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--Cirl 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.
In the last chapter I got away--succeeded in breaking away, would
perhaps be a better expression--from that favourite hunting-ground of
mine farther south; and the reader would perhaps care to know why a
book descriptive of days in Hampshire should be so much taken up with
days in one small corner of the county. Hampshire is not a very
large county compared with some others: I have traversed it in this
and in that direction often enough to be pretty familiar with a great
deal of it, from the walled-round cornfield which was once Roman
Calleva to the Solent; and from the beautiful wild Rother on the
Sussex border to the Avon in the west. There is much to see and know
within these limits: for all those whose proper study is man, his
history and his works; and for the archæologist and for the artist
and seekers after the picturesque, {154} there is much--nay, there is
more to attract in the northern than in the southern half of the
county. I, not of them, go south, and by preference to one spot,
because my chief interest and delight is in life--life in all its
forms, from man who "walks erect and smiling looks on heaven" to the
minutest organic atoms--the invisible life. It here comes into my
mind that the very smell of the earth, in which we all delight, the
smell which fills the air after rain in summer, and is strong when we
turn up a spadeful of fresh mould, which the rustic calls "good,"
believing, perhaps rightly, that we must smell it every day to be
well and live long, is after all an odour given off by a living
thing--_Cladothrix odorifera_. Too small for human eyes, which see
only objects proportioned to their bigness, so minute, indeed, that
millions may inhabit a clod no larger than one's watch, yet they are
able to find a passage to us through the other subtler sense; and
from the beginning of our earthly journey even to its end we walk
with this odour in our nostrils, and love it, and will perhaps take
with us a sweet memory of it into the after-life.
Life being more than all else to me, I am drawn to the spot where it
exists in greatest abundance and variety.
I remember feeling this passion very strongly one day during this
summer of 1902 after looking at a spider. It was an interesting
spider, and I found it within a couple of miles of Lyndhurst, of all
places; a spot so disagreeable to me that I avoid it, and {155} look
for nothing and wish for nothing to detain me in its vicinity.
[Sidenote: Lyndhurst]
Lyndhurst is objectionable to me not only because it is a vulgar
suburb, a transcript of Chiswick or Plumstead in the New Forest where
it is in a wrong atmosphere, but also because it is the spot on which
London vomits out its annual crowd of collectors, who fill its
numerous and ever-increasing brand-new red-brick lodging-houses, and
who swarm through all the adjacent woods and heaths, men, women, and
children (hateful little prigs!) with their vasculums, beer and
treacle pots, green and blue butterfly nets, killing bottles, and all
the detestable paraphernalia of what they would probably call "Nature
Study."
It happened that one day, a mile or two from Lyndhurst, going along
the road I caught sight of a pretty bit of heath through an opening
in the wood, and turning into it I looked out a spot to rest in, and
was just about to cast myself down when I noticed a small white
spider, disturbed by my step, drop from a cluster of bell-heath
flowers to the ground. I stood still, and presently the spider,
recovered from its alarm, drew itself up again by an invisible thread
and settled down on the bright-coloured blossoms. Seating myself
close by, I began to watch the strangely shaped and coloured little
creature. It was a _Thomisus_--a genus of spiders distinguished by
the extraordinary length of the two pairs of forelegs. The one
before me, _Thomisus citreus_, is also singular on account of its
colour--pale citron or white--and its habit of sitting on flowers.
{156} This habit and the colour, we may see, are related. The
_citreus_ is not a weaver of snares, but hunts for its prey, or
rather lies in wait to capture any insect that comes to the flower on
which it sits. On white, yellow, and indeed on most pale-coloured
flowers, it almost becomes invisible. On the brilliant red
bell-heath blossom it showed plainly enough, but even here it did not
look nearly so conspicuous as when on a green leaf.
