THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST
THE BOOK OF
A NATURALIST
BY
W. H. HUDSON
Author of
‘The Naturalist in LaPlata’
[Illustration]
SECOND EDITION
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LIMITED LONDON
PREFACE
It is necessary that a book should have a title, and important that
this should be descriptive of the book: accordingly, I was pleased with
my good fortune and myself when I hit upon one which was not merely
descriptive but was attractive as well.
This was a long time ago when these studies, essays and sketches of
animal life began to accumulate on my hands and I foresaw the book.
Unhappily, long before my book was ready my nice title had occurred
to some one else and was duly given by Sir E. Ray Lankester to his
_Diversions of a Naturalist_--a collection of papers on a vast variety
of subjects which had been appearing serially under another title.
I was very much annoyed, not only because he is a big man and I am
a little one and my need was therefore greater, but also because it
appeared to me better suited to my book than to his. He deals with the
deep problems of biology and is not exactly a naturalist in the old
original sense of the word--one who is mainly concerned with the “life
and conversation of animals,” and whose work is consequently more like
play than his can be, even when it is _Science from an Easy Chair_.
What then was I to do, seeing that all possible changes had been rung
on such general titles as Journals, Letters, Notes, Gleanings, and
what not, of a Naturalist? There was no second string to my bow since
_Recreations_ had already been used by my friend J. E. Harting for
his book. In sheer desperation I took this title, which would fit any
work on Natural History ever published. Doubtless it would have been
an improvement if I could have put in the “Field” before “Naturalist”
to show that it was not a compilation, but the title could not be made
longer even by a word.
Some of the chapters in this volume now appear for the first time;
more of them, however, are taken from or based on articles which have
appeared in various periodicals: the _Fortnightly Review_, _National
Review_, _Country Life_, _Nation_, the _New Statesman_, and others. I
am obliged to the Editors of the _Times_ and _Chambers’s Journal_ for
permission to use two short copyright articles on the Rat and Squirrel
which appeared in those journals.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
1. LIFE IN A PINE WOOD 1
2. HINTS TO ADDER-SEEKERS 15
3. BATS 33
4. BEAUTY OF THE FOX 50
5. A SENTIMENTALIST ON FOXES 55
6. THE DISCONTENTED SQUIRREL 63
7. MY NEIGHBOUR’S BIRD STORIES 74
8. THE TOAD AS TRAVELLER 84
9. THE HERON: A FEATHERED NOTABLE 93
10. THE HERON AS A TABLE-BIRD 106
11. THE MOLE QUESTION 113
12. CRISTIANO: A HORSE 119
13. MARY’S LITTLE LAMB 123
14. THE SERPENT’S TONGUE 134
15. THE SERPENT’S STRANGENESS 153
16. THE BRUISED SERPENT 172
17. THE SERPENT IN LITERATURE 186
18. WASPS 210
19. BEAUTIFUL HAWK-MOTHS 217
20. THE STRENUOUS MOLE 225
21. A FRIENDLY RAT 232
22. THE LITTLE RED DOG 238
23. DOGS IN LONDON 247
24. THE GREAT DOG-SUPERSTITION 265
25. MY FRIEND THE PIG 295
26. THE POTATO AT HOME AND IN ENGLAND 303
27. JOHN-GO-TO-BED-AT-NOON 316
28. THE CHEQUERED DAFFODIL 326
29. CONCERNING LAWNS AND EARTHWORMS 337
INDEX 357
I
LIFE IN A PINE WOOD
PEOPLE, BIRDS, ANTS
Some years ago a clever gentleman, a landowner no doubt with pine
plantations on his property, made the interesting discovery that the
ideal place to live in was a pine wood, owing to the antiseptic and
medicinal qualities emanating from the trees. You could smell them and
began to feel better the moment you entered the wood. Naturally there
was a rush to the pines just as there had been a rush to the hill-tops
in response to Tyndall’s flag-waving and exultant shouts from Hindhead,
and as there had been a rush over a century earlier to the seaside in
obedience to Dr. Russell’s clarion call. I have no desire myself to
live among pines, simply because I cannot endure to be shut off from
this green earth with sight of flocks and herds. Woods are sometimes
good to live in: I have spent happy months in a woodman’s cottage
in a forest; but the trees were mostly oak and beech and there were
wide green spaces and an abundant wild life. Pine woods, especially
plantations, are monotonous because the trees are nearly all pines and
one tree is like another, and their tall, bare trunks wall you in, and
their dark stiff foliage is like a roof above you. I, too, like being
in a pine wood, just as I like being by the sea, for a few hours or
a day, but for a place to live in I should prefer a moor, a marsh, a
sea-salting, or any other empty, desolate place with a wide prospect.
