The Lark, which is our river here, and more particularly the little
stream that runs into it, are, like most rivers and streams in England,
much haunted by moorhens and dabchicks, especially by the former,
though in winter I have seen as many as eleven of the latter--the
little dabchicks--swimming, dipping, and skimming over the water,
together. There is a fascination in making oneself acquainted with the
ways of these little birds. They are not so easy to watch, and yet
they are not so very very difficult. They seem made for concealment
and retirement, which makes it all the more piquant when they come,
plainly, into view, and remain there, at but a few yards’ distance,
which, with patience, can be brought about. The whole thing lies in
sitting still for an hour--or a few more hours--waiting for the
dabchick to come to you, for as to your trying to go to him, that is
no good whatever--“that way madness lies.” In watching birds, though
it may not be quite true--certainly I have not found it so--that “all
things come to him who knows how to wait,” this at least may be said,
that nothing, as a rule, comes to him who does not know how to--least
of all a dabchick.
Long before one sees the little bird--long before one could see it were
it right in front of one, if one comes at the proper time--one hears
its curious little note--accompanied, often, with scufflings and other
sounds that make one long to be there--amongst the reeds and rushes,
in the darkness. This note--which, until one knows all about it, fills
one with a strange curiosity--is a thin chirrupy chatter, high and
reed-like, rapidly repeated, and with a weak vibration in it. It is
like no other bird-cry that I am acquainted with, but it resembles,
or suggests, two things--first, the neigh or hinny of a horse heard
very faintly in the distance (for which I have often mistaken it),
and, again, if a tittering young lady were to be changed, or modified,
into a grasshopper, but beg, as a favour, to be allowed still to
titter--_as_ a grasshopper--this would be it. Sometimes, too, when
it comes, low and faint, in the near distance, one might think the
fairies were laughing. This is the commonest of the dabchick’s notes,
and though it has some other ones, they are uttered, for the most part,
in combination with it, and, especially, lead up to, and usher it in,
so that it becomes, through them, of more importance, as the _grande
finale_ of all, in which the bird rises to its emotional apogee, and
then stops, because anything would be tame after that. Thus, when a
pair of dabchicks play about in each other’s company--which they will
do in December as well as in spring--their note, at first, may be a
quiet “Chu, chu, chu,” “Queek, queek, queek,” or some other ineffective
sound. Then, side by side, and with their heads close together, they
burst suddenly forth with “Chēēlee, lēēlee, lēēlee, lēēlee, lēēlee,
lēēlee”--one thought, and both of one mind--
“A timely utterance gives that thought relief.”
It is as though they said, “Shall we? Well then--_Now_ then”--and
started. Who that sees a pair do this in the winter--in the very depth
of it, only a few days before Christmas--can doubt that the birds are
mated, and will be constant through life? They are like an old couple
by the fireside, now. As the spring comes round their youth will be
renewed, and the same duet will express the warmer emotions. Now it
is the bird’s contentment note. You know what it means, directly. It
expresses satisfaction with what has been, already, accomplished,
present complacency, and a robust determination to continue, for the
future, to walk--or swim--in the combined path of duty and pleasure.
What a pretty little scene it is!--and one may watch these little
cool-dipping, reed-haunting things, so dapper and circumspect, as
near as one’s _vis-à-vis_ in a quadrille--nearer even--and tear out
the heart of their mystery, with not a dabchick the wiser. No doubt
about what they say for the future, for when a most authoritative work
says “the note is a ‘whit, whit,’” and so passes on, it is time to
bestir oneself. “Whit!” No. I deny it. Even when it ends there, when
there is nothing more than that in the bird’s mind, it is not “whit,”
but “queek” that it says--“queek, queek, queek, queek,” a quavering
little note, with a sharp sound--the long ē--always. “Queek,” then,
_“pas ‘whit,’ Monsieur Fleurant. Whit! Ah, Monsieur Fleurant, c’est se
moquer. Mettez, mettez ‘queek,’ s’il vous plaît._” But what is this
“queek”--though repeated more than twice--compared with such a jubilee
as I have just described, and which the birds are constantly making?
Express it syllabically as one may, it is something very uncommon and
striking--a little thin burst of rejoicing--and it lasts for some time:
not to be passed off as a mere desultory remark or so, therefore--call
it what one will--which almost any bird might make.
Besides, it is not merely what a bird says, that one would like
to know, but what it means, and how it says it. One would like a
description, where there is anything to describe, and no one, I am
sure, could see a pair of dabchicks put their heads together and break
out like this, and then say, _tout court_--without comment, even, much
less enthusiasm, as though it exhausted the matter--“the note is a
whit, whit.” No, no one could be so cold-blooded. Though an alphabet
of letters may follow his name, the dabchick is a sealed book to any
one who writes of it like that. So now, coming again to the meaning of
this little duet, there can, as I say, be no doubt that it expresses
contentment, but this contentment is not of a quiet kind. It is raised,
for the moment, to a pitch of exaltation that throws a sort of triumph
into it. It is an access, an overflowing, of happiness, and the note
of love, though, now, in winter, a little subdued, must be there too,
for, as I say, these birds mate for life. So, at least, I feel sure,
and so I believe it to be with most other birds. Permanent union, with
recurrent incentive to unite, matrimony always and courtship every
spring--as one aerates, at intervals, the water in an aquarium--that,
I believe, is the way of it; a good way, too--the next best plan to
changing the water is not to let it get stagnant.
