Birds of the wave and woodland

In one aspect he is altogether admirable—as the comrade of Britain’s soldiers and sailors in times of war. Wherever our ships go the sparrow goes, and as the troops march he accompanies the army as a camp-follower, but finding his own rations. He is established in Afghanistan, where he went with Roberts and Stewart, and in Zululand where Evelyn Wood and Buller showed him the way. Like the Roman eagles, he is the ensign of victorious advance, and should I ever chance to go there, I expect to find him at home, by right of arms and the men, at Buluwayo. As they crossed the Cabul river and the Buffalo and the Nile with our forces, claiming at once from the natives privileges of conquest which our generals hesitated to assert, so no doubt they have crossed the Shangani, and among the rock-kranzes and kraals of the Matabele now rear the young which, under other conditions, might have lived in Covent Garden and died within sound of Bow-bells.

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER IV

WHICH bird-voice in Nature is the most expressive? Is it the ringdove’s happy crooning in the green depths of the woodland? or the nightingale’s solitary lamenting under the cold moon? Some might say the fierce, ringing cry of the Highlanders’ eagle among the clouds; others the soothing, homely clamour of the social rooks in the old Hampshire elms. Or is it some other? For myself, I think I would pass them all by, significant utterances though they are, like the cuckoo’s tell-tale note, the sparrow’s familiar chirp, the glad carol of the skylark, the placid vespers of the blackbird, and the joyous matins of the thrush; pass all these by, and many others, and choose—the cry of the corn-crake. Have you ever noticed that while you listen to the cuckoo calling, other birds seem to be silent? The cuckoo, for the time, is the only voice in the sky. So it is with the corn-crake. When you hear it, it is all alone. A short while ago the whitethroat was pouring out its little heart in an evening-song, and from the copse came the chuckle of the roosting pheasant. A night-jar had been purring over the golden furze that grows up from among the purple heather, and on the other side of the spinney an owl, on soft white lazy wing, had gone by crying to its mate. Queer little noises, “flung out of their holes” by rabbits, and others just as queer, but more inexplicable, from hedgerow and ditch, had told you that animal-life was on foot and a-wing, and as you sate on the stile, in the break of the high hedge, and saw the steam rising out of the clover, and the white moths, “ermine” and “ghost,” flash or flutter among the sweet bloom, it seemed as if everything was abroad, the day-things not yet asleep, the night-things already astir.

And all of a sudden the solitary corn-crake cries from the wheat. At once the whole air seems to hush: the very evening to listen. Crake-crake comes the cry, and there gathers over the scene an indescribable atmosphere of completest tranquillity. Crake-crake. Far away, somewhere in the dip beyond the rise, sounds a sheep-bell, and the chiding voice of the shepherd’s dog. But there is not a sound besides. Crake-crake. And the mist creeps up the corn-stalks, and covers the campions, and the air grows damp with dew. It is going to be another hot day to-morrow, just as it has been to-day. Crake-crake, cries the creeping rail, and

never a voice replies. And so homewards, up through the meadow, hummocked with hay-cocks, and rough to the feet with short grass-stubble, from which the sleepy skylarks spring at every step: up to the elms that shade the garden, and on to the lawn. The bats wheel overhead, their soft wings crumpling as they turn their somersaults, but never a voice in the air, save sharp needle-points of sound, as flittermouse calls to flittermouse. Only from among the wheat, now here, now there, comes up the cry of the rail, Crake-crake.

It is a charming bird, sufficiently rare to make the seeing of it an event to remember all the summer; the finding of its nest a triumph. And then to see the young ones!—little black imps that run like spiders. Once only in my life could I have shot one. I was out with my gun, “strolling round” for the unconsidering evening rabbit, when all of a sudden from under my feet, in the furrow that separated the turnips from a patch of lucerne, up got a bird, and its slow, clumsy flight told me that it was a corn-crake, and for the sake of its little black imps I lowered my gun and let the poor mother go.

