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Birds and Man

by W. H. Hudson · English · Gutenberg #37787 · 403,968 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Birds and Man

Author: W. H. Hudson


        
Release date: October 18, 2011 [eBook #37787]

Language: English

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BIRDS AND MAN




  +----------------------------+
  |    _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_    |
  |                            |
  | Birds in a Village         |
  |                            |
  | Adventures among Birds     |
  |                            |
  | Nature in Downland         |
  |                            |
  | Hampshire Days             |
  |                            |
  | The Land's End             |
  |                            |
  | A Shepherd's Life          |
  |                            |
  | Afoot in England           |
  |                            |
  | The Purple Land            |
  |                            |
  | Green Mansions             |
  |                            |
  | A Crystal Age              |
  |                            |
  | South American Sketches    |
  |                            |
  | The Naturalist in La Plata |
  |                            |
  | A Little Boy Lost          |
  |                            |
  +----------------------------+




   [Illustration]




BIRDS AND MAN

BY

W. H. HUDSON


LONDON

DUCKWORTH & CO.

3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.


_New Edition published by Duckworth & Co. 1915_

Re-issued 1920




This book has been out of print for several years and has been somewhat
altered for this new edition. The order in which the chapters originally
appeared is changed. One chapter dealing mainly with bird life in the
Metropolis, a subject treated fully in another work, has been omitted;
two new chapters are added, and some fresh matter introduced throughout
the work.




CONTENTS


  CHAP.                                                         PAGE

     I. Birds at their Best                                        1
    II. Birds and Man                                             37
   III. Daws in the West Country                                  58
    IV. Early Spring in Savernake Forest                          79
     V. A Wood Wren at Wells                                     101
    VI. The Secret of the Willow Wren                            117
   VII. Secret of the Charm of Flowers                           133
  VIII. Ravens in Somerset                                       159
    IX. Owls in a Village                                        173
     X. The Strange and Beautiful Sheldrake                      187
    XI. Geese: an Appreciation and a Memory                      199
   XII. The Dartford Warbler                                     222
  XIII. Vert--Vert; or Parrot Gossip                             249
   XIV. Something Pretty in a Glass Case                         269
    XV. Selborne                                                 283
        Index                                                    303




BIRDS AND MAN



CHAPTER I

BIRDS AT THEIR BEST


_By Way of Introduction_

Years ago, in a chapter concerning eyes in a book of Patagonian
memories, I spoke of the unpleasant sensations produced in me by the
sight of stuffed birds. Not bird skins in the drawers of a cabinet, it
will be understood, these being indispensable to the ornithologist, and
very useful to the larger class of persons who without being
ornithologists yet take an intelligent interest in birds. The
unpleasantness was at the sight of skins stuffed with wool and set up on
their legs in imitation of the living bird, sometimes (oh, mockery!) in
their "natural surroundings." These "surroundings" are as a rule
constructed or composed of a few handfuls of earth to form the floor of
the glass case--sand, rock, clay, chalk, or gravel; whatever the
material may be it invariably has, like all "matter out of place," a
grimy and depressing appearance. On the floor are planted grasses,
sedges, and miniature bushes, made of tin or zinc and then dipped in a
bucket of green paint. In the chapter referred to it was said, "When the
eye closes in death, the bird, except to the naturalist, becomes a mere
bundle of dead feathers; crystal globes may be put into the empty
sockets, and a bold life-imitating attitude given to the stuffed
specimen, but the vitreous orbs shoot forth no life-like glances: the
'passion and the life whose fountains are within' have vanished, and the
best work of the taxidermist, who has given a life to his bastard art,
produces in the mind only sensations of irritation and disgust."

That, in the last clause, was wrongly writ. It should have been _my_
mind, and the minds of those who, knowing living birds intimately as I
do, have the same feeling about them.

This, then, being my feeling about stuffed birds, set up in their
"natural surroundings," I very naturally avoid the places where they are
exhibited. At Brighton, for instance, on many occasions when I have
visited and stayed in that town, there was no inclination to see the
Booth Collection, which is supposed to be an ideal collection of British
birds; and we know it was the life-work of a zealous ornithologist who
was also a wealthy man, and who spared no pains to make it perfect of
its kind. About eighteen months ago I passed a night in the house of a
friend close to the Dyke Road, and next morning, having a couple of
hours to get rid of, I strolled into the museum. It was painfully
disappointing, for though no actual pleasure had been expected, the
distress experienced was more than I had bargained for. It happened that
a short time before, I had been watching the living Dartford warbler, at
a time when the sight of this small elusive creature is loveliest, for
not only was the bird in his brightest feathers, but his surroundings
were then most perfect--

   The whin was frankincense and flame.

His appearance, as I saw him then and on many other occasions in
the furze-flowering season, is fully described in a chapter in
this book; but on this particular occasion while watching my bird
I saw it in a new and unexpected aspect, and in my surprise and
delight I exclaimed mentally, "Now I have seen the furze wren at
his very best!"

It was perhaps a very rare thing--one of those effects of light on
plumage which we are accustomed to see in birds that have glossed
metallic feathers, and, more rarely, in other kinds. Thus the
turtle-dove when flying from the spectator with a strong
sunlight on its upper plumage, sometimes at a distance of two to
three hundred yards, appears of a shining whiteness.

I had been watching the birds for a couple of hours, sitting quite
still on a tuft of heather among the furze-bushes, and at
intervals they came to me, impelled by curiosity and solicitude,
their nests being near, but, ever restless, they would never
remain more than a few seconds at a time in sight. The prettiest
and the boldest was a male, and it was this bird that in the end
flew to a bush within twelve yards of where I sat, and perching on
a spray about on a level with my eyes exhibited himself to me in
his characteristic manner, the long tail raised, crest erect,
crimson eye sparkling, and throat puffed out with his little
scolding notes. But his colour was no longer that of the furze
wren: seen at a distance the upper plumage always appears
slaty-black; near at hand it is of a deep slaty-brown; now it was
dark, sprinkled or frosted over with a delicate greyish-white, the
white of oxidised silver; and this rare and beautiful appearance
continued for a space of about twenty seconds; but no sooner did
he flit to another spray than it vanished, and he was once
more the slaty-brown little bird with a chestnut-red breast.

It is unlikely that I shall ever again see the furze wren in this
aspect, with a curious splendour wrought by the sunlight in the
dark but semi-translucent delicate feathers of his mantle; but its
image is in the mind, and, with a thousand others equally
beautiful, remains to me a permanent possession.

As I went in to see the famous Booth Collection, a thought of the
bird I have just described came into my mind; and glancing round
the big long room with shelves crowded with stuffed birds, like
the crowded shelves of a shop, to see where the Dartford warblers
were, I went straight to the case and saw a group of them fastened
to a furze-bush, the specimens twisted by the stuffer into a
variety of attitudes--ancient, dusty, dead little birds, painful to
look at--a libel on nature and an insult to a man's intelligence.

It was a relief to go from this case to the others, which were not
of the same degree of badness, but all, like the furze wrens, were
in their natural surroundings--the pebbles, bit of turf, painted
leaves, and what not, and, finally, a view of the wide world
beyond, the green earth and the blue sky, all painted on
the little square of deal or canvas which formed the back of the
glass case.

Listening to the talk of other visitors who were making the round
of the room, I heard many sincere expressions of admiration: they
were really pleased and thought it all very wonderful. That is, in
fact, the common feeling which most persons express in such
places, and, assuming that it is sincere, the obvious explanation
is that they know no better. They have never properly seen
anything in nature, but have looked always with mind and the inner
vision preoccupied with other and familiar things--indoor scenes
and objects, and scenes described in books. If they had ever
looked at wild birds properly--that is to say, emotionally--the
images of such sights would have remained in their minds; and,
with such a standard for comparison, these dreary remnants of dead
things set before them as restorations and as semblances of life
would have only produced a profoundly depressing effect.

We hear of the educational value of such exhibitions, and it may be
conceded that they might be made useful to young students of zoology,
by distributing the specimens over a large area, arranged in scattered
groups so as to give a rough idea of the relationship existing among
its members, and of all together to other neighbouring groups, and to
others still further removed. The one advantage of such a plan to the
young student would be, that it would help him to get rid of the false
notion, which classification studied in books invariably produces,
that nature marshals her species in a line or row, or her genera in a
chain. But no such plan is ever attempted, probably because it would
only be for the benefit of about one person in five hundred visitors,
and the expense would be too great.

As things are, these collections help no one, and their effect is
confusing and in many ways injurious to the mind, especially to
the young. A multitude of specimens are brought before the sight,
each and every one a falsification and degradation of nature, and
the impression left is of an assemblage, or mob, of incongruous
forms, and of a confusion of colours. The one comfort is that
nature, wiser than our masters, sets herself against this rude
system of overloading the brain. She is kind to her wild children
in their intemperance, and is able to relieve the congested mind,
too, from this burden. These objects in a museum are not and
cannot be viewed emotionally, as we view living forms and all
nature; hence they do not, and we being what we are, cannot,
register lasting impressions.

It needed a long walk on the downs to get myself once more
in tune with the outdoor world after that distuning experience;
but just before quitting the house in the Dyke Road an old memory
came to me and gave me some relief, inasmuch as it caused me to
smile. It was a memory of a tale of the Age of Fools, which I
heard long years ago in the days of my youth.

I was at a small riverine port of the Plata river, called Ensenada
de Barragan, assisting a friend to ship a number of sheep which he
had purchased in Buenos Ayres and was sending to the Banda
Oriental--the little republic on the east side of the great
sea-like river. The sheep, numbering about six thousand, were
penned at the side of the creek where the small sailing ships were
lying close to the bank, and a gang of eight men were engaged in
carrying the animals on board, taking them one by one on their
backs over a narrow plank, while I stood by keeping count. The men
were gauchos, all but one--a short, rather grotesque-looking
Portuguese with one eye. This fellow was the life and soul of the
gang, and with his jokes and antics kept the others in a merry
humour. It was an excessively hot day, and at intervals of about
an hour the men would knock off work, and, squatting on the muddy
bank, rest and smoke their cigarettes; and on each occasion
the funny one-eyed Portuguese would relate some entertaining
history. One of these histories was about the Age of Fools, and
amused me so much that I remember it to this day. It was the
history of a man of that remote age, who was born out of his time,
and who grew tired of the monotony of his life, even of the
society of his wife, who was no whit wiser than the other
inhabitants of the village they lived in. And at last he resolved
to go forth and see the world, and bidding his wife and friends
farewell he set out on his travels. He travelled far and met with
many strange and entertaining adventures, which I must be pardoned
for not relating, as this is not a story-book. In the end he
returned safe and sound to his home, a much richer man than when
he started; and opening his pack he spread out before his wife an
immense number of gold coins, with scores of precious stones, and
trinkets of the greatest value. At the sight of this glittering
treasure she uttered a great scream of joy and jumping up rushed
from the room. Seeing that she did not return, he went to look for
her, and after some searching discovered that she had rushed down
to the wine-cellar and knocking open a large cask of wine had
jumped into it and drowned herself for pure joy.

"Thus happily ended his adventures," concluded the
one-eyed cynic, and they all got up and resumed their work of
carrying sheep to the boat.

It was one of the adventures met with by the man of the tale in
his travels that came into my mind when I was in the Booth Museum,
and caused me to smile. In his wanderings in a thinly settled
district, he arrived at a village where, passing by the church,
his attention was attracted by a curious spectacle. The church was
a big building with a rounded roof, and great blank windowless
walls, and the only door he could see was no larger than the door
of a cottage. From this door as he looked a small old man came out
with a large empty sack in his hands. He was very old, bowed and
bent with infirmities, and his long hair and beard were white as
snow. Toddling out to the middle of the churchyard he stood still,
and grasping the empty sack by its top, held it open between his
outstretched arms for a space of about five minutes; then with a
sudden movement of his hands he closed the sack's mouth, and still
grasping it tightly, hurried back to the church as fast as his
stiff joints would let him, and disappeared within the door. By
and by he came forth again and repeated the performance, and then
again, until the traveller approached and asked him what
he was doing. "I am lighting the church," said the old man; and he
then went on to explain that it was a large and a fine church,
full of rich ornaments, but very dark inside--so dark that when
people came to service the greatest confusion prevailed, and they
could not see each other or the priest, nor the priest them. It
had always been so, he continued, and it was a great mystery; he
had been engaged by the fathers of the village a long time back,
when he was a young man, to carry sunlight in to light the
interior; but though he had grown old at his task, and had carried
in many, many thousands of sackfuls of sunlight every year, it
still remained dark, and no one could say why it was so.

It is not necessary to relate the sequel: the reader knows by now
that in the end the dark church was filled with light, that the
traveller was feasted and honoured by all the people of the
village, and that he left them loaded with gifts.

Parables of this kind as a rule can have no moral or hidden
meaning in an age so enlightened as this; yet oddly enough we do
find among us a delusion resembling that of the villagers who
thought they could convey sunshine in a sack to light their dark
church. It is one of a group or family of indoor delusions
and illusions, which Mr Sully has not mentioned in his book on
that fascinating subject. One example of the particular delusion I
have been speaking of, in which it is seen in its crudest form,
may be given here.

A man walking by the water-side sees by chance a kingfisher fly
past, its colour a wonderful blue, far surpassing in beauty and
brilliancy any blue he has ever seen in sky or water, or in flower
or stone, or any other thing. No sooner has he seen than he wishes
to become the possessor of that rare loveliness, that shining
object which, he fondly imagines, will be a continual delight to
him and to all in his house,--an ornament comparable to that
splendid stone which the poor fisherman found in a fish's belly,
which was his children's plaything by day and his candle by night.
Forthwith he gets his gun and shoots it, and has it stuffed and
put in a glass case. But it is no longer the same thing: the image
of the living sunlit bird flashing past him is in his mind and
creates a kind of illusion when he looks at his feathered mummy,
but the lustre is not visible to others.

It is because of the commonness of this delusion that stuffed
kingfishers, and other brilliant species, are to be seen in the
parlours of tens of thousands of cottages all over the land. Nor is it
only those who live in cottages that make this mistake; those who care
to look for it will find that it exists in some degree in most
minds--the curious delusion that the lustre which we see and admire is
in the case, the coil, the substance which may be grasped, and not in
the spirit of life which is within and the atmosphere and
miracle-working sunlight which are without.

To return to my own taste and feelings, since in the present chapter I
must be allowed to write on Man (myself to wit) and Birds, the other
chapters being occupied with the subject of Birds and Man. It has
always, or since I can remember, been my ambition and principal
delight to see and hear every bird at its best. This is here a
comparative term, and simply means an unusually attractive aspect of
the bird, or a very much better than the ordinary one. This may result
from a fortunate conjunction of circumstances, or may be due to a
peculiar harmony between the creature and its surroundings; or in some
instances, as in that given above of the Dartford warbler, to a rare
effect of the sun. In still other cases, motions and antics, rarely
seen, singularly graceful, or even grotesque, may give the best
impression. After one such impression has been received, another
equally excellent may follow at a later date: in that case the second
impression does not obliterate, or is not superimposed upon the former
one; both remain as permanent possessions of the mind, and we may thus
have several mental pictures of the same species.

It is the same with all minds with regard to the objects and scenes
which happen to be of special interest. The following illustration
will serve to make the matter clearer to readers who are not
accustomed to pay attention to their own mental processes. When any
common object, such as a chair, or spade, or apple, is thought of or
spoken of, an image of a picture of it instantly comes before the
mind's eye; not of a particular spade or apple, but of a type
representing the object which exists in the mind ready for use on all
occasions. With the question of the origin of this type, this spade or
apple of the mind, we need not concern ourselves here. If the object
thought or spoken of be an animal--a horse let us say, the image seen
in the mind will in most cases be as in the foregoing case a type
existing in the mind and not of an individual. But if a person is
keenly interested in horses generally, and is a rider and has owned
and loved many horses, the image of some particular one which he has
known or has looked at with appreciative eyes will come to mind; and
he will also be able to call up the images of dozens or of scores of
horses he has known or seen in the same way. If on the other hand we
think of a rat, we see not any individual but a type, because we have
no interest in or no special feeling with regard to such a creature,
and all the successive images we receive of it become merged in
one--the type which already existed in the mind and was probably
formed very early in life. With the dog for subject the case is
different: dogs are more with us--we know them intimately and have
perhaps regarded many individuals with affection; hence the image that
rises in the mind is as a rule of some dog we have known.

The important point to be noted is, that while each and everything we
see registers an impression in the brain, and may be recalled several
minutes, or hours, or even days afterwards, the only permanent
impressions are of the sights which we have viewed emotionally. We may
remember that we have seen a thousand things in which at some later
period an interest has been born in the mind, when it would be greatly
to our pleasure and even profit to recover their images, and we strive
and ransack our brains to do so, but all in vain: they have been lost
for ever because we happened not to be interested in the originals,
but viewed them with indifference, or unemotionally.

With regard to birds, I see them mentally in two ways: each species
which I have known and observed in its wild state has its type in the
mind--an image which I invariably see when I think of the species;
and, in addition, one or two or several, in some cases as many as
fifty, images of the same species of bird as it appeared at some
exceptionally favourable moment and was viewed with peculiar interest
and pleasure.

Of hundreds of such enduring images of our commonest species I will
here describe one before concluding with this part of the subject.

The long-tailed or bottle-tit is one of the most delicately pretty of
our small woodland birds, and among my treasures, in my invisible and
intangible album, there were several pictures of him which I had
thought unsurpassable, until on a day two years ago when a new and
better one was garnered. I was walking a few miles from Bath by the
Avon where it is not more than thirty or forty yards wide, on a cold,
windy, very bright day in February. The opposite bank was lined with
bushes growing close to the water, the roots and lower trunks of many
of them being submerged, as the river was very full; and behind this
low growth the ground rose abruptly, forming a long green hill crowned
with tall beeches. I stopped to admire one of the bushes across the
stream, and I wish I could now say what its species was: it was low
with widespread branches close to the surface of the water, and its
leafless twigs were adorned with catkins resembling those of the black
poplar, as long as a man's little finger, of a rich dark-red or maroon
colour. A party of about a dozen long-tailed tits were travelling, or
drifting, in their usual desultory way, through the line of bushes
towards this point, and in due time they arrived, one by one, at the
bush I was watching, and finding it sheltered from the wind they
elected to remain at that spot. For a space of fifteen minutes I
looked on with delight, rejoicing at the rare chance which had brought
that exquisite bird- and plant-scene before me. The long deep-red
pendent catkins and the little pale birdlings among them in their grey
and rose-coloured plumage, with long graceful tails and minute round,
parroty heads; some quietly perched just above the water, others
moving about here and there, occasionally suspending themselves back
downwards from the slender terminal twigs--the whole mirrored below.
That magical effect of water and sunlight gave to the scene a somewhat
fairy-like, an almost illusory, character.

Such scenes live in their loveliness only for him who has seen and
harvested them: they cannot be pictured forth to another by words, nor
with the painter's brush, though it be charged with _tintas
orientales_; least of all by photography, which brings all things down
to one flat, monotonous, colourless shadow of things, weary to look
at.

From sights we pass to the consideration of sounds, and it is
unfortunate that the two subjects have to be treated consecutively
instead of together, since with birds they are more intimately joined
than in any other order of beings; and in images of bird life at its
best they sometimes cannot be dissociated;--the aerial form of the
creature, its harmonious, delicate tints, and its grace of motion; and
the voice, which, loud or low, is aerial too, in harmony with the
form.

