GROUSE ASPIRATIONS
The wind last night was simply awful. Why it has no effect on the sea
I cannot understand, for it is always calm now. No, there is little
beauty in the sound of the wind here--no mournful sighings, no weary
complainings, no intangible strange sounds, but a horrible howling and
blustering, the whole night through, like a mere rage, so that it has not
that soothing quality that it is wont to have in England: there is no
lullaby in it. Bed here is dreadful, partly on account of its hardness,
partly of its narrowness, partly of its coming-untuckedness, partly
because the wind comes in on both sides, through walls and clothes, and
shares it with one. With all this I lie in a continual prologue to a
play of lumbago, with wandering pains all about me. Oh for a nice little
cosy, comfy cottage here, with my good old Mrs. Brodby to cook for me!
I could be always out then. For the outdoor part of it, "this life is
most jolly," but the indoor part is a weariness, and, with all he can do,
man, in this country and climate, is a wretched indoor animal. If it were
not so, I would be beetling over the ledges, now, for though moist and
damp, and under a heavy pall of dun-grey cloud, it is yet not raining,
so may pass for a fine day here: it is not Tahiti. But to get up a fire,
to wash, and have some sort of breakfast--all in huge discomfort--takes
time. Biscuits and cheese in my pockets serve me for the day, but rain
and mist may drive me in, and something for a supper one must have. Oh
the time that goes in waste of time, when one has to cook for one's self!
And the washing first, at intervals--for I leave everything dirty as long
as I can, that is my system--is worse still, much the worst. I thought,
at first, I would only use one plate, and _never_ wash it, but I had
to give that up. How I do hate the washing! Oh, if there are meals in
heaven, and I get there, I hope Mrs. Brodby may get there too!
This morning I heard a great noise of skuas--the smaller kind--and,
coming out, saw a crowd of them chasing four ravens that were passing
over the ness. I had previously seen them thus mobbing one. The ravens
sometimes uttered an annoyed croak, and gave a twist round as though
to defend themselves, but whether they were ever seriously attacked or
pecked at I cannot say. The cries of the skuas, on this occasion, were
different from their ordinary one, though the general tone and character
was there.
On my island there were no ravens. Either the pair that bred there two
years ago had hatched out another brood, and they had then all left the
island together, or else, in spite of all Mr. Hoseason's efforts, they
have been driven away by persecution--perhaps killed. A general raven
battue is now in progress throughout the Shetlands, every landowner
being anxious to exterminate this bird, so interesting both in itself
and through the world of old legend and superstition that adheres to it,
in order that they may have grouse to bang at over their barren brown
moors. Had these men anything within them that responded to the real and
only charms that these bleak northern isles they were born in possess, or
ever can possess, except to vulgarians--their wildness, that is to say,
their wild bird-life, and their past--they would care more for one raven
than for a thousand brace of grouse. They would rejoice and congratulate
themselves whenever they saw its sable flight, and think its presence
amongst them a point of high superiority over richer and more fertile
lands. They would see, then, how the gaunt, black bird was in keeping and
harmony with their scathed hills and storm-lashed coasts, and, seeing and
knowing and feeling, they would seek to keep it amongst them, with every
other wild and waste-haunting thing. But no; instead of rejoicing they
lament. Born to such a heritage, they would exchange it for a park and
a game-preserve if they could; as they cannot--for the grouse will have
nothing to say to them, it draws the line at the Orkneys--they will do
their best to turn a living wilderness into a dead one, they will chase
away the only smile that ever sat on the hard-featured face of their
country, take away its youth--for the birds, each spring, are that--and
leave it childless and unchild-bearing, like a gaunt, hideous, barren
old hag. That is what they will do, these romantic islanders, for the
rugged old mother that bore them.[8] "Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!" is
their cry. Down with the raven, the eagle, the peregrine, gull, skua,
cormorant, and let the soul of the gamekeeper live for ever in the wild
Shetland Islands!
[Footnote 8: Not all, of course. To Mr. Lawrence Edmondston, of Unst, and
to Mr. Hoseason, of Yell, all lovers of birds and wild nature are greatly
indebted.]
There is something, I verily believe, in a gun and cartridges, that dries
up all poetry in a man's heart. Of all the inventions that this world has
ever seen, I most deplore that of gunpowder--not because it kills men,
but because it kills beasts--and next to that I deplore railways, which
take away all charm from the country, and kill the ballads and songs of a
people. Would that I had lived before them, in the quiet days of Gilbert
White! It is the absence, I believe, of all reference to railways in the
writings of our grandfathers and grandmothers that makes, or helps to
make, them such pleasant reading. Who would care for Sterne's Sentimental
Journey, had he made it by rail? and is it not delightful, when reading
Miss Austen, to know that none of those dear little quiet-world circles,
into which, for years, you have had the _entrée_, and which have given
you a thousand times more pleasure, through life, than you have derived
from your real acquaintance--is it not delightful to know that they could
none of them run up to town in an hour or a few minutes, as is the case
now? How nice it is to have Highbury, through the whole of _Emma_, a
quiet, untownified little place, and to know that it was not till long
afterwards that it became absorbed into London, like the village that
you once used to live in. Considerations of this kind add a charm, I
really do believe, even to the character-drawing of Jane Austen. We are
not so lucky with the other--the gunpowder. It is always, I confess, a
little unpleasant to me to find Mr. Bennet going pheasant-shooting. I
always wish he hadn't, such an _esprit fin_ as he is. Bingley--or even
Darcie--but I can't _see_ Mr. Bennet pheasant-shooting. However, those
were not the days of battues, and he would have worn knee-breeches, not
knickerbockers.
