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

I take it that in the lower animals misery can result from two causes
only--restraint and disease; consequently, that animals in a state of
nature are not miserable. They are not hindered nor held back. Whether
the animal is migrating, or burying himself in his hibernating nest or
den; or flying from some rapacious enemy, which he may, or may not, be
able to escape; or feeding, or sleeping, or fighting, or courting, or
incubating, however many days or weeks this process may last--in all
things he is obeying the impulse that is strongest in him at the
time--he is doing what he wants to do--the one thing that makes him
happy.

As to disease, it is so rare in wild animals, or in a large majority of
cases so quickly proves fatal, that, compared with what we call disease
in our own species it is practically non-existent. The "struggle for
existence," in so far as animals in a state of nature are concerned, is
a metaphorical struggle; and the strife, short and sharp, which is so
common in nature, is not misery, although it results in pain, since it
is pain that kills or is soon outlived. Fear there is, just as in fine
weather there are clouds in the sky; and just as the shadow of the cloud
passes, so does fear pass from the wild creature when the object that
excited it has vanished from sight. And when death comes, it comes
unexpectedly, and is not the death that we know, even before we taste of
it, thinking of it with apprehension all our lives long, but a sudden
blow that takes away consciousness--the touch of something that numbs
the nerves--merely the prick of a needle. In whatever way the animal
perishes, whether by violence, or excessive cold, or decay, his death is
a comparatively easy one. So long as he is fighting with or struggling
to escape from an enemy, wounds are not felt as wounds, and scarcely
hurt him--as we know from our own experience; and when overcome, if
death be not practically instantaneous, as in the case of a small bird
seized by a cat, the disabling grip or blow is itself a kind of anodyne,
producing insensibility to pain. This, too, is a matter of human
experience. To say nothing of those who fall in battle, men have often
been struck down and fearfully lacerated by lions, tigers, jaguars, and
other savage beasts; and after having been rescued by their companions,
have recounted this strange thing. Even when there was no loss of
consciousness, when they saw and knew that the animal was rending their
flesh, they seemed not to feel it, and were, at the time, indifferent to
the fate that had overtaken them.

It is the same in death from cold. The strong, well-nourished man,
overtaken by a snowstorm on some pathless, uninhabited waste, may
experience some exceedingly bitter moments, or even hours, before he
gives up the struggle. The physical pain is simply nothing: the whole
bitterness is in the thought that he must die. The horror at the thought
of annihilation, the remembrance of all the happiness he is now about to
lose, of dear friends, of those whose lives will be dimmed with grief
for his loss, of all his cherished dreams of the future--the sting of
all this is so sharp that, compared with it, the creeping coldness in
his blood is nothing more than a slight discomfort, and is scarcely
felt. By and by he is overcome by drowsiness, and ceases to struggle;
the torturing visions fade from his mind, and his only thought is to lie
down and sleep. And when he sleeps he passes away; very easily, very
painlessly, for the pain was of the mind, and was over long before death
ensued.

The bird, however hard the frost may be, flies briskly to its customary
roosting-place, and with beak tucked into its wing, falls asleep. It has
no apprehensions; only the hot blood grows colder and colder, the pulse
feebler as it sleeps, and at midnight, or in the early morning, it drops
from its perch--dead.

Yesterday he lived and moved, responsible to a thousand external
influences, reflecting earth and sky in his small brilliant brain as in
a looking-glass; also he had a various language, the inherited knowledge
of his race, and the faculty of flight, by means of which he could
shoot, meteor-like, across the sky, and pass swiftly from place to
place, and with it such perfect control over all his organs, such
marvellous certitude in all his motions, as to be able to drop himself
plumb down from the tallest tree-top or out of the void air, on to a
slender spray, and scarcely cause its leaves to tremble. Now, on this
morning, he lies stiff and motionless; if you were to take him up and
drop him from your hand, he would fall to the ground like a stone or a
lump of clay--so easy and swift is the passage from life to death in
wild nature! But he was never miserable.

