CHAPTER XVII THE COMING OF SPRING
Spring in winter—John Cocking—Antics and love-flights of the shag—Herring gull mocked by a jackdaw—Migrating sea-birds—Departure of winter visitors—Appearance of the wheatear—Resident songsters—The frogs' carnival—A Dominican adder—Willow-wren and chiffchaff—Nesting birds and washing-day—A merciful woman—Pied wagtails in a quarry—Boys and robins.
AFTER the frost described two chapters back, the change to the normal winter temperature was so great as to make it seem like spring before the end of January. When spring does come to England, known to all by many welcome signs, it makes but a very slight difference in this West Cornwall district and is hardly recognised. For more than half the year, from October to May, it is comparatively a verdureless and flowerless land, dark with furze and grey with rocks and heather, splashed with brown-red of dead bracken. Not till the end of May will the bracken live again and make the rough wilderness green, and not till July will the dead-looking heath have its flush of purple colour. Nevertheless, from autumn onwards the sense of spring in the earth is never long absent. It rains and rains; sea-mists come up and blot out the sight of all things, and the wind raves everlastingly, and, finally, there may be a spell of frost or a fall of snow; but through it all, at very frequent intervals, the subtle influence, the "ethereal mildness," makes itself felt. It is as if the sweet season had never really forsaken this end of all the land, following the receding sun, but rather as if it had retired with the adder and the mother bumble-bee into some secret hiding-place to sleep a little while and wake as often as the rain ceased and the wind grew still to steal forth and give a mysterious gladness to the air. It is felt even more by the wild creatures than by man, and I think that John Cocking is one of the first to show it, for by mid-January he has got himself a curly crest and a new spirit.
John Cocking is the local name of the shag, the commonest species of cormorant on the coast, a big, heavy, ungainly-looking creature, the ugliest fowl in Britain, half bird and half reptile in appearance on the water, where he spends half his time greedily devouring fish and the other half sitting on the rocks digesting his food and airing his wings. It is hard to imagine any softening or beautifying change in such a being, and indeed the only alteration to be observed in him at first is that he begins to pay some attention to his fellow shags and to find out occasion to quarrel with them. I watched the behaviour of one, a tyrant and hooligan, at Gurnard's Head, at a spot where a mass of rocks overlooking the sea has one perfectly flat stone on the top. This stone was a favourite standing-place of the shags on account of its position and flat surface, and it afforded space enough to accommodate a score or more birds. The bird I watched had placed himself in the centre of the flat rock and would not allow another to share it with him. At intervals of a few minutes a cormorant coming up from the sea would settle on it, as he had always or for a long time been accustomed to do, whereupon the John Cocking in possession would twist his snaky head round and glare at him with his malignant emerald-green eyes. If this produced no effect he would open wide his beak and dart his head out towards the intruder just as an irritated adder lunges at you when you are out of his reach. Then, if the new-comer still refused to quit, he would pull himself up erect and hurl his heavy body against the other and send him flying off the rock. The ejected one would then either fly away or find himself a place on the sloping rock among the nine or ten others who had been treated in the same way. Meanwhile the ruffian himself would go back to the middle of the stone platform, holding his tail stuck up vertically like a staff and turn himself about this way and that as if asking the whole company if there was any other Johnny there who would like to try conclusions with him.
The softening of the ugly bird comes a little later when the hooligan has got a mate and both are half beside themselves with joy which they express by rubbing their snaky necks together, crossing and seesawing them, first on one side then the other, like knife and steel in the butcher's hands. When the nesting-site has been chosen, John Cocking is seen at his best, playing the attentive young husband; he visits her twenty times an hour, always with something in his beak, a bit of seaweed or a stick, just because he must give her something, and she takes it from him and bows this way and that and puts it down and takes it up again, and out of her overflowing affection gives it back to him—"Dear, you must not be so generous!" And he flies away with it again just to have an excuse to fly back the next minute and insist on her accepting it. The great change, greater even than his new charming manner towards his mate, is in his flight on quitting the nesting-place: he flies and returns, and passes and repasses before her, and alights on the rock for a moment and then off again—all to exhibit his grace, his imitation of the love-flight of the cushat and turtle-dove. The curious thing is that so heavy and ungainly a creature, with such a laboured flight at other times, does succeed fairly well, as if that new fire in him had made him lighter, more volatile and like the white-winged birds about him.