In spite of this feeling I actually did spend a great part of last
summer in such a place. It is an extensive tract, which when the
excitement and rush for the medicinal pines began, was first seized
upon by builders as being near London and in a highly aristocratic
neighbourhood. Immediately, as by a miracle, large ornate houses sprang
up like painted agarics in the autumn woods--houses suitable for the
occupation of important persons. The wood itself was left untouched;
the houses, standing a quarter of a mile or more apart, with their
gardens and lawns, were like green, flowery oases scattered about in
its sombre wilderness. Gardens and lawns are a great expense, the soil
being a hungry sand, and for all the manuring and watering the flowers
have a somewhat sad and sickly look, and the lawns a poor thin turf,
half grass and half moss.
As a naturalist I was curious to observe the effect of life in a pine
wood on the inhabitants. It struck me that it does not improve their
health, or make them happy, and that they suffer most in summer,
especially on warm windless days. They do not walk in their woods; they
hasten to the gate which lets them out on the road and takes them to
the village--or to some point from which they can get a sight of earth
outside the pines. They are glad to escape from their surroundings, and
are never so happy as when going away on a long visit to friends living
no matter where, in the country or abroad, so long as it was not in a
pine wood. I should imagine that Mariana herself, supposing that she
had survived to the present day and had been persuaded to come down
south to try the effect of living in a pine wood, would soon wish to go
back to her moated grange on a Lincolnshire flat, for all its ancient
dust and decay, with no sound to break the sultry noonday brooding
silence save the singing of the blue fly i’ the pane and the small
shrill shriek of the mouse behind the rotting wainscot.
So much for the human dwellers among the “crepuscular pines.” I am
quoting an expression of the late lamented Henry James, which he used
not of pine woods generally but of this very wood, well known to him
too when he was a guest in the house. But he didn’t love it or he
would have been a more frequent visitor; as it was, he preferred to
see his dear friends--all his friends were very dear to him--when they
were away from the twilight shelter of their trees in ever bright and
beautiful London.
I was perhaps more interested in the non-human inhabitants of the
wood. The wood that was mine to walk in, the part which belonged to the
house and which as a fact I alone used, covered an area of about sixty
acres and was one with the entire wood, only divided from the rest by
oak palings. When one turned from the lawns and gardens into the wood
it was like passing from the open sunlit air to the twilight and still
atmosphere of a cathedral interior. It was also a strangely silent
place; if a thrush or chaffinch was heard to sing, the sound came from
the garden I had quitted or from some other garden in the wood still
farther away. The only small birds in these pines were those on a brief
visit, and little parties of tits drifted through. Nevertheless, the
wood--the part I was privileged to walk in--had its own appropriate
fauna--squirrels, wood-pigeons, a family of jays, another of magpies,
a pair of yaffles, and one of sparrow-hawks. Game is not preserved in
these woods which are parcelled out to the different houses in lots of
a dozen to fifty or more acres; consequently several species which are
on the gamekeeper’s black list are allowed to exist. Most of the birds
I have named bred during the summer--the hawks and yaffles, a dozen
or more pairs of wood-pigeons, and a pair each of magpies and jays.
The other members of the family parties of the last two species had no
doubt been induced by means of sharp beaky arguments to go and look for
nesting-places elsewhere.
But not one small bird could I find nesting in the wood. This set
me thinking on a question which has vexed my mind for years--How do
small birds safeguard their tender helpless fledgelings from the ants?
This wood swarmed with ants: their nests, half hidden by the bracken,
were everywhere, some of the old mounds being of huge size, twelve to
fourteen feet in circumference, and some over four feet high. As their
eggs were not wanted the ants were never disturbed, and the marvel was
how they could exist in such excessive numbers in a naked pine wood,
which of all woods is the poorest in insect life.
I have said to myself a hundred times that birds, especially the
small woodland species that nest on or near the ground, such as the
nightingale, robin, wren, chiff-chaff, wood and willow wrens, and
tits that breed low down in old stumps, must occasionally have their
nestlings destroyed by ants; yet I have never found a nest showing
plainly that such an accident had occurred, nor had I seen anything on
the subject in books about birds; and of such books I had read hundreds.
The subject was in my mind when I received evidence from an unexpected
quarter that tender fledgelings are sometimes destroyed by ants. This
was in an account of the wren by a little boy which I came upon in a
bundle of Bird and Tree Competition essays from the village schools in
Lancashire, sent on to me to read and judge from the Royal Society
for the Protection of Birds. The boy stated in his essay that having
selected the wren as his subject he watched the birds and looked for
nests; that among the nests he found one containing five eggs, and that
four young were hatched but were destroyed the same day by ants. I
wrote to the master of the school, at Newburgh, near Wigan, and to the
boy, Harry Southworth, asking for full particulars. The master’s reply
gave a satisfactory account of Harry as a keen and careful observer,
and Harry’s answer was that the nest was built in a small hole in a
bank beside a brook, that he had kept his eye on it during the time
the bird was sitting on her five eggs, that on his last visit he found
the parent bird in a terrified state outside the nest, and that on
examination he found that four young birds had been hatched, and were
all dead but still warm, and swarming with small reddish-brown ants
which were feeding on them.
This goes to show that not only do ants sometimes attack the
fledgelings in the nest, but also that the parent birds in such cases
are powerless to save their young from destruction. My conclusion was
that small ground-nesting birds have an instinctive fear of ants and
avoid building at places infested by them.
