“Soothed by the genial warmth, the cawing rook
Anticipates the Spring, selects her mate,
Haunts her tall nest-trees, and with sedulous care
Repairs her wicker eyrie tempest-torn.”
Gilbert White.
And so to March and “the throstle with his note so true”; and April, when “the swallow knows her time, and on the vernal breezes wings her way, o’er mountain, plain, and far-extending seas, from Afric’s torrid sands to Britain’s shore, before the cuckoo”; and May, “with the darling of the Summer’s pride, fair Philomel,” “the dear good angel of the Spring, the nightingale,” and
“All vital things that wake to bring
News of buds and blossoming.”
With the swallow and the nightingale, many other birds “transmigrating come, unnumbered colonies on foreign wing, at Nature’s summons.”
From every quarter the aliens, if birds bred on British soil by British-born parents can be called such, converge upon our coasts, just as if England were the centre of a circle at which all the birds who spend the rest of the year upon its circumference congregate for the nesting season, reaching the same point at the same time, but travelling, each company, on a radius of its own.
I have often wondered that migration is not more often looked at through the other end of the telescope, and Great Britain called the “home,” for instance, of the nightingale. What makes “home” for a bird? Is it not the place where the nest is built and the young are reared? For the rest of the year the families travel “abroad,” returning “home” for all that makes life important and domestic. Their fixed addresses are in England, their names are in British directories as residing there. But their doctors will not let them winter “at home,” and so they have to go on to the Continent, or to even warmer latitudes, for the colder months of the year. I myself entertain, and often express, a grudge against the “migrants” for staying only so long as it is fine; but as often as I do so, my conscience reproaches me, for, after all, the nightingale shows its affection for its birthplace by coming back to it; and, “in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations,” remains a true-born English bird. What more could it do? It might certainly stay and freeze to death. But why should we expect nightingales to do more than we expect men and women to do? Which of us, if warned by doctors against the English winter and possessing the means to go abroad, would stop at home to die here, just to show that we are lovers of our country? So it would be quite in keeping with the sympathetic and kindly tendency of contemporary natural history, if we looked upon the birds when they come, as our own birds coming home, and when they go, as going abroad under the inexorable compulsion of health; if we welcomed them in Spring as returning fellow-countrymen, and bade them god-speed in Autumn, as delicate folk who would, if they could, but dare not, stop in Britain all the year round. And who can blame the birds, apart from necessities of life and death, for leaving our shores? Think of the climate they can always, by a morning’s flight, enjoy, year in and year out, “in foreign countries”; what range of space, what perennial abundance of food, and then calculate the force of inherited affection for the place of their birth that urges them, hosts of little feeble people, to dare the appalling journey “home,” to risk the truly awful perils of return to their native land. Had they human intelligence, and did they live by reason, not one of them would think of coming here.
What human parents would think of wintering in, say, Cairo, if they knew that the railway companies meant to destroy them wholesale as they travelled down to Dover; that the coast-guard and along-shore rabble were all on the look-out for them to take their lives; that the Channel steamer owners were in conspiracy to kill them; that the quays at Calais were swarming with avowed murderers of British travellers; that every Continental line was run by bandits and brigands sworn to shed their blood, and every hotel and resting-place an ambush of assassins? What British pater-familias would “winter in Cairo” under such conditions of travel? Yet these are the conditions under which the nightingales come and go. Only they do not know it. If they did, “the instinct of self-preservation” would surely triumph over “love of country,” and we should never see any nightingales in England, nor any turtle-doves—one of the most beautiful of our birds. But more of turtle-doves by-and-by.
“The Ring-dove in the embowering ivy yet
Keeps up her love lament.”
Shelley.
“Summer hath spoken soothingly to each nested Finch.”
Keats.
Their larger and more beautiful relative the ring-dove or wood-pigeon we have with us always, and I think it is conspicuously the bird of June. The young are then on the wing, and it is impossible, passing near their haunts, not to be attracted by this ornamental bird, which, whether flying or at rest, adds a grace to every scene. Above all, it is beautiful when it beats its way up into the air to a height, and then, expanding its wings, comes floating down again. This exquisite performance may be seen at almost any time, for the ring-dove sometimes has three broods in the year, and if, as is supposed, it is a part of the bird’s courtship, is as appropriate in October as in March. Both birds may sometimes be seen executing this graceful “manœuvre” together; and it is, I think, the most prettily significant of all bird-gestures. Throughout June may be heard “the deep mellow crush of the wood-pigeon’s note, making music that sweetens the calm” of the summer woodlands or the sudden clapping when the startled bird, “on loud-applauding wing,” quits its perch. Hardly a country walk can then be taken without seeing, either feeding on the ground, at rest, or on watch upon the trees or flying overhead, the handsome bird, in its plumage of lavender-blue, that seems so wild, and yet can be tamed sooner almost than any bird but the robin.