to these water-born and amphibious creatures they yet seek it for
so short a period in each year, and for the rest of the time are
practically without it! The toad comes to it in the love season, and
at that time one is often astonished at the number of toads seen
gathered in some solitary pool, where perhaps not a toad has been seen
for months past, and with no other water for miles around. The fact
is, the solitary pool has drawn to itself the entire toad population
of the surrounding country, which may comprise an area of several
square miles. Each toad has his own home or hermitage somewhere in
that area, where he spends the greater portion of the summer season
practically without water excepting in wet weather, hiding by day in
moist and shady places, and issuing forth in the evening. And there too
he hibernates in winter. When spring returns he sets out on his annual
pilgrimage of a mile or two, or even a greater distance, travelling
in the slow, deliberate manner of the one described, crawling and
resting until he arrives at the sacred pool--his Tipperary. They
arrive singly and are in hundreds, a gathering of hermits from the
desert places, drunk with excitement, and filling the place with
noise and commotion. A strange sound, when at intervals the leader or
precentor or bandmaster for the moment blows himself out into a wind
instrument--a fairy bassoon, let us say, with a tremble to it--and no
sooner does he begin than a hundred more join in; and the sound, which
the scientific books describe as “croaking,” floats far and wide, and
produces a beautiful, mysterious effect on a still evening when the
last heavy-footed labourer has trudged home to his tea, leaving the
world to darkness and to me.
In England we are almost as rich in toads as in serpents, since there
are two species, the common toad, universally distributed, and the
rarer natterjack, abundant only in the south of Surrey. The breeding
habits are the same in both species, the concert-singing included,
but there is a difference in the _timbre_ of their voices, the sound
produced by the natterjack being more resonant and musical to most ears
than that of the common toad.
The music and revels over, the toads vanish, each one taking his
own road, long and hard to travel, to his own solitary home. Their
homing instinct, like that of many fishes and of certain serpents that
hibernate in numbers together, and of migrating birds, is practically
infallible. They will not go astray, and the hungriest raptorial
beasts, foxes, stoats, and cats, for example, decline to poison
themselves by killing and devouring them.
In the late spring or early summer one occasionally encounters a
traveller on his way back to his hermitage. I met one a mile or so from
the valley of the Wylie, half-way up a high down, with his face to the
summit of Salisbury Plain. He was on the bank at the side of a deep
narrow path, and was resting on the velvety green turf, gay with little
flowers of the chalk-hills--eye-bright, squinancy-wort, daisies, and
milkwort, both white and blue.
The toad, as a rule, strikes one as rather an ugly creature, but this
one sitting on the green turf, with those variously coloured fairy
flowers all about him, looked almost beautiful. He was very dark,
almost black, and with his shining topaz eyes had something of the
appearance of a yellow-eyed black cat. I sat down by his side and
picked him up, which action he appeared to regard as an unwarrantable
liberty on my part; but when I placed him on my knee and began stroking
his blackish corrugated back with my finger-tips his anger vanished,
and one could almost imagine his golden eyes and wide lipless mouth
smiling with satisfaction.
A good many flies were moving about at that spot--a pretty fly whose
name I do not know, a little bigger than a house-fly, all a shining
blue, with head and large eyes a bright red. These flies kept lighting
on my hand, and by and by I cautiously moved a hand until a fly on
it was within tongue-distance of the toad, whereupon the red tongue
flicked out like lightning and the fly vanished. Again the process was
repeated, and altogether I put over half-a-dozen flies in his way, and
they all vanished in the same manner, so quickly that the action eluded
my sight. One moment and a blue and red-headed fly was on my hand
sucking the moisture from the skin, and then, lo! he was gone, while
the toad still sat there motionless on my knee like a toad carved out
of a piece of black stone with two yellow gems for eyes.
After helping him to a dinner, I took him off my knee with a little
trouble, as he squatted close down, desiring to stay where he was, and
putting him back among the small flowers to get more flies for himself
if he could, I went on my way.
It is easy to establish friendly relations with these lowly creatures,
amphibious and reptiles, by a few gentle strokes with the finger-tips
on the back. Shortly after my adventure with this toad I was visiting a
naturalist friend, who told me of an adventure he had had with a snake.
