Here, then, are two night-voices of very different calibre. These are not our only birds that break the silence on moonlight nights in June. The common thrush often sings far into the night, and the sedge-warbler is a persistent caroller that has often been mistaken for the nightingale. The difference in this respect between the two subjects of these remarks is that the nightjar is invariably silent all through the day, whereas the nightingale sings joyously at all hours. It is only because his splendid music is more marked in the comparative silence of the night, with little or no competition, that his daylight concert is often overlooked.
JULY
SWIFTS, SWALLOWS AND MARTINS
SWIFTS, SWALLOWS AND MARTINS
When the trout-fisherman sees the first martins and swallows dipping over the sward of the water-meadows and skimming the surface of the stream in hot pursuit of such harried water-insects as have escaped the jaws of greedy fish, he knows that summer is coming in. The signs of spring have been evident in the budding hedgerows for some weeks. The rooks are cawing in the elms, the cuckoo's note has been heard in the spinney for some time before these little visitors pass in jerky flight up and down the valley. Then, a little later, come the swifts—the black and screaming swifts—which, though learned folk may be right in sundering them utterly from their smaller travelling companions from the sunny south, will always in the popular fancy be associated with the rest. Colonies of swifts, swallows, and martins are a dominant feature of English village life during the warm months; and though there are fastidious folk who take not wholly culpable exception to their little visitors on the score of cleanliness, most of us welcome them back each year, if only for the sake of the glad season of their stay. If, moreover, it is a question of choice between these untiring travellers resting in our eaves and the stay-at-home starling or sparrow, the choice will surely fall on the first every time.
The swift is the largest and most rapid in its flight, and its voice has a penetrating quality lacking in the notes of the rest. Swifts screaming in headlong flight about a belfry or up and down a country lane are the embodiment of that sheer joy of life which, in some cases with slender reason, we associate peculiarly with the bird-world. Probably, however, these summer migrants are as happy as most of their class. On the wing they can have few natural enemies, though one may now and again be struck down by a hawk; and they alight on the ground so rarely as to run little risk from cats or weasels, while the structure and position of their nests alike afford effectual protection for the eggs and young. Compared with that of the majority of small birds, therefore, their existence should be singularly happy and free from care; and though that of the swift can scarcely, perhaps, when we remember its shrill voice, be described as one grand sweet song, it should not be chequered by many troubles. The greatest risk is no doubt that of being snapped up by some watchful pike if the bird skims too close to the surface of either still or running water, and I have even heard of their being seized in this way by hungry mahseer, those great barbel which gladden the heart of exiled anglers whose lot is cast on the banks of Himalayan rivers.
It is, however, the sparrows and starlings, rivals for the nesting sites, who show themselves the irreconcilable enemies of the returned prodigals. Terrific battles are continually enacted between them with varying fortunes, and the anecdotes of these frays would fill a volume. Jesse tells of a feud at Hampton Court, in the course of which the swallows, having only then completed their nest, were evicted by sparrows, who forthwith took possession and hatched out their eggs. Then came Nemesis, for the sparrows were compelled to go foraging for food with which to fill the greedy beaks, and during their enforced absence the swallows returned in force, threw the nestlings out, and demolished the home. The sparrows sought other quarters, and the swallows triumphantly built a new nest on the ruins of the old. A German writer relates a case of revolting reprisal on the part of some swallows against a sparrow that appropriated their nest and refused to quit. After repeated failure to evict the intruder, the swallows, helped by other members of the colony, calmly plastered up the front door so effectually that the unfortunate sparrow was walled up alive and died of hunger. This refined mode of torture is not unknown in the history of mankind, but seems singularly unsuited to creatures so fragile.
The nests of these birds show, as a rule, little departure from the conventional plan, but they do adapt their architecture to circumstances, and I remember being much struck on one occasion by the absence of any dome or roof. It was in Asia Minor, on the seashore, that I came upon a cottage long deserted, its door hanging by one hinge, and all the glass gone from the windows. In the empty rooms numerous swallows were rearing twittering broods in roofless nests. No doubt the birds realised that they had nothing to fear from rain, and were reluctant to waste time and labour in covering their homes with unnecessary roofs.