DUCKS AND DIVERS
The red-throated diver moves softly upon the gentle play of the ripples,
seeming, rather, to float with the tide than to swim, for there is
no defined swimming action. When it turns and goes the other way, it
meets the opposing motion--the little dance of the sea--as if it were a
ripple itself, assuming the shape of a bird. This shape is a graceful
one, something between that of a grebe and a guillemot. One might say
that a guillemot had been sent to a finishing-school and had very much
profited by it; but this is not to imply that the grebe--I am thinking of
_Podiceps Cristatus_--is slighted in the comparison--no bird that swims
need think itself so. Much there is grebe-like in manner and action, and
in shape, except for the crest. By the want of this, the bird, I think,
rather gains than loses to the human eye, for handsome as the grebe's
crest is, the delicate curve of head and neck is interrupted by it,
and the effect is rather bizarre than beautiful--it loses something in
purity, that beauty of the undraped statue, to which Cicero compares the
style of Cæsar. The neck of the red-throated diver offers a wonderful
example of delicate yet effective ornament. Down the back of it, and
encroaching a little upon either side, run thin longitudinal stripes of
alternate black and white, so cleanly and finely divided that they look
as though they had been traced by a paint-brush in the hand of a Japanese
artist. There is a gorget of rich ruddy chestnut on the throat, but the
rest of it, with the head and chin, is of a very delicious plum-bloomy
grey, which looks in the sunlight as though it would be purple if it
dared, but were too modest--a lovely and æsthetic combination, soft, yet
bright, and the whole with such a smoothness as no words can describe.
There is another effect wrought by the sun, if it should happen to be
shining, and if the bird should be swimming so as to give a profile view.
It then looks as though there were a broad, white stripe--white, but
having almost a prismatic brilliancy--along the contour-line of the nape.
This appearance is most deceptive, and it is only when the bird turns
its neck so as to show the several thin delicate stripings that one sees
it to be illusory. It is produced, I think, by the light being reflected
from the white stripes alone, so that the black ones between them are
overlooked. Whatever may be the cause, the effect is most striking and
lovely, and if the stripes themselves are due to sexual selection--which
I do not doubt they are--this far more beautiful appearance, being the
effect and crown of them, must assuredly also be. Here is a neck, then!
and I have seen three, and once even seven, together!
In their way of diving, again, these birds resemble the grebes. Sometimes
they go down with a very quiet little leap, but often they sink and
disappear so gently and gradually that one is hardly conscious of what
they are about till one sees them no more. As much as any creature,
I think, they "softly and silently vanish away." Another habit which
they have is shared by the cormorant and other sea-birds, and has often
puzzled me. It is that of continually dipping their bills in the water
and raising them up from it again, as though they were drinking, though
that they should drink the salt sea like this, for hours at a time,
seems a strange thing. What is the meaning of this action, which I have
just seen a shag perform forty-six times in succession, at intervals of
a few seconds, as if for a wager? And this was after having watched it
doing the same thing for some time before. After the forty-sixth sip,
as it were, this bird made a short pause, and then recommenced. Is this
drinking, and, if not, what is it? The head and part of the bill are,
each time, sunk in the water, so that, as the bird moves on, they plough
it like the ram of a war-ship. Then, in a second or two, the head is
raised, not so high indeed as in an unmistakable thirsty draught--which
I do not remember at any time to have seen shags indulge in--but with
much the action of drinking. The bill, it is true, is very little
opened, hardly sufficiently so to be noticeable, but very little would
allow of water entering it. But why should the bird drink like this? It
cannot be that the salt water makes it more and more thirsty, for this,
as with shipwrecked sailors, would produce evil consequences--probably
death--but, of course, this is out of the question.
Sometimes it has struck me that some small disseminated matter in the
water might serve as food, and in regard to this, I have seen some large
white Muscovy ducks, in the Pittville Gardens at Cheltenham, engaged for
a long time, apparently, in carefully sifting the quite clear water of
a little rill. Here, too, there was some action, as of drinking. On the
whole, however, they seemed obviously to be feeding, but whatever they
got must have been extremely minute. The waters of the sea are, no doubt,
full of tiny floating substances, which a bird might yet be able to
appreciate, and which would perceptibly add to its nourishment. If this
were so, then drinking, as a special function, might become almost merged
in the constant swallowing of water whilst taking food, and this may be
the case with various sea-birds. Guillemots and razor-bills also act in
this way, but not, I think, gulls. Gulls drink the fresh water of lochs
and streams; whether they, of set purpose, also drink the sea, I am not
quite sure. If they do, then no doubt I have seen them; but I have not
set it down, and have no clear recollection of it.
These Muscovy ducks that I spoke of have another curious habit of
drinking dew in the early morning. This, at least, is what it looks like.
They walk about for hours over the well-kept lawns, and with their heads
stretched straight out, just above the herbage, continually just open and
shut the mandibles very quickly and very slightly, nibbling the dew as
it were. They certainly do drink it--one can see it disappear in their
mouths; but whether that is all they do, or their chief object, it is
not so easy to be sure of. Why should they walk about imbibing dew for
such a length of time? and why should dew be so much preferred by them to
ordinary water, of which there is abundance? These ducks, indeed, or at
least the larger kind of them, which are of great size, are never to be
seen swimming, but they often walk about by the edge of the lake. They
have a most portentous appearance, and walk with an extraordinary swing
of the body, first to one side and then another. They are fond of bread,
but their ordinary eating and drinking is something of a mystery to me.