We know that as with sights so it is with sounds: those to which we
listen attentively, appreciatively, or in any way emotionally, live in
the mind, to be recalled and reheard at will. There is no doubt that
in a large majority of persons this retentive power is far less strong
with regard to sounds than sights, but we are all supposed to have it
in some degree. So far, I have met with but one person, a lady, who is
without it: sounds, in her case, do not register an impression in the
brain, so that with regard to this sense she is in the condition of
civilised man generally with regard to smells. I say of civilised man,
being convinced that this power has become obsolete in us, although it
appears to exist in savages and in the lower animals. The most common
sounds, natural or artificial, the most familiar bird-notes, the
lowing of a cow, the voices of her nearest and dearest friends, and
simplest melodies sung or played, cannot be reproduced in her brain:
she remembers them as agreeable sounds, just as we all remember that
certain flowers and herbs have agreeable odours; but she does not
_hear_ them. Probably there are not many persons in the same case; but
in such matters it is hard to know what the real condition of
another's mind may be. Our acquaintances refuse to analyse or turn
themselves inside out merely to gratify a curiosity which they may
think idle. In some cases they perhaps have a kind of superstition
about such things: the secret processes of _their_ mind are their
secret, or "business," and, like the secret and _real_ name of a
person among some savage tribes, not to be revealed but at the risk of
giving to another a mysterious power over their lives and fortunes.
Even worse than the reticent, the superstitious, and the simply
unintelligent, is the highly imaginative person who is only too ready
to answer all inquiries, who catches at what you say in explanation,
divines what you want, and instantly (and unconsciously) invents
something to tell you.

But we may, I think, take it for granted that the faculty of retaining
sounds is as universal as that of retaining sights, although, speaking
generally, the impressions of sounds are less perfect and lasting than
those which relate to the higher, more intellectual sense of vision;
also that this power varies greatly in different persons. Furthermore,
we see in the case of musical composers, and probably of most
musicians who are devoted to their art, that this faculty is capable
of being trained and developed to an extraordinary degree of
efficiency. The composer sitting pen in hand to write his score in his
silent room hears the voices and the various instruments, the solos
and orchestral sounds, which are in his thoughts. It is true that he
is a creator, and listens mentally to compositions that have never
been previously heard; but he cannot imagine, or cannot _hear_
mentally, any note or combination of notes which he has never heard
with his physical sense. In creating he selects from the infinite
variety of sounds whose images exist in his mind, and, rearranging
them, produces new effects.

The difference in the brains, with regard to their sound-storing
power, of the accomplished musician and the ordinary person who does
not know one tune from another and has but fleeting impressions of
sounds in general, is no doubt enormous; probably it is as great as
that which exists in the logical faculty between a professor of that
science in one of the Universities and a native of the Andaman Islands
or of Tierra del Fuego. It is, we see, a question of training: any
person with a normal brain who is accustomed to listen appreciatively
to certain sounds, natural or artificial, must store his mind with the
images of such sounds. And the open-air naturalist, who is keenly
interested in the language of birds, and has listened with delight to
a great variety of species, should be as rich in such impressions as
the musician is with regard to musical sounds. Unconsciously he has
all his life been training the faculty.

With regard to the durability of the images, it may be thought by some
that, speaking of birds, only those which are revived and restored, so
to speak, from time to time by fresh sense-impressions remain
permanently distinct. That would naturally be the first conclusion
most persons would arrive at, considering that the sound-images which
exist in their minds are of the species found in their own country,
which they are able to hear occasionally, even if at very long
intervals in some cases. My own experience proves that it is not so;
that a man may cut himself off from the bird life he knows, to make
his home in another region of the globe thousands of miles away, and
after a period exceeding a quarter of a century, during which he has
become intimate with a wholly different bird life, to find that the
old sound-images, which have never been refreshed with new
sense-impressions, are as distinct as they ever were, and seem indeed
imperishable.

I confess that, when I think of it, I am astonished myself at such an
experience, and to some it must seem almost incredible. It will be
said, perhaps, that in the infinite variety of bird-sounds heard
anywhere there must be innumerable notes which closely resemble, or
are similar to, those of other species in other lands, and, although
heard in a different order, the old images of cries and calls and
songs are thus indirectly refreshed and kept alive. I do not think
that has been any real help to me. Thus, I think of some species which
has not been thought of for years, and its language comes back at call
to my mind. I listen mentally to its various notes, and there is not
one in the least like the notes of any British species. These images
have therefore never received refreshment. Again, where there is a
resemblance, as in the trisyllabic cry of the common sandpiper and
another species, I listen mentally to one, then to the other, heard so
long ago, and hear both distinctly, and comparing the two, find a
considerable difference, one being a thinner, shriller, and less
musical sound than the other. Still again, in the case of the
blackbird, which has a considerable variety in its language, there is
one little chirp familiar to every one--a small round drop of sound of
a musical, bell-like character. Now it happens that one of the true
thrushes of South America, a bird resembling our song-thrush, has an
almost identical bell-like chirp, and so far as that small drop of
sound is concerned the old image may be refreshed by new
sense-impressions. Or I might even say that the original image has
been covered by the later one, as in the case of the laughter-like
cries of the Dominican and the black-backed gulls. But with regard to
the thrushes, excepting that small drop of sound, the language of the
two species is utterly different. Each has a melody perfect of its
kind: the song of the foreign bird is not fluty nor mellow nor placid
like that of the blackbird, but has in a high degree that quality of
plaintiveness and gladness commingled which we admire in some fresh
and very beautiful human voices, like that described in Lowell's lines
"To Perdita Singing":--

   It hath caught a touch of sadness,
       Yet it is not sad;
   It hath tones of clearest gladness,
       Yet it is not glad.

Again, that foreign song is composed of many notes, and is poured out
in a stream, as a skylark sings; and it is also singular on account of
the contrast between these notes which suggest human feeling and a
purely metallic, bell-like sound, which, coming in at intervals, has
the effect of the triangle in a band of wind instruments. The image of
this beautiful song is as distinct in my mind as that of the blackbird
which I heard every day last summer from every green place.

Doubtless there are some and perhaps a good many ornithologists among
us who have been abroad to observe the bird life of distant countries,
and who when at home find that the sound-impressions they have
received are not persistent, or, if not wholly lost, that they grow
faint and indistinct, and become increasingly difficult to recall.
They can no longer _listen_ to those over-sea notes and songs as they
can, mentally, to the cuckoo's call in spring, the wood-owl's hoot, to
the song of the skylark and of the tree-pipit, the reeling of the
night-jar and the startling scream of the woodland jay, the deep
human-like tones of the raven, the inflected wild cry of the curlew,
and the beautiful wild whistle of the widgeon, heard in the silence of
the night on some lonely mere.

The reason is that these, and numberless more, are the sounds of the
bird life of their own home and country; the living voices to which
they listened when they were young and the senses keener than now, and
their enthusiasm greater; they were in fact heard with an emotion
which the foreign species never inspired in them, and thus heard, the
images of the sounds were made imperishable.

In my case the foreign were the home birds, and on that account alone
more to me than all others; yet I escaped that prejudice which the
British naturalist is never wholly without--the notion that the home
bird is, intrinsically, better worth listening to than the bird
abroad. Finally, on coming to this country, I could not listen to the
birds coldly, as an English naturalist would to those of, let us say,
Queensland, or Burma, or Canada, or Patagonia, but with an intense
interest; for these were the birds which my forbears had known and
listened to all their lives long; and my imagination was fired by all
that had been said of their charm, not indeed by frigid
ornithologists, but by a long succession of great poets, from Chaucer
down to those of our own time. Hearing them thus emotionally their
notes became permanently impressed on my mind, and I found myself the
happy possessor of a large number of sound-images representing the
bird language of two widely separated regions.

To return to the main point--the durability of the impressions both of
sight and sound.

In order to get a more satisfactory idea of the number and comparative
strength or vividness of the images of twenty-six years ago remaining
to me after so long a time than I could by merely thinking about the
subject, I drew up a list of the species of birds observed by me in
the two adjoining districts of La Plata and Patagonia. Against the
name of each species the surviving sight- and sound-impressions were
set down; but on going over this first list and analysis, fresh
details came to mind, and some images which had become dimmed all at
once grew bright again, and to bring these in, the work had to be
redone; then it was put away and the subject left for a few days to
the "subliminal consciousness," after which I took it up once more and
rewrote it all--list and analysis; and I think it now gives a fairly
accurate account of the state of these old impressions as they exist
in memory.

This has not been done solely for my own gratification. I confess to a
very strong feeling of curiosity as to the mental experience on this
point of other field naturalists; and as these, or some of them, may
have the same wish to look into their neighbours' minds that I have,
it may be that the example given here will be followed.

My list comprises 226 species--a large number to remember when we
consider that it exceeds by about 16 or 18 the number of British
species; that is to say, those which may truly be described as
belonging to these islands, without including the waifs and strays and
rare visitants which by a fiction are described as British birds. Of
the 226, the sight-impressions of 10 have become indistinct, and one
has been completely forgotten. The sight of a specimen might perhaps
revive an image of this lost one as it was seen, a living wild bird;
but I do not know. This leaves 215, every one of which I can mentally
see as distinctly as I see in my mind the common species I am
accustomed to look at every day in England--thrush, starling, robin,
etc.

A different story has to be told with regard to the language. To begin
with, there are no fewer than 34 species of which no sound-impressions
were received. These include the habitually silent kinds--the stork,
which rattles its beak but makes no vocal sound, the painted snipe,
the wood ibis, and a few more; species which were rarely seen and
emitted no sound--condor, Muscovy duck, harpy eagle, and others;
species which were known only as winter visitants, or seen on
migration, and which at such seasons were invariably silent.

Thus, those which were heard number 192. Of these the language of 7
species has been completely forgotten, and of 31 the sound-impressions
have now become indistinct in varying degrees. Deducting those whose
notes have become silent and are not clearly heard in the mind, there
remain 154 species which are distinctly remembered. That is to say,
when I think of them and their language, the cries, calls, songs, and
other sounds are reproduced in the mind.

Studying the list, in which the species are ranged in order according
to their affinities, it is easy to see why the language of some,
although not many, has been lost or has become more or less
indistinct. In some cases it is because there was nothing distinctive
or in any way attractive in the notes; in other cases because the
images have been covered and obliterated by others--the stronger
images of closely-allied species. In the two American families of
tyrant-birds and woodhewers, neither of which are songsters, there is
in some of the closely-related species a remarkable family resemblance
in their voices. Listening to their various cries and calls, the
trained ear of the ornithologist can easily distinguish them and
identify the species; but after years the image of the more powerful
or the better voices of, say, two or three species in a group of four
or five absorb and overcome the others. I cannot find a similar case
among British species to illustrate this point, unless it be that of
the meadow- and rock-pipit. Strongly as the mind is impressed by the
measured tinkling notes of these two songs, emitted as the birds
descend to earth, it is not probable that any person who had not heard
them for a number of years would be able to distinguish or keep them
separate in his mind--to hear them in their images as two distinct
songs.

In the case of the good singers in that distant region, I find the
voices continue remarkably distinct, and as an example will give the
two melodious families of the finches and the troupials (Icteridae),
the last an American family, related to the finches, but starling-like
in appearance, many of them brilliantly coloured. Of the first I am
acquainted with 12 and of the second with 14 species.

Here then are 26 highly vocal species, of which the songs, calls,
chirps, and various other notes, are distinctly remembered in 23. Of
the other three one was silent--a small rare migratory finch
resembling the bearded-tit in its reed-loving habits, its long tail
and slender shape, and partly too in its colouring. I listened in vain
for this bird's singing notes. Of the remaining two one is a finch,
the other a troupial; the first a pretty bird, in appearance a small
hawfinch with its whole plumage a lovely glaucous blue; a poor singer
with a low rambling song: the second a bird of the size of a starling,
coloured like a golden oriole, but more brilliant; and this one has a
short impetuous song composed of mixed guttural and clear notes.

Why is this rather peculiar song, of a species which on account of its
colouring and pleasing social habits strongly impresses the mind, less
distinct in memory than the songs of other troupials? I believe it is
because it is a rare thing to hear a single song. They perch in a tree
in company, like birds of paradise, and no sooner does one open his
beak than all burst out together, and their singing strikes on the
sense in a rising and falling tempest of confused sound. But it may be
added that though these two songs are marked "indistinct" in the list,
they are not very indistinct, and become less so when I listen
mentally with closed eyes.

In conclusion, it is worthy of remark that the good voices, as to
quality, and the powerful ones, are not more enduring in their images
than those which were listened to appreciatively for other reasons.
Voices which have the quality of ventriloquism, or are in any way
mysterious, or are suggestive of human tones, are extremely
persistent; and such voices are found in owls, pigeons, snipe, rails,
grebes, night-jars, tinamous, rheas, and in some passerine birds.
Again, the swallows are not remarkable as singers compared with
thrushes, finches, and other melodists; but on account of their
intrinsic charm and beauty, their interesting habits, and the
sentiment they inspire, we listen to them emotionally; and I
accordingly find that the language of the five species of swallows I
was formerly accustomed to see and hear continues as distinct in my
mind as that of the chimney swallow, which I listen to every summer in
England.

       *       *       *       *       *

I had meant in this chapter to give three or four or half a dozen
instances of birds seen at their best, instead of the one I have
given--that of the long-tailed tit; and as many more images in which a
rare, unforgettable effect was produced by melody. For as with sights
so it is with sounds: for these too there are "special moments," which
have "special grace." But this chapter is already longer than it was
ever meant to be, and something on another subject yet remains to be
said.

The question is sometimes asked, What is the charm which you find, or
say you find, in nature? Is it real, or do these words so often
repeated have a merely conventional meaning, like so many other words
and phrases which men use with regard to other things? Birds, for
instance: apart from the interest which the ornithologists must take
in his subject, what substantial happiness can be got out of these shy
creatures, mostly small and not too well seen, that fly from us when
approached, and utter sounds which at their best are so poor, so thin,
so trivial, compared with our soul-stirring human music?

That, briefly, is the indoor view of the subject--the view of those
who, to begin with, were perhaps town-born and town-bred; who have
existed amid conditions, occupied with work and pleasures, the reflex
effect of which, taken altogether and in the long-run, is to dim and
even deaden some of the brain's many faculties, and chiefly this best
faculty of preserving impressions of nature for long years or to the
end of life in all their original freshness.

Some five or six years ago I heard a speech about birds delivered by
Sir Edward Grey, in which he said that the love and appreciation and
study of birds was something fresher and brighter than the second-hand
interests and conventional amusements in which so many in this day try
to live; that the pleasure of seeing and listening to them was purer
and more lasting than any pleasures of excitement, and, in the
long-run, "happier than personal success." That was a saying to stick
in the mind, and it is probable that some who listened failed to
understand. Let us imagine that in addition to this miraculous faculty
of the brain of storing innumerable brilliant images of things seen
and heard, to be reproduced at call to the inner sense, there existed
in a few gifted persons a correlated faculty by means of which these
treasured images could be thrown at will into the mind of another; let
us further imagine that some one in the audience who had wondered at
that saying, finding it both dark and hard, had asked me to explain
it; and that in response I had shown him, as by a swift succession of
lightning flashes a score or a hundred images of birds at their
best--the unimaginable loveliness, the sunlit colour, the grace of
form and of motion, and the melody--how great the effect of even that
brief glance into a new unknown world would have been! And if I had
then said: All that you have seen--the pictures in one small room in a
house of many rooms--is not after all the main thing; _that_ it would
be idle to speak of, since you cannot know what you do not feel,
though it should be told you many times; this only can be told--the
enduring images are but an incidental result of a feeling which
existed already; they were never looked for, and are a free gift from
nature to her worshipper;--if I had said this to him, the words of the
speech which has seemed almost sheer insanity a little while before
would have acquired a meaning and an appearance of truth.

       *       *       *       *       *

It has curiously happened that while writing these concluding
sentences some old long-forgotten lines which I read in my youth came
suddenly into my mind, as if some person sitting invisible at my side
and thinking them apposite to the subject had whispered them into my
ear. They are lines addressed to the Merrimac River by an American
poet--whether a major or minor I do not know, having forgotten his
name. In one stanza he mentions the fact that "young Brissot" looked
upon this stream in its bright flow--

   And bore its image o'er the deep
       To soothe a martyr's sadness,
   And fresco in his troubled sleep
       His prison walls with gladness.

Brissot is not generally looked upon as a "martyr" on this side of the
Atlantic, nor was he allowed to enjoy his "troubled sleep" too long
after his fellow-citizens (especially the great and sea-green
Incorruptible) had begun in their fraternal fashion to thirst for his
blood; but we can easily believe that during those dark days in the
Bastille the image and vision of the beautiful river thousands of
miles away was more to him than all his varied stores of knowledge,
all his schemes for the benefit of suffering humanity, and perhaps
even a better consolation than his philosophy.

It is indeed this "gladness" of old sunshine stored within us--if we
have had the habit of seeing beauty everywhere and of viewing all
beautiful things with appreciation--this incalculable wealth of images
of vanished scenes, which is one of our best and dearest possessions,
and a joy for ever.

"What asketh man to have?" cried Chaucer, and goes on to say in
bitterest words that "now with his love" he must soon lie in "the
colde grave--alone, withouten any companie."

What he asketh to have, I suppose, is a blue diamond--some
unattainable good; and in the meantime, just to go on with, certain
pleasant things which perish in the using.

These same pleasant things are not to be despised, but they leave
nothing for the mind in hungry days to feed upon, and can be of no
comfort to one who is shut up within himself by age and bodily
infirmities and the decay of the senses; on the contrary, the
recollection of them at such times, as has been said, can but serve to
make a present misery more poignantly felt.

It was the nobly expressed consolation of an American poet, now dead,
when standing in the summer sunshine amid a fine prospect of woods and
hills, to think, when he remembered the darkness of decay and the
grave, that he had beheld in nature, though but for a moment,

   The brightness of the skirts of God.




CHAPTER II

BIRDS AND MAN


To most of our wild birds man must appear as a being eccentric and
contradictory in his actions. By turns he is hostile, indifferent,
friendly towards them, so that they never quite know what to expect.
Take the case of a blackbird who has gradually acquired trustful
habits, and builds its nest in the garden or shrubbery in sight of the
friends that have fed it in frosty weather; so little does it fear
that it allows them to come a dozen times a day, put the branches
aside and look upon it, and even stroke its back as it sits on its
eggs. By and by a neighbour's egg-hunting boy creeps in, discovers the
nest, and pulls it down. The bird finds itself betrayed by its
confidence; had it suspected the boy's evil intentions it would have
made an outcry at his approach, as at the appearance of a cat, and the
nest would perhaps have been saved. The result of such an accident
would probably be the unsettling of an acquired habit, the return to
the usual suspicious attitude.

Birds are able sometimes to discriminate between protectors and
persecutors, but seldom very well I should imagine; they do not view
the face only, but the whole form, and our frequent change of dress
must make it difficult for them to distinguish the individuals they
know and trust from strangers. Even a dog is occasionally at fault
when his master, last seen in black and grey suit, reappears in straw
hat and flannels.

Nevertheless, if birds once come to know those who habitually protect
them and form a trustful habit, this will not be abandoned on account
of a little rough treatment on occasions. A lady at Worthing told me
of her blackbirds breeding in her garden that they refused to be kept
from the strawberries when she netted the ripening fruit. One or more
of the birds would always manage to get under the net; and when she
would capture the robber and carry him, screaming, struggling and
pecking at her fingers, to the end of the garden and release him, he
would immediately follow her back to the bed and set himself to get at
the fruit again.

