A short general account of the London crows—The magpie—The jay—London ravens—The Enfield ravens—The Hyde Park ravens—The Tower ravens—The carrion crow, rook, and jackdaw.
There are not many crows in London; the number of the birds that are left are indeed few, and, if we exclude the magpie and jay, there are only three species. But the magpie and jay cannot be left out altogether, when we find both species still existing at a distance of six and a half to seven miles from Charing Cross. The magpie is all but lost; at the present time there are no more than four birds inhabiting inner London, doubtless escaped from captivity, and afraid to leave the parks in which they found refuge—those islands of verdure in the midst of a sea, or desert, of houses. One bird, the survivor of a pair, has his home in St. James’s Park, and is the most interesting figure in that haunt of birds; a spirited creature, a great hater and persecutor of the carrion crows when they come. The other three consort together in Regent’s Park; once or twice they have built a nest, but failed to hatch their eggs. Probably all three are females. When, some time ago, the ‘Son of the Marshes’ wrote that the magpie had been extirpated in his own county of Surrey, and that to see it he should have to visit the London parks, he made too much of these escaped birds, which may be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Yet we know that the pie was formerly—even in this century—quite common in London. Yarrell, in his ‘British Birds,’ relates that he once saw twenty-three together in Kensington Gardens. In these gardens they bred, probably for the last time, in 1856. Nor, so far as I know, do any magpies survive in the woods and thickets on the outskirts of the metropolis, except at two spots in the south-west district. The fate of the last pair at Hampstead has been related by Harting, in Lobley’s ‘Hampstead Hill’ (London, 1889). For several years this pair had their nest in an unclimbable tree at the Grove; at length, one of the pair was shot by a local bird-stuffer, after which the surviving bird twice found and returned with a new mate; but one by one all were killed by the same miscreant.
THE LAST RAVEN
It would be easy enough for any person to purchase a few magpies in the market and liberate them in St. James’s and Regent’s Parks, and other suitable places, where, if undisturbed, they would certainly breed; but I fear that it would not be an advisable thing to do at present, on account of the very strong prejudice which exists against this handsome bird. Thus, at St. James’s Park the one surviving bird is ‘one too many,’ according to the keepers. ‘One for sorrow’ is an old saying. He is, they say, a robber and a teaser, dangerous to the ornamental water-fowl in the breeding season, a great persecutor of the wood-pigeons, and in summer never happy unless he has a pigeon’s egg in his beak. It strikes one forcibly that this is not a faithful portrait—that the magpie has been painted all black, instead of black and white as nature made him. At all events, we know that during the first two or three decades of the present century there was an abundant and varied wild bird life in the royal parks, and that at the same time the magpies were more numerous there than they are now known to be in any forest or wild place in England.
The jay does not inhabit any of the inner parks and open spaces; nor is there any evidence of its having been a resident London species at any time. But it is found in the most rural parts and in the wooded outskirts of the metropolis. Its haunts will be mentioned in the chapters descriptive of the parks and open spaces.
There is no strong prejudice against the jay among the park keepers, and I am glad to know that, in two or three parks, attempts will be made shortly to introduce this most beautiful of British birds. It is to be hoped that when we have got him his occasional small peccadilloes will not be made too much of.
The raven has long been lost to London, but not so long as might be imagined when we consider how nearly extinct this noble species, as an inland breeder, now is in all the southern half, and very nearly all the northern half, of England. It is not my intention in this book to go much into the past history of London bird life, but I make an exception of the raven on account of an extreme partiality for that most human-like of feathered creatures. Down to about the middle of last century, perhaps later, the raven was a common London bird. He was, after the kite had vanished, the principal feathered scavenger, and it was said that a London raven could easily be distinguished from a country bird by his dulled or dusty-looking plumage, the result of his food-seeking operations in dust and ash heaps. A little way out of the metropolis he lingered on, as a breeding species, down to within a little more than half a century ago; the last pair, so far as I can discover, bred at Enfield down to about 1845. The original ‘raven tree’ on which this pair had nested for many years was cut down, after which the birds built a nest in a clump of seven elm-trees, known locally as the ‘seven sisters,’ five of which are still standing.