Birds in Town and Village

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Produced by Eric Eldred

BIRDS IN TOWN & VILLAGE

BY

W. H. HUDSON,

F.Z.S.

AUTHOR OF "THE PURPLE LAND," "IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA," "FAR AWAY AND
LONG AGO," ETC.

1920

PREFACE

This book is more than a mere reprint of _Birds in a Village_ first
published in 1893. That was my first book about bird life, with some
impressions of rural scenes, in England; and, as is often the case with
a first book, its author has continued to cherish a certain affection
for it. On this account it pleased me when its turn came to be reissued,
since this gave me the opportunity of mending some faults in the
portions retained and of throwing out a good deal of matter which
appeared to me not worth keeping.

The first portion, "Birds in a Village," has been mostly rewritten with
some fresh matter added, mainly later observations and incidents
introduced in illustration of the various subjects discussed. For the
concluding portion of the old book, which has been discarded, I have
substituted entirely new matter-the part entitled "Birds in a Cornish
Village."

Between these two long parts there are five shorter essays which I have
retained with little alteration, and these in one or two instances are
consequently out of date, especially in what was said with bitterness in
the essay on "Exotic Birds for Britain" anent the feather-wearing
fashion and of the London trade in dead birds and the refusal of women
at that time to help us in trying to save the beautiful wild bird life
of this country and of the world generally from extermination. Happily,
the last twenty years of the life and work of the Royal Society for the
Protection of Birds have changed all that, and it would not now be too
much to say that all right-thinking persons in this country, men and
women, are anxious to see the end of this iniquitous traffic.

W. H. H.

September, 1919.

CONTENTS

PAGE

BIRDS IN A VILLAGE:

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

EXOTIC BIRDS FOR BRITAIN

MOOR-HENS IN HYDE PARK

THE EAGLE AND THE CANARY

CHANTICLEER

IN AN OLD GARDEN

BIRDS IN A CORNISH VILLAGE:

I. TAKING STOCK OF THE BIRDS

II. DO STARLINGS PAIR FOR LIFE?

III. VILLAGE BIRDS IN WINTER

IV. INCREASING BIRDS IN BRITAIN

V. THE DAW SENTIMENT

VI. STORY OF A JACKDAW

BIRDS IN TOWN & VILLAGE

BIRDS IN A VILLAGE I

About the middle of last May, after a rough and cold period, there came
a spell of brilliant weather, reviving in me the old spring feeling, the
passion for wild nature, the desire for the companionship of birds; and
I betook myself to St. James's Park for the sake of such satisfaction as
may be had from watching and feeding the fowls, wild and semi-wild,
found gathered at that favored spot.

I was glad to observe a couple of those new colonists of the ornamental
water, the dabchicks, and to renew my acquaintance with the familiar,
long-established moorhens. One of them was engaged in building its nest
in an elm-tree growing at the water's edge. I saw it make two journeys
with large wisps of dry grass in its beak, running up the rough,
slanting trunk to a height of sixteen to seventeen feet, and
disappearing within the "brushwood sheaf" that springs from the bole at
that distance from the roots. The wood-pigeons were much more numerous,
also more eager to be fed. They seemed to understand very quickly that
my bread and grain was for them and not the sparrows; but although they
stationed themselves close to me, the little robbers we were jointly
trying to outwit managed to get some pieces of bread by flying up and
catching them before they touched the sward. This little comedy over, I
visited the water-fowl, ducks of many kinds, sheldrakes, geese from many
lands, swans black, and swans white. To see birds in prison during the
spring mood of which I have spoken is not only no satisfaction but a
positive pain; here--albeit without that large liberty that nature
gives, they are free in a measure; and swimming and diving or dozing in
the sunshine, with the blue sky above them, they are perhaps unconscious
of any restraint. Walking along the margin I noticed three children
some yards ahead of me; two were quite small, but the third, in whose
charge the others were, was a robust-looking girl, aged about ten or
eleven years. From their dress and appearance I took them to be the
children of a respectable artisan or small tradesman; but what chiefly
attracted my attention was the very great pleasure the elder girl
appeared to take in the birds. She had come well provided with stale
bread to feed them, and after giving moderately of her store to the
wood-pigeons and sparrows, she went on to the others, native and exotic,
that were disporting themselves in the water, or sunning themselves on
the green bank. She did not cast her bread on the water in the manner
usual with visitors, but was anxious to feed all the different species,
or as many as she could attract to her, and appeared satisfied when any
one individual of a particular kind got a fragment of her bread.
Meanwhile she talked eagerly to the little ones, calling their attention
to the different birds. Drawing near, I also became an interested
listener; and then, in answer to my questions, she began telling me what
all these strange fowls were. "This," she said, glad to give
information, "is the Canadian goose, and there is the Egyptian goose;
and here is the king-duck coming towards us; and do you see that large,
beautiful bird standing by itself, that will not come to be fed? That is
the golden duck. But that is not its real name; I don't know them all,
and so I name some for myself. I call that one the golden duck because
in the sun its feathers sometimes shine like gold." It was a rare
pleasure to listen to her, and seeing what sort of a girl she was, and
how much in love with her subject, I in my turn told her a great deal
about the birds before us, also of other birds she had never seen nor
heard of, in other and distant lands that have a nobler bird life than
ours; and after she had listened eagerly for some minutes, and had then
been silent a little while, she all at once pressed her two hands
together, and exclaimed rapturously, "Oh, I do so love the birds!"