But how does it happen, I now asked, that the larger birds that nest
high up in the pines escape the danger? The ants go up the tallest and
smoothest trunks with the ease and at the same rate of speed as when
moving on the surface. They are seen ascending and descending all day
long in countless numbers, so that the entire treetop must be swarming
with them, searching every twig and every needle; and being ants and
ready to fasten their jaws on any provender, dead or alive, without
regard to the size of the object, the newly-hatched young wood-pigeons
or magpies can be no safer in their lofty cradles than the robin or
willow-wren fledgelings in their nest on the ground.
Unfortunately, when I got to this point it was too late in the season
to follow the matter much further, since most of the birds had finished
breeding. Whether all or most of them had been successful or not I was
not able to discover; however, the young were not yet out of the one
nest which interested me the most. This was the sparrow-hawks’, and
was in the lowest branches of a tall, slim pine about forty-five feet
from the ground. It was an exceptionally big nest. The birds, I knew,
had brought off their young successfully in this same wood in the three
previous years, and I came to the conclusion that the same nest had
been used every time and had grown to its present size by the addition
of fresh materials each season. By standing on a high mound situated at
a distance of fifty yards from the tree I could, with my binocular, get
a perfect sight of the four young hawks on their platform, looking like
owls with their big round heads and their fluffy white down.
As their feathers grew they became more active; they were less and
less inclined to sit in a close bunch; they would draw as far apart
as they were able and sit on the extreme edge of the nest, and from
that high perch they would stare curiously down at me when I looked
up at them. The habits of the parent birds were unlike those of
sparrow-hawks breeding in woods and wild places where people are rarely
seen. Instead of displaying intense anxiety and screaming at the sight
of a human form, causing the young birds to squat low down in the
nest, they would slink off in silence and vanish from the scene. This
extreme secretiveness was, in the circumstances, their safest policy,
to express it in that way, but, of course, it had one drawback--it
left the young uninstructed as to the dangerous character of man. That
lesson would have to come later, when they were off the nest.
As the hawks grew, the supply of food increased, and the birds supplied
were so carefully plucked, not a feather being left, also the head
removed, that in some instances it was actually difficult to identify
the species; but I think that most of the birds brought to the nest
were starlings. The young hawks had now to feed themselves on what was
on the table, and when one felt peckish he would take up a bird and
carry it to the edge of the big nest so as to be out of the way of the
others, and setting a foot on it, go to work to tear it to pieces. But
he sometimes mismanaged the business, and when transferring the bird
from his beak to his claws he would drop it over the edge and lose it.
The dropped bird would be quickly found and attacked by the ants, and
before many hours it would be a well-cleaned skeleton.
But the ants never ascended this tree. It then occurred to me that ants
are always seen swarming up certain trees--always the same trees; and
that a vast majority of the trees were never invaded by them at all.
I now began going round and visiting all the trees where I distinctly
remembered having seen ants ascending, and on all those trees I
found them still swarming up in immense numbers as if to some place
containing an inexhaustible supply of food. It was now, however, too
late in the season to make sure that they do not from time to time
invade fresh trees. That they should go on from day to day for weeks,
and perhaps for the whole season, ascending the same trees strikes
one as very strange; yet such a fact would accord with what we know
of these puzzling insects--their almost incredible wisdom in their
complex actions and system of life, coupled with an almost incredible
stupidity. Or do the ants know just why they go up this particular tree
and not any of the surrounding trees? Can it be that on this particular
tree they have their carefully tended flocks and herds to supply them
with honey-dew--their milk, butter and cheese? Such flocks and herds
they do keep and tend on oak trees, as I discovered in Harewood Forest;
and I wish that readers of this chapter who live in or near a pine wood
and are the happy possessors of ladders forty or fifty feet long will
make some further investigation into the matter.
My conclusion for the present is that wood-pigeons and other birds that
breed in the pines do not build their nests in trees used by the ants.
Let us now follow the fortunes of the young sparrow-hawks, bred in a
wood where people inhabit.
I watched them day by day, and, gradually, as their fluffy coat was
replaced by feathers, and their lumpish appearance changed to the
sharp-cut hawk figure, they grew more adventurous and would mount upon
a branch accessible from the nest, the maturest bird taking the lead,
the others, one by one, slowly and cautiously following. Finally,
all four would be on the branch at a distance of six to ten inches
apart, the one nearest the nest being always the least hawk-like in
appearance--more lumpish and with more down on it than the others.
