Part 5

Buzzards--spanning nearly four feet--are the most graceful hoverers. They hang, with wings arched back, a few yards over the rabbit runs through the gorse and the bracken. A fairly steady breeze is needed to keep them stable. I have watched for more than a minute a buzzard hanging thus, moving only its tail. The secret of its poising is that it falls continually on the wind, pressing its breast into the flow to counteract the lifting impulse of its wings.

Once I saw a buzzard glide down a hill at about eight miles an hour, a yard from the ground, its feet hanging below, ready to grasp something. Its slow slip downwards (“glide” would convey too rapid a motion) amazed me--it might have been sliding on a wire. Eventually it alighted, and rose with a lashing snake. The reptile was too much for it; the buzzard rushed about in middle air, turning and screaming. Eventually the snake fell to the ground.

I know an eyrie in a pinewood composed of nearly two hundredweight of sticks. It is about seven feet across, and quite as deep. For half a century and more it has been repaired every spring. Years ago I took the three eggs and lay for a long time in the nest, trembling with joy. The old birds were frightened to come near. I still have those eggs.

The buzzards nested there this year, but I could not climb up. The nest was at a terrible height. Underneath were hundreds of rabbits’ skulls, rats’ tails, beetle skins, and the feathers of small birds. Perhaps in the years to come when I go there I shall be terrified to see an eager face looking over the nest, and a shrill, triumphant voice exclaiming, “I say, father, I’ve got three eggs. What a bit of luck!”

PROPHET BIRDS

One September morning there wheeled a great concourse of gulls over the headland. Through the mist their cries came wild and plaintive. Old men in the village said that it meant a big storm.

I did not believe that birds could prophesy. Having studied the phenomena of nature for many years, I have come to know that everything happens by chance. For instance, during the autumn of 1920 severe wintry weather was forecasted because the hawthorn peggles were plentiful, and the granaries of squirrels were more numerous than usual. Quite a number of journals and periodicals stated these “portents” quite seriously. What illusions! The spring of that year was mild, the hawthorn blossom beautiful, and unravaged by frost. Hence the peggles. As for the squirrels, they found a goodly fall of beechen mast, and promptly stored it!

But to return to the gulls over Baggy Point. There must have been two or three thousand of them, floating and wailing. “A master storm be cumin’,” said the granfers.

All that day, sunlessness and quiet seas. I told the granfers that they were wrong (I am young and self-confident). I explained that their knowledge of nature was not great--had one not told me that swallows sleep in the mud of the river Taw during winter?

But that night clouds came up and hid the stars, the owls called mournfully, the wind shook the elms in the churchyard. A moan under the door, a rattling of the window; the spaniels on my bed whined uneasily. Something was astir--a great silence hollow and foreboding. The chimney tun hummed a little song of rue in the dark; I was instantly awake, and waiting.

A faint roar overbore the near sounds. It was the sea on the rocks two miles away. Suddenly the rain came, like goose-shot against the window, on the trees: the blast tore at the thatch. All through the night it continued until a gray dawn showed low clouds going over like the canvas of ancient galleons, windburst and tattered.

The next morning tons of seaweed--deep-sea plant, too--heaved and shuddered in the rockpools, while a belt of oil fuel lay on the sand with spars and planks. Had there been a wreck somewhere? No one knew. Certainly it looked as though a cargo had gone overboard, for from the headland one could see another black belt where the walls of gray-green water toppled in foam.

But the gulls? They had gone inland, right up the wide sandy estuary of the river. How did they know, so many hours before, that the storm was coming?

The more one thinks one knows of nature the more open should be the mind of the naturalist. I am learning, or should I say, unlearning?

A BIRD MYSTIC

Every year the ragtailed swallows are fewer, for many are destroyed as the hosts sweep southward in autumn, killed by electric wires on the Continent “for food” (I have seen them, with thrushes and blackbirds, laid out, pitifully small and gentle, in the Italian shop-windows--Nero in hell must be awfully pleased with this sure sign of degeneracy among the descendants of that race of which he declared himself to be “a genius.”)

