itself before him was a riddle that I never solved. A materialistic
friend suggested that he was adjusting the focus of his wonderful eyes,
and the action was certainly like that of an optician examining a lens;
but I feel that there was something more ceremonial about it. This
punctiliousness cost him his dinner once. I was curious to know what he
would do with a mouse, so, having caught one alive, I slipped it quietly
into his cage. He was more surprised than ever before, raised himself
erect, bowed to the earth once, twice and three times, stared, bowed
again and so on until, to his evident astonishment and chagrin, the
mouse found an opening and was gone. The lesson was not lost. A few days
later I got another mouse, to which he began to do obeisance as before,
but very soon and suddenly, though as softly as falling snow, he plumped
upon it with both feet and, spreading his wings on the ground, looked
all round him with infinite satisfaction. The mouse squeaked, but he
stopped that by cracking its skull quietly with his beak. Then he
gathered himself up and flew to the perch with his prize.
One thing I noted about Tommy most emphatically. He never showed a sign
of affection, or what is called attachment. He maintained a strictly
bowing acquaintance with me. He was not afraid, but he would suffer no
familiarity. He would come and eat, with due ceremony, out of my hand,
but if I offered to touch him he was surprised and affronted and went
off at once. When I moved to another house I found that I could not
continue to keep him, so I sent him to the zoological garden, where I
visited him sometimes, but he never vouchsafed a token of recognition.
His heart was locked except to his own kin.
But since that time, when I have seen an owl, even a barn owl, or a
great horned owl, swiftly cross the sky in the darkness of night, I have
felt that I could accompany it, in imagination, on its secret quest. It
will arrive silently, like the angel of death, in a tree overlooking a
field in which a rat, whose hour has come, is furtively feeding, all
alert and tremulous, but unaware of any impending danger. The rat will
go on feeding, unconscious of the mocking curtsey and the baleful eyes
that follow with mute attention its every motion, until the hand of the
clock has moved to the point assigned by fate, and then it will feel
eight sharp talons plunged into its flesh. I have seen the fierce dash
of the sparrow hawk into a crowd of unsuspecting sparrows, I know the
triumph of the falcon as it rises for the final, fatal swoop on the
flying duck, and I have watched the kestrel, high in air, scanning the
field for some rash mouse or lizard that has wandered too far from
shelter. The owl is also a bird of prey, but its idea is different from
all these.
VII
THE BARN OWL
A FRIEND OF MAN
A thunderstorm has burst on the common rat. Its complicity in the spread
of the plague, which has been proved up to the hilt, has filled the cup
of its iniquities to overflowing, and we have awakened to the fact that
it is and always has been an arch-enemy of mankind. Simultaneously, in
widely separated parts of the world, a "pogrom" has been proclaimed, and
the accounts of the massacre which come to us from great cities like
Calcutta and Bombay are appalling and almost incredible. They would move
to pity the most callous heart, if pity could be associated with the
rat. But it cannot.
The wild rat deserves that humane consideration to which all our natural
fellow-creatures on this earth are entitled; but the domestic rat (I use
this term advisedly, for though man has not domesticated it, it has
thoroughly domesticated itself) cannot justify its existence. It is a
fungus of civilisation. If it confined itself to its natural food, the
farmer's grain, the tax which it levies on the country would still be
such as no free people ought to endure. But it confines itself to
nothing. As Waterton says: "After dining on carrion in the filthiest
sink, it will often manage to sup on the choicest dainties of the
larder, where like Celoeno of old _vestigia foeda relinquit_." It kills
chickens, plunders the nests of little birds, devouring mother, eggs and
young, murders and feeds on its brothers and sisters and even its own
offspring, and not infrequently tastes even man when it finds him
asleep. The bite of a rat is sometimes very poisonous, and I have had to
give three months' sick leave to a clerk who had been bitten by one. Add
to this that the rat multiplies at a rate which is simply criminal,
rearing a family of perhaps a dozen every two or three months, and no
further argument is needed to justify the war which has been declared
against it. Every engine of war will, no doubt, be brought into use,
traps of many kinds, poisons, cats, the professional rat-catcher, and a
rat bacillus which, if once it gets a footing, is expected to originate
a fearful epidemic.
