Birds in Town and Village

W >> W. H. Hudson >> Birds in Town and Village

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All this sounded very pretty, as well as true, and there was a pleased
smile on every face in the audience.

Then the rapid movements and gestures ceased, and the speaker was
silent. A cloud came over his rough-hewn majestic visage; he drew
himself up, and swayed his body from side to side, and shook his black
gown, and lifted his arms, as their plumed homologues are lifted by some
great bird, and let them fall again two or three times; and then said,
in deep measured tones, which seemed to express rage and despair, "But
did you ever see the eagle in his cage?"

The effect of the contrast was grand. He shook himself again, and lifted
and dropped his arms again, assuming, for the nonce, the peculiar
aquiline slouch; and there before us stood the mighty bird of Jove, as
we are accustomed to see it in the Zoological Gardens; its deep-set,
desolate eyes looking through and beyond us; ruffling its dark plumage,
and lifting its heavy wings as if about to scorn the earth, only to drop
them again, and to utter one of those long dreary cries which seem to
protest so eloquently against a barbarous destiny. Then he proceeded to
tell us of the great raptor in its life of hopeless captivity; his
stern, rugged countenance, deep bass voice, and grand mouth-filling
polysllables suiting his subject well, and making his description seem
to our minds a sombre magnificent picture never to be forgotten--at all
events, never by an ornithologist.

Doubtless this part of his discourse proved eminently pleasing to the
majority of his hearers, who, looking downwards into the depths of their
own natures, would be able to discern there a glimmer, or possibly more
than a glimmer of that divine quality he had spoken of, and which was,
unhappily for them, not recognized by the world at large; so that, for
the moment, he was addressing a congregation of captive eagles, all
mentally ruffling their plumage and flapping their pinions, and uttering
indignant screams of protest against the injustice of their lot.

The illustration pleased me for a different reason, namely, because,
being a student of bird-life, his contrasted picture of the two widely
different kinds, when deprived of liberty, struck me as being singularly
true to nature, and certainly it could not have been more forcibly and
picturesquely put. For it is unquestionably the fact that the misery we
inflict by tyrannously using the power we possess over God's creatures,
is great in proportion to the violence of the changes of condition to
which we subject our prisoners; and while canary and eagle are both more
or less aerial in their mode of life, and possessed of boundless energy,
the divorce from nature is immeasurably greater in one case than in the
other. The small bird, in relation to its free natural life, is less
confined in its cage than the large one. Its smallness, perching
structure, and restless habits, fit it for continual activity, and its
flitting, active life within the bars bears some resemblance except in
the great matter of flight, to its life in a state of nature. Again, its
lively, curious, and extremely impressible character, is in many ways an
advantage in captivity; every new sound and sight, and every motion,
however slight, in any object or body near it, affording it, so to
speak, something to think about. It has the further advantage of a
varied and highly musical language; the frequent exercise of the faculty
of singing, in birds, with largely developed vocal organs, no doubt
reacts on the system, and contributes not a little to keep the prisoner
healthy and cheerful.

On the other hand, the eagle, on account of its structure and large
size, is a prisoner indeed, and must languish with all its splendid
faculties and importunate impulses unexercised. You may gorge it with
gobbets of flesh until its stomach cries, "Enough"; but what of all the
other organs fed by the stomach, and their correlated faculties? Every
bone and muscle and fibre, every feather and scale, is instinct with an
energy which you cannot satisfy, and which is like an eternal hunger.
Chain it by the feet, or place it in a cage fifty feet wide--in either
case it is just as miserable. The illimitable fields of thin cold air,
where it outrides the winds and soars exulting beyond the clouds, alone
can give free space for the display of its powers and scope to its
boundless energies. Nor to the power of flight alone, but also to a
vision formed for sweeping wide horizons, and perceiving objects at
distances which to short-sighted man seem almost miraculous. Doubtless,
eagles, like men, possess some adaptiveness, else they would perish in
their enforced inactivity, swallowing without hunger and assimilating
without pleasure the cold coarse flesh we give them. A human being can
exist, and even be tolerably cheerful, with limbs paralyzed and hearing
gone; and that, to my mind, would be a parallel case to that of the
eagle deprived of its liberty and of the power to exercise its flight,
vision, and predatory instincts.

