Birds and Man

BIRDS AND MAN

BIRDS AND MAN

BY

W. H. HUDSON

LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.

New Edition published by Duckworth & Co. 1915
Re-issued 1920

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

CONTENTS

BIRDS AND MAN

CHAPTER I

BIRDS AT THEIR BEST

By Way of Introduction

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

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

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

The whin was frankincense and flame.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • • • •

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

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

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

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

• • • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The brightness of the skirts of God.

CHAPTER II

BIRDS AND MAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER III

DAWS IN THE WEST COUNTRY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER IV

EARLY SPRING IN SAVERNAKE FOREST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coo-coó-roo, coó-coo-roo.

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

Take two cows, David.

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

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

My toe bleeds, Betty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER V

A WOOD WREN AT WELLS

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

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

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

A brother of the leaves he seems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VI

THE SECRET OF THE WILLOW WREN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O stay, sweet warbling wood-lark, stay,
Nor quit for me the trembling spray,
A hopeless lover courts thy lay,
Thy soothing, fond complaining.
Again, again that tender part,
That I may catch thy melting art;
For surely that would touch her heart
Who kills me wi' disdaining.
Say, was thy little mate unkind,
And heard thee as the passing wind?
O nocht but love and sorrow joined
Sic notes o' wae could waken!
Thou tells o' never-ceasing care,
O' speechless grief and dark despair;
For pity's sake, sweet bird, nae mair,
Or my poor heart is broken!

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VII

SECRET OF THE CHARM OF FLOWERS

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

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

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

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

• • • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The azured harebell, like thy veins,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VIII

RAVENS IN SOMERSET

Mr Warde Fowler in his Summer Studies of Birds and Books has a pleasant chapter on wagtails, in which he remarks incidentally that he does not care for the big solemn birds that please, or are dear to, "Mr Hudson." Their bigness disturbs and their solemnity oppresses him. They do not twitter and warble, and flit hither and thither, flirting their feathers, and with their dainty gracefulness and airy, fairy ways wind themselves round his heart. Wagtails are quite big enough for him; they are, in fact, as big as birds should be, and so long as these charming little creatures abound in these islands he (Mr Fowler) will be content. Indeed, he goes so far as to declare that on a desert island, without a human creature to share its solitude with him, he would be happy enough if only wagtails were there to keep him company. Mr Fowler is not joking; he tells us frankly what he thinks and feels, and when we come to consider the matter seriously, as he wishes us to do, we discover that there is nothing astonishing in his confession—that his mental attitude is capable of being explained. It is only natural, in an England from which most of the larger birds have been banished, that he should have become absorbed in observing and in admiration of the small species that remain; for we observe and study the life that is nearest to us, and seeing it well we are impressed by its perfection—the perfect correspondence that exists between the creature and its surroundings—by its beauty, grace, and other attractive qualities, as we are not impressed by the life which is at a distance, and of which we only obtain rare and partial glimpses.

These thoughts passed through my mind one cold, windy day in spring, several hours of which I spent lying on the short grass on the summit of a cliff, watching at intervals a pair of ravens that had their nest on a ledge of rock some distance below. Big and solemn, and solemn and big, they certainly were, and although inferior in this respect to eagle, pelican, bustard, crane, vulture, heron, stork, and many another feathered notable, to see them was at the same time a pleasure and a relief. It also occurred to me at the time that, alone on a desert island, I should be better off with ravens than wagtails for companions; and this for an excellent reason. The wagtail is no doubt a very lively, pretty, engaging creature—so for that matter is the house fly—but between ourselves and the small birds there exists, psychologically, a vast gulf. Birds, says Matthew Arnold, live beside us, but unknown, and try how we will we can find no passages from our souls to theirs. But to Arnold—in the poem to which I have alluded at all events—a bird simply meant a caged canary; he was not thinking of the larger, more mammal-like, and therefore more human-like, mind of the raven, and, it may be added, of the crows generally.

