the spot where they had their little colony of about half-a-dozen pairs,
and where I discovered they bred every year. At first I used to go to
any bush where I had caught sight of a bird and sit down within a few
yards of it and wait until the little hideling's shyness wore off, and
he would come out and start reeling. Afterwards I always went straight
to the same bush, because I thought the bird that used it as his
singing-place appeared less shy than the others. One day I spent a long
time listening to this favourite; delightedly watching him, perched on a
low twig on a level with my sight, and not more than five yards from me;
his body perfectly motionless, but the head and wide-open beak jerked
from side to side in a measured, mechanical way. I had a side view of
the bird, but every three seconds the head would be jerked towards me,
showing the bright yellow colour of the open mouth. The reeling would
last about three minutes, then the bird would unbend or unstiffen and
take a few hops about the bush, then stiffen and begin again. While thus
gazing and listening I, by chance, met with an experience of that rare
kind which invariably strikes the observer of birds as strange and
almost incredible--an example of the most perfect mimicry in a species
which has its own distinctive song and is not a mimic except once in a
while, and as it were by chance. The marsh warbler is our perfect
mocking-bird, our one professional mimic; while the starling in
comparison is but an amateur. We all know the starling's ever varying
performance in which he attempts a hundred things and occasionally
succeeds; but even the starling sometimes affects us with a mild
astonishment, and I will here give one instance.
I was staying at a village in the Wiltshire downs, and at intervals,
while sitting at work in my room on the ground floor, I heard the
cackling of a fowl at the cottage opposite. I heard, but paid no
attention to that familiar sound; but after three days it all at once
struck me that no fowl could lay an egg about every ten or twelve
minutes, and go on at this rate day after day, and, getting up, I went
out to look for the cackler. A few hens were moving quietly about the
open ground surrounding the cottage where the sound came from, but I
heard nothing. By and by, when I was back in my room, the cackling
sounded again, but when I got out the sound had ceased and the fowls, as
before, appeared quite unexcited. The only way to solve the mystery was
to stand there, out of doors, for ten minutes, and before that time was
over a starling with a white grub in his beak, flew down and perched on
the low garden wall of the cottage, then, with some difficulty, squeezed
himself through a small opening into a cavity under a strip of zinc
which covered the bricks of the wall. It was a queer place for a
starling's nest, on a wall three feet high and within two yards of the
cottage door which stood open all day. Having delivered the grub, the
starling came out again and, hopping on to the zinc, opened his beak and
cackled like a hen, then flew away for more grubs.
I observed the starling a good deal after this, and found that
invariably on leaving the nest, he uttered his imitation of a fowl
cackling, and no other note or sound of any kind. It was as if he was
not merely imitating a sound, but had seen a fowl leaving the nest and
then cackling, and mimicked the whole proceeding, and had kept up the
habit after the young were hatched.
To return to my experience on the common. About fifty yards from the
spot where I was there was a dense thicket of furze and thorn, with a
huge mound in the middle composed of a tangle of whitethorn and bramble
bushes mixed with ivy and clematis. From this spot, at intervals of half
a minute or so, there issued the call of a duck--the prolonged, hoarse
call of a drake, two or three times repeated, evidently emitted in
distress. I conjectured that it came from one of a small flock of ducks
belonging to a cottage near the edge of the common on that side. The
flock, as I had seen, was accustomed to go some distance from home, and
I supposed that one of them, a drake, had got into that brambly thicket
and could not make his way out. For half an hour I heard the calls
without paying much attention, absorbed in watching the quaint little
songster close to me and his curious gestures when emitting his
sustained reeling sounds. In the end the persistent distressed calling
of the drake lost in a brambly labyrinth got a little on my nerves, and
I felt it as a relief when it finally ceased. Then, after a short
silence, another sound came from the same spot--a blackbird sound, known
to everyone, but curiously interesting when uttered in the way I now
heard it. It was the familiar loud chuckle, not emitted in alarm and
soon ended, but the chuckle uttered occasionally by the bird when he is
not disturbed, or when, after uttering it once for some real cause, he
continues repeating it for no reason at all, producing the idea that he
has just made the discovery that it is quite a musical sound and that he
is repeating it, as if singing, just for pleasure. At such times the
long series of notes do not come forth with a rush; he begins
deliberately with a series of musical chirps uttered in a measured
manner, like those of a wood wren, the prelude to its song, the notes
coming faster and faster and swelling and running into the loud
chuckling performance. This performance, like the lost drake's call, was
repeated in the same deliberate or leisurely manner at intervals again
and again, until my curiosity was aroused and I went to the spot to get
a look at the bird who had turned his alarm sound into a song and
appeared to be very much taken with it. But there was no blackbird at
the spot, and no lost drake, and no bird, except a throstle sitting
motionless on the bush mound. This was the bird I had been listening to,
uttering not his own thrush melody, which he perhaps did not know at
all, but the sounds he had borrowed from two species so wide apart in
their character and language.
