Birds in Town and Village

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

During the talk that followed I asked him if he knew the wryneck, and if
it ever nested in his orchard. He did not know the bird; had never heard
its name nor the other names of snake-bird and cuckoo's mate; and when I
had minutely described its appearance, he said that no such bird was
known in the village.

I assured him that he was mistaken, that I had heard the cry of the bird
many times, and had even heard it once at a distance since our
conversation began. Hearing that distant cry had caused me to ask the
question.

All at once he remembered that he knew, or had known formerly, the
wryneck very well, but he had never learnt its name. About twenty or
five-and-twenty years ago, he said, he saw the bird I had just described
in his orchard, and as it appeared day after day and had a strange
appearance as it moved up the tree trunks, he began to be interested in
it. One day he saw it fly into a hole close to the ground in an old
apple tree. "Now I've got you!" he exclaimed, and running to the spot
thrust his hand in as far as he could, but was unable to reach the bird.
Then he conceived the idea of starving it out, and stopped up the hole
with clay. The following day at the same hour he again put in his hand,
and this time succeeded in taking the bird. So strange was it to him
that after showing it to his own family he took it round to exhibit it
to his neighbours, and although some of them were old men, not one among
them had ever seen its like before. They concluded that it was a kind of
nuthatch, but unlike the common nuthatch which they knew. After they had
all seen and handled it and had finished the discussions about it, he
released it and saw it fly away; but, to his astonishment, it was back
in his orchard a few hours later. In a few weeks it brought out its five
or six young from the hole he had caught it in, and for several years it
returned each season to breed in the same hole until the tree was blown
down, after which the bird was seen no more.

What an experience the poor bird had suffered! First plastered up and
left to starve or suffocate in its hollow tree; then captured and passed
round from rough, horny hand to hand, while the villagers were
discussing it in their slow, ponderous fashion--how wildly its little
wild heart must have palpitated!--and, finally, after being released, to
go back at once to its eggs in that dangerous tree. I do not know which
surprised me most, the bird's action in returning to its nest after such
inhospitable treatment, or the ignorance of the villagers concerning it.
The incident seemed to show that the wryneck had been scarce at this
place for a very long period.

The villager, as a rule, is not a good observer, which is not strange,
since no person is, or ever can be, a good observer of the things in
which he is not specially interested; consequently the countryman only
knows the most common and the most conspicuous species. He plods through
life with downcast eyes and a vision somewhat dimmed by indifference;
forgetting, as he progresses, the small scraps of knowledge he acquired
by looking sharply during the period of boyhood, when every living
creature excited his attention. In Italy, notwithstanding the paucity of
bird life, I believe that the peasants know their birds better. The
reason of this is not far to seek; every bird, not excepting even the
"temple-haunting martlet" and nightingale and minute golden-crested
wren, is regarded only as a possible morsel to give a savour to a dish
of polenta, if the shy, little flitting thing can only be enticed within
touching distance of the limed twigs. Thus they take a very strong
interest in, and, in a sense, "love" birds. It is their passion for this
kind of flavouring which has drained rural Italy of its songsters, and
will in time have the same effect on Argentina, the country in which the
withering stream of Italian emigration empties itself.

VI

From the date of my arrival at the village in May, until I left it early
in July, the great annual business of pairing, nest-building, and
rearing the young was going on uninterruptedly. The young of some of the
earliest breeders were already strong on the wing when I took my first
walks along the hedgerows, still in their early, vivid green, frequently
observing my bird through a white and rose-tinted cloud of
apple-blossoms; and when I left some species that breed more than once
in the season were rearing second broods or engaged in making new nests.
On my very first day I discovered a nest full of fully fledged blue tits
in a hole in an apple tree; this struck me as a dangerous place for the
young birds; as the tree leaned over towards the lane, and the hole
could almost be reached by a person standing on the ground. On the next
day I went to look at them, and approaching noiselessly along the lane,
spied two small boys with bright clean faces--it was on a
Sunday--standing within three or four yards of the tree, watching the
tits with intense interest. The parent birds were darting up and down,
careless of their presence, finding food so quickly in the gooseberry
bushes growing near the roots of the tree that they visited the hole
every few moments; while the young birds, ever screaming for more, were
gathered in a dense little cluster at the entrance, their yellow breasts
showing very brightly against the rain-wet wood and the dark interior of
the hole. The instant the two little watchers caught sight of me the
excited look vanished from their faces, and they began to move off,
gazing straight ahead in a somewhat vacant manner. This instantaneous
and instinctive display of hypocrisy was highly entertaining, and would
have made me laugh if it had not been for the serious purpose I had in
my mind. "Now, look here," I said, "I know what you are after, so it's
no use pretending that you are walking about and seeing nothing in
particular. You've been watching the young tits. Well, I've been
watching them, too, and waiting to see them fly. I dare say they will
be out by to-morrow or the next day, and I hope you little fellows won't
try to drag them out before then."

