THE WHITE-THROAT.
With none of our migratory birds, our spring visitants from southern
lands, is the lover of the country more familiar than with the
White-throat, which, with its nest, is here so beautifully and livingly
depicted by Mr. Harrison Weir.
This bird, with its many names—White-throat, Peggy-white-throat,
Peggy-chaw, Charlie-mufty, Nettle-creeper, Whishey-whey-beard or
Pettichaps—comes to us in April, about the same time as the cuckoo and
the swallow; the male bird, like his cousin the nightingale, coming
before the female, but he does not make himself very conspicuous till
the hedges and bushes are well covered with leaves; then he may be
found in almost every lane and hedge the whole country over.
As soon as the female is here, and the birds have paired, the business
of nest-building begins, and they may then be seen flying in and out
of the bushes with great alertness, the he-bird carolling his light
and airy song, and often hurling himself, as it were, up into the air,
some twenty or thirty feet, in a wild, tipsy sort of way, as if he
were fuller of life than he could hold, and coming down again with a
warble into the hedge, where the little hen-wife is already arranging
her dwelling in the very spot probably where she was herself hatched,
and her ancestors before her, for ages. For I must here remark that
one of the most remarkable properties of birds is, that facility by
which they so regularly disperse themselves over the whole country on
their arrival after their far migration, each one, in all probability,
attracted by some attachment of the past, stopping short at, or
proceeding onward to, the exact spot where he himself first came into
the consciousness of life. This is one of the wonderful arrangements of
nature, otherwise of God, by which the great balance is so beautifully
kept in creation. If the migratory bird arrives ever so weary at Dover,
and its true home be some sweet low-lying lane of Devonshire, a thick
hedgerow of the midland counties, or a thickety glen of Westmoreland,
it will not delay its flight nor be tempted to tarry short of that
glen, hedgerow, or lane with which the experience of its own life and
affection is united.
At this charming time of the year none of the various performers in
nature’s great concert bring back to those who have passed their youth
in the country a more delicious recollection of vernal fields and lanes
than this bird of ours, the little white-throat.
[Illustration:
WHITE-THROAT AND NEST. [Page 98.
]
Yes, along those hedges, fresh and fragrant with their young leaves,
along those banks studded with primroses, campions, blue-bells and
white starwort, and through the thick growth of the wild rose bushes,
all of which have a beauty especially their own, the white-throat
salutes you as you pass, as if to recognise an old acquaintance. He
is brimful of fun; out he starts and performs his series of eccentric
frolics in the air, accompanied by his mad-cap sort of warble; or,
almost as if laughing at you, he repeats from the interior of the
bushes his deep grave note, _chaw! chaw!_ whence comes the name
of peggy-chaw. This, however, is to tell you—and to those who
understand bird-language it is intelligible enough—that he has now a
family to attend to, and he begs, very respectfully, that you will not
trouble yourself about it.
[Sidenote: _Description of the Bird._]
A Scotch naturalist says that “the peasant boys in East Lothian imagine
that the bird is mocking or laughing at them, as it tumbles over the
hedge and bushes in the lane, and, therefore, they persecute it at all
times, even more mercilessly than they do sparrows.”
The white-throat is an excitable little bird, rapid in all its
movements; and though it will apparently allow a person to come near,
it incessantly flits on, gets to the other side of the hedge, warbles
its quaint little song, flies to a short distance, sings again, and so
on, for a long time, returning in the same way. It erects the feathers
of its head when excited, and swells its throat so much when singing,
that the feathers stand out like a ruff, whence it has obtained the
name of _Muffety_, or Charlie-mufty, in Scotland.
Its colour, on the upper parts of the body, is reddish-brown,
brownish-white below, with a purely white throat. Its food is
principally insects and larvæ of various kinds, for which it is always
on the search amongst the thick undergrowth of the plants and bushes
where it builds. One of its many names is Nettle-creeper, from this
plant growing so generally in the localities which it haunts.
Its nest—one of the most light and elegant of these little abodes—may
truly be called “gauze-like,” for being constructed wholly of fine
grasses, and very much of the brittle stems of the Galnim aparine, or
cleavers, which, though slender, are not pliant, and bend only with an
angle; they prevent the whole fabric from being closely woven, so that
it maintains a gauzy texture; the inside, however, is put together more
closely of finer and more pliant materials, delicate root-filaments,
and various kinds of hair. The eggs, four or five in number, are of a
greenish-gray colour, often with a tawny hue, blotched and spotted over
with dark tints of the same colour.
A correspondent of the author of “British Birds” says that, one morning
in June, when walking in his shrubbery within about eighty yards of a
White-throat’s nest, which he was taking great interest in, he found a
portion of the shell of one of the eggs of this bird, and, fearing that
a magpie had been plundering it, hastened to the spot, but found to his
satisfaction that the nest was then full of newly-hatched birds. “The
shell had,” he says, “been instinctively taken away by the mother in
order to prevent the discovery of the place of her retreat.” He adds
that the mother-bird was very shy, and usually dropped from her nest
with the most astonishing rapidity, and, treading her way through the
grasses and other entanglements, disappeared in a moment. The young,
too, seemed greatly to dislike observation, and on his taking one into
his hand to examine it, it uttered a cry, no doubt of alarm, on which
all the other little things leapt out of their abode, although not more
than half-fledged, and hopped amongst the grass. It is a singular fact
that almost every kind of young bird, if they be caused to leave their
nest through alarm, or by being handled, can never be induced to stay
in the nest again, though they may be put back into it time after time.