In a bird's relations with other mammals there is no room for doubt or
confusion; each consistently acts after its kind; once hostile, always
hostile; and if once seen to be harmless, then to be trusted for ever.
The fox must always be feared and detested; his disposition, like his
sharp nose and red coat, is unchangeable; so, too, with the cat,
stoat, weasel, etc. On the other hand, in the presence of herbivorous
mammals, birds show no sign of suspicion; they know that all these
various creatures are absolutely harmless, from the big
formidable-looking bull and roaring stag, to the mild-eyed, timorous
hare and rabbit. It is common to see wagtails and other species
attending cattle in the pastures, and keeping close to their noses, on
the look-out for the small insects driven from hiding in the grass.
Daws and starlings search the backs of cattle and sheep for ticks and
other parasites, and it is plain that their visits are welcome. Here a
joint interest unites bird and beast; it is the nearest approach to
symbiosis among the higher vertebrates of this country, but is far
less advanced than the partnership which exists between the rhinoceros
bird and the rhinoceros or buffalo, and between the spur-winged plover
and crocodile in Africa.

One day I was walking by a meadow, adjoining the Bishop's palace at
Wells, where several cows were grazing, and noticed a little beyond
them a number of rooks and starlings scattered about. Presently a
flock of about forty of the cathedral jackdaws flew over me and
slanted down to join the other birds, when all at once two daws
dropped out of the flock on to the back of the cow standing nearest to
me. Immediately five more daws followed, and the crowd of seven birds
began eagerly pecking at the animal's hide. But there was not room
enough for them to move freely; they pushed and struggled for a
footing, throwing their wings out to keep their balance, looking like
a number of hungry vultures fighting for places on a carcase; and soon
two of the seven were thrown off and flew away. The remaining five,
although much straitened for room, continued for some time scrambling
over the cow's back, busy with their beaks and apparently very much
excited over the treasure they had discovered. It was amusing to see
how the cow took their visit; sinking her body as if about to lie down
and broadening her back, and dropping her head until her nose touched
the ground, she stood perfectly motionless, her tail stuck out behind
like a pump-handle. At length the daws finished their feeding and
quarrelling and flew away; but for some minutes the cow remained
immovable in the same attitude, as if the rare and delightful
sensation of so many beaks prodding and so many sharp claws scratching
her hide had not yet worn off.

Deer, too, like cows, are very grateful to the daw for its services.
In Savernake Forest I once witnessed a very pretty little scene. I
noticed a hind lying down by herself in a grassy hollow, and as I
passed her at a distance of about fifty yards it struck me as singular
that she kept her head so low down that I could only see the top of it
on a level with her back. Walking round to get a better sight, I saw a
jackdaw standing on the turf before her, very busily pecking at her
face. With my glass I was able to watch his movements very closely; he
pecked round her eyes, then her nostrils, her throat, and in fact
every part of her face; and just as a man when being shaved turns his
face this way and that under the gentle guiding touch of the barber's
fingers, and lifts up his chin to allow the razor to pass beneath it,
so did the hind raise and lower and turn her face about to enable the
bird to examine and reach every part with his bill. Finally the daw
left the face, and, moving round, jumped on to the deer's shoulders
and began a minute search in that part; having finished this he jumped
on to the head and pecked at the forehead and round the bases of the
ears. The pecking done, he remained for some seconds sitting perfectly
still, looking very pretty with the graceful red head for a stand, the
hind's long ears thrust out on either side of him. From his living
perch he sprang into the air and flew away, going close to the
surface; then slowly the deer raised her head and gazed after her
black friend--gratefully, and regretting his departure, I could not
but think.

Some birds when breeding exhibit great anxiety at the approach of any
animal to the nest; but even when most excited they behave very
differently towards herbivorous mammals and those which they know to
be at all times the enemies of their kind. The nest of a
ground-breeding species may be endangered by the proximity of a goat,
sheep, deer, or any grazing animal, but the birds do not winnow the
air above it, scream, make threatening dashes at its head, and try to
lead it away as they would do in the case of a dog or fox. When small
birds dash at and violently attack large animals and man in defence of
their nest, even though the nest may not have been touched, the action
appears to be purely instinctive and involuntary, almost unconscious,
in fact. Acts of this kind are more often seen in humming-birds than
in birds of other families; and humming-birds do not appear to
discriminate between rapacious and herbivorous mammals. When they see
a large animal moving about they fly close to and examine it for a few
moments, then dart away; if it comes too near the nest they will
attack it, or threaten an attack. When examining their nests I have
had humming-birds dash into my face. The action is similar to that of
a stingless, solitary carpenter bee, common in La Plata: a round burly
insect with a shining steel-blue body: when the tree or bush in which
this bee has its nest is approached by a man it darts about in an
eccentric manner, humming loudly, and at intervals remains suspended
motionless for ten or fifteen seconds at a height of seven or eight
yards above his head; suddenly it dashes quick as lightning into his
face, inflicting a sharp blow. The bee falls, as if stunned, a space
of a couple of feet, then rises again to repeat the action.

There is certainly a wide difference between so simple an instinctive
action as this, which cannot be regarded as intelligent or conscious,
and the actions of most birds in the presence of danger to their eggs
or young. In species that breed on the ground in open situations the
dangers to which bird and nest are exposed are of different kinds,
and, leaving out the case of that anomalous creature, man, we see that
as a rule the bird's judgment is not at fault. In one case it is
necessary that he should guard himself while trying to save his nest;
in another case the danger is to the nest only, and he then shows that
he has no fear for himself. The most striking instance I have met
with, bearing on this last point, relates to the action of a
spur-winged lapwing observed on the Pampas. The bird's loud excited
cries attracted my attention; a sheep was lying down with its nose
directly over the nest, containing three eggs, and the plover was
trying to make it get up and go away. It was a hot day and the sheep
refused to stir; possibly the fanning of the bird's wings was grateful
to her. After beating the sheep's face for some time it began pecking
sharply at the nose; then the sheep raised her head, but soon grew
tired of holding it up, and no sooner was it lowered than the blows
and peckings began again. Again the head was raised, and lowered again
with the same result, and this continued for about twelve or fourteen
minutes, until the annoyance became intolerable; then the sheep raised
her head and refused to lower it any more, and in that very
uncomfortable position, with her nose high in the air, she appeared
determined to stay. In vain the lapwing waited, and at last began to
make little jumps at the face. The nose was out of reach, but by and
by, in one of its jumps, it caught the sheep's ear in its beak and
remained hanging with drooping wings and dangling legs. The sheep
shook her head several times and at last shook the bird off; but no
sooner was it down than it jumped up and caught the ear again; then at
last the sheep, fairly beaten, struggled up to her feet, throwing the
bird off, and lazily walked away, shaking her head repeatedly.

How great the confidence of the plover must have been to allow it to
act in such a manner!

This perfect confidence which birds have in the mammals they have been
taught by experience and tradition to regard as harmless must be
familiar to any one who has observed partridges associating with
rabbits. The manners of the rabbit, one would imagine, must be
exceedingly "upsetting" to birds of so timorous a disposition. He has
a way, after a quiet interval, of leaping into activity with startling
suddenness, darting violently away as if scared out of his senses; but
his eccentric movements do not in the least alarm his feathered
companions. One evening early in the month of March I witnessed an
amusing scene near Ockley, in Surrey. I was walking towards the
village about half an hour after sunset, when, hearing the loud call
of a partridge, I turned my eyes in the direction of the sound and saw
five birds on a slight eminence nearly in the centre of a small green
field, surrounded by a low thorn hedge. They had come to that spot to
roost; the calling bird was standing erect, and for some time he
continued to call at intervals after the others had settled down at a
distance of one or two yards apart. All at once, while I stood
watching the birds there was a rustling sound in the hedge, and out of
it burst two buck rabbits engaged in a frantic running fight. For some
time they kept near the hedge, but fighting rabbits seldom continue
long on one spot; they are incessantly on the move, although their
movements are chiefly round and round now one way--flight and
pursuit--then, like lightning, the foremost rabbit doubles back and
there is a collision, bitings, and rolling over and over together, and
in an instant they are up again, wide apart, racing like mad.
Gradually they went farther and farther from the hedge; and at length
chance took them to the very spot on which the partridges had settled,
and there for three or four minutes the duel went on. But the birds
refused to be turned out of their quarters. The bird that had called
still remained standing, expectant, with raised head, as if watching
for the appearance of some loiterer, while the others all kept their
places. Their quietude in the midst of that whirlwind of battle was
wonderful to see. Their only movement was when one of the birds was in
a direct line with a flying rabbit, when, if it stayed still, in
another moment it would be struck and perhaps killed by the shock;
then it would leap a few inches aside and immediately settle down
again. In this way every one of the birds had been forced to move
several times before the battle passed on towards the opposite side of
the field and left the covey in peace.

Social animals, Herbert Spencer truly says, "take pleasure in the
consciousness of one another's company;" but he appears to limit the
feeling to those of the same herd, or flock, or species. Speaking of
the mental processes of the cow, he tells us just how that large
mammal is impressed by the sight of birds that come near it and pass
across its field of vision; they are regarded in a vague way as mere
shadows, or shadowy objects, flitting or blown about hither and
thither over the grass or through the air. He didn't know a cow's
mind. My conviction is that all animals distinctly see in those of
other species, living, sentient, intelligent beings like themselves;
and that, when birds and mammals meet together, they take pleasure in
the consciousness of one another's presence, in spite of the enormous
difference in size, voice, habits, etc. I believe that this sympathy
exists and is just as strong between a cow and its small volatile
companion, the wagtail, as between a bird and mammal that more nearly
resemble each other in size; for instance, the partridge, or pheasant,
and rabbit.

The only bird with us that appears to have some such feeling of
pleasure in the company of man is the robin. It is not universal, not
even very common, and Macgillivray, in speaking of the confidence in
men of that bird during severe weather, very truly says, "In ordinary
times he is not perfectly disposed to trust in man." Any person can
prove this for himself by going into a garden or shrubbery and
approaching a robin. We see, too, that the bird shows intense anxiety
when its nest is approached by a man; this point, however, need not be
made much of, since all visitors, even its best friends, are unwelcome
to the breeding bird. Still, there is no doubt that the robin is less
distrustful of man than other species, but not surely because this
bird is regarded by most persons with kindly feelings. The curious
point is that the young birds find something in man to attract them.
This is usually seen at the end of summer, when the old birds have
gone into hiding, and it is then surprising to find how many of the
young robins left in possession of the ground appear to take pleasure
in the company of human beings. Often before a person has been many
minutes in a garden strolling about, he will discover that the quiet
little spotted bird is with him, hopping and flying from twig to twig
and occasionally alighting on the ground, keeping company with him,
sometimes sitting quite still a yard from his hand. The gardener is
usually attended by a friendly robin, and when he turns up the soil
the bird will come down close to his feet to pick up the small grubs
and worms. Is it not probable that the tameness of the tame young
robin so frequently met with is, like that of the robin who keeps
company with the gardener or woodman, an acquired habit; that the
young bird has made the discovery that when a person is moving about
among the plants, picking fruit perhaps, lurking insects are disturbed
at the roots and small spiders and caterpillars shaken from the
leaves? We are to the robin what the cow is to the wagtail and the
sheep to the starling--a food finder.

Among the birds of the homestead the swallow is another somewhat
exceptional species in his way of regarding man. He is too much a
creature of the air to take any pleasure in the company of heavy
animals, bound to earth; the distance is too great for sympathy to
exist. When we consider how closely he is bound and how much he is to
us, it is hard to believe that he is wholly unconscious of our
benefits, that when he returns in spring, overflowing with gladness,
to twitter his delightful airy music round the house, he is not
singing to us, glad to see us again after a long absence, to be once
more our welcome guest as in past years. But so it is. When there were
no houses in the land he built his nest in some rocky cavern, where a
she-wolf had her lair, and his life and music were just as joyous as
they are now, and the wolf suckling her cubs on the stony floor
beneath was nothing to him. But if by chance she climbed a little way
up or put her nose too near his nest, his lively twittering quickly
changed to shrill cries of alarm and anger. And we are no more than
the vanished wolf to the swallow, and so long as we refrain from
peeping into his nest and handling his eggs or young, he does not know
us, and is hardly conscious of our existence. All the social feelings
and sympathy of the swallow are for creatures as aerial and
swift-winged as itself--its playmates in the wide fields of air.

Swallows hawking after flies in a village street, where people are
walking about, is a familiar sight, Swifts are just as confident. A
short time ago, while standing in the churchyard at Farnham, in
Surrey, watching a bunch of ten or twelve swifts racing through the
air, I noticed that on each return to the church they followed the
same line, doubling round the tower on the same side, then sweeping
down close to the surface, and mounting again. Going to the spot I put
myself directly in their way--on their race-course as it were, at that
point where it touched the earth; but they did not on that account
vary their route; each time they came back they streamed screaming
past my head so near as almost to brush my face with their wings. But
I was never more struck by the unconcern at the presence of man shown
by these birds--swallows, martins, and swifts--as on one occasion at
Frensham, when the birds were very numerous. This was in the month of
May, about five weeks after I had witnessed the fight between two
rabbits, and the wonderful composure exhibited by a covey of
partridges through it all. It was on a close hot morning, after a
night of rain, when, walking down to Frensham Great Pond, I saw the
birds hawking about near the water. The may-flies were just out, and
in some mysterious way the news had been swiftly carried all over the
surrounding country. So great was the number of birds that the entire
population of swallows, house- and sand-martins, and swifts, must have
been gathered at that spot from the villages, farms, and sand-banks
for several miles around. At the side of the pond I was approaching
there is a green strip about a hundred and twenty or a hundred and
thirty yards in length and forty or fifty yards wide, and over this
ground from end to end the birds were smoothly and swiftly gliding
backwards and forwards. The whole place seemed alive with them.
Hurrying to the spot I met with a little adventure which it may not be
inapt to relate. Walking on through some scattered furze-bushes,
gazing intently ahead at the swallows, I almost knocked my foot
against a hen pheasant covering her young chicks on the bare ground
beside a dwarf bush. Catching sight of her just in time I started
back; then, with my feet about a yard from the bird, I stood and
regarded her for some time. Not the slightest movement did she make;
she was like a bird carved out of some beautifully variegated and
highly-polished stone, but her bright round eyes had a wonderfully
alert and wild expression. With all her stillness the poor bird must
have been in an agony of terror and suspense, and I wondered how long
she would endure the tension. She stood it for about fifty seconds,
then burst screaming away with such violence that her seven or eight
chicks were flung in all directions to a distance of two or three feet
like little balls of fluff; and going twenty yards away she dropped to
the ground and began beating her wings, calling loudly.

I then walked on, and in three or four minutes was on the green ground
in the thick of the swallows. They were in hundreds, flying at various
heights, but mostly low, so that I looked down on them, and they
certainly formed a curious and beautiful spectacle. So thick were
they, and so straight and rapid their flight, that they formed in
appearance a current, or rather many currents, flowing side by side in
opposite directions; and when viewed with nearly closed eyes the birds
were like black lines on the green surface. They were silent except
for the occasional weak note of the sand-martin; and through it all
they were perfectly regardless of me, whether I stood still or walked
about among them; only when I happened to be directly in the way of a
bird coming towards me he would swerve aside just far enough to avoid
touching me.

In the evening of that very day the behaviour of a number of
gold-crests, disturbed at my presence, surprised and puzzled me not a
little; their action had a peculiar interest just then, as the
encounter with the pheasant, and the sight of the multitude of
swallows and their indifference towards me were still very fresh in
memory. The incident has only an indirect bearing on the subject
discussed here, but I think it is worth relating.

About two miles from Frensham ponds there is a plantation of fir-trees
with a good deal of gorse growing scattered about among the trees; in
walking through this wood on previous occasions I had noticed that
gold-crests were abundant in it. Soon after sunset on the evening in
question I went through this wood, and after going about eighty to a
hundred yards became conscious of a commotion of a novel kind in the
branches above my head--conscious too that it had been going on for
some time, and that absorbed in thought I had not remarked it. A
considerable number of gold-crests were flitting through the branches
and passing from tree to tree, keeping over and near me, all together
uttering their most vehement cries of alarm. I stopped and listened to
the little chorus of shrill squeaking sounds, and watched the birds as
well as I could in the obscurity of the branches, flitting about in
the greatest agitation. It was perfectly clear that I was the cause of
the excitement, as the birds increased in number as long as I stood at
that spot, until there could not have been less than forty or fifty,
and when I again walked on they followed. One expects to be mobbed and
screamed at by gulls, terns, lapwings, and some other species, when
approaching their nesting-places, but a hostile demonstration of this
kind from such minute creatures as gold-crests, usually indifferent to
man, struck me as very unusual and somewhat ridiculous. What, I asked
myself, could be the reason of their sudden alarm, when my previous
visits to the wood had not excited them in the least? I could only
suppose that I had, without knowing it, brushed against a nest, and
the alarm note of the parent birds had excited the others and caused
them to gather near me, and that in the obscure light they had
mistaken me for some rapacious animal. The right explanation (I think
it the right one) was found by chance three months later.

In August I was in Ireland, staying at a country house among the
Wicklow hills. There were several swallows' nests in the stable, one
or two so low that they could be reached by the hand, and the birds
went in and out regardless of the presence of any person. In a few
days the young were out, sitting in rows on the roof of the house or
on a low fence near it, where their parents fed them for a short time.
After these young birds were able to take care of themselves they
still kept about the house, and were joined by more swallows and
martins from the neighbourhood. One bright sunny morning, when not
fewer than two or three score of these birds were flying about the
house, gaily twittering, I went into the garden to get some fruit. All
at once a swallow uttered his loud shrill alarm cry overhead and at
the same time darted down at me, almost grazing my hat, then mounting
up he continued making swoops, screaming all the time. Immediately all
the other swallows and martins came to the spot, joining in the cry,
and continued flying about over my head, but not darting at me like
the first bird. For some moments I was very much astonished at the
attack; then I looked round for the cat--it must be the cat, I
thought. This animal had a habit of hiding among the gooseberry
bushes, and, when I stooped to pick the fruit, springing very suddenly
upon my back. But pussy was nowhere near, and as the swallow continued
to make dashes at me, I thought that there must be something to alarm
it on my head, and at once pulled off my hat and began to examine it.
In a moment the alarm cries ceased and the whole gathering of swallows
dispersed in all directions. There was no doubt that my hat had caused
the excitement; it was of tweed, of an obscure grey colour, striped or
barred with dark brown. Throwing it down on the ground among the
bushes it struck me that its colour and markings were like those of a
grey striped cat. Any one seeing it lying there would, at the first
moment, have mistaken it for a cat lying curled up asleep among the
bushes. Then I remembered that I had been wearing the same delusive,
dangerous-looking round tweed fishing-hat on the occasion of being
mobbed by the gold-crests at Frensham. Of course the illusion could
only have been produced in a bird looking down upon the top of the hat
from above.




CHAPTER III

DAWS IN THE WEST COUNTRY


Daws are more abundant in the west and south-west of England generally
than in any other part of the kingdom; and they abound most in
Somerset, or so it has seemed to me. It is true that the largest
congregations of daws in the entire country are to be seen at
Savernake in Wiltshire, where the ancient hollow beeches and oaks in
the central parts of the forest supply them with all the nesting holes
they require. There is no such wood of old decaying trees in Somerset
to attract them to one spot in such numbers, but the country generally
is singularly favourable to them. It is mainly a pastoral country with
large areas of rich, low grass land, and ranges of high hills, where
there are many rocky precipices such as the daw loves. For very good
reasons he prefers the inland to the sea-cliff as a breeding site. It
is, to begin with, in the midst of his feeding ground, whereas the
sea-wall is a boundary to a feeding ground beyond which the bird
cannot go. Better still, the inland bird has an immense advantage over
the other in travelling to and from his nest in bad weather.
When the wind blows strong from the sea the seaside bird must
perpetually fight against it and win his home by sheer muscular
exertion. The other bird, able to go foraging to this side or that,
according to the way the wind blows, can always have the wind as a
help instead of a hindrance.

