Birds in the Calendar

APRIL

BIRDS IN THE HIGH HALL GARDEN

All March the rooks were busy in the swaying elms, but it is these softer evenings of April, when the first young leaves are beginning to frame the finished nests, and the boisterous winds of last month no longer drown the babble of the tree-top parliament at the still hour when farm labourers are homing from the fields, that the rooks peculiarly strike their own note in the country scene. There is no good reason to confuse these curious and interesting fowl with any other of the crow family. Collectively they may be recognised by their love of fellowship, for none are more sociable than they. Individually the rook is stamped unmistakably by the bald patch on the face, where the feathers have come away round the base of the beak. The most generally accepted explanation of this disfigurement is the rook's habit of thrusting its bill deep in the earth in search of its daily food. This, on the face of it, looks like a reasonable explanation, but it should be borne in mind that not only do some individual rooks retain through life the feathers normally missing, but that several of the rook's cousins dip into Nature's larder in the same fashion without suffering any such loss. However, the featherless patch on the rook's cheeks suffices, whatever its cause, as a mark by which to recognise the bird living or dead.

Unlike its cousin the jackdaw, which commonly nests in the cliffs, the rook is not, perhaps, commonly associated with the immediate neighbourhood of the sea, but a colony close to my own home in Devonshire displays sufficiently interesting adaptation to estuarine conditions to be worth passing mention. Just in the same way that gulls make free of the wireworms on windswept ploughlands, so in early summer do the old rooks come sweeping down from the elms on the hill that overlooks my fishing ground and take their share of cockles and other muddy fare in the bank uncovered by the falling tide. Here, in company with gulls, turnstones, and other fowl of the foreshore, the rooks strut importantly up and down, digging their powerful bills deep in the ooze and occasionally bullying weaker neighbours out of their hard-earned spoils. The rook is a villain, yet there is something irresistible in the effrontery with which one will hop sidelong on a gorging gull, which beats a hasty retreat before its sable rival, leaving some half-prized shellfish to be swallowed at sight or carried to the greedy little beaks in the tree-tops. While rooks are far more sociable than crows, the two are often seen in company, not always on the best of terms, but usually in a condition suggestive of armed neutrality. An occasional crow visits my estuary at low tide, but, though the bird would be a match for any single rook, I never saw any fighting between them. Possibly the crow feels its loneliness and realises that in case of trouble none of its brothers are there to see fair play. Yet carrion crows, like herons, are among the rook's most determined enemies, and cases of rookeries being destroyed by both birds are on record. On the other hand, though the heron is the far more powerful bird of the two, heronries have likewise been scattered, and their trees appropriated, by rooks, probably in overwhelming numbers. Of the two the heron is, particularly in the vicinity of a preserved trout stream, the more costly neighbour. Indeed it is the only other bird which nests in colonies of such extent, but there is this marked difference between herons and rooks, that the former are sociable only in the colony. When away on its own business, the heron is among the most solitary of birds, having no doubt, like many other fishermen, learnt the advantage of its own company.

One of the most remarkable habits in the rook is that of visiting the old nests in mid-winter. Now and again, it is true, a case of actually nesting at that season has been noticed, but the fancy for sporting round the deserted nests is something quite different from this. I have watched the birds at the nests on short winter days year after year, but never yet saw any confirmation of the widely accepted view that their object is the putting in order of their battered homes for the next season. It seems a likely reason, but in that case the birds would surely be seen carrying twigs for the purpose, and I never saw them do so before January. What other attraction the empty nurseries can have for them is a mystery, unless indeed they are sentimental enough to like revisiting old scenes and cawing over old memories.

The proximity of a rookery does not affect all people alike. Some who, ordinarily dwelling in cities, suffer from lack of bird neighbours, would regard the deliberate destruction of a rookery as an act of vandalism. A few, as a matter of fact, actually set about establishing such a colony where none previously existed, an ambition that may generally be accomplished without extreme difficulty. All that is needed is to transplant a nest or two of young rooks and lodge them in suitable trees. The parent birds usually follow, rear the broods, and forthwith found a settlement for future generations to return to. Even artificial nests, with suitable supplies of food, have succeeded, and it seems that the rook is nowhere a very difficult neighbour to attract and establish.

