But I have never seen the blue-tit behave so prettily and airily with its catkins, as I have the little willow-warbler in April. These little birds are then constantly pursuing each other about through the trees, and especially the birch-trees, for which they seem to have a decided preference, perhaps because they make a fairy setting for their fairy selves. They affect its catkins, and one of the most pleasing of things is to see them shoot through the yet thin veil of green, give a flying peck at one, and become immediately enveloped in a little yellow cloud of the pollen. It looks, indeed, as if the bird had shaken it from its own feathers, for its intimate actions are too quick and small to be followed, and the pollen is all around it. But as the eye marks the tiny explosion with delight, reason, quickly following, as delightedly tells you the why of it, and a plucked catkin illustrates.
This is all in the early fresh morning, when the earth is like a dew-bath and all the influences so lovely that one wonders how sin and sorrow can have entered into such a world. It seems as though nature must be at her fairest for so fairy a thing to be done. I, at least, have not seen it take place later, and I cannot help hoping that no one else will.
But why do the little birds explode their catkins? Do their sharp eyes, each time, see an insect upon them, or do they really enjoy the thing for its own sake? I can see no reason why this latter should not be the case, or, even if it is not so to any great degree now, why it should not come to be so in time. It must be exciting, surely, this sudden little puff of yellow pollen-smoke, and then there is the fairy-like beauty of it. There was much laughter, naturally, when Darwin propounded the theory that birds could admire, and when he instanced the bower-birds, and, particularly, one that makes itself an attractive little flower-garden, removing the blossoms as soon as they fade, and replacing them with fresh ones, it was held that such cases as these were decisive against his views. Gradually, however, it began to be seen that they pointed rather in the opposite direction, and now it is recognised that Darwin was right. This being so, it does not appear to me absolutely necessary to suppose that when the little wood-warbler flies at his catkin and produces one of the prettiest little effects imaginable, he does so always merely to get a fly or a gnat. There are other possibilities, and I think that if our common birds were minutely and patiently watched, we might trace here and there in their actions the beginnings of some of those more wonderful ones, which obtain amongst birds far away.
CHAPTER X
Watching Rooks
In this chapter I will give a few scenes from rook life, as I have watched it from late autumn to early spring, linking them together by a remark now and again of a general nature, or, possibly, some theory which my observations may have suggested to me, and seemed to illustrate. Were I to put into general terms what I have jotted down at all times and in all places, in the darkness before morning when the rookery slept about me, in the dim dawn whilst it woke into life, to stream forth, later, on wings of joy and sound, in the long day by field and moor and waste, and at evening again, or night, when the birds swept home and sank to sleep amidst their own sinking lullaby, I might make a smoother narrative, but the picture would be gone. I think it better, therefore, to make a preliminary general apology for all roughnesses and repetitions, triviality of matter, minuteness of detail and so forth, in fact for all shortcomings, and then to go on in faith, not in myself, indeed, but in the rooks, believing that they will be interesting, however much I may stand in their way.