only of the large species
named above. They are not very large — they might
almost be described as small compared with many
species in other lands — but they were the largest known
throughout the greatest portion of England ; they were
birds that haunt in woods, and, above all, they were
soaring birds. Seen on high in placid flight, circling
and ascending, with the sunlight falling through the
translucent feathers of their broad wings and tail, they
looked large indeed — large as eagles and cranes. They
were a feature in the landscape which made it seem
vaster and the clouds higher and the sky immeasurably
farther away. They were something more : the sight
of them and the sound of their shrill reiterated cries
completed and intensified the effect of Nature's wild-
ness and majesty.

It is the loss of these soaring species which spoils
these great woods for me, for I am always sadly con-
scious of it : miles on miles of wood, millions of ancient
noble trees, a haunt of little dicky birds and tame
pheasants bred and fed for the autumn shoot. Also

THE TEMPLES OF THE HILLS 279

the keeper laying his traps for little mousing weasels,
or patiently waiting in hiding among the undergrowth
to send a charge of shot through a rare kestrel's nest
when the mother-bird comes back to feed and warm
her young.

CHAPTER XXVI

AUTUMN, 1912

WELLS-NEXT-THE-SEA, as I have already said in a
chapter a long way back in this volume, is one of the
spots I love best to frequent in the autumn, chiefly
to see and hear the wild geese that winter there in
larger numbers than at any other point on the coast.
This season of 1912 I had another object in going
thither ; there remained two or three weeks' work
to be done in order to complete this book ; and where,
flying from London, could one find a place more
admirably suited for such a purpose ? A small,
ancient, village-like town, set in a low flat land next
the sea, or separated from the sea by a mile-wide
marsh, grey in summer, but now rust-brown in its
autumnal colour. The fisher-folk are poor, and their
harvest consists mainly of shellfish, mussels, whelks,
clams, and they also dig at low water for sand-worms
to be sold for bait. They are, as I think I remarked
before, like their feathered fellow-creatures, the hooded
crows ; and indeed they resemble crows when seen,
small and black, scattered far out on the wide waste
of sand. When the men are away at sea and those
noisy little animals, the children, are shut up in school,
280

AUTUMN, 1912 281

you can imagine that there is no longer any life in Wells ;
you would not be in a quieter place on the wide brown
marsh itself, nor on the low grassy sand-hills faintly
seen in the distance, nor on the wide stretch of sand
beyond, where the men, crow-like, are seeking their
subsistence.

To Wells I accordingly went on October 17, yet
was no sooner in this ideal spot than I began to think
it was the last place where I could do any work, since
even the noises and distractions of London would have
a less disturbing effect than that low murmur, that
familiar yet ever strange sound of the old old sea, that
came to me by day and night, and the wild cries
and calls of passing birds, especially the cries of the
geese.

It is related of a man who has a great reputation in
his day which is now ended, that he was once taken
to task by a friend for having settled himself at Wells.
You, his friend said, with your love of mankind, your
noble ideals, your many talents, and especially your
eloquence in addressing your fellow men — how can
you endure to waste your years in this dead-alive little
town in a marsh ?

The other answered that it was because Wells was
the only town in England where, sitting at ease in his
study, he could listen to the cries of wild geese.

To me, just a naturalist, these same cries were even
more than to that famous man : to sit still and do any
work where I heard them was the difficulty. Thus
was I pulled two ways, and my state was that of being

282 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

in, or between, " two minds." My wish was that
these same two minds could have two bodies with sets
of senses complete, so that each might be able to follow
its own line. I envied the chameleon just then — a
strange creature which is said to change its colour ac-
cording to its surroundings. That, however, is merely
a physical condition, one which it shares with certain
other creatures without any mind at all, or in which
the mind is dormant, as, for example, in some chrysalids.
It is a minor mystery ; the big mystery of the chame-
leon, the pretty problem for the students of animal
psychology, is the divisibility of its mind, the faculty of
being two persons in one body, each thinking and
acting independently of the other. Observe him in
a domestic state, sitting on a branch in a room, in
appearance a deformed lizard, or the skeleton of one,
encased in a discoloured, granulated skin, long dried
to a parchment. The most remarkable feature is the
head, which reminds one of a grotesque mediaeval
carving in or on some old church, of a toad-like or
fish-like human creature, with a countenance expressive
of some ancient, forgotten kind of wisdom. He is
absolutely motionless, dead or asleep one might
imagine ; but on a closer scrutiny you discover that
he is not only awake and alive, but that he has two
lives in him — in other words, that the two hemispheres
of his brain are working separately, each occupied with
its own problem. It may be seen in his eyes — minute
round lenses mounted on swivels, or small fleshy or
rubber processes, capable of being elevated or de-

AUTUMN, 1912 283

pressed and pointed in this or that direction at will.
They are like the freely moving ears of a horse, but
they do not point one way, since each one, together
with the half-brain which governs it, is occupied with
looking at a different thing. You see, for instance,
that one of the pair is now aimed like a spy-glass at
some remote object, also that it is continually moving,
and you will presently discover that it is following the
erratic movements of a bluebottle, wandering about the
room. This is not an idle amusement nor mere mental
curiosity on the chameleon's part ; he knows that the
fly is an indefatigable traveller and investigator ; that
by-and-by, when he has finished quartering the ceiling,
running up and down the walls and looking at the
pictures, he will turn his attention to the furniture,
piece by piece, and eventually arrive at that very spot,
that stand or table with its counterfeit presentment
of a branch, and upon the branch the strange image
of a monster, perhaps a god, of stone or metal, dug up
by some Flinders Petrie in some desert city, where it
has been lying buried in sand these several thousand
years. Truly a curious and interesting object for an
inquisitive fly to look at ! And just as a little tourist
will place himself in front of the Sphinx to survey its
countenance at a proper distance of forty or fifty yards,
so does the fly settle himself before the face of the
chameleon, at a distance of six or eight or ten inches.
That is not too far for the tongue, which is as long as
the body : the eye on a swivel has never lost sight
of the blue wanderer ; it is fixed on him even now ;

284 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

the tongue follows like lightning, and lo, the fly has
vanished, and will buzz and look blue no more !

Meanwhile, the same chameleon, on the other side of
him, has fallen into a doze, or reverie, or is perchance
philosophising, the eye on that side being sunk into the
skull. One could say that he is lying comfortably
muffled up at home, lapped in rosy dreams, while his
fellow chameleon, the other half of him, is abroad
hunting, practising all his subtle strategy to capture a
shy volatile quarry. Yet at any moment these two,
so divided in mind and indifferent to each other's
doings and thinkings, can merge into one : they
literally pull themselves together, and a single will
takes command of the entire body, from the gargoyle
head to the prehensile tail.

