A Year with the Birds

Even in Virgil the distinction is maintained; for while palumbes breeds in the elm in the first Eclogue, already quoted (which poem, it should be noted, is genuinely north-Italian, and independent of a Greek original), columba on the other hand has her nest in a rock, as the following well-known and beautiful passage will plainly show —

Qualis spelunca subito commota columba,Cui domus et dulces latebroso in pumice nidi,Fertur in arva volans, plausumque exterrita pennisDat tecto ingentem, mox aere lapsa quietoRadit iter liquidum, celeres neque commovet alas.

And in the same fifth Aeneid, the bird which served as a target in the archery contest – a domestic bird, we may suppose – was a columba, not a palumbes.

Now it is a fact almost universally recognized by modern ornithologists that our domestic pigeon is in all its varieties descended from the wild Rock-dove; and thus when we find that the Romans used columba to denote their domestic bird, and also a wild bird which made its nest in rocks, the conclusion is almost certain that by that word we are to understand our Blue-rock pigeon (Columba livia); and if this is so, by palumbes must be meant one of the other two Italian pigeons, the Wood-pigeon (Columba palumbus, Linn.) or the Stock-dove (Columba aenas, Linn.). Both species, as I have said, are now birds of passage in Italy, while the Blue-rock is resident; and Pliny tells us of the palumbes that it arrived every year in great numbers from the sea – he does not say at what season. Perhaps the Stock-dove56 is the more likely of the two to have been the bird generally meant by palumbes; but it is quite possible that, like the unskilled of the present day, the Romans confounded the two species, and wrote of them as one.

But there is still a difficulty. The palumbes in the time of Virgil and Pliny seems to have bred in Italy; Pliny knew all about their breeding (x. 147 and 153), and Virgil makes Damoetas mark the place where their nesting is going on. But it is now very rarely, if we may trust Italian naturalists, that either Ring-dove or Stock-dove passes a summer in Italy. Birds seek a cool climate for their breeding-places; probably because in very hot countries the food suitable to their nestlings will not be found in the breeding-season. Has the climate of Italy become hotter in the last two thousand years, discouraging these birds from lingering south of the Alps?

This is an old question which has been well thrashed out by the learned, and the general conclusion seems to be in the affirmative. The last eminent writer on the subject takes this view,57 and his argument would receive a decided clinch if it could be proved that certain kinds of birds, which formerly bred in the country, do so no longer, and that this is not due to other causes, such as the well-known passion of the Italians for killing and eating all the birds on which they can lay their hands.

If we now turn to the first Georgic, in which, following the Greek poet Aratus with freedom and discretion, Virgil has told us more of animal life than in all the rest of his poems, we find frequent mention of the long-legged and long-billed birds with which he must have been very familiar in his boyhood at Mantua. The first of these we meet with is the Crane (Latin grus). About the meaning of the word grus there can be no doubt; it would seem that the Crane was a bird accurately distinguished by the forefathers of our modern Aryan peoples even before they separated from each other. The Greek word γέρανος, the Latin grus, the German Kranich, and the Welsh garan are all identical, and point to a period when the bird was known by the same name to the whole race. Probably it was much more abundant both in Europe and Asia, at a time when the face of the country was covered by vast tracts of swamp and forest. Even now, at the period of migration, they swarm in the East; “the whooping and trumpeting of the crane,” says a great authority (Canon Tristram), “rings through the night air in spring, and the vast flocks we noticed passing north near Beersheba were a wonderful sight.”

Virgil mentions the Crane in two passages as doing damage to the crops: and this is fully borne out by modern accounts from Asia Minor and Scinde, quoted by Mr. Dresser in his Birds of Europe. The poet says of them (Georgic i. 118) —

Nec tamen haec cum sint hominumque boumque laboresVersando terram experti, nihil improbus anserStrymoniaeque grues et amaris intuba fibrisOfficiunt aut umbra nocet.58

And in line 307 of the same book he tells the husbandman that the winter is the time to catch them: —

Tum gruibus pedicas, et retia ponere cervisAuritosque sequi lepores;59

a passage from which it might appear as if the Crane were snared as an article of food, not only as an enemy to the agriculturist. And indeed in Pliny’s time the epicure’s taste was all in favour of cranes against storks; but when Virgil wrote, the reverse was the case. This little fact, so characteristic of the sway of fashion over the gourmand of that luxurious age, was recorded by Cornelius Nepos, and is quoted from him by Pliny (Nat. Hist. x. 60).

