were more abundant, and which consequently had the greatest attraction
for me--there stands an old picturesque cottage nearly concealed from
sight by the hedge in front and closely planted trees clustering round
it. On one side was a grass field, on the other an orchard of old
cherry, apple, and plum trees, all the property of the old man living in
the cottage, who was a character in his way; at all events, he had not
been fashioned in quite the same mould as the majority of the cottagers
about him. They mostly, when past middle life, wore a heavy, dull and
somewhat depressed look. This man had a twinkle in his dark-grey eyes,
an expression of intelligent curiosity and fellowship; and his full
face, bronzed with sixty or sixty-five years' exposure to the weather,
was genial, as if the sunshine that had so long beaten on it had not
been all used up in painting his skin that rich old-furniture colour,
but had, some of it, filtered through the epidermis into the heart to
make his existence pleasant and sweet. But it was a very rough-cast
face, with shapeless nose and thick lips. He was short and
broad-shouldered, always in the warm weather in his shirt-sleeves, a
shirt of some very coarse material and of an earthen colour, his brown
thick arms bare to the elbows. Waistcoat and trousers looked as if he
had worn them for half his life, and had a marbled or mottled appearance
as if they had taken the various tints of all the objects and materials
he had handled or rubbed against in his life's work--wood, mossy trees,
grass, clay, bricks, stone, rusty iron, and dozens more. He wore the
field-labourer's thick boots; his ancient rusty felt hat had long lost
its original shape; and finally, to complete the portrait, a short black
clay pipe was never out of his lips--never, at all events, when I saw
him, which was often; for every day as I strolled past his domain he
would be on the outside of his hedge, or just coming out of his gate,
invariably with something in his hand--a spade, a fork, or stick of
wood, or an old empty fruit-basket. Although thus having the appearance
of being very much occupied, he would always stop for a few minutes'
talk with me; and by-and-by I began to suspect that he was a very social
sort of person, and that it pleased him to have a little chat, but that
he liked to have me think that he met me by accident while going about
his work.
One sunny morning as I came past his field he came out bearing a huge
bundle of green grass on his head. "What!" he exclaimed, coming to a
stand, "you here to-day? I thought you'd be away to the regatta."
I said that I knew little about regattas and cared less, that a day
spent in watching and listening to the birds gave me more pleasure than
all the regattas in the country. "I suppose you can't understand that?"
I added.
He took the big green bundle from his head and set it down, pulled off
his old hat to flap the dust out of it, then sucked at his short clay.
"Well," he said at length, "some fancies one thing and some another, but
we most of us like a regatta."
During the talk that followed I asked him if he knew the wryneck, and if
it ever nested in his orchard. He did not know the bird; had never heard
its name nor the other names of snake-bird and cuckoo's mate; and when I
had minutely described its appearance, he said that no such bird was
known in the village.
I assured him that he was mistaken, that I had heard the cry of the bird
many times, and had even heard it once at a distance since our
conversation began. Hearing that distant cry had caused me to ask the
question.
All at once he remembered that he knew, or had known formerly, the
wryneck very well, but he had never learnt its name. About twenty or
five-and-twenty years ago, he said, he saw the bird I had just described
in his orchard, and as it appeared day after day and had a strange
appearance as it moved up the tree trunks, he began to be interested in
it. One day he saw it fly into a hole close to the ground in an old
apple tree. "Now I've got you!" he exclaimed, and running to the spot
thrust his hand in as far as he could, but was unable to reach the bird.
Then he conceived the idea of starving it out, and stopped up the hole
with clay. The following day at the same hour he again put in his hand,
and this time succeeded in taking the bird. So strange was it to him
that after showing it to his own family he took it round to exhibit it
to his neighbours, and although some of them were old men, not one among
them had ever seen its like before. They concluded that it was a kind of
nuthatch, but unlike the common nuthatch which they knew. After they had
all seen and handled it and had finished the discussions about it, he
released it and saw it fly away; but, to his astonishment, it was back
in his orchard a few hours later. In a few weeks it brought out its five
or six young from the hole he had caught it in, and for several years it
returned each season to breed in the same hole until the tree was blown
down, after which the bird was seen no more.
