Next morning, whilst it is still moonlight, there is a subdued sing-songing amongst the birds, but by crawling, first on one’s hands and knees, and then flat, like a snake, one is able to get, gradually, into the very centre of their sleeping-quarters, where, sitting still, though one may create a little disturbance at first, one soon ceases to be noticed. As daylight dawns, there is some stretching of the wings, and preening, and then comes an outburst of song, which sinks, and then again rises, and so continues to fluctuate, though always rising, on the whole, until the sound becomes a very din. At length comes a first wave of motion, birds fluttering from perch to perch, and bush to bush, then a sudden roar of wings, as numbers fly out, a lull, and then a great crescendo of song, another greater roar, a still greater crescendo, and so on, roar upon roar, crescendo on crescendo, as the tide of life streams forth. The bushes where the birds went up are completely empty, but soon they fill again, and the same excited scene that preceded the last begins to re-enact itself. Birds dash from their perches, hang hovering in the air, with rapidly-vibrating wings, perch again, again fly and flutter, the numbers ever increasing, till the whole place seems to seethe. “Fervet opus,” as Virgil says of the bees. Greater and greater becomes the excitement, more and more deafening the noise, till, as though reaching the boiling-point, a great mass of the birds is flung off, or tears itself from the rest, and goes streaming away over the tree-tops. The pot has boiled over: that, rather than an art of volition, is what it looks like. There is a roar, thousands rise together, but the greater part remain. It is as though, from some great nature-bowl of dancing, bubbling wine, the most volatile, irrepressible particles—the very top sparkles—went whirling joyously away; or as though each successive flight out were a cloud of spray, thrown off from the same great wave. It will thus be seen that the starlings fly out of their bedroom, as they fly into it, in successive bodies, namely, and not in one cloud, all together.
In the plantation are many fair-sized young trees, but it is only now, when the birds have begun to fly, that they may be seen dashing into them. They have been empty before, standing like uninhabited islands amidst an ocean of life. When roosting, starlings seem to eschew trees that are at all larger than saplings, or whose tops project much above the level of the undergrowth. Tall, thin, flexible bushes—such as hazel or thorn—closely set together, seem to be what they demand for a sleeping-place. They sit on or near the tops of these, and it is obvious that a climbing animal, of any size—say a cat or a pole-cat—would find it difficult, or impossible, to run up them, and would be sure to sway or shake the stem, even if it succeeded. Whether this has had anything to do, through a long course of natural selection, with the choice of such coverts, I do not know, nor, do I suppose, does anybody. It is matter of conjecture, but what I have mentioned in regard to the many small trees, scattered through the plantation, seems to me curious. How comfortably, one would think, could the birds roost in these, but, again, how easily could a cat run up them. Of course a habit of this kind, gained in relation to such possibilities as these, would have been gained ages ago, when there might have been great differences both in the numbers and species of such animals as would have constituted a nightly danger. Certain it is that starlings, during the daytime, much affect all ordinarily-growing trees. They roost, also, in reed-beds, where they would be still safer from the kind of attack supposed.
