Part 9

One or more chaffinches generally feed with the fowls (and sometimes they are quite extraordinarily tame, hens more so, perhaps, than cocks), but they do not often attempt to get food from the stand. Though they sometimes do, for instance in the winter of 1910-11, there was one that came regularly.

The gait of the chaffinch strikes one as peculiar, it is as a fact a hopping movement, but it gives the impression of a run.

I have frequently noticed something like rivalry or competition in singing between a chaffinch and another bird, such as a tree-pipit or a lesser whitethroat, or a willow-wren.

One night as I was going the round of the house the last thing, about 12 o'clock, I heard a great fluttering and found that a light had been left on a table close to an unshuttered window, and outside beating against the glass was a handsome cock chaffinch.

In February, 1911, a brambling was brought to me for identification. It had been shot at the other side of the village, one of a large flock. I have never seen one in the garden itself, but not far away I think I caught sight of a small flock in March, 1899.

Far more interesting than stuffed specimens in a museum (how seldom, even at South Kensington, do you see small birds well set up, even sufficiently well to recognize the bird when met with alive!); far more interesting is such an outdoor aviary as one finds near the Town Hall in Warrington, where the birds appear to want nothing to make their lives ideally happy. In this aviary bramblings seem quite at home, and may be seen in best condition of health and feather.

Lesser redpoles, which here they call "jitties," I have seen close to the garden, and on the other side of the village they are common. I have heard of one boy catching 50 in a season with birdlime; for these he got a few pence apiece in Warrington.

A lesser redpole was given me in 1900, and a very engaging little bird he was. Though supposed to be freshly caught he was tame when first I had him, and in a very short time seemed hardly to know fear.

We used to let him out of his cage every day for an hour or so at a time. He enjoyed this immensely, and we had great difficulty in shutting him up again. He seemed fond of his cage, and would be continually going into it, but directly we went near to shut the door he was out. I tried a long string, which we pulled from a distance as soon as he was in the cage. This answered for a time, but he got to be so knowing that when he saw the string fastened to the door he wouldn't go into the cage at all. We got the better of him in the end, however, by hanging a bit of card inside the doorway; when he pushed against this on the outside he could get by into the cage, but he couldn't open it from the inside. We only turned the card in when we wanted him to go back, leaving him free to go in and out as he liked till then. Oddly enough, he used to go in almost directly the card was in its place, and never attempted to get out again. He seemed to enjoy the exercise of flying very much, and used to go round and round the room again and again and again for the mere pleasure of it.

Though he would settle on the different things in the room and stay there for some length of time, there was never any need to clean up after him, but on the outside of his cage he was not so particular. It was a great amusement to him to sit and make faces at himself in a looking-glass.

He lived very happily with us for more than two years. In the end he died of some kind of wasting disease, but was bright and apparently happy to the last.

For some months before he died, if we let him out at meal-times, as we often did, he had a curious habit of going to the salt-cellars and helping himself to grains of salt; once he took as many as thirteen pinches in succession! We often wondered afterwards whether he took the salt because he was ill or whether it was the salt that made him ill.

I would gladly sacrifice many fruit buds for the sake of seeing bullfinches in the garden, but never yet have I had that pleasure. Other people in the village do not regard their visits in the same light, and it is only because I hear of their being shot that I know they come here.

A bullfinch that belonged to a cousin must I think have reached the highest degree of tameness possible in a bird. Tommy, as he was called, was taken from the nest before he could fly, and he not only lost all sense of fear but showed an extraordinary personal devotion to his mistress. He used to wake her in the morning with a kiss, and warble his little greeting. He would come directly she called him, and would fly after her from room to room. This devotion was at last the cause of his death. In May, 1901, he was taken to London to a strange house, and one day hearing his mistress's voice as she came in, he flew down the stairs to meet her, and somehow struck against the hall lamp with such force that he was taken up dead.

I find the following entry in my diary for November 9th, 1895:--"A small flight of birds passed along the trees in front of the window. Caught a momentary glance of one as it rested on the tree, and noticed shades of brown and pink and the peculiar bill. Could they have been crossbills?"