But the corn-crake has done crying, or has wandered away into another field beyond hearing, and here in the garden the voices of Nature soon reassert themselves, and, resonant above the rest, the blackcap is singing

Whence comes this little musician? It may be from Persia or Abyssinia, or perhaps it has only stepped across, so to speak, from Norway. But here it is with its nest among the ivy and periwinkles on the bank, and its beautiful eggs, delicious little mottled ovals of jasper, complete in number in their cobweb cup. It is odd how few people, even those who are “fond of birds,” and have large gardens and grounds, know this little visitor by sight, or even by song. And yet it needs only a few minutes’ patience when once the blackcap is seen to watch it to its nest, and that once done it can be examined, as I have examined it, with a magnifying-glass at the end of a walking-stick, while it sits upon its eggs. Few birds are really more trustful in the places they may choose for their nests, or more courageous in remaining upon them when approached, than this pretty bird with the lovely voice.

Another bird seldom seen, or when seen recognised, is the turtle-dove. Its purring in the thicket is mistaken for the wood-pigeon’s by ears that are not on their guard for differences of note, and yet, if once recognised apart, the two can no more be confused than the rook’s and jackdaw’s. Of all birds I think it one of the stealthiest. Though building its nest where discovery seems almost certain for so large a fowl, it does its work with such secrecy that I doubt if any one in England ever saw a turtle-dove with a twig in its beak, or tracked it to its nest by its flight. I have found dozens of turtle-doves’ nests, but never one betrayed by the old birds. Yet the grasshopper warbler, supposed by most people to be one of the most subtle of nest-builders, and by its tiny size, its mouse-like habits, and its concealing colour, so carefully equipped by Nature for security, can be watched home to its nest, as I know from my own schoolboy days, with unerring certainty. It betrays itself in every action. You have only to “locate” the small ventriloquist’s cricket-voice and then lie down among the herbage and wait. From impatience the little birds are sure to show themselves, and if they are building they hop up and down, twist in and out of the lowest plants, with material for their nest in their beaks, and you have only to lie still and watch.

But “watching” all day long will do no good with turtle-doves. Whether building or not, they never tell you, and when they catch sight of you they fly off at once, as if they did not care where they flew to, or whether they ever came back there again. Let them go, but come back yourself later on to the same spot, approaching it, however, from the opposite direction. And if you flush them again, you may be sure that their nest will be, or is, thereabouts: midway, probably, between the two points of your approach. In a few days go back to find the nest, and if you walk backwards and forwards in the undergrowth, keeping your eyes upwards, so as to look through the bushes from underneath, you will find it, if it is there. For the hen-bird sits very close, and goes off her nest with a flap of the wings that is unmistakeable. Apart from this, if the bird is not at home, you may often find the nest by seeing the white eggs in it from underneath, the yolks of them showing against the sky a delicious pinky yellow. For the nest is a mere ghost of a nest—a skeleton—and can easily be imitated by taking a handful of thin birch and hazel twigs and sprinkling them at all angles in a heap. Such a nest a pair of birds may easily build in half an hour, and this, perhaps, is one reason why they are never seen at work. Why they should be content with such a skeleton of a nest or how so frail a network bears two bulky nestlings and their mother, is a mystery. But as Prior sings:

When they are on the wing, turtle-doves seem to like to keep below the level of the tree tops, and seldom, therefore,

come into sight conspicuously. But I have sate in an orchard and watched them, several together, flying about among the apple-trees, and feeding on the ground, when they were unconscious of my presence. Their flight is singularly beautiful and interesting, for the obstructions they meet with compel them to make the most graceful and sudden evolutions to avoid collision.

And I remember very well, how, as I sate there, looking up from my work every now and again at the wing-clapping and testily-cooing strangers, sporting and squabbling by turns, I heard, what I had never heard in that garden before—the tapping of a nuthatch.

