Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

by John Wilson

Too-hoo—too-hoo—too-whit-too-hoo!—we have got among the Owls. Venerable personages, in truth, they are—perfect Solomons! The spectator, as in most cases of very solemn characters, feels himself at first strongly disposed to commit the gross indecorum of bursting out a-laughing in their face. One does not see the absolute necessity either of man or bird looking at all times so unaccountably wise. Why will an Owl persist in his stare? Why will a Bishop never lay aside his wig?

People ignorant of Ornithology will stare like the Bird of Wisdom himself on being told that an Owl is an Eagle. Yet, bating a little inaccuracy, it is so. Eagles, kites, hawks, and owls, all belong to the genus Falco. We hear a great deal too much in poetry of the moping Owl, the melancholy Owl, the boding Owl, whereas he neither mopes nor bodes, and is no more melancholy than becomes a gentleman. We also hear of the Owl being addicted to spirituous liquors; and hence the expression, as drunk as an Owl. All this is mere Whig personality, the Owl being a Tory of the old school, and a friend of the ancient establishments of church and state. Nay, the same political party, although certainly the most shortsighted of God's creatures, taunt the Owl with being blind. As blind as an Owl, is a libel in frequent use out of ornithological society. Shut up Lord Jeffrey himself in a hay-barn with a well-built mow, and ask him in the darkness to catch you a few mice, and he will tell you whether or not the Owl be blind. This would be just as fair as to expect the Owl to see, like Lord Jeffrey, through a case in the Parliament House during daylight. Nay, we once heard a writer in Taylor and Hessey call the Owl stupid, he himself having longer ears than any species of Owl extant. What is the positive character of the Owl may perhaps appear by-and-by; but we have seen that, describing his character by negations, we may say that he resembles Napoleon Buonaparte much more than Joseph Hume or Alderman Wood. He is not moping—not boding—not melancholy—not a drunkard—not blind—not stupid; as much as it would be prudent to say of any man, whether editor or contributor, in her Majesty's dominions.

We really have no patience with people who persist in all manner of misconceptions regarding the character of birds. Birds often appear to such persons, judging from, of, and by themselves, to be in mind and manners the reverse of their real character. They judge the inner bird by outward circumstances inaccurately observed. There is the owl. How little do the people of England know of him—even of him the barn-door and domestic owl—yea, even at this day—we had almost said the Poets! Shakespeare, of course, and his freres, knew him to be a merry fellow—quite a madcap—and so do now all the Lakers. But Cowper had his doubts about it; and Gray, as every schoolboy knows, speaks of him like an old wife. The force of folly can go no further, than to imagine an owl complaining to the moon of being disturbed by people walking in a country churchyard. And among all our present bardlings, the owl is supposed to be constantly on the eve of suicide. If it were really so, he ought in a Christian country to be pitied, not pelted, as he is sure to be when accidentally seen in sunlight—for melancholy is a misfortune, especially when hereditary and constitutional, as it is popularly believed to be in the Black-billed Bubo, and certainly was in Dr Johnson. In young masters and misses we can pardon any childishness; but we cannot pardon the antipathy to the owl entertained by the manly minds of grown-up English clodhoppers, ploughmen, and threshers. They keep terriers to kill rats and mice in barns, and they shoot the owls, any one of whom we would cheerfully back against the famous Billy. "The very commonest observation teaches us," says the author of the "Gardens of the Menagerie," "that they are in reality the best and most efficient protectors of our cornfields and granaries from the devastating pillage of the swarms of mice and other small rodents." Nay, by their constant destruction of these petty but dangerous enemies, the owls, he says, "earn an unquestionable title to be regarded as among the most active of the friends of man; a title which only one or two among them occasionally forfeit by their aggressions on the defenceless poultry." Roger or Dolly beholds him in the act of murdering a duckling, and, like other light-headed, giddy, unthinking creatures, they forget all the service he has done the farm, the parish, and the state; he is shot in the act, and nailed, wide-extended in cruel spread-eagle, on the barn-door. Others again call him dull and shortsighted—nay, go the length of asserting that he is stupid—as stupid as an owl. Why, our excellent fellow, when you have the tithe of the talent of the common owl, and know half as well how to use it, you may claim the medal.

