Birds of the Wave and Woodland

CHAPTER I. "_and Now the Goddess Bids the Birds Appear,_

"And now the goddess bids the birds appear, Raise all their music and salute the year." WYATT.

"The birds sing many a lovely lay Of God's high praise and of their sweet love-tune." SPENSER.

"The Throstle with his note so true." SHAKESPEARE.

"The Mavis mild and mellow." BURNS.

"A few stars Were ling'ring in the heavens, while the Thrush Began calm-throated." KEATS.

The thrush is pre-eminently our bird of spring. While the snow-drops, the "Fair Maids of February," are still in early bloom, and before the crocus has lit its points of flame or the primrose its pale fires, and while "the daffodils that come before the swallow dares" are scarcely in their bud, the thrush has burst forth in full song, its burden the "news of buds and blossoming." There is little that is green yet in copse and hedge: few flowers worth a child's picking are to be seen. But he is too full of his glad evangel to be able to keep from singing, and from the tufted larch

"Rarely pipes the mounted thrush."

Some naturalists want us to call it a migrant, and in proof of their argument, tell us of the multitudes that pass over Heligoland at a certain time of the year. But against this, let every one who has a garden where thrushes build, bear witness how, in the hardest winters, the dead birds are picked up among the laurels, starved or frozen to death. This alone demolishes the migrant theory. That numbers do leave England in winter may be true enough; it is the overflow of population.

Indeed, if the superfluous songsters did not go away (and the Wild Birds' Protection Act remained in force), we should be smothered with thrushes. I know, for instance, of a little "place" in the country, some thirty acres all told, garden, shrubberies, orchards, spinneys, and meadow, where birds are tempted to come by the planting of fruit bushes and strawberry-beds in all directions, by the numbers of elder trees and mountain ash set out, by the encouragement of blackberries and dog-roses wherever they can be allowed to grow, and where birds are tempted to stay in winter by liberal scatterings of grain-foods and table-scraps. Within this little estate there were one year forty nests of thrush and blackbird. Now supposing these birds bred only once in the year, which is very improbable, and reared only three birds apiece, which is equally so, and that half were killed or died during the year, there would then be left twice as many thrushes as in the year before. Forty pairs would become eighty; eighty, a hundred and sixty; a hundred and sixty, three hundred and twenty, and so on till five years later there would be over ten thousand pairs of thrushes (allowing all along for the same excessive proportion of casualties), breeding on thirty acres, and if each pair hatched five birds, there would be fifty thousand thrushes all together!

So it is well that thoughtful Nature leads off vast colonies every year. Those that happen to stop to rest on Heligoland stop there for good and all, for the Heligolanders eat them. Those that get farther fare no better, for everybody eats them. Belgian and Dutchman, Frenchman, Spaniard and Portuguese, German, Swiss, Italian. And it is really a

mercy that they do. For if all the thrushes that leave us were to come back again, the consequences would be simply disastrous. Suppose all the human emigrants from Great Britain were to come back again! The population of these islands would be sitting three deep on top of one another.

No, the thrush is not a migrant in the sense that the nightingale is or the turtle-dove. By a wise dispensation of Nature the superfluous increment is drafted off annually. But the same number that sing in the garden in March sing every month in the year till March comes round again.

There is, I confess it, something very pleasing in the thought that a particular turtle-dove, all the time that it was enjoying itself in the palm-gardens by Cairo, or among the arbutus and olives of Athens, should keep in its memory a particular tree in my garden in England, and in spite of all temptations should come straight back to it every summer. For such fidelity I am cordially grateful, and I appreciate the dainty little bird's soft purring in the copse all the better for its pretty compliment of remembrance.

So with the nightingale, that, out of all the whole world, prefers an old juniper near my house to nest in, and that sits and sings gloriously every night as if in requital of my hospitality. I am proud of the small brown bird's preference for my garden over others, and proud of my neighbour's envy, whose garden the nightingale--"dear angel of the Spring," "the dearling of the somer's pryde"--never visits. And I take care that the rites shall not be violated; that my guests shall never have cause to regret their choice.

But they cannot stay with us. They come when our daffodils are all abloom, and go when the roses are fading. It is a far cry from London to Magdala, but the nightingale goes away even farther than that, and then in the Spring it turns northward again, and, by-and-by, with myriads of other birds, comes back to us to find the lilacs in flower, and the home-staying thrush with young ones already in the nest.

And they come in strange company. Sometimes the wild swan, quite an island for the little birds, flies winnowing the air beside them; sometimes a flight of hawks, but with their minds too full of their journey to think of harming their small fellow-voyagers; always with the sound of a multitude about them, and the murmuring of innumerable wings. Pitch dark the night, but somewhere or another is a leader, and they follow, wild duck and swallow, sea-fowl and dove, broad-winged geese and tiny gold-crest wrens, an instinct-driven mob that, in spite of all perils of storm and of distance, keeps its course, with dogged courage, and steers straight for the land that is to be its summer home. Lighthouses have become our best observatories for these annual transits, and the descriptions that are given of the mobbing of the great sea-lanterns by the hurrying flights of strangely assorted birds, are so curious as to be scarcely credible. What they suppose it to be, this bright revolving light in the dark waste, we cannot of course tell; but they have learned by experience that it means that land is very near, and so they all swerve in their course to pass through its rays. And those who keep the lighthouses tell us of the streams of birds that pass, flashing white for an instant in the glare of the lamp and then disappearing, and of still larger companies that fly overhead and out of sight, filling the night-air with the sound of rushing wings and the clamour of different voices, "feeling for each other in the dark," as Bunyan says, "with words."

"From worlds unknown The birds of passage transmigrating come; Unnumbered colonies of foreign wing At Nature's summons in bold voyage steer O'er the wide ocean, through the pathless sky." MALLET.

I had been telling a child about the miracle of migration, and when I had finished, she routed all my science by the simplest of questions, and utterly posed me by asking: "What do they do it for?" Yes, indeed, what do they do it for? or what do they do it for? It does not matter which word we put the emphasis on: it is the same conundrum always from a slightly different angle; only another turn in the maze. As the child got no reply, she helped herself to one, and satisfactorily remarked: "Perhaps they've got to." She had gathered from my description that there could be nothing agreeable to the birds in the migration, and, logically enough, since one only does that which is disagreeable from necessity, she inferred compulsion. But she set me thinking, and since science attempts no explanation of this appalling Kismet of the birds, I tried to find a reason for it for myself. And there can only be this, that it is one of Nature's methods for reducing numbers.

At any rate, wherever we turn our eyes in Nature, we find her bringing forth in vast excess of her requirements, and then restoring the equilibrium by the institution of active scourges, or terrific epidemics of suicide. There is no need for the birds to cross seas: to travel twice a year from the Hebrides to Abyssinia. Do they want a warmer climate? do they want a cooler? They have only to remain where they are and change their altitude. Do they need food? The idea is preposterous. They leave their various countries at seasons when their food is most abundant; they are then well fed, and are then strongest for the terrific ordeal before them. Besides, imagine a bird in, say Egypt, coming to England for food! No, that is the least reasonable of all explanations. And no other is much better. So we have to fall back on the child's reason, "Perhaps they do it because they've got to."

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