Birds and their nests

by Mary Howitt

With all his pleasant cooings in the wood, therefore, and all his complacent strutting about with elevated head and protruded breast—with all his gambols and graces, his striking the points of his wings together as he rises into the air, to express a pleasure to his mate beyond his cooing, he has not such a care free life of it. He is always kept on the alert, therefore, and, being always on the watch against danger, is not at all a sound sleeper. The least disturbance at night rouses him. “I have frequently,” continues our author, “attempted to approach the trees when the wood-pigeons were roosting, but even on the darkest nights they would take alarm. The poor wood-pigeon has no other defence against its enemies than its ever watchful and never sleeping timidity; not being able to do battle against even the smallest of its many persecutors.”

Gilbert White says that the wood-pigeons were greatly decreasing, in his time, in Hampshire, and there were then only about a hundred in the woods at Selborne, but in former times the flocks had been so vast, not only there, but in the surrounding districts, that they had traversed the air morning and evening like rooks, reaching for a mile together, and that, when they thus came to rendezvous there by thousands, the sound of their wings, suddenly roused from their roosting-trees in an evening, rising all at once into the air, was like a sudden rolling of distant thunder.

Although the wood-pigeon is considered to be the original parent of the tame pigeon, yet it does not seem possible to tame the young of this bird, though taken from the nest quite young. It is a bird which appears to hate confinement, and, as soon as it has the opportunity, spite of all kindness and attention, it flies away to the freedom of the woods.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE WHITE-THROAT.

With none of our migratory birds, our spring visitants from southern lands, is the lover of the country more familiar than with the White-throat, which, with its nest, is here so beautifully and livingly depicted by Mr. Harrison Weir.

This bird, with its many names—White-throat, Peggy-white-throat, Peggy-chaw, Charlie-mufty, Nettle-creeper, Whishey-whey-beard or Pettichaps—comes to us in April, about the same time as the cuckoo and the swallow; the male bird, like his cousin the nightingale, coming before the female, but he does not make himself very conspicuous till the hedges and bushes are well covered with leaves; then he may be found in almost every lane and hedge the whole country over.

As soon as the female is here, and the birds have paired, the business of nest-building begins, and they may then be seen flying in and out of the bushes with great alertness, the he-bird carolling his light and airy song, and often hurling himself, as it were, up into the air, some twenty or thirty feet, in a wild, tipsy sort of way, as if he were fuller of life than he could hold, and coming down again with a warble into the hedge, where the little hen-wife is already arranging her dwelling in the very spot probably where she was herself hatched, and her ancestors before her, for ages. For I must here remark that one of the most remarkable properties of birds is, that facility by which they so regularly disperse themselves over the whole country on their arrival after their far migration, each one, in all probability, attracted by some attachment of the past, stopping short at, or proceeding onward to, the exact spot where he himself first came into the consciousness of life. This is one of the wonderful arrangements of nature, otherwise of God, by which the great balance is so beautifully kept in creation. If the migratory bird arrives ever so weary at Dover, and its true home be some sweet low-lying lane of Devonshire, a thick hedgerow of the midland counties, or a thickety glen of Westmoreland, it will not delay its flight nor be tempted to tarry short of that glen, hedgerow, or lane with which the experience of its own life and affection is united.

At this charming time of the year none of the various performers in nature’s great concert bring back to those who have passed their youth in the country a more delicious recollection of vernal fields and lanes than this bird of ours, the little white-throat.