Why are rooks more sociable than ravens, and what do they gain from such communalism? These are favourite questions with persons informed with an intelligent passion for acquiring information, and the best answer, without any thought of irreverence, is "God knows!" It is most certain that we, at any rate, do not. So far from explaining how it was that rooks came to build their nests in company, we cannot even guess how the majority of birds came to build nests at all, instead of remaining satisfied with the simpler plan of laying their eggs in the ground that is still good enough for the petrels, penguins, kingfishers, and many other kinds. Protection of the eggs from rain, frost, and natural enemies suggests itself as the object of the nest, but the last only would to some extent be furthered by the gregarious habit, and even so we have no clue as to why it should be any more necessary for rooks than for crows. To quote, as some writers do, the numerical superiority of rooks over ravens as evidence of the benefits of communal nesting is to ignore the long hostility of shepherds towards the latter birds on which centuries of persecution have told irreparably. Rooks, on the other hand, though also regarded in some parts of these islands as suspects, have never been harassed to the same extent; and if anything in the nature of general warfare were to be inaugurated against them, the gregarious habit, so far from being a protection, would speedily and disastrously facilitate their extermination. Another curious habit noticed in these birds is that of flying on fine evenings to a considerable height and then swooping suddenly to earth, often on their backs. These antics, comparable to the drumming of snipe and roding of woodcock, are probably to be explained on the same basis of sexual emotion.

The so-called parliament of the rooks probably owes much of its detail to the florid imagination of enthusiasts, always ready to exaggerate the wonders of Nature; but it also seems to have some existence in fact, and privileged observers have actually described the trial and punishment of individuals that have broken the laws of the commune. I never saw this procedure among rooks, but once watched something very similar among the famous dogs of Constantinople, which no longer exist.

The most important problem however in connection with the rook is the precise extent to which the bird is the farmer's enemy or his friend. On the solution hangs the rook's fate in an increasingly practical age, which may at any moment put sentiment on one side and decree for it the fate that is already overtaking its big cousin the raven. Scotch farmers have long turned their thumbs down and regarded rooks as food for the gun, but in South Britain the bird's apologists have hitherto been able to hold their own and avert catastrophe from their favourite. The evidence is conflicting. On the one hand, it seems undeniable that the rook eats grain and potato shoots. It also snaps young twigs off the trees and may, like the jay and magpie, destroy the eggs of game birds. On the other hand, particularly during the weeks when it is feeding its nestlings, it admittedly devours quantities of wireworms, leathergrubs, and weevils, as well as of couch grass and other noxious weeds, while some of its favourite dainties, such as thistles, walnuts, and acorns, will hardly be grudged at any time. It is not an easy matter to decide; and, if the rook is to be spared, economy must be tempered with sentiment, in which case the evidence will perhaps be found to justify a verdict of guilty, with a strong recommendation to mercy.

MAY

THE CUCKOO

With the single exception of the nightingale, bird of lovers, no other has been more written of in prose or verse than the so-called "harbinger of spring." This is a foolish name for a visitor that does not reach our shores before, at any rate, the middle of April. Even Whitaker allows us to recognise the coming of spring nearly a month earlier; and for myself, impatient if only for the illusion of Nature's awakening, I date my spring from the ending of the shortest day. Once the days begin to lengthen, it is time to glance at the elms for the return of the rooks and to get out one's fishing-tackle again. Yet the cuckoo comes rarely before the third week of April, save in the fervent imagination of premature heralds, who, giving rein to a fancy winged by desire, or honestly deceived by some village cuckoo clock heard on their country rambles, solemnly write to the papers announcing the inevitable March cuckoo. They know better in the Channel Islands, for in the second week of April, and not before, there are cuckoos in every bush – hundreds of exhausted travellers pausing for strength to complete the rest of their journey to Britain. Not on the return migration in August do the wanderers assemble in the islands, since, having but lately set out, they are not yet weary enough to need the rest. The only district of England in which I have heard of similar gatherings of cuckoos is East Anglia, where, about the time of their arrival, they regularly collect in the bushes and indulge in preliminary gambols before flying north and west.

