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.
There are no more refreshing places in Hampshire, one might almost
say in England, than the green level valleys of the Test and Itchen
that wind, alternately widening and narrowing, through the downland
country to Southampton Water. Twin rivers they may be called,
flowing at no great distance apart through the same kind of country,
and closely alike in their general features: land and water
intermixed--greenest water-meadows and crystal currents that divide
and subdivide and join again, and again separate, forming many a
miniature island and long slip of wet meadow with streams on either
side. At all times refreshing to the sight and pleasant to dwell by,
they are best
When it is summer and the green is deep.
Greens of darkest bulrushes, tipped with bright brown panicles,
growing in masses where the water is wide and shallowest; of
grey-green graceful reeds and of tallest reed-mace with dark velvety
brown {243} spikes; behind them all, bushes and trees--silvery-leafed
willow and poplar, and dark alder, and old thorns and brambles in
tangled masses; and always in the foreground lighter and brighter
sedges, glaucous green flags, mixed with great hemp agrimony, with
flesh-coloured, white-powdered flowers, and big-leafed comfrey, and
scores of other water and moisture-loving plants.
Through this vegetation, this infinite variety of refreshing greens
and graceful forms, flow the rapid rivers, crystal-clear and cold
from the white chalk, a most beautiful water, with floating
water-grass in it--the fascinating _Poa fluviatilis_ which, rooted in
the pebbly bed, looks like green loosened wind-blown hair swaying and
trembling in the ever-crinkled, swift current.
[Sidenote: Test and Itchen]
They are not long rivers--the Test and Itchen--but long enough for
men with unfevered blood in their veins to find sweet and peaceful
homes on their margins. I think I know quite a dozen villages on the
former stream, and fifteen or sixteen on the latter, in any one of
which I could spend long years in perfect contentment. There are
towns, too, ancient Romsey and Winchester, and modern hideous
Eastleigh; but the little centres are best to live in. These are,
indeed, among the most characteristic Hampshire villages; mostly
small, with old thatched cottages, unlike, yet harmonising,
irregularly placed along the roadside; each with its lowly walls set
among gaily coloured flowers; the farm with its rural sounds and
smells, its big horses and {244} milch-cows led and driven along the
quiet streets; the small ancient church with its low, square tower,
or grey shingled spire; and great trees standing singly or in groups
or rows--oak and elm and ash; and often some ivy-grown relic of
antiquity--ivy, indeed, everywhere. The charm of these villages that
look as natural and one with the scene as chalk down and trees and
green meadows, and have an air of immemorial quiet and a human life
that is part of nature's life, unstrenuous, slow and sweet, has not
yet been greatly disturbed. It is not here as in some parts of
Hampshire, and as it is pretty well everywhere in Surrey, that most
favoured county, the Xanadu of the mighty ones of the money-market,
where they oftenest decree their lordly pleasure-domes. Those vast
red-brick habitations of the Kubla Khans of the city which stare and
glare at you from all openings in pine woods, across wide heaths and
commons, and from hill-sides and hill-tops, produce the idea that
they were turned out complete at some stupendous manufactory of
houses at a distance, and sent out by the hundred to be set up
wherever wanted, and where they are almost always utterly out of
keeping with their surroundings, and consequently a blot on and a
disfigurement of the landscape.
[Sidenote: Itchen Valley]
Happily the downland slopes overlooking these green valleys have so
far been neglected by the class of persons who live in mansions; for
the time being they are ours, and by "ours" I mean all those who love
and reverence this earth. But which of the two {245} is best I
cannot say. One prefers the Test and another the Itchen, doubtless
because in a matter of this kind the earth-lover will invariably
prefer the spot he knows most intimately; and for this reason, much
as I love the Test, long as I would linger by it, I love the Itchen
more, having had a closer intimacy with it. I dare say that some of
my friends, old Wykehamists, who as boys caught their first trout
close by the ancient sacred city and have kept up their acquaintance
with its crystal currents, will laugh at me for writing as I do. But
there are places, as there are faces, which draw the soul, and with
which, in a little while, one becomes strangely intimate.