As I sit writing these thoughts, with a cage containing four canaries on
the table before me, I cannot help congratulating these little prisoners
on their comparatively happy fate in having been born, or hatched,
finches and not eagles. And yet albeit I am not responsible for the
restraint which has been put upon them, and am not their owner, being
only a visitor in the house, I am troubled with some uncomfortable
feelings concerning their condition--feelings which have an admixture of
something like a sense of shame or guilt, as if an injustice had been
done, and I had stood by consenting. I did not do it, but we did it. I
remember Matthew Arnold's feeling lines on his dead canary, "Poor
Matthias," and quote:

Yet, poor bird, thy tiny corse
Moves me, somehow, to remorse;
Something haunts my conscience, brings
Sad, compunctious visitings.
Other favourites, dwelling here,
Open lived with us, and near;
Well we knew when they were glad
Plain we saw if they were sad;
Sympathy could feel and show
Both in weal of theirs and woe.

Birds, companions more unknown,
Live beside us, but alone;
Finding not, do all they can,
Passage from their souls to man.
Kindness we bestow and praise,
Laud their plumage, greet their lays;
Still, beneath their feathered breast
Stirs a history unexpressed.
Wishes there, and feeling strong,
Incommunicably throng;
What they want we cannot guess.

This, as poetry, is good, but it does not precisely fit my case; my
"compunctious visitings" being distinctly different in origin and
character from the poet's. He--Matthew Arnold--is a poet, and the author
of much good verse, which I appreciate and hold dear. But he was not a
naturalist--all men cannot be everything. And I, a naturalist, hold that
the wishes, thronging the restless little feathered breast are not
altogether so incommunicable as the melodious mourner of "Poor Matthias"
imagines. The days--ay, and years--which I have spent in the society of
my feathered friends have not, I flatter myself, been so wasted that I
cannot small my soul, just as the preacher smalled his voice, to bring
it within reach of them, and establish some sort of passage.

And so, thinking that a little more knowledge of birds than most people
possess, and consideration for them--for I will not be so harsh to speak
of justice--and time and attention given to their wants, might remove
this reproach, and silence these vague suggestions of a too fastidious
conscience, I have taken the trouble to add something to the seed with
which these little prisoners had been supplied. For we give sweetmeats
to the child that cries for the moon--an alternative which often acts
beneficially--and there is nothing more to be done. Any one of us, even
a philosopher, would think it hard to be restricted to dry bread only,
yet such a punishment would be small compared with that which we, in our
ignorance or want of consideration, inflict on our caged animals--our
pets on compulsion. Small, because an almost infinite variety of
flavours drawn from the whole vegetable kingdom--a hundred flavours for
every one in the dietary which satisfies our heavier mammalian
natures--is a condition of the little wild bird's existence and
essential to its well-being and perfect happiness. And so, to remedy
this defect, I went out into the garden, and with seeding grasses and
pungent buds, and leaves of a dozen different kinds, I decorated the
cage until it looked less like a prison than a bower. And now for an
hour the little creatures have been busy with their varied green
fare, each one tasting half a dozen different leaves every minute,
hopping here and there and changing places with his fellows, glancing
their bright little eyes this way and that, and all the time uttering
gratulatory notes in the canary's conversational tone. And their
language is not altogether untranslatable. I listen to one, a pretty
pure yellow bird, but slightly tyrannical in his treatment of the
others, and he says, or seems to say: "This is good, I like it, only the
old leaf is tough; the buds would be better. . . . These are certainly
not so good. _I tasted them out of compliment to nature, though they
were scarcely palatable. . . ._" No, that was not my own expression; it
was said by Thoreau, perhaps the only human a little bird can quote with
approval. "This is decidedly bitter--and yet--yes, it does leave a
pleasant flavour on the palate. Make room for me there--or I shall make
you and let me taste it again. Yes, I fancy I can remember eating
something like this in a former state of existence, ages and ages ago."
And so on, and so on, until I began to imagine that the whole thing had
been put right, and that the uncomfortable feeling would return to
trouble me no more. But at the rate they are devouring their green stuff
there will not be a leat, scarcely a stem left in another hour; and
then? Why, then they will have the naked wires of their cage all round
them to protect them from the cat and for hunger there will be seed in
the box.