Ravens, however, are very wary, and I hope may be able to hold their own
in this their last stronghold of the British Isles, in spite of all the
efforts of their unworthy and little-souled persecutors. Things seem
to me to go very strangely in this world, and only satisfactorily to
the optimist. In the days when Britain was full of birds and animals,
before there were railways or breechloaders, before there was a large
population, before the fens were drained or the broads crowded, in those
days there were no naturalists, and now that there are naturalists the
materials for natural history have disappeared, or are fast disappearing.
Railways, towns, factories, golf-links, breechloading guns, quietude
banished, solitude overrun--all is over, and the real naturalist is not a
man for this world. But regrets are useless, so let me on to the affairs
of state.
Along the opposite shores of the bay that skirts this hill on one side,
a raven or two are generally to be seen; and I once saw one, whilst
flying at some height, make an odd sort of manœuvre, the meaning of
which I did not quite catch. It appeared to me, however, that he brought
his foot forward towards his bill, and, at the same time, disgorged
something, which he caught hold of with it. A second or two afterwards,
as he came back into his natural pose, I thought I just saw something
fall from him, like a faint shadow on the air, and almost instantly
disappear. This raven had not been carrying anything in his bill
before--at least, I believe not, for nothing broke the clear outline of
it against the sky. What I believe he did was to bring up one of those
curious pellets of indigestible materials that birds, generally, are in
the habit of disgorging. But who would have thought that he would have
first taken it into his claws, whilst flying, before letting it drop? But
though I cannot be quite certain, yet I _feel_ certain that this is what
he did do.
Herrings are still scattered over that part of the ness where the great
skua breeds, and still they are headless, as I noticed the first time I
came here, and have recorded in my _Bird Watching_. Out of twenty-four,
for instance, that I have counted, all but three of them are in this
condition. With the exception of the head but little of them has been
eaten, and, of some, not any. Whether it is the old bird that eats the
head only, before bringing the fish to the chick, or whether the chick
helps to eat it, or whether it is eaten at all, I cannot say; but I have
noticed that the guillemot, also, sometimes brings in a sand-eel to the
ledges, that has been neatly decapitated. I can quite understand that the
head of a herring, if swallowed by a greedy young chick, might have a bad
effect on it, but that the old birds, through some process of natural
selection--for we cannot suppose that they are impelled by ordinary
foresight--should have acquired the habit of first decapitating the
herrings and thus removing the risk, seems very unlikely. On the other
hand, that they should eat one particular part, and no other, of each
fish that they bring to their young, is almost as difficult to believe.
I have elsewhere suggested another explanation,[9] but this too I find
it difficult to adopt, and the only remaining one I can think of is that
the gulls who catch these herrings, and who are robbed of them by the
skua, either bite off their heads in order to kill them, or eat the head
separately. Whatever the reason of it may be, I once more draw attention
to the fact.
[Footnote 9: _Bird Watching_, p. 117.]
At the tail, so to speak, of this track of herrings, I find another young
great skua, and sit down by him to make my entry. He is a big chick,
but the fluff still remains upon his head, neck, and under surface,
springing from the ends of the true feathers, which have thus gradually
pushed it out. On the back it is almost gone, thin patches of it only
appearing above a thick brown panoply of the mature plumage. This chick
is of milder mood than either of the other two. He lets me stroke him,
and though, when I approach my finger to his face, he opens his beak,
yet he cannot be said to show much fierceness. The father and mother
sail overhead, and once the chick reaches up with its neck stretched
straight into the air, and opening its mandibles widely and excitedly,
utters a thin little sound. This is to the parents, I feel sure--a cry of
distress--and has no reference to me, unless it be to call a rescue. It
seems like this, certainly, yet neither of them make, for some time, even
a pretence of swooping at me. Now, however, they begin, but always swerve
off when some yards away. Meanwhile the chick has run off; but when I
follow him I find him just as he was before, crouched against a little
bank of heather, with his head pressed somewhat into it. It is curious
how he now, a second time, lets me stroke him, without in the least
moving.
