A Year with the Birds

No one who hails the approach of spring as the real beginning of a new life for men and plants and animals, can fail to be grateful to this little brown bird for putting on it the stamp and sanction of his clear resonant voice. We may grow tired of his two notes – he never gets beyond two – for he sings almost the whole summer through, and was in full voice on the 25th of September in the same year in which he began on March 23rd; but not even the first twitter of the Swallow, or the earliest song of the Nightingale, has the same hopeful story to tell me as this delicate traveller who dares the east wind and the frost. They spend the greater part of the year with us; I have seen them still lurking in sheltered corners of the Dorsetshire coast, at the beginning of October, within sound of the sea-waves in which many of them must doubtless perish before they reach their journey’s end. And now and then they will even pass the winter with us: this was the case with one which took up his sojourn at Bodicote, near Banbury, in a winter of general mildness, though not unbroken, if I recollect right, by some very sharp frosts.

The Willow-warbler follows his cousin to England in a very few days, and remains his companion in the trees all through the summer. He has the same brownish-yellow back and yellowish-white breast, but is a very little larger, and sings a very different song, which is unique among all British birds. Beginning with a high and tolerably full note, he drops it both in force and pitch in a cadence short and sweet, as though he were getting exhausted with the effort; for that it is a real effort to him and all his slim and tender relations, no one who watches as well as listens can have a reasonable doubt. This cadence is often perfect, by which I mean that it descends gradually, not of course on the notes of our musical scale, by which no birds in their natural state would deign to be fettered, but through fractions of one or perhaps two of our tones, and without returning upwards at the end; but still more often, and especially, as I fancy, after they have been here a few weeks, they take to finishing with a note nearly as high in pitch as that with which they began.14 This singular song is heard in summer term in every part of the Parks, and in the grass beneath the trees there must be many nests; but these we are not likely to find except by accident, so beautifully are they concealed by their grassy roofs. Through the hole in the upper part of the side you see tiny eggs, speckled with reddish brown, lying on a warm bedding of soft feathers; one of these was built last May in the very middle of the lawn of the Parsonage-house at Ferry-Hincksey, and two others of exactly the same build, one a Chiff-chaff’s, were but a little way outside the garden-gate, and had escaped the sharp eyes of the village boys when I last heard of them. Though from being on the ground they probably escape the notice of Magpies and Jackdaws and other egg-devouring birds, these eggs and the young that follow must often fall a prey to stoats and weasels, rats and hedgehogs. That such creatures are not entirely absent from the neighbourhood of the Parks, I can myself bear witness, having seen one morning two fine stoats in deadly combat for some object of prey which I could not discern, as I was divided from them by the river. The piping squeaks they uttered were so vehement and loud, that at the first moment I mistook them for the alarm-note of some bird that was strange to me. In July, 1886, I saw a large stoat playing in Addison’s Walk, when few human beings were about, and the young birds, newly-fledged, were no doubt an easy prey.

One word more before we leave the Tree-warblers. In front of my drawing-room window in the country are always two rows of hedges of sweet peas, and another of edible peas; towards the end of the summer some little pale yellow birds come frequently and climb up and down the pea-sticks, apparently in search of insects rather than of the peas. These are the young Willow-warblers, which after their first moult assume this gently-toned yellow tint; and very graceful and beautiful creatures they are. I have sometimes seen them hover, like humming-birds, over a spray on which they could not get an easy footing, and give the stem or leaves a series of rapid pecks.

We have to walk but a little further on to hear or see at least two of our first group, the Sylviae, or fruit-eating warblers. As we pass into the Park by the entrance close to the house of the Keeper of the Museum, we are almost sure, on any sunny day, to hear both Blackcap and Garden-warbler, and with a little pains and patience, to see them both. These two (for a wonder) take their scientific names from the characteristics by which sensible English folk have thought best to name them; the Blackcap being Sylvia atracapilla, and the Garden-warbler Sylvia hortensis. Mr. Ruskin says, in that delicious fragment of his about birds, called Love’s Meinie, that all birds should be named on this principle; and indeed if they had only to discharge the duty which many of our English names perform so well, viz. that of letting English people know of what bird we are talking, his plan would be an excellent one. Unluckily, Ornithology is a science, and a science which embraces all the birds in the world; and we must have some means of knowing for certain that we shall be understood of all the world when we mention a bird’s name. This necessity is well illustrated in the case of the warblers. So many kinds of them are there, belonging to all our three groups, in Europe alone, not to speak of other parts of the world, that even a scientific terminology and description upon description have not been able to save the birds from getting mixed up together, or getting confounded with their own young, or with the young of other birds.