Whenever I can catch at evidence in regard to the sexual relations of
birds, it always seems to point in this direction. Take, for instance,
that species to which I now devote the rest of this chapter, the
moorhen, namely--_Gallinula chloropus_--for the dabchick has been an
encroachment. A very small pond in my orchard of some three half-dead
fruit-trees was tenanted by a single pair, who built their nest there
yearly. Had it not been for a cat, whose influence and position in the
family was fixed beyond my power of shaking, I should have made, one
year, a very close study, indeed, of the domestic economy of these
two birds; but this tiresome creature, either by the aid of a clump
of rushes, amidst which it was situated, or by jumping out boldly
from the bank, got at the nest, though it was at some distance, and
upset the eggs into the water. As a consequence, the birds deserted
both nest and pond, nor did the lost opportunity ever return. A few
points of interest, however, I had been able to observe, before the
cat intervened. The year before, I had noticed two slight nests in the
pond, in neither of which were any eggs laid, whilst the pond itself
remained always, as far as I could see, in possession of this one pair
of birds only. In the following spring I again noted two moorhens’
nests, in approximately the same situations as before, and now I
observed further. During the greater part of the day no moorhens were
to be seen in the pond, but, as evening began to fall, first one and
then another of these two birds would either steal silently into it,
through a little channel communicating with the river, or else out of
the clump of rushes where one of these nests had been built. The other
one was amongst the half-submerged branches of a fallen tree, the trunk
of which arched a corner of the pond. Over to here the birds would
swim, and one of them, ascending and running along the tree-trunk,
would enter the nest, and sit in it quietly, for a little while. Then
it would creep, quietly, out of it, run down the trunk, again, into
the water, and swim over to this same clump of rushes, from which,
in some cases, it had come. Whether it then sat in the nest there,
also, I cannot so positively affirm, but I have no doubt that it did,
for I could see it, for some time, through the glasses, a perfectly
still, dark object, somewhat raised above the surface of the water.
Assuming it to have been sitting in this nest, then it had, certainly,
just left the other one, and, moreover, there were the two nests,
and only the one pair of birds. For, as I say, I never saw more than
two moorhens, at a time, in this pond, which, being very small, was,
probably, considered by these as their property. Intrusion on the part
of any other bird would, no doubt, have been resented, but I never
saw or heard any brawling. The pretty scene of peaceful, calm, loving
proprietorship, was not once disturbed.
When the two birds were together, one swam, commonly, but just behind
the other, and kept pressing against it in a series of little, soft
impulses--a quietly amorous manner, much for edification to see.
Each night, from a little before the darkness closed in, one of
these moorhens--I believe always the same one--would climb out on a
particular branch of the fallen tree, and standing there, just on the
edge of the black water, bathe and preen itself till I could see it no
longer. It never varied from just this one place on the branch, which,
though a thin one, made there a sort of loop in the water, where it
could stand, or sit, very comfortably. The other of the two had, no
doubt, a tiring-place of its own--I judge so, at least, because it
would, probably, have bathed and preened about the same time, but, if
so, it did so somewhere where I could not see it. Moorhens have special
bathing-places, to which one may see several come, one after the other.
This is at various times of the day, but I have noticed, too, this
special last bathe and preening, before retiring for the night; and
here I do not remember seeing two birds resort to the same spot. There
would seem, therefore, to be a general bathing-place for the daytime,
and a private one for the evening.
Here, then, we have two nests built by one and the same pair
of moorhens, both of which were sat in--whether as a matter of
convenience, by both parties, or by the female, only, in order to
lay, I cannot be sure--some days before the eggs appeared. But, two
days afterwards, I found two other nests, or nest-like structures, at
different points of the same pond, and these, for the reasons before
given, must most certainly have been made by the same pair of birds;
for they were moorhens’ nests, and to imagine that four pairs of
moorhens had been building in so confined an area, without my ever
having seen more than two birds together, within it, though watching
morning and evening, and for hours at a time, is to _pensar en lo
imposible_, as Don Quijote is fond of saying. On the next day, I found
the first egg, in one of the two nests last noticed--not in either of
those, therefore, that I had seen the bird sitting in. This was on the
5th of May, and in as many days six more were added, making seven,
after which came the cat, and my record, which I had hoped would be a
very close and full one, came to an end. During this time, however,
I had remarked yet a fifth nest, built against the trunk of a young
fir-tree, that had fallen into the same small clump of rushes where the
one with the eggs, and another, were: and all these five had sprung
up within the last few weeks, for they had certainly not been there
before. The number of moorhens’ nests along the little stream, here,
had often struck me with surprise, though knowing it to be much haunted
by these birds. After these observations, I paid more particular
attention, and found, in one place, four nests so close together as
to make it very unlikely they could have been the work of different
birds; and, of these, all but one remained permanently empty. Moreover,
the three others, though obviously, as it seemed to me, the work of
moorhens, had a very unfinished appearance compared to the one that
fulfilled its legitimate purpose. Less material had been used--though
they varied in regard to this--and they seemed to have been formed, to
a more exclusive extent, by the bending over of the growing rushes. As
I say, no eggs were ever laid in these three nests, but in one of them
I once found the moorhen who had laid in the other, sitting with her
brood of young chicks. I have little doubt but that she had made the
four, and was accustomed thus to sit in all of them. Whether she had
made the supernumerary ones with any definite object of the sort, it
is more difficult to say. For myself, I doubt this; but, at any rate,
the moorhen would seem to stand prominent amongst the birds which have
this habit of over-building, as one may call it--a much larger body, I
believe, than is generally supposed.
