THE CARRION CROW IN THE BALANCE
The crow in London--Persecuted in the royal parks--Degradation
of Hyde Park--Ducks in the Serpentine: how they are
thinned--Shooting a chicken with a revolver--Habits of the Hyde
Park mallard--Anecdotes--Number of London crows--The crow a
long-lived bird; a bread-eater--Anecdote--Seeks its food on the
river--The crow as a pet--Anecdotes.
The carrion crow has probably always been an inhabitant of the central
parks; at all events it is well known that for a long time past a pair
bred annually in the trees on the north side of the Serpentine, down to
within the last three years. As these birds took toll of the ducks' eggs
and ducklings when they had a nest full of ravenous young to feed, it
was resolved that they should no longer be tolerated; their nests were
ordered to be pulled down and the old birds shot whenever an opportunity
offered. Now it is not the Hyde Park crows alone that will suffer if
this policy be adhered to, but the London crows generally will be in
danger of extermination, for the birds are constantly passing and
repassing across London, visiting all the parks where there are large
trees, on their way to and from their various feeding-grounds. Hyde Park
with Kensington Gardens is one of their favourite stopping places; one
or more pairs may be seen there on most mornings, frequently at noon
again on their return to Richmond, Kew, and Syon Park, and to the
northern heights of London. On the morning of October 10, 1896, I saw
eight carrion crows, in pairs, perched at a considerable distance apart
on the elm-tops near the palace in Kensington Gardens. After calling for
some time on the trees, they began to pursue and buffet one another with
violence, making the whole place in the meantime resound with their
powerful, harsh, grating cries. Their mock battle over, they rose to a
considerable height in the air and went away towards Hammersmith. It
seemed to me a marvellous thing that I had witnessed such a scene in
such a place. But it is not necessary to see a number of carrion crows
together to feel impressed with the appearance of the bird. There are
few finer sights in the wild bird life of London than one of these
visitors to the park on any autumn or winter morning, when he will allow
you to come quite near to the leafless tree on which he is perched, to
stand still and admire his massive raven-like beak and intense black
plumage glossed with metallic green, as he sits flirting his wings and
tail, swelling his throat to the size of a duck's egg, as, at intervals,
he pours out a succession of raucous caws--the cry of a true savage, and
the crow's 'voice of care,' as Chaucer called it.
[Illustration: CARRION CROW'S NEST]
The crow is, in fact, the grandest wild bird left to us in the
metropolis; and after corresponding and conversing with a large number
of persons on the subject, I find that in London others--most persons,
I believe--admire him as much as I do, and are just as anxious that he
should be preserved. It may be mentioned here that in two or three of
the County Council's parks the superintendents protect and take pride in
their crows. Why, then, should these few birds, which Londoners value,
be destroyed in the royal parks for fear of the loss of a few ducklings
out of the hundreds that are annually hatched and reared?
The ducks in the Serpentine are very numerous; many bucketfuls of
food--meal and grain--are given to them every day when they congregate
at the boat-house, and they get besides large quantities of broken bread
cast to them by the public; all day long, and every day when it is not
raining, there is a continual procession of men, women, and children
bringing food for the birds. Is it permissible to ask for whose
advantage this large number of ducks is reared and fattened for the
table at so small a cost? Hyde Park is maintained by the nation, and
presumably for the nation; it is a national as well as a royal park; is
it not extraordinary that so noble a possession, the largest and most
beautiful open space in the capital of the British empire, the chief
city of the world, should be degraded to something like a poultry farm,
or at all events a duck-breeding establishment, and that in order to get
as much profit as possible out of the ducks, one of the chief ornaments
of the park, the one representative of noble wild bird life that has
survived until now in London, should be sacrificed?
Let us by all means have ducks, and many of them; they are gregarious by
nature and look well in flocks, and are a source of innocent pleasure
to numberless visitors to the parks, especially to children and
nursemaids; but let us not have ducks only--a great multitude of ducks,
to the exclusion of other wilder and nobler birds.
Personally, I am very fond of these ducks, although I have never had
one on my table, and believe that I am as well able to appreciate their
beauty and feel an interest in their habits as any of the gentlemen in
authority who have decreed that the carrion crow shall go the way of the
raven in Hyde Park. I love them because they are not the ducks that have
been made lazy and fat, with all their fine faculties dulled, by long
domestication. They are the wild duck, or mallard, introduced many
years ago into the Serpentine. Doubtless they have some domestic taint
in them, since the young birds reared each season exhibit a very
considerable variation in colour and markings. Those that vary in
colour are weeded out each winter, and the original type is in this way
preserved; but not strictly preserved, as the weeding-out process is
carelessly--I had almost said stupidly--performed.
