CHAPTER XIV WINTER ASPECTS AND A BIRD VISITATION
Back to the land—Golden days in winter—Colour of dead bracken—Lichen on trees in winter—Furze and bracken in winter—A New Forest memory—Effect of rain on dead bracken—An artist in the rain—Snow and bird migration from the east—The birds return east—How the migrants are received at St. Ives—Birds taken with fish-hooks—Bush-beating—Dolls and gins for the children—Maimed birds—Wesley revisits St. Ives—A compassionate woman—Story of a robin—Mr. Ebblethwaite and the gulls—The author follows Ruskin's advice.
HAVING finished, not very satisfactorily perhaps either to myself or readers, with the difficult subjects which occupy the last few chapters, I returned with renewed zest to my solitary rambles among the hills and along the coast, particularly to that most fascinating strip of country named "Cornwall's Connemara." It was going back to the land and the simple life in a fresh sense—to have moorland donkeys and conies, and daws, gulls and yellow-hammers, instead of men for company; creatures whose lowly minds do not baffle us. I doubt if even the wildest American of the "new school of natural history" would maintain that these friends in fur and feathers possess the faculty of imagination in any degree. It was very pleasant and restful to sit on a granite boulder on the hillside and gaze by the hour, thinking of nothing, on the blue expanse of ocean and the more ethereal blue of the sky beyond, with perhaps a few floating white clouds and soaring white gulls in the void to add to the sense of height and vastness.
There is no question that the best days in the six months from October to March, which are more or less charged with gloom in these northern realms, are those rare days when the sky is clear, the wind still, and the sun floods the world with light and heat. Such days are apt to be warmer here than in other parts; even the adder, hibernating in his deep dark den beneath the rocks, is stirred by the heavenly influence, and crawls forth on a midwinter day to lie basking in the delicious beams. And the entire visible world, sea and land, is a glittering serpent, its discontent now forgotten, slumbering peacefully, albeit with wide-open eyes, in the face of the sun.
Here, in such weather, the futility of all our efforts, whether with pen or pencil, to convey the picture to another has forced itself on me. Some of the details in a description are visualised and remain, but refuse to arrange themselves in their proper place and order, and the result is a mere confusion. I can but go down to a distance of a mile or two from the hills and, turning my back to the sea, look at the prospect before me, and omitting all the small details speak only of its shape and colour. On the right hand and on the left it stretches away to the horizon, and it rises before me up to the rock-crowned peaks and ridges of the hills, the slopes and the moor below splashed and variegated with dead heath-brown, darkest green, and dull red, the hues of heather, furze and dead bracken; and everywhere among the harsh, rough, almost verdureless vegetation appear the granite boulders and masses of rock cropping out of the earth. A scene that enchants with its wildness and desolation; also, on wet days and when the air is charged with moisture, with its novel and strikingly beautiful colour.
The colour of bracken, living or dead—of a plant so universal and abundant—is familiar to everybody, yet I would like now to dwell at some length on its winter colour because it is a strange thing in itself—one of the most beautiful hues in nature which appears in a dead and faded vegetation after the beech-like brilliant autumn tints of russet, gold and copper-red have vanished, and glows and lives again as it were, and fades and vanishes only to return again and yet again, right on to the time when the deep undying roots shall thrust up new stems to uncurl at their tips, spreading out green fresh fronds to cover and conceal that mystery, even as we cover our dead, beautiful in death, with earth and with green and flowering plant. This phenomenon is common enough, but in no place known to me is the landscape so deeply and so constantly coloured by dead bracken as on these slopes, on account of the great abundance of the plant and the excessive moisture in the atmosphere.
In other parts of the county where trees grow a curious effect of the excessive humidity is seen in some woods, especially in deep valleys and coombes sheltered from the winds, in which the mists remain longest. Here you will find the trees thickly clothed from the roots to the highest terminal twigs with long coarse grey lichen like that which grows so abundantly on the granite boulders on the slopes and the rocks on the headlands. The trees are leafless but not naked in winter and look as if covered with a grey foliage, or grey with a faint tinge of green. The effect is not only singular; in walking through such a wood under the grey canopy of branches, and when you come out into an open glade and see the trees in multitudes extending far beyond and all clothed in the same dim mysterious unearthly colour, you are apt to have the fancy that you are in a ghostly wood and are, perhaps, a ghost yourself.
