The Bird Watcher in the Shetlands, with Some Notes on Seals—and Digressions
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Title: The Bird Watcher in the Shetlands, with Some Notes on Seals—and Digressions
Author: Edmund Selous
Illustrator: Joseph Smit
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BIRD WATCHER IN THE SHETLANDS, WITH SOME NOTES ON SEALS—AND DIGRESSIONS ***
Transcriber Notes
Text emphasis is denoted as _Italics_.
THE
BIRD WATCHER IN THE SHETLANDS
WITH SOME NOTES ON SEALS--AND DIGRESSIONS
_All rights reserved_
[Illustration: _A Seal's Dormitory._]
THE
BIRD WATCHER
IN THE SHETLANDS
WITH SOME NOTES ON SEALS--AND
DIGRESSIONS
BY
EDMUND SELOUS
[Illustration: Shadows we are and
Like shadows depart]
WITH 10 ILLUSTRATIONS
BY
J. SMIT
LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
1905
PREFACE
In the spring of 1900 I paid my first visit to the Shetlands, and most
of what I then saw is embodied in my work _Bird Watching_. Two years
afterwards I went there again, arriving somewhat later, and it is the
notes made by me during this second stay which fill the greater number
of these pages. They are my journal, written from day to day, amidst
the birds with whom I lived without another companion, nor did I look
upon them as more than the rough material out of which I might, some
day, make a book. When it came to making one, however, it struck me more
and more forcibly that I was taking elaborate pains to stereotype and
artificialise what was, at any rate, as it stood, an unforced utterance
and natural growth. I found, in fact, that I could make it worse, but not
better, so I resolved not to make it worse. Except for a few peckings,
therefore, and minor interpolations--mostly having to do with the working
out of ideas jotted down in the rough--I send it to press with this very
negative sort of recommendation, and with only the hope added that what
interested me so much will interest others also, even through the veil
of my writing. Besides birds, I was lucky enough this time to have
seals to watch, and I watched them hour after hour and day after day. I
believe I know them better now, than I do anybody, or than anybody does
me; but that is not to say much, for, as the true Russian proverb has it,
"Another man's soul is darkness." But I have them in my heart for ever,
and I would take them out of the Zoological Society's basins, and throw
them back into the sea, if I could.
I have no doubt that these pages contain some errors of observation or
inference which I am not yet aware of--but those who only glance at
them may sometimes be inclined to correct me, where, later, I correct
myself. It is best, I think, to let one's mistakes stand recorded
against one, for mistakes have their interest, and often emphasize some
truth. Honesty, too, would suffer in their suppression--and besides,
if one has got in some idea or reflection that pleases one, or a
piece of descriptive writing that does not seem amiss, how tiresome
to have to scratch it out, merely because it is founded on a wrong
apprehension!--the spire to come tumbling just for the want of a base!
For these reasons, therefore--especially the last, when it applies--I
have not suppressed my errors, even where I happen to know them. There
they stand, if only to encourage others who may be labouring in the same
field as myself--which makes one more high-minded motive.
For my digressions, etc.--for which I have been taken to task--I hope
this fresh crop of them will make it apparent that they are a part of
my method, or, rather, a part of myself. I have still a temperament I
find--and it gives me a good deal of trouble--but as soon as I have
become a nonentity, I will follow the advice given me, and write like
one. I would say more if I could, but I must not promise what it is not
in my power to perform.
EDMUND SELOUS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. My Island Again! 1
II. Spoiler and Spoiled 9
III. From Darkness to Light 15
IV. Duckings and Bobbings 26
V. A Vengeful Community 31
VI. Metempsychosis 37
VII. Bird Sympathy 39
VIII. Enchanted Caverns 47
IX. Ducks and Divers 59
X. From the Edge of a Precipice 68
XI. Darwinian Eider-ducks 74
XII. On the Great Ness-side 81
XIII. Mother and Child 88
XIV. "Dream Children" 95
XV. New Developments 104
XVI. Flight and Fancy 110
XVII. Mouths with Meanings 122
XVIII. Learning to Soar 133
XIX. The Dance of Death 138
XX. "By _Any_ Other Name"! 150
XXI. "Not Always to the Strong" 156
XXII. Children of the Mists 160
XXIII. Love on the Ledges 172
XXIV. Grouse Aspirations 190
XXV. Unorthodox Attitudes 203
XXVI. Pied Pipers 218
XXVII. A Bitter Disappointment 225
XXVIII. Tammy-Norie-land 234
XXIX. Thoughts in a Sentry-box 249
XXX. Intersexual Selection 261
XXXI. An All-day Sitting 284
XXXII. Three Murderers 297
XXXIII. Gulls and Gibbon 314
XXXIV. All about Seals 327
XXXV. The Devil's Advocate 342
XXXVI. Comparing Notes 365
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A Seal's Dormitory _Photogravure Frontispiece_
Bird Sympathy _Facing page_ 42
From the Rocks of Raasey Isle " 84
On the Edge of the Precipice " 92
Aerial Piracy " 133
A Seal's Plaything " 216
A Perilous Journey " 288
"One More Unfortunate" " 308
"Nature Red in Tooth and Claw" " 316
Polite but Insistent " 346
THE BIRD WATCHER
IN THE SHETLANDS
WITH SOME NOTES ON SEALS--AND
DIGRESSIONS
CHAPTER I
MY ISLAND AGAIN!
My island again!--and all the birds still there, looking just as they did
when I left it. More, too, have come. At night, but in a sort of murky
daylight, I walk over the breeding-ground of the terns, a long flat strip
of pebbly beach--or rather the heather a little way above it, for on
the beach itself they do not appear to have laid. Rising, all at once,
as is their wont, they make a second smaller canopy, above me, floating
midway beneath the all-overshadowing one of dreary low-lying cloud. Out
of it, ever and anon, some single bird shoots down, with a cry so sharp
and shrill that it seems to pierce the ear like a pointed instrument.
Occasionally an oyster-catcher darts in amongst them all, on quickly
quivering wings, its quavering high-pitched note of "teep, teep!--teep,
teep, teep!" threading, as it were, the general clamour, whilst like
a grey, complaining shadow, the curlew circles, beyond and solitary,
shunning even the outer margin of the crowd. How lonely is this island,
and yet how populous! The terns--a "shrieking sisterhood"--make, as I
say, a canopy above me, when I pace or skirt their territories; but what
is that to the great perpetual canopy of gulls that accompanies and
shrieks down at me, almost wherever I go? Were it beneath any roof but
that of heaven, how deafening, how ear-splitting would be the noise,
how utterly unendurable! But going forth into the immensity of sky and
air it sounds almost softly, harsh as it is, and even its highest, most
distressful notes, sink peacefully at last into the universal murmur of
the sea, making the treble to the bass of its lullaby.
Most of the cries seem to resolve themselves into the one note or
syllable "ow," out of which, through varied tone and inflection, a
language has been evolved. "Ow-_ow_, ow-_ow_, ow-_ow_!" sadly prolonged
and most disconsolately upturned upon the last, saddest syllable--a
despair, a dirge in "ow." Then a series of shrieking "ows," disjoined,
but each the echo of the last, so that when the last has sounded, the
memory hears but one. Then again a wail, intoned a little differently,
but as mournful as the other. And now a laugh--discordant, mirthless,
but a laugh, and with even a chuckle in it--"ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!" the
syllables huddling one another like the "_petit glou-glou_" of water out
of a bottle. All "ow" or variants of "ow," till the great black-backed
(the bulk are herring-gulls) swooping upon you, almost like the great
skua itself, breaks the spell with a "gugga, gugga, gugga!" or, right
over your head, says "er" with a stress and feeling that amounts almost
to solemnity.
How lonely and yet how populous! Does life, other than human life,
around one, in any way diminish the sense of solitude? I do not think
it does myself, except through human association, and for this, human
surroundings are more or less requisite. Thus woodland birds seem homely
and companionable in woods near which one has a home, and gulls upon the
roofs of houses take the place of pigeons or poultry in the feelings they
arouse. So, too, as long as a natural alacrity of the spirits prevails
over that dead, void feeling which prolonged solitude brings to the most
solitary, the wildest creatures in the wildest and loneliest places may
seem to cheer us with their presence. But the feeling is a false one,
dependent on that very condition, and treacherously forsaking us--even
to the extent of making what seemed a relief, an accentuation--when it
fails. How often, as I have wandered over this little, noisy, thickly
crowded retreat, has all the fellowship around me served but to remind
me of my own exclusion from it--as from that of fairies, ghosts,
elementals--but what all this life could not do, the cheerful firelight
on the bare stone walls of the solitary shepherd's hut did at once for
me, and with bacon in the frying-pan I had all the companionship I
wanted. A dog--one's own or that knew one--or even a cat, might do more
by its own personality than such inanimate objects by association merely,
to relieve the sense of solitude; but no quite indifferent creature
could do as much, I believe, or indeed anything.
But with the gulls here--and still more with the terns--there is more
than mere indifference. It is a disagreeable reflection that all these
many birds--these beings everywhere about one--resent one's presence and
wish one away, that every one of all the discordant notes uttered as one
walks about under this screaming cloud of witnesses has a distinct and
very unflattering reference to oneself, upbraids one, almost calls one
a name. To be hated by thousands--and rightly hated too! It is strange,
man's callousness in this respect--that he should see his presence affect
bird and beast as that of the most odious tyrant affects his fellow-men,
yet never sleep or eat a meal the less comfortably for it! So it is
indeed--and the principle holds good as between races and classes of
men--when one has one's fellow-tyrants to laugh and joke and chat with;
but here, with but oneself and one's own thoughts, the hostility of
all these gulls begins to trouble one. There is no one to share in the
obloquy--it falls upon you alone. You are the most unpopular person in
the island.
I get another odd sensation through being here. Gradually, as the days
go on, it seems more and more as though gulls made all the world, and
this feeling, which, for its singularity, I value, I can encourage by
seeking out some spot from which the sight of all but them and inanimate
nature is, with extra rigour, shut out. The centre of the island, which
is the gulls' especial sanctuary, presents these conditions. It forms an
extended grassy basin, ringed in with low, swelling peat-hills, above
which--for the intervening space is invisible--rise the tops of hills far
higher, belonging to islands of some size which lie spread about this
little one, hiding it from all the world. Through dips in these, and in
the rim of one's own brown basin, one gets the sea--dull, cold grey lakes
of it, engirt by dimmer islands, far away. No human sight in it all; no
sail, for hours, upon the sea--only the gulls which, in their thousands
and their all-possession, seem to have subdued the world. Men are gone,
and gulls now take their place, become ennobled for want of a superior.
Like snowy-toga'd Roman senators, they stand grouped about, or walk over
the grassy amphitheatre--their natural senate-house--and it is wonderful
with how slight an effort of the imagination--or indeed with none--the
dissonant cries and shrieks, the clang and the jangle, become as the
dignified utterance, eloquent oratory, to which one has sat and listened,
spell-bound, in the gallery of the House of Commons. "Such tricks has
strong imagination." "How easy," indeed, as Shakespeare tells us, "is a
bush supposed a bear!"
It is curious how the gulls cling to their breeding-places long after
the breeding-time is over. Summer--or say July--is now fast waning,
yet in the way they stand amidst the heather, rise as I approach, and
float, shrieking, above me, it is just as it was last time I was here,
which was in early June, when things were hardly more than beginning.
Any one not knowing the time of the year--and it is difficult to tell
in the Shetlands--might expect from the birds' actions and the general
appearance of the whole community, to find eggs and newly-hatched chicks
all about; but all are gone, and the nests now hardly to be distinguished
from the surrounding heather. A few young birds there are, but they are
of large size, though unable as yet--or scarcely able--to fly. It is
the habit of these, when approached, to crouch and lie flat along the
ground, without making any attempt to escape, even allowing themselves to
be stroked and taken up in the hand. When set down again, however, they
generally start off running, and often get to a great distance before
they stop. Young terns and young peewits do just the same thing, and it
is curious that in their manner of thus crouching, before the power of
flight has been fully gained, they exactly resemble the stone-curlew,
in which bird the habit is permanent, though not, I should say, very
frequently indulged in after maturity has been reached. As no adult gull
or peewit crouches in this way, we must suppose either that natural
selection has infixed a certain habit in the young bird, suited to its
flightless condition, or that in thus acting it reverts to a trick of its
ancestors, which were presumably, in that case, flightless, through life.
The clinging of the stone-curlew to the early habit seems to support
the latter supposition, and _primâ facie_ it is perhaps more probable
that crouching in a bird should have come before flying than after it,
or, at least, that it should have been resorted to by certain species,
on account of their flight having become weak. It is conceivable that
some birds may have alternately lost and reacquired the power of flight
many times in their genealogical history. But where have the majority
of the young gulls gone? That they have left the island seems evident,
for, were it otherwise, they would either be all about the heather, or
fill the air more numerously than do the mature birds, when they cluster
above me in my walks. In the air, however, none are to be seen, though,
as by far the greater number must now be full-fledged, it is there that
they ought to be, with the rest. On the ground there are, as I say, a few
that seem to have been later hatched, and are not yet matriculated in
flight. Their proportion, however, is not more than one to a hundred of
the grown gulls, whereas since every pair of these rears three young, it
should be as three to two. Gilbert White speaks of that general law in
accordance with which young birds are driven away by their parents, when
they are no longer dependent upon the latter's attention, but can feed
and look after themselves; but with social birds this law of expulsion
is apt to merge in a larger one, that, namely, which is expressed in the
old adage that "birds of a feather flock together." We often see this
illustrated in the case of the sexes, and after watching kittiwakes at
the close of the breeding-season, I can have no doubt that the same
principle governs the motions of young and old birds. Of hostility on
the part of the parents I have seen but little, nor is it necessary;
for the young, which are now distinguished by a different coloration,
both of plumage and bill, making them look like another and quite mature
species, delight to associate together, so that both the rocks and the
water become the scene of tolerably large gatherings of them, at which
hardly an old bird is present. As the parents of these assemblies are now
free from the cares of domesticity, it seems as though the reason for
such a segregation must be of a psychical nature, since one can hardly
suppose that the dissimilarity of plumage has anything to do with it,
seeing that young and old are as familiar with one another's appearance
as with their own. It is the same thing, no doubt, with the gulls on this
island, but as the whole interior, or rather the crown of it, is little
else than their nesting-ground, it would be difficult for the younger
generation to foregather, without the constraining presence of the elder
one. The inconveniences of this may be imagined. Not a remark but would
be overheard, not a side-glance but would be supervised and harshly
interpreted, not a giggle that would pass unreproved. In these irritating
circumstances, apparently--this, at least, is my theory of it--the young
people have migrated _en masse_, a striking proof that, with birds no
less than with ourselves,
Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.
CHAPTER II
SPOILER AND SPOILED
To the one smooth beach that there is here come the terns, each year,
to breed, and from these, as well as from the various gulls that nest
upon the island, the lesser or Arctic skua--whom some call Richardson's,
as though it belonged to that gentleman--is accustomed to take toll.
Sweeping the sea with the glasses, one detects, here and there upon its
surface, a dusky but elegantly shaped bird, that sometimes rises from the
water and descends upon it again, slowly and gracefully, but is never
seen to poise and hawk at fish, like the terns themselves, or, more
rarely, some of the gulls. These are those skuas who elect to take their
chances at sea, and whenever a tern rises after making his plunge, with
a fish in his bill, they rise also and pursue him. Then may be witnessed
a long and interesting chase, in the course of which the two birds will
sometimes mount up to a considerable height, rising alternately, one
above the other, as though each were ascending an aerial ladder. There
are no gyrations in these ascents. They are, or at least they have the
appearance of being, almost perpendicular, so that they differ altogether
from those of the heron and hawk, once familiar in falconry, and of which
Scott has given us such a splendid description in "The Betrothed," that
delightful work which an obtuse critic and publisher (_l'un vaut bien
l'autre_ very often) almost bullied its author into discontinuing. The
victory is by no means always to the robber bird, and I believe that if
a tern only persevere long enough it has nothing to fear, for, as in the
case of the black-headed gull and the peewit, with much threatening,
there is never, or, to be on the safe side, very rarely, an actual
assault. It almost seems as if this logical sequence of what has gone
before had dropped into desuetude, and that the skua, from having long
been accustomed to succeed by the show of violence only, had become
incapable of proceeding beyond the show. Why, if this were not the case,
should he always leave a bird that holds out beyond a certain time? It
is not that he is outstripped in the chase, for the skua's activity and
powers of flight have always seemed to me to be sufficient to overtake
any bird of his own size, however swift, with whom he has piratical
relations. Of his own size, or something approaching to it, for I have
seen him altogether baffled by the smaller turns and evasions of such a
comparatively feeble flyer as the rock-pipit. But this was out of the
ordinary way of his profession. The rock-pipit carried nothing, and,
even if he had done, it would have been too insignificant for the skua's
attention. Either amusement or murder--or the amusement _of_ murder,
which is felt by birds as well as men--must have been the object here,
nor does this contravene the theory I have just laid down, since such
generalised and legitimate longings are only indirectly related to the
bird's special instinct.
I do not myself see how these curious relations of robber and robbed
could have arisen, unless there had been, from the beginning, a marked
difference in the relative powers of flight possessed by each. The skua,
originally, must have caught fish, like the birds on whose angling
it is now dependent, and only an easy mastery over the latter could
have induced it to abandon the one way of living for the other. This
superiority was probably first impressed upon the weaker species through
bodily suffering, but it would have been less trouble for the stronger
one could it have succeeded without coming to extremities, and this, and
its constantly doing so, might in time have made it forget, as it were,
the last act of the drama. But say that the skua has forgotten this,
then it is likely that a certain number of the persecuted birds have by
practice discovered that it has, and so emancipated themselves from the
tyranny. Whether this be the reason or not, I have often noticed the
persistence with which some terns refuse to yield the fish, though the
nearness of the skua, and its sweeping rushes, seem quite sufficient to
induce them to. Those, on the other hand, who drop it quickly, often do
so whilst the enemy is still at a distance, in which case the fish falls
upon the water before the skua can catch it. Upon this, the latter--if
not invariably, as the fishermen assert, yet certainly in the greater
number of instances--flies off without any further attempt to secure
it, and I have then seen the tern sweep back, and, plunging down, retake
possession of its booty. Whether, in such cases, the fish was designedly
relinquished, in order to be secured again, I cannot say, but here, at
any rate, we see another way in which the parasite might come to be
outwitted by the more intelligent of its _vaches à lait_.
These competitions between skua and tern, both of them birds of such
swift and graceful flight, are very interesting to watch. The skua,
in the midst of the chase, will frequently sweep away, as if it had
abandoned all hope, and then return in a wide circling rush, at the end
of which there may be a sudden upward shoot, for the tern generally seeks
to elude its pursuer by rising higher into the air. Often--and again this
is just as with the peewit and gull--a pair of skuas will give chase
to the same tern, and then one may see the slender, shining bird quite
overshadowed by the two evil figures, as, pressing upon either side, they
rise or sink towards it, often almost covering it up with their broad
and dusky pinions. Twin evil geniuses they look like, seeking to corrupt
a soul, or else dark shadows that this soul itself has summoned up, and
that attend it, hardly now to be shaken off:
Da hab' ich viel blasse Leichen
Beschworen mit Wortesmacht.
Sie wollen, nun, nicht mehr weichen
Zurück in die alte Nacht.
For imagination can easily multiply the two into many--cares, shadows,
sorrows, they are easily multiplied.
A tern that either eludes or is not molested by a skua at sea, flies
home with its fish, to feed its young. But here it has often to run
the gauntlet of other skuas, who wait and watch for it upon the land,
sitting amidst the short stunted heather, with the brown of which their
plumage, as a rule, harmonises. There are, therefore, land-robbers and
sea-robbers--pirates, and highwaymen--amongst these aristocratic birds,
and it would be interesting to know whether the two rôles are performed
by different individuals, or indifferently by the same one. To ascertain
this satisfactorily I have found a difficult matter, but I believe that
here as elsewhere--in everything, as soon as one begins to watch it--a
process of differentiation is going on.