Somerset also possesses a long coast-line and some miles of
sea-cliffs, but the colonies of jackdaws found here are small compared
with those of the Mendip range. The inland-cliff breeding daws that
inhabit the valley of the Somerset Axe alone probably greatly
outnumber all the daws in Middlesex, or Surrey, or Essex.

Finally, besides the cliffs and woods, there are the old towns and
villages--small towns and villages with churches that are almost like
cathedrals. No county in England is richer in noble churches, and no
kind of building seems more attractive to the "ecclesiastical daw"
than the great Perpendicular tower of the Glastonbury type, which is
so common here.

Of the old towns which the bird loves and inhabits in numbers, Wells
comes first. If Wells had no birds it would still be a city one could
not but delight in. There are not more than half a dozen towns in all
the country where (if I were compelled to live in towns) life would
not seem something of a burden; and of these, two are in
Somerset--Bath and Wells. Of the former something will be said further
on: Wells has the first place in my affections, and is the one town in
England the sight of which in April and early May, from a neighbouring
hill, has caused me to sigh with pleasure. Its cathedral is assuredly
the loveliest work of man in this land, supremely beautiful, even
without the multitude of daws that make it their house, and may be
seen every day in scores, looking like black doves perched on the
stony heads and hands and shoulders of that great company of angels
and saints, apostles, kings, queens, and bishops, that decorate the
wonderful west front. For in this building--not viewed as in a
photograph or picture, nor through the eye of the mere architect or
archaeologist, who sees the gem but not the setting--nature and man
appear to have worked together more harmoniously than in others.

But it is hard to imagine a birdless Wells. The hills, beautiful with
trees and grass and flowers, come down to it; cattle graze on their
slopes; the peewit has its nest in their stony places, and the kestrel
with quick-beating wings hangs motionless overhead. Nature is round
it, breathing upon and touching it caressingly on every side; flowing
through it like the waters that gave it its name in olden days, that
still gush with noise and foam from the everlasting rock, to send
their crystal currents along the streets. And with nature, in and
around the rustic village-like city, live the birds. The green
woodpecker laughs aloud from the group of old cedars and pines, hard
by the cathedral close--you will not hear that woodland sound in any
other city in the kingdom; and the rooks caw all day from the rookery
in the old elms that grow at the side of the palace moat. But the
cathedral daws, on account of their numbers, are the most important of
the feathered inhabitants of Wells. These city birds are familiarly
called "Bishop's Jacks," to distinguish them from the "Ebor Jacks,"
the daws that in large numbers have their home and breeding-place in
the neighbouring cliffs, called the Ebor Rocks.

The Ebor daws are but the first of a succession of colonies extending
along the side of the Cheddar valley. A curious belief exists among
the people of Wells and the district, that the Ebor Jacks make better
pets than the Bishop's Jacks. If you want a young bird you have to pay
more for one from the rocks than from the cathedral. I was assured
that the cliff bird makes a livelier, more intelligent and amusing pet
than the other. A similar notion exists, or existed, at Hastings,
where there was a saying among the fisher folks and other natives that
"a Grainger daa is worth a ha'penny more than a castle daa." The
Grainger rock, once a favourite breeding-place of the daws at that
point, has long since fallen into the sea, and the saying has perhaps
died out.

At Wells most of the cathedral birds--a hundred couples at
least--breed in the cavities behind the stone statues, standing, each
in its niche, in rows, tier above tier, on the west front. In April,
when the daws are busiest at their nest-building, I have amused myself
early every morning watching them flying to the front in a constant
procession, every bird bringing his stick. This work is all done in
the early morning, and about half-past eight o'clock a man comes with
a barrow to gather up the fallen sticks--there is always a big
barrowful, heaped high, of them; and if not thus removed the
accumulated material would in a few days form a rampart or zareba,
which would prevent access to the cathedral on that side.

It has often been observed that the daw, albeit so clever a bird,
shows a curious deficiency of judgment when building, in his
persistent efforts to carry in sticks too big for the cavity. Here,
for instance, each morning in turning over the litter of fallen
material I picked up sticks measuring from four or five to seven feet
in length. These very long sticks were so slender and dry that the
bird was able to lift and to fly with them; therefore, to his corvine
mind, they were suitable for his purpose. It comes to this: the daw
knows a stick when he sees one, but the only way of testing its
usefulness to him is to pick it up in his beak, then to try to fly
with it. If the stick is six feet long and the cavity will only admit
one of not more than eighteen inches, he discovers his mistake only on
getting home. The question arises: Does he continue all his life long
repeating this egregious blunder? One can hardly believe that an old,
experienced bird can go on from day to day and year to year wasting
his energies in gathering and carrying building materials that will
have to be thrown away in the end--that he is, in fact, mentally on a
level with the great mass of meaner beings who forget nothing and
learn nothing. It is not to be doubted that the daw was once a builder
in trees, like all his relations, with the exception of the
cliff-breeding chough. He is even capable of reverting to the original
habit, as I know from an instance which has quite recently come to my
knowledge. In this case a small colony of daws have been noticed for
several years past breeding in stick nests placed among the clustering
foliage of a group of Scotch firs. This colony may have sprung from a
bird hatched and reared in the nest of a carrion crow or magpie.
Still, the habit of breeding in holes must be very ancient, and
considering that the jackdaw is one of the most intelligent of our
birds, one cannot but be astonished at the rude, primitive, blundering
way in which the nest-building work is generally performed. The most
we can see by carefully watching a number of birds at work is that
there appears to be some difference with regard to intelligence
between bird and bird. Some individuals blunder less than others; it
is possible that these have learned something from experience; but if
that be so, their better way is theirs only, and their young will not
inherit it.

One morning at Wells as I stood on the cathedral green watching the
birds at their work, I witnessed a rare and curious scene--one amazing
to an ornithologist. A bird dropped a stick--an incident that occurred
a dozen times or oftener any minute at that busy time; but in this
instance the bird had no sooner let the stick fall than he rushed down
after it to attempt its recovery, just as one may see a sparrow drop a
feather or straw, and then dart down after it and often recover it
before it touches the ground. The heavy stick fell straight and fast
on to the pile of sticks already lying on the pavement, and instantly
the daw was down and had it in his beak, and thereupon laboriously
flew up to his nesting-place, which was forty to fifty feet high. At
the moment that he rushed down after the falling stick two other daws
that happened to be standing on ledges above dropped down after him,
and copied his action by each picking up a stick and flying with it to
their nests. Other daws followed suit, and in a few minutes there was
a stream of descending and ascending daws at that spot, every
ascending bird with a stick in his beak. It was curious to see that
although sticks were lying in hundreds on the pavement along the
entire breadth of the west front, the daws continued coming down only
at that spot where the first bird had picked up the stick he had
dropped. By and by, to my regret, the birds suddenly took alarm at
something and rose up, and from that moment not one descended.

Presently the man came round with his rake and broom and barrow to
tidy up the place. Before beginning his work he solemnly made the
following remark: "Is it not curious, sir, considering the distance
the birds go to get their sticks, and the work of carrying them, that
they never, by any chance, think to come down and pick up what they
have dropped!" I replied that I had heard the same thing said before,
and that it was in all the books; and then I told him of the scene I
had just witnessed. He was very much surprised, and said that such a
thing had never been witnessed before at that place. It had a
disturbing effect on him, and he appeared to me to resent this
departure from their old ancient conservative ways on the part of the
cathedral birds.

For many mornings after I continued to watch the daws until the
nest-building was finished, without witnessing any fresh outbreak of
intelligence in the colony: they had once more shaken down into the
old inconvenient traditional groove, to the manifest relief of the man
with the broom and barrow.

Bath, like Wells, is a city that has a considerable amount of nature
in its composition, and is set down in a country of hills, woods,
rocks and streams, and is therefore, like the other, a city loved by
daws and by many other wild birds. It is a town built of white stone
in the hollow of an oblong basin, with the river Avon flowing through
it; and though perhaps too large for perfect beauty, it is exceedingly
pleasant. Its "stone walls do not a prison make," since they do not
shut you out from rural sights and sounds: walking in almost any
street, even in the lowest part, in the busiest, noisiest centre of
the town, you have but to lift your eyes to see a green hill not far
away; and viewed from the top of one of these hills that encircle it,
Bath, in certain favourable states of the atmosphere, wears a
beautiful look. One afternoon, a couple of miles out, I was on the top
of Barrow Hill in a sudden, violent storm of rain and wind; when the
rain ceased, the sun burst out behind me, and the town, rain-wet and
sun-flushed, shone white as a city built of whitest marble against the
green hills and black cloud on the farther side. Then on the slaty
blackness appeared a complete and most brilliant rainbow, on one side
streaming athwart the green hill and resting on the centre of the
town, so that the high, old, richly-decorated Abbey Church was seen
through a band of green and violet mist. That storm and that rainbow,
seen by chance, gave a peculiar grace and glory to Bath, and the
bright, unfading picture it left in memory has perhaps become too much
associated in my mind with the thought of Bath, and has given me an
exaggerated idea of its charm.

When staying in Bath in the winter of 1898-9 I saw a good deal of bird
life even in the heart of the town. At the back of the house I lodged
in, in New King Street, within four minutes' walk of the Pump Room,
there was a strip of ground called a garden, but with no plants except
a few dead stalks and stumps and two small leafless trees.
Clothes-lines were hung there, and the ground was littered with old
bricks and rubbish, and at the far end of the strip there was a
fowl-house with fowls in it, a small shed, and a wood-pile. Yet to
this unpromising-looking spot came a considerable variety of birds.
Starlings, sparrows, and chaffinches were the most numerous, while the
blackbird, thrush, robin, hedge-sparrow and wren were each represented
by a pair. The wrens lived in the wood-pile, and were the only members
of the little feathered community that did not join the others at
table when crumbs and scraps were thrown out.

It was surprising to find all or most of these birds evidently
wintering on that small plot of ground in the middle of the town,
solely for the sake of the warmth and shelter it afforded them, and
the chance crumbs that came in their way. It is true that I fed them
regularly, but they were all there before I came. Yet it was not an
absolutely safe place for them, being much infested by cats,
especially by a big black one who was always on the prowl, and who had
a peculiarly murderous gleam in his luminous yellow orbs when he
crouched down to watch or attempted to stalk them. One could not but
imagine that the very sight of such eyes in that black, devilish face
would have been enough to freeze their blood with sudden terror, and
make them powerless to fly from him. But it was not so: he could
neither fascinate nor take them by surprise. No sooner would he begin
to practise his wiles than all the population would be up in arms--the
loud, sharp summons of the blackbird sounding first; then the
starlings would chatter angrily, the thrush scream, the chaffinches
begin to _pink-pink_ with all their might, and the others would join
in, even the small hideling wrens coming out of their fortress of
faggots to take part in the demonstration. Then puss would give it up
and go away, or coil himself up and go to sleep on the sloping roof of
the tiny shed or in some other sheltered spot; peace and quiet would
once more settle on the little republic, and the birds would be
content to dwell with their enemy in their midst in full sight of
them, so long as he slept or did not watch them too narrowly.

Finding that blue tits were among the visitors at the back, I hung up
some lumps of suet and a cocoa-nut to the twigs of the bushes. The
suet was immediately attacked, but judging from the suspicious way in
which they regarded the round brown object swinging in the wind, the
Bath tits had never before been treated to a cocoa-nut. But though
suspicious, it was plain that the singular object greatly excited
their curiosity. On the second day they made the discovery that it was
a new and delightful dish invented for the benefit of the blue tits,
and from that time they were at it at all hours, coming and going from
morning till night. There were six of them, and occasionally they were
all there at once, each one anxious to secure a place, and never able
when he got one to keep it longer than three or four seconds at a
time. Looking upon them from an upper window, as they perched against
and flitted round and round the suspended cocoa-nut, they looked like
a gathering of very large pale-blue flies flitting round and feeding
on medlar.

No doubt the sparrow is the most abundant species in Bath--I have got
into a habit of not noticing that bird, and it is as if I did not see
him; but after him the starling is undoubtedly the most numerous. He
is, we know, increasing everywhere, but in no other town in England
have I found him in such numbers. He is seen in flocks of a dozen to
half a hundred, busily searching for grubs on every lawn and green
place in and round the town, and if you go up to some elevated spot so
as to look down upon Bath, you will see flocks of starlings arriving
and departing at all points. As you walk the streets their metallic
_clink-clink-clink_ sounds from all quarters--small noises which to
most men are lost among the louder noises of a populous town. It is as
if every house had a peal of minute bells hidden beneath the tiles or
slates of the roof, or among the chimney-pots, that they were
constantly being rung, and that every bell was cracked.

The ordinary or unobservant person sees and hears far more of the
jackdaw than of any other bird in Bath. Daws are seen and heard all
over the town, but are most common about the Abbey, where they soar
and gambol and quarrel all day long, and when they think that nobody
is looking, drop down to the streets to snatch up and carry off any
eatable-looking object that catches their eye.

It was here at this central spot, while I stood one day idly watching
the birds disporting themselves about the Abbey and listened to their
clamour, that certain words of Ruskin came into my mind, and I began
to think of them not merely with admiration, as when I first read them
long ago, but critically.

Ruskin, one of our greatest prose writers, is usually at his best in
the transposition of pictures into words, his descriptions of what he
has seen, in nature and art, being the most perfect examples of "word
painting" in the language. Here his writing is that of one whose
vision is not merely, as in the majority of men, the most important
and intellectual of the senses, but so infinitely more important than
all the others, and developed and trained to so extraordinary a
degree, as to make him appear like a person of a single sense. We may
say that this predominant sense has caused, or fed upon, the decay of
the others. This is to me a defect in the author I most admire; for
though he makes me see, and delight in seeing, that which was
previously hidden, and all things gain in beauty and splendour, I yet
miss something from the picture, just as I should miss light and
colour from a description of nature, however beautifully written, by a
man whose sense of sight was nothing or next to nothing to him, but
whose other senses were all developed to the highest state of
perfection.

No doubt Ruskin is, before everything, an artist: in other words, he
looks at nature and all visible things with a purpose, which I am
happily without: and the reflex effect of his purpose is to make
nature to him what it can never appear to me--a painted canvas. But
this subject, which I have touched on in a single sentence, demands a
volume.

Ruskin wrote of the cathedral daws, "That drift of eddying black
points, now closing, now scattering, now settling suddenly into
invisible places among the bosses and flowers, the crowd of restless
birds that fill the whole square with that strange clangour of theirs,
so harsh and yet so soothing." For it seemed to me that he had seen
the birds but had not properly heard them; or else that to his mind
the sound they made was of such small consequence in the effect of the
whole scene--so insignificant an element compared with the sight of
them--that it was really not worth attending to and describing
accurately.

Possibly, in this particular case, when in speaking of the daws he
finished his description by throwing in a few words about their
voices, he was thinking less of the impression on his own mind,
presumably always vague about natural sounds, than of what the poet
Cowper had said in the best passage in his best work about "sounds
harsh and inharmonious in themselves," which are yet able to produce a
soothing effect on us on account of the peaceful scenes amid which
they are heard.

Cowper's notion of the daw's voice, by the way, was just as false as
that expressed by Ruskin, as we may find in his paraphrase of Vincent
Bourne's lines to that bird:--

   There is a bird that by his coat,
   And by the hoarseness of his note
   Might be supposed a crow.

Now the daw is capable at times of emitting both hoarse and harsh
notes, and the same may perhaps be said of a majority of birds; but
his usual note--the cry or caw varied and inflected a hundred ways,
which we hear every day and all day long where daws abound--is neither
harsh like the crow's, nor hoarse like the rook's. It is, in fact, as
unlike the harsh, grating caw of the former species as the clarion
call of the cock is unlike the grunting of swine. It may not be
described as bell-like nor metallic, but it is loud and clear, with an
engaging wildness in it, and, like metallic sounds, far-reaching; and
of so good a quality that very little more would make it ring
musically.

Sometimes when I go into this ancient abbey church, or into some
cathedral, and seating myself, and looking over a forest of
bonnets, see a pale young curate with a black moustache, arrayed
in white vestments, standing before the reading-desk, and hear him
gabbling some part of the Service in a continuous buzz and rumble
that roams like a gigantic blue-bottle through the vast dim
interior, then I, not following him--for I do not know where he is,
and cannot find out however much I should like to--am apt to
remember the daws out of doors, and to think that it would be well
if that young man would but climb up into the highest tower, or on
to the roof, and dwell there for the space of a year listening to
them; and that he would fill his mouth with polished pebbles, and
medals, and coins and seals and seal-rings, and small porcelain
cats and dogs, and little silver pigs, and other objects from the
chatelaines of his lady admirers, and strive to imitate that
clear, penetrating sound of the bird's voice, until he had
mastered the rare and beautiful arts of voice production and
distinct understandable speech.

To go back to Cowper--the poet who has been much in men's thoughts of
late, and who appears to us as perhaps the most modern-minded of those
who ceased to live a century ago. Undoubtedly he was as bad a
naturalist as any singer before or after him, and as any true poet has
a perfect right to be. As bad, let us say, as Shakespeare and
Wordsworth and Tennyson. He does not, it is true, confound the sparrow
and hedge-sparrow like Wordsworth, nor confound the white owl with the
brown owl like Tennyson, nor puzzle the ornithologist with a "sea-blue
bird of March." But we must not forget that he addressed some verses
to a nightingale heard on New Year's Day. It is clear that he did not
know the crows well, for in a letter of May 10, 1780, to his friend
Newton, he writes: "A crow, rook, or raven, has built a nest in one of
the young elm-trees, at the side of Mrs Aspray's orchard." But when he
wrote those words--

   Sounds inharmonious in themselves, and harsh,
   Yet heard in scenes where peace for ever reigns,
   And only there, please highly for their sake--

words which I have suggested misled Ruskin, and have certainly
misled others--he, Cowper, knew better. His real feeling, and
better and wiser thought, is expressed in one of his incomparable
letters (Hayley, vol. ii. p. 230)--

"My green-house is never so pleasant as when we are just
on the point of surrendering it.... I sit with all the windows and
the door wide open, and am regaled with the scent of every flower
in a garden as full of flowers as I have known how to make it. We
keep no bees, but if I lived in a hive I could hardly have more of
their music. All the bees in the neighbourhood resort to a bed of
mignonette opposite to the window, and pay me for the honey they
get out of it by a hum, which, though rather monotonous, is as
agreeable to my ears as the whistling of my linnets. All the
sounds that nature utters are delightful, at least in this
country. I should not perhaps find the roaring of lions in Africa,
or of bears in Russia, very pleasing; but I know no beast in
England whose voice I do not account as musical, save and except
always the braying of an ass. The notes of all our birds and fowls
please me, without one exception. I should not indeed think of
keeping a goose in a cage that I might hang him up in the parlour
for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common, or in a
farmyard, is no bad performer; and as to insects, if the black
beetle, and beetles indeed of all hues, will keep out of my way, I
have no objection to any of the rest; on the contrary, in whatever
key they sing, from the gnat's fine treble to the bass of
the bumble-bee, I admire all. Seriously, however, it strikes me as
a very observable instance of providential kindness to men, that
such an exact accord has been contrived between his ear and the
sounds with which, at least in a rural situation, it is almost
every moment visited."

Who has not felt the truth of this saying, that all natural sounds
heard in their proper surroundings are pleasing; that even those
which we call harsh do not distress, jarring or grating on our
nerves, like artificial noises! The braying of the donkey was to
Cowper the one exception in animal life; but he never heard it in
its proper conditions. I have often listened to it, and have been
deeply impressed, in a wild, silent country, in a place where
herds of semi-wild asses roamed over the plains; and the sound at
a distance had a wild expression that accorded with the scene, and
owing to its much greater power effected the mind more than the
trumpeting of wild swans, and shrill neighing of wild horses, and
other far-reaching cries of wild animals.