Tracing up the small smith, I found it busy on the trunk of an old Scotch fir, where it found, if not ants, a colony of some other small insects, for it was picking them off right and left as they fled along the bark. This bird has discovered that if it raps upon a bough, the insects in the crevices are startled from their hiding-places by the jarring, and rush out, like human beings after an earthquake shock, into the open air, where the nuthatch soon disposes of them; and, unless I am mistaken, it is the only British bird that arrives at its food by a deliberate guile. All others, I think, catch their food by chancing to find it abroad, but the nuthatch accomplishes the effect by a reasonable cause, and frightens out of their chinks the creatures that it wishes to capture. Sometimes the insects only scuttle from one refuge into another, but the nuthatch rips the bark off in flakes and pursues the poor wretches from covert to covert.

It takes its name from another peculiarity, its fondness for nuts, beech-mast and acorns, which it fixes tight into some little crevice in the bark and hammers open. Looking at the shells of hazel-nuts that it has cracked, I believe that it first pecks a hole, and then getting its beak into it crosswise to the natural cleavage of the shell, splits the nut with a sharp rap on the bark. Its beak enters like a wedge and, while the two half-shells drop to the ground, one on either side, pierces and holds the kernel. It must take it out of its vice to split it, for while tightly gripped the bird could only pierce a hole in the nut and not cleave it, and this is evident if we put the two halves together, for we then see that though a hole was made, the shell did not split. The bird had to take it out of the cleft on its beak and knock it on the tree.

When nesting, it is not content with a hole that just suits it in size, but must needs choose a large hole and then plaster it up with mud till it becomes small enough. With the rest of the animal world the rule is to select what fits them at first, and failing this to enlarge the house to their needs. But the nuthatch has sense on its side, for it is easier to reduce than to increase, and which of us, if the sizes of houses made no difference in their rents, would not occupy by preference tenements with what auctioneers call “commanding approaches,” and “noble entrance halls,” even if we only used the back-door to come in and go out at? So the nuthatch picks out a big hole and then reduces it to its own dimensions, and the little nuthatches no doubt, when the tree-creepers happen to come by, speak boastfully of “the woodpecker’s house” that they live in, but never say that they keep the great front-doors shut and get in and out by the scullery-window.

Another little hole-nesting bird, an alien not often seen, is “the cuckoo’s mate,” the wryneck, a bird of very pretty plumage, mottled and barred, and yet curiously inconspicuous when clinging to a tree-trunk. Should you chance upon its nest it will twist its neck about in an extraordinary snake-like way and hiss, a procedure which in other countries may sometimes, perhaps, protect the small creature from capture, but in England, where tree-snakes are not common objects of the country, can hardly do the wryneck any good. At other times, too, it will pretend to be dead when you take it up, as the corn-crake will, but as soon as it sees a chance of escape it is off.

But when a bird is heard tapping in garden or orchard, it must not be taken for granted that the workman is either a nuthatch or a wryneck, for the “great tit,” the “oxeye” of many country places, has the same habit of fixing nuts or seeds in crevices and hammering at them with its bill till they split, and it will also search the bark of trees with its beak in quest of insects. But above all the birds of our English gardens, not excepting the sparrow (which, though an insolent is not a fearless bird) and the robin, the great tit confides in man and in all his doings.

I wrote once in a magazine an account of how I had caught the same great tit nine times in one afternoon, had nine times put it into an aviary, and nine times had found, on going to look for it, that it was gone. And a newspaper critic of my article suggested that I had been mistaken or something worse.

