Whatever foundation there may be for the belief, I found that if I caged a nest of blackbirds (leaving the cage in the bush and the top open for the parents to go in and out), the old birds would visit the nest, presumably with food, with the greatest diligence, but the young birds would be dying in two days. The thrushes kept their young ones alive.
Where do our blackbirds go to? They rear in nearly every case two broods a year; that is to say, there are every year five times as many blackbirds as the year before. According to this, starting with a single pair, a garden ought to have at the end of five years fourteen hundred, and at the end of ten years, supposing that one half died each year, something over two million blackbirds. Or, supposing they only rear one brood, there would be over seven thousand. Suppose the cats eat six thousand, there would still be the preposterous number of a thousand left. Where, then, I ask, do all the blackbirds go? It is quite certain that each pair, as a rule, hatches five birds, yet the number of blackbirds does not increase. So that if we say there are only ten thousand pairs of blackbirds in Great Britain, there are at least fifty thousand killed or made away with every year. “Then, what are they hatched for?” my child-friend might ask. “For cats” would be my reply. And yet it seems absurd that a hundred thousand blackbirds should be hatched every year just for cats to eat. All of which is a mystery to me.
It is noteworthy of this charming bird that it is an emblem of cultivation, as the sparrow is of civilisation. Savages only are exempt from the sparrow: only barren land from the blackbird. As soon as a garden is laid out, a hedge set, an orchard planted, the blackbird comes. Except within easy flight of land that man has tended, it is not found. Its nest, again, has a curious point in its favour, for it is so well built—being a cup of mud strongly felted with moss and grass both inside and out—and, as a rule, in such a sheltered spot that it lasts through the winter, and mice are often glad, when their tenements underground become uncomfortable, to occupy them. At other times, too, they serve them admirably for store-rooms and larders. One blackbird’s nest that I knew of, built into some very dense ivy in an angle of a wall, was a squirrel’s garden-house; not its regular home, for that was up in the pine-tree overhead, but a pleasure retreat for empty hours. But a vagabond rat turned it out, and made a “doss-house” of it.
The blackbird’s song everybody knows, but I have found that only the closer observers of Nature have noticed how it differs from that of other birds. Michael Drayton was, I think, the first:
The old English somewhat obscures the meaning, which is, that while all other birds “sing” with their throats, the blackbird alone “plays” upon a pipe. This “dulcet pipe” occurs in other poets, and two or three, Wordsworth, for instance, speak of “blackbird pipers.” It is almost the only bird said to “whistle” and to “flute.” The distinction is just, for it is, I think, the only European songster whose melody so curiously suggests artificial assistance. No voice is so completely a bird’s voice as the nightingale’s, but the blackbird, when at its best, is the master playing on some exquisite instrument. So the ear that has once distinguished the difference can never mistake the blackbird for the thrush. It is, too, perhaps the only bird that sings its best in captivity. There used to be one in an inn in Epping Forest that outsang all the wild birds within hearing.
Why do caged birds sing, if singing is the expression of happiness and joy? That human beings should, by the exercise of reason, or the growth of new interests, by the lapse of time, or the consolations of religion, recover, after a severe blow, their original serenity and even light-heartedness, is sufficiently intelligible. But what would the world say of any bridegroom, torn away from the arms of his bride, and shut up in a kennel; or of a young father kidnapped in the bosom of his young family, and ignominiously imprisoned in a fowl-run, who should straightway behave himself with the utmost gaiety, and exhibit to passers-by every symptom of happiness? Yet this is what the blackbird, caught in full song during the pairing season, does. He goes on singing just as if nothing had happened. It may be, of course, that the brief days of moping through which the poor bird passes, correspond to long years of human sorrowing, and that then hope revives, and the blackbird, remembering how song used to be “once upon a time” associated with all the joys of home and home-life, thinks that if he only sings long enough and well enough, they may all come back again. But surely there cannot be any happiness in that happy-sounding song?