About the sounds emitted by geese in a state of nature, and the
effect produced on the mind, I shall have something to say in a
chapter on that bird.




CHAPTER IV

EARLY SPRING IN SAVERNAKE FOREST


When the spring-feeling is in the blood, infecting us with vague
longings for we know not what; when we are restless and seem to be
waiting for some obstruction to be removed--blown away by winds, or
washed away by rains--some change that will open the way to liberty
and happiness,--the feeling not unfrequently takes a more or less
definite form: we want to go away somewhere, to be at a distance
from our fellow-beings, and nearer, if not to the sun, at all
events to wild nature. At such times I think of all the places
where I should like to be, and one is Savernake; and thither in
two following seasons I have gone to ramble day after day,
forgetting the world and myself in its endless woods.

It is not that spring is early there; on the contrary, it is actually
later by many days than in the surrounding country. It is flowerless
at a time when, outside the forest, on southern banks and by the
hedge-side, in coppices and all sheltered spots, the firstlings of the
year are seen--purple and white and yellow. The woods, which are
composed almost entirely of beech and oak, are leafless. The aspect on
a dull cold day is somewhat cheerless. On the other hand, there is
that largeness and wildness which accord with the spring mood; and
there are signs of the coming change even in the greyest weather.
Standing in some wide green drive or other open space, you see all
about you acres on acres, miles on miles, of majestic beeches, and
their upper branches and network of terminal twigs, that look at a
distance like heavy banked-up clouds, are dusky red and purple with
the renewed life that is surging in them. There are jubilant cries of
wild creatures that have felt the seasonal change far more keenly than
we are able to feel it. Above everything, we find here that
solitariness and absence of human interest now so rare in England. For
albeit social creatures in the main, we are yet all of us at times
hermits in heart, if not exactly wild men of the woods; and that
solitude which we create by shutting ourselves from the world in a
room or a house, is but a poor substitute--nay, a sham: it is to
immure ourselves in a cage, a prison, which hardly serves to keep out
the all-pervading atmosphere of miserable conventions, and cannot
refresh and invigorate us. There are seasons and moods when even the
New Forest does not seem sufficiently remote from life: in its most
secluded places one is always liable to encounter a human being, an
old resident, going about in the exercise of his commoner's rights; or
else his ponies or cows or swine. These last, if they be not of some
improved breed, may have a novel or quaint aspect, as of wild
creatures, but the appearance is deceptive; as you pass they lift
their long snouts from grubbing among the dead leaves to salute you
with a too familiar grunt--an assurance that William Rufus is dead,
and all is well; that they are domestic, and will spend their last
days in a stye, and end their life respectably at the hands of the
butcher.

At Savernake there is nothing so humanised as the pig, even of the old
type; you may roam for long hours and see no man and no domestic
animal. You have heard that this domain is the property of some
person, but it seems like a fiction. The forest is nature's and yours.
There you are at liberty to ramble all day unchallenged by any one; to
walk, and run to warm yourself; to disturb a herd of red deer, or of
fallow deer, which are more numerous; to watch them standing still to
gaze back at you, then all with one impulse move rapidly away, showing
their painted tails, keeping a kind of discipline, row behind row,
moving over the turf with that airy tripping or mincing gait that
strikes you as quaint and somewhat bird-like. Or you may coil yourself
up, adder-like, beside a thick hawthorn bush, or at the roots of a
giant oak or beech, and enjoy the vernal warmth, while outside of your
shelter the wind blows bleak and loud.

To lie or sit thus for an hour at a time listening to the wind is an
experience worth going far to seek. It is very restorative. That is a
mysterious voice which the forest has: it speaks to us, and somehow
the life it expresses seems nearer, more intimate, than that of the
sea. Doubtless because we are ourselves terrestrial and woodland in
our origin; also because the sound is infinitely more varied as well
as more human in character. There are sighings and moanings, and wails
and shrieks, and wind-blown murmurings, like the distant confused
talking of a vast multitude. A high wind in an extensive wood always
produces this effect of numbers. The sea-like sounds and rhythmic
volleyings, when the gale is at its loudest, die away, and in the
succeeding lull there are only low, mysterious agitated whisperings;
but they are multitudinous; the suggestion is ever of a vast
concourse--crowds and congregations, tumultuous or orderly, but all
swayed by one absorbing impulse, solemn or passionate. But not always
moved simultaneously. Through the near whisperings a deeper, louder
sound comes from a distance. It rumbles like thunder, falling and
rising as it rolls onwards; it is antiphonal, but changes as it
travels nearer. Then there is no longer demand and response; the
smitten trees are all bent one way, and their innumerable voices are
as one voice, expressing we know not what, but always something not
wholly strange to us--lament, entreaty, denunciation.

Listening, thinking of nothing, simply living in the sound of the
wind, that strange feeling which is unrelated to anything that
concerns us, of the life and intelligence inherent in nature,
grows upon the mind. I have sometimes thought that never does the
world seem more alive and watchful of us than on a still,
moonlight night in a solitary wood, when the dusky green foliage
is silvered by the beams, and all visible objects and the white
lights and black shadows in the intervening spaces seem
instinct with spirit. But it is not so. If the conditions be
favourable, if we go to our solitude as the crystal-gazer to his
crystal, with a mind prepared, this faculty is capable of awaking
and taking complete possession of us by day as well as by night.

As the trees are mostly beeches--miles upon miles of great trees,
many of them hollow-trunked from age and decay--the fallen leaves
are an important element in the forest scenery. They lie half a
yard to a yard deep in all the deep hollows and dells and old
water-worn channels, and where the ground is sheltered they cover
acres of ground--millions and myriads of dead, fallen beech leaves.
These, too, always seem to be alive. It is a leaf that refuses to
die wholly. When separated from the tree it has, if not
immortality, at all events a second, longer life. Oak and ash and
chestnut leaves fade from month to month and blacken, and finally
rot and mingle with the earth, while the beech leaf keeps its
sharp clean edges unbroken, its hard texture and fiery colour, its
buoyancy and rustling incisive sound. Swept by the autumn winds
into sheltered hollows and beaten down by rains, the leaves lie
mingled in one dead, sodden mass for days and weeks at a time, and
appear ready to mix with the soil; but frost and sun suck
up the moisture and the dead come to life again. They glow like
fire, and tremble at every breath. It was strange and beautiful to
see them lying all around me, glowing copper and red and gold when
the sun was strong on them, not dead, but sleeping like a
bright-coloured serpent in the genial warmth; to see, when the
wind found them, how they trembled, and moved as if awakening; and
as the breath increased rose up in twos and threes and half-dozens
here and there, chasing one another a little way, hissing and
rustling; then all at once, struck by a violent gust, they would
be up in thousands, eddying round and round in a dance, and,
whirling aloft, scatter and float among the lofty branches to
which they were once attached.

On a calm day, when there was no motion in the sunlit yellow leaves
below and the reddish-purple cloud of twigs above, the sounds of
bird-life were the chief attraction of the forest. Of these the cooing
of the wood-pigeon gave me the most pleasure. Here some reader may
remark that this pigeon's song is a more agreeable sound than its
plain cooing note. This, indeed, is perhaps thought little of. In most
biographies of the bird it is not even mentioned that he possesses
such a note. Nevertheless I prefer it to the song. The song
itself--the set melody composed of half a dozen inflected notes,
repeated three or four times with little or no variation--is
occasionally heard in the late winter and early spring, but at this
time of the year it is often too husky or croaky to be agreeable. The
songster has not yet thrown off his seasonal cold; the sound might
sometimes proceed from a crow suffering from a catarrh. It improves as
the season advances. The song is sometimes spelt in books:

   _Coo-coo-roo, coo-coo-roo._

A lady friend assures me the right words of this song are:

   Take _two_ cows, David.

She cannot, if she tries, make the bird say anything different,
for these are the words she was taught to hear in the song, as a
child, in Leicestershire. Of course they are uttered with a great
deal of emotion in the tone, David being tearfully, almost
sobbingly, begged and implored to take two cows; the emphasis is
very strong on the two--it is apparently a matter of the utmost
consequence that David should not take one, nor three, nor any
other number of cows, but just two.

In East Anglia I have been informed that what the bird really and
truly says is--

   My toe bleeds, Betty.

Many as are the species capable of articulate speech, as we may
see by referring to any ornithological work, there is no bird in
our woods whose notes more readily lend themselves to this
childish fancy than the wood-pigeon, on account of the depth and
singularly human quality of its voice. The song is a passionate
complaint. One can fancy the human-like feathered creature in her
green bower, pleading, upbraiding, lamenting; and, listening, we
will find it easy enough to put it all into plain language:

   O swear not you love me, for you cannot be true,
   O perjured wood-pigeon! Go from me--woo
   Some other! Heart-broken I rue
   That softness, ah me! when you cooed your false coo.
   Soar to your new love--the creature in blue!
   Who, who would have thought it of you!
   And perhaps you consider her beau--
   Oo--tiful! O you are too too cru--
   Bid them come shoo--oot me, do, do!
   Would I had given my heart to a hoo--
   Oo-ting wood-owl, cuckoo, woodcock, hoopoo!

One morning, at a village in Berkshire, I was walking along the
road, about twenty-five yards from a cottage, when I heard, as I
imagined, the familiar song of the wood-pigeon; but it sounded
too close, for the nearest trees were fifty yards distant.
Glancing up at the open window of an upper room in the cottage, I
made the discovery that my supposed pigeon was a four-year-old
child who had recently been chastised by his mother and sent
upstairs to do penance. There he sat by the open window, his face
in his hands, crying, not as if his heart would break, but seeming
to take a mournful pleasure in the rhythmical sound of his own
sobs and moans; they had settled into a rising and falling
_boo-hoo_, with regularly recurring long and short notes, agreeable
to the ear, and very creditable to the little crier's musical
capacity. The incident shows how much the pigeon's plaint
resembles some human sounds.

The plain cooing note is so common in this order of birds that it
may be regarded as the original and universal pigeon language, out
of which the set songs have been developed, with, in most
instances, but little change in the quality of the sound. In the
multitude of species there are voices clear, resonant, thick, or
husky, or guttural, hollow or booming, grating and grunting; but,
however much they vary, you can generally detect the _pigeon_ or
_family_ sound, which is more or less human-like. In some species
the set song has almost superseded the plain single note,
which has diminished to a mere murmur; in others, on the contrary,
there is no song at all, unless the single unvarying coo can be
called a song. In most species in the typical genus Columba the
plain coo is quite distinct from the set song, but has at the same
time developed into a kind of second song, the note being
pleasantly modulated and repeated many times. We find this in the
rock-dove: the curious guttural sounds composing its set song,
which accompany the love antics of the male, are not musical,
while the clear inflected cooing note is agreeable to most ears.
It is a pleasing morning sound of the dove-cote; but the note, to
be properly appreciated, must be heard in some dimly lighted
ocean-cavern in which the bird breeds in its wild state. The
long-drawn, oft-repeated musical coo mingles with and is heard
above the murmuring and lapping of the water beneath; the hollow
chamber retains and prolongs the sound, and makes it more
sonorous, and at the same time gives it something of mystery.

Of all the cooing notes of the different species I am acquainted with,
that of the stock-dove, a pigeon with no set song, is undoubtedly the
most attractive: next in order is that of the wood-pigeon on account
of its depth and human-like character. And it is far from monotonous.
In this wood in March I have often kept near a pigeon for half an hour
at a time hearing it uttering its cooing note, repeated half a dozen
or more times, at intervals of three or four minutes; and again and
again the note has changed in length and power and modulation. In the
profound stillness, on a windless day, of the vast beechen woods,
these sonorous notes had a singularly beautiful effect.

After spending a short time in the forest, one might easily get
the idea that it is a sanctuary for all the persecuted creatures
of the crow family. It is not quite that; the ravens have been
destroyed here as in most places; but the other birds of that
tribe are so numerous that even the most bloodthirsty keeper might
be appalled at the task of destroying them. The clearance would
doubtless have been effected if this noble forest had passed, as
so nearly happened, out of the hands of the family that have so
long possessed it: that calamity was happily averted. Not only are
the rooks there in legions, having their rookeries in the park,
but, throughout the forest, daws, carrion crows, jays, and magpies
are abundant. The jackdaws outnumber all the other species (rooks
included) put together; they literally swarm, and their
ringing, yelping cries may be heard at all hours of the day in any
part of the forest. In March, when they are nesting, their numbers
are concentrated in those parts of the wood where the trees, beech
and oak, are very old and have hollow trunks. In some places you
will find many acres of wood where every tree is hollow and
apparently inhabited. Yet there are doubtless some hollow trees
into which the daw is not permitted to intrude. The wood-owl is
common here, and is presumably well able to hold his castle
against all aggressors. If one could but climb into the airy
tower, and, sitting invisible, watch the siege and defence and the
many strange incidents of the war between these feathered foes!
The daw, bold yet cautious, venturing a little way into the dim
interior, with shrill threats of ejectment, ruffling his grey pate
and peeping down with his small, malicious, serpent-like grey
eyes; the owl puffing out his tiger-coloured plumage, and lifting
to the light his pale, shield-like face and luminous eyes,--would
indeed be a rare spectacle; and then, what hissings, snappings,
and beak-clatterings, and shrill, cat-like, and yelping cries!
But, although these singular contests go on so near us, a few
yards above the surface, Savernake might be in the misty
mid-region of Weir, or on the slopes of Mount Yanik, for all the
chance we have of witnessing them.

An experience I had one day when I was new to the forest and used
occasionally to lose myself, gave me some idea of the numbers of
jackdaws breeding in Savernake. During my walk I came to a spot
where all round me and as far as could be seen the trees were in
an advanced state of decay: not only were they hollow and rotten
within, but the immense horizontal branches and portions of the
trunks were covered with a thick crop of fern, which, mixed with
dead grass and moss, gave the dying giants of the forest a
strange, ragged and desolate appearance. Many a time looking at
one of these trees I have been reminded of Holman Hunt's forlorn
Scapegoat. Here the daws had their most populous settlement. As I
advanced, the dead twigs and leaves crackling beneath my feet,
they rose up everywhere, singly and in twos and threes and
half-dozens, darting hurriedly away and disappearing among the
trees before me. The alarm-note they emit at such times is like
their usual yelping call subdued to a short, querulous chirp; and
this note now sounded before me and on either hand, at a distance
of about one hundred yards, uttered continually by so many
birds that their voices mingled into a curious sharp murmur. Tired
of walking, I sat down on a root in the shelter of a large oak,
and remained there perfectly motionless for about an hour. But the
birds never lost their suspicion; all the time the distant subdued
tempest of sharp notes went on, occasionally dying down until it
nearly ceased, then suddenly rising and spreading again until I
was ringed round with the sound. At length the loud, sharp
invitation or order to fly was given and taken up by many birds;
then, through the opening among the trees before me, I saw them
rise in a dense flock and circle about at a distance: other flocks
rose on the right and left hands and joined the first; and finally
the whole mass come slowly overhead as if to explore; but when the
foremost birds were directly over me the flock divided into two
columns, which deployed to the right and left, and at a distance
poured again into the trees. There could not have been fewer than
two thousand birds in the flock that came over me, and they were
probably all building in that part of the forest.

The daw, whether tame or distrustful of man, is always
interesting. Here I was even more interested in the jays, and it
was indeed chiefly for the pleasure of seeing them, when they are
best to look at, that I visited this forest. I had also
formed the idea that there was no place in England where the jay
could be seen to better advantage, as they are, or until recently
were, exceedingly abundant at Savernake, and were not in constant
fear of the keeper and his everlasting gun. Here one could witness
their early spring assemblies, when the jay, beautiful at all
times, is seen at his very best.

It is necessary to say here that this habit of the jay does not appear
to be too well known to our ornithologists. When I stated in a small
work on British Birds a few years ago that jays had the custom of
congregating in spring, a distinguished naturalist, who reviewed the
book in one of the papers, rebuked me for so absurd a statement, and
informed me that the jay is a solitary bird except at the end of
summer and in the early autumn, when they are sometimes seen in
families. If I had not made it a rule never to reply to a critic, I
could have informed this one that I knew exactly where his knowledge
of the habits of the jay was derived-that it dated back to a book
published ninety-nine years ago. It was a very good book, and all it
contains, some errors included, have been incorporated in most of the
important ornithological works which have appeared during the
nineteenth century. But though my critic thus "wrote it all by rote,"
according to the books, "he did not write it right." The ancient error
has not, however, been repeated by all writers on the subject.
Seebohm, in his History of British Birds, wrote: "Sometimes,
especially in Spring, fortune may favour you, and you will see a
regular gathering of these noisy birds.... It is only at this time
that the jay displays a social disposition; and the birds may often be
heard to utter a great variety of notes, some of the modulations
approaching almost to a song."

The truth of the statement I have made that most of our writers on
birds have strictly followed Montague in his account of the jay's
habits, unmistakably shows itself in all they say about the bird's
language. Montagu wrote in his famous Dictionary of Birds (1802):--

"Its common notes are various, but harsh; will sometimes in spring
utter a sort of song in a soft and pleasing manner, but so low as
not to be heard at any distance; and at intervals introduce the
bleatings of a Lamb, mewing of a Cat, the note of a Kite or
Buzzard, hooting of an Owl, and even the neighing of a Horse.

"These imitations are so exact, even in a natural wild state, that
we have frequently been deceived."

This description somewhat amplified, and the wording
varied to suit the writer's style, has been copied into most books
on British birds--the lamb and the cat, and the kite and the horse,
faithfully appearing in most cases. Yet it is certain that if all
the writers had listened to the jay's vocal performances for
themselves, they would have given a different account. It is not
that Montagu was wrong: he went to nature for his facts and put
down what he heard, or thought he heard, but the particular sounds
which he describes they would not have heard.

My experience is, that the same notes and phrases are not
ordinarily heard in any two localities; that the bird is able to
emit a great variety of sounds--some highly musical; that he is
also a great mimic in a wild irregular way, mixing borrowed notes
with his own, and flinging them out anyhow, so that there is no
order nor harmony, and they do not form a song.

But he also has a real song, which may be heard in any assembly of
jays and from some male birds after the congregating season is
over and breeding is in progress. This singing of the jay is
somewhat of a puzzle, as it is not the same song in any two
places, and gives one the idea that there is no inherited and no
traditional song in this species, but that each bird that
has a song has invented it for himself. It varies from "a sort of
low song," as Montagu said,--a soft chatter and warble which one
can just hear at a distance of thirty or forty yards,--to a song
composed of several musical notes harmoniously arranged, which may
be heard distinctly a quarter of a mile away. This set and
far-reaching song is rare, but some birds have a single very
powerful and musical note, or short phrase, which they repeat at
regular intervals by way of song. If by following up the sound one
can get near enough to the tree where the meeting is being held to
see what is going on, it is most interesting to watch the
vocalist, who is like a leader, and who, perched quietly,
continues to repeat that one powerful, unchanging, measured sound
in the midst of a continuous concert of more or less musical
sounds from the other birds.

What I should very much like to know is, whether these powerful
and peculiar notes, phrases, and songs of the jay, which are
clearly not imitations of other species, are repeated year after
year by the birds in the same localities, or are dropped for ever
or forgotten at the end of each season. It is hard for me to find
this out, because I do not as a rule revisit the same places in
spring, and on going to a new or a different spot I find
that the birds utter different sounds. Again, the places where
jays assemble in numbers are very few and far between. It is true,
as an observant gamekeeper once said to me, that if there are as
many as half a dozen to a dozen jays in any wood they will
contrive to hold a meeting; but when the birds are few and much
persecuted, it is difficult to see and hear them at such times,
and when seen and heard, no adequate idea is formed of the beauty
of their displays, and the power and variety of their language, as
witnessed in localities where they are numerous, and fear of the
keeper's gun has not damped their mad, jubilant spirits.