Another singular and magnificent effect of dead bracken where it flourishes greatly among furze bushes can be best seen among the hills.
The first time I particularly noticed this effect was in April near Boldre, in the New Forest, a good many years ago. There was a patch of furze about three acres in extent, where the big rounded bushes grew so close as to touch one another and appeared to occupy the ground to the exclusion of all other plant life; yet it could be seen that bracken had also flourished there during the previous summer, growing tall among the bushes; for now the old dead and withered fronds were everywhere visible lying against or mixed with the dark massy spiky branchlets of the furze. Only it was so shrivelled and pale in colour, or rather colourless, amid the mound-like masses of the dark living green as almost to escape the sight. The mind at all events took no account of those thin and bleached lace-like rags of dead vegetable matter.
One day I walked in this place when it was raining, and after rain had been steadily falling for several hours; but the grey sky was now full of light and the wet grass and foliage had a silvery brightness that was full of promise of fair weather. The rain-soaked dead bracken had now opened and spread out its shrivelled and curled-up fronds and changed its colour from ashen grey and the pallid neutral tints of old dead grass to a beautiful, deep rich mineral red. It astonished me to think that I had never observed the effect before—this marvellous transformation of the sere and almost invisible lace rags to these rich red fabrics of curious design spread upon the monotonous dark green bushes like deepest red cornelian or reddest serpentine on malachite.
This peculiar beauty and richness of hue is seen in its perfection only while the rain is falling and the streaming water is glistening on the surface of the leaf, but is best when the rain is nearly over and the clouds are full of light. No sooner does the rain cease than the rich glistening red begins to grow dull and fades as the wet dries. In a little while, in a drying sun and wind, the red hue quite vanishes and the fern is again the old faded rag it was before.
In this part of West Cornwall there was more furze and bracken together than I had ever seen, where both plants grow in the greatest luxuriance, unmixed with other tree and bush vegetation, and with nothing among it but the grey lichened rocks which served to intensify the effect of the intermingled sombre green and glistening rich red. Nor had I long to wait for the falling drops which brought the loveliness into existence, seeing that it rains on most days, and when it was mild and the wind not too strong the rainy day was nearly as good as the rare golden day of clear skies and genial sunshine.
On one occasion when I was out in the hills feasting my sight on the beautiful strange aspect of things, when the rain was so heavy and continuous that it soaked through my waterproof and wetted me, I was surprised to find a lady artist at work under a big umbrella. She was one of a colony of forty or fifty artists in the small town close by, but the first one I had seen out in that wild place in wet weather. Her subject was a small, rather squalid-looking farm-house on the further side of a narrow green field—one which could have been better painted on a fine day. I was told that the artists of this one colony alone turn out about a thousand landscapes a year, and I wondered if any one had ever attempted to paint that wonderful sight just at their threshold—the dead bracken among the furze with the silvery-grey rain on it.
On the higher slopes where the furze is less abundant the bracken predominates, covering large areas with its red tapestry, and on most days throughout the winter it keeps its deep strong colour, owing to the excessive amount of moisture in the air. It disappears only when the new fern springs and spreads a wave of monotonous green over the rough land and well-nigh obliterates all other plant life. Only at very long intervals there is another winter aspect of the hills and moors, when they are whitened with a heavy fall of snow. "About every ten years," people say; but although the weather was exceptionally cold in December, 1906, I had no hope of witnessing that change, and going away to spend my Christmas elsewhere missed the very thing I wanted to see. It was not so much the sight of the hills in their ghostly white I desired as the accompanying phenomenon of the vast multitude of birds flying from the fury of winter; for whenever a wave of cold, with snow, comes over the southern half of England, the birds, wintering in myriads all over that part of the country, are driven further west, and finally concentrate on the Cornish peninsula and stream down to the very end of the land.