What an experience the poor bird had suffered! First plastered up and
left to starve or suffocate in its hollow tree; then captured and passed
round from rough, horny hand to hand, while the villagers were
discussing it in their slow, ponderous fashion--how wildly its little
wild heart must have palpitated!--and, finally, after being released, to
go back at once to its eggs in that dangerous tree. I do not know which
surprised me most, the bird's action in returning to its nest after such
inhospitable treatment, or the ignorance of the villagers concerning it.
The incident seemed to show that the wryneck had been scarce at this
place for a very long period.
The villager, as a rule, is not a good observer, which is not strange,
since no person is, or ever can be, a good observer of the things in
which he is not specially interested; consequently the countryman only
knows the most common and the most conspicuous species. He plods through
life with downcast eyes and a vision somewhat dimmed by indifference;
forgetting, as he progresses, the small scraps of knowledge he acquired
by looking sharply during the period of boyhood, when every living
creature excited his attention. In Italy, notwithstanding the paucity of
bird life, I believe that the peasants know their birds better. The
reason of this is not far to seek; every bird, not excepting even the
"temple-haunting martlet" and nightingale and minute golden-crested
wren, is regarded only as a possible morsel to give a savour to a dish
of polenta, if the shy, little flitting thing can only be enticed within
touching distance of the limed twigs. Thus they take a very strong
interest in, and, in a sense, "love" birds. It is their passion for this
kind of flavouring which has drained rural Italy of its songsters, and
will in time have the same effect on Argentina, the country in which the
withering stream of Italian emigration empties itself.
VI
From the date of my arrival at the village in May, until I left it early
in July, the great annual business of pairing, nest-building, and
rearing the young was going on uninterruptedly. The young of some of the
earliest breeders were already strong on the wing when I took my first
walks along the hedgerows, still in their early, vivid green, frequently
observing my bird through a white and rose-tinted cloud of
apple-blossoms; and when I left some species that breed more than once
in the season were rearing second broods or engaged in making new nests.
On my very first day I discovered a nest full of fully fledged blue tits
in a hole in an apple tree; this struck me as a dangerous place for the
young birds; as the tree leaned over towards the lane, and the hole
could almost be reached by a person standing on the ground. On the next
day I went to look at them, and approaching noiselessly along the lane,
spied two small boys with bright clean faces--it was on a
Sunday--standing within three or four yards of the tree, watching the
tits with intense interest. The parent birds were darting up and down,
careless of their presence, finding food so quickly in the gooseberry
bushes growing near the roots of the tree that they visited the hole
every few moments; while the young birds, ever screaming for more, were
gathered in a dense little cluster at the entrance, their yellow breasts
showing very brightly against the rain-wet wood and the dark interior of
the hole. The instant the two little watchers caught sight of me the
excited look vanished from their faces, and they began to move off,
gazing straight ahead in a somewhat vacant manner. This instantaneous
and instinctive display of hypocrisy was highly entertaining, and would
have made me laugh if it had not been for the serious purpose I had in
my mind. "Now, look here," I said, "I know what you are after, so it's
no use pretending that you are walking about and seeing nothing in
particular. You've been watching the young tits. Well, I've been
watching them, too, and waiting to see them fly. I dare say they will
be out by to-morrow or the next day, and I hope you little fellows won't
try to drag them out before then."
They at once protested that they had no such intention. They said that
they never robbed birds' nests; that there were several nests at home in
the garden and orchard, one of a nightingale with three eggs in it, but
that they never took an egg. But some of the boys they knew, they said,
took all the eggs they found; and there was one boy who got into every
orchard and garden in the place, who was so sharp that few nests escaped
him, and every nest he found he destroyed, breaking the eggs if there
were any, and if there were young birds killing them.