If the Blackcap were not a Sylvia, he could not well be scientifically named after his black head, for other birds, such as Titmice, have also black heads, and I have frequently heard the Cole Tit described as the Blackcap. In any case he should perhaps have been named after his wonderful faculty of song, in which he far excels all the other birds of our three groups. Most people know the Blackcap’s song who have ever lived in the country, for you can hardly enter a wood in the summer without being struck by it; and all I need do here is to distinguish it as well as I can from that of the Garden-warbler, which may easily be mistaken for it by an unpractised ear, when the birds are keeping out of sight in the foliage, as they often most provokingly will do. Both are essentially warblers; that is, they sing a strain of music, continuous and legato, instead of a song that is broken up into separate notes or short phrases, like that of the Song-thrush, or the Chiff-chaff. But they differ in two points: the strain of the Blackcap is shorter, forming in fact one lengthened phrase “in sweetness long drawn out,” while the Garden-warbler will go on almost continuously for many minutes together; and secondly, the Blackcap’s music is played upon a mellower instrument. The most gifted Blackcaps – for birds of the same species differ considerably in their power of song – excel all other birds in the soft quality of their tone, just as a really good boy’s voice, though less brilliant and resonant, excels all women’s voices in softness and sweetness. So far as I have been able to observe, the Blackcap’s voice is almost entirely wanting in that power of producing the harmonics of a note which gives a musical sound its brilliant quality; but this very want is what produces its unrivalled mellowness.

The other two members of our first group (we are still in genus Sylvia) are the two Whitethroats, greater and lesser, and we have not far to go to find them. They arrive just at the beginning of our Easter Term, but never come to Oxford in great numbers, because their proper homes, the hedge-rows, are naturally not common objects of a town. In the country the greater Whitethroats are swarming this year (1885), and in most years they are the most abundant of our eight warblers; and the smaller bird, less seen and less showy, makes his presence felt in almost every lane and meadow by the brilliancy of his note.

Where shall we find a hedge near at hand, where we may learn to distinguish the two birds? We left the Blackcaps and Garden-warblers at the upper end of the Park; we shall still have a chance of listening to them if we take the walk towards Parsons’ Pleasure, and here in the thorn-hedge on the right hand of the path, we shall find both the Whitethroats.15 As we walk along, a rough grating sound, something like the noise of a diminutive corn-crake, is heard on the other side of the hedge – stopping when we stop, and sounding ahead of us as we walk on. This is the teasing way of the greater Whitethroat, and it means that he is either building a nest in the hedge, or thinking of doing so. If you give him time, however, he will show himself, flirting up to the top of the hedge, crooning, craking, and popping into it again; then flying out a little way, cheerily singing a soft and truly warbling song, with fluttering wings and roughened feathers, and then perhaps perching on a twig to repeat it. Now you see the white of his throat; it is real white, and it does not go below the throat. In one book I have seen the Garden-warbler called a Whitethroat; but in his case the white is not so pure, and it is continued down the breast. The throat of both Whitethroats is real white, and they have a pleasant way of puffing it out, as if to assure one that there is no mistake about it.

But how to distinguish the two? for in size they differ hardly enough to guide an inexperienced eye. There are three points of marked difference. The larger bird has a rufous or rusty-coloured back,16 and his wing-coverts are of much the same colour; while the back of the lesser bird is darkish or grayish brown. Secondly, the head of the lesser Whitethroat is of a much darker bluish-gray tint. But much the best point of distinction in the breeding season is in the song. As I have said, the larger bird warbles; but the lesser one, after a little preliminary soliloquy in an under-tone, bursts out into a succession of high notes, all of exactly the same pitch. It took me some time to find out who was the performer of this music which I heard so constantly in the hedges, for the bird is very restless and very modest. When I caught sight of him he would not stop to be examined closely. One day however he was kind enough to alight for a moment in a poplar close by me, and as I watched him in the loosely-leaved branches, he poured out the song, and duly got the credit for it.