Love-notes of birds are generally unmusical and often grotesque. When they are pretty they are monosyllabic. So the emotions that prompt lengthened melody are, as a rule, the sterner and unamiable. Anger, defiance, pride and possessiveness supply the motives of their songs.
When a lion is amiable, he is quiet; his loudest utterance is a yawn; when courting, he grunts and hiccoughs; when aggressive or inclined to assert himself, “just to let Africa know” as it were, he opens upon the world with the artillery of his voice. Is that the lion’s way of “singing”? and is the blackbird’s song its way of “roaring”?
To take a more familiar case, it is only when the animal is in the presence of his own sex, and his intentions are the reverse of friendly, that the human understanding arrives at the vocal compass of domestic tom-cats. They then sing melancholy part-songs, out of all time and tune: we call them “cats’ concerts.” But if you will listen to them, and not disturb them either by laughter or missiles (as your humour may take you), you will observe that each cat is “singing” its very best. Very often no scrimmage results after the music is over, but each cat, satisfied with its exhibition of its upper register, goes its way. If, while listening, you can also see the cats while they are singing, you can have no more doubt as to their own opinion of their performances than when watching a blackbird. Female cats cannot sing. That fine voice is an ornament of the male sex alone, and whenever one male meets another—none of the other sex being present—they at once (if sudden conflict, giving no time for a “glee,” does not supervene) fall to singing, each pitting his “g” against the other’s. You may any day see two such encounterers, having sung their songs, relapse into placid indifference to each other’s presence, just as blackbirds do, and depart harmlessly each about his own duties.
Lions sing much as blackbirds do. Morning and evening they get on to an eminence and lift up their voices, informing all the other lions in their parish, and the continents adjoining, that they are going to bed or have just got up, and that they do not intend to stand any nonsense; that that particular eminence is their own, and no other lion in Lybia or thereabouts will be tolerated in its vicinity. If, while one is roaring, there should come rumbling along on the wind the voice of another, the vocal duet is prolonged; but when the rites have been duly performed, “matin-song and vespers eke,” they go about the business of the day or the night, as the case may be, without further ado.
So, again, in the ferocious old European fighting-days, warriors were perpetually singing—not love songs, for these were delegated to professionals and mercenaries, but war-chaunts. Heroes of the Berserker and hardy Norseman type got up and sang whenever they were excited, as naturally as blackbirds do, but their singing must have been much more like the lion’s than the bird’s. Savage races at the present day, whenever they are unamiably inclined, fall to “singing” war-songs, which they improvise, music and words alike; and to our ears their compositions are hideous. So, no doubt, the blackbird would think the lion’s, and the lion think the blackbird’s. Birds and beasts, no doubt, differ as much in ear as they do in voice. But reverse their sizes, and see the result. The emu bellows and booms; there are mice that “sing” quite prettily. If the lion were the size of a blackbird, he would, perhaps, as Bottom said, “roar you as gently as any sucking-dove: roar you as ’twere any nightingale.”
Voice alone does not make a bird a favourite, or what could we say for the swallow, that has so slight a song, and yet, excepting the robin, is
In the old days Rome loved the swallows as the spirits of dead children revisiting their homes, and Rhodes welcomed the bird’s return with public song and canticles of thanks. And long before Rome and Rhodes, men said that it was the swallow that brought Noah back the leaf; and the swallow, when Adam and Eve were separated after the Flood, brought our first parents together again, by telling Adam in Serendib that Eve was on the Red Sea coast. In later days it is a sacred bird in all four quarters of Europe: “the bird of consolation” in the North; “bird of the happy beak” in the South; “the bird of the hearth” in the West; and “the bird of God” in the East. Apart from all this, “the clime-changing swallow,” slipt from the secret hand of Providence, that comes all the way from Southern Africa to hunt our May-flies, is one of the oracles of Nature and the joyous evangelist of happy Summer.
