find it necessary to go warily, lest the people of any place where he
may be tempted to spread his nets should have formed the custom of
treating those of his calling somewhat roughly. That it will come soon
is earnestly to be wished. Nevertheless, it would be irrational to
cherish feelings of animosity and hatred against the bird-catcher
himself, the "man and brother," ready and anxious as we may be to take
the bread out of his mouth. He certainly does not regard himself as an
injurious or disreputable person; on the contrary he looks on himself as
a useful member of the community, and in some cases even more. If anyone
is to be hated or blamed, it is the person who sends the bird-catcher
into the fields; not the dealer, but he who buys trapped birds and keeps
them in cages to be amused by their twitterings. This is not a question
of morality, nor of sentimentality, as some may imagine; but rather of
taste, of the sense of fitness, of that something vaguely described as
the feeling for nature, which is not universal. Thus, one man will dine
with zest on a pheasant, partridge, or quail, but would be choked by a
lark; while another man will eat pheasant and lark with equal pleasure.
Both may be good, honest, moral men; only one has that something which
the other lacks. In one the soul responds to the skylark's music
"singing at heaven's gate," in the other not; to one the roasted lark is
merely a savoury morsel; the other, be he never so hungry, cannot
dissociate the bird on the dish from that heavenly melody which
registered a sensation in his brain, to be thereafter reproduced at
will, together with the revived emotion. It is a curious question, and
is no nearer to a settlement when one of these two I have described
turns round and calls his neighbour a gross feeder, a worshipper of his
belly, a soulless and brutish man; and when the other answers
"pooh-pooh" and goes on complacently devouring larks with great gusto,
until he is himself devoured of death.
To those with whom I am in sympathy in this matter, who love to listen
to and are yearly invigorated by the skylark's music, and whose souls
are yearly sickened at the slaughter of their loved songsters, I would
humbly suggest that there is a simpler, more practical means of ending
this dispute, which has surely lasted long enough. It goes without
saying that this bird's music is eminently pleasing to most persons,
that even as the sunshine is sweet and pleasant to behold, its silvery
aerial sounds rained down so abundantly from heaven are delightful and
exhilarating to all of us, or at all events, to so large a majority that
the minority are not entitled to consideration. One person in five
thousand, or perhaps in ten thousand, might be found to say that the
lark singing in blue heaven affords him no pleasure. This being so, and
ours being a democratic country in which the will or desire of the many
is or may be made the law of the land, it is surely only right and
reasonable that lovers of lark's flesh should be prevented from
gratifying their taste at the cost of the destruction of so loved a
bird, that they should be made to content themselves with woodcock, and
snipe on toast, and golden plover, and grouse and blackcock, and any
other bird of delicate flavor which does not, living, appeal so strongly
to the aesthetic feelings in us and is not so universal a favourite.
This, too, will doubtless come in time. Speaking for myself, and going
back to the former subject, little as I like to see men feeding on
larks, rather would I see larks killed and eaten than thrust into cages.
For in captivity they do not "sweeten" my life, as the Maidenhead
guidebook writer would say, with their shrill, piercing cries for
liberty, but they "sing me mad." Just as in some minds this bird's
music--a sound which above all others typifies the exuberant life and
joy of nature to the soul--cannot be separated from the cooked and
dished-up melodist, so that they turn with horror from such meat, so I
cannot separate this bird, nor any bird, from the bird's wild life of
liberty, and the marvellous faculty of flight which is the bird's
attribute. To see so wild and aerial a creature in a cage jars my whole
system, and is a sight hateful and unnatural, an outrage on our
universal mother.
This feeling about birds in captivity, which I have attempted to
describe, and which, I repeat, is not sentimentality, as that word is
ordinarily understood, has been so vividly rendered in an ode to "The
Skylarks" by Sir Rennell Rodd, that the reader will probably feel
grateful to me for quoting a portion of it in this place, especially as
the volume in which it appears--_Feda, with Other Poems_--is, I imagine,
not very widely known:
"Oh, the sky, the sky, the open sky,
For the home of a song-bird's heart!