The thinning takes place in December, and at that season people who
live in the vicinity of the park are startled each morning by the sound
of firing, as at the covert side. The sub-ranger and his friends and
underlings are enjoying their big annual shoot. And there is no reason
why they should not have this sport, if it pleases them, and if by this
means the object sought could be obtained. But it is not obtained, as
anyone may see for himself; and it also seems a trifle ridiculous that
any man can find sport in shooting birds accustomed to walk about among
people's legs and feed out of little children's hands.
Once upon a time, in a distant country, I came with a companion to a
small farmhouse. We were very much in want of a meal, but no person was
about, and the larder was empty, and so we determined to kill and broil
a chicken for ourselves. On our making certain chuckling noises, which
domestic birds understand, a number of fowls scattered about near the
place rushed up to us, expecting to be fed. We made choice of a very
tall cockerel for our breakfast; so tall was this young bird on his
long, bright yellow stilt-like shanks that he towered head and neck
above his fellows. My companion, who was an American, had a revolver
in his pocket, and pulling it out he fired five shots at the bird at a
distance of about six yards, but failed to hit it. He was preparing to
reload his weapon, when, to expedite matters, I picked up a stick and
knocked the chicken over, and in less than fifty minutes' time we were
picking his bones.
I doubt if the Hyde Park sportsmen will see anything very amusing in
this story.
The mallard is an extremely handsome fowl, and it is pleasant to see
such a bird in flocks, at home on the ornamental waters, and at the same
time to learn that it is, in a sense, a wild bird, that in the keenness
of its faculties, its power of flight, and nesting habits it differs
greatly from its degenerate domestic relation. By day he will feed from
any person's hand; in the evening he returns to his ancient wary habit,
and will not suffer a person to approach him. He is active by night,
particularly in the autumn, flying about the park and gardens in
small flocks and feeding on the grass. It is a curious and delightful
experience to be alone on a damp autumn night in Kensington Gardens. One
is surrounded by London; its dull continuous murmur may be heard, and
the glinting of distant lamps catches the eye through the trees; these
fitful gleams and distant sounds but make the silence and darkness all
the more deep and impressive. Suddenly the whistling of wings is heard,
and the loud startled cry of a mallard, as the birds, vaguely seen,
rush by overhead; the effect on the mind is wonderful--one has been
transported as by a miracle into the midst of a wild and solitary
nature.
Both by day and night there is much going to and fro between the
Serpentine and the Round Pond, but each bird appears to be faithful to
its _home_, and those that have been reared on the Round Pond breed
in its vicinity on the west side of the gardens. Where their eggs are
deposited is known to few. Strange as it may seem, they nest in the
trees, in holes in the trunks of the large elms, in many cases
at a height of thirty feet or more from the ground. Some of the
breeding-trees are known, of others the secret has been well kept by the
birds. Not a few ducks breed in Holland Park, and find it an exceedingly
difficult matter to get their broods into the gardens. More than once
the strange spectacle of a duck leading its newly-hatched young along
the thronged pavements of Kensington High Street has been witnessed.
When the young have been hatched in a tree the parent bird takes them up
in her beak and drops them one by one to the ground, and the fall does
not appear to hurt them. Last year a duck bred in a tree broken off at
the top near St. Gover's Well, in the gardens. One morning she appeared
with four ducklings, and leaving them near the pond went back to the
tree and in time returned with a second lot of four. Still she was not
satisfied, but continued to go back to the tree and to fly round and
round it with a great clamour. A keeper who had been watching her
movements sent for a man with a ladder to have the tree-top examined.
The man found the broken stem hollow at the top, and by thrusting his
arm down shoulder-deep was able to reach the bottom of the cavity with
his hand. One duckling was found in it and rescued, and its mother made
happy. That she had succeeded in getting all the others out of so deep
and narrow a shaft seemed very astonishing.
An extraordinary incident relating to these Kensington ducks was told
to me by one of the keepers, who himself heard it by a very curious
chance. One dark evening, after leaving the gardens, he got on to an
omnibus near the Albert Hall to go to his home at Hammersmith. Two men
who occupied the seat in front of him were talking about the gardens
and the birds, and he listened. One of the men related that he once
succeeded in taking a clutch of ducks' eggs from the gardens. He put
them under a hen at his home in Hammersmith, and nine ducklings were
hatched. They were healthy and strong and grew up into nine as fine
ducks as he had ever seen. Such fine birds were they that he was loth
to kill or part with them, and before he had made up his mind what to
do he lost them in a very strange way. One morning he was in his back
yard, where his birds were kept, when a crow appeared flying by at a
considerable height in the air; instantly the ducks, with raised heads,
ran together, then with a scream of terror sprang into the air and flew
away, to be seen no more. Up till that moment they had never seen beyond
the small back yard where they lived--it was their world--nor had any
one of them ever attempted to use his wings.