He was out walking with his wife near his home among the Mendips when
they spied the snake basking in the sun on the turf, and at the same
moment the snake saw them and began quietly gliding away. But they
succeeded in overtaking and capturing it, and, although it was a large
snake and struggled violently to escape, they soon quieted it down by
stroking its back with their fingers. They kept and played with it
for half an hour, then put it down, whereupon it went away, but quite
slowly, almost as if reluctant to leave them.
So far this was a common experience; I have tamed many grass-snakes
in the same way, and the only smooth snake I have ever captured in
England was made tame in about ten minutes by holding it on my knee
and stroking it. In the instance related by my friend, it would appear
that the tameness does not always vanish as soon as the creature finds
itself free again. About three days after the incident I have related
he was again walking with his wife, and they again found the snake
at the same spot, whereupon he, anxious to capture it again, made a
dash at it, but the snake on this occasion made no attempt to escape,
and when picked up did not struggle. They again kept it some time,
caressing it with their fingers, then releasing it as before; later
they saw their snake on several occasions, when it acted in the same
way, allowing itself to be taken up and kept as long as it was wanted,
and then, when released, going very slowly away.
That one first delightful experience of having its back stroked with
finger-tips had made a tame snake of it.
IX
THE HERON: A FEATHERED NOTABLE
The bird-watcher’s life is an endless succession of surprises. Almost
every day he appears fated to witness some habit, some action, which he
had never seen or heard of before, and will perhaps never see again.
Who but Waterton ever beheld herons hovering like gulls over the water,
attracted by the fish swimming near the surface? And who, I wonder,
except myself ever saw herons bathing and wallowing after the manner of
beasts, not birds? At all events I do not remember any notice of such
a habit in any account of the heron I have read; and I have read many.
At noon, one hot summer day, I visited Sowley Pond, which has a heronry
near it on the Hampshire coast; and peeping through the trees on the
bank I spied five herons about twenty yards from the margin bathing in
a curious way among the floating poa grass, where the water was about
two feet deep or more. All were quietly resting in different positions
in the water--one was sitting on his knees with head and neck and
shoulders out of it, another was lying on one side with one half-open
wing above the surface, a third had only head and neck out, the whole
body being submerged; and it puzzled me to think how he could keep
himself down unless it was by grasping the roots of the grass with his
claws. Occasionally one of the bathers would shift his position, coming
partly up or going lower down, or turning over on the other side; but
there was no flutter or bird-like excitement. They rested long in
one position, and moved in a leisurely, deliberate manner, lying and
luxuriating in the tepid water like pigs, buffaloes, hippopotamuses,
and other water-loving mammalians. I watched them for an hour or so,
and when I left, two were still lying down in the water. The other
three had finished their bath, and were standing drying their plumage
in the hot sun.
This was not the first surprise the heron had given me, but the first
was received far from this land in my early shooting and collecting
days, and the species was not our well-known historical bird, the
_Ardea cinerea_ of Britain and Europe generally, and Asia and Africa,
but the larger _Ardea cocoi_ of South America, a bird with a bigger
wing-spread, but so like it in colour and action that any person from
England on first seeing it would take it for a very large specimen of
his familiar home bird.
It happened that I was making a collection of the birds of my part of
the country and was in want of a specimen of our common heron. A few
of these birds haunted the river near my home, and one day when out
with the gun I caught sight of one fishing in the river. It was deep
there, and the bird was standing under and close to the bank, where
the water came up to his feathered thighs. Moving back from the bank
I got within shooting distance and then had a look at him and saw
that he was very intently watching the water, with head drawn back
and apparently about to strike. And just as I pulled the trigger he
struck, and stricken himself at the same moment he threw himself up
into the air and rose to a height of about thirty feet, then fell back
to earth close to the margin and began beating with his wings. When I
came up he was at his last gasp, and what was my astonishment to find a
big fish impaled by his beak. It was an uneatable fish, of a peculiar
South American family, its upper part cased in bony plates; an ugly and
curious-looking creature called _Vieja_ (“old woman”) by the natives.
