DAWS IN THE WEST COUNTRY
Daws are more abundant in the west and south-west of England generally
than in any other part of the kingdom; and they abound most in
Somerset, or so it has seemed to me. It is true that the largest
congregations of daws in the entire country are to be seen at
Savernake in Wiltshire, where the ancient hollow beeches and oaks in
the central parts of the forest supply them with all the nesting holes
they require. There is no such wood of old decaying trees in Somerset
to attract them to one spot in such numbers, but the country generally
is singularly favourable to them. It is mainly a pastoral country with
large areas of rich, low grass land, and ranges of high hills, where
there are many rocky precipices such as the daw loves. For very good
reasons he prefers the inland to the sea-cliff as a breeding site. It
is, to begin with, in the midst of his feeding ground, whereas the
sea-wall is a boundary to a feeding ground beyond which the bird
cannot go. Better still, the inland bird has an immense advantage over
the other in travelling to and from his nest in bad weather.
When the wind blows strong from the sea the seaside bird must
perpetually fight against it and win his home by sheer muscular
exertion. The other bird, able to go foraging to this side or that,
according to the way the wind blows, can always have the wind as a
help instead of a hindrance.
Somerset also possesses a long coast-line and some miles of
sea-cliffs, but the colonies of jackdaws found here are small compared
with those of the Mendip range. The inland-cliff breeding daws that
inhabit the valley of the Somerset Axe alone probably greatly
outnumber all the daws in Middlesex, or Surrey, or Essex.
Finally, besides the cliffs and woods, there are the old towns and
villages--small towns and villages with churches that are almost like
cathedrals. No county in England is richer in noble churches, and no
kind of building seems more attractive to the "ecclesiastical daw"
than the great Perpendicular tower of the Glastonbury type, which is
so common here.
Of the old towns which the bird loves and inhabits in numbers, Wells
comes first. If Wells had no birds it would still be a city one could
not but delight in. There are not more than half a dozen towns in all
the country where (if I were compelled to live in towns) life would
not seem something of a burden; and of these, two are in
Somerset--Bath and Wells. Of the former something will be said further
on: Wells has the first place in my affections, and is the one town in
England the sight of which in April and early May, from a neighbouring
hill, has caused me to sigh with pleasure. Its cathedral is assuredly
the loveliest work of man in this land, supremely beautiful, even
without the multitude of daws that make it their house, and may be
seen every day in scores, looking like black doves perched on the
stony heads and hands and shoulders of that great company of angels
and saints, apostles, kings, queens, and bishops, that decorate the
wonderful west front. For in this building--not viewed as in a
photograph or picture, nor through the eye of the mere architect or
archaeologist, who sees the gem but not the setting--nature and man
appear to have worked together more harmoniously than in others.
But it is hard to imagine a birdless Wells. The hills, beautiful with
trees and grass and flowers, come down to it; cattle graze on their
slopes; the peewit has its nest in their stony places, and the kestrel
with quick-beating wings hangs motionless overhead. Nature is round
it, breathing upon and touching it caressingly on every side; flowing
through it like the waters that gave it its name in olden days, that
still gush with noise and foam from the everlasting rock, to send
their crystal currents along the streets. And with nature, in and
around the rustic village-like city, live the birds. The green
woodpecker laughs aloud from the group of old cedars and pines, hard
by the cathedral close--you will not hear that woodland sound in any
other city in the kingdom; and the rooks caw all day from the rookery
in the old elms that grow at the side of the palace moat. But the
cathedral daws, on account of their numbers, are the most important of
the feathered inhabitants of Wells. These city birds are familiarly
called "Bishop's Jacks," to distinguish them from the "Ebor Jacks,"
the daws that in large numbers have their home and breeding-place in
the neighbouring cliffs, called the Ebor Rocks.
The Ebor daws are but the first of a succession of colonies extending
along the side of the Cheddar valley. A curious belief exists among
the people of Wells and the district, that the Ebor Jacks make better
pets than the Bishop's Jacks. If you want a young bird you have to pay
more for one from the rocks than from the cathedral. I was assured
that the cliff bird makes a livelier, more intelligent and amusing pet
than the other. A similar notion exists, or existed, at Hastings,
where there was a saying among the fisher folks and other natives that
"a Grainger daa is worth a ha'penny more than a castle daa." The
Grainger rock, once a favourite breeding-place of the daws at that
point, has long since fallen into the sea, and the saying has perhaps
died out.
