two countries, in summer and winter, regulates his habits in accordance
with the degree of friendliness or hostility exhibited towards him by
the human inhabitants of the respective areas. The bird has in fact two
traditions with regard to man's attitude towards him--one for each
country. Thus, the field-fare is an exceedingly shy bird in England, but
when he returns to the north if his breeding place is in some inhabited
district in northern Sweden or Norway he loses all his wildness and
builds his nest quite close to the houses. My friend Trevor Battye saw a
pair busy making their nest in a small birch within a few yards of the
front door of a house he was staying at. "How strange," said he to the
man of the house, "to see field-fares making a nest in such a place!"
"Why strange?" said the man in surprise. "Why strange? Because of the
boys, always throwing stones at a bird. The nest is so low down, that
any boy could put his hand in and take the eggs." "Take the eggs!" cried
the man, more astonished than ever. "And throwing stones at a bird! Who
ever heard of a boy doing such things!"
Closely related to this error is another error, which is that noise in
itself is distressing to birds, and has the effect of driving them away.
To all sounds and noises which are not associated with danger to them,
birds are absolutely indifferent. The rumbling of vehicles, puffing and
shrieking of engines, and braying of brass bands, alarm them less than
the slight popping of an air gun, where that modest weapon of
destruction is frequently used against them. They have no "nerves" for
noise, but the apparition of a small boy silently creeping along the
hedge-side, in search of nests or throwing stones, is very terrifying to
them. They fear not cattle and horses, however loud the bellowing may
be; and if we were to transport and set loose herds of long-necked
camelopards, trumpeting elephants, and rhinoceroses of horrible aspect,
the little birds would soon fear them as little as they do the familiar
cow. But they greatly fear the small-sized, quiet, unobtrusive, and
meek-looking cat. Sparrows and starlings that fly wildly at the shout
of a small boy or the bark of a fox-terrier, build their nests under
every railway arch; and the incubating bird sits unalarmed amid the iron
plates and girders when the express train rushes overhead, so close to
her that one would imagine that the thunderous jarring noise would cause
the poor thing to drop down dead with terror. To this indifference to
the mere harmless racket of civilization we owe it that birds are so
numerous around, and even in, London; and that in Kew Gardens, which, on
account of its position on the water side, and the numerous railroads
surrounding it, is almost as much tortured with noise as Willesden or
Clapham Junction, birds are concentrated in thousands. Food is not more
abundant there than in other places; yet it would be difficult to find a
piece of ground of the same extent in the country proper, where all is
silent and there are no human crowds, with so large a bird population.
They are more numerous in Kew than elsewhere, in spite of the noise and
the people, because they are partially protected there from their human
persecutors. It is a joy to visit the gardens in spring, as much to hear
the melody of the birds as to look at the strange and lovely vegetable
forms. On a June evening with a pure sunny sky, when the air is elastic
after rain, how it rings and palpitates with the fine sounds that people
it, and which seem infinite in variety! Has England, burdened with care
and long estranged from Nature, so many sweet voices left? What aerial
chimes are those wafted from the leafy turret of every tree? What
clear, choral songs--so wild, so glad? What strange instruments, not
made with hands, so deftly touched and soulfully breathed upon? What
faint melodious murmurings that float around us, mysterious and tender
as the lisping of leaves? Who could be so dull and exact as to ask the
names of such choristers at such a time! Earthly names they have, the
names we give them, when they visit us, and when we write about them in
our dreary books; but, doubtless, in their brighter home in cloudland
they are called by other more suitable appellatives. Kew is
exceptionally favoured for the reason mentioned, but birds are also
abundant where there are no hired men with red waistcoats and brass
buttons to watch over their safety. Why do they press so persistently
around us; and not in London only, but in every town and village, every
house and cottage in this country? Why are they always waiting,
congregating as far from us as the depth of garden, lawn, or orchard
will allow, yet always near as they dare to come? It is not sentiment,
and to be translated into such words as these: "Oh man, why are you
unfriendly towards us, or else so indifferent to our existence that you
do not note that your children, dependants, and neighbours cruelly
persecute us? For we are for peace, and knowing you for the lord of
creation, we humbly worship you at a distance, and wish for a share in
your affection." No; the small, bright soul which is in a bird is
incapable of such a motive, and has only the lesser light of instinct
for its guide, and to the birds' instinct we are only one of the
wingless mammalians inhabiting the earth, and with the cat and weasel
are labelled "dangerous," but the ox and horse and sheep have no such
label. Even our larger, dimmer eyes can easily discover the
attraction. Let any one, possessing a garden in the suburbs of London,
minutely examine the foliage at a point furthest removed from the house,
and he will find the plants clean from insects; and as he moves back he
will find them increasingly abundant until he reaches the door. Insect
life is gathered thickly about us, for that birdless space which we have
made is ever its refuge and safe camping ground. And the birds know. One
came before we were up, when cat and dog were also sleeping, and a
report is current among them. Like ants when a forager who has found a
honey pot returns to the nest, they are all eager to go and see and
taste for themselves. Their country is poor, for they have gathered its
spoils, and now this virgin territory sorely tempts them. To those who
know a bird's spirit it is plain that a mere suspension of hostile
action on our part would have the effect of altering their shy habits,
and bringing them in crowds about us. Not only in the orchard and grove
and garden walks would they be with us, but even in our house. The
robin, the little bird "with the red stomacher," would be there for the
customary crumbs at meal-time, and many dainty fringilline pensioners
would keep him company. And the wren would be there, searching
diligently in the dusty angles of cornices for a savoury morsel; for it
knows, this wise little Kitty Wren, that "the spider taketh hold with
her hands, and is in king's palaces"; and wandering from room to room it
would pour forth many a gushing lyric--a sound of wildness and joy in
our still interiors, eternal Nature's message to our hearts.