The astonishing thing in this case was that the bird never uttered a
note of his own original and exceedingly copious song; and I could only
suppose that he had never learned the thrush melody; that he had,
perhaps, been picked up as a fledgling and put in a cage, where he had
imitated the sounds he heard and liked best, and made them his song, and
that he had finally escaped or had been liberated.
The wild thrush, we know, does introduce certain imitations into his own
song, but the borrowed notes, or even phrases, are, as a rule, few, and
not always to be distinguished from his own.
Sometimes one can pick them out; thus, on the borders of a marsh where
redshanks bred, I have heard the call of that bird distinctly given by
the thrush. And again, where the ring-ouzel is common, the thrush will
get its brief song exactly. When thrushes taken from the nest are reared
in towns, where they never hear the thrush or any other bird sing, they
are often exceedingly vocal, and utter a medley of sounds which are
sometimes distressing to the ear. I have heard many caged thrushes of
this kind in London, but the most remarkable instance I have met with
was at the little seaside town of Seaford. Here, in the main shopping
street, a caged thrush lived for years in a butcher's shop, and poured
out its song continuously, the most distressing throstle performance I
ever heard, composed of a medley of loud, shrill and harsh
sounds--imitations of screams and shouts, boy whistlers, saw filing,
knives sharpened on steels, and numerous other unclassifiable noises;
but all, more or less, painful. The whole street was filled with the
noise, and the owner used to boast that his caged thrush was the most
persistent as well as the loudest singer that had ever been heard. He
had no nerves, and was proud of it! On a recent visit to Seaford I
failed to hear the bird when walking about the town, and after two or
three days went into the shop to enquire about it. They told me it was
dead--that it had been dead over a year; also that many visitors to
Seaford had missed its song and had called at the shop to ask about the
bird. The strangest thing about its end, they said, was its suddenness.
The bird was singing its loudest one morning, and had been at it for
some time, filling the whole place with its noise, when suddenly, in the
middle of its song, it dropped down dead from its perch.
To drop dead while singing is not an unheard of, nor a very rare
occurrence in caged birds, and it probably happens, too, in birds living
their natural life. Listening to a nightingale, pouring out its powerful
music continuously, as the lark sings, one sometimes wonders that
something does not give way to end the vocalist's performance and life
at the same instant. Some such incident was probably the origin of the
old legend of the minstrel and the nightingale on which Strada based his
famous poem, known in many languages. In England Crawshaw's version was
by far the best, and is perhaps the finest bird poem in our literature.