After all, then, what a little I have been able to do! But I flatter
myself that if they were mine I should do more. I never keep captive
birds, but if they were given to me, and I could not refuse, I should do
a great deal more for them. All my knowledge of their ways and their
requirements would teach me how to make their caged existence less
unlike the old natural life, than it now is. To begin the ameliorating
process, I should place them in a large cage, large enough to allow
space for flight, so that they might fly to and fro, a few feet each
way, and rest their little feet from continual perching. That would
enable them to exercise their most important muscles and experience once
more, although in a very limited degree, the old delicious sensation of
gliding at will through the void air. The wires of their new cage would
be of brass or of some bright metal, and the wooden parts and perches
green enamelled, or green variegated with brown and grey, and the roof
would be hung with glass lustres, to quiver and sparkle into drops of
violet, red, and yellow light, gladdening these little lovers of bright
colours; for so we deem them. I should also add gay flowers and berries,
crocus and buttercup and dandelion, hips and haws and mountain ash and
yellow and scarlet leaves--all seasonable jewellery from woods and
hedges and from the orchard and garden. Then would come the heaviest
part of my task, which would be to satisfy their continual craving for
new tastes in food, their delight in an endless variety. I should go to
the great seed-merchants of London and buy samples of all the cultivated
seeds of the earth, and not feed them in a trough, or manger, like heavy
domestic brutes, but give it to them mixed and scattered in small
quantities, to be searched for and gladly found in the sand and gravel
and turf on the wide floor of the cage. And, higher up, the wires of
their dwelling would be hung with an endless variety of seeded grasses,
and sprays of all trees and plants, good, bad, and indifferent. For if
the volatile bird dines on no more than twenty dishes every day he
loves to taste of a hundred and to have at least a thousand on the table
to choose from.

Feeding the birds and keeping the cage always sweet and clean would
occupy most, if not the whole of my time. But would that be too much to
give if it made me tranquil in my own mind? For it must be noted that I
have done all this, mentally and on paper, for my own satisfaction
rather than that of the canaries. Birds are not worth much--_to us_. Are
not five sparrows sold for three farthings? I have even shot many birds
and have felt no compunction. True, they perished before their time, but
they did not languish, and being dead there was an end of them; but the
caged canaries continuing with us, cannot be dismissed from the mind
with the same convenient ease. After all, I begin to think that my
imaginary reforms, if carried out, would not quite content me. The
"compunctious visitings" would continue still. I look out of the window
and see a sparrow on a neighbouring tree, loudly chirruping. And as I
listen, trying to find comfort by thinking of the perils which do
environ him, his careless unconventional sparrow-music resolves itself
into articulate speech, interspersed with occasional bursts of derisive
laughter. He knows, this fabulous sparrow, what I have been thinking
about and have written. "How would you like it," I hear him saying, "O
wise man that knows so much about the ways of birds, if you were shut up
in a big cage--in Windsor Castle, let us say--with scores of menials to
wait on you and anticipate your every want? That is, I must explain,
every want compatible with--ahem!--the captive condition. Would you be
happy in your confinement, practising with the dumb-bells, riding up and
down the floors on a bicycle and gazing at pictures and filigree caskets
and big malachite vases and eating dinners of many, many courses? Or
would you begin to wish that you might be allowed to live on sixpence a
day--_and earn it_; and even envy the ragged tramp who dines on a
handful of half-rotten apples and sleeps in a hay-stack, but is free to
come and go, and range the world at will? You have been playing at
nature; but Nature mocks you, for your captives thank you not. They
would rather go to her without an intermediary, and take a scantier
measure of food from her hand, but flavoured as she only can flavour it.
Widen your cage, naturalist; replace the little twinkling lustres with
sun and moon and milky way; plant forests on the floor, and let there be
hills and valleys, rivers and wide spaces; and let the blue pillars of
heaven be the wires of your cage, with free entrance to wind and rain;
then your little captives will be happy, even happy as I am, in spite of
all the perils which do environ me--guns and cats and snares, with wet
and fog and hard frosts to come."

And, seeing my error, I should open the cage and let them fly away. Even
to death, I should let them fly, for there would be a taste of liberty
first, and life without that sweet savour, whether of aerial bird or
earth-bound man, is not worth living.