The pair I spent so long a time in watching were greatly disturbed at my presence on the cliff. Their anxiety was not strange, seeing that their nest is annually plundered in the interest of the "cursed collector," as Sir Herbert Maxwell has taught us to name the worst enemy of the rarer British birds. The "worst," I say; but there is another almost if not quite as bad, and who in the case of some species is really worse. At intervals of from fifteen to twenty minutes they would appear overhead uttering their angry, deep croak, and, with wings outspread, seemingly without an effort on their parts allow the wind to lift them higher and higher until they would look no bigger than daws; and, after dwelling for a couple of minutes on the air at that great height, they would descend to the earth again, to disappear behind a neighbouring cliff. And on each occasion they exhibited that wonderful aërial feat, characteristic of the raven, and rare among birds, of coming down in a series of long drops with closed wings. I am inclined to think that a strong wind is necessary for the performance of this feat, enabling the bird to fall obliquely, and to arrest the fall at any moment by merely throwing out the wings. At any rate, it is a fact that I have never seen this method of descent used by the bird in calm weather. It is totally different to the tumbling down, as if wounded, of ravens when two or more are seen toying with each other in the air—a performance which is also practised by rooks and other species of the crow family. The tumbling feat is indulged in only when the birds are playing, and, as it would appear, solely for the fun of the thing; the feat I am describing has a use, as it enables the bird to come down from a great height in the air in the shortest time and with the least expenditure of force possible. With the vertical fall of a bird like the gannet on its prey we are not concerned here, but with the descent to earth of a bird soaring at a considerable height. Now, many birds when rushing rapidly down appear to close their wings, but they are never wholly closed; in some cases they are carried as when folded, but are slightly raised from the body; in other cases the wing is tightly pressed against the side, but the primaries stand out obliquely, giving the descending bird the figure of a barbed arrow-head. This may be seen in daws, choughs, pipits, and many other species. The raven suddenly closes his outspread wings, just as a man might drop his arms to his sides, and falls head downwards through the air like a stone bird cast down from its pedestal; but he falls obliquely, and, after falling for a space of twenty or thirty or more feet, he throws out his wings and floats for a few seconds on the air, then falls again, and then again, until the earth is reached.

Let the reader imagine a series of invisible wires stretched, wire above wire, at a distance of thirty or forty yards apart, to a height of six or seven hundred yards from the earth. Let him next imagine an acrobat, infinitely more daring, more agile, and graceful in action than any performer he has ever seen, standing on the highest wire of all, in his black silk tights, against the blue sky, his arms outstretched; then dropping his arms to his sides and diving through the air to the next wire, then to the next, and so on successively until he comes to the earth. The feat would be similar, only on a larger scale and less beautiful than that of the ravens as I witnessed it again and again from the cliff on that windy day.

While watching this magnificent display it troubled me to think that this pair of ravens would probably not long survive to be an ornament to the coast. Their nest, it has been stated, is regularly robbed, but I had been informed that in the summer of 1894 a third bird appeared, and it was then conjectured that the pair had succeeded in rearing one of their young. About a month later a raven was picked up dead on the coast by a boatman,—killed, it was believed, by his fellow-ravens,—and since then two birds only have been seen. There are only two more pair of ravens on the Somersetshire coast, and, as one of these has made no attempt to breed of late, we may take it that the raven population of this county, where the species was formerly common, has now been reduced to two pairs.

Anxious to find out if there was any desire in the place to preserve the birds I had been observing, I made many inquiries in the neighbourhood, and was told that the landlord cared nothing about them, and that the tenant's only desire was to see the last of them. The tenant kept a large number of sheep, and always feared, one of his men told me, that the ravens would attack and kill his lambs. It was true that they had not done so as yet, but they might kill a lamb at any time; and, besides, there were the rabbits—the place swarmed with them—there was no doubt that a young rabbit was taken occasionally.

Why, then, I asked, if they were so destructive, did not his master go out and shoot them at once? The man looked grave, and answered that his master would not do the killing himself, but would be very glad to see it done by some other person.

How curious it is to find that the old superstitions about the raven and the evil consequences of inflicting wilful injury on the bird still survive, in spite of the fact that the species has been persecuted almost to extirpation!

"Have you not read, sir," Don Quixote is made to say, "the annals and histories of England, wherein are renowned and famous exploits of King Arthur, of whom there goes a tradition, and a common one, all over that kingdom of Great Britain, that the king did not die, but that by magic art he was transformed into a raven, and that in process of time he shall reign again and recover his kingdom and sceptre, for which reason it cannot be proved that, from that day to this, any Englishman has killed a raven?"