Where there are terns to be robbed, the skuas--I am speaking always of
the smaller and, as I have found it, the more interesting species--seem
to prefer them to any other quarry, so that the gulls, generally, benefit
by their presence; otherwise all are victimised, except, as I think, the
great black-backed gull. The latter will, himself, attack the skua, who
flies before him, so that, taking this and his size into consideration,
it does not seem very likely that the parts should ever be reversed
between them, nor can I recall any clear instance in which they were.
Of all the birds attacked, the common gull--which, like common sense,
seems to be anything but common--makes, in my experience, the stoutest
resistance; for it will turn to bay and show fight, both in the air and
on the water, when it has been driven down upon it. Generally it is
able to hold its own, and I look upon it as a vigorous young Christian
nationality, in course of establishing its independence against the
intolerable yoke of Turkish oppression.
These skuas love brigandage so much that, amongst themselves, they
play at it; swooping, fleeing, and pursuing, each feigns, in turn, to
be spoiler or spoiled. So, at least, I understand it, for nothing ever
comes of these mock skirmishings, no real fight or flight, or anything
approaching to one. It is fun, frolic, with a sense of humour, maybe,
as though two pirates were playfully to hoist the black flag at each
other. I love the humour of it. I love the birds. Above all, I love that
wild cry of theirs that rings out so beautifully "to the wild sky," to
the mists and scudding clouds. By its general grace and beauty, by its
sportings and piracies, its speed of flight and the rushing sweeps of its
attack, this bird must ever live in the memories of those who have known
it: but, most of all, it will live there by the inspiring music of its
cry.
CHAPTER III
FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT
To all that I have said concerning the Arctic skua in my last chapter (I
do not say it is much) I will now add what the Germans call a _Beitrag_,
on the subject of the multitudinous variety of colouring and arrangement
of markings which the plumage of this species exhibits.
Hitherto, indeed, I have spoken as if it were always of a uniformly
dusky shade, but that was because I wanted that shade (and, indeed, it
happened so to be) in the two that were chasing my tern. Otherwise they
would not have suited the part I assigned them of twin evil geniuses, or
have contrasted sufficiently with the white soul that they were seeking
to corrupt. So, till that was all over, there could be no light or
half-light skuas, but now that it is, and the effect produced, I permit
things to be as they are.
The Arctic skua, then, is supposed by ornithologists--or, at any rate,
that is how they are accustomed to speak of it--to be a bird of two
different outer appearances, independent of sex, which does not add
another one: dimorphic we are told it is, which means, or should mean,
that it is two- or double-formed, taking form here to mean colour. Two!
A hundred would be nearer the mark, I think, but I have only had the
time, or the patience, to note down fifteen, which I did very carefully,
through the glasses, as the birds stood amidst the short heather on the
ness-side. Here they are; not, perhaps, very precisely or scientifically
defined, but none the less truthfully so, for all that, and as accurate,
I think, as the fact that no two people see colours quite alike will
allow. But they, at any rate, bring out four facts, which, together,
have, I think, a distinct meaning, viz. (1) the unmistakable and, for the
most part, pronounced difference in these fifteen forms of a two-formed
species; (2) the likeness of the extremely plain, permanent form to the
plain-coloured great skua; (3) the same resemblance in the first true
plumage of the young bird; and (4) the absence in the young bird of the
two lance-like feathers which, in the old ones, project beyond the rest
of the rectrices, but which are also absent in the great skua. Well, here
they are.
(1) The neck, from just below the head, with the throat, breast, and
ventral surface, as far as the legs, a beautiful creamy white; the
rest dark, as in the ordinary dark form, but I was not careful to
note the precise shade; the crown of the head--and this, it seems, is
universal--sufficiently dark to appear black. This bird represents, I
think, the extreme of the light or ornate form, in which dark and light
are almost equally divided.
(2) The light colouring extends, speaking roughly, over the same
parts, but is very much less bright and pure. It might be described
as a dun-cream or cream-dun, the two shades seeming to struggle for
supremacy. The cream prevails on the neck, the dun on the other parts;
but even the neck is of a much duller shade than in the bird just
described (No. 1). There are parts of the breast where the original
sombre hue, a little softened, encroaches, cloudily, upon the lighter
surface. These two birds cannot, certainly, be described as more or less
handsome, merely, in the same colouring. The lighter surface, at any
rate, is plainly different in shade, also its amount and distribution,
though in a less degree.
(3) Another bird is much like this last one (No. 2), but there is, here,
a distinct, broad, dunnish space, dividing the throat and breast parts,
making, of course, a very palpable difference.
(4) Another bird--one of two standing together--is the common uniformly
dark form, except that the neck and throat just below the head is, for
about an inch, very much lighter, making a considerable approach to cream
without quite attaining it. This light part is conspicuous in the one
bird--this that I have been describing (No. 4)--but not in the other (No.
5) that it is standing by.
(5) This other one might pass for the ordinary dark form, but on
examining it through the glasses a lighter, though less salient, collar
is distinctly visible.
(6) In a third bird, not far off these two (Nos. 4 and 5) the whole
colouring, from immediately below the crown of the head--which seems
always to be black or very dark--is of a uniform brown-drab or brown-dun
colour, there being not the slightest approach to a lighter collar, or
any lightness elsewhere, except, as in every bird, without exception, on
the quill feathers of the wings as seen in flight.
(7) In another bird the breast and ventral surface is of a delicate
silvery cream, or creamy silver, something like that on the same parts
of the Great Crested Grebe. On the sides of the neck, and just below the
chin it is the same, perhaps a little less silvered; but between these
two spaces, and so between the chin and breast, a zone of faint brown or
dun, somewhat broken and cloudy, pushes itself forward from the wings,
thus breaking the continuity of the light surface by the strengthening
of a tendency which is, perhaps, just traceable even in the lightest
specimens. Besides this, a similar clouded space is continued downwards
from the back of the head, first in a diminishing quantity, and then,
again, broadening out, till it joins the upper body-colour. So that here
only a little of the nape is white, hardly more than what may still
be described as the two sides of the neck. This is a very pretty and
delicate combination.
(8) Close beside this last bird (No. 7) is a uniformly dark brown one; and
(9) Not far off, on the other side of it, one which exhibits the same
sort of general effect, in a dark, smoky dun. This latter bird would
generally pass as representing the dark form, and, with fluctuations
in either direction, dark or light, it does represent the common form.
Nevertheless, it is both light and varied compared with the extreme or
uniform dark brown form beside it (No. 8), which appears to me to be the
least common one of all, less so than the extreme light one (No. 1) at
the other end. When I say uniform, however, I do not mean to include the
crown of the head or tips of the wings, which are always darker than the
rest of the plumage, nor yet that lighter shade which is on the primary
quills of every individual, but only seen in flight. These exceptions
must always be understood, and, moreover, the expression uniform is not
to be construed with mathematical accuracy, but only as conveying the
general effect upon the eye.
(10) A bird that from the dark crown of the head to the dark tips of the
wings is, above and below, a uniform dark, browny dun, yet some washes
lighter than the uniformly brown one (No. 8) that I have spoken of.
(11) A bird that, from the dark crown to the dark wing-tips, is, above
and below, a uniform light fawny dun.
(12) A bird that would be the extreme light form (No. 1) that I have
first described, were it not that, both on the throat and breast, the
cream is encroached upon by cloudy barrings of a soft greyey-brown (or
something between the two) which extend also over the under surface of
the wings. Moreover, a toning of the darker colour of the general upper
surface encroaches a little upon the cream of the nape.
(13) A bird exhibiting the uniform, dusky-dunnish colour of the common
form (a shade lighter, perhaps, on the under surface), but with a cream
patch on each side of the neck, just below the head. These patches are
not, perhaps, of the brightest cream, but they are very conspicuous,
whether the bird is seen standing or flying--in fact, the salient feature.
(14) A bird that would be the extreme light form (No. 1), but for a
distinct collar of soft brown dividing the cream of the neck and throat
from that of the breast.
(15) A bird that is yellowish dun on the neck and throat, mottled-brown
on the breast, and a fine cream on the ventral surface.
Moreover, all these birds differed to a greater or less extent in those
lighter markings of the quill feathers, both on the upper and under
surface, some being lighter and some darker; following, in this respect,
the general colouring. This feature, however, is only apparent when the
birds fly, and I found it too laborious to include.
I can say with certainty, I think--judging by the lance-like projecting
feathers of the tail, absent in the young bird, and by every other
indication--that all the individuals here described by me, were birds of
mature plumage. They were all established in one locality, and I was able
to compare most of them with each other. I think, therefore, that though
there might, perhaps, be some difference of opinion in regard to some of
my colour terms--as where would there not be?--yet that the variation
between the different forms is properly brought out. Without my seeking
it, the list includes the two extreme forms, as I believe them to be, of
dark and light; the former represented by a uniformly dark-brown bird,
the latter by one having the whole under surface of the body, as well as
the sides and nape of the neck, of a beautiful cream colour, by virtue of
which, and of the salient contrast exhibited between this and the dusky
upper surface, it is extremely handsome, not to say beautiful--one of
the handsomest of all our birds in my opinion. Both the extreme forms
are uncommon, but only, I think, as compared with all the intermediate
shades, not with any one of them. Also the extreme light, or handsome,
form seems to me to be commoner than the extreme plain one. Should not a
bird like this be described as multi-morphic rather than as dimorphic?
I believe that there exists as perfect a series between the two extreme
forms as between the least eye-like and the most perfect eye-feather in
the tail of the peacock--to take the well-known illustration given by
Darwin to enforce his arguments in favour of sexual selection. The eye,
however, insensibly masses the less saliently distinguished individuals
together, so that those in whose plumage the light colour is more _en
évidence_ than the dark, go down as the light form, and _vice versâ_.
Moreover, the more _prononcé_ a bird is, in one or another direction,
the more it is remarked; so that, perhaps, the intermediate shadings are
forgotten, on the same principle as that by which extreme characters,
in any direction, are more appreciated than less extreme ones, by the
breeders of fancy birds--pigeons, poultry, etc. The uniform brown form,
however, as being less striking (though extreme at one end) is not, I
believe, so much noticed as those various dunnish shades, which have, in
my view, been classed all together, as the dark variety.
In regard to the young birds, I only remember those nestling ones which
had feathers under the fluff, as brown, without any admixture of cream.
But I had not, at that time, these matters in my mind, and, moreover, I
did not see many. When older, however, and able to fly, all that I have
seen have had a distinct colouring of their own--for their plumage has
borne a considerable resemblance to that of the Great Skua (_Stercorarius
catarriactes_), being mottled on the back with two shades of brown, a
darker and a lighter one. I got the effect of this when I watched young
birds flying or standing, and one day I caught one whose wing had been
injured, and saw that it was so. This resemblance is increased by such
birds wanting the two lance-like feathers in the tail. As I say, this
mottled brown is the only kind of colouring which I have seen in these
immature but comparatively advanced birds, and my impression is that,
in the still younger birds, such mottling was either absent or not so
noticeable. At any rate, I have no clear recollection of it.
My own explanation of all these facts is that _Stercorarius
crepidatus_--by my faith, 'tis a pretty name, though not wholly
deserved--having been, originally, a plain homely-coloured bird, like
his relative, the great skua, is being gradually modified, under the
influence of sexual selection, into a most beautiful one, as represented
by the extreme light or half-cream form. Natural selection, in the more
general sense, seems here excluded, or, at any rate, extremely doubtful;
and if it be suggested that the lighter birds have the more vigorous
constitutions, that they are fuller of verve and energy, to which they
owe their cream colouring, I, for my part, can only say "Prodigious!" (or
think it), like Dominie Sampson. But I can assure all those who hold this
unmanageable view--for really there is no dealing with it--that the one
sort came not a whit nearer to knocking my cap off than did the other.
But, leaving shadows, the main facts here suggest choice in a certain
direction. There is a gradation of colour and pattern, connecting two
forms--one plain, the other lovely. This suggests a passage from one
to the other, and if the plain mature form--I mean the uniform brown
one--most resembles the young bird in colouring--which to me it seems to
do--whilst the young bird resembles, more than any old one, an allied
plainer species, this makes it more than likely that the passage has
been from the plain to the lovely, and not from the lovely to the plain.
Supporting and emphasising this, we have the absence, in the tail of the
young bird, of those lance-like feathers which give so marked a character
to, and add so infinitely to the grace of, the old one. Of what use can
this thin projection, an inch or so beyond the serviceable fan of the
tail, be to the bird? Seeing how well every other bird does without it,
can we suppose it to be of any service? Its beauty, however--which one
misses dreadfully in the young flying bird--is apparent to any one, and
it goes hand in hand with an ascending scale of beauty in colour. All
this seems to me to point strongly towards sexual selection as the agency
by which these changes have been, and are being, effected;[1] since I am,
personally, a believer in the reality of that power, having never heard
or read anything against it, so convincing to my mind as what Darwin said
for it, nor seen anything that has appeared to me to be inconsistent
either with his facts or his arguments.
[Footnote 1: It is a strong enforcement, I think, of this view, that in
another variable species of skua--_Stercorarius pomatorhinus_--the same
two feathers give the bird "the grotesque appearance of having a disk
attached to its tail."]
No doubt if the varied coloration of the Arctic skua is really to be
explained in this way, the lighter-coloured forms, especially the
extreme one, in which the whole under surface is cream, ought to be
on the increase, whilst the dark ones should ultimately die out or
remain, perhaps, as a separate species, the intermediate tintings having
disappeared. It is very difficult to form an idea of the relative number
of individuals constituting any one form, because one unconsciously
compares such form with a great many others instead of with each
separately; but, whereas I remember various repetitions of the extreme
light or half-cream variety, I have not the same clear recollection in
regard to birds exhibiting other shades and proportions of cream. It was
the opinion, moreover, of the man engaged to protect the sea-birds during
the breeding season on Unst, that the light birds, by which he meant
the ones more markedly so, were increasing in numbers. It would appear,
therefore, that the process one might expect, were sexual selection
the agency here at work, is in operation, and, for the rest, it is no
use being in a hurry. A little patience, the "rolling" of "a few more
years"--say a million--will settle the matter either one way or the
other.
CHAPTER IV
DUCKINGS AND BOBBINGS
The eider-duck is here, but not its beauty, for at this fag-end of the
summer and breeding season the males have all departed, and it is the
sober-coloured female, either alone or accompanied by her little brood
of ducklings, that one meets now along the shores of the island. True
there must be males in their just proportion among the latter, but at
this tender age--the age of fluff and innocence--the sex of a bird is
in abeyance--a world that is not yet begun. A pretty thing it is to
see such little family parties coasting quietly along the shore and
following all its bends and indentations. There is one such now--mother
and three--coming "slowly up this way," like the spring, though not so
slowly as the spring, or anything at all spring or summer-like, comes to
these islands. They are feeding, apparently, upon the brown seaweed that
clothes, as with a mantle, each rock and smooth stone that lies upon the
shallow bottom along a gently shelving beach--making a continuous fringe
which is but just submerged at low tide. In this the heads of the young
ones are continually buried, but the mother eats more sparingly, and
seems all-in-all happy to be thus with her family. Now as the eider-duck
is certainly very much of an animal feeder--supposed, indeed, to be
wholly so--one would naturally think that here the food sought for is not
the seaweed itself, but any live things that may be clinging to it. This,
accordingly, was my provisional hypothesis, but practical investigation
hardly supported it, for on examining some of the seaweed, first in one
spot and then another, along the track in which the birds had swum, I
could find nothing whatever upon it--noticeably bare, indeed, it was. The
eyes of an eider-duck are, no doubt, sharper than my own--or anybody's.
Still I do not believe that even the most sharp-sighted one could find
anything on this seaweed, at least without searching for it, whereas
these ducklings are constantly dipping and, apparently, as constantly
feeding all the way along. Finding always, they never have the appearance
of looking for what they find. To me they seem to be browsing in their
little ducking way, just as sheep browse in a field.
The seaweed here is not the long, brown sort, but another and almost
equally common kind, which is shorter and covered with little lobes,
shaped something like an orange-pip, but of a slightly larger size--small
grapes, perhaps, since they grow in bunches, is more what they resemble.
They are full of a clear, gelatinous substance that might well be
appreciated, and having, to the boot of all the other indications,
actually seen something that looked very like one of them in the beak of
a duckling, I imagine--and it is a pleasing imagination--that the latter,
at any rate, derive some part of their sustenance from these their
subaqueous vineries. But I have seen seaweed in the mother's bill also,
and this was not only the brown sort, but a soft green variety which
grows sparingly with it. When feeding, without any doubt, upon living
prey, eider-ducks are accustomed to dive, going right to the bottom,
and often coming up with what they find there--a crab or other kind of
shell-fish--to dispose of it on the surface at their leisure. The chick
can dive as easily as the grown bird, but one may watch these family
excursions for a long time without once seeing either of them do so.
Instead, they now merely duck to get the seaweed, which almost reaches
the surface. The chicks, however, are often raised by the swell of the
sea beyond the height at which they can nibble it comfortably, and it is
then funny to see the hinder portion of their little bodies sticking up
in the air, with their legs violently kicking, as they hold on with might
and main to prevent being floated off on the wave. Sometimes a brisk one
bids fair to tilt them right over, but they always ride it in the most
buoyant manner. The motion with which they do so--or rather with which it
is done for them--is sometimes very curious, for they look as though they
were swung out at the end of a piece of elastic, and then drawn smoothly
back again, just as they are on the point of turning a somersault; but
more often it is a plain bob-bobbing. Thus over wave and ripple they bob
lightly along, whilst their mother, floating deeper and heavier, bobs
with more equipoise--a staider bob, that has much of deportment about
it. Each kind has its charm--never was there a prettier family bobbing.
All bob to each other--that, at least, is what it looks like--and their
song, if they had one, would be certainly this:
If it wasna weel bobbit, weel bobbit, weel bobbit,
If it wasna weel bobbit, we'll bob it again.
But, for my part, I have never seen them bob it otherwise than well. They
all of them bob to perfection.
Scenes like this belong to the pebbled beach and gently sloping shore.
There are others in the deeply indented, rocky bays that bound the
greater part of the island. Here, in the frowning shadow of beetling,
cavern-worn precipices, one may often see the little eider-ducklings
crawl out to feed upon the steeply-sloping sides of rocks or mightier
"stacks"--as those great detached spurs of the cliff that the water
swirls round are called here--whilst their mother waits and watches on
the sea close at hand. She does not bob now. These sullen heaving waves
sway her with a larger and more rhythmic motion, calm but portentous,
like the breathings of a sleeping lion that may at any moment awake.
Or she will follow her ducklings, sliding up on the heave of the wave,
and remaining, most smoothly deposited, as though the sea, rough and
rude as it cannot help being, yet really loved her, in its way, and
were solicitous of her safety. There she will feed beside them till she
tires, and with a deep note that brings them running after her down the
smooth, wet slope of the rock, goes off on the wave that is waiting, like
a ship with so many little pinnaces following in her wake. The most she
ever sails with now is three, and very often she has only one to attend
her.
CHAPTER V
A VENGEFUL COMMUNITY
It was terns, I think, who, when some killing Scotch naturalist or
other had wounded one of their number, came down to it, pitifully, as
it lay on the sea, and bore it away upon their backs and wings. I can
better realise this incident now, after having walked about a ternery
in these northern parts, and again tried the experiment--which in the
south produced no special consequences--of interfering with their young.