The Crane is now a bird of passage in Italy, and the Stork also; they appear in spring on their way to northern breeding-places, and in autumn reappear with their numbers reinforced by the young broods of the year. These habits seem to have been the same in Virgil’s day. In the passage just quoted (Georgic i. 120) it is evidently in the spring that the bird was hurtful to the crops, as the seed was to be sown in the spring (line 43, etc.).

On the other hand, in line 307, the Crane is to be snared in the winter; yet I can hardly believe that any number could have stayed in Italy during winter, if the climate was then colder than it is now. Moreover, Pliny speaks of the Crane as ‘aestatis advena,’ that is, a summer visitor, as opposed to the Stork, who was a winter visitor. But these Latin words ‘aestas’ and ‘hiems’ are to be understood loosely for the whole warm season, and the whole cold or stormy season; and if cranes came on their passage northwards, when warm weather began, they must also have appeared, on their return journey, when cold weather was beginning; so that both crane and stork might equally be styled ‘aestatis advena,’ or ‘hiemis advena.’ Pliny was surely making one of his many blunders when he distinguished the two birds by these two expressions.

The migration of such great birds as these, unlike those of our tiny visitors to England, could hardly escape the notice even of men who knew nothing of scientific observation. Virgil has given us a momentary glimpse of the Crane’s migration in spring; he is following in the tracks of Homer, but as a Mantuan he must have seen the phenomenon himself also.

Clamorem ad sidera tolluntDardanidae e muris; spes addita suscitat iras;Tela manu jaciunt; quales sub nubibus atrisStrymoniae dant signa grues, atque aethera tranantCum sonitu, fugiuntque Notos clamore secundo.60

Here, as they fly before a southern wind, they are on their way to the north in the spring. But in another passage he seems rather to be thinking of autumn; it is where he is telling the husbandman how to presage an approaching storm, such a storm as descends in autumn from the Alps upon the plains of Lombardy: —

Nunquam imprudentibus imberObfuit; aut illum surgentem vallibus imisAeriae fugere grues, aut bucula coelumSuspiciens patulis captavit naribus auras,Aut arguta lacus circumvolitavit hirundo.61

The general tenor of the whole passage of which these lines are a fragment, as well as their original in the Diosemeia of Aratus, points to the approach of ‘hiems,’ the stormy season, as the event indicated; the falling leaves dance in air, the feathers of the moulting birds float on the water, but the swallow is not yet gone. The deep Alpine valleys seethe with swirling mist, which rises into gathering cloud, and soon becomes stormy rain beating upon the plains, as we may see it in any ‘Loamshire’ of our own, that lies below the stony hills of a wilder and wetter country-side. In this striking and truthful passage, Virgil has not followed his model too closely, but was evidently thinking of what he must often have witnessed himself.

The Stork is only mentioned by Virgil in a single passage —

Cum vere rubentiCandida venit avis longis invisa colubris.62

Doubtless the bird arrived in great numbers in spring on the Mantuan marshes, and found abundance of food there in the way of frogs and snakes. Its snake-eating propensity was considered so valuable in Thessaly, that the bird was preserved there by law, says Aristotle.63 But did it remain to breed in Italy? It is remarkable that both Aristotle and Pliny have very little to say of its habits, and hardly anything as to its breeding; and if the Stork had been a bird familiar to them, they could hardly have failed to give it a prominent place in their books. At the present time it seems to pass over Italy and Greece on its passage northwards, never staying to breed in the former country and rarely in the latter; yet this can hardly be owing to temperature, as it breeds freely in the parallel latitudes of Spain and Asia Minor.