Now, it is certain that many Englishmen kill ravens, also that if the country people in England ever had any knowledge of King Arthur they have long forgotten it. Nevertheless this particular superstition still exists. I have met with it in various places, and found an instance of it only the other day in the Midlands, where the raven no longer breeds. Near Broadway, in Worcestershire, there is a farm called "Kite's Nest," where a pair of ravens bred annually up to about twenty-eight or thirty years ago, when the young were taken and the nest pulled down by three young men from the village: to this day it is related by some of the old people that the three young men all shortly came to bad ends. Near Broadway an old farmer told me that since the birds had been driven away from "Kite's Nest" he had not seen a raven in that part of the country until one made its appearance on his farm about four years ago. He was out one day with his gun, cautiously approaching a rabbit warren, when the bird suddenly got up from the mouth of a burrow, and coming straight to him, hovered for some seconds above his head, not more than thirty yards from him. "It looked as if he wanted to be shot at," said the old man, "but he's no bird to be shot at by I. 'Twould be bad for I to hurt a raven, and no mistake."

Continuing my inquiries about the Somerset ravens, I found a man who was anxious that they should be spared. His real reason was that their eggs for him were golden eggs, for he lived near the cliff, and had an eye always on them, and had been successful for many years in robbing their nest, until he had at length come to look on these birds almost as his own property. Being his he loved them, and was glad to talk about them to me by the hour. Among other things he related that the ravens had for very near neighbours on the rocks a pair of peregrine falcons, and for several years there had always been peace between them. At length one winter afternoon he heard loud, angry cries, and presently two birds appeared above the cliff—a raven and a falcon—engaged in desperate battle and mounting higher and higher as they fought. The raven, he said, did not croak, but constantly uttered his harsh, powerful, barking cry, while the falcon emitted shrill, piercing cries that must have been audible two miles away. At intervals as they rose, wheeling round and round, they struck at each other, and becoming locked together fell like one bird for a considerable distance; then they would separate and mount again, shrieking and barking. At length they rose to so great a height that he feared to lose sight of them; but the struggle grew fiercer; they closed more often and fell longer distances, until they were near the earth once more, when they finally separated, flying away in opposite directions. He was afraid that the birds had fatally injured each other, but after two or three days he saw them again in their places.

It was not possible for him, he told me, to describe the feelings he had while watching the birds. It was the most wonderful thing he had ever witnessed, and while the fight lasted he looked round from time to time, straining his eyes and praying that some one would come to share the sight with him, and because no one appeared he was miserable.

I could well understand his feeling, and have not ceased to envy him his good fortune. Thinking, after leaving him, of the sublime conflict he had described, and of the raven's savage nature, Blake's question in his "Tiger, tiger, burning bright" came to my mind:

Did He who made the lamb make thee?

We can but answer that it was no other; that when the Supreme Artist had fashioned it with bold, free lines out of the blue-black rock, he smote upon it with his mallet and bade it live and speak; and its voice when it spoke was in accord with its appearance and temper—the savage, human-like croak, and the loud, angry bark, as if a deep-chested man had barked like a blood-hound.

How strange it seems, when we come to think of it, that the owners of great estates and vast parks, who are lovers of wild nature and animal life, and should therefore have been most anxious to preserve this bird, have allowed it to be extirpated! "A raven tree," says the author of the Birds of Wiltshire, "is no mean ornament to a park, and speaks of a wide domain and large timber, and an ancient family; for the raven is an aristocratic bird and cannot brook a confined property and trees of a young growth. Would that its predilection were more humoured and a secure retreat allowed it by the larger proprietors in the land!"

The wide domains, the large timber, and the ancient families survive, but the raven has vanished. It occasionally takes a young rabbit. But the human ravens of Somerset—to wit, the men and boys who have as little right to the rabbits—do the same. I do not suppose that in this way fewer than ten thousand to twenty thousand rabbits are annually "picked up," or "poached"—if any one likes that word better—in the county. Probably a larger number. The existence of a pair of ravens on an estate of twenty or thirty thousand acres would not add much to the loss. No doubt the raven kills other creatures that are preserved for sport, but it does not appear that its extermination has improved things in Somerset. Thirty years ago, when black-game was more plentiful than it is now, the raven was to be met with throughout the county, and was abundant on Exmoor and the Quantocks. The old head keeper on the Forest of Exmoor told me that when he took the place, twenty-five years ago, ravens, carrion crows, buzzards, and hawks of various kinds were very abundant, and that the war he had waged against them for a quarter of a century had well-nigh extirpated all these species. He had kept a careful record of all birds killed, noting the species in every case, as he was paid for all, but the reward varied, the largest sum being given for the largest birds—ravens and buzzards. His book shows that in one year, a quarter of a century ago, he was paid for fifty-two ravens shot and trapped. After that the number annually diminished rapidly, and for several years past not one raven had been killed.

