HAMPSHIRE
DAYS
BY
W. H. HUDSON
1923
J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
LONDON & TORONTO
PARIS: J. M. DENT ET FILS
All rights reserved
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
INSCRIBED TO
SIR EDWARD AND LADY GREY
NORTHUMBRIANS
WITH HAMPSHIRE WRITTEN IN THEIR HEARTS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
Autumn in the New Forest--Red colour in mammals--November mildness--A
house by the Boldre--An ideal spot for small birds--Abundance of
nests--Small mammals and the weasel's part--Voles and mice--Hornet
and bank-vole--Young shrews--A squirrel's visit--Green woodpecker's
drumming-tree--Drumming of other species--Beauty of great spotted
woodpecker--The cuckoo controversy--A cuckoo in a robin's
nest--Behaviour of the cuckoo--Extreme irritability--Manner of
ejecting eggs and birds from the nest--Loss of
irritability--Insensibility of the parent robins--Discourse on
mistaken kindness, pain and death in nature, the annual destruction
of bird life, and the young cuckoo's instinct.
CHAPTER II.
Between the Boldre and the Exe--Abuse of the New Forest--Character of
the population--New Forest code and conscience--A radical change
foreshadowed--Tenacity of the Forest fly--Oak woods of
Beaulieu--Swallow and pike--Charm of Beaulieu--Instinctive love of
open spaces--A fragrant
heath--Nightjars--Snipe--Redshanks--Pewits--Cause of sympathy with
animals--Grasshopper and spider--A rapacious fly--Melancholy
moods--Evening on the heath--"World-strangeness"--Pixie mounds--Death
and burial--The dead in the barrows--Their fear of the living.
CHAPTER III.
A favourite New Forest haunt--Summertide--Young blackbird's
call--Abundance of blackbirds and thrushes, and destruction of
young--Starlings breeding--The good done by starlings--Perfume of the
honeysuckle--Beauty of the hedge rose--Cult of the rose--Lesser
whitethroat--His low song--Common and lesser whitethroat--In the
woods--A sheet of bracken--Effect of broken surfaces--Roman mosaics
at Silchester--Why mosaics give pleasure--Woodland birds--Sound of
insect life--Abundance of flies--Sufferings of cattle--Dark
Water--Biting and teasing flies--Feeding the fishes and fiddlers with
flies.
CHAPTER IV.
The stag-beetle--Evening flight--Appearance on the wing--Seeking a
mate--Stag and doe in a hedge--The plough-man and the beetle--A
stag-beetle's fate--Concerning tenacity of life--Life appearances
after death--A serpent's skin--A dead glow-worm's light--Little
summer tragedies--A snaky spot--An adder's basking-place--Watching
adders--The adder's senses--Adder's habits not well known--A pair of
anxious pewits--A dead young pewit--Animals without knowledge of
death--Removal of the dead by ants--Gould's observations on ants.
CHAPTER V.
Cessation of song--Oak woods less silent than others--Mixed
gatherings of birds in oak woods--Abundance of
caterpillars--Rapacious insects--Wood ants--Alarm cries of woodland
birds--Weasel and small birds--Fascination--Weasel and short-tailed
vole--Account of Egyptian cats fascinated by fire--Rabbits and
stoats--Mystery of fascination--Cases of pre-natal
suggestion--Hampshire pigs fascinated by fire--Conjectures as to the
origin of fascination--A dead squirrel--A squirrel's fatal
leap--Fleas large and small--Shrew and fleas--Fleas in woods--The
squirrel's disposition--Food-hiding habit in animals--Memory in
squirrels and dogs--The lower kind of memory.
CHAPTER VI.
Insects in Britain--Meadow ants--The indoor view of insect
life--Insects in visible nature--The humming-bird hawk-moth and the
parson lepidopterist--Rarity of death's-head moth--Hawk-moth and
meadow-pipit--Silver-washed fritillaries on bracken--Flight of the
white admiral butterfly--Dragon-flies--Want of English names--A
water-keeper on dragon-flies--Moses Harris--Why moths have English
names--Origin of the dragon-fly's bad reputation--_Cordulegaster
annulatus_--_Calopteryx virgo_--Dragon-flies
congregated--Glow-worm--Firefly and glow-worm compared--Variability
in light--The insect's attitude when shining--Supposed use of the
light--Hornets--A long-remembered sting--The hornet local in
England--A splendid insect--Insects on ivy blossoms in autumn.
CHAPTER VII.
Great and greatest among insects--Our feeling for insect
music--Crickets and grasshoppers--_Cicada anglica_--_Locusta
viridissima_--Character of its music--Colony of green
grasshoppers--Harewood Forest--Purple emperor--Grasshoppers' musical
contests--The naturalist mocked--Female
_viridissima_--Over-elaboration in the male--Habits of female--Wooing
of the male by the female.
CHAPTER VIII.
Hampshire, north and south--A spot abounding in life--Lyndhurst--A
white spider--Wooing spider's antics--A New Forest little boy--Blonde
gipsies--The boy and the spider--A distant world of spiders--Selborne
and its visitors--Selborne revisited--An owl at Alton--A wagtail at
the Wakes--The cockerel and the martin--Heat at Selborne--House
crickets--Gilbert White on crickets--A colony of field
crickets--Water plants--Musk mallow--Girl buntings at
Selborne--Evening gatherings of swifts at
Selborne--Locustidæ--_Thamnotrizon cinereus_--English names
wanted--Black grasshopper's habits and disposition--Its abundance at
Selborne.