Not, perhaps, without first mutilating them, I thought; for I know
something of this kind of young "human devil," to use the phrase which
Canon Wilberforce has made so famous in another connexion. Later on I
heard much more about the exploits of this champion bird-destroyer of
the village from (strange to say) a bird-catcher by trade, a man of a
rather low type of countenance, and who lived, when at home, in a London
slum. On the common where he spread his nets he had found, he told me,
about thirty nests containing eggs or fledglings; but this boy had gone
over the ground after him, and not many of the nests had escaped his
sharp eyes.
I was satisfied that the young tits were quite safe, so far as these
youngsters were concerned, and only regretted that they were such small
Boys, and that the great nest-destroyer, whose evil deeds they spoke of
with an angry colour in their cheeks, was a very strong boy, otherwise I
should have advised them to "go" for him.
Oddly enough I heard of another boy who exercised the same kind of
cruelty and destructiveness over another common a few miles distant.
Walking across it I spied two boys among the furze bushes, and at the
same moment they saw me, whereupon one ran away and the other remained
standing. A nice little fellow of about eight, he looked as if he had
been crying. I asked him what it was all about, and he then told me that
the bigger boy who had just run away was always on the common searching
for nests, just to destroy them and kill the young birds; that he, my
informant, had come there where he came every day just to have a peep at
a linnet's nest with four eggs in it on which the bird was sitting; that
the other boy, concealed among the bushes had watched him go to the nest
and had then rushed up and pulled the nest out of the bush.
"Why didn't you knock him down?" I asked.
"That's what I tried to do before he pulled the nest out," he said; and
then he added sorrowfully: "He knocked me down."
I am reminded here of a tale of ancient Greece about a boy of this
description--the boy to be found in pretty well every parish in the
land. This was a shepherd boy who followed or led his sheep to a
distance from the village and amused his idle hours by snaring small
birds to put their eyes out with a sharp thorn, then to toss them up
just to see how, and how far, they would fly in the dark. He was seen
doing it and the matter reported to the heads or fathers of the village,
and he was brought before them and, after due consideration of the case,
condemned to death. Such a decision must seem shocking to us and worthy
of a semi-barbarous people. But if cruelty is the worst of all
offences--and this was cruelty in its most horrid form--the offence
which puts men down on a level with the worst of the mythical demons, it
was surely a righteous deed to blot such an existence out lest other
young minds should be contaminated, or even that it should be known that
such a crime was possible.
* * *
All those birds that had finished rearing their young by the sixteenth
of June were fortunate, for on the morning of that day a great and
continuous shouting, with gun-firing, banging on old brass and iron
utensils, with various other loud, unusual noises, were heard at one
extremity of the village, and continued with occasional quiet intervals
until evening. This tempest of rude sounds spread from day to day, until
the entire area of the village and the surrounding orchards was
involved, and the poor birds that were tied to the spots where their
treasures were, must have existed in a state of constant trepidation.
For now the cherries were fast ripening, and the fruit-eating birds,
especially the thrushes and black-birds, were inflamed at the gleam of
crimson colour among the leaves. In the very large orchards men and boys
were stationed all day long yelling and firing off guns to frighten the
marauders. In the smaller orchards the trees were decorated with
whirligigs of coloured paper; ancient hats, among which were some of the
quaintly-shaped chimney-pots of a past generation; old coats and
waistcoats and trousers, and rags of all colours to flutter in the wind;
and these objects were usually considered a sufficient protection. Some
of the birds, wiser than their fellows, were not to be kept back by such
simple means; but so long as they came not in battalions, but singly,
they could have their fill, and no notice was taken of them.
I was surprised to hear that on the large plantations the men employed
were not allowed to use shot, the aim of the fruit grower being only to
scare the birds away. I had a talk with my old friend of the wryneck on
the subject, and told him that I had seen one of the bird-scarers going
home to his cottage very early in the morning, carrying a bunch of about
a dozen blackbirds and thrushes he had just shot.