But a year later I found that I had Dr. Günther with me; for in an article written by him, now before me, he says that he has caught the same great tit over and over again, and that at last the bird, discovering that nothing disagreeable resulted, coolly went on eating while the trap snapped over him. My own experience was in the hard winter of 1892. I had put out a long row of traps, and visitors were very numerous. Among them came a great tit which was caught and put into the aviary, and to cut the story short, nine times a great tit was caught and nine times put into the aviary. But when in the afternoon we went to look at the captives, there was not a great tit among them all. Then the thought flashed upon me that we had been catching the same bird over and over again. Then we caught another great tit, and this time, before letting it go, we marked its tail, and sure enough the next great tit we caught had its tail marked. So instead of putting it into the aviary we fixed the trap open to let it eat its fill of chopped fat and hemp-seed without molestation.

How did it manage to get out? The mesh of the netting over the aviary was small enough to keep siskins inside, but the great tit, as we afterwards found, was not to be kept within the wires. It turns its body sideways, puts a wing through first and then its head and then squeezes the body out—exactly the same procedure, that is, reading arm instead of wing, as the professional child-burglar’s in India. If the great tit cannot get out of its prison, it commits suicide. For it thrusts itself so far through the wires or netting that it cannot move one way or the other, and is strangled.

Dr. Günther elsewhere gives an instance of fearlessness which is no doubt paralleled in animal history, but certainly never excelled, and for once I must break my rule and make a quotation in honour of the bird of Rowfant. So many vaguely authenticated stories are current that one, on such authority, is very valuable. “In the year 1888 a pair of great tits began to build in a post-box which stood in the road in the village of Rowfant, Sussex, and into which letters, etc. were posted and taken out of the door daily. One of the birds was killed by a boy, and the nest was not finished. However in the succeeding year, it appears, the survivor found another mate, and the pair completed the nest, filling nearly one half the box with moss and other nesting materials. Seven eggs were laid and incubated, but one day when an unusual number of post-cards were dropped into and nearly filled the box, the birds deserted the nest, which was afterwards removed with the eggs and preserved. In 1890 the pair built a new nest of about the same size as the previous one, laid again seven eggs, and reared a brood of five young, although the letters posted were often found lying on the back of the sitting bird, which never left the nest when the door was opened to take out the letters. The birds went in and out by the slit for the letters on the side of the box.”

Could anything be more charming, more touching, than this? and does any bird that breathes English air deserve more respect for its delightful confidence in man, more assistance in its times of stress and want, than the great tit? But it is not a bird that many people think of when they try to remember the lovable creatures that haunt their garden. For one thing, it is so restless that it seldom remains in sight more than an instant, and, as often as not, its crisp bright call is the only sign that we have of its presence as it flits to and fro after insects among the tree-tops, dropping suddenly on to the ground after a falling caterpillar, and as suddenly skipping up branch by branch to the height it had left. Whenever heard, even in the depth of winter, it is cheery, crying out with just as brisk and hearty a voice as when the summer sun was shining.

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER V

ANOTHER bird that visits country-houses with unbounded confidence in man, if man would only recognise it, is the owl. How many people know that if they will put little barrels up in trees, or among ivy, that the barn-owls will accept the invitation and make the barrels their home, bringing to it many a hundred mice in the course of the year, and scaring away thousands more? Yet such is the case. And those who keep pigeons need not be alarmed. The owl will not touch them, and the owners, if they will take the trouble to watch, may see the owls making the dove-cot their perch and their starting-point on their sallies, their tower of observation, and the pigeons showing no uneasiness whatever at the coming and going of the cat on wings. When will the time come that gamekeepers, under pain of immediate dismissal, will be forbidden by their masters to shoot owls? As it is, this bird, which ought to be as common as the rook, is actually rare; and when it goes out to kill the mice and rats, which are the farmer’s worst enemies, it has to sneak to and fro as if it was a criminal, doing something that it should not—

Owls, as a matter of fact, should be tempted in every way to live amongst us, and a reward should be given to every farm-hand who brought first news of a nest upon the grounds. That they do no mischief is absolutely beyond all doubt; that they do an enormous amount of good is as absolutely on proof. Yet farmers’ gamekeepers, many of whom are simply poachers promoted to private employment, grossly ignorant and brutal men, are allowed to shoot these valuable birds as if they were a pest. Poor owls! They had a bad name given them in the beginning, and, such is the persistence of popular prejudice and superstition, their bad name still clings to them among the class of rustic from which the farmers’ gamekeepers are too often selected, the men who commit the very offences of egg-and-game stealing, of which they falsely accuse the owl.