It was a common fish in our stream and a nuisance when caught, as it
invariably sucked the hook into its belly. Now I had often found dead
“old women” lying on or near the bank with a hole in their bony back
and wondered at it. I had concluded that some of the native boys in
our neighbourhood had taken to spearing the fish, and naturally these
useless ones they killed were thrown away. Now I knew that they were
killed by the heron with a blow of his powerful beak; a serious mistake
on the bird’s part, but an inevitable one in the circumstances, since
even the shining, piercing eyes of a heron would only be able to
_surmise_ the presence of a fish a few inches below the surface in the
muddy streams of the pampas. To distinguish the species would never be
possible.
In this case the iron-hard dagger-like beak had been driven right
through the fish from the bone-plated back to the belly, from which
it projected about an inch and a half. With such power had the blow
been delivered that it was only by exerting a good deal of force that
I was able to wrench the beak out. My conclusion was that the bird
would never have been able to free himself, and that by shooting
him I had only saved him from the torture of a lingering death from
starvation. The strange thing was that bird and fish had met their
end simultaneously in that way: I doubted that such a thing had ever
happened before or would ever happen again. From that time I began to
pay a good deal of attention to the dead “old women” I found along the
river-bank with a hole in their back, and could never find one in which
the beak had been driven right through the body. In every case the beak
had gone in about half-way through--just far enough to enable the bird
to fly to the shore with its inconvenient captive and there get rid of
it.
* * * * *
Death by accident is common enough in wild life, and a good proportion
of such deaths are due to an error of judgement, often so slight as not
to seem an error at all. For example, a hawking swallow may capture
and try to bolt a wasp or other dangerous insect without first killing
or crushing it, and in doing so receive a fatal sting in the throat.
The flight of hawking swallows and swifts is so rapid that it hardly
gives them time to judge of the precise nature of the insect appearing
before them which a second’s delay would lose. This is seen in swallows
and swifts so frequently getting hooked by dry-fly anglers. Birds of
prey, too, occasionally meet their death in a similar way, as when a
kite or falcon or buzzard or eagle lifts a stoat or weasel, and the
lithe little creature succeeds in wriggling up and fixing its teeth
in the bird’s flesh. If they fall from a considerable height both are
killed. Again, birds sometimes get killed by attempting to swallow too
big a morsel, and I think this is oftenest the case with birds that
have rather weak beaks and have developed a rapacious habit. I remember
once seeing a Guira cuckoo with head hanging and wings drooping,
struggling in vain to swallow a mouse stuck fast in its gullet, the
tail still hanging from its beak. Undoubtedly the bird perished, as I
failed in my attempts to capture it and save its life by pulling the
mouse out. A common tyrant-bird of South America, Pitangus, preys on
mice, small snakes, lizards and frogs, as well as on large insects, but
invariably hammers its prey on a branch until it is bruised to a pulp
and broken up. It will work at a mouse in this way until the skin is
so bruised that it can be torn open with its long, weak bill, but it
never attempts to bolt it whole as the cuckoo does.
One day when sitting on the bank of Beaulieu River in Hampshire I saw a
cormorant come up with a good-sized eel it had captured and was holding
by the neck close to the head, but the long body of the eel had wound
itself serpentwise about the bird’s long neck, and the cormorant was
struggling furiously to free itself. Unable to do so it dived, thinking
perhaps to succeed better under water, but when it reappeared on the
surface the folds of the eel appeared to have tightened and the bird’s
struggles were weaker. Again it dived, and then again three or four
times, still keeping its hold on the eel, but struggling more feebly
each time. Finally it came up without the eel and so saved itself,
since if it had kept its hold a little longer it would have been
drowned.
In my _Land’s End_ book I have given an account of a duel between a
seal and a huge conger-eel it had captured by the middle of the body,
the conger-eel having fastened its teeth in the seal’s head.
An odd way in which birds occasionally kill themselves is by getting a
foot caught in long horse-hair or thread used in building. I have seen
sparrows and house-martins dead, suspended from the nest by a hair or
thread under the nest in this way.
