Birds in Town and Village

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

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I will conclude this digression and dissertation on a bird's instinct by
relating the action of a hen-pheasant I once witnessed, partly because
it is the most striking one I have met with of that instantaneous
recovery of a bird from an extremity of distress and terror, and partly
for another reason which will appear at the end.

The hen-pheasant was a solitary bird, having strayed away from the
pheasant copses near the Itchen and found a nesting-place a mile away,
on the other side of the valley, among the tall grasses and sedges on its
border. I was the bird's only human neighbour, as I was staying in a
fishing-cottage near the spot where the bird had its nest. Eventually,
it brought off eight chicks and remained with them at the same spot on the
edge of the valley, living like a rail among the sedges and tall valley
herbage. I never went near the bird, but from the cottage caught sight of
it from time to time, and sometimes watched it with my binocular. There
was, I thought, a good chance of its being able to rear its young, unless
the damp proved injurious, as there was no dog or cat at the cottage, and
there were no carrion crows or sparrow-hawks at that spot. One morning
about five o'clock on going out I spied a fox-terrier, a poaching dog
from the neighbouring village, rushing about in an excited state a
hundred yards or so below the cottage. He had scented the birds, and
presently up rose the hen from the tall grass with a mighty noise, then
flopping down she began beating her wings and struggling over the grass,
uttering the most agonizing screams, the dog after her, frantically
grabbing at her tail. I feared that he would catch her, and seizing a
stick flew down to the rescue, yelling at the dog, but he was too excited
to obey or even hear me. At length, thanks to the devious course taken by
the bird, I got near enough to get in a good blow on the dog's back. He
winced and went on as furiously as ever, and then I got in another blow
so well delivered that the rascal yelled, and turning fled back to the
village. Hot and panting from my exertions, I stood still, but sooner
still the pheasant had pulled herself up and stood there, about three
yards from my feet, as if nothing had happened--as if not a ripple had
troubled the quiet surface of her life! The serenity of the bird, just
out of that storm of violence and danger, and her perfect indifference to
my presence, was astonishing to me. For a minute or two I stood still
watching her; then turned to walk back to the cottage, and no sooner did
I start than after me she came at a gentle trot, following me like a dog.
On my way back I came to the very spot where the fox-terrier had found
and attacked the bird, and at once on reaching it she came to a stop and
uttered a call, and instantly from eight different places among the tall
grasses the eight fluffy little chicks popped up and started running to
her. And there she stood, gathering them about her with gentle
chucklings, taking no notice of me, though I was standing still within
two yards of her!

Up to the moment when the dog got his smart blow and fled from her she
had been under the domination of a powerful instinct, and could have
acted in no other way; but what guided her so infallibly in her
subsequent actions? Certainly not instinct, and not reason, which
hesitates between different courses and is slow to arrive at a decision.
One can only say that it was, or was like, intuition, which is as much
as to say that we don't know.

IX

Among the rarer fringilline birds on the common were the cirl bunting,
bullfinch and goldfinch, the last two rarely seen. Linnets, however,
were abundant, now gathered in small flocks composed mainly of young
birds in plain plumage, with here and there an individual showing the
carmine-tinted breast of the adult male. Unhappily, a dreary fate was in
store for many of these blithe twitterers.