And why, and why, and for ever why,
Do they stifle here in the mart:
Cages of agony, rows on rows,
Torture that only a wild thing knows:
Is it nothing to you to see
That head thrust out through the hopeless wire,
And the tiny life, and the mad desire
To be free, to be free, to be free?
Oh, the sky, the sky, the blue, wide sky,
For the beat of a song-bird's wings!
* * *
Straight and close are the cramping bars
From the dawn of mist to the chill of stars,
And yet it must sing or die!
Will its marred harsh voice in the city street
Make any heart of you glad?
It will only beat with its wings and beat,
It will only sing you mad.
* * *
If it does not go to your heart to see
The helpless pity of those bruised wings,
The tireless effort to which it clings
To the strain and the will to be free,
I know not how I shall set in words
The meaning of God in this,
For the loveliest thing in this world of His
Are the ways and the songs of birds.
But the sky, the sky, the wide, free sky,
For the home of the song-bird's heart!"
How falsely does that man see Nature, how grossly ignorant must he be of
its most elemental truths, who looks upon it as a chamber of torture, a
physiological laboratory on a very vast scale, a scene of endless strife
and trepidation, of hunger and cold, and every form of pain and
misery--and who, holding this doctrine of
"Oh, the sky, the sky, the open sky is the home of a song-bird's heart,"
Nature's cruelty, keeps a few captive birds in cages, and is accustomed
to say of them, "These, at any rate, are safe, rescued from subjection
to ruthless conditions, sheltered from the inclement weather and from
enemies, and all their small wants abundantly satisfied;" who once or
twice every day looks at his little captives, presents them with a lump
of sugar, whistles and chuckles to provoke them to sing, then goes about
his business, flattering himself that he is a lover of birds, a being of
a sweet and kindly nature. It is all a delusion--a distortion and
inversion of the truth--so absurd that it would be laughable were it
not so sad, and the cause of so much unconscious cruelty. The truth is,
that if birds be capable of misery, it is only in the unnatural
conditions of a caged life that they experience it; and that if they are
capable of happiness in a cage, such happiness or contentment is but a
poor, pale emotion compared with the wild exuberant gladness they have
in freedom, where all their instincts have full play, and where the
perils that surround them do but brighten their many splendid faculties.
The little bird twitters and sings in its cage, and among ourselves the
blind man and the cripple whistle and sing, too, feeling at times a
lower kind of contentment and cheerfulness. The chaffinch in East
London, with its eyeballs seared by red-hot needles, sings, too, in its
prison, when it has grown accustomed to its darkened existence, and is
in health, and the agreeable sensations that accompany health prompt it
at intervals to melody, but no person, not even the dullest ruffian
among the baser sort of bird-fanciers would maintain for a moment that
the happiness of the little sightless captive, whether vocal or silent,
is at all comparable in degree to that of the chaffinch singing in April
"on the orchard bough," vividly seeing the wide sunlit world, blue above
and green below, possessing the will and the power, when its lyric ends,
to transport itself swiftly through the crystal fields of air to other
trees and other woods.
I take it that in the lower animals misery can result from two causes
only--restraint and disease; consequently, that animals in a state of
nature are not miserable. They are not hindered nor held back. Whether
the animal is migrating, or burying himself in his hibernating nest or
den; or flying from some rapacious enemy, which he may, or may not, be
able to escape; or feeding, or sleeping, or fighting, or courting, or
incubating, however many days or weeks this process may last--in all
things he is obeying the impulse that is strongest in him at the
time--he is doing what he wants to do--the one thing that makes him
happy.