Cuckoos, then, reach these islands about the third week of April, and they leave us again at the end of the summer, the old birds flying south in July, the younger generation following three or four weeks later. Goodness knows by what extraordinary instinct these young ones know the way. But the young cuckoo is a marvel altogether in the manner of its education, since, when one comes to think of it, it has no upbringing by its own parents and cannot even learn how to cry "Cuckoo!" by example or instruction. Its foster-parents speak another language, and its own folk have ceased from singing by the time it is out of the nest. A good deal has been written about the way in which the note varies, chiefly in the direction of greater harshness and a more staccato and less sustained note, towards the end of the cuckoo's stay. According to the rustic rhyme, it changes its tune in June, which is probably poetic licence rather than the fruits of actual observation. It is, however, commonly agreed that the cuckoo is less often heard as the time of its departure draws near, and the easiest explanation of its silence, once the breeding season is ended, is that the note, being the love-call of a polygamous bird, is no longer needed.

In Australia the female cuckoo is handsomely barred with white, whereas the male is uniformly black; but with our bird it is exceedingly difficult to distinguish one sex from the other on the wing, and, were it not for occasional evidence of females having been shot when actually calling, we might still believe that it is the male only that makes this sound. The note is joyous only in the poet's fancy, just as he has also read sadness into the "sobbing" of the nightingale. There is, indeed, when we consider its life, something fantastic in the hypothesis that the cuckoo can know no trouble in life, merely because it escapes the rigours of our winter. Eternal summer must be a delight, but the cuckoo has to work hard for the privilege, and it must at times be harried to the verge of desperation by the small birds that continually mob it in broad daylight. This behaviour on the part of its pertinacious little neighbours has been the occasion of much futile speculation; but the one certain result of such persecution is to make the cuckoo, along with its fellow-sufferer, the owls, preferably active in the sweet peace of the gloaming, when its puny tyrants are gone to roost. Much heated argument has raged round the real or supposed sentiment that inspires such demonstrations on the part of linnets, sparrows, chaffinches, and other determined hunters of the cuckoo. It seems impossible, when we observe the larger bird's unmistakable desire to win free of them, to attribute friendly feelings to its pursuers. Yet some writers have held the curious belief that, with lingering memories of the days when, a year ago, they devoted themselves to the ugly foster-child, the little birds still regard the stranger with affection. If so, then they have an eccentric way of showing it, and the cuckoo, driven by the chattering little termagants from pillar to post, may well pray to be saved from its friends. On the other hand, even though convinced of their hostility, it is not easy to believe, as some folks tell us, that they mistake the cuckoo for a hawk. Even the human eye, though slower to take note of such differences, can distinguish between the two, and the cuckoo's note would still further undeceive them. The most satisfactory explanation of all perhaps is that the nest memories do in truth survive, not, however, investing the cuckoo with a halo of romance, but rather branding it as an object of suspicion, an interloper, to be driven out of the neighbourhood at all costs ere it has time to billet its offspring on the hard-working residents. All of which is, needless to say, the merest guesswork, since any attempt to interpret the simplest actions of birds is likely to lead us into erroneous conclusions. Yet, of the two, it certainly seems more reasonable to regard the smaller birds as resenting the parasitic habit in the cuckoo than to admit that they can actually welcome the murder of their own offspring to make room in the nest for the ugly changeling foisted on them by this fly-by-night.