We all notice the first swallow almost as soon as the first cuckoo; for though the one bird’s note catches the ear, the flight of the other arrests the eye as certainly. And what a flight it is! Has it ever been computed how many hundred miles it flies every day? For hours they are on the wing, flying at the rate of a mile a minute, and always with exquisite grace. Watch a bird crossing a hay-field, winding in and out of the hay-cocks, rising just sufficiently to clear the hedge at the bottom, wheeling round over the gate, and then up the lane, almost, so it seems, skimming the ground as it goes, and yet without an effort lifting itself up over the spinney, and so dropping back into the hay-field. Their judgment is so accurate that they never have to turn at an angle, but, always allowing for the curve beforehand, make their course with a beautifully easy sweep. When there are young ones to feed their speed is even swifter, their industry more untiring, for instead of breaking off in their insect hunting to circle in play with their fellows, or to race the swifts across the sky, they have only the one idea, to fill their beaks as full as they will hold, and hurry back to the nest.
The swallow does not go back to its young with a single fly at a time, but with a mouth filled as full as possible, so that those who try to calculate the usefulness of this bird by the number of the journeys that it makes to its nest, underestimate its destruction of insects by probably fifty per cent. Although, perhaps, few who watch the birds know it, the swallow’s wide-gaping mouth is sticky inside, so that everything it catches it holds, and in this way is spared interminable miles of journeying. To see them at their best is when a hawk passes, and, for sheer mischief, the swallows chase it.
The hawk is flying, as hawks can fly, with great swiftness; but look at the velocity of the swallows, which fly round and round the hawk as it goes! They hover over it, loiter by the side of it, make excursions ahead of it, and come back, mock it, in fact, as if it were an owl, or as hares might mock and mob a tortoise. And the hawk never even pretends to chase one of the swallows, but goes doggedly on its way, as fast as it can go, to the cover of the wood. To see the swallow at its worst is upon the ground: there it is a poor thing indeed, and from the shortness of its legs and the length of its wings, has to shuffle along, rather than walk.
But it does not often condescend to walk on the ground. When it alights, to knead the plaster for its nest at a puddle’s edge, or for any other purpose, it springs up into the air from the spot on which it settled. And its nest once built, it has no reason for coming to the ground at all. It does so from choice sometimes, where it suspects insects are congregated, or sometimes to drink, but, as a rule, it both eats and drinks on the wing. When it rests, it is on a house-roof, a railing, or dead branch, and often when thus seated it sings a very sweet, simple little song, loud enough to puzzle the passer-by, who can hear but not see the songster, and pretty enough to astonish those who imagine that swallows only twitter.
While the hen-bird is brooding she is busily fed by her mate, and the compliments that pass whenever the two birds meet are very sweet to listen to.
Every time he comes there is a scrap of conversation, and when she has eaten what he has brought, there is a little exchange of twittered love-nothings. There are always two broods in the year, the first scattering over the country and eventually straggling away in small migratory parties across the sea, the second going with their parents in the great annual exodus in October.
It is then that these birds congregate in vast companies, lining the telegraph-wires for miles, till they loop with their weight, or crowding upon every available foothold of some range of buildings. How irresistible the discipline of these little creatures is, as you look at them sitting there by the thousand, waiting for the signal to start on a journey the object and end of which is a mystery to all the young ones. You will see how impatient they are, how they keep on trying their wings by wheeling round in the air. With what restlessness they take short flights and resettle. And all this time, and up to the very last, the old ones keep on busily feeding the young, as if they knew what a trial was before them, and how urgent their need of all the strength possible. Here and there are broods hatched too young to join in the great Hegira, and here and there nestlings with some infirmity that unfits them for boisterous travel. These are found lingering in our islands all through October into November, but the great army of the swallows musters at the rendezvous punctually to date. And there they sit in their myriads, but the whole obedient as one, and lo! next morning, before the sun is up, they are gone, every one of them—gone towards the sea, towards the Nile and the Cape, gone till next Spring. For
The Birds of the Months—Some Rare Birds and some Common—January and the Fieldfare—February and the Rook—March, April, May, with the Thrush, Swallow and Nightingale—The Terrors of Migration—June and the Ring-dove—A Wood-pigeon Problem—The Dotterel—Evening Voices: The Night-jars—July and the Skylark—August, September, with Grouse and Partridge—The Ptarmigan—The old Cock-pheasant—November and the Woodcock—December with its Robin and Wren
IT is easy, taking a score of birds, to construct a bird-calendar, a zodiac of birds, that comes very near the actual truths, and almost exhausts the list of more notable land-fowl. There are some, like the heron or the bittern, the curlew, the woodpecker, or the coot, that are not significant of any particular time and season, because they are not sufficiently familiar.