With the above habit, a much stranger one, which, from a single
observation, I believe this species to have, is, perhaps, indirectly
connected. Moorhens, as a rule, lay a good many eggs--from seven
to eleven, if not, sometimes, more. I have, however, upon various
occasions, found them sitting on a much smaller number--on four once,
and once, even, upon only three--notwithstanding that these represented
the first brood. The nest with only three eggs I had watched for
some days before the hatching took place. It could hardly have been,
therefore, that others had been hatched out before, and the chicks
gone; nor had it ever occurred to me that the original number might
have been artificially diminished, by the birds themselves. One day,
however, I happened to be watching a pair of moorhens, by a lake in
a certain park, when I noticed one of them walking away from the
nest--to which, though it appeared quite built, they had both been
adding--with some large thing, of a rounded shape, in its bill. Before
I had time to make out what this thing was, the bird, still carrying
it, became hidden behind some foliage, and this happened again on a
second occasion, much to my disappointment, since my curiosity was now
aroused. Resolved not to miss another opportunity if I could help it,
I kept the glasses turned upon this bird whenever it was visible, and
very soon I saw it go again to the nest, and, standing just outside it,
with its head craned over the rim, spear down suddenly into it, and
then walk away, with an egg transfixed on its bill. The nest was on a
mudbank in the midst of shallow water, through which the bird waded to
the shore, and deposited the egg there, somewhere where I could not
see it. Twice, now, at short intervals, the same bird returned to the
nest, speared down with its bill, withdrew it with an egg spitted on
its point, and walked away with it, as before. Instead of landing with
it, however, it, each of these times, dropped it in the muddy water,
and I saw as clearly through the glasses as if I had been there, that
the egg, each time, sank. This shows that they were fresh, for one can
test eggs in this manner. Had it been, not the whole egg, but only the
greater part of its shell that the bird was carrying, this would have
floated, a conspicuous object on the black, stagnant water. That it
was the whole egg, and transfixed, as I say, not carried, I am quite
certain, for I caught, through the glasses, the full oval outline, and
could see, where the beak pierced it, a thin, transparent streamer
of the albumen depending from the hole, and being blown about by the
wind. As birds remove the shells of their hatched eggs from the nest,
I took particular pains not to be mistaken on this point, the result
being absolute certainty as far as my own mind is concerned. The
circumstances, however, were not such as to allow me to verify them
by walking to the spot. Early on the following morning I returned to
my post of observation, and now I at once saw, on using the glasses,
the empty egg-shell, as it appeared to be, floating on the water
just where I had seen it sink the day before. No doubt the yelk-sac
had been pierced by the bill of the bird, so that the contents had
gradually escaped, and the shell risen to the surface as a consequence.
This moorhen, then, had destroyed, at the very least, as I now feel
certain, five of its own eggs, for that, on the first two occasions,
it had acted in the same way as on the last three, there can be no
reasonable doubt, nor is it wonderful that I should not, then, have
quite made out what it was doing, considering its quick disappearance
and the hurried view of it that I got. Afterwards, I saw the whole
thing from the beginning, and had a very good view throughout. At the
nest, especially, the bird was both nearer to me, and stood in a good
position for observation.
Here, then, we seem introduced to a new possibility in bird
life--parental prudence, or something analogous to it, purposely
limiting the number of offspring to be reared. I can conceive, myself,
how a habit of this sort might become developed in a bird, for the
number of eggs that can be comfortably sat upon must depend upon the
size of the nest; and this might tend to decrease, not at all on
account of a bird’s laziness, but owing to that very habit of building
supernumerary nests, which appears to be so developed in the moorhen.
That a second nest should, through eagerness, be begun before the
first was finished, is what one might expect, and also that the nest,
under these circumstances, would get gradually smaller--for what the
bird was always doing would soon seem to it the right thing to do. As
a matter of fact, the size of moorhens’ nests does vary very greatly,
some being thick, deep, and massive, with a large circumference, whilst
others are a mere shallow shell that the bird, when sitting, almost
covers. Such a one was that which I have mentioned, as containing only
four eggs--for they quite filled the nest, so that it would not have
been easy for the bird to have incubated a larger number. The one from
which the five eggs were carried, was, however, quite a bulky one. But
whatever the explanation may be, this particular moorhen that I saw
certainly did destroy five of its own eggs, carrying them off, speared
on its bill, in the way I have described. Either it was an individual
eccentricity on the part of one bird, or others are accustomed to do
the same, which last, I think, is quite possible, when we consider how
rarely it is that birds are seen removing the shells of the hatched
eggs from their nests, which, however, they always do. Certain of the
cow-birds of America have, it seems, the habit of pecking holes both in
their own eggs and those of the bird in whose nest they are laid.[29]
The cow-bird is a very prolific layer, and it is possible that we may
see, in this proceeding, the survival of a means which it once employed
to avoid the discomfort attendant on the rearing of too large a family,
before it had hit upon a still better way out of the difficulty. The
way in which the moorhen carried the eggs is interesting, since it is
that employed by ravens in the Shetlands, when they rob the sea-fowl.
It would seem, indeed, the only way in which a bird could carry an egg
of any size, without crushing it up.
