Part 8

The swan is a very silent bird in captivity, for this reason it is called the mute swan. The only noise I have ever heard it make is a hiss when it is angry. At the breeding season it is said to trumpet sometimes. The ancients believed that the swan, though mute throughout life, sings most sublimely at the approach of death; it then sings, not a funeral dirge, but a jolly, rollicking song. This presented an excellent opportunity for moralising. Mediæval authors were always on the look out for such opportunities. The swan, wrote the author of the Speculum Mundi, “is a perfect emblem and pattern to us, that our death ought to be cheerful, and life not so dear to us as it is.” This practice of singing before death has, like the crinoline, quite gone out of fashion. The mute swan can never have been so great a musician as some of his brethren, since the French horn which he carries in his breast-bone is not nearly so well developed as it is in either the hooper or the black swan. Let me here say, en passant, that both ancient and mediæval writers declined to believe in the existence of a black swan; they regarded it as “the very emblem and type of extravagant impossibility.” The phœnix, the dragon, and the mermaid they could believe, but they felt that they must really draw the line at a black swan.

A swan’s nest is a bulky structure composed of rushes, reeds, and other aquatic plants; it is placed on the ground near the water’s edge. Six or seven large greenish-white eggs are laid. The breeding season is from March to May. Swans do not, of course, breed in India. Indeed, it is only on rare occasions that they visit that country, and then they do not venture farther south than Sind.

XIX KITES OF THE SEA

“Graceful seagulls, plumed in snowy white, Follow’d the creaming furrow of the prow, With easy pinion, pleasurably slow; Then on the waters floated like a fleet Of tiny vessels, argosies complete, Such as brave Gulliver, deep wading, drew Victorious from the forts of Blefuscu.”

Of all the methods of obtaining food to which birds resort, none makes greater demands on their physical powers than that which we human beings term scavenging—the seeking-out and devouring of the multifarious edible objects left, unclaimed by the owners, on the face of the land or the sea. No bird can eke out an existence by scavenging unless it be endowed with wonderful power of flight, the keenest eyesight, and limitless energy, to say nothing of the ability and the will to fight when necessity arises. Thus it happens that it is to the despised scavengers that we must direct our eyes if we would behold the perfection of flight. The vultures, the kites, and the gulls are verily the monarchs of the atmosphere.

Bird scavengers are of two kinds—specialists and general practitioners. The former confine themselves to one particular kind of food—the bodies of dead animals. Of such are the vultures. In the polity of the feathered folk might is right, so that these great birds enjoy the prerogative of picking and choosing their food. The lesser fry have to be content with that which the vultures do not require, with the crumbs that fall from the vulturine table; they are ready to devour “anything that is going.” All is grist that comes to their mill.

The kites and gulls are the chieftains of the clan of general scavengers. The sway of the former extends over the land: the latter have dominion over the seas. Kites cannot swim; their operations are in consequence necessarily confined to the land, and to water in the neighbourhood of terra firma. Sea-gulls, on the other hand, are as buoyant as corks, and have webbed feet; they are, further, no mean swimmers, and are eminently adapted to a seafaring life. They are birds of powerful flight, and almost as much at home on land as at sea. They confine their attention mainly to the sea, not because they are compelled by their structure to do so, but because they encounter less opposition there.

Among birds, similarity in feeding habits often engenders similarity in appearance—a professional likeness grows up among those that pursue the same calling. The likeness between swifts and swallows is a remarkable instance of this. The separate sphere of influence occupied by kites and gulls sufficiently explains the dissimilitude of their plumage. In nearly all other respects the birds closely resemble one another. In habits, gulls are marine kites. Grandeur of flight is the most marked attribute of each. They do not cleave the air at great velocity, like swifts or “green parrots.” It is the effortlessness, the perfect ease with which kites and sea-gulls perform their aerial movements for hours at a time, rather than phenomenal speed, that compels our admiration. A dozen gentle flaps of the wings in a minute suffices to enable a gull to keep pace with a fast steamship.

Cowper sang of—

“Kites that swim sublime In the still repeated circles, screaming loud.”

These words are equally appropriate to the kites of the sea.

I have watched, until my eyes grew tired, kites floating in circles in the thin atmosphere, with scarce a movement of the pinions; I have seen gulls keeping pace with a steamer without as much as a quiver of their wings. In each case the wind was the motive power.

Both kites and gulls fly with downwardly directed eyes. Their life is one long search for food. So keen is their vision that no object seems minute enough to escape their notice. The smallest piece of bread thrown from a moving ship is immediately pounced upon by the “wild sea-birds that follow through the air,” but no notice appears to be taken of a piece of paper rolled up into a ball.