It is only by some fortunate accident and in particular places that you may hear the lonely cry of
or the bittern
It is a very quaint and ancient myth that the “mire-dromble” or “mere-drum” fixed its beak in a hollow reed or in the bog, and by “snoring,” “booming,” or “bellowing” through it made, as Burns says, “the quagmire reel.” Several poets refer to the bittern “shaking the solid ground,” Thomson among them, in the absurd lines, “The bittern knows his time, with bill ingulpht, to shake the surrounding marsh.” But they are all to be traced back to Michael Drayton’s description of how
It is altogether a delightful bird in poetry and folk-lore, this “bog-bumper” or “betowre,” or whatever name we choose to know it by. The curlew again, a bird of the coast and the northern uplands, is familiar only to those who live near marsh and moor, though its weird, wild clamour, as it passes overhead in the night, is the source of a superstition, which, as “Gabriel’s hounds,” “The Seven Whistlers,” “The Wild Huntsman,” is common to all Northern Europe, and is probably the origin of that fearful wild-fowl that was the “trump of doleful drere,” “the whistler shrill that whoso hears doth die,” to which Wordsworth alludes:
and Moore:
All this, and ever so much more of quaint and interesting tradition, has its source in the impressive uncanny cries with which the curlews, flying by night, keep their company all safely together. The woodpecker again, Tennyson’s “garnet-headed yaffingale,” the bird of Picus the augur, which breaks with his crazy ringing laugh so suddenly upon the solitude, is familiar only to those who live near woods. Marvel has some excellent but little-known lines on the “hewel,” as he calls this bird of many aliases:
The coot, too, is a bird only familiar to such as dwell near quiet waters—a whimsical and odd-mannered amphibian, that gives a very pleasing animation to the sequestered places it frequents, for whether diving and ducking in the water, or moving with flicking tail about the banks, in that “jerky, high-stepping manner” which Dudley Warner disliked so delightfully in his neighbours’ hens, it is a fowl of pantomimic behaviour that is very diverting to watch.
Other birds, again, are too common to be significant of time or of season, though, among them are many of the most popular of our feathered folk—the beautiful and merry chaffinch, the roadside yellowhammer, the linnets that are everywhere, the delightful goldfinch and bullfinch, the sweet-song hedge-sparrow, the handsome monotonous greenfinch, the ubiquitous sparrow—“meanest of the feathered race,” as Cowper unkindly calls it—and the dainty water-wagtails that
everybody likes. Some of the wagtails stay with us all the year round, but most move southward as winter approaches, and when the weather becomes severe, cross the Channel to seek a warmer climate. In Spring they are one of the ploughman’s companions, for often it is only in the freshly-turned furrows that they can then find the insect food they need, but later on they seek the neighbourhood of water where winged things assemble, and there love to paddle in the shallows. Often, too, they take flights inland, searching the meadows and garden-lawns for “such small deer” as they live upon, hawking for flies among the haycocks or amongst the cattle that are standing at ease by the pond, or following them in quest of the insects which, as they graze, they disturb from the herbage. I know no bird that is more “bird-like” than the wagtail; more dainty, delicate, and elegant: in its every movement it is airy, the embodiment of buoyant grace: whether on the ground or a-wing it is fairy-like, volatile, and wayward: running, fluttering, and flitting impulsively as if it were too happy to stop to think, like a child in a meadow full of flowers: a sylph among the birds, so slim and so sweetly-proportioned as to make its little companions look burly and thick-set: so prettily timid in its demeanour that the rest seem almost aggressive; in a word, a bird of birds.