CHAPTER IX.
The Selborne atmosphere--Unhealthy faces--Selborne Common--Character
of scenery--Wheatham Hill--Hampshire village churches--Gilbert
White's strictures--Churches big and little--The peasants' religious
feeling--Charm of old village churches--Seeking Priors Dean--Privett
church--Blackmoor church--Churchyards--Change in gravestones--Beauty
of old gravestones--Red alga on gravestones--Yew trees in
churchyards--British dragon-tree--Farringdon village and
yew--Crowhurst yew--Hurstbourne Priors yew--How yew trees are injured.
CHAPTER X.
Wolmer Forest--Charm of contrast and novelty in scenery--Aspect of
Wolmer--Heath and pine--Colour of water and soil--An old woman's
recollections--Story of the "Selborne mob"--Past and present times
compared--Hollywater Clump--Age of trees--Bird life in the
forest--Teal in their breeding haunts--Boys in the forest--Story of
the horn-blower.
CHAPTER XI.
The Hampshire people--Racial differences in neighbouring counties--A
neglected subject--Inhabitants of towns--Gentry and peasantry--Four
distinct types--The common blonde type--Lean women--Deleterious
effects of tea-drinking--A shepherd's testimony--A mixed race--The
Anglo-Saxon--Case of reversion of type--Un-Saxon character of the
British--Dark-eyed Hampshire people--Racial feeling with regard to
eye-colours--The Iberian type--Its persistence--Character of the
small dark man--Dark and blonde children--A dark village child.
CHAPTER XII.
Test and Itchen--Vegetation--Riverside villages--The cottage by the
river--Itchen valley--Blossoming limes--Bird
visitors--Goldfinch--Cirl bunting--Song--Plumage--Three common river
birds--Coots--Moor-hen and nest--Little grebes' struggles--Male
grebe's devotion--Parent coot's wisdom--A more or less happy
family--Dogged little grebes--Grebes training their young--Fishing
birds and fascination.
CHAPTER XIII.
Morning in the valley--Abundance of swifts--Unlikeness to other
birds--Mayfly and swallows--Mayfly and swift--Bad weather and
hail--Swallows in the rain--Sand martins--An orphaned
blackbird--Tamed by feeding--Survival of gregarious instinct in young
blackbirds--Blackbird's good-night--Cirl buntings--Breeding habits
and language--Habits of the young--Reed bunting--Beautiful
weather--The oak in August.
CHAPTER XIV.
Yellow flowers--Family likeness in flavours and scents--_Mimulus
luteus_--Flowers in church decoration--Effect of
association--_Mimulus luteus_ as a British plant--A rule as to
naturalised plants wanted--A visit to Swarraton--Changes since
Gilbert White's day--"Wild musk"--Bird life on the downs--Turtle-dove
nestlings--Blue skin in doves--A boy naturalist--Birds at the
cottage--The wren's sun-bath--Wild fruits ripen--An old chalk
pit--Birds and elderberries--Past and present times compared--Calm
days--Migration of swallows--Conclusion.
{1}
HAMPSHIRE DAYS
CHAPTER I
Autumn in the New Forest--Red colour in mammals--November mildness--A
house by the Boldre--An ideal spot for small birds--Abundance of
nests--Small mammals and the weasel's part--Voles and mice--Hornet
and bank-vole--Young shrews--A squirrel's visit--Green woodpecker's
drumming-tree--Drumming of other species--Beauty of great spotted
woodpecker--The cuckoo controversy--A cuckoo in a robin's
nest--Behaviour of the cuckoo--Extreme irritability--Manner of
ejecting eggs and birds from the nest--Loss of
irritability--Insensibility of the parent robins--Discourse on
mistaken kindness, pain and death in nature, the annual destruction
of bird life, and the young cuckoo's instinct.
Here, by chance, in the early days of December 1902, at the very spot
where my book begins, I am about to bring it to an end.
A few days ago, coming hither from the higher country at Silchester,
where the trees were already nearly bare, I was surprised to find the
oak woods of this lower southern part of the New Forest still in
their full autumnal foliage. Even now, so late in the year, after
many successive days and nights of rain and wind, they are in leaf
still: everywhere the woods are yellow, here where the oak
predominates; the stronger golden-red and russet tints of the beech
are vanished. We have rain and wind on most days, or rather mist and
rain by day and wind with storms of rain by night; days, too, or
parts of days, when it {2} is very dark and still, and when there is
a universal greyness in earth and sky. At such times, seen against
the distant slaty darkness or in the blue-grey misty atmosphere, the
yellow woods look almost more beautiful than in fine weather.
The wet woodland roads and paths are everywhere strewn, and in places
buried deep in fallen leaves--yellow, red, and russet; and this
colour is continued under the trees all through the woods, where the
dead bracken has now taken that deep tint which it will keep so long
as there is rain or mist to wet it for the next four or five months.
Dead bracken with dead leaves on a reddish soil; and where the woods
are fir, the ground is carpeted with lately-fallen needles of a
chestnut red, which brightens almost to orange in the rain. Now, at
this season, in this universal redness of the earth where trees and
bracken grow, we see that Nature is justified in having given that
colour--red and reddish-yellow--to all or to most of her woodland
mammals. Fox and foumart and weasel and stoat; the hare too; the
bright squirrel; the dormouse and harvest-mouse; the bank-vole and
the wood-mouse. Even the common shrew and lesser shrew, though they
rarely come out by day, have a reddish tinge on their fur.