But I need not linger any more among rats, which are not my subject. I
am writing in the hope that this may be an opportune time to put in a
plea for a much persecuted native of this and many other countries,
whose principal function in the economy of nature is to kill rats and
mice. The barn, or screech, owl, which is found over a great part of
Europe and Asia and also in America, was once very common in Britain,
inhabiting every "ivy-mantled tower," church steeple, barn loft, hollow
tree, or dovecot, in which it could get a lodging. But it was never
welcome. Like the Jews in the days of King John it has been relentlessly
persecuted by superstition, ignorance and avarice. Avarice, instigated
by ladies and milliners, has looked with covetous eye on its downy and
beautiful plumes; while ignorance and superstition have feared and hated
the owl in all countries and all ages. In ancient Rome it was a bird of
evil omen.
Foedaque fit volucris venturi nuncia luctus,
Ignavus bubo, dirum mortalibus omen.
In India, to-day, if an owl sits on the house-top, the occupants dare
scarcely lie down to sleep, for they know that the devil is walking the
rooms and marking someone for death. Lady Macbeth, when about the murder
of Duncan, starts and whispers,
Hark! Peace! It was the owl that shrieked,
The fatal bellman.
And even as late as the nineteenth century, Waterton's aged housekeeper
"knew full well what sorrow it had brought into other houses when she
was a young woman," Witches, like modern ladies of fashion, set great
value on its wings. The latter stick them on their hats, the witches in
Macbeth threw them into their boiling cauldron. Horace's Canidia could
not complete her recipe without
"Plumamque nocturnae strigis."
We may suppose that in Britain these superstitions are gone for ever,
killed and buried by board schools and compulsory education. If they are
(there is room for an _if_) they have been succeeded by a worse, the
superstition of gamekeepers and farmers. It is worse in effect, because
these men have guns, which their predecessors had not. And it is more
wicked, because it is founded on an ignorance for which there is no
excuse. How little harm the barn owl is likely to do game may be
inferred from the fact that, when it makes its lodging in a dovecot, the
pigeons suffer no concern! Waterton (and no better authority could be
quoted) scouts the idea, common among farmers, that its business there
is to eat the pigeons' eggs. "They lay the saddle," he says, "on the
wrong horse. They ought to put it on the rat." His predecessor in the
estate had allowed the owls to be destroyed and the rats to multiply,
and there were few young pigeons in the dovecot. Waterton took strong
measures to exterminate the rats, but built breeding places for the
owls, and the dovecot, which they constantly frequented, became prolific
again.
But granting that the owls did twice the injury to game with which they
are credited, it would be repaid many times over by their services.
Waterton well says that, if we knew its utility in thinning the country
of mice, it would be with us what the ibis was with the Egyptians--a
sacred bird. He examined the pellets ejected by a pair of owls that
occupied a ruined gateway on the estate. Every pellet contained
skeletons of from four to seven mice. Owls, it may be necessary to
explain, swallow their food without separating flesh from bone, skin and
hair, and afterwards disgorge the indigestible portions rolled up into
little balls. In sixteen months the pair of owls above-mentioned had
accumulated a deposit of more than a bushel of these pellets, each a
funeral urn of from four to seven mice! In the old Portuguese fort of
Bassein in Western India I noticed that the earth at the foot of a
ruined tower was plentifully mixed with small skulls, jaws and other
bones. Taking home a handful and examining them, I found that they were
the remains of rats, mice and muskrats.
The owl kills small birds, large insects, frogs and even fishes, but
these are extras: its profession is rat-catching and mousing, and only
those who have a very intimate personal acquaintance with it know how
peculiarly its equipment and methods are adapted to this work. The
falcon gives open chase to the wild duck, keeping above it if possible
until near enough for a last spurt; then it comes down at a speed which
is terrific, and, striking the duck from above, dashes it to the ground.
The sparrow hawk plunges unexpectedly into a group of little birds and
nips up one with a long outstretched foot before they have time to get
clear of each other. The harrier skims over field, copse and meadow,
suddenly rounding corners and topping fences and surprising small
birds, or mice, on which it drops before they have recovered from their
surprise.
The owl does none of these things. For one thing, it hunts in the night,
when its sight is keenest and rats are abroad feeding. Its flight is
almost noiseless and yet marvellously light and rapid when it pleases.