I can laugh now at the plight I was in just through
not being made like a chameleon ; but it wasn't a
laughing matter when Conscience pointed sternly to
the writing-table and at the same time a persuasive
voice called to me from the door to come out,
otherwise I should miss something never again to
be seen. No hint as to what the wonderful thing
was to be, nor when nor where it was to be seen :
all I had to do was to be out all day, patiently
waiting and watching !

The wonder is that when, in spite of conscience, I
got away, I did witness some things which were actually
worth recording. Thus, one day while sitting by the
old sea-ruined coastguard station on the dunes, between
the sea and the marsh, I noticed a small, unfamiliar

AUTUMN, 1912 285

bird, robin-like in appearance, but darker and without
the red waistcoat, flitting in a sprightly manner about
the old crumbling walls. By-and-by his flittings and
little dashes after passing flies brought him to a perch
within five yards of me ; and sitting there, curiously
eyeing me, droping his wings and flirting a broad tail,
he stood revealed — a black redstart ! A happy ex-
perience : in all that empty desolate place I could not
have met with a more engaging stranger, nor one more
friendly. For he is first cousin to our pretty firetail
with a sweet little summer song, only our redstart is
a shy bird, whereas this black redstart was tamer than
any robin. I took it that he was resting a day on the
dunes after his perilous flight over the North Sea,
and that he came from Holland, where he is common
and breeds fearlessly in and on the houses. That is
why he was so confident, also why he eyed me so curi-
ously, for he knew by the look of me that I was not a
Dutchman. More than that he did not know, and he
had no letter tied to his wing ; nevertheless, he had
a greeting and a message for me from that country and
that people, who, among the nations of the Continent,
are most like the English in kindness to animals as well
as in some other things, but are better than we are in
their treatment of birds.

On another day I stole into the pine-wood growing
on the sandhills by the sea, and in the heart of the wood
came to a deep basin-like depression in the sand, and
there I seated myself on the rim or margin among the
long grey marram grass, with the dark red pillars of

286 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

the pines standing all about me. It was marvellously
still in that hidden place in the wood ; after sitting
there for half-an-hour, listening and watching, the
thought came to me that I might stay there half a day
without seeing any living creature or hearing any
faintest sound of life. Yet before another minute
had passed something living flashed into sight, the
woodland creature that is most alive — a beautiful red
squirrel with an exceptionally big bushy tail. He
slided swiftly down a bole, and straightway began leap-
ing, pirouetting, and dashing hither and thither about
the floor of the basin, not twenty yards from my feet.
As I sat motionless he did not see or did not heed me :
he was alone in the wood, and was like the solitary
nightingale that asks for no witness to his song, and
played his glad, mad game with his whole soul. Now
with feet together he arched his body like a stoat, then
flung himself out full length and dashed round in a
circle, and as he moved there was an undulating motion,
as of wave following wave along his back and tail which
gave him a serpentine appearance. On coming to
a thick bed of pine needles, he all at once became
motionless and spread himself out on the ground and
looked like the flattened skin of a squirrel, with the
four paws visible at the corners. When he had suffi-
ciently enjoyed the sensation of pressing on the pine
needles with the under surface of his body, he started
up to continue his game, until he suddenly caught
sight of a large, yellowish-white agaric growing some
yards away, and, dashing at it, he tore it violently from

AUTUMN, 1912 287

the stalk with his two paws and began devouring it as
if mad with hunger, taking huge bites and working his
jaws like a chaff-cutter.

Sitting upright devouring his mushroom, he looked
like a quaint little red man eating a round piece of
bread-and-butter twice as broad as himself. Then
suddenly, after a few more bites, he dashed the mush-
room to the ground as if he hated the taste of it, and
scampering off out of the hollow, vanished from sight
among the trees.

With such things as these to be seen, the very thought
of work gave me a sensation of weariness and disgust :
to sit down to a pile of old note-books, some of them
more than a year old, patiently and laboriously to sift
out two or three observations worth recording out of
every hundred, seemed an intolerable burden, and
not worth the candle. Even the sight of a black
redstart (with greetings from Holland) and the romps
of a fantastic squirrel seemed more to me a hundred
times than the sights of a year ago. To go back to
such stuff was to leave living, breathing, palpitating
nature to finger bundles of old faded photographs
and muse on dusty memories. Why then go back ?
Why indeed ! Ah ! how easy to ask that question ;
how often we ask it and there is no answer but the old
one ; because of the eternal desire in us, which must
have fretted even the hearts of the men who dwelt
in caves ; to reveal, to testify, to point out the path
to a new enchanted realm, which we have discovered ;
to endeavour to convey to others some faint sense or

288 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

suggestion of the wonder and delight which may be
found in nature.

We say, and I am here speaking of my own peculiar
people, the naturalists, that birds too, like ourselves,
may be pulled two ways, and that two conflicting im-
pulses may be the cause of one of the most pathetic
of Nature's innumerable little annual tragedies. This
is when a pair of swallows are rearing a late brood, and
before the time comes for the young to fly are them-
selves overtaken and borne away to the south by the
irresistible migratory instinct.

It happened that on the very day of my arrival at
Wells, October 17, I noticed a pair of martins still
feeding their young in a nest under the eaves above a
sweetstuff shop, within two or three doors of the
Wells post-office. Now I shall see for myself, I said,
resolving to keep an eye on them. There were no
other martins or swallows of any kind in Wells at that
date : a fortnight earlier I had witnessed the end of
the swallow migration, as I thought, on the South
Devon sea-coast. I saw them morning after morning
in numbers, travelling along the coast towards the
Isle of Wight, which is one of their great crossing-
places, until they had all gone.

I kept an eye on the martins, visiting them very early
every morning and two or three times later during each
day. The young, it could be seen when they thrust
their heads and almost half their bodies out to receive
the food their parents brought, were fully grown and
very clamorous.

AUTUMN, 1912 289

" They will be out in a day or two," I said con-
fidently. The people of the house informed me that
this same nest had been occupied, off and on, through-
out the summer ; and if we take it that eggs were laid
at the beginning of May, it must be assumed that this
pair of martins had been occupied almost continuously
with the breeding business for six months, and were
now rearing their third, or possibly their fourth brood.
A long period when we consider that they could not
have had a worse season : bad everywhere in England,
it was exceptionally so on the Norfolk coast, where the
winds and cold were most felt and the flooding rains
in August were greatest.