On the lucus a non lucendo principle, the cuckoo is chiefly interesting as a parent. The bare fact is that our British kind builds no nest of its own, but puts its eggs out to hatch, choosing for the purpose the nests of numerous small birds which it knows to be suitable. Further investigation of the habits of this not very secretive bird, shows that she first lays her egg on the ground and then carries it in her bill to a neighbouring nest. Whether she first chooses the nest and then lays the egg destined to be hatched in it, or whether she lays each egg when so moved and then hunts about for a home for it, has never been ascertained. The former method seems the more practical of the two. On the other hand, little nests of the right sort are so plentiful in May that, with her mother-instinct to guide her, she could always find one at a few moments' notice. Some people, who are never so happy as when making the wonders of Nature seem still more wonderful than they really are, have declared that the cuckoo lays eggs to match those among which she deposits them, or that, at any rate, she chooses the nests of birds whose eggs approximately resemble her own. I should have liked to believe this, but am unfortunately debarred by the memory of about forty cuckoo's eggs that I took, seven-and-twenty summers ago, in the woods round Dartford Heath. The majority of these were found in hedgesparrows' nests, and the absolute dissimilarity between the great spotted egg of the cuckoo and the little blue egg of its so-called dupe would have impressed even a colour-blind animal. Occasionally, I believe, a blue cuckoo's egg has been found, but such a freak could hardly be the result of design. As a matter of fact, there is no need for any such elaborate deception. Up to the moment of hatching, the little foster-parents have in all probability no suspicion of the trick that has been played on them. Birds do not take deliberate notice of the size or colour of their own eggs. Kearton somewhere relates how he once induced a blackbird to sit on the eggs of a thrush, and a lapwing on those of a redshank. So, too, farmyard hens will hatch the eggs of ducks or game birds and wild birds can even be persuaded to sit on eggs made of painted wood. Why then, since they are so careless of appearances, should the cuckoo go to all manner of trouble to match the eggs of hedgesparrow, robin or warbler? The bird would not notice the difference, and, even if she did, she would probably sit quite as close, if only for the sake of the other eggs of her own laying. Once the ugly nestling is hatched, there comes swift awakening. Yet there is no thought of reprisal or desertion. It looks rather as if the little foster-parents are hypnotised by the uncouth guest, for they see their own young ones elbowed out of the home and continue, with unflagging devotion, to minister to the insatiable appetite of the greedy little murderer. A bird so imbued as the parasitic cuckoo with the Wanderlust would make a very careless parent, and we must therefore perhaps revise our unflattering estimate of its attitude and admit that it does the best it can by its offspring in putting them out to nurse. This habit, unique among British birds, is practised by many others elsewhere, and in particular by the American troupials, or cattle-starlings. One of these indeed goes even farther, since it entrusts its eggs to the care of a nest-building cousin. There are also American cuckoos that build their own nest and incubate their own eggs.

On the whole, our cuckoo is a friend to the farmer, for it destroys vast quantities of hairy caterpillars that no other bird, resident or migratory, would touch. On the other hand, no doubt, the numbers of other small useful birds must suffer, not alone because the cuckoo sucks their eggs, but also because, as has been shown, the rearing of every young cuckoo means the destruction of the legitimate occupants of the nest. So far however as the farmer is concerned, this is probably balanced by the reflection that a single young cuckoo is so rapacious as to need all the insect food available.

The cuckoo, like the woodcock, is supposed to have its forerunner. Just as the small horned owl, which reaches our shores a little in advance of the latter, is popularly known as the "woodcock owl," so also the wryneck, which comes to us about the same time as the first of the cuckoos, goes by the name of "cuckoo-leader." It is never a very conspicuous bird, and appears to be rarer nowadays than formerly. Schoolboys know it best from its habit of hissing like a snake and giving them a rare fright when they cautiously insert a predatory hand in some hollow tree in search of a possible nest. It is in such situations that, along with titmice and some other birds, the wryneck rears its young; and it doubtless owes many an escape to this habit of hissing, accompanied by a vigorous twisting of its neck and the infliction of a sufficient peck, easily mistaken in a moment of panic for the bite of an angry adder. Thus does Nature protect her weaklings.

JUNE

VOICES OF THE NIGHT

The majority of nocturnal animals, more particularly those bent on spoliation, are strangely silent. True, frogs croak in the marshes, bats shrill overhead at so high a pitch that some folks cannot hear them, and owls hoot from their ruins in a fashion that some vote melodious and romantic, while others associate the sound rather with midnight crime and dislike it accordingly. The badger, on the other hand, with the otter and fox – all of them sad thieves from our point of view – have learnt, whatever their primeval habits, to go about their marauding in stealthy silence; and it is only in less settled regions that one hears the jackals barking, the hyænas howling, and the browsing deer whistling through the night watches.

