Birds in London

by W. H. Hudson

Once upon a time, in a distant country, I came with a companion to a small farmhouse. We were very much in want of a meal, but no person was about, and the larder was empty, and so we determined to kill and broil a chicken for ourselves. On our making certain chuckling noises, which domestic birds understand, a number of fowls scattered about near the place rushed up to us, expecting to be fed. We made choice of a very tall cockerel for our breakfast; so tall was this young bird on his long, bright yellow stilt-like shanks that he towered head and neck above his fellows. My companion, who was an American, had a revolver in his pocket, and pulling it out he fired five shots at the bird at a distance of about six yards, but failed to hit it. He was preparing to reload his weapon, when, to expedite matters, I picked up a stick and knocked the chicken over, and in less than fifty minutes’ time we were picking his bones.

I doubt if the Hyde Park sportsmen will see anything very amusing in this story.

The mallard is an extremely handsome fowl, and it is pleasant to see such a bird in flocks, at home on the ornamental waters, and at the same time to learn that it is, in a sense, a wild bird, that in the keenness of its faculties, its power of flight, and nesting habits it differs greatly from its degenerate domestic relation. By day he will feed from any person’s hand; in the evening he returns to his ancient wary habit, and will not suffer a person to approach him. He is active by night, particularly in the autumn, flying about the park and gardens in small flocks and feeding on the grass. It is a curious and delightful experience to be alone on a damp autumn night in Kensington Gardens. One is surrounded by London; its dull continuous murmur may be heard, and the glinting of distant lamps catches the eye through the trees; these fitful gleams and distant sounds but make the silence and darkness all the more deep and impressive. Suddenly the whistling of wings is heard, and the loud startled cry of a mallard, as the birds, vaguely seen, rush by overhead; the effect on the mind is wonderful—one has been transported as by a miracle into the midst of a wild and solitary nature.

Both by day and night there is much going to and fro between the Serpentine and the Round Pond, but each bird appears to be faithful to its home, and those that have been reared on the Round Pond breed in its vicinity on the west side of the gardens. Where their eggs are deposited is known to few. Strange as it may seem, they nest in the trees, in holes in the trunks of the large elms, in many cases at a height of thirty feet or more from the ground. Some of the breeding-trees are known, of others the secret has been well kept by the birds. Not a few ducks breed in Holland Park, and find it an exceedingly difficult matter to get their broods into the gardens. More than once the strange spectacle of a duck leading its newly-hatched young along the thronged pavements of Kensington High Street has been witnessed.

When the young have been hatched in a tree the parent bird takes them up in her beak and drops them one by one to the ground, and the fall does not appear to hurt them. Last year a duck bred in a tree broken off at the top near St. Gover’s Well, in the gardens. One morning she appeared with four ducklings, and leaving them near the pond went back to the tree and in time returned with a second lot of four. Still she was not satisfied, but continued to go back to the tree and to fly round and round it with a great clamour. A keeper who had been watching her movements sent for a man with a ladder to have the tree-top examined. The man found the broken stem hollow at the top, and by thrusting his arm down shoulder-deep was able to reach the bottom of the cavity with his hand. One duckling was found in it and rescued, and its mother made happy. That she had succeeded in getting all the others out of so deep and narrow a shaft seemed very astonishing.

An extraordinary incident relating to these Kensington ducks was told to me by one of the keepers, who himself heard it by a very curious chance. One dark evening, after leaving the gardens, he got on to an omnibus near the Albert Hall to go to his home at Hammersmith. Two men who occupied the seat in front of him were talking about the gardens and the birds, and he listened. One of the men related that he once succeeded in taking a clutch of ducks’ eggs from the gardens. He put them under a hen at his home in Hammersmith, and nine ducklings were hatched. They were healthy and strong and grew up into nine as fine ducks as he had ever seen. Such fine birds were they that he was loth to kill or part with them, and before he had made up his mind what to do he lost them in a very strange way. One morning he was in his back yard, where his birds were kept, when a crow appeared flying by at a considerable height in the air; instantly the ducks, with raised heads, ran together, then with a scream of terror sprang into the air and flew away, to be seen no more. Up till that moment they had never seen beyond the small back yard where they lived—it was their world—nor had any one of them ever attempted to use his wings.

Let us now return to the nobler bird, the subject of this chapter.

It would not, I imagine, be difficult for one who had the time to count the London crows; those I am accustomed to see number about twenty, and I should not be surprised to learn that as many as forty crows frequent inner London. But with the exception of two, or perhaps three pairs, they do not now breed in London, but have their nesting-haunts in woods west, north, and east of the metropolis. These breeders on the outskirts bring the young they succeed in rearing to the parks, from which they have themselves in some cases been expelled, and the tradition is thus kept up. Most of the birds appear to fly over London every day, paying long visits on their way to Regent’s Park, Holland Park, the central parks, and Battersea Park. As their movements are very regular it would be possible to mark their various routes on a map of the metropolis.

Mr. W. H. Tuck, writing to me about the carrion crow, says: ‘For many years, when living in Kensington, several pairs of crows going from N.E. to S.W. passed at daybreak over my house on their way to the Thames banks at Chelsea, and I could always time them within a minute or two.’ These birds come on their way from the northern heights to the river at Chelsea; the crows that breed in the neighbourhood of Syon Park and Richmond fly over the central parks to Westminster, and then follow the river down to its mouth.

The persistency with which the carrion crow keeps to his nesting-place may be seen in the case of a pair that have bred in private grounds at Hillfield, Hampstead, for at least sixty years. Nor is it impossible to believe that the same birds have occupied the site for this long period, the crow being a long-lived creature. The venerable author of ‘Festus,’ who also has the secret of long life, might have been thinking of this very pair when, more than half a century ago, he wrote his spirited lyric:—