CHANTICLEER

During the month of September I spent several days at a house standing
on high ground in one of the pleasantest suburbs of London, commanding a
fine view at the back of the breezy, wooded, and not very far-off Surrey
hills; and all round, from every window, front and back, such a mass of
greenery met the eye, almost concealing the neighbouring houses, that I
could easily imagine myself far out in the country. In the garden the
omnipresent sparrow, and that always pleasant companion the starling,
associated with the thrush, blackbird, green linnet, chaffinch,
redstart, wren, and two species of tits; and, better than all these, not
fewer than half a dozen robins warbled their autumn notes from early
morning until late in the evening. Domestic bird-life was also
represented by fifteen fowls, and the wise laxity existing in the
establishment made these also free of the grounds; for of eyesores and
painful skeletons in London cupboards, one of the worst, to my mind, is
that unwholesome coop at the back where a dozen unhappy birds are
usually to be found immured for life. These, more fortunate, had ample
room to run about in, and countless broad shady leaves from which to
pick the green caterpillar, and red tortoise-shaped lady-bird, and
parti-coloured fly, and soft warm soil in which to bathe in their own
gallinaceous fashion, and to lie with outstretched wings luxuriating by
the hour in the genial sunshine. And having seen their free wholesome
life, I did not regard the new-laid egg on the breakfast-table with a
feeling of repugnance, but ate it with a relish.

I have said that the fowls numbered fifteen; five were old birds, and
ten were chickens, closely alike in size, colour and general appearance.
They were not the true offspring of the hen that reared them, but
hatched from eggs bought from a local poultry-breeder. As they advanced
in age to their teens, or the period in chicken-life corresponding to
that in which, in the human species, boy and girl begin to diverge,
their tails grew long, and they developed very fine red combs; but the
lady of the house, who had been promised good layers when she bought the
eggs clung tenaciously to the belief that long arching tails and stately
crests were ornaments common to both sexes in this particular breed. By
and by they commenced to crow, first one, then two, then all, and stood
confessed cockerels. Incidents like this, which are of frequent
occurrence, serve to keep alive the exceedingly ancient notion that the
sex of the future chick can be foretold from the shape of the egg. As I
had no personal interest in the question of the future egg-supply of the
establishment, I was not sorry to see the chickens develop into cocks;
what did interest me were their first attempts at crowing--those grating
sounds which the young bird does not seem to emit, but to wrench out
with painful effort, as a plant is wrenched out of the soil, and not
without bringing away portions of the lungs clinging to its roots. The
bird appears to know what is coming, like an amateur dentist about to
extract one of his own double-pronged teeth, and setting his feet
firmly on the ground, and throwing himself well back before an imaginary
looking-glass, and with arched-neck, wide-open beak, and rolling eyes,
courageously performs the horrible operation. One cannot help thinking
that a cockerel brought up without any companions of his own sex and age
would not often crow, but in this instance there were no fewer than ten
of them to encourage each other in the laborious process of tuning thejr
harsh throats. Heard subsequently in the quiet of the early morning,
these first tuning efforts suggested some reflections to my mind, which
may not prove entirely without interest to fanciers who aim at something
beyond a mere increase in our food-supply in their selecting and
refining processes.

To continue my narration. I woke in the morning at my usual time,
between three and four o'clock, which is not my getting-up time, for, as
a rule, after half an hour or so I sleep again. The waking is not
voluntary as far as I know; for although it may seem a contradiction in
terms to speak of coming at will out of a state of unconsciousness, we
do, in cases innumerable, wake voluntarily, or at the desired time, not
perhaps being altogether unconscious when sleeping. If, however, this
early waking were voluntary, I should probably say that it was for the
pleasure of listening to the crowing of the cocks at that silent hour
when the night, so near its end, is darkest, and the mysterious tide of
life, prescient of coming dawn, has already turned, and is sending the
red current more and more swiftly through the sleeper's veins. I have
spent many a night in the desert, and when waking on the wide silent
grassy plain, the first whiteness in the eastern sky, and the fluting
call of the tinamou, and the perfume of the wild evening primrose, have
seemed to me like a resurrection in which I had a part; and something of
this feeling is always associated in my mind with the first far-heard
notes of Chanticleer.

