Part 36

The migration season is a season of slaughter. The law which impels southward the tribes of birds is, for millions, a law of death. Many depart, few return; at each stage of their route they must pay a tribute of blood. The eagle waits on his crag, man watches in the valley. He who escapes the tyrant of the air, falls a victim to the tyrant of the earth. "A fortunate opportunity!" exclaims the child or the sportsman, the ferocious child with whom murder is a jest. "God has willed it so!" mutters the pious glutton; "let us be resigned!" These are the judgments of man upon the carnival of massacre. As yet we know nothing more, for history has not written the opinions of the massacred.

* * * * *

Migrations are exchanges for every country (except the poles, at the epoch of winter). The particular condition of climate or food, which decides the departure of one species of birds, is precisely that which determines the arrival of another species. When the swallow quits us at the autumn rains, we note the arrival of the army of plovers and peewits in quest of the lobworms driven from their lurking-places by the floods. In October, and as the cold increases, the greenfinches, the yellow-hammers, the wrens, replace the song-birds which have deserted us. The snipes and partridges descend from their mountains at the moment when the quail and the thrush emigrate towards the south. It is then, too, that the legions of the aquatic species quit the extreme north for those temperate climes where the seas, the lakes, and the pools, do not freeze. The wild geese, the swans, the divers, the ducks, the teal, cleave the air in battle array, and swoop down upon the lakes of Scotland and Hungary, and our marshes of the south. The delicate stork flies southward, when his cousin, the crane, sets out from the north, where his supplies begin to fail him. Passing over our lands, he pays us tribute by delivering us from the last reptiles and batrachians which a warm autumnal breeze has restored to life.

Page 188. My muse is the light.--And yet the nightingale loses it when he returns to us from Asia. But all true artists require that it should be softly ordered, blended with rays and shadows. Rembrandt in his paintings has exhausted the effects, at once warm and soft, of the science of chiaro-oscuro. The nightingale begins his song when the gloom of evening mingles with the last beams of the sun; and hence it is that we tremble at his voice. Our soul in the misty and uncertain hours of the gloaming regains possession of the inner light.

Page 215. Do not say, "Winter is on my side."--While M. de Custine was travelling in Russia, he tells us that, at the fair of Nijni-Novgorod, he was frightened by the multitude of blattes which thronged his chamber, with an infectious smell, and which could not be got rid of. Dr. Tschudi, a careful traveller, who has explored Switzerland in its smallest details, assures us that at the breath of the south wind, which melts the snow in twelve hours, innumerable hosts of cockchafers ravage the country. They are not a less terrible scourge than the locusts to the south.

During our Italian tour, my wife and I made an observation which will not have escaped the notice of naturalists; namely, that the cockchafer does not die in autumn. From the inhabited portions of our palazzo, almost entirely shut up in winter, we saw clouds of these insects emerge in the spring, which had slept peacefully in expectation of its warmth. Moreover, in that country, even ephemeral insects do not perish. Gigantic gnats wage war against us every night, demanding our blood with sharp and strident voice.

If, by the side of these proofs of the multiplication of insects, even in temperate or cold countries, we put the fact that the swallow is not satisfied with less than one thousand flies per diem; that a couple of sparrows carry home to their young four thousand three hundred caterpillars or beetles weekly; a tomtit three hundred daily; we see at once the evil and the remedy. We quote these figures from M. Quatrefages (Souvenirs), and from a letter written by Mr. Walter Trevelyan to the editor of "The Birds of Great Britain," translated in the Revue Britannique, July 7, 1850.

I offer the reader a very incomplete summary of the services rendered to us by the birds of our climate.