As the young birds did not come out during the
two following days, I began to look for their abandon-
ment, whereupon the women of the house com-
passionately offered to take them in and feed them, in
the hope of keeping them alive until the return of warm
weather, when they would be liberated. From that
time onwards they and others in the town who had
begun to take an interest in the birds helped me to
keep a watch on the nest. Assuredly the young would
be abandoned and that very shortly; the weather
was rough and cold, food becoming scarcer each day ;
and for a month or six weeks the impulse to fly south,
the " mighty breath, which in a powerful language,
felt not heard, instructs the fowls of heaven," must
have been worrying the brains of those two overworked
little martins.

But again the expected did not happen ; the parents

290 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

did not forsake their young, and on two occasions, one
on October 25, the other five days later, they tried their
best to get the young out. They came to the nest
with flies a dozen times a minute, and instead of
delivering the food into the open mouths, they
would flutter a moment with beaks just out of reach,
then drop off to circle round and repeat the action.
All these enticing arts were of no avail ; the
young had not the strength or spirit to launch
themselves on the air, otherwise they would have
been saved.

On the following day, October 31, the weather was
exceptionally bad ; it was cold, with a strong wind,
and rained heavily all day : the call of the young now
sounded feebler from the nest, and the eager little
black, flat heads and white throats were no longer thrust
out. Yet the old birds still laboured faithfully to find
them food, only on this last day they did not go far in
search of provender. They were too anxious, or in
some way conscious, of the failing strength of the
young; they hawked after scarce flies up and down
the street, always near the nest, constantly giving
themselves that quick little shake by means of which
the swallow throws the rain off his feathers. There
was another noticeable change in them : at intervals
of about a quarter of an hour one or both of the birds
would fly into the nest and remain there for a space
of three or four minutes, doubtless to warm the young.
At all events, I don't think it was merely to rest them-
selves, as on previous days I noticed that when they

AUTUMN, 1912 291

wanted to rest they would fly into one of the empty
martins' nests close to their own.

That last day came to an early end, as it began to
get dark at four o'clock, and the old birds settled down
with their young for the night.

The following morning, although somewhat chilly,
was more like April than November, with a light
wind, a crystal clear sky, and a sunshine with a magic
in it to enliven the world and give renewed life even
to the perishing. The old birds had vanished and no
faintest sound came from the nest. I waited some
hours, then procured a ladder and took the nest down,
and found two full-grown dead young martins in it.
One had died that morning, probably at two or three
o'clock, before the turning of the tide of life ; the
other looked as if it had died about two days before.

This is but one case and it happens to be the only
one of an exceptionally late brood which I have had
an opportunity of observing closely, yet to me it does
suggest the idea that we may be mistaken after all in
our belief that the migratory impulse or passion will
cause the swallow to forsake its late-hatched offspring,
leaving them to perish of starvation in the nest. More
observation is wanted, but the case described inclines
me to think that so long as the young continue alive
and able to emit their hunger cry, the parental instinc t
in the old birds remains dominant and holds the
migratory impulse in check or in abeyance ; that only
when the insistent cry ceases and the young birds
grow cold the release comes and the " mighty breath "

292 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

blows upon and bears them away southward irresisting
as a ball of thistledown carried by the air.

I see that Dixon, in his Migration of Birds (1897),
page 112, says that he knew of a case in which a pair of
barn swallows abandoned their young in the early
days of November when they were almost able to take
care of themselves, whether in or out of the nest he
does not say. Nor does he state that the case came
directly under his own observation ; if the young were
in the nest it may be they were dead before the parent
birds set out on their journey. It is possible that
such cases do occur from time to time and have been
observed, yet they may be exceptional cases. We know
that a few swallows do linger on with us into the depth
of winter each year ; that they become torpid with
cold, and that occasionally one does survive until the
following spring. These rare instances gave rise to the
belief that swallows hibernate regularly, which was
held by serious naturalists down to the early nineteenth
century : but we now know that these cases of torpid
birds are rare exceptions to the rule that the swallow
migrates each autumn to Africa.

While I was keeping watch on the martins when the
fate of the young was still hanging in the balance, there
was a good deal of talk on the case among my old
fishermen and wild-fowling friends, and about swallows
generally. One man told me that last winter (1911)
he was at the neighbouring village of Warham, one
bright sunny day about the middle of December, and
saw five or six swallows at a pond there flying about in

AUTUMN, 1912 293

a slow feeble manner over the water. They perched
frequently on a small bramble bush growing by the
pond and were so tame or stupefied by the cold that
he actually attempted to take one in his hand. He
thought it was an extraordinary thing, but there is
no doubt that a few swallows are seen every year up to
mid-winter somewhere in England although their
appearance is not recorded ; also that these birds have
been lying up in a torpid condition until a bright
warm day revived and brought them out. Few of
these stay-at-home swallows can survive to the spring.
Another curious incident was related by another
man, a very old wild-fowler of the place. He said
that when he was a young man living in his home,
a small hamlet near Wroxham Broad, a number of
martins bred every year on his cottage. They thought
a great deal of their martins and were proud to have
them there and every spring he used to put up a board
over the door to prevent the entrance from being
messed by the birds. One spring a pair of martins
made their nest just above the door and had no sooner
completed it than a pair of sparrows stepped in and
took possession and at once began to lay eggs. The
martins made no fight at all, but did not go away ;
they started making a fresh nest as close up as they
could against the old one. The entrance to the
new nest was made to look the same way as in the
first, so that the back part was built up against
the front of the other. It was quickly made and
when completed quite blocked up the entrance of

294 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

the old nest. The sparrows had disappeared ; he
wondered why after taking a nest that didn't belong
to them they had allowed themselves to be pushed
out in this way. At the end of the season, after the
departure of the martins, he got up to remove the
board and the double nest looked so curious he
thought he would take this down too and examine
it. On breaking the closed nest open he was astonished
to find the hen sparrow in it, a feathered skeleton
still sitting on four eggs !