Sailing over field, lane and hedgerow and examining the ground as it
goes, it finds a likely place and takes a post of observation on a fence
perhaps, or a sheaf of corn. Here it sits, bolt upright, all eyes. It
sees a rat emerge from the grass and advance slowly, as it feeds, into
open ground. There is no hurry, for the doom of that rat is already
fixed. So the owl just sits and watches till the right moment has
arrived; then it flits swiftly, softly, silently, across the intervening
space and drops like a flake of snow. Without warning, or suspicion of
danger, the rat feels eight sharp claws buried in its flesh. It protests
with frantic squeals, but these are stopped with a nip that crunches its
skull, and the owl is away with it to the old tower, where the hungry
children are calling, with weird, impatient hisses, for something to
eat.
The owl does not hunt the fields and hedgerows only. It goes to all
places where rats or mice may be, reconnoitres farmyards, barns and
dwelling houses and boldly enters open windows. Sometimes it hovers in
the air, like a kestrel, scanning the ground below. And though its
regular hunting hours are from dusk till dawn, it has been seen at work
as late as nine or ten on a bright summer morning. But the vulgar boys
of bird society are fond of mobbing it when it appears abroad by day,
and it dislikes publicity.
The barn owl lays its eggs in the places which it inhabits. There is
usually a thick bed of pellets on the floor, and it considers no other
nest needful. The eggs are said to be laid in pairs. There may be two,
four, or six, of different eggs, in the nest, and perhaps a young one,
or two, at the same time. Eggs are found from April, or even March, till
June or July, and there is, sometimes at any rate, a second brood as
late as November or December. This owl does not hoot, but screeches. A
weird and ghostly voice it is, from which, according to Ovid, the bird
has its Latin name, Strix (pronounced "Streex," probably, at that time).
Est illis strigibus nomen, sed nominis hujus.
Causa, quod horrenda stridere nocte silent.
It is a sound which, coming suddenly out of the darkness, might well
start fears and forebodings in the dark and guilty mind of untutored
man, which would not be dispelled by a nearer view of the strange object
from which they proceeded. White, ghostly, upright, spindle-shaped and
biggest at the top, where two great orbs flare, like fiery bull's-eyes,
from the centres of two round white targets, it stands solemn and
speechless; you approach nearer and it falls into fearsome pantomimic
attitudes and grimaces, like a clown trying to frighten a child. And now
a new horror has been added to the barn owl. The numerous letters which
appeared in _The Times_ and were summarised, with comments, by Sir T.
Digby Pigott, C.B., in _The Contemporary Review_ of July 1908, leave no
reasonable room for doubt that this bird sometimes becomes brightly
luminous, and is the will-o'-the-wisp for believing in which we are
deriding our forefathers. All things considered, I cannot withhold my
sympathy and some respect for the superstition of aged housekeepers,
Romans and Indians. For that of gamekeepers and farmers I have neither.
All our new schemes of "Nature study" will surely deserve the reproach
of futility if, in the next generation, every farmhouse in England has
not its own Owl Tower for the encouragement of this friend of man.
VIII
DOMESTIC ANIMALS
Long before Jubal became the father of all such as handle the harp and
the organ and Tubalcain the instructor of every artificer in brass and
iron, Abel was a keeper of sheep, but the sacred writer has not informed
us how he first caught them and tamed them. If we consult other records
of the infancy of the human race, they reveal as little. When the
Egyptians began to portray their daily life on stone 6,000 or 7,000
years ago, they already had cattle and sheep, geese and ducks and dogs
and plenty of asses, though not horses. They got these from the
Assyrians, who had used them in their chariots long before they began to
record anything.
Further back than this we have no one to question except those shadowy
men of the Stone Age who have left us heaps of their implements, but
none of their bones. They were not so careful of the bones of horses,
which lie in thousands about the precincts of their untidy villages, but
not a scrawl on a bit of a mammoth tusk has been found to indicate
whether these were ridden and driven, or only hunted and eaten.
