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.
[Sidenote: Swifts]
During the month of July the swift was the most abundant and most
constantly before us of all our Itchen-valley birds. In the morning
he was not there. We had the pigeons then, all three
species--ring-dove, stock-dove and turtle-dove--being abundant in the
woods on the opposite side of the valley, and from four o'clock to
six was the time of their morning concert, when the still air was
filled with the human-like musical sound of their multitudinous
voices mingled in one voice. An hour or two later, as the air grew
warmer, the swifts would begin to arrive to fly up and down the
stream incessantly until dark, feasting on the gnats and ephemeræ
that swarmed over the water during those hot days of late summer.
Doubtless these birds come every day from all the towns, villages,
and farm-houses scattered over a very broad strip of country on
either side of the Itchen. Never had I seen swifts so numerous;
looking down on the {265} valley from any point one had hundreds of
birds in sight at once, all swiftly flying up and down stream; but
when the sight was kept fixed on any one bird, it could be seen that
he went but a short distance--fifty to a hundred yards--then turned
back. Thus each bird had a very limited range, and probably each
returned to his accustomed place or beat every day.
These swifts are very much in the angler's way. Frequently they get
entangled in the line and are brought down, but are seldom injured.
During one day's fishing my friend here had three swifts to disengage
from his line. On releasing one of these birds he watched its
movements, and saw it fly up stream a distance of about forty yards,
then double back, mechanically going on with its fly-hunting up and
down stream just as if nothing had happened.
It may be said of swifts, as Bates said of hummingbirds, that,
mentally, they are more like bees than birds. The infallible,
unchangeable way in which they, machine-like, perform all their
actions, and their absolute unteachableness, are certainly
insect-like. They are indeed so highly specialised and perfected in
their own line, and, on account of their marvellous powers of flight,
so removed from all friction in that atmosphere in which they live
and move, above the complex and wit-sharpening conditions in which
the more terrestrial creatures of their class exist, as to be
practically independent of experience.
It is known that for some time the mayfly has {266} been decreasing,
and in places disappearing altogether from these Hampshire streams,
and it is believed and said by some of those who are concerned at
these changes that the swallow is accountable for them. I do not
know whether they have invented this brilliant idea themselves or
have taken it ready-made from the water-keeper. Probably the last,
since he, the water-keeper, is apt to regard all creatures that come
to the waters where his sacred fishes are with a dull, hostile
suspicion, though in some cases he is not above adding to his income
by taking a few trout himself--not indeed with the dry fly, which is
useless at night, but with the shoe-net. In any case the question of
exterminating the swallows in all the villages near the rivers has
been seriously considered. Now, it is rather odd that this notion
about the swallow--the martin is of course included--should have got
about just when this bird has itself fallen on evil times and is
decreasing with us. This decrease has, in all parts of the country
best known to me, become increasingly rapid during the last few
years, and is probably due to new and improved methods of taking the
birds wholesale during migration in France and Spain. Putting that
matter aside, I should like to ask those gentlemen who have decreed,
or would like to decree, the abolition of the swallow in all the
riverside villages, what they propose to do about the swift.
[Sidenote: Mayfly and swift]
One day last June (1902) I was walking with two friends by the
Itchen, when a little below the village of Ovington we sat down to
rest and to enjoy a gleam {267} of sunshine which happened to visit
the world about noon that day. We sat down on a little wooden bridge
over the main current and fell to watching the swifts, which were
abundant, flying up and down just over our heads and, swift-like,
paying no more heed to us than if we had been three wooden posts or
three cows. We noticed that ephemeræ of three or four species were
rising up, and, borne by a light wind, drifting down-stream towards
us and past us; and after watching these flies for some time we found
that not one of them escaped. Small and grey, or dun, or
water-coloured and well-nigh invisible, or large and yellow and
conspicuous as they rose and slowly fluttered over the stream, they
were seen and snapped up, every one of them, by those fateful
sooty-coloured demons of the air, ever streaming by on their swift
scythe-shaped wings. Not a swallow nor a martin was in sight at that
spot.
It is plain, then, that if the mayfly is declining and dying out
because some too greedy bird snatches its life before it can lay its
eggs to continue the species, or drop upon the water to supply the
trout with its proper succulent food, the swift and not the swallow
is the chief culprit.