CHAPTER XXVII
WILD WINGS : A FAREWELL

MY anxious interest in the swallows did not keep me
from seeing and hearing the geese. They had arrived
as usual " in their thousands " ; the wild-fowlers
said they had never seen them in greater numbers than
this autumn. One reason for this was supposed to be
the unusual abundance of food on the farmlands,
where a great deal of the corn had remained on the
ground on account of the floods in August and Sep-
tember. The farmer's loss was pure gain to the wild
geese. The birds shot during my stay were fat and
their crops full of corn ; certainly they appeared
happy ; and when they passed over the town with
resounding cackle and scream one could imagine they
were laughing in the sky : Ha ! ha ! ha ! it is a jolly
life in spite of you wingless, wicked wild-fowlers, so
long as we remember when flying to and from the sea
to keep out of range of your hateful old guns ! They
didn't always remember, and a goose was a great prize
when one fell to the gun of one of these very poor men ;
but when they sent me round a bird just to see what
a fine bird old So-and-so had got, and " would I
give him half-a-crown for it ? " I could only reply
295

296 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

that it was indeed a fine bird, and I congratulated my
old friend on his luck, but I wasn't buying a goose.
I can eat sheep and pig and some other beasts, always
excepting cow ; also fowl, pheasant, and various other
birds, wild and tame ; but I draw the line at wild geese.
I would as soon eat a lark, or a quail, or a nice plump
young individual of my own species as this wise and
noble bird.

The cries of the geese going inland to their happy
feeding-grounds would come to me in my room before
I was up in the morning, and again the same exhilarat-
ing sound was heard in the evening just after sunset,
causing the women and children to run out of their
cottages to see and listen to the passing birds. At
that hour I was usually a mile or so out on the marsh
or by the sea to have a good view of the geese as they
came over. On some evenings they disappointed me,
but there were always other birds to look at and enjoy,
the chief among these being the hooded crow. He
was a few days later than usual this year, but during
the last ten or twelve days of October came in steadily,
arriving, as a rule, in the morning, until he was as
numerous as ever all along the coast. The best time
to see these birds is in the evening, when they have
been feeding all day on the marshes, and are as full of
small crabs and carrion cast up by the sea as the geese
are of corn, and when they have an hour before going
to roost to spend in play.

One evening I was greatly entertained by their
performance, when the tide was out, leaving a wide

WILD WINGS: A FAREWELL 297

stretch of mud at the mouth of the river or small
estuary which serves Wells as harbour ; and here some
sixty or seventy birds had gathered to amuse them-
selves before going to roost. Here would be a bird
looking for something to eat, and when he found a
small crab or other morsel he would make a great to-do
about it, and hold it up as a challenge to others ; then
his next neighbour would set upon him and there
would be a sham-fight, and the crab would be captured
and carried triumphantly away, only to be used as a
challenge to others. This was but one of a dozen
different forms of play they were indulging in, and
while this play on the ground went on, at intervals of
a few seconds a bird would shoot straight up into the
air to a height of eighteen or twenty feet, then, turning
over, tumble straight down to the ground again. To
drop vertically down seemed to be the aim of every
bird, but with a wind blowing they found it a some-
what difficult feat, and would wriggle and flutter
and twist their wings about in various ways to save
themselves from being blown to one side. At longer
intervals a bird would shoot up to a height of forty
to sixty feet, going up in a much easier way than the
others, with a stronger flight and falling more skilfully,
almost like a stone. So great was the difference be-
tween this display and that of the generality that these
birds were like old practised hands or professionals at
the game, and the others mere amateurs or beginners.
On describing what I had witnessed to an old fisher-
man and fowler, he said, " I've watched them playing

298 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

like that many and many a time, and have thought
to myself, they're just like a lot o' children."

I doubt if any one who has observed birds in com-
pany closely, especially when they have come together,
as in the case of the hooded crows, just for recreation
has not occasionally had this same thought — just like
a lot of little children !

It is, as I remarked in the chapter on the marsh
warbler, a delightful experience to a field naturalist
to sit at ease, binocular in hand, at a proper distance
from a company of birds and watch them at their little
games. The right distance varies according to the
species and the nature of the ground ; it should always
be outside the danger limit, so that if they see the
spectator they do not heed him and are practically
unconscious of his presence. Whatever that distance
may be a nine to twelve prismatic glass will bring
them within a dozen yards of his vision.

This delight was mine almost every day at the
spots where the birds were accustomed to congregate
on the meadows and by the sea. I could watch them
by the hour and was never disappointed, even when
there was nothing particular to see, or at all events
nothing worth noting down. The more the species in
a gathering the greater the interest one takes in watch-
ing them, on account of the marked difference in dis-
position they exhibit ; but, speaking of the bird-life
of the meadows and shore, they have this in common,
that they all appear to take a certain pleasure in each
other's company. I notice, for instance, that if a pair

WILD WINGS: A FAREWELL 299

of peewits are in a meadow and a flock of starlings ap-
pear, after wheeling about as if undecided for a few
moments, they almost invariably drop down where the
peewits are and feed in their company. If rooks or
fieldfares come they too join the others. Even where
there are only large birds on the spot, geese or shel-
drakes for example, any small birds that come to the
place, starlings, thrushes, larks, will alight among or
alongside of them. They will appear to know each
other, and if no relations they are friends and in-
timates— geese, ducks, rooks, daws, crows, peewits,
thrushes of all kinds, larks, pipits, and wagtails ; also
curlews, redshanks and other small shore birds during
the intervals when they leave the sea. On these
meadows herons and gulls are also included in the
company. You cannot watch one of these gatherings
for long without witnessing many little incidents that
have nothing to do with the business in hand — the
search for small seeds hidden on the surface and
for grubs beneath it lying among the fibrous roots
of grass. It is an important matter, and it takes a long
time to get a satisfactory meal when each morsel or
half-mouthful has to be searched for in a separate
place ; but it does not take up their whole attention ;
there is always some sort of byplay going on, en-
counters friendly or hostile between two birds, mis-
chievous pranks and ebullitions of fun. The playful
spirit is universal among them ; even the solemn
gaunt heron, that stick of a bird, is capable of it ; I was
delighted one day to witness three of these birds that

3oo ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

formed part of a big promiscuous gathering all at
once break out in a wild game of romps. A heron
at play differs from all other birds in its awkward
ungraceful motions and when running about appears
hardly able to keep its balance.

The heron's moments of abandonment are rare and
he is rusty in consequence : the small shore birds
on the contrary relax often and are as easy and graceful
at play as any bird. One day when sitting on Wells
bank I had only two birds in sight, two ringed dotterels,
one quietly feeding on the mud flat directly beneath
me, the second bird running along the margin of the
water forty or fifty yards away. By-and-by this one
rose and came flying to his companion, but instead of
alighting near him as I expected him to do he paused
in the air and hovered for three or four seconds directly
over him, at a height of a couple of feet, then dropped
plump down upon his back, almost throwing him to
the ground with the impact, after which he folded
his wings and stood quietly as if nothing had happened.
The other bird, recovering from the sudden shock,
threw himself into a belligerent attitude, lowering his
beak and aiming it like a fighting ruff at his comrade,
his whole plumage raised and his wings and tail
feathers open ; but he did not attempt to inflict any
punishment ; after all that show of resentment at the
insult he contented himself by pouring out a series of
prolonged sharp scolding notes. These ended, the
two birds started quietly feeding together.