As to disease, it is so rare in wild animals, or in a large majority of
cases so quickly proves fatal, that, compared with what we call disease
in our own species it is practically non-existent. The "struggle for
existence," in so far as animals in a state of nature are concerned, is
a metaphorical struggle; and the strife, short and sharp, which is so
common in nature, is not misery, although it results in pain, since it
is pain that kills or is soon outlived. Fear there is, just as in fine
weather there are clouds in the sky; and just as the shadow of the cloud
passes, so does fear pass from the wild creature when the object that
excited it has vanished from sight. And when death comes, it comes
unexpectedly, and is not the death that we know, even before we taste of
it, thinking of it with apprehension all our lives long, but a sudden
blow that takes away consciousness--the touch of something that numbs
the nerves--merely the prick of a needle. In whatever way the animal
perishes, whether by violence, or excessive cold, or decay, his death is
a comparatively easy one. So long as he is fighting with or struggling
to escape from an enemy, wounds are not felt as wounds, and scarcely
hurt him--as we know from our own experience; and when overcome, if
death be not practically instantaneous, as in the case of a small bird
seized by a cat, the disabling grip or blow is itself a kind of anodyne,
producing insensibility to pain. This, too, is a matter of human
experience. To say nothing of those who fall in battle, men have often
been struck down and fearfully lacerated by lions, tigers, jaguars, and
other savage beasts; and after having been rescued by their companions,
have recounted this strange thing. Even when there was no loss of
consciousness, when they saw and knew that the animal was rending their
flesh, they seemed not to feel it, and were, at the time, indifferent to
the fate that had overtaken them.
It is the same in death from cold. The strong, well-nourished man,
overtaken by a snowstorm on some pathless, uninhabited waste, may
experience some exceedingly bitter moments, or even hours, before he
gives up the struggle. The physical pain is simply nothing: the whole
bitterness is in the thought that he must die. The horror at the thought
of annihilation, the remembrance of all the happiness he is now about to
lose, of dear friends, of those whose lives will be dimmed with grief
for his loss, of all his cherished dreams of the future--the sting of
all this is so sharp that, compared with it, the creeping coldness in
his blood is nothing more than a slight discomfort, and is scarcely
felt. By and by he is overcome by drowsiness, and ceases to struggle;
the torturing visions fade from his mind, and his only thought is to lie
down and sleep. And when he sleeps he passes away; very easily, very
painlessly, for the pain was of the mind, and was over long before death
ensued.
The bird, however hard the frost may be, flies briskly to its customary
roosting-place, and with beak tucked into its wing, falls asleep. It has
no apprehensions; only the hot blood grows colder and colder, the pulse
feebler as it sleeps, and at midnight, or in the early morning, it drops
from its perch--dead.
Yesterday he lived and moved, responsible to a thousand external
influences, reflecting earth and sky in his small brilliant brain as in
a looking-glass; also he had a various language, the inherited knowledge
of his race, and the faculty of flight, by means of which he could
shoot, meteor-like, across the sky, and pass swiftly from place to
place, and with it such perfect control over all his organs, such
marvellous certitude in all his motions, as to be able to drop himself
plumb down from the tallest tree-top or out of the void air, on to a
slender spray, and scarcely cause its leaves to tremble. Now, on this
morning, he lies stiff and motionless; if you were to take him up and
drop him from your hand, he would fall to the ground like a stone or a
lump of clay--so easy and swift is the passage from life to death in
wild nature! But he was never miserable.
Those of my readers who have seen much of animals in a state of nature,
will agree that death from decay, or old age, is very rare among them.
In that state the fullest vigour, with brightness of all the faculties,
is so important that probably in ninety-nine cases in a hundred any
falling-off in strength, or decay of any sense, results in some fatal
accident. Death by misadventure, as we call it, is Nature's ordinance,
the end designed for a very large majority of her children.
Nevertheless, animals do sometimes live on without accident to the very
end of their term, to fade peacefully away at the last. I have myself
witnessed such cases in mammals and birds; and one such case, which
profoundly impressed me, and is vividly remembered, I will describe.
One morning in the late summer, while walking in the fields at my home
in South America, I noticed a few purple martins, large, beautiful
swallows common in that region, engaged, at a considerable height, in
the aerial exercises in which they pass so much of their time each day.