As bearing on the strongly developed nest-building instinct of the
moorhen, leading it, sometimes, to make four or five when only one is
required, it is interesting to find that, in some cases, the building
is continued all the while the eggs are being hatched, or even whilst
the young are sitting in the nest--in fact as long as the nest is in
regular occupation. The one bird swims up with reeds or rushes in his
bill--sometimes with a long flag that trails far behind him on the
water--and these are received and put into position by the other, in
the nest. Thus the shape of the nest may vary, something, from day to
day, and from a point where, yesterday, the eggs, as one stood, were
quite visible, to-day they will be completely hidden by a sconce, or
parapet that has since been thrown up. It may be thought, from this,
that the birds have some definite object in thus continuing their
labours, but, for myself, I believe that it is merely in deference
to a blind impulse, which is its own pleasure and reward. It is a
pretty thing to see a pair of moorhens building. During the later
stages they will run about, together, on the land, their necks
stretched eagerly out, the whole body craned forward, searching,
examining, sometimes both seizing on something at the same time--the
one a twig, the other a brown leaf--and then running with them, cheek
by jowl, to the nest, on which both climb, and place them, standing
side by side. On their next going forth, they may start in different
directions, or become separated, so that when one goes back to the
nest he may find the other already upon it. It is interesting, then,
to see him reach up, with whatever he has brought, and present it to
his partner’s bill, who takes it of him, and at once arranges it. The
look, the general appearance of interest and tender solicitude, which
the bird, particularly, that presents his offering, has, must be seen
to be appreciated. Not that the other is deficient in this respect--a
gracious, pleased acceptance, with an interest all as keen, speaks
in each feather, too. The expression of a bird is given by its whole
attitude--everything about it, from beak to toe and tail--and, by dint
of this, it often appears to me to have as much as an intelligent
human being has, by the play of feature; in which, of course, birds
are deficient--at least to our eyes. Certain I am that no _dressed_
human being could express more, in offering something to another, than
a bird sometimes does; and if it be said that we cannot be sure of
this, that it is mere inference based on analogy, it may be answered
that, equally, we cannot be _sure_, in the other case--nor, indeed, in
anything.
When the male and female moorhen stand, together, on the nest, it is
impossible to distinguish one from the other. The legs, which in the
male, alone, are gartered, are generally hidden, whilst the splendid
scarlet cere--making a little conflagration amongst the rushes--and
the coloration of the plumage, are alike in both--at least for field
observation. In the early autumn, and onwards, one sees numbers
of moorhens that have a green cere, instead of a red one, and the
plumage of whose back and wings is of a very plain, sober brown,
much lighter than we have known it hitherto. These are the young
birds of the preceding spring and summer, and everything in regard
to their different coloration would be simple enough, if it were not
for a curious fact--or one which seems to me to be curious--viz.
this, that the moorhen chicks have, when first hatched, and for some
time afterwards, a red cere, as at maturity. It seems very strange
that, being born with what is, probably, a sexual adornment, they
should afterwards lose it, to reacquire it, again, later on. Darwin
explains the difference between the young and the parent form, upon
the principle that “at whatever period of life a peculiarity first
appears, it tends to reappear in the offspring, at a corresponding
age, though sometimes earlier.” Thus, in the plumage of the young
and female pheasant, or the young green woodpecker, we may suppose
ourselves to see the ancestral unadorned states of these birds. But
what should we think if the young male pheasant was, at first, as
brilliant as the mature bird, then became plain, like the female, and
afterwards reassumed its original brilliancy, or if the woodpecker
of either sex were first green, then brown, and then green again.
If the young moorhen, having exchanged its scarlet cere for a much
less showy one, kept this latter through life, we should, I suppose,
assume that the first had been acquired long ago, and then lost for
some reason, possibly because change of habits, or circumstances, had
made it more of a disadvantage, by being conspicuous, than it had
remained an advantage, by being attractive. Are we, now, to think that,
having acquired, and then lost, the crimson, the bird has subsequently
reacquired it? If so, what has been the reason for this? Were green
ceres, for some time, preferred to scarlet ones? This hardly seems
probable, since the green, in this instance, is pale and dull. However,
birds are but birds, and even amongst ourselves anything may be
fashionable, even downright ugliness, as is almost equally well seen
in a milliner’s shop or a picture gallery. As far as the mere loss of
beauty is concerned, a parallel example is offered by the coot, which,
in its young state, is all-glorious, about the head, with orange and
purple, which changes, later, to a uniform, sooty black. But the coot
stops there; it does not get back, later on, the colours it has lost.
Young moorhens are almost, if not quite, as precocious as chickens.
Out of three that were in the egg, the day before, I found two, once,
sitting in the nest, from which the shells had already been removed.
The nest was on a snag in the midst of a small pond, or, rather, pool,
so that I could not get to it; but, as I walked up to the water’s
edge, both the chicks evinced anxiety, though in varying degrees. One
kept where it was, at the bottom of the nest, the other crawled to the
edge and lay with its head partly over it, as though ready to take the
water, which, no doubt, both would have done, had I been able to come
nearer. Yet, in all probability, as the pool lay in a deep hollow,
seldom visited, I was the first human being they had either of them
ever seen. The third egg was, as yet, unhatched; but coming, again, on
the following day, the nest was entirely empty, and I now found pieces
of the egg-shells, lying high and dry upon the bank of the pool, to
which they had evidently been carried by the parent birds. In the same
way, it will be remembered, the moorhen that destroyed its eggs, walked
with them through the water, to the bank, on which it placed three out
of the five--two at some distance away.
Though so precocious, yet the young moorhens are, for some time, fed
by their dams. I have seen them run to them, with their wings up, over
a raft of water-plants, and then crouch and lift their heads to one
of their parents, from whom they received a modicum of weed. Or they
will sit down beside their mother, and look up in her face in a pretty,
beseeching way. When frightened or disturbed, they utter a little
wheezy, querulous note, like “kew-ee, kew-ee,” which has a wonderful
volume of sound in it, for such little things. The mother soon appears,
and gives a little purring croon, after which the cries cease; or she
may answer them with a cry something like that of a partridge. She
calls them to her with a clucking note, uttered two or three times
together, and repeated at longer or shorter intervals. When one sees
this, one would never doubt but that here is the special call-note of
the mother to the chicks. Nevertheless, I have heard her thus clucking,
whilst sitting on a first brood of eggs, and this shows how careful
one ought to be in attributing a special and definite significance to
any cry uttered by an animal. Besides the one which I have mentioned,
young moorhens make a little shrilly sound that has something, almost,
of a cackle in it. There is also a little “chillip, chillip”; nor does
this exhaust their repertory. In fact they have considerable variety
of expression, even at this early age. They swim as “to the manner
born,” nid-nodding like their parents, but cannot progress against a
stream that is at all swift. One paddling with all its might, neither
advancing nor receding, and uttering, all the while, its little
querulous cry, is a common sight. Up a steep bank they can climb with
ease, and they have a manner of leaning forward, when running, to an
extent which makes them seem always on the point of overbalancing, that
is very funny to see. For some time, they are accustomed to return to
the nest, after leaving it, and sit there with one of the parent birds.