I replied that that was not strange, since it is impossible for us not
to love whatever is lovely, and of all living things birds were made
most beautiful.

Then I walked away, but could not forget the words she had exclaimed,
her whole appearance, the face flushed with color, the eloquent brown
eyes sparkling, the pressed palms, the sudden spontaneous passion of
delight and desire in her tone. The picture was in my mind all that day,
and lived through the next, and so wrought on me that I could not longer
keep away from the birds, which I, too, loved; for now all at once it
seemed to me that life was not life without them; that I was grown sick,
and all my senses dim; that only the wished sight of wild birds could
medicine my vision; that only by drenching it in their wild melody could
my tired brain recover its lost vigour.

II

After wandering somewhat aimlessly about the country for a couple of
days, I stumbled by chance on just such a spot as I had been wishing to
find--a rustic village not too far away. It was not more than
twenty-five minutes' walk from a small station, less than one hour by
rail from London.

The way to the village was through cornfields, bordered by hedges and
rows of majestic elms. Beyond it, but quite near, there was a wood,
principally of beech, over a mile in length, with a public path running
through it. On the right hand, ten minutes' walk from the village, there
was a long green hill, the ascent to which was gentle; but on the
further side it sloped abruptly down to the Thames.

On the left hand there was another hill, with cottages and orchards,
with small fields interspersed on the slope and summit, so that the
middle part, where I lodged, was in a pretty deep hollow. There was no
sound of traffic there, and few farmers' carts came that way, as it was
well away from the roads, and the deep, narrow, winding lanes were
exceedingly rough, like the stony beds of dried-up streams.

In the deepest part of the coombe, in the middle of the village, there
was a well where the cottagers drew their water; and in the summer
evenings the youths and maidens came there, with or without jugs and
buckets, to indulge in conversation, which was mostly of the rustic,
bantering kind, mixed with a good deal of loud laughter. Close by was
the inn, where the men sat on benches in the tap-room in grave discourse
over their pipes and beer.

Wishing to make their acquaintance, I went in and sat down among them,
and found them a little shy--not to say stand-offish, at first. Rustics
are often suspicious of the stranger within their gates; but after
paying for beer all round, the frost melted and we were soon deep in
talk about the wild life of the place; always a safe and pleasant
subject in a village. One rough-looking, brown-faced man, with iron-grey
hair, became a sort of spokesman for the company, and replied to most of
my questions.

"And what about badgers?" I asked. "In such a rough-looking spot with
woods and all, it strikes me as just the sort of place where one would
find that animal."

A long dead silence followed. I caught the eye of the man nearest me and
repeated the question, "Are there no badgers here?" His eyes fell, then
he exchanged glances with some of the others, all very serious; and at
length my man, addressing the person who had acted as spokesman before,
said, "Perhaps you'll tell the gentleman if there are any badgers here."

At that the rough man looked at me very sharply, and answered stiffly,
"Not as I know of."

