After you have seen and heard the wheatears you begin to listen in the furze and thorn grown bottoms for that bright, airy, tender, running, rippling little melody of the willow-wren, which should come next, and is so universal in England, and it will surprise you to hear the chiffchaff before him, for in this treeless district the species so abundant everywhere else is comparatively rare, while the local chiffchaff is exceedingly common.
Before the earliest summer migrants are heard some of the resident species are breeding, not only on the cliffs, but the small birds in the bushes—thrushes, blackbirds, dunnocks, wrens and others. I was surprised to find that clothes-drying was a very serious trouble to these bush-breeders where there are no trees. Monday is washing-day at the farms and cottages, and it is usual to use the stone hedges covered with their luxuriant crop of furze as a drying-place. Looking over the land from some elevated place you see the gleam of white linen far and near as of hedges covered with snow. Passing one of these hedges one evening I found a gathering of about a dozen blackbirds in a state of great excitement, hopping and flying up and down, chuckling and screaming before the white sheets and counterpanes covering some of the large round bushes. Poor birds! it was late in the day and they were getting desperate, since if these hateful white coverings were not removed soon so as to let them return to their nests their eggs would be chilled beyond hope. Some of the birds care as little for the covering sheet as rooks and jackdaws do for the grotesque imitations of a human figure set up in the ploughed fields to frighten them. A woman in one of the cottages told me that once when going round among the furze bushes where her things were drying she noticed a dunnock slip out from under a sheet and fly away. She lifted the sheet and found a nest with fledglings in it close to the top of the bush. "Why, gracious me!" she exclaimed, "perhaps I've been covering their dear little nesties with my washing without ever knowing such a thing. I'll just have a look at the other bushes." And at the very next bush on peering under the cloth spread over it she spied a dunnock sitting on its nest—sitting, she soon found, on five lovely little blue eggs! In the evening when the family were having tea she told them about it, and immediately her boys began to tease her to tell them where the nest was, and after a good deal of talk and solemn promise on the part of the boys that they would not take nor even touch one of the little blue eggs, and many warnings on her side that they would have the rope's end if they ever dared to do such a cruel thing, she led the way to the bush and allowed them all to have a good look at the nest and the five little gems of blue colour lying in it. But from that day she had no peace, for now her bad boys had got a means of coercing her, and she had to let them stay away from school and go where and do what they liked and to give them bread and butter and pasties at all hours of the day and whatever they asked for; for if she refused them anything they would say, "Then we'll go and get the eggs out of the hedge-sparrow's nest"; nor could she punish them for anything they did for the same reason. It was only when the blue eggs hatched and the young birds were safely reared that she got the upper hand in her house once more. Poor, anxious, thin, shrill-voiced woman, fighting for a small bird with her rough sons, her husband standing silent by listening with amused contempt to the dispute; for he too had been a boy, and was not the harrying of birds a boy's proper pastime? But she was one of the few who made it possible for me to live with and not hate my fellow-creatures even in these habitations of cruelty.
In conclusion of this chapter I will relate two other little incidents of this kind which show that the spirit of mercy is not wholly dead. A pair of pied wagtails were constantly seen at a stone quarry near a village I stayed at, and as they appeared very tame I spoke to the quarrymen about them. They said the birds had lived there, winter and summer, five years, and bred every spring in a hole among the stones at the side of the quarry. They were as tame as chickens and came for crumbs every day at dinner time, and when it was raining and the men had to take shelter in their little stone hut inside the quarry, the wagtails, or tinners as they are called in West Cornwall, would run in and feed at their feet.
On my return, in the spring of 1907, to this place I found a pair of wheatears in possession; they had fought the wagtails and driven them away and made their nest in the same place. The same kindly protection was given to them as to the old favourites, though they never became so tame; and I saw the young safely brought off.
We have seen in a former chapter that the robin is somewhat of a sacred bird, or at all events that the feeling in its favour, superstitious or not, is so general that even in the darkest part of the country the bird when caught in a gin is released and allowed to fly away, to perish of its hurts or drag out a miserable existence in a maimed condition. This feeling is a great protection to the bird, but in many boys the bird-hunting and nest-destroying passion overmasters it, so that I am not greatly surprised when I find boys persecuting robin redbreast.
One very warm morning in early spring, walking uphill from Penzance to Castle-an-Dinas, I came on two boys, aged about ten and eleven respectively, lying on the green turf by the side of the hedge. A nice place to rest and nice company; so I threw myself down by them and started talking, naturally about the birds. They replied reluctantly, exchanging glances and looking very uncomfortable. There were plenty of nests now, I said; I was finding a good many, and I asked them directly how many they knew of with eggs and young birds in them. Seeing that I put it that way they recovered courage and one, after a brief whispered consultation with the other, said that there was a robin's nest close to my side, and on looking round I spied a fully-fledged young robin standing on a trodden-down little nest on the bank-side. I picked the bird up and was surprised at its docility, for it made no effort to escape, and then, more surprising still, the old bird flew down and perched a yard off, but did not appear at all anxious about the safety of its young. "I wonder," said I, "what has become of the others? There must have been more young robins in this nest—it looks as if it had had three or four to tread it down."
Whereupon one of the boys produced a second robin from his jacket pocket, and when I took it from him the other boy pulled out two more robins from his pockets and handed them to me.
"Now look here," I began in my severest tone, and proceeded to give them a lecture on their unkindness in taking young robins, and did not forget to quote Blake on the subject, for of all birds the robin was the least fitted to be made a prisoner, and so on until I finished.
But the boys showed no sense of guilt or repentance and were no more disturbed at my words than the robins were at being handled, and at length one of them said that they had no intention of taking the birds home.
"What, then, did you have them in your pockets for?" I demanded.