[Sidenote: Wooing spider's antics]
I had observed this white spider before, but had always seen it
sitting motionless in its flower; this one was curiously restless,
and very soon after I had settled myself down by its side it began to
throw itself into a variety of strange attitudes. The four long
forelegs would go up all at once and stand out like rays from the
round, white body, and by-and-by they would drop and hang down like
two long strings from the flower. Pretty soon I discovered the cause
of these actions in the presence of a second spider, less than half
the size of the first, moving about close by. His smallness and
hideling habits had prevented me from seeing him sooner. This small,
active, white creature was the male, and though moving constantly
about in the heath at a distance of half a foot from her, it was
plain that they could see each other and also understand each other
very well. As he moved round her, passing by means of the threads he
kept throwing out from spray to spray, she moved round on her flower
to keep him in sight; but though fascinated and drawn to her, he
still dreaded, and was pulled by his fear and his desire in opposite
ways. {157} The excitement of both would increase whenever he came a
little nearer, and their attitudes were then sometimes very curious,
the most singular being one of the male when he would raise his body
vertically in the air and stand on his two pairs of forelegs. When
very near, they would extend the long forelegs and touch one another;
but always at this point when they were closest and the excitement
greatest a panic would seize him, and he would make haste to get to a
safer distance. On two such occasions she, as if afraid to lose him
altogether, quitted her beloved flower and moved after him, and after
wandering about for some time to no purpose, found another
flower-cluster to settle on. And so the queer wooing went on, and
seemed no nearer to a conclusion, when, to my surprise, I found that
I had been sitting and lying there, with eyes close to the female
spider, for an hour and a half. Once only, feeling a little bored, I
gently stroked her on the back, which appeared to please her as much
as if she had been a pig and I had scratched her back with my
walking-stick. But no sooner had the soothing effect passed off than
she began again watching the movements of that fantastic little lover
of hers, who loved her for her beautiful white body, but feared her
on account of those poison fangs which he could probably see every
time she smiled to encourage him. At the end of my long watch the
conclusion of the whole complex business seemed farther off than
ever: fear had got the mastery, and the male had put so great a
distance between them, and moved now {158} so languidly, that it
seemed useless to remain any longer.
[Sidenote: A little forest boy]
I had not been watching alone all this time: when I had been about
half an hour on the spot I had a visitor, a small miserable-looking
New Forest boy; he came walking towards me with a little crooked
stick in his hand, and asked me in a low, husky voice if I had seen a
pony in that part of the Forest. I told him sharply not to come too
near as his steps would disturb a spider I was watching. It did not
seem to surprise him that I was there by myself watching a spider,
but creeping up he subsided gently on the heath by my side and began
watching with me. At intervals when there was a lull in the
excitement of the spiders I could spare time for a glance at my poor
little companion. He was probably eleven or twelve years old, but
his stature was that of a boy of eight--a small, stunted creature,
meanly dressed, with light-coloured lustreless hair, pale-blue eyes,
and a weary sad expression on his pale face. Yet he called himself a
gipsy! But the south of England gipsies are a mixed and degenerate
lot. They are now so incessantly harried by the authorities that the
best of them settle down in the villages, while those who keep to the
old ways and vagrant open-air life are joined by tramps and wastrels
of every shade of colour. This little fellow had little or no Romany
blood in his watery veins.
He told me that his people were camping not far off, and that the
party consisted of his parents with six (the half-dozen youngest) of
their thirteen children. {159} They had a pony and trap; but the
pony had got away during the night, and the father and two or three
of the children were out looking for it in different directions. We
talked a little at intervals, and I found him curiously ignorant
concerning the wild life of the Forest. He assured me that he had
never seen the cuckoo, but he had heard of its singular habits, and
was anxious to know how big a bird it was, also its colour. In some
trees near us a wood-wren was uttering its sorrowful little wailing
note of anxiety, and when I asked him what bird it was, he answered
"a sparrer." Nevertheless he seemed to feel a dim sort of interest
in the spiders we were watching, and at length our intermittent
conversation ceased altogether. When at last, after a long silence,
I spoke, he did not answer, and glancing round I found that he had
gone to sleep. Lying there with eyes closed, his pale face on the
bright green turf, he looked almost corpse-like. Even his lips were
colourless. Getting up, I placed a penny piece on the turf beside
his little crooked stick, so that on awaking he should have a gleam
of happiness in his poor little soul, and went softly away. But he
was sleeping very soundly, for when after going a couple of hundred
yards I looked back he was still lying motionless on the same spot.
But when I looked back, and when, regaining the road, I went on my
way, and indeed for long hours after, I saw the boy vaguely, almost
like a boy of mist, and was hardly able to recall his features, so
faintly had he impressed me; while the spider on {160} her flower,
and the small male that wooed and won her many times yet never
ventured to take her, were stamped so vividly on my brain, that even
if I had wished it I could not have got rid of that persistent image.
