“musical and loud,
Buried among the twinkling leaves.”
Whence comes this little musician? It may be from Persia or Abyssinia, or perhaps it has only stepped across, so to speak, from Norway. But here it is with its nest among the ivy and periwinkles on the bank, and its beautiful eggs, delicious little mottled ovals of jasper, complete in number in their cobweb cup. It is odd how few people, even those who are “fond of birds,” and have large gardens and grounds, know this little visitor by sight, or even by song. And yet it needs only a few minutes’ patience when once the blackcap is seen to watch it to its nest, and that once done it can be examined, as I have examined it, with a magnifying-glass at the end of a walking-stick, while it sits upon its eggs. Few birds are really more trustful in the places they may choose for their nests, or more courageous in remaining upon them when approached, than this pretty bird with the lovely voice.
“Deep mourns the Turtle in sequestered bower.”
Beattie.
“The Ringdove in the embowering ivy, yet
Keeps up her love lament.”
Shelley.
Another bird seldom seen, or when seen recognised, is the turtle-dove. Its purring in the thicket is mistaken for the wood-pigeon’s by ears that are not on their guard for differences of note, and yet, if once recognised apart, the two can no more be confused than the rook’s and jackdaw’s. Of all birds I think it one of the stealthiest. Though building its nest where discovery seems almost certain for so large a fowl, it does its work with such secrecy that I doubt if any one in England ever saw a turtle-dove with a twig in its beak, or tracked it to its nest by its flight. I have found dozens of turtle-doves’ nests, but never one betrayed by the old birds. Yet the grasshopper warbler, supposed by most people to be one of the most subtle of nest-builders, and by its tiny size, its mouse-like habits, and its concealing colour, so carefully equipped by Nature for security, can be watched home to its nest, as I know from my own schoolboy days, with unerring certainty. It betrays itself in every action. You have only to “locate” the small ventriloquist’s cricket-voice and then lie down among the herbage and wait. From impatience the little birds are sure to show themselves, and if they are building they hop up and down, twist in and out of the lowest plants, with material for their nest in their beaks, and you have only to lie still and watch.
But “watching” all day long will do no good with turtle-doves. Whether building or not, they never tell you, and when they catch sight of you they fly off at once, as if they did not care where they flew to, or whether they ever came back there again. Let them go, but come back yourself later on to the same spot, approaching it, however, from the opposite direction. And if you flush them again, you may be sure that their nest will be, or is, thereabouts: midway, probably, between the two points of your approach. In a few days go back to find the nest, and if you walk backwards and forwards in the undergrowth, keeping your eyes upwards, so as to look through the bushes from underneath, you will find it, if it is there. For the hen-bird sits very close, and goes off her nest with a flap of the wings that is unmistakeable. Apart from this, if the bird is not at home, you may often find the nest by seeing the white eggs in it from underneath, the yolks of them showing against the sky a delicious pinky yellow. For the nest is a mere ghost of a nest—a skeleton—and can easily be imitated by taking a handful of thin birch and hazel twigs and sprinkling them at all angles in a heap. Such a nest a pair of birds may easily build in half an hour, and this, perhaps, is one reason why they are never seen at work. Why they should be content with such a skeleton of a nest or how so frail a network bears two bulky nestlings and their mother, is a mystery. But as Prior sings:
“Each according to her kind
Proper material for her nest can find,
And build a frame which deepest thought in man
Would or amend or imitate in vain.”
When they are on the wing, turtle-doves seem to like to keep below the level of the tree tops, and seldom, therefore,