A few weeks later, at a small town in the neighbourhood, I got into
conversation with a hotel keeper, an intelligent man, who gave me a good
deal of information about the country. He asked me where I was staying,
and, on my telling him, said "Ah, I know it well--that village in a
hole; and a very nasty hole to get in, too--at any rate it was so,
formerly. They are getting a bit civilized now, but I remember the time
when a stranger couldn't show himself in the place without being jeered
at and insulted. Yes, they were a rough lot down in that hole--the
Badgers, they were called, and that's what they are called still."

The pity of it was that I didn't know this before I went among them! But
it was not remembered against me that I had wounded their
susceptibilities; they soon found that I was nothing but a harmless
field naturalist, and I had friendly relations with many of them.

At the extremity of the straggling village was the beginning of an
extensive common, where it was always possible to spend an hour or two
without seeing a human creature. A few sheep grazed and browsed there,
roaming about in twos and threes and half-dozens, tearing their fleeces
for the benefit of nest-building birds, in the great tangled masses of
mingled furze and bramble and briar. Birds were abundant there--all
those kinds that love the common's openness, and the rough, thorny
vegetation that flourishes on it. But the village--or rather, the large
open space occupied by it, formed the headquarters and centre of a
paradise of birds (as I soon began to think it), for the cottages and
houses were widely separated, the meanest having a garden and some
trees, and in most cases there was an old orchard of apple, cherry, and
walnut trees to each habitation, and out of this mass of greenery, which
hid the houses and made the place look more like a wood than a village,
towered the great elms in rows, and in groups.

On first approaching the place I heard, mingled with many other voices,
that of the nightingale; and as it was for the medicine of its pure,
fresh melody that I particularly craved, I was glad to find a lodging in
one of the cottages, and to remain there for several weeks.

The small care which the nightingale took to live up to his reputation
in this place surprised me a little. Here he could always be heard in
the daytime--not one bird, but a dozen--in different parts of the
village; but he sang not at night. This I set down to the fact that the
nights were dark and the weather unsettled. But later, when the weather
grew warmer, and there were brilliant moonlight nights, he was still a
silent bird except by day.

I was also a little surprised at his tameness.

On first coming to the village, when I ran after every nightingale I
heard, to get as near him as possible, I was occasionally led by the
sound to a cottage, and in some instances I found the singer perched
within three or four yards of an open window or door. At my own cottage,
when the woman who waited on me shook the breakfast cloth at the front
door, the bird that came to pick up the crumbs was the nightingale--not
the robin. When by chance he met a sparrow there, he attacked and chased
it away. It was a feast of nightingales. An elderly woman of the village
explained to me that the nightingales and other small birds were common
and tame in the village, because no person disturbed them. I smile now
when recording the good old dame's words.

On my second day at the village it happened to be raining--a warm,
mizzling rain without wind--ind the nightingales were as vocal as in
fine bright weather. I heard one in a narrow lane, and went towards it,
treading softly, in order not to scare it away, until I got within eight
or ten yards of it, as it sat on a dead projecting twig. This was a twig
of a low thorn tree growing up from the hedge, projecting through the
foliage, and the bird, perched near its end, sat only about five feet
above the bare ground of the lane. Now, I owe my best thanks to this
individual nightingale, for sharply calling to my mind a common
pestilent delusion, which I have always hated, but had never yet raised
my voice against--namely, that all wild creatures exist in constant fear
of an attack from the numberless subtle or powerful enemies that are
always waiting and watching for an opportunity to spring upon and
destroy them. The truth is, that although their enemies be legion, and
that every day, and even several times on each day, they may be
threatened with destruction, they are absolutely free from apprehension,
except when in the immediate presence of danger. Suspicious they may be
at times, and the suspicion may cause them to remove themselves to a
greater distance from the object that excites it; but the emotion is so
slight, the action so almost automatic, that the singing bird will fly
to another bush a dozen yards away, and at once resume his interrupted
song. Again, a bird will see the deadliest enemy of its kind, and unless
it be so close as to actually threaten his life, he will regard it with
the greatest indifference or will only be moved to anger at its
presence. Here was this nightingale singing in the rain, seeing but not
heeding me; while beneath the hedge, almost directly under the twig it
sat on, a black cat was watching it with luminous yellow eyes. I did not
see the cat at first, but have no doubt that the nightingale had seen
and knew that it was there. High up on the tops of the thorn, a couple
of sparrows were silently perched. Perhaps, like myself, they had come
there to listen. After I had been standing motionless, drinking in that
dulcet music for at least five minutes, one of the two sparrows dropped
from the perch straight down, and alighting on the bare wet ground
directly under the nightingale, began busily pecking at something
eatable it had discovered. No sooner had he begun pecking than out
leaped the concealed cat on to him. The sparrow fluttered wildly up from
beneath or between the claws, and escaped, as if by a miracle. The cat
raised itself up, glared round, and, catching sight of me close by,
sprang back into the hedge and was gone. But all this time the exposed
nightingale, perched only five feet above the spot where the attack had
been made and the sparrow had so nearly lost his life, had continued
singing; and he sang on for some minutes after. I suppose that he had
seen the cat before, and knew instinctively that he was beyond its
reach; that it was a terrestrial, not an aerial enemy, and so feared it
not at all; and he would, perhaps, have continued singing if the sparrow
had been caught and instantly killed.