It made me miserable to think that I had left, thousands of miles
away, a world of spiders exceeding in size, variety of shape and
beauty and richness of colouring those I found here--surpassing them,
too, in the marvellousness of their habits and that ferocity of
disposition which is without a parallel in nature. I wished I could
drop this burden of years so as to go back to them, to spend half a
lifetime in finding out some of their fascinating secrets. Finally,
I envied those who in future years will grow up in that green
continent, with this passion in their hearts, and have the happiness
which I had missed.
I, of course, knew that it was but the too vivid and persistent image
of that particular creature on which my attention had been fixed
which made me regard spiders generally as the most interesting beings
in nature--the proper study of mankind, in fact. But it is always
so; any new aspect, form, or manifestation of the principle of life,
at the moment it comes before the vision and the mind, is, to one who
is not a specialist, attractive beyond all others.
But, after all is said and done, I have as a fact spent many of my
Hampshire days at a distance from the spots I love best, and my
subject in this chapter will be of my sojourn in that eastern corner
of the county, in the village and parish which all {161} naturalists
love, and which many of them know so well.
[Sidenote: Visitors to Selborne]
It is told in the books that some seventy or eighty years ago an
adventurous naturalist journeyed down from London by rough ways to
the remote village of Selborne, to see it with his own eyes and
describe its condition to the world. The way is not long nor rough
in these times, and on every summer day, almost at every hour of the
day, strangers from all parts of the country, with not a few from
foreign lands, may be seen in the old village street. Of these
visitors that come like shadows, so depart, nine in every ten, or
possibly nineteen in every twenty, have no real interest in Gilbert
White and his work and the village he lived in, but are members of
that innumerable tribe of gadders about the land who religiously
visit every spot which they are told should be seen.
One morning, while staying at the village, in July 1901, I went at
six o'clock for a stroll on the common, and, on going up to the
Hanger, noticed a couple of bicycles lying at the foot of the hill;
then, half-way up I found the cyclists--two young ladies--resting on
the turf by the side of the Zigzag. They were conversing together as
I went by, and one having asked some question which I did not hear,
the other replied, "Oh no! he lived a very long time ago, and wrote a
history of Selborne. About birds and that." To which the other
returned, "Oh!" and then they talked of something else.
{162}
These ladies had probably got up at four o'clock that morning, and
ridden several miles to visit the village and go up the Hanger before
breakfast. Later in the day they would be at other places where
other Hampshire celebrities, big and little, had been born, or had
lived or died--Wootton St. Lawrence, Chawton, Steventon, Alresford,
Basing, Otterbourne, Buriton, Boldre, and a dozen more; and one, the
informed, would say to her uninformed companion, "Oh dear, no; he, or
she, lived a long, long time ago, somewhere about the eighteenth
century--or perhaps it was the sixteenth--and did something, or wrote
fiction, or history, or philosophy, and that." To which the other
would intelligently answer, "Oh!" and then they would remount their
bicycles, and go on to some other place.
[Sidenote: Selborne revisited]
Although a large majority of the visitors are of this description,
there are others of a different kind--the true pilgrims; and these
are mostly naturalists who have been familiar from boyhood with the
famous Letters, who love the memory of Gilbert White, and regard the
spot where he was born, to which he was so deeply attached, where his
ashes lie, as almost a sacred place. It is but natural that some of
these, who are the true and only Selbornians, albeit they may not
call themselves by a name which has been filched from them, should
have given an account of a first visit, their impression of a spot
familiar in description but never realised until seen, and of its
effect on the mind. But no one, so far as I know, has told of a
second or of any subsequent {163} visit. There is a good reason for
this, for though the place is in itself beautiful and never loses its
charm, it is impossible for anyone to recover the feeling experienced
on a first sight. If I, unlike others, write of Selborne revisited,
it is not because there is anything fresh to say of an old, vanished
emotion, a feeling which forms a singular and delightful experience
in the life of many a naturalist, and is thereafter a pleasing memory
but nothing more.
Selborne is now to me like any other pleasant rural place: in the
village street, in the churchyard, by the Lyth and the Bourne, on the
Hanger and the Common, I feel that I am
In a green and undiscovered ground;
the feeling that the naturalist must or should always experience in
all places where nature is, even as Coventry Patmore experienced it
in the presence of women. He had paid more than ordinary attention
to their ways, and knew that there was yet much to learn.