Water-shrew and water-vole inhabit the banks of streams, and are
safer without such a colour; the dark grey badger is strictly a night
rover.
[Sidenote: Autumn in the New Forest]
Sometimes about noon the clouds grow thin in that part of the sky,
low down, where the sun is, and a pale gleam of sunlight filters
through; even a {3} patch of lucid blue sky sometimes becomes visible
for a while: but the light soon fades; after mid-day the dimness
increases, and before long one begins to think that evening has come.
Withal it is singularly mild. One could almost imagine in this
season of mist and wet and soft airs in late November that this is a
land where days grew short and dark indeed, but where winter comes
not, and the sensation of cold is unknown. It is pleasant to be out
of doors in such weather, to stand in the coloured woods listening to
that autumn sound of tits and other little birds wandering through
the high trees in straggling parties, talking and calling to one
another in their small sharp voices. Or to walk by the Boldre, or,
as some call it, the Lymington, a slow, tame stream in summer,
invisible till you are close to it; but now, in flood, the trees that
grow on its banks and hid it in summer are seen standing deep in a
broad, rushing, noisy river.
The woodpecker's laugh has the same careless happy sound as in
summer: it is scarcely light in the morning before the small wren
pours out his sharp bright lyric outside my window; it is time, he
tells me, to light my candle and get up. The starlings are about the
house all day long, vocal even in the rain, carrying on their
perpetual starling conversation--talk and song and recitative; a sort
of bird-Yiddish, with fluty fragments of melody stolen from the
blackbird, and whistle and click and the music of the triangle thrown
in to give variety. So mild is it that in the blackness of night I
{4} sometimes wander into the forest paths and by furzy heaths and
hedges to listen for the delicate shrill music of our late chirper in
the thickets, our _Thamnotrizon_, about which I shall write later;
and look, too, for a late glow-worm shining in some wet green place.
Late in October I found one in daylight, creeping about in the grass
on Selborne Hill; and some few, left unmarried, may shine much later.
And as to the shade-loving grasshopper or leaf cricket, he sings, we
know, on mild evenings in November. But I saw no green lamp in the
herbage, and I heard only that nightly music of the tawny owl,
fluting and hallooing far and near, bird answering bird in the oak
woods all along the swollen stream from Brockenhurst to Boldre.
This race of wood owls perhaps have exceptionally strong voices:
Wise, in his book on the New Forest, says that their hooting can be
heard on a still autumn evening a distance of two miles. I have no
doubt they can be heard a good mile.
[Sidenote: A house by the Boldre]
But it is of this, to a bird lover, delectable spot in the best
bird-months of April, May, and June that I have to write. The house,
too, that gave me shelter must be spoken of; for never have I known
any human habitation, in a land where people are discovered dwelling
in so many secret, green, out-of-the-world places, which had so much
of nature in and about it. Grown-up and young people were in it, and
children too, but they were girls, and had always quite spontaneously
practised what I had preached--pet nothing and persecute nothing.
There {5} was no boy to disturb the wild creatures with his hunting
instincts and loud noises; no dog, no cat, nor any domestic creature
except the placid cows and fowls which supplied the household with
milk and eggs. A small old picturesque red-brick house with
high-pitched roof and tall chimneys, a great part of it overrun with
ivy and creepers, the walls and tiled roof stained by time and
many-coloured lichen to a richly variegated greyish red. The date of
the house, cut in a stone tablet in one of the rooms, was 1692. In
front there was no lawn, but a walled plot of ground with old, once
ornamental trees and bushes symmetrically placed--yews, both
spreading and cypress-shaped Irish yew, and tall tapering juniper,
and arbor vitæ; it was a sort of formal garden which had long thrown
off its formality. In a corner of the ground by the side of these
dark plants were laurel, syringa, and lilac bushes, and among these
such wildings as thorn, elder and bramble had grown up, flourishing
greatly, and making of that flowery spot a tangled thicket. At the
side of the house there was another plot of ground, grass-grown,
which had once been the orchard, and still had a few ancient apple
and pear trees, nearly past bearing, with good nesting-holes for the
tits and starlings in their decayed mossy trunks. There were also a
few old ivied shade-trees--chestnuts, fir, and evergreen oak.
Best of all (for the birds) were the small old half-ruined outhouses
which had remained from the distant days when the place, originally a
manor, {6} had been turned into a farm-house. They were here and
there, scattered about, outside the enclosure, ivy-grown, each
looking as old and weather-stained and in harmony with its
surroundings as the house itself--the small tumble-down barns, the
cow-sheds, the pig-house, the granary with open door and the wooden
staircase falling to pieces. All was surrounded by old oak woods,
and the river was close by. It was an ideal spot for small birds. I
have never in England seen so many breeding close together. The
commoner species were extraordinarily abundant. Chaffinch and
greenfinch; blackbird, throstle and missel-thrush; swallow and
martin, and common and lesser whitethroat; garden warbler and
blackcap; robin, dunnock, wren, flycatcher, pied wagtail, starling,
and sparrow;--one could go round and put one's hand into half a dozen
nests of almost any of these species. And very many of them had
become partial to the old buildings: even in closed rooms where it
was nearly dark, not only wrens, robins, tits, and wagtails, but
blackbirds and throstles and chaffinches were breeding, building on
beams and in or on the old nests of swallows and martins. The
hawfinch and bullfinch were also there, the last rearing its brood
within eight yards of the front door. One of his two nearest
neighbours was a gold-crested wren. When the minute bird was sitting
on her eggs, in her little cradle-nest suspended to a spray of the
yew, every day I would pull the branch down so that we might all
enjoy the sight of the little fairy bird in her fairy nest which she
refused to quit. The {7} other next-door neighbour of the bullfinch
was the long-tailed tit, which built its beautiful little nest on a
terminal spray of another yew, ten or twelve yards from the door; and
this small creature would also let us pull the branch down and peep
into her well-feathered interior.