Let us now return to the nobler bird, the subject of this chapter.
It would not, I imagine, be difficult for one who had the time to count
the London crows; those I am accustomed to see number about twenty, and
I should not be surprised to learn that as many as forty crows frequent
inner London. But with the exception of two, or perhaps three pairs,
they do not now breed in London, but have their nesting-haunts in woods
west, north, and east of the metropolis. These breeders on the outskirts
bring the young they succeed in rearing to the parks, from which they
have themselves in some cases been expelled, and the tradition is thus
kept up. Most of the birds appear to fly over London every day, paying
long visits on their way to Regent's Park, Holland Park, the central
parks, and Battersea Park. As their movements are very regular it would
be possible to mark their various routes on a map of the metropolis.
Mr. W. H. Tuck, writing to me about the carrion crow, says: 'For many
years, when living in Kensington, several pairs of crows going from N.E.
to S.W. passed at daybreak over my house on their way to the Thames
banks at Chelsea, and I could always time them within a minute or two.'
These birds come on their way from the northern heights to the river
at Chelsea; the crows that breed in the neighbourhood of Syon Park and
Richmond fly over the central parks to Westminster, and then follow the
river down to its mouth.
The persistency with which the carrion crow keeps to his nesting-place
may be seen in the case of a pair that have bred in private grounds at
Hillfield, Hampstead, for at least sixty years. Nor is it impossible to
believe that the same birds have occupied the site for this long period,
the crow being a long-lived creature. The venerable author of 'Festus,'
who also has the secret of long life, might have been thinking of this
very pair when, more than half a century ago, he wrote his spirited
lyric:--
The crow! the crow! the great black crow!
He lives for a hundred years and mo';
He lives till he dies, and he dies as slow
As the morning mists down the hill that go.
Go--go! you great black crow!
But it's fine to live and die like a great black crow.
Many persons might be inclined to think that it must be better for the
crow to have his nest a little way out of the hurly-burly, or at all
events within easy reach of the country; for how, they might ask, can
this large flesh-eating, voracious creature feed himself and rear a nest
full of young with cormorant appetites in London?
Eliza Cook, whose now universally neglected works I admired as a boy,
makes the bird say, in her 'Song of the Crow':--
I plunged my beak in the marbling cheek,
I perched on the clammy brow;
And a dainty treat was that fresh meat
To the greedy carrion crow.
The unknown author of 'The Twa Corbies' was a better naturalist as well
as a better poet when he wrote--
I'll pick out his bonny blue een.
But this relates to a time when the bodies of dead men, as well as of
other large animals, were left lying promiscuously about; in these
ultra-civilised days, when all dead things are quickly and decently
interred, the greedy carrion crow has greatly modified his feeding
habits. In London, as in most places, he takes whatever he finds on the
table, and though not in principle a vegetarian, there is no doubt that
he feeds largely on vegetable substances. Like the sparrow and other
London birds, he has become with us a great bread-eater.
Mr. Kempshall, the superintendent at Clissold Park, relates a curious
story of this civilised taste in the crow. The park for very many years
was the home of a pair of these birds. Unfortunately, when this space
was opened to the public, in 1889, the birds forsook it, and settled in
some large trees on private grounds in the neighbourhood. These trees
were cut down about three years ago, whereupon the birds returned to
Clissold Park; but they have now again left it. One summer morning
before the park was opened, when there were young crows in the nest,
Mr. Kempshall observed one of the old birds laboriously making his
way across the open ground towards the nesting-tree, laden with a
strange-looking object. This was white and round and three times as big
as an orange, and the crow, flying close to the ground, was obliged to
alight at short intervals, whereupon he would drop his pack and take a
rest. Curious to know what he was carrying, the superintendent made a
sudden rush at the bird, at a moment when he had set his burden down,
and succeeded in getting near enough to see that the white object was
the round top part of a cottage loaf. But though the rush had been
sudden and unexpected, and accompanied with a startling shout, the crow
did not lose his head; striking his powerful beak, or _plunging_ it, as
Eliza Cook would have said, into the mass, he flopped up and struggled
resolutely on until he reached the nest, to be boisterously welcomed by
his hungry family. They had a big meal, but perhaps grumbled a little at
so much bread without any ghee.