When I killed my heron, and by doing so probably saved it from a
lingering death by starvation, it struck me as an odd coincidence that
it was within a stone’s throw of the spot where a few weeks before
I had saved another bird from a like fate--not in this instance by
shooting it. The bird was the painted snipe, _Rhynchaea semicollaris_,
a prettily coloured and mottled species with a green curved beak, and
I found it on the low grassy margin of the stream with the point of
its middle toe caught in one of Nature’s traps for the unwary--the
closed shell of a large fresh-water clam. The stream at this spot
was almost entirely overgrown with dense beds of bulrushes, and the
clams were here so abundant that the bottom of the stream was covered
with them. The snipe wading into the water a foot or so from the
margin had set its middle toe inside a partially open shell, which
had instantly closed and caught it. Only by severing the point off
could the bird have delivered itself, but its soft beak was useless
for such a purpose. It had succeeded in dragging the clam out, and on
my approach it first tried to hide itself by crouching in the grass,
and then struggled to drag itself away. It was, when I picked it up,
a mere bundle of feathers and had probably been lying thus captive
for three or four days in constant danger of being spied by a passing
carrion-hawk and killed and eaten. But when I released the toe it
managed to flutter up and go away to a distance of thirty or forty
yards before it dropped down among the aquatic grasses and sedges on a
marshy islet in the stream.
* * * * *
A large heronry is to the naturalist one of the most fascinating
spectacles in the wild bird life of this country. Heaven be thanked
that all our landowners are not like those of South Devon, who are
anxious to extirpate the heron in that district in the interest of the
angler. On account of their action one is inclined to look on the whole
fraternity of dry-fly fishers as a detestable lot of Philistines. Some
years ago they raised a howl about the swallows--their worst enemies,
that devoured all the mayflies, so that the trout were starved! Well,
they can rejoice now to know that swallow and martin return to England
in ever-decreasing numbers each summer, and they must be grateful to
our neighbours across the Channel who are exterminating these noxious
birds on migration.
I have known and know many heronries all over England, and I think the
one I liked to visit best of all was in a small wood in a flat green
country in the Norfolk Broads district. It was large, containing about
seventy inhabited nests--huge nests, many of them, and near together,
so that it looked like a rookery made by giant rooks. And it has had
a troubled history, like that of an old Norfolk town in the far past
when Saxons and Danes were at variance. For this heronry had been
established alongside of an old populous rookery, and the rooks hated
the herons and mobbed them and demolished their nests, and persecuted
them in every rookish way; but they refused to quit, and at length the
rooks, unable to tolerate them, shifted their rookery a little farther
away, and there was an uncomfortable sort of truce between the big
black hostile birds and their grey ghostly neighbours with very long,
sharp, and very unghostly beaks.
On the occasion of my last visit this heronry was in the most
interesting stage, when the young birds were fully grown and were to
be seen standing up on their big nests or on the topmost branches of
the trees waiting to be fed. At some spots in the wood where the trees
stand well apart I could count as many as forty to fifty young birds
standing in this way, in families of two, three, and four. It was a
fine sight, and the noise they made at intervals was a fine thing to
hear. The heron is a bird with a big voice. When nest-building is going
on, and in fact until most of the eggs are laid, herons are noisy
birds, and the sounds they emit are most curious--the loud familiar
squalk or “frank,” which resembles the hard, powerful alarm-note of the
peacock, but is more harsh, while other grinding metallic cries remind
one of the carrion-crow. Other of their loud sounds are distinctly
mammalian in character; there is a dog-like sound, partly bark and
partly yelp, swine-like grunting, and other sounds which recall the
peculiar, unhappy, desolate cries of the large felines, especially of
the puma. One need not take it for granted that these strange vocal
noises are nothing but love calls. They may be in part expressions of
anger, since it is hardly to be believed that the members of these rude
communities invariably respect one another’s rights. We see how it is
with the rook, which has a more developed social instinct than the
lonely savage heron.