It is equally plain that these (from the angler's point of view)
injurious birds are not breeders by the waterside. Their numbers are
too great: they come, ninety per cent. of them I should say, from
farm-houses, villages, and towns at a distance of a good many miles
from the water.
The revels of the swifts were brought prematurely {268} to an end by
a great change in the weather, which began with a thunderstorm on
27th July, and two days later a greater storm, with hail the size of
big marrowfat peas, which fell so abundantly that the little lawn was
all white as if snow had fallen. From that time onwards storm
succeeded storm, and finally the weather became steadily bad; and we
had rough, cold, wet days right on to the 10th of August. It was a
terrible time for the poor holiday people all over the country, and
bad too for the moulting and late-breeding birds. As a small set-off
to all the discomfort of these dreary days, we had a green lawn once
more at the cottage. I had made one or two attempts at watering it,
but the labour proved too great to a lazy man, and now Nature had
come with her great watering-pot and restored its spring-like verdure
and softness.
During the wettest and coldest days I spent hours watching the
swallows and swifts flying about all day long in the rain. These
are, indeed, our only summer land-birds that never seek a shelter
from the wet, and which are not affected in their flight by a wetted
plumage. Their upper feathers are probably harder and more closely
knit and impervious to moisture than those of other kinds. It may be
seen that a swallow or swift, when flying about in the rain, at short
intervals gives himself a quick shake as if to throw off the
raindrops. Then, too, the food and constant exercise probably serve
to keep them warmer than they would be sitting motionless in a dry
place. Swifts, we sometimes see, are numbed {269} and even perish of
cold during frosty nights in spring; I doubt that the cold ever kills
them by day when they can keep perpetually moving.
[Sidenote: Sand-martins]
Day by day, during this long spell of summer wet and cold, these
birds diminished in number, until they were almost all gone--swifts,
swallows, and house-martins; but we were not to be without a swallow,
for as these went, sand-martins came in, and increased in numbers
until they were in thousands. We had them every day and all day
before us, flying up and down the valley, in the shelter of the
woods, their pale plumage and wavering flight making them look in the
distance like great white flies against the wall of black-green trees
and gloomy sky beyond.
On days when the sun shone they came in numbers to perch on the
telegraph wires stretched across a field between the cottage and
village. It was beautiful to see them, a double line fifty or sixty
yards long of the small, pale-coloured, graceful birdlings, sitting
so close together as to be almost touching, all with their beaks
pointing to the west, from where the wind blew.
In this same field, one day when this pleasant company were leaving
us after a week's rest, I picked up one that had killed himself by
striking against the wire. A most delicate little dead swallow,
looking in his pale colouring and softness as moth-like in death as
he had seemed when alive and flying. I took him home--the little
moth-bird pilgrim to Africa, who had got no farther than the Itchen
on his journey--and buried him at the roots of a {270} honeysuckle
growing by the cottage door. It seemed fittest that he should be put
there, to become part with the plant which, in the pallid yellows and
dusky reds of its blossoms, and in the perfume it gives out so
abundantly at eventide, has an expression of melancholy, and is more
to us in some of our moods than any other flower.
[Sidenote: An orphaned blackbird]
The bad weather brought to our little plot of ground a young
blackbird, who had evidently been thrown upon the world too early in
life. A good number of blackbird broods had been brought off in the
bushes about us, and in the rough and tumble of those tempestuous
days some of the young had no doubt got scattered and lost; this at
all events was one that had called and called to be fed and warmed
and comforted in vain--we had heard him calling for days--and who had
now grown prematurely silent, and had soberly set himself to find his
own living as best he could. Between the lawn and the small
sweetbriar hedge there was a strip of loose mould where roses had
been planted, and here the bird had discovered that by turning over
the dead leaves and loose earth a few small morsels were to be found.
During those cold, windy, wet days we observed him there diligently
searching in his poor, slow little way. He would strike his beak
into the loose ground, making a little hop forward at the same time
to give force to the stroke, and throw up about as much earth as
would cover a shilling-piece; then he would gaze attentively at the
spot, and after a couple of seconds hop and strike again; and {271}
finally, if he could see nothing to eat, he would move on a few
inches and begin again in another place. That was all his art--his
one poor little way of getting a living; and it was plain to see from
his bedraggled appearance and feeble motions, that he was going the
way of most young orphaned birds.