[Sidenote: Abundance of nests]
It seemed that, from long immunity from persecution, all these small
birds had quite lost their fear of human beings; but in late May and
in June, when many young birds were out of the nest, one had to walk
warily in the grass for fear of putting a foot on some little
speckled creature patiently waiting to be visited and fed by its
parents.
Nor were there birds only. Little beasties were also quite abundant;
but they were of species that did no harm (at all events there), and
the weasel would come from time to time to thin them down. Money is
paid to mole-catcher and rat-catcher; the weasel charges you nothing:
he takes it out in kind. And even as the jungle tiger, burning
bright, and the roaring lion strike with panic the wild cattle and
antelopes and herds of swine, so does this miniature carnivore, this
fairy tiger of English homesteads and hedges, fill with trepidation
the small deer he hunts and slays with his needle teeth--Nature's
scourge sent out among her too prolific small rodents; her little
blood-letter who relieves her and restores the balance. And
therefore he, too, with his flat serpent head and fiery killing soul,
is a "dear" creature, being, like the poet's web-footed beasts of an
earlier epoch, "part of a general plan."
{8}
The most abundant of the small furred creatures were the two
short-tailed voles--field-vole and bank-vole; the last, in his bright
chestnut-red, the prettiest. Whenever I sat down for a few minutes
in the porch I would see one or more run across the stones from one
side, where masses of periwinkle grew against the house, to the other
side, where Virginia creeper, rose, and an old magnolia tree covered
the wall. One day at the back of the house by the scullery door I
noticed a swaying movement in a tall seeded stem of dock, and looking
down spied a wee harvest-mouse running and climbing nimbly on the
slender branchlets, feeding daintily on the seed, and looking like a
miniature squirrel on a miniature bush.
Just there, close to the door, was a wood-pile, and the hornets had
made their nest in it. The year before they had made it in a loft in
the house, and before that in the old barn. The splendid insects
were coming and going all day, interfering with nobody and nobody
interfering with them; and when I put a plate of honey for them on
the logs close to their entrance they took no notice of it; but
by-and-by bank-voles and wood-mice came stealing out from among the
logs and fed on it until it was all gone.
I was surprised, and could only suppose that the hornets did not
notice or discover the honey, because no such good thing was looked
for so close to their door. Away from home the hornet was quick to
discover anything sweet to the taste, and very ready to resent the
presence of any other creature at the table.
{9}
[Sidenote: Hornet and bank-vole]
At the riverside, a few hundred yards from the house, I was sitting
in the shade of a large elm tree one day when I was visited by a big
hornet, who swept noisily down and settled on the trunk, four or five
feet above the ground. A quantity of sap had oozed out into a deep
cleft of the rough bark and had congealed there, and the hornet had
discovered it. Before he had been long feeding on it I saw a little
bank-vole come out from the roots of the tree and run up the trunk,
looking very pretty in his bright chestnut fur as he came into the
sunlight. Stealing up to the lower end of the cleft full of
thickened sap he too began feeding on it. The hornet, who was at the
upper end of the cleft, quite four inches apart from the vole, at
once stopped eating and regarded the intruder for some time, then
advanced towards him in a threatening attitude. The vole was
frightened at this, starting and erecting his hair, and once or twice
he tried to recover his courage and resume his feeding, but the
hornet still keeping up his hostile movements, he eventually slipped
quietly down and hid himself at the roots. When the hornet departed
he came out again and went to the sap.
Wishing to see more, I spent most of that day and the day following
at the spot, and saw hornet and vole meet many times. If the vole
was at the sap when the hornet came he was at once driven off, and
when the hornet was there first the vole was never allowed to feed,
although on every occasion he tried to do so, stealing to his lower
place in the {10} gentlest way in order not to give offence, and
after beginning to feed affecting not to see that the other had left
off eating, and with raised head was regarding him with jealous eyes.
Rarely have I looked on a prettier little comedy in wild life.
But to return to the house. There was quite a happy family at that
spot by the back door where the hornets were. A numerous family of
shrews were reared, and the young, when they began exploring the
world, used to creep over the white stone by the threshold. The
girls would pick them up to feel their soft mole-like fur: the young
shrew is a gentle creature and does not attempt to bite. Some of the
more adventurous ones were always blundering into the empty
flowerpots heaped against the wall, and there they would remain
imprisoned until some person found and took them out.
One morning, at half-past four o'clock, when I was lying awake
listening to the blackbird, a lively squirrel came dancing into the
open window of my bedroom on the first floor. There were writing
materials, flowers in glasses, and other objects on the ledge and
dressing-table there, and he frisked about among them, chattering,
wildly excited at seeing so many curious and pretty things, but he
upset nothing; and by-and-by he danced out again into the ivy
covering the wall on that side, throwing the colony of breeding
sparrows into a great state of consternation.
[Sidenote: Drumming of woodpecker]
The river was quite near the house--not half a {11} minute from the
front door, though hidden from sight by the trees on its banks.
