towards evening in March and April, their disagreeable croaking caw may be
heard from all quarters where they are numerous. Just at dusk they become
less wary than in the day. The writer for many years used to organise a
few evening "drives" of the crows to try to thin them down before their
ravenous families were hatched. Several guns used to hide in different
parts of the valley near nests, and on to this "blockhouse line" the crows
were driven. A few were generally shot before they discovered the plot.
Solicitude for the nest seldom leads them into danger, but one pair met
their fate in this way. The first bird came flying to the nest, in which
there were eggs, as soon as a shot was heard in the distance. It was
killed, and hardly had the spark of the flash disappeared when the other
bird dropped down out of the gloom straight on to the eggs, and met the
same fate. Forty young chickens were taken by a pair of crows from a farm
in one spring. It was objected by some young ladies who were "interested"
in the farm that the crows were "such sneaks." They used to come at
luncheon-time up a line of trees extending from the wood to the farm. They
were not in the least afraid of any one with a cart, apparently knowing
that the horse could not be left, but would go straight for the chicken
yard. A pair of sparrow-hawks near would seize a chicken now and then, but
in a bold way as if they had a right to them. A few crows contrive to nest
in Kensington Gardens. In the early mornings they always hunt the west
banks of the Long Water, and are credited with taking a good many ducks'
eggs, as well as ducklings.
Crows make one of the best nests constructed by the larger English birds.
Usually it is placed, not out on the small branches, where rooks prefer to
build them, but on the fork made by a large bough starting from the main
trunk. This aids in concealment, and is a protection against shot, though
probably the birds do not reckon on this contingency. The bottom of the
nest is made of large, dead sticks. Upon and between these smaller twigs,
often torn off green from willow-and elm-trees, or stolen from faggots of
recent cutting, are laid and woven. Then a fine deep basin is made, woven
of roots, grass, and some wiry stalk like esparto, the secret of where to
find which seems a special possession of crows, and on this often a lining
of bits of sheep's wool and cow's hair. There are sometimes as many as six
eggs, and rarely less than four. They are quite beautiful objects, of a
bright blue-green marked variously, but in a very decorative way, with
blotches and smears of olive and blackish-brown. Two or three clutches of
these eggs, with some of the splendid purple-red kestrels' eggs, and
sparrow-hawks of bluish white, blotched with rich chestnut, make a very
handsome show after a day's bird-nesting on the hills. The first eggs are
laid very early, sometimes by the second week in April. A nest recently
analysed consisted mainly of green ash taken from faggots and cuttings in
the wood. One piece was a yard long, and as thick at the base as the
little finger. The nest was _felted_ with cow's hair, and quite
impenetrable to shot. These nests last for years, and often have a series
of tenants, kestrels, squirrels, brown owls, or hobbies. If the first nest
is destroyed, the crow makes another. In his conjugal relations the
carrion crow is a model bird. He pairs for life, and is inseparable from
his mate. If one croaks, the other answers instantly, but usually they
keep within sight of one another all day. In the evening the pair, seldom
more than a few yards apart, may be seen hunting diligently in the meadows
for slugs, which, so long as the weather is not too dry, form the regular
supper of the birds.
A remarkable instance of the crow's courage in defence of its mate
occurred some years ago on Salisbury Plain when a party were out
rook-hawking. A falcon was flown at one of a pair of crows on favourable,
open ground. The two birds mounted in the usual spiral until the falcon
stooped, bound to the crow, and the pair came to the ground together. Just
as the horseman rode in to take up the hawk the other crow descended
straight upon the falcon, knocked her off its prostrate mate, and the two
flew off together to cover before the falcon had realised whence the onset
came. This crow not only showed great courage in facing both the falcon
and the sportsman, but timed its interference with the greatest judgment
and precision.