In the promiscuous gatherings, one cannot but

WILD WINGS: A FAREWELL 301

observe that although they all meet and mix in an
easy friendly manner there is yet a great difference in
their dispositions and in their ideas about fun if it be
permissible to put it in that way. In some of the
most social species, small shore birds, starlings and
rooks, for instance, their games are mostly among
themselves and are quite harmless although there
is often a pretence of anger. That is part of the game
just as it is with kittens and with children. The gulls
mix but do not affiliate with the others and play no
tricks on their neighbours, like the crow, just for
mischief's sake. They want something more substantial.
They must have it out of some one and it is usually
the peewit. He, the gull, flies about in a somewhat
aimless way, then drops down among them to rest on
the turf or walks about curiously inspecting the grass,
perhaps wondering what the mysterious sense or
faculty of the rook and starling is by means of which
they know just which individual grass among a hundred
grasses contains a grub in its roots — a fat morsel which
may be unearthed by a thrust of the beak. The grass
tells him nothing and in the end he finds it more
profitable to watch the other probers at work. He
sidles up in a casual manner to the peewit pretending
all the time to be honestly seeking for something himself
but watching the other's motions very keenly to be
ready at the prime moment when a grub is being
pulled out to make a dash for it.

There was another bird who took no part at all
in the work and play of the others — a kestrel who made

302 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

the meadows his daily hunting-ground. What he
was finding I could not discover as I never saw him
lift a vole and it was too late for insects. Anyhow,
he was often there and the other birds took not the
slightest notice of him ; even the smallest in the
company, the larks, pipits, and wagtails, knew him for
a harmless person. But one day while he was flying
about hovering at intervals and dropping to the earth,
a flock of about fifty starlings came flying to the mea-
dow and after circling round as if just going to alight
they all at once appeared to change their minds — or
mind — and mounting up again until they were about
twenty yards above the kestrel, began following his
movements, and when he hovered six or seven birds
detached themselves from the flock and dropped like
stones upon his back. He struck them angrily off and
flying a little distance away began searching again ; but
they followed and no sooner did he hover than down
again came half a dozen starlings on to his back.

After this annoyance had been repeated five or
six times he flew away to another part of the meadow
and resumed his hunting there. Again the starlings
followed and repeated the former action each time he
hovered, until in anger and disgust he flew away out of
sight while the starlings, their object gained, dropped
down to the meadow and started feeding. The action
may have been inspired by a love of fun or a spirit
of mischief complicated with a sense of irritation at
the sight of a bird who was not of their society, whose
ways were not their ways — a feeling akin to that which

WILD WINGS: A FAREWELL 303

occasionally prompts a person of a primitive order of
mind to heave half a brick at a stranger. The feeling
is quite common among birds, only the heaving process
is performed with such a precision and so gracefully
that it is a pleasure to witness it.

In marked contrast with this spiteful behaviour was
another act of a flock of starlings I witnessed at the
same spot, showing the different feelings entertained
towards a stranger like the kestrel and a comrade of the
feeding ground — a wild goose. A small gaggle or
company of a dozen or fourteen geese came flying from
the sea across the meadows on their way inland to the
feeding ground, and at the same time a flock of about a
hundred starlings, travelling at a much greater height
than the geese, came flying by, their course crossing that
of the geese at right angles. Just as the flocks crossed
about thirty starlings detached themselves from the
flock and dropping straight down joined the geese.
They did not merely place themselves alongside of the
big birds ; they mixed and went away among them,
accommodating their flight to that of the geese. Yet
they must have been uncomfortably placed among such
big and powerful birds fanned by their wings and
in some peril of being struck with the long hard flight
feathers. With my binocular on the flock I watched
them until they gradually faded from sight in the
sky, the starlings still keeping with them.

What could have moved these thirty birds out of a
flock of a hundred to act in this way ? Perhaps they
were " just like little children " and had said to each

304 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

other, "Come, let's play at being geese and march
solemnly to the sound of screaming and cackling to the
distant farm lands where we'll stuff our crops with
clover and spilt wheat ; and while some of us are feed-
ing others will keep watch, so that no crafty gunner,
hiding his approach behind an old grazing plough-
horse, shall get within shot of us."

One becomes so imbued with the notion of unity
of mind in a flock of starlings — the idea that the whole
crowd must act with and follow the leader, if leader
there be — that one always wants to know why there
is any divergence at all, as when a flock divides and
goes off in different directions. Thus, from a flock
proceeding steadily in a certain direction some of the
birds, half the flock it may be, will suddenly drop down
to settle on a tree-top, leaving the others to go on ; or
in passing over a field where sheep are grazing a certain
number of the birds will come down to feed among
them. In the first case, the sight of the tree-top
below has probably suggested the need for rest to a
single bird ; the impulse is instantly acted on and a
certain number of the birds are carried away by the
example and follow, while in the others the original
motive or impulse which sent them off to travel to
some more distant place remains unaffected and they
keep steadily on their way. In like manner, in the
other case, the scene below tells sharply on some one
bird in the flock ; hunger is created by suggestion ; the
sight of feeding sheep scattered about in the moist
green earth is associated in his starling mind with the

WILD WINGS: A FAREWELL 305

act of satisfying his want, and down to the sheep he
accordingly goes and carries some of the others with
him.

The action of the starlings going off with the geese
may perhaps be accounted for in the same way. An
impulse due to an associate feeling caused those thirty
birds to break away from the flock. These starlings
were probably migrants from the north of Europe
and were intimate with geese : they had perhaps even
travelled with the geese over lands already whitened
with snow and over the sea ; they had also probably
fed with the geese in green meadows and fields where
both birds find their food in abundance. The sight
of the flying geese became associated in their minds
with some such past experience and they were instantly
carried away by an impulse to join and fly with them,
but only some thirty of the flock, the other seventy
remaining unaffected or uninfected by the example.