In genial weather the jays' assembly may be held at any hour, but
is most frequently seen during the early part of the day: on a
fine warm morning in March and April one can always count on
witnessing an assembly, or at all events of hearing the birds, in
any wood where they are fairly common and not very shy. They are
so vociferous and so conspicuous to the eye during these social
intervals, and at the same time so carried away by excitement,
that it is not only easy to find and see them, but possible at
times to observe them very closely.

The loud rasping alarm- and angry-cry of the jay is a
sound familiar to every one; the cry used by the bird to call his
fellows together is somewhat different. It resembles the cry or
call of the carrion crow, in localities where that bird is not
persecuted, when, in the love season, he takes his stand on the
top of the nesting-tree and calls with a prolonged, harsh,
grating, and exceedingly powerful note, many times repeated. The
jay's call has the same grating or grinding character, but is
louder, sharper, more prolonged, and in a quiet atmosphere may be
heard distinctly a mile away. The wood is in an uproar when the
birds assemble and scream in concert while madly pursuing one
another over the tall trees.

At such times the peculiar flight of the jay is best seen and is very
beautiful. In almost all birds that have short, round wings, as we may
see in our little wren, and in game birds, and the sparrow-hawk, and
several others, the wing-beats are exceedingly rapid. This is the case
with the magpie; the quickness of the wing-beats causes the black and
white on the quills to mingle and appear a misty grey; but at short
intervals the bird glides and the wings appear black and white again.
The jay, although his wings are so short and round, when not in a
hurry progresses by means of comparatively slow, measured wing-beats,
and looks as if swimming rather than flying.

It is when the gathered birds all finally settle on a tree that they
are most to be admired. They will sometimes remain on the spot for
half an hour or longer, displaying their graces and emitting the
extraordinary medley of noises mixed with musical sounds. But they do
not often sit still at such times; if there are many birds, and the
excitement is great, some of them are perpetually moving, jumping and
flitting from branch to branch, and springing into the air to wheel
round or pass over the tree, all apparently intent on showing off
their various colours--vinaceous brown, sky blue, velvet black, and
glistening white--to the best advantage.

Again and again, when watching these gatherings at Savernake and at
other places where jays abound, I have been reminded of the
description given by Alfred Russel Wallace of the bird of paradise
assemblies in the Malayan region. Our jay in some ways resembles his
glorious Eastern relation; and although his lustre is so much less, he
is at his very best not altogether unworthy of being called the
British Bird of Paradise.




CHAPTER V

A WOOD WREN AT WELLS


East of Wells Cathedral, close to the moat surrounding the bishop's
palace, there is a beautifully wooded spot, a steep slope, where the
birds had their headquarters. There was much to attract them there:
sheltered by the hill behind, it was a warm corner, a wooded angle,
protected by high old stone walls, dear to the redstart, masses of
ivy, and thickets of evergreens; while outside the walls were green
meadows and running water. When going out for a walk I always passed
through this wood, lingering a little in it; and when I wanted to
smoke a pipe, or have a lazy hour to myself among the trees, or
sitting in the sun, I almost invariably made for this favourite spot.
At different hours of the day I was a visitor, and there I heard the
first spring migrants on their arrival--chiff-chaff, willow wren,
cuckoo, redstart, blackcap, white-throat. Then, when April was drawing
to an end, I said, There are no more to come. For the wryneck, lesser
white-throat, and garden warbler had failed to appear, and the few
nightingales that visit the neighbourhood had settled down in a more
secluded spot a couple of miles away, where the million leaves in
coppice and brake were not set a-tremble by the melodious thunder of
the cathedral chimes.

Nevertheless, there was another still to come, the one I perhaps love
best of all. On the last day of April I heard the song of the wood
wren, and at once all the other notes ceased for a while to interest
me. Even the last comer, the mellow blackcap, might have been singing
at that spot since February, like the wren and hedge-sparrow, so
familiar and workaday a strain did it seem to have compared with this
late warbler. I was more than glad to welcome him to that particular
spot, where if he chose to stay I should have him so near me.

It is well known that the wood wren can only be properly seen
immediately after his arrival in this country, at the end of April or
early in May, when the young foliage does not so completely hide his
slight unresting form, as is the case afterwards. For he,
too, is green in colour; like Wordsworth's green linnet,

   A brother of the leaves he seems.

There is another reason why he can be seen so much better during the
first days of his sojourn with us: he does not then keep to the higher
parts of the tall trees he frequents, as his habit is later, when the
air is warm and the minute winged insects on which he feeds are
abundant on the upper sun-touched foliage of the high oaks and
beeches. On account of that ambitious habit of the wood wren there is
no bird with us so difficult to observe; you may spend hours at a
spot, where his voice sounds from the trees at intervals of half a
minute to a minute, without once getting a glimpse of his form. At the
end of April the trees are still very thinly clad; the upper foliage
is but an airy garment, a slight golden-green mist, through which the
sun shines, lighting up the dim interior, and making the bed of old
fallen beech-leaves look like a floor of red gold. The small-winged
insects, sun-loving and sensitive to cold, then hold their revels near
the surface; and the bird, too, prefers the neighbourhood of the
earth. It was so in the case of the wood wren I observed at Wells,
watching him on several consecutive days, sometimes for an hour or two
at a stretch, and generally more than once a day. The spot where he
was always to be found was quite free from underwood, and the trees
were straight and tall, most of them with slender, smooth boles.
Standing there, my figure must have looked very conspicuous to all the
small birds in the place; but for a time it seemed to me that the wood
wren paid not the slightest attention to my presence; that as he
wandered hither and thither in sunlight and shade at his own sweet
will, my motionless form was no more to him than a moss-grown stump or
grey upright stone. By and by it became apparent that the bird knew me
to be no stump or stone, but a strange living creature whose
appearance greatly interested him; for invariably, soon after I had
taken up my position, his careless little flights from twig to twig
and from tree to tree brought him nearer, and then nearer, and finally
near me he would remain for most of the time. Sometimes he would
wander for a distance of forty or fifty yards away, but before long he
would wander back and be with me once more, often perching so near
that the most delicate shadings of his plumage were as distinctly seen
as if I had had him perched on my hand.

The human form seen in an unaccustomed place always excites a good
deal of attention among the birds; it awakes their curiosity,
suspicion, and alarm. The wood wren was probably curious and nothing
more; his keeping near me looked strange only because he at the same
time appeared so wholly absorbed in his own music. Two or three times
I tried the experiment of walking to a distance of fifty or sixty
yards and taking up a new position; but always after a while he would
drift thither, and I would have him near me, singing and moving, as
before.

I was glad of this inquisitiveness, if that was the bird's motive
(that I had unconsciously fascinated him I could not believe); for of
all the wood wrens I have seen this seemed the most beautiful, most
graceful in his motions, and untiring in song. Doubtless this was
because I saw him so closely, and for such long intervals. His fresh
yellowish-green upper and white under plumage gave him a wonderfully
delicate appearance, and these colours harmonised with the tender
greens of the opening leaves and the pale greys and silvery whites of
the slender boles.

Seebohm says of this species: "They arrive in our woods in
marvellously perfect plumage. In the early morning sun they look
almost as delicate a yellowish-green as the half-grown leaves amongst
which they disport themselves. In the hand the delicate shading of the
eye-stripe, and the margin of the feathers of the wings and tail, is
exquisitely beautiful, but is almost all lost under the rude handling
of the bird-skinner."

The concluding words sound almost strange; but it is a fact that this
sylph-like creature is sometimes shattered with shot and its poor
remains operated on by the bird-stuffer. Its beauty "in the hand"
cannot compare with that exhibited when it lives and moves and sings.
Its appearance during flight differs from that of other warblers on
account of the greater length and sharpness of the wings. Most
warblers fly and sing hurriedly; the wood wren's motions, like its
song, are slower, more leisurely, and more beautiful. When moved by
the singing passion it is seldom still for more than a few moments at
a time, but is continually passing from branch to branch, from tree to
tree, finding a fresh perch from which to deliver its song on each
occasion. At such times it has the appearance of a delicately coloured
miniature kestrel or hobby. Most lovely is its appearance when it
begins to sing in the air, for then the long sharp wings beat time to
the first clear measured notes, the prelude to the song. As a rule,
however, the flight is silent, and the song begins when the new perch
is reached--first the distinct notes that are like musical strokes,
and fall faster and faster until they run and swell into a long
passionate trill--the woodland sound which is like no other.

Charming a creature as the wood wren appears when thus viewed closely
in the early spring-time, he is not my favourite among small birds
because of his beauty of shape and colour and graceful motions, which
are seen only for a short time, but on account of his song, which
lasts until September; though I may not find it very easy to give a
reason for the preference.

It comforts me a little in this inquiry to remember that Wordsworth
preferred the stock-dove to the nightingale--that "creature of
ebullient heart." The poet was a little shaky in his ornithology at
times; but if we take it that he meant the ring-dove, his preference
might still seem strange to some. Perhaps it is not so very strange
after all.

If we take any one of the various qualities which we have agreed to
consider highest in bird-music, we find that the wood wren compares
badly with his fellow-vocalists--that, measured by this standard, he
is a very inferior singer. Thus, in variety, he cannot compare with
the thrush, garden-warbler, sedge-warbler, and others; in brilliance
and purity of sound with the nightingale, blackcap, etc.; in strength
and joyousness with the skylark; in mellowness with the blackbird; in
sprightliness with the goldfinch and chaffinch; in sweetness with the
wood-lark, tree-pipit, reed-warbler, the chats and wagtails, and so on
to the end of all the qualities which we regard as important. What,
then, is the charm of the wood wren's song? The sound is unlike any
other, but that is nothing, since the same can be said of the wryneck
and cuckoo and grasshopper warbler. To many persons the wood wren's
note is a bird-sound and nothing more, and it may even surprise them
to hear it called a song. Indeed, some ornithologists have said that
it is not a song, but a call or cry, and it has also been described as
"harsh."

I here recall a lady who sat next to me on the coach that took me from
Minehead to Lynton. The lady resided at Lynton, and finding that I was
visiting the place for the first time, she proceeded to describe its
attractions with fluent enthusiasm. When we arrived at the town, and
were moving very slowly into it, my companion turned and examined my
face, waiting to hear the expressions of rapturous admiration that
would fall from my lips. Said I, "There is one thing you can boast of
in Lynton. So far as I know, it is the only town in the country where,
sitting in your own room with the windows open, you can listen to the
song of the wood wren." Her face fell. She had never heard of the wood
wren, and when I pointed to the tree from which the sound came and she
listened and heard, she turned away, evidently too disgusted to say
anything. She had been wasting her eloquence on an unworthy
subject--one who was without appreciation for the sublime and
beautiful in nature. The wild romantic Lynn, tumbling with noise and
foam over its rough stony bed, the vast wooded hills, the piled-up
black rocks (covered in places with beautiful red and blue lettered
advertisements), had been passed by in silence--nothing had stirred me
but the chirping of a miserable little bird, which, for all that she
knew or cared, might be a sparrow! When we got down from the coach a
couple of minutes later, she walked away without even saying good-bye.

There is no doubt that very many persons know and care as little about
bird voices as this lady; but how about the others who do know and
care a good deal--what do they think and feel about the song of the
wood wren? I know two or three persons who are as fond of the bird as
I am; and two or three recent writers on bird life have spoken of its
song as if they loved it. The ornithologists have in most cases been
satisfied to quote Gilbert White's description of Letter XIX.: "This
last haunts only the tops of trees in high beechen woods, and makes a
sibilous grasshopper-like noise now and then, at short intervals,
shaking a little with its wings when it sings."

White was a little more appreciative in the case of the willow wren
when he spoke of its "joyous, easy, laughing note"; yet the willow
wren has had to wait a long time to be recognised as one of our best
vocalists. Some years ago it was greatly praised by John Burroughs,
who came over from America to hear the British songsters, his thoughts
running chiefly on the nightingale, blackcap, throstle, and blackbird;
and he was astonished to find that this unfamed warbler, about which
the ornithologists had said little and the poets nothing, was one of
the most delightful vocalists, and had a "delicious warble." He waxed
indignant at our neglect of such a singer, and cried out that it had
too fine a song to please the British ear; that a louder coarser voice
was needed to come up to John Bull's standard of a good song. No one
who loves a hearty laugh can feel hurt at his manner of expressing
himself, so characteristic of an American. Nevertheless, the fact
remains that only since Burroughs' appreciation of the British
song-birds first appeared, several years ago, the willow wren, which
he found languishing in obscurity, has had many to praise it. At all
events, the merits of its song are now much more freely acknowledged
than they were formerly.

Perhaps the wood wren's turn will come by and by. He is still an
obscure bird, little known, or not known, to most people: we are more
influenced by what the old writers have said than we know or like to
believe; our preferences have mostly been made for us. The species
which they praised and made famous have kept their places in popular
esteem, while other species equally charming, which they did not know
or said nothing about, are still but little regarded. It is hardly to
be doubted that the wood wren would have been thought more of if
Willughby, the Father of British Ornithology, had known it and
expressed a high opinion of its song; or that it would have had
millions to admire it if Chaucer or Shakespeare had singled it out for
a few words of praise.

It is also probably the fact that those who are not students, or close
observers of bird life, seldom know more than a very few of the most
common species; and that when they hear a note that pleases them they
set it down to one of the half-dozen or three or four songsters whose
names they remember. I met with an amusing instance of this common
mistake at a spot in the west of England, where I visited a castle on
a hill, and was shown over the beautiful but steep grounds by a stout
old dame, whose breath and temper were alike short. It was a bright
morning in May, and the birds were in full song. As we walked through
the shrubbery a blackcap burst into a torrent of wild heart-enlivening
melody from amidst the foliage not more than three yards away. "How
well that blackcap sings!" I remarked. "That blackbird," she
corrected; "yes, it sings well." She stuck to it that it was a
blackbird, and to prove that I was wrong assured me that there were no
blackcaps there. Finding that I refused to acknowledge myself in
error, she got cross and dropped into sullen silence; but ten or
fifteen minutes later she returned of her own accord to the subject.
"I've been thinking, sir," she said, "that you must be right. I said
there are no blackcaps here because I've been told so, but all the
same I've often remarked that the blackbird has two different songs.
Now I know, but I'm so sorry that I didn't know a few days sooner." I
asked her why. She replied, "The other day a young American lady came
to the castle and I took her over the grounds. The birds were singing
the same as to-day, and the young lady said, 'Now, I want you to tell
me which is the blackcap's song. Just think,' she said, 'what a
distance I have come, from America! Well, when I was bidding good-bye
to my friends at home I said, "Don't you envy me? I'm going to Old
England to hear the blackcap's song."' Well, when I told her we had no
blackcaps she was so disappointed; and yet, sir, if what you say is
right, the bird was singing near us all the time!"

Poor young lady from America! I should have liked to know whose
written words first fired her brain with desire of the blackcap's
song--a golden voice in imagination's ear, while the finest home
voices were merely silvern. I think of my own case; how in boyhood
this same bird first warbled to me in some lines of a poem I read; and
how, long years afterwards, I first heard the real song--beautiful,
but how unlike the song I had imagined!--one bright evening in early
May, at Netley Abbey. But the poet's name had meanwhile slipped out of
memory; nothing but a vague impression remained (and still persists)
that he flourished and had great fame about the beginning of the
nineteenth century, and that now his (or her) fame and works are
covered with oblivion.

To return to the subject of this paper: the wood wren--the secret of
its charm. We see that, tried by ordinary standards, many other
singers are its superiors; what, then, is the mysterious something in
its music that makes it to some of us even better than the best?
Speaking for myself, I should say because it is more harmonious, or in
more perfect accord with the nature amid which it is heard; it is the
truer woodland voice.

The chaffinch as a rule sings in open woods and orchards and groves
when there is light and life and movement; but sometimes in the heart
of a deep wood the silence is broken by its sudden loud lyric: it is
unexpected and sounds unfamiliar in such a scene; the wonderfully
joyous ringing notes are like a sudden flood of sunshine in a shady
place. The sound is intensely distinct and individual, in sharp
contrast to the low forest tones: its effect on the ear is similar to
that produced on the sight by a vivid contrast in colours, as by a
splendid scarlet or shining yellow flower blooming solitary where all
else is green. The effect produced by the wood wren is totally
different; the strain does not contrast with, but is complementary to,
the "tremulous cadence low" of inanimate nature in the high woods, of
wind-swayed branches and pattering of rain and lisping and murmuring
of innumerable leaves--the elemental sounds out of which it has been
fashioned. In a sense it may be called a trivial and a monotonous
song--the strain that is like a long tremulous cry, repeated again and
again without variation; but it is really beyond criticism--one would
have to begin by depreciating the music of the wind. It is a voice of
the beechen woods in summer, of the far-up cloud of green, translucent
leaves, with open spaces full of green shifting sunlight and shadow.
Though resonant and far-reaching it does not strike you as loud, but
rather as the diffused sound of the wind in the foliage concentrated
and made clear--a voice that has light and shade, rising and passing
like the wind, changing as it flows, and quivering like a
wind-fluttered leaf. It is on account of this harmony that it is not
trivial, and that the ear never grows tired of listening to it: sooner
would it tire of the nightingale--its purest, most brilliant tone and
most perfect artistry.

The continuous singing of a skylark at a vast height above the green,
billowy sun and shadow-swept earth is an etherealised sound which
fills the blue space, fills it and falls, and is part of that visible
nature above us, as if the blue sky, the floating clouds, the wind and
sunshine, has something for the hearing as well as for the sight. And
as the lark in its soaring song is of the sky, so the wood wren is of
the wood.




CHAPTER VI

THE SECRET OF THE WILLOW WREN


The willow wren is one of the commonest and undoubtedly the most
generally diffused of the British songsters. A summer visitor, one of
the earliest to arrive, usually appearing on the South Coast in the
last week in March; a little later he may be met with in very nearly
every wood, thicket, hedge, common, marsh, orchard, and large garden
throughout the kingdom--it is hard to say, writes Seebohm, where he is
not found. Wherever there are green perching-places, and small
caterpillars, flies and aphides to feed upon, there you will see and
hear the willow wren. He is a sweet and constant singer from the date
of his arrival until about the middle of June, when he becomes silent
for a season, resuming his song in July, and continuing it throughout
August and even into September. This late summer singing is, however,
fitful and weak and less joyous in character than in the spring. But
in spite of his abundance and universality, and the charm of his
little melody, he is not familiarly known to the people generally, as
they know the robin redbreast, pied wagtail, dunnock, redstart,
wheatear, and stonechat. The name we call him by is a very old one; it
was first used in English by Ray, in his translation of Willughby's
Ornithology, about three centuries ago; but it still remains a
book-name unknown to the rustic. Nor has this common little bird any
widely known vernacular name. If by chance you find a country-man who
knows the bird, and has a name for it, this will be one which is
applied indiscriminately to two, three, or four species. The willow
wren, in fact, is one of those little birds that are "seen rather than
distinguished," on account of its small size, modest colouring, and
its close resemblance to other species of warblers; also on account of
the quiet, gentle character of its song, which is little noticed in
the spring and summer concert of loud, familiar voices.

