_A second wave of cold--Migrating goldfinches--Increase in number of
wintering birds--Beginning of the frost--At Zennor--Feeding the birds
under difficulties--A crippled robin--Crystal fruit--Prowess of a
fox--Fox and raven--The foxes' larder--Migrating ravens--Frosted window
panes--Starving birds--Starlings going to roost--Evening on Zennor
Hill--Heath fires--The windy night--Animism and personifications of
nature--The end of the frost._
|THERE was no second westward movement of birds in the winter of 1906-7,
although another and more intense spell of cold weather occurred a month
after the one described in the last chapter. It looked as if the birds
had exhausted their powers in their long disastrous flight to and from
the Land's End, or that some saving instinct had failed to come to them
on this occasion. Doubtless many thousands had perished in that journey
over a snow-covered country to the extremity of Cornwall, and we
may suppose that when the weather moderated the surviving millions
redistributed themselves over the southern counties from Somerset to
Kent; also that many birds had been continually slipping away across the
Channel. Many of our migrants, which have not a strict migration like
the swallow and cuckoo, the species which shift their quarters or of
which considerable numbers remain in this country throughout the year,
do annually come down in batches to the south and remain for a month
or so, in some cases until December, then vanish, and these no doubt
continue their journey over the sea. Thus, every autumn there is a
migration of goldfinches into Cornwall, many birds appearing in the
neighbourhood of Mount's Bay in September and remaining until November.
These goldfinches have a brighter plumage than those which winter in
England, and appear to form a body or race distinct from the earlier
migrants having their own seasons and perhaps a route of their own.
To return to the great visitation of birds in December. I am sure that
very many of these, exhausted by hunger and cold, dropped out of the
winged army at the extremity of Cornwall, and remained there until the
end of the cold season. At all events, when I returned to the scene
in January, I noticed a very great increase in the number of wintering
birds, particularly starlings, larks, song-thrushes, fieldfares and
redwings. The weather continued cold and rough, with storms of wind and
sleet and occasional flurries of snow, until January 21, when the cold
became intense, and that rare phenomenon in West Cornwall, a severe
frost, began, which lasted several days, and was said by some of the old
natives to be the greatest frost in forty years, while others affirmed
they had not experienced anything like it in their lives.
I was staying at Zennor at the time--that lonely little village nestling
among its furze thickets and stone hedges, with the rough granite hills,
clothed in brown dead bracken, before it and the black granite cliffs
and sea behind. I had been amusing myself by feeding a few birds that
came to the door, and now my small company of pensioners, suddenly grown
tame, began to interest me very much. There was no garden to the house,
which was situated in the centre of the village, with the church on one
side and the inn on the other--nothing but the road, broadening out into
a wide bare space on which my window looked, with a stone hedge and a
fountain of gushing water on the other side, where the people dipped
their buckets and the animals came to drink. Here the cows came on their
way to and from the farm, and the pigs and dogs and a flock of geese;
and as some of these animals were always about, they very naturally
helped themselves to the bread they found in the public road.
Fortunately the ground-floor window had a raised stone platform before
it, surrounded by iron railings, and I started putting out the food for
the birds in this area. The cows and pigs could not get in there, but
some of the most intelligent of the village dogs managed to get a share
by thrusting their paws far in and dragging the scraps out, and the
geese would follow suit, putting their long necks between the rails. The
birds, however, fared better than before; thrushes, blackbirds, robins,
dunnocks, pied wagtails, meadow pipits and one grey wagtail were the
usual feeders; the daws, too, would occasionally pluck up courage enough
to drop down between the railings and snatch up something.
[Illustration:0251]
One of my guests was a robin of exceptionally small size with a withered
leg. This bird was first brought to me one evening by some of the
children, who had caught it in the schoolroom, and thought I would
be able to do something for it. A more pitiable object could not
be imagined; it was nothing but a little feathered skeleton; the
"comfortable little red waistcoat with legs to it" was now a sharp keel,
but behind the bone one could feel the little muscular heart working
away violently. One leg was crushed above the knee and was now dead
and dried, the closed claws hardened into a ball. I assured them that
nothing could be done to save it, that the most merciful thing we could
do would be to let it fly away into the bushes, where it would quickly
fall asleep and die without pain in the intense cold. I opened my
hand and it darted away into the black bitter night, but great was
my surprise next morning, when looking at the company gathered at the
window, to find the wasted little cripple among them, eagerly picking up
crumbs! I was foolishly pleased to see it there; nevertheless it was
a pity that it had survived the night and in the end lived through the
frost, seeing that a hopelessly injured and maimed bird is, like the
caged bird, incapable of its proper life, and to any one who can feel
for a bird is better dead.