At present one may go from end to end of the county, which is a long one, and find no raven; but in very many places, from North Devon to the borders of Gloucestershire, one would find accounts of "last ravens." Even in the comparatively populous neighbourhood of Wells at least three pairs of ravens bred annually down to about twenty years ago—one pair in the tower on Glastonbury Tor, one on the Ebor rocks, and one at Wookey Hole, two miles from the town.

But Somerset is no richer in memories of "last ravens" than most English counties. A selection of the most interesting of such memories of ravens expelled from their ancestral breeding-places during the last half-century would fill a volume. In conclusion I will give one of the raven stories I picked up in Somerset. It was related to me by Dr Livett, who has been the parish doctor in Wells for over sixty years, and was able to boast, before retiring in 1898, that he was the oldest parish doctor in the kingdom. About the year 1841 he was sent for to attend a cottage woman at Priddy—a desolate little village high up in the Mendips, four or five miles from Wells. He had to remain some hours at the cottage, and about midnight he was with the other members of the family in the living-room, when a loud tapping was heard on the glazed window. As no one in the room moved, and the tapping continued at intervals, he asked why some one did not open the door. They replied that it was only the ravens, and went on to tell him that a pair of these birds roosted every night close by, and invariably when a light was seen burning at a late hour in any cottage they would come and tap at the window. The ravens had often been seen doing it, and their habit was so well known that no notice was taken of it.

CHAPTER IX

OWLS IN A VILLAGE

In November, when tramping in the Midlands, I paid a visit to a friend who had previously informed me, in describing the attractions of the small, remote, rustic village he lived in, that it was haunted by owls.

The night-roving bird that inhabits the country village and its immediate neighbourhood is, in most cases, the white or barn owl, the owl that prefers a loft in a barn or a church tower for home and breeding-place to the hollow, ivied tree. The loft is dry and roomy, the best shelter from the storm and the tempest, although not always from the tempest of man's insensate animosity. The larger wood owl is supposed to have a different disposition, to be a dweller in deep woods, in love with "seclusion, gloom, and retirement,"—a thorough hermit. It is not so everywhere, certainly not in my friend's Gloucestershire village, where the white owl is unknown, while the brown or wood owl is quite common. But it is not a thickly wooded district; the woods there are small and widely separated. There is, however, a deal of old hedgerow timber and many large trees scattered about the fields. These the owl inhabits and is abundant simply because the gamekeeper is not there with his everlasting gun; while the farmers look on the bird rather as a friend than an enemy.

To go a little further into the matter, there are no gamekeepers because the landowners cannot afford the expensive luxury of hand-reared pheasants. The country is, or was, a rich one; but the soil is clay so extraordinarily stiff that four or five horses are needed to draw a plough. It is, indeed, strange to see five huge horses, all in line, dragging a plough, and moving so slowly that, when looked at from a distance, they appear not to move at all. If here and there a little wheat is still grown, it is only because, as the farmers say, "We mun have straw." The land has mostly gone out of cultivation, many vacant farms could be had at about five shillings an acre, and the landlords would in many cases, when pay day came round, be glad to take half a crown and forgive the rest.

The fields that were once ploughed are used for grazing, but the sheep and cattle on them are very few; one can only suppose that the land is not suitable for grazing purposes, or else that the farmers are too poor to buy sufficient stock.

Viewed from some eminence, the wide, green country appears a veritable waste; the idle hedges enclosing vacant fields, the ancient scattered trees, the absence of life, the noonday quiet, where the silence is only broken at intervals by some distant bird voice, strangely impress the mind as by a vision of a time to come and of an England dispeopled. It is restful; there is a melancholy charm in it similar to that of a nature untouched by man, although not so strong. Here, everywhere are visible the marks of human toil and ownership—the wave-like, parallel ridges in the fields, now mantled with grass, and the hedges that cut up the surface of the earth into innumerable segments of various shapes and sizes. It is not wild, but there is something in it of the desolaton that accompanies wildness—a promise soon to be fulfilled, now that grass and herbage will have freedom to grow, and the hedges that have been trimmed for a thousand years will no longer be restrained from spreading.