One morning in September I found the nest empty; the young had been
persuaded to leave for good early that morning. Just how they had
been persuaded--feelingly, perhaps with sudden smart blows--it would
have been a great thing to witness, but I had never looked for it on
account of the vigilance and extraordinary secretiveness of the parent
birds. Never once had they uttered a sound or allowed themselves to be
seen. Now that their young were out and able to fly, they no longer
found it necessary to make themselves invisible on the appearance of
the human form in the wood. At all events, after keeping the young
concealed for the space of three or four days, they began to show
themselves openly, pursued by the young, wailing and screaming to be
fed. All day long these whining cries were heard, and it was plain that
a new system had been adopted by the parent birds at this stage, which
was to keep their young on short commons, instead of supplying them
with more food than they could consume. The result was that the young,
instead of sitting idly waiting for small birds, properly plucked, to
be brought and dropped at their feet, were driven by hunger to fly
after the parent birds, who led them an endless chase in and out and
above the trees. It all looked like a great waste of energy, but it had
an important use in teaching the young to fly and to develop the wing
muscles by incessant exercise. These exercises continued for five or
six days in the wood, then followed a fresh move; every morning early
the wood was quitted by the whole family, the young, no doubt, being
conducted to a clump on one of the extensive tracts of heath in the
neighbourhood. There they would have other and more important lessons
to learn. The young hawk would have to pluck the feathers out himself
or else swallow them along with the flesh; the next stage would be that
the bird would be delivered alive, but partially disabled, and he would
have to kill it himself; finally, he would have to capture his own
prey--the last and most difficult lesson of all.
That they were still kept on short commons was evident from the
perpetual hunger-cries of the young when they returned each evening
to their roosting-place in the wood. From the moment of their arrival
an hour before sunset, until it was almost dark, the clamour went on,
the young birds following their parents the whole time. This continued
for a fortnight, and during the last few evenings the parent birds
introduced yet another new subject or feature into their educational
system. They would rise over the trees, both male and female, but
keeping wide apart, followed by the clamouring young; and floating
and circling up with easy harrier-like movement, they would mount
to a height of two or three hundred yards above the tree-tops, then
suddenly hurl themselves down like stones and vanish among the trees,
still followed at a long distance by the young. Once down beneath the
tree-tops it was marvellous to see them, dashing at their topmost
sparrow-hawk speed hither and thither among the tall, naked boles,
with many sudden sharp twistings which apparently just enabled them
to escape being dashed to death against a trunk or branch. Every time
I witnessed this seemingly mad violent action, yet accomplished with
such ease, such certainty, such grace, I was astonished afresh.
This would be the last act in the day’s business, for immediately
afterwards they would fly to the roosting-place and the hungry young
would hush their cries.
Then at the end of the third week in September the whole family
disappeared. The young had now to learn that they could not always stay
in the one place which they knew, soon to be followed with the last and
hardest of all their lessons, that they must make their own living or
else starve.
NOTE.--Since this paper appeared in the _National Review_, my idea
concerning the destructiveness of ants to young birds has received
further confirmation from two widely separated quarters. One, oddly
enough, is contained in another country schoolboy essay, for a Bird
and Tree Day Competition, in this case from a village in Hampshire.
The skylark was the bird observed, and on one of the visits the little
observer paid to the nest, when the nestlings were a few days old, he
found them outside of the nest covered with small red ants and in a
dying condition.
The second case is contained in a letter from one of my correspondents
in Australia, Mr. Charles Barrett, well known in the Colony and in
this country as a student of the native avifauna. He had in reading
seen an extract from my paper on “Life in a Pine Wood,” and wrote: “I
believe that in Australia, where ants of many species swarm in the dry
regions, large numbers of nestlings fall victims to these insects. Of
course it is the birds that nest on the ground that suffer the most,
but some of the ants ascend trees and attack the fledgelings in nests
in the highest branches.... In November I noticed a stream of large
reddish ants streaming up a gum sapling, and found it was pouring into
a nest of wood swallows, _Artamus sarolida_, which contained three
chicks about a week old. They were being devoured alive by ants.... I
put the nestlings out of their misery, but felt miserable myself for
the remainder of that golden afternoon, thinking that many similar
tragedies to that were being enacted in the Bush. The odour and
fragrance of the wattle bloom along the creek and the blithe songs of
birds failed to cheer for the time.”
He also described finding the nest of a song-thrush (our English bird)
with nestlings in a similar state.
II
HINTS TO ADDER-SEEKERS
It has occurred to me that a few hints or wrinkles on the subject
of adder-seeking might prove serviceable to some readers of this
work, seeing that there are very many persons desirous of making the
acquaintance of this rare and elusive reptile. They wish to know it--at
a safe distance--in a state of Nature, in its own home, and have sought
and have not found it. Quite frequently--about once or twice each week
in summer--I am asked by some one for instructions in the matter.
One of my sweetest-tempered and most benevolent friends, who loves, he
imagines, all things both great and small, pays the children of his
village sixpence for every dead adder or grass-snake they bring him.
He does not distinguish between the two ophidians. It is to be hoped
that no such lover of God’s creatures, including His “wild wormes in
woods,” will take advantage of these hints. Let him that finds an adder
treat it properly, not without reverence, and his finding it will be to
his gain in knowledge of that rare and personal kind which cannot be
written or imparted in any way. That which we seek is not the viper,
the subject of Fontana’s monumental work, the little rope of clay or
dead flesh in the British Museum, coiled in its bottle of spirits, and
labelled “_Vipera berus_, Linn.”
