A Year with the Birds

But to return to my village; it is astonishing how many birds, in spite of the presence of their deadliest enemies, boys and cats, will come into our gardens to build their nests, if only fair opportunities are offered them. In a garden close to my own, whose owner has used every means in his power to attract them,27 there were last May fifty-three nests, exclusive of those of swallows and martins. The garden is not more than two or three acres in extent, including the little orchard which adjoins it; but by planting great numbers of thick bushes and coniferous trees, and by placing flower-pots, old wooden boxes, and other such odds and ends, in the forks of the branches at a considerable height from the ground, he has inspired them with perfect confidence in his goodwill and ‘philornithic’ intentions. The fact that a pair of Missel-thrushes reared their young here only a few feet from the ground, and close to a stable and a much-frequented walk, shows that even birds of wild habits of life may be brought to repose trust in man by attention to their wants and wishes. The Blackcap, which almost always nests in woods, had here found it possible to take up its quarters close to the fruit it loves; and of all the commoner kinds the nests were legion. Three Greenfinches built in the same tree one over another, the nests being little more than a foot apart; a Wren had so closely fitted a little box with the usual materials of its nest, that the door corresponded with the only opening in the box; a Robin had found an ample basis of construction in the deserted nest of a Blackbird. The only bird that had been forbidden access to this Eden was the Bullfinch; he duly made his appearance, but was judged to be too dangerous to the buds of the fruit-trees. Siskins and Hawfinches have occasionally looked into this garden; but the Hawfinch has never bred here, and for some unexplained reason the same is the case with the Redstart.

In my own garden, within a few feet of the house, this last-mentioned friend found a very convenient abode in a hole in my largest apple-tree. The parents became very tame, and when they knew their young were discovered, made very little scruple about exposing themselves in going in and out. The food they brought their young, whenever we happened to see it, was a small green caterpillar; and I sincerely hope we may have them again next year, both for the benefit to my garden and for the pleasure they give me.28 May the sad loss of one fledgling depart from their memory before next summer! It was just launched into the world when it fell a victim to my dog, for I had seen it in the nest only an hour or two before; I had left strict injunctions for the confinement of all domestic animals as soon as the young were seen to leave the nest, but had not expected them to face the world so soon. This was a beautiful little bird, showing already the rich russet colour in what he had of tail; his legs and claws were of extreme slightness and delicacy, and his whole colouring and framework was far more engaging than is the case with most young birds of his age. He had already picked up, or had been given by his mother, a pebble or two to assist his digestion.

The Redstart was not a very common bird about us until about three years ago, but now its gentle song is heard in May in almost every garden and well-hedged field. In August and September the young birds are everywhere seen showing their conspicuous fire-tails as they flit in and out of the already fast-browning hedges; yet three or four years ago my daily walks did not discover more than a few dozen in a summer. What can be the cause of this surprising increase of population? If it is anything that has happened in this country, such as the passing of the Wild Birds’ Protection Act, we must suppose that the same individuals which breed and are born here in one spring, return here the next year; i. e. our supply of this summer migrant depends on the treatment it receives here, and not upon the number of Redstarts available in the world generally. I am inclined indeed to think, though it is difficult to prove it, that the wholesale slaughter of young birds in our neighbourhood is less horrible than it used to be before the passing of the Act; but when we remember that other creatures, certain butterflies, for example, whose relations to man never greatly differ from year to year, are found to be much more abundant in some years than others, the more rational conclusion seems to be, that an increase or decrease of numbers depends, in the case of migrating birds, on certain causes which are beyond the reach of mankind to regulate. What these may be it is possible only to guess. A famine in the winter quarters would rapidly decimate the numbers of those individuals which were with us last summer, and we cannot tell whether the deficiency would be supplied from other sources. Even a severe storm in the spring or autumn journey would destroy an immense number of birds so tender and fragile; and we must not forget that these journeys take place at the very seasons when storms are especially frequent and violent. Any very serious alteration in the methods of dealing with the land in this country, such as the substitution of railings or ditches for hedges, or the wholesale felling of woods and copses, would also most certainly affect the numbers of this and most other birds; but in the course of the last few years no such change of any magnitude has taken place, and the increase of the Redstarts must be put down, I think, to causes taking effect beyond the sea.