Yellow-hammers, or "goldfinches" as they are called here, are often to be seen in the fields near, but in the garden we are more familiar with the black-headed reed-bunting. We generally have one or two about the old bed of the river. I have watched the bird through a telescope on a July day, as he sat on an osier twig that was swaying in the wind, preening his feathers and uttering his short melody (?) betweenwhiles. He would begin as though he had really something to sing, then would come two halting notes, indicating doubt of his power to do much after all, which would immediately become a certainty, and his brief attempt would end in a fizzle. He would, however, be perfectly satisfied with the performance himself, and would go through it again and again almost as persistently as the yellow-hammer repeats his wearisome monotonous phrase. In the spring he has a still simpler song, if it can be called a song, consisting of two or three notes of one tone, something like the cheep of a chicken, sometimes repeated ad infinitum, sometimes followed by a short run of three or four notes more.

We have starlings with us all the year round, and I am glad of it. Here at any rate they do nothing but good, and they are, besides, handsome, and are interesting to watch, while their song, whether a chorus or a solo, is always cheerful. Cold and bad weather doesn't seem to affect their spirits. On Christmas morning, in 1897, although there was a hard frost, starlings were singing away merrily, one of them imitating a blackbird's note exactly.

At one time flocks of starlings used to come on autumn evenings to roost in the garden. I have watched one detachment after another arrive until the trees and evergreens were crowded with them. They did not come so much later on when the leaves had fallen, and now that the shrubbery has been thinned they do not come at all in any numbers. In spring I have heard 30 or more all singing together in this same shrubbery as late as April 2nd.

Starlings hunt for their food in a methodical, business-like way. They do not seem to have the peculiar gift by which thrushes hit on the exact spot where a worm is (I fancy they do not feed much on worms) but they go diligently over every square inch of ground in their search, probing the turf with their bills widely open, so widely that one can hardly see how they can close them on a grub when they find one.

Starlings afford another example of a strange perversion of instinct or want of common sense. If you happen to be standing anywhere near the place that one has chosen for his nest, and he arrives with his food in his mouth, instead of slipping quietly in whilst your eyes are turned away, he waits outside making as much racket as he can, and you are almost forced to notice him and cannot fail to see the whereabouts of his nest, plainly marked as it is sure to be by plentiful splashes of white.

It is quite a common thing in spring and summer to see starlings catching flies in the air, and I remember in 1906, on September 29th, the air was, one might say, full of starlings, floating about in every direction with expanded wings, and then shooting up or down or to one side when they came within reach of a fly. It was a warm, still day, and I fancy the flies they were catching were winged aphides.

For many years now as soon as the elder-berries are ripe numbers of starlings, chiefly young ones, arrive on the scene, and in a few days clear them off completely.

Jays are not common here, but we have occasionally watched one in the garden as he was looking for fallen acorns in the grass close to the house.

One may pretty safely count on seeing a magpie near Arley at any time of the year, and we do at long intervals see them in this garden and in the fields near, but they are very far from common.

I have heard of a magpie at a farm in the next village to this, many years ago indeed, who kept his eye on a turkey that was in the habit of laying eggs at a little distance from the house, and often managed to appropriate the newly-laid egg before the farm people could stop him.

Jackdaws are often about, generally in company with rooks, but I have never specially noticed them settling in the garden, as the rooks often do.

In Wales once I saw a jackdaw busily engaged exploring the back of a pony with its beak. The pony continued quietly grazing all the while, but I thought he seemed rather relieved when his visitor left.

In January, 1898, two crows appeared in the garden; I used to see them nearly every evening. A month later we saw a single crow, injured in one wing, go backwards and forwards over the whole length of the opposite bank. Up and down he went, regularly quartering the ground in his search for food. He did this for several days, and we felt quite sorry for him, he was so diligent and persevering, and it must have been so little that he could find within such comparatively narrow limits. We put food for him, which he soon found and seemed to appreciate. He drove away rooks who tried to share it with him, but as he carried away each bit to eat in private the rooks took advantage of his absence, and the supply did not last as long as it might have done.