Yes, he replied, some of the men would buy shot and use it early in the
morning before their master was about; but if the man I had seen had
been detected in the act, he would have been discharged on the spot. It
was not only because the trees would be injured by shot, but this
fruitgrower was friendly to birds.
Most fruit-growers, I said, were dead against the birds, and anxious
only to kill as many of them as possible.
It might be so in some places, he answered, but not in the village. He
himself and most of the villagers depended, in a great measure, on the
fruit they produced for a living, and their belief was that, taking one
bird with another all the year round, the birds did them more good than
harm.
I then imparted to him the views on this bird subject of a well-known
fruit-grower in the north of England, Mr. Joseph Witherspoon, of
Chester-le-Street. He began by persecuting the birds, as he had been
taught to do by his father, a market-gardener; but after years of
careful observation he completely changed his views, and is now so
convinced of the advantage that birds are to the fruit-grower, that he
does all in his power to attract them, and to tempt them to breed in his
grounds. His main idea is that birds that are fed on the premises, that
live and feed among the trees, search for and attack the gardeners'
enemies at every stage of their existence. At the same time he believes
that it is very bad to grow fruit near woods, as in such a case the
birds that live in the woods and are of no advantage to the garden,
swarm into it as the fruit ripens, and that it is only by liberal use of
nets that any reasonable portion of the fruit can be saved.
He answered that with regard to the last point he did not quite agree
with Mr. Witherspoon. All the gardens and orchards in the village were
raided by the birds from the wood, yet he reckoned they got as much
fruit from their trees as others who had no woods near them. Then there
was the big cherry plantation, one of the biggest in England, so that
people came from all parts in the blossoming time just to look at it,
and a wonderful sight it was. For a quarter of a mile this particular
orchard ran parallel with the wood; with nothing but the green road
between, and when the first fruit was ripening you could see all the big
trees on the edge of the wood swarming with birds--jays, thrushes,
blackbirds, doves, and all sorts of tits and little birds, just waiting
for a chance to pounce down and devour the cherries. The noise kept them
off, but many would dodge in, and even if a gun was fired close to them
the blackbirds would snatch a cherry and carry it off to the wood. That
didn't matter--a few cherries here and there didn't count. The starlings
were the worst robbers: if you didn't scare them they would strip a tree
and even an orchard in a few hours. But they were the easiest birds to
deal with: they went in flocks, and a shout or rattle or report of a gun
sent the lot of them away together. His way of looking at it was this.
In the fruit season, which lasts only a few weeks, you are bound to
suffer from the attacks of birds, whether they are your own birds only
or your own combined with others from outside, unless you keep them off;
that those who do not keep them off are foolish or indolent, and deserve
to suffer. The fruit season was, he said, always an anxious time.
In conclusion, I remarked that the means used for protecting the fruit,
whether they served their purpose well or not, struck me as being very
unworthy of the times we lived in, and seemed to show that the British
fruit-growers, who were ahead of the world in all other matters
connected with their vocation, had quite neglected this one point. A
thousand years ago cultivators of the soil were scaring the birds from
their crops just as we are doing, with methods no better and no worse,
putting up scarecrows and old ragged garments and fluttering rags,
hanging a dead crow to a stick to warn the others off, shouting and
yelling and throwing stones. There appeared to be an opening here for
experiment and invention. Mere noise was not terrifying to birds, and
they soon discovered that an old hat on a stick had no injurious brains
in or under it. But certain sounds and colours and odours had a strong
effect on some animals. Sounds made to stimulate the screams of some
hawks would perhaps prove very terrifying to thrushes and other small
birds, and the effect of scarlet in large masses or long strips might be
tried. It would also be worth while to try the effect of artificial
sparrow-hawks and other birds of prey, perched conspicuously, moving and
perking their tails at intervals by clockwork. In fact, a hundred things
might be tried until something valuable was found, and when it lost its
value, for the birds would in time discover the deception, some new plan
adopted.