The cormorants are the earliest breeders, excepting the ravens, now so much persecuted by the injurious idiots and Philistines who call themselves collectors and naturalists that they rarely succeed in rearing their young; and the next to follow are the herring gulls. The gull fixes on a site for his nest, but long before building begins he appears anxious to let all his neighbours know that this particular spot is his very own and that he looks on their approach with jealous eyes. Not green eyes like the cormorant's, but of a very pure luminous yellow like the vivid eyes of a harrier hawk, or some brilliant yellow gem, or like the glazed petal of a buttercup lit by a sunbeam. His gull neighbours respect his rights, but the jackdaws mock at his feeling of proprietorship and amuse themselves very much at his expense.
One day I watched a pair of gulls on a rock they had recently taken possession of—a large mass of granite thrust out from the cliff over the sea. The female was reposing at the spot where it was intended the nest should be, while the male kept guard, walking proudly about on his little domain, now turning an eye up to watch the birds flying overhead, then stooping to pick up a pebble to hold it a few moments in his bill and drop it again, and then marching up to his mate, whereupon they would open wide their yellow beaks, stretch out their necks and join their voices in a loud triumphant chant. "Here we are," he appeared to be saying, "established on our own rock, which belongs exclusively to us with everything on it, even to the smallest pebble and to every leaf and flower of the thrift and sea-campion growing on it. Not a bird of them all will venture to alight on this rock. Come now, stand up and let us shout together!"
And shout they did, their loudest, and in the middle of their shouting performance a jackdaw, detaching himself from a company of thirty or forty birds wheeling about overhead, dropped plump down on to the rock. Instantly the gull dashed at and drove him away, but no sooner was he back on his rock than he found the daw back too, and had to hunt him away again, and then again to the ninth time. And at last when he had been mocked nine times he became furious and set himself to give the insolent daw a lesson he would not forget: over the sea and land and along the face of the cliff he chased him, and up into the sky they rose and down again, the daw at his greatest speed, the pursuer screaming with wrath close behind him, but he could not catch or hurt him, and at last giving up the chase returned to alight once more on his rock. But the daw had followed him back, and no sooner had the gull folded his wings than down on the rock he dropped once more and sat there, a picture of impudence, eyeing the other's movements with his little white mocking eyes. What will happen now? I asked myself. But the gull was not going to be made a fool of any more; he put up with the insult, and after two or three minutes, finding he was to have no more fun, the daw flew off to rejoin his companions.
Sea-birds, visible from the headlands, are common enough throughout the cold season, but after midwinter their numbers increase, until at last you may see the travellers passing by in small flocks of a dozen to a hundred or even two hundred birds, almost every day and often all day long, flock succeeding flock as if they were all keeping in a line—puffins, razorbills, guillemots—flying low on rapidly-beating wings, their bodies showing black and white just above the rough surface of the sea. More interesting than these in appearance are those dusky-winged swifts of the ocean, the shearwaters, travellers the same way, not in flocks but singly and in twos and threes and sometimes as many as half a dozen, all keeping wide apart, searching the sea as they go, moving very swiftly above the water in a series of wide curves looking like shadows of birds passing, invisible, far up in the sky. Sometimes they seemed like shadows, and sometimes I imagined them to be the ghosts of those pelagic birds which had recently died in all the seas which flow round the world, travelling by some way mysteriously known to them to their ultimate bourne in the furthest north, beyond the illimitable fields of ice where, according to Court-hope, dead birds have their paradise.