Upon my taking one of them in my hand, the whole community, amounting,
perhaps, to several hundreds, gathered in one great, air-filling cloud,
a little above my head, and with violent sweeps and piercing cries,
seemed to threaten an actual attack. When I let the young thing flutter
to the ground, and it moved and struggled upon it, the excitement was
redoubled. It seemed as though they were animated with hope at seeing
it out of my grasp, and as I took it up and let it go twice again, each
time with the same result, I have little doubt that this was really
the case. It was not only the two parents--assuming them to have been
there--who attacked me. Many did so; many, too, seemed to feel, at some
time, an extra degree of fury, whilst not a bird in the whole crowd but
was violently and vengefully moved. These terns, as they clustered and
darted about, resembled, or at least made me think of an angry swarm of
wasps or hornets; but how different is the anger of insects to that of
any other sort of animal! Though so much smaller, they attack without
any hesitation or mistrust as to the result whatever. A hornet or an ant
threatening merely when its nest was attacked seems an absurdity, whilst
in a creature many times their size it is the idea of courage only that
is presented to us.
Yet it was not all threatening with these terns, for as the excitement
and hubbub increased several of them attacked me, though only with
missile weapons. To be explicit, they excreted upon me, as they swept
down, in such an irate "Take that!" sort of manner and with such
precision of aim, that the intention was quite evident. This habit I
had heard of, though not felt, before, for a south coast fisherman
told me that he once had a dog which had developed a strong liking for
tern's eggs, to gratify which he used to make egg-hunting and feasting
expeditions along a line of beach where they lived, from which he would
return in a most unseemly plight, owing to the birds having "dunged" him.
I did not doubt this account at the time, and I have now this interesting
confirmation of it, but though I myself walked amongst these southern
terns and often took the young ones up in my hand, they never vented
their displeasure on me in this particular way, nor were such swoops and
threatenings as they made of so pronounced and violent a character. They
mobbed a hare, however, in a much more determined way, and certainly
pecked at it, though, at the distance, this was all I could say with
certainty. It is interesting if a means of defence resorted to against
animals only, by some colonies of these birds, is by others employed to
repel the intrusion of man also. For the habit itself, I do not remember
reading of it, either in the case of terns or any other bird or animal,
except one with which Swift has made us familiar--Swift, that great
misanthrope, who, by the sheer force of his satire, has anticipated to
some extent the reasoned truth of Darwin. As I say, I can hardly doubt
that these terns acted as they did with malice prepense, yet, as their
conduct is, perhaps, susceptible of another interpretation, I ought to
mention that the bombardment was not continuous, but occasional only--a
dropping fire, so to speak. As far as I could observe, however, the act
was always in combination with the plunging sweep down, which makes me
certain that, if not the mere mechanical effect of intense excitement, it
was prompted by hostility--to which latter view I strongly incline.
A little way farther on I found two quite tiny terns--the other was
of a fair size--lying together in the nest. There was excitement when
I took up these also, but not nearly so great as just before, except,
perhaps, on the part of the two parents. The first young bird had assumed
almost its final appearance, though not quite able to fly. I concluded,
therefore, that this had something to do with the different degree of
excitement shown by the terns as a whole, but when, after some while,
I found and took up another baby, almost as big as the first, there was
still less demonstration than in the case of the two fluffy ones--again
excepting the parents. Perhaps the boiling point of communal fury that
had been aroused by my first unlawful act was not to be again reached;
but birds are certainly capricious in their actions, and there is no
judging from one to the next.
But, taking them at their best, why are these northern terns so much
fiercer and more vengeful than those which breed in the south? Of the
disposition of the latter I have had ample time to judge, and, though
there was always anger when I walked over the great bank crowded with
their nests, yet its manifestations were of a more ordinary kind, nor,
as I say, did I notice any very acute development of it when I lifted
a young one from the ground. Sometimes I think these Shetlanders look
slightly smaller than the English kind, and always they seem to me to be
more waspish and irritable in their disposition. Are they, therefore, of
a different species--the Arctic, instead of the common tern, or _vice
versâ_? The two, indeed, are so much alike that only an ornithologist--as
ornithologists tell us--is capable of distinguishing them whilst the
birds are alive and at liberty. However, as the sole mark of distinction
appears to consist in a hardly appreciable difference in the length
of the tarsus, it is easier to understand the difficulty than how the
ornithological eye, even, unsupported by a measuring-tape, manages to
surmount it. But when would any member of a fraternity admit himself on
a level with mankind in general, in regard to his particular cult? The
thing is always to ramp on one's pedestal, though it be no higher than
the houses over the way. Personally I doubt the validity of a specific
distinction so attenuated as this; but be that as it may, terns, in
their northern and southern homes, seem to differ somewhat in their
natures, even as do the respective beaches on which they lay, with their
surrounding scenery of sea and sky. How different are these one from
another! Here, in these desolate and wind-swept isles, I, at least,
though I have sometimes seen the sun, have never caught one glimpse of
summer--nothing at all nearer to it than a somewhat fresher and very
much rougher November. But on that other great bank, in the more genial
climate of southern England, not only is it summer, sometimes--and that
in spring--for hours together, but one may even be, for a while, in the
tropics. How else could there be the mirage? Yet there it is, or, at any
rate, something like it; for as one lies at length and gazes through the
golden haze that seems to beat in waves upon the hot, parched shingle,
lo! this is gone, and where it lay, all glaring, a blue pellucid lake,
that seems to partake equally of the nature of sea and sky, lies now,
cool and delightful. Into it terns, ever descending, seem to plunge or
softly dip, as though it were the sea itself; and as they do so they
either disappear altogether, becoming lost in azure haze, or are seen
through it, dimly and vaguely, sitting or performing such actions as are
proper to their shore life, amidst those strange new waters, from which
others as constantly ascend. Gulls, too, and sometimes cormorants, may be
there, whilst dove-cot pigeons, with familiar, yet now half phantasmal
strut and bow, mingle occasionally, like little household Pucks, with
the more poetic figures of this fairy dream. A dream, indeed, it is;
but, more and more, it passes into one of far-off, sunnier lands--seen
once, remembered now. Bluer becomes the sky--the sea; softer the air.
Palm-trees wave, the long, bright breakers are bursting on a coral shore,
the surf roars in, hissing and sparkling, the gulls are the surf-riders,
England is no more.
CHAPTER VI
METEMPSYCHOSIS
Oh, if there is really a metempsychosis, has not the soul of Bardolph
gone into an oyster-catcher, or at least has not his nose, which was his
soul--Shakespeare, at any rate, has made it the most immortal part of
him--gone into an oyster-catcher's bill? I believe it has, and it burns
there, now, just as brightly, with nothing but the salt sea to drink.
It is that bill, that wonderful bill, which makes the oyster-catcher a
handsome bird. The ruby eye, the pale pink legs, and the gaily-chequered
plumage, all help; but they are but adjuncts, and by themselves would
work but small effect. This is well seen when the bird, having before
been running actively about on the foreshore, becomes, all at once,
oppressed with somnolence, stands still, turns its head over its
shoulder, and thrusts its long, fierce, fiery tube amidst the plumage
of the back. The transition from something showy to something plain,
from brilliancy to mediocrity, is then quite remarkable; and equally so
is it the other way when, for some imperative purpose, or in a wakeful
moment, the red ray flashes out again. Every now and again come these
swift conflagrations, and, between them, the bird stands like a little
lighthouse, in the intervals between the flashes of the revolving light.
Oyster-catchers--or sea-pies, to give them their old name, which is a
very much better one--seem somewhat sleepy birds, unless it be that in
the Shetlands birds sleep more in the daytime and less at night than
farther south. Sleep, I think, it may be called, taking the attitude and
the complete quiescence into consideration. Yet the red eye is always
open, seeming--for you see but one--to wake singly, keeping guard over
the rest of the slumbering commonwealth to which it belongs. But there
is another eye, and that, no doubt, is open too. A pair of these quaint
birds will often rest thus, side by side, upon the rocks, and another,
seeing them as he comes flying along the dividing-line of shore and sea,
will wheel inwards, and, settling beside them, be a lotus-eater too.
CHAPTER VII
BIRD SYMPATHY
To-day--which is my third here upon the island--I was actually
assaulted by the terns. I saw a young one, now well advanced, that
flew for a little and then went down on the grass. Walking towards
it, a bird--presumably one of the parents--descended upon me twice in
succession, and, with that angry and piercing cry that I have spoken or
ought to have spoken of--it sounds very like a shrill "bah!"--delivered a
fierce peck at my head, so that I felt it each time, quite unpleasantly,
through the thin cloth of my cap. The difference is to be noted in
this form of attack, to that employed by gulls and skuas, the former
in battles _inter se_ only, and the latter as against man in defence
of their eggs or young. Both of them, when they thus "swoop to their
revenge," use the feet only, and the superiority of the tern's method is
so great that it makes this small bird almost as redoubtable--if this
exaggerated word may be pardoned--as even the largest of the others. The
Great Skua, especially, were it to use its powerful beak, would be really
formidable, even to a man. In fighting with its fellows, it no doubt
does so, and gulls, under these circumstances, make the greatest use of
theirs. This, however, is when they struggle together on the ground;
but when one fights on the ground and the other in the air, the latter
uses its feet only, with effects that are irritating rather than to be
feared. Now why is this, and what causes the difference in this respect
as between gull and tern? From my own observation I think I can explain
it. So long as two contending gulls fight with any equality, they do so
upon the ground, but when one of them can no longer hold his own there,
he rises into the air and, sweeping backwards and forwards over the
other, who stays where he was, annoys him in this particular way. The
bird, therefore, by whom these tactics are resorted to has already got
the worst of it, and the last thing he wishes is again to close with a
rival who has defeated him. This, however, is exactly what would happen
were he to use his hooked beak in the manner proper to it, for it is
adapted for seizing and tearing, and to these uses it has hitherto been
put. To peck or stab with it would be like making a thrust with a sickle,
and though possibly as against a weaker antagonist it might be made
effectual in some other than the normal way, yet here there is always the
fear of detention, to check any experiment of the sort. Let the hooked
tip but pierce the skin to any extent, and the swoop would be checked
sufficiently to allow of the flying bird's being seized. The feet,
therefore, though without efficient claws and quite unadapted to anything
except swimming, are employed by preference, and in the manner in which
they are used we see the same principle at work, for instead of making
any attempt at grasping or scratching, the flying gull, as it sweeps by,
just gives a flick with the back of them, which the other revenges or
parries with a blow of the wing.
The tern, however, having a straight and sharply pointed bill, adapted
for pecking, and nothing else, can use it in this manner when flying
also, though in other respects it delivers its attack in exactly the same
manner as the gull does, allowing for the difference in bulk and aerial
grace and mastery, between the two birds. Here, as it appears to me, we
see structure affecting habit. As a rule, I think, it is rather the other
way, for it is wonderful to how many uses, other than the primary one
for the performance of which it has been specially adapted, almost any
part of an animal's anatomy may be put. And indeed, if we look at it in
another way, this truth is as strikingly illustrated by what we have just
been considering as by almost anything, for the webbed foot of a gull or
any swimming bird is extremely unadapted for fighting, and yet we here
see it thus employed. But it is owing to the structure of the beak, in
my opinion, that this has come about. That is the bird's real weapon,
which I am convinced it would always use if it could or if it dared. Not
even in their rough-and-tumbles, where they close and roll over and over
together, have I seen gulls fight with their feet, upon the ground.
I had not gone far, after this episode with the terns, when I was pecked
at, twice again, by another one, under similar circumstances. Each
time, I believe, the sharp point of the beak went through the slight
stuff of my cap, or I should hardly have felt it so sharply. It is not
only the skuas, then, that attack you in defence of their young. These
terns, though so much smaller, do so too, and, as appears by the story,
they have more than one weapon in their armoury. But a more interesting
experience was in store for me, which brought still more forcibly to my
mind that incident with the wounded tern to which I have before alluded.
Walking on, I noticed a bird which, though a young one, looked almost
in its full plumage, and which kept flying for a little, and then going
down again at some distance in front of me. Every time it alighted, a
cloud of terns hovered excitedly over it, and first one, and then another
of them kept swooping down, so as just or almost to touch it, until at
last it flew up again, so that I could never approach it more nearly. It
certainly seemed to me as though the grown community were trying to get
this young one to fly, so as to be out of danger, and this they always
succeeded in doing. I do not think they really prevented me from catching
the bird, for, no doubt, it would have flown of itself before very long;
but what interest and sympathy shown! Moreover, had I been pursuing it
with a gun it might have made all the difference.
[Illustration: BIRD SYMPATHY]
So, too, it must be considered how lethargic these young terns are
before they can fly, and how easily they then let themselves be caught,
though able to run quickly. When noticed, or approached closely, they
crouch, but though this is probably due to an inherited instinct of
self-preservation, they do not appear to have much fear of one. Therefore
it seems likely that in their early flying days they might still be
inclined to act in this way, and if so, any encouragement to fly which
they received from their elders would be of assistance to them. It is
noteworthy that the younger birds which I caught were not thus encouraged
to run. The public attention, in this case, seemed concentrated on myself.
Terns vary much in the degree of resistance, or rather of evasion, which
they offer to the attacks of the skuas--always I am speaking of the
smaller of the two species. I have often seen them get off scot-free,
without losing their fish, and, as before said, this has always seemed
to me to be because of their persistency in holding out, and not at all
on account of their superior speed. I have advanced a theory as to why
the skuas should not actually attack the terns on these occasions, as
they do not seem to me to do, and if there is any truth in it, we here
see a road along which a certain number of the latter might become free
of the tyranny under which they now suffer. It is doubtful, however,
whether these more obstinate birds would gain, in this way, a sufficient
advantage over the others to allow of natural selection coming into play.
They could carry, no doubt, more fish to their young, but here, at least,
the skuas seem hardly in sufficient numbers to make the difference a
working one. With many birds, however, a similarly acquired change of
habit would mean the difference between life and death. I remember once
passing unusually close to a cock pheasant, which remained crouching
all the while, though nineteen out of twenty birds would, I feel sure,
have gone up. It struck me, then, that as all such pheasants as acted
in this way would have a greater chance of not being shot than the
others that rose more easily, whilst these latter were constantly being
killed off, therefore, in course of time, the habit of crouching close
ought to become more and more developed, and pheasants, in consequence,
more and more difficult to shoot. Some time afterwards I met with some
independent evidence that this was the case, for a gentleman who shot
much in Norfolk, remarked, without any previous conversation on the
subject, that the pheasants there had taken to refusing to rise, and
that this unsportsmanlike conduct on their part was giving great trouble
and causing general dissatisfaction. That was his statement. He spoke
of it as something that had lately become more noticeable, but only, as
far as his knowledge went, in Norfolk, which, I believe, is an extremely
murderous county.
Beyond this I have no knowledge on the subject, but I feel sure that
a gradual process of change and differentiation is every day going on
amongst numbers of our British birds. I believe that I have myself, here
and there, seen some traces of it, and my idea is that greater pains
ought to be taken to collect evidence in this and similar directions.
Along all those lines where fluctuation has been observed, or where
modification might, in course of time, be expected, the present truth
should be most carefully made out, and having been accurately recorded
and published, observation, after a certain length of time, should again
be focussed on the same points, and this being renewed every ten, twenty,
fifty, or a hundred years, the results could be compared. For instance,
our green woodpecker feeds now largely upon ants in their nests, whilst
it both fights and copulates upon the ground. How interesting would
it be if we had a continuous record of observations of this bird's
habits, dating, say, from William the Conqueror or the days of the
Saxon Heptarchy, and if we found that no mention was made of these
peculiarities, by the field naturalists of those times, but that they
first began to be doubtfully recorded in the reign of Henry the Fifth, or
Richard the Third. No doubt a connected chain of evidence of this kind
will gradually grow up, owing to the accumulation of works of natural
history, but it would, I think, be a great deal more satisfactory if the
object were kept steadily in view, and I am quite sure that observations
made in this spirit would produce much more interesting matter than that
which is to be found in the ordinary bird or beast book. For the great
idea would then be to compare the present with the past habits of any
creature, in order to see whether, or in what degree, they have changed,
and this could only be done by continual re-observation, which would
assuredly lead to novelty of some sort, instead of mere repetition,
which is what we have now; and not only so, but the thing that is so
constantly repeated seems often to be founded either on nothing, or
nothing that one can get at. Take, for instance--but no, that would lead
to twenty more pages at the least, and I want them for something better.
CHAPTER VIII
ENCHANTED CAVERNS
Along the bolder coast-line of this island, where the cliffs, without
being very high, are steep and frowning, there are some remarkable
caves, which I to-day visited with Mr. Hoseason, in his boat--he having
sailed over from Yell Island. To me, at least, they seemed remarkable,
principally by reason of the various and vivid colours which the rock
perforated by them begins to display as soon as their entrance is passed.
This rock, as elsewhere in the Shetlands, is sedimentary, but broken
here and there with veins of quartz, often of considerable thickness,
which seem to have been shot up in a molten state and to have afterwards
cooled--"seem," I say, for I have no proper knowledge as to their
geological formation. This quartz, which when exposed to the light of day
is white or whitish, is here of a deep rust-red, and this, distributed in
long zigzag lines or meanderings, is sufficiently striking, but nothing
compared to the much brighter reds, the lakes, and brilliant greens with
which the interior of the cavern is, as it were, painted; so that the
whole effect, lit up by the candles which we used as torches, resembled,
in a surprising and quite unexpected way, those highly coloured and very
artificial-looking representations of natural scenery which one sees
on the stage--in pantomimes more particularly or on some very florid
drop-scene. These colours are due to some low form of vegetation which
is spread like a wash over the face of the stratified rock, but it seems
surprising, since one is accustomed to associate colour with light,
that in the absence of all sun they should not only exist, but be so
very brilliant. I have never seen anything like such vivid hues on the
surface of rock or cliff exposed to the light of day, nor, indeed, in
any landscape, if flowers and the autumn tints of leaves are excluded.
Gaudily painted stage scenery, some enchanted or robber's cavern in a
pantomime--Ali Baba's, for instance--is really the best comparison I
can think of, nor shall I ever again think these exaggerated. Nature
is really harder to outdo or burlesque than one may fancy--even on
the stage, where the effort is so constantly, and, one would swear,
successfully made.
In shape these caverns are long and narrow--throatal, one might call
them--and the sea, with the many weird and uncouth noises that it makes
as it licks, tongue-like, in and out of them, helps to suggest this
resemblance. Though their height is really but moderate, yet, owing to
the narrowness of their walls, they have the appearance of being lofty,
especially near the entrance, or where, after descending till it nearly
reaches the water, the roof is suddenly carried up again. For the most
part, however, the height decreases gradually, with the breadth, till at
length the cave ends in a low, dark tunnel, which the sea almost fills,
and up which the boat can no longer proceed. Yet far beyond, where all is
opaque darkness, one still hears the muffled wash and sob of the waves
as they ceaselessly eat and eat into the hidden bowels of the rock. As
the whole force and vastness of the ocean lies beyond this little tip
of its tongue, to where may not such burrows extend? and might not, by
a knowledge of their position and the direction in which they run, some
inland towns be supplied with the blessing of sea-water?
The water in these caverns is delightfully clear, revealing in every
detail, through its lucid green, the smooth-rolled pebbles and great
white rounded boulders which strew, or rather make, their floor. To look
down at them is like looking up into the arched roof of some other cave.
One might think it the reflection of the one overhead, till, glancing up,
the difference is remarked--jagged, bright-hued peaks and niches instead
of smooth, even whiteness. This effect, as of a roof beneath one, is
due, I think, to the continuation downwards of the sides of the cavern,
for this gives the same vaulted appearance, but reversed, that there is
overhead, and the mind, as with the image on the retina of the eye, soon
sets it the right way up.