Many are the assiduous guardians of our herds. The heron garde-boeuf, making use of his bill as a lancet, cuts the flesh of the ox to extract from it a parasitical worm which sucks the blood and life of the animal. The wagtails and the starlings render very similar services to our cattle. The swallows destroy myriads of winged insects which never rest, and which we see dancing in the sun's rays; gnats, midges, flies. The goat-suckers and the martinets, twilight hunters, effect the disappearance of the cockchafers, the gnats, the moths, and a swarm of nibbling insects (rongeurs), which work only by night. The magpie hunts after the insects which, concealed beneath the bark of the tree, live upon its sap. The humming-bird, the fly-catcher, the soui-mangas, in tropical countries, purify the chalice of the flower. The bee-eater, in all lands, carries on a fierce hostility against the wasps which ruin our fruit. The goldfinch, partial to uncultivated soil and the seeds of the thistle, prevents the latter from spreading over the ground. Our garden birds, the chaffinches, blackcaps, blackbirds, tits, strip our fruit-bushes and great trees of the grubs, caterpillars, and beetles, whose ravages would be incalculable. A large number of these insects remain during winter in the egg or the larva, waiting for spring to burst into life; but in this state they are diligently hunted up by the mavis, the wren, the troglodyte. The former turn over the leaves which strew the earth; the latter climb to the loftiest branches, or clear out the trunk. In wet meadows, you may see the crows and storks boring the ground to seize on the white worm (ver blanc) which, for three years before metamorphosing into a cockchafer, gnaws at the roots of our grasses.

Here we pause, not to weary our reader, and yet the list of useful birds is scarcely glanced at.

Page 228. The woodpecker, as an augur.--Are the methods of observation adopted by meteorology serious and efficacious? Some men of science doubt it. It might, perhaps, be worth while examining if we could not deduce any part of the meteorology of the ancients from their divination by birds. The principal passages are pointed out in Pauly's Encyclopædia (Stuttgard), article Divinatio.

"The woodpecker is a favoured bird in the steppes of Poland and Russia. In these sparsely wooded plains he constantly directs his course towards the trees; by following him, you discover a hidden ravine, a little later some springs, and finally descend towards the river. Under the bird's guidance you may thus explore and reconnoitre the country." (Mickiewicz, Les Slaves, vol. i., p. 200.)

Page 235. Song.--Do not separate what God has joined together. If you place a bird in a cage beside you, his song quickly fatigues you with its sonorous timbre and its monotony. But in the grand concert of Nature, that bird would supply his note, and complete the harmony. This powerful voice would subdue itself to the modulations of the air; soft and tender it would glide, borne upon the breeze.

And then, in the deep woody depths, the singer incessantly moves from place to place, now drawing near, and now receding; hence arise those distant effects which induce a delightful reverie, and that delicate cadence which thrills the heart.

Under our roof his song would be ever the same; but on the pinions of the wind the music is divine, it penetrates and ravishes the soul.

Page 241. The robin hastens, singing, to enjoy his share of the warmth.--I find this admirable passage in "The Conquest of England by the Normans" (by Augustin Thierry). The chief of the barbarous Saxons assembles his priests and wise men to ascertain if they will become Christians. One of them speaks as follows:--

"Thou mayst remember, O king, a thing which sometimes happens, when thou art seated at table with thy captains and men-at-arms, in the winter season, and when a fire is kindled and the hall well warmed, while there are wind and rain and snow without. There comes a little bird, which traverses the room on fluttering wing, entering by one door and flying out at another: the moment of its passage is full of sweetness for it, it feels neither the rain nor the storm; but this interval is brief, the bird vanishes in the twinkling of an eye, and from winter passes away into winter. Such seems to me the life of man upon this earth, and its limited duration, compared with the length of the time which precedes and follows it."

From winter he passes into winter. "Of wintra in winter eft cymeth."

Page 247. Nests and Hatching.--In the vast extent of the islands linking India to Australia, a species of bird of the family Gallinaceæ dispenses with the labour of hatching her eggs. Raising an enormous hillock of grasses whose fermentation will produce a degree of heat favourable to the process, the parents, as soon as this task is completed, trust to Nature for the reproduction of their kind. Mr. Gould, who furnishes these curious details, speaks also of some curious nests constructed by another species of bird. It consists of an avenue formed by small branches planted in the ground, and woven together at their upper extremities in the fashion of a dome. The structure is consolidated by enlaced and intertwined herbs. This first stage of their labour accomplished, the artists proceed to the work of decoration. They seek in every direction, and often at a distance, the gaudiest feathers, the finest polished shells, and the most brilliant stones, to strew over the entrance. This avenue would seem, however, not to be the nest, but the place where the birds hold their first rendezvous. (See the coloured plates in Mr. Gould's magnificent volume, "Australian Birds.")