Here, at the nearest point, there was an old half-dead dwarf oak
growing by the water and extending one horizontal branch a distance
of twenty feet over the stream. This was the favourite drumming-tree
of a green woodpecker, and at intervals through the day he would
visit it and drum half a dozen times or so. This drumming sounded so
loud that, following the valley down, I measured the distance it
could be heard and found it just one-third of a mile. At that
distance I could hear it distinctly; farther on, not at all. It
seemed almost incredible that the sound produced by so small a stick
as a woodpecker's beak striking a tree should be audible at that
distance.
It is hardly to be doubted that the drumming is used as a love-call,
though it is often heard in late summer. It is, however, in early
spring and in the breeding season that it is oftenest heard, and I
have found that a good imitation of it will sometimes greatly excite
the bird. The same bird may be heard drumming here, there, and
everywhere in a wood or copse, the sound varying somewhat in
character and strength according to the wood; but each bird as a rule
has a favourite drumming-tree, and it probably angers him to hear
another bird at the spot. On one occasion, finding that a very
large, old, and apparently dying cedar in a wood was constantly used
by the woodpecker, I went to the spot and imitated the sound. Very
soon the bird came and begun drumming against me, close by. {12} I
responded, and again he drummed; and becoming more and more excited
he flew close to me, and passing from tree to tree drummed at every
spot he lighted on.
The other species have the same habit of drumming on one tree. I
have noticed it in the small spotted, or banded, woodpecker; and have
observed that invariably after he has drummed two or three times the
female has come flying to him from some other part of the wood, and
the two birds have then both together uttered their loud chirping
notes and flown away.
On revisiting the spot a year after I had heard the green woodpecker
drumming every day in the oak by the river, I found that he had
forsaken it, and that close by, on the other side of the stream, a
great spotted woodpecker had selected as his drumming-tree a very big
elm growing on the bank. He drummed on a large dead branch about
forty feet from the ground, and the sound he made was quite as loud
as that of the green bird. It may be that the two big woodpeckers,
who play equally well on the same instrument, are intolerant of one
another's presence, and that in this case the spotted bird had driven
the larger yaffle from his territory.
[Sidenote: Our handsomest bird]
One of the prettiest spots by the water was that very one where the
spotted bird was accustomed to come, and I often went there at noon
and sat for an hour on the grassy bank in the shade of the
drumming-tree. The river was but thirty to forty feet wide at that
spot, with masses of water forget-me-not growing on the opposite
bank, clearly reflected {13} in the sherry-coloured sunlit current
below. The trees were mostly oaks, in the young vivid green of early
June foliage. And one day when the sky, seen through that fresh
foliage, was without a stain of vapour in its pure azure, when the
wood was full of clear sunlight--so clear that silken spider webs,
thirty or forty feet high in the oaks, were visible as shining red
and blue and purple lines--the bird, after drumming high above my
head, flew to an oak tree just before me, and clinging vertically to
the bark on the high part of the trunk, remained there motionless for
some time. His statuesque attitude, as he sat with his head thrown
well back, the light glinting on his hard polished feathers, black
and white and crimson, the setting in which he appeared of greenest
translucent leaves and hoary bark and open sunlit space, all together
made him seem not only our handsomest woodpecker, but our most
beautiful bird. I had seen him at his best, and sitting there
motionless amid the wind-fluttered leaves, he was like a bird-figure
carved from some beautiful vari-coloured stone.
The most interesting events in animal life observed at this spot
relate to the cuckoo in the spring of 1900. Some time before this
Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace said, in the course of a talk we had, that
he very much wanted me to find out exactly what happened in a nest in
which a young cuckoo was hatched. It was, I replied, an old, old
story--what could I see, supposing I was lucky enough to find a nest
where I {14} could observe it properly, more than Jenner, Hancock,
Mrs. Hugh Blackburn, and perhaps other writers, had told us? Yes, it
was an old story, he said, and he wanted it told again by someone
else. People had lately been discrediting Jenner's account, and as
to the other chief authority I had named, one writer, a Dr.
Creighton, had said, "As for artists like Mrs. Blackburn, they can
draw what they please--all out of their own brains: we can't trust
them, or such as them." Sober-minded naturalists had come to regard
the habit and abnormal strength attributed to the newly-hatched
cuckoo as "not proven" or quite incredible; thus Seebohm had said,
"One feels inclined to class these narratives with the equally
well-authenticated stories of ghosts and other apparitions which
abound."
Since my conversation with Dr. Wallace we have had more of these
strange narratives--the fables and ghost stories which the
unbelievers are compelled in the end to accept--and all that Dr.
Jenner or his assistant saw others have seen, and some observers have
even taken snapshots of the young cuckoo in the act of ejecting his
fellow-nestling. But it appears from all the accounts which I have
so far read, that in every case the observer was impatient and
interfered in the business by touching and irritating the young
cuckoo, by putting eggs and other objects on his back, and by making
other experiments. In the instance I am about to give there was no
interference by me or by the others who at intervals watched with me.
{15}
[Sidenote: A cuckoo in a robin's nest]
A robin's nest with three robin's eggs and one of the cuckoo was
found in a low bank at the side of the small orchard on 19th May,
1900. The bird was incubating, and on the afternoon of 27th May the
cuckoo hatched out. Unfortunately I did not know how long incubation
had been going on before the 19th, but from the fact that the cuckoo
was first out, it seems probable that the parasite has this further
advantage of coming first from the shell. Long ago I found that this
was so in the case of the parasitical troupials of the genus
_Molothrus_ in South America.
