However, it is a curious, and really baffling, commentary on the whole incident that thereafter two old wood-pigeons and a young one, before the household was up in the morning, and off and on during the day, used to come down upon the lawn and examine the spot where the captive’s basket had stood, and which, after the young bird’s flight, we had shaken out on the spot, scattering all the peas and food that was in it upon the grass. Every day a handful of crumbs or maize used to be thrown there, and every day the family came for it. By what process of “instinct” could wild birds be led to behave so unreasonably? Did they separate in their “minds” the incidents of capture and of release, and being unable to put one and one together, consider the latter as an isolated act of benevolence apart from, and quite unconnected with, the former, and so behave with gratitude in consequence? Did they look on us only as the good Jack Stout who pulled Pussy out, forgetting that we were also the naughty Tommy Green who put Pussy in? But the workings of “instinct” are not to be followed out by “reason,” or what shall we say of all the other birds who, until we find their nests, are full of artifice to mislead us, and apparently most anxious that their secret should not be known, but who, once their nest is found, appear to lose all concern about the matter, and move to and fro as if it were the most natural thing in the world to treat us with confidence and be thoroughly aboveboard with us?
Take the delightful dotterel, for instance. It will go through all the deceptive performances of a lapwing, and weary out your patience with anxious devices for leading you astray; and yet, when you at last discover its beautiful eggs, olive, with rich dark markings, or its downy little ones, almost the same colour as the eggs, cuddled together in a small hollow, the old birds seem almost to congratulate you upon your sagacity, and come close, as much as to say, “Yes, these are our eggs; we were trying to show them to you all the time; and this is the way we sit down on them. Like to see us catch a fly? There! That’s the way we do it. See us run.” Then they droop one wing and begin to flutter along the ground, as if hurt—just to show you how it is done; and, in fact, before you go (and over your going they unreservedly and unmistakably rejoice), will sometimes go through such a series of performances as justifies their proverbial reputation for semi-idiotcy:
“The dotterell which we think a very dainty dish,
Whose taking makes such sport as man no more could wish,
For as you creep or cower, or lie or stoop, or go,
So marking you with care, the apish bird doth so,
And acting everything doth never mark the net
Till he be in the snare which men for him have set.”
This was written three centuries ago; but foolish or not, the dotterel is a very engaging little bird, and to those who live near its summer haunts one of the prettiest details of bird-life
