Wild Life in a Southern County

by Richard Jefferies

The nomadic tribes that live in tents, and wander over thousands of miles in the East, at first sight seem to roam aimlessly, or to be determined simply by considerations of water and pasture. But those who have lived with and studied them say that, though they have no maps, each tribe, and even each particular family, has its own special route and special camping-ground. Could these routes be mapped out, they would present an interlaced pattern of lines crossing and recrossing without any appreciable order; yet one family never interferes with another family. This statement seems to me to be most interesting if compared with the habits of birds that roam hither and thither apparently without order or method, that come back in the spring to particular places, and depart again after their young are reared. Though to us they wander aimlessly, it is possible that from their point of view they may be following strictly prescribed routes sanctioned by immemorial custom.

And so itinerant labourers move about. In the particular district which has been described their motions are roughly these:—In the early spring they go up on the uplands, where there are many thousand acres of arable land, for the hoeing. Then comes a short space of employment—haymaking in the water-meadows that follow the course of the rivers there, and which are cut very early. Next, they return down into the vale, where the haymaking has then commenced. Just before it begins the Irish arrive in small parties, coming all the way from their native land to gather the high wages paid during the English harvest time. They show a pleasing attachment to the employer who has once given them work and treated them with a little kindness. To him they go first; and thus it often happens that the same band of Irish return to the same farm year after year as regularly as the cuckoo. They lodge in an open shed, making a fire in the corner of the hedge where it is sheltered. They are industrious, work well, drink little, and bear generally a good character.

After the haymaking in the vale is finished, the itinerant families turn towards the lighter soils, where the corn crops are fast ripening, and soon leave the scene of their former labours fifty miles behind them. A few perhaps straggle back in time to assist in the latter part of the corn harvest on the heavy lands, if it has been delayed by the weather. The physicians say that change of air is essential to health: the migration of birds may not be without its effect upon their lives, quite apart from the search for food alone.

The dry walls which sometimes enclose cornfields (built of flat stones) are favourite places with many birds. The yellowhammers often alight on them, so do the finches and larks; for the coarse mortar laid on the top decays and is overgrown with mosses, so that it loses the hard appearance of a wall. When the sparrow who has waited till you are close to him suddenly starts, his wings, beating the air, make a sound like the string of a bow pulled and released—to try it without an arrow.

The dexterous way in which a bird helps itself to thistledown is interesting to watch. The thistle has no branch on which he can perch; he must take it on the wing. He flies straight to the head of the thistle, stoops as it were, seizes the down, and passes on with it in the bill to the nearest bough—much in the same way as some tribes of horsemen are related to pick up a lance from the ground whilst going at full speed.

Many birds twirl their ‘r’s;’ others lisp, as the nightingale, and instead of ‘sweet’ say ‘thweet, thweet’ The finches call to each other, ‘Kywee, kywee—tweo—thweet,’ which, whatever may be its true translation, has a peculiarly soothing effect on the ear. Swifts usually fly at a great height, and, being scattered in the atmosphere, do not appear numerous; but sometimes during a stiff gale they descend and concentrate over an open field, there wheeling round and to and fro only just above the grass. Then the ground looks quite black with them as they dart over it: they exhibit no fear, but if you stand in the midst come all round you so close that they might be knocked down with a walking-stick if used quick enough. In the air they do not look large, but when so near as this they are seen to be of considerable size. The appearance of hundreds of these jet black, long-winged birds, flying with marvellous rapidity and threading an inextricable maze almost, as it were, under foot is very striking.

The proverbial present of a white elephant is paralleled in bird life by the gift of the cuckoo’s egg. The bird whose nest is chosen never deserts the strange changeling, but seems to feel feeding the young cuckoo to be a sacred duty, and sees its own young ejected and perishing without apparent concern. My attention was called one spring to a robin’s nest made in a stubble rick; there chanced to be a slight hollow in the side of the tick, and this had been enlarged. A cuckoo laid her egg in the nest, and as it happened to be near some cowsheds it was found and watched. When the young bird began to get fledged some sticks were inserted in the rick so as to form a cage, that it might not escape, and there the cuckoo grew to maturity and to full feather.

All the while the labour undergone by the robins in supplying the wide throat of the cuckoo with food was something incredible. It was only necessary to wait a very few minutes before one or other came, but the voracious creature seemed never satisfied; he was bigger than both his foster-parents put together, and they waited on him like slaves. It was really distressing to see their unrewarded toil. Now, no argument will ever convince me that the robin or the wagtail, or any other bird in whose nest the cuckoo lays its egg, can ever confound the intruding progeny with its own offspring. Irrespective of size, the plumage is so different; and there is another reason why they must know the two apart: the cuckoo as he grows larger begins to resemble the hawk, of which all birds are well known to feel the greatest terror. They will pursue a cuckoo exactly as they will a hawk.

I will not say that that is because they mistake it for a hawk, for the longer I observe the more I am convinced that birds and animals often act from causes quite distinct from those which at first sight appear sufficient to account for their motions. But about the fact of the lesser birds chasing the cuckoo there is no doubt. Are they endeavouring to drive her away that she may not lay her egg in either of their nests? In any case it is clear that birds do recognise the cuckoo as something distinct from themselves, and therefore I will never believe that the foster-parent for a moment supposes the young cuckoo to be its own offspring.

To our eyes one young robin (meaning out of the nest—on the hedge) is almost identical with another young robin; to our ears the querulous cry of one for food is confusingly like that of another: yet the various parent birds easily distinguish, recognise, and feed their own young. Then to suppose that, with such powers of observation—with the keenness of vision that can detect an insect or a worm moving in the grass from a branch twenty feet or more above it, and detect it while to all appearance engaged in watching your approach—to suppose that the robin does not know that the cuckoo is not of its order is past credit. The robin is much too intelligent. Why, then, does he feed the intruder? There is something here approaching to the sentiment of humanity, as we should call it, towards the fellow-creature.