But between the familiar and unfamiliar there are just enough birds, well known to all of us, that fit the seasons and the months with a rather special appropriateness. For the months there is the fieldfare for January, the rook for February, the thrush for March, the swallow for April, the nightingale for May, the dove for June, the kingfisher for July, the grouse for August, the partridge for September, the pheasant for October, the woodcock for November, and “the wren, the wren, the king o’ the birds,” for December.
The fieldfares comes to us late in the year, and in January, if the weather be very hard, are often the most conspicuous wild birds of the month. Most people mistake them for missel-thrushes, as they travel about in companies over the snow-covered fields, ransacking the hedges in such methodical fashion for the hawthorn berries, or scattering over open patches of ground in quest of seeds or insects. This mistake, doubtless, saves many of their lives, for those who would not shoot our native missel-thrushes in the snow, might have no compunction in bagging the strangers from abroad, who bring with them such a reputation for the table as the fieldfares, and who, it might be urged, are poaching on the scanty winter-provisions of thrush and blackbird—“the hawthorn’s berries red, with which the fieldfare, wintry guest, is fed,” and which, if it had stayed at home, would help to keep our own song-birds alive through the pinch of the year.
In February the rooks have repossessed themselves of their old haunts:
And so to March and “the throstle with his note so true”; and April, when “the swallow knows her time, and on the vernal breezes wings her way, o’er mountain, plain, and far-extending seas, from Afric’s torrid sands to Britain’s shore, before the cuckoo”; and May, “with the darling of the Summer’s pride, fair Philomel,” “the dear good angel of the Spring, the nightingale,” and
With the swallow and the nightingale, many other birds “transmigrating come, unnumbered colonies on foreign wing, at Nature’s summons.”
From every quarter the aliens, if birds bred on British soil by British-born parents can be called such, converge upon our coasts, just as if England were the centre of a circle at which all the birds who spend the rest of the year upon its circumference congregate for the nesting season, reaching the same point at the same time, but travelling, each company, on a radius of its own.
I have often wondered that migration is not more often looked at through the other end of the telescope, and Great Britain called the “home,” for instance, of the nightingale. What makes “home” for a bird? Is it not the place where the nest is built and the young are reared? For the rest of the year the families travel “abroad,” returning “home” for all that makes life important and domestic. Their fixed addresses are in England, their names are in British directories as residing there. But their doctors will not let them winter “at home,” and so they have to go on to the Continent, or to even warmer latitudes, for the colder months of the year. I myself entertain, and often express, a grudge against the “migrants” for staying only so long as it is fine; but as often as I do so, my conscience reproaches me, for, after all, the nightingale shows its affection for its birthplace by coming back to it; and, “in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations,” remains a true-born English bird. What more could it do? It might certainly stay and freeze to death. But why should we expect nightingales to do more than we expect men and women to do? Which of us, if warned by doctors against the English winter and possessing the means to go abroad, would stop at home to die here, just to show that we are lovers of our country? So it would be quite in keeping with the sympathetic and kindly tendency of contemporary natural history, if we looked upon the birds when they come, as our own birds coming home, and when they go, as going abroad under the inexorable compulsion of health; if we welcomed them in Spring as returning fellow-countrymen, and bade them god-speed in Autumn, as delicate folk who would, if they could, but dare not, stop in Britain all the year round. And who can blame the birds, apart from necessities of life and death, for leaving our shores? Think of the climate they can always, by a morning’s flight, enjoy, year in and year out, “in foreign countries”; what range of space, what perennial abundance of food, and then calculate the force of inherited affection for the place of their birth that urges them, hosts of little feeble people, to dare the appalling journey “home,” to risk the truly awful perils of return to their native land. Had they human intelligence, and did they live by reason, not one of them would think of coming here.