Why should it be recorded that Cadmus invented letters? Why should we
inquire who first made gunpowder and glass? Why should every schoolboy
be taught that Watt was the inventor of the steam engine? Can any of
these be put in the scale, as benefactors of our race, with the man who
first trained a horse to carry him on its back, or drew milk with his
hands from the udders of a cow? The familiarity of the thing has made us
callous to the wonder of it. Let us put it before us, like a painting or
a statue, and have a good look at it.
There is a farmhouse, any common farmhouse, just one of the molecules
that constitute the mass of our wholesome country life. A horse is being
harnessed for the plough: its ancestors sniffed the wind on the steppes
of Tartary. Meek cows are standing to be milked: when primitive man
first knew them in their native forests he used to give them a wide
berth, for his flint arrows fell harmless off their tough hides, and
they were fierce exceedingly. A cock is crowing on the fence as if the
whole farm belonged to himself: he ought to be skulking in an Indian
jungle. The sheep have no business here; their place is on the rocky
mountains of Asia. As for the dog, it is difficult to assign it a
country, for it owns no wild kindred in any part of the world, but it
ought at least to be worrying the sheep. If there is an ass, it is a
native of Abyssinia, and the Turkeys are Americans. The cat derives its
descent from an Egyptian.
But all these are of one country now and of one religion. They know no
home nor desire any, except the farmhouse, in which they were born and
bred, and the lord of it is their lord, to whom they look for food and
protection. And what would he do without them? What should we do without
them? It is impossible to conceive that life could be carried on if we
were deprived of these obedient and uncomplaining servants. High
civilisation has been attained without steam engines; education, as we
use the term now, is superfluous--Runjeet Singh, the Lion of the Punjab,
could neither read nor write; the human race has prospered and
multiplied without the knowledge of iron; but we know of no time when
man did without domestic animals.
It is vain to speculate how the thing first came about, whether the
sportive anthropoid ape took to riding on a wild goat before he emerged
as a man keeping flocks, or whether some great pioneer, destined to be
worshipped in after ages as a demigod, showed his fellows how the wild
calves, if taken young, might be trained into tractable slaves; and it
is hopeless to expect that any record will now leap to light which will
give us knowledge in place of speculation. But it might not be
unprofitable to seek for some clue to the strange selection which the
domesticating genius of man has made from among the multifarious
material presented to it by the animal kingdom. If we do so we shall
almost be forced to the conclusion that domesticability is a character,
or quality, inherent in some animals and entirely wanting in others.
Let us begin with pigeons, a very large group, but one that shows more
unity than any of the other Orders into which naturalists divide birds.
It embraces turtle doves of many species, wood pigeons, ground pigeons,
fruit pigeons and some strange forms like the great crowned pigeon of
Victoria. Of all these only one, the common blue rock, has been
domesticated. The ring dove of Asia has been kept as a cage bird for so
long that a permanent albino and also a fawn-coloured variety have been
established and are more common in aviaries than birds of the natural
colour; but the ring dove has not become a domestic fowl, and never
will. In this instance there is a plausible explanation, for the blue
rock, unlike the rest of the tribe, nests and roosts in holes and is
also gregarious; therefore, if provided with accommodation of the kind
it requires, it will form a permanent settlement and remain with us on
the same terms as the honey bee; while the ring dove, not caring for a
fixed home, must be confined, however tame it may become, or it will
wander and be lost.
But this explanation will not fit other cases. What a multitude of wild
ducks there are in Scotland and every other country, mallards, pintails,
gadwalls, widgeons, pochards and teals, all very much alike in their
habits and tastes! But of them all only one species, and that a
migratory one, the mallard, has been persuaded to abandon its wandering
ways and settle down to a life of ease and obesity as a dependant of
man. In India there is a duck of the same genus as the mallard, known as
the spotted-billed duck (_Anas poecilorhynchus_), which is as large as
the mallard and quite as tasty, and is, moreover, not migratory, but
remains and breeds in the country. But it has not been domesticated: the
tame ducks in India, as here, are all mallards. The muscovy duck is a
distinct species which has been domesticated elsewhere and introduced.