I kept a close watch on the nest for the rest of that afternoon and
the whole of the following day (the 28th), during which the young
cuckoo was lying in the bottom of the nest, helpless as a piece of
jelly with a little life in it, and with just strength enough in his
neck to lift his head and open his mouth; and then, after a second or
two, the wavering head would drop again. At eight o'clock next
morning (29th), I found that one robin had come out of the shell, and
one egg had been ejected and was lying a few inches below the nest on
the sloping bank. Yet the young cuckoo still appeared a weak,
helpless, jelly-like creature, as on the previous day. But he had
increased greatly in size. I believe that in forty-eight hours from
the time of hatching he had quite doubled his bulk, and had grown
darker, his naked skin being of a bluish-black colour. The robin,
thirty or more hours younger, was little more than half his size, and
had a pale, pinkish-yellow {16} skin, thinly clothed with a long
black down. The cuckoo occupied the middle of the deep, cup-shaped
nest, and his broad back, hollow in the middle, formed a sort of
false bottom; but there was a small space between the bird's sides
and the nest, and in this space or interstice the one unhatched egg
that still remained and the young robin were lying.
During this day (29th) I observed that the pressure of the egg and
young robin against his sides irritated the cuckoo: he was
continually moving, jerking and wriggling his lumpish body this way
and that, as if to get away from the contact. At intervals this
irritation would reach its culminating point, and a series of
mechanical movements would begin, all working blindly but as surely
towards the end as if some devilish intelligence animated the
seemingly helpless infant parasite.
Of the two objects in the nest the unhatched egg irritated him the
most. The young robin was soft, it yielded when pressed, and could
be made somehow to fit into the interstice; but the hard, round
shell, pressing against him like a pebble, was torture to him, and at
intervals became unendurable. Then would come that magical change in
him, when he seemed all at once to become possessed of a
preternatural power and intelligence, and then the blind struggle
down in the nest would begin. And after each struggle--each round it
might be called--the cuckoo would fall back again and lie in a state
of collapse, as if the mysterious virtue had gone out of him. But in
a very short time the pressure on his {17} side would begin again to
annoy him, then to torment him, and at last he would be wrought up to
a fresh effort. Thus in a space of eight minutes I saw him struggle
four separate times, with a period of collapse after each, to get rid
of the robin's egg; and each struggle involved a long series of
movements on his part. On each of these occasions the egg was pushed
or carried up to the wrong or upper side of the nest, with the result
that when the bird jerked the egg from him it rolled back into the
bottom of the nest. The statement is therefore erroneous that the
cuckoo knows at which side to throw the egg out. Of course he
_knows_ nothing, and, as a fact, he tries to throw the egg up as
often as down the slope.
The process in each case was as follows: The pressure of the egg
against the cuckoo's side, as I have said, was a constant irritation;
but the irritability varied in degree in different parts of the body.
On the under parts it scarcely existed; its seat was chiefly on the
upper surface, beginning at the sides and increasing towards the
centre, and was greatest in the hollow of the back. When, in moving,
the egg got pushed up to the upper edge of his side, he would begin
to fidget more and more, and this would cause it to move round, and
so to increase the irritation by touching and pressing against other
parts. When all the bird's efforts to get away from the object had
only made matters worse, he would cease wriggling and squat down
lower and lower in the bottom of the nest, and the egg, forced up,
would finally roll right into the cavity in his back--the {18} most
irritable part of all. Whenever this occurred, a sudden change that
was like a fit would seize the bird; he would stiffen, rise in the
nest, his flabby muscles made rigid, and stand erect, his back in a
horizontal position, the head hanging down, the little naked wings
held up over the back. In that position he looked an ugly, lumpish
negro mannikin, standing on thinnest dwarf legs, his back bent, and
elbows stuck up above the hollow flat back.
Once up on his small stiffened legs he would move backwards, firmly
grasping the hairs and hair-like fibres of the nest-lining, and never
swerving, until the rim of the cup-like structure was reached; and
then standing, with feet sometimes below and in some cases on the
rim, he would jerk his body, throwing the egg off or causing it to
roll off. After that he would fall back into the nest and lie quite
exhausted for some time, his jelly-like body rising and falling with
his breathing.
These changes in the bird strongly reminded me of a person with an
epileptic fit, as I had been accustomed to see it on the pampas,
where, among the gauchos, epilepsy is one of the commonest
maladies;--the sudden rigidity of muscle in some weak, sickly,
flabby-looking person, the powerful grip of the hand, the strength in
struggling, exceeding that of a man in perfect health, and finally,
when this state is over, the weakness of complete exhaustion.
I witnessed several struggles with the egg, but at last, in spite of
my watchfulness, I did not see it ejected. On returning after a very
short absence, {19} I found the egg had been thrown out and had
rolled down the bank, a distance of fourteen inches from the nest.
The young cuckoo appeared to rest more quietly in the nest now, but
after a couple of hours the old fidgeting began again, and increased
until he was in the same restless state as before. The rapid growth
of the birds made the position more and more miserable for the
cuckoo, since the robin, thrust against the side of the nest, would
throw his head and neck across the cuckoo's back, and he could not
endure being touched there. And now a fresh succession of struggles
began, the whole process being just the same as when the egg was
struggled with. But it was not so easy with the young bird, not
because of its greater weight, but because it did not roll like the
egg and settle in the middle of the back; it would fall partly on to
the cuckoo's back and then slip off into the nest again. But success
came at last, after many failures. The robin was lying partly across
the cuckoo's neck, when, in moving its head, its little curved beak
came down and rested on the very centre of that irritable hollow in
the back of its foster-brother. Instantly the cuckoo pressed down
into the nest, shrinking away as if hot needles had pricked him, as
far as possible from the side where the robin was lying against him,
and this movement of course brought the robin more and more over him,
until he was thrown right upon the cuckoo's back.