What human parents would think of wintering in, say, Cairo, if they knew that the railway companies meant to destroy them wholesale as they travelled down to Dover; that the coast-guard and along-shore rabble were all on the look-out for them to take their lives; that the Channel steamer owners were in conspiracy to kill them; that the quays at Calais were swarming with avowed murderers of British travellers; that every Continental line was run by bandits and brigands sworn to shed their blood, and every hotel and resting-place an ambush of assassins? What British pater-familias would “winter in Cairo” under such conditions of travel? Yet these are the conditions under which the nightingales come and go. Only they do not know it. If they did, “the instinct of self-preservation” would surely triumph over “love of country,” and we should never see any nightingales in England, nor any turtle-doves—one of the most beautiful of our birds. But more of turtle-doves by-and-by.
Their larger and more beautiful relative the ring-dove or wood-pigeon we have with us always, and I think it is conspicuously the bird of June. The young are then on the wing, and it is impossible, passing near their haunts, not to be attracted by this ornamental bird, which, whether flying or at rest, adds a grace to every scene. Above all, it is beautiful when it beats its way up into the air to a height, and then, expanding its wings, comes floating down again. This exquisite performance may be seen at almost any time, for the ring-dove sometimes has three broods in the year, and if, as is supposed, it is a part of the bird’s courtship, is as appropriate in October as in March. Both birds may sometimes be seen executing this graceful “manœuvre” together; and it is, I think, the most prettily significant of all bird-gestures. Throughout June may be heard “the deep mellow crush of the wood-pigeon’s note, making music that sweetens the calm” of the summer woodlands or the sudden clapping when the startled bird, “on loud-applauding wing,” quits its perch. Hardly a country walk can then be taken without seeing, either feeding on the ground, at rest, or on watch upon the trees or flying overhead, the handsome bird, in its plumage of lavender-blue, that seems so wild, and yet can be tamed sooner almost than any bird but the robin.
It is an odd fact that the civilised sparrow, the most coolly familiar of birds, is the most difficult to make tame. The fact is, it is naturally vulgar, and no gentle influences can ameliorate the naturally vulgar. When at liberty, it will take all the liberties it can and dares; when shut up, even if from the nest, it develops into a voracious idiot; never amenable to kindness, always ferocious for food.
Yet the wood-pigeon, one of the wildest and shyest of birds, will soon become tame, will feed from the hand, and when the miserable, suspicious sparrow rushes into hiding, will sit in the aviary unconcerned and confident of friendship.
But note this curious difference. The sparrow in an aviary will breed, lay its eggs, and bring up its young ones, without any difficulty. The ring-dove may walk about at nesting-time with twigs in its mouth, may lay eggs, but let the aviary be never so large, it will not hatch its eggs.
This contradiction in character is very extraordinary, and yet, if considered, there is no irregularity in it. The sparrow builds simply because it will build anywhere, and is accustomed to the neighbourhood of men. But it never becomes in the least friendly: never even lays aside a suspicion which would be unbecoming in a Central African finch. The ring-dove, on the other hand, recognises at once a benevolent intention, becomes quite tame, and yet, during the nesting-season, cannot accommodate itself to conditions so outrageous to its nature. For it loves to build its platform in the most secluded spots, not always far from human habitation, but as far as possible out of sight.