[Sidenote: An owl at Alton]
How irrecoverable the first feeling is--a feeling which may be almost
like the sense of an unseen presence, as I have described it in an
account of my first visit to Selborne in the concluding chapter in a
book on _Birds and Man_--was impressed upon me on the occasion of a
second visit two or three years later. There was then no return of
the feeling--no faintest trace of it. The village was like any
other, only more interesting because of several amusing incidents in
bird-life which I by chance {164} witnessed when there. Animals in a
state of nature do not often move us to mirth, but on this occasion I
was made to laugh several times. At first it was at an owl at Alton.
I arrived there in the evening of a wet, rough day in May 1898, too
late to walk the five miles that remained to my destination. After
securing a room at the hotel, I hurried out to look at the fine old
church, which Gilbert White admired in his day; but it was growing
dark, so that there was nothing for me but to stand in the wind and
rain in the wet churchyard, and get a general idea of the outline of
the building, with its handsome, shingled spire standing tall against
the wild, gloomy sky. By-and-by a vague figure appeared out of the
clouds, travelling against the wind towards the spire, and looking
more like a ragged piece of newspaper whirled about the heavens than
any living thing. It was a white owl, and after watching him for
some time I came to the conclusion that he was trying to get to the
vane on the spire. A very idle ambition it seemed, for although he
succeeded again and again in getting to within a few yards of the
point aimed at, he was on each occasion struck by a fresh violent
gust and driven back to a great distance, often quite out of sight in
the gloom. But presently he would reappear, still striving to reach
the vane. A crazy bird! but I could not help admiring his pluck, and
greatly wondered what his secret motive in aiming at that windy perch
could be. And at last, after so many defeats, he succeeded in
grasping the metal cross-bar with his {165} crooked talons. The
wind, with all its fury, could not tear him from it, and after a
little flapping he was able to pull himself up; then, bending down,
he deliberately wiped his beak on the bar and flew away! This, then,
had been his powerful, mysterious motive--just to wipe his beak,
which he could very well have wiped on any branch or barn-roof or
fence, and saved himself that tremendous labour!
It was an extreme instance of the tyrannous effect of habit on a wild
animal. Doubtless this bird had been accustomed, after devouring his
first mouse, to fly to the vane, where he could rest for a few
minutes, taking a general view of the place, and wipe his beak at the
same time; and the habit had become so strong that he could not forgo
his visit even on so tempestuous an evening. His beak, if he had
wiped it anywhere but on that lofty cross-bar, would not have seemed
quite clean.
At Selborne, in the garden at the Wakes, I noticed a pair of pied
wagtails busy nest-building in the ivy on the wall. One of the birds
flew up to the roof of the house, where, I suppose, he caught sight
of a fly in an upper window which looked on to the roof, for all at
once he rose up and dashed against the pane with great force; and as
the glass pane hit back with equal force, he was thrown on to the
tiles under the window. Nothing daunted, he got up and dashed
against the glass a second time, with the same result. The action
was repeated five times, then the poor baffled bird withdrew from the
contest, and, drawing in his head, sat hunched up for two or three
minutes {166} perfectly motionless. The volatile creature would not
have sat there so quietly if he had not hurt himself rather badly.
[Sidenote: Cockerel and martin]
One more of the amusing incidents witnessed during my visit must be
told. Several pairs of martins were making their nests under the
eaves of a cottage opposite to the Queen's Arms, where I stayed; and
on going out about seven o'clock in the morning, I stood to watch
some of the birds getting mud at a pool which had been made by the
night's rain in the middle of the street. It happened that some
fowls had come out of the inn yard, and were walking or standing near
the puddle picking up gravel or any small morsel they could find.
Among them was a cockerel, a big, ungainly, yellowish Cochin, in the
hobbledehoy stage of that ugliest and most ungraceful variety. For
some time this bird stood idly by the pool, but by-and-by the
movements of the martins coming and going between the cottage and the
puddle attracted his attention, and he began to watch them with a
strange interest; and then all at once he made a vicious peck at one
occupied in deftly gathering a pellet of clay close to his great,
feathered feet. The martin flitted lightly away, and after a turn or
two, dropped down again at almost the same spot. The fowl had
watched it, and as soon as it came down moved a step or two nearer to
it with deliberation, then made a violent dash and peck at it, and
was no nearer to hitting it than before. The same thing occurred
again and again, the martin growing shyer after each attack; then
other martins {167} came, and he, finding them less cautious than the
first, stalked them in turn and made futile attacks on them.