The blackbird, like the thrush, sometimes borrows a note or a phrase,
and, like the thrush again, if reared by hand he may become a nuisance
by mimicking some disagreeable sound, and using it by way of song. I
heard of such a case a short time ago at Sidmouth. The ground floor of
the house where I lodged was occupied by a gentleman who had a fondness
for bird music, and being an invalid confined to his rooms, he kept a
number of birds in cages. He had, besides canaries, the thrush,
chaffinch, linnet, goldfinch and cirl bunting. I remarked that he did
not have the best singer of all--the blackbird. He said that he had
procured one, or that some friend had sent him one, a very beautiful
ouel cock in the blackest plumage and with the orange-tawniest bill,
and he had anticipated great pleasure from hearing its fluting melody.
But alas! no blackbird song did this unnatural blackbird sing. He had
learnt to bark like a dog, and whenever the singing spirit took him he
would bark once or twice or three times, and then, after an interval of
silence of the proper length, about fifteen seconds, he would bark
again, and so on until he had had his fill of music for the time. The
barking got on the invalid's nerves, and he sent the bird away. "It was
either that," he said, "or losing my senses altogether."
* * *
As all or most singing birds learn their songs from the adults of the
same species, it is not strange that there should be a good deal of what
we call mimicry in their performances: we may say, in fact, that pretty
well all the true singers are mimics, but that some mimic more than
others. Thus, the starling is more ready to borrow other birds' notes
than the thrush, while the marsh-warbler borrows so much that his
singing is mainly composed of borrowings. The nightingale is, perhaps,
an exception. His voice excels in power and purity of sound, and what we
may call his artistry is exceptionally perfect; this may account for the
fact that he does not borrow from other birds' songs. I should say, from
my own observation, that all songsters are interested in the singing of
other species, or at all events, in certain notes, especially the most
striking in power, beauty, and strangeness. Thus, when the cuckoo starts
calling, you will see other small birds fly straight to the tree and
perch near him, apparently to listen. And among the listeners you will
find the sparrow and tits of various species--birds which are never
victimized by the cuckoo, and do not take him for a hawk since they take
no notice of him until the calling begins. The reason that the double
fluting call of the cuckoo is not mimicked by other birds is that they
can't; because that peculiar sound is not in their register. The
bubbling cry is reproduced by both the marsh warbler and the starling.
Again, it is my experience that when a nightingale starts singing, the
small birds near immediately become attentive, often suspending their
own songs and some flying to perch near him, and listen, just as they
listen to the cuckoo. Birds imitate the note or phrase that strikes them
most, and is easiest to imitate, as when the thrush copies the piping
and trilling of the redshank and the easy song of the ring-ouzel, which,
when incorporated into his own music, harmonizes with it perfectly. But
he cannot flute, and so never mimics the blackbird's song, although he
can and does, as we have seen, imitate its chuckling cry.
There is another thing to be considered. I believe that the bird, like
creatures in other classes, has his receptive period, his time to learn,
and that, like some mammals, he learns everything he needs to know in
his first year or two; and that, having acquired his proper song, he
adds little or nothing to it thereafter, although the song may increase
in power and brilliance when the bird comes to full maturity. This, I
think, holds true of all birds, like the nightingale, which have a
singing period of two or three months and are songless for the rest of
the year. That long, silent period cannot, so far as sounds go, be a
receptive one; the song early in life has become crystallized in the
form it will keep through life, and is like an intuitive act. This is
not the case with birds like the starling, that sing all the year
round--birds that are naturally loquacious and sing instead of screaming
and chirping like others. They are always borrowing new sounds and
always forgetting.