The first English cathedral I ever saw was that of Winchester: that
was a long time ago; it was then and on a few subsequent occasions
that I had glimpses of the river that runs by it. They were like
momentary sights of a beautiful face, caught in passing, of some
person unknown. Then it happened that in June 1900, cycling
Londonwards from Beaulieu and the coast by Lymington, I came to the
valley, and to a village about half-way between Winchester and
Alresford, on a visit to friends in their summer fishing retreat.
[Sidenote: A riverside cottage]
They had told me about their cottage, which serves them all the best
purposes of a lodge in the vast wilderness. Fortunately in this case
the "boundless contiguity of shade" of the woods is some little
distance away, on the other side of the ever green Itchen valley,
which, narrowing at this spot, is not much more than a couple of
hundred yards wide. {246} A long field's length away from the
cottage is the little ancient, rustic, tree-hidden village. The
cottage, too, is pretty well hidden by trees, and has the reed- and
sedge- and grass-green valley and swift river before it, and behind
and on each side green fields and old untrimmed hedges with a few old
oak trees growing both in the hedgerows and the fields. There is
also an ancient avenue of limes which leads nowhere and whose origin
is forgotten. The ground under the trees is overgrown with long
grass and nettles and burdock; nobody comes or goes by it, it is only
used by the cattle, the white and roan and strawberry shorthorns that
graze in the fields and stand in the shade of the limes on very hot
days. Nor is there any way or path to the cottage; but one must go
and come over the green fields, wet or dry. The avenue ends just at
the point where the gently sloping chalk down touches the level
valley, and the half-hidden, low-roofed cottage stands just there,
with the shadow of the last two lime trees falling on it at one side.
It was an ideal spot for a nature-lover and an angler to pitch his
tent upon. Here a small plot of ground, including the end of the
lime-tree avenue, was marked out, a hedge of sweetbriar planted round
it, the cottage erected, and a green lawn made before it on the river
side, and beds of roses planted at the back.
Nothing more--no gravel walks; no startling scarlet geraniums, no
lobelias, no cinerarias, no calceolarias, nor other gardeners'
abominations to hurt one's eyes and make one's head ache. And no
dog, {247} nor cat, nor chick, nor child--only the wild birds to keep
one company. They knew how to appreciate its shelter and
solitariness; they were all about it, and built their nests amid the
great green masses of ivy, honeysuckle, Virginia creeper, rose, and
wild clematis which covered the trellised walls and part of the red
roof with a twelve years' luxuriant growth. To this delectable spot
I returned on 21st July to see the changeful summer of 1900 out, my
friends having gone north and left me their cottage for a habitation.
"There is the wind on the heath, brother," and one heartily agrees
with the half-mythical Petulengro that it is a very good thing; it
had, indeed, been blowing off and on in my face for many months past;
and from shadeless heaths and windy downs, and last of all, from the
intolerable heat and dusty desolation of London in mid-July, it was a
delightful change to this valley.
During the very hot days that followed it was pleasure enough to sit
in the shade of the limes most of the day; there was coolness,
silence, melody, fragrance; and, always before me, the sight of that
moist green valley, which made one cool simply to look at it, and
never wholly lost its novelty. The grass and herbage grow so
luxuriantly in the water-meadows that the cows grazing there were
half-hidden in their depth; and the green was tinged with the purple
of seeding grasses, and red of dock and sorrel, and was everywhere
splashed with creamy white of meadow-sweet. The channels of the
swift {248} many-channelled river were fringed with the livelier
green of sedges and reed-mace, and darkest green of bulrushes, and
restful grey of reeds not yet in flower.