Convinced at last that it was not possible for him to injure or touch
these elusive little creatures, he determined that they should gather
no mud at that place, and with head up he watched them circling like
great flies around him, dashing savagely at them whenever they came
lower, or paused in their flight, or dropped lightly down on the
margin. It was a curious and amusing spectacle--the big, shapeless,
lumbering bird chasing them round and round the pool in his stupid
spite; they by contrast so beautiful in their shining purple mantle,
snow-white breast, and stockinged feet, their fairy-like aerial
bodies that responded so quickly to every motion of their bright,
lively, little minds. It was like a very heavy policeman "moving on"
a flock of fairies.
One remembers Æsop's dog in the manger, and thinks that this and many
of the apologues are really nothing but everyday incidents in animal
life, told just as they happened, with the addition of speech (in
some cases quite unnecessary) put in the mouth of the various actors.
Æsop's dog did not want to be disturbed in his bed of hay, and was
not such an unredeemed curmudgeon as the Selborne fowl; but this
unlovely temper or feeling--spite and petty tyranny and
persecution--is exceedingly common in the lower animals, from the
higher vertebrates down even to the insects.
My third visit to Selborne was in July 1901. I {168} went there on
the 12th and stayed till the 23rd. Now July, when the business of
breeding is over or far advanced and all the best songsters are
dropping into silence, and when the foliage is deepening to a uniform
monotonous dark green, is, next to August, the least interesting
month of the year. But at Selborne I was singularly fortunate,
although the season was excessively dry and hot. The heat was indeed
great all over the country, but I doubt if there exists a warmer
village than Selborne, unless it be one in some, to me unknown,
coombe in Cornwall or Devon. Thus on 19th July, when the temperature
rose to ninety degrees in the shade in the City of London, we had it
as high as ninety-four degrees in Selborne. The village lies in a
kind of trough at the foot of a wall-like hill. If it were not for
the moisture and the greenery that surrounds and almost covers it,
hanging, as it were, like a cloud above it, the heat would doubtless
have been even greater.
[Sidenote: Crickets]
These conditions, in whatever way they may affect the human
inhabitants, appear to be exceedingly favourable to the
house-crickets. It was impossible for anyone to walk in the village
of an evening without noticing the noise they made. The cottages on
both sides of the street seemed to be alive with them, so that,
walking, one was assailed by their shrilling in both ears. Hearing
them so much sent me in search of their wild cousin of the fields and
of the mole-cricket, but no sound of them could I hear. It was too
late for them to sing. No doubt--as White conjectured--the
artificial conditions which {169} civilised man has made for the
house-cricket have considerably altered its habits. Like the canary
and other finches that thrive in captivity, a uniform indoor climate,
with food easily found, have made it a singer all the year round. I
trust we shall never take to the Japanese custom of caging insects
for the sake of their music; but it is probable that a result of
keeping tamed or domesticated field-crickets would be to set them
singing at all seasons against the cricket on the hearth. A listener
would then be able to judge which of the two "sweet and tiny cousins"
is the better performer. The house-cricket has to my ears a louder,
coarser, a more creaky sound; but we hear him, as a rule, in a room,
singing, as it were, confined in a big box; and I remember the case
of the skylark, and the disagreeable effect of its shrill and harsh
spluttering song when heard from a cage hanging against a wall. The
field-cricket, like the soaring skylark, has the wide expanse of open
air to soften and etherealise the sound.
Gilbert White lived in an age which had its own little,
firmly-established, conventional ideas about nature, which he,
open-air man though he was, did not escape, or else felt bound to
respect. Thus, the prolonged, wild, beautiful call of the peacock,
the finest sound made by any domesticated creature, was to the
convention of the day "disgustful," and as a disgustful sound he sets
it down accordingly; and when he speaks of the keen pleasure it gave
him to listen to the field-cricket, he writes in a somewhat
apologetic strain:
{170}
Sounds do not always give us pleasure according to their
sweetness and melody, nor do harsh sounds always displease. We
are more apt to be captivated or disgusted with the associations
which they promote than with the notes themselves. Thus the
shrilling of the field-cricket, though sharp and stridulous, yet
marvellously delights some hearers, filling their minds with a
train of summer ideas of everything that is rural, verdurous, and
joyous.
The delight I know, but I cannot wholly agree with the explanation.