By and by, one of the birds separated itself from the others, and,
circling slowly downward, finally alighted on the ground not far from
me. I walked on: but the action of the bird had struck me as unusual and
strange, and before going far, I turned and walked back to the spot
where it continued sitting on the ground, quite motionless. It made no
movement when I approached to within four yards of it; and after I had
stood still at that distance for a minute or so, attentively regarding
it, I saw it put out one wing and turn over on its side. I at once took
it up in my hand, and found that it was already quite dead. It was a
large example of its species, and its size, together with a something of
dimness in the glossy purple colour of the upper plumage, seemed to show
that it was an old bird. But it was uninjured, and when I dissected it
no trace of disease was discernible. I concluded that it was an old bird
that had died solely from natural failure of the life-energy.
But how wonderful, how almost incredible, that the healthy vigour and
joy of life should have continued in this individual bird down to within
so short a period of the end; that it should have been not only strong
enough to find its food, but to rush and wheel about for long intervals
in purely sportive exercises, when the brief twilight of decline and
final extinction were so near! It becomes credible--we can even believe
that most of the individuals that cease to exist only when the vital
fire has burnt itself out, fall on death in this swift, easy
manner--when we recall the fact that even in the life-history of men
such a thing is not unknown. Probably there is not one among my readers
who will not be able to recall some such incident in his own circle--the
case of someone who lived, perhaps, long past the term usually allotted
to man, and who finally passed away without a struggle, without a pang,
so that those who were with him found it hard to believe that the spirit
had indeed gone. In such cases, the subject has invariably been healthy,
although it is hard to believe that, in the conditions we exist in, any
man can have the perfect health that all wild creatures enjoy.
X
After my long talk with the bird-catcher on June 24, and two more talks
equally long on the two following days, I found that something of the
charm the common had had for me was gone. It was not quite the same as
formerly; even the sunshine had a something of conscious sadness in it
which was like a shadow. Those merry little brown twitterers that
frequently shot across the sky, looking small as insects in the wide
blue expanse, and ever and anon dropped swiftly down like showers of
aerolites, to lose themselves in the grass and herbage, or perch singing
on the topmost dead twigs of a bush, now existed in constant imminent
danger--not of that quick merciful destruction which Nature has for her
weaklings, and for all that fail to reach her high standard; but of a
worse fate, the prison life which is not Nature's ordinance, but one of
the cunning larger Ape's abhorred inventions. Instead of taking my usual
long strolls about the common I loitered once more in the village lanes
and had my reward.
On the morning of June 27 I was out sauntering very indolently, thinking
of nothing at all; for it was a surpassingly brilliant day, and the
sunshine produced the effect of a warm, lucent, buoyant fluid, in which
I seemed to float rather than walk--a celestial water, which, like the
more ponderable and common sort, may sometimes be both felt and seen.
The sensation of feeling it is somewhat similar to that experienced by a
bather standing breast-deep in a dear, green, warm tropical sea, so
charged with salt that it lifts him up; but to distinguish it with the
eye, you must look away to a distance of some yards in an open unshaded
place, when it will become visible as fine glinting lines, quivering and
serpentining upwards, fountain-wise, from the surface. All at once I was
startled by hearing the loud importunate hunger-call of a young cuckoo
quite close to me. Moving softly up to the low hedge and peering over, I
saw the bird perched on a long cross-stick, which had been put up in a
cottage garden to hang clothes on; he was not more than three to four
yards from me, a fine young cuckoo in perfect plumage, his barred
under-surface facing me. Although seeing me as plainly as I saw him, he
exhibited no fear, and did not stir. Why should he, since I had not come
there to feed him, and, to his inexperienced avian mind, was only one of
the huge terrestrial creatures of various forms, with horns and manes on
their heads, that move heavily about in roads and pastures, and are
nothing to birds? But his foster parent, a hedge-sparrow, was
suspicious, and kept at some distance with food in her bill; then
excited by his imperative note, she flitted shyly to him, and deposited
a minute caterpillar in his great gaping yellow mouth. It was like
dropping a bun into the monstrous mouth of the hippopotamus of the
Zoological Gardens. But the hedge-sparrow was off and back again with a
second morsel in a very few moments; and again and again she darted away
in quest of food and returned successful, while the lazy, beautiful
giant sat sunning himself on his cross-stick and hungrily cried for
more.