When surprised, under these circumstances, the mother (presumably),
utters a short, sharp, shrilly note, which is instantly followed by
another, equally short and much lower. As she utters them she retreats,
and the chicks, with this warning, are left to themselves--to stay or
to follow her, as best they can.
Having often disturbed birds under these or similar conditions, I can
say confidently that the moorhen employs no ruse, to divert attention
from its young. The following circumstance, therefore, as bearing on
my theory of the origin of such stratagems, especially interested me.
In this case I came suddenly upon a point of the stream where the bank
was precipitous, on which a moorhen flew out upon the water, with a
loud clacking note, and then, after some very disturbed motions, swam
to the opposite shore, giving constant, violent flirts of the tail, the
white feathers of which were, each time, broadened out, as when two
male birds fight, or threaten one another. In this state she went but
slowly, though most birds in her position would have flown right off.
On my coming closer to the edge of the bank, six or seven young chicks
started out, all in different directions, as though from a central
point where they had been sitting together on the water, as, no doubt,
they had been, the mother with them, just as though upon the nest. No
one could have thought that this moorhen had any idea of diverting
attention from her young to herself. Sudden alarm, producing, at first,
a nervous shock, and then distress and apprehension, seemed to me,
clearly, the cause of her actions, which yet bore a rude resemblance
to highly specialised ones, and had much the same effect. From such
beginnings, in my opinion, and not from successive “small doses of
reason,” have the most elaborate “ruses” been evolved and perfected.
In one or two other instances--in a wood-pigeon, for example, and a
pheasant--I have noticed the strange effect--amounting, for a few
moments, to a sort of paralysis--which a very sudden surprise may
produce in a bird, even when its young do not come into question.
Moorhens, too, are excitable, even as birds. Their nerves, I think, are
highly strung. I have often noticed that the report of a gun in the
distance--even in the far distance--will be followed by half-a-dozen
clanging cries from as many birds--in fact, from as many as are about.
Especially is the hen moorhen of a nervous and sensitive temperament,
open to “thick-coming fancies,” varying from minute to minute. How
often have I watched her pacing, like a bride, on cold, winter
mornings, along the banks of our little stream. Easy, elastic steps;
head nodding and tail flirting in unison. She nestles, a moment, on
the frosted grass, then rises and paces, as before, stops now, stands
on one leg a little, puts the other down, again makes a step or two,
then another pause, glances about, thinks she will preen herself, but
does not, nestles once more, gives a glance over her shoulder, half
spies a danger, rises and tip-toes out of sight. What a little bundle
of caprices and apprehensions! But they all become her, “all her acts
are queens.” Some special savour lies in each motion, in each frequent
flirt of the tail. Though this flirtation of the tail is very habitual
with moorhens, though nine times out of ten, almost, when you see them
either on land or water, they are flirting it, still they do not always
do so. “_Nonnunquam dormitat bonus Homerus_”--“_Non semper tendit arcum
Apollo._” It _can_ be quite still, that tail. I have seen it so--even
twenty together, whose owners were reposefully browsing. But let there
be _any_ kind of emotion, almost, and heavens! how it flirts!
Moorhens are pugnacious birds, even in the winter. At any time, one
amongst several browsing over the meadow-land, may make a sudden,
bull-like rush--its head down and held straight out--at another, and
this, often, from a considerable distance. The bird thus suddenly
attacked generally takes flight, and afterwards, as a solace to its
feelings, runs at some other one, and drives it about, in its turn.
This second bird will do the same by a third, and thus, in wild nature,
we have a curious reproduction--much to the credit of Sheridan--of that
scene in “The Rivals” where Sir Anthony bullies his son, his son the
servant, and the servant the page. “It is still the sport” in natural
history, to see poor humanity aped. Such likenesses are humiliating but
humorous, and, by making us less proud, may do good. But chases like
this are not in the grand style. There is nothing stately about them,
no “pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war”--little, perhaps,
of its true spirit. As the spring comes on it is different. Then male
birds that, at three yards apart, have been quietly feeding, walk,
if they come a yard nearer, with wary, measured steps, in a crouched
attitude, holding their heads low, and with their tails swelled out.
On the water these mannerisms are still more marked, and then it is
that the bird’s true beauty--for beauty it is, and of no mean order--is
displayed. Two will lie all along, facing each other, with the neck
stretched out, and the head and bill, which are in one line with it,
pointing straight forward, like the ram of a war-ship. Their tails,
however, are turned straight up, in bold contrast with all the rest
of them, so that, with the white feathers which this part bears, and
which are now finely displayed, they have a most striking and handsome
appearance. There is a little bunch of these feathers--the under
tail-coverts--on either side of the true tail, and each of these is
frilled and expanded outwards, to the utmost possible extent, which
gives it the shape and appearance of one half, or almost half, of a
palm-leaf fan. The tail is the whole fan, so that, what with its size,
and the graceful form that it has now assumed, and the pure white
contrasting with the rich brown in the centre, it has become quite
beautiful, more so, I think, than the fan of any fan-tail pigeon.
