‘I call these my chickens, and I’m obliged to come every day to feed them,’ said a paralytic-looking white-haired old man in the shabbiest clothes, one evening as I stood there; then, taking some fragments of stale bread from his pockets, he began feeding the sparrows, and while doing so he chuckled with delight, and looked round from time to time to see if the others were enjoying the spectacle.
To him succeeded two sedate-looking labourers, big, strong men, with tired, dusty faces, on their way home from work. Each produced from his coat-pocket a little store of fragments of bread and meat, saved from the midday meal, carefully wrapped up in a piece of newspaper. After bestowing their scraps on the little brown-coated crowd, one spoke: ‘Come on, mate, they’ve had it all, and now let’s go home and see what the missus has got for our tea’; and home they trudged across the park, with hearts refreshed and lightened, no doubt, to be succeeded by others and still others, London workmen and their wives and children, until the sun had set and the birds were all gone.
Here then is an object lesson which no person who is capable of reading the emotions in the countenance, who has any sympathy with his fellow-creatures, can fail to be impressed by. Not only at that spot in Hyde Park may it be seen, but at all the parks and open spaces in London; in some more than others, as at St. James’s Park, where the gulls are fed during the winter months, and at Battersea and Regent’s Parks, where the starlings congregate every evening in July and August. What we see is the perpetual hunger of the heart and craving of those who are compelled to live apart from Nature, who have only these momentary glimpses of her face, and of the refreshment they experience at sight of trees and grass and water, and, above everything, of wild and glad animal life. How important, then, that the most should be made of our few suitable open spaces; that everything possible should be done to maintain in them an abundant and varied wild bird life! Unfortunately, this has not been seen, else we should not have lost so much, especially in the royal parks. In some of the parks under the County Council there are great signs of improvement, an evident anxiety to protect and increase the stock of wild birds; but even here the most zealous of the superintendents are not fully conscious of the value of what they are themselves doing. They are encouraging the wild birds because they are considered ‘ornaments’ to the park, just as they plant rhododendrons and other exotic shrubs that have big gaily-coloured flowers in their season, and as they exhibit some foreign bird of gorgeous plumage in the park aviary. They have not yet grasped the fact—I hope Mr. Sexby, the excellent head of the parks department, will pardon my saying it—that the feathered inhabitants of our open spaces are something more than ‘ornaments’; that the sight and sound of any wild bird, from the croaking carrion crow to the small lyrical kitty wren or tinkling tomtit, will afford more pleasure to the Londoner—in other words, conduce more to his health and happiness—than all the gold pheasants and other brightly-apparelled prisoners, native and foreign, to be seen in the park cages.
From the foregoing it will be seen that this little book, which comes in place of the one I had, in a vague way, once thought of writing, is in some degree a book with a purpose. Birds are not considered merely as objects of interest to the ornithologist and to a few other persons—objects or creatures which the great mass of the people of the metropolis have really nothing to do with, and vaguely regard as something at a distance, of no practical import, or as wholly unrelated to their urban life. Rather they are considered as a necessary part of those pleasure- and health-giving transcripts of nature which we retain and cherish as our best possessions—the open sun-lit and tree-shaded spaces, green with grass and bright with water; so important a part indeed, as bringing home to us that glad freedom and wildness which is our best medicine, that without it all the rest would lose much of its virtue.
But on this point—the extreme pleasure which the confined Londoner experiences in seeing and hearing wild birds, and the consequent value of our wild bird life—enough has been said in this place, as it will be necessary to return to the subject in one of the concluding chapters.