As regards ancient Italy, however, the question seems to be set at rest by a very curious passage from the Satyricon of Petronius, which has been kindly pointed out to me by Mr. Robinson Ellis. It is remarkable not only for its Latin, but for its concise and admirable description of the characteristic ways of the Stork: —

Ciconia etiam grata, peregrina, hospita,Pietaticultrix, gracilipes, crotalistria,Avis exsul hiemis, titulus tepidi temporis,Nequitiae nidum in cacabo fecit meo.64

“A Stork too, that welcome guest from foreign lands, that devotee of filial duty, with its long thin legs and rattling bill, the bird that is banished by the winter and announces the coming of the warm season, has made his accursed nest in my boiler.” I am reminded also of a story, which has the authority both of Jornandes and Procopius, that at the siege of Aquileia in A.D. 452, Attila was encouraged to persist by the sight of a Stork and her young leaving the beleaguered city. “Such a domestic bird would never have abandoned her ancient seats unless those towers had been devoted to impending ruin and solitude.”65 Here then we seem to have another example of a bird abandoning its ancient practice of breeding, occasionally at least, in Italy. If this is due to persecution, the persecutors have made a great mistake. The Stork does no harm to man, but rather rids his fields of vermin; the Crane, which belongs to a different order of birds, may do serious damage, as we have seen, to cultivated land, like the ‘improbus anser,’ and other birds which Virgil in the first Georgic instructs the husbandman to catch with lime or net, or to frighten away from the fields.66

Let us now turn to the big black birds of the race of the Crows, which are always so difficult to distinguish from one another: for the Roman savant not less difficult than for our own unlearned. There are to be found in Italy at the present day the Raven, the Crow, the Rook, the Jackdaw, the Chough, and the Alpine Chough; all of these seem to be fairly common and resident in one or other part of the country, except our familiar friends the Crow and the Rook, the former of which is very rare, and the latter hardly more than a bird of passage. We cannot of course expect to find these accurately distinguished by the ancient Italians; and there is in fact still some uncertainty as to the identification of certain birds of this kind mentioned by Virgil.

The two commonest of these are the corvus and the cornix– words which undoubtedly represent two different species. The Roman augurs, who were always busily engaged in observing birds (and it were to be wished that they had observed them to some better purpose), clearly distinguished corvus and cornix.67 So also did Pliny,68 in the following curious passage: “The corvus lays its eggs before midsummer, and is then in bad condition for sixty days, up to the ripening of the figs in autumn: but the cornix begins to be disordered after that time.” Virgil also uses the words for two distinct species; his cornix is solitary —

Tum cornix plena pluviam vocatEt sola in sicca secum spatiatur arena;69

improba voce while corvus is gregarious, as is shown in the following memorable description of Nature and of the birds taking heart after the storm has passed: —

Tum liquidas corvi presso ter gutture vocesAut quater ingeminant, et saepe cubilibus altis,Nescio qua praeter solitum dulcedine laeti,Inter se in foliis strepitant; juvat imbribus actis,Progeniem parvam dulcesque revisere natos.70

That in these last beautiful lines corvus means a Rook, no Englishman is likely to deny; yet there are two difficulties to be put aside before we can make the assertion with entire confidence. The first is, that Virgil, here following Aratus, translated by corvus the Greek word κόραξ, which is not generally accepted as meaning a Rook. This is the word which the Greek historian Polybius uses for those naval machines invented by the Romans, in the first war with Carthage, for grappling with a hooked projecting beak the galleys of the enemy; and the rook’s bill is hardly so well suited to give a name to such an engine as that of the crow or raven,71 which has the tip of the upper mandible sharply bent downwards, like that of most flesh-eating birds. Still I must hold it probable that Aratus here used the word for the rook, as he makes it gregarious, and so, I think, did the Alexandrian scholar Theon, who wrote a commentary on his poem. The only other possibility is that he was thinking of the Alpine Chough, a bird which he might possibly have known, and one of thoroughly social habits. But that Virgil, though he too probably knew this bird, was not thinking of it when he wrote the lines just quoted, I feel tolerably sure; he would most likely have used the word graculus rather than corvus, which would seem never to have been applied, like monedula and graculus, to the smaller birds of the group, such as the Alpine Chough and the Jackdaw.

The second difficulty lies in the fact that the Rook is now only a bird of passage in Italy, never stopping to breed in the southern part of the peninsula, and very rarely in the northern; while Virgil speaks of the corvi in the last-quoted passage as loving to revisit their nests. But this difficulty has been overcome by the delightful discovery that the Rooks still stay and breed in the sub-alpine neighbourhood where Virgil passed his early life.72 As I have remarked about the pigeons and the stork, the climate may have been such as would induce some birds to stop south of the great Alpine barrier, which now find there no climate cool enough for breeding; and the Rook was perhaps a more regular resident and breeder then than he is now.