_We_ seek the adder or nadder, that being venerated of old and
generator of the sacred adder-stone of the Druids, and he dwells not
in a jar of alcohol in the still shade and equable temperature of a
museum. He is a lover of the sun, and must be sought for after his
winter sleep in dry incult places, especially in open forest-lands,
stony hill-sides, and furze-grown heaths and commons. After a little
training the adder-seeker gets to know a viperish locality by its
appearance. It is, however, not necessary to go out at random in search
of a suitable hunting-ground, seeing that all places haunted by adders
are well known to the people in the neighbourhood, who are only too
ready to give the information required. There are no preservers of
adders in the land, and so far as I know there has been but one person
in England to preserve that beautiful and innocuous creature, the
ringed-snake. Can any one understand such a hobby or taste? Certainly
not that friend of animals who pays sixpence for a dead snake. He,
the snake-saviour, our unknown little Melampus, paid his village boys
sixpence for every one they brought to him alive and uninjured, and to
inspire confidence in them he would go with half a dozen large snakes
in his coat pockets into the village school, and pulling his pets out,
would play with and make the children handle them and take note of
their beautiful form and motions.
This snake-lover possessed at Aldermaston one of the largest parks in
southern England, abounding in oak trees so ancient and of so noble a
growth that they are a wonder to all who see them. This vast park was
his snake-preserve, and in moist green places, by running waters, he
planted thickets for their shelter. But when his time came and he died,
the son who succeeded him thought he would get more glory and sport by
preserving pheasants, and accordingly engaged a little army of men and
boys to extirpate the reptiles. There is nothing now to recall the dead
man’s “fantastic hobby” but a stained-glass window--I wish it had been
done by a better artist--placed by his pious widow in the beautiful
parish church, where you can see him among angelic figures surrounded
by a company of birds and beasts and reptiles of many shapes and
colours, and at the margins the familiar words, _He prayeth best who
loveth best_, etc.
Let us return to our quest. The trouble is when you have arrived at the
adder-haunt to find the adder. A man may spend years, even a lifetime,
without seeing one. Some time ago I talked to an aged shepherd whose
flock fed in a wide furze-grown hollow in the South Downs where adders
were not uncommon. He told me he had been shepherding forty years in
that place, and during the entire period had found three adders! If
he had said 300 I should not have been surprised. The man on the soil
does not often see an adder, because for one thing he does not look
for it, and still more because of the heavy boots he wears, with which
he pounds the earth like a dray-horse with its ponderous iron-shod
hoofs. Even men who walk lightly and wear light foot-gear make, as a
rule, an amazing noise in walking over dry heathy places with brittle
sticks and dry vegetable matter covering the ground. I have had
persons thrust their company on me when going for a stroll on ground
abounding in adders, and have known at once from their way of walking
in an unaccustomed place that the quest would prove an idle one. Their
lightest, most cautious tread would alarm and send into hiding every
adder a dozen or twenty yards in advance of us.
In spring the adders are most alert and shyest. Later in the season
some adders, as a rule the females, become sluggish and do not slip
quickly away when approached; but in summer the herbage is apt to hide
them, and they lie more in the shade than in March, April, and the
early part of May. In spring you must go alone and softly, but you
need not fear to whistle and sing, or even to shout, for the adder is
deaf and cannot hear you; on the other hand, his body is sensitive in
an extraordinary degree to earth vibrations, and the ordinary tread
of even a very light man will disturb him at a distance of fifteen or
twenty yards. That sense of the adder, which has no special organ yet
may serve better than vision, hearing, smell, and touch together, is
of the greatest importance to it, since to a creature that lies and
progresses prone on the ground and has a long brittle backbone, the
heavy mammalian foot is one of the greatest dangers to its life.
Not only must the seeker go softly, but he must have a quick-seeing,
ever-searching eye, and behind the eye a mind intent on the object.
The sharpest sight is useless if he falls to thinking of something
else, since it is not possible for him to be in two places at once. To
empty the mind as in crystal-gazing is a good plan, but if it cannot
be emptied, if thought will not rest still, it must be occupied with
adders and nothing else. The exercise and discipline is interesting
even if we find no adders; it reveals in swift flickering glimpses a
vanished experience or state of the primitive mind--the mind which,
like that of the inferior animals, is a polished mirror, undimmed by
speculation, in which the extraneous world is vividly reflected. If
the adder quest goes on for days, it is still best to preserve the
mood, to think of adders all day, and when asleep to dream of them.
The dreams, I have found, are of two sorts--pleasant and unpleasant.
In the former we are the happy first finders of the loveliest and most
singular serpents ever looked upon; in the second we unwittingly go up
barefooted into a place from which we cannot escape, a vast flat region
extending to the horizon, littered with adders. We have lifted a foot
and don’t know where to set it, for there is not one square foot of
ground which is not already occupied by an adder coiled in readiness to
strike.
In adder-seeking, the main thing is to find your adder without
disturbing it, so as to be able to stand near and watch it lying
quiescent in the sun. The best plan is to come almost to a stop as soon
as the creature has been caught sight of, then to advance so slowly and
stealthily as to appear stationary, for the adder although unalarmed
is, I believe, always conscious of your presence. In this way you may
approach to within two or three yards, or nearer, and remain a long
time regarding it.
