A Year with the Birds

The next day, September 20, we packed up our baggage, and left this health-giving spot with its iced air and scented breezes, and again climbed the pass on our way to Wasen, being anxious to get to the head of the St. Gotthard before the fine weather should desert us. I was not unwilling to see my fellow-creatures again, as I had been quite alone on the Stein-alp, except for a single hour which an Englishman of education and intelligence had made very enjoyable as he took his ‘Mittagessen’ and smoked his cigarette with me. As it happened, we left just in time to enable us, as the reader will learn shortly, to see things worth recording at Hospenthal the following day.

On going up the ascent from the inn, I noticed that the Pipits were now in great numbers at a lower level than yesterday, and this suggested the conclusion that a fresh instalment had arrived from below, while those of yesterday had gone still higher or descended on the other side. This idea was fully confirmed by what I saw afterwards; for a good many more were at or about the top, and as we sat there for a few minutes, one flew right over us and disappeared in the depths of the valley in the direction of Wasen. All the way down too on the other side little parties were making their way in the same direction; and thus it became clear that these birds at least do not take flight all at once, but move in a continuous stream of parties smaller or greater, much as the late Mr. A. E. Knox described the migration of the Pied Wagtails from west to east in the south coast of England, in his admirable Ornithological Rambles in Sussex.48 But we may well ask the question, Do they arrive in the same manner? The Susten Pass is 7000 feet above the sea, and is covered with snow from October to June. I myself once crossed it on June 29, when its deep snow bore no trace of human footsteps, and it was possible to make glissades over slopes where now not a vestige of snow was to be seen. Are we to suppose that the Pipits and their friends pass it in spring in spite of the snow, and travel in the same gradual manner? I cannot yet answer this question, nor is it likely that I shall ever be able to witness the arrival of the Susten Pipits as I witnessed their departure; but I contrived in the course of a week in these regions to set a few intelligent natives in an inquiring mood with regard to these matters, and it is possible that next spring may bring me some scraps of useful information. At present I am content to remember that Mr. Knox, in the passage just now referred to, was the first to discover that the arrival and departure of our English species are not performed in exactly the same manner.

We saw nothing of special ornithological interest in the melancholy Meienthal, which leads down from the Susten to the St. Gotthard railway at Wasen; but I was reminded of a passage in my third chapter (p. 83) when we arrived at the first considerable pasture, and found a whole community of men, women, children, cows, and goats, on the very point of migrating from their cool and healthy summer home. The cows were all gathered in front of the ‘Sennhütten,’ and when doors and windows had been made fast for the winter, all the human migrants stood for a few minutes in prayer, doubtless thanking God for the provision He had made for them and their cattle, and asking for a blessing on the pasture for the summers yet to come. Then all these Catholics of Uri streamed downwards with their cows in long procession, the head ‘Senner’ walking in front followed by one fine animal; and to-day the pasture is as still and desolate as it will be all the coming winter. Even the very stream that washes it will be less voiceful, when the first frosts have bound once more the snow that feeds and fills it through all the warm season. It was indeed most curious and interesting to find man, beast, and bird all leaving it on the same day.

On arriving at Wasen, being still alarmed lest I should be too late to see much on this side of the great double barrier – for it now became evident that the birds were taking advantage of the last fine weather – I had half a mind to go through the tunnel to Airolo, and catch them on the southern side. My second thoughts, however, were in this expedition unusually lucky, and I fortunately decided to stay for a night or two at Hospenthal, which lies just at the northern mouth of the St. Gotthard Pass proper, in that curious elevated valley mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, which lies just between the two halves of the great trench formed by the valleys of the Rhine and Rhone. Any birds crossing the St. Gotthard into Italy must necessarily pass Hospenthal, and I had heard enough already of migration in this district to make me pretty confident of getting information here, even if I were not lucky enough to see anything myself.