While this migration is visibly going on at sea another is in progress all over the land which is not seen or not noticed, and this is the departure of visitants from the northern parts of Britain which have been wintering in Cornwall. From day to day their numbers diminish imperceptibly—first fieldfares and redwings; then starlings, thrushes, larks, pipits, wagtails and some other species which come in smaller numbers. By the end of February or quite early in March the winter visitors, British and foreign, have all slipped quietly away, their eastward movement unmarked, and still no new bird from oversea has come to take their place. Then, one day in March when the sun shines, as you stroll by the sea, suddenly a flash of white comes before you at a distance of forty or fifty yards and you see your first wheatear, or whitaker as the natives call him, back in his old home among the rocks. And as he is the first to come you think him the most beautiful bird in the world in his chaste and delicate dress of black and white and buff and clear blue-grey. And so when you first hear him uttering his wild brief warble, as he flutters in the air in appearance a great black and white butterfly, you think that no sound can compare with it in exquisite purity and sweetness.
Away from the sea you will hear no spring bird; the only songs are of the resident species which you have heard at intervals throughout the winter—robin and wren and dunnock and lark and corn bunting. The only new song—if song it may be called—is not uttered by a bird at all, although it often has a curiously bird-like musical tinkle. You begin to hear it as you ramble among the furze thickets in the neighbourhood of some hidden stream—a succession of chirping and croaking sounds in various keys, and sounds like the craking of corncrakes, and at intervals the little musical sounds as of birds and of running water. The frogs are having their grand annual carnival, and when seen congregated at the water-courses, it is strange to think they should be so abundant in this stony district overgrown with harsh furze, ling and bracken. You have perhaps spent months in the place without seeing a frog, now following the stream you could count hundreds at their revels in the water, brown and olive frogs, clay colour, yellow and old gold, and some strangely marked with black and brown on a pale ground. These congregations which begin to form before March are continued until May.
Adders, seen occasionally on warm days in February, are common enough in March and April if one knows how to find them. Here, at two spots within half a mile of each other, I found two of the most singular and beautifully coloured adders I had ever seen. One was of so pale a grey in its ground colour as to appear white at a little distance; the other was perfectly white, the zigzag band intensely black with a narrow border of delicate buff. I turned him over expecting to find some curious variation in the colour of the belly, and was disappointed to find it the usual dark blue; but I was so charmed with this rare Dominican adder that I kept it half an hour, carrying it to a piece of level green turf for the pleasure of watching the sinuous movements of so strange a serpent over the ground before I finally let it go into hiding among the bushes.
After you have seen and heard the wheatears you begin to listen in the furze and thorn grown bottoms for that bright, airy, tender, running, rippling little melody of the willow-wren, which should come next, and is so universal in England, and it will surprise you to hear the chiffchaff before him, for in this treeless district the species so abundant everywhere else is comparatively rare, while the local chiffchaff is exceedingly common.
Before the earliest summer migrants are heard some of the resident species are breeding, not only on the cliffs, but the small birds in the bushes—thrushes, blackbirds, dunnocks, wrens and others. I was surprised to find that clothes-drying was a very serious trouble to these bush-breeders where there are no trees. Monday is washing-day at the farms and cottages, and it is usual to use the stone hedges covered with their luxuriant crop of furze as a drying-place. Looking over the land from some elevated place you see the gleam of white linen far and near as of hedges covered with snow. Passing one of these hedges one evening I found a gathering of about a dozen blackbirds in a state of great excitement, hopping and flying up and down, chuckling and screaming before the white sheets and counterpanes covering some of the large round bushes. Poor birds! it was late in the day and they were getting desperate, since if these hateful white coverings were not removed soon so as to let them return to their nests their eggs would be chilled beyond hope. Some of the birds care as little for the covering sheet as rooks and jackdaws do for the grotesque imitations of a human figure set up in the ploughed fields to frighten them. A woman in one of the cottages told me that once when going round among the furze bushes where her things were drying she noticed a dunnock slip out from under a sheet and fly away. She lifted the sheet and found a nest with fledglings in it close to the top of the bush. "Why, gracious me!" she exclaimed, "perhaps I've been covering their dear little nesties with my washing without ever knowing such a thing. I'll just have a look at the other bushes." And at the very next bush on peering under the cloth spread over it she spied a dunnock sitting on its nest—sitting, she soon found, on five lovely little blue eggs! In the evening when the family were having tea she told them about it, and immediately her boys began to tease her to tell them where the nest was, and after a good deal of talk and solemn promise on the part of the boys that they would not take nor even touch one of the little blue eggs, and many warnings on her side that they would have the rope's end if they ever dared to do such a cruel thing, she led the way to the bush and allowed them all to have a good look at the nest and the five little gems of blue colour lying in it. But from that day she had no peace, for now her bad boys had got a means of coercing her, and she had to let them stay away from school and go where and do what they liked and to give them bread and butter and pasties at all hours of the day and whatever they asked for; for if she refused them anything they would say, "Then we'll go and get the eggs out of the hedge-sparrow's nest"; nor could she punish them for anything they did for the same reason. It was only when the blue eggs hatched and the young birds were safely reared that she got the upper hand in her house once more. Poor, anxious, thin, shrill-voiced woman, fighting for a small bird with her rough sons, her husband standing silent by listening with amused contempt to the dispute; for he too had been a boy, and was not the harrying of birds a boy's proper pastime? But she was one of the few who made it possible for me to live with and not hate my fellow-creatures even in these habitations of cruelty.