The literary history of this admirably useful and beautiful bird is a chronicle of calumny and ill-treatment. There is no epithet too bad for it in poetry; it is deadly, dreadful, wicked, hateful, fearful, fatal, dire, accursed, curst, unhallowed, obscene, and is called every kind of name, “bird of hate,” “of the grave,” “of death,” “of gloom,” “messenger of death,” “herald of disaster,” “foul bird of omen.” “The screech-owle betokeneth always some heavy news, and is most execrable and accursed in the presages of public affairs. He keepeth ever in the deserts, and loveth not only such unpeopled places, but also that are horribly hard of access. In short, he is the very monster of the night, neither crying nor singing out clear, but uttering a certain heavy groan of doleful moaning. And, therefore, if he be seen within cities, or otherwise in any place, it is not for good, but prognosticates some fearful misfortunes.” These are Pliny’s words, and sum up therefore the collective opinion of antiquity. Nor has this opinion ever changed, for poets in our own century sing of—

Little by little, no doubt, the superstition will die out; but they die so hard, these prejudices of the ignorant, that the owl runs a risk of becoming extinct before it is properly appreciated.

Another handsome bird on “the tables of proscription,” is the magpie; but it deserves all the persecution it receives, for though it certainly eats a certain number of snails and insects, it is far more partial to eggs and young birds; and its audacity is so extraordinary, that only its death puts an end to its marauding, while its cunning is such that shooting a magpie is a matter of the greatest difficulty. The numbers that are destroyed annually must be very large; but the magpie is a prolific bird, and withal so astute in its nest-building that it is still in the greater part of the country a common object. Its nest, indeed, is a fortress, proof against all natural enemies, and offering even considerable chances of

immunity from man, for it barricades it with thorns, domes it over, and very skilfully conceals the entrance. Moreover, it has the sagacity to build, as a rule, in tall hawthorns, than which no tree offers more difficulties to even the hardiest and most weasel-bodied bird’s-nester. Failing trees, as happened in a certain barrens pot in the north of Scotland, magpies will build in a gooseberry-bush, but finding this position exceptionally exposed to enemies, they not only built their nest of the usual strength, but fortified the bush itself with a chevaux-de-frise of dead gooseberry-twigs, a foot in thickness, and impenetrable even by a mouse. To this stronghold they returned year after year; but the cottagers, who gave the birds protection for the sake of their society, were compelled to confess that the only return the pies made for their clemency was to try to rob the hens and kill the chickens.

Jays in many ways resemble magpies, being quite as cunning and just as destructive; and even those who are most averse to the persecution of any wild creature are compelled to warn the jay off their premises if they wish their game to thrive, or the song-birds in their shrubberies to live in security. For this beautiful but unprincipled bird is a most diligent and successful bird’s-nester; and, in spite of its conspicuous plumage, so stealthy in its mischief, that a pair will “work” a shrubbery thoroughly without betraying themselves even to the gardeners. Even if the clamour of the small birds attracts you to the spot, you will see nothing to explain their alarm, and the cat that you afterwards come upon watching for a mouse under the bushes is saddled with the blame which ought really to be fastened upon the pretty wretches that are watching you from the foliage overhead. The magpie and jay are, I confess, two birds that I like to see—on other people’s grounds. On my own I should prefer them stuffed, and right handsomely do they lend themselves to the artistic taxidermist. In combination and contrast no two birds are more beautiful, and as an ornament for a hall or billiard-room are not to be surpassed. For to the maximum of admiration there goes only the minimum of compunction.