The second day of the frost made a wonderful difference in the
appearance of the birds out in the fields, especially the starlings.
These had now lost all energy and were seen everywhere moving languidly
about over the pale frosty turf in a hopeless search for a soft place,
while others were found gathered at some spot sheltered by a stone hedge
from the bitter north-east wind, standing crowded together in listless
attitudes, with drooping wings. By degrees the fieldfares and redwings
disappeared. The song-thrushes which, next to the starlings, were
the most numerous, appeared to fare better than the other soft-billed
species, owing to the abundance of snails in the stone hedges. It was
a mystery to me how with nothing but those poor beaks they were able to
get them out. Snails were exceedingly plentiful in the crevices between
the stones, many of them easily got at, but so tightly were they glued
and frozen to the stone that I could not pull them off with my fingers.
They were like limpets on a rock, yet it was plain to see that
the thrushes did get a good many out and so saved themselves from
starvation. Their anvils were everywhere near the walls, each with its
litter of broken shells about it. The hibernating snails were not only
found in the stone hedges; they were also extraordinarily abundant
among the sandhills or towans at Lelant and Phillack on the coast near
St. Ives. They were hidden in the sand at the roots of the coarse marram
grass growing on the hills. Here the thrushes had less difficulty in
getting them out, and every stone lying in the sand was made use of. It
amused me to find that the favourite anvil at one spot was a soda-water
bottle which had been stuck deep in the soft sand, leaving the round end
about two inches above the ground. Its form and the faint bluish tinge
in the clear thick glass gave it the exact appearance of a round lump of
ice, but the thrushes had discovered that it was not ice but something
as hard as stone, and being immovable, better suited to their purpose
than the pebbles and small fragments of stone lying about on the
sand. All round the useful bottle the ground was thickly strewn with
many-coloured broken snail-shells.
The soda-water bottle reminds me of the appearance of a singular and
beautiful form of icicle which became common on the water-courses on the
second and third days of the frost. I saw it chiefly on a stream near
Zennor that gushes and tumbles over the rocks on its way to the sea and
is in great part almost covered with a dense growth of dwarf blackthorn,
bramble and furze bushes. Where the water pouring over the boulders
splashes the overhanging branches the constant drops running down the
pendent twigs grew into globular or oval crystals; these were mostly
about the size as well as shape of ducks' eggs, pure as the purest
glass, and had the appearance of a wonderful crystal fruit hanging from
stems on the dark purple-red sloe bushes.
I greatly liked to follow this same stream in its swift downward course,
as it ran through the roughest bit of ground in all this roughest spot
in West Cornwall, and where it finished its course, rushing down through
a cleft into the sea, the sloping shore was abundantly strewn with
masses of granite lying everywhere among the furze thicket, a spot
where adders and lizards (the longcripple, as called here) are common
in summer and a favourite refuge and dwelling-place of the fox. A
fox belonging to this spot distinguished himself at one of the small
neighbouring farms at the beginning of the cold spell. There were
two small farm-houses very little bigger than cottages together, with
nothing but a cart-road to divide them, and each one had its hen-house
close by. The fox came, and the door not being properly fastened got
in and succeeded in carrying away eight fowls besides injuring several
more, without disturbing either the inmates of the house or the dogs.
A few nights later he came again and finding the door locked turned his
attention to the second hen-house. It was built of stone and the door
was securely fastened, but it had a thatched roof, and getting on it he
gnawed a hole big enough to let himself in. The fowls screamed, the
dogs barked, and the farmer, roused from slumber, jumped out of bed and
seizing his gun rushed out. Just as he got up to the hen-house he saw
the fox pop up out of the hole in the thatch, leap down and vanish into
the black night. Twelve fowls were found dead or dying of their bites as
the result of this attempt which was not a complete success.