There are, however, two of our native birds, or rather summer visitors, since they leave us in autumn, closely associated with these warm June nights, the stillness of which they break in very different fashion, and these are the nightingale and nightjar. Each is of considerable interest in its own way. It is not to be denied that the churring note of the nightjar is, to ordinary ears, the reverse of attractive, and the bird is not much more pleasing to the eye than to the ear; while the nightingale, on the contrary, produces such sweet sounds as made Izaak Walton marvel what music God could provide for His saints in heaven when He gave such as this to sinners on earth. The suggestion was not wholly his own, since the father of angling borrowed it from a French writer; but he vastly improved on the original, and the passage will long live in the hearts of thousands who care not a jot for his instructions in respect of worms. At the same time, the nightjar, though the less attractive bird of the two, is fully as interesting as its comrade of the summer darkness, and there should be no difficulty in indicating the little that they have in common, as well as much wherein they differ, in both habits and appearance.

Both, then, are birds of sober attire. Indeed of the two, the nightjar, with its soft and delicately pencilled plumage and the conspicuous white spots, is perhaps the handsomer, though, as it is seen only in the gloaming, its quiet beauty is but little appreciated. The unobtrusive dress of the nightingale, on the other hand, is familiar in districts in which the bird abounds, and is commonly quoted, by contrast with its unrivalled voice, as the converse of the gaudy colouring of raucous macaws and parrakeets. As has been said, both these birds are summer migrants, the nightingale arriving on our shores about the middle of April, the nightjar perhaps a fortnight later. Thenceforth, however, their programmes are wholly divergent, for, whereas the nightjars proceed to scatter over the length and breadth of Britain, penetrating even to Ireland in the west and as far north as the Hebrides, the nightingale stops far short of these extremes and leaves whole counties of England, as well as probably the whole of Scotland, and certainly the whole of Ireland, out of its calculations. It is however well known that its range is slowly but surely extending towards the west.

This curiously restricted distribution of the nightingale, indeed, within the limits of its summer home is among the most remarkable of the many problems confronting the student of distribution, and successive ingenious but unconvincing attempts to explain its seeming eccentricity, or at any rate caprice, in the choice of its nesting range only make the confusion worse. Briefly, in spite of a number of doubtful and even suspicious reports of the bird's occurrence outside of these boundaries, it is generally agreed by the soundest observers that its travels do not extend much north of the city of York, or much west of a line drawn through Exeter and Birmingham. By way of complicating the argument, we know, on good authority, that the nightingale's range is equally peculiar elsewhere; and that, whereas it likewise shuns the departments in the extreme west of France, it occurs all over the Peninsula, a region extending considerably farther into the sunset than either Brittany or Cornwall, in both of which it is unknown. No satisfactory explanation of the little visitor's objection to Wild Wales or Cornwall has been found, and it may at once be stated that its capricious distribution cannot be accounted for by any known facts of soil, climate, or vegetation, since the surroundings which it finds suitable in Kent and Sussex are equally to be found down in the West Country, but fail to attract their share of nightingales.

The song of the nightingale, in praise of which volumes have been written, is perhaps more beautiful than that of any other bird, though I have heard wonderful efforts from the mocking-bird in the United States and from the bulbuls along the banks of the Jordan. The latter are sometimes, more especially in poetry, regarded as identical with the nightingale; and, indeed, some ornithologists hold the two to be closely related. What a gap there is between the sobbing cadences of the nightingale and the rasping note of the nightjar, which, with specific reference to a Colonial cousin of that bird Tasmanians ingeniously render as "more pork"! It seems almost ludicrous to include under the head of birdsong not only the music of the nightingale, but also the croak of the raven and the booming note of the ostrich. Yet these also are the love-songs of their kind, and the hen ostrich doubtless finds more music in the thunderous note of her lord than in the faint melody of such song-birds as her native Africa provides. The nightingale sings to his mate while she is sitting on her olive-green eggs perching on a low branch of the tree, at foot of which the slender nest is hidden in the undergrowth. So much is known to every schoolboy who is too often guided by the sound on his errand of plunder; and why the song of this particular warbler should have been described by so many writers as one of sadness, seeing that it is associated with the most joyous days in the bird's year, passes comprehension. So obviously is its object to hearten the female in her long and patient vigil that as soon as the young are hatched the male's voice breaks like that of other choristers to a guttural croak. It is said, indeed – though so cruel an experiment would not appeal to many – that if the nest be destroyed just as the young are hatched the bird recovers all his sweetness of voice and sings anew while another home is built.