In all the tallats of my Devon village there were but four swallows’ nests during the summer of 1921. There are over fifty tallats. Under the rafters are the ruins of nearly two hundred mud mansions--belonging to past summers. Some, indeed, are intact, others utilised by flycatchers, others have been selected by wrens for foundations of their domed nests. But only four are being used this year.

Although the swallows are becoming extinct the swifts are increasing. I have met many people who do not know one bird from the other. Yet it is easy to tell.

The swift is the mystic among birds. He is aloof from other birds--apart from life. He is never seen to perch unless it be on the rigging of a ship during migration. The swift is black, he screams shrilly as he darts through the air, his wings are curved like a boomerang. During June I have seen and heard them long after midnight, whole cohorts of them wheeling in the sky, their cries sounding like the thin jingle of a frail chain. I verily believe that some remain on the wing (not the brooding females, of course) from dawn till dawn. They pass my cottage door a foot away from my head, their wings hissing. Under the ancient thatch they nest, plunging, it seems, straight into the holes. This is necessary, because a swift clings with difficulty; for some reason all its four toes are in front of the foot. Through the dark holes they creep, to reach the nests of saliva, cobwebs, and straw-speck laid like a mouldered saucer on the lath and plaster.

One midsummer eve a great commotion brought me to my doorway. I looked out and saw about half a hundred swifts pursuing a great barn owl, white and slow-fanning, holding in one dropped foot a limp rat. The owls are nesting on the lath and plaster of my cottage, but they do not interfere with the swifts.

When the wheat is nearly ready for the reaping, the swifts begin to think of the journey to Africa. They are among the last birds to arrive here in the spring, but the first to depart (excepting the cuckoo). When the Voice speaks in the night they mount many miles, flying up to the stars, and rush to the south. It is a sad time for some birds, as the instinct for migration is so intense that if any young are unable to fly they are left. What caused this remorseless migration in the first place, and why does it happen? Nobody knows. It is one of the problems insoluble by research or reasoning; insoluble as the mystery of life itself.

SAMARITANS

Towards the end of August a pair of house-martins (or eave-swallows--I prefer the name given them by Richard Jefferies) came to my cottage wall, and clung, two slim, black-and-white fairies, to the rough cob surface. Excited twitterings and peckings for a minute, then they flew away. Almost immediately one returned with a beakful of mud, taken from the verge of a ruddle-red pool in the roadway. This was tacked to the wall, close under the ragged fringe of thatch, and away sped the bird as her mate came with his burden. All day they worked, seeming never to feed.

But the nest grew slowly. Perhaps their other muddied cup had been knocked down by boys, or sparrows had seized it; by their intense eagerness it appeared to me that their first brood had failed altogether; there was something of the frenzy of April in their labour.

In the evening I was amazed by what I saw. The toiling pair had been joined by about a dozen other martins, all bearing beakfuls of mud and grass to the precipitous site. In regular order came mud, quickly moulded and kneaded into place, then came a broken straw, a rootlet, or a twitch of grass. There was just time to place this in position before another bird would arrive. A sweet soft trickle of eagerness fell continually from just above my window. The next morning succour was still availing, and quickly the nest grew. We discussed this in the village, but even the oldest granfer had never heard tell of such a thing before. Toilers in the harvest fields (the “unimaginative labourers”) paused and regarded. They were interested, and many pondered the problem with me.

“League o’ Nations,” grinned one. “There is much friendship among birds,” I said. “Aiy, aiy!” agreed another, and told me in the soft melodious burr of the west country how, in his garden that spring, a robin had fed a nest of hedge-sparrows.

The nest was finished in three days. The lining of feathers was a speedy business, for I scattered a handful on the ground beneath, wishing to give my small aid. I am sure the pair were grateful, for on the fourth day, when I inspected from a ladder, the first egg was laid and the mother was not alarmed by my intrusion.

This intensive construction is not usual. It is not instinctive. It is the result of reason and decency of life in their colonies. Rooks, being amoral, would not help one another. Martins live together in trust and decency. Who, hearing their song (jumbled though it may be), can doubt this.