These caves must have been known from time immemorial to as many as were
accustomed to coast round the island, and it is interesting to think
of who, and what kind of craft may, from age to age, have visited or
sheltered in them. Recently, however, they were first explored, if not
discovered, by Mr. Hoseason (who has for years rented the island and done
his best to protect the bird life upon it) in the spring of the preceding
year, and they were at that time tenanted by numbers both of shags and
rock-pigeons, who sat incubating their eggs on any suitable ledge or
projection of the rock. Of the latter birds, to-day, there were none, but
several of the former, though so late in the season, were sitting on eggs
which, to judge by their whiteness, must have been but lately laid, and,
no doubt, represented a second brood, whilst others, whose young were
still with them on the nest, although full-fledged and almost as big as
themselves, plunged, attended by these, into the water. The hollow sounds
of splash after splash were echoed and re-echoed from sea to roof, and
the air seemed filled with sepulchral croakings. It was easy to follow
these birds as they swam midway between the surface of the water and the
white pebbled floor of the cavern, and I was thus able to confirm my
previous conviction that the feet alone are used by them in swimming,
without any help from the wings, which are kept all the while closed. I
have many times observed this before, but never so clearly or for such a
length of time.
The young birds, after diving, made for the nearest rock or ledge on
to which they could scramble, and they were so unwilling again to take
the water that some of them allowed themselves to be caught by us,
though showing every sign of fear--indeed, of extreme terror--which
one might naturally suppose them to feel. This is a puzzling thing to
understand--at least, to me it is. An aquatic bird that swims and dives
all as easily as it breathes, and which has just before plunged into
the water from a considerable height, stands now upon a rock but little
above its surface, and watches a boat, the object of its dread, coming
nearer and nearer, till at last it stops in front of it, and the hand
is stretched out to seize and take, without ever escaping, which it
might easily do in the way that it has just before done. What is the
explanation? We may suppose, perhaps, that these young birds have not yet
got to look upon the ocean as a place of long abode, that they enter it
only with the idea of getting quickly out again, and that the rock is as
yet so much more their true home that they cling to it in preference, and
may even have a feeling of safety in being there. But if this last were
the case, why should they leave it in the first instance? There would be
no difficulty in understanding the matter if they refused to take the
sea at all, but having done so once, it seems strange that they should
so fear or dislike to, again. Possibly the having soon to come out--as
being impelled to do so--and finding themselves no better off, but
menaced as before, may give a feeling of inevitability and hopelessness
of escape, sufficient to take away the power of effort. But this I do
not believe--despair hardly belongs to animals, and if it did, imminent
peril, with at least a temporary refuge at hand, ought to conquer such
a feeling. As the birds which we thus caught were only in the water for
a very little while, exhaustion could have had nothing to do with their
self-surrender. The paralysis of fear ought, one would think, to have
acted from the first, instead of supervening after a period of activity,
but perhaps mere bewilderment, by preventing sustained exertion, may
have produced a similar effect. Had it always been the parent bird
that led the way on the occasion of the first leap from the rock, this
powerlessness on the part of the young to leave it a second time might
be attributed to her absence--but as far as I can remember there was
no fixed rule in this respect. Both old and young birds generally went
off with great unwillingness, but at other times this was not nearly so
marked.
In their swimming so quickly to the shore again, after their first
plunge, and refusing thereafter to leave it, these young cormorants
brought to my mind those amphibious lizards of the Galapagos Islands
which Darwin mentions as never entering the sea to avoid danger, but, on
the contrary, always swimming to land on the slightest alarm, though it
might be there precisely that danger awaited them. This "strange anomaly"
Darwin explains in the following manner: "Perhaps this singular piece of
apparent stupidity may be accounted for by the circumstance that this
reptile has no enemy whatever on shore, whereas at sea it must often fall
a prey to the numerous sharks. Hence, probably, urged by a fixed and
hereditary instinct that the shore is its place of safety, whatever the
emergency may be, it there takes refuge." The shag, as far as I know, has
nothing particular to fear, either by sea or shore. His only enemy is
man, who is not confined to either, but is as brutal and ignorant on the
one as the other. But in avoiding danger the instinct of any animal would
probably be to leave the place to which it was less accustomed, and run
to that with which it was familiar--and this we constantly see. Thus a
land-bird that was beginning to take to the water would leave it for the
land on any alarm, whilst a water-bird under similar circumstances would
make for the water. But all water-birds were probably land-birds once, so
that we might expect sometimes to see in their young that old instinct
of taking refuge there, which had become reversed in the parents. We
might also expect to find greater dislike, on their part, to entering
the water; and certainly the young shags did enter it very unwillingly
from the first. So, indeed, for that matter did the old ones, as already
stated, but with them there was the love of being on their nests, or at
least their nesting-ledges--a late continuance of the breeding habits--to
be overcome. When once they had plunged, however, they did not, like the
young birds, swim at once to the shore again, but made for the open sea,
and it must have required a strong contrary instinct on the part of the
latter not to follow them. The lizards on the Galapagos Islands have, no
doubt, also taken to the sea gradually, so that their habit of swimming
to the shore when alarmed may, possibly, be due to a long-enduring
ancestral instinct, having nothing to do with sharks.
We passed, whilst exploring one of these caverns, just beneath a ledge
of rock, where a shag sat brooding over two tiny little things, but
just hatched, perfectly naked, and jet black all over. This poor bird
showed an anxiety which could hardly have been overpassed in the most
devoted of human mothers, and I almost believe her sufferings were as
great--for surely all extremities are equal. Her hoarse, bellowing cries
reverberated through all the place, and helped, with the gloom, the murky
light flung by our candles, the lurid colouring, and the deep, gurgling
noises of the sea, to make a weird, Tartarean picture, difficult to
excel. But it was not in sound alone that she vented her displeasure, for
she was angry as well as alarmed. As the boat passed, she rose on the
nest, and, in a frenzy of apprehension, snapped her bill, and alternately
advanced and retreated her long, snake-like and darkly iridescent green
neck. Though my head was but a foot or two away from her, she kept her
place on the nest, and becoming more and more beside herself, behaved,
at last, in such a manner as it is difficult to describe, but which upon
the human plane and amongst the lower classes, is called "taking on." Not
until I actually took up one of the young ones, to examine it--for this I
could not resist--did she fling herself into the water, and then it was
with a dramatic suddenness that looked like despair. It was as though
she had attempted suicide, but no cormorant, I suppose, would do so in
such a way.
What a strange sight this was! What a gargoyle of a creature--alive, in
these gloomy shades! It seemed not a bird, but something in _The Faerie
Queen_, one of
The uncouth things of faerie,
--a line, by the way, which only resembles Spenser by being, probably,
unfamiliar to most people. But our knowledge makes things commonplace.
Did the fairies exist, they would be classified, and, with Latin names
and description of their habits, would be no more _really_ the fairies
than are birds or beasts. Let one but know nothing, and these caverns are
enchanted.
It is not often that one has so close a view of a shag as this. My
head was but a foot or so off, and on a level with her own; my eyes
looked into her glass-green ones. One thing about her struck me with
wonder, and that was the intense brilliancy of the whole inside of her
mouth, which, in a blaze of gamboge, seemed to imitate, in miniature,
the cavern in which she sat. Most stupidly I did not think to open the
bill of the chick whilst I had it in my hand, in order to see what its
mouth was like. As bearing on the conjecture which I have formed, this
would have interested me, and such an opportunity is not likely to come
again. I noticed, however, that the naked skin about the beak, which,
in the grown bird, is thus vividly coloured, was very much lighter,
and consequently not nearly so handsome, in the larger fledged young
ones. That here the intensity of the hue was gained gradually through
sexual selection, I--being a believer in sexual selection--can have no
doubt, and the lesser degree of it in the young bird would be due to
a well-known principle of inheritance, which has been pointed out or,
rather, discovered by Darwin. If, therefore, the inner colouring has been
acquired in the same manner, it ought also to be first light and become
brighter by degrees.[2] I must now watch for these young cormorants to
open their bills, for it is a habit which they share, more or less, with
their parents, and out of it, as I believe, the adornment has grown.
[Footnote 2: This is, in fact, the case.]
I have no doubt that numbers of shags roost in these caverns during the
night, for when I was lost on Raasey Isle in Skye, I came to a huge
vaulted chamber in the cliffs, into which scores--perhaps hundreds--both
of these birds and the common cormorant flew, after the sun had set. When
they were all settled, every ledge, crevice, and pinnacle seemed tenanted
by them, and never shall I forget the gloom, the grandeur, and the
loneliness of this scene. I admired it, though naked, except for a torn
pair of trousers which were half wet through. I should like to see them
come flying into their caves here also, where I am not so forlorn; but
the distance of my hut from this part of the shore, the lateness of the
hour up to which the light lasts, and my having to cook my supper, makes
this difficult, or, at least, inconvenient. But if I cannot see them fly
in in the evening, I may see them fly out in the morning, and that should
be "a sight for sair een."
Whilst rowing to these caves we had seen one black guillemot, or "tysty,"
flying over the sea with a fish in its bill, and another swimming with
a young one by its side. The latter was of a greyish colour, and about
a third smaller than the parent bird, which in shape and movements it
closely resembled. These birds, therefore, breed in the Shetlands--a fact
well known before, I believe; but I like to rediscover things. Another
and more interesting thing that we saw was a seal swimming very fast,
and leaping, at intervals, out of the water. I think I may use this
expression, for if he did not leap quite free of it, he very nearly did,
so as to show his whole body. He rose in a very bluff, bold way, with
great impetus, as it seemed, and went straight, or nearly straight up,
for a little, before falling forward again. Each time one seemed to hear
the splash and the blow, but this was only in imagination, the distance
being too great. When I say that this seal was swimming very fast I am
giving my impression merely. All I saw was the leaps, which were quickly
repeated, yet with a good space between each, and all in one direction.
Between them, therefore, he must have been speeding along at a great
pace, so that, each time he plunged up, it was as from a spring-board of
impetus and energy. I do not remember reading of seals leaping thus out
of the water, but Mr. Hoseason had seen them do so before, though not
often. There was a fine joyous spirit in the thing--"there is" joy, as
well as "sorrow on the sea."
It is good to see an animal like this in this United Kingdom of ours--or
at least in its seas--for, for a moment, it makes one think one is out of
it, and in some wilder, more life-teeming part of the world. It is hard
to have to live in a country, glorified as being "a network of railways,"
and to have no taste for railways. Oh, wretched modern world of ugliness,
noise, improvement and extermination, what a vile place art thou becoming
for one who loves nature, and only cares for man in books!--the best
books _bien entendu_.
CHAPTER IX
DUCKS AND DIVERS
The red-throated diver moves softly upon the gentle play of the ripples,
seeming, rather, to float with the tide than to swim, for there is
no defined swimming action. When it turns and goes the other way, it
meets the opposing motion--the little dance of the sea--as if it were a
ripple itself, assuming the shape of a bird. This shape is a graceful
one, something between that of a grebe and a guillemot. One might say
that a guillemot had been sent to a finishing-school and had very much
profited by it; but this is not to imply that the grebe--I am thinking of
_Podiceps Cristatus_--is slighted in the comparison--no bird that swims
need think itself so. Much there is grebe-like in manner and action, and
in shape, except for the crest. By the want of this, the bird, I think,
rather gains than loses to the human eye, for handsome as the grebe's
crest is, the delicate curve of head and neck is interrupted by it,
and the effect is rather bizarre than beautiful--it loses something in
purity, that beauty of the undraped statue, to which Cicero compares the
style of Cæsar. The neck of the red-throated diver offers a wonderful
example of delicate yet effective ornament. Down the back of it, and
encroaching a little upon either side, run thin longitudinal stripes of
alternate black and white, so cleanly and finely divided that they look
as though they had been traced by a paint-brush in the hand of a Japanese
artist. There is a gorget of rich ruddy chestnut on the throat, but the
rest of it, with the head and chin, is of a very delicious plum-bloomy
grey, which looks in the sunlight as though it would be purple if it
dared, but were too modest--a lovely and æsthetic combination, soft, yet
bright, and the whole with such a smoothness as no words can describe.
There is another effect wrought by the sun, if it should happen to be
shining, and if the bird should be swimming so as to give a profile view.
It then looks as though there were a broad, white stripe--white, but
having almost a prismatic brilliancy--along the contour-line of the nape.
This appearance is most deceptive, and it is only when the bird turns
its neck so as to show the several thin delicate stripings that one sees
it to be illusory. It is produced, I think, by the light being reflected
from the white stripes alone, so that the black ones between them are
overlooked. Whatever may be the cause, the effect is most striking and
lovely, and if the stripes themselves are due to sexual selection--which
I do not doubt they are--this far more beautiful appearance, being the
effect and crown of them, must assuredly also be. Here is a neck, then!
and I have seen three, and once even seven, together!
In their way of diving, again, these birds resemble the grebes. Sometimes
they go down with a very quiet little leap, but often they sink and
disappear so gently and gradually that one is hardly conscious of what
they are about till one sees them no more. As much as any creature,
I think, they "softly and silently vanish away." Another habit which
they have is shared by the cormorant and other sea-birds, and has often
puzzled me. It is that of continually dipping their bills in the water
and raising them up from it again, as though they were drinking, though
that they should drink the salt sea like this, for hours at a time,
seems a strange thing. What is the meaning of this action, which I have
just seen a shag perform forty-six times in succession, at intervals of
a few seconds, as if for a wager? And this was after having watched it
doing the same thing for some time before. After the forty-sixth sip,
as it were, this bird made a short pause, and then recommenced. Is this
drinking, and, if not, what is it? The head and part of the bill are,
each time, sunk in the water, so that, as the bird moves on, they plough
it like the ram of a war-ship. Then, in a second or two, the head is
raised, not so high indeed as in an unmistakable thirsty draught--which
I do not remember at any time to have seen shags indulge in--but with
much the action of drinking. The bill, it is true, is very little
opened, hardly sufficiently so to be noticeable, but very little would
allow of water entering it. But why should the bird drink like this? It
cannot be that the salt water makes it more and more thirsty, for this,
as with shipwrecked sailors, would produce evil consequences--probably
death--but, of course, this is out of the question.
Sometimes it has struck me that some small disseminated matter in the
water might serve as food, and in regard to this, I have seen some large
white Muscovy ducks, in the Pittville Gardens at Cheltenham, engaged for
a long time, apparently, in carefully sifting the quite clear water of
a little rill. Here, too, there was some action, as of drinking. On the
whole, however, they seemed obviously to be feeding, but whatever they
got must have been extremely minute. The waters of the sea are, no doubt,
full of tiny floating substances, which a bird might yet be able to
appreciate, and which would perceptibly add to its nourishment. If this
were so, then drinking, as a special function, might become almost merged
in the constant swallowing of water whilst taking food, and this may be
the case with various sea-birds. Guillemots and razor-bills also act in
this way, but not, I think, gulls. Gulls drink the fresh water of lochs
and streams; whether they, of set purpose, also drink the sea, I am not
quite sure. If they do, then no doubt I have seen them; but I have not
set it down, and have no clear recollection of it.
These Muscovy ducks that I spoke of have another curious habit of
drinking dew in the early morning. This, at least, is what it looks like.
They walk about for hours over the well-kept lawns, and with their heads
stretched straight out, just above the herbage, continually just open and
shut the mandibles very quickly and very slightly, nibbling the dew as
it were. They certainly do drink it--one can see it disappear in their
mouths; but whether that is all they do, or their chief object, it is
not so easy to be sure of. Why should they walk about imbibing dew for
such a length of time? and why should dew be so much preferred by them to
ordinary water, of which there is abundance? These ducks, indeed, or at
least the larger kind of them, which are of great size, are never to be
seen swimming, but they often walk about by the edge of the lake. They
have a most portentous appearance, and walk with an extraordinary swing
of the body, first to one side and then another. They are fond of bread,
but their ordinary eating and drinking is something of a mystery to me.
I have seen them apparently browsing some long, coarse grass, more like
rushes, but though occasionally they did crop a piece, the incessant
nibbling was out of all proportion to what they got, and seemed for the
most part to be simply in the air. They seem indeed to have a habit of
incessantly moving the mandibles in this way, without any particular
object, or, at any rate, without any clearly discernible result following
upon their doing so.
But as I remember these fine white Muscovy ducks with their vermilion
faces and wild, light eye, with something a look of insanity in it, I
remember, too, that they are now gone, or, at any rate, that most of them
are, and those the best--the hugest and most dragon-like. "Sometimes we
see a cloud that's dragonish" and sometimes a duck. These wonderful,
waddling, swinging red and white Muscovy ducks were, and to have them
running after one, with uncouth hissings and with their heads held down,
yet scooping up and wagged from side to side at one--and with that insane
eye--made one think all sorts of odd things. Well, they are gone, nor are
they the only ones that are. When I first, by necessity, came to live at
Cheltenham, the ducks in the Pittville Gardens were a great consolation
to me. There was quite a fleet of them, a gay little flotilla of all
kinds and colours, and at the smallest hint of bread, on one side of the
lake, they would all come flying over from the other; and then it was
the sport to feed them. How diverting that was! Being in such numbers,
one took notice of all the little differences in their dispositions, the
different degrees of boldness or retiringness, of pugnacity, greediness,
aggressiveness, pertness, impudence, swagger, imperialism, and so on,
all of which one could bring out, in some amusing way or another, by the
varied and nicely-schemed throwing of the bread. To contrive that a timid
bird should always get it, whilst a boldly greedy one pursued in vain,
that two should contend for a large piece, to the end that a third might
swim securely away with it, to tempt some to walk on thin ice till it
broke, and others to make little canals through it, each from a different
place, each struggling to be first, to have one bird feeding from the
hand, whilst a crowd stood round, looking enviously on, to see greed
just drag on fear, or fear just drive back greed, or the two so nicely
balanced that they produced a deadlock, so that the bird stood on a very
knife-edge, trembling between a forward and a backward movement; and
then, too, gradually to come to connect the look and bearing of each bird
with its disposition, to know them, both outwardly and psychologically,
to see them grow into their names that grew with them, and have the bold
orange-bill, the modest grey, the swaggering white bird, the Duchess, the
Fine Lady, the My Lord Tomnoddy, the Kaiser, the Swashbuckler, and so
on, all about one, so many characters, so many amusing little burlesques
of humanity--human nature stripped, without its guards, disguises,
softenings and hypocrisies--all this was the solace and beguilement of
many a tedious afternoon.
But there exists for some reason, in every town in England, a body of
men who can do what they like, without asking anybody, to the annoyance
of everybody, though everybody pays for them. One day, after an absence,
I came with my bag of bread as usual, but there were no ducks to be
fed; all had vanished--there was only the uninteresting pond. Alarmed,
I inquired of the man at the entrance, and found that the Cheltenham
Corporation had got rid of the whole of them on account of their being
of no particular breed or strain, just ordinary tame ducks and no more.
Their appearance, the indiscriminate diversity of their plumage, their
infinite variety of colour and pattern, had been against them. It had,
indeed, made the water gay, and gladdened the eyes of subscribers to
the gardens, but it had not been creditable to the Corporation. True
elegance, it appears, which can only come from true breeding, had
been wanting. These ducks were "a mongrel lot," and though they might
be pretty to look at and entertaining to feed, that was not what the
Corporation cared about. What the Corporation did care about, presumably,
was to read in the local papers, or be told by their friends that now,
at last, there were some ducks on the Cheltenham lakes a little better
than the "mongrel lot" one had so long been accustomed to see there,
more worthy of themselves, more worthy of the town they represented, and
so forth. So the poor "mongrel lot," the delight of all the children,
and of many a grown-up person to boot--Charles the Second was grown up,
and a clever man too--were done away with, and a few pairs of select,
blue-blooded strangers (more soothing to gentle bourgeois feelings) were
introduced in their place. The children who came to feed them said,
"Where are the others? Where are all the rest gone to? There's no fun
in feeding three or four." Nor is there, in comparison with feeding a
hundred, as one grown-up person at least can testify. As additions,
these new arrivals would have been welcome enough, and being of distinct
species they would not, probably, have entered into mésalliances with
the others, to make a correct Corporation blush. Why could they not
have stayed? But this, I suppose, was the way of it. Here were pleasure
gardens for which the public paid. This pretty little fleet of ducks,
painted all sorts of colours and not one painted quite like another,
made a very considerable part of the pleasure thus paid for. So the
Corporation, vested with mysterious and almost unlimited powers of
annoyance, decided that the proper thing to do was to do away with them,
and they did do away with them, and the gardens have been the duller for
it ever since. What they could have thought----But there! they were a
Corporation and acted like one. They had a precedent. They had previously
done away with the peacocks.