Now, I hate playing at providence among the creatures, but we cannot
be rid of pity; and there are exceptional cases in which one feels
justified in putting out a helping hand. Nature herself is not
always careless of the individual life: or perhaps it would be better
to say with Thoreau, "We are not wholly involved in Nature." And
anxious to give the poor bird a chance by putting him in a sheltered
place, and feeding him up, as Ruskin once did in a like case, I set
about catching him, but could not lay hands on him, for he was still
able to fly a little, and always managed to escape pursuit among the
brambles, or else in the sedges by the waterside. Half an hour after
being hunted, he would be back on the edge of the lawn prodding the
ground in the old feeble, futile way. And the scraps of food I
cunningly placed for him he disregarded, not knowing in his ignorance
what was good for him. Then I got a supply of small earthworms, and,
stalking him, tossed them so as to cause them to fall near him, and
he saw and knew what they were, and swallowed them hungrily; and he
saw, too, that they were thrown to him by a hand, and that the hand
was part of that same huge grey-clad monster that had a little while
back so furiously hunted him; {272} and at once he seemed to
understand the meaning of it all, and instead of flying from he ran
to meet us, and, recovering his voice, called to be fed. The
experience of one day made him a tame bird; on the second day he knew
that bread and milk, stewed plums, pie-crust, and, in fact, anything
we had to give, was good for him; and in the course of the next two
or three days he acquired a useful knowledge of our habits. Thus, at
half-past three in the morning he would begin calling to be fed at
the bedroom window. If no notice was taken of him he would go away
to try and find something for himself, and return at five o'clock
when breakfast was in preparation, and place himself before the
kitchen door. Usually he got a small snack then; and at the
breakfast hour (six o'clock) he would turn up at the dining-room
window and get a substantial meal. Dinner and tea time--twelve and
half-past three o'clock--found him at the same spot; but he was often
hungry between meals, and he would then sit before one door or window
and call, then move to the next door, and so on until he had been all
round the cottage. It was most amusing to see him when, on our
return from a long walk or a day out, he would come to meet us,
screaming excitedly, bounding over the lawn with long hops, looking
like a miniature very dark-coloured kangaroo.
One day I came back alone to the cottage, and sat down on the lawn in
a canvas chair, to wait for my companion who had the key. The
blackbird had seen, and came flying to me, and pitching close to my
{273} feet began crying to be fed, shaking his wings, and dancing
about in a most excited state, for he had been left a good many hours
without food, and was very hungry. As I moved not in my chair he
presently ran round and began screaming and fluttering on the other
side of it, thinking, I suppose, that he had gone to the wrong place,
and that by addressing himself to the back of my head he would
quickly get an answer.
The action of this bird in coming to be fed naturally attracted a
good deal of attention among the feathered people about us; they
would look on at a distance, evidently astonished and much puzzled at
our bird's boldness in coming to our feet. But nothing dreadful
happened to him, and little by little they began to lose their
suspicion; and first a robin--the robin is always first--then other
blackbirds to the number of seven, then chaffinches and dunnocks, all
began to grow tame and to attend regularly at meal-time to have a
share in anything that was going. The most lively, active, and
quarrelsome member of this company was our now glossy foundling; and
it troubled us to think that in feeding him we were but staving off
the evil day when he would once more have to fend for himself.
Certainly we were teaching him nothing. But our fears were idle.
The seven wild blackbirds that had formed a habit of coming to share
his food were all young birds, and as time went on and the hedge
fruit began to ripen, we noticed that they kept more and more
together. Whenever one was observed to fly straight {274} away to
some distance, in a few moments another would follow, then another;
and presently it would be seen that they were all making their way to
some spot in the valley, or to the woods on the other side. After
several hours' absence they would all reappear on the lawn, or near
it, at the same time, showing that they had been together throughout
the day and had returned in company. After observing them in their
comings and goings for several weeks I felt convinced that this
species has in it the remains of a gregarious instinct which affects
the young birds. Our bird, as a member of this little company, must
have quickly picked up from the others all that it was necessary for
him to know, and at last it was plain to us from his behaviour at the
cottage that he was doing very well for himself. He was often absent
most of the day with the others, and on his return late in the
afternoon he would pick over the good things placed for him in a
leisurely way, selecting a morsel here and there, and eating more out
of compliment to us, as it seemed, than because he was hungry. But
up to the very last, when he had grown as hardy and strong on the
wing as any of his wild companions, he kept up his acquaintance with
and confidence in us; and even at night when I would go out to where
most of our wild birds roosted, in the trees and bushes growing in a
vast old chalk-pit close to the cottage, and called "Blackie,"
instantly there would be a response--a softly chuckled note, like a
sleepy "Good-night," thrown back to me out of the darkness.