Those of my readers who have seen much of animals in a state of nature,
will agree that death from decay, or old age, is very rare among them.
In that state the fullest vigour, with brightness of all the faculties,
is so important that probably in ninety-nine cases in a hundred any
falling-off in strength, or decay of any sense, results in some fatal
accident. Death by misadventure, as we call it, is Nature's ordinance,
the end designed for a very large majority of her children.
Nevertheless, animals do sometimes live on without accident to the very
end of their term, to fade peacefully away at the last. I have myself
witnessed such cases in mammals and birds; and one such case, which
profoundly impressed me, and is vividly remembered, I will describe.

One morning in the late summer, while walking in the fields at my home
in South America, I noticed a few purple martins, large, beautiful
swallows common in that region, engaged, at a considerable height, in
the aerial exercises in which they pass so much of their time each day.
By and by, one of the birds separated itself from the others, and,
circling slowly downward, finally alighted on the ground not far from
me. I walked on: but the action of the bird had struck me as unusual and
strange, and before going far, I turned and walked back to the spot
where it continued sitting on the ground, quite motionless. It made no
movement when I approached to within four yards of it; and after I had
stood still at that distance for a minute or so, attentively regarding
it, I saw it put out one wing and turn over on its side. I at once took
it up in my hand, and found that it was already quite dead. It was a
large example of its species, and its size, together with a something of
dimness in the glossy purple colour of the upper plumage, seemed to show
that it was an old bird. But it was uninjured, and when I dissected it
no trace of disease was discernible. I concluded that it was an old bird
that had died solely from natural failure of the life-energy.

But how wonderful, how almost incredible, that the healthy vigour and
joy of life should have continued in this individual bird down to within
so short a period of the end; that it should have been not only strong
enough to find its food, but to rush and wheel about for long intervals
in purely sportive exercises, when the brief twilight of decline and
final extinction were so near! It becomes credible--we can even believe
that most of the individuals that cease to exist only when the vital
fire has burnt itself out, fall on death in this swift, easy
manner--when we recall the fact that even in the life-history of men
such a thing is not unknown. Probably there is not one among my readers
who will not be able to recall some such incident in his own circle--the
case of someone who lived, perhaps, long past the term usually allotted
to man, and who finally passed away without a struggle, without a pang,
so that those who were with him found it hard to believe that the spirit
had indeed gone. In such cases, the subject has invariably been healthy,
although it is hard to believe that, in the conditions we exist in, any
man can have the perfect health that all wild creatures enjoy.

X

After my long talk with the bird-catcher on June 24, and two more talks
equally long on the two following days, I found that something of the
charm the common had had for me was gone. It was not quite the same as
formerly; even the sunshine had a something of conscious sadness in it
which was like a shadow. Those merry little brown twitterers that
frequently shot across the sky, looking small as insects in the wide
blue expanse, and ever and anon dropped swiftly down like showers of
aerolites, to lose themselves in the grass and herbage, or perch singing
on the topmost dead twigs of a bush, now existed in constant imminent
danger--not of that quick merciful destruction which Nature has for her
weaklings, and for all that fail to reach her high standard; but of a
worse fate, the prison life which is not Nature's ordinance, but one of
the cunning larger Ape's abhorred inventions. Instead of taking my usual
long strolls about the common I loitered once more in the village lanes
and had my reward.

On the morning of June 27 I was out sauntering very indolently, thinking
of nothing at all; for it was a surpassingly brilliant day, and the
sunshine produced the effect of a warm, lucent, buoyant fluid, in which
I seemed to float rather than walk--a celestial water, which, like the
more ponderable and common sort, may sometimes be both felt and seen.
The sensation of feeling it is somewhat similar to that experienced by a
bather standing breast-deep in a dear, green, warm tropical sea, so
charged with salt that it lifts him up; but to distinguish it with the
eye, you must look away to a distance of some yards in an open unshaded
place, when it will become visible as fine glinting lines, quivering and
serpentining upwards, fountain-wise, from the surface. All at once I was
startled by hearing the loud importunate hunger-call of a young cuckoo
quite close to me. Moving softly up to the low hedge and peering over, I
saw the bird perched on a long cross-stick, which had been put up in a
cottage garden to hang clothes on; he was not more than three to four
yards from me, a fine young cuckoo in perfect plumage, his barred
under-surface facing me. Although seeing me as plainly as I saw him, he
exhibited no fear, and did not stir. Why should he, since I had not come
there to feed him, and, to his inexperienced avian mind, was only one of
the huge terrestrial creatures of various forms, with horns and manes on
their heads, that move heavily about in roads and pastures, and are
nothing to birds? But his foster parent, a hedge-sparrow, was
suspicious, and kept at some distance with food in her bill; then
excited by his imperative note, she flitted shyly to him, and deposited
a minute caterpillar in his great gaping yellow mouth. It was like
dropping a bun into the monstrous mouth of the hippopotamus of the
Zoological Gardens. But the hedge-sparrow was off and back again with a
second morsel in a very few moments; and again and again she darted away
in quest of food and returned successful, while the lazy, beautiful
giant sat sunning himself on his cross-stick and hungrily cried for
more.