CHAPTER X
FROM THE EDGE OF A PRECIPICE
I have been watching the black guillemots. Like the common ones, they
often carry a fish they have caught, for a very long time in the bill,
before swallowing it, or even before giving it to their young. They will
swim with it for half an hour or so, constantly dipping it beneath the
water, and apparently nibbling on it with the bill, whilst they hold it
thus submerged. Then finding themselves near a rock which is ascendable,
they ascend it, and lie couched there for a while, resting, always with
the fish in their bill. Anon, with refreshed energies, they re-enter the
sea with it, and, if very patient, and prepared to watch indefinitely,
one may at last see that fish swallowed; but I hardly think I should be
exaggerating were I to say that hours may pass in this way. They usually
hold the fish by the middle, or just below the head, and if they want to
shift their hold from one place to the other, they sink down their bills
into the water, as though better able to do so through its medium. To
_mandibulate_ a fish in the air, quite freely, as does the cormorant, is,
perhaps, beyond their power. Any moment, however, may show me that it is
not. So, too, when I have seen them swallow the fish, they have done so
in the same way. Instead of raising the head and gulping it down, they
gulped it up, with the water to help them; though I can hardly think that
they are compelled to act in this way.
These little birds--old ocean's pets, his darlings--seem to me to play
at fighting. Whilst swimming together in little changing troops--for the
numbers are always increasing or diminishing--they constantly approach
one another in a threatening manner, the body raised in the water, the
head held straight up, and the mandibles opening and shutting like a
slender pair of scissors--a thoroughly warlike appearance. Yet it hardly
ever ends in anything, nor does the threatened bird seem really alarmed.
Generally, the threatener, as he comes alongside, subsides into quiet
humdrum, or two birds, after circling round one another in this way, each
almost on its own pivot, like a pair of whirligig corks, both quiet down.
Each, whilst thus acting, will, at intervals, drop the head and sink the
beak a little in the water--one of their most usual actions. Sometimes,
indeed, the menacing bird may fly at the one he menaces, who ducks at
the right moment; but what makes me think it more play than wrath is
that, often, instead of flying right _at_ him, he flies to beside him
only, and both then swim together, looking the best of friends. Yet too
much stress is not to be laid on this either, and certainly it can be
"miching malicho" on occasions. Often, when one bird is attacked, all the
others will dive and scurry about under the water, in the most excited
manner, seeming to pursue one another, as though it were a game or
romp. Sometimes, indeed, there will be a little bit of a scuffle; but if
there be fighting, still more, as it appears to me, is there the play or
pretence of fighting, which is tending to pass into a social sport or
dance.
The antics of birds are often so very curious, and the whole subject of
their origin and meaning is so full of interest, that nothing which might
by any possibility throw light upon this ought to be neglected, or can be
too closely observed. I believe that the feelings of animals, still more
than is known to be the case with savages, pass easily from one channel
into another, and that, therefore, nervous excitement brought forth by
one kind of emotion is apt, in its turn, to produce another kind, so that
if any special transition of this sort were at all frequent, it might,
through memory and association of ideas, become habitual. If, however,
a _mêlée_ or scrimmage--to meet the case of these guillemots--became,
almost as soon as started, a mere hurrying and scurrying about, it would
be difficult to detect the one as the cause of the other, and this is
just the difficulty one might expect, for in such a sequence the tendency
would, no doubt, be for the first or causal part of the activity to
become more and more abbreviated (what should delay the passage?) till,
at length, a mere start on the part of any one bird might set the others
off dancing. Finally, what had become a mere pretence or starting-point
might vanish entirely, or only survive as an indistinguishable part of
the other, in which case there would be the dance or sport alone, which
would then seem a very unaccountable thing. In this way I can imagine
the evening dances or antics of the great plover, which used to impress
me so when I lived in Suffolk, to have originated. One might watch these
performances a great many times without seeing anything to suggest
that a feeling of pugnacity entered into them. Nevertheless, there is,
sometimes, a slight appearance of this, for I have several times seen a
bird pursue and wave its wings over another one. My theory is that an
initial energy or emotion sometimes flows out into subsidiary channels,
and that gradually this secondary factor may encroach upon and take the
place of the primary one.
At any rate, to come back from the general to the particular, it is
apparent to me that these little ebullitions, or whatever they may be
called, of the black guillemots are of a blended nature, and I should
think it misleading to describe them simply as fights. Whatever they
are, they are very pretty to see. The actions of all the little dumpling
birds are so pert, brisk, and vivacious--so elegant, too. Yet a bird will
go through it all, play every part in the little _affaire_, carrying,
all the while, a fish in its bill. It makes no difference to him; he
will even threaten in the way I have described, whilst thus encumbered.
Whether this makes it more likely that the whole thing is sport, I hardly
know.[3] It seems strange to seek one's enemy with one's dinner in one's
hand--the beak is used more as a hand here than a mouth--yet what is done
with entire ease is as though it were not done at all. Even so do the
guillemots--the common ones, I mean--but then, they used to fight for
their fish. Here I saw little or nothing of any real attempt on the part
of one bird, to take the fish from another.
[Footnote 3: On second thoughts it does not, since sparrows will attack
martins though holding grass, etc., for nest-building, in their beaks--as
I have seen.]
In swimming under water the black guillemot uses its wings only--the
rose-red legs trail behind it, a fading fire as it goes down. The body
becomes one great glaucous-green bubble, which has, still more, a
luminous appearance. The effect may almost be called beautiful, but it is
still more odd and bottle-imp-like. Most diving sea-birds exhibit this
appearance under water, but not all in the same degree. Whether sexual
selection has come into play here I know not.
A pair of these birds are now feeding their young. The nest is in a
hole in the earth, on a ridge of the precipitous grass-slope of the
cliff, just above where it breaks into rocks, and drops sheer to the
sea. Both parents feed the chick--for their family is no larger--but
one more often than the other. They bring, each time, a single fish--a
sand-eel, often of a fair size--and disappear with it into the hole,
reappearing shortly afterwards. Once both are in the hole together,
having entered in succession, each with a fish, but generally when the
two meet at the entrance one only brings a fish and goes in, and the
other, having nothing, stays outside. When the parent bird has fed its
young and come out again, it will often sit for a little on the steep
slope, above or below the hole, before flying away. It looks solicitously
at the hole, and from time to time utters a little thin note that just
reaches me where I am. Once both the birds sat like this, one above and
one below the hole. What I particularly noticed was that when the bird
that had taken a fish in had come out again, the other, even though it
had nothing, would always go in too, as though to pay the chick a little
visit. It stayed about the same time--less than a minute that is to say.
How interesting are these little birds to watch, and how delightful is
it to watch them from the summit of precipices that "beetle o'er their
base into the sea," where all is wild and tremendous, and in the midst of
utter solitude!
CHAPTER XI
DARWINIAN EIDER-DUCKS
I have seen a fair number of eider-ducks within the last few days. All
the grown ones are females--not a male to be seen now--and the greater
number of them are unaccompanied by ducklings. Of those that are, most
have but one, and three is the maximum number that I have seen swimming
together with their mother. Yet two years ago, in early June, the males
here were courting the females, and when I left, about the middle of the
month, but very few eggs, I believe, had been laid. This year, I learn,
the birds have been very late in breeding, there having been some very
"rough weather," as it is euphoniously called, in the spring--that is to
say, the spring has been like a bad winter, and now the summer, though
it has no very close resemblance to any of the four seasons as I have
seen them elsewhere, yet comes nearest to a phenomenally bad November. I
wonder, therefore, that so many of these mother eiders are without their
young ones, for they should all have hatched out a brood of them not so
very long ago. Why, too, should so many be swimming with one duckling
only? Were these single ones of any size, one could understand the others
of the brood having escaped from tutelage, but, like all I have seen,
they are but little fluffy things. It looks as though their fellow
nestlings had come to grief in some way, and if so it is probable that
many entire broods have also. Yet perhaps they have merely drifted away
into the wide, watery world, where they may be able enough to shift for
themselves thus early. To judge by these, however, they would not have
left the mother duck voluntarily--they are dutiful, dependent little
things.
Where the coast is iron-bound, in delightful little bays and
inlets--those sea-pools lovely to look down upon--one may watch the
eiders feeding on the rocks, and try, through the glasses, to make out
exactly what they are getting. In this way I am amusing myself this
morning, having just run round a projecting point, towards which a
family of three were advancing, and concealed myself behind a projecting
ridge. Over this I can just peep at some black rocks, up which, whilst
their mother waits, the little ducklings now begin to crawl. So steep
is the slope that sometimes they slip and roll a little way down it,
but they always recover themselves and run up it again, none the worse.
In the intervals between such little mishaps they seem to be picking
minute shell-fish off the rock; but what shell-fish are they? for the
small white ones, with which large areas of the rock are covered, are
as hard as stone, and might defy anything short of a hammer and chisel
to dislodge them. It is not on these assuredly that these soft little
things are feeding, and now I see that where they are most active the
rock is black. There are broad, black bands and streaks upon it, but
what these consist of, or whether they are anything more than seaweed
I cannot quite make out; and here, where I lie, being above the sea's
influence, there is nothing similar to instruct me. Rocks now I find--as
I have often before--are inferior to foliage for concealing oneself, that
is, if one wishes to see as well as to be unseen. One's head, projecting
over their hard, sharp, uncompromising lines, catches the eye of a wary
bird, and recesses made by their angles are not often to be found where
one wants them. Twice has the mother duck been slightly suspicious, and
now, to my chagrin--though it really should not be, for what can be more
entertaining?--she goes to the length of calling her ducklings off the
rock. This she does by uttering a deep "quorl"--a curious sound, not a
quack, but something like one--on which they come scurrying down to join
her, putting off to sea with the greatest precipitation, like two little
boats that have only just themselves to launch--no waiting for people
to get into them. I have heard this note before, and always it has been
uttered as a danger-signal to the chicks. There is another one that is
used on ordinary occasions, and this much more resembles a true "quack."
In spite of these various alarms, however, the young eiders are soon on
the rock again, and after a while the mother walks up it, too, and begins
picking and pulling with her bill over these same black surfaces. I still
cannot quite make out, though now I surmise, what it is that gives
this black, or rather indigo, tinting to the rock, and in trying to get
nearer, the mother duck is again alarmed, and with another deep "quorl"
or two, runs quickly down the slant, and slides into the water, close
followed by her two little children. This time she swims away with them
and returns no more, leaving me as disappointed as though I had thirsted
for her blood.
Going down now to the rocks, where they have just been, I find that the
black appearance of which I have spoken is caused by immense numbers
of quite small mussels which grow thickly wedged together. It is on
these that all three have been feeding, and I have no doubt that they
form one of the staples of the eider-duck's food just now. Earlier in
the year it seemed to be all diving, and when they brought anything up
it did not look like a mussel. All about the rocks there are certain
little collections of broken mussel-shells--often of a very pretty violet
tint--coagulated more or less firmly together, and these must evidently
have been ejected, as indigestible, by birds that had swallowed them; but
whether by gulls only, or by both gulls and eider-ducks, I cannot tell.
Gulls, I know, disgorge these queer kinds of pellets as well as others
still more peculiar, since they occur over the interior of the island in
numbers too great for any other bird to have produced them.
The eider-ducks, therefore, feed on the beds of mussels that the sea
exposes at low tide, but they also, to go by appearances, devour the
actual seaweed, irrespective of anything that may be growing upon
it. Having seen them do both, I see no reason why I should reject the
evidence of my eyesight in the one case more than in the other. What
interests me is that I have several times during this week seen the
same duck, with her young ones, feeding along this one flat part of the
coast-line, where it forms a beach, whereas all the others that I have
seen have kept in the neighbourhood of the rocks. Even about the shores
of this small island it seems as though a process of differentiation were
going on, and that whilst the great majority of the eider-ducks affect a
diet of shell-fish, and, therefore, haunt the broken, rocky parts where
it is to be best obtained, some few prefer the seaweed growing on the
smooth, shallow bottoms, which they therefore do not leave, or, at least,
more frequently resort to.
A difference of food like this, involving a residence in different
localities, must lead to change in other habits, to which structure
would, in time, respond, so that, at last, upon Darwinian principles,
two different birds would be produced. Thus anywhere and everywhere one
may see with one's own eyes--or think that one sees, which is just as
instructive--the early unregarded stages of some important evolutionary
process.
It is a good thing, I think, thus to exercise one's imagination, and
by observing this or that more or less slight deviation from the main
stream of an animal's habits, to try and picture its remote future
descendants. Too little, I think, has been done in this way. The
imaginative element is one without which all things starve. In natural
history it is particularly wanted, and would have particularly good
effects. Most naturalists think only of what is the rule in any animal's
habits--exceptions they do not care about--yet, looked at in a certain
way, they are still more interesting. Moreover, there is a great tendency
to see an animal do just what it is supposed to do, and this tendency
does not conduce to keen and interested observation. But the future
modification of any species must depend largely upon deviations, on the
part of individuals belonging to it, from its more ordinary line of
conduct, so that any man who should wish rationally to speculate on this
future must become, perforce, a patient noticer of such deviations, and,
therefore, a great observer of the animal in question.
To support a theory is a great motive towards the collection of facts,
yet a number of small-minded people are always deprecating what they
call "mere theory" in field natural history, and crying out for facts
only. Theory, however, is a soil in which facts grow, and there is a
greater crop from a false one than from none at all. The history of
astrology and alchemy are instances of this--if, indeed, the latter, in
its fundamental belief, does not turn out to have been true after all.
When have men been much interested in facts--apart from mere gaping
wonder or amusement--except in connection with some idea in their mind,
which, by giving, or seeming to give, them significance, as it were
irradiated them? The "matter-of-fact man," as that lowest type of one is
called, is interested in comparatively few facts even, and such fancy and
imagination as he does possess plays around those few.
To return to the eider-ducks, I cannot, of course, be quite certain that
it is always the same family party that I see along the beach by the
fringe of seaweed, but I have little doubt that it is; for, in the first
place, it always consists of the mother and three ducklings, and in the
next, there is never another bird or party of birds there at the same
time with them. The double coincidence is, I think, decisive, for most
of the eiders that have ducklings at all, have either one only or two,
whilst the greater number are without any. But then, to be sure, I have
only been here a week, nor have I given the matter any very _special_
attention. It is not quite _constaté_, only I like to think things, and
then think as though they were as I think.
CHAPTER XII
ON THE GREAT NESS-SIDE
To-day I was to see the cormorants fly out from their caves, but my hopes
were too high, and so proper for dashing. Having gone to bed at six,
I awoke at ten, dozed till eleven, read Shakespeare till near twelve,
and, soon after, got up. It was night when I first opened the door and
looked out, morning when I went away. The moon had possessed the world
in fullest sovereignty, had streamed her silver over land and sea. Now
she was deposed, dethroned, yet there had only intervened the short time
necessary to resuscitate the peat fire and make a cup of tea. Yet it
is not morning either, even yet--or only on the eastern sea and in the
eastern sky; the one a lake of lucid light, hung in an all but universal
pall of dun cloud, the other lying beneath it, bathed in it, glowing with
reflected colours, which yet seem deeper and more lurid than those from
which they have their birth. Two seas of surpassing splendour: and long
lines of heavy purple cloud hang, like ocean islands, in the one of the
sky. The other, the true sea, has a strangely opaque appearance--it does
not look like water at all. It is this that makes the morning; all else
is dark and shrouded. Standing here, upon a cornerstone of this island,
one looks from night into day. Just before the sun rises the clouds about
become rosy red, and then take fire; but from the moment he has risen
they begin to fade back into grey again. All flame himself, he puts all
other out. It is a strange effect. The sun here wants his state. He has
been up but a moment, yet, but for a very tempered glow just about him,
all light and all colour is gone. Soon it will be all gone, for into the
great grey cloudy continent that broods upon the one clear space and
spreads from it, illimitable as the sky itself, he, "the King of Glory,"
is now entering, and there, in all probability, he will be for the rest
of the sombre day. Here in the Shetlands the sky that waits for the sun
is a much more wonderful sight than the actual sunrise, whereas elsewhere
I have seen it throb to his coming and relume at his torch.
Walking to the caves, I miss my way and long overshoot the point. This
is a pity, for it has grown lighter yonder, and I do not wish to disturb
the shags, some of whom, no doubt, roost near the entrance. However, when
I get there, the island is still dark and shrouded, and sitting, as I
have to, with my face to the western sea, that, too, lies in a grey-blue
something that is neither light nor dark. Through it and over it the
Skerries Lighthouse still throws at regular intervals its revolving beam,
showing that it still counts as night. The shags do not seem to wait for
the true morning--the one over to the east. Many of them have flown out
to sea like shadows, or great, uncouth bats, yet I hardly think they can
have seen me in the greyness after I had sat down. I am not sure whether
they came from the cavern itself or only from about its frowning portals.
Wondrous noises the sea is making now, as, with the heaves of a dead
calm, even--heaves that in their very quietude suggest a terrible reserve
of power--it laps into and out of this awesome cavern--moans, rumblings,
sullen sounds that want and seem to crave a name.
It is now near three, and the first gull yet--of its own free will, and
not unsettled by me--has flown by. Just before, some very large fish--for
I think it must be a shark, and not a cetacean--has passed on its silent
way along the silent sea. It came several times to the surface, and
showed each time a very long back, with one small pointed fin, very
much out of proportion to its bulk, rising sharply and straightly from
it, just as a shark's dorsal fin does. Each time it made that same sort
of roll that a porpoise does, only more slowly and in a much greater
space. This, indeed, does not suggest a shark--indeed, it can't be
one--but one of the smaller cetaceans that is yet much larger than the
common porpoise. Every time it comes up it makes a sort of grunting
snort or blow. On account of this--for it gives itself more leisure to
do it--and that its roll describes a longer curve, I doubt if it be the
porpoise--the one we know so well. It must be a larger sort, nor should
I ever have supposed it to be a shark had I not been assured that sharks
of some size are common round the shores of these islands. This must be
true, I think, for my informants could hardly have been mistaken.
At two I could see, though dimly, to write, and now, at a quarter-past
three, I can as plainly as by full daylight, though it is not that yet.
The Skerries light is still flashing, though it must be now superfluous;
but even as I write this, it must have flashed its last, for the proper
interval has gone by. There is now a great bellowing of shags from the
cave, which may proceed either from a single pair or from several. No
words can describe the strangeness of these sounds. They are more than
guttural--stomachic rather. They harmonise finely with those of the sea,
and sometimes, indeed, bear a curious resemblance to some of its minor,
sullen gurgles, deep within the cavern. But no birds fly out.