But what is the seeker to do if, after long searching, he discovers
his adder already in retreat, and knows that in two or three seconds
it will vanish from his sight? As a rule, the person who sees an adder
gliding from him aims a blow at it with his stick _so as not to lose
it_. Now to kill your adder _is_ to lose it. It is true you will have
something to show for it, or something of it which is left in your
hands, and which, if you feel disposed, you may put in a glass jar and
label “_Vipera berus_.” But this would not be an adder. Must we then
never kill an adder? That is a question I do not undertake to answer,
but I can say that if we are seeking after knowledge, or something we
call knowledge because it is a convenient word and can be made to cover
many things it would be difficult to name, then to kill is no profit,
but, on the contrary, a distinct loss. Fontana dissected 40,000 adders
in his long and busy day, but if there is anything we want to know
about the adder beyond the number of scales on the integument, and
the number, shape, and size of the bones in the dead coil, he and the
innumerable ophiologists and herpetologists who came after him are
unable to tell us. We can read about the scales and bones in a thousand
books. We want to know more about the living thing, even about its
common life habits. It has not yet been settled whether or not the
female adder swallows its young, not, like the fer-de-lance, to digest
them in her stomach, but to save their threatened lives. It is true
that many persons have, during the last half century, witnessed the
thing and have described what they saw in _The Zoologist_, _Land and
Water_, _Field_ and other journals; nevertheless the compilers of our
Natural Histories regard the case as not yet proved beyond a doubt.
Here, then, we have one of several questions which can only be answered
by field-naturalists who abstain from killing. But a better reason for
not killing may be given than this desire to discover a new fact--the
mere satisfying of a mental curiosity. I know good naturalists who
have come to hate the very sight of a gun, simply because that useful
instrument has become associated in their case with the thought and the
memory of the degrading or disturbing effect on the mind of killing the
creatures we love, whose secrets we wish to find out.
Alas! it took me a long time to discover the advantages of not
killing. The following account of killing an adder--the last time I
did such a thing--may serve to throw a little light on the question.
Adders were common at a place where I was staying at a farm in the
New Forest, but I had never seen one near the house until one sultry
afternoon in July, when coming into a path which led from the farm-yard
into and through a hazel copse, I came upon one lying in the middle of
the path. It was a large adder, so sluggish that it made no attempt to
escape, but turned and struck at me when I approached it. I thought of
the little children, for this was the very spot where they came to play
and hunt for fowls’ eggs every afternoon; the adder, if left there,
might be a danger to them; it was necessary either to kill or remove
it. Then it occurred to me that to remove it would be useless, since if
the creature’s place was there, it would infallibly return to it from
any distance. The homing instinct is strong in the adder and in most
serpents. And so to end the matter I killed and buried it, and went on
my way. My way was through the copse and over a fence and ditch on the
other side, and I was no sooner over the ditch than I beheld a second
adder, bigger than the last and just as sluggish. It was, however, not
strange, as in July the female adder is often like that, especially
in sultry thunderous weather. I teased it to make it move away, then
picked it up to examine it, after which I released it and watched it
gliding slowly away into the shadow of the bushes. And, watching it, I
became conscious of a change in my mental attitude towards the living
things that were so much to me, my chief happiness having always been
in observing their ways. The curiosity was not diminished, but the
feeling that had gone with it for a very long time past was changed to
what it had been when I was sportsman and collector, always killing
things. The serpent gliding away before me was nothing but a worm with
poison fangs in its head and a dangerous habit of striking at unwary
legs--a creature to be crushed with the heel and no more thought about.
I had lost something precious, not, I should say, in any ethical sense,
seeing that we are in a world where we must kill to live, but valuable
in my special case, to me as a field-naturalist. Abstention from
killing had made me a better observer and a happier being, on account
of the new or different feeling towards animal life which it had
engendered. And what was this new feeling--wherein did it differ from
the old of my shooting and collecting days, seeing that since childhood
I had always had the same intense interest in all wild life? The power,
beauty, and grace of the wild creature, its perfect harmony in nature,
the exquisite correspondence between organism, form and faculties,
and the environment, with the plasticity and intelligence for the
readjustment of the vital machinery, daily, hourly, momentarily, to
meet all changes in the conditions, all contingencies; and thus,
amidst perpetual mutations and conflict with hostile and destructive
forces, to perpetuate a form, a type, a species for thousands and
millions of years!--all this was always present to my mind; yet even so
it was but a lesser element in the complete feeling. The main thing was
the wonderfulness and eternal mystery of life itself; this formative,
informing energy--this flame that burns in and shines through the case,
the habit, which in lighting another dies, and albeit dying yet endures
for ever; and the sense, too, that this flame of life was one, and
of my kinship with it in all its appearances, in all organic shapes,
however different from the human. Nay, the very fact that the forms
were unhuman but served to heighten the interest;--the roe-deer, the
leopard and wild horse, the swallow cleaving the air, the butterfly
toying with a flower, and the dragon-fly dreaming on the river; the
monster whale, the silver flying-fish, and the nautilus with rose and
purple tinted sails spread to the wind.