Even whilst this book is going through the press, have come the usual shoutings of the Philistines—their cries for blood and fierce instigations to slaughter. The starlings, they tell us, do harm, but what they really mean is this, that, seeing them in abundance, their fingers itch to destroy. It is ever so. These men, having no souls in their bodies, have nothing whatever to set against the smallest modicum of injury that a bird or beast (unless it be a fox or a pheasant) may do—against any of those sticks, in fact, that are so easily found to beat dogs with. In one dingle or copse of their estate a pheasant or two is disturbed. Then down with the starlings who do it, for what good are the starlings to them? They do not care about grand sights or picturesque effects. They would sooner shoot a pheasant nicely, to see it shut its eyes and die in the air—a subject of rapture with them, they expatiate to women upon that—than gaze on the Niagara Falls—nay, they would sooner shoot it anyhow. Were it a collection of old masters that swept into their plantations, to flutter their darlings, they would wish to destroy them too—unless indeed they could sell them: there would be nothing to look at. Pheasants are their true gods. To kill them last, they would kill everything else first—dogs, men, yea women and children—but not liking, perhaps, to say so, they talk, now, about the song-birds. The starlings, forsooth, disturb them. Oh hypocrites who, for a sordid pound or two, which your pockets could well spare, would cut down the finest oak or elm that ever gladdened a whole countryside—yes, and have often done so—would you pretend to an aesthetic motive? This wretched false plea, with an appeal for guidance in the matter of smoking out or otherwise expelling the starlings from their sleeping-places, appeared lately in the Daily Telegraph. In answer to it I wrote as follows—for I wish to embody my opinion on the matter with the rest of this chapter, nor can I do so in any better way:—
“Sir,—Will you allow me to make a hasty protest—for I have little time, and write in the railway-train—against the cruel and ignorant proposition to destroy the starlings, or otherwise interfere with their sleeping arrangements, under the mistaken idea that they do harm to song-birds? I live within a few miles of a wood where a great host of these birds roost, every night. The wood is small, yet in spite of their enormous numbers, they occupy only a very small portion of it, for they sleep closely packed—and consider the size of a starling. In that small wood are as many song-birds as it is common to find in others of similar size belonging to the district, and they are as indifferent to the starlings as the starlings are to them—or, if they feel anything as they come sailing up, it is probably a sympathetic excitement; for small birds, as I have seen and elsewhere recorded,[19] will sometimes associate themselves joyously with the flight out of rooks from their woods in the morning, and I know not why they should more fear the one than the other. That they do not care to roost amidst such crowds may be true; but what of that? Were their—the song-birds’—numbers multiplied by a thousand, there would still be plenty of room for them, even in the same small wood or plantation; and, if not, there is no lack of others. What, then, is the injury done them? It exists but in imagination. How many of those who lightly urge the smoking out of these poor birds from their dormitories (must they not sleep, then?) have seen starlings fly in to roost? Night after night I have watched them sail up, a sight of surpassing grandeur and interest—nay, of wonder too; morning after morning I have seen them burst forth from that dark spot, all joyous with their voices, in regular, successive hurricanes—a thing to make the heart of all but Philistines rejoice exceedingly. Moreover, these gatherings present us with a problem of deep interest. Who can explain those varied, ordered movements, those marvellous aerial manœuvrings, that, at times, absolute simultaneousness, as well as identity of motion and action amidst vast crowded masses of birds, flying thick as flakes in a snow-storm? Is there nothing to observe here, nothing to study? Are we only to disturb and destroy? Our island offers no finer, no more grand and soul-exalting sight than these nightly gatherings of the starlings to their roosting-places. Who is the barbarian that would do away with them? Why, it would take a Turner to depict what I have seen, to give those grand effects—those living clouds and storms, those skies of beating breasts and hurrying wings. Will no artist lift up his voice? Will no life-and-nature lover speak? I call upon all naturalists with souls (as Darwin says somewhere, feeling the need of a distinction), upon all who can see beauty and poetry where these exist, upon all who love birds and hate their slayers and wearers, to protest against this threatened infamy, the destruction of our starling-roosts. How should these gatherings interfere with the song-birds? The latter must be numerous indeed if some small corner of a wood—or even some small wood itself—to which all the starlings for ten or twenty miles around repair, can at all crowd them for room. Such an idea is, of course, utterly ridiculous, and in what other way can they be incommoded? In none. They do not fear the starlings. Why should they? They are not hawks, not predaceous birds, but their familiar friends and neighbours. The whole thing is a chimera, or, rather, a piece of unconscious hypocrisy, born of that thirst for blood, that itching to destroy, which, instead of interest and appreciation, seems to fill the breasts of the great majority of people—men, and women, too, those tender exterminators—as soon as they see bird or beast in any numbers. It is so, at least, in the country. How well I know the spirit! How well I know (and hate) the kind of person in which it most resides. They would be killing, these people—so they talk of ‘pests,’ and ‘keeping down.’”