We may conclude then that Virgil’s corvus is our old friend the Rook, even if some Latin authors use the word equally for Rook, Crow, and Raven. Pliny for example tells us (N. H. x. 124) that the corvus can be taught to speak (fancy a bird talking Latin, that stiff and solemn speech!), that he eats flesh for the most part, and that he sometimes makes his nest in elevated buildings; feats which we are not used to associate with Rooks. In fact it is plain that Pliny, who was more of a learned book-reader than a careful observer of the minutiæ of nature, was not quite clear in his notions about the big black birds. But if we can be pretty sure about corvus, what is Virgil’s cornix, stalking on the shore in solitary state, and uttering admonitory croaks from the hollow holm-oak? If we consult dictionaries we shall learn that cornix is the Crow or Rook, “a smaller bird than corvus.” Where did the dictionaries get this authority for making confusion worse confounded? If Virgil distinguished corvus and cornix, and if corvus is the rook, then cornix must be the crow or the raven, and in fact the word probably stands for both. I should incline on the whole to the raven, seeing that at the present day it is much the commoner bird of the two in Italy. Alpine choughs and jackdaws are not wont to stalk about alone; and though the larger chough (our Cornish chough) might do so, and is to be found in the mountain districts of Italy, he cannot well be the bird generally understood by cornix. Could a chough learn to talk with his long thin red bill? But Pliny knew of a talking cornix; “while I was engaged upon this book,” he says, “there was in Rome a cornix from the south-west of Spain, belonging to a Roman knight, which was of an amazingly pure black, and could say certain strings of words, to which it frequently added new ones.”

Swans are frequently mentioned by Virgil, as by other Latin and Greek poets. This splendid bird must have been much commoner then throughout Europe than it is now, and accordingly attracted much attention. It doubtless abounded in the swampy localities of the north of Italy, and at the mouths of the great rivers of Thrace and Asia Minor, as well as in the north of Europe, where it came to be woven into many a Teutonic fable. Homer has frequent and beautiful allusions to it; and the town of Clazomenae, at the mouth of the river Hermus, has a swan stamped upon its coins.

This Swan of the old poets is without any doubt the whooper (Cycnus musicus), whose voice and presence are still well known in Italy and Greece. Virgil had seen it at Mantua, on the watery plain of the Mincius:

Pascentem niveos herboso flumine cycnos.73

And in an admirable simile in the eleventh book of the Aeneid, he likens the stir and dissension in the camp of Turnus, when the news suddenly arrives that Aeneas is marching upon them, to the loud calls of this bird:

Hic undique clamorDissensu vario magnus se tollit ad auras:Haud secus atque alto in luco cum forte catervaeConsedere avium, piscosove amne PadusaeDant sonitum rauci per stagna loquacia cycni.74

We now come to two birds mentioned in the same line of the third Georgic. The poet is telling the farmer to water his flocks in the cool evening of a hot day:

Cum frigidus aera vesperTemperat, et saltus reficit jam roscida luna,Litoraque alcyonen resonant, acalanthida dumi.75

The first of these birds is also mentioned in a line of the first Georgic, which is mainly taken from Aratus; but it is significant that Aratus does not mention the ‘alcyon’ either here or anywhere else.

Non tepidum ad solem pennas in littore panduntDilectae Thetidi alcyones.76

That the ‘alcyon’ of these two passages is to be identified with our Kingfisher, which is still an Italian bird, and the only one of its kind, I can have no reasonable doubt; for Pliny’s description of the bird is too exact to be mistaken. “It is,” he says, “a little larger than a sparrow, of a blue-green colour (colore cyaneo), red in the under parts, having some white feathers close to its neck, and a long thin bill.” This description, it is true, is copied almost word for word from Aristotle, the only exception being the allusion to the white feathers on the side of the neck, which are a well-known feature in the Kingfisher.77 Whether both were thinking of the same bird it is impossible to decide; but that Pliny was describing our Kingfisher, and believed Aristotle to have done so in the passage he copied, it is almost unreasonable to doubt.

