The power to feel pain in any great degree comes into the bird's life after this transitional period, and is greatest at maturity, when consciousness and all the mental faculties are fully developed, particularly the passion of fear, which plays continually on the strings of the wild creature's heart with an ever varying touch, producing the feeling in all degrees from the slight disquiet, which is no sooner come than gone, to extremities of agonising terror. It would perhaps have a wholesome effect on their young minds, and save them from grieving over-much at the death of a newly-hatched robin, if they would consider this fact of the pain that is and must be. Not the whole subject—the fact that as things are designed in this world of sentient life there can be no good, no sweetness or pleasure in life, nor peace and contentment and safety, nor happiness and joy, nor any beauty or strength or lustre, nor any bright and shining quality of body or mind, without pain, which is not an accident nor an incident, nor something ancillary to life, but is involved in and a part of life, of its very colour and texture. That would be too long to speak about; all I meant was to consider that small part of the fact, the necessary pain to and destruction of the bird life around them and in the country generally.
Annual bird-mortality
Here, for instance, without going farther than a hundred yards from the house in any direction, they could put their hands in nests in trees and bushes, and on the ground, and in the ivy, and in the old outhouse, and handle and count about one hundred and thirty young birds not yet able to fly. Probably more than twice that number would be successfully reared during the season. How many, then, would be reared in the whole parish! How many in the entire New Forest district, in the whole county of Hampshire, in the entire kingdom! Yet when summer came round again they would find no more birds than they had now. And so it would be in all places; all that incalculable increase would have perished. Many millions would be devoured by rapacious birds and beasts; millions more would perish of hunger and cold; millions of migrants would fall by the way, some in the sea and some on land; those that returned from distant regions would be but a remnant, and the residents that survived through the winter, these, too, would be nothing but a remnant. It is not only that this inconceivable amount of bird life must be destroyed each year, but we cannot suppose that death is not a painful process. In a vast majority of cases, whether the bird slowly perishes of hunger and weakness, or is pursued and captured by birds and beasts of prey, or is driven by cold adverse winds and storms into the waves, the pain, the agony must be great. The least painful death is undoubtedly that of the bird that, weakened by want of sustenance, dies by night of cold in severe weather. It is indeed most like the death of the nestling, but a few hours out of the shell, which has been thrown out of the nest, and which soon grows cold, and dozes its feeble, unconscious life away.
We may say, then, that of all the thousand forms of death which Nature has invented to keep her too rapidly multiplying creatures within bounds, that which is brought about by the singular instinct of the young cuckoo in the nest is the most merciful or the least painful.
I am not sure that I said all this, or marshalled fact and argument in the precise order in which they are here set down. I fancy not, as it seems more than could well have been spoken while we were standing there in the late evening sunlight by that primrose bank, looking down on the little flesh-coloured mite in its scant clothing of black down, fading out of life on its cold green leaf. But what was said did not fail of its effect, so that my young tender-hearted hearers, who had begun to listen with moist eyes, secretly accusing me perhaps of want of feeling, were content in the end to let it be—to go away and leave it to its fate in that mysterious green world we, too, live in and do not understand, in which life and death and pleasure and pain are interwoven light and shade.
CHAPTER II
Between the Boldre and the Exe—Abuse of the New Forest—Character of the population—New Forest code and conscience—A radical change foreshadowed—Tenacity of the Forest fly—Oak woods of Beaulieu—Swallow and pike—Charm of Beaulieu—Instinctive love of open spaces—A fragrant heath—Nightjars—Snipe—Redshanks—Pewits—Cause of sympathy with animals—Grasshopper and spider—A rapacious fly—Melancholy moods—Evening on the heath—"World-strangeness"—Pixie mounds—Death and burial—The dead in the barrows—Their fear of the living.
Between the Boldre and the Exe, or Beaulieu river, there is a stretch of country in most part flat and featureless. It is one of those parts of the Forest which have a bare and desolate aspect; here in places you can go a mile and not find a tree or bush, where nothing grows but a starved-looking heath, scarcely ankle-deep. Wild life in such places is represented by a few meadow-pipits and small lizards. There is no doubt that this barrenness and naked appearance is the result of the perpetual cutting of heath and gorse, and the removal of the thin surface soil for fuel.