In conclusion of this chapter I will relate two other little incidents of this kind which show that the spirit of mercy is not wholly dead. A pair of pied wagtails were constantly seen at a stone quarry near a village I stayed at, and as they appeared very tame I spoke to the quarrymen about them. They said the birds had lived there, winter and summer, five years, and bred every spring in a hole among the stones at the side of the quarry. They were as tame as chickens and came for crumbs every day at dinner time, and when it was raining and the men had to take shelter in their little stone hut inside the quarry, the wagtails, or tinners as they are called in West Cornwall, would run in and feed at their feet.
On my return, in the spring of 1907, to this place I found a pair of wheatears in possession; they had fought the wagtails and driven them away and made their nest in the same place. The same kindly protection was given to them as to the old favourites, though they never became so tame; and I saw the young safely brought off.
We have seen in a former chapter that the robin is somewhat of a sacred bird, or at all events that the feeling in its favour, superstitious or not, is so general that even in the darkest part of the country the bird when caught in a gin is released and allowed to fly away, to perish of its hurts or drag out a miserable existence in a maimed condition. This feeling is a great protection to the bird, but in many boys the bird-hunting and nest-destroying passion overmasters it, so that I am not greatly surprised when I find boys persecuting robin redbreast.
One very warm morning in early spring, walking uphill from Penzance to Castle-an-Dinas, I came on two boys, aged about ten and eleven respectively, lying on the green turf by the side of the hedge. A nice place to rest and nice company; so I threw myself down by them and started talking, naturally about the birds. They replied reluctantly, exchanging glances and looking very uncomfortable. There were plenty of nests now, I said; I was finding a good many, and I asked them directly how many they knew of with eggs and young birds in them. Seeing that I put it that way they recovered courage and one, after a brief whispered consultation with the other, said that there was a robin's nest close to my side, and on looking round I spied a fully-fledged young robin standing on a trodden-down little nest on the bank-side. I picked the bird up and was surprised at its docility, for it made no effort to escape, and then, more surprising still, the old bird flew down and perched a yard off, but did not appear at all anxious about the safety of its young. "I wonder," said I, "what has become of the others? There must have been more young robins in this nest—it looks as if it had had three or four to tread it down."
Whereupon one of the boys produced a second robin from his jacket pocket, and when I took it from him the other boy pulled out two more robins from his pockets and handed them to me.
"Now look here," I began in my severest tone, and proceeded to give them a lecture on their unkindness in taking young robins, and did not forget to quote Blake on the subject, for of all birds the robin was the least fitted to be made a prisoner, and so on until I finished.
But the boys showed no sense of guilt or repentance and were no more disturbed at my words than the robins were at being handled, and at length one of them said that they had no intention of taking the birds home.
"What, then, did you have them in your pockets for?" I demanded.
He replied that they put them in their pockets just to keep them out of my sight. They were playing with the birds when I found them, and they had known the nest since it was made, and every day after the young had come out one or both of them had paid them a visit, and they always brought a small supply of caterpillars to feed the robins with.
It was quite true, the tameness of the four young robins sitting on our hands and knees was a proof of it. From time to time while we sat there with them the old birds flew down near us just to take a look round as it seemed and then flew off again, but by and by when we put them back on their little platform the parents came and fed them close to our side.