But this is not the case with another of the brutal gamekeeper’s victims, that exquisite little falcon, the kestrel. All day long it is busy at the good work which the owl takes up at nightfall, for it lives almost entirely upon mice, and, these failing, upon large insects, especially the destructive cockchafer. It so very rarely molests a bird that, hawk though it is, you never see the smaller feathered-folk in alarm at its approach. “He is no enemy of theirs, and mingles freely with them, almost unheeded.” Observe what consternation the sparrow-hawk brings to the little songsters when he is abroad; but how different when the kestrel passes overhead! The chaffinch, instead of uttering cries of alarm, continues his merry notes; and the larks and pipits pay no attention to the little bird of prey. When it hovers over the farmyard, or hunts round the ricks, no anxious hen clucks to her scattered family any note of warning or recall, the sparrows continue at their meal, and the swallows, unconcerned and trustful, wheel twittering in the air. Its nest is sometimes found in holes in buildings where doves and starlings are its companions. But for mice of all kinds the kestrel has only unrelenting and ceaseless hostility; and it has been calculated that a single pair will account in a season for the astonishing number of ten thousand.

Its favourite method of hunting makes the kestrel a familiar bird by sight, and gives it its name of “windhover,” for,

it hangs suspended in the air over a given spot, until it either

sees a mouse below it, upon which it then drops with lightning speed, or else decides that there is nothing there, when it moves on a little further and hovers again, thus beating a field or moor thoroughly over before it leaves it. And while it is thus engaged the gamekeeper steals upon it and shoots it, and, taking it home, the mutton-headed ignoramus that he is, nails it up on his “tree,” in the company of that other good friend of man, the owl.

But the gamekeeper’s enormities reach their climax when he murders that noble bird the heron. His master perhaps has a field or two that runs down to a stream, and in the advertisement, by which the thrifty farmer makes annually a few pounds, of “so many acres of shooting to let,” there is added, the “right of fishing in the river so-and-so.” So if by any chance a poor heron, strayed from the upper reaches where some nobleman or gentleman preserves this fine bird, comes on the farmer’s meadows, the farmer’s gamekeeper (it is sport exactly to his taste) stalks it from behind the line of willows and kills it as it stands there. He will probably get a shilling for it from the birdstuffer, and that is quite enough reason to him for destroying the heron. It is a great pity these miserable men are allowed to fire anything but blank cartridge. On the larger estates the head-gamekeeper is often a man of intelligence and a sound naturalist, and owls and kestrels are not murdered, and the heron, of course, goes free. But on either side of him may be a farmer who keeps a “gamekeeper” who steals eggs and young birds from his aristocratic neighbours, so that his master may let his “shooting” to some “city gents from London,” and who, though there maybe a heronry on the adjoining estate, kills the birds when he gets the chance, because, as he says, he has to “preserve the fishing,” but really because he can get a few pence for its skin. Sometimes a heron appears in a poulterer’s shop and finds a purchaser who is curious in matters of eating[B] and wishes to taste a fowl that once was so highly prized as to be the dish of honour in the game course at banquets of State.

But there are not, I fancy, many men, except farmers’ “gamekeepers” and their confederates the so-called “naturalists”,

who would pull a trigger upon a heron. The admiration of Nature is very sincere in the educated Englishmen of to-day, and by far the greater number of them would rather see the beautiful creature making their estate its home than kill it. It is, indeed, the very genius of beautiful solitude, and by its mere presence raises the commonplace to the picturesque.

