The Last of the Bitterns.
Although the hawthorn in the valley was opening its leaves and
disclosing the rosy-tipped buds of May, there were but few signs of
returning spring on the marshlands of the mountain slope. The scanty
grass was withered with the searching winds of winter, and the wild
thyme had scarcely yet begun to creep over the lichened stones; but
through the entanglement of beaten-down reeds and rushes by the
waterside fresh green spikes were pushing their way up to the light.
Here and there some flecks of gold enlivened the whin bushes, and, far
away in the distant valley, a thrush was singing. The song floated up
the still air of the valley as the blue mists of the late afternoon
paled into the evening grey; the last flush of sunset faded over the
rugged mountains of the west, and the melancholy marshland sank into the
shadows of the coming night. Then the thrush’s song died in the
gathering darkness, and all was still, save for the bark of some
shepherd’s dog in the distance and the faint murmur of a trout
stream—sounds that only seemed to intensify the quietude.
Suddenly the desolate marsh was awakened by a ringing, booming voice
that pierced the misty darkness and vibrated in the still air. No echo
followed that weird, mysterious call, that deep metallic ring, “as when
a bell no longer swings,” but the desolation of the moors seemed the
more desolate as I listened and wondered what the sound might be. The
night hugged the silence, Nature held her breath, until again that
lonely booming voice broke the stillness and died in a tone of
despairing lament. Passion was in the voice, and love; a challenge was
there, yet a sublimity and a loneliness that haunted the very breath of
spring. Once more the vibrating tones were swallowed up by the darkness,
but once again they pierced the night air and rang in a cadence of
passionate, deep-toned booms that shook “the sounding marsh” and
awakened the desolate places of the sleeping earth. Even as the
lightning smites the heavy laden cloud and disperses it in drops of
rain, so that penetrating voice struck the brooding darkness of the
moor, and the abiding peace, in little fragments, was shattered and
forgotten in a multitude of thoughts.
Those who are acquainted with the bird-life of our islands need not be
told that the deep-toned, booming cry of the last of the bitterns was
heard a very long while ago. Marshes have been drained and rough lands
cleared, cornfields and rich pastures cover the earth which once swayed
and rustled with bulrushes and tasselled reeds, and the birds and
flowers—the aborigines of the marshlands—have been driven away from
their old haunts. Yet one would not stay the cultivator’s hand that the
secluded retreat of the bittern might be left undisturbed. Time brings
many changes, and the well-cleared dyke, the uprooted reeds and willows,
the burning of scrubby wastes, were inevitable, and once the nesting
place—the home of a species—is taken away extinction becomes a matter of
years. So the noble bittern that stalked heron-like in the shallow pools
and streams of the fens and marshes, whose pencilled plumage of rich
browns of varying shades blended so beautifully with the surroundings,
and whose weird notes resounded in the spring nights of long ago, year
after year, became a less frequent visitor. It is probably twenty-five
years or more since the last love-song of the bittern was answered, and
some eggs were laid, in the land that it had inhabited for so long. Now
some few stragglers drift into our shores, but the booming note—the
love-song only uttered at nesting time—is no longer heard, and those
lonely migrants that casually seek refuge here only too quickly fall a
prey to the loafer’s gun.