Indeed the whole bird seems to be different, and looks more than twice
as handsome as it does under ordinary circumstances. Its spirit, which
is now exalted and warlike, “shines through” it, and, with its rich
crimson bill, it glows and burns on the water, like Cleopatra’s barge.
A fierce and fiery little prow this bill makes, indeed, and there
is the poop, too, for the elevated tail, with the part of the body
adjoining, which has, also, a bold upward curve, has very much that
appearance. Thus, in this most salient of attitudes, with tail erect,
and with beak and throat laid, equally with the whole body, along the
water, with proud and swelling port the birds make little impetuous
rushes at one another, driving, each, their little ripple before
them, from the vermilion prow-point. They circle one about another,
approach and then glide away again, looking, for all the world, like
two miniature war-ships of proud opposing nations: for their pride
seems more than belongs to individuals--it is like a national pride.
Yet even so, and just as great deeds seem about to be achieved, the two
may turn and swim off in a stately manner, their tails still fanned,
their heads, now, proudly erect, each scorning, yet, also, respecting
the other, each seeming to say, “Satan, I know thy strength, and thou
know’st mine.” Otherwise, however, as the upshot of all this warlike
pomp, they close in fierce and doubtful conflict. This is extremely
interesting to see. After lying, for some time, with the points of
their beaks almost touching, both the birds make a spring, and, in a
moment, are sitting upright in the water, on their tails, so to speak,
and clawing forwards and downwards with their feet. The object of each
bird seems to be to drag his adversary down in the water, so as to
drown him, but what always happens is that the long claws interlock,
and then, holding and pulling, both of them fall backwards from their
previously upright position, and would be soon lying right on their
backs, were it not that, to prevent this, they spread their wings on
the water, so that they act as a prop and support, which, together with
their hold on one another, prevents their sinking farther. Their heads
are still directed as much as possible forward, and in this singular
attitude they glare at each other, presenting an appearance which
one would never have thought it possible they could do, from seeing
them in their more usual, everyday life. They may sit thus, leaning
backwards, as though in an arm-chair, and inactive from necessity, for
a time which sometimes seems like several minutes, but which is, more
probably, several seconds. Then, at length, with violent strugglings,
they get loose, and either instantly grapple again, or, as is more
usual, float about with the same proud display as before, each seeming
to breathe out menace for the future, with present indignation at what
has just taken place.
Moorhens fight in just the same manner as coots, and seeing what a
very curious and uncommon-looking manner this is, it might be thought
that it was specially adapted to the aquatic habits of the two
species. It is not. It is related to their terrestrial ancestry, and
the terrestrial portion of their own lives. One has only to see them
fighting on land to become, at once, aware that they are doing so in
exactly the same way as they do in the water, and, also, that this way,
on land, is by no means peculiar, but very much that in which cocks,
pheasants, partridges, and, indeed, most birds, fight. For, jumping
up against one another, moorhens, like these, strike down with the
feet, but, having no spurs, use their long claws and toes in the way
most natural to them. And this, no doubt, their fathers did before
them, in deeper and deeper water, as from land-rails they passed into
water-rails, until, at last, they were doing it when bottom was not to
be touched, and they had only water to leap up from. Even the falling
back with the claws interlocked has nothing specially aquatic in it. I
have seen moorhens do so in the meadows, and they then spread out their
wings, to support themselves on the ground, just as they do in the
water. The continual leaping up from the water, as from the ground, is
extremely noticeable, especially in the coot, and, in fact, the strange
appearance presented by the whole thing--its _bizarrerie_, which is
very great--is entirely due to our seeing something which belongs,
essentially, to the land, carried on in another element, for which it
is not really fitted. How differently do the grebes fight--by diving,
and using the beak under water! Yet they, like the coot, are only
fin-footed, whilst the coot is almost as good a diver as themselves.
No one, however, comparing the structure and general habits of the two
families, can doubt that the one is much more distantly separated from
its land ancestry than the other. In both the coot and the moorhen,
indeed, we see an interesting example of the early stages of an
evolution, but the coot has gone farther than the moorhen, for besides
that it dives much better, and swims out farther from the shore, it
bathes floating on the water, whilst the moorhen does so only where it
is shallow enough to stand.
Readers of “The Naturalist in La Plata,” may remember the account there
given of the curious screaming-dances--social, not sexual--of the
Ypecaha rails. “First one bird among the rushes emits a powerful cry,
thrice repeated; and this is a note of invitation, quickly responded
to by other birds from all sides, as they hurriedly repair to the
usual place.... While screaming, the birds rush from side to side,
as if possessed with madness, the wings spread and vibrating, the
long beak wide open and raised vertically.” Do moorhens do anything
analogous to this, anything that might in time grow into it, or into
something like it? In my opinion they do, for I think that I have seen
a hint of it, on a few occasions, and on one in particular, of which
I made a note. Two birds, in this case, had been floating, for some
time, quietly on the water, when one of them, suddenly, threw up its
wings, waved them violently and excitedly, and scudded, thus, rather
than flew, along the surface, into a reed-bed not far off. Before it
had got there the other moorhen, first making a quick turn or two in
the water, threw up its wings also, and scudded after its friend,
in just the same way. Then came from the reeds, and was continued
for a little time, that melancholy-sounding, wailing, clucking note
that I have so often listened to, wondering what it might mean, and
convinced that it meant something interesting. But if “the heart of man
at a foot’s distance is unknowable,” as a Chinese proverb says--and
doubtless rightly--that it is, so is the whole of a moorhen, when it
has got as far as that, amongst reeds and rushes. Here, however--and
I have seen something very similar, which began on the land--we have
the sudden, contagious excitement, _à propos de rien_ it would seem,
the motion of the wings--not so very common with moorhens, under
ordinary circumstances--and the darting to a certain spot, with the
cries immediately proceeding from it: all which, together, bears a not
inconsiderable resemblance to the more finished performance of the
Ypecaha rail, a bird belonging to the same family as the moorhen.