[Sidenote: Bird visitors]
The old limes were now in their fullest bloom; and the hotter the day
the greater the fragrance, the flower, unlike the woodbine and
sweetbriar, needing no dew nor rain to bring out its deliciousness.
To me, sitting there, it was at the same time a bath and atmosphere
of sweetness, but it was very much more than that to all the
honey-eating insects in the neighbourhood. Their murmur was loud all
day till dark, and from the lower branches that touched the grass
with leaf and flower to their very tops the trees were peopled with
tens and with hundreds of thousands of bees. Where they all came
from was a mystery; somewhere there should be a great harvest of
honey and wax as a result of all this noise and activity. It was a
soothing noise, according with an idle man's mood in the July
weather; and it harmonised with, forming, so to speak, an appropriate
background to, the various distinct and individual sounds of bird
life.
The birds were many, and the tree under which I sat was their
favourite resting-place; for not only was it the largest of the
limes, but it was the last of the row, and overlooked the valley, so
that when they flew across from the wood on the other side they
mostly came to it. It was a very noble tree, eighteen feet in
circumference near the ground; at about twenty feet from the root,
the trunk divided into two central boles and several of lesser size,
and {249} these all threw out long horizontal and drooping branches,
the lowest of which feathered down to the grass. One sat as in a
vast pavilion, and looked up to a height of sixty or seventy feet
through wide spaces of shadow and green sunlight, and sunlit
golden-green foliage and honey-coloured blossom, contrasting with
brown branches and with masses of darkest mistletoe.
Among the constant succession of bird visitors to the tree above me
were the three pigeons--ring-dove, stock-dove, and turtle-dove;
finches, tree-warblers, tits of four species, and the wren,
tree-creeper, nuthatch, and many more. The best vocalists had ceased
singing; the last nightingale I had heard utter its full song was in
the oak woods of Beaulieu on 27th June: and now all the
tree-warblers, and with them chaffinch, thrush, blackbird, and robin,
had become silent. The wren was the leading songster, beginning his
bright music at four o'clock in the morning, and the others, still in
song, that visited me were the greenfinch, goldfinch, swallow,
dunnock, and cirl bunting. From my seat I could also hear the songs
in the valley of the reed and sedge warblers, reed-bunting, and
grasshopper-warbler. These, and the polyglot starling, and cooing
and crooning doves, made the last days of July at this spot seem not
the silent season we are accustomed to call it.
Of these singers the goldfinch was the most pleasing. The bird that
sang near me had assisted in rearing a brood in a nest on a low
branch a few yards away, but {250} he still returned from the fields
at intervals to sing; and seen, as I now saw him a dozen times a day,
perched among the lime leaves and blossoms at the end of a slender
bough, in his black and gold and crimson livery, he was by far the
prettiest of my feathered visitors.
[Sidenote: Cirl bunting]
But the cirl bunting, the inferior singer, interested me most, for I
am somewhat partial to the buntings, and he is the best of them, and
the one I knew least about from personal observation.
On my way hither at the end of June, somewhere between Romsey and
Winchester, a cock cirl bunting in fine plumage flew up before me and
perched on the wire of a roadside fence. It was a welcome encounter,
and, alighting, I stood for some time watching him. I did not know
that I was in a district where this pretty species is more numerous
than in any other place in England--as common, in fact, as the
universal yellowhammer, and commoner than the more local
corn-bunting. Here in July and August, in the course of an
afternoon's walk, in any place where there are trees and grass
fields, one can count on hearing half a dozen birds sing, every one
of them probably the parent of a nestful of young. For this is the
cirl bunting's pleasant habit. He assists in feeding and
safeguarding the young, even as other songsters do who cease singing
when this burden is laid upon them; but he is a bird of placid
disposition, and takes his task more quietly than most; and, after
returning from the fields with several grasshoppers in his throat and
{251} beak and feeding his fledglings, he takes a rest, and at
intervals in the day flies to his favourite tree, and repeats his
blithe little song half a dozen times.