It is, however, an open question whether the bird ordinarily known to the Greeks as ἀλκυὼν is to be identified with the Kingfisher. The greatest living authority on the birds of the Levant, Canon Tristram of Durham, tells me that he has convinced himself that it is not the Kingfisher, but the Tern or Sea-swallow: a rare coin of Eretria led him to this conclusion, on which a Tern is figured, sitting on the back of a cow.78 And it must be allowed that the Greeks seem to have thought of their ἀλκυὼν as a sea bird no less than as a river bird. Aristotle remarks that it goes up rivers, but he seems to have thought of it mainly as a sea bird, and a well-known passage in the seventh Idyll of Theocritus appears to bear him out. But I am not here specially concerned with Greek ornithology, and what Virgil says of the alcyon piping and pluming himself on the shore is perfectly consistent with the habits of the bird. I have myself seen it on the coast of Dorset, “pennas in littore pandens,” and taking flight over a bay full half a mile in width. A greater difficulty lies in the alleged vocal powers of the bird; they sing, Pliny tells us, in the reeds, and Virgil’s alcyon makes the shore echo with his voice. The Kingfisher, so far as I know, is a silent bird except when disturbed; he will then utter a shrill pipe as he flies away. But I am quite at a loss to explain his singing, except by supposing that this was one of several curious delusions that had gathered round a curious bird.79

The other bird mentioned in the lines last quoted is, and perhaps will remain, a puzzle. Mr. Rhoades makes it the Goldfinch, following the commentators, who themselves follow an old tradition which will not bear criticism, and in favour of which I can find nothing more convincing than the argument that acantha80 means in Greek a thorny or prickly tree, while the Goldfinch’s favourite food is the seed of the thistle. Let us notice, however, first, that it is not the way of the Goldfinch to sit in a thicket and sing, as Virgil describes the Acalanthis; it is a restless, lively, aërial bird, fond of singing on the wing, and by no means disposed to lurk under cover; and secondly, that the word ἄκανθα does not necessarily mean a thistle, but is equally applied to all kinds of thorny trees and shrubs,81 such as the dumi in which Virgil makes the voice of the bird resound.

Where did Virgil get this Greek word acanthis82 or acalanthis, which he thus appropriated to express some bird familiar to himself? Probably from a very beautiful passage in Theocritus’ seventh Idyll, where, lying on the vine-leaves, Damoetas and Daphnis hear the birds singing, and the murmur of the bees: —

Ἄειδον κορυδοὶ καὶ ἀκανθίδες, ἔστενε τρυγών,

“the larks and the acanthides were singing, and the turtle-dove was moaning.” But what kind of bird was Theocritus himself thinking of? Here we must have recourse to Aristotle, who in his book on birds describes the bird known to the Greeks as acanthis as being “of poor colouring and habits, but having a clear shrill voice.”83 This cannot possibly be the Goldfinch, the happiest and most brightly coloured of our smaller English birds; one too whose song would hardly be picked out to be described as λιγυρά, which word denotes a sustained high and shrill sound, and would not well express a twitter or a quiet warble. Sundevall, the Swedish scholar-naturalist, has pronounced this acanthis of Aristotle to be the linnet; a conclusion with which no one would be likely to agree who is fresh from a sight of that lively bird in its splendid summer plumage, or who knows its gentle twittering song. Let us remember that Aristotle is of all naturalists, down to the time of Willoughby and Ray, the most exact and trustworthy, and that when he uses an adjective to describe a bird or its voice, he means something exact and definite, and is not talking loosely.

Before we try to come to a conclusion about the ἀκανθίς, let us note that Aristotle mentions another small bird, the ἀκανθυλλίς, which, from the name, we may guess to have been one of the same kind as the acanthis. This bird builds a nest which is round and made of flax, and has a small hole by way of entrance. Now let us observe that Italy and Greece are swarming for the greater part of the year with a variety of those small brown or dusky-coloured birds which naturalists roughly call ‘warblers’ – birds for the most part apt to creep and lurk about in thickets or small trees, and having voices more or less shrill, which may very well indeed be called λιγυραί. In England we have some species of this order which are abundant in the summer; e. g. in Oxford, the chiff-chaff, willow-wren, sedge-warbler, and reed-warbler – the two former of which build spherical nests on the ground with a small entrance-hole. These birds correspond with both of Aristotle’s birds in being κακόβιοι —i. e. leading a poor lurking life; κακόχροοι, as being all very sober-coloured and difficult to distinguish from one another, even by a modern expert; in having a clear, sustained, or sibilant song,84 and lastly in building – some of them, that is – round nests with small holes for ingress and egress.