My best evening was on October 29, for at the close
of that day the sky cleared and the geese returned not in
detachments, but all together a little earlier than usual.
I was out on the marsh towards Blakeney, a mile and
a half or so from Wells, when, about half an hour
before sunset, a solitary goose came flying by me towards
the sea, keeping only a foot or two above the ground.
It was a wounded bird, shot somewhere on its feeding-
ground, and, being unable to keep with the flock, was
travelling slowly and painfully to the roosting-place
on the sands. When it had got about a couple of hun-

20

306 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

dred yards past me a few redshanks rose from the
edge of the creek and, after wheeling round once or
twice, dropped down again in the same place, and no
sooner had they alighted than the goose turned aside
from his course and, flying straight to them, pitched
on the ground at their side. That is just how a bird
of social disposition will always act when forsaken by
his fellows and in distress : it will try to get with
others, however unlike its own species they may be —
even a goose with redshanks ; and this, too, in a most
dangerous place for a goose to delay in, where gunners
are accustomed to hide in the creeks. It was evident
that he was ill at ease and troubled at my presence, as
after alighting he continued standing erect with head
towards me. There he remained with the red-
shanks for full fifteen minutes, but he had not been
more than two minutes on the spot before a passing
hooded crow dropped down close to and began walking
round him. The crow will not attack a wounded
goose, even when badly wounded, but he knows
when a bird is in trouble and he must satisfy his in-
quisitive nature by looking closely at him to find out
how bad he really is. The goose, too, knows exactly
what the crow's life and mind is, and no doubt de-
spises him. I watched them intently, and every time
the crow came within a couple of feet of him the goose
bent down and shot out his snake-like head and neck
at him. If my binocular had been able to catch the
sound as well as the sight, it would have conveyed to
me, too, the angry snake-like hiss which accompanied

WILD WINGS: A FAREWELL 307

the threatening gesture. And each time this gesture
was made the crow hopped away a little space, only to
begin walking and hopping round the goose again until
he had satisfied his impudent curiosity, whereupon he
flew off towards his roosting-place.

Then, after a few minutes, from a great way off in the
sky came the sounds of approaching geese, and the
wounded bird turned his breast towards the land and
stood with head held high to listen to and see his
fellows returning uninjured with crops full of corn,
boisterous in their happiness, to the roosting-place.
The sound grew louder, and presently the birds ap-
peared, not in a compact body, but in three single
lines or skeins of immense length, while between these
widely separated lines were many groups or gaggles of a
dozen to forty or fifty birds arranged in phalanx form.

I had been witnessing this evening return of the geese
for a fortnight, but never, as now, united in one vast
flock, numbering at the least four thousand birds, the
skeins extending over the sky for a length of about a
third of a mile. Nor had the conditions ever been so
favourable ; the evenings had been clouded and it was
often growing dark when they appeared. On this
occasion the heavens were without a cloud or stain and
the sun still above the horizon. I could see it from
the flat marsh like a great crimson globe hanging just
above the low, black roofs of Wells, with the square
church tower in the middle. The whole vast aerial
army streamed by directly over me and over their
wounded fellow below, still standing statuesque and

308 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

conspicuous on the brown, level marsh. In two or
three minutes more the leading birds were directly
above the roosting-place on the flat sands, and at this
point they paused and remained stationary in mid-air,
or slowly circled round, still keeping at the same
height ; and as others and still others joined them,
the whole formation was gradually broken up, skeins
and phalanxes becoming merged in one vast cloud of
geese, circling round like a cloud of gulls. Then the
descent began, a few at a time detaching themselves
from the throng and sweeping obliquely downwards,
while others, singly or in small parties, with half-
closed wings appeared to hurl themselves towards
earth with extraordinary violence. This marvellous
wild wing display continued for four or five minutes
before the entire multitude had come to the ground.
Altogether it had been the most magnificent spectacle
in wild-bird life I had ever witnessed in England.

It was not until all were down and invisible, and the
tumult of the multitudinous cries had sunk to silence,
that the wounded bird, after some moments of inde-
cision, first taking a few steps onwards, then returning
to the side of the redshanks, as if reluctant to part from
those little unhelpful friends lest he should find no
others, finally set off walking towards the sea.

There were no gunners out on the shore at this
point just then and he would be able to reach the flock
in a little while, although he would not perhaps be able
to follow them to the farmlands on the morrow or ever
again.

WILD WINGS: A FAREWELL 309

Rough and rainy days succeeded that rare evening
of a wild-wing display on a magnificent scale ; then
followed yet another perfect November morning
like that on which the martins had abandoned their
stricken nest. A clear sky, a light that glorified that
brown marshy world and a clear sharp air which
almost made one think that " miracles are not ceased,"
since in breathing it in the shackles that hold and
weigh us down appear to drop off. On such a morn-
ing it is only necessary for a man to mimic the actions
of a crane or stork by lifting his arms and taking a
couple of strides and a hop forward, to find himself
launched in space, rising to a vast height, on a voyage
of exploration to " heavens not his own and worlds
unknown before." It is the nearest we can get to the
state of being a bird.

On that side where the large sun was coming up
the sky was all a pale amber-coloured flame, and
on it, seemingly at a great distance, appeared minute
black floating spots, which rapidly increased in size
and presently resolved themselves into a company of
hooded crows just arrived from their journey over
the North Sea. And no sooner were they gone journey-
ing inland in their slow-flapping laborious manner,
than other crows and yet more crows succeeded, in
twos and threes and half-dozens, and in scores and
more, an endless straggling procession of hoary
Scandinavian or " Danish " crows coming to winter
in England. And from time to time fieldfares, too,
appeared, travelling a little faster with an undulatory

310 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS

flight, but keeping strictly to the crow-line ; and
these too appeared to be fatigued and journeyed
silently, and there was no sound but the low swish
of their wings.

A morning and a bird -life to rejoice the heart of a
field naturalist ; yet this happiness was scarcely
mine before a contrary feeling supervened — the same
old ineffable sadness experienced on former occasions
on quitting some spot which had all unknown been
growing too dear to me. For no sooner am I conscious
of such an attachment — of this queer trick of the
vegetative nerves in throwing out countless invisible
filaments to fasten themselves like tendrils to every
object and " every grass," or to root themselves in
the soil, than I am alarmed and make haste to sever
these inconvenient threads before they get too strong
for me, and take my final departure from that place.
For why should these fields, these houses and trees,
these cattle and sheep and birds, these men and women
and children, be more to me than others anywhere in
the land ?

However, I made no desperate vow on this occa-
sion : the recollection of the wild geese prevented
me from saying a word which could never be unsaid.
I had planned to go that morning and bade a simple
goodbye : nevertheless my heart was heavy in me and
it was perhaps a prophetic heart.