Several times, again, now, I have seen this large small cetacean, and
once another one, larger still--in fact, an unmistakable small whale,
which came briskly up at no great distance away and blew a jet of
oily-looking vapour from its nose. It looked almost black, and had
the right whale shape, though not more, perhaps, than some dozen or
twenty feet long. These small whales are common off the Shetlands, but
suddenly to see one is very exciting. It reminds me of when, from the
rocks of Raasey Isle, I saw in the clear, pale light of the morning,
true whales--huge monsters of the deep--leaping, head first, out of the
water and falling back into it again with a roar, which, though several
miles off, I heard each time most distinctly, and attributed, at first,
to the breaking away of portions of the cliff on the opposite shores
of Skye. Nothing, it seemed to me, but a landslip was sufficient to
account for such a tremendous sound, and it was with an interest the
vividness of which I can even now feel that its true nature first dawned
upon me. These whales, as, with their huge dimensions, I could see,
though so far away, leapt almost if not entirely clear of the water,
and perpendicularly into the air. At that time I was quite unaware that
they ever did this, but since then I have both heard and read of it, and
Darwin, somewhere in his journal, speaks of the cachalot or sperm-whale
doing the same thing.
[Illustration: FROM THE ROCKS OF RAASEY ISLE]
Puffins are beginning now to fly hither and thither over the sea, and
terns are fishing about a low-lying eastern isle. They are the common
kind, but some clouds above the island are becoming flame-touched, making
them roseate terns. An Arctic skua goes by too, and a black guillemot
flies with a fish to feed its young. Still from the recesses of the
cavern come those deep, hoarse, bellowing sounds, but they must be
uttered by shags upon their nests, and that do not mean to come forth.
What there was to see I have seen--those bat-like shadows. There can be
no more to speak of--it is too late--but, were there hundreds, I can no
longer resist the impulse to walk and walk in the clear and cool-aired
morning. The shags that roost in these caverns cannot, I think, be
numerous, and they leave them, it would seem, whilst night still broods
upon the sea.
True, there was the morning, clear and lovely, in the east, but, to see
that, they would have had to peep round the point. Both in numbers,
therefore, and impressiveness the _Ausflug_ has been a failure, but the
morning, with the almost midnight sun, a splendid success.
This was my last day on the island. In the afternoon my friends sailed
over from Yell, bringing me my letters. One was from my sentry-box
man, telling me the birds were still on the ledges, but advising me
to come at once, if I wished to find them there--otherwise they might
be flown. I therefore went back the same evening, and next day, which
was Sunday, took steamer to Uyea Sound, from whence I walked through a
barren desolation to Balta Sound, getting in, about 10 p.m., to tea and
cakes at one of the most homelike, friendly-breathing hostels possible
to find either in the Shetlands or the rest of the United Kingdom--or,
indeed, the world, to judge by probabilities--to wit, Mrs. Hunter's
establishment, where many a one has had cause to say, like myself:
"Sleep (or rather rest) after toil, port after stormie seas,
* * * * * does greatly please."
Next day I made what purchases I wanted, not forgetting a good
serviceable porridge-spoon--I had used a stick before--and, on Tuesday,
drove over to Burra Firth, where I was met by the watcher, and between
us we carried my belongings up the great hill--or ness, to give it its
Shetland name--to the little black sentry-box that I knew so well. The
"pockmantle" fell to my share, and was the lesser burden. It was very
heavy, however, and I had almost as lief be taken to a tea-party as have
such another trudge. But how the skuas greeted me, again, with their wild
cries, as we climbed the higher slopes where their nurseries are. Having
set everything where it would best go, in the little cabin, I walked out
and made my way to the cliffs.
CHAPTER XIII
MOTHER AND CHILD
The young fulmar petrels here are still all in a state of fluff--not
one true feather to be seen--just as I left them in the middle of July,
on my last visit, though now it is the end of it. They are larger,
however, which, with their softness, whiteness, and general appearance,
as of a great powder-puff, makes them more marvellous-looking than
ever. Their shape, as they lie on the rock, is that of a round flat
disc--a muffin somewhat inflated, or an air-ball compressed. Only when
they flutter their wings, or waggle out their legs, have they any more
intricate shape than this, except that the funny little head, with the
black eyes and black hooked beak, projects permanently out of their
roundness. The latter is frequently held open, with the mandibles widely
distended--sometimes fixed so, at others gently moving. The neck, on
these occasions, is often stretched out and swayed from side to side,
so that we have here, in embryo, those curious movements which, in the
grown birds, are nuptial ones, and accompany the note then uttered.
Although the chick, as would be naturally expected, often opens its bill
in order to persuade the parent bird to feed it, yet after some hours'
watching I came to the conclusion that the action was too frequent and
too habitual to be altogether explained in this way, and I look upon it
as an inherited tendency. But may not the habit have originated in the
hunger of the chick, and have been worked in, sexually, at a later age,
when the reproductive system had become active? Strong emotion, one may
suppose, would require an outward manifestation in the shape of movements
of some sort, and it would be such as were already known, that, by first
coming to hand, would be likely to be first employed. If we had been
accustomed to do one kind of work for which we had a suitable implement,
and it became suddenly necessary to do some other for which we had none,
it would be natural for us to catch up the one we had and make a shift
with that. If a swim-bladder can be worked in as a lung, or a pair of
legs as part of a mouth, then why not a hunger-signal as a love-signal?
Be this as it may, it is certainly strange to see little fluffy chicks
on the nest going through the same sort of pantomime as their parents do
when in love. But why do I call them little? I have never seen such big
baby things, and their size makes them look all the weirder. So great,
indeed, is the chick's fluffiness that though the wings are tiny and the
tail invisible, it looks almost, if not quite, as big as the graceful and
delicately shaped parent bird sitting beside it.
The lethargy of these young fulmars is very noticeable. They do
occasionally rise a little on their feet and shuffle about in the place
where they sit, so that in this way they may, in time, turn quite round.
But after watching them now, for some two hours, I should doubt if they
ever moved more than an inch or so beyond an imaginary line drawn close
round them, as they lie. Here natural selection seems a demonstrable
thing, for often, were the chick to move so much as six inches forward,
or a few feet in any other direction, it must fall and be dashed to
pieces. What but this force--or, rather, process--can have produced
such a want of all inclination to move? It is the same, I suppose, with
birds that nest in trees or bushes. With the nightjar, however, though
the chicks become, after a while, somewhat active, so that the nest, or
rather nursery, is shifted from day to day, yet for some time they lie
very quiet, though well able to run about. Here the above explanation
does not apply, so that one can never be sure. "Theories," says Voltaire
"are like mice. They run through nineteen holes, but are stopped by the
twentieth." Still, it would generally be an advantage for young birds to
keep still when left by themselves, even in a field or wood, and how much
more so where a step or two, or one little run, would be death. Looking
at these fat, fluffy, odd-looking creatures as they sit motionless
from hour to hour, and then at the grown bird sailing on spread wings,
all grace and beauty,--a being that seems born of the air--the change
from one to the other--from the fixed to the free phase of life--seems
hardly less or more remarkable than that by which a chrysalis becomes
a butterfly. Not the egg itself differs more from this last stage of
its inmate--this free flitting, gliding thing--than does the round,
squat, stolid chick, which in appearance is nearer to an egg than to a
full-blossomed bird.
The mother fulmar--for I suppose it is the mother--cossets the chick
as she sits beside it, leaning tenderly over it, and nibbling with
her bill amidst its long, soft, white fluff, the chick sitting still,
the while, with its beak held open, but not at all as though it were
thinking of food. Sometimes, by inadvertence, the mother pricks the chick
a little, with her bill, upon which it turns indignantly towards her,
with distended jaws. She, to cover her _maladresse_, does the same, but
in a dignified, parental manner, as though it were she who had cause
to be angry. But it is easy to see that she is really a little ashamed
of herself, and purposes to be more careful another time. Mother and
chick often sleep side by side on the rock, and then it is noticeable
that whilst the mother has her head turned and partially hidden amongst
the feathers of the back--"under her wing," as one says--the chick's is
often held straight in the usual manner. Not always, however: at other
times, it is disposed of in the same way. As far as I can see, the chick
is in the charge of one parent only. On several occasions a bird, which
I suppose to be the other one, has flown in, and settled on the rock
near, but always, on its coming nearer than some three feet or so, the
one in charge, distending its jaws, and with threatening gestures, has
uttered an angry "ak, ak, ak, ak!" and, on two occasions, has squirted
something--I presume, oil--at the intruder, causing it to go farther off.
This cry is sometimes preceded by a more curious and less articulate one
of "rherrrrrr!"--at a venture: I would not answer for the spelling being
exact.
I believe it is the mother who takes charge of the chick, and becomes so
intensely jealous of it that she will not suffer even her _cáro spóso_,
to whom she was so much attached, to come within a certain distance
of it. One cannot, indeed, say for certain that it is the husband who
thus sometimes flies up, and seems to show a wish to approach his wife
or child, but it is not likely that a strange bird would act in this
way--for all are mated--and if both parents fed the young one, why should
either repulse the other? I feel sure, therefore, that only one does, and
this one is much more likely to be the female.
The chick, in order to be fed, places its bill within that of the parent
bird, and evidently gets something which she brings up into it. This
appears to be liquid and, I suppose, is oil. Had it been solid, I must,
I think, at this close distance, have seen it--or at least have seen
that it was. Where, however, this supply of oil comes from, or how it is
procured, I have no very clear idea. Though the actions of the old bird
in thus feeding the chick are something like those of a pigeon, yet they
are much easier and, so to speak, softer. The liquid food is brought up
without difficulty or straining, as one might, indeed, expect would be
the case, seeing the ease with which the bird can at any moment squirt
it out, when angry, and the distance to which it is shot. Nor is this
the only power of the kind which these petrels possess, for they are
able to eject their excrement to a quite astonishing distance--greater
even, perhaps, than that to which the cormorant or shag attains in this
art--at least it seems so at the time. This power is fully developed in
the chick--by whom, indeed, it is the more needed--and I notice that the
rock where each one lies is clean enough, though all round about it is
whitened.
[Illustration: ON THE EDGE OF THE PRECIPICE]
When the mother petrel leaves the chick, she, for the most part,
continually circles round in the neighbourhood, and almost at every
circle looks in at it, sometimes waking it up as it lies asleep, causing
it to give an impatient little snap of the bill towards her. It is as
though she could not sufficiently love, cherish, and look at it. It is
her only child, and a spoilt one.
I must not forget to note down--now that it is full before me--that
the inside of the chick's bill, with the mouth generally, is somewhat
more lightly coloured than in the old bird; it is more pink--which may
represent the natural colour--and less mauvy. This difference, as in the
other cases, is what we might expect to see, were the colour a sexual
adornment; but why, if it is not so, should there be any difference
depending on age in such a region?
The great skua still reigns here in its accustomed territory, which,
whilst encircled on all sides by that of the lesser one, is not
intermingled with it, even on the frontiers. Many of the young birds are
still about, but being now feathered and active in proportion to their
size, they are more difficult to find than when I was here before. Though
the old birds still swoop at one, they are not so savage as they were
when the chicks were young and fluffy; they do not actually strike, but
swerve off, particularly if one glances up at them as they approach. The
Arctic skua, on the other hand, is still as bold as ever, and will strike
one as repeatedly and come as near to knocking one's hat off without
doing it (not near at all, that is to say) as ever it did before; or the
great one either, I might add, as far as my own personal experience is
concerned. I would not, however, be unduly sceptical, and this I can say,
that I could easily set my hat on my head so that either bird--or any
bird--might knock it off again.
CHAPTER XIV
"DREAM CHILDREN"
Visiting these islands in the late summer impresses me with a fact that
it is easy to forget, viz. that even the most oceanic of sea-birds--the
wandering albatross or stormy petrel, for instance--pass almost as
much of their life upon the land as the water. The breeding season is
no slight matter, lasting but a short time. It goes on for months and
months, and sometimes, from its earliest beginnings, must represent a
period not very far short of half the year. On the ----shire coast, for
instance, the terns appeared in the earlier part of April, and I was told
by the fishermen that they stayed sometimes till well into September. How
the gulls at the end of July stand congregated on their nesting-grounds,
as if the business of matrimony were rather beginning than ending, I
have already mentioned, and it is the same thing here in August with the
guillemots. Everywhere the ledges are crowded with them, as they were
when I last came in June--indeed, if there is any difference, the numbers
seem even greater. But though there is the same general appearance,
the glasses soon reveal the fact that, with very few exceptions, all
the young birds are departed. Such as remain are no larger than the
chicks I saw in the spring, and as most of the parents were then still
incubating, besides that the young guillemot is known to leave the ledge
whilst quite small, there is no room for doubt on this point.
No; the young are gone. Why, then, do the parents stay? They will rear
no second brood, so that it seems as though they love the ledges better
than the little fluffy things that they were feeding upon them, up to the
moment of their departure. Affection apparently must be bounded by the
sea, for whilst the parents, if we suppose them to have accompanied the
chicks down, and swum about with them for a little, must have soon flown
back, the chicks, owing to the undeveloped state of their wings, would
have been unable to make the return journey. It would seem, therefore,
that the first night after the down-flight must have separated mother and
child for ever; but if this is the case we may well wonder how the rising
generation of guillemots are able to support themselves. Up to now they
have been fed upon the ledges, but henceforth they must dive and catch
fish for themselves. That they should at once and of their own initiative
acquire the skill to do this, or learn the art in so very short a
time, from the parent birds, hardly seems possible. We must perforce
suppose--or at least I must--that either the mother, as is most probable,
or both the parents, remain with the chick for a little, feeding it now
on the sea as they did before on the ledge, until in time--and no doubt
very quickly--it learns to feed itself. But how strange, if this is so,
that the grown birds return to the ledges and stay there day after
day--I know not for how long--without laying a second egg. If they do not
do so, then none of these birds can have bred. But the ledges are alive
with them, and they are of both sexes. How long does the mother bird
remain with her chick upon the sea, and does she, during such period,
remain with it there at night, thus abandoning the ledges for a time
altogether, though she afterwards returns to them, or does she fly up
each night to the ledges, whilst the chick roosts upon some rock at the
cliff's base, to be rejoined by its mother next morning? I cannot answer
these questions in a satisfactory manner. It seems as though time must
be wanting for such a little family exodus as I am here suggesting, for
on the 16th of July, upon the occasion of my first visit, I left these
same ledges crowded with guillemots, all, or almost all, of whom were
still feeding their young, and now, on the last day of the same month,
I find all the old birds still upon them, but nearly all the young are
gone. This gives about a fortnight for the birds I left to have gone off
to sea with the young ones, and returned to the ledges alone, supposing
the exodus to have commenced almost on the day I went away. But did it?
As the few chicks that are still here are just about as big as the others
were at the time I left them last year, I shall be better able to judge
of this when I see how long they stay.
Meanwhile, there is something to interest me under my eyes--a curious
matter as it seems to me, which requires some sort of explanation. As I
have said, but very few of these guillemots have still a chick to look
after, but those that have not, often seem to be under the hallucination
that they are blessed in this way. But a little while ago, for instance,
a bird--one of such a childless pair--flew in with a fish, and running
with it to its partner, both of them stood together drooping their wings,
and, at the same time, projecting them forwards, so as to make that
little tent, within which the young one is so characteristically fed.
Always either one or both of them had the wings thus drooped, as though
to shield and protect something, though "nothing was but what was not."
Standing in this way, they passed the fish several times to and from
each other, and, alternately bending their heads down till its tail hung
a little above the ground, appeared to wait for an imaginary chick to
take it from them. Now had the fish, which was a sand-eel, been held by
the head in the tip of the bill, very little stooping would have been
necessary for this purpose, and therefore I might the more easily have
imagined what I here describe. But instead of this it lay longitudinally
within the beak, so that only about an inch of the tail projected beyond
it, as is very commonly the case. Therefore, when the birds bent down
as a preliminary to moving the fish forward along the bill--which,
however, they can do as well in one position as another--it was in a
quite unmistakable manner that they did so, and, looking almost directly
down upon them from the edge of the cliff, at a height of not more than
twenty feet or so, I was enabled to see the whole process. Judging by
their actions, any one would have said that these birds had a chick, and
were feeding it; and calling up the many such scenes that I was witness
of when last here, I can think of no point in which they differed from
this present one, except in the presence of the chick. This curious
make-believe, or whatever it may be called, lasted for some little time,
but at last, I think, one of the birds ate the fish. Between them, at any
rate, it swam out of the ken of my glasses.
And now, what is the meaning of all this? Many birds, of course, are in
the habit of feeding one another--conjugally or loverly--or the male is
in the habit of feeding the female, and this seems the most obvious and
natural explanation here. I do not, however, think that this is a special
trait of the guillemot, and inasmuch as there are but few young birds
now, it is quite a rare thing to see a bird flying in with a fish in its
bill. I believe, myself, that when a childless one does so, it is with
the idea of feeding the chick--the last one, the one that it remembers
and pictures as still on the ledge--in its mind; and it is the more easy
for me to think this, because I feel sure that this habit of conjugal
feeding has grown out of the feeding of the young, and I can even imagine
that, by one of those mental transitions which with animals (as with
savages) are so quick and so easy, the bird offering the food, does,
occasionally and for a moment, put its partner in place of the young one.
We must not think only of the forgetfulness of animals--of their
inability to retain past actions or events clearly in the mind, so as to
remember them, long afterwards, in the way that we do. We should bear in
mind, also, that they are influenced, like ourselves, by association of
ideas, and that savages, whose psychology should stand nearer to theirs
than our own, often confound the subjective with the objective--the idea
of a thing in their mind, that is to say, with the thing itself, outside
it. It would be quite natural, in my idea, that any of these guillemots
should, by the mere catching of a fish, be reminded of the occupation it
had for so long previously been engaged in, and the mental picture, thus
raised, of the chick on the ledge, might well be so vivid as to overcome
the mere negative general impression that it was no longer there. Under
the influence of this delusion--let us say, then--the bird flies in with
its fish, and, seeing it do so, its partner, by a similar association
of ideas, is affected in just the same way, seeing also in its mind's
eye--less blurred, perhaps, by innumerable figures than our own--a lively
image of its child. What follows we have seen--a little play or pretence,
as it looked like, on the part of the two birds, who thus, as it were,
reminded one another of what both so well remembered. Of such conscious
reminiscence, however, I do not suppose them to have been capable, but
they may both, I think, have acted in something the same way that a
bereaved mother may be supposed to, when she almost unconsciously lays
out clothes or goes through some other once habitual process, in behalf
of a dead child--forgetful, for a moment, or half-forgetful, of the
change. All would have been brought about through association of ideas,
one appropriate act suggesting and leading to others no longer so, but of
whose propriety or otherwise the bird--or any animal--has probably but
one means of judging--the presence or absence, namely, of the idea of
them in its mind.
Now when, as Miss Kingsley tells us, a negro, chatting in his hut, turns
with a smile or a remark, to his mother--deceased, but whom he supposes
to be sitting in the accustomed place there--may not this also be through
association of ideas, producing a strong visual image of what he has
so long been used to see? There is hardly anything that so readily
summons up the image, with the remembrance, of the dead, as the place
where they lived or the objects amongst which they moved. How much, for
instance, does the familiar chair suggest the presence of some one who
used habitually to sit in it. "I know," says Darwin--referring to a visit
to his old home after his father's death, which had occurred during his
absence on the famous voyage--"I know if I could have been left alone
in that greenhouse for five minutes, I should have been able to see my
father in his wheel-chair as vividly as if he had been there before
me."[4] If such an effect, so produced, may be strong--and it varies
greatly--in the civilised man, it is likely to be much stronger in the
savage, who does not distinguish so clearly between the world without him
and what is in his own mind. To him, therefore, the visual image of a
deceased person, that is summoned up by the sight of anything that more
particularly appertained to him, during life, might well seem to be that
person himself, and thus, as it appears to me, a belief might arise of
the continual presence amongst us of the departed, even without anything
else to help it. That there is much else--real, as well as seeming
evidence--I know, or at any rate I am of that opinion. I do not write
as a disbeliever in real apparitions, in clairvoyance, premonitions,
thought-transference, or a host of other things, for I am one of those
who really go by evidence in such matters--very few do--and to me no
one thing in "this great world of shows" is in itself more wonderful or
incredible than another--which is my own idea of what the scientific
attitude of mind should be. But because there may be much that goes to
prove what Myers calls the survival of human (which, to me, involves
animal) personality after physical death, it does not, therefore, follow
that the belief in man's immortality has originated through this, and
still less that it could not have arisen without it. Association of
ideas, producing a strong mental image, with the confusion between
thought and objective reality, would, I believe, have been sufficient;
for it must be remembered that man's ancestry leads up, through the
semi-human, to the primeval savage, and it is amongst the lowest tribes
of existing savages that the tendency last indicated is most noticeable.