{275}
[Sidenote: Cirl bunting]
During the spell of rough weather which brought us the blackbird, my
interest was centred in the cirl buntings. On 4th August, I was
surprised to find that they were breeding again in the little
sweetbriar hedge, and had three fledglings about a week old in the
nest. They had on this occasion gone from the west to the east side
of the cottage, and the new nest, two to three feet from the ground,
was placed in the centre of a small tangle of sweet-briar, bramble,
and bryony, within a few yards of the trunk of the big lime tree
under which I was accustomed to sit. I had this nest under
observation until 9th August, which happened to be the worst day, the
coldest, wettest, and windiest of all that wintry spell; and yet in
such weather the young birds came out of their cradle. For a couple
of days they remained near the nest concealed among some low bushes;
then the whole family moved away to a hedge at some distance on
higher ground, and there I watched the old birds for some days
feeding their young on grasshoppers.
The result of my observations on these birds and on three other pairs
which I found breeding close by--one in the village, another just
outside of it, and the third by the thorn-grown foundation of ruined
Abbotstone not far off--came as a surprise to me; for it appeared
that the cirl in its breeding habits and language was not like other
buntings, nor indeed like any other bird. The young hatched out of
the curiously marked or "written" eggs are like those of the
yellowhammer, black as moor-hen {276} chicks in their black down,
opening wide crimson mouths to be fed. But should the parent birds,
or one of them, be watching you at the nest, they will open not their
beaks, but hearing and obeying the warning note they lie close as if
glued to the bottom of the nest. It is a curious sound. Unless one
knows it, and the cause of it, one may listen a long time and not
discover the bird that utters it. The buntings sit as usual,
motionless and unseen among the leaves of the tree, and, so long as
you are near the nest, keep up the sound, an excessively sharp
metallic chirp, uttered in turns by both birds, but always a short
note in the female, and a double note in the male, the second one
prolonged to a wail or squeal. No other bird has an alarm or warning
note like it: it is one of those very high sounds that are easily
missed by the hearing, like the robin's fine-drawn wail when in
trouble about his young; but when you catch and listen to it the
effect on the brain is somewhat distressing. A Hampshire friend and
naturalist told me that a pair of these birds that bred in his garden
almost drove him crazy with their incessant sharp alarm note.
The effect of this warning sound on the young is very striking:
before they can fly or are fit to leave the nest, they are ready,
when approached too closely, to leap like startled frogs out of the
nest, and scuttle away into hiding on the ground. Once they have
flown they are extremely difficult to find, as, on hearing the
parent's warning note, they squat down on their perch and remain
motionless as a leaf among {277} the leaves. Often I could only
succeed in making them fly by seizing and shaking the branches of a
thorn or other bush in which I knew they were hidden. So long as the
young bird keeps still on its branch, the old bird on some tree
twenty or thirty or forty yards away remains motionless, though all
the time emitting the sharp, puzzling, warning sound; but the very
instant that the young bird quits his perch, darting suddenly away,
the parent bird is up too, shooting out so swiftly as almost to elude
the sight, and in a moment overtakes and flies with the young bird,
hugging it so closely that the two look almost like one. Together
they dart away to a distance, usually out over a field, and drop and
vanish in the grass. But in a few moments the parent bird is back
again, sitting still among the leaves, emitting the shrill sound,
ready to dart away with the next young bird that seeks to escape by
flight.
This method of attending and safe-guarding the young is, indeed,
common among birds, but in no species known to me is it seen in such
vigour and perfection. What most strikes one is the change from
immobility when the bird sits invisible among the leaves, marking the
time with those excessively sharp, metallic clicks and wails like a
machine-bird, to unexpected, sudden, brilliant activity.
When not warned into silence and immobility by the parent the young
cirls are clamorous enough, crying to be fed, and these, too, have
voices of an excessive sharpness. Of other native species the
sharpest hunger-cries that I know are those of the {278} tits,
especially the long-tailed tit, and the spotted fly-catcher; but
these sounds are not comparable in brain-piercing acuteness to those
of the young cirls.