We are now close to our old winter-station on the bridge over the mill-stream, and leaning over it once more on the upper side, we shall hear, if not see, both the remaining species of the warblers that Oxford has to show us. They are the only species of River-warblers that are known to visit England regularly every year; these two, the Sedge-warbler and the Reed-warbler, never fail, and the Sedge-warbler comes in very large numbers, but only a few specimens of other River-warblers have been found out in their venturesomeness. Still, every young bird-hunter should acquaint himself with the characteristics of the rarer visitors, in order to qualify himself for helping to throw light on what is still rather a dark corner of English ornithology. These same species which we so seldom see are swarming in the flat lands of Holland, close by us, and why should they not come over to the island which birds seem to love so dearly?

But there is no doubt that birds have ways, and reasons for them, which man is very unlikely ever to be able to understand. Why, as Mr. Harting asks,17 should the Reed-warbler be so much less “generally distributed” than the Sedge-warbler? That it is so, we can show well enough even from Oxford alone. You will find Sedge-warblers all along the Cherwell and the Isis, wherever there is a bit of cover, and very often they will turn up where least expected; in a corn-field, for example, where I have seen them running up and down the corn-stalks as if they were their native reeds. But you must either know where to find the Reed-warbler, or learn by slow degrees. Parsons’ Pleasure is almost the only place known to me where

“The Reed-warbler swung in a nest with her young,Deep-sheltered and warm from the wind.”18

There is, however, in this case, at least a plausible answer to Mr. Harting’s question. Owing to the prime necessity of reeds for the building of this deep-sheltered nest, which is swung between several of them, kept firm by their centrifugal tendency, yielding lovingly yet proudly to every blast of wind or current of water – owing to this necessity, the Reed-Warbler declines to take up his abode in any place where the reeds are not thick enough and tall enough to give a real protection to himself and his brood. Now in the whole length of Isis between Kennington19 and Godstow, and of Cherwell between its mouth and Parsons’ Pleasure, there is no reed-bed which answers all the requirements of this little bird. Now and then, it is true, they will leave the reeds for some other nesting-place; one of them sang away all the Summer Term of 1884 in the bushes behind the Museum, nearly half a mile from the river, and probably built a nest among the lilac-bushes which there abound. But that year they seemed to be more abundant than usual; and this, perhaps, was one for whom there was no room in the limited space of the reeds at Parsons’ Pleasure. Thick bushes, where many lithe saplings spring from a common root, would suit him better than a scanty reed-bed.20

There is no great difficulty in distinguishing Sedge- and Reed-warblers, if you have an eye for the character of birds. The two are very different in temperament, though both are of the same quiet brown, with whitish breast. The Sedge-bird is a restless, noisy, impudent little creature, not at all modest or retiring, and much given to mocking the voices of other birds. This is done as a rule in the middle of one of his long and continuous outpourings of chatter; but I one day heard a much more ridiculous display of impertinence. I was standing at the bottom of the Parks, looking at a pair or two of Sedge-warblers on a bush, and wondering whether they were going to build a nest there, when a Blackbird emerged from the thicket behind me, and seeing a human being, set up that absurd cackle that we all know so well. Instantly, out of the bush I was looking at, there came an echo of this cackle, uttered by a small voice in such ludicrous tones of mockery, as fairly to upset my gravity. It seemed to say, “You awkward idiot of a bird, I can make that noise as well as you: only listen!” —

The Reed-warbler, on the other hand, is quieter and gentler, and utters, by way of song, a long crooning soliloquy, in accents not sweet, but much less harsh and declamatory than those of his cousin. I have listened to him for half-an-hour together among the bushes that border the reed-bed, and have fancied that his warble suits well with the gentle flow of the water, and the low hum of the insects around me. He will sit for a long time singing on the same twig, while his partner is on her nest in the reeds below; but the Sedge-warbler, in this and other respects like a fidgety and ill-trained child, is never in one place, or in the same vein of song, for more than a minute at a time.

