Brave and faithful starlings! we hardly deserve to have you back, since London has not been too kind to her feathered children. Quite lately she has driven out her rooks, who were faithful too; and long ago she got rid of her ravens; and to her soaring kites she meted out still worse treatment, pulling down their last nest in 1777 from the trees in Gray’s Inn Gardens, and cutting open the young birds to find out, in the interests of ornithological science, what they had eaten!
Between the starling and the next in order, the blackbird, there is again a very great difference with regard to numbers. The former counts thousands, the latter hundreds. Between blackbird and song-thrush, or throstle, there is not a wide difference, but if we take the whole of London, the blackbird is much more numerous. After these two, at a considerable distance, comes the robin. In suburban grounds and gardens these three common species are equally abundant. But in these same private places, which ring the metropolis round with innumerable small green refuges, or sanctuaries, several other species which are dying out in the parks and open spaces of inner London are also common—wren, hedge-sparrow, blue, cole, and great tits, chaffinch, and greenfinch—and of these no more need be said in this chapter.
As we have seen, there is always a great interest shown (by the collector especially) in that not very rare phenomenon, an abnormally white bird. But in London the bird-killers are restrained, and the white specimen is sometimes able to keep his life for a few or even for several months. Recently (1897) a very beautiful white blackbird was to be seen in Kensington Gardens, in the Flower Walk, east of the Albert Memorial. He was the successor to a wholly milk-white blackbird that lived during the summer of 1895 in the shrubberies of Kensington Palace, and was killed by some scoundrel, who no doubt hoped to sell its carcass to some bird-stuffer. Its crushed body was found by one of the keepers in a thick holly-bush close to the public path; the slayer had not had time to get into the enclosure to secure his prize.
The other bird had some black and deep brown spots on his mantle, and a few inky black tail and wing feathers—a beautiful Dominican dress. But when I first saw him, rushing out of a black holly-bush, one grey misty morning in October, his exceeding whiteness startled me, and I was ready to believe that I had beheld a blackbird’s ghost, when the bird, startled too, emitted his prolonged chuckle, proving him to be no supernatural thing, but only a fascinating freak of nature. He lived on, very much admired, until the end of March last year (1897), having meanwhile found a mate, and was then killed by a cat.
The robin, although common as ever in all the more rural parts of London—the suburban districts where there are gardens with shrubs and trees—is now growing sadly scarce everywhere in the interior of the metropolis. In 1865 the late Shirley Hibberd wrote that this bird was very common in London: ‘Robins are seen among the hay-carts at Whitechapel, Smithfield, and Cumberland Markets, in all the squares, in Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, and other gardens, in the open roadway of Farringdon Street, Ludgate Hill, the Strand, and Blackfriars Road; nay, I once saw a robin on a lovely autumn afternoon perch upon the edge of a gravestone in St. Paul’s Churchyard and trill out a carol as sweetly as in any rural nook at home.’
Now the robin has long vanished from all these public places, even from the squares that are green, and that he is becoming very scarce in all the interior parks I shall have occasion to show in later chapters. It is a great pity that this should be so, as this bright little bird is a universal favourite on account of his confidence in and familiarity with man, and his rare beauty, and because, as becomes a cousin of the nightingale, he is a very sweet singer. Moreover, just as his red breast shines brightest in autumn and winter, when all things look grey and desolate, or white with the snow’s universal whiteness, so does his song have a peculiar charm and almost unearthly sweetness in the silent songless season. It is not strange that in credulous times man’s imagination should have endowed so loved a bird with impossible virtues, that it should have been believed that he alone—heaven’s little feathered darling—cared for ‘the friendless bodies of unburied men’ and covered them with leaves, and was not without some supernatural faculties. Nor can it be said that all these pretty fables have quite faded out of the rustic mind. But, superstition apart, the robin is still a first favourite and dear to everyone, and some would gladly think he is a better bird, in the sense of being gentler, sweeter-tempered, more affectionate and human, than other feathered creatures. But it is not so, the tender expression of his large dark eye is deceptive. The late Mr. Tristram-Valentine, writing of the starling in London, its neat, bright, glossy appearance, compared with that of the soot-blackened disreputable-looking sparrow, says ‘the starling always looks like a gentleman.’ In like manner the robin will always be a robin, and act like one, in London or out of it—the most unsocial, fierce-tempered little duellist in the feathered world. Now I wish to point out that this fierce intolerant spirit of our bird is an advantage in London, if we love robins and are anxious to have plenty of them.
It is a familiar fact that at the end of summer the adult robins disappear; that they remain in hiding in the shade of the evergreens and thick bushes until they have got a new dress, and have recovered their old vigour; that when they return to the world, so to speak, and find their young in possession of their home and territory, they set themselves to reconquer it. For the robin will not tolerate another robin in that portion of a garden, shrubbery, orchard, or plantation which he regards as his very own. A great deal of fighting then takes place between old and young birds, and these fights in many instances end fatally to one of the combatants. The raven has the same savage disposition and habit with regard to its young; and when a young raven, in disposition a ‘chip of the old block,’ refuses to go when ordered, and fights to stay, it occasionally happens that one of the birds gets killed. But the raven has a tremendous weapon, a stone axe, in his massive beak; how much greater the fury and bulldog tenacity of the robin must be to kill one of his own kind with so feeble a weapon as his small soft bill! At the end of the summer of 1896 two robins were observed fighting all day long in the private gardens of Kensington Palace, the fight ending in the death of one of the birds.
Finally, as a result of all the chasing and fighting that goes on, the young birds are driven out to find homes for themselves. In London, in the interior parks, not many young robins are reared, but many of those that have been reared in the suburban districts drift into London, and altogether a considerable number of birds roam about the metropolis in search of some suitable green spot to settle in; and I will only add here, in anticipation of what will be said in a later chapter, that if suitable places were provided for them, the robins would increase year by year from this natural cause.