The poor man was very much cast down at his loss when I saw him next
day. "I've been feeding them all the winter," he said, "and they never
laid an egg until now, and now just when they begin to lay the fox comes
and kills them! If I go to the gentleman of the hunt he perhaps gives me
a shilling a head at the outside, and perhaps nothing at all. He'll say,
We're very sorry for you, but we can't do anything for you because the
money isn't enough and you should take better care of your fowls." He
went on in this mournful strain for about half an hour and said that
what made it seem worse to him was the fact that the foxes had bred
during the summer in the rocks quite near the farm, down by the sea, and
he never disturbed them--never had a thought against them! I agreed that
it was very hard lines and all the rest, but secretly my sympathies were
with the fox rather than with him and his fowls.
It was certainly an almost incredibly audacious act on the part of
the fox, seeing that in letting himself down through the hole he had
made--"hardly big enough for a cat" the farmer said--he had put himself
in a trap; yet in spite of the joyful excitement of killing and of the
screaming and the fluttering of the birds he became aware of the danger
he was in and made good his escape. His mouth must have watered for many
a day at the recollection of the fowls he had killed and left behind,
and in the following month he actually came again one dark night and
made a hole as before in the roof and then smelling danger made off.
The day after the second raid I was down among the rocks and bushes
by the sea, half a mile from the farm, when I heard the repeated angry
croak of a raven not far away. He was perched on a rock on the further
side of a gully a couple of hundred yards from me, and getting my
binocular on to him I was surprised at his excited appearance as I
could see nothing to account for such a state. Presently he rose up to
a height of about a hundred yards in the air, then turning and letting
himself go he came down like a raven gone mad, violently doubling about
this way and that in his descent until, nearing the ground, he struck
savagely at a fox which I now perceived for the first time. A big
gaunt-looking dog-fox standing motionless on a large rock rising about
three feet above the surface. Just as the raven made the last sudden
twist in his flight and delivered his blow the fox dropped flat down on
the stone as if he had dropped dead, then, as the raven rose, he got
up and stood again, motionless as before. Again and again the raven
repeated the mad swoop, eight or nine swoops following in quick
succession, and on every occasion the fox threw himself down just as the
blow was struck, but invariably keeping his face towards the assailant
with his mouth wide open and all his dangerous teeth displayed. Then the
raven gave it up; he could not drive the fox from the big flat-topped
rock on which he had placed himself apparently to defy the bird, and he
knew, I imagined, that he was playing an exceedingly dangerous game.
The extraordinary manner in which he twisted about in descending was
evidently meant to intimidate and confuse his enemy and enable him to
deliver his blow in an unexpected place, but there was danger in this
method, seeing that the least miscalculation or the slightest accident
would have placed him at the mercy of the savage beast hungry to get his
sharp teeth into his hated black carcass.
The bird rose high up with a sullen croak and flew away out of sight,
and only then the fox quitted his post. He did not see me among the
rocks on my side of the gully, although I was able to keep my glass on
him all the time. He came at a quiet trot straight towards me, springing
lightly from stone to stone and only dropping down to the rough frozen
ground when there was no other way. After travelling about a hundred
yards in this way he turned aside at right angles and went a distance of
about forty yards straight to a spot where a mass of heather grew in the
cleft of a rock. Thrusting his head and half his body into the heather
he began digging and presently pulled out something which he had
concealed there and which he now proceeded to devour, holding it down
with his paws. Having eaten it he sat down and licked his chops, then
picked up the crumbs so to speak and sat down and licked his chops once
more. Evidently the meat had not satisfied his hunger, for by and by he
thrust himself into the clump and began digging again, but there was no
more, and coming out he sat up again and with head inclining downwards
remained for some moments in a dejected attitude, revolving things in
his mind perhaps, and then, perhaps all at once remembering that he had
another little hoard somewhere else, he started up and went off in a new
direction with the same quiet trot as before, jumping lightly from stone
to stone, and was soon lost to sight.
The raven I have spoken of was one of four that haunted this part of
the coast, where they were very much hated by a pair of kestrels. One
evening just before sunset I had a great surprise--when standing in a
field half a mile from the sea talking to a farmer a flock of thirty-two
ravens flew over our heads. It was impossible to make a mistake in this
case, as the birds were flying quietly and low, passing directly over
us at a height of scarcely forty yards. Undoubtedly they were strangers
from a great distance, perhaps from the northern extremity of Scotland,
and were making a tour round the whole island, but I had never heard of
a migration of ravens into Cornwall in winter.