One day in London during the late summer I was amused and at the same
time a little disgusted at this general indifference to the delicate
beauty in a bird-sound which distinguishes the willow wren even among
such delicate singers as the warblers: it struck me as a kind of
aesthetic hardness of hearing. I heard the song in the flower walk, in
Kensington Gardens, on a Sunday morning, and sat down to listen to it;
and for half an hour the bird continued to repeat his song two or
three times a minute on the trees and bushes within half a dozen yards
of my seat. Just after I had sat down, a throstle, perched on the
topmost bough of a thorn that projected over the walk, began his song,
and continued it a long time, heedless of the people passing below.
Now, I noticed that in almost every case the person approaching lifted
his eyes to the bird above, apparently admiring the music, sometimes
even pausing for a moment in his walk; and that when two or three came
together they not only looked up, but made some remark about the
beauty of the song. But from first to last not one of all the
passers-by cast a look towards the tree where the willow wren was
singing; nor was there anything to show that the sound had any
attraction for them, although they must have heard it. The loudness of
the thrush prevented them from giving it any attention, and made it
practically inaudible. It was like a pimpernel blossoming by the side
of a poppy, or dahlia, or peony, where, even if seen, it would not be
noticed as a beautiful flower.

In the chapter on the wood wren, I endeavoured to trace to its source
the pleasurable feelings which the song of that bird produces in me and
in many others--a charm exceeding that of many more celebrated
vocalists. In that chapter the song of the willow wren was mentioned
incidentally. Now, these two--wood wren and willow wren--albeit nearly
related, are, in the character of their notes, as widely different as it
is possible for two songsters to be; and when we listen attentively to
both, we recognise that the feeling produced in us differs in each
case--that it has a different cause. In the case of the willow wren it
might be said off-hand that our pleasure is simply due to the fact that
it is a melodious sound, associated in our minds with summer scenes. As
much could be said of any other migrant's song--nightingale, tree-pipit,
blackcap, garden warbler, swallow, and a dozen more. But it does not
explain the individual and very special charm of this particular
bird--what I have ventured to call the secret of the willow wren. After
all, it is not a deeply hidden secret, and has indeed been half guessed
or hinted by various writers on bird melody; and as it also happens to
be the secret of other singers besides the willow wren, we may, I think,
find in it an explanation of the fact that the best singers do not
invariably please us so well as some that are considered inferior.

The song of the willow wren has been called singular and unique among
our birds; and Mr Warde Fowler, who has best described it, says that
it forms an almost perfect cadence, and adds, "by which I mean that it
descends gradually, not, of course, on the notes of our musical scale,
by which no birds in their natural state would deign to be fettered,
but through fractions of one or perhaps two of our tones, and without
returning upward at the end." Now, this arrangement of its notes,
although very rare and beautiful, does not give the little song its
highest aesthetic value. The secret of the charm, I imagine, is
traceable to the fact that there is distinctly something human-like in
the quality of the voice, its timbre. Many years ago an observer of
wild birds and listener to their songs came to this country, and
walking one day in a London suburb he heard a small bird singing among
the trees. The trees were in an enclosure and he could not see the
bird, but there would, he thought, be no difficulty in ascertaining
the species, since it would only be necessary to describe its peculiar
little song to his friends and they would tell him. Accordingly, on
his return to the house he proceeded to describe the song and ask the
name of the singer. No one could tell him, and much to his surprise,
his account of the melody was received with smiles of amusement and
incredulity. He described it as a song that was like a wonderfully
bright and delicate human voice talking or laughingly saying something
rather than singing. It was not until some time afterwards that the
bird-lover in a strange land discovered that his little talker and
laugher among the leaves was the willow wren. In vain he had turned to
the ornithological works; the song he had heard, or at all events the
song as he had heard it, was not described therein; and yet to this
day he cannot hear it differently--cannot dissociate the sound from
the idea of a fairy-like child with an exquisitely pure, bright,
spiritual voice laughingly speaking in some green place.

And yet Gilbert White over a century ago had noted the human quality
in the willow wren's voice when he described it as an "easy, joyous,
laughing note." It is still better to be able to quote Mr Warde
Fowler, when writing in A Year with the Birds, on the futile attempts
which are often made to represent birds' songs by means of our
notation, since birds are guided in their songs by no regular
succession of intervals. Speaking of the willow wren in this
connection, he adds: "Strange as it may seem, the songs of birds may
perhaps be more justly compared with the human voice when speaking,
than with a musical instrument, or with the human voice when singing."
The truth of this observation must strike any person who will pay
close attention to the singing of birds; but there are two criticisms
to be made on it. One is that the resemblance of a bird's song to a
human voice when speaking is confined to some or to a few species; the
second is that it is a mistake to think, as Mr Fowler appears to do,
that the resemblance is wholly or mainly due to the fact that the
bird's voice is free when singing--that, like the human voice in
talking, it is not tied to tones and semitones. For instance, we note
this peculiarity in the willow wren, but not in, say, the wren and
chaffinch, although the songs of these two are just as free, just as
independent of regular intervals as our voices when speaking and
laughing. The resemblance in a bird's song to human speech is entirely
due to the human-like quality in the voice; for we find that other
songsters--notably the swallow--have a charm similar to that of the
willow wren, although the notes of the former bird are differently
arranged, and do not form anything like a cadence. Again, take the
case of the blackbird. We are accustomed to describe the blackbird's
voice as flute-like, and the flute is one of the instruments which
most nearly resemble the human voice. Now, on account of the leisurely
manner in which the blackbird gives out his notes, the resemblance to
human speech is not so pronounced as in the case of the willow wren or
swallow; but when two or three or half a dozen blackbirds are heard
singing close together, as we sometimes hear them in woods and
orchards where they are abundant, the effect is singularly beautiful,
and gives the idea of a conversation being carried on by a set of
human beings of arboreal habits (not monkeys) with glorified voices.
Listening to these blackbird concerts, I have sometimes wondered
whether or not they produced the same effect on others' ears as on
mine, as of people talking to one another in high-pitched and
beautiful tones. Oddly enough, it was only while writing this chapter
that I by chance found an affirmative answer to my question. Glancing
through Leslie's Riverside Letters, which I had not previously seen, I
came upon the following remarks, quoted from Sir George Grove, in a
letter to the author, on the blackbird's singing: "He selects a spot
where he is within hearing of a comrade, and then he begins quite at
leisure (not all in a hurry like the thrush) a regular conversation.
'And how are you? Isn't this a fine day? Let us have a nice talk,'
etc., etc. He is answered in the same strain, and then replies, and so
on. Nothing more thoughtful, more refined, more feeling, can be
conceived." In another passage he writes: "I love them (the robins),
but they fill a much smaller part than the blackbird does in my heart.
To hear the blackbird talking to his mate a field off, with
deliberate, refined conversation, the very acme of grace and courtesy,
is perfectly splendid."

There are two more common British songsters that produce much the same
effect as the willow wren and blackbird; these are the swallow and
pied wagtail. They are not in the first rank as melodists, and I can
find no explanation of the fact that they please me better than the
great singers other than their more human-like tones, which to my
hearing have something of an exceedingly beautiful contralto sound.
The swallow's song is familiar to every one, but that of the wagtail
is not well known. The bird has two distinct songs: one, heard
oftenest in early spring, consists of a low rambling warble, with some
resemblance to the whinchat's song; it is the second song, heard
occasionally until late June, frequently uttered on the wing--a
torrent of loud, rapidly uttered, and somewhat swallow-like
notes--that comes nearest in tone to the human voice, and has the
greatest charm.

After these, we find other songsters with one or two notes, or a
phrase, human-like in quality, in their songs. Of these I will only
mention the blackcap, linnet, and tree-pipit. The most beautiful of
the blackcap's notes, which come nearest to the blackbird, have this
human sound; and certainly the most beautiful part of the linnet's
song is the opening phrase, composed of notes that are both
swallow-like and human-like.

It may appear strange to some readers that I put the tree-pipit, with
his thin, shrill, canary-like pipe, in this list; but his notes are
not all of this character; he is moreover a most variable singer; and
it happens that in some individuals the concluding notes of the song
have more of that peculiar human quality than any other British
songster. No doubt it was a bird in which these human-like,
languishing notes at the close of the song were very full and
beautiful that inspired Burns to write his "Address to a Wood-lark."
The tree pipit is often called by that name in Scotland, where the
true wood-lark is not found.

   O stay, sweet warbling wood-lark, stay,
   Nor quit for me the trembling spray,
   A hopeless lover courts thy lay,
       Thy soothing, fond complaining.

   Again, again that tender part,
   That I may catch thy melting art;
   For surely that would touch her heart
       Who kills me wi' disdaining.

   Say, was thy little mate unkind,
   And heard thee as the passing wind?
   O nocht but love and sorrow joined
       Sic notes o' wae could waken!

   Thou tells o' never-ceasing care,
   O' speechless grief and dark despair;
   For pity's sake, sweet bird, nae mair,
       Or my poor heart is broken!

Much more could be said about these and other species in the passerine
order that have some resemblance, distinct or faint, to the human
voice in their singing notes--an echo, as it were, of our own common
emotions, in most cases simply glad or joyous, but sometimes, as in
the case of the tree-pipit, of another character. And even those
species that are furthest removed from us in the character of the
sounds they emit have some notes that suggest a highly brightened
human voice. Witness the throstle and nightingale. The last approaches
to the human voice in that rich, musical throb, repeated many times
with passion, which is the invariable prelude to his song; and again,
in that "one low piping note, more sweet than all," four times
repeated in a wonderfully beautiful crescendo. Who that ever listened
to Carlotta Patti does not remember sounds like these from her lips?
It was commonly said of her that her voice was bird-like; certainly it
was clarified and brightened beyond other voices--in some of her notes
almost beyond recognition as a human voice. It was a voice that had a
great deal of the quality of gladness in it, but less depth of human
passion than other great singers. Still, it was a human voice; and,
just as Carlotta Patti (outshining the best of her sister-singers even
as the diamond outsparkles all other gems) rose to the birds in her
miraculous flights, so do some of the birds come down to and resemble
us in their songs.

If I am right in thinking that it is the human note in the voices of
some passerine birds that gives a peculiar and very great charm to
their songs, so that an inferior singer shall please us more than one
that ranks high, according to the accepted standard, it remains to ask
why it should be so. Why, I mean, should the mere likeness to a human
tone in a little singing-bird impart so great a pleasure to the mind,
when the undoubtedly human-like voices of many non-passerine species
do not as a rule affect us in the same way? As a matter of fact, we
find in the multitude of species that resemble us in their voices a
few, outside of the order of singers, that do give us a pleasure
similar to that imparted by the willow wren, swallow, and tree-pipit.
Thus, among British birds we have the wood-pigeon, and the stock-dove;
the green woodpecker, with his laugh-like cry; the cuckoo, a universal
favourite on account of his double fluty call; and (to those who are
not inclined to be superstitious) the wood-owl, a most musical
night-singer; and the curlew, with, in a less degree, various other
shore birds. But in a majority of the larger birds of all orders the
effect produced is different, and often the reverse of pleasant. Or if
such sounds delight us, the feeling differs in character from that
produced by the melodious singer, and is mainly due to that wildness
with which we are in sympathy expressed by such sounds. Human-like
voices are found among the auks, loons, and grebes; eagles and
falcons; cuckoos, pigeons, goatsuckers, owls, crows, rails, ducks,
waders, and gallinaceous birds. The cries and shrieks of some among
these, particularly when heard in the dark hours, in deep woods and
marshes and other solitary places, profoundly impress and even startle
the mind, and have given rise all the world over to numberless
superstitious beliefs. Such sounds are supposed to proceed from
devils, or from demons inhabiting woods and waters and all desert
places; from night-wandering witches; spirits sent to prophesy death
or disaster; ghosts of dead men and women wandering by night about the
world in search of a way out of it; and sometimes human beings who,
burdened with dreadful crimes or irremediable griefs, have been
changed into birds. The three British species best known on account of
their supernatural character have very remarkable voices with a human
sound in them: the raven with his angry, barking cry, and deep, solemn
croak; the booming bittern; and the white or church owl, with his
funereal screech.

It is, I think, plain that the various sensations excited in us by the
cries, moans, screams, and the more or less musical notes of different
species, are due to the human emotions which they express or seem to
express. If the voice simulates that of a maniac, or of a being
tortured in body or mind, or overcome with grief, or maddened with
terror, the blood-curdling and other sensations proper to the occasion
will be experienced; only, if we are familiar with the sound or know
its cause, the sensation will be weak. Similarly, if in some deep,
silent wood we are suddenly startled by a loud human whistle or
shouted "Hi!" although we may know that a bird, somewhere in that
waste of foliage around us, uttered the shout, we yet cannot help
experiencing the feelings--a combination of curiosity, amusement, and
irritation--which we should have if some friend or some human being
had hailed us while purposely keeping out of sight. Finally, if the
bird-sounds resemble refined, bright, and highly musical human voices,
the voices, let us say, of young girls in conversation, expressive of
various beautiful qualities--sympathy, tenderness, innocent mirth, and
overflowing gladness of heart--the effect will be in the highest
degree delightful.

Herbert Spencer, in his account of the origin of our love of music in
his Psychology, writes: "While the tones of anger and authority are
harsh and coarse, the tones of sympathy and refinement are relatively
gentle and of agreeable timbre. That is to say, the timbre is
associated in experience with the receipt of gratification, has
acquired a pleasure-giving quality, and consequently the tones which
in music have an allied timbre become pleasure-giving and are called
beautiful. Not that this is the sole cause of their pleasure-giving
quality.... Still, in recalling the tones of instruments which
approach the tones of the human voice, and observing that they seem
beautiful in proportion to their approach, we see that this secondary
aesthetic element is important."

As with instruments, so it is with bird voices; in proportion as they
approach the tones of the human voice, expressive of sympathy,
refinement, and other beautiful qualities, they will seem
beautiful--in some cases even more beautiful than those which, however
high they may rank in other ways, are yet without this secondary
aesthetic element.




CHAPTER VII

SECRET OF THE CHARM OF FLOWERS


When my mind was occupied with the subject of the last chapter--the
human quality in some sweet bird voices--it struck me forcibly that
all resemblances to man in the animal and vegetable worlds and in
inanimate nature, enter largely into and strongly colour our aesthetic
feelings. We have but to listen to the human tones in wind and water,
and in animal voices; and to recognise the human shape in plant, and
rock, and cloud, and in the round heads of certain mammals, like the
seal; and the human expression in the eyes, and faces generally, of
many mammals, birds and reptiles, to know that these casual
resemblances are a great deal to us. They constitute the expression of
numberless natural sights and sounds with which we are familiar,
although in a majority of cases the resemblance being but slight, and
to some one quality only, we are not conscious of the cause of the
expression.

It was principally with flowers, which excite more attention and give
more pleasure than most natural objects, that my mind was occupied in
this connection; for here it seemed to me that the effect was similar
to that produced on the mind by sweet human-like tones in bird music.
In other words, a very great if not the principal charm of the flower
was to be traced to the human associations of its colouring; and this
was, in some cases, more than all its other attractions, including
beauty of form, purity and brilliance of colour, and the harmonious
arrangement of colours; and, finally, fragrance, where such a quality
existed.

We see, then, that there is an intimate connection between the two
subjects--human associations in the colouring of flowers and in the
voices of birds; and that in both cases this association constitutes,
or is a principal element in, the expression. This connection, and the
fact that the present subject was suggested and appeared almost an
inevitable outcome of the one last discussed, must be my excuse for
introducing a chapter on flowers in a book on birds--or birds and man.
But an excuse is hardly needed. It must strike most readers that a
great fault of books on birds is, that there is too much about birds
in them, consequently that a chapter about something else, which has
not exactly been dragged in, may come as a positive relief.

As the word expression which occurs with frequency in this chapter was
not understood in the sense in which I used it on the first appearance
of the book, it may be well to explain that it is not used here in its
ordinary meaning as the quality in a face, or picture, or any work of
art, which indicates thought or feeling. Here the word has the meaning
given to it by writers on the aesthetic sense as descriptive of the
quality imparted to an object by its associations. These may be
untraceable: we may not be conscious and as a rule we are not
conscious that any such associations exist; nevertheless they are in
us all the time, and with what they add to an object may enhance and
even double its intrinsic beauty and charm.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have somewhere read a very ancient legend, which tells that man was
originally made of many materials, and that at the last a bunch of
wild flowers was gathered and thrown into the mixture to give colour
to his eyes. It is a pretty story, but might have been better told,
since it is certain that flowers which have delicate and beautiful
flesh-tints are attractive mainly on that account, just as blue and
some purples delight us chiefly because of their associations with the
human iris. The skin, too, needed some beautiful colour, and there
were red as well as blue flowers in the bunch; and the red flowers
being most abundant in nature and in greater variety of tints, give us
altogether more pleasure than their beautiful rivals in our affection.

The blue flower is associated, consciously or not, with the human blue
eye; and as the floral blue is in all or nearly all instances pure and
beautiful, it is like the most beautiful human eye. This association,
and not the colour itself, strikes me as the true cause of the
superior attraction which the blue flower has for most of us. Apart
from association blue is less attractive than red, orange, and yellow,
because less luminous; furthermore green is the least effective
background for such a colour as blue in so small an object as a
flower; and, as a fact, we see that at a little distance the blue of
the flower is absorbed and disappears in the surrounding green, while
reds and yellows keep their splendour. Nevertheless the blue has a
stronger hold on our affections. As a human colour, blue comes first
in a blue-eyed race because it is the colour of the most important
feature, and, we may say, of the very soul in man.

Some purple flowers stand next in our regard on account of their
nearness in colour to the pure blue. The wild hyacinth, blue-bottle,
violet, and pansy, and some others, will occur to every one. These are
the purple flowers in which blue predominates, and on that account
have the same expression as the blue. The purples in which red
predominates are akin in expression to the reds, and are associated
with flesh-tints and blood. And here it may be noted that the blue and
blue-purple flowers, which have the greatest charm for us, are those
in which not only the colour of the eye but some resemblance in their
form to the iris, with its central spot representing the pupil,
appears. For example, the flax, borage, blue geranium, periwinkle,
forget-me-not, speedwell, pansy and blue pimpernel, are actually more
to us than some larger and handsomer blue flowers, such as the
blue-bottle, vipers' bugloss, and succory, and of blue flowers seen in
masses.

With regard to the numerous blue and purple-blue flowers which we all
admire, or rather for which we all feel so great an affection, we find
that in many cases their very names have been suggested by their human
associations--by their expression.

Love-in-a-mist, angels' eyes, forget-me-not, and heartsease, are
familiar examples. Heartsease and pansy both strike us as peculiarly
appropriate to one of our commonest and most universal garden flowers;
yet we see something besides the sympathetic and restful expression
which suggested these names in this flower--a certain suggestion of
demureness, in fact, reminding those who have seen Guido's picture of
the "Adoration of the Virgin," of one of his loveliest angels whose
angelical eyes and face reveal some desire for admiration and love in
the spectator. And that expression, too, of the pansy named
Love-in-Idleness, has been described, coarsely or rudely it may be, in
some of its country names: "Kiss me behind the garden gate," and,
better (or worse) still, "Meet-her-i'-th'-entry-kiss-her-i'-th'-buttery."
Of this order of names are None-so-pretty and Pretty maids, Pretty
Betsy, Kiss-me-quick. Even such a name as Tears of the blood of Christ
does not sound extravagantly fanciful or startling when we look at the
glowing deep golden crimson of the wall flower; nor of a blue flower,
the germander speedwell, such names as The more I see you the more I
love you, and Angels' tears, and Tears of Christ, with many more.

A writer on our wild flowers, in speaking of their vernacular names of
this kind, has said: "Could we penetrate to the original suggestive
idea that called forth its name, it would bring valuable information
about the first openings of the human mind towards nature; and the
merest dream of such a discovery invests with a strange charm the
words that could tell, if we could understand, so much of the
forgotten infancy of the human race."