On June 24, when walking towards the pool, I spied two recumbent human
figures on a stretch of level turf near its banks, and near them a
something dark on the grass--a pair of clap-nets! "Still another serpent
in my birds' paradise!" said I to myself, and, walking on, I skirted the
nets and sat down on the grass beside the men. One was a rough
brown-faced country lad; the other, who held the strings and wore the
usual cap and comforter, was a man of about five-and-twenty, with pale
blue eyes and yellowish hair, close-cropped, and the unmistakable London
mark in his chalky complexion. He regarded me with cold, suspicious
looks, and, when I talked and questioned, answered briefly and somewhat
surlily. I treated him to tobacco, and he smoked; but it wasn't shag,
and didn't soften him. On mentioning casually that I had seen a stoat an
hour before, he exhibited a sudden interest. It was as if one had said
"rats!" to a terrier. I succeeded after a while in getting him to tell
me the name of the man to whom he sent his captives, and when I told him
that I knew the man well--a bird-seller in a low part of London--he
thawed visibly. Finally I asked him to look at a red-backed shrike,
perched on a bush about fifteen yards from his nets, through my
field-glasses, and from that moment he became as friendly as possible,
and conversed freely about his mystery. "How near it brings him!" he
exclaimed, with a grin of delight, after looking at the bird. The
shrike had greatly annoyed him; it had been hanging about for some time,
he told me, dashing at the linnets and driving them off when they flew
down to the nets. Two or three times he might have caught it, but would
not draw the nets and have the trouble of resetting them for so
worthless a bird. "But I'll take him the next time," he said
vindictively. "I didn't know he was such a handsome bird."
Unfortunately, the shrike soon flew away, and passing linnets dropped
down, drawn to the spot by the twitterings of their caged fellows, and
were caught; and so it went on for a couple of hours, we conversing
amicably during the waiting intervals. For now he regarded me as a
friend of the bird-catcher. Linnets only were caught, most of them young
birds, which pleased him; for the young linnet after a month or two of
cage life will sing; but the adult males would be silent until the next
spring, consequently they were not worth so much, although the carmine
stain in their breast made them for the time so much more beautiful.

I remarked incidentally that there were some who looked with unfriendly
eyes on his occupation, and that, sooner or later, these people would
try to get an Act of Parliament to make bird-catching in lanes, on
commons and waste lands illegal. "They can't do it!" he exclaimed
excitedly. "And if they can do it, and if they do do it, it will be the
ruination of England. For what would there be, then, to stop the birds
increasing? It stands to reason that the whole country would be eaten
up."

Doubtless the man really believed that but for the laborious days that
bird-catchers spend lying on the grass, the human race would be very
badly off.

Just after he had finished his protest, three or four linnets flew down
and were caught. Taking them from the nets, he showed them to me,
remarking, with a short laugh, that they were all young males. Then he
thrust them down the stocking-leg which served as an entrance to the
covered box he kept his birds in--the black hole in which their captive
life begins, where they were now all vainly fluttering to get out. Going
back to the previous subject, he said that he knew very well that many
persons disliked a bird-catcher, but there was one thing that nobody
could say against him--he wasn't cruel; he caught, but didn't kill. He
only killed when he caught a great number of female linnets, which were
not worth sending up; he pulled their heads off, and took them home to
make a linnet pie. Then, by way of contrast to his own merciful temper,
he told me of the young nest-destroyer I have writ-ten about. It made
him mad to see such things! Something ought to be done, he said, to stop
a boy like that; for by destroying so many nestlings he was taking the
bread out of the bird-catcher's mouth. Passing to other subjects, he
said that so far he had caught nothing but linnets on the common--you
couldn't expect to catch other kinds in June. Later on, in August and
September, there would be a variety. But he had small hopes of catching
goldfinches, they were too scarce now. Greenfinches, yellow-hammers,
common buntings, reed sparrows--all such birds were worth only tuppence
apiece. Oh, yes, he caught them just the same, and sent them up to
London, but that was all they were worth to him. For young male linnets
he got eightpence, sometimes tenpence; for hen birds fourpence, or less.
I dare say that eightpence was what he hoped to get, seeing that young
male linnets are not unfrequently sold by London dealers for sixpence
and even fourpence. Goldfinches ran to eighteenpence, sometimes as much
as two shillings. Starlings he had made a lot out of, but that was all
past and over. Why?

Because they were not wanted--because people were such fools that they
now preferred to shoot at pigeons. He hated pigeons! Gentlemen used to
shoot starlings at matches; and if you had the making of a bird to shoot
at, you couldn't get a better than the starling--such a neat bird! He
had caught hundreds--thousands--and had sold them well. But now nothing
but pigeons would they have. Pigeons! Always pigeons! He caught
starlings still, but what was the good of that? The dealers would only
take a few, and they were worth nothing--no more than greenfinches and
yellow-hammers.

My colloquy with my enemy on the common tempts me to a fresh digression
in this place--to have my say on a question about which much has already
been said during the last three or four decades, especially during the
'sixties, when the first practical efforts to save our wild-bird life
from destruction were made.

There is a feeling in the great mass of people that the pursuit of any
wild animal, whether fit for food or not, for pleasure or gain, is a
form of sport, and that sport ought not to be interfered with. So strong
and well-nigh universal is this feeling, which is like a superstition,
that the pursuit is not interfered with, however unsportsmanlike it may
be, and when illegal, and when practised by only a very few persons in
any district, where to others it may be secretly distasteful or even
prejudicial.