The song is not quite accurately described in the standard
ornithological works as exactly like that of the yellowhammer, only
without the thin, drawn-out note at the end, and therefore
inferior--the little bit of bread, but without the cheese. It
certainly resembles the yellowhammer's song, being a short note, a
musical chirp, rapidly repeated several times. But the yellowhammer
varies his song as to its time, the notes being sometimes fast and
sometimes slow. The cirl's song is always the same in this respect,
and is always a more rapid song than that of the other species. So
rapid is it that, heard at a distance, it acquires almost the
character of a long trill. In quality, too, it is the better
song--clearer, brighter, brisker--and it carries farther; on still
mornings I could hear one bird's song very distinctly at a distance
of two hundred and fifty yards. The only good description of the
cirl bunting's song--as well as the best general account of the
bird's habits--which I have found, is in J. C. Bellamy's _Natural
History of South Devon_ (Plymouth and London), 1839, probably a
forgotten book.
The best singer among the British buntings, he is also to my mind the
prettiest bird. When he is described as black and brown, and lemon
and sulphur-yellow, and olive and lavender-grey, and chestnut-red, we
are apt to think that the effect of so many colours thrown upon his
small body cannot be very {252} pleasing. But it is not so; these
various colours are so harmoniously disposed, and have, in the
lighter and brighter hues in the living bird, such a flower-like
freshness and delicacy, that the effect is really charming.
When, in June, I first visited the cottage, my host took me into his
dressing-room, and from it we watched a pair of cirl buntings bring
food to their young in a nest in a small cypress standing just five
yards from the window. The young birds were in the pinfeather stage,
but they were unfortunately taken a very few days later by a rat, or
stoat, or by that winged nest-robber the jackdaw, whose small cunning
grey eyes are able to see into so many hidden things.
The birds themselves did not grieve overlong at their loss: the day
after the nest was robbed the cock was heard singing--and he
continued to sing every day from his favourite tree, an old black
poplar growing outside the sweetbriar hedge in front of the cottage.
About this bird of a brave and cheerful disposition, more will have
to be said in the next chapter. It is, or was, my desire to describe
events in the valley at this changeful period from late July to
October in the order of their occurrence, but in all the rest of the
present chapter, which will be given to the river birds exclusively,
the order must be broken.
[Sidenote: Water-birds]
Undoubtedly the three commonest water-birds inhabiting inland waters
throughout England are {253} the coot, moor-hen, and dabchick, or
little grebe; and on account of their abundance and general
distribution they are almost as familiar as our domestic birds. Yet
one never grows tired of seeing and hearing them, as we do of noting
the actions of other species that inhabit the same places; and the
reason for this--a very odd reason it seems!--is because these three
common birds, members of two orders which the modern scientific
zoologist has set down among the lowest, and therefore, as he tells
us, most stupid, of the feathered inhabitants of the globe, do
actually exhibit a quicker intelligence and greater variety in their
actions and habits than the species which are accounted their
superiors.
The coot is not so abundant as the other two; also he is less varied
in his colour, and less lively in his motions, and consequently
attracts us less. The moor-hen is the most engaging, as well as the
commonest--a bird concerning which more entertaining matter has been
related in our natural histories than of any other native species.
And I now saw a great deal of him, and of the other two as well.
From the cottage windows, and from the lawn outside, one looked upon
the main current of the river, and there were the birds always in
sight; and when not looking one could hear them. Without paying
particular attention to them their presence in the river was a
constant source of interest and amusement.