The eagles, kites, and hawks, hunt by day. The Owl is the Nimrod of the Night. Then, like one who shall be nameless, he sails about seeking those whom he may devour. To do him justice, he has a truly ghost-like head and shoulders of his own. What horror to the "small birds rejoicing in spring's leafy bowers," fast-locked we were going to say in each other's arms, but sitting side by side in the same cosy nuptial nest, to be startled out of their love-dreams by the great lamp-eyed, beaked face of a horrible monster with horns, picked out of feathered bed, and wafted off in one bunch, within talons, to pacify a set of hissing, and snappish, and shapeless powder-puffs, in the loophole of a barn? In a house where a cat is kept, mice are much to be pitied. They are so infatuated with the smell of a respectable larder, that to leave the premises, they confess, is impossible. Yet every hour—nay, every minute of their lives—must they be in the fear of being leaped out upon by four velvet paws—and devoured with kisses from a whiskered mouth, and a throat full of that incomprehensible music—a purr. Life, on such terms, seems to us anything but desirable. But the truth is, that mice in the fields are not a whit better off. Owls are cats with wings. Skimming along the grass tops, they stop in a momentary hover, let drop a talon, and away with Mus, his wife, and small family of blind children. It is the white, or yellow, or barn, or church, or Screech-Owl, or Gilley-Owlet, that behaves in this way; and he makes no bones of a mouse, uniformly swallowing him alive. Our friend, we suspect, though no drunkard, is somewhat of a glutton. In one thing we agree with him, that there is no sort of harm in a heavy supper. There, however, we are guilty of some confusion of ideas; for what to us, who rise in the morning, seems a supper, is to him who gets up at evening twilight, a breakfast. We therefore agree with him in thinking that there is no sort of harm in a heavy breakfast. After having passed a pleasant night in eating and flirting, he goes to bed betimes about four o'clock in the morning; and, as Bewick observes, makes a blowing hissing noise, resembling the snoring of a man. Indeed nothing can be more diverting to a person annoyed by blue devils, than to look at a white Owl and his wife asleep. With their heads gently inclined towards each other, there they keep snoring away like any Christian couple. Should the one make a pause, the other that instant awakes, and, fearing something may be wrong with his spouse, opens a pair of glimmering winking eyes, and inspects the adjacent physiognomy with the scrutinising stare of a village apothecary. If all be right, the concert is resumed, the snore sometimes degenerating into a sort of snivel, and the snivel into a blowing hiss. First time we heard this noise was in a churchyard when we were mere boys, having ventured in after dark to catch the minister's colt for a gallop over to the parish capital, where there was a dancing-school ball. There had been a nest of Owls in some hole in the spire; but we never doubted for a moment that the noise of snoring, blowing, hissing, and snapping proceeded from a testy old gentleman that had been buried that forenoon, and had come alive again a day after the fair. Had we reasoned the matter a little, we must soon have convinced ourselves that there was no ground for alarm to us at least; for the noise was like that of some one half stifled, and little likely to heave up from above him a six-feet-deep load of earth—to say nothing of the improbability of his being able to unscrew the coffin from the inside. Be that as it may, we cleared about a dozen of decent tombstones at three jumps—the fourth took us over a wall five feet high within and about fifteen without, and landed us, with a squash, in a cabbage-garden, enclosed on the other three sides by a house and a holly-hedge. The house was the sexton's, who, apprehending the stramash to proceed from a resurrectionary surgeon mistaken in his latitude, thrust out a long duck-gun from a window in the thatch, and swore to blow out our brains if we did not instantly surrender ourselves, and deliver up the corpse. It was in vain to cry out our name, which he knew as well as his own. He was deaf to reason, and would not withdraw his patterero till we had laid down the corpse. He swore that he saw the sack in the moonlight. This was a horse-cloth with which we had intended to saddle the "cowt," and that had remained, during the supernatural agency under which we laboured, clutched unconsciously and convulsively in our grasp. Long was it ere Davie Donald would see us in our true light—but at length he drew on his Kilmarnock nightcap, and coming out with a bouet, let us through the trance and out of the front door, thoroughly convinced, till we read Bewick, that old Southfield was not dead, although in a very bad way indeed. Let this be a lesson to schoolboys not to neglect the science of natural history, and to study the character of the White Owl.

Owls—both White and common Brown, are not only useful in a mountainous country, but highly ornamental. How serenely beautiful their noiseless flight; a flake of snow is not winnowed through the air more softly-silent! Gliding along the dark shadows of a wood, how spiritual the motion—how like the thought of a dream! And then, during the hushed midnight hours, how jocund the whoop and hollo from the heart of a sycamore—grey rock, or ivied Tower! How the Owls of Windermere must laugh at the silly Lakers, that under the garish eye of day, enveloped in clouds of dust, whirl along in rattling post-shays in pursuit of the picturesque! Why, the least imaginative Owl that ever hunted mice by moonlight on the banks of Windermere, must know the character of its scenery better than any poetaster that ever dined on char at Bowness or Lowood. The long quivering lines of light illumining some sylvan isle—the evening-star shining from the water to its counterpart in the sky—the glorious phenomenon of the double moon—the night-colours of the woods—and, once in the three years perhaps, that loveliest and most lustrous of celestial forms, the lunar rainbow—all these and many more beauteous and magnificent sights are familiar to the Owls of Windermere. And who know half so well as they do the echoes of Furness, and Applethwaite, and Loughrigg, and Landale, all the way on to Dungeon-Gill and Pavey-Ark, Scawfell and the Great Gable, and that sea of mountains, of which every wave has a name? Midnight—when asleep so still and silent—seems inspired with the joyous spirit of the Owls in their revelry—and answers to their mirth and merriment through all her clouds. The Moping Owl, indeed!—the Boding Owl, forsooth!—the Melancholy Owl, you blockhead!—why, they are the most cheerful—joy-portending—and exulting of God's creatures! Their flow of animal spirits is incessant—crowing-cocks are a joke to them—blue devils are to them unknown—not one hypochondriac in a thousand barns—and the Man-in-the-Moon acknowledges that he never heard one of them utter a complaint.