At Wells most of the cathedral birds--a hundred couples at
least--breed in the cavities behind the stone statues, standing, each
in its niche, in rows, tier above tier, on the west front. In April,
when the daws are busiest at their nest-building, I have amused myself
early every morning watching them flying to the front in a constant
procession, every bird bringing his stick. This work is all done in
the early morning, and about half-past eight o'clock a man comes with
a barrow to gather up the fallen sticks--there is always a big
barrowful, heaped high, of them; and if not thus removed the
accumulated material would in a few days form a rampart or zareba,
which would prevent access to the cathedral on that side.
It has often been observed that the daw, albeit so clever a bird,
shows a curious deficiency of judgment when building, in his
persistent efforts to carry in sticks too big for the cavity. Here,
for instance, each morning in turning over the litter of fallen
material I picked up sticks measuring from four or five to seven feet
in length. These very long sticks were so slender and dry that the
bird was able to lift and to fly with them; therefore, to his corvine
mind, they were suitable for his purpose. It comes to this: the daw
knows a stick when he sees one, but the only way of testing its
usefulness to him is to pick it up in his beak, then to try to fly
with it. If the stick is six feet long and the cavity will only admit
one of not more than eighteen inches, he discovers his mistake only on
getting home. The question arises: Does he continue all his life long
repeating this egregious blunder? One can hardly believe that an old,
experienced bird can go on from day to day and year to year wasting
his energies in gathering and carrying building materials that will
have to be thrown away in the end--that he is, in fact, mentally on a
level with the great mass of meaner beings who forget nothing and
learn nothing. It is not to be doubted that the daw was once a builder
in trees, like all his relations, with the exception of the
cliff-breeding chough. He is even capable of reverting to the original
habit, as I know from an instance which has quite recently come to my
knowledge. In this case a small colony of daws have been noticed for
several years past breeding in stick nests placed among the clustering
foliage of a group of Scotch firs. This colony may have sprung from a
bird hatched and reared in the nest of a carrion crow or magpie.
Still, the habit of breeding in holes must be very ancient, and
considering that the jackdaw is one of the most intelligent of our
birds, one cannot but be astonished at the rude, primitive, blundering
way in which the nest-building work is generally performed. The most
we can see by carefully watching a number of birds at work is that
there appears to be some difference with regard to intelligence
between bird and bird. Some individuals blunder less than others; it
is possible that these have learned something from experience; but if
that be so, their better way is theirs only, and their young will not
inherit it.
One morning at Wells as I stood on the cathedral green watching the
birds at their work, I witnessed a rare and curious scene--one amazing
to an ornithologist. A bird dropped a stick--an incident that occurred
a dozen times or oftener any minute at that busy time; but in this
instance the bird had no sooner let the stick fall than he rushed down
after it to attempt its recovery, just as one may see a sparrow drop a
feather or straw, and then dart down after it and often recover it
before it touches the ground. The heavy stick fell straight and fast
on to the pile of sticks already lying on the pavement, and instantly
the daw was down and had it in his beak, and thereupon laboriously
flew up to his nesting-place, which was forty to fifty feet high. At
the moment that he rushed down after the falling stick two other daws
that happened to be standing on ledges above dropped down after him,
and copied his action by each picking up a stick and flying with it to
their nests. Other daws followed suit, and in a few minutes there was
a stream of descending and ascending daws at that spot, every
ascending bird with a stick in his beak. It was curious to see that
although sticks were lying in hundreds on the pavement along the
entire breadth of the west front, the daws continued coming down only
at that spot where the first bird had picked up the stick he had
dropped. By and by, to my regret, the birds suddenly took alarm at
something and rose up, and from that moment not one descended.
Presently the man came round with his rake and broom and barrow to
tidy up the place. Before beginning his work he solemnly made the
following remark: "Is it not curious, sir, considering the distance
the birds go to get their sticks, and the work of carrying them, that
they never, by any chance, think to come down and pick up what they
have dropped!" I replied that I had heard the same thing said before,
and that it was in all the books; and then I told him of the scene I
had just witnessed. He was very much surprised, and said that such a
thing had never been witnessed before at that place. It had a
disturbing effect on him, and he appeared to me to resent this
departure from their old ancient conservative ways on the part of the
cathedral birds.