Who delights not in a bird? Yet how few among us find any pleasure in
reading of them in natural history books! The living bird, viewed
closely and fearless of our presence, is so much more to the mind than
all that is written--so infinitely more engaging in its spontaneous
gladness, its brilliant vivacity, and its motions so swift and true and
yet so graceful! Even leaving out the melody, what a charm it would add
to our homes if birds were permitted to take the part there for which
Nature designed them--if they were the "winged wardens" of our gardens
and houses as well as of our fields. Bird-biographies are always in our
bookcases; and the bird-form meets our sight everywhere in decorative
art Eastern and Western; for its aerial beauty is without parallel in
nature; but the living birds, with the exception of the unfortunate
captives in cages, are not with us.
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage,
sings Blake prophet and poet; and for "robin redbreast" I read every
feathered creature endowed with the marvellous faculty of flight. Wild,
and loving their safety and liberty, they keep at a distance, at the end
of the garden or in the nearest grove, where from their perches they
suspiciously watch our movements, always waiting to be encouraged,
waiting to feed on the crumbs that fall from our table and are wasted,
and on the blighting insects that ring us round with their living
multitudes.
THE EAGLE AND THE CANARY
One week-day morning, following a crowd of well-dressed people, I
presently found myself in a large church or chapel, where I spent an
hour very pleasantly, listening to a great man's pulpit eloquence. He
preached about genius. The subject was not suggested by the text, nor
did it have any close relation with the other parts, of his discourse;
it was simply a digression, and, to my mind, a very delightful one. He
began about the restrictions to which we are all more or less subject,
the aspirations that are never destined to be fulfilled, but are mocked
by life's brevity. And it was at this point that--probably thinking of
his own case--he branched off into the subject of genius; and proceeded
to show that a man possessing that divine quality finds existence a
much sadder affair than the ordinary man; the reason being that his
aspirations are so much loftier than those of other minds, the
difference between his ideal and reality must be correspondingly greater
in his case. This was obvious--almost a truism; but the illustration by
means of which he brought it home to his hearers was certainly born of
poetic imagination. The life of the ordinary person he likened to that
of the canary in its cage. And here, dropping his lofty didactic manner,
and--if I may coin a word--smalling his deep, sonorous voice, to a thin
reedy treble, in imitation of the tenuous fringilline pipe, he went on
with lively language, rapid utterance, and suitable brisk movements and
gestures, to describe the little lemon-coloured housekeeper in her
gilded cage. Oh, he cried, what a bright, busy bustling life is hers,
with so many things to occupy her time! how briskly she hops from perch
to perch, then to the floor, and back from floor to perch again! how
often she drops down to taste the seed in her box, or scatter it about
her in a little shower! how curiously, and turning her bright eyes
critically this way and that, she listens to every new sound and regards
every object of sight! She must chirp and sing, and hop from place to
place, and eat and drink, and preen her wings, and do at least a dozen
different things every minute; and her time is so fully taken up that
the narrow limits confining her are almost forgotten--the wires that
separate her from the great world of wind-tossed woods, and of blue
fields of air, and the free, buoyant life for which her instincts and
faculties fit her, and which, alas! can never more be hers.
All this sounded very pretty, as well as true, and there was a pleased
smile on every face in the audience.
Then the rapid movements and gestures ceased, and the speaker was
silent. A cloud came over his rough-hewn majestic visage; he drew
himself up, and swayed his body from side to side, and shook his black
gown, and lifted his arms, as their plumed homologues are lifted by some
great bird, and let them fall again two or three times; and then said,
in deep measured tones, which seemed to express rage and despair, "But
did you ever see the eagle in his cage?"
