Birds in Town and Village

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

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The wood-pigeon is another species which, like the starling, has
increased greatly in recent years, without special protection and with
no sentiment in its favour. . . . The sentiment is all confined to the
nature-lovers, whose words have no effect on the people generally, least
of all on the farmers. I am reminded here of the experience of a young
man, an ardent bird-lover, on his visit to a Yorkshire farm. His host,
who was also a young man, took him a walk across his fields. It was a
spring day of brilliant sunshine, and the air was full of the music of
scores of soaring skylarks. The visitor long in cities pent, was
exhilarated by the strains and kept on making exclamations of rapturous
delight, "Just listen to the larks! Did you ever hear anything like it!"
and so on.

His host, his eyes cast down, trudged on in glum silence. Finally the
young man, carried away by his enthusiasm, stopped and turning to his
companion shouted, "Listen! Listen! Do you hear the larks?"

"Oh, yes," drawled the other, looking more glum than ever, "I hear them
fast enough. And I wish they were all dead!"

So with the other charming species. The moan of doves in immemorial elms
is a pleasing sound to the poets, but it does not prevent the farmers
throughout the land from wishing them all dead; and every person who
possesses a gun is glad to help in their massacre. For the bird is a
pest and he who shoots it is doing something for England; furthermore,
shooting it is first-rate sport, not like slaughtering wretched little
sparrows or innocent young rooks just out of their windy cradles. And
when shot it is a good table-bird, with as much tasty flesh on it as a
woodcock or partridge.

How, then can we account for the increase of such a species? One cause
is undoubtedly to be found in the removal by gamekeepers of its three
chief enemies--the carrion crow, magpie, and jay--all these three being
great devourers of pigeon's eggs, which of all eggs are most conspicuous
and open to attack. Then again the winter immigration of wood-pigeons
from northern Europe appears to be on the increase, and it may be
conjectured that a considerable number of these visitors remain annually
to breed with us. There has also been an increase in the stockdove and
turtle-dove in recent years, and the former species is extending its
range in the north. The cause or causes of the increase of the
turtledove are not far to seek. Its chief feathered enemies, the egg and
fledgling robbers, are the same as the wood-pigeon's; moreover, the
turtledove is least persecuted by man of our four pigeons, and being
strictly migratory it quits the country before shooting-time begins; add
to this that the turtle-dove has been specially protected under Sir
Herbert Maxwell's Act of 1894 in a good number of English counties, from
Surrey to Yorkshire.

Of the stock-dove we can only say that, like the ring-dove, it has
increased in spite of the persecution it is subject to, since no person
out after pigeons would spare it because it is without a white collar.
With the exception of the county of Buckinghamshire it is not on the
schedule anywhere in the country. One can only suppose that this species
has been indirectly benefited by the bird legislation and all that has
been done to promote a feeling favourable to bird-preservation during
the last thirty years.

V

THE DAW SENTIMENT

I have spoken of the wood adjacent to the villages of Hayle and Lelant
where the rooks, daws, and starlings of the neighbourhood have their
winter roosting-place. This is at Trevelloe, the ancient estate of the
Praeds, who now call themselves Tyringham. Here the daws congregate each
evening in such numbers that a stranger to the district and to the local
habits of the bird might imagine that all the cliff-breeding jackdaws in
West Cornwall had come to roost at that spot. Yet the cliff-breeders,
albeit abundant enough, are but a minority of the daw population of this
district. The majority of these birds live and breed in the neighbouring
villages and hamlets--St. Ives, Carbis Bay, Towadneck, Lelant, Phillack,
Hayle, and others further away. It is a jackdaw metropolis and, as we
have seen, every village receives its own quota of birds each morning, and
there they spend the daylight hours and subsist on the waste food and on
what they can steal, just as the semi-domestic raven and the kite did in
former ages, from Roman times down to the seventeenth century.