Take a secluded bend of any stream, with its alders and willows, its wild flowers stealing down to the water’s edge to see their faces in the glass, and yellow flags boldly wading out by their companies and battalions into mid-stream. The dragon-flies poise upon the tips of the reeds, or with rustling wings dart and wheel upon the water, puzzling the coot’s flotilla of puff-balls paddling about among the water-daisies. The scene is sweetly pretty, and when on a sudden a kingfisher on sapphire wings comes flashing past, enhancing every charm by its transient brilliance, the pretty becomes lovely, and the little common reach of water catches a glimpse of fairyland possibilities, and of beauties something rarer than of every day. Then let a heron on its broad slow-moving wings come up the stream, and lo! the whole scene changes. It becomes at once unfamiliar, of another world, exotic. The heron’s long legs are dropped down, the long neck stretched out and, almost as a spectre might appear, there stands “the bird so gaunt,” its crest-feathers slightly raised, its eyes scrutinising the banks. Silent as the great bird is, you must keep more silent still. For it is watching and listening as only the bird can do that fishes by sound as well as by sight. If it is satisfied, the aigrette, “fit for the turban of a king,” droops flat to its head, the neck is retracted, the wings comfortably closed, and the heron relapses into that beautiful attitude of patient watchfulness that Art delights in. And as it stands there, motionless in misty grey, in the utter silence of the tranquil corner, it looks like one of the jinns of Arabian tales, for its being there seems to bewitch the place and the stream becomes haunted.

So I remember once how when I was in India lying down in the jungle waiting for a bear to be driven, a sambhur-stag with splendid antlers came spectrally into the open space that my rifle covered. An instant before it was empty. Not a leaf stirred, and yet there, on the sudden, stood the great-horned stag, only a few paces from me, listening to the distant voices of the beaters. An instant later, and it stepped into the jungle again and vanished as silently, completely, as a ghost. And I rubbed my eyes and blinked, but I know that it came and that it went.

And where, to come back to our heron, is the fisher now? A minute ago it seemed as if it would never move: a statue in feathers set up there among the forget-me-nots for the stream-folk to worship. But while your eye has been following that fat perch loitering by the side of its shadow, as if they were company for each other, in that little clear patch of water by the bank which a shaft of sunlight pierces to the pebbled floor, the heron, with half a dozen stately, noiseless steps has changed its ground, and passing behind that thick spray of willow that droops “aslant the stream,” is out of sight. Come away, yourself, as quietly as you can: the poor heron is not often left in peace by those who see it. Be, then, one of the few who treat the noble bird with courtesy.

It is not given to many to see a large heronry at breeding time, but should the opportunity offer, it is well worth your while. The size of the birds alone makes them interesting, and the spectacle of so many flying to and fro at once and the grotesque nestlings flopping about on their nests or standing grimly but with uncertain foothold at the edges, their half-humorous, half-wicked looks and gestures, will keep your glasses to your eyes as long as friends will wait for you. The noises that proceed from old and young alike are both solemn and comical, disconcerted fragments of croaks and squeaks, mingled with such discordant scraps of sound as a child trying to blow a coach-horn might produce. The young ones too keep falling off their perches, probably because the instinct to try and stand on one leg is too strong for their prudence and their thin knee-joints. They manage, as a rule, to scramble and flap themselves on to other standpoints, but very often, failing to make good their foothold, they fall to the ground, when the parents seem to lose all further interest in them. To these accidents probably is due the superstition alluded to by Marvel:

In the old cruel days when falconry was for a time so “fashionable,” the heron—or rather the heronsewe, hornsea, hornsey or hernshaw, for these are the older names of the bird we call heron and hern—was the fowl chiefly flown at with the largest and fiercest falcons, and the penalties for killing the bird, except with hawks or the long-bow, were very severe. But modern falconers, whose sport is now as humane as sport can ever be, have to be content with water-fowl for their prime flights. For the heron is annually becoming rarer as a wild bird, and before long will probably only be seen in the vicinity of private heronries, where the courtesies of country neighbourhood protect it from wilful molestation, and suffice to preserve for all lovers of Nature the charming sight of these birds, by some hill-bound tarn, “sole-sitting on the shores of old romance,” seated aloft on “the pines, the heron’s ancient home,” or, like the spirit of tranquil solitude, beautifying the pleasant reaches of a river.

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VI.