From the ducks let us turn to the hens. The partridge, grouse and
pheasant are all dainty birds, but if we desire to eat them we must
shoot them, or (_proh pudor!_) snare them. Plover's eggs are worth four
shillings a dozen, but we must seek them on the moors. The birds that
have covenanted to accept our food and protection and lay their eggs for
our use and rear their young for us to kill are descended from _Gallus
bankivus_, the jungle fowl of Eastern India. How they came here history
records not: perhaps the gipsies brought them. They appear now in
strange and diverse guise, the ponderous and feather-legged
Cochin-China, the clean-limbed and wiry game, the crested Houdan, the
Minorca with its monstrous comb, and the puny bantam. In Japan there is
a breed that carries a tail seven or eight feet in length, which has to
be "done" regularly like a lady's hair, to keep it from dirt and damage.
But however their outward aspects may differ, they are of the same
blood and know it. A featherweight bantam cock will stand up to an
elephantine brahma and fight him according to the rules of the ring and
next minute pay compliments to his lady in language which she will be at
no loss to understand. And if the artificial conditions of their life
were removed, they would soon all lapse alike to the image of the stock
from which they are sprung. This is well illustrated in a show case in
the South Kensington Museum exhibiting a group of fowls from Pitcairn's
Island. These are descended from some stock landed by the mutinous crew
of H.M.S. _Bounty_ in 1790, which ran wild, and in a century they have
gone back to the small size and lithe figure and almost to the game
colour of the wild birds from which they branched off before history
dawned.
If we turn next to the Ruminants, the clean beasts which chew the cud
and divide the hoof, the puzzle becomes harder still. Deer and antelopes
are often kept as pets, and become so tame that they are allowed to
wander at liberty. In Egypt herds of gazelles were so kept before the
days of Cheops. In India I have known a black buck which regularly
attended the station cricket ground, moving among the nervous players
with its nose in the air and insolence in its gait, fully aware that
eighteen-inch horns with very sharp points insured respectful treatment.
Mr. Sterndale trained a Neilghai to go in harness. The great bovine
antelopes of Africa would become as tame, and there is no reason to
suppose that their beef and milk would not be as good as those of the
cow. But no antelope or deer appears ever to have been domesticated,
with the exception of the reindeer.
Of the other ruminants the ox, buffalo, yak, goat, sheep and a few
others are domestic animals, while the bison and the gaur, or so-called
Indian bison, and a large number of wild goats and sheep have been
neglected. The buffalo and yak have probably come under the yoke in
comparatively recent times, for they are little changed; but the goat
and still more the sheep have undergone a wonderful transformation
within and without. Who could recognise in a Leicester ewe the wary
denizen of precipitous mountains which will not feed until it has set a
sentinel to give warning if danger approaches? And here is a curious
fact which has scarcely been noticed by naturalists.
The original of our goat is supposed to be the Persian ibex. At any
rate, it was an ibex of some species, as its horns plainly show. But on
the plains of Northern India, under ranges of hills on which the Persian
ibex wanders wild, the common domestic goat is a very different animal
from that of Europe, and has peculiar spiral horns of the same pattern
as the markhor, another grand species of wild goat which draws eager
hunters to the higher reaches of the same mountains. From this it would
appear that two species of wild goat have been domesticated and kept to
some extent distinct, one eventually finding its way westward, but not
eastward and southward.
The Indian humped cattle also differ so widely in form, structure and
voice from those of Europe that there can scarcely be a doubt of their
descent from distinct species. But both have entirely disappeared as
wild animals, unless indeed the white cattle of Chillingham are really
descendants of Caesar's dreadful urus and not merely domestic cattle
lapsed into savagery. So have the camel, and, with a similar possible
exception, the horse. Was the whole race in each of these cases
subjugated, or exterminated, and that by uncivilised man with his
primitive weapons? There is no analogy here with the extinction of such
animals as the mammoth, for the ox is a beast in every way fitted to
live and thrive in the present condition of this world, as much so as
the buffalo and the Indian bison, which show no sign of approaching
extinction. Our fathers easily got rid of the difficulty by assuming
that Noah never released these species after the Flood, but what shall
those do who cannot believe in the literality of Noah's ark?
As for the dog, its domestication has been the creation of a new
species. The material was perhaps the wolf, more likely the jackal, but
possibly a blend of more than one species. But a dog is now a dog and
neither a wolf nor a jackal. A mastiff, a pug, a collie, a greyhound, a
pariah all recognise each other and observe the same rules of etiquette
when they meet.