Early in May the winter congregation breaks up, the cliff-breeders going
back to the rocks and the village birds to their chimneys, where they
presently set about relining their old nests. There are plenty of places
for all, since there are chimneys in almost every cottage where fires
are never lighted, and as ventilation is not wanted in bedrooms the
birds are allowed to bring in more materials each year, until the whole
flue is filled up. Year by year the materials brought in, sink lower and
lower until they rest on the closed iron register and change in time to
a solid brown mould. Thus, however long-lived a daw may be--and there
are probably more centenarians among the daws than among the human
inhabitants of the villages--it is a rare thing for one to be disturbed
in his tenancy.

In the cottage opposite the one I was staying in, its owner, an old
woman who had lived in it all her life, had recently died, aged
eighty-seven.

She was very feeble at the last, and one cold day when she could not
leave her bed, the extraordinary idea occurred to some one of her people
that it might be a good thing to light a fire in her room. The fireplace
was examined and was found to have no flue, or that the flue had been
filled with earth or cement. The village builder was called in, and with
the aid of a man on the roof and poles and various implements he
succeeded in extracting two or three barrow-loads of hard earth which
had no doubt once been sticks, centuries ago, as the building was very
ancient. No one had remembered that the daws had always occupied the
same chimney; the old dame herself had seen them going in and out of it
from her childhood, and her end was probably hastened by the disturbance
made in cleaning it. Now she is gone the daws here are in possession of
it once more.

All through the month of May daws were to be seen about the village,
dropping from time to time upon the chimney-pots where they had their
nests and occasionally bringing some slight materials to form a new
lining, but it was very rare to see one with a stick in his beak. The
flues were already full of old sticks and no more were wanted. It was
amusing to see a bird flying about, suddenly tumble out of the air on to
a chimneypot, then with tail tipped up and wings closed, dive into the
cavity below. One wondered how the young birds would be got out!

Talking with the rector of the neighbouring parish of Phillack one day
on this subject, he said, "Don't imagine that the daws restrict
themselves to the chimneys where fires are not lighted. At all events it
isn't so at Phillack. Perhaps we have too many daws in our village, but
every year before lighting fires in the drawing and dining-rooms we have
to call in a man with a pole to clear the flues out." He told me that a
few years ago, one cold June day, a fire was lighted in the
drawing-room, and as the smoke all poured out into the room a man was
sent up to the roof with a pole to clear the obstruction out. Presently
a mess of sticks came down and with them two fully-fledged young
jackdaws, one dead, killed with the pole, the other sound and lively.
This one they kept and it soon became quite tame; when able to fly it
would go off and associate with the wild birds, but refused to leave
the house until the following summer, when it found a mate and went away.

The head keeper at Trevelloe, a remarkably vigorous and intelligent
octogenarian who has been in his place over half a century, gave me some
interesting information about the daws. He says they have greatly
increased in recent years in this part of Cornwall because they are no
longer molested; no person, he says, not even a game-keeper anxious
about his pheasants, would think of shooting a jackdaw. But this is not
because the bird has changed its habits. He is as great a pest as ever
he was, and as an example of how bad jackdaws can be, he related the
following incident told him by a friend of his, a head keeper on an
estate adjoining a shooting his master took one year on the northwest
coast of England. It happened that a big colony of daws existed within a
mile or two of the preserves, and one day the keeper was called' away in
a hurry and left the coops unattended for the best part of a day; it was
the biggest mistake he had ever made and the chief disaster of his life.
On his return he found that the daws had been before him and that all
his precious chicks had been carried off. For several hours of that day
there was a steady coming and going of birds between the cliffs and the
coops, every daw going back with a chick in his beak for his hungry
young in the nest.

Yet my informant, this ancient and singularly intelligent old man, a
gamekeeper all his life, who knows his jackdaw, could not tell me why
gamekeepers no longer persecute so injurious a bird I He will not allow
a sparrow-hawk to exist in his woods, yet all he could say when I
repeated my question was, "No keeper ever thinks of hurting a jack now,
but I can't say why."