It is a pity, I think, that our commoner birds, when related to foreign
ones in which some strikingly peculiar habit has long been matter for
wonder, should not be more carefully and continuously observed, with
a view to detecting something in their own daily routine, which might
throw light on the origin of such eccentricities--something either
just starting along, or already some way on the road to, the wonderful
house at which their kinsfolk have arrived. Unfortunately, whilst the
end arouses great interest, the beginnings, or, even, something more
than the beginnings, either escape observation altogether, or are not
observed properly. When a thing, by its saliency, has been forced upon
our notice, it is comparatively easy to find out more about it; but
when it is not known whether there is anything or not, but only that,
if there is, it cannot be very remarkable, the initial incentive to
investigation seems wanting. Yet the starting-place and the half-way
house are as interesting as the final goal, and our efforts to find
the former, in particular, ought to be unremitting. In a previous
chapter, I have given my reasons for thinking that we might learn
something in regard to the origin of the bower-building instinct--that
crowning wonder, perhaps, of all that is wonderful in birds--by making
a closer study of rooks. But for this proper observatories are needed,
and whilst those who possess both the means of making these and the
rookeries in which to make them, are not, as a rule, interested, those
who are have too often neither the one nor the other--I, at least,
stand in this predicament.
It may be thought that the above-described sudden excitement and
activity on the part of these two moorhens was, more probably, of a
nuptial character; but I do not myself think so, for the nuptial
antics--or, rather, the nuptial pose--of the bird, is of a quite
different character, being slow and stiff, a sort of solemn formality.
It belongs to the land and not the water, where, indeed, it could
hardly be carried out. In making it, the two birds advance, for a
little--one behind the other--with a certain something peculiar and
highly strung in their gait and general appearance. Then the foremost
one stops, and whilst a strange rigidity seems to possess every part of
him, he slowly bends the head downwards, till the beak, almost touching
the ground, points inwards towards himself. Meantime the other bird
walks on, with an increasingly stilted, and, withal, stealthy-looking
step, and when a little way in front of its companion, makes the same
pose in even an exaggerated manner, curving the bill so much inwards,
with the head held so low down, that it may even overbalance and have
to make a quick step forward, or two, in order to recover itself. Here
we have another example--and there are many--of a nuptial pose--between
which and true sexual display it is hard, even if it be possible, to
fix a line of demarcation--common to both the sexes; and, just as
with the peewit, it is seen to the greatest advantage, not before,
but immediately after, coition, in the act, or, rather, the two acts
of which, the male and female play interchangeable parts. There is
hermaphroditism, in fact, which must be real, emotionally, if not
functionally--for what else is its _raison d’être_?
Surely facts such as these deserve more attention than they seem to
have received. To me it appears that not only must they have a most
important bearing on the question of the nature and origin of sexual
display, and whether there is or is not, amongst certain birds, an
intersexual selection, but that some of those odd facts, such as dual
or multiplex personality, which have been made too exclusively the
subject of psychical research--or rather of psychical societies--may
receive, through them, a truer explanation than that suggested by the
hypothesis of the subliminal self, in that they may help us to see the
true nature of that part of us to which this name has been applied.
Surely if both the male and the female bird act, in an important office
for the performance of which they are structurally distinct, as though
they were one and the same, this proves that the nature of either sex,
though, for the most part, it may lie latent in the opposite one, must
yet reside equally in each. Here, then, we have a subliminal element,
but as this can only have been passed on, through individuals in the
bird’s ancestral line, by the ordinary laws of inheritance, is it not
likely that other characteristics which seldom, or perhaps never,
emerge, have also been passed on, in the same way, thus making many
subliminal _selves_, instead of one subliminal _self_, merely? Of
what, indeed, is any self--is any personality--made up, but of those
countless ones which have gone before it, in the direct line of its
ancestry? What is any bird or beast but a blend between its parents,
their parents, and the parents before those parents, going back to
the beginnings of life? But that much--more, probably, than nineteen
twentieths--of this complicated mosaic lies latent, is an admitted fact
both in physiology and psychology, to justify which assertion the
very naming of the word “reversion” is sufficient. But if this be a
true explanation for the animal, what excuse have we for disregarding
it, and dragging in a transcendental element, in our own case? None
whatever that I can see; but by excluding from their _purview_--to
use their own favourite word--every species except the human one,
the Psychical Society, in my opinion, are making a gigantic error,
through which all their conclusions suffer more or less, so that the
whole speculative structure, reared on too narrow a basis of fact and
observation, will, one day, come tumbling to the ground.