This is one of those exceptional sights in nature which, however often
seen, never become altogether familiar, never fail to re-excite the old
feelings of wonder and admiration which were experienced on first
witnessing them. I can safely say, I think, that no man has observed so
many parasitical young birds (individuals) being fed by their
foster-parents as myself, yet the interest such a sight inspired in me
is just as fresh now as in boyhood. And probably in no parasitical
species does the strangeness of the spectacle strike the mind so sharply
as in this British bird, since the differences in size and colouring
between the foster-parent and its false offspring are so much greater in
its case. Here nature's unnaturalness in such an instinct--a close union
of the beautiful and the monstrous--is seen in its extreme form. The
hawk-like figure and markings of the cuckoo serve only to accentuate the
disparity, which is perhaps greatest when the parent is the
hedge-sparrow--so plainly-coloured a bird, so shy and secretive in its
habits. One never ceases to be amazed at the blindness of the parental
instinct in so intelligent a creature as a bird in a case of this kind.
Some idea of how blind it is may be formed by imagining a case in widely
separated types of our own species, which would be a parallel to that of
the cuckoo and hedge-sparrow. Let us imagine that some malicious Arabian
Night's genius had snatched up the infant male child of a Scandinavian
couple--the largest of their nation; and flying away to Africa with it,
to the heart of the great Aruwhimi forest had laid it on the breast of a
little coffee-coloured, woolly-headed, spindle-shanked, pot-bellied,
pigmy mother, taking away at the same time her own newly-born babe; that
she had tenderly nursed the substituted child, and reared and protected
it, ministering, according to her lights, to all its huge wants, until
he had come to the fullness of his stature, yet never suspected, that
the magnificent, ivory-limbed giant, with flowing yellow locks and
cerulean eyes, was not the child of her own womb.

XI

Bright and genial were all the last days of June, when I loitered in the
lanes before the unwished day of my return to London. During this quiet,
pleasant time the greenfinch was perhaps more to me than any other
songster. In the village itself, with the adjacent lanes and orchards,
this pretty, seldom-silent bird was the most common species. The village
was his metropolis, just as London is ours--and the sparrow's; its lanes
were his streets, its hedges and elm trees his cottage rows and tall
stately mansions and public buildings. . We frequently find the
predominance of one species somewhat wearisome. Speaking for myself,
there are songsters that are best appreciated when they are limited in
numbers and keep their distance, but of the familiar, unambitious
strains of swallow, robin, and wren I never tire, nor, during these
days, could I have too much of the greenfinch, low as he ranks among
British melodists. Tastes differ; that is a point on which we are all
agreed, and every one of us, even the humblest, is permitted to have his
own preferences. Still, after re-reading Wordsworth's lines to "The
Green Linnet," it is curious, to say the least of it, to turn to some
prosewriter--an authority on birds, perhaps--to find that this species,
whose music so charmed the poet, has for its song a monotonous croak,
which it repeats at short intervals for hours without the slightest
variation--a dismal sound which harmonizes with no other sound in
nature, and suggests nothing but heat and weariness, and is of all
natural sounds the most irritating. To this writer, then--and there are
others to keep him in countenance--the greenfinch as a vocalist ranks
lower than the lowest. One can only wonder (and smile) at such extreme
divergences. To my mind all natural sounds have, in some measure an
exhilarating effect, and I cannot get rid of the notion that so it
should be with every one of us; and when some particular sound, or
series of sounds, that has more than this common character, and is
distinctly pleasing, is spoken of as nothing but disagreeable,
irritating, and the rest of it, I am inclined to think that there is
something wrong with the person who thus describes it; that he is not
exactly as nature would have had him, but that either during his
independent life, or before it at some period of his prenatal existence,
something must have happened to distune him. All this, I freely confess,
may be nothing but fancy. In any case, the subject need not keep us
longer from the greenfinch--that is to say, _my_ greenfinch not another
man's.