What a roll of words and what a mighty and mysterious business is here
made of a very simple little matter! It is a charming example of the
strange helplessness, not to say imbecility, which affects most of
those who have been trained in our mind-killing schools; trained not
to think, but taught to go for anything and everything they desire to
know to the books. If the books in the British Museum fail to say why
our ancestors hundreds of years ago named a flower None-so-pretty or
Love-in-a-mist, why then we must be satisfied to sit in thick darkness
with regard to this matter until some heaven-born genius descends to
illuminate us! Yet I daresay there is not a country child who does not
occasionally invent a name for some plant or creature which has
attracted his attention; and in many cases the child's new name is
suggested by some human association in the object--some resemblance to
be seen in form or colour or sound. Not books but the light of nature,
the experience of our own early years, the look which no person not
blinded by reading can fail to see in a flower, is sufficient to
reveal all this hidden wonderful knowledge about the first openings of
the heart towards nature, during the remote infancy of the human race.

From this it will be seen that I am not claiming a discovery; that
what I have called a secret of the charm of flowers is a secret known
to every man, woman, and child, even to those of my own friends who
stoutly deny that they have any such knowledge. But I think it is best
known to children. What I am here doing is merely to bring together
and put in form certain more or less vague thoughts and feelings which
I (and therefore all of us) have about flowers; and it is a small
matter, but it happens to be one which no person has hitherto
attempted.

It may be that in some of my readers' minds--those who, like the
sceptical friends I have mentioned, are not distinctly conscious of
the cause or secret of the expression of a flower--some doubt may
still remain after what has been said of the blue and purple-blue
blossom. Such a doubt ought to disappear when the reds are considered,
and when it is found that the expression peculiar to red flowers
varies infinitely in degree, and is always greatest in those shades of
the colour which come nearest to the most beautiful flesh-tints.

When I say "beautiful flesh-tints" I am thinking of the aesthetic
pleasure which we receive from the expression, the associations, of
the red flower. The expression which delights is in the soft and
delicate shades; and in the texture which is sometimes like the
beautiful soft skin; but the expression would exist still in the case
of floral tints resembling the unpleasant reds, or the reds which
disgust us, in the human face. And we most of us know that these
distressing hues are to be seen in some flowers. I remember that I
once went into a florist's shop, and seeing a great mass of hard
purple-red cinerarias on a shelf I made some remark about them. "Yes,
are they not beautiful?" said the woman in the shop. "No, I loathe the
sight of them," I returned. "So do I!" she said very quickly, and then
added that she called them beautiful because she had to sell them.
She, too, had no doubt seen that same purple-red colour in the evil
flower called "grog-blossom," and in the faces of many middle-aged
lovers of the bottle, male and female, who would perish before their
time, to the great relief of their kindred, and whose actions after
they were gone would not smell sweet and blossom in the dust.

The reds we like best in flowers are the delicate roseate and pinky
shades; they are more to us than the purest and most luminous tints.
And here, as with bird notes which delight us on account of their
resemblance to fresh, young, highly musical human voices, flowers
please us best when they exhibit the loveliest human tints--the apple
blossom and the bindweed, musk mallow and almond and wild rose, for
example. After these we are most taken with the deeper but soft and
not too luminous reds--the red which we admire in the red
horse-chestnut blossom, and many other flowers, down to the minute
pimpernel. Next come the intense rosy reds seen in the herb-robert and
other wild geraniums, valerian, red campion and ragged robin; and this
shade of red, intensified but still soft, is seen in the willow-herb
and foxglove, and, still more intensified, in the bell- and
small-leafed heath. Some if not all of these pleasing reds have purple
in them, and there are very many distinctly purple flowers that appeal
to us in the same way that red flowers do, receiving their expression
from the same cause. There is some purple colour in most skins, and
even some blue.

   The azured harebell, like thy veins,

is a familiar verse from Cymbeline; any one can see the resemblance to
the pale blue of that admired and loved blossom in the blue veins of
any person with a delicate skin. Purples and purplish reds in masses
are mostly seen in young persons of delicate skins and high colour in
frosty weather in winter, when the eyes sparkle and the face glows
with the happy sensations natural to the young and healthy during and
after outdoor exercise. The skin purples and purple-reds here
described are beautiful, and may be matched to a nicety in many
flowers; the human purple may be seen (to name a very common wild
flower) in purple loosestrife and the large marsh mallow, and in
dozens and scores of other familiar purple flowers; and the purple-red
hue in many richly coloured skins has its exact shade in common
hounds' tongue, and in other dark and purple-red flowers. But we
always find, I fancy, that the expression due to human association in
a purple flower is greatest when this colour (as in the human face) is
placed side by side or fades into some shade of red or pink. I think
we may see this even in a small flower like the fumitory, in which one
portion is deep purple and all the rest of the blossoms a delicate
pink. Even when the red is very intense, as in the common field poppy,
the pleasing expression of purple on red is very evident.

To return to pure reds. We may say that just as purples in flowers
look best, or have a greater degree of expression, when appearing in
or with reds, so do the most delicate rose and pink shades appeal most
to us when they appear as a tinge or blush on white flowers. Probably
the flower that gives the most pleasure on account of its beautiful
flesh-tints of different shades is the Gloire de Dijon rose, so common
with us and so universal a favourite. Roses, being mostly of the
garden, are out of my line, but they are certainly glorious to look
at--glorious because of their associations, their expression, whether
we know it or not. One can forgive Thomas Carew the conceit in his
lines--

   Ask me no more where Jove bestows
   When June is past, the fading rose,
   For in your beauty's orient deep
   These flowers as in their causes sleep.

But all reds have something human, even the most luminous scarlets and
crimsons--the scarlet verbena, the poppy, our garden geraniums,
etc.--although in intensity they so greatly surpass the brightest colour
of the lips and the most vivid blush on the cheek. Luminous reds are
not, however, confined to lips and cheeks: even the fingers when held up
before the eyes to the sun or to firelight show a very delicate and
beautiful red; and this same brilliant floral hue is seen at times in
the membrane of the ear. It is, in fact, the colour of blood, and that
bright fluid, which is the life, and is often spilt, comes very much
into the human associations of flowers. The Persian poet, whose name is
best left unwritten, since from hearing it too often most persons are
now sick and tired of it, has said,

   I sometimes think that never blooms so red
   The rose as where some buried Caesar bled.

There is many and many a "plant of the blood of men." Our most common
Love-lies-bleeding with its "dropping wells" of crimson serves to
remind us that there are numberless vulgar names that express this
resemblance and association. The thought or fancy is found everywhere
in poetic literature, in the fables of antiquity, in the tales and
folk-lore of all nations, civilised and barbarous.

I think that we can more quickly recognise this human interest in a
flower, due to its colour, and best appreciate its aesthetic value from
this cause, when we turn from the blues, purples, and reds, to the
whites and the yellows. The feeling these last give us is distinctly
different in character from that produced by the others. They are not
like us, nor like any living sentient thing we are related to: there
is no kinship, no human quality.

When I say "no kinship, no human quality," I refer to flowers that are
entirely pure white or pure yellow; in some dull or impure yellows,
and in white and yellow flowers that have some tinge or mixture of red
or purple, we do get the expression of the red and purple flower. The
crystalline and snow white of the whitest flowers do indeed resemble
the white of the eyeballs and the teeth in human faces; but we may see
that this human white colour by itself has no human association in a
flower.

The whiteness of the white flower where there is any red is never
unhuman, probably because a very brilliant red or rose colour on some
delicate skins causes the light flesh-tints to appear white by
contrast, and is the complexion known as "milk and roses." The
apple-blossom is a beautiful example, and the beloved daisy--the "wee,
modest, crimson-tipped flower," which would be so much less dear but
for that touch of human crimson. This is the herb-Margaret of so many
tender and pretty legends, that has white for purity and red for
repentance. Even those who have never read these legends and that
prettiest, most pathetic of all which tells of the daisy's origin,
find a secret charm in the flower. Among other common examples are the
rosy-white hawthorn, wood anemone, bindweed, dropwort, and many
others. In the dropwort the rosy buds are seen among the creamy white
open flowers; and the expression is always very marked and beautiful
when there is any red or purple tinge or blush on cream-whites and
ivory-whites. When we look from the dropwort to its nearest relative,
the common meadow-sweet, we see how great a charm the touch of
rose-red has given to the first: the meadow-sweet has no expression of
the kind we are considering--no human association.

In pure yellow flowers, as in pure white, human interest is wanting.
It is true that yellow is a human colour, since in the hair we find
yellows of different shades--it is a pity that we cannot find, or have
not found, a better word than "shades" for the specific differences of
a colour. There is the so-called tow, the tawny, the bronze, the
simple yellow, and the golden, which includes many varieties, and the
hair called carroty. But none of these has the flower yellow. Richard
Jefferies tells us that when he placed a sovereign by the side of a
dandelion he saw how unlike the two colours were--that, in fact, no
two colours could seem more unlike than the yellow of gold and the
yellow of the flower. It is not necessary to set a lock of hair and
any yellow flower side by side to know how utterly different the hues
are. The yellow of the hair is like that of metals, of clay, of stone,
and of various earthy substances, and like the fur of some mammals,
and like xanthophyll in leaf and stalk, and the yellow sometimes seen
in clouds. When Ossian, in his famous address to the sun, speaks of
his yellow hair floating on the eastern clouds, we instantly feel the
truth as well as beauty of the simile. We admire the yellow flower for
the purity and brilliance of its colour, just as we admire some bird
notes solely for the purity and brightness of the sound, however
unlike the human voice they may be. We also admire it in many
instances for the exquisite beauty of its form, and the beauty of the
contrast of pure yellow and deep green, as in the yellow flag,
mimulus, and numerous other plants. But however much we may admire, we
do not experience that intimate and tender feeling which the blues and
reds inspire in us; in other words, the yellow flower has not the
expression which distinguishes those of other colours. Thus, when
Tennyson speaks of the "speedwell's darling blue," we know that he is
right--that he expresses a feeling about this flower common to all of
us; but no poet would make so great, so absurd a mistake as to
describe the purest and loveliest yellow of the most prized and
familiar wild flower--buttercup or kingcup, yellow flag, sea poppy,
marsh marigold, or broom, or furze, or rock-rose, let us say--by such
a word--the word that denotes an intimate and affectionate
feeling--the feeling one cherishes for the loved ones of our kind. Nor
could that word of Tennyson be properly used of any pure white
flower--the stitchwort for instance; nor of any white and yellow
flower like the Marguerite. But no sooner do you get a touch of rose
or crimson in the whitest flower, as we see in the daisy and
eyebright, than you can say of it that it is a "dear" or a "darling"
colour, and no one can find fault with the expression.

When we consider the dull and impure yellows sometimes seen in
flowers, and some soft yellows seen in combination with pleasing
wholesome reds, as in the honeysuckle, we may find something of the
expression--the human association--in yellow flowers. For there is
yellow in the skin, even in perfect health; it appears strongest on
the neck, and spread round to the throat and chin, and is a warm buff,
very beautiful in some women; but very little of this tint appears in
the face. When a tinge of this warm buffy yellow and creamy yellow is
seen mixed with warmer reds, as in the Gloire de Dijon rose, the
effect is most beautiful and the expression most marked. But the
expression in flowers of a pale dull, impure yellow, where there is an
expression, is unpleasant. It is the yellow of unhealthy skins, of
faces discoloured by jaundice, dyspepsia, and other ailments. We
commonly say of such flowers that they are "sickly" in colour, and the
association is with sick and decaying humanity. Gerarde, in describing
such hues in flowers, was fond of the word "overworn"; and it was a
very good word, and, like the one now in use, is derived from the
association.

It will be noted by those who are acquainted with many flowers that I
have given the names of but few--it may be too few--as examples, and
that these are nearly all of familiar wild flowers. My reason for not
going to the garden is, that our cultivated blooms are not only
artificially produced, and in some degree monstrosities, but they are
seen in unnatural conditions, in crowds and masses, the various kinds
too near together, and in most cases selected on account of their
gorgeous colouring. The effect produced, however delightful it may be
in some ways, is confusing to those simple natural feelings which
flowers in a state of nature cause in us.

I confess that gardens in most cases affect me disagreeably; hence I
avoid them, and think and know little about garden flowers. It is of
course impossible not to go into gardens. The large garden is the
greatly valued annexe of the large house, and is as much or more to
the mistress than the coverts to the master; and when I am asked to go
into the garden to see and admire all that is there, I cannot say,
"Madam, I hate gardens." On the contrary, I must weakly comply and
pretend to be pleased. And when going the rounds of her paradise my
eyes light by chance on a bed of tulips, or scarlet geraniums, or blue
larkspurs, or detested calceolarias or cinerarias--a great patch of
coloured flame springing out of a square or round bed of grassless,
brown, desolate earth--the effect is more than disagreeable: the mass
of colour glares at and takes possession of me, and spreads itself
over and blots out a hundred delicate and prized images of things seen
that existed in the mind.

But I am going too far, and perhaps making an enemy of a reader when I
would much prefer to have him (or her) for a friend.

I have named few flowers, and those all the most familiar kinds,
because it seemed to me that many examples would have had a confusing
effect on readers who do not intimately know many species, or do not
remember the exact colour in each case, and are therefore unable to
reproduce in their minds the exact expression--the feeling which every
flower conveys. On the other hand, the reader who knows and loves
flowers, who has in his mind the distinct images of many scores,
perhaps of two or three hundreds of species, can add to my example
many more from his own memory.

There is one objection to the explanation given here of the cause of
the charm of certain flowers, which will instantly occur to some
readers, and may as well be answered in advance. This view, or theory,
must be wrong, a reader will perhaps say, because my own preference is
for a yellow flower (the primrose or daffodil, let us say), which to
me has a beauty and charm exceeding all other flowers.

The obvious explanation of such a preference would be that the
particular flower preferred is intimately associated with
recollections of a happy childhood, or of early life. The associations
will have made it a flower among flowers, charged with a subtle magic,
so that the mere sight or smell of it calls up beautiful visions
before the mind's eye. Every person bred in a country place is
affected in this way by certain natural objects and odours; and I
recall the case of Cuvier, who was always affected to tears by the
sight of some common yellow flower, the name of which I have
forgotten.

The way to test the theory is to take, or think of, two or three or
half-a-dozen flowers that have no personal associations with one's own
early life--that are not, like the primrose and daffodil in the
foregoing instance, sacred flowers, unlike all others; some with and
some without human colouring, and consider the feeling produced in
each case on the mind. If any one will look at, say, a Gloire de Dijon
rose (in some persons its mental image will serve as well as the
object itself) and then at a perfect white chrysanthemum, or lily, or
other beautiful white flower; then at a perfect yellow chrysanthemum,
or an allamanda, and at any exquisitely beautiful orchid, that has no
human colour in it, which he may be acquainted with, he will probably
say: I admire these chrysanthemums and other flowers more than the
rose; they are most perfect in their beauty--I cannot imagine anything
more beautiful; but though the rose is less beautiful and splendid,
the admiration I have for it appears to differ somewhat in
character--to be mixed with some new element which makes this flower
actually more to me than the others.

That something different, and something more, is the human association
which this flower has for us in virtue of its colour; and the new
element--the feeling it inspires, which has something of tenderness
and affection in it--is one and the same with the feeling which we
have for human beauty.

       *       *       *       *       *

The foregoing has been given here with a few alterations,
mainly verbal, as it appeared originally: something now remains to
be added.

When writing about the wild flowers of West Cornwall in a work on
The Land's End (1908), I returned to the subject of the charm of
flowers due to their human colouring, and will repeat here much of
what was there said.

Some of the readers of my flower chapter were not convinced that I had
made out my case: it came as a surprise to them, and in some instances
they cherished views of their own which they did not want to give up.
Thus, two of my critics, writing independently, expressed their belief
that flowers are precious to us and seem more beautiful than they are,
because they are absolutely unrelated to our human life with its
passions, sorrows, and tragedies--because, looking at flowers, we are
taken into, or have glimpses of, another and brighter world such as a
disembodied spirit might find itself in. It was nothing more than a
pretty fancy; but I had other more thoughtful critics, and during my
correspondence with them I became convinced of a serious omission in
my account of the blue flower, when I said that its expression was due
to association with the blue eye in man. The strongest of my friendly
adversaries informed me that any man can revel at will among his own
personal feelings and associations; that these were a "kind of bloom
on the intrinsic beauty of things"--a happy phrase! He then asks:
"What does blue suggest to a sailor? Sometimes the sea, sometimes the
sky, sometimes the Blue Peter; but if you ask him what does blue paint
suggest he would say mourning, that being the colour of a ship's
mourning. Dr Sutton always called blue no colour, because it was the
colour of death, the sign of the withdrawal of life."

This was interesting but fails as an argument since it was taken
for granted in the chapter that blue in a flower or anything else,
and in fact any colour, possesses individual associations for
every one of us, according to what we are, to the temper of our
minds, to the conditions in which we exist, our vocation, our
early life, and so on. Blue may suggest sea and sky and the Blue
Peter to a sailor, and yet the blue flower have an expression due
to its human association in him as in another.

But my critic dropped by chance into something better, when he
went on to ask, "Why shouldn't the heaven's blue make us love
flowers? It does in my case I know, and I can feel the different
blues of skies and air and distance in flower blue."

Undoubtedly he was right; the blue sky, fair weather, the open air,
was a suggestion of the blue flower. It amazed me to think of the
years I had spent under blue skies and of all I had felt about blue
flowers, without stumbling upon this very simple fact. So simple, so
near to the surface that you no sooner hear it than you imagine you
have always known it! It was impossible to look at blue flowers and
not be convinced of its truth, especially when the flowers were spread
over considerable areas, as when I looked at wild hyacinths in the
spring woods, or followed the interminable blue band of the vernal
squill on the west Cornish coast, or saw large arid tracts of land in
Suffolk blue with viper's bugloss.

Oddly enough just after the letter containing this criticism had
reached me, another correspondent who was also among my opponents,
sent me this fine passage from the old writer Sir John Ferne, on azure
in blazoning: "Which blew colour representeth the Aire amongst the
elements, that of all the rest is the greatest favourer of life, as
the only nurse and maintainer of spirits in any living creature. The
colour blew is commonly taken from the blue skye which appeareth so
often as the tempests be overblowne, and notes prosperous successe and
good fortune to the wearer in all his affayres."

In conclusion, after having adopted this new idea, my view is still
that the human association is the principal factor in the expression
of the blue flower, or at all events in a majority of flowers that
bloom more or less sparingly and are usually seen as single blooms,
not as mere splashes of colour. Such are the pansy, violet, speedwell,
hairbell, lungwort, blue geranium, etc. It may be that in all flowers
of this kind too an element in the expression is due to the
fair-weather associations with the colour; but these associations must
be very much stronger in the case of a blue flower always seen in
masses and sheets of colour as the wild hyacinth. Among dark-eyed
races the fair-weather associations would alone give the blue flower
its expression. I shouldn't wonder, if some explorer with a curious
mind would try to find out what savages feel about flowers, that he
would discover in them a special regard for the blue flower.




CHAPTER VIII

RAVENS IN SOMERSET


Mr Warde Fowler in his Summer Studies of Birds and Books has a
pleasant chapter on wagtails, in which he remarks incidentally that he
does not care for the big solemn birds that please, or are dear to,
"Mr Hudson." Their bigness disturbs and their solemnity oppresses him.
They do not twitter and warble, and flit hither and thither, flirting
their feathers, and with their dainty gracefulness and airy, fairy
ways wind themselves round his heart. Wagtails are quite big enough
for him; they are, in fact, as big as birds should be, and so long as
these charming little creatures abound in these islands he (Mr Fowler)
will be 

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