A couple of months before this visit to Selborne, on 25th May, on
passing some small grass-fields, enclosed in high, untrimmed hedges,
on the border of a pine wood near Hythe, by Southampton Water, I all
at once became conscious of a sound, which indeed had been for some
considerable time in my ears, increasing in volume as I went on until
it forced my attention to it. When I listened, I found myself in a
place where field-crickets were in extraordinary abundance; there
must have been many hundreds within hearing distance, and their
delicate shrilling came from the grass and hedges all round me. It
was as if all the field-crickets in the county had congregated and
were holding a grand musical festival at that spot. A dozen or
twenty house-crickets in a kitchen would have made more noise; this
was not loud, nor could it properly be described as a noise; it was
more like a subtle music without rise or fall or change; or like a
continuous, diffused, silvery-bright, musical hum, which surrounded
one like an atmosphere, and at the same time pervaded and trembled
through one like a vibration. It was certainly very delightful, and
the feeling in this instance was not due to {171} association, but, I
think, to the intrinsic beauty of the sound itself.
[Sidenote: Wild flowers]
The Selborne stream, or Bourne, with its meadows and tangled copses
on either side, was my favourite noonday haunt. The volume of water
does not greatly diminish during the summer months, but in many
places the bed of the stream was quite grown over with aquatic
plants, topped with figwort, huge water-agrimony, with its masses of
powdery, flesh-coloured blooms, creamy meadow-sweet, and rose-purple
loosestrife, and willow-herb with its appetising odour of codlins and
cream. The wild musk, or monkey-flower, a Hampshire plant about
which there will be much to say in another chapter, was also common.
At one spot a mass of it grew at the foot of a high bank on the
water's edge; from the top of the bank long branches of briar-rose
trailed down, and the rich, pure yellow mimulus blossoms and
ivory-white roses of the briar were seen together. An even lovelier
effect was produced at another spot by the mingling of the yellow
flowers with the large turquoise-blue water forget-me-nots.
The most charming of the Selborne wild plants that flower in July is
the musk mallow. It was quite common round the village, and perhaps
the finest plant I saw was in the churchyard, growing luxuriantly by
a humble grave near the little gate that opens to the Lyth and
Bourne. As it is known to few persons, there must almost every day
have been strangers and pilgrims in the churchyard who looked with
admiration on that conspicuous plant, {172} with its deep-cut,
scented geranium-like, beautiful leaves, tender grey-green in colour,
and its profusion of delicate, silky, rose-coloured flowers. Many
would look on it as some rare exotic, and wonder at its being there
by that lowly green mound. But to the residents it was a musk mallow
and nothing more--a weed in the churchyard.
When one morning I found two men mowing the grass, I called their
attention to this plant and asked them to spare it, telling them that
it was one which the daily visitors to the village would admire above
all the red geraniums and other gardeners' flowers which they would
have to leave untouched. This simple request appeared to put them
out a good deal; they took their hats off and wiped the sweat from
their foreheads, and after gravely pondering the matter for some
time, said they would "see about it" or "bear it in mind" when they
came round to that side. In the afternoon, when the mowing was done,
I returned and found that the musk mallow had not been spared.
During my stay I was specially interested in two of the common
Selborne birds--the cirl bunting and the swift. At about four
o'clock each morning the lively, vigorous song of the cirl bunting
would be heard from the gardens or ground of the Wakes, at the foot
of the hill. From four to six, at intervals, was his best
singing-time; later in the day he sang at much longer intervals.
There appeared to be three pairs of breeding birds: one at the Wakes,
another on the top of the hill to the left of the Zigzag path, {173}
and a third below the churchyard. The cock bird of the last pair
sang at intervals every day during my visit from a tree in the
churchyard, and from a big sycamore growing at the side of it. On
14th July I had a good opportunity of judging the penetrative power
of this bunting's voice, for by chance, just as the bells commenced
ringing for the six o'clock Sunday evening service, the bird, perched
on a small cypress in the churchyard, began to sing. Though only
about forty yards from the tower, he was not in the least discomposed
by the clanging of the bells, but sang at proper intervals the usual
number of times--six or eight--his high, incisive voice sounding
distinct through that tempest of jangled metallic music.
[Sidenote: Cirl bunting]
I was often at Farringdon, a village close by, and there, too, the
churchyard had its cirl bunting, singing merrily at intervals from a
perch not above thirty yards from the building. And as at Selborne
and Farringdon, so I have found it in most places in Hampshire,
especially in the southern half of the county; the cirl is the
village bunting whose favourite singing place is in the quiet
churchyard or the shade-trees at the farm: compared with other
members of the genus he might almost be called our domestic bunting.
