The sparrow gazed at me hard out of the corner of his eye. “Well, I don’t want it put in print,” he said confidentially, “for farmers are so unreasonable; but I will admit that at certain times of the year we do pick up a good many seeds out of fields and gardens. But then, consider how many insects we help to eat up. Why, I lived for a week last year upon aphides—what the farmers call bean-bugs. We must be philosophical, my dear sir; we must be philosophical. There’s a give-and-take in these affairs, you may depend upon it.”
He ruffled his neck as he spoke, and I observed it was marked by a conspicuous black band I had never before noticed.
“That’s a pretty cravat of yours,” I interposed, just to change the subject.
“Yes, it is pretty,” he admitted, swelling himself out a bit as he said it. “Our women don’t have them, you know, nor the young ones either. This beautiful decoration is the peculiar glory and special distinction of the adult cock-sparrow.” And anything cockier than he looked at that moment it would be hard to imagine.
It occurred to me as he spoke that I had seldom seen a slenderer form of masculine adornment on which to pride one’s self, till I suddenly recollected that a black moustache on a human face must be as relatively inconspicuous to any other species; and I have never noticed that the possessors of well-grown black moustaches under-rated their importance.
“You have a large family, I believe,” I remarked, as he chirped to his mate cheerily.
“Oh, several of them,” he answered with a nonchalant air; “sometimes as many as three yearly. We are a dominant race, you know, and we don’t always trouble to build our own nests; we just drive out a house-martin, or take possession of a sand-martin’s burrow in a cutting. Arbitrary, did you say? Oh, well, you see, we are sparrows; and, of course, we can make a much better use of them. Poor devils of martins, they have to go elsewhere, and house themselves as best they may—the survivors, that is to say, for a good many of them get killed and torn to pieces in the process of readjustment. They’re such savages, you see; we’re obligea to be sharp with them. Why, I’ve known a horde of house-martins fight in defence of their wretched mud hovels till we were compelled to exterminate them. Well, I’m off now; ta-ta! Mind you send me a copy of your paper with this interview. And oh, by the way, if you describe my wife, just make the most you can of that pale streak over her eye, will you? It is all she has to be proud of, poor thing. She’s not as distinguished-looking as I am, of course; but let her down gently, please; do let her down gently.”
XXXI.
THE GREEN WOODPECKER.
We live so closely and familiarly with nature on the isolated hilltop, where my cottage is perched, that we often behold from our own drawing-room windows pretty rural sights, which seem intensely strange to more town-bred visitors. A little while since, for example, I was amused at reading in an evening newspaper a lament by a really well-informed and observant naturalist on the difficulty of actually seeing the night-jar, or fern-owl, alight upon a tree, and stand, as is his wont, lengthwise, not transversely to the branch that bears him. Now, from our little bay lattice that doubting Thomas might see the weird bird nightly, not twenty yards off, the whole summer through, crooning its passionate song, full in view of our house, from a gnarled old fir-tree. So again this morning, at breakfast, we raised our eyes from the buttered eggs and coffee, and they fell at once on a big green woodpecker, creeping upward, after his fashion, along a russet-brown pine-trunk, not fifteen feet from the place at table where we were quietly sitting. One could make out with the naked eye the dark olive-green of his back, relieved by the brilliant crimson patch on his gleaming crown. For several minutes he stood there, clambering slowly up the tree, though we rose from our seats and approached quite close to the open window to examine him. When he turned his head, and listened intently after his tapping, with that characteristic air of philosophic inquiry which marks his species, the paler green of his under parts flashed for a second upon us; and when at last, having satisfied himself there was nothing astir under the bark of the stunted pine, he flew away to the next clump, we caught the glint of his wings and the red cap on his head in motion through the air with extraordinary distinctness.
The yaffle, as we call our red-headed friend in these parts, is one of the largest and handsomest of our woodland wild birds. About a foot in length, by the actual measurement, “from the end of his beak to the tip of his tail,” he hardly impresses one at first sight with a sense of his full size, because of his extreme concinnity and neatness of plumage. A practical bird, he is built rather for use than for vain gaudy display; for, though his colour is fine, and evidently produced by many ages of æsthetic selection, he yet sedulously avoids all crests and top-knots, all bunches and bundles of decorative feathers protruding from his body, which would interfere with his solid and business-like pursuit of wood-burrowing insects. How well-built and how cunningly evolved he is, after all, for his special purpose! His feet are so divided into opposite pairs of toes—one couple pointing forward and the other backward—that he can easily climb even the smooth-barked beech-tree, by digging his sharp claws into any chance inequality in its level surface. He alights head upward, and moves on a perpendicular plane as surely and mysteriously as a lizard. Nothing seems to puzzle him; the straightest trunk becomes as a drawing-room floor to his clinging talons. But in his climbing he is also aided not a little by his stiff and starched tail, whose feathers are so curiously rigid, like a porcupine’s quills, that they enable him to hold on and support himself behind with automatic security. Long ancestral habit has made it in him “a property of easiness.” A practised acrobat from the egg, he thinks nothing of such antics; and when he wishes to descend he just lets himself drop a little, like a sailor on a rope, sliding down head uppermost, and stopping himself when he wishes by means of his claws and tail, as the sailor stops himself by tightening his bent fingers and clinging legs round the cable he is descending.