When we issued from the ‘Urner-loch’ into this broad and grassy valley, it was just beginning to grow dark; but we could see great numbers of swallows and martins on the church steeples both of Andermatt and Hospenthal, which are about a mile apart. As I came down the next morning at 7 a.m., I was met by Anderegg, who informed me that the gathering on the Hospenthal steeple had left their station in a body at 6 a.m., had circled high into the air for a few minutes, and then taken a directly southward course, not by the St. Gotthard road, but over the shoulder of the mountain which separates that road from a parallel valley to the east of it. That this account was true I was able to prove to my own satisfaction, for on the morning of the next day I was up in time to see a new party depart in precisely the same manner and the same direction. Like the Pipits, these Swallows and Martins migrate in considerable flocks coming one behind the other; and so far as we could ascertain from walks taken during the day, these flocks occupy successively the steeples of Andermatt and Hospenthal, coming up from the lower valley and settling first on the former, then leaving it when the other is free, and so eventually leaving that also to rise for their last flight over the great barrier. How long this process goes on I could not very clearly ascertain. But there were still young martins in the nests at Hospenthal, which would hardly be ready to fly for some days, and as we subsequently found a certain number of martins (though very few swallows) when we returned to the Haslithal, I am inclined to think that it occupies a considerable time, and differs in length according to the weather. On the occasion of my visit, though it was fine and warm, the barometer was falling, and the very next day a continuous rain and snow-fall set in, lasting nearly three days; so that it seemed as if the birds were making haste to escape from a climate which might very well be dangerous to them. In Meiringen I was told that great numbers of them were caught and killed by severe weather in September last year. And the waiter in the hotel at Hospenthal, who most fortunately has some interest in these matters, and keeps his eyes open in his idle autumn hours, declared that he had seen the martins so eager to induce their young to leave the nest before it was too late, that at last they pulled them out by main force and compelled them to join the general assembly on the steeple.

This same man had also noticed a migration of another kind, which it may be worth while to record here. Sitting in front of the hotel, with nothing to do, he had observed a constant stream of dragon-flies making their way up the valley; and during my walks that day I was able fully to verify his statement. All the way from Hospenthal to Andermatt these creatures were to be seen coming up against the wind, which was now blowing from the west. Doubtless I should never have noticed them, if my attention had not been drawn to them by this most fortunately situated observer. There was no mistake about it; countless numbers were steadily passing up the valley, but whither they were going it was hopeless to ascertain; they did not seem to turn up the St. Gotthard road, for I remarked them the whole way up the valley to the foot of the Furka Pass westwards. Frau Meyer, landlady of the hotel, told me that she had once witnessed an extraordinary flight of countless butterflies at Hospenthal; but could not tell me the species. I had myself previously noticed the tendency of the Apollo butterfly at the Stein-alp to fly up the pass – every individual I saw being apparently on his way upwards. And this was against an east wind, close to a glacier, and on the 19th of September!

The migrating birds, however, did not seem to get any further up the valley than Hospenthal; and indeed at no point further up would they have found a route into Italy so comparatively free from difficulty. We took a walk in the afternoon in order to ascertain whether this were so, and the result was interesting. Let it be understood that at Hospenthal the St. Gotthard road turns sharp to the south up a narrow valley, while the elevated valley or plain in which Hospenthal lies extends for several miles further to the foot of the Furka Pass, which leads, not into Italy, but into the Rhone valley westwards. Exactly as the human traveller into Italy follows the road up the narrow defile, leaving the broad plain behind him, so do the birds change their direction at this point, and prepare to leave food and comfort until they are on the southern side of the barrier. All day long a little tract of broken ground lying between the hotel and the river had been alive with Pipits; but when we walked further up the main valley westwards not a bird was to be seen, except here and there a lingering Redstart. The desolation was complete; yet no sooner had we returned to Hospenthal, than we were greeted again by Pipits, Wagtails, Martins, and even by a solitary Wheatear, who seemed left behind by his relations. This was the only bird of its kind which I saw during my stay in the Alps. The Wheatears are, as in England, the first migrants which arrive in the spring, and doubtless they are also among the first to depart. The only other bird which was common here at this time was the Kestrel – the Thurmfalk (tower-falcon) as he is here called; they nest in the Alps in old towers or rocks, and several were always to be seen about the old Lombard tower which overlooks the village, and once overawed its inhabitants.