The yellowhammer is never heard in a village: at Selborne to find him
one had to climb the hill and go out on the common, and there he
could be heard drawling out his lazy song all day long. How curious
to think that Gilbert White never distinguished between these two
species, although it {174} is probable that he heard the cirl on
every summer day during the greater part of his life.
[Sidenote: Visiting swifts]
The swifts at Selborne interested me even more, and I spent a good
many hours observing them; but the swifts I watched were not, strange
to say, the native Selborne birds. When I arrived I took particular
notice of the swallows and swifts--a natural thing to do in Gilbert
White's village. The swallows, I was sorry to find, had decreased so
greatly in numbers since my former visits that there were but few
left. The house-martins, though still not scarce, had also fallen
off a good deal. Of swifts there were about eight or nine pairs, all
with young in their nests, in holes under the eaves of different
cottages. The old birds appeared to be very much taken up with
feeding their young: they ranged about almost in solitude, never more
than four or five birds being seen together, and that only in the
evening, and even when in company they were silent and their flight
comparatively languid. This continued from the 12th to the 16th, but
on that day, at a little past seven o'clock in the evening, I was
astonished to see a party of over fifty swifts rushing through the
air over the village in the usual violent way, uttering excited
screams as they streamed by. Rising to some height in the air, they
would scatter and float above the church for a few moments, then
close and rush down and stream across the Plestor, coming as low as
the roofs of the cottages, then along the village street for a
distance of forty or fifty yards, after which they would mount up and
return to the {175} church, to repeat the same race over the same
course again and again. They continued their pastime for an hour or
longer, after which the flock began to diminish, and in a short time
had quite melted away.
On the following evening I was absent, but some friends staying at
the village watched for me, and they reported that the birds appeared
after seven o'clock and played about the place for an hour or two,
then vanished as before.
On the afternoon of the 18th I went with my friends to the ground
behind the churchyard, from which a view of the sky all round can be
obtained. Four or five swifts were visible quietly flying about the
sky, all wide apart. At six o'clock a little bunch of half a dozen
swifts formed, and began to chase each other in the usual way, and
more birds, singly, and in twos and threes, began to arrive. Some of
these were seen coming to the spot from the direction of Alton.
Gradually the bunch grew until it was a big crowd numbering seventy
to eighty birds, and as it grew the excitement of the birds
increased: until eight o'clock they kept up their aerial mad gambols,
and then, as on the previous evenings, the flock gradually dispersed.
On the evening of the 19th the performance was repeated, the birds
congregated numbering about sixty. On the 20th the number had
diminished to about forty, and an equal number returned on the
following evening; and this was the last time. We watched in vain
for them on the 22nd: no swifts {176} but the half-a-dozen Selborne
birds usually to be seen towards evening were visible; nor did they
return on any other day up to the 24th, when my visit came to an end.
It is possible, and even probable, that these swifts which came from
a distance to hold their evening games at Selborne were birds that
had already finished breeding, and were now free to go from home and
spend a good deal of time in purely recreative exercises. The
curious point is that they should have made choice of this sultry
spot for such a purpose. It was, moreover, new to me to find that
swifts do sometimes go a distance from home to indulge in such
pastimes. I had always thought that the birds seen pursuing each
other with screams through the sky at any place were the dwellers and
breeders in the locality; and this is probably the idea that most
persons have.
I wish I could have visited Selborne again last July, in order to
find out whether or not the evening gatherings and pastimes of the
swifts occur annually. But I was engaged elsewhere, and at the
village I failed to discover any person with interest enough in such
subjects to watch for me. It would have been very strange if I had
found such a one.
It was not until October 1902 that I went back, two months after the
swifts had gone; but I was well occupied for two or three weeks
during this latest visit in observing the ways of a grasshopper.