Even bird-catching on a common is regarded as a form of sport and the
bird-catcher as a sportsman--and a brother.

A striking instance of this tameness and stupidly acquiescent spirit in
people generally was witnessed during the intensely severe frosts of the
early part of the late winter (1882-3), when incalculable numbers of
sea-birds were driven by hunger and cold into bays and inland waters. At
this time thousands of gulls made their appearance in the Thames, but no
sooner did they arrive than those who possessed guns and licences to
shoot began to shoot them. The police interfered and some of these
sportsmen were brought before the magistrates and fined for the offence
of discharging guns to the public danger. For upwards of a fortnight
after the shooting had been put a stop to, the gulls continued to
frequent the river in large numbers, and were perhaps most numerous from
London Bridge to Battersea, and during this time they were watched every
day by thousands of Londoners with keen interest and pleasure. The river
here, flowing through the very centre and heart of the greatest city of
the world, forms at all hours and at all seasons of the year a noble and
magnificent sight; to my eyes it never looked more beautiful and
wonderful than during those intensely cold days of January, when there
was nothing that one could call a mist in a chilly, motionless
atmosphere, but only a faint haze, a pallor as of impalpable frost,
which made the heavens seem more white than blue, and gave a hoariness
and cloud-like remoteness to the arches spanning the water, and the vast
buildings on either side, ending with the sublime dome of the city
cathedral; and when out of the pale motionless haze, singly, in twos and
threes, in dozens and scores, floated the mysterious white bird-figures,
first seen like vague shadows in the sky, then quickly taking shape and
whiteness, and floating serenely past, to be succeeded by others and yet
others.

It was not merely the ornithologist in me that made the sight so
fascinating, since it was found that others--all others, it might almost
be said,--experienced the same kind of delight. Crowds of people came
down to the river to watch the birds; workmen when released from their
work at mid-day hurried down to the embankment so as to enjoy seeing the
gulls while eating their dinners, and, strangest thing of all, to feed
them with the fragments!

And yet these very men who found so great a pleasure in observing and
feeding their white visitors from the sea, and were exhilarated with the
novel experiences of seeing wild nature face to face at their own
doors--these thousands would have stood by silent and consenting if the
half-a-dozen scoundrels with guns and fish-hooks on lines had been
allowed to have their will and had slaughtered and driven the birds from
the river! And this, in fact, is precisely what happened at a distance
from London, where guns could be discharged without danger to the
public, in numberless bays and rivers in which the birds sought refuge.
They were simply slaughtered wholesale in the most wanton manner; in
Morecambe Bay a hundred and twelve gulls were killed at one discharge,
and no hand and no voice was raised to interfere with the hideous sport.
Not because it was not shocking to the spectators, but because it was
"Sport."

Doubtless it will be said that this wholesale wanton destruction of bird
life, however painful it may be to lovers of nature, however
reprehensible from a moral point of view, is sanctioned by law, and
cannot therefore be prevented. This is not quite so. We see that the
Wild Birds Protection Act is continually being broken with impunity, and
where public opinion is unfavourable to it the guardians of the law
themselves, the police and the magistrates, are found encouraging the
people to break the law. Again, we find that where commons are enclosed,
and the law says nothing, the people are accustomed to assemble together
unlawfully to tear the fences down, and are not punished. For, after
all, if laws do not express or square with public will or opinion, they
have little force; and if, in any locality, the people thought proper to
do so--if they were not restrained by that dull, tame spirit I have
spoken of--they would, lawfully or unlawfully, protect their sea-fowl
from the cockney sportsmen, and sweep the bird-catchers out of their
lanes and waste lands.

One day I paid a visit to Maidenhead, a pleasant town on the Thames,
where the Thames is most beautiful, set in the midst of a rich and
diversified country which should be a bird's paradise. In my walks in
the town, I saw a great many stuffed kingfishers, and, in the shops of
the local taxidermists, some rare and beautiful birds, with others that
are fast becoming rare. But outside of the town I saw no kingfishers and
no rare species at all, and comparatively few birds of any kind. It
might have been a town of Philistine cockneys who at no very distant
period had emigrated thither from the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields.
I came home with the local guide-book in my pocket. It is now before me,
and this is what its writer says of the Thicket, the extensive and
beautiful common two miles from the town, which belongs to Maidenhead,
or, in other words, to its inhabitants: "The Thicket was formerly much
infested by robbers and highwaymen. The only remains of them to be found
now are the snarers of the little feathered songsters, who imprison them
in tiny cages and carry them off in large numbers to brighten by their
sweet, sad sighs for liberty the dwellers in our smoky cities."