The next day I resolved to try whether the Grimsel Pass, the second principal opening from the north through the great barrier, would show us anything new; but in this project I was disappointed, for rain and intense cold came on, which drove me down to Meiringen and deprived me of any opportunity of further observation. And here, as I write, the sun has once more broken through the clouds, a bracing north wind blows, the mountains above us are covered with fresh snow, the trees are beginning to lose their summer green, the cow-bells are ringing in the valley instead of upon the alps, and alpine autumn is here in all its health and beauty. The hotel is empty, and my only companions are the faithful Anderegg and my host, Herr Willi, now Cabinet Minister of his Canton, who entertains me with discourse of the history of the Haslithal, the antiquities of which he has been the first to explore. Some summer birds are still here; the Chiff-chaff for a single moment uttered its voice outside the window by which I write. The Robins are in fair abundance, and a few will stay in the valley, where the cold is not greater than in our own climate, throughout the winter. A walk this morning showed us the House-martin, the Crag-martin, and a single individual of the numerous Alpine Swifts, which in the summer haunt the gigantic precipices that frown upon the valley.

We have seen how the Swallow-tribe departs from the Alps, and have also learnt something of the movements and migration of other birds; but I have still to discover in which direction the tenderer birds, the various members of the tribe of warblers, find a way to their southern winter home. I can hardly believe that they can traverse the wild and shelterless mountain passes with their short wings and fragile bodies; yet in the long sea voyages which they make they are no less at the mercy of the elements than they would be when in the jaws of the most savage defile of the St. Gotthard.

While I have been fortunate in seeing so much in the course of a very few days, it is obvious that much remains to be discovered, and that future visits to Switzerland, whether in spring or autumn, may not be without their reward; for I have little doubt that there is no European region where the peculiar conditions of temperature, and the extraordinary variety of food, are so likely to produce abnormal effects on the living population – effects which as yet are perhaps comparatively little understood. I feel that my hastily collected information is but a single item in the vast repertory of material which stands ready to the hand of any one whose fortune may send him here at the right time, and with the requisite qualifications. Many Englishmen now pass the Alps in spring by way of the St. Gotthard railway on their return from Italy and the Riviera; if among these there be any that are curious about birds, let them halt for a day or two on each side of the pass, and learn what they can of the arrival of migrants from the south. And let me add, that any occupation which brings a foreigner into close contact with the more intelligent Swiss, especially at a time when they are not hard driven by the touring world of all nations, will give new life and interest to even the shortest visit to a country whose history and institutions are as wonderful as its scenery, or as its animal and vegetable life. We are apt to think of the Swiss as a self-seeking people, whose only object is to make capital out of the natural beauties of the extraordinary land they live in. But this is not a happy impeachment in the mouth of Englishmen, who know so well how to make the best of their own resources, and who have contributed not a little to stimulate the ardour of the Swiss for gain and speculation. He who would really know the peasant of the Alps must see him in his natural state, struggling hard against adversity, heavily taxed for education and improvements, loving labour and doing it cheerfully; a human being wrestling hard with Nature, who yields her wealth for him with a very sparing hand, while she lavishes upon the birds that live around him untold abundance and endless resource.

CHAPTER VII.

THE BIRDS OF VIRGIL

It might naturally be supposed, that an Oxford tutor, who finds his vocation in the classics and his amusement in the birds, would be in the way of noticing what ancient authors have to say about their feathered friends and enemies. One Christmas vacation, when there was comparatively little to observe out-of-doors, I made a tour through the poems of Virgil, keeping a sharp look-out for all mention of birds, and compiled a complete collection of his ornithological passages. I chose a Latin poet because in Latin it happens to be easier to identify a genus or species than it is in Greek; and I chose Virgil partly because the ability to read and understand him is to me one of the things which make life most worth living, and partly because I know that there is no other Latin poet who felt in the same degree the beauty and the mystery of animals.

I believe there are still people who think of Virgil as a court-poet, writing to order, and drawing conventional ideas of nature from Greek authors of an earlier age. This is, of course, absolutely untrue. Virgil’s connection with Augustus was accidental, and was probably no more to the poet’s taste than any other result of an education and an occasional residence in the huge city of Rome. If we compare what is known of his life with the general character of his poetry, we get a very different result.