They at once protested that they had no such intention. They said that
they never robbed birds' nests; that there were several nests at home in
the garden and orchard, one of a nightingale with three eggs in it, but
that they never took an egg. But some of the boys they knew, they said,
took all the eggs they found; and there was one boy who got into every
orchard and garden in the place, who was so sharp that few nests escaped
him, and every nest he found he destroyed, breaking the eggs if there
were any, and if there were young birds killing them.

Not, perhaps, without first mutilating them, I thought; for I know
something of this kind of young "human devil," to use the phrase which
Canon Wilberforce has made so famous in another connexion. Later on I
heard much more about the exploits of this champion bird-destroyer of
the village from (strange to say) a bird-catcher by trade, a man of a
rather low type of countenance, and who lived, when at home, in a London
slum. On the common where he spread his nets he had found, he told me,
about thirty nests containing eggs or fledglings; but this boy had gone
over the ground after him, and not many of the nests had escaped his
sharp eyes.

I was satisfied that the young tits were quite safe, so far as these
youngsters were concerned, and only regretted that they were such small
Boys, and that the great nest-destroyer, whose evil deeds they spoke of
with an angry colour in their cheeks, was a very strong boy, otherwise I
should have advised them to "go" for him.

Oddly enough I heard of another boy who exercised the same kind of
cruelty and destructiveness over another common a few miles distant.
Walking across it I spied two boys among the furze bushes, and at the
same moment they saw me, whereupon one ran away and the other remained
standing. A nice little fellow of about eight, he looked as if he had
been crying. I asked him what it was all about, and he then told me that
the bigger boy who had just run away was always on the common searching
for nests, just to destroy them and kill the young birds; that he, my
informant, had come there where he came every day just to have a peep at
a linnet's nest with four eggs in it on which the bird was sitting; that
the other boy, concealed among the bushes had watched him go to the nest
and had then rushed up and pulled the nest out of the bush.

"Why didn't you knock him down?" I asked.

"That's what I tried to do before he pulled the nest out," he said; and
then he added sorrowfully: "He knocked me down."

I am reminded here of a tale of ancient Greece about a boy of this
description--the boy to be found in pretty well every parish in the
land. This was a shepherd boy who followed or led his sheep to a
distance from the village and amused his idle hours by snaring small
birds to put their eyes out with a sharp thorn, then to toss them up
just to see how, and how far, they would fly in the dark. He was seen
doing it and the matter reported to the heads or fathers of the village,
and he was brought before them and, after due consideration of the case,
condemned to death. Such a decision must seem shocking to us and worthy
of a semi-barbarous people. But if cruelty is the worst of all
offences--and this was cruelty in its most horrid form--the offence
which puts men down on a level with the worst of the mythical demons, it
was surely a righteous deed to blot such an existence out lest other
young minds should be contaminated, or even that it should be known that
such a crime was possible.

* * *

All those birds that had finished rearing their young by the sixteenth
of June were fortunate, for on the morning of that day a great and
continuous shouting, with gun-firing, banging on old brass and iron
utensils, with various other loud, unusual noises, were heard at one
extremity of the village, and continued with occasional quiet intervals
until evening. This tempest of rude sounds spread from day to day, until
the entire area of the village and the surrounding orchards was
involved, and the poor birds that were tied to the spots where their
treasures were, must have existed in a state of constant trepidation.
For now the cherries were fast ripening, and the fruit-eating birds,
especially the thrushes and black-birds, were inflamed at the gleam of
crimson colour among the leaves. In the very large orchards men and boys
were stationed all day long yelling and firing off guns to frighten the
marauders. In the smaller orchards the trees were decorated with
whirligigs of coloured paper; ancient hats, among which were some of the
quaintly-shaped chimney-pots of a past generation; old coats and
waistcoats and trousers, and rags of all colours to flutter in the wind;
and these objects were usually considered a sufficient protection. Some
of the birds, wiser than their fellows, were not to be kept back by such
simple means; but so long as they came not in battalions, but singly,
they could have their fill, and no notice was taken of them.