During incubation quiet reigns in the heronry; when the young are out,
especially when they are well grown and ravenously hungry all day
long, the wood is again filled with the uproar; and a noisier heronry
than the one I am describing could not have been found. For one thing,
it was situated on the very edge of the wood, overlooking the green
flat expanse towards Breydon Water, where the parent birds did most
of their fishing, so that the returning birds were visible from the
tree-tops at a great distance, travelling slowly with eel and frog and
fish-laden gullets on their wide-spread blue wings--dark blue against
the high shining blue of the sky. All the young birds, stretched up to
their full height, would watch its approach, and each and every one of
them would regard the returning bird as its own too-long absent parent
with food to appease its own furious hunger; and as it came sweeping
over the colony there would be a tremendous storm of wild expectant
cries--strange cat- and dog-like growling, barking, yelping, whining,
screaming; and this would last until the newcomer would drop upon its
own tree and nest and feed its own young, whereupon the tempest would
slowly subside, only to be renewed on the appearance of the next great
blue bird coming down over the wood.
* * * * *
One of the most delightful, the most exhilarating spectacles of wild
bird life is that of the soaring heron. The great blue bird, with great
round wings so measured in their beats, yet so buoyant in the vast
void air! It is indeed a sight which moves all men to admiration in
all countries which the great bird inhabits; and I remember one of the
finest passages in old Spanish poetry describes the heron rejoicing in
its placid flight. “Have you seen it, beautiful in the heavens!” the
poet exclaims in untranslatable lines, in which the harmonious words,
_delicado y sonoroso_, and the peculiar rhythm are made to mimic the
slow pulsation of the large wings. Who has not seen it and experienced
something of the feeling which stirred the old writer centuries ago:
Has visto hermosa en el cielo
La gárza sonreárse con plácido vuélo?
Has visto, torciendo de la mano,
Sacra que la deribe por el suelo?
The most perfect example I know of in literature in which the sound
is an echo to the sense. How artificial and paltry that ornament
often seems to us in our poets, even in much-admired passages, such
as Goldsmith’s white-washed walls and nicely-sanded floor, and the
varnished clock that clicked behind the door. The beauty of the
passage quoted--the heavenward sublime flight of the heron and the
furious zigzag pursuit of the falcon, who will presently overtake and
hurl it back to earth--is in its perfect naturalness, its spontaneity,
as if some one in delight at the spectacle had exclaimed the words.
This is one of the sights in bird life which makes me envy the
sportsmen of the old time when falconry was followed and the peregrine
was flown, not at skulking magpies, as the way is with our Hawking
Club, but at noble heron. They saw the great bird at its best, when
it mounts with powerful wing-beats almost vertically to a vast height
in the sky. The heron, in these days, when all the hawks have been
extirpated by our Philistine pheasant-breeders who own the country, has
no need to exercise that instinct and faculty.
* * * * *
The question has sometimes come into my mind: Why does the heron at all
times, when, seen on the wing, it strikes us as beautiful, and when
only strange or quaint-looking, or actually ugly, produce in some of us
a feeling akin to melancholy? We speak of it as a grey, a ghost-like
bird; and grey it certainly is, a haunter of lonely waters at the dim
twilight hour; mysterious in its comings and goings. Ghostly, too, it
is in another sense, and here we may see that the feeling, the sense
of melancholy, is due to association, to the fact that the heron is a
historical bird, part of the country’s past, when it was more to the
country gentleman than the semi-domestic pheasant and the partridge
on the arable land and the blackcock and red-grouse on the moors all
together to the man of to-day. The memory of that vanished time, the
thought that the ruder life of the past, when men lived nearer to
Nature, had a keener flavour, is accompanied with a haunting regret.
It is true that the regret is for something we have not known, that we
have only heard or read of it, but it has become mixed in our mind with
our very own experienced past--our glad beautiful “days that are no
more.” And when we remember that in those distant days the heron was a
table-bird, we may well believe that men were healthier and had better
appetites than now--that they were all and always young.
X
THE HERON AS A TABLE-BIRD
In reading the Hampshire children’s Bird and Tree Essays for 1916
I came upon one by a little boy which ends as follows: “One of our
schoolboys had a heron given him, so his mother cooked it and when it
was done it was tough and had a NASTY TASTE.”
Mine are the capitals, but the concluding words seemed crying for them;
they also served to remind me of a story about eating heron told me by
the only person I had ever met who had some first-hand knowledge about
the heron as a table-bird. It is a rather long story; perhaps a painful
one to persons of a squeamish stomach, but as it is pure natural
history I must be allowed to tell it.