Why should so much be postulated, on the strength of mysterious
faculties existing in ourselves, when equally mysterious, though less
abnormal ones, exist in various animals? Can we, for instance, say
that the sense of direction (and this is common to savage man and
animals)[30] is less extraordinary than what we call clairvoyance,
or that the one is essentially different from the other? And what is
more mysterious than this (which I have on good authority), that a
certain spot should, year after year for some forty years, be chosen
as a nesting-site by a pair of sparrow-hawks, although, during many
of these years, not _one_ only of the breeding birds, but _both of
them_, have been shot by the game-keepers? What is it tells the
new pair, next year, that, somewhere or other in the wide world, a
certain spot is left vacant for them? Again, I have brought forward
evidence to show that the same thought or desire can communicate
itself, instantaneously, to a number of birds, in a way difficult to
account for, other than on the hypothesis of thought-transference,
or, as I should prefer to call it, collective thinking. Who can
imagine, however--or, rather, why should we imagine--that faculties
which, though we may not be able to understand them, yet do exist in
animals, have become developed in them by other than the ordinary
earth-laws of heredity and natural selection? It is, indeed, easy
to imagine, that the power of conveying and receiving impressions,
otherwise than through specialised sense-organs, may have been--and
still be--of great advantage to creatures not possessing these; and
how can such structures have come into being, except in relation to a
certain generalised capacity which was there before them? Darwin, for
instance, in speculating on the origin of the eye, has to presuppose
a sensitiveness to light in the, as yet, eyeless organism. Again,
it does not seem impossible that the hypnotic state--or something
resembling it--may be the normal one in low forms of life, and this
would make ordinary sleep, which occurs for the most part when the
waking faculties are not needed, a return to that early semiconscious
condition out of which a waking consciousness has been evolved. Be
this as it may, we ought surely to assume that any sense or capacity,
however mysterious, with which animals are endowed, was acquired by
them on the same principles that others which we better understand
were; and, moreover, where all is mystery--for ultimately we can
explain nothing--why should one thing in nature be deemed more
mysterious than another? It seems foolish to make a wonder out of our
own ignorance; which, however, we are always doing. But, now, if such
powers and faculties as we have been considering, transmitted, in a
more or less latent condition, through millions of generations that no
longer needed them, had come, at last, to man, they could, it seems
probable, only manifest themselves in him, through and in connection
with his own higher psychology; just, in fact, as sexual love does, for
this, of course, is essentially the same in man and beast. Yet we have
our novels and our plays. Thus, such endowments, answering no longer
to the lowly needs which had brought them into being, would present,
when wrought into the skein of our human mentality, a far higher
and more exalted appearance, well calculated to put us in love with
ourselves--never a very difficult business--to the tune of such lines
as “We feel that we are greater than we know,” “Out of the deep, my
child, out of the deep,” and many another _d’este jaez_, which, though
they issue from the lips of great poets, may be born, none the less, of
mere human pride and complacency. Yet, all the time, animal reversion,
as opposed to godlike development, might be, as I believe it is, the
_vera causa_ of what seems so high and so holy.
Were the late Mr. Myers’ conception of the subliminal self--a part of
us belonging, as far as one can understand the idea, not to this earth
but to a spiritual state of things beyond and without it, and bringing
with it intuitive knowledge and enlarged powers, from this outer sea,
these extra-territorial waters--were, I say, this conception a true
one, it is difficult to see why such knowledge and such powers should
always have stood in an ordered relation to the various culture-states
through which man--the terrestrial or supraliminal part of him, that
is to say--has passed, and to his earthly advantages and means of
acquiring knowledge. It is difficult to see why the subliminal part
of such a gifted race as the Greeks, though proportionately high,
yet knew, apparently, so much less than this same sleeping partner
in the joint-firm, so to speak, of far less gifted, but later-living
peoples: why genius, which is “a welling-up of the subliminal into the
supraliminal region,” should bear, always, the impress of its age,
race, and country: why it is governed by the law of deviation from an
average, as laid down by Galton: why it should so often be ignorant
in matters which ought to be well known to the subliminal ego, as
thus conceived of: why it asserts what is false as frequently as what
is true, and with the same inspired eloquence:[31] why “the _dæmon_
of Socrates” was either ignorant of its own nature, or else deceived
Socrates, who of all men, surely, was fitted to know the truth: why
Aristotle perceived less than Darwin: why Pythagoras grasped only
imperfectly what Copernicus saw fully: why no other Greek astronomer
had an inkling of the same truths: why Shakespeares and Newtons do
not spring out of low savage tribes: why the negro race has produced
no man higher than Toussaint l’Ouverture, who to the giants of the
Aryan stock is as Ben Nevis to Mount Everest: and so on, and so on--a
multitude of difficulties, as it appears to me, which the theory has
neither answered, nor, as far as I know, has yet been called upon to
answer.
I really do wish that writers upon psychical subjects would sometimes
make an allusion to the animal world--the very existence of which one
might, almost, suppose they had forgotten. The perpetual ignoring
of so vast a matter--as though one were to go about, affecting not
to breathe--is not only irritating, but calculated to produce a bad
impression. Surely the originator or maintainer of any view or doctrine
of the nature and immortal destinies of man, ought to be delighted
to enforce his arguments by showing that they are applicable, not to
man only, but to millions of animals, to whom, as we all now very
well know, he is more or less closely related. When, therefore,
we constantly miss this most natural and necessary extension, it
is difficult not to think that some flaw, some weak point in the
hypothesis--and, if so, _what_ a weak one!--is being carefully avoided.
It is amusing to contrast the space which animals occupy in such a
work as Darwin’s “Descent of Man” with that allotted to them--to be
counted not by pages, but lines--in those two huge volumes of the late
Mr. Myers’ “Human Personality and its Survival of Physical Death.”
Yet, as clearly as man’s body, in the former work, is shown to have
been evolved out of the bodies of animals, so clearly is his mind
demonstrated to have come to him through their minds. That, mentally
and corporeally, we are no more nor less than the chief animal in
this world, is now indeed, a proven and, scientifically speaking, an
admitted thing; and I think it is time that those who, with scientific
pretensions, seem yearning, more and more, to spell man with a capital
M, should be called upon to state their views in regard to that mighty
assemblage of beings, but for which he (or He) would never have
appeared here at all, yet which, notwithstanding, they seem determined
to ignore.
[Illustration: DABCHICKS AND NEST]