I was surprised to hear that on the large plantations the men employed
were not allowed to use shot, the aim of the fruit grower being only to
scare the birds away. I had a talk with my old friend of the wryneck on
the subject, and told him that I had seen one of the bird-scarers going
home to his cottage very early in the morning, carrying a bunch of about
a dozen blackbirds and thrushes he had just shot.

Yes, he replied, some of the men would buy shot and use it early in the
morning before their master was about; but if the man I had seen had
been detected in the act, he would have been discharged on the spot. It
was not only because the trees would be injured by shot, but this
fruitgrower was friendly to birds.

Most fruit-growers, I said, were dead against the birds, and anxious
only to kill as many of them as possible.

It might be so in some places, he answered, but not in the village. He
himself and most of the villagers depended, in a great measure, on the
fruit they produced for a living, and their belief was that, taking one
bird with another all the year round, the birds did them more good than
harm.

I then imparted to him the views on this bird subject of a well-known
fruit-grower in the north of England, Mr. Joseph Witherspoon, of
Chester-le-Street. He began by persecuting the birds, as he had been
taught to do by his father, a market-gardener; but after years of
careful observation he completely changed his views, and is now so
convinced of the advantage that birds are to the fruit-grower, that he
does all in his power to attract them, and to tempt them to breed in his
grounds. His main idea is that birds that are fed on the premises, that
live and feed among the trees, search for and attack the gardeners'
enemies at every stage of their existence. At the same time he believes
that it is very bad to grow fruit near woods, as in such a case the
birds that live in the woods and are of no advantage to the garden,
swarm into it as the fruit ripens, and that it is only by liberal use of
nets that any reasonable portion of the fruit can be saved.

He answered that with regard to the last point he did not quite agree
with Mr. Witherspoon. All the gardens and orchards in the village were
raided by the birds from the wood, yet he reckoned they got as much
fruit from their trees as others who had no woods near them. Then there
was the big cherry plantation, one of the biggest in England, so that
people came from all parts in the blossoming time just to look at it,
and a wonderful sight it was. For a quarter of a mile this particular
orchard ran parallel with the wood; with nothing but the green road
between, and when the first fruit was ripening you could see all the big
trees on the edge of the wood swarming with birds--jays, thrushes,
blackbirds, doves, and all sorts of tits and little birds, just waiting
for a chance to pounce down and devour the cherries. The noise kept them
off, but many would dodge in, and even if a gun was fired close to them
the blackbirds would snatch a cherry and carry it off to the wood. That
didn't matter--a few cherries here and there didn't count. The starlings
were the worst robbers: if you didn't scare them they would strip a tree
and even an orchard in a few hours. But they were the easiest birds to
deal with: they went in flocks, and a shout or rattle or report of a gun
sent the lot of them away together. His way of looking at it was this.
In the fruit season, which lasts only a few weeks, you are bound to
suffer from the attacks of birds, whether they are your own birds only
or your own combined with others from outside, unless you keep them off;
that those who do not keep them off are foolish or indolent, and deserve
to suffer. The fruit season was, he said, always an anxious time.

In conclusion, I remarked that the means used for protecting the fruit,
whether they served their purpose well or not, struck me as being very
unworthy of the times we lived in, and seemed to show that the British
fruit-growers, who were ahead of the world in all other matters
connected with their vocation, had quite neglected this one point. A
thousand years ago cultivators of the soil were scaring the birds from
their crops just as we are doing, with methods no better and no worse,
putting up scarecrows and old ragged garments and fluttering rags,
hanging a dead crow to a stick to warn the others off, shouting and
yelling and throwing stones. There appeared to be an opening here for
experiment and invention. Mere noise was not terrifying to birds, and
they soon discovered that an old hat on a stick had no injurious brains
in or under it. But certain sounds and colours and odours had a strong
effect on some animals. Sounds made to stimulate the screams of some
hawks would perhaps prove very terrifying to thrushes and other small
birds, and the effect of scarlet in large masses or long strips might be
tried. It would also be worth while to try the effect of artificial
sparrow-hawks and other birds of prey, perched conspicuously, moving and
perking their tails at intervals by clockwork. In fact, a hundred things
might be tried until something valuable was found, and when it lost its
value, for the birds would in time discover the deception, some new plan
adopted.

