It was an extreme instance of the tyrannous effect of habit on a wild animal. Doubtless this bird had been accustomed, after devouring his first mouse, to fly to the vane, where he could rest for a few minutes, taking a general view of the place, and wipe his beak at the same time; and the habit had become so strong that he could not forgo his visit even on so tempestuous an evening. His beak, if he had wiped it anywhere but on that lofty cross-bar, would not have seemed quite clean.
At Selborne, in the garden at the Wakes, I noticed a pair of pied wagtails busy nest-building in the ivy on the wall. One of the birds flew up to the roof of the house, where, I suppose, he caught sight of a fly in an upper window which looked on to the roof, for all at once he rose up and dashed against the pane with great force; and as the glass pane hit back with equal force, he was thrown on to the tiles under the window. Nothing daunted, he got up and dashed against the glass a second time, with the same result. The action was repeated five times, then the poor baffled bird withdrew from the contest, and, drawing in his head, sat hunched up for two or three minutes perfectly motionless. The volatile creature would not have sat there so quietly if he had not hurt himself rather badly.
Cockerel and martin
One more of the amusing incidents witnessed during my visit must be told. Several pairs of martins were making their nests under the eaves of a cottage opposite to the Queen's Arms, where I stayed; and on going out about seven o'clock in the morning, I stood to watch some of the birds getting mud at a pool which had been made by the night's rain in the middle of the street. It happened that some fowls had come out of the inn yard, and were walking or standing near the puddle picking up gravel or any small morsel they could find. Among them was a cockerel, a big, ungainly, yellowish Cochin, in the hobbledehoy stage of that ugliest and most ungraceful variety. For some time this bird stood idly by the pool, but by-and-by the movements of the martins coming and going between the cottage and the puddle attracted his attention, and he began to watch them with a strange interest; and then all at once he made a vicious peck at one occupied in deftly gathering a pellet of clay close to his great, feathered feet. The martin flitted lightly away, and after a turn or two, dropped down again at almost the same spot. The fowl had watched it, and as soon as it came down moved a step or two nearer to it with deliberation, then made a violent dash and peck at it, and was no nearer to hitting it than before. The same thing occurred again and again, the martin growing shyer after each attack; then other martins came, and he, finding them less cautious than the first, stalked them in turn and made futile attacks on them. Convinced at last that it was not possible for him to injure or touch these elusive little creatures, he determined that they should gather no mud at that place, and with head up he watched them circling like great flies around him, dashing savagely at them whenever they came lower, or paused in their flight, or dropped lightly down on the margin. It was a curious and amusing spectacle—the big, shapeless, lumbering bird chasing them round and round the pool in his stupid spite; they by contrast so beautiful in their shining purple mantle, snow-white breast, and stockinged feet, their fairy-like aerial bodies that responded so quickly to every motion of their bright, lively, little minds. It was like a very heavy policeman "moving on" a flock of fairies.
One remembers Æsop's dog in the manger, and thinks that this and many of the apologues are really nothing but everyday incidents in animal life, told just as they happened, with the addition of speech (in some cases quite unnecessary) put in the mouth of the various actors. Æsop's dog did not want to be disturbed in his bed of hay, and was not such an unredeemed curmudgeon as the Selborne fowl; but this unlovely temper or feeling—spite and petty tyranny and persecution—is exceedingly common in the lower animals, from the higher vertebrates down even to the insects.
My third visit to Selborne was in July 1901. I went there on the 12th and stayed till the 23rd. Now July, when the business of breeding is over or far advanced and all the best songsters are dropping into silence, and when the foliage is deepening to a uniform monotonous dark green, is, next to August, the least interesting month of the year. But at Selborne I was singularly fortunate, although the season was excessively dry and hot. The heat was indeed great all over the country, but I doubt if there exists a warmer village than Selborne, unless it be one in some, to me unknown, coombe in Cornwall or Devon. Thus on 19th July, when the temperature rose to ninety degrees in the shade in the City of London, we had it as high as ninety-four degrees in Selborne. The village lies in a kind of trough at the foot of a wall-like hill. If it were not for the moisture and the greenery that surrounds and almost covers it, hanging, as it were, like a cloud above it, the heat would doubtless have been even greater.
Crickets
These conditions, in whatever way they may affect the human inhabitants, appear to be exceedingly favourable to the house-crickets. It was impossible for anyone to walk in the village of an evening without noticing the noise they made. The cottages on both sides of the street seemed to be alive with them, so that, walking, one was assailed by their shrilling in both ears. Hearing them so much sent me in search of their wild cousin of the fields and of the mole-cricket, but no sound of them could I hear. It was too late for them to sing. No doubt—as White conjectured—the artificial conditions which civilised man has made for the house-cricket have considerably altered its habits. Like the canary and other finches that thrive in captivity, a uniform indoor climate, with food easily found, have made it a singer all the year round. I trust we shall never take to the Japanese custom of caging insects for the sake of their music; but it is probable that a result of keeping tamed or domesticated field-crickets would be to set them singing at all seasons against the cricket on the hearth. A listener would then be able to judge which of the two "sweet and tiny cousins" is the better performer. The house-cricket has to my ears a louder, coarser, a more creaky sound; but we hear him, as a rule, in a room, singing, as it were, confined in a big box; and I remember the case of the skylark, and the disagreeable effect of its shrill and harsh spluttering song when heard from a cage hanging against a wall. The field-cricket, like the soaring skylark, has the wide expanse of open air to soften and etherealise the sound.
Gilbert White lived in an age which had its own little, firmly-established, conventional ideas about nature, which he, open-air man though he was, did not escape, or else felt bound to respect. Thus, the prolonged, wild, beautiful call of the peacock, the finest sound made by any domesticated creature, was to the convention of the day "disgustful," and as a disgustful sound he sets it down accordingly; and when he speaks of the keen pleasure it gave him to listen to the field-cricket, he writes in a somewhat apologetic strain: