Under this heading I had meant to deal with the return of the Plover
and Lapwing, having in mind a Galloway rhyme,
“Whaup, Whimbrel, an’ Plover,
Whan these whustle the worst o’ t’s over!”
But on consideration it was evident that March has so complicated an
orchestral prelude that the name could hardly be given to any one group
of birds. Does not another rhyme go,
“The Lavrock, the Mavis,
The Woodlark, the Plover,
March brings them back
Because Winter is over.”
But March brings back so many birds! There is another bird-rhyme ...
“When the Song-Thrush is ready to laugh,
Ye’ll hear the Woodlark an’ the Wheatear an’ the Chaff.”
Well, the Song-Thrush has been ‘ready to laugh’ a good while back,
now: his ‘laughter’ has already whirled the flute-notes of Spring,
amid branches swelling to leaf-break, but not yet at the greening.
The Chiff-Chaff has been heard on many a common, or on the ridge of
a stone-dyke, or calling from the blackthorn thickets. The Wheatear
has by this time delighted many a superstitious yokel who has caught
his first glimpse of it sitting on a grassy tuft, or on a low spray
of gorse or juniper, or depressed him sorely if he has come upon it
for the first time when seen perched on a stone. But all three are
birds which are with us long before the real Spring is come. With the
missel-thrush on the elm-bole, the song-thrush in the copses, the
blackbird calling from the evergreens, it does not follow, alas! that,
as in the fairy-tale, the north wind has become a feeble old man and
the east wind a silly old wife. Frost and snow and sleet, rain and
flood, and the dull greyness of returned winter, may only too likely
succeed these blithe heralds, have so succeeded, this year, as we know
to our cost. There was jubilation in some places at January-end because
of the early singing of the larks, which here and there had been heard
soon after the New Year; but those who rejoiced untimely at the advent
of spring-weather must have forgot the north-country proverb, ‘As long
as the laverock sings before Candlemas it will greet after it.’
The lark and the blackbird are, in truth, such irresponsible singers,
have such glad irrepressible hearts, that they will sing in the dead of
winter, if only the wind slides through a windless air and the sunshine
is unclouded. Tens of thousands have gone oversea, but thousands
remain; and these are not to be chilled into silence if but the least
excuse be given for the unsealing of the founts of joy. In green
Decembers one may hear the merle’s notes fluting down the wet alleys as
though Christmas were still a long way off; but the wary will recall
another north-country saying akin to that just quoted concerning the
laverock ... ‘When the blackbird sings before Christmas she will cry
before Candlemas.’
So now I shall leave the Tribe of the Plover to a succeeding article,
and, speaking of the skylark and his spring comrades, allude to that
mysterious March wayfaring of the winged people which is so enthralling
a problem in the psychology of bird-life.
The whole problem of Migration is still a mystery, but an enhancement
of this mystery is in the irregularity and incompleteness of the
working out of this all but universal instinct, this inscrutable
rhythmic law. Both the skylark and the blackbird, for example, are
migratory birds, and yet larks and merles by the thousand remain in our
northlands through the winter, and even come to us at that season. The
skylark in particular puzzles the ornithologist. While certain birds
appear and disappear with an astonishing regularity, as though they
heard the pealing of aerial chimes afar off and knew the bells of home
... the swallow, for example; or, again, the tiny gold-crested wren,
in some parts called ‘the woodcock-pilot’ because in two or at most
three days after its appearance the first woodcocks are invariably
seen ... there are others, like the song-thrush, which will pass away
in the great migratory clouds that like withdrawing veils every autumn
carry the winged clans oversea; which will pass so absolutely that
for a hundred miles not one of its kind will be observed, not even
a straggler: and yet, in some other direction, others will be seen
weeks later and perhaps even through the winter. We are all familiar
with the homestay of the Redbreast, and many people believe that it is
not a migrant because of its frequency about our garden-ways even in
the hardest winter: and yet, in incalculable myriads, the redbreast
migrates as far south as the Sahara, and its sweet home-song of the
north may be heard in Greece, by the banks of the Nile, throughout
Palestine even, from the cedars of Lebanon to the valleys about
Jerusalem.
It is the skylark, however, more than any other bird which so often
upsets rules and calculations. Even people who do not observe the ways
of birds must be struck by the numbers of larks which may be met with
in the course of several midwinter walks, by the occasional outbreak
of brief song, even, though snow be upon the wolds and a grey wind
blow through the sere leaves of the oak-coppice or among the desolate
hedgerows; must be the more struck by this, or by mention of it on the
part of others, when they read of the hundreds, sometimes thousands,
of dead larks found on nights of storm or bitter frost, on the rocks
below lighthouses, along the great lines of migration during the season
of the vast inscrutable ebb or of the as vast and inscrutable vernal
arrival. Incalculable hosts leave our shores every autumn, and along
the bleak fen-lands, by wave-set lighthouses, on isles such as Ushant
or Heligoland, thousands of wings flutter and fail; and the host passes
on; and the sea-wave, the fierce gull, the shore-hawk, all the tribe of
the owl, all the innumerable foes which prey upon the helpless, give
scant grace to the weaklings and the baffled and weary. But why should
all this immense congregation have listened to the ancestral cry, and
from meadow and moor and the illimitable dim-sea of the fallowlands
come singly and in flocks and in immense herds and in a cloudlike
multitude, as sheep at the cry of the herdsman, as hounds at the long
ululation of a horn, while thousands of their clan remain deaf to the
mysterious Voice, the imperative silent mandate from oversea? Of these,
again, countless numbers merely move to another region, and mayhap some
cross the salt straits only to return; or as many, it may be, leave
not at all the familiar solitudes, and at most show by cloudy flights
and wild and fluctuating gyrations the heritage of blind instinct,
which, if it cannot be satiated by far pilgrimage, must at least shake
these troubled hearts with sudden inexplicable restlessness. It is
calculated, again, that myriads of skylarks merely use our coasts as
highways on their journey from the far south to the far north ... in
this, too, exemplifying another strange law or manifestation of the
mystery of migration, that the birds which move furthest north in
their vernal arrival are those which penetrate furthest south when
they turn again upon the autumnal wind of exile. Naturalists have
proved, however, that countless hordes of skylarks actually arrive from
Northern Europe to winter in our country. Are these birds moved by a
different instinct from that which impels the majority of their kind?
Have they, through generations following one another in the path of an
accident, forgotten the sunlands of the common ancestral remembrance,
and, having found Britain less snowbound and frostbound than the wastes
of Esthonia and Pomerania, been content, when driven before the icy
east wind, to fare no further than our bleak, and yet, save in the
worst winters, relatively habitable inlands? Again, naturalists have
observed a like movement hitherward in winter from Central Europe.
There may be observed in the early spring as regular an emigration as,
on a perhaps not vaster scale, an incalculable immigration. Apparently,
most if not all of the myriads of skylarks which are undoubtedly with
us throughout the winter are these immigrants from Northern and Central
Europe. Those who come in February and in still greater numbers in
March and April (and the later the arrivals the further north the goal,
it is said) are the ‘strayed revellers’ from the South, the home-bred
birds home again. In our remote Hebrides the nesting season is hardly
over before the island-bred skylarks, so late in coming, are on the
Great South Road once more. What with the habitual two and the not
infrequent three broods raised in a single season, particularly in
Southern England, South-West Scotland, and Ireland, and the enormous
influx of aliens from Northern and Central Europe, our skylark
population is at its highest, not, as most people might think, in May,
or even about the season of the autumnal equinox, but at the beginning
of November, when already the great tides of migration have ebbed.
Another puzzling problem is the rhythmic regularity of the arrivals
and departures of the incomers and the outgoers. For, while the latter
will not take the high-road of the upper air till nightfall or at least
until dusk, the former travel by day: and the goings and comings are
so timed, or to observation appear so timed, that about four o’clock
on a late October day the first cohort of the invaders may in the wide
lonely desert overhead pass the first caravans of the exiles. In March,
again, the two currents may once more meet: the home-bred birds are on
their return, the aliens are on the wing for the hill-pastures and the
vales and uplands of their native countries. This will account for how,
say in the Hebrides, one observer will chronicle the departure of the
skylarks before Summer-end, at the early close there of the nesting
season, and how another, not less accurate, will note the presence
weeks later of larks in apparently as great a number as ever. The
islanders have gone, to seek the south: the newcomers from Scandinavia
have taken their place. But here also, as elsewhere, the conditions of
the weather will be more potent than even the summons of the spirit
of migration: a severe frost will for a time clear a whole region of
the tufted birdeens, a prolonged frost will drive them away from that
region for the winter.
