Never in my experience has there been a worse spring season than that
of 1903 for the birds, more especially for the short-winged migrants. In
April I looked for the woodland warblers and found them not, or saw but
a few of the commonest kinds. It was only too easy to account for this
rarity. The bitter north-east wind had blown every day and all day long
during those weeks when birds are coming, and when nearing the end
of their journey, at its most perilous stage, the wind had been dead
against them; its coldness and force was too much for these delicate
travellers, and doubtless they were beaten down in thousands into the
grey waters of a bitter sea. The stronger-winged wheatear was more
fortunate, since he comes in March, and before that spell of deadly
weather he was already back in his breeding haunts on Salisbury Plain,
and, in fact, everywhere on that open down country. I was there to hear
him sing his wild notes to the listening waste--singing them, as his
pretty fashion is, up in the air, suspended on quickly vibrating wings
like a great black and white moth. But he was in no singing mood, and at
last, in desperation, I fled to Salisbury to wait for loitering spring
in that unattractive town.
The streets were cold as the open plain, and there was no comfort
indoors; to haunt the cathedral during those vacant days was the only
occupation left to me. There was some shelter to be had under the walls,
and the empty, vast interior would seem almost cosy on coming in from
the wind. At service my due feet never failed, while morning, noon,
and evening I paced the smooth level green by the hour, standing at
intervals to gaze up at the immense pile with its central soaring spire,
asking myself why I had never greatly liked it in the past and did not
like it much better now when grown familiar with it. Undoubtedly it is
one of the noblest structures of its kind in England--even my eyes that
look coldly on most buildings could see it; and I could admire, even
reverence, but could not love. It suffers by comparison with other
temples into which my soul has wandered. It has not the majesty
and appearance of immemorial age, the dim religious richness of the
interior, with much else that goes to make up, without and within, the
expression which is so marked in other mediaeval fanes--Winchester, Ely,
York, Canterbury, Exeter, and Wells. To the dry, mechanical mind of the
architect these great cathedrals are in the highest degree imperfect,
according to the rules of his art: to all others this imperfectness is
their chief excellence and glory; for they are in a sense a growth, a
flower of many minds and many periods, and are imperfect even as Nature
is, in her rocks and trees; and, being in harmony with Nature and like
Nature, they are inexpressibly beautiful and satisfying beyond all
buildings to the aesthetic as well as to the religious sense.
Occasionally I met and talked with an old man employed at the cathedral.
One day, closing one eye and shading the other with his hand, he gazed
up at the building for some time, and then remarked: "I'll tell you
what's wrong with Salisbury--it looks too noo." He was near the mark;
the fault is that to the professional eye it is faultless; the lack of
expression is due to the fact that it came complete from its maker's
brain, like a coin from the mint, and being all on one symmetrical plan
it has the trim, neat appearance of a toy cathedral carved out of wood
and set on a green-painted square.
After all, my thoughts and criticisms on the cathedral, as a building,
were merely incidental; my serious business was with the feathered
people to be seen there. Few in the woods and fewer on the windy downs,
here birds were abundant, not only on the building, where they were like
seafowl congregated on a precipitous rock, but they were all about me.
The level green was the hunting ground of many thrushes--a dozen or
twenty could often be seen at one time--and it was easy to spot those
that had young. The worm they dragged out was not devoured; another was
looked for, then another; then all were cut up in proper lengths and
beaten and bruised, and finally packed into a bundle and carried off.
Rooks, too, were there, breeding on the cathedral elms, and had no time
and spirit to wrangle, but could only caw-caw distressfully at the wind,
which tossed them hither and thither in the air and lashed the tall
trees, threatening at each fresh gust to blow their nests to
pieces. Small birds of half a dozen kinds were also there, and one
tinkle-tinkled his spring song quite merrily in spite of the cold that
kept the others silent and made me blue. One day I spied a big queen
bumble-bee on the ground, looking extremely conspicuous in its black and
chestnut coat on the fresh green sward; and thinking it numbed by the
cold I picked it up. It moved its legs feebly, but alas! its enemy
had found and struck it down, and with its hard, sharp little beak had
drilled a hole in one of the upper plates of its abdomen, and from that
small opening had cunningly extracted all the meat. Though still alive
it was empty as a blown eggshell. Poor queen and mother, you survived
the winter in vain, and went abroad in vain in the bitter weather in
quest of bread to nourish your few first-born--the grubs that would
help you by and by; now there will be no bread for them, and for you no
populous city in the flowery earth and a great crowd of children to rise
up each day, when days are long, to call you blessed! And he who
did this thing, the unspeakable oxeye with his black and yellow
breast--"catanic black and amber"--even while I made my lamentation was
tinkling his merry song overhead in the windy elms.