The two coldest days during the frost were the one on which I watched
the fox and the day following. In the morning I had found the large
window panes of my sitting-room thickly coated with a beautiful frost
pattern, but the sky was clear and with the sun shining on the window
and a big fire in the grate I thought it would soon be gone. It
continued all day, although the fire never went out! The birds were now
in desperate case: it appeared as if they had given up searching for
food in despair, and were now idly waiting for a change or for the end,
hunched up in any shelter they could find from the deadly north-east
wind. The very daws were silent now, and dropped their wings like the
others, as if they had not energy enough to fold them over their backs.
Even the wren, that most vigorous little creature, the very type and
embodiment of cheerfulness, had now too fallen into the universal
misery, and came out of hiding languidly if it came at all, its feathers
fluffed out and not a ghost of its sharp angry little voice to scold you
with.
Towards evening on the second of the two worst days I went out to Zennor
Hill to see the sun set from the top and watch the big furze and heath
fires which were burning far and wide on the moor. On the slope of the
hill I found a number of small companies of starlings, huddled together
as usual by a hedge-side, making no attempt to feed, there being nothing
to be got from the iron earth; and as the sun declined they began to
rise and fly away southwards to their roosting-place--a spot three or
four miles inland, where a depression in the moor is covered with a
dense growth of old furze mixed with blackthorn and brambles. Their
miserable day was ended and numbers of small flocks of from a dozen to
forty or fifty birds could now be seen against the sky, all directing
their flight to the same point. It was a strangely slow and laborious
flight, and many of the birds were going for the last time to their
roost. From the summit where I tried to shelter myself from the fury
of the wind among the large black masses of granite, the scene I looked
upon was exceedingly desolate. The brown moor stretched away inland,
lonely and dark, to the horizon. There was on all that expanse but one
small object to arrest the sight--a frozen pool a couple of miles away
which gleamed like grey glass in the level beams. Many heath fires were
burning, one not above a mile from the hill and near enough for one to
see the yellow flames running before the wind and leaping a dozen to
twenty yards high. The sun seen through the vast clouds of dun smoke had
the appearance of a globe of fiery red copper. After it had gone down
and the earth began to darken the smoke took an intense orange colour
from the flames, which seen against the pale blue sky gave a dreadful
magnificence to the scene.
With this picture in my mind I went down the hill, chilled to the
marrow, thinking of the birds asleep and occasionally disturbing one as
I stumbled over the stones in the dark and picked my way among the black
furze bushes. Indoors it was very comfortable, sitting by the fire, with
the lighted lamp on the table and a book waiting to be read; then supper
and a pipe, but through it all that strange and desolate aspect of
nature remained persistently before my inner sight. I went to bed and
lay soft and warm, covered with many blankets, but did not sleep; the
wind increased in violence as the hours went on, making its doleful
wailing and shrieking noises all round the house and causing the doors
and windows to rattle in their frames. In spirit I was in it, out on
the hillside where the birds were in their secret hiding-places, in the
black furze and heath, in holes and crevices in the hedges, their little
hearts beating more languidly each hour, their eyes glazing, until stiff
and dead they dropped from their perches. And I was on the summit of
the hill among the rude granite castles and sacred places of men who had
their day on this earth thousands and thousands of years ago. Here
there are great blocks and slabs of granite which have been artificially
hollowed into basins--for what purpose, who shall say? The rain falls
and fills them to the brim with crystal-clear water, and in summer the
birds drink and bathe in these basins. But they were doubtless made for
another, possibly for some dreadful, purpose. Perhaps they were filled
from time to time with the blood of captive men sacrificed on the
hill-top to some awful god of the ancient days. Now it seemed to me,
out there in spirit on the hill, that the darkest imaginings of men--the
blackest phantom or image of himself which he has sacrificed to--was
not so dark as this dreadful unintelligible and unintelligent power that
made us, in which we live and move and have our being.