From morning until evening all around and about the cottage, and out of
doors whithersoever I bent my steps, from the masses of deep green
foliage, sounded the perpetual airy prattle of these delightful birds.
One had the idea that the concealed vocalists were continually meeting
each other at little social gatherings, where they exchanged pretty
loving greetings, and indulged in a leafy gossip, interspersed with
occasional fragments of music, vocal and instrumental; now a long
trill--a trilling, a tinkling, a sweeping of one minute finger-tip over
metal strings as fine as gossamer threads--describe it how you will, you
cannot describe it; then the long, low, inflected scream, like a lark's
throat-note drawn out and inflected; little chirps and chirruping
exclamations and remarks, and a soft warbled note three or four or more
times repeated, and sometimes, the singer fluttering up out of the
foliage and hovering in the air, displaying his green and yellow plumage
while emitting these lovely notes; and again the trill, trill answering
trill in different keys; and again the music scream, as if some
unsubstantial being, fairy or woodnymph had screamed somewhere in her
green hiding-place. In London one frequently hears, especially in the
spring, half-a-dozen sparrows just met together in a garden tree, or
among the ivy or creeper on a wall, burst out suddenly into a confused
rapturous chorus of chirruping sounds, mingled with others of a finer
quality, liquid and ringing. At such times one is vexed to think that
there are writers on birds who invariably speak of the sparrow as a
tuneless creature, a harsh chirper, and nothing more. It strikes one
that such writers either wilfully abuse or are ignorant of the right
meaning of words, so wild and glad in character are these concerts of
town sparrows, and so refreshing to the tired and noise-vexed brain! But
now when I listened to the greenfinches in the village elms and
hedgerows, if by chance a few sparrows burst out in loud gratulatory
notes, the sounds they emitted appeared coarse, and I wished the
chirrupers away. But with the true and brilliant songsters it seemed to
me that the rippling greenfinch music was always in harmony, forming as
it were a kind of airy, subdued accompaniment to their loud and ringing
tones.

I had had my nightingale days, my cuckoo and blackbird and tree-pipit
days, with others too numerous to mention, and now I was having my
greenfinch days; and these were the last.

One morning in July I was in my sitting-room, when in the hedge on the
other side of the lane, just opposite my window, a small brown bird
warbled a few rich notes, the prelude to his song. I went and stood by
the open window, intently listening, when it sang again, but only a
phrase or two. But I listened still, confidently expecting more; for
although it was now long past its singing season, that splendid sunshine
would compel it to express its gladness. Then, just when a fresh burst
of music came, it was disturbed by another sound close by--a human
voice, also singing. On the other side of the hedge in which the bird
sat concealed was a cottage garden, and there on a swing fastened to a
pair of apple trees, a girl about eleven years old sat lazily swinging
herself. Once or twice after she began singing the nightingale broke out
again, and then at last he became silent altogether, his voice
overpowered by hers. Girl and bird were not five yards apart. It
greatly surprised me to hear her singing, for it was eleven o'clock,
when all the village children were away at the National School, a time
of day when, so far as human sounds were concerned, there reigned an
almost unbroken silence. But very soon I recalled the fact that this was
a very lazy child, and concluded that she had coaxed her mother into
sending an excuse for keeping her at home, and so had kept her liberty
on this beautiful morning. About two minutes' walk from the cottage, at
the side of the crooked road running through the village, there was a
group of ancient pollarded elm trees with huge, hollow trunks, and
behind them an open space, a pleasant green slope, where some of the
village children used to go every day to play on the grass. Here I used
to see this girl lying in the sun, her dark chestnut hair loosed and
scattered on the sward, her arms stretched out, her eyes nearly closed,
basking in the sun, as happy as some heat-loving wild animal. No, it was
not strange that she had not gone to school with the others when her
disposition was remembered, but most strange to hear a voice of such
quality in a spot where nature was rich and lovely, and only man was, if
not vile, at all events singularly wanting in the finer human qualities.