In regard to this, one should read Tylor, as likewise Clodd, concerning
the probable effect that dreams have had in producing the idea of a
soul. From the dream figure to that of our waking mind's eye there is
but a step; and as animals dream, we may suppose that they likewise see
mentally.
[Footnote 4: _The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin_, p. 11.]
This seems clear, that wherever the visualising faculty--to give it a
name--produced the image of anything, it would be mistaken for that
thing if reason did not convince to the contrary. In animals, reason is
weaker than with us, but that the power of mental vision, within the
narrower range of their experience, is weaker also, I can see no reason
to conclude. Rather, I think, it is likely to be the other way, and this
should make it an easier matter for a guillemot than for a negro to see,
or seem to see, an absent relative. But possibly this vivid conjuring
up of the mere outward form of anything may not be required in order to
induce the belief of its being there. The negro, perhaps, rather feels
the presence of his mother than thinks that he actually sees her; and
might not this effect, also, be produced through a strong association of
ideas? If so, this is all that would have been necessary to give man that
belief in his immortal destinies which, upon the whole, we find him with.
CHAPTER XV
NEW DEVELOPMENTS
It is curious to see the guillemot-ledges so thronged now, when
everything speaks of the departure of summer, if that, indeed, can be
said to depart which has never, apparently, arrived. As I said before,
there are very few young birds to be seen, and since the sexes in the
guillemot are alike, one might think, at first, that the mothers had
all gone off with their chicks, leaving only the males on the ledges.
This, however, cannot be the case, since there is much cossetting, and
sometimes a touch of "the wren," and "small gilded fly," of King Lear--I
trust I express myself clearly.
I was beginning to think that there were no young guillemots at all here
now, but just at this moment a bird flies in with a fish in its bill,
and, running up to another one, with it, the chick immediately appears
from under a projecting cranny of the ledge, where it has been concealed,
and receives and eats the fish. It is the usual thing--the wings of the
two parents drooped, like a tent, in which the little thing stands,
and both of them equally interested. This chick seems of considerable
size--as guillemot chicks go--is properly feathered, and the plumage has
the colouring of the grown birds, except that the throat and chin are
white as well as the breast--a continuity of white, therefore, over the
whole under surface. Moreover, from each eye to the base of the bill, on
the corresponding side, there is a thick black line. The wings, which I
have seen it flap, are small, with the quills not sufficiently developed
for flight--at least, I should think not. Some time after this I saw a
smaller chick which had been hidden hitherto behind the two parents. The
non-locomotion of both was as marked a feature as ever--for this struck
me very much the last time I was here. The smaller one I could never make
out again. The other was for a long time invisible behind its slight
escarpment, and then, though it came out and was active where it stood,
it did not move more than an inch or so beyond it, or in any direction.
As this chick evidently could not fly, it, as evidently, could not have
left the ledge, and returned to it. Imagine, therefore, that the chicks
are conveyed down by the parents, in this state, as it is asserted that
they are, and the emptiness of the ledges, of young birds, is explained;
for by the time they could fly they would have forgotten all about them,
even if they were not far away, as they probably by that time would be.
But if they wait till they can fly before leaving the ledges, why do they
not fly back to them, and then backwards and forwards, like the young
kittiwakes, or the young shags? Why do they not accompany their parents
when _they_ return, since their parents _will_ not stay with them upon
the sea? All this is explained upon the supposition that the parent
guillemot flies down with the chick on its back, but it does not follow
that there is no other way of explaining it. I think there is another;
for though the chick, when it leaves the ledge, may not be able to fly in
any true sense of the word, yet it might make a shift to flutter down to
the sea, in a line sufficiently diagonal to avoid the danger of striking
upon the face of the cliff where it projected at a lower elevation, or
upon the rocks at its base. This may not be likely, but at least it is
possible, and, on the other hand, if the parent guillemots do really
carry their chicks down, why do they not do so shortly after they are
hatched, or, at least, much sooner than they do? Why should they feed
them on the ledges for a fortnight or three weeks, for I think they are
as long as that there, during all which time they are getting larger and
heavier? Though the young guillemot keeps so quiet on the ledge, yet it
has the full use of its limbs, and seems quite as forward and capable as
are young chickens and ducklings. It would, no doubt, be at home in the
water at once, if only it were put there. Does it, then, wait until it
can get there itself, or does the parent bird take it? This question I
hope to be able to answer before I leave here.
A bird that has no chick now brings in a fish to the ledge, and seems
not to know what to do with it. At last he puts it down, and another
bird--not, I think, the partner, but it may be--takes it. It seems as
though the instinct of feeding the young still continued with this bird,
though its young one is gone. We may think "out of sight, out of mind"
with animals, but what is probably wanted to make them remember is a
reminder of some sort; and when they are reminded, though their memory
may be less capacious than ours, it does not follow that it is likewise
less vivid within their own limited range. Indeed, I think there is some
reason to conclude the contrary. The imagination of a great writer is
such that he sees the scenes and persons that exist but in his own mind,
as clearly, possibly, as we do our own familiar friends and their, or
our, all as familiar surroundings. We must suppose so, at any rate, as we
read Scott or Shakespeare; and indeed their productions are such that it
cannot be far short of this. I question if any man ever saw his absent
friend more clearly than did Shakespeare his _Falstaff_, for instance,
or Scott his _Balfour of Burleigh_. But does it, therefore, follow that
either of these great writers would, when hungry, have summoned up
before him a clearer picture of his approaching dinner, than does the
equally hungry or very much hungrier boor? This I doubt; and on the same
principle I doubt if the said boor would see _his_ dinner more clearly
than a wolf, bear, or tiger would theirs when in quest of it.
The memory of an animal, as compared with that of a man, may be not so
much weaker as less multitudinous. As a rule we remember those things
best in which we take the greatest interest. This gives to man a much
wider range of memory than any animal can possess, with a proportionately
increased area for association to work over. But there are certain
primitive interests, as we may call them, connected with food, and the
family and sexual relations, which are very strong in animals, and in
regard to which the memory, when put in action, may be equally strong.
Who shall say that a man, returning to his home at the end of the day,
sees in his mind's eye a clearer picture of what awaits him there than
does the bird flying to its nest, or the bee to its hive? Now could
anything, by association, call up this picture, suddenly, in the bird's
or insect's mind, they would, no doubt, act for the moment as though
it were real--as did Darwin's dog when he called him after five years'
absence; and thus I can understand one of these guillemots flying with a
fish to its ledge, to feed its chick, although its chick were no longer
there. It might be so; I can see no reason against it. In the actions
of these two birds there may lie--for me, now, there does lie--a great
psychological interest. Suggestive they certainly are. I shall keep this
in my mind and watch the ledges more closely.
The larger of the two young guillemots is now frequently flapping its
wings, and latterly it has been jumping up, at the same time, though
always it keeps in one place by its mother, and does not run about.
Mother and chick often delectate themselves by nibbling the tip of each
other's bills. And now there comes a surprise. For the first time that I
have ever seen, the chick moves right away from where it was, leaving its
father and mother. It travels along the ledge, often uncomfortably near
to the edge of it, and at last gets round a corner, out of my sight. The
parents, as far as I can make out, have not followed it. This is quite
a new development in my experience of the chick, if not in the chick's
own experience. It is not, then, quite immovable, till it flies or is
carried down. Were it to fall now, how aptly would it illustrate that law
of natural selection which I have called in to account for its general
quiescence. I hope it won't though--which is to my credit surely.
I note one more thing before leaving. A bird picks up and, as it were,
plays with some feathers lying on the ledge, one of which it now brings
to its partner, lays it on the rock, and then both pull it about. This,
too, I noticed when I was last here. I have mentioned it in my _Bird
Watching_, and account for it by supposing that we here see a last trace
of the once active nest-building instinct. Perhaps, however, the act is
too trivial to need any special accounting for.
CHAPTER XVI
FLIGHT AND FANCY
Would God my home were here, that I might make a lifelong and continuous
study of the wild sea-bird life about me! What more should I want, then?
except, indeed, a better climate, which is not a matter of culture.
Of all that civilisation has to give I value nothing much (that I can
get) except books, and those I might have here, at least in a moderate
profusion, "the hundred (or so) best" ones--of my own choice _bien
entendu_; the devil take any other man's. "Oh, hell! to choose love by
another's eyes." But all my own writers--with never an impudent, pert
critic amongst them to _échauffer ma bile_--awaiting me at home, with
these birds--these dear birds--to look down upon outside, and I think I
might be happy, as things go. But with such a strange blending of tastes
and desires as nature has put upon me, how can I ever hope to be, to any
satisfactory extent? What I want, really, is the veldt, or Brazilian
forests, or Lapland, or the Spanish Marisma, with the British Museum
library round the corner; but, as Cleopatra says of two other things,
"they do not go together."
"Well, here's my comfort" for a time--my half-measure of content. Oh, is
there anything in life more piquant (if you care about it) than to lie on
the summit of a beetling cliff, and watch the breeding sea-fowl on the
ledges below? In the Shetlands, at least, it is possible to do this in
perfect safety, for the strata of the rock have often been tilted up to
such an extent that, whilst the precipice formed by their broken edges
is of the most fearful description, their slope, even on the landward
side, is so steep that when one has climbed it, and flung oneself full
length at the top, one's head looks down--as mine does now--as from a
slanting wall, against which one's body leans. To fall over, one would
first have to fall upwards, and the knowledge of this gives a feeling of
security, without which one could hardly observe or take notes. The one
danger lies in becoming abstracted and forgetting where one is. Those
steep, green banks--for the rock, except in smooth, unclimbable patches,
is covered with lush grass--have no appearance of an edge, and I have
often shuddered, whilst plodding mechanically upwards, to find myself but
just awakened from a reverie, within a yard or so of their soft-curled,
lap-like crests. But I think my "subliminal," in such cases, was always
pretty well on the watch, or--to adopt a more prosaic and now quite
obsolete explanation--the reverie was not a very deep one.
At any rate, here I am safe, and, looking down again from my old
"coign of vantage" of two years before, the same wonderful and never
forgotten--never-to-be-forgotten--sight presents itself. Here are the
guillemots, the same individual birds, standing--each in the old place,
perhaps, if the truth were known--in long, gleaming rows and little
salient clusters, equally conspicuous by their compact shape and vividly
contrasted colouring; whilst both above and below them, on nests which
look like some natural, tufted growth of the sheer, jagged rock, and
which touch, or almost touch, one another, sit hundreds and hundreds
of kittiwakes, the soft bluey-grey and downier white of whose plumage,
with their more yielding and accommodating outlines, make them as a
tone and tinting of the rock itself, and delight with grace, as the
others do with boldness. Seen from a distance all except the white is
lost, and then they have the effect of snow, covering large surfaces of
the hard, perpendicular rock. Nearer, they look like little nodules or
bosses of snow projecting from a flatter and less pure expanse of it.
An innumerable cry goes up, a vociferous, shrieking chorus, the sharp
and ear-piercing treble to the deep, sombrous bass of the waves. The
actual note is supposed to be imitated in the name of the bird, but to
my own ear it much more resembles--to a degree, indeed, approaching
exactitude--the words "It's getting late!" uttered with a great emphasis
on the "late," and repeated over and over again in a shrill, harsh, and
discordant shriek. The effect--though this is far from being really
the case--is as though the whole of the birds were shrieking out this
remark at the same time. There is a constant clang and scream, an eternal
harsh music--harmony in discord--through and above which, dominating
it as an organ does lesser instruments--or like "that deep and dreadful
organ-pipe, the thunder"--there rolls, at intervals, one of the most
extraordinary voices, surely, that ever issued from the throat of a
bird: a rolling, rumbling volume of sound, so rough and deep, yet so
full, grand, and sonorous, that it seems as though the very cliffs were
speaking--ending sometimes in something like a gruff laugh, or, as some
will have it, a bark.
This marvellous note is the nuptial one of the guillemot, or, rather, it
is that, swelled and multiplied by the echoes to which it gives rise, and
which roll and mutter along the face of the precipice, and mingle with
the dash of the waves. The effect is most striking when heard at a little
distance, and especially across the chasm that divides one precipice from
another. Under these circumstances it is less the actual cry itself than
what, by such help, it becomes, that impresses one. Uttered quite near,
by some bird that stands conspicuous on the ledge one looks down upon,
the sound is less impressive, though still extraordinary enough. It can
then be better understood, and resolves itself into a sort of _jodel_,
long continued and having a vibratory roll in it. It begins usually with
one or two shorter notes, which have much the syllabic value of "hărāh,
hărāh"--first ă as in "hat," with the accent on the last syllable, as in
"hurrah." Very commonly the outcry ends here, but otherwise the final
"rah" is prolonged into the sound I speak of, which continues rising and
falling--which is why I call it a _jodel_--for a longer or shorter time,
the volume of sound being increased, sometimes, to a wonderful extent.
It ends, usually, as it began, with a few short, rough notes which may
be called a bark, as the other is called a bray, though to neither is
there much resemblance if we make either a dog or a donkey the basis
of comparison. Altogether it is one of the strangest, weirdest sounds
that can be imagined, and nobody, not accustomed to such surprises,
would suppose it could issue from the lungs of so small an animal as a
guillemot.
I made a strange error in regard to the utterer of this note when I
first came to the Shetlands, and the history of it will show either what
a fool I was (and am, in that case), or else how possible it is for
such mistakes to arise, even with great care and close and continued
observation--I should prefer it to show the latter. I thought it was
impossible that I could have been mistaken, but now that I know I was
I can see how it happened perfectly. At that time I knew nothing about
the matter, for though I love natural history I hate the "British Bird"
books, nor am I often in the way of being told anything, since, to
be frank, I am as much a hermit as I am mercifully permitted to be:
therefore, when I first heard the "bray" of the guillemot, as it is
called, I was lost in wonder, and as it came but rarely, and never from
any of the birds upon the one particular ledge that I watched day after
day--often for many hours at a time--I never suspected its true origin.
These particular birds never uttered any sound more extraordinary than
a kind of "ik, ik, ik!" and this though they were constantly fighting,
whilst the performance of the nuptial rite was frequent amongst them. The
note which so astonished me never came from very near; I heard it, as I
have said before, only occasionally, and it always seemed to come from a
part of the rock where a few pairs of fulmar petrels were sitting. When
I mentioned it to the watcher, who occupied the little sentry-box on the
ness, during the daytime, when I was out, leaving it for me to sleep in
at night, he said nothing about guillemots, but expressed his opinion
that the sound was produced by these fulmar petrels. Now the fulmar
petrel, though I have never met with any reference to it, does utter,
when on the breeding-ledges--or at least, it does in the Shetlands--a
note which is sufficiently marked and striking, a sort of angry, hoarse,
gruff interjection--guttural too--several times repeated, and sounding
sometimes like a laugh. Often too, these notes are not divided, or else
are so quickly repeated that they sound like one, continuously uttered
for some little space of time. As I now think, I must sometimes have
caught this note at the beginning or end of the cry of the guillemot,
and put it down as a part of it. Then, when, with this idea in my mind,
I watched the petrels at but a few yards' distance, and heard them
uttering the note they do utter, to my heart's content--swelling out
the throat and rolling the head at one another, the while, in the way I
have described--I was so foolish as to think that this was the cry that
I thought so wonderful, but not at its best, and that the real one, when
I heard it again in the distance--for, as I say, it never sounded very
near--was the same one _at_ its best. With this false idea in my head I
went home, and when somebody, assuming the character of a "Fulmar Petrel"
himself--assured me that I had mistaken the guillemot's note for his own,
I was as convinced that he did not know what he was talking about, and
that I did, as I am now to the contrary.
On one point, however, I am clear, and cannot possibly be mistaken,
since I have verified it only in these last few days, having come, in
fact, partly to do so--at least that made another motive for my journey.
The fulmar petrel, if it does not bray like a guillemot, has at least a
nuptial note--and that a sufficiently striking one--of its own, which
is uttered by both sexes as they lie on the rock, but never, in my
experience, whilst flying. Moreover, just as the vocal powers of the
guillemot are now marvellously increased--or rather multiplied--compared
with what they were some weeks earlier in the year, on my last visit, so,
if I may trust my own memory--which, however, I never do trust--those of
the fulmar petrel have suffered a corresponding diminution. I attribute
both these facts to one and the same cause. At the earlier date the
guillemots were in the very midst of their domestic duties, so that those
feelings proper to the courting period were in abeyance. Now, however,
they are free, and, under the influence of returning emotion, have become
noisy again, as no doubt, at the very beginning, they were noisier still.
Though their physical energy may not be sufficient to enable them to rear
another brood, that, I am sure--and there is plenty of evidence of it--is
what they feel like--there is dalliance and a "smart set" morality. But
with the petrels, at the same time, things had not gone so far--some,
if I remember rightly, had not even yet laid their egg--and so their
nuptial vociferations were more energetic than they are now--or, at any
rate, I think they were. Here, then, was a mistake, and I have shown
clearly how it came about. Some perhaps--especially those who get all
their information from books, and feel as if they had found it out for
themselves--may admit no excuse for it, my explanation notwithstanding;
but, for my part, I think it is easy to make mistakes. Had but one of the
guillemots on my own ledge been so good as to bray for me, all would have
been well, but never a word did any of them say except "ik, ik, ik!"
There was another point on which "Fulmar Petrel" took exception to
what I said about him--or rather to what I seemed to say. In view of
his oil-squirting and other unangelic propensities, he thought the
descriptive phrase "half angel and half bird," which formed the title of
my article, was not quite suitable to him. Well, I may tell him now that
I never thought so either--titles, as most authors nowadays have good
cause to know, are not always one's own. I never compare birds to angels,
for fear of thinking slightingly of the latter, and though I admit that,
in the hands of a skilled artist, a pelican's wings on a pair of human
shoulders may make a pretty enough combination, and that the whole human
body need not _look_ so heavy and unmanageable as it, no doubt, would
be in reality, still, as far as flight is concerned, I confess I think
it takes a bird to beat a bird. Angels are out of it in my opinion, or,
if they are not, at least my powers of imagination in regard to them
are. I shall always think of "Fulmar Petrel" as flying much better than
the best of them, though, as his habit of squirting oil does not in the
least degree lessen his aerial grace and beauty, as far as that alone
is concerned I see no reason why he should not be half an angel, at any
rate, if not a whole one.
Yes, here are powers indeed! What buoyant ease! What marvellous,
least-action grace! Surely no bird has ever flown before. This--this
only--is flight; for a moment, at any rate, one forgets even the
nightjar. And yet all these storm-riding, blast-defying powers belong to
one of the most placid-looking, delicately dove-like beautiful beings of
all air's kingdom. How soft is its colouring! How gentle its look! Was
there ever a more "delicate Ariel" than this?