This is one of those exceptional sights in nature which, however often
seen, never become altogether familiar, never fail to re-excite the old
feelings of wonder and admiration which were experienced on first
witnessing them. I can safely say, I think, that no man has observed so
many parasitical young birds (individuals) being fed by their
foster-parents as myself, yet the interest such a sight inspired in me
is just as fresh now as in boyhood. And probably in no parasitical
species does the strangeness of the spectacle strike the mind so sharply
as in this British bird, since the differences in size and colouring
between the foster-parent and its false offspring are so much greater in
its case. Here nature's unnaturalness in such an instinct--a close union
of the beautiful and the monstrous--is seen in its extreme form. The
hawk-like figure and markings of the cuckoo serve only to accentuate the
disparity, which is perhaps greatest when the parent is the
hedge-sparrow--so plainly-coloured a bird, so shy and secretive in its
habits. One never ceases to be amazed at the blindness of the parental
instinct in so intelligent a creature as a bird in a case of this kind.
Some idea of how blind it is may be formed by imagining a case in widely
separated types of our own species, which would be a parallel to that of
the cuckoo and hedge-sparrow. Let us imagine that some malicious Arabian
Night's genius had snatched up the infant male child of a Scandinavian
couple--the largest of their nation; and flying away to Africa with it,
to the heart of the great Aruwhimi forest had laid it on the breast of a
little coffee-coloured, woolly-headed, spindle-shanked, pot-bellied,
pigmy mother, taking away at the same time her own newly-born babe; that
she had tenderly nursed the substituted child, and reared and protected
it, ministering, according to her lights, to all its huge wants, until
he had come to the fullness of his stature, yet never suspected, that
the magnificent, ivory-limbed giant, with flowing yellow locks and
cerulean eyes, was not the child of her own womb.
XI
Bright and genial were all the last days of June, when I loitered in the
lanes before the unwished day of my return to London. During this quiet,
pleasant time the greenfinch was perhaps more to me than any other
songster. In the village itself, with the adjacent lanes and orchards,
this pretty, seldom-silent bird was the most common species. The village
was his metropolis, just as London is ours--and the sparrow's; its lanes
were his streets, its hedges and elm trees his cottage rows and tall
stately mansions and public buildings. . We frequently find the
predominance of one species somewhat wearisome. Speaking for myself,
there are songsters that are best appreciated when they are limited in
numbers and keep their distance, but of the familiar, unambitious
strains of swallow, robin, and wren I never tire, nor, during these
days, could I have too much of the greenfinch, low as he ranks among
British melodists. Tastes differ; that is a point on which we are all
agreed, and every one of us, even the humblest, is permitted to have his
own preferences. Still, after re-reading Wordsworth's lines to "The
Green Linnet," it is curious, to say the least of it, to turn to some
prosewriter--an authority on birds, perhaps--to find that this species,
whose music so charmed the poet, has for its song a monotonous croak,
which it repeats at short intervals for hours without the slightest
variation--a dismal sound which harmonizes with no other sound in
nature, and suggests nothing but heat and weariness, and is of all
natural sounds the most irritating. To this writer, then--and there are
others to keep him in countenance--the greenfinch as a vocalist ranks
lower than the lowest. One can only wonder (and smile) at such extreme
divergences. To my mind all natural sounds have, in some measure an
exhilarating effect, and I cannot get rid of the notion that so it
should be with every one of us; and when some particular sound, or
series of sounds, that has more than this common character, and is
distinctly pleasing, is spoken of as nothing but disagreeable,
irritating, and the rest of it, I am inclined to think that there is
something wrong with the person who thus describes it; that he is not
exactly as nature would have had him, but that either during his
independent life, or before it at some period of his prenatal existence,
something must have happened to distune him. All this, I freely confess,
may be nothing but fancy. In any case, the subject need not keep us
longer from the greenfinch--that is to say, _my_ greenfinch not another
man's.