Happily for me the loss of this sense and feeling was but a temporary
one, and was recovered in the course of the next two days, which I
spent in the woods and on the adjacent boggy heath, finding many
adders and snakes, also young birds and various other creatures which
I handled and played with, and I could afford once more to laugh at
those who laughed at or were annoyed with me on account of my fantastic
notions about animals. My next great adventure with an adder, which
came a year later, gave me so good a laugh that I am tempted to go
further with this digression to give an account of it.
The adventure was the finding of my biggest adder. It was in a tract
of ground overgrown with furze and thorn, at a spot not far from the
turnpike road that runs from Salisbury to Blandford. Having discovered
that this spot, with an area of several hundred acres, teemed with
interesting wild life, I made it a haunt for several weeks. I soon
found out that it was a valuable game preserve and that the keeper had
strict orders from the shooting tenant not to allow any person on the
land. However, I approached him in the proper way, and he left me to
enjoy myself in my own fashion.
Never had I seen adders so abundant as at this spot, yet the keeper
assured me that he had been trying for years to extirpate them, and
often killed as many as half a dozen in a day.
One morning, near the end of June, I found my big adder, and picking it
up, held it suspended by the tip of its tail for nearly half an hour,
until, exhausted with its vain wriggling, it allowed itself to hang
limp and straight. Then I got out my tape-measure and set about the
difficult task of getting the exact length; but the adder would not
have it, for invariably when the tape was dropped at its side it drew
itself up into a series of curves and defeated me. Tired of the long
business, I set it down at length and stunned it with a rap on its head
with my stick, then setting the tape on its flat head and pressing
it with my thumb, I pulled the body straight and succeeded in getting
the exact length. It was twenty-eight inches. The biggest adder I had
hitherto found was twenty-five and a half; this was in the New Forest,
in the wildest part, where it is most thinly inhabited and adders are
most abundant. None of the other biggest adders I had measured before
and since exceeded twenty-four inches.
We see that the adder, when we come to measure it, is not a big
snake; it looks bigger than it is, partly on account of its strange
conspicuous colouring, with the zigzag shape of the band, and its
reputation as a dangerous serpent; this makes an adder two feet long
look actually bigger than the grass-snake of three feet--the size to
which this snake usually grows.
In a minute or two my adder recovered from the effects of the tap
on his head and was permitted to glide away into the furze bushes.
And leaving the spot I went on, but had not gone forty yards before
catching sight of another adder lying coiled up. I stopped to look at
it, then slowly advanced to within about five feet of it, and there
remained standing still, just to see whether or not my presence so
close to it would affect it in any way. Presently, hearing a shout,
I looked up and saw two horsemen coming up over the down in front of
me. They pulled up and sat staring down at me--a big man on a big
horse, and a rather small man on a small horse. The big man was the
shooting tenant, and the shout was evidently meant for me, but I took
no notice. I kept my eyes on my adder, and soon the two horsemen came
down at a gallop to me, and of course before they were fifty yards from
me, the thunder of the hoofs had sent the creature into hiding. Sitting
on their horses they stared in angry silence at me, and finding I had
to speak first, I apologised for being in the preserve, and said the
keeper, knowing me to be a harmless naturalist, had given me permission
to come there to find a flower I was interested in--also an adder.
What, he demanded, did I want with adders? Just to see them, I said; I
had found one and was watching it when his approach had driven it away.
I then added that adders were exceedingly abundant on this land of his,
that I had just found and measured one which was twenty-eight inches
long--the biggest adder I had ever found.
“Where is it?--let’s see it!” shouted both men, and I had to tell them
that I had released it, and it had gone into a bush about forty yards
from where we stood.
They stared at me, then exchanged glances, then the big man asked me if
I meant what I had said--if I had actually caught a big adder only to
release it unharmed?
That, I said, was what I had done.
“Then you did wrong,” almost yelled the second man. “To catch and
release an adder that might bite and kill some one any day--I consider
it a crime.”
I laughed and said I didn’t mind being a criminal in that way, and I
also thought people greatly exaggerated the danger of adder bites.
“You are wrong again!” he yelled, quite in a temper now. “As a
naturalist, you ought to know better. Let me tell you that last summer
I nearly lost my little son through an adder bite. He was in the Isle
of Wight with his nurse, and trod on the thing and was bitten on the
leg. For a whole day his life was trembling in the balance, and you
dare to tell me that adders are not a danger!”
I apologised for having made light of the subject. He was right and
I was wrong. But I couldn’t explain to him why I could not kill
adders--or anything else.
* * * * *
Let us now return to the adder-seeker who has unwittingly disturbed the
adder he has found, and who sees it about to vanish into the brake. He
has been waiting all this time to know what to do in such a case. He
must let it vanish, and comfort himself with the thought that he has
discovered its haunt and may re-find it another day, especially if he
is so fortunate as to scare it from its favourite bed on which it is
accustomed to lie sunning itself at certain hours each day until the
progress of the season will make it too warm or otherwise unsuitable,
when the old basking-place will be changed for a new one. But should
he not be satisfied to lose sight of the adder immediately after
discovering it, he must be provided with some simple contrivance for
its capture.