Quite early in June I began to feel just a little cross with the
nightingales, for they almost ceased singing; and considering that the
spring had been a backward one, it seemed to me that their silence was
coming too soon. I was not sufficiently regardful of the fact that their
lays are solitary, as the poet has said; that they ask for no witness of
their song, nor thirst for human praise. They were all nesting now. But
if I heard them less, I saw much more of them, especially of one
individual, the male bird of a couple that had made their nest in a
hedge a stone's throw from the cottage. A favourite morning perch of
this bird was on a small wooden gate four or five yards away from my
window. It was an open, sunny spot, where his restless, bright eyes
could sweep the lane, up and down; and he could there also give vent to
his superfluous energy by lording it over a few sparrows and other small
birds that visited the spot. I greatly admired the fine, alert figure of
the pugnacious little creature, as he perched there so close to me, and
so fearless. His striking resemblance to the robin in form, size, and in
his motions, made his extreme familiarity seem only natural. The robin
is greatly distinguished in a sober-plumaged company by the vivid tint
on his breast. He is like the autumn leaf that catches a ray of sunlight
on its surface, and shines conspicuously among russet leaves. But the
clear brown of the nightingale is beautiful, too.

This same nightingale was keeping a little surprise in store for me.
Although he took no notice of me sitting at the open window, whenever I
went thirty or forty yards from the gate along the narrow lane that
faced it, my presence troubled him and his mate only too much. They
would flit round my head, emitting the two strongly contrasted sounds
with which they express solicitude--the clear, thin, plaintive, or
wailing note, and the low, jarring sound--an alternate lamenting and
girding. One day when I approached the nest, they displayed more anxiety
than usual, fluttering close to me, wailing and croaking more vehemently
than ever, when all at once the male, at the height of his excitement,
burst into singing. Half a dozen notes were uttered rapidly, with great
strength, then a small complaining cry again, and at intervals, a fresh
burst of melody. I have remarked the same thing in other singing birds,
species in which the harsh grating or piercing sounds that properly
express violent emotions of a painful kind, have been nearly or quite
lost. In the nightingale, this part of the bird's language has lost its
original character, and has dwindled to something very small.
Solicitude, fear, anger, are expressed with sounds that are mere
lispings compared with those emitted by the bird when singing. It is
worthy of remark that some of the most highly developed melodists--and I
am now thinking of the mocking-birds--never, in-moments of extreme
agitation, fall into this confusion and use singing notes that express
agreeable emotions, to express such as are painful. But in the
mocking-bird the primitive harsh and grating cries have not been lost
nor softened to sounds hardly to be distinguished from those that are
emitted by way of song.

III

By this time all the birds were breeding, some already breeding a second
time. And now I began to suspect that they were not quite so undisturbed
as the old dame had led me to believe; that they had not found a
paradise in the village after all. One morning, as I moved softly along
the hedge in my nightingale's lane, all at once I heard, in the old
grassy orchard, to which it formed a boundary, swishing sounds of
scuttling feet and half-suppressed exclamations of alarm; then a
crushing through the hedge, and out, almost at my feet, rushed and
leaped and tumbled half-a-dozen urchins, who had suddenly been
frightened from a bird-nesting raid. Clothes torn, hands and faces
scratched with thorns, hat-less, their tow-coloured hair all disordered
or standing up like a white crest above their brown faces, rounded eyes
staring--what an extraordinarily wild appearance they had! I was back
in very old times, in the Britain of a thousand years before the coming
of the Romans, and these were her young barbarians, learning their
life's business in little things.