At one spot, where the stream made a slight bend, the floating
water-weeds brought down by the current were always being caught by
scattered bulrushes {254} growing a few feet from the edge; the
arrested weeds formed a minute group of islets, and on these
convenient little refuges and resting-places in the waterway, a dozen
or more of the birds could be seen at most times. The old coots
would stand on the floating weeds and preen and preen their plumage
by the hour. They were like mermaids, for ever combing out their
locks, and had the clear stream for a mirror. The dull-brown,
white-breasted young coots, now fully grown, would meanwhile swim
about picking up their own food. The moor-hens were with them,
preening and feeding, and one had its nest there. It was a very big
conspicuous nest, built up on a bunch of floating weeds, and formed,
when the bird was sitting on its eggs, a pretty and curious object;
for every day fresh bright-green sedge leaves were plucked and woven
round it, and on that high bright-green nest, as on a throne, the
bird sat, and when I went near the edge of the water, she (or he)
would flirt her tail to display the snowy-white under-feathers, and
nod her head, and stand up as if to display her pretty green legs, so
as to let me see and admire all her colours; and finally, not being
at all shy, she would settle quietly down again.
[Sidenote: Little grebes]
The little grebes, too, had chosen that spot to build on. Poor
little grebes! how they worked and sat, and built and sat again, all
the summer long. And all along the river it was the same thing--the
grebes industriously making their nests, and trying ever so hard to
hatch their eggs; and then at intervals of a few days the ruthless
water-keeper would come by {255} with his long fatal pole to dash
their hopes. For whenever he saw a suspicious-looking bunch of dead
floating weeds which might be a grebe's nest, down would come the end
of the pole on it, and the eggs would be spilt out of the wet bed,
and rolled down by the swift water to the sea. And then the birds
would cheerfully set to work again at the very same spot: but it was
never easy to tell which bunch of wet weeds their eggs were hidden
in. Watching with a glass I could see the hen on her eggs, but if
any person approached she would hastily pull the wet weeds from the
edge over them, and slip into the water, diving and going away to
some distance. While the female sat the male was always busy, diving
and catching little fishes; he would dive down in one spot, and
suddenly pop up a couple of yards away, right among the coots and
moor-hens. This Jack-in-the-box action on his part never upset their
nerves. They took not the slightest notice of him, and were
altogether a more or less, happy family, all very tolerant of each
other's little eccentricities.
The little grebe fished for himself and for his sitting mate; he
never seemed so happy and proud as when he was swimming to her,
patiently sitting on her wet nest, with a little silvery fish in his
beak. He also fished for old decaying weeds, which he fetched up
from the bottom to add to the nest. Whenever he popped up among or
near the other birds with an old rag of a weed in his beak, one or
two of the grown-up young coots would try to take it from him; and
seeing them gaining on him he would dive down to {256} come up in
another place, still clinging to the old rag half a yard long; and
again the chase would be renewed, and again he would dive; until at
last, after many narrow escapes and much strategy, the nest would be
gained, and the sitting bird would take the weed from him and draw it
up and tuck it round her, pleased with his devotedness, and at the
sight of his triumph over the coots. As a rule, after giving her
something--a little fish, or a wet weed to pull up and make herself
comfortable with--they would join their voices in that long trilling
cry of theirs, like a metallic, musical-sounding policeman's rattle.
It was not in a mere frolicsome spirit that the young coots hunted
the dabchick with his weed, but rather, as I imagine, because the
white succulent stems of aquatic plants growing deep in the water are
their favourite food; they are accustomed to have it dived for by
their parents and brought up to them, and they never appear to get
enough to satisfy them; but when they are big, and their parents
refuse to slave for them, they seem to want to make the little grebes
their fishers for succulent stems.
One day in August 1899, I witnessed a pretty little bird-comedy at
the Pen Ponds, in Richmond Park, which seemed to throw a strong light
on the inner or domestic life of the coot. For a space of twenty
minutes I watched an old coot industriously diving and bringing up
the white parts of the stems of _Polygonum persicaria_, which grows
abundantly there, together with the rarer more beautiful
_Lymnanthemum nymphoïdes_, {257} which is called Lymnanth for short.