On this point I consulted a bird-catcher, who had spread his nets on the
common for many years, and he complained bitterly of the increasing
scarcity of its bird life. There was no better place than the Thicket
formerly, he said; but now he could hardly make his bread there. I
presume that a dozen men of his trade would be well able to drain the
country in the neighbourhood of the Thicket of the greater portion of
its bird life each year so as to keep the songsters scarce. Will any
person maintain for a moment that the eight or nine thousand inhabitants
of Maidenhead, and the hundreds or thousands inhabiting the surrounding
country could not protect their songbirds from these few men, most of
them out of London slums, if they wished or had the spirit to do so?

It is true that the local authorities in some country towns have made
by-laws to protect the birds in their open spaces. Thus, at Tunbridge
Wells, since 1890, bird-trapping and bird's-nesting have been prohibited
on the large and beautiful common there; but, so far as I know, such
measures have only been taken in boroughs after the birds have been
almost exterminated.

Doubtless the day will come when, law or no law, the bird-catcher will
find it necessary to go warily, lest the people of any place where he
may be tempted to spread his nets should have formed the custom of
treating those of his calling somewhat roughly. That it will come soon
is earnestly to be wished. Nevertheless, it would be irrational to
cherish feelings of animosity and hatred against the bird-catcher
himself, the "man and brother," ready and anxious as we may be to take
the bread out of his mouth. He certainly does not regard himself as an
injurious or disreputable person; on the contrary he looks on himself as
a useful member of the community, and in some cases even more. If anyone
is to be hated or blamed, it is the person who sends the bird-catcher
into the fields; not the dealer, but he who buys trapped birds and keeps
them in cages to be amused by their twitterings. This is not a question
of morality, nor of sentimentality, as some may imagine; but rather of
taste, of the sense of fitness, of that something vaguely described as
the feeling for nature, which is not universal. Thus, one man will dine
with zest on a pheasant, partridge, or quail, but would be choked by a
lark; while another man will eat pheasant and lark with equal pleasure.
Both may be good, honest, moral men; only one has that something which
the other lacks. In one the soul responds to the skylark's music
"singing at heaven's gate," in the other not; to one the roasted lark is
merely a savoury morsel; the other, be he never so hungry, cannot
dissociate the bird on the dish from that heavenly melody which
registered a sensation in his brain, to be thereafter reproduced at
will, together with the revived emotion. It is a curious question, and
is no nearer to a settlement when one of these two I have described
turns round and calls his neighbour a gross feeder, a worshipper of his
belly, a soulless and brutish man; and when the other answers
"pooh-pooh" and goes on complacently devouring larks with great gusto,
until he is himself devoured of death.

To those with whom I am in sympathy in this matter, who love to listen
to and are yearly invigorated by the skylark's music, and whose souls
are yearly sickened at the slaughter of their loved songsters, I would
humbly suggest that there is a simpler, more practical means of ending
this dispute, which has surely lasted long enough. It goes without
saying that this bird's music is eminently pleasing to most persons,
that even as the sunshine is sweet and pleasant to behold, its silvery
aerial sounds rained down so abundantly from heaven are delightful and
exhilarating to all of us, or at all events, to so large a majority that
the minority are not entitled to consideration. One person in five
thousand, or perhaps in ten thousand, might be found to say that the
lark singing in blue heaven affords him no pleasure. This being so, and
ours being a democratic country in which the will or desire of the many
is or may be made the law of the land, it is surely only right and
reasonable that lovers of lark's flesh should be prevented from
gratifying their taste at the cost of the destruction of so loved a
bird, that they should be made to content themselves with woodcock, and
snipe on toast, and golden plover, and grouse and blackcock, and any
other bird of delicate flavor which does not, living, appeal so strongly
to the aesthetic feelings in us and is not so universal a favourite.

