Each spring I have to defend myself against his bold usurpations. I gladly surrender to him the shed, the cellar-porch, the Dog’s corner, the woodshed and other outhouses. This does not suffice for his ambitious views: he wants my study. At one time he tries to make his home on the curtain-rod, at another on the lintel of the open window. In vain I strive to make him understand, by destroying the foundations of his edifice as he lays them, how dangerous to his nest is the shifting support of a casement, which must be closed from time to time, at the risk of crushing house and brood alike, and how disagreeable for my curtains this dirty business is, with its mud and, later, the excretions of the young birds: I do not succeed in convincing him; and to put an end to his determined enterprise I am compelled to keep the windows shut. If I open them too soon, he returns with his beakful of clay and begins all over again.
Instructed by experience, I know what it would cost me to grant the hospitality demanded so persistently. If I were to leave some precious book open on the table, some drawing of a mushroom, my morning’s [[146]]work and still quite fresh from the brush,[4] he would not fail, in passing, to drop his muddy seal or his stercoral initials upon it. These little annoyances have made me suspicious; and I remain obdurate to all my visitor’s importunities.
Once only I allowed myself to be beguiled. The nest was placed in a corner of the ceiling and the wall, on some plaster mouldings. Below it stood a marble console-table, usually covered with books which I had to be constantly consulting. In anticipation of events, I moved my reference-library away. All went well until the eggs were hatched; but, as soon as the young birds were there, things changed. With their insatiable stomachs, into which the food had barely passed before it was digested and dissolved, the six fledgelings became unendurable. Every minute—flick, flack!—it rained guano on the console. If my poor books had been there, oh dear, oh dear!
Dust and sweep as I might, my study continued redolent of ammonia. And then what a slave the birds made of me! The room was shut up at night. The father slept [[147]]out; so did the mother, after the little ones were beginning to grow up. Then, at early dawn, both were at the windows, in a mighty state of distress outside the glass barrier. With eyes still heavy with sleep, I had to get up hurriedly and let the poor things in. No, I shall not allow myself to be persuaded again; never more shall I permit the Swallow to settle in a room that has to be closed at night and still less in the room where I am describing the misadventures that befel me owing to my too-accommodating kindness.
As you see, the Swallow with the nest shaped like a half-cup well deserves his epithet of domestic, inasmuch as he makes his home inside our houses. In this respect, he is among birds what the Pelopæus is among insects. Here we have once again the question of the Sparrow and the Wall-swallow: where did he live before houses existed? Personally, I have never seen him build his nest elsewhere than in the shelter of our habitations; and the authors whom I consult do not appear to be any wiser on this subject. None of them says a word of the manor occupied by the bird apart from the refuges provided by human industry. Can it be that his long frequentation of our society and the consequent sense [[148]]of comfort have made him forget the primitive customs of his race?
I find it difficult to believe: animals are not, to that extent, unmindful of their ancient habits, when it is necessary to remember them. Somewhere, in our day, the Swallow still works independently of us and of our buildings, even as he did in the beginning. Though observation can tell us nothing concerning the site selected, analogy makes up for this silence with a wealth of probabilities. After all, what do our houses represent to the Domestic Swallow? Refuges against the weather, especially against the rain, which does so much harm to the mud shell. Natural grottoes, caves, the irregularities of crumbling rocks: these are all refuges, less healthy, perhaps, but still well worth having. It was here, beyond a doubt, that the Swallow constructed his nest when he had no human dwellings to build in. Man contemporary with the Mammoth and the Reindeer came and shared his lodging under the rock. Intimacy sprang up between the two. Then, step by step, the cave was succeeded by the hut, the hut by the cabin, the cabin by the house; and the bird, abandoning the less good for the better, followed man into his improved abode. [[149]]
We will now end this digression on the habits of birds and apply the evidence which we have gathered to the Pelopæus. Every species practising its industry in our dwellings must first have practised and, we maintain, must still practise it under conditions wholly extraneous to the work of man. The Wall-swallow and the Sparrow have given us proofs which are all that can be desired; the Domestic Swallow, more reticent of his secrets, gave us only probabilities, which however come very near to certainty. The Pelopæus is almost as obstinate as the last-named in refusing to divulge her ancient customs and long remained to me an insoluble problem in so far as her original domicile was concerned. Where can the enthusiastic colonist of our chimneys have lived, when far removed from man? Thirty years and more elapsed after I first made her acquaintance; and her history always ended in a note of interrogation. Outside our houses, never a trace of a Pelopæus-nest. And all the time I was applying the method of analogy, which provides a very probable answer to the question of the Domestic Swallow; I was pursuing my search in the caves, in the shelters under rocks facing the sun. Not a sign. I was [[150]]still continuing my useless investigations, when at last chance, which favours the persevering, thrice compensated me, under conditions which I did not for a moment suspect of being auspicious.
The Sérignan quarries are rich in accumulations of broken stones, refuse that has lain piled up there for centuries. These stone-heaps are the refuge of the Field-mouse, who, on a mattress of dried grass, crunches the almonds, olive-stones and acorns which he picks up all around and varies this farinaceous diet with Snails, whose empty shells lie packed under some flat stone. Different Bees and Wasps—Osmiæ, Anthidia, Odyneri—pick out shells to suit them from the heap and build their cells in the spiral. My search for these treasures makes me turn over a few cubic yards of broken stones every year.
Three times, when engaged upon this task, I came upon the Pelopæus’ work. Two nests were placed deep down in the heap, against blocks hardly bigger than a man’s two fists; the third was fixed to the lower surface of a large flat stone, forming a canopy above the ground. These three nests, though subject to all the changes of the weather, contained nothing more than [[151]]the usual structure found inside our houses. The material was plastic mud, as always; the protection, a covering of the same mud; and that was all. The dangers of the site had suggested no improvement to the architect; the edifice was no different from those built against the wall of a chimney. One point is established, therefore: in my district, the Pelopæus nidifies sometimes, but very rarely, in stone-heaps and under natural flagstones which do not touch the ground. Thus must she have nidified before becoming the inmate of our dwellings and our fireplaces.
A second point is open to discussion. The three nests found under the stones are in a piteous state. Soaked with damp, they possess hardly more consistency than the muddy puddle utilized for their construction. They are softened to such a degree that they can no longer be handled. The cells are ripped open; the cocoons, easily recognizable by their colour and their transparency, which is that of an onion-skin, are in pieces, without any vestige of the larvæ which I ought to find at the time of my discovery, that is in winter. And yet the three hovels are not old nests ruined by the weather after the emergence of the [[152]]perfect insect, for the exit-doors are still closed with their well-fitting plugs. It is at an abnormal place, in the side, that the yawning breach occurs. The escaping insect would never use such violence in breaking through. They are certainly recent nests, nests of the previous summer.