The Lark, then, so often apostrophised as the first voice of Spring,
is by no means specifically the Herald of March. When we see his
brown body breasting the air-waves of the March wind, it may not be
the welcome migrant from the South we see, with greenness in his high
aerial note and the smell of hay and wild roses in the o’ercome of his
song, but a winter-exile from a far mountain-vale in Scandinavia or
from the snowbound wastes of Courland or Westphalia.
The Woodlark, the Chiff-Chaff, and the rest, all are heralds of March.
But as we identify certain birds with certain seasons and certain
qualities ... as the Swallow with April, and the Cuckoo with May, and
the Dove with peace ... so we have come to think of the Mavis and the
Merle, but, above all, of the Skylark as the true heralds of March, the
month when the Flutes of Pan sound from land’s end to land’s end, for
all that tempest and flood, sleet and the polar blast and the bitter
wind of the east, may ravage the coverts of the winged clans.
To write of all the birds who come back to us in the Spring, even so
early as the front of March, would be, here, a mere catalogue, and then
be incomplete. For the hidden places in the woods, in the meadows, in
the hedgerows, on the moors, in the sandy dunes, in the hollowed rocks,
on the ledges over green water and on the wind-scooped foreheads of
cliffs and precipices; everywhere, from the heather-wilderness on the
unsnowed hills to the tangled bent on the little windswept eyot set in
the swing of the tides, the secret homes are waiting, or are already
filled, and glad with that everlasting and unchanging business of the
weaving anew of life which has the constancy of sunrise, the rhythmic
certitude of day and night.
The spiritual secret of our delight in the joyousness of the lark’s
song, or in that of mavis or merle, is because the swift music is a
rapture transcending human utterance. There is not less joy in the
screech of the jay, in the hoarse cry of the cormorant, in the scream
of the gannet poised like a snowflake two thousand feet above the
turbulent surge of blue and white, or green and grey, to its vision
but a vast obscurity of calm filled with phantom life, a calm moveless
seen from that great height, wrinkled only with perplexing interplay of
wave and shadow. These have their joy, and to the open ear _are_ joy;
not less than the merle singing among wet lilac, the mavis calling from
the swaying poplar, the lark flinging the largesse of his golden music
along the high devious azure roads. Can one doubt that this is so ...
that, listening with the inward ear, we must hold as dear the wail of
the curlew, the mournful cry of the lapwing, when on the hill-slope or
in the wild grass these call rejoicingly in life and love and the mute
ecstasy of implicit duty.
As long, however, as we impose our own needs and our own desires on the
indifferent tribes of the earth and air, so long shall we take this or
that comrade of the elements and say it is the voice of Peace, or War,
or Love, or Joy. March, we say, is the month of gladness. A new spirit
is awake, is abroad. The thrush and the blackbird are _our_ clarions
of rejoicing. The lark, supremely, is _our_ lyric of joy.
Joy, the poet tells us, is the Mother of Spring, and of Joy has it
not been said that there is no more ancient God? What fitter symbol
for this divine uplift of the year than this bird whose ecstasy in
song makes the very word Spring an intoxication in our ears? We have
a Gaelic legend that the first word of God spoken to the world became
a lark ... the eternal joy translated into a moment’s ecstasy. But
further back has not Aristophanes told us that the lark existed, not
only before the green grass where it nests or the blue lift into which
it soars, but before Zeus and Kronos themselves, before the Creation,
before Time. It is but a symbol of the divine Joy which is Life: that
most ancient Breath, that Spirit whose least thought is Creation, whose
least motion is Beauty, whose least glance is that eternal miracle
which we, seeing dimly and in the rhythmic rise of the long cadence of
the hours, call by a word of out-welling, of measureless effluence, the
Spring.