Contrast such scenes as those described above with what may be seen in the City of London at six o’clock on a weekday. A multitude of pale, anxious, worn-looking men, and thin, tired, haggard women pursue with listless steps their homeward way. Compared with the lot of these, how happy is that of the birds.
Birds are, like children, loath to go to bed. They feel no weariness, and so great is their enjoyment of life, that they are almost sorry when the sun disappears for a little.
Jules Michelet, than whom no more wrong-headed naturalist ever lived, declares that birds dread the night. “Heavy,” he writes, “for all creatures is the gloom of evening. . . . Night is equally terrible for the birds. . . . What monsters it conceals, what frightful chances for the bird lurk in its obscurity. Its nocturnal foes have this characteristic in common—their approach is noiseless. The screech-owl flies with a silent wing, as if wrapped in tow. The weasel insinuates its long body into the nest without disturbing a leaf. The eager polecat, athirst for the warm life-blood, is so rapid that in a moment it bleeds both parents and progeny, and slaughters a whole family.
“It seems that the bird, when it has little ones, enjoys a second sight for these dangers. It has to protect a family far more feeble and more helpless than that of the quadruped, whose young can walk as soon as born. But how protect them? It can do nothing but remain at its post and die; it cannot fly away, for its love has broken its wings. All night the narrow entry of the nest is guarded by the father, who sinks with fatigue, and opposes danger with feeble beak and shaking head. What will this avail if the enormous jaw of the serpent suddenly appears, or the horrible eye of the bird of death, immeasurably enlarged by fear?”
Greater nonsense than this was never penned outside a political pamphlet. Birds do not, as Michelet seems to imagine, go to sleep quaking with terror. They know not the meaning of the word death, nor have they any superstitious fears of ghosts and goblins.
Birds with young sleep the sleep of a man without a single care.
At other times birds do not roost in solitude, but gather together in great companies, the members of which are as jolly as the young folks at a supper party after the theatre. The happiness of the fowls of the air at the sunset hour is almost riotous.
Darkness, however, exercises a soothing influence over them. A feeling of sleepiness steals over them, and they then doubtless experience the luxurious sensation of tiredness which we human beings feel after a day spent in the open air; for, although they know it not, their muscles are tired as the result of the activity of the day.
Their sweet slumbers completely refresh them. Before dawn they are awake again, and are up and about waiting for it to grow sufficiently light to enable them to resume the interrupted pleasures of the previous day.
With the exception of “The Education of Young Birds,” which came out in The Albany Review, the chapters which compose this book appeared in one or other of the following Indian periodicals: The Madras Mail, The Times of India, The Indian Daily Telegraph, The Indian Field, The Indian Forester.