I prefer an English name for a British plant, an exceedingly
attractive one in this case, and so beg leave to call it
Water-crocus. The old bird was attended by a full-grown young one,
which she was feeding, and the unfailing diligence and quickness of
the parent were as wonderful to see as the gluttonous disposition of
its offspring. The old coot dived at least three times every minute,
and each time came up with a clean white stem, the thickness of a
stout clay pipe-stem, cut the proper length--about three to four
inches. This the young bird would take and instantly swallow; but
before it was well down his throat the old bird would be gone for
another. I was with a friend, and we wondered when its devouring
cormorant appetite would be appeased, and how its maw could contain
so much food; we also compared it to a hungry Italian greedily
sucking down macaroni.
While this was going on a second young bird had been on the old nest
on the little island in the lake, quietly dozing; and at length this
one got off his dozing-place, and swam out to where the weed-fishing
and feeding were in progress. As he came up, the old coot rose with
a white stem in her beak, which the new-comer pushed forward to take;
but the other thrust himself before him, and, snatching the stem from
his parent's beak, swallowed it himself. The old coot remained
perfectly motionless for a space of about four seconds, looking
fixedly at the greedy one who had been gorging for twenty {258}
minutes yet refused to give place to the other. Then very suddenly,
and with incredible fury, she dashed at and began hunting him over
the pond. In vain he rose up and flew over the water, beating the
surface with his feet, uttering cries of terror; in vain he dived;
again and again she overtook and dealt him the most savage blows with
her sharp beak, until, her anger thoroughly appeased and the
punishment completed, she swam back to the second bird, waiting
quietly at the same spot for her return, and began once more diving
for white stems of the _Polygonum_.
Never again, we said, would the greedy young bird behave in the
unmannerly way which had brought so terrible a castigation upon him!
The coot is certainly a good mother who does not spoil her child by
sparing the rod. And this is the bird which our comparative
anatomists, after pulling it to pieces, tell us is a small-brained,
unintelligent creature; and which old Michael Drayton, who, being a
poet, ought to have known better, described as "a formal brainless
ass"!
[Sidenote: Happy families]
To come back to the Itchen birds. The little group, or happy family,
I have described was but one of the many groups of the same kind
existing all along the river; and these separate groups, though at a
distance from each other, and not exactly on visiting terms, each
being jealous of its own stretch of water, yet kept up a sort of
neighbourly intercourse in their own way. Single cries were heard at
all times from different points; but once or two or {259} three times
in the day a cry of a coot or a moor-hen would be responded to by a
bird at a distance; then another would take it up at a more distant
point, and another still, until cries answering cries would be heard
all along the stream. At such times the voice of the skulking
water-rail would be audible too, but whether this excessively
secretive bird had any social relations with the others beyond
joining in the general greeting and outcry I could not discover.
Thus, all these separate little groups, composed of three different
species, were like the members of one tribe or people broken up into
families; and altogether it seemed that their lines had fallen to
them in pleasant places, although it cannot be said that the placid
current of their existence was never troubled.
I know not what happened to disturb them, but sometimes all at once
cries were heard which were unmistakably emitted in anger, and sounds
of splashing and struggling among the sedges and bulrushes; and the
rushes would be swayed about this way and that, and birds would
appear in hot pursuit of one another over the water; and then, just
when one was in the midst of wondering what all this fury in their
cooty breasts could be about, lo! it would all be over, and the
little grebe would be busy catching his silvery fishes; and the
moor-hen, pleased as ever at her own prettiness, nodding and prinking
and flirting her feathers; and the coot, as usual, mermaid-like,
combing out her slate-coloured tresses.
We have seen that of these three species the little {260} grebe was
not so happy as the others, owing to his taste for little fishes
being offensive to the fish-breeder and preserver. When I first saw
how this river was watched over by the water-keepers, I came to the
conclusion that very few or no dabchicks would succeed in hatching
any young. And none were hatched until August, and then to my
surprise I heard at one point the small, plaintive _peep-peep_ of the
young birds crying to be fed. One little grebe, more cunning or more
fortunate than the others, had at last succeeded in bringing off her
young; and once out of their shells they were safe. But by-and-by
the little duckling-like sound was heard at another point, and then
at another; and this continued in September, until, by the middle of
that month, you could walk miles along the river, and before you left
the sound of one little brood hungrily crying to be fed behind you,
the little _peep-peep_ of another brood would begin to be heard in
advance of you.