For many mornings after I continued to watch the daws until the
nest-building was finished, without witnessing any fresh outbreak of
intelligence in the colony: they had once more shaken down into the
old inconvenient traditional groove, to the manifest relief of the man
with the broom and barrow.
Bath, like Wells, is a city that has a considerable amount of nature
in its composition, and is set down in a country of hills, woods,
rocks and streams, and is therefore, like the other, a city loved by
daws and by many other wild birds. It is a town built of white stone
in the hollow of an oblong basin, with the river Avon flowing through
it; and though perhaps too large for perfect beauty, it is exceedingly
pleasant. Its "stone walls do not a prison make," since they do not
shut you out from rural sights and sounds: walking in almost any
street, even in the lowest part, in the busiest, noisiest centre of
the town, you have but to lift your eyes to see a green hill not far
away; and viewed from the top of one of these hills that encircle it,
Bath, in certain favourable states of the atmosphere, wears a
beautiful look. One afternoon, a couple of miles out, I was on the top
of Barrow Hill in a sudden, violent storm of rain and wind; when the
rain ceased, the sun burst out behind me, and the town, rain-wet and
sun-flushed, shone white as a city built of whitest marble against the
green hills and black cloud on the farther side. Then on the slaty
blackness appeared a complete and most brilliant rainbow, on one side
streaming athwart the green hill and resting on the centre of the
town, so that the high, old, richly-decorated Abbey Church was seen
through a band of green and violet mist. That storm and that rainbow,
seen by chance, gave a peculiar grace and glory to Bath, and the
bright, unfading picture it left in memory has perhaps become too much
associated in my mind with the thought of Bath, and has given me an
exaggerated idea of its charm.
When staying in Bath in the winter of 1898-9 I saw a good deal of bird
life even in the heart of the town. At the back of the house I lodged
in, in New King Street, within four minutes' walk of the Pump Room,
there was a strip of ground called a garden, but with no plants except
a few dead stalks and stumps and two small leafless trees.
Clothes-lines were hung there, and the ground was littered with old
bricks and rubbish, and at the far end of the strip there was a
fowl-house with fowls in it, a small shed, and a wood-pile. Yet to
this unpromising-looking spot came a considerable variety of birds.
Starlings, sparrows, and chaffinches were the most numerous, while the
blackbird, thrush, robin, hedge-sparrow and wren were each represented
by a pair. The wrens lived in the wood-pile, and were the only members
of the little feathered community that did not join the others at
table when crumbs and scraps were thrown out.
It was surprising to find all or most of these birds evidently
wintering on that small plot of ground in the middle of the town,
solely for the sake of the warmth and shelter it afforded them, and
the chance crumbs that came in their way. It is true that I fed them
regularly, but they were all there before I came. Yet it was not an
absolutely safe place for them, being much infested by cats,
especially by a big black one who was always on the prowl, and who had
a peculiarly murderous gleam in his luminous yellow orbs when he
crouched down to watch or attempted to stalk them. One could not but
imagine that the very sight of such eyes in that black, devilish face
would have been enough to freeze their blood with sudden terror, and
make them powerless to fly from him. But it was not so: he could
neither fascinate nor take them by surprise. No sooner would he begin
to practise his wiles than all the population would be up in arms--the
loud, sharp summons of the blackbird sounding first; then the
starlings would chatter angrily, the thrush scream, the chaffinches
begin to _pink-pink_ with all their might, and the others would join
in, even the small hideling wrens coming out of their fortress of
faggots to take part in the demonstration. Then puss would give it up
and go away, or coil himself up and go to sleep on the sloping roof of
the tiny shed or in some other sheltered spot; peace and quiet would
once more settle on the little republic, and the birds would be
content to dwell with their enemy in their midst in full sight of
them, so long as he slept or did not watch them too narrowly.
Finding that blue tits were among the visitors at the back, I hung up
some lumps of suet and a cocoa-nut to the twigs of the bushes. The
suet was immediately attacked, but judging from the suspicious way in
which they regarded the round brown object swinging in the wind, the
Bath tits had never before been treated to a cocoa-nut. But though
suspicious, it was plain that the singular object greatly excited
their curiosity. On the second day they made the discovery that it was
a new and delightful dish invented for the benefit of the blue tits,
and from that time they were at it at all hours, coming and going from
morning till night. There were six of them, and occasionally they were
all there at once, each one anxious to secure a place, and never able
when he got one to keep it longer than three or four seconds at a
time. Looking upon them from an upper window, as they perched against
and flitted round and round the suspended cocoa-nut, they looked like
a gathering of very large pale-blue flies flitting round and feeding
on medlar.