The reason of it I fancy is plain enough; it is simply the sentiment I
have spoken of. In a small way it has always existed in certain places,
in towns, where the jackdaw is associated in our minds with cathedrals
and church towers--where he is the "ecclesiastical daw"; but the modern
wider toleration is due to the character, the personality, of the bird
itself, which is more or less like that of all the members of the
corvine family, with the exception of the rook, who always tries his
best to be an honest, useful citizen; but it is not precisely the same.
They may be regarded as bad hats generally In the bird community, and on
this very account--"I'm sorry to say," to quote Mr. Pecksniff--they
touch a chord in us; and the daw being the genial rascal in feathers par
excellence is naturally the best loved.

It has thus come about that of all the Corvidae the daw is now the
favourite as a pet bird, and in the domestic condition he is accorded
more liberty than is given to other species. We think he makes better
use of his freedom, that he does not lose touch with his human friends
when allowed to fly about, and appears more capable of affection.

Formerly, the raven and magpie came first as pets. The raven vanished as
a pet, because like the goshawk, kite, and buzzard, he was extirpated in
the interests of the game-preserver and hen-wife. The magpie was then
first, and has only been recently ousted from that ancient, honourable
position. The pie was a superior bird as a feathered pet in a cage; he
is beautiful in shape and colour in his snow-white and metallic
dark-green and purple-glossed plumage, and his long graduated tail.
Moreover, he is a clever bird. To my mind there is no more fascinating
species when I can find it in numbers, in places where it is not
persecuted, and is accustomed to congregate at intervals, not as rooks
and starlings do merely because they are gregarious, but purely for
social purposes--to play and converse with one another. Its language at
such times is so various as to be a surprise and delight to the
listener; while its ways of amusing itself, its clowning and the little
tricks and practical jokes the birds are continually playing on each
other, are a delight to witness. All this is lost in a caged bird. He is
handsome to look at and remarkably intelligent, but he distinguishes
between magpies and men; he doesn't reveal himself; his accomplishments,
vocal and mental, are for his own tribe. In this he differs from the
daw; for the daw is less specialized; he is an undersized common crow,
livelier, more impish than that bird, also more plastic, more adaptive,
and takes more kindly to the domestic or parasitic life. Human beings to
him are simply larger daws, and unlike the pie he can play his tricks
and be himself among them as freely as when with his feathered comrades.
We like him best because he makes himself one of us.

Undoubtedly the chough comes nearest to the daw mentally, and as it is a
far more beautiful bird--the poor daw having little of that quality--it
would probably have been our prime favourite among the crows but for its
rarity. Formerly it was a common pet bird, caged or free, in all the
coast districts where it inhabited, and it may be that the desire for a
pet chough was the cause of its decline and final disappearance all
round the south and west coasts of England, except at one spot near
Tintagel where half a dozen pairs still exist only because watchers
appointed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds are always on
the spot to warn off the nest-robbers during the breeding season. But of
the chough in captivity or as a domesticated bird we know little now, as
no records have been preserved. I have only known one bird, taken from a
North Devon cliff about forty years ago, at a house near the coast; a
very beautiful pet bird with charming, affectionate ways, always free to
range about the country and the cliffs, where it associated with the
daws. It was the last of its kind at that place, and I do not know if it
still lives.

Next to the chough the jay comes nearest to the daw mentally of all our
crows, and as he excels most of our wild birds in beauty he would
naturally have been a first favourite as a pet but for the fact that it
is only in a state of nature in which he is like the daw--lively,
clever, impish; in captivity he is more like the magpie and affiliates
even less than that bird with his human associates. In confinement he is
a quiet, almost sedate, certainly a silent bird: He is essentially a
woodland species; all his graces, his various, often musical, language,
with many imitations of bird and animal sounds, and his spectacular
games and pretty wing displays, are for his own people exclusively. He
must have his liberty in the woods and a company of his fellow-jays to
exhibit his full lustre.