Another thing I have wondered at in a creature of so quiet a
disposition as the cirl bunting is the extraordinary violence of the
male towards other small birds when by chance they come near his
young, in or out of the nest. So jealous is he that he will attack a
willow-wren or a dunnock with as much fury as other birds use only
towards the most deadly enemies of their young.
Here, by the Itchen, where we have all four buntings, I find that the
reed-bunting--called black-head or black-top--is, after the cirl, the
latest singer. He continues when, towards the end of August, the
corn-bunting and yellowhammer become silent. He is the poorest
singer of the bunting tribe, the first part of his song being like
the chirp of an excited sparrow, somewhat shriller, and then follows
the long note, shrill too, or sibilant and tremulous. It is more
like the distressful hunger-call of some young birds than a
song-note. A reedy sound in a reedy place, and one likes to hear it
in the green valley among the wind-rustled, sword-shaped leaves and
waving spears of rush and aquatic grass. So fond is he of his own
music that he will sing even when moulting. I was amused one day
when listening to a reed-bunting sitting on a top branch of a dwarf
alder tree in the valley of Ovington, busily occupied in preening his
fluffed-out and rather ragged-looking plumage, yet pausing at short
intervals in his task {279} to emit his song. So taken up was he
with the feather-cleaning and singing, that he took no notice of me
when I walked to within twenty-five yards of him. By-and-by, in
passing one of his long flight-feathers through his beak it came out,
at which he appeared very much surprised. First he raised his head,
then began turning it about this way and that, as if admiring the
feather he held, or trying to get a better sight of it. For quite a
minute he kept it, forgetting to sing, then in turning it about he
accidentally dropped it. Bending his head down, he watched its slow
fall to the grass below very intently, and continued gazing down even
after it was on the ground; then, pulling himself together, he
resumed the feather-preening task, with its musical interludes.
The worst day during the bad weather when the young cirl buntings
left the nest brought the wintry spell to an end. A few days of such
perfect weather followed that one could wish for no higher good than
to be alive on that green earth, beneath that blue sky. One could
best appreciate the crystal purity and divine blueness of the immense
space by watching the rooks revelling on high in the morning
sunshine, looking in their blackness against the crystalline blue
like bird-figures with outspread, motionless wings, carved out of
anthracite coal, and suspended by invisible wires in heaven. You
could watch them, a numerous company, moving upward in wide circles,
the sound of their voices coming fainter and fainter back to earth,
until at that vast height they seemed no bigger than humble-bees.
{280}
[Sidenote: The oak in August]
This clarity of atmosphere had a striking effect, too, on the
appearance of the trees, and I could not help noticing the
superiority of the oak to all other forest trees in this connection.
There comes a time in late summer when at last it loses that "glad
light grene" which has distinguished it among its dark-leafed
neighbours, and made it in our eyes a type of unfading spring and of
everlastingness. It grows dark, too, at last, and is as dark as a
cypress or a cedar of Lebanon; but observe how different this depth
of colour is from that of the elm. The elm, too, stands alone, or in
rows, or in isolated groups in the fields, and in the clear sunshine
its foliage has a dull, summer-worn, almost rusty green. There is no
such worn and weary look in the foliage of the oak in August and
September. It is of a rich, healthy green, deep but undimmed by time
and weather, and the leaf has a gloss to it. Again, on account of
its manner of growth, with widespread branches and boughs and twigs
well apart, the foliage does not come before us as a mere dense mass
of green--an intercepting cloud, as in a painted tree; but the sky is
seen through it, and against the sky are seen the thousand thousand
individual leaves, clear-cut and beautiful in shape.
It was one of my daily pleasures during this fine weather to go out
and look at one of the solitary oak trees growing in the adjoining
field when the morning sunlight was on it. To my mind it looked best
when viewed at a distance of sixty to seventy yards across the open
grass field with nothing but {281} the sky beyond. At that distance
not only could the leaves be distinctly seen, but the acorns as well,
abundantly and evenly distributed over the whole tree, appearing as
small globes of purest bright apple-green among the deep green
foliage. The effect was very rich, as of tapestry with an oak-leaf
pattern and colour, sprinkled thickly over with round polished gems
of a light-green sewn into the fabric.
To an artist with a soul in him, the very sight of such a tree in
such conditions would, I imagined, make him sick of his poor little
ineffectual art.
{282}