The black straggling procession of crows, with
occasional flocks of fieldfares, had not finished passing
when the train carried me away towards Lynn, skirt-

WILD WINGS: A FAREWELL 311

ing the green marshes or meadows sacred to the wild
geese. And here, before we came to the little
Holkham station, I had my last sight of them. Looking
out I spied a party of about a dozen Egyptian
geese, on a visit to their wild relations, from
Holkham Park close by, and as the train ap-
proached they became alarmed and finally rose up
with much screaming and cackling and flew from
us, showing their strongly contrasted colours, black
and red and glistening white, to the best advantage.
Now a very little further on a flock of about eight
hundred wild geese were stationed. They were all
standing with heads raised to see the train pass within
easy pistol shot ; yet in spite of all the noise and steam
and rushing motion, and of the outcry the semi-
domestic Egyptians had raised, and their flight, these
wild geese, the most persecuted and wariest birds in
the world, uttered no sound of alarm and made no
movement !

A better example of this bird's intelligence could
not have been witnessed ; nor — from the point of
view of those who dream of a more varied and nobler
wild-bird life than we have now been reduced to in
England — could there have been a more perfect
object lesson.

INDEX

ANATID^E (the duck family), in-
stances of intelligence in the, 32

Argentine ornithology, 53

Athelney, lake of, 197

Avalon, 185

Aviculture, 97

Avington in Hampshire, last
ravens at, 255

Axe Edge, source of rivers Wye,
Goyt, Dane, and Dove, 120 ;
dreary farms, 120 ; sheep and
cows on, 121-2 ; character of
inhabitants, 122 ; signs of
spring, 123 ; bird life, 121-32

BADBURY RINGS, pine grove and

earthworks, 262
Bicycle, soundlessness of, 153
Birds, books on, 2, 5 ; discoverers
of, 3 ; delight in, 6-10 ; great
gatherings of, 32 ; destruction
of, 37 ; helping instinct in, 51-
2, 77-80 ; friendly spirit in,
62-4, 66, 71-7 ; absence of
large, in Peak district, 1 30 ; in
great woods and forests in Eng-
land generally, 275-9 ; music
of, 141 ; charm of, 212 ; omens,
240 ; window panes struck by,
242 ; beauty of soaring, 278 ;
pleasures of watching, 211-12,
298 ; social disposition in, 80
Bittern, little, beauty of eggs, 197
Blackbird, a pheasant's friend,
62-4 ; the one and only, 133 ;
capturing a young, 136; a
widely distributed type, 1 39 ;
early morning singing of, 148-
9 ; nest of in a London park,
161 ; human-like music, 185 ;
C. A. Johns on song of, 186;
C. A. Witchell's records of songs,
187-8; genius in a, 189; cha-
racter of song, 190 ; in poetic

literature, 191 ; in early Irish

poetry, 152
Blandford, 156
Blind man, meeting 3,153
Bulleid, Dr., lake village discovered

by, 195
Bullfinch, affectionate temper of,

74

Bulrushes, sound of wind in, 196
Buxton, an impression of, 120

CARDINAL, a caged, 12

Cerne and Cerne Abbas, 2 1 5

Chaffinch, singing of a, 147

Chameleon, problem of the, 282-4

Chanctonbury Ring, 262

Cheddar valley, 200

Chepstow, an impression of, 203

Cloudburst, a, at Wareham, 1 56

Clumps. See Hill-top groves

Cobbett, William, goldfinches
seen by, 218

Colorin de Filis, El, 224 ; transla-
tion of, 227-30

Cory, epitaph from Callimachus
234

Cotton-grass, 195

Crested screamer, great gather-
ings of the, 34

Crossbills, flock of, 200

Crow, carrion, on hill-top grove,
and in forest of a millionaire,
265

— hooded, 27, 30 ; as food, 58 ;
scared by an owl, 61-2 ; a
killer of sick birds, 99 ; even-
ing pastimes of, 296-8 ; teasing
a wounded goose, 306 ; im-
migration of, at Wells, 308

Cuckoo, abundance and habits of
in Peak district, 126

Curlew, helping instinct in, 52 ;
love language and an aspect of,
129

313

3*4

INDEX

DARTFORD WARBLER. See Furze-
wren

Davies, Sir John, quoted, 208
Daw, a friendly, 72 ; at Salisbury

Cathedral, 182

Dewpond, invention of the, 261
Dixon, on swallows forsaking

their young, 292
Dogs, 69
Dotterel, ringed, playful spirit of,

300
Downs, the, effect of pasturing

sheep on, 260
Drayton, Michael, the Polyolbion

of, 197-8
Duck, white, beauty of the, 106-9

an English queen's sobriquet,

116
Dutchman, love of birds of the,

285

ECHO, a curious, 59

England, beauty of spring in, 1 50 ;

first sight of, 151
Evolution of Bird-Song, 187

FAWLEY, New Forest, a black-
bird at, 189-90

Fieldfares, immigration of, 309
Forbes, Stanhope, on portraiture,

Fowler, W. Warde, on warbling in

birds, 135 ; Marsh warbler's

song described by, 208
Fox, a pet, 69
Friendship in birds, 66
Furze-wren, 169 ; elusiveness of,

170 ; girding note of, 172 ;

a colony, 172 ; song of, 173-7

GAMEKEEPERS, destructiveness of,
87-91,274

Garibaldi, death-bed incident, 10

Geese, wild, at Wells in Norfolk,
27-32 ; intelligent birds, 28 ;
great gatherings, 40 ; cries, 281;
arrival of, 295 ; starling's asso-
ciating with, 303 ; evening re-
turn of the, 307 ; tameness of,
atHolkham, 311

Geikie, Dr. Cunninghame, 65

Geochicla, 139

Glastonbury, excavations and re-
storations, 185

Goldcrest in a soldier's hospital, 8

Golden oriole, a breeding haunt
of the, 155

Golden plover, 1 30

Goldfinches in Dorset and Somer-
set, 217 ; numbers of, seen by
Cobbett, 218 ; increase of, due
to protective laws, 247

Goose, wild, a wounded, 305-6

Goshawk, 269

Gospel Oak at Avington, 257

Grass, mental effect of, 104-6

Green colour of England, 151

Guanaco, a habit of the, 52

Guarani legends, 109

Gulls, blackheaded, breeding of
with terns, 33 ; lapwings
robbed by, 301

HAM HILL stone, 180

Hampshire village, 161

Harrogate, 143

Hawking, a fascinating sport, 268

Hawks, pleasure of seeing, 267

Heckfield, churchyard in, 253

Helping instinct in a troupial, 77 ;
in a blackbird, 78 ; in a mag-
pie, 79 ; in a lark, 79