The first sixteen years of his life were spent in his native country of Cisalpine Gaul, almost under the shadow of the Alps, three hundred miles away from Rome. His parents were ‘rustic,’ and he himself was brought up among the woods and rushy meads of Mantua and Cremona. “Doubtless there is many a reminiscence of his early years in the Georgics, where his love of the woods, in which he must have wandered as a boy, meets us in every page.”49 In that day it is probable enough that the great plain of the Po was still largely occupied by those dense forests, the destruction of which is said to be the chief cause of the floods to which the river is liable. Much land must also have been still undrained and marshy: and we can still trace in the neighbourhood of Mantua the remains of those ancient lake-dwellings which an ancient people had built there long before the Gauls, from whom our poet was perhaps descended, had taken possession of the plain. These woods and marshes, as well as the land which Roman settlers had tilled for vine or olive, must have been alive with birds in Virgil’s day. There would be all the birds of the woods, the pigeons and their enemies the owls and hawks; there would be cranes and storks in their yearly migrations, and all manner of water-fowl from the two rivers Po and Mincio, and from the Lacus Benacus (Lago di Garda) which is only about twenty miles distant. It would be strange indeed, if, even when following the tracks of a Greek poet, Virgil had not in his mind some of the familiar sights on the banks of Mincius.

But later in life he was at least as much in Southern as in Northern Italy. That the first three Georgics were written, or at least thought out, on the lovely bay of Naples, is certain from the lines at the end of the fourth Georgic: —

Illo Virgilium me tempore dulcis alebatParthenope, studiis florentem ignobilis oti.50

Here were all the sea-birds, and the wild-fowl that haunt the sea; here, as we shall see, the summer visitors might land on their way from Africa. Here, from the sea and all its varying life, the poet’s mind would enrich itself with sights unknown to him in the flat-lands of the Padus, and grow to understand more fully day by day the impressions – often dull ones – which Nature had made on the poets who had sung before him. Rome he never loved, though he had a house there: perhaps he had seen enough of the huge city during the years given to the dreary rhetorical education of the day, after first leaving his home. He loved Campania, and he loved Sicily51; at Tarentum also he is found, probably visiting the friendly and jovial Horace. The hill-country of the peninsula, and of the island that belongs to it, became a part of his poetical soul; and as he probably spent much of his time at his own Cisalpine farm, after he was restored to it by his patron’s kindly influence, he must have been constantly moving among all the phases of Italian landscape – in the plain, on the hills, by the sea.

Everything, then, in Virgil’s history, shows him a genuine poet of the country, and at the same time no one who really knows his poems can deny that they fully bear out the evidence of his life. It is true that he drew very largely on other poets, and could not “disengage himself from the antecedents of his art.” From Homer, Hesiod, Aratus, or Theocritus, for example, come nearly all the passages in his works in which birds are mentioned. But though they descend from these poets, and bear the features of their ancestors, they are yet a new and living generation, not lifeless copies modelled by a mere imitator; and their beauty and their truth is not that of Greek, but of Italian poetry. Let any one compare the translations of Aratus by other Roman hands, by Cicero, Festus, and Germanicus, with Virgil’s first Georgic, and he will not fail to mark the difference between the mere translator and the poet who breathes into the work of his predecessors a new life and an immortal one. There is hardly to be found, in the whole of Virgil’s poems, a single allusion to the habits of birds or any other animals which is untrue to fact as we know it from Italian naturalists. Here and there, of course, there are delusions which were the common property of the age. If, for example, he tells us in the fourth Georgic that bees

oft weigh up tiny stonesAs light craft ballast in the tossing tide,Wherewith they poise them through the cloudy vast:

let us remember that the true history of bees has been matter of quite recent discovery. And we may note at the same time that Pliny, a professed naturalist, living at least a generation after Virgil, has actually asserted that cranes, when flying against the wind, will take up stones with their feet, and stuff their long throats full of gravel, which they discharge when they alight safely on the ground!52