Again, in protecting its young, this timid bird becomes very bold. I remember taking a young cushat from a tree and trying to rear it by hand, but it was almost full-grown, well-feathered, and too old for the purpose. After two days’ very unsuccessful experiments, I took it out on the lawn in a basket, on the chance of its parents being about, and the result was certainly as surprising as it was unlooked-for. The young bird, when we had all retired, began to show signs of excitement, stretching its neck up, and looking all round it vaguely; then it perched on the rim of the basket, and thoroughly searched the tree-tops, and all of a sudden it either saw or heard something that we did not, for it brightened up, stretched its neck to the utmost, looking excitedly in a particular direction, and then flew its first flight, heavily, but straight, to the top of an arbour. Scarcely had its feet touched the roof when, as if by magic, one of the old birds appeared at its side and began at once to feed it. None of us stirred, and, as soon as the meal was finished, the old bird hopped up to an overhanging branch, the young one following, and so up into the tree, and from that one to the next, and the next, till, in a few minutes, it had travelled along the tree-tops a hundred yards away. Now, the old birds must have been waiting about the house all the two days, for it is hardly likely that the taking out of the young one on to the lawn could have accidentally coincided with the coming of the old one to the same spot.
However, it is a curious, and really baffling, commentary on the whole incident that thereafter two old wood-pigeons and a young one, before the household was up in the morning, and off and on during the day, used to come down upon the lawn and examine the spot where the captive’s basket had stood, and which, after the young bird’s flight, we had shaken out on the spot, scattering all the peas and food that was in it upon the grass. Every day a handful of crumbs or maize used to be thrown there, and every day the family came for it. By what process of “instinct” could wild birds be led to behave so unreasonably? Did they separate in their “minds” the incidents of capture and of release, and being unable to put one and one together, consider the latter as an isolated act of benevolence apart from, and quite unconnected with, the former, and so behave with gratitude in consequence? Did they look on us only as the good Jack Stout who pulled Pussy out, forgetting that we were also the naughty Tommy Green who put Pussy in? But the workings of “instinct” are not to be followed out by “reason,” or what shall we say of all the other birds who, until we find their nests, are full of artifice to mislead us, and apparently most anxious that their secret should not be known, but who, once their nest is found, appear to lose all concern about the matter, and move to and fro as if it were the most natural thing in the world to treat us with confidence and be thoroughly aboveboard with us?
Take the delightful dotterel, for instance. It will go through all the deceptive performances of a lapwing, and weary out your patience with anxious devices for leading you astray; and yet, when you at last discover its beautiful eggs, olive, with rich dark markings, or its downy little ones, almost the same colour as the eggs, cuddled together in a small hollow, the old birds seem almost to congratulate you upon your sagacity, and come close, as much as to say, “Yes, these are our eggs; we were trying to show them to you all the time; and this is the way we sit down on them. Like to see us catch a fly? There! That’s the way we do it. See us run.” Then they droop one wing and begin to flutter along the ground, as if hurt—just to show you how it is done; and, in fact, before you go (and over your going they unreservedly and unmistakably rejoice), will sometimes go through such a series of performances as justifies their proverbial reputation for semi-idiotcy:
This was written three centuries ago; but foolish or not, the dotterel is a very engaging little bird, and to those who live near its summer haunts one of the prettiest details of bird-life
in June. Long after dusk, its plaintive note can be heard, now here, now there, among the tussocked grass, as the birds reply to one another from their sleeping-places. And the mist comes creeping up on to the moorland from the reedy mere beyond, and in the distance may be heard the voices of the water-birds settling down for the night among the plumy sedges, where the grey heron, perched upon the skeleton of some water-logged boat, seems to act as timekeeper to the ducks and widgeon that live hard by, and are under orders to be “within doors” by nightfall.
Listening to the twilight voices of birds, the most notable by far, that which holds the attention longest, though it may not be the first to catch the ear, is the fern-owl, whirring to his mate as she hawks backwards and forwards over the undergrowth, and turning in the air as she flies with queer sweep of the wings. Where there is one pair there are generally more, and the sound seems continuous, one bird taking it up from the other, or more than one “churring” at the same time. No bird of its size performs more curious antics on the wing than the “nightjar” or “goatsucker,” and it is almost incredible that the creature, flapping and tumbling in such ungainly fashion through the air, when startled from its sleeping-place in the day-time, is the same that one sees sailing and sliding so gracefully after nightfall.