The difference between jay and daw is similar to that between fox and
dog; or rather let us say, between one of the small desert foxes of
Syria and Egypt--the fennec, for instance--and the jackal, the domestic
dog's progenitor; the first gifted with exquisite grace and beauty, was
too highly specialized to suit the domestic condition; hence the
generalized un-beautiful beast was chosen to be man's servant and
companion. In the same way it looks as if we were taking to the daw in
preference to the more beautiful bird because he is more like us, or
understands us better, or adapts himself more readily to our way of
life.

I believe that about nine out of every ten interesting and amusing
stories about charming pet birds I have heard in England during the last
quarter of a century relate to the daw, and this, I think, goes to show
that he is a prime favourite as a feathered pet, at all events in the
southern and western counties.

VI

STORY OF A JACKDAW

When I laid my pen down after concluding Part V it pleased me to think
that I had written the last word, that, my task finished, I was free to
go on to something else. But I was not yet wholly free of the jackdaws;
their yelping cries were still ringing in my mental ears, and their
remembered shapes were still all about me in their black dress, or
cassock, grey hood, and malicious little grey eyes. The persistent
images suggested that my task was not properly finished after all, that
it would be better to conclude with one of those anecdotes or stories of
the domesticated bird which I have said are so common; also that this
should be a typical story, which would serve to illustrate the peculiar
daw sentiment--the affectionate interest we take in him, not only in
spite of his impudence and impishness and naughtiness, but also to some
extent because of these same qualities, which find an echo in us.
Accordingly I set myself to recall some of the latest anecdotes of this
kind which I had heard, and selected the one which follows, not because
it was more interesting as a daw story than the others, but mainly on
account of the shrewd and humorous and dramatic way in which it was
related to me by a little boy of the working class.

I met him on a bright Sunday morning at the end of June in the park-like
grounds of Walmer Castle. I had not long been seated on a garden bench
when a daw came flying to a tree close by and began craning her neck and
eyeing me with one eye, then the other, with an intense, almost painful
curiosity; and these nervous movements and gestures immediately revealed
to me that she had a nestful of young birds somewhere close by. After
changing her position several times to view me from other points and
find out what I was there for, she came to the conclusion that I was not
to be got rid of, and making a sudden dash to a tree standing just
before me, disappeared in a small hole or cleft in the trunk about
forty-five feet above the ground, and in a few seconds came out again
and flew swiftly away. In four or five minutes she returned, and after
eyeing me suspiciously a short time flew again to the tree and,
vanishing from sight in the hole, remained there. I was intently
watching that small black spot in the bark to see her emerge, when a
little boy came slowly sauntering past my bench, and glancing at him I
found that his shrewd brown eyes were watching my face and that he had a
knowing half-smile on his lips.

"Hullo, my boy!" I said. "I can see plainly enough what is in _your_
mind. You know I'm watching a hole in the tree where a jackdaw has just
gone in, and your intention is, when no one is about, to swarm up the
tree and get the young birds."

"Oh, no," he returned. "I'm not going to climb the tree and don't want
any young jackdaws. I always come to look because the birds breed in
that hole every year. Two years ago I had a bird from the nest, but I
don't want another."

Then at my invitation he sat down to tell me about it. One morning when
he came the young had just come off, and he found one squatting on the
ground under the trees, looking stupefied. No doubt when it flew out it
had struck against a trunk or branch and come down bruised and stunned.