Virgil mentions about twenty kinds of birds, most of them several times. These twenty kinds do not correspond so much to our species as to our genera; for the Greeks and Romans, I need hardly say, had only very rough-and-ready methods of classification, just as is the case with uneducated people at the present day. When they found birds tolerably like each other, they readily put them down as of the same kind, rarely marking minor differences. Thus corvus appears to stand for both crow and rook; picus stands for all the woodpeckers inhabiting Italy; by accipiter may be understood any kind of hawk. But in spite of this difficulty, it is sometimes possible to make out the particular species which is alluded to, partly by getting information as to those which are found in Italy at the present day, partly by comparing Virgil with Pliny and other Roman writers, and where Virgil is using a Greek original, by trying to discover, chiefly through Aristotle’s admirable book on natural history, what bird is indicated by the Greek word translated, and whether that bird is an Italian bird as well as Greek, and therefore likely to be known to Virgil at first hand.

I am not going to trouble my readers with much of the uninteresting detail of an inquiry like this (in which indeed the game might seem to be hardly worth the candle), but merely to give them some idea of the bird-knowledge on which this greatest of Roman poets drew, whether at first or second-hand, for description or illustration; and in so doing to make clear to them, so far as I can, the particular kinds of birds which he had in his mind. I shall quote him in the original, but shall add translations in footnotes: in the Georgics, his poem of husbandry, I take advantage of a poet’s translation, that of my friend Mr. James Rhoades, which cannot easily be outdone either in exactness of scholarship or in beauty of diction; and in the Aeneid I make use of Mr. Mackail’s prose translation, which I prefer on the whole to any poetical version I know. One passage from the Eclogues I have translated myself.

The first birds we find mentioned in the poems are the Pigeons, and we may as well begin with them as with any other. Meliboeus tells Tityrus that the farm to which he is returned after a long exile – the same farm which the poet himself lost and found again – shall yield him much true comfort and delight, even though he find it overgrown with reeds, and spoilt with the stones and mud of overflowing Mincius: —

Nec tamen interea raucae, tua cura, palumbes,Nec gemere aeria cessabit turtur ab ulmo.53

Here two distinct species are clearly meant by the words palumbes and turtur. About the latter of these there is no difficulty; from all that is told us of it we gather that it is the same bird which the French still call tourterelle and the Italians tortorella, and which we know as the Turtle-dove; it is still found in small numbers passing the summer and breeding in Italy, and is most frequent in the sub-alpine region of which Virgil is here writing. But what bird is here meant by palumbes? Both this word and its near relative columba must be translated by pigeon, but can we distinguish them as different species? Here the commentaries and dictionaries give us no substantial help, and I may be pardoned for pausing a moment to consider a question of some interest to historical ornithologists.

There are at the present day three kinds of pigeons beside the turtle-dove just mentioned, which are found in Italy; they are the same three which we know in England as the Wood-pigeon or Ring-dove, the Stock-dove, and the Rock-dove or Blue-rock. Of these the last, which with us is the rarest, only found on certain parts of our coast, is by far the most abundant in Italy, and is the only one which habitually breeds there. The other two species pass over Italy in spring and autumn regularly, but seldom or never stay there; they go northwards in the spring from Africa and the East, and return again in the autumn after breeding in cooler climes. But it is fairly certain that in ancient times two species of pigeons bred in Italy: (1) the bird meant by palumbes, of which Virgil makes the shepherd Damoetas say in the third Eclogue that he has “marked the place where they have gathered materials for nesting,”54 and of which Pliny tells his readers that when they see this bird upon her nest they may know that midsummer is past (Pliny, Nat. Hist. xviii. 267); (2) the bird named columba, which word, though etymologically the same as palumbes, is used by Pliny, and also by the Roman agricultural writers, to represent a bird which is certainly to be distinguished from palumbes.55 The columba was in fact the tame pigeon of the Romans: it was also their carrier-pigeon; for in the siege of Mutina, B.C. 43, the besieged general communicated with the relieving force by means of columbae, to the feet of which letters were attached (Plin. x. 110). The words may here and there be used loosely, and it is possible that attempts may have been made to domesticate the palumbes as well as the columba; but in the vast majority of passages the columba is certainly either the domestic bird or a wild bird of the same species, while palumbes is some other kind of pigeon.