Although the hawthorn in the valley was opening its leaves and disclosing the rosy-tipped buds of May, there were but few signs of returning spring on the marshlands of the mountain slope. The scanty grass was withered with the searching winds of winter, and the wild thyme had scarcely yet begun to creep over the lichened stones; but through the entanglement of beaten-down reeds and rushes by the waterside fresh green spikes were pushing their way up to the light. Here and there some flecks of gold enlivened the whin bushes, and, far away in the distant valley, a thrush was singing. The song floated up the still air of the valley as the blue mists of the late afternoon paled into the evening grey; the last flush of sunset faded over the rugged mountains of the west, and the melancholy marshland sank into the shadows of the coming night. Then the thrush’s song died in the gathering darkness, and all was still, save for the bark of some shepherd’s dog in the distance and the faint murmur of a trout stream—sounds that only seemed to intensify the quietude.
Suddenly the desolate marsh was awakened by a ringing, booming voice that pierced the misty darkness and vibrated in the still air. No echo followed that weird, mysterious call, that deep metallic ring, “as when a bell no longer swings,” but the desolation of the moors seemed the more desolate as I listened and wondered what the sound might be. The night hugged the silence, Nature held her breath, until again that lonely booming voice broke the stillness and died in a tone of despairing lament. Passion was in the voice, and love; a challenge was there, yet a sublimity and a loneliness that haunted the very breath of spring. Once more the vibrating tones were swallowed up by the darkness, but once again they pierced the night air and rang in a cadence of passionate, deep-toned booms that shook “the sounding marsh” and awakened the desolate places of the sleeping earth. Even as the lightning smites the heavy laden cloud and disperses it in drops of rain, so that penetrating voice struck the brooding darkness of the moor, and the abiding peace, in little fragments, was shattered and forgotten in a multitude of thoughts.
Those who are acquainted with the bird-life of our islands need not be told that the deep-toned, booming cry of the last of the bitterns was heard a very long while ago. Marshes have been drained and rough lands cleared, cornfields and rich pastures cover the earth which once swayed and rustled with bulrushes and tasselled reeds, and the birds and flowers—the aborigines of the marshlands—have been driven away from their old haunts. Yet one would not stay the cultivator’s hand that the secluded retreat of the bittern might be left undisturbed. Time brings many changes, and the well-cleared dyke, the uprooted reeds and willows, the burning of scrubby wastes, were inevitable, and once the nesting place—the home of a species—is taken away extinction becomes a matter of years. So the noble bittern that stalked heron-like in the shallow pools and streams of the fens and marshes, whose pencilled plumage of rich browns of varying shades blended so beautifully with the surroundings, and whose weird notes resounded in the spring nights of long ago, year after year, became a less frequent visitor. It is probably twenty-five years or more since the last love-song of the bittern was answered, and some eggs were laid, in the land that it had inhabited for so long. Now some few stragglers drift into our shores, but the booming note—the love-song only uttered at nesting time—is no longer heard, and those lonely migrants that casually seek refuge here only too quickly fall a prey to the loafer’s gun.
But there is no reason to suppose why, if suitable places—
Not where along unlovely ways
The roaring tide of trouble flows—
but secluded tracts of land, such as still exist in many counties of Wales particularly, were protected, many of our partially extinct birds would avail themselves of the opportunity of breeding again in the old home of their ancestors. In these days of cheap cartridges, few birds that are not catalogued as common, are suffered to exist, and the rarer the species so much the less chance has it of surviving. Speaking generally, the sportsman—I mean the man who is fond of a gun and who protects rather than exterminates those birds and animals not really destructive—is the friend rather than the foe of our wild life, but the class of gamekeeper who, often against his employer’s instructions, kills anything that his imagination can conceive to be harmful or uncommon is responsible for much of the extinction now going on. The loafer who “pots” seals and swallows on Sundays, and earns his beer by selling skins of kingfishers (for the kingfisher is yet another that must now be considered rare) and other rarities to local “naturalists” is a tyrant of the meanest order, a parasite upon his own kind and a terror to all things beautiful and rare. In speaking upon this subject one wishes to refrain from any sickly sentiment, of which there has already been a super-abundance. The effect of much that has been written and spoken on the extinction of our wild birds has been neutralised on account of the rabid and ultra-sentimental way in which enthusiasts have expressed their views and feelings, and, as in the case of “vivisection,” many people who might have been workers for good have been reluctant to join forces with those who have clamoured and preached so extravagantly. Owing to the efforts of private individuals and the various societies, a great deal has been done to protect the wild life that is annually becoming scarcer; but much remains to be done, and most particularly in the case of those few straggling remnants of our avifauna, viz., the bitterns and bustards, hen-harriers and marsh-harriers, eagles and kites, hoopoes and ravens, and others of that sad, long list of birds, the most beautiful and noblest that ever gave lustre to our avian population.
It is strange, too, that all, or nearly all, these declining races were denizens of the marshlands or the mountain where the voice of a bird is ever such a welcome sound, and to-day when the chilly winds of a March evening drive through the lank, dry grass with a whistling sound, or surge and whisper in the heather, to which still cling last year’s faded flowers, when the curlew and the plover break the solitude with their wild, yet plaintive cries, when the last dipper has shot like a black dart round the bend of the stream, and the skylarks, that have been joyously singing far up in the sky the day long, have sank silently into the beds of rushes, then, when the wind sinks away into the still dark valley below, one feels that Nature is still waiting and listening for the ringing boom of the bittern to herald the birth of the marshland spring. But only the shepherd’s dog barks intermittently in the darkness, and a voice like that of some belated sheep falls dreamily upon the air of night. Up there, where the club moss stands sturdily in the crisp snow, the grim old rocks that have witnessed man’s coming, and will, perchance, witness his passing, look down upon these “haunts of ancient peace,” and we ponder over the changes that time has wrought in the solitary spot.
A. T. Johnson.