No sooner had I gone away than the bitterly cold weather with snow and sleet, which prevailed over a great part of the country at Christmas, swept over the southern and western counties and drove the birds before it. The first news I had of it was in a letter, dated December 30, from a naturalist friend, Mr. G. A. B. Dewar, who was staying on the towans, overlooking St. Ives Bay, close to Hayle. "I wonder," he wrote, "did you see much of the marvellous migration scene which took place here on Friday morning? For hours—till about midday—redwings, thrushes, larks and fieldfares streamed across St. Ives Bay, coming from the east. There was a great highway of birds, which must have been miles broad. We saw them first from the window as we dressed.... Most of the birds crossed the Bay, going towards Land's End, but thousands and tens of thousands dropped exhausted among the sand dunes, or towans, here, and among these I found golden plover, ring plover, sanderlings, lapwings, etc.—altogether an extraordinary assemblage. On Saturday morning, lasting till one o'clock p.m., the birds returned in a great highway east again. Mingled among them were many small birds, linnets, etc. A most wonderful pathetic scene, I assure you. I wondered if any ol the travellers crossed the Channel, or whether they all stopped in this extreme westerly bit of land. I did not think England had so many fieldfares and redwings."
On my return a few days later, I found on inquiring along the coast that large numbers of the birds had appeared at the Land's End towards evening and settled down to roost in the furze and heath and among the stones. At one house, I was told, numbers of thrushes and starlings crowded on the window sills, and some of them that were stiff with cold were taken in but were found dead in the morning. From all I could hear the migration appears to have spent itself at this spot.
To me the "pathetic" part of it was the reception the starved fugitives met with from the good people along the coast, especially at St. Ives with its horn or "island" beyond the town thrust out into the sea, a convenient resting-place for the birds after flying across the bay. My information on the subject, which would fill some twenty pages of a blue-book, was gathered from men and lads, mostly fishermen, who had taken part in the massacre. Each person buys a handful of small fish-hooks, manufactured for the purpose and sold, a dozen for a penny, by a tradesman in the town. Ten to twenty baited hooks are fastened with short threads to a string, two or three feet long, called a "teagle," and placed on a strip of ground from which the snow has been cleared. To these strips of mould or turf the birds fly and seize the hooks, and so blind to danger are they made by hunger that they are not deterred by the frantic struggles of those already hooked. Many birds succeed in freeing themselves by breaking the thread in their struggles, but always with that bit of barbed bent wire in their mouths or stomachs, which must eventually cause their death. In one garden where food was placed for the birds and their hunters kept out, eleven dead and dying birds were picked up in one day among the shrubs, all with hooks in their gullets.
One young fisherman told me with great glee that he had found two hooks besides his own in the mouth of a blackbird he had taken from his teagle.
[Original]
This method of slaying the small birds, most common in seasons of snow and frost, and practised without a qualm by the pious natives of all ages from the small shiny-faced boy to the hoary-headed ancient who can no longer take his seat in a boat—a method one would imagine which even the most hardened Italian, hungering for the flesh of robins, tomtits and jenny wrens, would be ashamed to follow—is not the only cruel and brutish one practised. Bush-beating is also common in many of the villages and hamlets along the coast and in the country generally. Even here at this extreme end of Cornwall, a treeless district, there are bits of hedge and sheltered spots with a dense bush growth to which birds resort in crowds to roost, and these are the places where bush-beating, or "bush-picking" as it is often called, is practised. It is a favourite pastime, men and boys going out in gangs with dark lanterns and sticks to massacre the birds. It is a primitive sort of battue with brooms and caps and jackets for weapons, and very many of the victims are lost in the dense thicket or in the surrounding blackness—little bruised and broken-winged birds left to perish slowly of cold and hunger and of their hurts.
Even more hateful than these battues and wholesale slaughter of the starving immigrants in times of severe weather is the little daily dribbling warfare which the boys are permitted to wage at all seasons in many villages and hamlets against the birds. They are actually encouraged to do it; and it is a common thing to find fathers and mothers after a visit to their market town, giving little hooks and wire and steel gins to their small boys. Dolls for the girls and steel gins for the boys! Where there is a little strip of sand on the beach the gin is set, covered with a little sand, and a few crumbs strewn on it. One result of this practice is that many little birds after having been caught get away with the loss of a leg or foot. Every day at St. Ives I used to see one or more of these poor maimed creatures—sparrows, wagtails, rock and meadow pipits, and other species—painfully hopping on one foot or crawling with the help of their wings over the ground in search of food. Yet the boys and men who do these things every day and are not rebuked by their pastors and masters are, or are supposed to be, the spiritual children and descendants of John Wesley, who converted and made them what they are, the most religious people in Britain! Wesley, the most compassionate of men, who not only loved all creatures but actually believed that they too, like men, were destined to know a future life!