I have seen them apparently browsing some long, coarse grass, more like
rushes, but though occasionally they did crop a piece, the incessant
nibbling was out of all proportion to what they got, and seemed for the
most part to be simply in the air. They seem indeed to have a habit of
incessantly moving the mandibles in this way, without any particular
object, or, at any rate, without any clearly discernible result following
upon their doing so.
But as I remember these fine white Muscovy ducks with their vermilion
faces and wild, light eye, with something a look of insanity in it, I
remember, too, that they are now gone, or, at any rate, that most of them
are, and those the best--the hugest and most dragon-like. "Sometimes we
see a cloud that's dragonish" and sometimes a duck. These wonderful,
waddling, swinging red and white Muscovy ducks were, and to have them
running after one, with uncouth hissings and with their heads held down,
yet scooping up and wagged from side to side at one--and with that insane
eye--made one think all sorts of odd things. Well, they are gone, nor are
they the only ones that are. When I first, by necessity, came to live at
Cheltenham, the ducks in the Pittville Gardens were a great consolation
to me. There was quite a fleet of them, a gay little flotilla of all
kinds and colours, and at the smallest hint of bread, on one side of the
lake, they would all come flying over from the other; and then it was
the sport to feed them. How diverting that was! Being in such numbers,
one took notice of all the little differences in their dispositions, the
different degrees of boldness or retiringness, of pugnacity, greediness,
aggressiveness, pertness, impudence, swagger, imperialism, and so on,
all of which one could bring out, in some amusing way or another, by the
varied and nicely-schemed throwing of the bread. To contrive that a timid
bird should always get it, whilst a boldly greedy one pursued in vain,
that two should contend for a large piece, to the end that a third might
swim securely away with it, to tempt some to walk on thin ice till it
broke, and others to make little canals through it, each from a different
place, each struggling to be first, to have one bird feeding from the
hand, whilst a crowd stood round, looking enviously on, to see greed
just drag on fear, or fear just drive back greed, or the two so nicely
balanced that they produced a deadlock, so that the bird stood on a very
knife-edge, trembling between a forward and a backward movement; and
then, too, gradually to come to connect the look and bearing of each bird
with its disposition, to know them, both outwardly and psychologically,
to see them grow into their names that grew with them, and have the bold
orange-bill, the modest grey, the swaggering white bird, the Duchess, the
Fine Lady, the My Lord Tomnoddy, the Kaiser, the Swashbuckler, and so
on, all about one, so many characters, so many amusing little burlesques
of humanity--human nature stripped, without its guards, disguises,
softenings and hypocrisies--all this was the solace and beguilement of
many a tedious afternoon.
But there exists for some reason, in every town in England, a body of
men who can do what they like, without asking anybody, to the annoyance
of everybody, though everybody pays for them. One day, after an absence,
I came with my bag of bread as usual, but there were no ducks to be
fed; all had vanished--there was only the uninteresting pond. Alarmed,
I inquired of the man at the entrance, and found that the Cheltenham
Corporation had got rid of the whole of them on account of their being
of no particular breed or strain, just ordinary tame ducks and no more.
Their appearance, the indiscriminate diversity of their plumage, their
infinite variety of colour and pattern, had been against them. It had,
indeed, made the water gay, and gladdened the eyes of subscribers to
the gardens, but it had not been creditable to the Corporation. True
elegance, it appears, which can only come from true breeding, had
been wanting. These ducks were "a mongrel lot," and though they might
be pretty to look at and entertaining to feed, that was not what the
Corporation cared about. What the Corporation did care about, presumably,
was to read in the local papers, or be told by their friends that now,
at last, there were some ducks on the Cheltenham lakes a little better
than the "mongrel lot" one had so long been accustomed to see there,
more worthy of themselves, more worthy of the town they represented, and
so forth. So the poor "mongrel lot," the delight of all the children,
and of many a grown-up person to boot--Charles the Second was grown up,
and a clever man too--were done away with, and a few pairs of select,
blue-blooded strangers (more soothing to gentle bourgeois feelings) were
introduced in their place. The children who came to feed them said,
"Where are the others? Where are all the rest gone to? There's no fun
in feeding three or four." Nor is there, in comparison with feeding a
hundred, as one grown-up person at least can testify. As additions,
these new arrivals would have been welcome enough, and being of distinct
species they would not, probably, have entered into mésalliances with
the others, to make a correct Corporation blush. Why could they not
have stayed? But this, I suppose, was the way of it. Here were pleasure
gardens for which the public paid. This pretty little fleet of ducks,
painted all sorts of colours and not one painted quite like another,
made a very considerable part of the pleasure thus paid for. So the
Corporation, vested with mysterious and almost unlimited powers of
annoyance, decided that the proper thing to do was to do away with them,
and they did do away with them, and the gardens have been the duller for
it ever since. What they could have thought----But there! they were a
Corporation and acted like one. They had a precedent. They had previously
done away with the peacocks.