The effect of the contrast was grand. He shook himself again, and lifted
and dropped his arms again, assuming, for the nonce, the peculiar
aquiline slouch; and there before us stood the mighty bird of Jove, as
we are accustomed to see it in the Zoological Gardens; its deep-set,
desolate eyes looking through and beyond us; ruffling its dark plumage,
and lifting its heavy wings as if about to scorn the earth, only to drop
them again, and to utter one of those long dreary cries which seem to
protest so eloquently against a barbarous destiny. Then he proceeded to
tell us of the great raptor in its life of hopeless captivity; his
stern, rugged countenance, deep bass voice, and grand mouth-filling
polysllables suiting his subject well, and making his description seem
to our minds a sombre magnificent picture never to be forgotten--at all
events, never by an ornithologist.
Doubtless this part of his discourse proved eminently pleasing to the
majority of his hearers, who, looking downwards into the depths of their
own natures, would be able to discern there a glimmer, or possibly more
than a glimmer of that divine quality he had spoken of, and which was,
unhappily for them, not recognized by the world at large; so that, for
the moment, he was addressing a congregation of captive eagles, all
mentally ruffling their plumage and flapping their pinions, and uttering
indignant screams of protest against the injustice of their lot.
The illustration pleased me for a different reason, namely, because,
being a student of bird-life, his contrasted picture of the two widely
different kinds, when deprived of liberty, struck me as being singularly
true to nature, and certainly it could not have been more forcibly and
picturesquely put. For it is unquestionably the fact that the misery we
inflict by tyrannously using the power we possess over God's creatures,
is great in proportion to the violence of the changes of condition to
which we subject our prisoners; and while canary and eagle are both more
or less aerial in their mode of life, and possessed of boundless energy,
the divorce from nature is immeasurably greater in one case than in the
other. The small bird, in relation to its free natural life, is less
confined in its cage than the large one. Its smallness, perching
structure, and restless habits, fit it for continual activity, and its
flitting, active life within the bars bears some resemblance except in
the great matter of flight, to its life in a state of nature. Again, its
lively, curious, and extremely impressible character, is in many ways an
advantage in captivity; every new sound and sight, and every motion,
however slight, in any object or body near it, affording it, so to
speak, something to think about. It has the further advantage of a
varied and highly musical language; the frequent exercise of the faculty
of singing, in birds, with largely developed vocal organs, no doubt
reacts on the system, and contributes not a little to keep the prisoner
healthy and cheerful.
On the other hand, the eagle, on account of its structure and large
size, is a prisoner indeed, and must languish with all its splendid
faculties and importunate impulses unexercised. You may gorge it with
gobbets of flesh until its stomach cries, "Enough"; but what of all the
other organs fed by the stomach, and their correlated faculties? Every
bone and muscle and fibre, every feather and scale, is instinct with an
energy which you cannot satisfy, and which is like an eternal hunger.
Chain it by the feet, or place it in a cage fifty feet wide--in either
case it is just as miserable. The illimitable fields of thin cold air,
where it outrides the winds and soars exulting beyond the clouds, alone
can give free space for the display of its powers and scope to its
boundless energies. Nor to the power of flight alone, but also to a
vision formed for sweeping wide horizons, and perceiving objects at
distances which to short-sighted man seem almost miraculous. Doubtless,
eagles, like men, possess some adaptiveness, else they would perish in
their enforced inactivity, swallowing without hunger and assimilating
without pleasure the cold coarse flesh we give them. A human being can
exist, and even be tolerably cheerful, with limbs paralyzed and hearing
gone; and that, to my mind, would be a parallel case to that of the
eagle deprived of its liberty and of the power to exercise its flight,
vision, and predatory instincts.
As I sit writing these thoughts, with a cage containing four canaries on
the table before me, I cannot help congratulating these little prisoners
on their comparatively happy fate in having been born, or hatched,
finches and not eagles. And yet albeit I am not responsible for the
restraint which has been put upon them, and am not their owner, being
only a visitor in the house, I am troubled with some uncomfortable
feelings concerning their condition--feelings which have an admixture of
something like a sense of shame or guilt, as if an injustice had been
done, and I had stood by consenting. I did not do it, but we did it. I
remember Matthew Arnold's feeling lines on his dead canary, "Poor
Matthias," and quote:
Yet, poor bird, thy tiny corse
Moves me, somehow, to remorse;
Something haunts my conscience, brings
Sad, compunctious visitings.
Other favourites, dwelling here,
Open lived with us, and near;
Well we knew when they were glad
Plain we saw if they were sad;
Sympathy could feel and show
Both in weal of theirs and woe.
Birds, companions more unknown,
Live beside us, but alone;
Finding not, do all they can,
Passage from their souls to man.
Kindness we bestow and praise,
Laud their plumage, greet their lays;
Still, beneath their feathered breast
Stirs a history unexpressed.