Instantly the rigid fit came on, and up rose the cuckoo, as if the
robin weighed no more than a feather {20} on him; and away backwards
he went, right up the nest, without a pause, and standing actually on
the rim, jerked his body, causing the robin to fall off, clean away
from the nest. It fell, in fact, on to a large dock leaf five inches
below the rim of the nest, and rested there.
After getting rid of his burden the cuckoo continued in the same
position, perfectly rigid, for a space of five or six seconds, during
which it again and again violently jerked its body, as if it had the
feeling of the burden on it still. Then, the fit over, it fell back,
exhausted as usual.
I had been singularly fortunate in witnessing the last scene and
conclusion of this little bloodless tragedy in a bird's nest, with
callow nestlings for _dramatis personæ_, this innocent crime and
wrong, which is not a wrong since the cuckoo doesn't think it one.
It is a little curious to reflect that a similar act takes place
annually in tens of thousands of small birds' nests all over the
country, and that it is so rarely witnessed.
Marvellous as the power of the young cuckoo is when the fit is on
him, it is of course limited, and when watching his actions I
concluded that it would be impossible for him to eject eggs and
nestlings from any thrush's nest. The blackbird's would be too deep,
and as to the throstle's, he could not move backwards up the sides of
the cup-like cavity on account of the smooth plastered surface.
After having seen the young robin cast out I still refrained from
touching the nest, as there were yet {21} other things to observe.
One was the presence, very close to the nest, of the ejected
nestling--what would the parents do in the case? Before dealing with
that matter I shall conclude the history of the young cuckoo.
Having got the nest to himself he rested very quietly, and it was not
till the following day (1st July) that I allowed myself to touch him.
He was, I found, still irritable, and when I put back the eggs he had
thrown out he was again miserable in the nest, and the struggle with
the eggs was renewed until he got rid of them as before. The next
day the irritability had almost gone, and in the afternoon he
suffered an egg or a pebble to remain in the nest with him without
jerking and wriggling about, and he made no further attempt to eject
it. This observation--the loss of irritability on the fifth day
after hatching--agrees with that of Mr. Craig, whose account was
printed in the _Feathered World_, 14th July, 1899.
The young cuckoo grew rapidly and soon trod his nest into a broad
platform, on which he reposed, a conspicuous object in the scanty
herbage on the bank. We often visited and fed him, when he would
puff up his plumage and strike savagely at our hands, but at the same
time he would always gobble down the food we offered. In seventeen
days after being hatched he left the nest and took up his position in
an oak tree growing on the bank, and there the robins continued
feeding him for the next three days, after which we saw no more of
him.
{22}
I may add that in May 1901 a pair of robins built on the bank close
to where the nest had been made the previous year, and that in this
nest a cuckoo was also reared. The bird, when first seen, was
apparently about four or five days old, and it had the nest to
itself. Three ejected robin's eggs were lying on the bank a little
lower down.
It is hardly to be doubted that the robins were the same birds that
had reared the cuckoo in the previous season; and it is highly
probable that the same cuckoo had returned to place her egg in their
nest.
The end of the little history--the fate of the ejected nestling and
the attitude of the parent robins--remains to be told. When the
young cuckoo throws out the nestlings from nests in trees, hedges,
bushes, and reeds, the victims, as a rule, fall some distance to the
ground, or in the water, and are no more seen by the old birds. Here
the young robin, when ejected, fell a distance of but five or six
inches, and rested on a broad, bright green leaf, where it was an
exceedingly conspicuous object; and when the mother robin was on the
nest--and at this stage she was on it a greater part of the
time--warming that black-skinned, toad-like, spurious babe of hers,
her bright, intelligent eyes were looking full at the other one, just
beneath her, which she had grown in her body and had hatched with her
warmth, and was her very own. I watched her for hours; watched her
when warming the cuckoo, when she left the nest and when she returned
with food, and warmed it again, and never {23} once did she pay the
least attention to the outcast lying there so close to her. There,
on its green leaf, it remained, growing colder by degrees, hour by
hour, motionless, except when it lifted its head as if to receive
food, then dropped it again, and when, at intervals, it twitched its
body as if trying to move. During the evening even these slight
motions ceased, though that feeblest flame of life was not yet
extinguished; but in the morning it was dead and cold and stiff; and
just above it, her bright eyes on it, the mother robin sat on the
nest as before, warming her cuckoo.
How amazing and almost incredible it seems that a being such as a
robin, intelligent above most birds as we are apt to think, should
prove in this instance to be a mere automaton! The case would, I
think, have been different if the ejected one had made a sound, since
there is nothing which more excites the parent bird, or which is more
instantly responded to, than the cry of hunger or distress of the
young. But at this early stage the nestling is voiceless--another
point in favour of the parasite. The sight of its young, we see,
slowly and dumbly dying, touches no chord in the parent: there is, in
fact, no recognition; once out of the nest it is no more than a
coloured leaf, or a bird-shaped pebble, or fragment of clay.