The only really annoying destruction of hedges in our immediate neighbourhood within my recollection is one for which I ought always to be grateful, for it brought me a sight of the only Black Redstart I have ever seen in England. I mentioned in the last chapter that this little bird, which is so abundant on the Continent all through the summer, never comes to this country except in the autumn, and then only in very small numbers, chiefly along the south-west coast. It is generally seen in Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall in November, but never breeds there, and it is seldom that a straggler finds his way further north. On the 6th of November, 1884, I was returning from a morning walk, and about a mile from the village came to a spot which a few years ago was one of the prettiest in the country-side. Here one road crosses another, and formerly the crossing was enclosed by high hedges and banks, forming a comfortable nook where the hounds used to meet, and where the Sand-martins bored their way into the light and sandy soil. A land-agent descended here one day, like a bird of ill omen, and swept the hedges away, filling their place with long lines of bare and ugly wall; the martins sought a lodging elsewhere, for they could no longer feed their young with the insect-life of the hedgerows; the hounds followed their example, and all my associations with the spot were broken. But it was upon this very wall, new, useful, straight, and intensely human, that this rare little bird chose to sun himself that bright November morning. A thousand times have I seen him on the old gray fern-covered walls of the Alpine passes, but never did I expect to see him on this hideous ‘improvement’ of civilization. Except that he was silent and alone, he seemed as much at home here as on the flowery slopes of the Engstlen-alp. There is nothing that man can erect that is too uncomely for the birds.29

I have digressed for a moment to tell this tale of the Black Redstart, but I have hardly yet done with the village itself. We have of course plenty of Robins and Hedge-sparrows breeding in our gardens, and in the nests of these the Cuckoo is fond of depositing its egg. It would not be always true to say that the Cuckoo lays its egg in its victim’s nest, for in some instances at least the egg is dropped from the bill. A Robin built its nest in a hole in the wall of my garden, several inches deep, and with a rather narrow entrance; several eggs were laid and all was going well. It was three or four days from my first knowledge of the nest to my second visit, when I was greatly annoyed to find all the eggs but one on the ground at the foot of the wall, broken to fragments. I accused the boy who filled the office of boot-cleaner; he was more or less of a pickle, but he positively denied all complicity. Meanwhile in my indignation I had forgotten to examine the remaining egg; but the mystery was soon solved. Noticing that the Robins had not deserted, I looked again after awhile, and found a young Cuckoo. The ugly wretch grew rapidly, and soon became too big for the nest, so we hung him up in a basket on a branch, where the Robins continued to feed him. His aspect and temper were those of a young fiend. If you looked at him he would swell with passion, and if you put your finger towards him, he would rise up in the basket and ‘go for it.’ One fine morning he disappeared, and was never heard of more.

In this case the egg was unquestionably deposited with the bill, while the same instrument must have been used to eject the Robin’s eggs, thus saving the young Cuckoo when hatched the trouble of getting rid of the young Robins by muscular exertions. Next year a Cuckoo’s egg was laid in a Hedge-sparrow’s nest in an adjoining garden; but the intended foster-parents wisely deserted, and I was able to take possession of the nest and eggs. Every year in June we are sure to notice a persistent cuckooing close by us, and nearly every year an egg is found in some nest in the village. Once (I think it was at the time when the Robin was the victim) boys reported that they saw a cuckoo sitting on a bough hard by, with an egg in its bill. There is no doubt whatever that the bill can hold the egg, which is hardly as large as a starling’s.30