To this dissertation on what might be done, he answered that if any one
could find out or invent any new effective means to keep the birds from
the fruit, the fruit-growers would be very thankful for it; but that no
such invention could be looked for from those who are engaged on the
soil; that it must come from those who do not dig and sweat, but sit
still and work with their brains at new ideas.

This ended our conversation, and I left him more than satisfied at the
information he had given me, and with a higher opinion than ever of his
geniality and good practical sense.

It was a relief when the noisy, bird-scaring business was done with, and
the last market baskets of ripe cherries were carried away to the
station. Very splendid they looked in such large masses of crimson, as
the baskets were brought out and set down in the grassy road; but I
could not help thinking a little sadly that the thrushes and blackbirds
which had been surreptitiously shot, when fallen and fluttering in the
wet grass in the early morning, had shed life-drops of that same
beautiful colour.

VII

After the middle of June the common began to attract me more and more.
It was so extensive that, standing on its border, just beyond the last
straggling cottages and orchards, the further side was seen only as a
line of blue trees, indistinct in the distance. As I grew to know it
better, adding each day to my list from its varied bird life, the woods
and waterside were visited less and less frequently, and after the
bird-scaring noises began in the village, its wildness and quiet became
increasingly grateful. The silence of nature was broken only by bird
sounds, and the most frequent sound was that of the yellow bunting, as,
perched motionless on the summit of a gorse bush, his yellow head
conspicuous at a considerable distance, he emitted his thin monotonous
chant at regular intervals, like a painted toy-bird that sings by
machinery. There, too, sedentary as an owl in the daytime, the corn
bunting was common, discharging his brief song at intervals--a sound as
of shattering glass. The whinchat was rarely seen, but I constantly met
the small, prettily coloured stonechat flitting from bush to bush,
following me, and never ceasing his low, querulous tacking chirp,
anxious for the safety of his nest. Nightingales, blackcaps and
white-throats also nested there, and were louder and more emphatic in
their protests when approached. There were several grasshopper-warblers
on the common, all, very curiously as it seemed to me, clustered at one
spot, so that one could ramble over miles of ground without hearing
their singular note; but on approaching the place they inhabited one
gradually became conscious of a mysterious trilling buzz or whirr, low
at first and growing louder and more stridulous, until the hidden
singers were left behind, when by degrees it sank lower and lower again,
and ceased to be audible at a distance of about one hundred yards from
the points where it had sounded loudest. The birds hid in clumps of
furze and bramble so near together that the area covered by the buzzing
sound measured about two hundred yards across. This most singular sound
(for a warbler to make) is certainly not ventriloquial, although if one
comes to it with the sense of hearing disorganized by town noises or
unpractised, one is at a loss to determine the exact spot it comes from,
or even to know from which side it comes. While emitting its prolonged
sound the bird is so absorbed in its own performance that it is not
easily alarmed, and will sometimes continue singing with a human
listener standing within four or five yards of it. When one is near the
bird, and listens, standing motionless, the effect on the nerves of
hearing is very remarkable, considering the smallness of the sound,
which, without being unpleasant, is somewhat similar to that produced by
the vibration of the brake of a train; it is not powerful enough to jar
the nerves, but appears to pervade the entire system. Lying still, with
eyes closed, and three or four of these birds singing near, so that
their strains overlap and leave no silent intervals, the listener can
imagine that the sound originates within himself; that the numberless
fine cords of his nervous network tremble responsively to it.

There are a number of natural sounds that resemble more or less closely
the most unbirdlike note of this warbler--cicada, rattlesnake, and some
batrachians. Some grasshoppers perhaps come nearest to it; but the most
sustained current of sound emitted by the insect is short compared to
the warbler's strain, also the vibrations are very much more rapid, and
not heard as vibrations, and the same effect is not produced.