In this district the farmhouses and cottages are not scattered over the country. The farm-buildings, as a rule, form part of the village; the villages are small and mostly hidden from sight among embowering trees or in a coombe. From the high ground in some places it is possible to gaze over many miles of surrounding country and not see a human habitation; hours may sometimes be passed in such a spot without a human figure appearing in the landscape.

The village I was staying at is called Willersey; the nearest to it, a little over a mile away, is Saintbury. This last was just such a pretty peaceful spot as would tempt a world-weary man to exclaim on first catching sight of it, "Here I could wish to end my days." A little old-world village, set among trees in the sheltering hollow of a deep coombe, consisting of thatched stone cottages, grouped in a pretty disorder; a modest ale-house; a parsonage overgrown with ivy; and the old stone church, stained yellow and grey with lichen, its low square tower overtopped by the surrounding trees. It was a pleasure merely to sit idle, thinking of nothing, on the higher part of the green slope, with that small centre of rustic life at my feet. For many hours of each day it was strangely silent, the hours during which the men were away at a distance in the fields, the children shut up in school, and the women in their cottages. An occasional bird voice alone broke the silence—the distant harsh call of a crow, or the sudden startled note of a magpie close at hand, a sound that resembles the broken or tremulous bleat of a goat. If an apple dropped from a tree in the village, its thud would be audible from end to end of the little crooked street in every cottage it would be known that an apple had dropped. On some days the sound of the threshing-machine would be heard a mile or two away; in that still atmosphere it was like the prolonged hum of some large fly magnified a million times. A musical sound, buzzing or clear, at times tremulous, rising or falling at intervals, it would swell and fill the world, then grow faint and die away. This is one of the artificial sounds which, like distant chimes, harmonise with rural scenes.

Towards evening the children were all at play, their shrill cries and laughter sounding from all parts of the village. Then, when the sun had set and the landscape grew dim, they would begin to call to one another from all sides in imitation of the wood owl's hoot. During these autumn evenings the children at this spot appeared to drop naturally into the owl's note, just as in spring in all parts of England they take to mimicking the cuckoo's call. Children are like birds of a social and loquacious disposition in their fondness for a set call, a penetrative cry or note, by means of which they can converse at long distances. But they have no settled call of their own, no cry as distinctive as that of one of the lower animals. They mimic some natural sound. In the case of the children of these Midland villages it is the wood owl's clear prolonged note; and in every place where some animal with a striking and imitable voice is found its call is used by them. Where no such sound is heard, as in large towns, they invent a call; that is, one invents it and the others immediately take it up. It is curious that the human species, in spite of its long wild life in the past, should have no distinctive call, or calls, universally understood. Among savage tribes the men often mimic the cry of some wild animal as a call, just as our children do that of an owl by night, and of some diurnal species in the daytime. Other tribes have a call of their own, a shout or yell peculiar to the tribe; but it is not used instinctively—it is a mere symbol, and is artificial, like the long-drawn piercing coo-ee of the Australian colonists in the bush, and the abrupt Hi! with which we hail a cab, with other forms of halooing; or even the lupine gurgled yowl of the morning milkman.

After dark the silence at the village was very profound until about half-past nine to ten o'clock, when the real owls, so easily to be distinguished from their human mockers, would begin their hooting—a single, long, uninflected note, and after it a silent interval of eight or ten seconds; then the succeeding longer, much more beautiful note, quavering at first, but growing steady and clear, with some slight modulation in it. The symbols hoo-hoo and to-whit to-who, as Shakespeare wrote it, stand for the wood owl's note in books; but you cannot spell the sound of an oaten straw, nor of the owl's pipe. There is no w in it, and no h and no t. It suggests some wind instrument that resembles the human voice, but a very un-English one—perhaps the high-pitched somewhat nasal voice of an Arab intoning a prayer to Allah. One cannot hit on the precise instrument, there are so many; perhaps it is obsolete, and the owl was taught his song by lovers in the long ago, who wooed at twilight in a forgotten tongue,

And gave the soft winds a voice,
With instruments of unremembered forms.