Looking out from the open window across the low hedge-top, I could see
her as she alternately rose and fell with slow, indolent motion, now
waist-high above the green dividing wall, then only her brown head
visible resting against the rope just where her hand had grasped it. And
as she swayed herself to and fro she sang that simple melody--probably
some child's hymn which she had been taught at the Sunday-school; but it
was a very long hymn, or else she repeated the same few stanzas many
times, and after each there was a brief pause, and then the voice that
seemed to fall and rise with the motion went on as before. I could have
stood there for an hour--nay, for hours--listening to it, so fresh and
so pure was the clear young voice, which had no earthly trouble in it,
and no passion, and was in this like the melody of the birds of which I
had lately heard so much; and with it all that tenderness and depth
which is not theirs, but is human only and of the soul.

It struck me as a singular coincidence--and to a mind of so primitive a
type as the writer's there is more in the fact that the word
implies--that, just as I had quitted London, to seek for just such a
spot as I so speedily found, with the passionately exclaimed words of a
young London girl ringing in my ears, so now I went back with this
village girl's melody sounding and following me no less clearly and
insistently. For it was not merely remembered, as we remember most
things, but vividly and often reproduced, together with the various
melodies of the birds I had listened to; a greater and principal voice
in that choir, yet in no wise lessening their first value, nor ever out
of harmony with them.

EXOTIC BIRDS FOR BRITAIN

There are countries with a less fertile soil and a worse climate than
ours, yet richer in bird life. Nevertheless, England is not poor; the
species are not few in number, and some are extremely abundant.
Unfortunately many of the finer kinds have been too much sought after;
persecuted first for their beauty, then for their rarity, until now we
are threatened with their total destruction. As these kinds become
unobtainable, those which stand next in the order of beauty and rarity
are persecuted in their turn; and in a country as densely populated as
ours, where birds cannot hide themselves from human eyes, such
persecution must eventually cause their extinction. Meanwhile the bird
population does not decrease. Every place in nature, like every property in
Chancery, has more than one claimant to it--sometimes the claimants are
many--and so long as the dispute lasts all live out of the estate. For
there are always two or more species subsisting on the same kind of
food, possessing similar habits, and frequenting the same localities. It
is consequently impossible for man to exterminate any one species
without indirectly benefiting some other species, which attracts him in
a less degree, or not at all. This is unfortunate, for as the bright
kinds, or those we esteem most, diminish in numbers the less interesting
kinds multiply, and we lose much of the pleasure which bird life is
fitted to give us. When we visit woods, or other places to which birds
chiefly resort, in districts uninhabited by man, or where he pays little
or no attention to the feathered creatures, the variety of the bird life
encountered affords a new and peculiar delight. There is a constant
succession of new forms and new voices; in a single day as many species
may be met with as one would find in England by searching diligently for
a whole year.

And yet this may happen in a district possessing no more species than
England boasts; and the actual number of individuals may be even less
than with us. In sparrows, for instance, of the one common species, we
are exceedingly rich; but in bird life generally, in variety of birds,
especially in those of graceful forms and beautiful plumage, we have
been growing poorer for the last fifty years, and have now come to so
low a state that it becomes us to inquire whether it is not in our power
to better ourselves. It is an old familiar truth--a truism--that it is
easier to destroy than to restore or build up; nevertheless, some
comfort is to be got from the reflection that in this matter we have up
till now been working against Nature. She loves not to bring forth food
where there are none to thrive on it; and when our unconsidered action
had made these gaps, when, despising her gifts or abusing them, we had
destroyed or driven out her finer kinds, she fell back on her lowlier
kinds--her reserve of coarser, more generalized species--and gave them
increase, and bestowed the vacant places which we had created on them.
What she has done she will undo, or assist us in undoing; for we should
be going back to her methods, and should have her with and not against
us. Much might yet be done to restore the balance among our native
species. Not by legislation, albeit all laws restraining the wholesale
destruction of bird life are welcome. On this subject the Honourable
Auberon Herbert has said, and his words are golden: "For myself,
legislation or no legislation, I would turn to the friends of animals in
this country, and say, 'If you wish that the friendship between man and
animals should become a better and truer thing than it is at present,
you must make it so by countless individual efforts, by making thousands
of centres of personal influence.'"

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