Page 266. Instinct and Reason.--The ignorant and inattentive think all things nearly alike. And Science perceives that all things differ. According as we learn to observe, do these differences become apparent; that imperceptible "shade," and worthless "almost," which at the outset does not prevent us from confusing all things with one another, really distinguishes them, and points out a notable discrepancy, a wide interval betwixt this object and that, a blank, a hiatus, sometimes an enormous abyss, which separates and holds them apart,--so much so, that occasionally between these things, at first sight so nearly alike, a whole world will intervene, without the power of bringing them together.

It has been asserted and repeated that the works of insects presented an absolute similarity, a mechanical regularity. And yet our Reaumurs and our Hubers have discovered numerous facts which positively contradict this pretended symmetry, especially in the case of the ant, whose life is complicated with so many incidents, so many unforeseen exigencies, that she would never provide against them but for the rapid discernment, the promptitude of mind, which is one of the most striking characteristics of her individuality.

It has been supposed that the nests of birds are always constructed on identical principles. Not at all. A close observation reveals the fact that they differ according to the climate and the weather. At New York, the baltimore makes a closely fitted nest, to shelter him from the cold. At New Orleans his nest is left with a free passage for the air to diminish the heat. The Canadian partridges, which in winter cover themselves with a kind of small pent-roof at Compiègne, under a milder sky do away with this protection, because they judge it to be useless. The same discernment prevails in relation to the seasons. The American spring, in the opening years of the present century, occurring very late, the woodpecker (of Wilson) wisely made his nest two weeks later. I will venture to add that I have seen, in southern France, this delicate appreciation of climatic changes varying from year to year; by an inexplicable foresight, when the summer was likely to be cold, the nests were always more thickly woven.

The guillemot of the north (mergula), which fears above all things the fox, on account of his partiality for her eggs, builds her nest on a rock level with the water, so that, no sooner are they hatched than the brood, however closely dogged by the plunderer, have time to escape in the waves. On the other hand, here, on our coasts, where her only enemy is man, she makes her nest on the loftiest and most precipitous cliffs, where man can with difficulty reach it.

Ignorant persons, and no less those naturalists who study natural history in books only, acknowledge the differences existing between species, but believe that the actions and labours of the individuals of a species invariably correspond. Such a view is possible when you have only seen things from above and afar, in a sublime generality. But when the naturalist takes in hand his pilgrim's staff--when, as a modest, resolute, indefatigable pilgrim of Nature, he assumes his shoes of iron--all things change their aspect: he sees, notes, compares numerous individual works in the labours of each species, seizes their points of difference, and soon arrives at the conclusion which logic had already suggested,--that, in truth, no one thing resembles another. In those works which appear identical to inexperienced eyes, a Wilson and an Audubon have detected the diversities of an art very variable--according to means and places, according to the characters and talents of the artists--in a spontaneous infinity. So extensive is the region of liberty, fancy, and ingegno.

Let us hope that our collections will bring together several specimens of each species, arranged and classified according to the talent and progress of the individual, recording as near as may be the age of the birds which constructed the nests.

If these boundless diversities do not result from unrestrained activity and personal spontaneity, if you wish to refer them all to an identical instinct, you must, to support so miraculous a theory, make us believe another miracle: that this instinct, although identical, possesses the singular elasticity of accommodating and proportioning itself to a variety of circumstances which are incessantly changing, to an infinity of hazardous chances.

What, then, will be the case if we find, in the history of animals, such an act of pretended instinct as supposes a resistance to that very course our instinctive nature would apparently desire? What will you say to the wounded elephant spoken of by Fouché d'Obsonville?

That judicious traveller, so utterly disinclined to romantic tendencies, saw an elephant in India, which, having been wounded in battle, went daily to the hospital that his wound might be dressed. Now, guess what this wound might be. A burn. In this dangerous Indian climate, where everything grows putrid, they are frequently constrained to cauterize the sores. He endured this treatment patiently, and went every day to undergo it. He felt no antipathy towards the surgeon who inflicted upon him so sharp an agony. He groaned; nothing more. He evidently understood that it was done for his benefit; that his torturer was his friend; that this necessary cruelty was designed for his cure.