There has already been much about insects in {177} this book, and it
may seem that I am giving a disproportionate amount of space to these
negligible atomies; nevertheless I should not like to conclude this
chapter without adding an account of yet another species, one indeed
worthy to rank among the Insect Notables of Southern England
described in a former chapter. The account comes best in this place,
since the species had seemed rare, or nowhere abundant, until, in
October, I found it most common in Selborne parish; and here I came
to know it well, as I had come to know its great green relation,
_Locusta viridissima_, at Longparish. Both are of one family, and
are night singers, but the Selborne insect belongs to a different
genus--_Thamnotrizon_--of which it is the only British
representative; and in colour and habits it differs widely from the
green grasshoppers. The members of this charming family are found in
all warm and temperate countries throughout the world: in this island
we may say that they are at the extreme northern limit of their
range. Of our nine British species only three are found north of the
Thames. _Thamnotrizon cinereus_ is one of these, but is mainly a
southern species, and the latest of our grasshoppers to come to
maturity. In September it is full grown, and may be heard until
November. It is much smaller than _viridissima_, and is very dark in
colour, the female, which has no vestige of wings, being of a uniform
deep olive-brown, except the under surface, which is bright
buttercup-yellow. The male, though smaller than the female, and like
her in colour, has a more {178} distinguished appearance on account
of his small aborted wings, which serve as an instrument of music,
and form a disc of ashy grey colour on his black and brown body.
[Sidenote: The black grasshopper]
Unless looked at closely this insect appears black, and might very
well be called the black grasshopper. And here it is necessary once
more to protest against what must be regarded as a gross neglect of a
plain duty on the part of writers on our native insects who will not
give English names even to the most common and interesting species.
Unless it has a vernacular name they will go on speaking of it as
_Thamnotrizon cinereus_, _Cordulegaster annulatus_, or whatever it
may be, to the end of time. This grasshopper has no common name that
I can discover: I have caught and shown it to the country people,
asking them to name it, and they informed me that it was a
"grasshopper," or else a "cricket." Black, or black and yellow, or
autumn grasshopper would do very well: but any English name would be
better than the entomologist's ponderous double name compounded out
of two dead languages.
Our black grasshopper lives in grass and herbage, in the shade of
bushes and trees, and so long as the weather is hot it is hard to
find him, as he keeps in the shade. He is furthermore the shyest and
wariest of his family, and ready to vanish on the least alarm. He
does not leap, but slips away into hiding; and if one goes too near,
or attempts to take him, he suddenly vanishes. He simply drops down
through the leaves to the earth, and sits close and motionless {179}
at the roots on the dark mould, and unless touched will not move.
When traced down to his hiding-place he leaps away, and again sits
motionless, where, owing to his dark colour on the dark soil, he is
invisible. Later, when the weather grows cool, he comes out and sits
on a leaf, basking by the hour in the sun, his eyes turned from it;
and it is then easy to find him, the dark colour making him appear
very conspicuous on a green leaf. Occasionally he sings in the
afternoon, but, as a rule, he begins at dusk, and continues for some
hours. To sing, the males often go high up in the bushes, and when
emitting their sound are almost constantly on the move.
The sound is a cricket-like chirp; it is never sustained, but in
quality it resembles the subtle musical shrilling of the
_viridissima_, although it does not carry half so far.
In disposition the two species, the black and great green
grasshoppers, are very unlike. The female _viridissima_, we have
seen, is the most indolent and placid creature imaginable, while the
males are perpetually challenging and fighting one another. The
males of the black grasshopper I could never detect fighting. It is
not easy to observe them, as they sing mostly at night; and as a rule
when singing they are well hidden by the leaves. But I have
occasionally found two males singing together, apparently against
each other, when I would watch them, and although as they moved about
they constantly passed and repassed so close that they all but
touched, they never struck at each other, nor put themselves into
fighting {180} attitudes. One day I found two males sitting on a
leaf together, side by side, like the best of friends, basking in the
sun.
The female, on the other hand, is a most unpleasant creature, so
restless that in confinement she spends the whole time in running
about in her cage or box, incessantly trying to get out, examining
everything, eating of everything given her, and persecuting any other
insect placed with her. When I put males and females together the
poor males were kicked and bitten until they died.
Before visiting Selborne in October, it had seemed to me that hunting
for this grasshopper was a most fascinating pursuit. It was very
hard to find him by day, and when by chance you caught sight of him,
sitting on a green leaf in the sun and looking like a small, very
dark-coloured frog with abnormally long hind legs, it was generally
in a bramble bush, into which he would vanish when approached too
near.
When at Selborne, one evening I heard one singing among the herbage
at the foot of the Hanger, and next morning I found one at the same
spot--a female, sitting on a gold-red fallen beech leaf, her
blackness on the brilliant leaf making her very conspicuous. A
little later, when the wet weather improved, I found the grasshopper
all about the village, and even in it; but it was most abundant near
the Well Head and in the hedges between Selborne and Nore Hill. Here
on a sunny morning I could find a score or more of them, and at dark
they could be heard in numbers chirping in all the hedges.
{181}