The grasshopper warblers gave me so much pleasure that I was often at
the spot where they had their little colony of about half-a-dozen pairs,
and where I discovered they bred every year. At first I used to go to
any bush where I had caught sight of a bird and sit down within a few
yards of it and wait until the little hideling's shyness wore off, and
he would come out and start reeling. Afterwards I always went straight
to the same bush, because I thought the bird that used it as his
singing-place appeared less shy than the others. One day I spent a long
time listening to this favourite; delightedly watching him, perched on a
low twig on a level with my sight, and not more than five yards from me;
his body perfectly motionless, but the head and wide-open beak jerked
from side to side in a measured, mechanical way. I had a side view of
the bird, but every three seconds the head would be jerked towards me,
showing the bright yellow colour of the open mouth. The reeling would
last about three minutes, then the bird would unbend or unstiffen and
take a few hops about the bush, then stiffen and begin again. While thus
gazing and listening I, by chance, met with an experience of that rare
kind which invariably strikes the observer of birds as strange and
almost incredible--an example of the most perfect mimicry in a species
which has its own distinctive song and is not a mimic except once in a
while, and as it were by chance. The marsh warbler is our perfect
mocking-bird, our one professional mimic; while the starling in
comparison is but an amateur. We all know the starling's ever varying
performance in which he attempts a hundred things and occasionally
succeeds; but even the starling sometimes affects us with a mild
astonishment, and I will here give one instance.

I was staying at a village in the Wiltshire downs, and at intervals,
while sitting at work in my room on the ground floor, I heard the
cackling of a fowl at the cottage opposite. I heard, but paid no
attention to that familiar sound; but after three days it all at once
struck me that no fowl could lay an egg about every ten or twelve
minutes, and go on at this rate day after day, and, getting up, I went
out to look for the cackler. A few hens were moving quietly about the
open ground surrounding the cottage where the sound came from, but I
heard nothing. By and by, when I was back in my room, the cackling
sounded again, but when I got out the sound had ceased and the fowls, as
before, appeared quite unexcited. The only way to solve the mystery was
to stand there, out of doors, for ten minutes, and before that time was
over a starling with a white grub in his beak, flew down and perched on
the low garden wall of the cottage, then, with some difficulty, squeezed
himself through a small opening into a cavity under a strip of zinc
which covered the bricks of the wall. It was a queer place for a
starling's nest, on a wall three feet high and within two yards of the
cottage door which stood open all day. Having delivered the grub, the
starling came out again and, hopping on to the zinc, opened his beak and
cackled like a hen, then flew away for more grubs.

I observed the starling a good deal after this, and found that
invariably on leaving the nest, he uttered his imitation of a fowl
cackling, and no other note or sound of any kind. It was as if he was
not merely imitating a sound, but had seen a fowl leaving the nest and
then cackling, and mimicked the whole proceeding, and had kept up the
habit after the young were hatched.

To return to my experience on the common. About fifty yards from the
spot where I was there was a dense thicket of furze and thorn, with a
huge mound in the middle composed of a tangle of whitethorn and bramble
bushes mixed with ivy and clematis. From this spot, at intervals of half
a minute or so, there issued the call of a duck--the prolonged, hoarse
call of a drake, two or three times repeated, evidently emitted in
distress. I conjectured that it came from one of a small flock of ducks
belonging to a cottage near the edge of the common on that side. The
flock, as I had seen, was accustomed to go some distance from home, and
I supposed that one of them, a drake, had got into that brambly thicket
and could not make his way out. For half an hour I heard the calls
without paying much attention, absorbed in watching the quaint little
songster close to me and his curious gestures when emitting his
sustained reeling sounds. In the end the persistent distressed calling
of the drake lost in a brambly labyrinth got a little on my nerves, and
I felt it as a relief when it finally ceased. Then, after a short
silence, another sound came from the same spot--a blackbird sound, known
to everyone, but curiously interesting when uttered in the way I now
heard it. It was the familiar loud chuckle, not emitted in alarm and
soon ended, but the chuckle uttered occasionally by the bird when he is
not disturbed, or when, after uttering it once for some real cause, he
continues repeating it for no reason at all, producing the idea that he
has just made the discovery that it is quite a musical sound and that he
is repeating it, as if singing, just for pleasure. At such times the
long series of notes do not come forth with a rush; he begins
deliberately with a series of musical chirps uttered in a measured
manner, like those of a wood wren, the prelude to its song, the notes
coming faster and faster and swelling and running into the loud
chuckling performance. This performance, like the lost drake's call, was
repeated in the same deliberate or leisurely manner at intervals again
and again, until my curiosity was aroused and I went to the spot to get
a look at the bird who had turned his alarm sound into a song and
appeared to be very much taken with it. But there was no blackbird at
the spot, and no lost drake, and no bird, except a throstle sitting
motionless on the bush mound. This was the bird I had been listening to,
uttering not his own thrush melody, which he perhaps did not know at
all, but the sounds he had borrowed from two species so wide apart in
their character and language.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14