One cannot, indeed, watch for long the flight of the fulmar petrel
without becoming dissatisfied, or at least critical, in regard to that
of other sea-birds. The larger gulls grow hopelessly coarse and heavy;
the kittiwake is not what it was, something is gone from the bold
corsair-like sweeps of the Arctic skua, and even in the seeming-laboured
grace of the tern the eye begins to dwell more on the labour and less on
the grace. All these birds are bodies: the fulmar petrel more suggests
a soul. Something of this it owes to its colouring, which, though
approaching to blue above, and of the purest-looking white below, yet
has in it that exquisitely smoked or shadowed quality which allows of
no glint or gleam, avoids all saliency, and almost seems alien from
substance itself. It blends with the air, of which it seems to be a
condensation rather than something introduced into it. Yet most lies in
the flight. In this there is conveyed to one a sense, not so much of
power over as of actual partnership in the element in which the bird
floats, as though it had been born there, as though it might sleep and
awake there, as though it had never been, nor ever could be, anywhere
else. It is, I suppose, the small apparent mechanism of the flight that
gives this impression, the absence, or the ease, of effort. Sliding,
as it were, from the face of the precipice, and often from the most
towering heights of it, the thin cleaver-like wings are at once, or after
a few quick, flickering vibrations, spread to their full extent, and on
them the bird floats, sweeps, circles, now sinking towards the sea, now
cresting the summit of the cliff,[5] but keeping, for the most part,
within the middle space between the two. Ever and anon it sails smoothly
in to its own rocky ledge, pauses above it, as though to think "My home!"
then, with another quick shimmer or flicker of the thin shadow-wings,
sweeps smoothly out again, to enter once more on those wonderful
down-sliding, up-gliding circles that have more of magic in them, and are
more drawn to charm, than had ever a necromancer's.
[Footnote 5: The idea that the fulmar petrel never flies over the land
is a delusion. I have often seen it do so, though that is not its habit.
It goes but a trifling way, however, cutting off a cape or corner, and
returns almost immediately.]
This light flickering of the wings, as I have called it, for they
cannot be said to flap or beat--even quiver is too gross a term for
so delicate a motion--is a characteristic part of the fulmar petrel's
flight. They move for a moment--for a few seconds more or less--in the
way in which a shadow flickers on the wall, and then the bird glides
and circles, holding them outspread and at rest, opposing their thin,
flat surface, now to this point, now to that, by a turn of the head or
body, but giving them no independent motion. Then another flicker, and
again the gliding and circling. When spread thus, flat to the air, the
wings have a very thin, paper-knifey appearance. The simile does not
seem worthy either of them or of the bird, but as it is continually
brought to my mind, I must employ it, albeit apologetically. It is the
shape of them that suggests it. Their ends are smooth and rounded, and
they are held so straight that they seem to be in one piece, without a
joint; though, just when the wind catches them freshly, and drives the
bird swiftly along, they are turned slightly upwards toward the tips,
through the momentary yielding of the quills. Strange though it may seem,
this straightness--almost stiffness--of the wing-contour adds to--nay,
makes--the grace of the fulmar petrel's flight, and the pronounced bend
at the joint, which, in the gull and kittiwake, causes the forepart of
the wing to slope backwards in a marked degree, looks almost clumsy by
comparison. The reason, I think, is that the petrel's straight, thin,
flat-pressed wings look so splendidly set to the wind, suggesting a
graceful ship--lateen-rigged--in fullest sail, whilst the others seem
timidly furled and reefed, by the side of them. Sometimes, indeed, the
wings do bend just a little--for, after all, they have a joint--but the
straight-set attitude is more germane to them, and soon they assume it
again, shooting forward so briskly, yet softly, that one seems to hear a
soft little musical click.
And thus this dream and joy of glorious motion, this elemental spirit
of a bird, floats and flickers along, cradled in air, looking like a
shadow upon it, sweeping and gliding, rising and falling, in circles of
consummate ease. No, this is not dominion, but union and sweet accord.
There is no in-spite-of, no proud compelling, here. Lighter than the air
that it rides on, the bird seems married to it, clasps it as a bride.
CHAPTER XVII
MOUTHS WITH MEANINGS
The young kittiwake differs in appearance from the parent birds in a
quite uncommon manner, for, being prettily and saliently marked, it looks
like a mature gull of another species, whereas the young of other gulls,
being plain brown things, suggest their juvenility on the analogy of
pheasants or birds of paradise. The general colour is mauvy grey, but
black, falling here and there upon it, seems striving to blot it out.
Half of the wings are thus darkened, and a broad half-moon of sooty black
nearly encircles the neck, looking like black velvet on the back of it,
where it is by much the broadest. There is a clouded black mark, too, on
either side of the head, with some nuances of black between, black tips
the tail, and the beak is all black. The _tout ensemble_ of all this is
very pretty, and the young kittiwake is a pretty bird. Mauve and black
velvet is the dress it comes out in, and it looks like a soft little
dove. Many might admire it beyond the grown bird, but, personally, I
prefer the latter.
One of these well-grown young kittiwakes has just been fed by the mother,
or father--but call it the mother, it always sounds better. Being
importuned by sundry little peckings at her beak, she opened it, and the
young one, thrusting in its own, helped himself as though her throat
were a platter. It was much the same as with the fulmar petrels. Numbers
of the young have left their nests, and keep all together, standing on
the rocks or floating on the sea. Others remain, and I notice that these
keep flapping their wings. This must strengthen them, and have the effect
of preparing Dædalus for his first flight--for it seems probable that
these particular ones have not made it. But they have, though, and bang
goes a provisional hypothesis! Every moment, to laugh at me, one or other
of them is flying out from the ledges, whilst others are returning to
them.
When one of these young kittiwakes opens its bill, it is at once
apparent that the inside of its mouth is much less brilliantly coloured
than it is in the parent bird, being of a pale pinkish, merely, with,
perhaps, a tinge of light yellow. As for the grown bird's mouth, one can
hardly exaggerate the lurid brightness of it. The whole buccal cavity,
including, as I think is usual, the tongue, is of a fine rich red, or
orange-red colour, carrying on that of the naked skin adjoining the
mandibles outside, with which, indeed, it is continuous. It is just the
same in the case of the old and young shag. The mouth of the former
presents a uniform surface of splendid gamboge, whilst that of the latter
is almost the natural pink, only just beginning to pass into yellow. In
the young guillemot, also, the interior of the mouth is pinkish merely,
whilst in the grown bird it is of a pleasing lemon or gamboge. With the
fulmar petrel again, we have much the same thing, though here--and
this is significant--the difference, as well as the actual colour, is
less striking. These varying degrees of brilliancy of colouring in this
particular region, as between the mature and immature form, must surely
have some meaning, and as it goes hand-in-hand with a similar, if not,
as I believe, an identical difference in the hue of the naked facial
integument, as well as with the pattern and shade of the plumage, I feel
persuaded that all three are governed by the same general law.
As explained by Darwin--and nothing better, that I can see, than
opposition has ever been opposed to his views--the beauty of certain
birds has been acquired through the principle of sexual selection, and
the lesser degree of it, which we notice in the young, represents the
earlier and less-finished beauty of the adult in times gone by. Of all
the elements which go to make up the beauty thus acquired, colour, on
the whole, plays the most conspicuous part, and nothing can be more
brilliant and striking than some of the colours that I am here speaking
of. The only reason, therefore, why, in their use, and the laws that have
governed their acquirement, they should be thought to differ from the
hues and tintings of the plumage, or of the naked outer skin--the cere
or the labial region--would be their habitual, necessary concealment.
If, then, it can be shown that, far from their being always concealed,
they are prominently displayed during the breeding season by certain
birds which possess them in a marked degree, then, as far as these
birds are concerned, there ceases to be a reason for thus, in idea,
separating them. Let us see, now, how far this is the case. To begin with
these kittiwakes, in their courting, or rather connubial actions on the
ledges--as may be seen now, but much more earlier in the year--both sexes
open their bills widely, and crane about, with their heads turned toward
each other, whilst at the same time uttering their shrieking, clamorous
cry. The motion, however, is often continued after the cry has ceased,
and this we might expect if the birds took any pleasure in the brilliant
gleam of colour which each presents to, and, as it were, flashes about
in front of the other. The effect of this it is not easy to exaggerate,
and if it is extremely noticeable to an onlooker at some little distance,
what must it be to the bird itself, who looks right into the almost
scarlet cavity? We have only to think of the inside of some shells, or of
a large, highly-coloured flower-cup, to understand the kind of æsthetic
pleasure that may be derived from such a sight.
Similar, but much more striking, is the nuptial behaviour of the fulmar
petrel. A pair of these birds lying near together, on some ledge or
cranny of the rock, will, every few minutes, open their bills to the
very widest extent, at the same time blowing and swelling out the skin
of the throat, including that which lies between the two sides of the
lower mandible, until it has a very inflated appearance. In this state
they stretch their heads towards each other, and then, with languishing
gestures and expression, keep moving them about from side to side,
uttering whilst they do so, but by no means always, a hoarse, unlovely
sort of note, like a series of hoarse coughs or grunts, as though in
anger--and indeed, it is uttered in anger, too. But though these motions,
with the distension of the jaws, always, as far as I have seen, accompany
the note when it is uttered, yet they are often continued afterwards, and
sometimes commence and end in silence, so that one has to conclude that
they are themselves of importance, and may have as much, or even more, to
do with the expression of the bird's feelings as the vocal utterance has.
It is difficult to give an adequate idea of the strange, lackadaisical
appearance which these birds present while acting in the above-described
manner. With widely-gaping bills, swelled throats, necks stretched out,
and heads moving slowly all about, now up, now down, now to this side,
now to that, they look sometimes "sick of love," like Solomon, and
sometimes as though about to be sick indeed--in fact, on the point of
vomiting. All the bird's actions are peculiar, but none more so than
this wide gaping distension of the mandibles, with the full view that it
offers of the whole interior cavity of the mouth. This last is not indeed
brilliant, as is that of the kittiwake, but, for all that, it is very
pleasing, of a delicate mauvy blue, æsthetic in its appearance, and in
harmony with the soft and delicate tinting of the plumage. There is no
reason to suppose that the latter beauty is unappreciated by the bird
itself, when seen in the opposite sex. Why, then, should the pale mauve
or blue of the inside of the mouth--this purple chamber flung open for
inspection during the season of courtship or of nuptial dalliance--be not
appreciated too?
The razorbill's mouth, inside, is of a conspicuous light yellow, which,
when exposed suddenly to view, contrasts very forcibly with the black
of the beak and upper plumage. In dalliance these birds throw the
head straight up into the air, and, opening their clean-cut bills, so
that one sees the gay interior like a line of bright gamboge, utter
a deep guttural note, which is prolonged and has a vibratory roll in
it, like the cry of the gorilla when angry--_si parva licet componere
magnis_--as described by Du Chaillu. It is not loud, however, and so is
easily lost amidst elemental sounds and the cries of other birds. The
vibratory character of the note becomes more marked under the influence
of excitement, and the mandibles themselves vibrate as they are opened
at intervals, somewhat widely. In the midst of their duet the pair toss
their heads about, catch hold of each other's beaks, and give quick
little emotional nibbles at the feathers of their throats or breasts. If
we can suppose that the birds are interested in each other's appearance
whilst thus acting--that they admire or are sexually excited by one
another--then it would be strange if the bright flashing yellow so
constantly exhibited did not play its full part in producing this result.
Imagine ourselves razor-bills, and thus acting. Could we be blind to
such revelations? I think not.
The pretty little black guillemot--the dabchick of ocean--may often be
seen sitting in a niche of the cliffs, and calling to another--its mate
presumably--either above or below it. The cry is, for the most part,
a weak, twittering sound, but occasionally rises into a very feeble
little wail or scream. All the while the bird is uttering it he keeps
raising and again depressing his head and opening his beak so as to
show conspicuously the inside of his mouth, which is of a very pretty
rose or blush-red hue, almost as vivid as that of the feet. The beak is
opened more widely than would seem to be necessary for the production of
the sound, as if to show this coloration, even though, for the moment,
there may be no other bird there to see it. If, however, the rosy inward
complexion were in any way an attraction, it would be natural for a bird,
wanting its mate, to associate the wish with the action of opening the
beak, just as a lonely dove in a cage will coo and bow as to a partner.
As a matter of fact, the crying bird very soon flies to the other one
(or _vice versâ_), and, standing beside her, utters his little twitter
as a greeting. She, being couched down, responds by raising her head,
so that the tip of her beak touches, or nearly touches, his. Then he
couches also, and sitting thus, side by side--comfy on the sheer edge of
the precipice--the two turn, from time to time, their heads towards each
other, open their bills, and twitter together. Every time they open them
the pretty rose tapestry of the mouth-chamber must be plain to each or
either, and the more so that they are _vis-a-vis_.
In all these four birds, therefore, we have a nuptial habit of distending
the jaws, side by side with a brilliant or pleasing coloration of the
region which, by such action, is exhibited. Moreover, in the case of
one of them, more particularly--viz. the fulmar petrel--this distension
may be unaccompanied with any note, though it always is with the odd
gestures and lackadaisical expression which I have tried to describe.
In other words, the beak is sometimes opened as a part of the bird's
nuptial actions, and not merely with a view to the production of sound.
That originally this alone would have been the motive of its being so
can hardly, I suppose, be doubted, but may it not be possible that the
eye has gradually come to share in a pleasure which was, at first,
communicated through the ear alone, and that a process of selection,
founded, perhaps, on some initial freshness of colouring, has in time
produced a special kind of adornment? If this were so, we might expect
that some of the birds so adorned would have the habit of opening the
bill in this manner without uttering any note at all, or, at least,
that they would very frequently do so. Such an instance we have in the
shag, that smaller and more adorned variety of the cormorant, which is
much more common on our northern coasts than the so-called common one.
One of the most ordinary nuptial actions of these birds is to throw
the head into the air, and open and shut the beak several times in
succession; and sometimes they hold it wide open for several seconds
together. Each time, as the jaws gape, a splendid surface of bright
gamboge yellow is exhibited, which the human eye, at any rate, has to
admire, and which exactly matches with the naked yellow skin at the base
of the two mandibles on either side, where they become lost in what may
be called the bird's cheek. This exterior brightly-tinted surface is
continuous with the interior and much larger one, and my view is that the
colour of the latter represents an extension of that of the former, by
a similar process of sexual selection. There is no doubt whatever that
this outward adornment largely adds to the handsome appearance of the
shag, and probably those naturalists who believe in sexual selection at
all will think it as much due to that agency as the crest and the sheeny
green plumage. But if the closely similar colouring of the adjacent
interior region is to be looked on as merely fortuitous (we escape here,
thank heaven, from the all-pervading protective theory), why should the
other be thought to be anything more? If the shag had not this habit
of opening its mouth and thus displaying what is, in itself, so very
striking, it would be difficult, I think, to accept sexual selection as
an explanation even of the facial adornment, since, if the one effect
were nonsignificant, so might the other be. As it is, I can see no reason
why it should not have brought about both.
I have often watched shags thus throwing up their heads and opening and
shutting their jaws at one another, and though I have generally been
fairly close to them I have never heard them utter a note whilst so
doing. I consider these actions--together with other still more peculiar
ones, which they indulge in during the breeding season--to be of a sexual
character, and, if so, this silent and oft-repeated distension of the
jaws must have some kind of meaning. The large and brilliantly-coloured
surface which is thus displayed supplies this meaning, as I am inclined
to think.
The fact that some birds--I have not the knowledge to say how many--which
do not open the beak in this way, have yet the inside of the mouth
brightly or conspicuously coloured, may seem to throw doubt on the theory
here advanced; but of course sexual selection is not the only power which
may have produced such coloration, and the likelihood of its having done
so is decreased if there is no outer facial adornment to match that
within. The cuckoo is one such example, for--I speak on the strength of
young ones which I have seen in the nest--the whole of its inner mouth
is of a really splendid salmon colour. When approached, the nestling
cuckoo assumes a most threatening attitude, alternately dilating and
drawing itself in, now receding into the nest, now rising up in it as
though to strike, having all the while its mouth wide open and hissing
violently. Its feathers are ruffled, and altogether it has a quite
terrifying aspect, to which the triangular flaming patch that seems to
burst out of the centre of it--for the head is drawn right back upon the
body--very largely contributes. Especially is this so when, as is mostly
the case, there is considerable shadow in the recess of the nest, amidst
the surrounding foliage. If it can be supposed that the large false head
and painted eyes of the puss or elephant hawk-moth caterpillars have
been acquired as a protection against enemies--as to which see Professor
Poulton's interesting suggestion[6]--then it certainly seems to me more
than possible that the flame-like throat of the young cuckoo has been
developed in the same manner, _pari passu_ with the loud, snake-like
hiss and intimidating gestures. In conclusion, I would suggest that the
bright or pleasingly-coloured mouth-cavity which some birds possess may
have a distinct meaning, and be the product either of natural or sexual
selection.
[Footnote 6: _The Colours of Animals_ (International Scientific
Series).]
[Illustration: AERIAL PIRACY]
CHAPTER XVIII
LEARNING TO SOAR
I had not before imagined that the puffin was one of those birds that
suffered from the extortions of the Arctic or lesser skua, but I have
found it out to-day without knowing whether it is in a British Bird book
or not. Twice have the two passed me, close together, and flying with
tremendous velocity, their wings--especially, I think, those of the
skua--making a portentous sound just above my head. The puffin, though
hotly pursued, was a little in front, and such was his speed that it
seemed doubtful if the skua would overtake him. I suppose, however, that
the latter must be competent to do so, or, having learnt otherwise by
experience, he would long ago have ceased giving chase.
The puffin, like the partridge and other birds that progress by a
succession of quick strokes with the wings, flies with great rapidity.
He is so small and light that perhaps one ought not to be surprised
at this, so I reserve my wonder for the guillemot. How this solid and
weighty-looking bird can, with wings that are small out of all proportion
to its bulk, narrow to a degree, and by no means long, get through the
air at the rate it does, how it can even stay in it at all and not come
plump down like the wooden bird that it looks, is to me a mystery. The
wing, I think, is considerably smaller in proportion to the body than is
that of the wild duck. When I see these birds going along over the sea
at the rate they do, it does not seem to me impossible that a man should
fly, if only his arms were to sprout feathers and his pectoral muscles
enlarge sufficiently to enable him to move them with the same quickness.
Is there, by the by, any special adaptation to the power of flight in the
body and bones of a bat? We are generally referred to such arrangements
in reference to the flight of birds, with a view to lessening the wonder
of it, as if birds were the only things that flew. Bats, however, are
mammals like ourselves, and their aerial performances are very wonderful.
I have often watched them and the swifts together, at the close of a
summer day, and have been hardly able to decide which of the two showed
the greater mastery over the element in which both moved. The swifts
indeed alone skimmed on outspread wings, without pulsating them; but in
quick, sudden turns in every direction, in the power of instantaneously
and abruptly changing the angle of their flight, and especially in
descending, sometimes almost perpendicularly, the bats excelled them. In
regard to speed, the disparity did not appear to be so great as I suppose
it must have been. I do not know if any observations have been made to
determine the speed at which bats fly, but they often seem to go very
fast.
To return to the puffins, their powers of flight extend a little beyond
mere speed gained by constant exertion, for they do sometimes make swift
gliding circles through the air, not indeed without moving the wings
at all, yet moving them but little, and at intervals--a few pulsations
and then a sweep. Yet this is never very much. They seem to be just in
the way of getting to something more advanced in flying, without quite
knowing what they would be at. However, I think in time they will begin
to understand, get a hint of their real feelings, like the heroines in
novels, who find all at once that they have been in love for some while
without noticing it. (Shakespeare's heroines, by the by, seem to have had
a clearer insight into their state of mind--but then, there was more for
them to know about.) They--the puffins, I mean, not the heroines--will
often, when they leave their nests, mount up to a considerable height
and then descend in a long slant to the sea. In this they are peculiar,
as far as I have observed, and for some time I could not imagine why
they did it; but tearing up some letters one day as I sat on the rock's
edge and throwing them towards the sea, the pieces were carried upwards,
some of them rising almost perpendicularly, and continuing to do so
for some while before they were blown against the higher slopes of the
cliff. The puffins, I then felt sure, must mount upon this upward current
of air, eithe
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