We have another much smaller bird in the village which can hold large objects between its mandibles – objects almost as large, and sometimes more bulky, than the egg of the Cuckoo. This is the Nuthatch, which will carry away from a window any number of hard dessert nuts, and store them up in all sorts of holes and corners, where they are sometimes found still unbroken. These plump and neat little birds, whose bills and heads and necks seem all of a piece, while their bodies and tails are not of much account, have been for years accustomed to come for their dinners to my neighbour’s windows.31 One day while sitting with my friend, Col. Barrow, F.R.S. (to whom the Oxford Museum is indebted for a most valuable present of Arctic Birds), we set the Nuthatches a task which at first puzzled them. After letting them carry off a number of nuts in the usual way, we put the nuts into a glass tumbler. The birds arrived, they saw the nuts, and tried to get at them, but in vain. Some invisible obstacle was in the way; they must have thought it most uncanny. They poked and prodded, and departed ἀπρακτοὶ. Again they came, and a third time, with the like result. At last one of them took his station on a bit of wood erected for perching purposes just over the lintel; he saw the nuts below him, down he came upon the tumbler’s edge, and in a moment his long neck was stretched downwards and the prize won. The muscular power of the bird is as well shown by this feat, as his perseverance and sagacity by the discovery of the trick; for holding on by his prehensile claws to the edge of the tumbler, he contrived to seize with his bill a large nut placed in the bottom of it, without any assistance from his wings; the length of the tumbler being little less than that of the bird. But after all, this was no more than a momentary use of the same posture in which he is often to be seen, as he runs down the trunks of trees in search of insects.

The Spotted Flycatcher is another little bird which abounds in our gardens and orchards; it is always pleasant to watch, and its nest is easy to find. One pair had the audacity to build on the wall of the village school: it was much as if a human being should take up his residence in a tiger’s jungle, but if I recollect right, the eggs and young escaped harm. Another pair placed their nest on a sun-dial in Col. Barrow’s garden, as late as mid-July. This Flycatcher is the latest of all the summer migrants to arrive on our shores;32 the males and females seem to come together, and begin the work of nesting at once, i. e. in the middle of May; if the nest is taken, as was probably the case with this pair, the second brood would not be hatched till July. The bird is singularly silent, never getting (within my experience) beyond an oft-repeated and half-whispered phrase, which consists of three notes, or rather sounds, and no more; the first is higher and louder than the others, which are to my mind much like that curious sound of disappointment or anxiety which we produce by applying the tongue to the roof of the mouth, and then suddenly withdrawing it. But is the Flycatcher always and everywhere a silent bird?33 It is most singular that he should be unattractive in colour also – gray and brown and insignificant; but perhaps in the eyes of his wife even his quiet voice and gray figure may have weight.

This Flycatcher is an excellent study for a young ornithologist. He is easily seen, perching almost always on a leafless bough or railing, whence he may have a clear view, and be able to pick and choose his flies; and he will let you come quite close, without losing his presence of mind. His attitude is so unique, that I can distinguish his tiny form at the whole length of the orchard; he sits quietly, silently, with just a shade of tristesse about him, the tail slightly drooped and still, the head, with longish narrow bill, bent a little downwards, for his prey is almost always below him; suddenly this expectant repose is changed into quick and airy action, the little wings hover here and there so quickly that you cannot follow them, the fly is caught, and he returns with it in his bill to his perch, to await a safe moment for carrying it to its young. All this is done so unobtrusively by a little grayish-brown bird with grayish-white breast, that hundreds of his human neighbours never know of his existence in their gardens. He is wholly unlike his handsomer and livelier namesake, the Pied Flycatcher, in all those outward characteristics which attract the inexperienced eye; but the essential features are alike in both, the long wing, the bill flat at the base, and the gape of the mouth furnished with strong hairs, which act like the backward-bent teeth of the pike in preventing the escape of the prey.

Our village is so placed, that all the birds that nest in our gardens and orchards have easy and immediate access to a variety of feeding-grounds. From my window, as I write, I look over the village allotments, where all kinds of birds can be supplied with what they need, whether they be grain-eating or grub-eating; here come the Rooks, from the rookery close by, and quite unconscious of my presence behind the window, and regardless of the carcases of former comrades which swing on some of the allotments, they turn out the grubs with those featherless white bills which are still as great a mystery as the serrated claw of the Nightjar.

