One might think that the most timid birds would, under ordinary circumstances, be the ones least liable to change their habits, for such change would often mean a penetrating into "fresh fields and pastures new," where they might be expected to fear and distrust in a higher degree than amidst surroundings with which they were familiar. This, perhaps, may be the case, but one must distinguish between timidity and a wary caution or prudence, which may be combined with an independent, perhaps one may even say a bold, spirit.
The moor-hen is an example of such a combination. I have watched these birds for hours browsing over some meadow-land, bordering a small and very quiet stream, near where I live. Sometimes there would be a dozen or twenty scattered over a wide space, and every now and again, when something had alarmed them, the whole troop, one taking the cue from another, would run or fly pell-mell to the water, most of them swimming across and taking refuge in a belt of reeds skirting the opposite bank, whilst some few would remain floating in mid-stream, ready to follow their companions if necessary. In two or three minutes, or sometimes less, they would all be back browsing again, and so continue till, all at once, there was another panic rush and flight. The cause of these stampedes was generally undiscoverable; but sometimes, when the birds stayed some time down on the water, the figure of a rustic would at length appear, walking behind a hedge, along a path bounding the little meadow. Of such a figure rooks and many other birds would have taken no notice, even when considerably nearer. One cause of alarm I frequently noted, and this was where another moor-hen would come flying over the meadow, either to alight amongst those upon it, or making for a more distant point of the stream. Such birds, though not alarmed themselves—for I frequently saw the commencement and spontaneous nature of their flights—yet always brought alarm to the others: a fact which seems to me interesting, for it cannot be supposed that these would have been disquieted at the mere sight of one of their kind, and if they judged from the flying bird's manner that it was seeking safety, then they judged wrongly. This, again, does not seem likely, and the only remaining explanation is that they drew an inference—"This bird may be flying from danger"—which, I think, must have been the case. At any rate, each time it was a sauve-qui-peut, one of themselves sent them all in a race to the water, just as a dog or a man would have done. But I must qualify the word "all." Often—perhaps each time—one or two birds might be seen (like the pheasant) to glance warily about, as though to assure themselves whether there was danger or not, standing, the while, in a hesitating attitude, and ready, on the slightest indication, to follow their companions. Then, having satisfied themselves, they would continue quietly to browse—for moor-hens browse the grass of meadows as do geese.
Coming, now, to the opposite side of the bird's character—its boldness and enterprise—I remember one afternoon, when I had been watching the stone curlews, seeing, just as evening was falling, a moor-hen walking along the piece of wire netting which skirted a wheat-field, or rather an arid waste of sand where some wheat was feebly attempting to grow. The whole country around was the chosen haunt of the former birds, as opposed, therefore, to anything damp, moist, or marshy, as can well be imagined. The moor-hen went steadily on, with a composed and mind-made-up step, never deviating from the straight line of the netting till, upon coming to where this was continued at a right angle in another direction, it found its way through, and proceeded to cross a green road skirted with fir-trees into another Sahara-like waste, where I lost it, at least a quarter of a mile from the nearest little pond or pool. Possibly it was walking from one of these to another, but quite as probably—in my experience—it was leaving its ordinary haunts for some inland part it had discovered, where it could get food to its liking. For the moor-hens living in the little creek or stream that I used to watch would range over the adjacent meadow-land, and a few of them, having come to the limit of this, would climb up a steep bank and through a hedge at its top, down again into a little bush and bramble-grown patch on the other side. One bird, indeed, that I startled, actually climbed this bank and scrambled through the hedge into the patch, instead of flying to the water; which is as though a lady were to take up Shakespeare rather than a novel, or a servant-maid to act by reason instead of by rote. Again, I have startled a moor-hen out of a large tree standing in a thicket, and a good way back from the ditch surrounding it—such a tree as one might have expected to see a wood-pigeon fly out of, but certainly not a moor-hen.
Such variations of habit are to me more interesting than those of structure, for they represent the mind, as do the latter—which they have probably in most cases preceded—the body. Changes of structure, too, if slight, are not easy to see, and as soon as they become observable the varying animal is dubbed another species, or, at least, a variety of the old one, so that one is not allowed, as it were, to see the actual passage from form to form;—one is always either at one end of the bridge or the other end. But changed habits may be marked in transitu, and there is hardly, perhaps, a bird or a beast which, if closely watched, will not be seen to act sometimes in a manner which, if persisted in to the neglect of its more usual circle of activities, would make it, in effect, a new being, though dressed in an old suit of clothes. Thus, in such a bird as the robin, which is associated—and rightly—in the popular mind with the cottage, the little rustic garden, and with woodlands wild—such scenes and surroundings, in fact, as are represented, or used to be, on Christmas cards—one may get a hint of some future little red-breasted, water-loving bird, at first no more aquatic than the water-wagtail, but becoming, perhaps, as time goes on, as accomplished a diver and clinger to stones at the bottom of running streams as is the water-ouzel—a bird as to which, Darwin says, "the acutest observer by examining its dead body would never have suspected its sub-aquatic habits."
