Wild Life in a Southern County

by Richard Jefferies

I fancy that the hive-bee and some kindred insects have a special faculty of seeing colour at a distance, and that colours attract them. It can hardly be scent, because when flowers are placed in a room and the window left open the wind generally blows strongly into the apartment, and odours will not travel against a breeze. It seems natural that in both cases the continual watch for certain things should enable bird and insect to observe the faintest indication. Slugs, caterpillars, and such creatures, too, in moving among the grass, cause a slight agitation of the grass-blades; they lift up a leaf by crawling under it, or depress it with their weight by getting on it. This may enable the bird to detect their presence, even when quite hidden by the herbage, experience having taught it that when grass is moved by the wind broad patches sway simultaneously, but when an insect or caterpillar is the agent only a single leaf or blade is stirred.

At the farmhouse here, robins, wrens, and tomtits are always hanging about the courtyard, especially close to the dairy, where one or other may be constantly seen perched on the palings; neither do they scruple to enter the dairy, the brewhouse, or wood-house adjacent, when they see a chance. The logs (for fuel) stored in the latter doubtless afford them insects from under the dead bark.

Among the most constant residents in the garden at Wick Farm are the song thrushes. They are the tamest of the larger birds; they come every morning right under the old bay-window of the sitting-room on the shady side of the house, where the musk-plant has spread abroad and covered the stone-pitching for many yards, except just a narrow path paved with broad flagstones. The musk finds root in every interstice of the pitching, but cannot push up through the solid flat flags; a fungus, however, has attempted even that, and has succeeded in forcing a great stone, weighing perhaps fifteen or twenty pounds, from its bed, so that instead of being level it forms an inclined plane. The carpet of musk yields a pleasant odour; in one corner, too, the ‘monkey-plant’ grows luxuriously, and the grass of the green or lawn is for ever trying to encroach upon the paving. In the centre of the green is a bed of gooseberries and a cherry tree; and though the fruit is so close to the window, both thrush and blackbird make as free with it as if it was in the hedgerow.

The thrush, when he wishes to approach the house, flies first to the cover of these gooseberries; then, after reconnoitring a few minutes, comes out on the green and gradually works his way across it to the stone-pitching, and so along under the very window. The blackbird comes almost as often to the lawn, but it is in a different way. His manner is that of a bold marauder, conscious that he has no right, and aware that a shot from an ambuscade may lay him low, but defiantly risking the danger. He perches first on a bush, or on the garden wall, under the sheltering boughs of the lime trees, at a distance of some twenty yards; then, waiting till all is clear, he makes a desperate rush for the fruit trees or the lawn. The moment he has succeeded in violently seizing some delicious morsel off he goes, uttering a loud chuckle—half as a challenge, half as a vent for his pent-up anxiety.

This peculiar chuckle is so well known by all the other birds as a note of alarm that every one in the garden immediately move; his position, if only a yard or two. When you are stealing down the side of the hedgerow, endeavouring to get near enough to observe the woodpecker in a tree, or with a gun to shoot a pigeon, the great anxiety is lest you startle a blackbird. If he thinks you have not seen him, he is cunning enough to slip out the other side noiselessly and fly down beside the hedge just above the ground for some distance. He then crosses the field to a hedge on the other side, and, just as he safely lands himself in a thick hawthorn bush a hundred yards away, defiantly utters his cry. The pigeon or the woodpecker will instantly glance round; but, the cry being at a distance, if you keep still a minute or two they will resume their occupation. But if you should disturb the blackbird on the side of the bank next you, where he knows you must have seen or heard him, or if he is obliged to come out on your side of the hedge, then he makes the meadow ring with his alarm-note, and immediately away goes pigeon or woodpecker, thrushes fly further down the hedge, and the rabbits feeding in the grass lift up their heads and, seeing you, rush to their burrows. In this way the blackbird acts as a general sentinel.

He has two variations of this cry. One he uses when just about to change his feeding ground and visit another favourite corner across the field; it is as much as to say, “Take notice, all you menials; I, the king of the hedge, am coming.” The other is a warning, and will very often set two or three other blackbirds calling in the same way, whose existence till then was unsuspected. These calls are quite distinct from his song.

Sometimes, when sitting on a rail in the shade of a great bush—a rail placed to close a gap—I have had a blackbird come across the meadow and perch just above my head. Till the moment of alighting he was ignorant of my presence, and for a second the extremity of his astonishment literally held him speechless at his own temerity. The next—what an outcry and furious bustle of excitement to escape! So in the garden here he makes a desperate rush, seizes his prey, and off again twenty or thirty yards, exhibiting an amusing mixture of courage and timidity. This process he will repeat fifty times a day. No matter how terribly frightened, his assurance quickly returns, and another foray follows; so that you begin by thinking him the most cowardly and end by finding him the most impudent of birds.

I own I love the blackbird, and never weary of observing him. There is a bold English independence about him—an insolent consciousness of his own beauty. He must somehow have read Shakespeare, for he seems quite aware of his ‘orange-tawny bill’ and deep black hue. He might really know that he figures in a famous ballad, and that four-and-twenty of his species were considered a dish to set before a king.

It is a sight to see him take his bath. In a meadow not far from the house here is a shallow but clear streamlet, running down a deep broad ditch overshadowed by tall hemlock and clogweed, arched over with willow, whose leaves when the wind blows and their under-side is exposed give the hedge a grey tint, with maple and briar. Hide yourself here on a summer morning among the dry grass and bushes, and presently the blackbird comes to stand a minute on a stone which checks the tiny stream like a miniature rock, and then to splash the clear water overhead and back with immense energy. He repeats this several times, and immediately afterwards flies to an adjacent rail, where, unfettered by boughs, he can preen his feathers, going through his toilet with the air of a prince. Finally, he perks his tail up, and challenges the world with the call already mentioned, which seems now to mean, “Come and see Me; am I not handsome?”

On a warm June day, when the hedges are covered with roses and the air is sweet with the odour of mown grass, it is pleasant to listen to the blackbirds in the oaks pouring forth their rich liquid notes. There is no note so sweet and deep and melodious as that of the blackbird to be heard in our fields; it is even richer than the nightingale’s, though not so varied. Just before noonday—between eleven and twelve—when the heat increases, he leaves the low thick bushes and moist ditches and mounts up into an oak tree, where, on a branch, he sits and sings. Then another at a distance takes up the burden, till by-and-by, as you listen, partly hidden in a gateway, four or five are thus engaged in the trees of a single meadow.