It was this terrible aspect of nature, as I had seen it on that evening,
which was uppermost in the mind of the race at an earlier stage of
culture before man's cunning brain had found out so many inventions and
created new and pleasant conditions for his own species. When animistic
promptings survive in him he is now apt to personify nature in its
milder beneficent aspects. Such personifications, fanciful and religious
at the same time, are common in our imaginative writers, especially
in the poets, but, when lying awake that night, I tried to recall the
passages I had read just to contrast the brighter picture with that dark
one in my mind, I could only remember one, in a prose writer, and it was
this:--
"Nature is now at her evening prayers, kneeling before the red hills.
On the steps of her great altar she is praying for a fair night for
mariners at sea, for travellers in lonely deserts, for lambs on moors
and for unfledged little birds in their nests. She appears to me as
a Titanic woman, her robe of blue air spread to the outskirts of the
heath; a veil white as an avalanche extends from her head to her feet
with arabesques of lightning flame on its borders. Under her breasts is
seen her purple zone, and through its blush shines the evening star. Her
eyes are clear and deep as lakes, and are lifted and full of worship and
tremble with the softness of love and the lustre of prayer."
Very curiously in this the only poetic passage I could recall the
author's religion has mixed itself with the sense of a living and
intelligent principle in nature--that which at times makes nature seem a
person to us. The person may be interested in or indifferent to us, but
is all-knowing and all-powerful and cannot be an intercessor. There is
no doubt that this sense or feeling in us, when strong, is disturbing
to the religious mind, producing as it does the notion of a something
unknown and uncanny (probably the devil) in nature--something which is
ever trying in all solitary places to seduce the soul from a jealous
and watchful God. It was, I think, a religious poet and an American who
wrote of the "dreadful wilderness of mind"--I read it when a boy:
There is a wilderness more dark
Than groves of fir on Huron's shore.
Many of us have just such visions of the person that nature is on
occasions to us: a woman-Titan, a beautiful female, the mother of
men and of all life, all breathing sentient things, and of grass
and flowers; a being in whom all beauty in the visible world and all
sweetness and love and compassion in a mother's heart and in all hearts
are concentrated and intensified. But it is a personification of a
reclaimed and softened nature and of the soft conditions of life in
which we are nursed. My vision of nature as a person that night had no
softness or beauty in it and was not woman. Standing on the hills I saw
him coming up from the illimitable moaning sea, riding on the blast as
on a chariot, and he was himself wind and cloud and sea and land.
He towered above the granite hills, blotting out the stars with his
streaming hair which covered the heavens like a cloud. I saw his face,
dark as granite, as he rose up before me and passed over the stony
desolate hills, and his eyes gazing straight before him were like two
immense round shields of grey ice and had no speculation in them.
This indeed was to my mind the most dreadful thing, that this being,
all-powerful and everlasting, creator and slayer of all things that
live, of all beauty and sweetness and compassion, was himself without
knowledge or thought or emotion, and that that which he had made and
would unmake was without significance to him.
If there be nothing but this mechanical world, and if the pure
materialist even in spite of his materialism should invent for himself
or imagine a god, it would be such a one as I beheld on that windy
night.
So passed the miserable darkling hours, "as I lay a-thynkinge," and saw
no hope until I slept, and when I woke and the grey morning was come,
the wind had fallen and the cold was not so intense.
The frost continued that day and the next, and although very cold with
occasional storms of sleet and snow, it was getting milder all the time.
The change was so gradual one could hardly feel it, but it had a great
effect on the birds; they were recovering very rapidly, and on the
morning of the 27th, when the ground had once more grown soft except in
shady places, my birds did not turn up at feeding-time in the morning:
they were back in the fields getting their natural food, which no doubt
tasted best after their long abstinence. It was a pleasure to go out
again to see the thrush standing up stiff and alert on the green turf
in the old way, and the speckled starlings scattered about and once more
busily prodding the turf. The daws rose up with the old insolent ring in
their clamouring voices, and the wren was himself again, briskly hopping
out of his hiding-place in the stones for a moment or two just to fling
that sharp little note of indignation at you for disturbing him--"Go
away--mind your own business!"
The mortality had undoubtedly been very great, but a majority of the
birds died in the night-time, dropping from their perches in the close
bushes and dying in holes in the hedges, where their bodies remained
hidden. But they had died in the daytime too, and I found their remains
all about the fields, mostly starlings, but dead redwings and thrushes
were also plentiful.
[Illustration: 0268]