No doubt the sparrow is the most abundant species in Bath--I have got
into a habit of not noticing that bird, and it is as if I did not see
him; but after him the starling is undoubtedly the most numerous. He
is, we know, increasing everywhere, but in no other town in England
have I found him in such numbers. He is seen in flocks of a dozen to
half a hundred, busily searching for grubs on every lawn and green
place in and round the town, and if you go up to some elevated spot so
as to look down upon Bath, you will see flocks of starlings arriving
and departing at all points. As you walk the streets their metallic
_clink-clink-clink_ sounds from all quarters--small noises which to
most men are lost among the louder noises of a populous town. It is as
if every house had a peal of minute bells hidden beneath the tiles or
slates of the roof, or among the chimney-pots, that they were
constantly being rung, and that every bell was cracked.
The ordinary or unobservant person sees and hears far more of the
jackdaw than of any other bird in Bath. Daws are seen and heard all
over the town, but are most common about the Abbey, where they soar
and gambol and quarrel all day long, and when they think that nobody
is looking, drop down to the streets to snatch up and carry off any
eatable-looking object that catches their eye.
It was here at this central spot, while I stood one day idly watching
the birds disporting themselves about the Abbey and listened to their
clamour, that certain words of Ruskin came into my mind, and I began
to think of them not merely with admiration, as when I first read them
long ago, but critically.
Ruskin, one of our greatest prose writers, is usually at his best in
the transposition of pictures into words, his descriptions of what he
has seen, in nature and art, being the most perfect examples of "word
painting" in the language. Here his writing is that of one whose
vision is not merely, as in the majority of men, the most important
and intellectual of the senses, but so infinitely more important than
all the others, and developed and trained to so extraordinary a
degree, as to make him appear like a person of a single sense. We may
say that this predominant sense has caused, or fed upon, the decay of
the others. This is to me a defect in the author I most admire; for
though he makes me see, and delight in seeing, that which was
previously hidden, and all things gain in beauty and splendour, I yet
miss something from the picture, just as I should miss light and
colour from a description of nature, however beautifully written, by a
man whose sense of sight was nothing or next to nothing to him, but
whose other senses were all developed to the highest state of
perfection.
No doubt Ruskin is, before everything, an artist: in other words, he
looks at nature and all visible things with a purpose, which I am
happily without: and the reflex effect of his purpose is to make
nature to him what it can never appear to me--a painted canvas. But
this subject, which I have touched on in a single sentence, demands a
volume.
Ruskin wrote of the cathedral daws, "That drift of eddying black
points, now closing, now scattering, now settling suddenly into
invisible places among the bosses and flowers, the crowd of restless
birds that fill the whole square with that strange clangour of theirs,
so harsh and yet so soothing." For it seemed to me that he had seen
the birds but had not properly heard them; or else that to his mind
the sound they made was of such small consequence in the effect of the
whole scene--so insignificant an element compared with the sight of
them--that it was really not worth attending to and describing
accurately.
Possibly, in this particular case, when in speaking of the daws he
finished his description by throwing in a few words about their
voices, he was thinking less of the impression on his own mind,
presumably always vague about natural sounds, than of what the poet
Cowper had said in the best passage in his best work about "sounds
harsh and inharmonious in themselves," which are yet able to produce a
soothing effect on us on account of the peaceful scenes amid which
they are heard.
Cowper's notion of the daw's voice, by the way, was just as false as
that expressed by Ruskin, as we may find in his paraphrase of Vincent
Bourne's lines to that bird:--
There is a bird that by his coat,
And by the hoarseness of his note
Might be supposed a crow.
Now the daw is capable at times of emitting both hoarse and harsh
notes, and the same may perhaps be said of a majority of birds; but
his usual note--the cry or caw varied and inflected a hundred ways,
which we hear every day and all day long where daws abound--is neither
harsh like the crow's, nor hoarse like the rook's. It is, in fact, as
unlike the harsh, grating caw of the former species as the clarion
call of the cock is unlike the grunting of swine. It may not be
described as bell-like nor metallic, but it is loud and clear, with an
engaging wildness in it, and, like metallic sounds, far-reaching; and
of so good a quality that very little more would make it ring
musically.