Heron, playful spirit in, 299

Heronry, 88

Hill- top groves or " clumps,"
260 ; aspect of on hot days,
263 ; wild life, 263

Hobby-hawk, 95

Holkham, 26 ; refuge of wild
geese at, 28, 30

Hollywater clump, 263

Horses, friendships of, 67-8

ITCHEN ABBAS, village of, 251
Ivy- tree, at Chepstow, 203

JACKDAW. See Daw
James, Prof. William, on im-
pressions, 107

KEATS, ode to nightingale, 235
Kestrel, appearance of, 268 ;
destroyed by gamekeepers,
274, 279 ; teased by starlings,
301-3

LAKE village at Glastonbury, 195
Lapwing, 30 ; robbed by gull,

301
— spur- wing, singular action of,

Leicester, Lord, birds protected
by, 32

INDEX

Lincolnshire, Drayton's account

of fens of, 1 97
Lydekker, Mr. Richard, 34

MARTIN, house, late breeding of
a pair, 288-92 ; ousted by spar-
rows, 293

— sand, singular action of a, 49-
51

Maxwell, Sir Herbert, bird pro-
tection Act of, 246

Melendez, goldfinch poem by, 224

Meredith, George, on the lark's
song, 175 ; nightingale's song
described by, 235

Merula (blackbird), wide dis-
tribution of genus, 139

Meyer, Prof. Kuno, translations of
ancient Irish poetry, 192

Migration of Birds, Dixon's, 292

Military starling, helping in-
stinct in, 77 ; chirping note, 98

Mirage in England, 263

Mocking bird, Southey's lines on,
207 ; singing of the Patagonian
white- winged, 207

Montacute house, 180-1

Montagu on the furze-wren, 1 74

Montagu's harrier, 90

Moor hen, 162

NATURALIST IN LA PLATA, 34, 36,

4°

Newton, Sir Isaac, belief con-
cerning migration, 234

Nightingale, a Yeovil, 182-4;
migration and distribution, 232-
8, 243 ; myths and poetry 234-
5 ; song, 235 ; anecdote, 240-2 ;
extermination in Germany, 245

OLDYS, Henry, Mr., studies of

bird music by, 187
Owl, long-eared, in hill-top grove,

271-2 ; habit of the, 272

PAGET, Miss Rosalind, 8

Parish clerk, 25

Partridge, friendship with horse

of, 80
Passenger pigeon, extirpation of

the, 39
Patagonian mocking-bird, song of,

188

Peak of Derbyshire, 1 19
Peewit. See Lapwing

Peregrine falcon, 268

Pheasant, and blackbird, 62 ;
a tame, 64-5 ; a sacred bird,
89-94

Phyllis and her goldfinch, prose
translation of Spanish poem
of, 227-30

Pipit, meadow, and cuckoo, 126

Pleydell-Bouverie, Mansel, 217

Plover, golden, 130

Poetic feeling in north and south
Britain, 183

Poetry, Spanish, freedom of, 224

Pollock, W. H., sensations in a bel-
fry described by, 201

Polyolbion, Drayton's, 198

Poole, recreations of the people
at, 157-9

Proctor, A. A., "Child and the
Bird," 225-6

Protection of birds, Royal Society
for the, 249

Psophia leucoptera. See Trum-
peter.

QUERQUEDULA flavirostra, 74

RAIL, water, 196

Ravens, last of the Hampshire,

Redbreast injured, fed by mag-
pie, 79 ; wailing note of, 1 39 ;
favoured by sentiment, 245 ;
young persecuted by, 259

Redshanks, and wounded goose,
306

Redstart, a black, 285

Redwing, 96 ; song of the, 97 ;
not a cage bird, 97 ; beauty of,
1 02

Ring-ouzel, 131, 133-9

Robin. See Redbreast

Roman pavement at Itchen
Abbas, 254

Rural Rides, 218

Rusby, Dr., on the trumpeter, 47

Ruskin on the colouring of phea-
sants, 93

Ryme Intrinsica, village of, 215,
219

SALISBURY Cathedral, birds on,
182

Salt, Mr. Micah, a Buxton natura-
list, 125, 127

Sandpiper, 130

3i6

INDEX

Saunders, Howard, on the furze-
wren, 176

Seabirds, destruction of, 37-8
Sheep, in the Peak district, 121 ;

on the downs, 260
Sherborne Abbey, the colour of,

181
Silchester, birds' bones in ash pits

at, 86
Sinclair, Sir John, nightingales

bred by, 244
Siskin, black-headed, a memory

of, 220-3
Southey, mocking-bird described

by, 207
Sparrow-hawk, small bird killed

by, 171 ; nesting in hill-top

grove, 266-7 ; hunting method

of, 269-71

Sparrows driving out martins, 293
Spencer, Herbert, on love of

wildness in man, 276
Squirrel, hunting a, 297 ; eccen-
tric behaviour of a, 286
Starling mimicry, 210
Starlings teasing a kestrel, 301 ;

accompanying wild geese, 303 ;

unity in flock, of, 304
Stuart-Wortley. A., on pheasant

shooting, 91
Swallow, habits of, 50 ; forsaking

their young, 288 ; wintering

in England, 292

Swan, friendship of with a trout,
V 81-2

Swift, a habit of the, 49
Swinburne, poetry of, 225

NX' TEAL anecdotes, 74-7
Terns, breeding-place, 33
Tilshead, village of, 72
Tinamou, spotted, love call of, 1 29

Tintern Abbey, birds breeding on,

204

Tree-climbing contests, 257
Troupials (Icterida), 9, 16, 77
Trumpeter, friendly disposition of,

47

VIZCACHA, a S. American rodent,
20

WALLACE, Dr. A. R., 149

Walnut-tree, a noble, 203

Walton, Isaac, on nightingale's
song, 235

Warbler, marsh, colony, 304-5 ;
song and imitations, 207-10;
listening to the, 213-14

Wareham, St. Mary's, 1 56

Water-squealer, 130

Wells-next-the-Sea, character of,
25 ; a wood at, 58 ; on the
saltings at, 95 ; return to, 280

Whinchat, song of, 128 ; night-
singing, 148 ; marsh warblers
imitation of, song of, 210

White, Gilbert, on the music of
field crickets, 142 ; on last
ravens, 256

Wild bird protection legislation,

37
Willow wren, at Harrogate, 144 ;

song of mimicked by marsh

warbler, 209, 210
Willughby, on the nightingale, 246
Wimborne, church at, 1 56
Winscombe, village of, 200
Witchell, C. A., on bird music, 187
Wolf, a pet, 69-71

YEOVIL, sand martins at, 49 ;

nightingale at, 182
Yetminster, village of, 215

Printed by Hasell, Watson & Vinty, LA., London and Aylesbury.

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