The Heart of the Wild: Nature Studies from Near and Far

by S. L. Bensusan

“I know,” said the bird with a little shiver. “You mean great big men with guns and dogs. I knew a mallard who came to live here in the rushes with his wife, and we became very friendly. He had the most beautiful green feathers I have ever seen in birdland. One morning in January when there was a hard frost and my friends were lying low in the rushes, a big dog came up to them, and they jumped up to fly away. They went head to wind to keep their feathers in the proper place for the breeze was strong. Before they had gone as far as the bridge there was a hideous noise, and then another hideous noise, and one fell dead on the land, and the other fell dead in the water, and the dog went after them and picked them up, and I buried myself in the water up to the tip of my nose and felt terribly afraid.”

“I have heard those noises,” said Jock, “but I don’t think men would harm you or me; we do no hurt to anybody, and they don’t need us for their food. My enemies are the stoats and the weasels that run along the hedgerows and kill rabbits and anything else they can get their teeth into. Many of my family have suffered death at their hands, and I am always afraid when I go on the land lest they should see my beautiful tail. If they did it would be all up with me, for they can walk faster than I can run. On my bank I am safe for I can drop into the water, and the weasel or stoat that can follow me there may have all he can get. I don’t mind men, they never seek to hurt me. I don’t like boys because some have thrown stones at me, and I don’t like women because one passed last summer when I sat washing myself by my door, and she said: ‘Oh, there’s a horrid rat!’ and ran away.”

In those late spring days there was not much opportunity for conversation. Mr. and Mrs. Moorhen had built a nest in the roots of a willow tree, so close to the water that had it risen an inch or two the eggs must have been destroyed; and Mrs. Water-rat had retired to a nest at the far end of the burrow well above the water line, a nest of weeds and grass that had been bitten into tiny pieces and shaped rather like a cup. Jock in those days had less time for sunning and washing himself than he thought he needed, and was constantly in the water searching for dainties for his wife, or looking out for attractive pieces of grass or weed that he thought were needed to make the nest still more beautiful. Sometimes his wife would come from the nest for a brief wash and return immediately. Before May had passed, and at a time when the river banks were loaded with an abundance of food that must have gladdened any water-rat’s heart, Jock was the father of six little blind baby water-rats, and Mrs. Moorhen was the mother of eight tiny little babies, that looked like balls of soot, so round and so black were they. It was a busy time, but yet Jock found hours through which it was possible to listen to the lark, or to watch the bats when they gathered towards evening and fluttered through the air in pursuit of the flies and insects that could never get away. In all the land there were no happier families than those of the harmless bird that lived among the rushes, and the good water-rat whose record defied reproach.

“If I could find nothing else to eat,” he said one day when he had been explaining his rules of life to his friends, who paused on the water just in front of his burrow, with their little family playing round them, “I might be tempted to eat some of those young frogs. Some of my cousins do so, but they have rather low tastes, and you wouldn’t find a white tip to any tail among them. I hold that it’s wrong, for there’s no excuse here to be anything but a vegetarian.”

Doubtless the little frogs who had been tadpoles so recently and now swarmed all over the grass, were very pleased to hear the news, for they had quite enough enemies already, the old heron being the most determined of them all. Though he sometimes missed his aim when he struck at a fish now, he seldom made a mistake about a frog, and as he too had domestic duties and a family to provide for, he was terribly in earnest. Had he stayed in the narrower part of the river, it might have gone ill with Jock and his family, but he felt the need of the biggest fish he could find, and preferred the neighbourhood of the mill where there were eels in abundance and he had a fair sporting chance of capturing a young pike or two.

Jock and his wife had quite enough work to do in the early summer days when their young were ready to leave the snug nest at the end of the burrow. It was not difficult to teach them to swim, when once they could be coaxed into the water, for their natural instinct aided them, and they took more readily to the water than birds that are born in high trees take to the air. But it was exceedingly difficult to make them understand, in the first joy of their newly discovered achievement, that the river held dangers in its waters, that if the parent water-rats were too big for the small fish, the little ones in those early days were quite tempting morsels. Though the father water-rat was quite a foot long from tip of nose to tip of tail, his children could not claim more than three inches.

Then too, the babies were inclined to scatter and to be curious, and to go on voyages of discovery on their own account when they had passed the period of extreme helplessness that came to them at birth.

In the days when they first looked out upon the water they had no liking for it, and were carried for their swimming lesson in fashion rather similar to that employed by the seal when she takes her little one for the first time to the depths that are to serve as home for the greater part of his life. When the moment came to leave the baby water-rat alone, the father or mother would swim away from it, and the little one would find that it could not drown, and that the water could not even soak its scanty covering. The water-rat’s coat is full of oil that keeps the water standing in a thousand little bubbles on the points of its hair unless it stays for a very long time under the water, and no water-rats do this unless they are attracted by some roots that require a lot of investigation. The young water-rats swam with head and back right out of the water. At first they knew no other way, for this was the method that their parents practised, but they were soon to learn that, in times of danger, the body must be sunk altogether, and only the tip of the nose allowed to show above the water. The moorhens dived in similar fashion, and each thought that the one imitated the other.

“I daresay you find our method of diving very useful when you’re at all alarmed,” said Mr. Moorhen to Mrs. Water-rat.

“I see you’ve learned to dive just as I do,” said Jock to Mrs. Moorhen. “It’s the best way to get about, and you’ve learned the trick perfectly.” It would have been hard to make either believe that the other had not copied his action.