Probably a tame crow would make an amusing pet. Its intelligence must be
very considerable, though the shape of its head does not so clearly
indicate brain as does that of a raven. Among the crows which haunt the
banks of the London river there are some highly educated pairs. One has
maintained itself on the reach opposite Ham House for thirteen years, if
the evidence used to identify them is reliable. These birds were noticed
at that distance of time ago to have learnt to pick up food floating on
the water. To see a big black crow hovering like a gull, and picking up
bread from the bosom of the Thames, is so unusual that it always excites
remark, and the writer was informed only last summer that these Ham House
crows were seen doing this constantly. Not many years ago a crow nested in
a plane-tree in St. Paul's Churchyard, and a pair also reside on the
island in Battersea Park. But the great headquarters of London crows are
the grounds of Ranelagh, and the reservoirs and market gardens of Barnes
and Chiswick. They flock to the manure heaps in the latter, where the
gulls now join them, and several pairs spend all day nearly all the year
round on the reservoir banks at Barnes, and on Chiswick Eyot. The Eyot
crows seems to find a good living there, and never leave it till their
young, which are annually hatched in a tree at some distance on the
Middlesex side, can fly. But the crows haunting the great Barnes
reservoirs, where the tufted ducks now assemble in winter, are a bad lot.
Last winter they were seen to single out and attack any gull separated
from the flock which usually came there to roost. A sick or wounded gull
was soon caught, killed, and eaten, the small black-headed gulls being no
match for the crows. It was characteristic of their cunning that by the
river itself they did not molest the gulls.
LONDON'S BURIED ELEPHANTS
The amount of river gravel left in the part of the Thames Valley on which
West London is built is extraordinary. It is all round, and mostly red,
and as there are no rocks like the stone which makes up most of this
gravel anywhere in the modern valley, it is puzzling to know where it came
from. I went to see the digging of the foundations of the new South
Kensington Museum, and the great excavation, which was like the ditch of a
fortress, and the stuff thrown out, which was like the rampart, was all
dug in, or made of, river gravel. In this the men had found, lying
higgledy-piggledy, with no two bones "belonging," quantities of bones of
the beasts which used to graze on what I suppose was the Kensington
"veldt," or perhaps flats by the riverside, during the time when the
river's drift and brick earth was being deposited. The Clerk of the Works
was much interested in these discoveries, and had caused them to be
carefully collected. These were bones of the great stags then common, of
the elephant, and of the primaeval horse, creatures which lived here
before the Channel was cut between England and France, though not,
perhaps, before man had appeared in what is now the Thames Valley, for
flint implements are often found with the bones. Dr. Woodward, to whom
some of the remains were taken, said that they reminded him of the great
discovery of similar remains in the brick earth at Ilford, in Essex,
thirty-seven years ago, when he personally saw, dug from the brickfields
of that almost suburban parish, the head and tusks of one of the largest
mammoth elephants in the world. These river-gravel and brick-earth buried
bones are rather earlier than those found in the peat and marl. The latter
belonged to creatures which, though they no longer exist in England, are
still found in temperate Europe--beavers, bears, bison, and wolves. But
the Thames gravel and the London clay are in places full of the bones of
another, and earlier, though by no means primaeval, generation of mammals,
some of which are extinct, while others are found at great distances from
this country, in remote parts of the earth. Judging from the places where
they are found and from the position of the bones, large animals must have
swarmed all over what is now London, just as they do on the Athi plains
and near the rivers and forests through which the Uganda Railway runs.
There was the same astonishing mixture of species, a mixture which puzzles
inquirers rather more than it need. Hippopotamus bones are found in great
numbers, and with the hippopotamus remains those of creatures like the
reindeer and the musk ox, now found only on the Arctic fringe and frozen
rim of the North, which lived on the same area and with them the Arctic
fox. Judging from the great range of climate which most northern animals
can endure, there is no reason to think this juxtaposition of a creature
only found in warm rivers and of what are now Arctic animals is very
strange. The London "hippo" was just the same, to judge from his bones, as
that of the Nile or Congo. But the reindeer of North America, under the
name of the woodland cariboo, comes down far south, and in the Arctic
summer that of Europe endures a very high temperature. The Arctic fox does
the same. If there were Arctic animals in Kensington and Westminster, that
is no evidence that they lived in an Arctic climate. Looking over the list
of bones, skulls, teeth, and tusks found, it is interesting to try to
reconstruct mentally the fauna of greater London just previous to the
coming of man. There were, to begin with, some African animals, either the
same as are found on the Central African plains, and were found on the