It is amusing to stand and listen to the two voices going on at the same time; the Sedge-bird rattling along in a state of the intensest excitement, pitching up his voice into a series of loud squeaks, and then dropping it into a long-drawn grating noise, like the winding-up of an old-fashioned watch, while the Reed-warbler, unaffected by all this volubility, takes his own line in a continued prattle of gentle content and self-sufficiency.

These eight birds, then, are the warblers which at present visit Oxford. Longer walks and careful observation may no doubt bring us across at least two others, the Wood-warbler and the Grasshopper-warbler: the nest of the Wood-warbler has been found within three miles. Another bird, too, which is often called a warbler, has of late become very common both in and about Oxford – the Redstart. Four or five years ago they were getting quite rare; but this year (1885) the flicker of the red tail is to be seen all along the Cherwell, in the Broad Walk, where they build in holes of the elms, in Port Meadow, where I have heard the gentle warbling song from the telegraph wires, and doubtless in most gardens. The Redstart is so extremely beautiful in summer, his song so tender and sweet, and all his ways so gentle and trustful, that if he were as common, and stayed with us all the year, he would certainly put our Robin’s popularity to the proof. Nesting in our garden, or even on the very wall of our house, and making his presence there obvious by his brilliant colouring and his fearless domesticity, he might become, like his plainer cousin of the continent, the favourite of the peasant, who looks to his arrival in spring as the sign of a better time approaching. “I hardly hoped,” writes my old Oberland guide to me, after an illness in the winter, “to see the flowers again, or hear the little Röthel (Black Redstart) under my eaves.”

The Oxford Redstarts find convenient holes for their nests in the pollard willows which line the banks of the Cherwell and the many arms of the Isis. The same unvaried and unnatural form of tree, which looks so dreary and ghastly in the waste of winter flood, is full of comfort and adaptability for the bird in summer. The works of man, though not always beautiful, are almost always turned to account by the birds, and by many kinds preferred to the solitude of wilder haunts. Whether he builds houses, or constructs railways, or digs ditches, or forces trees into an unnatural shape, they are ready to take advantage of every chance he gives them. Only when the air is poisoned by smoke and drainage, and vegetation retreats before the approach of slums, do they leave their natural friends to live without the charm of their voices – all but that strange parasite of mankind, the Sparrow. He, growing sootier every year, and doing his useful dirty work with untiring diligence and appetite, lives on his noisy and quarrelsome life even in the very heart of London.

Whether the surroundings of the Oxford Sparrows have given them a sense of higher things, I cannot say; but they have ways which have suggested to me that the Sparrow must at some period of his existence have fallen from a higher state, of which some individuals have a Platonic ἀνάμνησις which prompts them to purer walks of life. No sooner does the summer begin to bring out the flies among our pollard willows, than they become alive with Sparrows. There you may see them, as you repose on one of the comfortable seats on the brink of the Cherwell in the Parks, catching flies in the air with a vigour and address which in the course of a few hundred years might almost develop into elegance. Again and again I have had to turn my glass upon a bird to see if it could really be a Sparrow that was fluttering in the air over the water with an activity apparently meant to rival that of the little Fly-catcher, who sits on a bough at hand, and occasionally performs the same feat with native lightness and deftness. But these are for the most part young Sparrows of the year, who have been brought here perhaps by their parents to be out of the way of cats, and for the benefit of country air and an easily-digested insect diet. How long they stay here I do not know; but before our Autumn Term begins they must have migrated back to the city, for I seldom or never see them in the willows except in the Summer Term.

