Birds of the wave and woodland

by Phil Robinson

always the most delightful bends of the streams, the most charming nooks and corners of the waterways and pools that the kingfisher haunts. Where the scenery is open and tame, he is only a passer-by. But where his beauty adds the one charm of life, and beautiful life, that was needed to make some special “bit” of loveliness complete, there the kingfisher lives. It is a sweet little poem, this bird. Does it see any of the beauty that we do in these archways of willow and alder, this exquisite embroidery of forget-me-nots upon the brink, this clump of yellow flags and fair tall willow-herb? One could almost imagine that it does, so careful is it to pitch its camp just where Nature is at its best. Here the banks are flowered and prettily uneven with mossy stumps and roots “peeping out upon the brook.” The moor-hen is at home here, and that delightful, harmless little beast the water-vole.

I remember once seeing a water-vole sitting up at its front door in the sun, nibbling its crisp salad of young reed-shoot: on one side of it grew a tuft of “faint sweet cuckoo-flower,” and just above it was a great rosette of primroses, and I thought I had never seen anything more enchanting than this quiet little touch of innocent and pretty spring.

One of them has his hole yonder where there is a little overhanging bulge in the bank, and that little platform which seems neatly laid with rushes is his dining-room, and from it, running either way, you can easily trace the small animal’s regular path to points where he can slip into the water quietly. If he were to jump in off his doorstep he would make a splash: a great indiscretion in a water-rat. So he toddles off to the right or the left as his fancy takes him, till he comes to a conveniently shelving place where he can take to water without noise.

Under that green moss-furred root, over which his pathway so clearly goes, is the kingfisher’s nest. The hole runs in straight for about three feet, and at the end is “the nest,” and the little birds sitting in it can tell by the stoppage of the light at the entrance that father or mother has come back with a fish, and they hurry forward, crouching low, with out-stretched necks (for the tunnel is only three inches high), to get the food first. So the strongest or hungriest gets fed first, and when it has had enough it stays behind when the next race to the opening takes place, and the weaker or lazier take their turns till all are satisfied. And this is the simple explanation of that which so often puzzles people—“How do the old birds know that all the young ones have been fed? can they count, or do they know them all one from the other?”

No, they cannot count, and they do not know one from another. If you watch a bird at a nest, it gives the food to the nearest mouth: it never picks and chooses. But young birds know when they have had enough—for the present. If you are feeding a young bird you have taken from the nest, how ferociously it takes the first bit, and the second, and perhaps the third; and then how utterly and suddenly its appetite collapses! It refuses, in the most dogged and sulky way, to open its beak though you tempt it ever so much. It has had enough, and it knows it, and isn’t going to burst for you or for anybody else. It is just the same in the nest. The first two or three pieces of food may all follow one another down the same throat, but next time the mother comes there is one mouth shut tight. And so it goes on. One by one the mouths are shut up, and the mother comes at last with a titbit, and finds every one of the little ones asleep, on full stomachs, and as haughtily regardless of her and her provender as if they would never need feeding any more. So the mother eats it herself, and sits down on the top of the sleepers. This is the whole secret of the mystery. While the little birds are hungry they keep on asking for more: as soon as they are stuffed full they convey that information to the parents by holding their tongues. So all get fed.

And a word here as to that odd superstition which is still current, that the British Museum will give “a hundred pounds for a complete kingfisher’s nest.” Every year the “authorities” are written to by people in the country offering to send them one at the price, but of course it was never offered, and indeed a kingfisher’s nest has not been wanted, since the beautiful section of a river-bank, with the nest, and young, and old ones all complete, was set up in the Bird Gallery at the British Museum in 1883. But the kingfisher’s nest is not the only article that a deluded public seems to imagine the British Museum is still pining for, for as a letter to the Times by Sir J. Flower in 1894 tells us, offers are regularly received of tortoise-shell tom-cats at the most exorbitant prices, and inquiries continue to come in, asking if it is true that the Museum has offered a hundred pounds for “an entire cigar-ash.”

Nowhere can the lover of Nature find more to spend his time over than in the pretty haunts of this pretty bird. As a schoolboy I have spent many hours in water-meadows watching the bird-life about me, and, sitting on some mossy stump in the middle of the marsh-marigolds or on some rail that straddled across the water, enjoyed the little spectacles, comic and serious, that various companies of amateurs—moor-hen and water-rat, bunting and reed-warbler and weasel—presented for my entertainment.

My visits to the kingfisher’s osier-beds were often really Platonic. There were no eggs to be taken that I had not enough of and to spare in my collection. Albeit the chance of a cuckoo’s egg always made looking into every nest I found “a pleasurable expectation,” which was just often enough fulfilled to make the quest a perpetual hope.