But what say ye to an Owl, not only like an eagle in plumage, but equal to the largest eagle in size—and therefore named, from the King of Birds, the Eagle Owl. Mr Selby! you have done justice to the monarch of the Bubos. We hold ourselves to be persons of tolerable courage, as the world goes—but we could not answer for ourselves showing fight with such a customer, were he to waylay us by night in a wood. In comparison, Jack Thurtell looked harmless. No—that bold, bright-eyed murderer, with Horns on his head like those on Michael Angelo's statue of Moses, would never have had the cruel cowardice to cut the weasand, and smash out the brains of such a miserable wretch as Weare! True, he is fond of blood—and where's the harm in that? It is his nature. But if there be any truth in the science of Physiognomy—and be that of Phrenology what it will, most assuredly there is truth in it—the original of that Owl, for whose portrait the world is indebted to Mr Selby, and Sir Thomas Lawrence never painted a finer one of Prince or Potentate of any Holy or Unholy Alliance, must have despised Probert from the very bottom of his heart. No prudent Eagle but would be exceedingly desirous of keeping on good terms with him—devilish shy, i' faith, of giving him any offence by the least hauteur of manner, or the slightest violation of etiquette. An Owl of this character and calibre is not afraid to show his horns at mid-day on the mountain. The Fox is not over and above fond of him—and his claws can kill a cub at a blow. The Doe sees the monster sitting on the back of her fawn, and, maternal instinct overcome by horror, bounds into the brake, and leaves the pretty creature to its fate. Thank Heaven, he is, in Great Britain, a rare bird! Tempest-driven across the Northern Ocean from his native forests in Russia, an occasional visitant he "frightens this isle from its propriety," and causes a hideous screaming through every wood he haunts. Some years ago, one was killed in the upland moors in the county of Durham—and, of course, paid a visit to Mr Bullock's Museum. Eagle-like in all its habits, it builds its nest on high rocks—sometimes on the loftiest trees—and seldom lays more than two eggs. One is one more than enough—and we who fly by night trust never to fall in with a live specimen of the Strix-Bubo of Linnæus.

But largest and loveliest of all the silent night-gliders—the $1! Gentle reader—if you long to see his picture, we have told you where it may be found;—and in the College Museum, within a glass vase on the central table in the Palace of Stuffed Birds, you may admire his outward very self—the semblance of the Owl he was when he used to eye the moon shining over the Northern Sea:—but if you would see the noble and beautiful Creature himself, in all his living glory, you must seek him through the long summer twilight among the Orkney or the Shetland Isles. The Snowy Owl dearly loves the snow—and there is, we believe, a tradition among them, that their first ancestor and ancestress rose up together from a melting snow-wreath on the very last day of a Greenland winter, when all at once the bright fields reappear. The race still inhabits that frozen coast—being common, indeed, through all the regions of the Arctic Circle. It is numerous on the shores of Hudson's Bay, in Norway, Sweden, and Lapland—but in the temperate parts of Europe and America "rara avis in terris, nigroque simillima cygno."

We defy all the tailors on the face of the habitable globe; and what countless cross-legged fractional parts of men—who, like the beings of whom they are constituents, are thought to double their numbers every thirty years—must not the four quarters of the earth, in their present advanced state of civilisation, contain!—we defy, we say, all the tailors on the face of the habitable globe to construct such a surtout as that of the Snowy Owl, covering him, with equal luxury and comfort, in summer's heat and winter's cold. The elements, in all their freezing fury, cannot reach the body of the bird through that beautiful down-mail. Well guarded are the opening of those great eyes. Neither the driving dust, nor the searching sleet, nor the sharp frozen snow-stour, give him the ophthalmia. Gutta Serena is to him unknown—no Snowy Owl was ever couched for cataract—no need has he for an oculist, should he live an hundred years; and were they to attempt any operation on his lens or iris, how he would hoot at Alexander and Wardrope!

Night, doubtless, is the usual season of his prey; but he does not shun the day, and is sometimes seen hovering unhurt in the sunshine. The red or black grouse flies as if pursued by a ghost; but the Snowy Owl, little slower than the eagle, in dreadful silence overtakes his flight, and then death is sudden and sure. Hawking is, or was, a noble pastime—and we have now prevented our eyes from glancing at Jer-falcon, Peregrine, or Goshawk; but Owling, we do not doubt, would be noways inferior sport; and were it to become prevalent in modern times, as Hawking was in times of old, why, each lady, as Venus already fair, with an Owl on her wrist, would look as wise as Minerva.

But our soul sickens at all those dreams of blood! and fain would turn away from fierce eye, cruel beak, and tearing talon—war-weapons of them that delight in wounds and death—to the contemplation of creatures whose characteristics are the love of solitude—shy gentleness of manner—the tender devotion of mutual attachment—and, in field or forest, a lifelong passion for peace.