Here also come the Wood-pigeons, and in late summer the Turtle-doves – far worse enemies to the cottager than the rooks; here all the common herd of Blackbirds, Thrushes, Sparrows, Chaffinches, and Greenfinches, help to clear the growing vegetables of crawling pests at the rate of hundreds and thousands a day, yet the owners of the allotments have been accustomed since their childhood to destroy every winged thing that comes within their cruel reach. Short-sighted, unobservant as they are, they decline to be instructed on matters of which they know very little, but stick to what they know like limpets. For my part, I decline to protect my gooseberries and currants from the birds; their ravages are grossly exaggerated, and what they get I do not grudge them, considering their services during the rest of the year.34

Beyond the allotments the ground falls to the brook which I mentioned as descending from Chipping Norton to join the Evenlode. This brook is dammed up just below to supply an old flour-mill, and has been so used for centuries; its bed is therefore well lined with mud, and when the water is let out, which often happens (for the mill is on its last legs, and supports itself by aid of a beer-license which is the plague of the village), this mud appears in little banks under the shelving rat-riddled lip of the meadow. Here is a chance for some of the more unusual birds, as every ornithologist would say if he saw the stream; but both water and mud are often thick with the dye from the Chipping Norton tweed-mill, and no trout will live below the point at which the poisoned water comes in. Strange to say, the poisoning does not seem to affect the birds. Two pairs of Gray Wagtails, which I seldom see in the Evenlode, passed a happy time here from July to December last year, preferring some turn of the brook where the water broke over a few stones or a miniature weir; and through August and September they were joined by several Green Sandpipers. These beautiful birds, whose departure I always regret, are on their way from their breeding-places in the North to some winter residence; they stay only a few weeks in England, and little is known about them. Many a time have I stalked them, looking far along the stream with a powerful glass in hopes of catching them at work with their long bills; each effort comes to the same provoking conclusion, the bird suddenly shooting up from beneath your feet, just at a place which you fancied you had most carefully scanned. When they first arrive they will fly only to a short distance, and the bright white of their upper tail-feathers enables you to mark them down easily for a second attempt; but after a few days they will rise high in the air, like a snipe, when disturbed, and uttering their shrill pipe, circle round and round, and finally vanish.

It should be noted that this species is called the Green Sandpiper because its legs are green; such are the wilful ways of English terminology.35 It is the only Sandpiper we have, beside the common species, which invariably prefers the Evenlode, where it may every now and then be seen working its rapid way along the edge of the water, quite unconcerned at a spectator, and declining to go off like a champagne cork. Both kinds come in spring and late summer, but the Green Sandpiper is much more regular in his visits, and stays with us, in autumn at least, much longer. A stray pair found their way here last winter in a hard frost, and rose from beneath my feet as I walked along the Evenlode on December 24th. This is the only time I have ever seen them here except in the other brook; and I have very little doubt that they were total strangers to the locality. Had they ever been here before, I make bold to say that they would have gone to their old haunts.