These seats by the Cherwell are excellent stations for observation. Swallows, Martins, and Sand-martins flit over the water; Swifts scream overhead towards evening; Greenfinches trill gently in the trees, or utter that curious lengthened sound which is something between the bleat of a lamb and the snore of a light sleeper; the Yellow Wagtail, lately arrived, walks before you on the path, looking for materials for a nest near the water’s edge; the Fly-catcher, latest arrival of all, is perched in silence on the railing, darting now and then into the air for flies; the Corn-crake sounds from his security beyond the Cherwell, and a solitary Nightingale, soon to be driven away by dogs and boats and bathers, may startle you with a burst of song from the neighbouring thicket.

Of the birds just mentioned, the Swifts, Swallows, and Martins build, I need hardly say, in human habitations, the Sand-martins in some sand- or gravel-pit, occasionally far away from the river. The largest colony of these little brown birds, so characteristic of our Oxford summer, is in a large sand-pit on Foxcombe Hill: there, last July, I chanced to see the fledgelings peeping out of their holes into the wide world, like children gazing from a nursery window. The destruction all these species cause among the flies which swarm round Oxford must be enormous. One day a Martin dropped a cargo of flies out of its mouth on to my hat, just as it was about to be distributed to the nestlings; a magnifying glass revealed a countless mass of tiny insects, some still alive and struggling. One little wasp-like creature disengaged himself from the rest, and crawled down my hand, escaping literally from the very jaws of death.

Before I leave these birds of summer, let me record the fact that last June (1886) a pair of swallows built their nest on the circular spring of a bell just over a doorway behind the University Museum; the bell was constantly being rung, and the nest was not unfrequently examined, but they brought up their young successfully. This should be reassuring to those who believe that the Museum and its authorities are a terror to living animals.

CHAPTER III.

THE ALPS IN JUNE

When the University year is over, usually about mid-June, responsibilities cease almost entirely for a few weeks; and it is sometimes possible to leave the lowlands of England and their familiar birds without delay, and to seek new hunting-grounds on the Continent before the freshness of early summer has faded, and before the world of tourists has begun to swarm into every picturesque hole and corner of Europe. An old-standing love for the Alpine region usually draws me there, sooner or later, wherever I may chance to turn my steps immediately after leaving England. He who has once seen the mountain pastures in June will find their spell too strong to be resisted.

At that early time the herdsmen have not yet reached the higher pastures, and cows and goats have not cropped away the flowers which scent the pure cool breeze. The birds are undisturbed and trustful, and still busy with their young. The excellent mountain-inns are comparatively empty, the Marmots whistle near at hand, and the snow lies often so deep upon footpaths where a few weeks later even the feeblest mountaineer would be at home, that a fox, a badger, or even a little troop of chamois, may occasionally be seen without much climbing. If bad weather assails us on the heights, which are liable even in June to sudden snow-storms and bitter cold, we can descend rapidly into the valleys, to find warmth and a new stratum of bird-life awaiting us. And if persistent wet or cold drives us for a day or two to one of the larger towns, Bern, or Zürich, or Geneva, we can spend many pleasant hours in the museums with which they are provided, studying specimens at leisure, and verifying or correcting the notes we have made in the mountains.

It is a singular fact that I do not remember to have ever seen an Englishman in these museums, nor have I met with one in my mountain walks who had a special interest in the birds of the Alps. Something is done in the way of butterfly-hunting; botanists, or at least botanical tins, are not uncommon. The guide-books have something to say of the geology and the botany of the mountains, but little or nothing of their fauna. I have searched in vain through all the volumes of the Jahrbuch of the Swiss Alpine Club for a single article or paragraph on the birds, and the oracles of the English Alpine Club are no less dumb.

Not that ornithologists are entirely wanting for this tempting region; Switzerland has many, both amateur and scientific. A journal of Swiss ornithology is published periodically. Professor Fatio, of Geneva, one of the most distinguished of European naturalists, has given much time and pains to the birds of the Alpine world, and published many valuable papers on the subject, the results of which have been embodied in Mr. Dresser’s Birds of Europe. But what with the all-engrossing passion for climbing, and the natural indisposition of the young Englishman to loiter in that exhilarating air, it has come to pass that the Anglo-Saxon race has for long past invaded and occupied these mountains for three months in each year, without discovering how remarkable the region is in the movements and characteristics of its animal life.