The most curious example of mimicry I have yet met with is that of a
true mocking-bird, Mimus patachonicus, a common resident species in
northern Patagonia, on the Atlantic side, very abundant in places. He is
a true mocking-bird because he belongs to the genus Mimus, a branch of
the thrush family, and not because he mocks or mimics the songs of other
species, like others of his kindred. He does not, in fact, mimic the set
songs of others, although he often introduces notes and phrases borrowed
from other species into his own performance. He sings in a sketchy way
all the year round, but in spring has a fuller unbroken song, emitted
with more power and passion. For the rest of the time he sings to amuse
himself, as it seems, in a peculiarly leisurely, and one may say,
indolent manner, perched on a bush, from time to time emitting a note or
two, then a phrase which, if it pleases him, he will repeat two or
three, or half a dozen times. Then, after a pause, other notes and
phrases, and so on, pretty well all day long. This manner of singing is
irritating, like the staccato song of our throstle, to a listener who
wants a continuous stream of song; but it becomes exceedingly
interesting when one discovers that the bird is thinking very much about
his own music, if one can use such an expression about a bird; that he
is all the time experimenting, trying to get a new phrase, a new
combination of the notes he knows and new notes. Also, that when sitting
on his bush and uttering these careless chance sounds, he is, at the
same time, intently listening to the others, all engaged in the same
way, singing and listening. You will see them all about the place, each
bird sitting motionless, like a grey and white image of a bird, on the
summit of his own bush. For, although he is not gregarious as a rule, a
number of pairs live near each other, and form a sort of loose
community. The bond that unites them is their music, for not only do
they sit within hearing distance, but they are perpetually mimicking
each other. One may say that they are accomplished mimics but prefer
mimicking their own to other species. But they only imitate the notes
that take their fancy, so to speak. Thus, occasionally, one strikes out
a phrase, a new expression, which appears to please him, and after a few
moments he repeats it again, then again, and so on and on, and if you
remain an hour within hearing he will perhaps be still repeating it at
short intervals. Now, if by chance there is something in the new phrase
which pleases the listeners too, you will note that they instantly
suspend their own singing, and for some little time they do nothing but
listen. By and by the new note or phrase will be exactly reproduced from
a bird on another bush; and he, too, will begin repeating it at short
intervals. Then a second one will get it, then a third, and eventually
all the birds in that thicket will have it. The constant repeating of
the new note may then go on for hours, and it may last longer. You may
return to the spot on the second day and sit for an hour or longer,
listening, and still hear that same note constantly repeated until you
are sick and tired of it, or it may even get on your nerves. I remember
that on one occasion I avoided a certain thicket, one of my favourite
daily haunts for three whole days, not to hear that one everlasting
sound; then I returned and to my great relief the birds were all at
their old game of composing, and not one uttered--perhaps he didn't
dare--the too hackneyed phrase. I was sharply reminded one day by an
incident in the village of this old Patagonian experience, and of the
strange human-like weakness or passion for something new and arresting
in music or song, something "tuney" or "catchy."
It chanced that when I left London a new popular song had come out and
was "all the rage," a tune and words invented or first produced in the
music-halls by a woman named Lottie Collins, with a chorus to
it--_Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay_, repeated several times. First caught up in
the music-halls it spread to the streets, and in ever-widening circles
over all London, and over all the land. In London people were getting
tired of hearing it, but when I arrived at my village "in a hole," and
settled down among the Badgers, I heard it on every hand--in cottages,
in the streets, in the fields, men, women and children were singing,
whistling, and humming it, and in the evening at the inn roaring it out
with as much zest as if they had been singing _Rule Britannia._
This state of things lasted from May to the middle of June; then, one
very hot, still day, about three o'clock, I was sitting at my cottage
window when I caught the sound of a rumbling cart and a man singing. As
the noise grew louder my interest in the approaching man and cart was
excited to an extraordinary degree; never had I heard such a noise! And
no wonder, since the man was driving a heavy, springless farm cart in
the most reckless manner, urging his two huge horses to a fast trot,
then a gallop, up and down hill along those rough gully-like roads, he
standing up in his cart and roaring out "Auld Lang Syne," at the top of
a voice of tremendous power. He was probably tipsy, but it was not a bad
voice, and the old familiar tune and words had an extraordinary effect
in that still atmosphere. He passed my cottage, standing up, his legs
wide apart, his cap on the back of his head, a big broad-chested young
man, lashing his horses, and then for about two minutes or longer the
thunder of the cart and the roaring song came back fainter, until it
faded away in the distance. At that still hour of the day the children
were all at school on the further side of the village; the men away in
the fields; the women shut up in their cottages, perhaps sleeping. It
seemed to me that I was the only person in the village who had witnessed
and heard the passing of the big-voiced man and cart. But it was not so.