Sometimes when I go into this ancient abbey church, or into some
cathedral, and seating myself, and looking over a forest of
bonnets, see a pale young curate with a black moustache, arrayed
in white vestments, standing before the reading-desk, and hear him
gabbling some part of the Service in a continuous buzz and rumble
that roams like a gigantic blue-bottle through the vast dim
interior, then I, not following him--for I do not know where he is,
and cannot find out however much I should like to--am apt to
remember the daws out of doors, and to think that it would be well
if that young man would but climb up into the highest tower, or on
to the roof, and dwell there for the space of a year listening to
them; and that he would fill his mouth with polished pebbles, and
medals, and coins and seals and seal-rings, and small porcelain
cats and dogs, and little silver pigs, and other objects from the
chatelaines of his lady admirers, and strive to imitate that
clear, penetrating sound of the bird's voice, until he had
mastered the rare and beautiful arts of voice production and
distinct understandable speech.
To go back to Cowper--the poet who has been much in men's thoughts of
late, and who appears to us as perhaps the most modern-minded of those
who ceased to live a century ago. Undoubtedly he was as bad a
naturalist as any singer before or after him, and as any true poet has
a perfect right to be. As bad, let us say, as Shakespeare and
Wordsworth and Tennyson. He does not, it is true, confound the sparrow
and hedge-sparrow like Wordsworth, nor confound the white owl with the
brown owl like Tennyson, nor puzzle the ornithologist with a "sea-blue
bird of March." But we must not forget that he addressed some verses
to a nightingale heard on New Year's Day. It is clear that he did not
know the crows well, for in a letter of May 10, 1780, to his friend
Newton, he writes: "A crow, rook, or raven, has built a nest in one of
the young elm-trees, at the side of Mrs Aspray's orchard." But when he
wrote those words--
Sounds inharmonious in themselves, and harsh,
Yet heard in scenes where peace for ever reigns,
And only there, please highly for their sake--
words which I have suggested misled Ruskin, and have certainly
misled others--he, Cowper, knew better. His real feeling, and
better and wiser thought, is expressed in one of his incomparable
letters (Hayley, vol. ii. p. 230)--
"My green-house is never so pleasant as when we are just
on the point of surrendering it.... I sit with all the windows and
the door wide open, and am regaled with the scent of every flower
in a garden as full of flowers as I have known how to make it. We
keep no bees, but if I lived in a hive I could hardly have more of
their music. All the bees in the neighbourhood resort to a bed of
mignonette opposite to the window, and pay me for the honey they
get out of it by a hum, which, though rather monotonous, is as
agreeable to my ears as the whistling of my linnets. All the
sounds that nature utters are delightful, at least in this
country. I should not perhaps find the roaring of lions in Africa,
or of bears in Russia, very pleasing; but I know no beast in
England whose voice I do not account as musical, save and except
always the braying of an ass. The notes of all our birds and fowls
please me, without one exception. I should not indeed think of
keeping a goose in a cage that I might hang him up in the parlour
for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common, or in a
farmyard, is no bad performer; and as to insects, if the black
beetle, and beetles indeed of all hues, will keep out of my way, I
have no objection to any of the rest; on the contrary, in whatever
key they sing, from the gnat's fine treble to the bass of
the bumble-bee, I admire all. Seriously, however, it strikes me as
a very observable instance of providential kindness to men, that
such an exact accord has been contrived between his ear and the
sounds with which, at least in a rural situation, it is almost
every moment visited."
Who has not felt the truth of this saying, that all natural sounds
heard in their proper surroundings are pleasing; that even those
which we call harsh do not distress, jarring or grating on our
nerves, like artificial noises! The braying of the donkey was to
Cowper the one exception in animal life; but he never heard it in
its proper conditions. I have often listened to it, and have been
deeply impressed, in a wild, silent country, in a place where
herds of semi-wild asses roamed over the plains; and the sound at
a distance had a wild expression that accorded with the scene, and
owing to its much greater power effected the mind more than the
trumpeting of wild swans, and shrill neighing of wild horses, and
other far-reaching cries of wild animals.
About the sounds emitted by geese in a state of nature, and the
effect produced on the mind, I shall have something to say in a
chapter on that bird.