veldt of South Africa, or of the same families. The present condition of
the country between Mount Kilimanjaro and the Victoria Nyanza shows quite
as great a mixture of species. There, for instance, are all the big
antelopes, rhinoceroses, zebras, lions, elephants, hyaenas, and wild dogs,
and though there are glaciers on Kilimanjaro and the great mountains near
the central valleys, the river running out of the Great Rift Valley is
full of crocodiles and hippopotami. There is heather and, higher up, also
ice and snow on the mountains, from whose tops the waters come that feed
these crocodile-haunted streams. So on the London "veldt" there were
lions, wild horses (perhaps striped like zebras), three kinds of
rhinoceroses--two of which were just like the common black rhinoceros of
Africa, though one had a woolly coat--elephants, hyaenas, hippopotami, and
that most typical African animal the Cape wild dog! All these, except the
elephants and hippos, can stand some degree of cold; and there is not the
slightest reason why the two last may not have flourished in some deep
river valley, very many degrees hotter than the hills above. To take an
instance still remaining nearer to Europe than the Great Rift Valley. The
Jordan Valley is very deep and very hot. Many species of birds are there
found which are resident in India, and not anywhere nearer. It is a kind
of hot slice of India embedded in the Palestine hills. The very large deer
and immense bison and wild oxen probably fed on the same low veldt as the
African animals. The bison were the same as those found in Lithuania, but
far larger. Numbers of the skulls, of quite gigantic size, have been found
in the brick earth. In the British Museum there is a tooth of the mammoth
found in 1731, at a depth of 28 feet below the surface, in digging a sewer
in Pall Mall. This Pall Mall mammoth might well figure in Mr. E. T. Reed's
prehistoric series in _Punch_. Another tooth was found in Gray's Inn
Lane. The mammoth was evidently not confined to the present region of
clubland.
Besides these European and African groups of animals, a third class ranged
the London plains, probably at a greater height and in a still colder
temperature than the large grass-eating mammals mentioned. These
creatures, whose bones are found plentifully in the drift, are now living
in a country even more specialised than the African veldt. They are the
creatures of the Tartar steppes and the cold plains of Central Asia. Their
names are the suslik (a Central Asian prairie dog), the pika, a little
steppe hare, and an extremely odd antelope, now found in Thibet. This is a
singularly ugly beast with a high Roman nose, and wool almost as thick as
that of a sheep when the winter coat is on. It must have been quite common
in those parts, for I have had the cores of two of their horns brought to
me during the last few years.
These dry bones are not made so astonishingly interesting by their setting
in the gravel as are some far more ancient remains in England. The gravel
is a mere rubbish-bed, like a sea-beach, in which all things have lost
their connection. I was recently shown a set of fossils far more ancient,
possibly not less than 2,000,000 years old, which were all found and may
be seen exactly as they lay and lived when they were on the bottom of a
prehistoric river which flowed through Hampshire, across what is now the
Channel, over South France, and then fell into the Mediterranean. This
river crosses the Channel at Hordwell cliffs on the Solent. There is the
whole section, of a great stream two miles wide, with the gravel at its
edges, the sediment and sand a little lower down the sides, and the mud at
the bottom. On each lie its appropriate shells. Some are like those in the
Thames to-day, but many more like those of a river in Borneo. They are so
thick that out of a single ounce of the mud 150 little shells were
obtained. In this, too, were found the tooth of a crocodile and the bones
of a spiny pike, and in other masses of clay the very reeds and bits of
the trees that grew there. These sedges of the primitive ages were quite
charming. Even some of their colour was preserved, and all their delicate
fluting and fibre, in the fine clay. One of the branches of a tree, now
turned to lignite, had possessed a thick pith. This pith had decayed, and
water had trickled down the hollow like a pipe. The water was full of iron
pyrites, and had first lined the tube with iron crystals and then filled
up the whole hollow with a frosted network of the same. There is a
striking contrast between the presence and realism of these once living
things still preserving the outer forms of life and the vast and
inconceivable distances of "geological time."
SWANS, BLACK AND WHITE
A few pairs of black swans have been placed upon the river. Some of these
rear broods of young ones, and appear to be quite acclimatised. The black
swan was known to the traders of our own East India Company nearly a
century before Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks discovered Botany Bay.
The first notice of it appears in a letter, written about the year 1698,
by a Mr. Watson to Dr. M. Lister, in which he says, "Here is returned a
ship which by our East India Company was sent to the South Land, called
Hollandia Nova," and adds that black swans, parrots, and many sea-cows
were found there. In 1726, two were brought alive to Batavia, which were
caught on the West Coast of Australia, near Hartop Bay, but no good
account of their habits was ever written till Gould put together the facts
he had seen and learnt on the spot.