At all events, next day, the whole village, men, women and children,
were singing, humming and whistling "Auld Lang Syne," and "Auld Lang
Syne" lasted for several days, and from that day "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay"
was heard no more. It had lost its charm.
VIII
Just out of hearing of the grasshopper warblers, there was a good-sized
pool of water on the common, probably an old gravel-pit, its bottom now
overgrown with rushes. A sedge warbler, the only one on the common,
lived in the masses of bramble and gorse on its banks; and birds of so
many kinds came to it to drink and bathe that the pool became a
favourite spot with me. One evening, just before sunset, as I lingered
near it, a pied wagtail darted out of some low scrub at my feet and
fluttered, as if wounded, over the turf for a space of ten or twelve
yards before flying away. Not many minutes after seeing the wagtail, a
reed-bunting--a bird which I had not previously observed on the
common--flew down and alighted on a bush a few yards from me, holding a
white crescent-shaped grub in its beak. I stood still to watch it,
certainly not expecting to see its nest and young; for, as a rule, a
bird with food in its beak will sit quietly until the watcher loses
patience and moves away; but on this occasion I had not been standing
more than ten seconds before the bunting flew down to a small tuft of
furze and was there greeted by the shrill, welcoming cries of its young.
I went up softly to the spot, when out sprang the old bird I had seen,
but only to drop to the ground just as the wagtail had done, to beat the
turf with its wings, then to lie gasping for breath, then to flutter on
a little further, until at last it rose up and flew to a bush.
After admiring the reed-bunting's action, I turned to the dwarf bush
near my feet, and saw, perched on a twig in its centre, a solitary young
bird, fully fledged but not yet capable of sustained flight. He did not
recognise an enemy in me; on the contrary, when I approached my hand to
him, he opened his yellow mouth wide, in expectation of being fed,
although his throat was crammed with caterpillars, and the white
crescent-shaped larva I had seen in the parent's bill was still lying in
his mouth unswallowed. The wonder is that when a young bird had been
stuffed with food to such an extent just before sleeping time, he can
still find it in him to open his mouth and call for more.
* * *
How wonderful it is that this parental instinct, so beautiful in its
perfect simulation of the action of the bird that has lost the power of
flight, should be found in so large a number of species! But when we
find that it is not universal; that in two closely-allied species one
will possess it and the other not; and that it is common in such
widely-separated orders as gallinaceous and passerine birds, in pigeons,
ducks, and waders, it becomes plain that it is not assignable to
community of descent, but has originated independently all over the
globe, in a vast number of species. Something of the beginnings and
progressive development of this instinct may be learnt, I think, by
noticing the behaviour of various passerine birds in the presence of
danger, to their nests and young. Their actions and cries show that they
are greatly agitated, and in a majority of species the parent bird flits
and flutters round the intruder, uttering sounds of distress. Frequently
the bird exhibits its agitation, not only by these cries and restless
motions, but by the drooping of the wings and tail--the action observed
in a bird when hurt or sick, or oppressed with heat. These languishing
signs are common to a great many species after the young have been
hatched; the period when the parental solicitude is most intense. In
several species which I have observed in South America, the languishing
is more marked. There are no sorrowful cries and restless movements; the
bird sits with hanging wings and tail, gasping for breath with open bill
--in appearance a greatly suffering bird. In some cases of this
description, the bird, if it moves at all, hops or flutters from a
higher to a lower branch, and, as if sick or wounded, seems about to
sink to the ground. In still others, the bird actually does drop to the
ground, then, feebly flapping its wings, rises again with great effort.
From this last form it is but a step to the more highly developed
complex instinct of the bird that sinks to the earth and flutters
painfully away, gasping, and seemingly incapable of flight.