Probably the London crows get most of their food from the river. Very
early every morning, as we have seen, they wing their way to the Thames,
and at all hours of the day, when not engaged in breeding, crows may be
seen travelling up and down the river, usually in couples, from Barnes
and Mortlake and higher up, down to the sea. They search the mud at low
tide for dead fishes, garbage, bread, and vegetable matter left by the
water. Even when the tide is at its full the birds are still able to
pick up something to eat, as they have borrowed the gull's habit of
dropping upon the water to pick up any floating object which may form
part of their exceedingly varied dietary. It is amusing to see the
carrion crow fishing up his dinner in this way, for he does not venture
to fold his wings like the gull and examine and take up the morsel at
leisure; he drops upon the water rather awkwardly, wetting his legs and
belly, but keeps working his wings until he has secured the floating
object, then rises heavily with it in his beak. Another curious habit of
some London crows in the south-west district, is to alight, dove-like,
on the roofs and chimney-stacks of tall houses.
In an article on this bird which appeared in the 'Fortnightly Review'
for May 1895, I wrote: 'It sometimes greatly adds to our knowledge of
any wild creature to see it tamed--not confined in any way, nor with its
wings clipped, but free to exercise all its faculties and to come and go
at will. Some species in this condition are very much more companionable
than others, and probably none so readily fall into the domestic life as
the various members of the crow family; for they are more intelligent
and adaptive, and nearer to the mammalians in their mental character
than most birds. It is therefore curious to find that the subject of
this paper appears to be little known as a domestic bird, or pet. A
caged crow, being next door, so to speak, to a dead and stuffed crow,
does not interest me. Yet the crow strikes one as a bird with great
possibilities as a pet: one would like to observe him freely associating
with the larger unfeathered crows that have a different language, to
learn by what means he communicates with them, to sound his depths of
amusing devilry, and note the modulations of his voice; for he, too,
like other corvines, is loquacious on occasions, and much given to
soliloquy. He is also a musician, a fact which is referred to by Æsop,
Yarrell, and other authorities, but they have given us no proper
description of his song. A friend tells me that he once kept a crow
which did not prove a very interesting pet. This was not strange in the
circumstances. The bird was an old one, just knocked down with a charge
of shot, when he was handed over in a dazed condition to my informant.
He recovered from his wounds, but was always a very sedate bird. He
had the run of a big old country house, and was one day observed in a
crouching attitude pressed tightly into the angle formed by the wall
and floor. He had discovered that the place was infested by mice, and
was watching a crevice. The instant that a mouse put out a head the crow
had him in his beak, and would kill him by striking him with lightning
rapidity two or three times on the floor, then swallow him. From that
time mouse-catching was this bird's sole occupation and amusement, and
he went about the house in the silent and stealthy manner of a cat.
'I am anxious to get the history of a tame crow that never had his
wing-feathers clipped, and did not begin the domestic life as an old
bird with several pellets of lead in his body.'
Curiously enough, not long after this article appeared another
bird-lover in London was asking the same question in another journal.
This was Mr. Mandeville B. Phillips, of South Norwood, then private
secretary to the late Archbishop of Canterbury. By accident he had
become possessed of a carrion crow, sold to him as a young raven taken
from a nest at Ely. This bird made so interesting a pet that its owner
became desirous of hearing the experiences of others who had kept
carrion crows. Mr. Phillips, in kindly giving me the history of his
bird, says that at different times he has kept ravens, daws, jays, and
magpies, but has never had so delightful a bird friend as the crow. It
was a revelation to him to find what an interesting pet this species
made. No other bird he had owned approached him in cleverness and in
multiplicity of tricks and devices: he could give the cleverest jackdaw
points and win easily. If his bird was an average specimen of the race,
he wondered that the crow is not more popular as a pet. This bird was
fond of his liberty, but would always come to his master when called,
and roosted every night in an outhouse. Like the tame raven, and also
like human beings of a primitive order of mind, he was excessively fond
of practical jokes, and whenever he found the dog or cat asleep he would
steal quietly up and administer a severe prod on the tail with his
powerful beak. He would also fly into the kitchen when he saw the
window open, to steal the spoons; but his chief delight was in a box
of matches, which he would carry off to pick to pieces and scatter the
matches all over the place. He was extremely jealous of a tame raven and
a jackdaw that shared the house and garden with him, and which he chose
to regard as rivals; but this was his only unhappiness. The appearance
of his master dressed in 'blazers' always greatly affected him. It
would, indeed, throw him into such a frenzy of terror that Mr. Phillips
became careful not to exhibit himself in such bizarre raiment in the
garden. My informant concludes, that he is not ashamed to say that he
shed a few tears at the loss of this bird.
I may add that I received a large number of letters in answer to my
article on the carrion crow, but none of my correspondents in this
country had any knowledge of the bird as a pet. In several letters
received from America--the States and Canada--long histories of the
common crow of that region as a pet bird were sent to me.