Beyond the brook lies a magnificent meadow nearly a mile long, called the Yantle, in which, a century and a half ago, the little Warren Hastings used to lie and look up with ambitious hopes and fears at the hills and woods of Daylesford. This meadow was once doubtless the common pasture ground of the parish: it now serves as ager publicus for great numbers of winged families bred in our gardens and orchards. Goldfinches, linnets, starlings, redstarts, pipits, wagtails, white-throats, and a dozen or two of other kinds, spend their whole day here when the broods are reared. The Yellow Wagtails are always conspicuous objects; not that they are brilliantly coloured, for the young ones are mostly brown on the back, and would hardly catch an inexperienced eye, but because of the playfulness of their ways and their graceful, wavy flight. Young birds play just like kittens, or like the fox-cubs I once caught playing in Daylesford wood at the mouth of their earth, and watched for a long time as they rolled and tumbled over each other. Only yesterday (July 15, 1885) I watched a host of young willow-wrens, whitethroats, titmice, and others, sporting with each other in a willow-coppice, and mixing together without much reserve. Once I was taken aback by the sight of two young buntings at play; for a time they quite deceived me by their agility, fluttering in the air like linnets, unconscious that a single winter was to turn them into burly and melancholy buntings. The student of birds who sighs when the breeding season is over and the familiar voices are mute, is consoled by the sight of all these bright young families, happy in youth, liberty, and abundance. His knowledge, too, is immensely increased by the study of their habits and appearance. His sense of the ludicrous is also sometimes touched, as mine was yesterday when I went to see how my young swallows were getting on under the roof of an outhouse, and found them all sitting in a row on a rafter, like school-children; or when the young goldfinches in the chestnut tree grew too big for their nest, but would persist in sitting in it till they sat it all out of shape, and no one could make out how they contrived to hold on by it any longer. Young birds too, like young trout, are much less suspicious than old ones, and will often let you come quite close to them. In Magdalen Walk at Oxford the young birds delight to hop about on the gravel path, supplying themselves, I suppose, with the pebbles which they need for digestion; and here one day in July a young Robin repeatedly let me come within two yards of him, at which distance from me he picked up a fat green caterpillar, swallowed it with great gusto, and literally smacked his bill afterwards. The very close examination thus afforded me of this living young Robin disclosed a strong rufous tint on the tail-coverts, of which I can find nothing in descriptions of the bird; if this is usually the case, it should indicate a close connection with the Redstarts, the young of which resemble the young Robin also in the mottled brown of the rest of their plumage.

Our meadows are liable to flood occasionally in the winter, and also in a summer wetter than usual. One stormy day in July, some years ago, I espied two common Gulls standing in the water of a slight flood, apparently quite at home. But our Rooks found them out, and considering the Yantle sacred to themselves and such small birds as they might be graciously pleased to allow there, proceeded to worry them by flying round and round above them incessantly until the poor birds were fain to depart. Rooks are very hostile to intruders, and quite capable of continued teasing; I have watched them for a whole morning persecuting a Kestrel. No sooner did the Kestrel alight on the ground than the Rooks ‘went for it,’ and drove it away; and wherever it went they pursued it, backwards and forwards, over a space of two or three miles.

In winter the floods will sometimes freeze. One very cold day, as I was about to cross the ice-bound meadow, I saw some little things in motion at the further end, like feathers dancing about on the ice, which my glass discovered to be the tails of a family of Long-tailed Tits. They were pecking away at the ice, with their tails high in the air. As I neared them they flew away, and marking the place where they were at work, I knelt down on the ice and examined it with the greatest care. Not a trace of anything eatable was to be found. Were they trying to substitute ice for water? Not a drop of water was to be found anywhere near. I have seen Fieldfares and Redwings doing the same thing in Christ Church meadow at Oxford, but the unfrozen Cherwell was within a few yards of them.36 Whether or no the Long-tails were trying to appease their thirst, I may suggest to those who feed the starving birds in winter, that they should remember that water as well as food is necessary to support life.

The Yantle is a great favourite with Plovers, Turtle-doves, and Wood-pigeons, and in the winter it is much patronized by Fieldfares and Redwings. And a day or two ago I surprised four Curlew here (March 21), on their way from the sea to their inland breeding-places. But enough of the village and its gardens and out-lying meadows; in the next chapter we will stroll further afield.

CHAPTER V.

A MIDLAND VILLAGE: RAILWAY AND WOODLAND

Beyond the Yantle we come upon a line of railway, running down from Chipping Norton to join the main line to Worcester. Just as the waters of the Evenlode are reinforced at this point in its course by the two contingent streams I described in the last chapter, so the main railway is here joined by two subsidiary lines, the one coming from Chipping Norton and the other from Cheltenham over the Cotswolds. Paradoxical as it may seem, I do not hesitate to say that this large mileage of railway within a small radius acts beneficially upon our bird-life. Let us see how this is.