"One most excellent end may undoubtedly be answered by the present considerations," he said in concluding a sermon on this subject. "They may encourage us to imitate Him whose mercy is over all His works. They may soften our hearts towards the meaner creatures, knowing that the Lord careth for all."
I think if he could revisit the scene of his greatest triumph of over a century and a half ago; if he could stand, perched like a cormorant, on the rocky headland above the town on a misty Sunday morning in November or December, and look down on the numerous chapels and the people in their best black clothes thronging into them; if he could listen to their eager conversation as they went and know that they were greatly concerned about the precise differences between Methodist and Primitive Methodist, between Wesleyans, Bible Christians and the New Connexion, with other minute variations in form and shades of colouring; and if he then, casting his eyes down to where at the foot of the rock a faint, sharp, sorrowful little note is heard at frequent intervals, he should catch sight of a maimed rock-pipit or titlark, creeping painfully about the beach with the aid of its wings in search of small morsels of food among the shingle and sea-wrack, his soul would be filled with exceeding bitterness. "They do not know, they never knew, me!" I think he would turn away from a people who call themselves by his name but are not his followers in that which was best in his teaching—not in that divine spirit of love and tenderness which was in Jesus of Nazareth, in St. Francis of Assisi, and in all men whose memories are sacred in the earth. I think he would pass away in the sea mist with a mournful cry which would perhaps be audible to the chapel-goers; and they would wonder at it and ask each other what this strange fowl could be that uttered a cry as of a soul in pain.
It is something to be able to say that not all of the inhabitants are indifferent to these things. Even in St. Ives, where bird-killing is most popular and a wholesale slaughter of the spent and hungry fugitives intoxicates with joy like a big catch of pilchards—where, indeed, bird-killing appears like an instinct as well as a pastime, having come down "from ancientie," to quote a phrase of Carew—there are some who are revolted by it. I am speaking not of visitors and English residents, but of native Cornishmen; and a few of these have begged me "to do or say something to put a stop to these disgusting barbarities"; and again they have said to me, "We can do nothing—they abuse us because we forbid them putting their traps and hooks on our ground—but you can perhaps do something."
Of these compassionate persons, of different social ranks, I will speak particularly of only one, a very tender-hearted woman, the wife of a working man, a huge fellow with the strength of an ox; and whenever the winter-driven birds arrived and were slaughtered in great numbers with circumstance of shocking cruelty, it was a consolation to her in her distress to think that he, her life-mate, although a native of the town, had never killed a bird in his life. There was doubtless a strain of mercy in both of them. She told me of an uncle who had inherited a house and garden in the town, where he had spent his life, whose habit it was to take out a basket of food every day for the birds. For some two or three years before his death one of his little pensioners was a robin with a crushed or broken leg that lived in his garden, and the woman assured me that when he was taken to be buried this bird followed the funeral, and was seen by many of those present flitting about close to the grave. On inquiry I found that this story was believed by many persons in St. Ives.
I have spoken in this chapter of the little crippled birds so often seen in this town and in some of the villages, and my belief was that these had all been caught in gins and had got away, leaving a foot or leg behind. But I occasionally saw a bird with a dangling leg, and could only account for it by supposing that in such cases the leg had been broken by a stone, the boys of the place all being greatly addicted to stone-throwing at the birds. Later I discovered that they were birds which had been caught in gins and liberated by their captors. At least a dozen of the big boys who spend all their leisure time in taking birds with gins on the sands at St. Ives assured me that they did not kill the small birds they caught, which were not wanted to eat. They killed starlings, blackbirds, thrushes and some other kinds, but liberated the wagtails, titlarks, robins and a few other small species. I also found out that when birds arrive in vast numbers in a severe frost or snowstorm and are caught with small baited hooks many of the smaller birds after the hook has been taken from the mouth or gullet are allowed to fly away. One man, the most enthusiastic bird-catcher with the teagle in the place, after removing the hook from the mouth or gullet of the bird he does not want, takes the two little mandibles between his thumbs and forefingers and wrenches the face open, then tosses the bird up to fly away to a little distance, soon to drop down and perish in agony. Small birds that are not wanted, he says, will sometimes return after being liberated and get caught again; those he liberates will trouble him no more.