It happened that my young fellow-watchers, seeing that the ejected
robin if left there would inevitably perish, proposed to take it in
to feed and rear it--to save it, as they said; but I advised them not
to {24} attempt such a thing, but rather to spare the bird. To spare
it the misery they would inflict upon it by attempting to fill its
parents' place. They had, so far, never kept a caged bird, nor a pet
bird, and had no desire to keep one; all they desired to do in this
case was to save the little outcast from death--to rear it till it
was able to fly away and take care of itself. That was a difficult,
a well-nigh impossible task. The bird, at this early stage, required
to be fed at short intervals for about sixteen hours each day on a
peculiar kind of food, suited to its delicate stomach--chiefly small
caterpillars found in the herbage; and it also needed a sufficient
amount by day and night of that animal warmth which only the parent
bird could properly supply. They, not being robins, would give it
unsuitable food, feed it at improper times, and not keep it at the
right temperature, with the almost certain result that after
lingering a few days it would die in their hands. But if by giving a
great deal of time and much care they should succeed in rearing it,
their foundling would start his independent life so handicapped,
weakened in constitution by an indoor artificial bringing up, without
the training which all young birds receive from their parents after
quitting the nest, that it would be impossible for him to save
himself. If by chance he should survive until August, he would then
be set upon and killed by one of the adult robins already in
possession of the ground. Now, when a bird at maturity perishes, it
suffers in dying--sometimes very acutely; but if left to grow {25}
cold and fade out of life at this stage it can hardly be said to
suffer. It is no more conscious than a chick in the shell; take from
it the warmth that keeps it in being, and it drops back into
nothingness without knowing and, we may say, without feeling
anything. There may indeed be an incipient consciousness in that
small, soft brain in its early vegetative stage, a first faint
glimmer of bright light to be, and a slight sensation of numbness may
be actually felt as the body grows cold, but that would be all.
[Sidenote: Mistaken kindness]
Pain is so common in the world; and, owing to the softness and
sensitiveness induced in us by an indoor artificial life--since that
softness of our bodies reacts on our minds--we have come to a false
or an exaggerated idea of its importance, its _painfulness_, to put
it that way; and we should therefore be but making matters worse, or
rather making ourselves more miserable, by looking for and finding it
where it does not exist.
The power to feel pain in any great degree comes into the bird's life
after this transitional period, and is greatest at maturity, when
consciousness and all the mental faculties are fully developed,
particularly the passion of fear, which plays continually on the
strings of the wild creature's heart with an ever varying touch,
producing the feeling in all degrees from the slight disquiet, which
is no sooner come than gone, to extremities of agonising terror. It
would perhaps have a wholesome effect on their young minds, and save
them from grieving over-much at the death of a newly-hatched robin,
if they {26} would consider this fact of the pain that is and must
be. Not the whole subject--the fact that as things are designed in
this world of sentient life there can be no good, no sweetness or
pleasure in life, nor peace and contentment and safety, nor happiness
and joy, nor any beauty or strength or lustre, nor any bright and
shining quality of body or mind, without pain, which is not an
accident nor an incident, nor something ancillary to life, but is
involved in and a part of life, of its very colour and texture. That
would be too long to speak about; all I meant was to consider that
small part of the fact, the necessary pain to and destruction of the
bird life around them and in the country generally.
[Sidenote: Annual bird-mortality]
Here, for instance, without going farther than a hundred yards from
the house in any direction, they could put their hands in nests in
trees and bushes, and on the ground, and in the ivy, and in the old
outhouse, and handle and count about one hundred and thirty young
birds not yet able to fly. Probably more than twice that number
would be successfully reared during the season. How many, then,
would be reared in the whole parish! How many in the entire New
Forest district, in the whole county of Hampshire, in the entire
kingdom! Yet when summer came round again they would find no more
birds than they had now. And so it would be in all places; all that
incalculable increase would have perished. Many millions would be
devoured by rapacious birds and beasts; millions more would perish of
hunger and cold; millions of migrants would fall by the {27} way,
some in the sea and some on land; those that returned from distant
regions would be but a remnant, and the residents that survived
through the winter, these, too, would be nothing but a remnant. It
is not only that this inconceivable amount of bird life must be
destroyed each year, but we cannot suppose that death is not a
painful process. In a vast majority of cases, whether the bird
slowly perishes of hunger and weakness, or is pursued and captured by
birds and beasts of prey, or is driven by cold adverse winds and
storms into the waves, the pain, the agony must be great. The least
painful death is undoubtedly that of the bird that, weakened by want
of sustenance, dies by night of cold in severe weather. It is indeed
most like the death of the nestling, but a few hours out of the
shell, which has been thrown out of the nest, and which soon grows
cold, and dozes its feeble, unconscious life away.
We may say, then, that of all the thousand forms of death which
Nature has invented to keep her too rapidly multiplying creatures
within bounds, that which is brought about by the singular instinct
of the young cuckoo in the nest is the most merciful or the least
painful.
I am not sure that I said all this, or marshalled fact and argument
in the precise order in which they are here set down. I fancy not,
as it seems more than could well have been spoken while we were
standing there in the late evening sunlight by that primrose bank,
looking down on the little {28} flesh-coloured mite in its scant
clothing of black down, fading out of life on its cold green leaf.
But what was said did not fail of its effect, so that my young
tender-hearted hearers, who had begun to listen with moist eyes,
secretly accusing me perhaps of want of feeling, were content in the
end to let it be--to go away and leave it to its fate in that
mysterious green world we, too, live in and do not understand, in
which life and death and pleasure and pain are interwoven light and
shade.
{29}