My plan, which cannot be recommended to timid persons liable in moments
of excitement to get flustered and awkward, is to catch the retreating
adder quickly by the tail, which is a perfectly safe proceeding if
there is no blundering, since the creature when going from you is not
in a position to strike.
I confess I am always a little reluctant to offer such an indignity
to the adder as grasping and holding it up, enraged and impotent, by
the tail, although such treatment may be to its advantage in the end.
We have a naturalist in England who picks up every adder he finds and
pinches its tail before releasing it, just to teach it caution. The
poor creeping thing with a zigzag band on its back to advertise its
dangerous character has of all creatures the fewest friends among men.
My sole object in picking up an adder by the tail is to be able to
look at its under-surface, which is often the most beautiful part. As
a rule the colour is deep blue, but it varies; the darkest specimens
being blue-black or even quite black, while the exceedingly rare light
blue is too beautiful for words. Occasionally we find an adder with the
belly-plates of the same ground colour, a dull or pale straw yellow,
as the upper part of the body, with the dark blue colour in broken
spots and dots and lines inscribed on it. These markings in some cases
resemble written characters, and it was said of old that they formed
the words:
If I could hear as well as see,
No man of life would master me.
Probably these letter-like markings on the creature’s belly, like the
minute black lines, resembling writing, on the pale bark of the holly
tree, suggested some other more important meaning to the priests of an
ancient cult, and gave the adder a peculiarly sacred character.
To conclude, let me relate here how I once had to congratulate myself
on having hurriedly snatched at and captured an adder at the moment
of seeing it, and of its attempted escape. I was cautiously strolling
along, hoping to see some good thing, in a copse in private grounds
in the New Forest, a place abounding in adders and other interesting
creatures. Night-jars were common there, and by and by one rose almost
at my feet over the roots of an oak tree, and casting my eyes down
at the spot from which it had risen, I spied a large adder, which,
alarmed either at my step or the sudden flight of the bird, was gliding
quickly away over the bed of old dry bleached leaves to its refuge at
the roots of the tree. Oddly enough, it was not the first occasion on
which I had come upon a night-jar and adder dozing peacefully side by
side. It was a beautiful adder of a rich tawny yellow hue, with an
intensely black broad zigzag mark, and as there was no time to lose,
I dashed at and managed to catch it; then holding it up by the tail,
what was my surprise and delight at finding its under-surface of a
colour or “shade” I had never previously seen--the lovely blue I have
mentioned. There was no break in the colour; every belly-plate from
the neck to the tip of the tail was of a uniform exquisite turquoise
blue, or considering that turquoise blues vary in depth and purity, it
would be more exact to describe the colour as most like that of the
forget-me-not, but being enamelled, it reminded me rather of the most
exquisite blue one has seen on some priceless piece of old Chinese
pottery. I think that if some famous aged artist of the great period, a
worshipper of colour whose life had been spent in the long endeavour to
capture and make permanent the most exquisite fleeting tints in Nature,
had seen the blue on that adder he would have been overcome at the same
time with rapture and despair. And I think, too, that if Mother Nature
in turning out this ophidian had muddled things, as she is apt to do
occasionally, and had reversed the position of the colours, putting the
tawny yellow and black zigzag band on the belly and the blue above,
the sight of the creature would have given rise to a New Forest myth.
It would have been spread abroad that an angelic being had appeared
in those parts in the form of a serpent but in its natural celestial
colour.
After keeping it a long time in my hand, I released it reluctantly,
and saw it steal away into the cavity at the roots of the oak. Here
was its home, and I fondly hoped to see it again many times. But it
was not there when I called on many successive days--neither serpent
nor night-jar; but though we three shall meet no more, I remember the
finding of that adder as one of the loveliest experiences I have met
with during all the years I have spent in conversing with wild animals.
III
BATS
The bat was formerly looked upon as an uncanny sort of bird, and
described as such in the old natural histories. Oh, those ever
delightful old natural histories, and the vision of the wise old
naturalist examining a recently-taken specimen through his horn-bound
spectacles, and setting it gravely down in his books that it is the
only known bird which was clothed in fur in place of feathers! Or,
as Plinius puts it, the only bird which brings forth and suckles its
young, just as we say that the Australian water-mole is the only mammal
which lays eggs. The modern ornithologist will have nothing to do with
the creature; but after his expulsion from the feathered nation it was
his singular good fortune not to sink lower in the scale; he was, on
the contrary, raised to the mammalians, or quadrupeds, as our fathers
called them; then on the discovery being made that he was anatomically
related to the lemurs, he was eventually allotted a place in our
systems next after that ancient order of fox-faced monkeys. And thus it
has come to pass that when some one writes a book on the mammals of
this island, which has no monkeys or lemurs, and man cannot be included
in such works on account of an old convention or prejudice, he is
obliged to give the proud first place to this very poor relation.