To illustrate this, I take from my notes the following:—"A robin"—it is in December—"flies on to the trunk of a fallen tree spanning the little stream, from thence on to some weedy scum lying against it on the water, from which he picks something off and returns again to the trunk. Two or three times again he flies down and hops about on the weeds, and sometimes, whilst doing so, pecks at the great black trunk. Now he is standing on them contentedly, with the water touching his crimson breast-feathers. He is in his first or more primitive figure, for the robin has two. Either he is a little round globe with a sunset in him—his rotundity being broken only by a beak and a tail—or else very elegant, dapper, and well set up. In the first he is fluffy, for he has ruffled out his feathers, but in the last he has pressed them down and is smooth and glossy—has almost a polish on him." Again, whilst walking by the river in the early morning, the water being very low, "a robin hops down over the exposed shingle, to near the water's edge, then flies across to the opposite more muddy surface, and hops along it, pecking here and there. He again flies across and proceeds in the same way, always going up the stream, crosses again, and so on. Each time he is farther away from me, and now I lose sight of him; but this is evidently his system. How out of character he seems amidst the mud and ooze of the dank river-bed on this chill winter's morning, how little like the robin of poetry and Christmas-card, how much more in the style of some little mud-loving, stilt-walking bird: for this is often their manner of zig-zagging from shore to shore up or down the stream. I have noticed it but now in the redshank. Yet the old associations are with him, for this is home, and the thatched cottage peeps over the familiar hedge."
And here I will chronicle an experience—my own, if it be not that of others. Provided there be shrubbery about, there are but few places here in England where one can sit quietly for very long, without a robin stealing softly out and, as it were, sliding himself into the landscape. Then—however bleak or chill it may be—his presence seems to bring home comforts with it. But this is only when one is near home and home comforts—not when one is far, far away from them. I remember in the great pine-forests of Norway—so lovely yet so stern in their loveliness—the robin seemed to have lost all his character. He did not suggest home and all its pleasures when home was no longer near. It was not (or perhaps it was) that by suggestion he made these seem farther off, but that his character seemed gone. Surely, things are to us as a part of what they move in with us, and, out of this, seem changed and to be something else.
I am not quite sure if the following represents any change of habits in regard to food, induced by the presence of a foreign tree, in any of the three birds that it concerns. I have occasionally watched the great-tit in our own fir-plantations, but have not yet seen him attacking the cones, though the coal-tit, as I believe, does so. For the greenfinch I can only say that I should not have thought it of him, nor is he often to be seen in such places. The nut-hatch is not common where I live.
"Standing this Christmas Eve under a large exotic conifer on the lawn of the garden here in Gloucestershire, I became aware that various birds were busy amongst its branches, and I kept hearing a curious grating noise with a strong vibration in it, which seemed to be made by them with the beak upon the large fir-cones, but as the branches were very close together, and the birds high up, I could not observe the manner of it—the sound (as I said before) being very peculiar. I therefore climbed the tree (which was easy), and the birds being now often quite near—though the branches and great clusters of needle-tufts were much in the way—I ascertained that it was the greenfinch alone which was producing the peculiar, vibratory noise, but how, exactly, he did it I could not make out. He appeared to be tearing at the woody sheaths or clubs (which stood wide apart) of the large fir-cones, and it seemed as though, to give the vibration in the sound, either the mandibles must work against each other with extraordinary swiftness, or the clubs of the cone itself vibrate in some manner against the beak, thus causing the sound in question to mingle with the scratching made by the latter against the hard surface.
"The great-tit and the nut-hatch are also busy at the cones. The former strikes them repeatedly with his bill, making a quick 'rat-tat-tat.' He attacks them either from the branch or twigs from which they hang, striking downwards, or clinging to the side of one and striking sideway-downwards, or even hanging at their tips, in which case he hammers up at them. Whilst hammering, or rather pick-axeing, he often bends his head very sharply from the body—almost at a right angle—towards the point at which his blow is aimed, and he then becomes, as it were, a natural, live pickaxe, of which his body is the handle and his head and beak the pick. After hammering a little on one of two cones that hang together, he perches on the other one, and, in the intervals of hammering it, shifts his head to the first and gives it, as it seems, a sharp investigatory glance. He then flies away.
"A nut-hatch, also, I twice see hammering at the cones, in much the same manner as the tit, and, having loosened a thin brown flake from one of them, he flies off with it in his beak. I have not yet seen the tit do this, nor did I ever see him get an insect. If he got anything at all, it must have been in one of the actual blows, become a peck, as when he hammers at a cocoa-nut hung in the garden. The greenfinches never hammered, but only bit and tugged at the clubs of the cones. Brown flakes often fell down from them, but I never saw the birds fly off with these, as the nut-hatch has done. I had seen one with a flake in his bill which, however, he soon let fall to the ground.