Ever since I came to live in the west of England, I have watched the starlings as opportunity presented, and I believe, of all birds, they are the greatest benefactors to the farmer, and to agriculture generally. Spread over the face of the entire country, they, all day long, search the fields for grubs, yet because, at night, they roost together in an inconsiderable space, they “infest” and are to be got rid of. As to the smallness of the space required, and the wide area of country from which the birds who sleep in it are drawn, I may refer to a letter which appeared, some time ago, in the Standard,[20] in which the opinions of Mr. Mellersh, author of “The Birds of Gloucestershire,” are referred to. That starlings eat a certain amount of orchard fruit is true—that is a more showy performance than the constant, quiet devouring of grubs and larvæ. Such as it is, I have watched it carefully, and know how small is the amount taken, compared with the size of the orchards and the abundance of the fruit. Starlings begin to congregate some time before they fly to their roosting-place. They then crowd into trees—often high elm-trees, but often, too, into those of orchards. The non-investigating person takes it for granted that they are there, all for plunder, and that all are eating—but this is a wrong idea. The greater number—full of another kind of excitement—touch nothing, and dead barkless trees may be seen as crowded as those which are loaded with fruit. Some fruit, as I say, they do destroy, and this, in actual quantity, may amount to a good deal. But let anybody see the orchards in the west of England—where starlings are most abundant—during the gathering-time, and he may judge as to the proportion of harm that the birds do. It is, in fact, infinitesimal, not worth the thinking of, a negligeable quantity. Yet in the same year that mountains of fruit are thrown away, or left ungathered, when it may rot rather than that the poor—or indeed anybody—should buy it cheap, you will hear men talk of the starlings.
Why, then, do the starlings “infest”? Why should they be persecuted? Because they sleep together, in the space of, perhaps, a quarter of an acre here and there—one sole dormitory in a large tract of country? Is that their crime? For myself I see not where the harm of this can lie, but supposing that a thimbleful does lie somewhere, that a pheasant or two—for whose accommodation the country groans—is displaced, is not the pleasure of having the birds, and their grub-collecting all day long, sufficient to outweigh it? Is there nothing to love and admire in these handsome, lively, friendly, vivacious birds? They do much good, little harm, and none of that little to song-birds. Indeed they are song-birds too, or very nearly. How pleasant are their cheery, sing-talking voices! How greatly would we miss them—the better part of us, I mean—were they once gone! Harm to the song-birds! Why, when do these grand assemblages take place? Not till the spring is over, and our migratory warblers gone or thinking of going. They are autumn and winter sights. Are our thrushes and blackbirds alarmed, then?—or bold robin? Perish the calumny! “Infest!” No, it is not the starlings—loved of all save clods—who infest the country. It is rather, our country gentlemen. “Song-birds!” No, they have nothing to do with it. “Will you ha’ the truth on’t?” To see life, and to wish to take it, is one and the same thing with the many, so that the greater the numbers, the greater seems the need to destroy.
Peewits and Nest
CHAPTER VII
Peewits, besides those aerial antics which are of love, or appertaining to love, have some other and very strange ones, of the same nature, which they go through with on the ground. A bird, indulging in these, presses his breast upon the ground, and uses it as a pivot upon which he sways or rolls, more or less violently, from side to side. The legs, during this process, are hardly to be seen, but must, I suppose, support the body, which is inclined sharply upwards from the breast. The wings project like two horns on either side of the tail, which is bent down between them, in a nervous, virile manner. All at once, a spasm or wave of energy seems to pass through the bird, the tail is bent, still more forcibly, down, the body and wings remaining as before; and, with some most energetic waggles of it, from side to side, the generative act appears to be performed. That, at any rate, is what it looks like—the resemblance could hardly be more exact.