Hyde Park, Its History and Romance

by Mrs. Alec-Tweedie

In the summer of 1907, quite an interesting correspondence on “Birds in the Parks” appeared in the Daily Telegraph. It grew out of a remark by a writer in a paper, “it is many a day since a magpie fluttered in black and white in the heart of London.” Correspondents poured in letters to testify they had themselves seen the bird, so apparently a magpie is not such a rarity in the Metropolis after all.

A couple of magpies had a nest in the Green Park in June 1906, and were often seen in that and the following month. One, at least, visited St. James’s Park in the previous year. Another couple of magpies are recorded in the “Field Club,” a journal edited by that ardent naturalist, the Rev. Theodore Wood, which he noticed in the same park in May 1903.

Mr. A. Withers Green writes that he has for years past seen a couple of magpies in St. James’s Park flying across from the island to the mainland. In 1907 they had a nest in a black poplar in the hollow of the Green Park, and young ones had been hatched. An old Field-Marshal is said to feed them daily with hard-boiled eggs.

Nor are the magpies the only ornithological visitors which delight the heart of the Metropolis, so famous for its bird life.

In an interesting article by Mr. A. Collett, that appeared in The Evening Standard, he describes the sparrows and owls in Hyde Park:

“It is seldom, of course, that a perfectly white sparrow makes its appearance, but it is not at all uncommon to see one in autumn which is so strongly splashed and spotted with white among the brown that it immediately attracts the attention across the whole width of a square garden, and looks more like a snow bunting than the familiar London bird.... When London contains the largest crop of plump young sparrows, at the end of the nesting-season back come the owls to pick a bone with them, in no metaphorical sense. There is a hollow elm in one of the London parks, where every year, from about the end of October onwards, the ground beneath the largest hole becomes littered with the skulls and other indigestible portions of sparrows, cast up (and then thrown down) by the owls which engage the tree for the winter. To the jauntiest of sparrow bachelors this skull surrounded elm must seem the very cave of Giant Despair. There is little safety for any sparrow which chooses to go to roost among the open boughs of the park trees; and they are only acting in accordance with their natural self-protective instincts when they flock in chattering multitudes at sunset to certain well-known points of thick shrubbery, such as the ever-greens at the side of the Mall, by Stafford House, and the island in the Serpentine near the Royal Humane Society’s house.”

Carrion crows have for some years haunted Kensington Gardens. An early morning stroller has described a tragedy which he witnessed a few years ago. A duck was taking its newly-hatched brood to the Serpentine near the fountain, when one of the crows tried to seize a young duckling. The mother immediately covered them and warded off each attack of the intruder. The crow, finding that it could not succeed, flew away, and shortly afterwards returned with its mate. One crow then engaged the mother’s attention in front, while the other attacked the young from the rear, and, although the onlooker to this dastardly proceeding did all he could to drive the crows away, four of the little ducks were killed in an incredibly short time.

The same observer adds: “I have constantly visited Kensington Gardens in the early morning, and four or five years since, in the late summer, I saw a cuckoo flying along the paths which run parallel with the Bayswater Road. Last winter, in a rather foggy morning, I saw a sparrow-hawk in the Gardens, evidently by its manner a stranger; and two years ago, in November, I saw a perfectly pure albino cock blackbird flying into the island near the boat-house. I was within three or four yards of him. It was busy on the ground, but as it flew, it uttered the unmistakable cry which a cock blackbird gives on being disturbed.”

There was a curious legend that long prevailed in country districts, that the cuckoo of summer turned into a sparrow-hawk in winter, and back again into a cuckoo in the spring. On 21st August 1895, there was the rare appearance of “a cuckoo flying up and down a London street, bewildered, sheltering in its limes.”

It is excellent news that a kingfisher was recently watched flying over the Serpentine, though it is too much to hope that the bird of brilliant plumage will ever leave its favourite solitudes for the streams of the town.