To this dissertation on what might be done, he answered that if any one
could find out or invent any new effective means to keep the birds from
the fruit, the fruit-growers would be very thankful for it; but that no
such invention could be looked for from those who are engaged on the
soil; that it must come from those who do not dig and sweat, but sit
still and work with their brains at new ideas.
This ended our conversation, and I left him more than satisfied at the
information he had given me, and with a higher opinion than ever of his
geniality and good practical sense.
It was a relief when the noisy, bird-scaring business was done with, and
the last market baskets of ripe cherries were carried away to the
station. Very splendid they looked in such large masses of crimson, as
the baskets were brought out and set down in the grassy road; but I
could not help thinking a little sadly that the thrushes and blackbirds
which had been surreptitiously shot, when fallen and fluttering in the
wet grass in the early morning, had shed life-drops of that same
beautiful colour.
VII
After the middle of June the common began to attract me more and more.
It was so extensive that, standing on its border, just beyond the last
straggling cottages and orchards, the further side was seen only as a
line of blue trees, indistinct in the distance. As I grew to know it
better, adding each day to my list from its varied bird life, the woods
and waterside were visited less and less frequently, and after the
bird-scaring noises began in the village, its wildness and quiet became
increasingly grateful. The silence of nature was broken only by bird
sounds, and the most frequent sound was that of the yellow bunting, as,
perched motionless on the summit of a gorse bush, his yellow head
conspicuous at a considerable distance, he emitted his thin monotonous
chant at regular intervals, like a painted toy-bird that sings by
machinery. There, too, sedentary as an owl in the daytime, the corn
bunting was common, discharging his brief song at intervals--a sound as
of shattering glass. The whinchat was rarely seen, but I constantly met
the small, prettily coloured stonechat flitting from bush to bush,
following me, and never ceasing his low, querulous tacking chirp,
anxious for the safety of his nest. Nightingales, blackcaps and
white-throats also nested there, and were louder and more emphatic in
their protests when approached. There were several grasshopper-warblers
on the common, all, very curiously as it seemed to me, clustered at one
spot, so that one could ramble over miles of ground without hearing
their singular note; but on approaching the place they inhabited one
gradually became conscious of a mysterious trilling buzz or whirr, low
at first and growing louder and more stridulous, until the hidden
singers were left behind, when by degrees it sank lower and lower again,
and ceased to be audible at a distance of about one hundred yards from
the points where it had sounded loudest. The birds hid in clumps of
furze and bramble so near together that the area covered by the buzzing
sound measured about two hundred yards across. This most singular sound
(for a warbler to make) is certainly not ventriloquial, although if one
comes to it with the sense of hearing disorganized by town noises or
unpractised, one is at a loss to determine the exact spot it comes from,
or even to know from which side it comes. While emitting its prolonged
sound the bird is so absorbed in its own performance that it is not
easily alarmed, and will sometimes continue singing with a human
listener standing within four or five yards of it. When one is near the
bird, and listens, standing motionless, the effect on the nerves of
hearing is very remarkable, considering the smallness of the sound,
which, without being unpleasant, is somewhat similar to that produced by
the vibration of the brake of a train; it is not powerful enough to jar
the nerves, but appears to pervade the entire system. Lying still, with
eyes closed, and three or four of these birds singing near, so that
their strains overlap and leave no silent intervals, the listener can
imagine that the sound originates within himself; that the numberless
fine cords of his nervous network tremble responsively to it.
There are a number of natural sounds that resemble more or less closely
the most unbirdlike note of this warbler--cicada, rattlesnake, and some
batrachians. Some grasshoppers perhaps come nearest to it; but the most
sustained current of sound emitted by the insect is short compared to
the warbler's strain, also the vibrations are very much more rapid, and
not heard as vibrations, and the same effect is not produced.