Often enough it is "dogged as does it" in bird as well as in human
affairs, and never had birds more deserved to succeed than these
dogged little grebes. I doubt if a single pair failed to bring out
at least a couple of young by the end of September. And at that date
you could see young birds apparently just out of the shell, while
those that had been hatched in August were full grown.
[Sidenote: Fishing-lessons]
About the habits of the little grebe, as about those of the moor-hen,
many curious and entertaining things have been written; but what
amused me most in these birds, when I watched them in late September
{261} on the Itchen, was the skilful way in which the parent bird
taught her grown-up young ones to fish. At an early period the
fishes given to the downy young are very small, and are always well
bruised in the beak before the young bird is allowed to take it,
however eager he may be to seize it. Afterwards, when the young are
more grown, the size of the fishes is increased, and they are less
and less bruised, although always killed. Finally, the young has to
be taught to catch for himself; and at first he does not appear to
have any aptitude for such a task, or any desire to acquire it. He
is tormented with hunger, and all he knows is that his parent can
catch fish for him, and his only desire is that she shall go on
catching them as fast as he can swallow them. And she catches him a
fish, and gives it to him, but, oh mockery! it was not really dead
this time, and instantly falls into the water and is lost! Not
hopelessly lost, however, for down she goes like lightning, and comes
up in ten seconds with it again. And he takes and drops it again,
and looks stupid, and again she recovers and gives it to him. How
many hundreds of times, I wonder, must this lesson be repeated before
the young grebe finds out how to keep and to kill? Yet that is after
all only the beginning of his education. The main thing is that he
must be taught to dive after the fishes he lets fall, and he appears
to have no inclination, no intuitive impulse, to do such a thing. A
small, quite dead fish must be given him carelessly, so that it shall
fall, and he must be taught to pick up a {262} fallen morsel from the
surface; but from that first simple act to the swift plunge and long
chase after and capture of uninjured vigorous fishes, what an immense
distance there is! It is, however, probable that, after the first
reluctance of the young bird has been overcome, and a habit of diving
after escaped fishes acquired, he makes exceedingly rapid progress.
But, even after the completion of his education, when he is
independent of his parents, and quick and sure as they at capturing
fishes down in their own dim element, is it not still a puzzle and a
mystery that such a thing can be done? And here I speak not only of
the little grebe, but of all birds that dive after fishes, and pursue
and capture them in fresh or salt water. We see how a kingfisher
takes his prey, or a tern, or gannet, or osprey, by dropping upon it
when it swims near the surface; he takes his fish by surprise, as a
sparrow-hawk takes the bird he preys upon. But no specialisation can
make an air-breathing, feathered bird an equal of the fish under
water. One can see at a glance in any clear stream that any fish can
out-distance any bird, darting off with the least effort so swiftly
as almost to elude the sight, while the fastest bird under water
moves but little faster than a water-rat.
[Sidenote: Fascination]
The explanation, I believe, is that the paralysing effect on many
small, persecuted creatures in the presence of, or when pursued by,
their natural enemies and devourers, is as common under as above the
water. I have distinctly seen this when watching fish-eating birds
being fed at the Zoological {263} Gardens in glass tanks. The
appearance of the bird when he dives strikes an instant terror into
them; and it may then be seen that those which endeavour to escape
are no longer in possession of their full powers, and their efforts
to fly from the enemy are like those of the mouse and vole when a
weasel is on their track, or of a frog when pursued by a snake; while
others remain suspended in the water, quite motionless, until seized
and swallowed.
{264}