It was very dark and quiet when I woke; my window was open, with only a
lace curtain before it to separate me from the open air. Presently the
profound silence was broken. From a distance of fifty or sixty yards
away on the left hand came the crow of a cock, soon answered by another
further away on the same side, and then, further away still, by a third.
Other voices took up the challenge on the right, some near, some far,
until it seemed that there was scarcely a house in the neighbourhood at
which Chanticleer was not a dweller. There was no other sound. Not for
another hour would the sparrows burst out in a chorus of chirruping
notes, lengthened or shortened at will, variously inflected, and with a
ringing musical sound in some of them, which makes one wonder why this
bird, so high in the scale of nature, has never acquired a set song for
itself. For there is music in him, and when confined with a singing
finch he will sometimes learn its song. Then the robins, then the tits,
then the starlings, gurgling, jarring, clicking, whistling, chattering.
Then the pigeons cooing soothingly on the roof and window-ledges, taking
flight from time to time with sudden, sharp flap, flap, followed by a
long, silken sound made by the wings in gliding. At four the cocks had
it all to themselves; and, without counting the cockerels (not yet out
of school), I could distinctly hear a dozen birds; that is to say, they
were near enough for me to listen to their music critically. The variety
of sounds they emitted was very great, and, if cocks were selected for
their vocal qualities, would have shown an astonishing difference in the
musical tastes of their owners. A dozen dogs of as many different
breeds, ranging from the boar-hound to the toy terrier, would not have
shown greater dissimilarity in their forms than did these cocks in their
voices. For the fowl, like the dog, has become an extremely variable
creature in the domestic state, in voice no less than in size, form,
colour, and other particulars. At one end of the scale there was the
raucous bronchial strain produced by the unwieldy Cochin. What a bird is
that! Nature, in obedience to man's behests, and smiling with secret
satire over her work, has made it ponderous and ungraceful as any clumsy
mammalian, wombat, ardvaark, manatee, or hippopotamus. The burnished red
hackles, worn like a light mantle over the black doublet of the breast,
the metallic dark green sickle-plumes arching over the tail, all the
beautiful lines and rich colouring, have been absorbed into flesh and
fat for gross feeders; and with these have gone its liveliness and
vigour, its clarion voice and hostile spirit and brilliant courage; it
is Gallus bankiva degenerate, with dulled brains and blunted spurs, and
its hoarse crow is a barbarous chant.

And far away at the other end, startling in its suddenness and
impetuosity, was a trisyllabic crow, so brief, piercing, and emphatic,
that it could only have proceeded from that peppery uppish little bird,
the bantam. And of the three syllables, the last, which should be the
longest, was the shortest, "short and sharp like the shrill swallow's
cry," or perhaps even more like the shrieky bark of an enraged little
cur; not a _reveille_ and silvern morning song in one, as a crow should
be, but a challenge and a defiance, wounding the sense like a spur, and
suggesting the bustle and fury of the cockpit.

If this style of crowing was known to Milton, it is perhaps accountable
for the one bad couplet in the "Allegro":

While the cock with lively din
Scatters the rear of darkness thin.

Someone has said that every line in that incomparable poem brings at
least one distinct picture vividly before the mind's eye. The picture
the first line of the couplet I have quoted suggests to ray mind is not
of crowing Chanticleer at all, but of a stalwart, bare-armed,
blowsy-faced woman, vigorously beating on a tin pan with a stick; but
for what purpose--whether to call down a passing swarm of bees, or to
summon the chickens to be fed--I never know. It is only my mental
picture of a "lively din." As to the second line, all attempts to see
the thing described only bring before me clouds and shadows, confusedly
rushing about in an impossible way; a chaos utterly unlike the serenity
and imperceptible growth of morning, and not a picture at all.

By and by I found myself paying special attention to one cock, about a
hundred yards away, or a little more perhaps, for by contrast all the
other songs within hearing seemed strangely inferior. Its voice was
singularly clear and pure, the last note greatly prolonged and with a
slightly falling inflection, yet not collapsing at the finish as such
long notes frequently do, ending with a little internal sound or croak,
as if the singer had exhausted his breath; but it was perfect in its
way, a finished performance, artistic, and, by comparison, brilliant.
After once hearing this bird I paid little attention to the others, but
after each resounding call I counted the seconds until its repetition.
It was this bird's note, on this morning, and not the others, which
seemed to bring round me that atmosphere of dreams and fancies I exist
in at early cockcrow--dreams and memories, sweet or sorrowful, of old
scenes and faces, and many eloquent passages in verse and prose, written
by men in other and better days, who lived more with nature than we do
now. Such a note as this was, perhaps, in Thoreau's mind when he
regretted that there were no cocks to cheer him in the solitude of
Walden. "I thought," he says, "that it might be worth while keeping a
cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of this once
wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of any bird's, and
if they could be naturalized without being domesticated it would soon
become the most famous sound in our woods. . . . To walk in a winter
morning in a wood where these birds abounded, their native woods, and
hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees, clear and shrill for miles
over the surrounding country--think of it! It would put nations on the
alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier on
each successive morning of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy,
wealthy, and wise?"

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