“A woodlark, o’er the kind contending throng
Superior heard, ran thro’ the sweetest length of song.”
On the wing, no doubt, it is mistaken for “the lark,” but when singing, especially at night, in the shrubbery or copse, as often for the nightingale; yet it is common enough, and if those who care to do so will, when they hear its exquisite song, stop and look round for the singer, they will see, sitting on a branch, a bird just like the skylark, but will notice, if they listen, that its voice is richer and its notes more varied than the laverock’s, and that the bird shifts from one perch to another while it is singing, sometimes even mounting to the top of a tree, and thence, still in song, flying up into the air to circle. If you startle a skylark it will never, you will notice, fly to woodland for shelter, but only to another part of the meadow or into the next, and settle there on the ground, so that whenever a bird that you think is a “lark” flies on being startled into a tree, you may be sure it is the “soft enamoured woodlark”—next to the nightingale the sweetest minstrel of the copse.
“The woodlark breathes in softer strain the vow,
And love’s sweet burthen floats from bough to bough.”
A skylark, as every one knows, sings, as a rule, when in the air, but it, too, will sing upon the ground; and in its cage, forgetful apparently of its captivity, pours out its song with the same enchanting gaiety as when it is free of all the sky.
“What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?”
As seen in Nature, there can be nothing imagined more exultant, more heartily joyous, than the glad, eager way in which the skylark seems to spring up from the meadow and commence its artless canticles of praise as thanks for its happiness and freedom. Yet, perched upon a scrap of turf, in a cage so low-roofed that it cannot attempt to rise, it sings the same “strains of unpremeditated art” that so charmed the great poet, and live for ever in his deathless verse. Even in winter, on a sunny day, the lark will soar up into the air “like an embodied joy whose race is just begun,” and “shower a rain of melody.” For some stay with us all the year round, though most of their companions go, and in such vast flocks that fifteen thousand have been caught in a single night out of a flight passing a single spot. And, poor little birds, wherever they rest on their journey they find nets spread for them, for every nation alike is agreed that larks are good to eat; and so they go, to and fro, literally “larding the earth” with their bodies. Yet in spite of these periodical massacres, and in spite of perennial persecution for the cage and the table, their numbers never seem to lessen, and our skies and meadows are as full of them one year as another. And it is well that it is so, for what should we miss more in a country walk than “the lark’s blithe carol from the clouds”?
“Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass.”
Yet, introduced into New Zealand, they have become a pest, ravaging the cornfields when the blade first appears above ground, and pulling up, grain by grain, every plant in the field. The goldfinch, also imported into the colony, now flies about in wisps of hundreds, inflicting serious damage on the buds of crops and fruit-trees. It is a severe lesson this in natural history that we have learned, trying to exchange the wild creatures of different continents. Australia is in despair over the rabbit, and the Colonies and America alike hold the sparrow in abomination.
“The Sparrow, meanest of the feathered race,
His fit companion finds in every place.”
Cowper.
When I was travelling in the United States in 1883, I drew the sparrow-line from personal observation at Omaha on the east and Salt Lake City on the west. From the one side it had not then crossed the Mississippi. But it was steadily advancing, the aggressive little fowl, from both seaboards, and while it had pushed forward from the Atlantic into Illinois, so from the Pacific it had then travelled as far as Nevada. The tyranny of the sparrow is part of the price men pay for civilisation. Only savages are exempt. In America it has developed into a multitudinous evil, to which our own grievance against the bird is nothing; has dispossessed the children of the soil, and thrust its Saxon assumption of superiority upon the feathered natives of the country.