These things are perfectly well known to every one in the place, and as this man has not been taken by his fellow-townsmen to the cliff and stoned and his carcass thrown into the sea as food for dogfishes, but, on the contrary, as they have friendly relations with him and sit in the same chapel on Sundays and regard him as a respectable member of the community, one can only suppose that nothing in the way of cruelty to God's creatures can be hellish enough to touch the St. Ives mind.
But, as we know, there are some exceptions, and I must now go back to the compassionate woman and to a word she dropped when she spoke to me with tears in her eyes of these cruelties. "I'm sure," she said, "that if some one living here, who loves the birds, would go about among the people and talk to the men and boys and not be afraid of anything but try to get the police and magistrates to help him, he could get these things stopped in time, just as Mr. Ebblethwaite did about the gulls."
But who was Mr. Ebblethwaite, and what was it he did about the gulls? I had been off and on a long time in the place and had talked about the birds with scores of persons without ever hearing this name mentioned. And as to the gulls, they were well enough protected by the sentiment of the fisher-folk. But it was not always so. On inquiry I found twenty persons to tell me all about Mr. Ebblethwaite, who had been very well known to everybody in the town, but as he had been dead some years nobody had remembered to tell me about him. It now came out that the very strict protection awarded to the gulls at St. Ives dates back only about fifteen to eighteen years. The fishermen always had a friendly feeling for the birds, as is the case in all the fishing places on the coast, but they did not protect them from persecution, although the chief persecutors were their own children. People, natives and visitors, amused themselves by shooting the gulls along the cliff and in the harbour. Harrying the gulls was the most popular amusement of the boys; they were throwing stones at them all day long and caught them with baited hooks and set gins baited with fish on the sands and no person forbade them. Then Mr. Ebblethwaite appeared on the scene. He came from a town in the north of England, in broken health, and here he stayed a number of years, living alone in a small house down by the waterside. He was very fond of the gulls and fed them every day, but his example had no effect on others, nor did his words when he went about day after day on the beach trying to persuade people to desist from these senseless brutalities. Finally he succeeded in getting a certain number of boys summoned for cruelty before the magistrates, and though no convictions followed nor could be obtained, since there was no law or by-law to help him in such a case, he yet in this indirect way accomplished his object. He made himself unpopular, and was jeered and looked black at and denounced as an interfering person, especially by the women, but some of the fishermen now began to pluck up spirit and second his efforts, and in a little while it came to be understood that, law or no law, the gulls must not be persecuted.
That is what Mr. Ebblethwaite did. For me it was to "say something," and I have now said it.
Doing and saying comes to pretty much the same thing; at all events I have on this occasion kept Ruskin's words in mind concerning the futility of prodding and scratching at that thick insensible crust which lies above the impressible part in men unless we come through with a deep thrust somewhere.
The majority may hate me for having followed this counsel, but there will be one or two here and there who will applaud my courage for having spoken in this book of the ugly things as well as of the things which flatter. And I will add—in no boastful spirit, Heaven knows—that what I have written will not be forgotten to-morrow, nor next year, nor the year after, but will be read some day, with a sense of shame, I trust, by the children of the very men who could do something and that now, but who refuse to listen to me and others, or listen coldly, when we plead for the birds. I refer to the landlords, who are absent or else shut up and inaccessible in their houses where they see nothing and hear nothing; the local editors; the ministers of religion (God save the mark!); and, above all, the authorities, and county and borough councillors and magistrates. They are all very careful of their "position" and their "reputation" and cannot afford to and dare not denounce or interfere with these old pastimes or customs of the people, to which they are attached and upon which they look as a right.