Gulls, like kites, are omnivorous. Some species occasionally prey upon fish which they catch alive; this method of obtaining food is, however, the exception rather than the rule among gulls. They are sea-birds merely in the sense that they usually pick their food off water. They are found only where there is refuse to be picked up. In those parts of the ocean that are not frequented by ships gulls are conspicuous by their absence. They do not, as a rule, travel very far from land; when they do venture out to sea, it is invariably in the wake of some great ship. Every ocean liner sheds edible objects all along its course, and so attracts numbers of gulls. These follow the ship for perhaps two hundred miles, and then forsake it to return with some homeward-bound vessel.

The seashore and the estuaries of tidal rivers are the favourite hunting-grounds of the sea-gulls, the flotsam of the rivers and the jetsam of the waves being the attractions. Numbers of the graceful birds await the return of the fishing smacks, in order to secure the fish thrown away by the fishermen. The marine kites are not always content to wait for rejected fish; not infrequently they boldly help themselves to some of the shining contents of the nets, and sometimes actually tear the meshes with their strong sharp bills. In India there is always much fighting between the gulls and the crows over the fish cast away by the fishers. The antagonists are well matched. Similar contests have been recorded in the British Isles. I cull from The Evening Telegraph the following description of a fight between gulls and rooks over ground covered with worms which had been killed by a salt-water flood: “Thousands of gulls and rooks fought each other with a determination and venom that could not be appreciated unless witnessed. Feathers flew in all directions; the cawing and screaming were almost deafening. It was a genuine fight. At first it took place in mid-air, but soon the combatants came to the ground, and then the struggle centred in and around a fairly large hillock. Just as the gulls appeared to be gaining the upper hand, the report of a gun broke up the fight.”

The diet of the kites of the sea is not confined to small things. “A son of the marshes” states that he has seen them feeding with hooded crows on the carcases of moorland sheep. In the British Isles gulls frequently follow the plough and greedily seize the worms and grubs turned up in the furrow. In London and Dublin, and probably in other places, gulls have taken up their residence in the parks, where they feed largely on the bread thrown to the ornamental water-fowl, seizing it in the air before it reaches the ducks. So tame do these gulls become that they will almost take bread from the hands of children. Many people labour under the delusion that these gulls are domesticated ones kept by the authorities along with the ducks and swans.

Of late years a large colony of gulls has established itself on the Thames opposite the Temple. These now form one of the sights of London. The townsfolk take so much interest in the graceful birds that some individuals earn a living by selling on the Embankment small baskets of little fish which passers-by purchase in order to throw to the screaming gulls that hover around expectantly.

Even as hunger frequently drives kites to commit larceny in the farmyard, so does it sometimes turn sea-gulls into birds of prey.

Mr. W. J. Williams gives an account, in The Irish Naturalist, of a lesser black-headed gull that used to frequent the lake in St. Stephen’s Green Park. It was wont to rest on the cornice of a house overlooking the park, till an opportunity presented itself of swooping down and snatching a duckling. It became so expert at this form of poaching that the Board of Works had the marauder executed. Another gull which attacked a duckling was in turn attacked by the parents (a pair of Chilian wigeons), with such success that the exhausted gull was killed with a stick by one of the Park constables.

In India gulls do not, I think, venture far inland. The terns regard the inland waters of Hindustan as their preserve. Some people eat gulls. The late Lord Lilford declared that the black-headed species is a good bird for the table. I am not prepared to deny this assertion. I shall not put it to the test, for, in my opinion, gulls should be a feast only for the eyes.

XX RIVER TERNS

A sojourn of a few years in Upper India usually teaches a European to make the most of the cold weather as it gives place to the heat of summer. There is a period of a week or two in March and early April when, although the days are very hot, the nights and early mornings are cool, when the mercury in the thermometer fluctuates between 104° and 68° F. If at this season a man is energetic enough to rise at 5.15, shortly after the birds awake, there are few more pleasant ways of spending the ensuing three hours than by taking what the French would term a promenade upon the water. The gliding motion of a boat propelled by sail or oar is always soothing, and is doubly so when one knows that the breeze which then blows cool upon the cheek will scorch the face seven hours hence. The morning excursion on the water is rendered especially enjoyable if it happens to take place at one of the comparatively few parts of the Ganges or the Jumna where the river-bed is narrow, so that the water fills the space between the banks, instead of being, as is more usually the case, a mere trickle of water meandering through a great expanse of sand. Under the former conditions it is good to sit in the stern of a gliding boat and watch the birds that frequent the river.

