Part 7

The instinct which in character comes nearest to that of the parent simulating the action of a wounded and terrified bird struggling to escape in order to safeguard its young, is that one, very strong in all ground-breeding species, of sitting close on the nest in the presence of danger. Here, too, the instinct is of prime importance to the species, since the bird by quitting the nest reveals its existence to the prowling, nest-seeking enemy--dog, cat, fox, stoat, rat, in England; and in the country where I first observed animals, the skunk, armadillo, opossum, snake, wild cat, and animals of the weasel family. By leaving its nest a minute or half a minute too soon the bird sacrifices the eggs or young; by staying a moment too long it is in imminent danger of being destroyed itself. How often the bird stays too long on the nest is seen in the corn-crake, a species continually decreasing in this country owing to the destruction caused by the mowing-machine. The parent birds that escape may breed again in a safer place, but in many cases the bird clings too long to its nest and is decapitated or fatally injured by the cutters. Larks, too, often perish in the same way. To go back to the ailing or wounded bird simulating action: this is perhaps most perfect in the gallinaceous birds, all ground-breeders whose nests are most diligently hunted for by all egg-eating creatures, beast or bird, and whose tender chicks are a favourite food for all rapacious animals. In the fowl, pheasants, partridges, quail, and grouse, the instinct is singularly powerful, the bird making such violent efforts to escape, with such an outcry, such beating of its wings and struggles on the ground, that no rapacious beast, however often he may have been deceived before, can fail to be carried away with the prospect of an immediate capture. The instinct and action has appeared to me more highly developed in these birds because, in the first place, the demonstrations are more violent than in other families, consequently more effective; and secondly, because the danger once over, the bird's recovery to its normal quiet, watchful state is quicker. By way of experiment, I have at various times thrown myself on pheasants, partridges and grouse, when I have found them with a family of recently-hatched chicks; then on giving up the chase and turning away from the bird its instantaneous recovery has seemed like a miracle. It was like a miracle because the creature did actually suffer from all those violent, debilitating emotions expressed in its disordered cries and action, and it is the miracle of Nature's marvellous health. If we, for example, were thrown into these violent extremes of passion, we should not escape the after-effects. Our whole system would suffer, a doctor would perhaps have to be called in and would discourse wisely on metabolism and the development of toxins in the muscles, and give us a bottle of medicine.

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.

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!

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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.

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