The habits in their native land of birds which we only see acclimatised
and domesticated, sometimes give a clue to what can be done to domesticate
other breeds. This swan is only found in Australia, and only locally
there, in the south and west. There it takes the place occupied by the
Brent goose in our northern latitude, both as a water bird and as a source
of food to the natives. "Wherever there are rivers, estuaries of the sea,
lagoons, and pools of water of any extent the bird is generally
distributed," says Gould. "Sometimes it occurs in such numbers that flocks
of many hundreds can be seen together, particularly on those arms of the
sea which, after passing the beachline of the coast, expand into great
sheets of shallow water, on which the birds are seldom disturbed either by
the force of boisterous winds or the intrusion of the natives. In the
white man, however, the black swan finds an enemy so deadly, that in many
parts where it was formerly quite numerous it has been almost, if not
entirely, extirpated.
"This has been particularly the case on some of the larger rivers of
Tasmania, but on the salt lagoons and inlets of D'Entrecasteaux's channel,
the little-frequented bays of the southern and western shores of that
island and the entrance to Melbourne Harbour at Port Phillip, it is still
numerous." This was written in 1865, when to voyagers to the new continent
the black swans of Melbourne Harbour were sometimes a first and striking
reminder that they had reached a new world. One of the most deadly means
of killing off the black swans was to chase them in boats, and either to
net or club them, when they had shed all their flight feathers. This is
what Mr. Trevor Battye saw the Samoyeds doing to the Brent geese on
Kolguev Island. Thousands were driven into a kind of kraal, and killed for
winter food. Next to the pelagic sealer, the whalers and ordinary
seal-hunters are the worst scourges of the animal world. They killed off,
for instance, every single one of the Antarctic right whales, and nearly
all the Cape and Antarctic fur seals. But it is not generally known that
they succeeded in almost killing off the black swans in some districts.
They caught and killed them in boatloads, not for the flesh, but to take
the swans' down. Black swans have white wings, though as they are nearly
always pinioned here, a stupid habit which our people have learnt from the
ancient and time-honoured brutality of "swan upping," we never see them
flying. They are then very beautiful objects, with their plumage of ebon
and ivory.
In Australia they begin to lay in October, and the young are hatched and
growing in January. They are very prolific birds, laying from five to
eight light-green eggs with brownish buff markings. Some years ago a
splendid brood of six jolly little nigger cygnets were hatched out by the
black swans at Kew. But the most successful breeder of black swans in this
country was Mr. Samuel Gurney, who began his stock with a pair on the
river Wandle, at Carshalton. He bought them in Leadenhall Market, in 1851.
They did not breed till three years later, and laid their first egg on
January 1st.
This is very interesting, because it shows that so far these birds were
not acclimatised, but kept more or less to the seasons of reproduction
proper to their native land. They were laying in what is the Australian
summer and our mid-winter. It was a most severe winter, and the young ones
were hatched out in a severe frost, which had lasted all the time that the
birds were sitting in the open. The cygnets lived--it is not stated how
many there were--and later on, the parents continued to breed, till in
1862, eight years after, they had hatched ninety-three young ones, and
reared about half the number. The most extraordinary thing about the
original pair was that they seem to have taken on both our seasons and
their own, laying both in our spring and in the Australian spring, and so
hatching two broods a year. They bred sixteen times in seven years--or
probably seven and a half--and in that time laid one hundred and eleven
eggs. The interest of this story is very considerable, because it shows
the imperfect and exhausting efforts which Nature causes animals to make
to adapt their breeding time to a new climate. Black swans which are
descended from young birds bred in this country conform to the ordinary
nesting-time of our hemisphere.
I notice that among the white swans on the Thames the cock-bird will fight
to preserve his lady from intrusion, but he never thinks of taking her any
breakfast, or of bringing her food of any kind, even though he may be fed
most liberally himself. His only idea of helping her actively is by
minding house while she goes off to feed and also while she is making her
toilet. Not long ago, a swan who had a nest by the Thames so far forgot
his mate as to fall in love with a young lady, whom he constantly tried to
persuade to come and join him on the river. She was in the habit of
feeding both swans every day, but as the lady swan was on the nest for the
greater part of the time, the cock swan came in for most of the attention.