At sunrise the crow-pheasants (Centropus rufipennis) come to the water’s edge to drink, so that numbers of the long-tailed, black birds with chestnut wings are to be seen from the boat. Having slaked their thirst, they hop up the steep bank with considerable dexterity, to disappear into the stunted bushes that grow on the top of the bank. Then there are, of course, the regular habitués of the water’s edge—the birds that frequent it at all hours of the day—the ubiquitous paddy bird (Ardeola grayii), which spends the greater part of its life ankle-deep in water, waiting motionless for the coming of its prey; the common sandpiper (Totanus hypoleucus), that solitary bird, as small as a starling, which, on the approach of a human being, emits a plaintive cry and flies away, displaying pointed wings along the length of which runs a narrow white bar; the handsome spur-winged plover (Hoplopterus ventralis), whose call is very like that of the did-he-do-it—but we must not dwell on these littoral birds, for to-day I would write of terns, the river birds par excellence. None of God’s creatures are more attractive than terns to those who love beauty. That few, if any, of our English poets have sung the praises of these beautiful birds surely demonstrates how little attention poets pay to nature, and how artificial are their writings. This will, I fear, annoy the friends of the poets. I am sorry, but I cannot help it. It is the fault of the bards for having so grossly neglected the terns.

In colouring, these superb birds show what endless possibilities are open to the artist who confines himself to black and white and their combinations.

There is in the flight of terns a poetry of motion over which no one with an eye for the beautiful can fail to wax enthusiastic. The popular name for terns—sea-swallows—is a tribute to their wing power. They are all designed upon a common plan. Length and slimness characterise every part of their anatomy, save the legs, which are very short. Terns rarely walk; nearly all their movements are aerial.

The terns that commonly frequent the rivers of Upper India are of three species—the black-bellied tern (Sterna melanogaster), the Indian river tern (S. seena) with its deeply forked tail, and the whiskered tern (Hydrochelidon hybrida), a study in pale grey. These, when not resting on a sandbank, are dashing through the air without effort, ever and anon dropping on to the water to pick something from off the surface, or plunging in after a fish. Allied to the terns, and found along with them, are the Indian skimmers (Rynchope albicollis), easily recognised by their larger size and black wings.

The passing of a black crow causes some of the terns to desist from their piscatorial occupation, in order to mob the intruder. This means that there are terns’ eggs or young ones in the vicinity. Many species of birds betray the presence of their nests by displaying unusual pugnacity at the breeding season. To discover the eggs or young of the terns is not a difficult matter. It is only necessary to land upon the nearest island between which and the river bank there is a sufficient depth of water to prevent jackals fording it. If the island contain eggs or young ones, the parent birds will make a hostile demonstration by collecting overhead and flying backwards and forwards, uttering their harsh cries, and the nearer one approaches the nest the more clamorous do they become. In this manner they unwittingly inform the nest-seeker whether he is getting “hot” or “cold,” to use the expressions employed in a nursery game.

The terns which breed on islets in Indian rivers do not appear to do much incubating in the daytime. There is no need for them to do so, because the sand grows very warm under the rays of the sun. Moreover, the only foes to be feared are the crows and the kites, which the terns can keep at bay more effectually when on the wing than while sitting on the eggs. Very different is the behaviour of the sea terns, whose eggs are liable to attack by gulls and crabs. For safety’s sake the sea terns lay in large colonies, and, to use Colonel Butler’s expression, sit on their eggs “packed together as close as possible without, perhaps, actually touching one another.” He once came upon the nests of a colony of large-crested terns (Sterna bergii). The sitting birds did not leave their eggs until he was within a few yards of them. Having put them up, he retired to a little distance. “No sooner had I done so,” he writes, “than both species [i.e. the gulls and terns] began to descend in dozens to the spot where the eggs were lying. In a moment a general fight commenced, and it was at once evident that the eggs belonged to Sterna bergii, and that the gulls were carrying them off and swallowing their contents as fast as they could devour them.” River terns do not construct any nest. They deposit their eggs on the bare, dry sand. The eggs have a stone-coloured ground, sometimes suffused with pink, blotched with dark patches, those at the surface of the shell having a sepia hue, and those deeper down appearing dark greyish mauve. The eggs, although not conspicuous, may, without difficulty, be detected when lying on the sand. Their colouring would seem to be adapted to match a stony, rather than a sandy environment, but the fact that the colouring of the eggs is but imperfectly protective does not much matter when the latter lie on a sand island, to which but few predaceous creatures have access; the watchfulness of the parent birds more than compensates for the comparative conspicuousness of the eggs.