He wrapped it up in a handkerchief and took it home to Deal and put it
in a box; then mother got some flannel and made a sort of bed for it,
and warmed some milk and they opened its beak and fed it with a
teaspoon. Next day it was all right and opened its beak to be fed
whenever they came near it, and in two or three days it began flying
about the room and perching on their shoulders. Then he brought it back
to Walmer and let it go and saw it fly off into the trees, but when he
got home mother scolded him for having let it go when its parents were
not about; she said it would die of starvation, and was going on at him
when in flew the jackdaw and came flop on her shoulder! After that
mother and father said they'd keep the daw a little longer, and then he
could let it go at a distance where there were other daws about. By and
by they said they'd let it stay where it was. Father liked a bloater for
his tea, and there was nothing the jackdaw was fonder of, so he was
always on the table at tea-time, eating out of father's plate. Then he
got to be troublesome. He was always watching for a door or window of
the parlour to be opened to let the air in, and that was the room mother
was so careful about, and every time he got in he'd fly straight to the
mantelpiece, which was covered with photographs and ornaments. They were
mostly those little things--pigs and dogs and parrots and all sorts of
animals made of glass and china, and the jackdaw would begin to pick
them up and throw them down on to the fender, and of course he broke a
lot of them. That made mother mad, and she scolded him and told him to
get rid of the bird. So he wrapped it up so as it shouldn't know where
it was going and went off two or three miles along the coast, and let it
go where there were other daws. It flew off and joined them, and he
came home. That afternoon Jackie came back, and they wondered how he had
found his way. Father said 'twas plain enough, that the bird had just
followed the coast till he got back to Deal, and there he was at home.
He said the only way to lose it was to take it somewhere away from the
sea; so he wrapped it up again and took it to his Aunt Ellen's at
Northbourne, about five miles from Deal. His aunt told him to carry
it to the park, where he'd find other daws and settle down. And that's
what he did, but Jackie came back to Deal again that same day; the
strangest thing was that mother and father made a great fuss over it and
fed it just as if they were glad to have it back. Next day it got into
the parlour and broke some more things, and mother scolded him for not
getting rid of the bird, and father said he knew how it could be done.
One of his pals was going to Dover, and he would ask him to take the
bird and let it go up by the castle where it would mix with the jackdaws
there, and that would be too far away for it to come back. But it did
come back, and after that he sent it to Ashford, and then to Canterbury,
and I don't know how many other places, but it always came back, and
they always seemed very glad to see it back. All the same, mother was
always scolding him about the bird and complaining to father about the
damage it did in the house. Then one day Aunt Ellen came to see mother,
and told her the best way to get rid of the daw would be to send it
abroad; she said her husband's cousin, Mr. Sturge, was going out to his
relations in Canada to work on their farm, and she would get
her husband to ask him to take the jackdaw. It would never come back
from such a distant place. A week afterwards Mr. Sturge sent word that
he would take the bird, as he thought his relations would like to have a
real old English jackdaw to remind them of home. So one day Aunt Ellen
came and took Jackie away in a small covered basket. The funniest thing
was the way father went on when he came home to tea. "A bloater with a
soft roe," he says; "just what Jackie likes! Where's the bird got to?
Come to your tea, Jackie!"

"He's gone," says mother, "gone to Canada, and a good riddance, too!"

"Oh, gone, has he?" says father. "Then we're a happy family and going to
lead a quiet life. No more screams and tears over broken chiny dolls!
And if ever Billy brings another jackdaw into the house we'll dust his
coat for him."

Here Billy interposed to say that if he ever made such a mistake again
they could thrash him as much as they liked.

"Oh, yes," said father, "we'll thrash you fast enough; mother'll do it
for the sake of her chiny toys and dolls."

That put mother up. "You're in a nasty temper," she says, "but you know
I miss the bird as much as you do!"

"Then," said father, "why the devil didn't you tell that sister of yours
to mind her own business when she came interfering about my jackdaw! And
that Sturge, he'll soon get tired of the bird and give it away for a
pint of beer before he gets to Liverpool."

"So much the better," says mother. "If Jackie can get free before they
take him aboard you may be sure he'll find his way back to Deal."

And that's what they went on hoping for days and days; but Jackie never
came back, so I s'pose Mr. Sturge took him out all right and that he's
in Canada now.

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