This, too, will doubtless come in time. Speaking for myself, and going
back to the former subject, little as I like to see men feeding on
larks, rather would I see larks killed and eaten than thrust into cages.
For in captivity they do not "sweeten" my life, as the Maidenhead
guidebook writer would say, with their shrill, piercing cries for
liberty, but they "sing me mad." Just as in some minds this bird's
music--a sound which above all others typifies the exuberant life and
joy of nature to the soul--cannot be separated from the cooked and
dished-up melodist, so that they turn with horror from such meat, so I
cannot separate this bird, nor any bird, from the bird's wild life of
liberty, and the marvellous faculty of flight which is the bird's
attribute. To see so wild and aerial a creature in a cage jars my whole
system, and is a sight hateful and unnatural, an outrage on our
universal mother.

This feeling about birds in captivity, which I have attempted to
describe, and which, I repeat, is not sentimentality, as that word is
ordinarily understood, has been so vividly rendered in an ode to "The
Skylarks" by Sir Rennell Rodd, that the reader will probably feel
grateful to me for quoting a portion of it in this place, especially as
the volume in which it appears--_Feda, with Other Poems_--is, I imagine,
not very widely known:

"Oh, the sky, the sky, the open sky,
For the home of a song-bird's heart!
And why, and why, and for ever why,
Do they stifle here in the mart:
Cages of agony, rows on rows,
Torture that only a wild thing knows:
Is it nothing to you to see
That head thrust out through the hopeless wire,
And the tiny life, and the mad desire
To be free, to be free, to be free?
Oh, the sky, the sky, the blue, wide sky,
For the beat of a song-bird's wings!

* * *

Straight and close are the cramping bars
From the dawn of mist to the chill of stars,
And yet it must sing or die!
Will its marred harsh voice in the city street
Make any heart of you glad?
It will only beat with its wings and beat,
It will only sing you mad.

* * *

If it does not go to your heart to see
The helpless pity of those bruised wings,
The tireless effort to which it clings
To the strain and the will to be free,
I know not how I shall set in words
The meaning of God in this,
For the loveliest thing in this world of His
Are the ways and the songs of birds.
But the sky, the sky, the wide, free sky,
For the home of the song-bird's heart!"

How falsely does that man see Nature, how grossly ignorant must he be of
its most elemental truths, who looks upon it as a chamber of torture, a
physiological laboratory on a very vast scale, a scene of endless strife
and trepidation, of hunger and cold, and every form of pain and
misery--and who, holding this doctrine of

"Oh, the sky, the sky, the open sky is the home of a song-bird's heart,"

Nature's cruelty, keeps a few captive birds in cages, and is accustomed
to say of them, "These, at any rate, are safe, rescued from subjection
to ruthless conditions, sheltered from the inclement weather and from
enemies, and all their small wants abundantly satisfied;" who once or
twice every day looks at his little captives, presents them with a lump
of sugar, whistles and chuckles to provoke them to sing, then goes about
his business, flattering himself that he is a lover of birds, a being of
a sweet and kindly nature. It is all a delusion--a distortion and
inversion of the truth--so absurd that it would be laughable were it
not so sad, and the cause of so much unconscious cruelty. The truth is,
that if birds be capable of misery, it is only in the unnatural
conditions of a caged life that they experience it; and that if they are
capable of happiness in a cage, such happiness or contentment is but a
poor, pale emotion compared with the wild exuberant gladness they have
in freedom, where all their instincts have full play, and where the
perils that surround them do but brighten their many splendid faculties.
The little bird twitters and sings in its cage, and among ourselves the
blind man and the cripple whistle and sing, too, feeling at times a
lower kind of contentment and cheerfulness. The chaffinch in East
London, with its eyeballs seared by red-hot needles, sings, too, in its
prison, when it has grown accustomed to its darkened existence, and is
in health, and the agreeable sensations that accompany health prompt it
at intervals to melody, but no person, not even the dullest ruffian
among the baser sort of bird-fanciers would maintain for a moment that
the happiness of the little sightless captive, whether vocal or silent,
is at all comparable in degree to that of the chaffinch singing in April
"on the orchard bough," vividly seeing the wide sunlit world, blue above
and green below, possessing the will and the power, when its lyric ends,
to transport itself swiftly through the crystal fields of air to other
trees and other woods.

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