The birds that lived on the huge cathedral itself had the greatest
attraction for me; and here the daws, if not the most numerous, were the
most noticeable, as they ever are on account of their conspicuousness in
their black plumage, their loquacity and everlasting restlessness. Far
up on the ledge from which the spire rises a kestrel had found a cosy
corner in which to establish himself, and one day when I was there a
number of daws took it on themselves to eject him: they gathered near
and flew this way and that, and cawed and cawed in anger, and swooped at
him, until he could stand their insults no longer, and, suddenly dashing
out, he struck and buffeted them right and left and sent them screaming
with fear in all directions. After this they left him in peace: they
had forgotten that he was a hawk, and that even the gentle mousing
wind-hover has a nobler spirit than any crow of them all.
On first coming to the cathedral I noticed a few pigeons sitting on the
roof and ledges very high up, and, not seeing them well, I assumed that
they were of the common or domestic kind. By and by one cooed, then
another; and recognizing the stock-dove note I began to look carefully,
and found that all the birds on the building--about thirty pairs--were
of this species. It was a great surprise, for though we occasionally
find a pair of stock-doves breeding on the ivied wall of some inhabited
mansion in the country, it was a new thing to find a considerable colony
of this shy woodland species established on a building in a town.
They lived and bred there just as the common pigeon--the vari-coloured
descendant of the blue rock--does on St. Paul's, the Law Courts, and the
British Museum in London. Only, unlike our metropolitan doves, both the
domestic kind and the ringdove in the parks, the Salisbury doves though
in the town are not of it. They come not down to mix with the currents
of human life in the streets and open spaces; they fly away to the
country to feed, and dwell on the cathedral above the houses and people
just as sea-birds--kittiwake and guillemot and gannet--dwell on the
ledges of some vast ocean-fronting cliff.
The old man mentioned above told me that the birds were called "rocks"
by the townspeople, also that they had been there for as long as he
could remember. Six or seven years ago, he said, when the repairs to the
roof and spire were started, the pigeons began to go away until there
was not one left. The work lasted three years, and immediately on
its conclusion the doves began to return, and were now as numerous as
formerly. How, I inquired, did these innocent birds get on with their
black neighbours, seeing that the daw is a cunning creature much given
to persecution--a crow, in fact, as black as any of his family? They got
on badly, he said; the doves were early breeders, beginning in March,
and were allowed to have the use of the holes until the daws wanted them
at the end of April, when they forcibly ejected the young doves. He
said that in spring he always picked up a good many young doves, often
unfledged, thrown down by the dawn. I did not doubt his story. I had
just found a young bird myself--a little blue-skinned, yellow-mouthed
fledgling which had fallen sixty or seventy feet on to the gravel below.
But in June, he said, when the daws brought off their young, the doves
entered into possession once more, and were then permitted to rear their
young in peace.
I returned to Salisbury about the middle of May in better weather,
when there were days that were almost genial, and found the cathedral a
greater "habitacle of birds" than ever: starlings, swifts, and swallows
were there, the lively little martins in hundreds, and the doves and
daws in their usual numbers. All appeared to be breeding, and for some
time I saw no quarreling. At length I spied a pair of doves with a
nest in a small cavity in the stone at the back of a narrow ledge about
seventy feet from the ground, and by standing back some distance I could
see the hen bird sitting on the nest, while the cock stood outside on
the ledge keeping guard. I watched this pair for some hours and saw
a jackdaw sweep down on them a dozen or more times at long intervals.
Sometimes after swooping down he would alight on the ledge a yard or
two away, and the male dove would then turn and face him, and if he then
began sidling up the dove would dash at and buffet him with his wings
with the greatest violence and throw him off. When he swooped closer the
dove would spring up and meet him in the air, striking him at the moment
of meeting, and again the daw would be beaten. When I left three days
after witnessing this contest, the doves were still in possession of
their nest, and I concluded that they were not so entirely at the mercy
of the jackdaw as the old man had led me to believe.
It was, on this occasion, a great pleasure to listen to the doves. The
stock-dove has no set song, like the ringdove, but like all the other
species in the typical genus Columba it has the cooing or family note,
one of the most human-like sounds which birds emit. In the stock-dove
this is a better, more musical, and a more varied sound than in any
other Columba known to me. The pleasing quality of the sound as well as
the variety in it could be well noted here where the birds were many,
scattered about on ledges and projections high above the earth, and when
bird after bird uttered its plaint, each repeating his note half a dozen
to a dozen times, one in slow measured time, and deep-voiced like the
rock-dove, but more musical; another rapidly, with shorter, impetuous
notes in a higher key, as if carried away by excitement. There were not
two birds that cooed in precisely the same way, and the same bird would
often vary its manner of cooing.
It was best to hear them during the afternoon service in the cathedral,
when the singing of the choir and throbbing and pealing of the organ
which filled the vast interior was heard outside, subdued by the walls
through which it passed, and was like a beautiful mist or atmosphere of
sound pervading and enveloping the great building; and when the plaining
of the doves, owing to the rhythmic flow of the notes and their human
characters, seemed to harmonize with and be a part of that sacred music.