No, the birds of the village were not undisturbed while breeding; but
happily the young savages never found my nightingale's nest. One day the
bird came to the gate as usual, and was more alert and pugnacious than
ever; and no wonder, for his mate came too, and with them four young
birds. For a week they were about the cottage every day, when they
dispersed, and one beautiful bright morning the male bird, in his old
place near my window, attempted to sing, beginning with that rich,
melodious throbbing, which is usually called "_jugging_," and following
with half-a-dozen beautiful notes. That was all. It was July, and I
heard no more music from him or from any other of his kind.

* * *

I have perhaps written at too great length of this bird. The nightingale
was after all only one of the fifty-nine species I succeeded in
identifying during my sojourn at the village. There were more. I heard
the calls and cries of others in the wood and various places, but
refused, except in the case of the too elusive crake, to set down any in
my list that I did not see. It was not my ambition to make a long list.
My greatest desire was to see well those that interested me most. But
those who go forth, as I did, to look for birds that are a sight for
sore eyes, must meet with many a disappointment. In all those fruit and
shade trees that covered the village with a cloud of verdure, and in the
neighbouring woods, not once did I catch a glimpse of the green
woodpecker, a beautiful conspicuous bird, supposed to be increasing in
many places in England. Its absence from so promising a locality seemed
strange. Another species, also said to be increasing in the
country--the turtledove, was extremely abundant. In the tall beech woods
its low, montonous crooning note was heard all day long from all sides.
In shady places, where the loud, shrill bird-voices are few, one prefers
this sound to the set song of the woodpigeon, being more continuous and
soothing, and of the nature of a lullaby. It sometimes reminded me of
the low monotone I have heard from a Patagonian mother when singing her
"swart papoose" to sleep. Still, I would gladly have spared many of
these woodland crooners for the sake of one magpie--that bird of fine
feathers and a bright mind, which I had not looked on for a whole year,
and now hoped to see again. But he was not there; and after I had looked
for myself, some of the natives assured me that no magpie had been seen
for years in that wood.

For a time I feared that I was to be just as unlucky with regard to the
jay, seeing that the owner of the extensive beech woods adjoining the
village permitted his keeper to kill the most interesting birds in
it--kestrels and sparrowhawks, owls, jays, and magpies. He was a new
man, comparatively, in the place, and wanted to increase his preserves,
but to do this it was necessary first to exclude the villagers--the
Badgers, who were no doubt partial to pheasants' eggs. Now, to close an
ancient right-of-way is a ticklish business, and this was an important
one, seeing that the village women did their Saturday marketing in the
town beyond the wood and river, and with the path closed they would have
two miles further to walk. The new lord wisely took this into
consideration, and set himself to win the goodwill of the people before
attempting any strong measures. He walked in the lanes and was affable
to the cottage women and nice to the children, and by and bye he
exclaimed, "What! No institute! no hall, or any place where you can meet
and spend the long winter evenings? Well, I'll soon see to that." And
soon, to their delight, they had a nice building reared on a piece of
land which he bought for the purpose, furnished with tables, chairs,
bagatelle boards, and all accessories; and he also supplied them with
newspapers and magazines. He was immensely popular, but appeared to
think little of what he had done. When they expressed their gratitude to
him he would move his hand, and answer, "Oh, I'm going to do a great
deal more than that for you!"

A few months went by, then he caused a notice to be put up about the
neighbourhood that the path through the wood was going to be closed "by
order." No one took any notice, and a few weeks later his workmen
appeared on the scene and erected a huge oakwood barrier across the
path; also a notice on a board that the wood was strictly private and
trespassers would be prosecuted. The villagers met in force at the
institute and the inn that evening, and after discussing the matter over
their ale, they armed themselves with axes and went in a body and
demolished the barrier.

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