This instinct of crouching and lying still when young is one which both
the skuas here share with terns, gulls, peewits, etc. All of them lie
in a very marked attitude, with the head and neck stretched straight
out along the ground; yet all of them, as soon as they learn to fly,
quite give up this habit. The stone-curlew, however, which, when young,
has a precisely similar one, is supposed to keep it through life, but
though this may be the case, I am convinced, from my own observation,
that the grown bird acts in this manner far less frequently. To run
with great swiftness, and then, if they think it worth while, to fly,
is their common practice when approached--I, at least, have found it
so--whilst the young ones, according to Dr. Bowdler Sharpe, as invariably
crouch. The question is if the latter, when of a respectable size, are
not sometimes mistaken for the fully-grown birds, for certainly none
of these have ever allowed me to come close up to them as they lay
crouched, like a pheasant, revealing their presence, at last, only by
the bright golden eye, as they are said to do. It is this element of
confusion, in my opinion, together with the fact that it is "a ratite
bird," and therefore _ought_ to act like one, which has caused that
strange scientific delusion in regard to the domestic habits of the
ostrich; a delusion which, it seems, is destined to endure till some
one or other of the learned persons responsible for it happens to be
living on an ostrich-farm, instead of in a museum or a class-room,
since the statements of those who have, or have had, that advantage are
not regarded by them. No, no! the ostrich is "a ratite bird," and the
scientific exigencies of such a position require it to do what it doesn't
do. In regard to the above crouching habit, it may conceivably relate to
an antecedent period in the life of the various species which, in their
young days, practise it, during which they may have been flightless,
though perhaps at a still earlier period they flew as well as, or better
than, they do now. Doubtless, the ostrich once flew--so much of truth is
contained in the Arab fable--and were any gradual change in the character
of the countries it inhabits to render swift running less practicable
whilst, at the same time, its growth became stunted, it would be almost
certain to fly again.
Young kittiwakes--as no doubt the old ones, too, though I have not yet
noticed them doing so--bathe, or rather play about in the sea, very
prettily. They flap their wings in an excited way, or hold them spread
on the water whilst turning round, or half round in it, then, with their
wings still spread, they make a little spring upwards, and flop down on
it again, like a kite falling flat, and repeat the performance any number
of times. There are staider intervals during which they duck and sprinkle
themselves in the ordinary way, but this is not such a prominent feature
as the other. I doubt if these little round-abouts, which seem to please
the bird so much, are really in the nature of bathing, and the same doubt
has been still more strongly impressed upon me in the case of the shag,
and, to some extent, of the coot. To me it seems that the so-called
bathing of many aquatic birds much more resembles an antic than movements
made for a definite purpose--or rather I suspect that the one thing is in
process of passing into the other.
The passage, as I believe, might take place in this way. A land-bird
bathes in water with the express object of cleaning itself, and therefore
the energy which it expends in so doing is both guided and regulated.
It is confined within a certain channel, which it does not leave. But
when this same bird takes to the water--for I assume all aquatic birds
to have been land-birds once--bathing, as a special activity, is not
so necessary to it there as it was on the land. Being always in the
bath, it needs not to specially bathe, or, always bathing, it wants no
special bath. It finds itself, however, with an inherited habit which it
is impelled to continue; but as the constant sensation of being in the
water weakens the desire, as the fact of being there does the necessity,
for special ablutions, this energy becomes gradually less governed, and
its direction less fixed. The movements being no longer limited to the
purpose in which they originated, or exclusively shaped by it, grow more
violent, and corporeal activity producing mental excitement, which again
reacts upon the former, this violence tends to increase. The result is
a mad sort of romp, or play, more or less boisterous in proportion to
the greater or less vitality of the bird, or its quieter or livelier
disposition, which perhaps is the same thing; and when we have this we
have what, in bird life, is called an antic. To generalise it, this antic
will be due to the continuance of an energy once directed to a special
purpose, but which is now no longer so, or not exclusively; and this, I
believe, has been one of the principal paths along which antics have been
evolved.
I can, I think, see another reason why the bathing of aquatic birds
has passed, as I believe it has in several instances, into an antic
or something partaking of that character. They bathe in their own
element--water--in which they are thoroughly at home, whilst the wide
expanse of it around them allows of free and extended movement. But when
a land-bird washes itself it does so under very different conditions,
and a more or less lively tubbing is the utmost one would expect it to
evolve out of the situation. Anything more than this would probably go
hand-in-hand with an increased liking for the water, that is to say with
a gradual change of habitat. Some, perhaps, may think that the fact which
I am trying to account for has not yet been made out, but I beg these, if
they have not already done so, to watch shags bathing, and then I think
they will say that it has. I have already described it in the work to
which I so often have to allude,[10] but any mere description must be
weak compared with the reality.
[Footnote 10: _Bird Watching_, pp. 170-1.]
Numbers of young kittiwakes are still on the ledges; they look quite
mature, and much like some pretty species of dove. Many are on the
nests and close beside the parent birds, though sometimes, but not
often, the latter seem impatient of their presence and force them to
take flight. Anywhere else than on the ledges the young seem to keep to
themselves, swimming together in large flocks upon the sea, or standing
so on the rocks. One may sometimes see an old bird amongst them, but the
association is half-hearted, nor does it last long. Of the fulmar petrels
I have nothing more to record except that my statement in regard to the
hen bird not permitting her husband to sit with her by the chick was
incorrect, or, at least, needs qualification, as I have now seen several
such family parties. The grown birds continue, in some cases, to swell
the throat and open the beak at one another, rolling, at the same time,
the head, and uttering the hoarse, scolding note which seems reserved for
the ledges--for I have never heard it in the air.