Wishes there, and feeling strong,
Incommunicably throng;
What they want we cannot guess.
This, as poetry, is good, but it does not precisely fit my case; my
"compunctious visitings" being distinctly different in origin and
character from the poet's. He--Matthew Arnold--is a poet, and the author
of much good verse, which I appreciate and hold dear. But he was not a
naturalist--all men cannot be everything. And I, a naturalist, hold that
the wishes, thronging the restless little feathered breast are not
altogether so incommunicable as the melodious mourner of "Poor Matthias"
imagines. The days--ay, and years--which I have spent in the society of
my feathered friends have not, I flatter myself, been so wasted that I
cannot small my soul, just as the preacher smalled his voice, to bring
it within reach of them, and establish some sort of passage.
And so, thinking that a little more knowledge of birds than most people
possess, and consideration for them--for I will not be so harsh to speak
of justice--and time and attention given to their wants, might remove
this reproach, and silence these vague suggestions of a too fastidious
conscience, I have taken the trouble to add something to the seed with
which these little prisoners had been supplied. For we give sweetmeats
to the child that cries for the moon--an alternative which often acts
beneficially--and there is nothing more to be done. Any one of us, even
a philosopher, would think it hard to be restricted to dry bread only,
yet such a punishment would be small compared with that which we, in our
ignorance or want of consideration, inflict on our caged animals--our
pets on compulsion. Small, because an almost infinite variety of
flavours drawn from the whole vegetable kingdom--a hundred flavours for
every one in the dietary which satisfies our heavier mammalian
natures--is a condition of the little wild bird's existence and
essential to its well-being and perfect happiness. And so, to remedy
this defect, I went out into the garden, and with seeding grasses and
pungent buds, and leaves of a dozen different kinds, I decorated the
cage until it looked less like a prison than a bower. And now for an
hour the little creatures have been busy with their varied green
fare, each one tasting half a dozen different leaves every minute,
hopping here and there and changing places with his fellows, glancing
their bright little eyes this way and that, and all the time uttering
gratulatory notes in the canary's conversational tone. And their
language is not altogether untranslatable. I listen to one, a pretty
pure yellow bird, but slightly tyrannical in his treatment of the
others, and he says, or seems to say: "This is good, I like it, only the
old leaf is tough; the buds would be better. . . . These are certainly
not so good. _I tasted them out of compliment to nature, though they
were scarcely palatable. . . ._" No, that was not my own expression; it
was said by Thoreau, perhaps the only human a little bird can quote with
approval. "This is decidedly bitter--and yet--yes, it does leave a
pleasant flavour on the palate. Make room for me there--or I shall make
you and let me taste it again. Yes, I fancy I can remember eating
something like this in a former state of existence, ages and ages ago."
And so on, and so on, until I began to imagine that the whole thing had
been put right, and that the uncomfortable feeling would return to
trouble me no more. But at the rate they are devouring their green stuff
there will not be a leat, scarcely a stem left in another hour; and
then? Why, then they will have the naked wires of their cage all round
them to protect them from the cat and for hunger there will be seed in
the box.
After all, then, what a little I have been able to do! But I flatter
myself that if they were mine I should do more. I never keep captive
birds, but if they were given to me, and I could not refuse, I should do
a great deal more for them. All my knowledge of their ways and their
requirements would teach me how to make their caged existence less
unlike the old natural life, than it now is. To begin the ameliorating
process, I should place them in a large cage, large enough to allow
space for flight, so that they might fly to and fro, a few feet each
way, and rest their little feet from continual perching. That would
enable them to exercise their most important muscles and experience once
more, although in a very limited degree, the old delicious sensation of
gliding at will through the void air. The wires of their new cage would
be of brass or of some bright metal, and the wooden parts and perches
green enamelled, or green variegated with brown and grey, and the roof
would be hung with glass lustres, to quiver and sparkle into drops of
violet, red, and yellow light, gladdening these little lovers of bright
colours; for so we deem them. I should also add gay flowers and berries,
crocus and buttercup and dandelion, hips and haws and mountain ash and
yellow and scarlet leaves--all seasonable jewellery from woods and
hedges and from the orchard and garden. Then would come the heaviest
part of my task, which would be to satisfy their continual craving for
new tastes in food, their delight in an endless variety. I should go to
the great seed-merchants of London and buy samples of all the cultivated
seeds of the earth, and not feed them in a trough, or manger, like heavy
domestic brutes, but give it to them mixed and scattered in small
quantities, to be searched for and gladly found in the sand and gravel
and turf on the wide floor of the cage. And, higher up, the wires of
their dwelling would be hung with an endless variety of seeded grasses,
and sprays of all trees and plants, good, bad, and indifferent. For if
the volatile bird dines on no more than twenty dishes every day he
loves to taste of a hundred and to have at least a thousand on the table
to choose from.