In time he became tame enough to feed from her hand, and would come out on
to the bank; but he preferred to sit on the water and to be fed from a
boat-raft. After being fed he wanted to see more of his friend, but could
not understand why she preferred stopping on such an uncomfortable place
as the land when all she need do to enjoy his society, and to be happier
herself, was to step down into the water. He would swim away slowly,
looking over his shoulder to see if she was coming. As she usually wore a
white dress, there is very little doubt that the swan thought she only
wanted a few feathers to be quite a presentable swan, and suited for life
on the river. When he found that she did not follow, he would return, and
stretching out his neck would take hold of her dress and pull her towards
the water, not in anger, but with a kind and pressing insistence, as
showing her what was best. This he did usually when he had finished the
food she brought, and when she left the bank would swim up and down,
waiting to see if she were coming back.
The time-honoured brutality of swan-upping is now mitigated by law, its
cruelty being obvious. It would be far better to leave them the use of
their wings, which would enable them to seek food at a distance in winter,
and to escape the ice, which sometimes breaks their legs. Several of these
flightless swans were starved to death in 1902.
CANVEY ISLAND
Down near Thames mouth is the curious reclamation from the river mud known
as Canvey Island. It is separated from the land by a "fleet," in which the
Danes are recorded to have laid up their ships in the early period of
their invasions, and the village opposite on the mainland is called
Benfleet. Though on the river, it is a half-marine place, with the typical
sea-plants growing on the saltings by the shore. In summer I noticed that
the graves below the grey sea-eaten, storm-furrowed walls of the church
have wreaths of sea-lavender laid upon them. But there is not the same
rich carpet of sea-flowers as at Wells or Blakeney. Nor is the deposit so
rich, so soft, so ready to be covered with smiling meadows as those of
North Norfolk, built up from the mud-clouds of the Fen. Canvey Island
itself is a heavy, indurated soil in parts, now well established, and
producing fine crops. But is it the kind of ground which would pay a fair
return on the cost of "inning it" to-day? The wheat is good, the straw
long, and the ears full. The oats are less good, perhaps because the soil
is too heavy. The beans are strong and healthy; clover, which does not
mind a salty soil, thrives there; and there are strong crops of mangold.
But it is not like the Fenland; it cracks under the sun, "pans" upon the
surface, and is not adapted for inexpensive or for intensive cultivation.
Such was the writer's impression from a careful view of the farms in the
middle of harvest. But as a fact in the history of English agriculture,
and in its relation to the past story of the Thames mouth, and its
possibilities as a future health resort, this work of the enterprising
Dutchmen in the beginning of the seventeenth century is full of interest.
In 1622 Sir Henry Appleton, the owner of the marsh, agreed to give
one-third of it to Joas Croppenburg, a Dutchman skilled in the making of
dikes, if he "inned" the marsh. This the Dutchman did off hand, and
enclosed six thousand acres by a wall twenty miles round. Like many parts
of the Fens, the island was peopled for a time by Dutchmen engaged on the
works, and Croppenburg is said to have built there a church. Two small
Dutch cottages remain, built in 1621. The general aspect of the island is
like that part of Holland near the mouth of the "old" Rhine, but less
closely cultivated and cared for.
[Illustration: THE LOBSTER SMACK INN, CANVEY ISLAND. _From a photograph by
R. B. Lodge_.]
[Illustration: THE STEPPING STONES AT BENFLEET. _From a photograph by R.
B. Lodge_.]
It has always been a separate region. Never yet has it entered the heads
of its proprietors to join it permanently to the mainland. For three
centuries its visitors and people have driven or walked over a tide-washed
causeway at low water, or ferried over at high tide. You do so still, in a
scrubbed and salty boat, while an ancient road-mender is occupied in the
oddest of all forms of road maintenance. He stirs and swirls the mud as
the tide goes down, to wash it out of the hollow way, otherwise it would
be turned into warp-land every day, and become impassable. The Dutchmen's
roads are sound and straight enough on the island. Outside the wall the
samphire and orach beds are wholly marine. Inside the dikes and ditches
are filled with a purely sweet-water vegetation. Further seawards, or
rather riverwards, at a place called "Sluis," they are fringed with wild
rose and wild plum, and the ditches are deep in rushes, in willow herb, in
purple nightshade, water-mint, and reeds.